Power Mentors

Let's talk about mentorship. Do you currently have a mentor and why?

I do. I've been lucky enough to have a ton of mentors, both informal and formal over the years. I count so many CEOs as mentors. I'm lucky enough to have a global board. They are all mentors as well. Our board for Out Leadership is advisory, they're not fiduciary, and so they really view their role as just being advice and counsel to me and really help in guide me and the organization. I was lucky enough that Lloyd Blankfein, the global CEO of Goldman Sachs who just retired this last year was my first board member for Out Leadership and our board and slash my mentors include leaders like Kathleen Sebelius, the former governor of Kansas and health and human services under President Obama, or Noel Quinn, the global CEO of HSBC, I mentioned, or Lord John Brown, former CEO of BP, the list goes on of these leaders who have really bought into what I'm trying to accomplish and have been incredibly willing and generous with their time to help me, but I also have a formal mentor, a woman named Nina Link. Nina worked for a company called Merryck. Merryck, if you're not familiar, is a global mentoring organization and they mentor Fortune 500, generally Fortune 250 CEOs, and all of their CEO, all of their mentors are former CEOs themselves, and so Nina was the CEO of the Magazine Publishers of America and she was one of the leaders of the Children's Television workshop which makes Sesame Street for many years. I've been lucky enough to have her as a mentor for going on 6 1/2 years now. We meet each week, and I was really honored actually, the CEO of Merrick many years ago found out about Out Leadership, attended some of our events and they said, "Look, we have the opportunity to give one pro bono mentor each year and we'd like it to have it from an Out Leadership perspective," and so for 3 1/2 almost 4 years, Nina was my pro bono mentor.

That's awesome.

It really is, she likes to also say she's my Jewish mom, which isÉ having someone to hold you accountable is a really useful thing.

Can you expand on that? What has been the value of that mentorship for you, holding you accountable? And what else would you say you've gotten out of it?

Holding me accountable, I think the opportunity to bounce ideas, the opportunity for even in a crisis when things happen over the years, you have a challenge with an employee, with something about their family or something happens in the office, or even strategy, right? The first strategic plan I did, Nina and I built together on a flipchart and were able to refer back to it each year as we sort of ended it and ultimately, EY did a huge three-month engagement with us but they started with that original strategic plan that Nina and I built many years ago, so the opportunity to really leverage her smarts, her insight, her different take on the world, right? She has very different experience for a number of years that is in a different industry, but equally, there are things that are very similar, so having her as a sounding board but also someone who says, "Okay, Todd, enough of the sales talk, did you do it? What happened? Why didn't it happen the way we talked about, right?" Sort of cut the crap and make sure that we're having an honest conversation, it's incredibly valuable because when you're in an organization that small and you're the leader, you don't really get that, right? People don't necessarily call you out or are afraid to or - my team is not afraid to which is good, but having someone whose job it is really helps keep you accountable is a really great thing.