Leadership & Mentorship

Rachel

 I guess for my female mentor, I would say is my supervisor in my previous role as an intern. I would say I was very lucky to have her because I've heard many stories. The advice given to me is your manager makes your experience at your job.

I think what I learned from her the most wasn't like technical skills, but more on like how to be like a leader like a supervisor for your juniors 'cause what I felt as an intern was, my opinions was very respected and she saw me at the same level instead of sometimes I could receive some more condescending feedback from other people.So I think that's what I learned the most. And also something that I would wanna learn as a practice and pass on to my juniors as I grow in the future.

 But I also heard a lot of interesting stories about her experience as a woman working in Japan. But that is a very long story, but it was very eyeopening. We could talk about that later though.

Silvia

Yeah. I don't know. It's different and not, I don't know, like it was Derek or someone who told me like that the super senior male designers were fine. So in the states you don't get basically any parental leave. And they were like, yeah, it's okay. My wife will take care of our kids or whatever. They just were so unbothered by the fact that they, that policy was in place.

It's so interesting to hear your guys' perspective on like more senior designers that like mentored, like female designers and like I didn't have any, like I didn't have any female designer mentors at all. Yeah. I. I don't, no, I, I didn't really have anyone. It was just like, there was, I had mentors, but they were all men. Just because, I guess of the time or whatever. Yeah. So it's interesting to hear your guys' perspective.

I had men like peers and mentors in that way later on and Nina or like other folks that. I worked with and obviously learned a ton from, in terms of specifically senior like designers, I didn't have anything like that.

Rachel

I think regardless of gender, I think one thing that I change is the way that I give feedback. I think it's probably because of how I was receiving feedback growing up in a very like, blunt, straightforward way that I took that practice as well in myself. So I feel like knowing how we should actually be giving more constructive feedback and like in a nicer way and softening your speech. Especially, I think with English we tend to soften our speech a bit before giving, like more critical feedback. So I think that's what I learned the most and I think it's a good practice that I picked up from all the mentors that I have and also in With as well.

Sarah

Yeah, it's nice to hear everyone's stories about light there. Mentors in, in their past or jobs. I feel like I'm like Sylvia, where all of my work experience has not been that long, but all my previous work experience has also been men.

Tania

 I always was like looking up to other women for that leadership or that mentorship and one person that comes to mind for me specifically is a designer that I worked with at my last job. Her name's Dragana and was a senior designer that I worked with when I was like mid-level. And I feel like she definitely inspired me a lot. Just like in my growth as a designer, but also on a personal level. So at my last job, she'd always guide me to learn design stuff and would often, I guess push me out of my comfort zone.

And I think the moment when we got super close was at my last job. We did this three week retreat in Korea, and we were actually rooming together. So I was literally living in a house with all my coworkers, which was really interesting. But when we, yeah, it was like we were living in a house with a bunch of guys and some females too. So I was like, I'm curious to know how that's gonna be, but me rooming with my like. Designer who I worked with all the time it ended up being so cool. Like we, I feel like it almost felt like we were sisters.

Because for the retreat. They're like, okay, like during the day we're gonna co-work with each other, but then we also have time to go out and explore the city on our own and just do random things. So when in the evening when it'd be time to wind down, like I'm literally just showered coming in my room and we're both just like laughing at each other and like it, we just ended up getting like super close and I feel like she ended up being this person for me who like impacted me from like a design point of view, but then also just like personally looking up to her as a sister.And often she'd gimme advice on life and health. She was super into biohacking, so we'd often just talk about wellness and stuff.

And then from a design perspective, like one thing that I really admire that she did at my last job was I found that people were mainly just focused on like the client work that we were doing. So she started running this like weekly or biweekly workshop where she put together like this challenge. So it'd be like a startup is trying to solve X problem design a screen that might solve for why. So she'd gather like a couple people together and then we'd get five to 10 minutes to just tinker and come up with a random design, but purely not based on UX and just pushing ourselves visually, which I thought was quite interesting.

And I was telling myself that at my next job, that's something that I wanna do. So maybe it's just like a future thing that we could do together. But yeah, she's just someone that I look up to a lot and we recently haven't chatted in a while, but I just feel like our relationship is. We're like we both just go ghost for a while and then it'll be months and we're just like, oh my God, dude, like, how have you been? And we'll catch up and stuff. But yeah, I ask and think about her and whenever I get the time to touch base with her, it's really nice. She also lives in Barcelona, so like the time differences really a lot. So yeah, we don't get to chat all the time. But yeah, she's somebody that's like super important to me.

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