Women's Ways Of Mentoring

Coordinates: Lourdes Townsend, Lourdes_Townsend@striderite.com; WOMEN Unlimited, 212-572-6211; Menttium Corp., 612-814-2600, www.menttium.com; Kathy Higgins Victor, khvic@worldnet.att.net; Ann Latendresse, ann.latendresse@greatclips.com

Old Rule: Look for your mentor higher-up on the food chain.

New Rule: A good mentor is anyone you can learn from.

Everyone knows what an old-style mentor looked like: someone who had a little gray hair and an air of wisdom - a seasoned executive who was several promotions ahead of you. In the new world of mentoring, however, the ideal mentor is impossible to visualize - it could be anyone from anywhere inside or outside of the organization.

Peers can serve as handy mentors when you have no obvious senior role models to look to. Take Christine Comaford, 36, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with five successful startups to her credit, including planet U (a Web-based marketing company) and her current business, Artemis Ventures, a venture-capital company that itself provides mentoring for startups.

As a woman running high-tech companies, Comaford found that mentors were scarce. So in 1996, she founded and organized Digital Dames, a peer-mentoring group for women who are top executives in technology companies.

So far, the group of about 30 women has kept its meetings informal and casual, gathering for occasional potlucks at Comaford's house. The strength of the group: Its members have a wealth of experience in a wide range of entrepreneurial issues. "Our industry changes so fast, only someone inside it knows what's going on," Comaford says.

Coordinates: Christine Comaford, cc@artemisventures.com

Old Rule: Mentoring is one-on-one.

New Rule: Mentoring works best when you mix and match.

Sure, it would be great if you could find a mentor who would shower you with attention. But not many people have the time to be a one-on-one professional trainer. Don't worry, says Tara Levine, 27, director of research and advisory services for New York-based Catalyst, a nonprofit group that works with companies to advance women within their organizations. In fact, you're better off diversifying your mentor portfolio.

"Get creative about how you set up mentoring groups," Levine says. "You can have a mentoring quad, with two mentors and two mentees, or a mentoring circle, with two mentors and from 6 to 10 mentees."

One of the programs offered by Menttium is a service called Circles, an approach to mentoring that brings together mixed-gender groups within companies. At Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Co. (BNSF), based in Fort Worth, Richard Dennison, 57, an assistant vice president in the mechanical division, has been participating as a mentor in a Circles group for six months.

Dennison meets monthly with six mentees. In the group's first meeting, mentees outlined their career goals. Next, Dennison found speakers who could address topics that the mentees had expressed an interest in. The company also organized sessions on basic skills, such as budgeting and conflict management.

Coordinates: Tara Levine, info@catalystwomen.org; Richard Dennison, richardtdennison@bnsf.com

Old Rule: Mentors pick their proteges.

New Rule: Proteges pick their mentors.

Everyone knows how old-style mentoring was supposed to work: It started when a mentor picked a protege or the company sanctioned a formal mentoring program. Not anymore. Women don't ask permission, and they don't wait for mentors to find them. They've started grassroots mentoring programs on their own.

At Apple, for example, the company's women took the initiative in 1994, when Apple scaled back its mentoring program, its formal staff development, and its diversity activities. A few determined women, including Subhana Ansari, 47, decided that if Apple would not bring mentoring to them, they would bring mentoring to Apple. Ansari, an area administrator, approached other women at Apple with a proposal: With no funding, no support, and no materials, Ansari and other volunteers would build a formal mentoring program in a matter of weeks, starting in March 1996.

The classes, which ran for six weeks every Tuesday afternoon, attracted 20 people - 15 women and 5 men - and taught them how to recruit their own mentors. Two people dropped out, but the remaining 18 all had mentors by the fourth week of class. Within four months after the program was completed, six of the group's members had been promoted.

The mentoring program helped its participants reach new career heights - and for Ansari, it opened up a new career. She left Apple to become a training project manager for Adecco Employment Services in Redwood City, California. "Creating the program redirected my career," Ansari says. "It was the most fun I ever had at work."