The first step, Pianin says, was garnering interest to ensure the program would be successful. “We sent out a lot of surveys to our membership. There [was] a strong verbal response, but the survey responses were pretty strong as well. We asked who was interested in this and what part of it are [they] interested in. Some people want to be exclusively a mentor or be mentored. And then there’s a lot of people who would like to be both,” Pianin recalled. “It’s exciting to see that even when people are at a certain level, they’re still looking to grow.”
Pianin remarked that even C-Suite women leaders want the opportunity to become mentees. “No matter how advanced you are in your career, or how accomplished, there’s always room to grow. There’s always room to be better,” she said.
Setting The Foundation
The Women Who L.E.A.D. Mentorship Program spans nine months, beginning with three months of mentor training, provided by Build-U-Up Consulting. The mentor-mentee portion of the program is slated to last between January and June 2025. Mentor selection has just begun as of early September.
“There isn’t any requirement as much as we’re asking people to commit to the mentor training. You must be within the mortgage industry, obviously, and you must be a member to participate as a mentor and mentee,” Pianin says. “We took our surveys and we looked at who was interested in becoming a mentor, expressed that they’d be interested, and also expressed that they’d be willing to commit to training and the full program. So we sent a message to all of those people stipulating the requirements, explaining the dates that they would need to commit to for their mentor training, explaining that they must attend all of these training sessions because we’re paying for the program to train them.”
The program Pianin is referring to was created and customized for the council by Tina Asher, founder and president of Build-U-Up Consulting. Asher has been coaching under her business umbrella for seven years but has over 30 years of experience in the mortgage business. The Missouri-based coach was reached out to by Pianin about how the council didn’t have the bandwidth to put together a program from scratch but desired to provide an initiative to support its members.
“Since I have a lot of tools in place, we started having some conversations,” Asher explained. “I was sharing a little bit of some of the tools and the things that I use in my training. And then we came up with a program, and it’s turned into the Women Who L.E.A.D. Mentorship program.”
Asher and Pianin worked together to structure the program, choosing topics for mentor training and discussing how Asher could measure the success of the program. Asher says the first topic is designed to recognize blind spots.
“We’ll have two sessions per month, and each topic will be different … The first phase is all about self-discovery and self-awareness. I think it’s really important for us to start first with if people aren’t doing what we want them to do in an organization, we have to look in the mirror first,” Asher said. “We have to really [ask] how am I explaining that to that person? Or what could I be doing differently to help them to get the result that I want to get?”
The second and third topics, Asher adds, are understanding motivators in the workplace and how to set up new leaders for success. “We all know the mortgage industry is so crazy with the ups and downs, and there are ways to manage that,” Asher elaborated. “And I learned that by a fault. I didn’t do that so well when I was in the industry, and I revamped and trained myself to understand I could have done that better. And if I would have had these tools and done this differently, I wouldn’t have been running so ragged.”
Asher says one of her goals during the training is to teach the mentors how to handle difficult conversations their mentees might have questions about.
“One of the areas that we’re going to talk about, [is] a lot of times it’s one week you’re sitting and having lunch with your buddy, the next week you’re now the team lead or the supervisor. Now, how does that dynamic change? Because that does change, right? And how do you manage differently versus still be a friend, but be careful because your upper management is watching you and lower management is watching you,” Asher said.
Measuring Success
The buck doesn’t stop after six sessions, Asher assures, including that mentors will have access into a private portal full of additional resources. “They can reach out to me in between sessions if they have questions,” Asher added. “I will be there to check base with them … we’ll have a Q&A session once a month and flush out some of the things that they’ve been coming up with.”
Asher is taking mentors back to grade school and assigning homework to ensure the mentors can best support their mentees. Pianin says that the plan is to have five main mentors, each with no more than three mentees beneath them.
“We’re structuring it in a way that it’s mostly leadership-focused,” Pianin explained. “If there are people who have certain specialties, that’s how we’ll match up our mentors and mentees. For example, if there’s a mentor whose specialty is mostly technology or mostly marketing, and the mentees are looking for specifically that, we would match them that way. However, we are mostly leadership-based [and are] empowering people to find their leadership voices.”
