Bobbi Dangerfield, Senior Technology and Operations Executive.
Bobbi Dangerfield is a senior Technology and Operations executive who has held a series of executive level global General Management roles. Her experience spans high tech, transportation, utilities, and government sectors with emphasis on global operational excellence, customer experience, risk management, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate governance. She has over 30 years of global operations leadership across the Americas, Asia Pacific and Japan and Europe. Bobbi Dangerfield is the President of the Dangerfield Family Foundation and former SVP at Dell Technologies. She currently serves on the board of non-profit organizations Dress for Success Austin, Susan G. Komen Austin, and the Texas Conference for Women. Bobbi is passionate about family, traveling, fitness and gourmet cooking.
Q: Why do you choose to spend your time mentoring others?
A: I've been fortunate in my career to have had a lot of really great mentors, many who I still rely on today, so it's important for me to pay it forward, helping the next generation of people in their careers. No one succeeds without their tribe, and I'm a firm believer that you can learn something from anyone and everyone. Mentoring gives me fresh perspectives and ideas. It's not only a benefit to the people that I mentor but for me as well.
Q: What have you personally gained from mentoring others?
A: In my career, I've had some great successes and some great failures. I've benefited from mentoring relationships where I could have open and honest conversations about both, where I could talk about things going well, as well as where I was struggling – which you can't always do with your boss or even your peers at work. It's also helpful in mentoring to receive critical feedback that helps you see your blind spots and reveals that people's perception of you might be different than yours.
Mentoring has helped broaden my network. As you move along in your career, your network naturally becomes bigger and bigger, with more and more people to leverage. What I find is that everybody is always willing to help and that you can reach out to your network for all kinds of things. And when I reach out to my network to get help for a mentee, people are all over it.
Q: To what do you attribute your success?
A: My ability to take feedback and really listen to what people have to say. My great grandmother used to say all the time, “God gave you two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in that proportion.” I listen a lot and speak when I have something to say versus jumping out there with thoughts and ideas before I really understand the situation. Also, I've learned how to take big problems, break them down into parts, and then generate quick wins.
“My great grandmother used to say all the time, God gave you two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in that proportion.”
Q: How has mentoring impacted your journey?
A: When I first started my career, I worked for IBM in software support, which I really enjoyed. I enjoyed the technical aspects of the job, including looking at code. I thought I'd continue in a technical role that was close to the customer, maybe systems engineering, where I could help customers with their technology solutions. At the same time, my manager noticed I was very good at bringing people together and solving issues, whether it was for a customer or an internal issue. He asked me if I'd ever thought about being a manager – and it hadn't even crossed my mind – I really wanted to do the systems engineering thing.
He and I talked about it a lot, and he finally convinced me to take my first management job, where I found that I enjoyed helping people grow and develop. I also enjoyed getting work done through and with the team. If I hadn't listened to him and stayed on my own path, I would be in a very different place in my career.
Another example was when I was an executive director at Dell, about ten years into my career there when I was leading the customer-centricity efforts for their consumer business. We had a large customer experience effort going on company-wide. Once a month, every leader was to provide an update to a more senior executive in charge of the corporate effort. Every time I offered my update, I felt like this executive was harder on me than anyone else. I decided to put myself out there, and I asked him to be my mentor, and he agreed!
In our first session, when he asked me what I wanted to do with my career, I said I wanted to get to the vice president level and lead a more strategic part of the business. He told me that I had a reputation as a fixer, which was great because they were confident in placing me anywhere with an issue and that I'd turn it around. However, to get to the vice president level, he said I also needed to be viewed as a strategic thought leader. He told me he believed I could do that, but that I didn't naturally talk about it.
For the next year, we worked on how to rephrase things, how to talk about something more strategically. And then things started to change, and I got a promotion to vice president. His critical feedback made a huge difference in my career.
Q: What does good mentoring look like to you?
A: One element is being willing to give open and honest feedback and doing it in a way that allows the mentee to hear it. Building trust early enables you to have those conversations effectively. I can be pretty direct, which could turn somebody off, so it's important to be open and have a trusting relationship from the beginning.
I also think it's important to make the time and keep the time. If you are committed to mentoring, than the time, it should be sacred. We all realize there are emergencies that come up everyone's life, but, as much as possible, you should try to maintain the sanctity of that time you have together.
Q: What advice would you give to someone who is starting to mentor?
A: It's okay to share ideas and experiences, but don't tell somebody what to do; that's not what it's about, especially in a new mentoring relationship. The mentee needs to make their own decisions and to figure out how to move forward. You should share your stories, your own experiences, what worked, what didn't, but then they need to go off and make their own decisions. Mentoring is guiding, not handholding.
Q: Why do you choose to be a mentor with Ceresa?
A: I really like and respect many of the mentors at Ceresa, so I wanted to be a part of the same organization. And once I started, I found the training to be fabulous and incredibly helpful. Also, the structure put into the program and the support that Ceresa provides has been amazing. I think it's a great program, and I've been involved with a lot of different mentoring programs and tools, and I have to say that this is probably the most well done mentoring program from a structure, training, and tools point of view that I've seen.
Mentorship: integral to the Ceresa whole-person approach
At Ceresa, mentorship is an integral part of our leadership development process. The mentor-mentee relationship is a key component in providing the structure, and at the same time fluidity, necessary to facilitate pointed leadership and career growth for both the participant and the mentor.