Well, within WGCN, I think it’s a little more straightforward. There are so many women GCs that are eager, not just willing, but eager to mentor. In WGCN, we just hired—I wouldn’t say hired, because we’re not paying her. But our first WGCN fellow, she’s a new graduate out of Howard, is working with legal innovators, and they are sponsoring her to come help us out.
So, a lot of the work that she does for WGCN is not glamorous, but we are giving her the opportunity to meet with members in WGCN, which we think can be a very valuable stage in her career, just because she gets exposure to a lot of women who are at the top of the profession. As far as mentoring for my teams, I like to do things cross-functionally. At my companies, we’ve done teams sort of cross-training, where people, I mean, I’ve had people who are not lawyers, and they’ll teach project management skills. Or one of my lawyers taught the whole group negotiating, negotiation skills, because she had taken classes.
So it’s cross-mentoring within the team. But I think I gravitate towards people who have that desire and that vent. One of the women I hired at my last company, she was a big part of the Leading in Women in Technology, which is also a huge, an important network for mentoring and developing women who are mid-level managers.
As far as mentoring, I feel like it comes in many, many different shapes. Funnily enough, there’s been so many people who’ve come up to me and talk, and referred to me, or introduced me as their mentor, and I was like, I had no idea I was doing mentoring. So, I love the fact that they feel like they’ve gotten something out of our relationship. Even if I didn’t think of it as a formal mentoring relationship.
So, for me, it’s all about well…Once, the president of Karmax once said to me, he said, “Jan, the really nice thing about you is that you always say yes.” And I thought, well, that’s not very…It doesn’t seem like a very high level compliment, but I mean, I guess the fact that I am willing to show up and help others, yeah, I am going to take that as a compliment, even though I knew I did not think it was.
