Empowering Women Through Mentorship with Stefany Stanley
It’s been five years since the start of Ok Mentor! And we don’t need to tell you that since 2018, the world has changed in more ways than one.
We wanted to take a deeper dive into OK Mentor's past, present and future - and what better way than to talk to OK Mentor’s co-founder Stefany Stanley?
Apart from being OK Mentor’s co-founder, Stefany Stanley wears many hats - senior client director at LinkedIn in the advertising division, a co-chair for women at LinkedIn London and a Mum.
Stefany talks to us about everything OK Mentor, and shares how mentoring can be a game changer!
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity.
“OK Mentor started about five years ago and at the time, there was very little mentorship and knowledge sharing. I would usually get mentorship through either university or through the corporation that you worked at, and that felt really non-inclusive for us.
We thought, what if you're not going to university or if you're not at a big company, what are your chances? And then, we started looking at, gender, and the pay gap and found that only 6% of Fortune, 500 companies have female CEOs.
When we started looking at those numbers through an inclusivity lens, we thought, what are we doing to accelerate the success of women? What are we actually contributing and what if we shared everything that we've learned in our 20s with the women?
How fast could we change the future generations?
That was the starting point and driving force for us. For me especially, I felt a little purposeless in life, like many people do at various times in their lives and I felt I needed to do something that was bigger than me that helped me, help others, and so, when Liz and I kind of came together at an event, it was the perfect synergy.
And that's how it started.
We've mentored thousands of mentees across 52 different countries now…It’s been a really exciting journey for sure.”
“I think mentorship can play many different hats.
Mentorship is sometimes coaching sometimes friendship sometimes just telling someone what they think that they should do. It’s helping people make decisions.
I think the key thing about mentorship is that it’s not someone taking a position of, “Hey, I'm teaching you something and you should do as I say”, but it's more like “This is how I did something, this is what worked for me, how can we make something work for you?”, This has been my experience, and from what I’ve learned, you can almost accelerate your knowledge.
Imagine my dream situation is to be an entrepreneur of a company with 500 people minimum.
Right? That's my dream.
And then I get mentored by someone who's accomplished that. They can give me insight into all the different things that would have taken me years, and potentially a lot of failures, to understand and learn.
Mentorship can really accelerate your success, accelerate your knowledge and avoid a lot of failures, or at least, guide you through them.
Through my experiences, both as a mentee and as a mentor, I’ve been able to level up my understanding of everything from negotiation to knowing my value to understanding how to ask for what I want to make tough decisions.
It's brought me to tears, it's brought me laughter. It really can play a huge role in someone's life.
But if it doesn’t represent the communities and people that really need it, then it's not a level playing field, right?
You have people who have already privileges and more opportunities and if we're also feeding them with mentorship, but we're not giving an opportunity to everyone else, then you're always going to see one specific segment of society accelerating, which is the problem today.
That's what we're trying to solve.”
“When Ok Mentor was about two years old, we were talking with one of our advisors about how we worked with universities.
At the time, we were partners with Oxford University and their graduate schemes said, “I don't think you should explore that.”
I remember thinking“Why?! This is so great. We're helping students, They have no idea what to do.”
But looking back, it’s clear to see how we were directly targeting people with privilege.
No shame to anyone going there, it’s obviously amazing, that's when it dawned on me that we're actually helping only a few, and doing a disservice to everyone else.
That’s when we really reshaped our strategy. We started partnering with a lot of charities to allow underrepresented people in communities to get mentorship. It was our biggest shift, but arguably our most important one.”
“It’s a process and it’s not easy because the media is constantly changing. There's a little bit more representation in media and arguably, more sense of value. I think that It is a very difficult line.
We get a lot of people who have phenomenal 30-years+s expertise, who have a lot of value to give, but whose experience isn’t relevant to creative women trying to crack the market today.
We've been looking at our mentors and working with them to better explain what the job market looks like today, and we’ve had some really successful workshops on that to date.
For example, one really common thing we get, and I can even relate to, is that 20 years ago, you would say yes to working for free all the time because it got you the exposure, the introductions, whatever it was needed, to be able to succeed.
Could it still work today? Probably. Does it work for everybody? Absolutely not.
So we're training all different types of mentors and shifting the category or the criteria to qualify from what was plainly just years of experience, to more about what kind of experience you have.
Is it that you only have three or four years of experience, but you've accelerated and you're ready, to manage a team?
Or maybe, you don't have any years of experience, but you really represent your community or your voice is heard within a particular space or you really understand a lot about certain industry markets, people demographics, whatever that may be.
We also live-revise our curriculum.
Luckily, the committees involved in revising our curriculum are working in today's tough job market themselves and understand its complexities, which I think helps us stand out from any offering out there.
In essence, we try to incorporate everything we can. But we do fail. Sometimes, as a mentor, I have been in situations where I'm like, “What do I advise here?” because you want to be respectful and you understand that people are different.
But in that moment, all you can do is say what worked for you, 15 or so years ago.
That said, I do my best to see working for other people today, that's the approach I try to have, but it's still a process for sure.
We're not by any means there, we have always got a lot of work to do, but we’re getting a lot better.”
“We started as an organisation that was for women by women, or those who identify as women, but we want to grow from there.
We want to figure out a group at a time first and then expand, as there are so many people and underrepresented communities that need more help that aren't necessarily just women, right?
We’re talking about that a lot in leadership at the moment, so more on that to come soon.”
“My most impactful mentor-slash coaching moment, was when I came back from maternity leave and my identities and priorities were completely all over the place.
I felt like such an imposter and that the person that I once was was really not how I was anymore.
I had no idea how to respond to it or how to find myself again and honestly, I couldn't have gotten through that without my mentor.”
Got questions, thoughts or feedback on OK Mentor? Drop us a line - info@okmentor.me - we'd love to hear from you <3
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