Friends,
Many business people, especially women, like to talk about having mentors or being one to other women. I have mentored a lot of folks, women and men alike. Many have worked for me, some for years and years; other mentor/mentee relationships were brokered through human resources or industry programs; lots come through the more informal but no less important asks of friends and peers on behalf of their peers. Or their children.
There are many rewarding, fulfilling relationships that grow out of these sometimes initially lop-sided engagements. There are others that just don’t work. The very best ones, like most relationships, are those that feel like you’re both approaching the relationship as equals, with equivalent value to offer, though often from vastly different vantage points.
It’s rare, though, that I am in a pretty deep work relationship but didn’t know I was a mentor at all! It happened just this week.
If you read the fine print of this Facebook post, the woman on the left, Allison Rapson, tells the story of going from an intern at Bravo to co-creator and producer of a fabulous docu-series. The surprise to me is that, while I knew I was the Executive Producer, I did not know I was also credited as a mentor.
How did it all begin?
Truth be told, she “won me” at an auction at NBCUniversal. Yup, that’s right. Allison recently reminded me that years ago she was working for NBC News in D.C. Pre-Facebook- and Google-as-we-know-them, she had been “studying me” because I was the head of an NBCUniversal division called The Women & Lifestyle Entertainment Networks, and she wanted to transition from working in a news bureau to female-focussed audience platforms. So, when the chance to enter the corporate lottery came, she entered to win an “NBC Experience” — like seeing the tree lighting at 30 Rock or going to an SNL taping. When her lucky number was called she instead chose her own real life kewpie doll — me. Or, actually, a breakfast with me at a now-defunct breakfast club atop 30 Rock. Subsequently, she became an intern in my division, ultimately working at two separate businesses.
Many years later, Allison emailed me out of the blue to ask for a meeting with her and her business partner, Kassidy Brown. They wanted to tell me about their aspirations for a company they were founding. And they wanted help: Support. Validation. Connections. Money. Some pencil-pushing. Advice. Feedback on everything from logos to business structure. That was a couple of years ago. It’s been a terrific business relationship. Now, reading Allison’s Facebook post, it forces me to reclassify my “business relationship” categorization from the transactional to the personal. That’s intense. And moving and gratifying.
While we are not currently offering a grab-bag of life-changing “experiences” for you to win, hopefully you will find something fun and/or beneficial in this Bingo-board of a Newsletter. The LZSundayPaper is a snapshot of the week’s news about and by women in business, politics, digital, media, film, tv, fashion, sports, and pop culture. Roughly in that order. And it usually contains a little bit of a laugh, no matter what.
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LZ
