By Brenan German, Founder and President of Bright Talent
with Tammy Cooper, CEO and CFO of Technologent
Upskilling and reskilling are perpetually trending topics, and there are lots of good reasons for that – including the cost-effectiveness of keeping good employees and helping them grow. When it comes to successful upskilling of employees, mentoring is the key. It’s probably one of the most overlooked aspects of employee development and it's essential to creating and maintaining a compelling employment value proposition.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Tammy Cooper, CEO and CFO of Technologent. I wanted to tap into Tammy’s knowledge and experience because she is a highly accomplished and award-winning business leader who started her career in accounting before transitioning into HR, and eventually, into the CEO/CFO role. She is also responsible for launching her company’s industry-leading mentorship program, and our discussion revolved around the key elements that are essential to implementing and managing a successful mentor program.
BG: Tammy, I’ve long been inspired by your commitment to mentoring others and your keen ability to develop the best in people. Help us understand how you got started with the mission for your mentor program and how you initially established it.
TC: Thank you, Brenan. As you know, everyone is fighting for the best employees out there, so you need to have some type of advantage to your company so they come to you versus someone else. We started our structured mentorship program last summer as a way to foster growth, knowledge sharing and meaningful connections. We want to have a supportive and inclusive environment, and mentoring leads to development of enhanced skills for our mentees as well as career advancement, a strong sense of belonging, continuous learning, collaboration and personal development. It's our little hook to get the employees to come and to stay.
BG: So, as you started, I'm sure you were meeting with other leaders in the business. How did you ultimately develop that mission for mentoring? What was your process for building buy-in and getting other people on board?
TC: Well, we started with a senior leadership meeting and I brought up this topic saying, “Hey, I'd like to develop a mentorship program because my passion is to have employees never have a dead end job, and to always feel a sense of belonging.” I didn't want anyone to come here and say, “I work eight to five, and then I go home and that's it.”
I want everyone to have goals, to have something they can work toward and achieve. So I developed this mentorship program to be able to engage our employees, to have them grow, have them develop and help them build relationships with mentors who are senior leaders in our organization.
We actually started as a pilot program. We picked three individuals and picked three mentors, and we fostered them along the way. We checked in regularly to see how it was going and it was a success.
We put each of them with someone who is not in their career path. For example, if they're in accounting, we didn't put them with another accounting person. We put them with a sales person to see what the company does or put them with an operations person to see what it takes to get product into the warehouse. So we put them with someone who is not a person they report to daily, but rather in another capacity so they get another sense of belonging in our company.
BG: I just love how that works. And you get the generational differences too. You have more experienced people mentoring with younger professionals as well.
Another aspect to this is remote versus on site employees. I think about how it was during the pandemic and what was lost from people working mostly remote. There’s just a natural networking that happens when you're in an office together. So as you were defining the goals and the objectives for your mentoring program, as you were meeting with different business leaders, were you looking beyond just purely skill development? Were those some of the benefits you were looking at?
TC: We are a national company, so we’d have people in Irvine, our headquarters, who would be paired with someone in South Carolina. So, we brought this up to mentors and I brought this up to our senior leadership.
I said, “Hey, you can help set the tone and shape of the next generation – share your expertise, share your professional growth, enhance your leadership and coaching skills. It also provided networking opportunities. You know, maybe this person was really going to want to go into operations, not stay in accounting. We want these people to grow within our organization.
BG: So, as you were building that buy-in, did you have any resistance? Did people challenge the idea a little bit or did they look for possible negatives that might be coming out of this? Or was it mostly that everybody could see the vision, and everybody could see the benefits.
TC: Initially I had a PowerPoint deck that I gave to potential mentors and mentees so everyone shared the vision.
I should also note, we initially did this with one-on-one mentoring, and then a couple of the mentors really liked what they were doing, so they took on two mentees and they have time enough for both of them and they really foster the relationship. But, I wouldn’t go with more than two mentees per mentor – you know, you gotta do your day job too!
I have one mentor who’s in Idaho and he comes into Irvine. He has a mentee here, and he surprises him and he takes him out to lunch. So it's a nice match. It's a lifetime connection.
