Candid Conversation with John Onoda, former CCO of Visa USA, General Motors, and Levi Strauss, and longtime mentee, Lori Teranishi, Founder & CEO of iQ360 Inc.
Gain tips and tricks on all things mentorship
Designed for emerging leaders, the Plank Center launches the Candid Conversations series featuring industry leaders and their mentees. With a focus on mentoring relationships, series host and Plank Center Emerging Leader Committee member, Sonny Franks Miller, poses challenging career questions to uncover insights from the nearly 30-year mentoring relationship between John Onoda and Lori Teranishi.
Topics include:
How do you stand out as a mentee to a mentor?
How has your mentor helped you recover from failure?
Agency or corporate for the most meaningful career?
How do you maintain a mentoring relationship for nearly 30 years?
From their experiences, you’ll be able to apply their learning and insight to your own success. The following is some background on John and Lori’s relationship and selected quotes from their Candid Conversation found on the Plank Center YouTube channel.
Candid Conversation soundbites
Featuring
How did they meet?
Lori met John when he joined Visa USA as CCO in 1998. John has been Lori’s mentor guiding her through all sorts of professional and personal challenges and opportunities. Lori says her relationship with John has been one of the most rewarding of her life. Ironically, today John works for Lori.
What was Lori’s first impression of John?
“When I first worked with John I was shaking in my boots every time I had to talk to him. He was just so smart and I was intimidated by him and I just wanted to do my very best.”
What advice did John give Lori early in their relationship?
“When I first started working for John, he told me that I apologize too much. Actually, it was the way I was raised to apologize a lot. He told me I wasn’t enough of a risk-taker – also true. In the formative years of my career, I had John really pushing me and giving me assignments that made me fail.”
Can you share an example of a time you felt you failed?
“We had a very difficult legal situation coming up and John asked me to write a position paper for the CEO. And I sweated every word and three hours after he gave me the assignment which was quite time-sensitive, he came in my office and threw down a memo and said, ‘I just did this because you took too long.’
I was mortified but it taught me, look, you just have to do it, trust in what you do and just give him something. I was able to adopt that mindset because as I worked more and more with John, I realized that we could fail and he wouldn’t penalize us for it.”
John, you seem to have a tough-love approach to mentoring.
“What mentors can do is provide a perspective on failure. In a way, failure isn’t failure, because you’ve got to try and then you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t work. Sometimes you’re going to have to try and do something that is outside of your scope of experience or even competency, but you’ve got to try because the situation demands it.”
Lori, agency or corporate? What’s the best career track?
“My advice is whether it’s on agency or the corporate side that people really do try to develop these business skills. Not look at yourself as a communicator but look at yourself as someone who is trying to help whatever organization you are in and all their challenges.”
Lori, what effect will AI have on our industry?
“I think AI probably poses the biggest challenge for people in our profession who aren’t willing to flex and grow and have this continuous-learning mindset. It can be scary on one hand because it will displace portions of our job.
However, for people who have critical thinking skills, who think like business people and assess what’s important and where we have to go. That’s all of the counseling, the strategic, human intelligence part of the equation. If we can continue to develop those kinds of skills as communicators, we’re going to win.”
John, how would you summarize your approach to mentorship?
“I think there’s some similarities between leadership and mentorship in that they are both lifelong journeys. You can’t give cookie-cutter mentorship. You’re trying to help this person achieve what they want to achieve. So you have to get your head inside their head and give them advice that will fit their internal landscape.”
More Candid Conversations on the Plank Center YouTube channel
John and Lori have many more insights to share on the value of mentoring relationships, their take on AI, and how young professionals can manage the ever-increasing work pace in their Candid Conversation. You can watch the full conversation here.
Check out more Candid Conversations with other industry leaders and their mentees as the Plank Center releases more segments in the coming weeks. Please let us know if there are industry leaders you’d like to hear from.
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