HITS

Mentorship has created a faster track toward salary increases and has also provided its participants with a greater sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in their lives at work.

Like mountaineers linked at the hip, mentors and mentees usually stay loyal to their jobs and are justly valued for their commitment and professionalism.

Too many people are hesitant to ask for help, Nadya Ichinomiya, executive director-head of Agile Center of Excellence at Sony Pictures Entertainment and Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH) Foundation chairwoman, said during the mentorship workshop session “The Four Mentors: The Case for Kind Leadership” at the SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit 2022 on Nov. 4 in Los Angeles. The Summit was co-located with the Infinity Festival Hollywood event, and held as both a live, in-person event and online via the MESAverse virtual platform.

Ichinomiya asked attendees if they ever found it challenging to ask for help and noted that almost the entire room indicated they had. “Do you wonder where that might come from – the hesitation of asking for help?” she asked.

“I think we all have an origin story about not wanting to ask for help but here’s mine,” she said, noting it all started off with laundry, when she asked her best friend to support her by attending a beauty pageant she was competing in.  The friend said she’d be happy to attend but, on the day of the event, “she told me she had laundry to do.” The result: “I was devastated. So, in that pivotal moment, I was relying on someone to provide me support. I vowed [to] myself that I would not ask for help [anymore]. I needed to have the intestinal fortitude to do it by myself.”

“Unfortunately my story is not unique,” she said, pointing to data from a recent university study of 3,000 working professionals 21 to 68 years old showing 76% said mentors were important but only 37% had one.

“So there’s a mentor gap of 39 percent of people that don’t have mentors,” she said. The same study also said people with mentors were happier at their current jobs than those who weren’t in mentoring relationships, she noted.

There are four types of mentors: your mentor (with you as mentee), you as mentor, peer to peer mentoring, and your inner mentor, according to Ichinomiya.

The best CEOs tend to have mentors, she pointed out. “So some of you may think being mentored by someone else might be a sign of weakness but, actually, It’s the same thing as vulnerability, which she said is a  “sign of courage.”

She went on to tell attendees if they “just spend one hour per month mentoring someone, you will get more out of that hour then the 10, 20, 30 hours being a consumer of other people’s products.”

She pointed to a five-year study by a “leading tech company” that found male employees who mentored others were promoted six times more than peers who didn’t mentor. That same  study also found mentees were promoted five times the rate of people who passed up the opportunity for structured guidance and advice.

The SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit was presented by Ateliere with sponsorship by Amazon Studios, Softtek, Fortinet, Prime Video, SHI, Amazon Web Services, PacketFabric and Presidio.

To learn more about MESA’s events, contact [email protected].