Gifts of mentoring

Natasha Williams, CFE, CIA, jumped at the chance to mentor a colleague in the ACFE Mentoring Program. “I had to learn [in my career] the hard way through a lot of trial and error,” Williams says. “So, if I can assist someone to move their career to the next level more easily and help them to avoid making the same errors that I made on this path, I thought that would be great.”

Mariam Afzal, CFE, CPA, says she wanted to expand her professional horizons. She requested a mentor in the Mentoring Program who worked in a different industry and location, had a strong technical skill set, had been in leadership positions and had global work experience.

“When I came across Natasha’s profile, I was beyond impressed,” says Afzal, an audit manager at United Airlines. “She not only had extensive experience working in many countries, but she was also a subject matter expert in anti-fraud and corruption audits. This is an area that interests me immensely.” Williams, senior manager, global compliance, at Bio-Rad Laboratories, has more than 20 years combined experience in auditing, banking, compliance and accounting. She’s managed audits across the globe throughout Europe, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region.

During their “discovery call,” Williams knew right away that Afzal would be the right mentee to work with. “Our personalities are similar, so we had great communication,” Williams says. “Most importantly, she had a ‘can-do’ attitude. … You must stretch yourself if you want to grow. Stretching often requires venturing outside of your comfort zone, which also brings along its best friend, fear. I told her to fight the fear and do it anyway. She listened, she did it, and I think she’s going to get some good results."

Afzal says she’s grown in many areas but especially her confidence. “Natasha has helped me create a map to take my current accomplishments and start building my areas of specialization,” she says. “I have a passion for sharing knowledge with others, and she has advised me on the steps she took to become a speaker and be more involved in the anti-fraud community.”

Williams says the profession needs more longtime fraud examiners to share their failures and successes. “If I had a mentor along my career path, I truly believe I would have gotten a lot farther faster,” she says. “However, all the stumbling blocks helped build my character and build the skills and tools needed to succeed. Now, I am able to share those experiences with others.”

“Natasha has helped me create a map to take my current accomplishments and start building my areas of specialization.”
Mariam Afzal, CFE, CPA

“You must stretch yourself if you want to grow. Stretching often requires venturing outside of your comfort zone.”
Natasha Williams, CFE, CIA

Giving back, giving forward

Mentoring is a critical foundation to any profession. Mentors impart practical wisdom, experience and lessons to newcomers during one-to-one conversations, which books podcasts and training sessions can’t quite capture. Research has shown that inexpensive, well-designed mentoring programs can be one of the best development tools. (See Mentoring Impact on Leader Efficacy Development: A Field Experiment, by Paul B. Lester, Sean T. Hannah, Peter D. Harms, Grethchen R. Vogelgesang and Bruce J. Avolio, University of Nebraksa – Lincoln.)

Mentees can increase their competency and self-awareness, and develop broader networks. Mentors can be recharged, feel good about giving back to their professions, and gain new understanding and perspectives. But sometimes poor pairings or disparate communications styles can hinder mentor-mentee relationships. Or a mentee might be seeking a quick fix to a much deeper issue. (See How Effective Are Mentoring Programs for Youth? A Systematic Assessment of the Evidence, by David L. DuBois, Nelson Portillo, Jean E. Rhodes, Naida Silverthorn and Jeffrey C. Valentine, Association for Psychological Service, 12(2) 57-91, 2011.)

Start with yourself, then devise a plan together

Becoming a mentor means first considering your professional journey. Honestly determine your strengths, limitations, interests and style because your job will be to help mentees clarify their goals, be supportive and help them on their journeys. I’ll give some tools and models in this article to help you in this process.

Even if you don’t enroll in the ACFE Mentoring Program, review the site to gather its policies, tips, resources, tools and frequent issues and formulate a solid plan and productive mentoring relationship.

For starters, I created a sheet for my initial discovery call with my prospective mentee. I took information from the ACFE materials, added some questions and discussion points, and formatted it so I could take notes during the call, which would help me remember essential areas over the course of the mentoring time.

Spend some time working on your profile page for the ACFE Mentoring Program. Add a short biography, and include industries in which you have experience and topics you’re passionate about. Write a short statement of your personal mentoring philosophy so prospective mentees know what to expect and which subjects are off-limits. Your profile should be warm, welcoming and inviting. A nice photo helps.

