Designing for the Human Experience

For twenty-seven years, the company I work for has been delivering formal corporate mentoring programs. Seven years ago, I was first introduced to this organization and their programs during my career at a Fortune 1000 company, which utilized their formal group mentoring program for women in leadership. My participation was a game-changer for me personally and professionally, and I rely on that experience to influence how we design, sell and market our offerings.

The Company’s WHY: we believe that all leaders at any stage in their career can benefit from the wisdom and personalized attention of formal mentors. We believe that learning happens at the difference, and therefor intentionally pair mentees-mentors from different industries, functional areas and backgrounds. We believe that mentors benefit just as much as mentees by honing coaching skills, giving back, and learning about what is working on the front lines in other organizations. We believe that a mentor’s hindsight can become a mentee’s foresight, and accelerate growth.

My Personal WHY: as a mentee in a group program, I discovered how valuable a trusted, personal board of directors can be when you face difficult challenges in your career and life. I connected on a deep, emotional level with my fellow mentees, and was better able to handle difficult situations because of their listening, coaching and encouragement. My Why is quite simply that I want to enable as many leaders as possible to benefit from a similar experience.

The company started as a program called “Minnesota 100,” designed to pair 100 women leaders in the Twin Cities with formal mentors outside of their own organization for a 12-month partnership focused on the development goals of the mentees. We now run programs globally and have maintained essentially the same business model for the partnerships and tools/resources to support the program, including business education webinars. The cross-company programs are now all virtual. The webinars focus on key development areas, like executive presence, effective communications, influencing without direct authority, etc. Our human-based match process and ROI assessment contribute to a very successful model responding to a critical need in today’s corporations: retaining, engaging and developing their key talent.

About a year after joining, I realized we needed a new program. I was hearing from trusted clients that in the space between our foundational programs and executive mentoring, we were missing some critical needs for a population of their leaders who were more advanced and/or tenured (VP, SVP level). We designed a new program, called Elevate, to meet these needs, which launched as a pilot in 2017.

The key differentiators for the Elevate program:

Who was Elevate designed for? Consistent with our WHY, we wanted to create the best mentoring experience for all levels of leaders within our client organizations. We needed to more closely meet these needs for the senior level leaders, prior to the senior executive level.

What was it for? The common worldview in our company community (staff, clients, mentees, mentors, alumni) is a commitment to life-long learning, the power of mentoring across differences, and the importance of learning from the experiences of others. Elevate was designed to create an environment and experience maximized for the success of this level of leader (defined as accelerated growth assessed by the mentees, their managers and their mentors and measured against defined, key leadership competencies). Elevate would ideally provide more senior level leaders with a trusted sounding-board in a mentor, an opportunity to connect with other mentees in their cohort to share experiences and compare best practices, and webinars uniquely designed for their leadership level.

Learnings on fit and where we mismatched with Elevate: With a lot of in-depth discussion about the innovative products and services that WORK, we discovered common themes:
• they all speak to their buyers on an emotional level
• align with their core values
• exceed expectations
• provide tribal affiliation and attachment

Applying these principles to our Elevate pilot:

• we aligned the program well around attaching at the emotional level of offering a customized solution for higher-level leaders who didn’t want to attend webinars that were beneath their skill level (i.e., recognizing their status) and allowing them to form connections with others in the cohort
• we aligned with their core values of continuous learning and becoming the best leaders they can be
• we mismatched on exceeding expectations because we were unable to execute on the in-person component for some clients because of challenges bringing global leaders together in one location
• because we were unable to bring in-person sessions to fruition for some clients, they missed the ability to “form a tribe” or make that personal connection across the cohort they were seeking

Overall, the pilot was a success. We sunsetted the program and incorporated its best features into our foundational programs. We developed more advanced content that we now deliver to all program levels (exceeding client expectations) and offer onsite network sessions a la carte where feasible for clients.

Reflecting on the Elevate program pilot and what we learned from it, framed by a larger study of Design Thinking, has given me a new frame of reference for creation of products and services going forward, no matter what organization I may work for in the future. Absent the opportunity to experience the product or service myself as a consumer, to do my best work and provide excellence for customers/clients, I have the responsibility to think hard about what the need is we are trying to answer, how these needs connect with the fundamental human experience, and how we can make the world a better place for at least some of its inhabitants. It’s not easy work, but worth the emotional labor.

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