Tamra Kerns, Leadership Consultant
Tamra is a Leadership Consultant partnering with business & non-profit leaders to build high performing teams. Prior to this role, Tamra worked at National Instruments for 27 years, serving in a variety of leadership roles, including Vice-President of Global Support and Services, Director of Product Strategy, Director of Product Management, and Director of Software Marketing. She has also served on several non-profit boards and is passionate about mentoring people to help them advance their own careers.
Q: Why do you choose to spend your time mentoring others?
A: Mentoring has always been a passion of mine. As I progressed throughout my career, there were a few people that helped me along the way. Every time I had a career dilemma, I would always go back to those people. I'm forever grateful to them because, at times, they saw me better than I saw myself and gave me some great advice. Mentoring is a small way to give back, and it also gives me a lot of personal energy. I enjoy watching people discover things about themselves and discover what they can do with those things and move forward, so that's why I mentor.
Q: What do you personally gain from mentoring?
A: I gain things on both an individual level and a macro level. On an individual level, whenever I have a conversation with someone I'm mentoring, I always take away something helpful for me in my current world situation. On the macro scale, if I look at everybody that I mentor, it helps me stay connected with the professional world because I'm not in corporate America anymore. It helps me keep my skills fresh, as they talk about their challenges, it keeps things very close to home for me. It also gives me energy, so it helps me want to do a lot of other things.
Q: To what do you attribute your success?
A: I define success very differently now than I did ten years ago. Ten years ago, I defined success as how well my business area was performing, how well my team was performing, and whether they were getting recognized for what they were doing for the business. One of the biggest things that helped me achieve business success was taking personal relationships seriously and investing in them. I invested huge amounts of my time in the people in my group, in the relationships I had with customers and with other departments. I was probably in 10 to 14 meetings a day, which helped me succeed in terms of business success.
Today, I define success more around my contribution to the world, society, my mentees, and my clients. I get a better sense of interpersonal success and satisfaction now than before. But it's been a journey.
Q: How has mentoring impacted your own journey?
A: Two people in my life had a profound impact on me. Both of them were my manager at one point in time. They saw things about me that I didn't see. They saw my strengths and blind spots. And it is only now, looking back over two decades, that I think, "Wow, this person was really impactful to me." So, the single biggest thing that I learned from my mentors is that external perspective is really good. We all need someone who will give it to you straight.
Fast forward to today, mentoring others has led me to a transformation in how I view success. I had spent so long judging my success by the success of the work that I was producing or that of my group in the business environment, and then, suddenly, when I wasn't working, I went through a little bit of an identity crisis. I'd go to a happy hour, and people would say, "What do you do?" And I didn't know how to answer the question because I had, for so long, defined myself in a role in corporate America. And once I started mentoring, and I started helping people, I realized, "Wow, there's a lot of different ways to be successful and to provide value to the environment and the world." Mentoring helped me make that shift at this particular phase in my life: "Wow, success can actually take on different forms, and it's okay that I can't necessarily talk about growing the business X percent. That's okay. That's not my role now."
Q: What does good mentoring look like to you?
A: Mentoring should always help people break through their barriers, whether they're barriers at work or barriers in their beliefs about themselves. However, good mentoring looks different depending on where the person is in their journey. On a given day, good mentoring can help them overcome a challenge at work, or it may be helping them figure out their five-year career path.
“A good mentor will understand that the little challenges they face are also key to solving the big challenges they’re facing. It usually paints a picture of what is holding them back from achieving their long-term goals.”
A good mentor will understand that the little challenges they face are also key to solving the big challenges they're facing. It usually paints a picture of what is holding them back from achieving their long-term goals. It's far better to take a pause, listen to them, hear them out, offer advice, and spend a quarter or even up to a half of the call working on that and clearing that off of their plate so that you can then get back to working on the long-term goals.
Q: What advice would you give to someone interested in mentoring?
A: Listen a lot, and ask a lot of probing questions, open-ended questions, to just figure out what people are thinking, so that you can figure out what the mentee needs from you over the long-term, but also on call by call. And be especially aware of the phrase, "I'm not very good at that," because one of two things is true, either they aren't very good at that, and you can help them with it, or they're just fine at that, and it is an artificial barrier that they've put up that's limiting their potential. So, listen a lot.
If you have at your disposal their 360 review or open comments that people have left, frequently go back and revisit the things that people said they were good at and remind them of that. Most often, if people feel successful about something, it can help them overcome the things they are challenged with and need to work on. Success begets success. But you can only do that if you are listening.
Q: Why do you choose to mentor with Ceresa?
A: All too often, the only mentoring that we get is from the few people that are right around us. They're down the hallway. They're in the cube next to us, et cetera. The model that Ceresa has is much more effective in helping people get the help they need: to match people who have taken a similar path or overcome similar challenges. I feel like it's everybody's responsibility to figure out ways to help others trying to take a similar journey because we all have to work together to be successful.
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.