BG: I think that's just so amazing. And I think what you just touched on is an important part of this. As people are reading this and they decide to develop these programs and select mentors, my natural inclination was, “How am I going to fit this into my regular routine? How could I possibly be a mentor?
Obviously the person you just mentioned in Idaho, obviously they've made it part of who they are and what they do for the organization, which is amazing. But I think there's a natural tendency to think we're all busy and how do we fit this in? How did you respond to that?
TC: What I have done, is everyone has that PowerPoint deck, and the deck provides sample questions and sample discussions for three different sessions. From the third session, you can either continue or not.
The deck gives talking points for each of the sessions so that you know it's mentee led – that is, mentees are trying to tell the mentor what they’d like to achieve and what they’d like to get out of this. They have homework, so the mentor doesn't need to come up with questions.
It's never been a problem. People squeeze this in. And mentors have leaned on their mentees for other things, like “Hey, I have a project coming up, I think you'd be good at.” So it, it doesn't really end with, okay, third session, goodbye. You know, I see that you have some skill sets that I really can use for my own group.
BG: Boy, I can see this as a workforce planning tool, right? It would be essential because then there are going to be those leaders who now are working with somebody they would've never worked with. They now have an opening and there’s someone they might want to bring over, which I think is exactly what we aspire to, especially when we're upskilling and reskilling. That is so essential.
Now that you've laid that foundation and you started identifying the mentors and the mentees, you picked people. I always like to joke, was that “voluntary” or “voluntold” for them to participate in the program?
TC: Well, we actually asked the mentees. We put an email out saying, “Hey, we have a mentorship program. It's now in full fledge operations. It was, at first, just a startup pilot. Now it's built. Who would like to participate?” And, as a matter of fact, I got a lot of mentors saying, “Hey, I'd like to be part of the program” in addition to mentees. So I got both.
For the mentees, we asked them, what are you looking for? What do you want to get out of this? Are you just looking for someone you can ask questions of? Are you looking to maybe see if you want to jump into marketing? And based on what they're looking for, and their career goals, we match them up.
They get a match and then they get an email saying they've been matched and here’s the mentor's contact and the mentee's contact. And, the slide deck I referred to, it's actually in the form of a notebook, so the notebook gets sent on and everyone can read through it to see exactly what's expected of them, so there are no surprises.
BG: I love that. So now, you've started it, and it's going, it's an operational program inside of your business. It's now impacting the culture. Are you starting to have people now come forward and raise their hands? Are they seeing the value of their peers doing it, and now they're coming forward and wanting to join it?
TC: I check in about monthly with this to see how it's going. And, as a matter of fact, they've all continued, so no one has dropped out yet. And during the course of the year, when we have new employees they can join the program if they want to.
I have two Mensa people in our company who I particularly want to challenge and make sure that they're going stay with Technologent. So I gave them to top ranking senior leaders at our company that I made a match for with them. I'm going to do another full launch again this summer to see who else wants to join.
BG: So, are you doing this twice a year, more or less?
TC: I'm doing it really once a year. It’s every summer that I'm pushing it, because people join automatically during the course of the year. They heard from somebody else they're in a mentorship program, and ask “How do I get in the program?” So I'm not pushing it down their throats, but I do push it once a year. So in July, I'll have another big launch as we go into third quarter.
BG: So from your perspective, how has this supported your company culture? You already had a strong culture. How does this support it?
TC: What we have done is we have empowered our employees. We have a talent pipeline that’s like no other right now. We have a knowledge transfer so the people are not just learning their skillset, they have another skillset they're learning.
We have a very, very positive work culture, because now they see it as a way that the company is investing in their talents and it’s creating strong internal networks within our company. If you have a question, you know who you can turn to. And it has enhanced engagement and satisfaction with the program.
And it has led to continuous improvement – that our people can constantly challenge themselves and improve themselves.
BG: Can you see this evolving into potential succession planning as well?
