Career Journey Mentoring at DHW: Embracing the Past to Empower the Future
By Susan Glenn
At DHW, mentoring, the essence of the company’s culture, is a value shared by all employees. Recently, the leadership team started thinking about how an employee’s previous work experience matters to their current and future professional and personal well-being. This question is particularly relevant to professionals in the insurance industry because, all too often, they don’t receive the tools from their employers that they need and deserve to power their success. Rather than progressing confidently forward in their career trajectory, they’re merely treading water just to make it through another day.
So in the spirit of kicking off 2020 with inspiration and empowerment, DHW launched an innovative mentoring initiative they’ve coined Career Journeys Mentoring. As a component of their mentoring approach Sharing the Way, Career Journeys challenges colleagues to take control of their careers by exploring and cataloging their past and current work experiences.
Why Career Journeys
Career Journeys is a process of goal setting that incorporates mentoring and self-reflection. First, the mentee sits with their mentor to explore similar behaviors and experiences across every job they’ve had, even the almost-forgotten-jobs that have long been collecting dust on the resume cutting room floor. By the end of the meeting, a whiteboard is peppered with notes on the mentee’s strengths, challenges, needs, and passions related to those previous job experiences. Together, the mentor and mentee establish opportunities for growth based on newfound insights.
Trish Daley, Operations Manager and Account Executive at DHW, is a co-creator of Career Journeys. In her role at the firm, Daley oversees the quality of work and performance of DHW’s account professionals. She’s also responsible for the day-to-day development and strategy oversight in support of DHW’s mission and business goals.
She notes, “As part of my role, it’s important for me to know what our employees at DHW want to accomplish through their work. I helped develop Career Journeys so we could motivate our employees to form goals that personally made sense to them and that aligned with their individual needs and passions. Through our unique mentoring approach, we hope we can truly identify what it is they want to reach for. Ultimately, this means our clients are provided the best partnership possible.”
Trish Daley as a Career Journeys Mentee
Daley is currently undertaking her own Career Journeys experience before DHW launches it to the rest of the firm. Her experience kicked off with a meeting between her and her mentor.
On a whiteboard, there were three columns: Strengths, Challenges, and Needs/Passions. She and her mentor explored these three attributes across all the jobs she ever had. They even discussed her high school job at Baskin Robbins. While reminiscing, she identified that her need for teamwork and her ability to self-lead became manifest while working at the famous ice cream chain. She also explored multiple examples of her resilience, exemplified by her ability to reinvent herself after the blow of being fired from a job.
And while she probed her strengths, challenges, and needs, she also identified a few qualities that she realized she wanted to shed, which are evidenced across multiple jobs throughout her life. On the Challenge column, she wrote fear of failure and not saying no. She admits, “Some challenges you just don’t want to have to look at sometimes. If we try to self reflect, most of us know where we have some shortfalls. Do we know all of them? Probably not.” Regardless of the discomfort it caused, she pushed through with a candid self-assessment and has identified behaviors and perceptions she’s committed to changing.
Going into the initiative, Daley already had a sense of her goals. She says, “I wanted to explore how I can make myself better so I can manage better and so I can make DHW run better. Because I wear so many hats, I saw my challenge was for me to become more organized and efficient.”
Through the process, Daley has identified goals focused on helping her become a more effective leader and mentor for the account managers on her team. But she recognizes that every individual has their own motivations, needs, and passions. Goals are a very personal thing. They can be about career advancement or making more money. They can also be about improving certain skills and behaviors like time management, setting realistic expectations, or learning a new skill set. She hopes that everyone who goes through Career Journeys will have a unique and highly personalized experience that responds to their needs and passions.
Powering the Journey Ahead
A few weeks after completing the first phase of the initiative, Daley is identifying the actual tasks she plans on implementing in order to meet her goals. She admits that going through the memory lane of her work experiences triggered some unexpected emotional responses, some more fondly remembered than others. But she recognizes that all of these experiences help to define who she is today. She notes, “Oftentimes, we say ‘Oh, that was a great job.’ But we don’t dig deeper than that and find out what effect it had on us and who we are going forward into the next position.”
Daley sees her role as a mentor to her team. Because the insurance market is an ever-changing landscape of rules, regulations, policies, and carriers, she says it’s her job to make sure her team paints an accurate and complete picture of risk and solutions for their clients. This means building efficiencies and tools to help them do their jobs better. She finds the renewed connection with her past jobs empowering and motivating and believes the experience will ultimately serve to make her a stronger leader in service to her team and to DHW’s clients.
DHW plans to formally roll out Career Journeys in the summer of 2020. For more information about DHW’s employee-driven mentorship and for professional opportunities at DHW, contact Trish Daley at tdaley@dhw-ins.com or call her at (650) 852-1498.
Susan Glenn has covered insurance, health care, technology, and marketing for over fifteen years. She is a contributing writer to multiple organizations and is the Content Marketing Manager for Demandbase, the leading account-based marketing platform for businesses. Connect with Susan on LinkedIn.
