In a very saturated industry, planners do their best to stand out and achieve the goals they desire for their business. For seasoned meeting planners, there is that understanding and perhaps even a sense of duty to share what they have learned along the journey with others, and give back to those who are starting their career as a planner in the association industry.

For new meeting and event planners entering the associations industry, it can sometimes be a daunting first step. Learning to have the right outlook of the business, how to tap into vital resources and how to avoid making crucial mistakes along the way is critical to their success.

Through coaching and mentorship, new planners can learn from others who have paved the path for them and receive knowledge that will stay with them forever.

Types of Coaching & Mentorship

Today’s meeting planner mentoring is as diverse as the mentors and mentees themselves. Some coaching and mentoring relationships are formal and focus on learning about specific components of the association meeting role. Others are more informal and social — allowing the mentor/mentee to share industry knowledge and insights, like how to grow your business, how to get through the “stuck” felling and reach your definition of success.

The length of time mentors and mentees meet can range from a certain number of weeks to an ongoing mentoring program. And while many mentoring relationships are job performance specific, others may also include a networking component whereby the mentor helps the mentee expand their network connections with others in the industry.

Karen Hill, MBA, DES, director of meetings, events and engagement at Barcami Lane, Inc., an accredited association management company that provides nonprofit associations with both full-service management and project management services in Westford, MA, said that as someone who was entirely new to associations and the association management industry, when she started in her current role five years ago, being able to have individuals she could reach out at any time for advice, guidance and resources was extremely beneficial.

“It provided the opportunity for me to gain new insights and grow my professional network,” Hill said. “As a meeting planner, having the skills and background can carry over from role to role, but having a mentor helped me to gain a better, and quicker, understanding of the role I was stepping into.” The best mentoring creates a positive and long-lasting impact on the mentee and it allows the mentee the opportunity to think more broadly about their career path and aspirations, and with guidance be more effective in their chosen path.

Hill pointed out that there is so much information and experiences to be shared between experienced planners and those who are just starting out in the industry.
Mentoring provides the opportunity to gain those insights from an experienced planner and help another planner grow professionally. In addition, seasoned mentors understand that it is not necessarily their years of experience nor their expertise as association meeting planners that greatly impact their mentee’s experience. Rather, it is about how they engage with their mentee, helping them learn to apply certain approaches.

“Having a couple key mentors throughout my career has helped me in different ways, as they both provided me with different outlooks and resources,” Hill said. “They pushed me to set goals for myself as a meeting planner and think about my future. Depending on the situation, both mentors have different experiences and networks that I’ve been able to benefit from throughout the years.”

Most recently, Hill has found that the challenges that she’s sharing with them are very similar to what they are going through in their role. “It’s become more of a brainstorming session with them, versus a one-sided discussion,” Hill said. “It feels good to be able to share solutions that they may not have come up with within their team.”

Teaching the Tools of the Trade

Patricia Foss-Bennie, CAE, IOM, CMP, who has retired from being the director of conferences and publications and editor-in-chief at The Maryland Municipal League, in Annapolis, MD, believes that because of its deep roots, mentoring is important for the association meeting planning industry.

When her career transitioned from the hotel side to the planner side, there weren’t prestigious universities offering courses in association management, let alone anything as specific as meeting planning.

“Cornell had a restaurant and hotel program and maybe a couple others, but even growing up in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area, few new college graduates like me knew anything about association career paths,” Foss-Bennie said.

“The way one learned then was through experience and you really had to have mentors to learn how to master all the diverse areas the meeting planning required. I consider that I was lucky to begin on the hotel side, spent three years learning and gaining appreciation for what the hotelier needed to do their job right. I honestly still use some of the tools and skills today, such as the staging guide concept, building in reset time for meeting rooms and certainly in contract negotiation.”

Foss-Bennie said, “The association member organizations like ASAE and PCMA have provided great tools and forums for information sharing and through these I got my CAE, CMP and IOM credentials. In association and all event planning, we continue to teach one another and share best practices. Now college and university programs do a great job of teaching new generations.”

Kristyn McCauley, CAE, CMP, former meeting planner and program manager at Partners in Association Management, in Tallahassee, FL, sees mentoring as a very important component in the association meeting planning industry since most planners who find themselves in these roles did not have formal education or training specific to event planning, much less, planning events for an association.

“Many people who work in association management in general will joke about how we fell into this career by accident and I’d imagine that is also true for many association meeting planners,” McCauley said.

“Many of us come to this role without specific degrees or other training for meeting planning. We have to learn these skills and best practices on the job experience, training we may seek out for ourselves and learning from those that came before us. Having a network of other association meeting planners and mentors within the space is invaluable for those of us who are often learning as we go. It is so helpful to learn from others who may have made a mistake before you so that you don’t have to make that mistake for yourself.”