TC: Very, very much so, yes. We have a lot of older people in our company as well as a lot of recent graduates. And for the recent graduates it gives them an idea of succession planning. “I see where I can go. I know where I can go.”
I just want everyone to see that this is a job that has a career path. Having a career path is very important for me, so I want to make sure that they see there is a succession that they could grow into.
BG: I think that's so critical. No matter what level you're at, entry level, mid-level, you have a path that you want to take so you know you've got a future there and you're not feeling like you have to leave.
Do you ever find it’s helping to grow people out of the organization?
TC: So, you know, maybe there’s somebody, who's in, say, our human resource department and I match them up with marketing and they say “I really, really, really want to join marketing, I want be a part of that, but we don't have a marketing position open. Of course, I want to keep everyone as much as I can, but I can't hold tight onto them. And they might come back saying, “Hey, Technologent launched me on this career path, and now I'm going to come back and be in the marketing program and do what I need to do.
BG: That's a very unselfish approach, a very employee-centric approach, and I'm not so sure there's a lot of organizations that take that approach. However, how does that help with attraction and engagement?
TC: It helps tremendously because people see that we have this mentorship program, we offer advancement within our company. We take their learning into our mission for our company, that we are doing continuous improvement, continuous engagement. So it fosters you people who want to come to Technologent. And, you know, we've won a number of culture awards, as you mentioned.
We asked our recent recruits from colleges, why do you want to come here? And they said, because you've, you've taken into account what I want to do, what I want to achieve in life. And, it's such a fostering environment. That's why I wanna be here.
BG: I love this so much and I'm so grateful you're sharing this story. What is your ultimate vision? You’ve launched, you've implemented it, it's going. Where do you see it going from here?
TC: So right now, of course we are going to continue our mentorship program. We get new employees all the time. We are increasing our staff. But what I want to go from here is more into an employee development program, starting with senior leadership all the way to managers and to team leaders, all the way down to starting Technologent University.
I want to launch a path that they can use to identify an issue, perhaps within our company, then work with various resources that we provide them to solve the issue and then present it to senior leader management to become a graduate of Technologent University. I always want to foster continuous learning for them. Continuous growth. You know, it takes a lot to run a company, and, I want to be able to share that with them. I want to show them that we don't know it all. We're not skilled in everything, but maybe they can come and they could find a problem that we don't even know exists and help solve it. And get a Technologent University achievement badge or something from that.
BG: I think that's fantastic. Obviously when you're implementing a new program into a business, as a head of HR, you want to influence top leadership, including the CEO. Obviously you're sitting in the CEO seat, so that gives you an advantage to influence others and this helps you achieve your vision.
So for those HR leaders who are sitting on this call, what recommendation do you have for them if they're building a mentorship program and they want to influence the CEO to gain buy-in? What are one or two key things that you think would help them achieve that?
TC: Not knowing what kind of companies they come from, I think that if they're looking to attract top talent, maybe away from their competitors, they can use our slideshow (provided at the link below). They can take Technologent off of it and use it for their top leadership, because it shows how to keep employees, how to engage employees, how to foster relationships, support people with guidance, and support retention. That all leads to positive things to keep your employee base.
You know, when we had the great resignation happen a while ago, we didn't lose anybody. We actually had people come to us, saying they heard we pay well, we have a program, we're very into their growth and continuing their goals. So, you know, it's very important. Especially if you are losing employees, what can you do as HR leaders to keep employees? You've got to constantly develop and constantly have new programs to have the employees set goals and have a vision toward achieving those goals.
BG: I love it. Tammy, you are an inspiration for a lot of us HR leaders because you grew out of HR into that CEO role. Obviously you have deep finance too. I love your journey. However, what I'm gleaning from this is your employee-centric focus is absolutely tied to your HR acumen in terms of those key words, like engagement, fostering and compensating. And I think this is what's so key – what you bring to the CEO role with that HR experience.
Tammy, thank you so much for sharing your story and the successes you've had with your mentorship program.
TC: You are welcome.
BG: And readers, you’ll want to check out those great resources Tammy's been kind enough to share with us. Just click here to download the Mentor Framework PDF.