This article is written by Saguna Roy, supervisor of operations performance and analytics for the City of Edmonton and co-chair of Women@theCity Employee Resource Network

Imagine walking into a conference room to find you look distinctly different to every other person seated at the table.

Slightly unnerved, you find a spot that will draw the least attention to you. You’ve come prepared, perhaps a bit over-prepared, though mostly for your own benefit. You wait for the opportunity to share your thoughts and ideas, but that opportunity never comes, and before you know it the meeting is over. You promise yourself that next time will be different. Next time, you won’t wait for that perfect window of silence. Next time, you’ll speak up. The trouble is, you promised yourself that last time.

This is an experience many of us can relate to. It's certainly a familiar one for me. From being educated in Canada in the field of mechanical engineering, where only 14% of students are women, to working on remote oil and gas sites north of Fort McMurray, Canada, this is just how things always were for me. It took moving to the public sector and being in a room with many more women to realise what I’d been missing in my career.

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When you are the only woman in the room, work can be lonely. It takes courage and self-assurance to speak up and share your thoughts. When you can look across the table at others who look like you, these tensions lift. The stark difference in my working style, idea-generation and problem solving ability was evident to me once I joined a more gender-balanced team. As a result, I quickly jumped at the opportunity when asked to co-chair the Women@theCity Employee Resource Network (ERN) at my organisation.

The Employee Resource Network

Our vision at the ERN is simple: deliver equity for women. To realise that vision, our ERN has engaged with women in fields such as the fire service, the police force and in frontline municipal operations, all of which are heavily male-dominated sectors. In addition, we’ve looked to fields such as skills training, human resources, and public programming for guidance.

The network uncovered a recurring theme that affected women negatively — the lack of a professional support system. To quote a study in the American Society of Safety Engineering written by Crystal Turner-Moffatt in 2019:

“Women in business, including women in leadership, should not be expected to single-handedly change the culture and values of their workplace — this is a near-impossible feat. Moreover, they should not need to mimic men’s behaviour to get fair consideration for career advancement. A more effective strategy to increase influence and capitalise on the opportunities they deserve is to find allies and mentors within their organisations.”

Through mentorship, women can seize opportunities to expand their professional networks, explore different career paths, as well as feel affirmed and motivated by others’ experiences that are similar to their own. Moreover, companies that support mentorship are likelier to keep employees and reach gender equality within leadership roles.

The mentors I never knew I had

Webster’s dictionary defines a mentor as “a trusted counselor or guide/a tutor or coach”. Until recently, I didn’t think I could claim to have had a mentor, yet on this definition I can think of at least one person who has been there for me. My father is also a mechanical engineer, and has been a sounding board for me throughout my working life. I’ve never hesitated to reach out to him to discuss challenges at work, opportunities on the horizon, or the fears and struggles I’ve had to navigate, such as becoming a mother while balancing a fast-growing career.

Weaving mentorship into our organisation in this way made the idea of mentoring and being mentored a social norm like any other.

The more I think about it, the more people I consider as having been mentors to me keep coming up. I almost always found an inspirational role model to help me understand the nuances of the particular organisation. Perhaps at the time I didn’t know that I had forged these mentor-mentee relationships for myself. This is probably how I survived feeling so lonely in so many conference rooms.

Having established the benefits of mentorship both to women and their organisations, our Women@theCity ERN set out to create a mentorship programme at the City of Edmonton.

We linked up with established women leaders in the organisation to understand how mentorship had impacted their career trajectory. We also worked with university research students at the University of Alberta to explore the best mentorship models. Through this, we discovered that mentorship is most effective when it is not a programme, but a culture.

Shift from programme to culture

Treating mentorship as a programme means getting people to sign up via applications, scheduling mentee-mentor matching, and arranging and tracking follow-up. Through this approach, we manage mentorship on the basis of statistics: how many mentee-mentor relationships we had in the organisation, how we could grow those numbers, and how best to match mentees and mentors.

Realising that what we needed was in fact a culture of mentorship meant I had to fight my spreadsheet-creating instincts and really try not to ‘input’ mentorship into the organisation. This left me stumped as to what mentorship within a culture would look like, and how we could influence it.

Then one day, it hit me. We needed the networking effect. By asking that every employee set themselves up as a mentor to one other employee and to also seek out a mentor, we’d effectively spark a chain reaction. The whole organisation would soon be supported through mentorship — not just women, but everyone. Weaving mentorship into our organisation in this way made the idea of mentoring and being mentored a social norm like any other.

My mentoring mission

I now have a mission of my own — to spark the same chain reaction of mentorship within my organisation. I call it ‘Be one, mentor one’. To that supposedly insurmountable feat described by Crystal Turner-Moffatt as “single-handedly changing the culture and values of the workplace”, I say: let’s give it a go.

So imagine again walking into that conference room, only this time knowing that while not everyone will remind you of yourself, at least everyone around the table will be mentoring someone, even someone who might look like you. Mentorship, not just for women but for all, is the key to an inclusive, engaged and passionate workforce. — Saguna Roy

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