McCauley has had the pleasure of working with many other meeting planners through her time at a captive association and at an association management company. Having this group of professionals to bounce ideas off of, working through roadblocks, asking for their creative input, etc. has greatly impacted her ability to do her job well.

“My mentors have also pushed me to seek out additional education for myself, including the Certified Meeting Professional certification,” McCauley said. “A great perk of working for an association management company versus a small captive association is that you end up having so many peers within your office who are doing similar work as you are but are at different stages in their careers. In my current role, I have the option of plenty of built-in mentors to help me as I grow in my career and knowledge as an association meeting planner.”

And while McCauley has not served as a mentor in a formal capacity, she is always happy to chat with association meeting planners both within and outside of her organization to work through creative solutions and share best practices — or at least what has worked or not worked for her and the associations she has planned meetings for.

“The best resource we have in this profession is each other,” McCauley said. “We have to lean on others that went before us and be available to those coming after us to share the knowledge we have gained. The events industry is evolving, and although associations tend to be slower in their evolution than corporations, hearing from others about how they have handled certain situations in the past is still relevant. We rely on each other to get better at what we are doing. Learning from other’s experiences plays a huge role in our own success, so the value of mentorship will not go away.”

Mentee Becomes the Mentor

In the last several years of Hill’s career, she’s been given the opportunity to mentor new and current teammates. She admitted that it has been challenging at times, and other times it has been the best learning experience.

“Mentoring gave me the opportunity to provide solutions and resources, but also to see my teammates grow and take on new professional goals,” Hill said. “Being a mentor has also provided me the opportunity to learn from them, get some new fresh ideas that I can implement as a planner with the associations I work with.”

In fact, mentoring others has been Foss-Bennie’s favorite part of any work she’s done throughout her career. She said that hearing from people she’s worked with in the past and watching their careers unfold is a joy.

“That they still remember me and value what I’ve been able to help them with is giving back the gifts we receive as we build our own careers,” Foss-Bennie said. “It honors those who helped us along by carrying on the tradition of mentoring.”

And although the mentee certainly gains valuable insights and education from their mentor, those association planners who go down the path of mentoring also gain considerable benefits including:

• Enhancing their career: By mentoring, association planners hone their own skills of listening, influencing, being reflective and asking questions that are thought-provoking to others.
• Developing others’ skills: In a mentorship role, committing to another person’s development can have a profound impact on the mentor, as the mentor needs to recognize a mentee’s strengths and weaknesses, potential skills they need to learn or improve and new behaviors they may need to embrace.
• Staying relevant: Mentees depend on a mentor’s ability to share insights and expertise on how to improve their own role within the association meeting planning industry. Because of this, mentors need to stay up-to-date on the latest and greatest facets of the meeting planning industry in order to share that with their mentees.

For association meeting planners who may be considering mentoring another planner or being mentored themselves, Hill recommended that those planners take the time to get to know their mentee. Gain a better understanding of their experience, background and what their professional goals are. Get to know them as a person and build that relationship. Be open to sharing the good and the bad times you’ve faced in your career, and what you’ve learned from those experiences.

“As a mentee, take the time to learn more about your mentor and what their background and experience has been,” Hill said. “Most importantly, ask as many questions as you possibly can.”

Looking ahead, association planners agree that mentoring will continue to play an important role in the meeting planning industry for planners.

“It will absolutely play an important role in the industry, as I hope to see more willing to mentor,” Hill said. “This is how you build the interest of the younger generation in becoming planners. It’s all about sharing your experience, getting someone excited for their role and being that guide or resource.”

As association meeting planners, Hill said they bring a lot of knowledge, resources and their own growing networks to the proverbial table.

“Being able to share that information to help someone else succeed professionally makes me look forward to what the future holds for myself and other planners,” Hill said.

Foss-Bennie said that association meeting planners need to remember that mentoring isn’t just about getting on either side of the practice. It’s about giving, whether mentor or mentee. She said that whether formal or informal, mentoring fosters learning on both sides with open two-way communication helping create valuable lifelong relationships.

“Usually, you both get far more than you feel you put in to a mentoring relationship,” Foss-Bennie said.

“Look at the CEO profiles in the Wall Street Journal. Every one of these very successful leaders cites at least four other leaders as mentors, and not just mentors from their specific field,” Foss-Bennie said. “There is also great value in talking with and learning from someone in a completely different business than the one you’re in and rarely is good conversation wasted when it is begun with genuine questioning.”  | AC&F |