Mentors: Developmental activities for mentees

Here’s a sampling of activities that mentors can suggest to mentees to help them develop and reach goals. The list isn’t inclusive but a starting point for brainstorming.

• Become involved in a local ACFE chapter.
• Help identify, address and separate mentees’ larger personal challenges into smaller, attainable goals.
• Find relevant trainings and courses to enhance or supplement existing skill sets.
• Explore career options in such areas as government, non-profit, self-employment or industry.
• Ascertain their future career moves, including lateral or cross-functional roles, supervisory or leadership roles, and geographic changes.
• Pinpoint interests in emerging or advanced areas of fraud examination, such as international fraud, asset recovery, cyber or digital forensics, open-source investigations, and blockchain or cryptocurrency.
• Draft a résumé or cover letter for a specific position.
• Check out and then discuss the article Mentoring can move your career forward faster, by Donn LeVie Jr., CFE, Fraud Magazine, Nov./Dec. 2018.
• Provide resources and discuss lessons learned from your engagements.
• Encourage them to write an article for Fraud Magazine, the ACFE Insights blog or The Fraud Examiner newsletter.
• Suggest the possibility of teaching a course (or parts of one) on fraud prevention, detection or recovery, and give them ways they could pursue that.
• Introduce them to CFEs in your professional sphere.
• Track their progress on taking the CFE Exam.

Mentees: Tips to build meaningful mentoring partnerships

Mentoring is a two-party system; a mentor and a mentee, of course, must contribute for it to work effectively. Two researchers did a study on how mentees can take advantage of a mentoring relationship. I’ve adapted several of their findings and combined them with my observations. (Read the full study, Attracting Great Mentors: Seven Strategies to Cultivate, by Judy Vogel and Susan Finkelstein, OD Practitioner, volume 43, No. 3, 2011.)

• Be curious and open. Seasoned fraud examiners took unique paths to be where they are depending on their circumstances, aspirations and interests. No one path is preferred. Ask them what led them to be successful, and what they did to remove blockages and barriers.
• Always be on the lookout for potential mentors. You can have formal mentors, such as those in the ACFE Mentoring Program, but also seek out informal sounding boards for occasional conversations.
• Don’t be afraid. Summon a bit of courage, proactively seize opportunities and ask questions (even “Will you be my mentor?”). Our greatest insights sometimes come when we’re least comfortable.
• Be appreciative. A mentor’s time and experience are valuable. If you were a client, you’d be paying them a lot for their customary hourly fees. After your mentorship has ended, keep in touch to acknowledge their contributions to your career.
• Take the lead. After all, it’s your career! Don’t sit back and hope the mentor will find you a dream job. This field requires hard work, discipline and continued practice. Pursue excellence and methodically take small steps toward your goals. You’ll eventually look back at the seemingly insignificant yet pivotal career moments.
• Be passionate about learning new things. Be willing to ask for help in areas you don’t know much about. But don’t leave it there; look for more resources and opportunities to apply and practice the knowledge or skill even if it’s not directly related to your career. The desire to be lifelong learners drives successful people.
• Take a long-term approach. View your life as a series of overlapping big pictures because productive change seldom comes quickly. At some point, you might become a peer (or even supervisor) to your mentor. Give back to the profession. Become a mentor and spur others to attain their career goals.

Build trust

The mentor and mentee relationship should be a safe place to discuss sensitive career, job and case issues. The initial discovery call can be a bit awkward, but it’s the time to first agree about confidentiality and information exchange.

Then begins the vital work of developing a working understanding and knowledge of each other. In his bestselling book, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable,” Patrick Lencioni provides three questions to kick off the conversation:

1. Where did you grow up?
2. How many siblings do you have, and where do you fall in the order?
3. What’s one unique or interesting experience from your childhood?

These questions allow both of you to begin from the same point in a neutral zone. Everyone has a family story. We all came from somewhere. This icebreaker allows you and your mentee to begin to personally connect and not just talk about jobs or tasks.

