Cross Cultural Mentoring: A Tool for the 21st Century by Phyllis Barajas, NEHRA Conference Breakout Session Speaker

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"The dominant factor in the next two decades is not going to be economics or technology. It will be demographics."
Peter Drucker*

With the dramatic shift in the composition of the U.S., more and more cities are becoming majority minority cities (14 states are now majority minority "Toddler" under five population**, and by 2040, it is projected the U.S. will be a majority minority country). Of these changing demographics, Hispanic-Latinos are the largest ethnic group and growing segment of the population. Latinos currently represent 13 percent of the U.S. population, increasing at a rate three times the national average. The growth includes a rapidly expanding community of Latino mid-career professionals who could provide the economic and visionary leadership the country needs NOW.

At the heart of every successful enterprise is how well your company does in talent acquisition and retention — one of the leading challenges facing business today! Who’s your customer, your workforce and in the foreseeable future? Are you ready?

"This is an important tipping point," said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, describing the shift as a "transformation from a mostly white baby boomer culture to the more globalized multi-ethnic country that we are becoming."

Companies must reassess how they define talent and the implications for a workforce that is increasingly diverse across race, gender and ethnicity, and all the associated assumptions that follow. For the purpose of this article we will focus on some of the considerations when adapting your approach to mentoring — an important tool in the arsenal of leadership development — across groups, and in particular Hispanic-Latinos who are underrepresented in leadership roles in most companies while at the same time represent the largest growing segment of the workforce for the foreseeable future!

CONTEXT

Pipeline of talent is shifting from majority to minority and women.

2010 Census data confirms more metro areas than ever are becoming majority minority cities. Boston is a majority minority city and growing with 53 percent of the population non-white or Hispanic and 47 percent white non-Hispanic.

Traditional mentor/mentee matches have been majority mentor/majority mentee. Implicit in this dynamic is the assumption that they have more in common, (i.e. shared values, way of looking at things and approaches to the work effort).

More professionals of color and women entering the workforce require reassessment of how individuals are selected for mentoring, what do we look for?

Framework
Our perceptual lens color how we see things and what we believe to be true, shapes our values and assumptions. One researcher, Evangelina Holvino, Senior Research Faculty at the Center for Gender in Organizations and President of Chaos Management, Ltd., proposes another important consideration simultaneity — Differences are relational and socially constructed, not innate and fixed, and they depend on having an opposite" — she further suggests that, "Social differences signal unequal relations of power among members of different groups in the larger society. Whites as a group have more power than other racial groups; men have more power than women." In research done at Harvard Business School by Herminia Ibarra, Nancy M. Carter and Christine Silva, they found that, "All mentoring is not created equal", there is a special kind of relationship — called sponsorship — mentor uses influence with senior executives to advocate for the mentee. Their research* suggests high-potential women are over mentored and under sponsored relative to their male peers — and that they are not advancing in their organizations."

As Holvino goes on to write these differences are not fixed and therefore when assessing a better way to develop the talent you have requires a greater degree of self awareness on the part not only of the mentee but of the mentor as well. To what extent do you wish to cultivate and develop certain approaches to the work effort, characteristics and behaviors commonly found in your workplace, if in fact your target market is becoming more diverse, your customers are becoming more diverse, the things are changing? Is the mentoring exercise about helping others to "fit in" or is it a process for engagement and using insights gained for enhancing your organizational culture to become more nimble at adapting to the changing market place?

Consider how to develop reciprocal mentoring relationships where there is an exchange of ideas, a mutual exploration of values and assumptions and the behaviors that follow.

In the organization that I founded and lead, we focus specifically on mid-career Hispanic-Latino professionals. The mentors are senior managers, CFO/COO/CEOs and entrepreneurs. We select individuals who have mentored before but as one mentor, a retired CFO of a bank, noted "... I have never met or interacted with a person of color until I left the state I grew up in to go to college," and he went on, "My career in the financial industry has not afforded me many opportunities to meet and get to know very many diverse professionals, never mentored a Latino."During the two times he has mentored so far, he has come to gain insights into how an accomplished Hispanic-Latinos may in fact view things such as power, managing up and influencing. He has come to appreciate the value that these individuals can bring with their experience "walking in two cultures" and doing so very effectively. They are also bilingual and bicultural. They have adapted well in their respective companies, been promoted several times and have had the experience of accompanying him to BBJ CFO forums, and other professional association experiences that they might not have attended without his mentorship and his sharing his contacts.

In summary, be self aware as a company, as an individual, be open to other points of view. When mentoring across cultures, it can provide a wealth of new information, contacts and insights that can result in a more informed and culturally competent community of professionals and build an organizational culture that is able to adapt more readily to the changing demographics, the future is now!

*Peter Drucker was a writer, management consultant, and self-described "social ecologist," widely considered to be the father of "modern management."

*Why Men Still Get More Promotions than Women by Herminia Ibarra, Nancy M. Carter and Christine Silva.

Harvard Business Review September 2010.

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