Starting a Successful Mentoring Program in Your Organization with Dr. Lisa DeRoché

Better People Podcast

In this episode, Dr. Lisa DeRoché discusses the significance of mentoring in HR and her dissertation on entrepreneurial behaviors. She emphasizes the need for building relationships, empathy, and leadership support in HR mentoring programs. Dr. Lisa also provides useful tips for starting and growing successful mentoring partnerships in organizational settings.

Dr. Lisa DeRoché is the Chief People & Equity Officer at Roosevelt Institute, where she shapes the culture of a team driving progressive research to strengthen democracy. With a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, she provides strategic direction for human resources and advances innovative HR systems and processes. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Better People:

• Mentoring is a powerful HR development tool that assists career advancement and promotes positive outcomes such as job satisfaction for employees.
• Taking a risk and being vulnerable can lead to wonderful experiences in professional growth and building trust.
• Entrepreneurial activities include creating new programs and products, innovative hiring, expanding business functions, opening new businesses, and using data.
• Leadership support, engagement, and communication are essential to the success of mentoring programs.
• Patience, compassion, role modeling, offering safe spaces, and creating a sense of community are critical behaviors that foster entrepreneurial attitudes.
• Start informally and promote it internally
• Engage in working through a plan that suits your organization's culture

Resources:

• Roosevelt Institute
• MidAtlantic Employers’ Association (MEA)

Connect with Dr. Lisa DeRoché:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our host Margaret Uhrich:

• LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 11:02 - “You have to be willing to use your voice even when immediate trust is not there. Y you know, and that's one of the, you know, points of my HR experience that has always been a challenge, both as an employee, you know, individual as well as a manager and a leader. The opportunity to build trust with, you know, another is, is potentially the block that can stop or start a career and or your engagement and being happy in your day-to-day work.”
• 31:04 - “As I've grown and matured in my career, I've always felt as if you have to please everyone, right? And I recognize in the various environments that I've worked in that, you know, it's important to please everyone, but you'll never get to that point. It's impossible to please everyone. You have to remove the mindset of, you know, the fact that you are attempting to please everyone, but go in with the mindset that you are a trusted individual, especially as an HR leader”
• 25:20 - “But so many people are like, are in that place where, how do I get started? What do I do? What should it look like? What would you tell somebody? What would be the, you know, one or two pieces of advice that you could give somebody who is thinking about creating the first mentorship program in their organization?”
• 29:06 - “And you know, what I tell the members that I talk with and, and that I support in rolling out mentorship programs here at our organization is, yeah, it doesn't have to cost anything really other than some time initially. And you can start small and those people, you know, if you even pair up have one pair to start, they will benefit from it. You will do something good, right? And, and so it's worth it to start. It's, it's just worth it to just start at, at whatever level and then have it grow organically and, and all along the way people are just really benefiting from it.”
• 10:07 - Lisa: You don't, you know, you haven't met these people before and that's really the hard part, you know, it's like going to a cocktail party and like, oh, I have got to get out here and talk to people, right? So it was really a wonderful opportunity.. Margaret: Interrupt. So, so yes, take the risk, right? Enter the relationship, start, you know, do it. But I think, and maybe this is part of the risk that you're talking about, I mean, you allowed yourself to be very vulnerable.