Ask questions

As fraud examiners, we ask a lot of questions in our audits, examinations or investigations. Start with an open, inquiry-based approach to mentoring because it might take some time to build trust. Open questions allow for a dialogue to begin in a non-threatening, supportive manner.

Leadership consultant Sir John Whitmore developed the G-R-O-W model in the 1980s that you can use to develop a common picture of a mentee’s interests by asking pointed questions:

• Goals: What’s the mentee ultimately seeking? A new job, a career pivot, enhanced skills in a specific area of fraud examination?
• Reality: What’s the mentee’s status? Where do things stand in their life, career, job, aspirations? Do personal, organizational or environmental barriers inhibit forward movement?
• Options: What are the mentee’s options? Brainstorm all the potential avenues to pursue the mentee’s goals. Don’t discount or second-guess anything initially (that can come later), but put everything on the table.
• Will: Is the mentee willing to make changes even if it means short-term discomforts (geographic, salary, cost) for long-term benefits? Recognize that sometimes mentees are more comfortable in difficult realities than unknown futures. All we can do is point out that choices can be limiting. Ultimately, it’s their life, not ours.

Be a good coach

Another good model, from the book The Coaching Habit, by Michael Bungay Stanier, contains seven questions that enable a mentor and mentee to explore the aspirations and challenges. Much like the G-R-O-W model, it focuses the discussion on open-ended ways to unearth topics that the mentee finds difficult to articulate.

I’ve adapted the seven core questions from the book for a mentoring relationship:

• What’s on your mind today?
• What else are you thinking about?
• What do you think your real challenge is?
• What do you want out of this mentoring program?
• How can I help put you on your path to success?
• How are you managing your time and organizing your life to take these steps?
• What was most helpful or useful in reaching your goals today?

These questions can broaden the discussion beyond the task of mentoring and can encourage further reflection, especially the third and fourth questions on challenges and goals.

Dual exploration

Mentors have helped me in my career several times. I’ve written about how mentoring has benefited me for Fraud Magazine and the ACFE Insights blog.

My mentors helped me consider future possibilities and then structured a way for me to think about how to get there. I was inspired by the ACFE Report to the Nations when I was trying to replicate the mentor/mentee experience and to structure a meaningful dialogue.

I used RTTN information and the ACFE Fraud Tree to devise the four-part Fraud Skills Mentoring Review Assessment. The first part gives the three divisions of the Fraud Tree — corruption, financial statement fraud and asset misappropriation — plus the specific frauds under each.

The second section reviews industry or sector interests. The third section examines job roles or functions. The fourth section identifies key skills for fraud examiners.

Use the assessment to focus your discussion on current or past experiences, plus potential future pursuits, which can save time in discarding extraneous items and allows the mentor to target discussions toward the most fruitful areas for growth.

Before the first session, the mentee completes the entire assessment by providing on each line item the level of experience they have and how it appeals to them. The mentor then can suggest trainings, cases, readings or action items.

The Professional Balance Wheel (below) is another excellent tool to start a discussion. The diagram consists of eight categories, such as networking, productivity and interpersonal skills, and a 10-point scale for each.

Professional Balance Wheel

Mentees rate themselves on each category with a numeric score of their level of satisfaction. The goal is to gain consistent improvement or look at opportunities to develop one thing in each category. This assessment can be an excellent way to begin to focus the discussions of goals, strategy and action.

Assessments or exercises like these provide valuable opportunities for you and the mentee to develop the “dual exploration” nature of mentoring. They provide launching points for tailored mutually beneficial dialogue. For example, a seasoned CFE might be able to think through these skills and apply them in a supervisory capacity, or to become a trainer (or even mentor) to junior investigators, auditors and examiners.

Gift of time and experience

Our journeys through this life shouldn’t be solitary. Most of us are surrounded by people who’ve helped us — sometimes with a metaphorical push or pull. Mentors give the selfless gift of time and expertise to help develop others who are interested in taking their careers in fraud examination to the next level.

The ACFE Mentoring Program is a good place for CFEs to impart their knowledge and experience. Productive dialogues based on common understanding of mentees’ backgrounds, interests, challenges and opportunities can significantly enhance the mentoring process for both the mentor and mentee. The result? The profession and communities strengthen.