Mentoring relationships help with success
As vice-president of HR at Ford Motor Company of Canada since 2003, Stacey Allerton Firth oversees all of the company’s labour relations, compensation and benefits programs and is responsible for 7,400 employees.
But of all her responsibilities and accomplishments, she is most proud of strengthening the relationship between the Oakville, Ont.-based automaker and the Canadian Auto Workers union.
She did that by having open, ongoing communication with the union and being transparent and respectful. This included sharing all the company’s performance data and goals, as well as letting the union know what its role was in delivering on those goals, she said.
It also included listening to the union’s needs and responding to them.
“You can’t go to bargaining and establish the relationship in the moment,” said Allerton Firth. “It’s something that happens through a number of encounters and actions over time, leading up to bargaining, where you display that respect, the listening, the data sharing, the transparency and then that starts to create that environment of trust so that when you have to have those difficult conversations, or when you have to reach an agreement in tough times, you have the foundation on which you can do that.”
That approach served her well as lead negotiator for the 2005 and 2008 negotiations with the CAW, she said.
Allerton Firth’s success at Ford is why she was named to Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 list run by the Women’s Executive Network (WXN) in 2006, 2007 and 2008, and why she was inducted into the WXN Hall of Fame in 2009, said Pamela Jeffery, founder of WXN.
In her three years on the Top 100 list, Allerton Firth was honoured in the corporate executive category. Nominees in this category are judged on their management role, vision and leadership, corporate performance and community service.
After a woman has made the list three times, the WXN board looks at her accomplishments and the legacy she has created to determine if she would be an appropriate choice for the Hall of Fame, which now has 62 members, said Jeffery.
“For Stacey Allerton Firth, like many of the others, she has been in that senior, senior HR position in corporate Canada for a long time. That’s part of the reason why we have the Hall of Fame as well, to recognize women who have been in the profession and have made a real contribution over a period of time,” she said.
Jeffery created Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 awards in 2003 and chose the name in an attempt to shatter gender stereotypes and be a bit provocative.
“I thought, oftentimes, that ‘power’ and ‘women’ don’t necessarily tend to be in the same sentence,” she said.
In this case, power is defined as how a woman drives an organization’s results, improves her community and mentors and coaches the next generation of women leaders, said Jeffery.
HR executive at TD also a winner
Teri Currie, executive vice-president of HR and corporate and public affairs at TD Bank Financial Group, was also honoured in the corporate executive category three times and inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2009.
One of the reasons for her induction was her involvement in WXN’s mentoring program, where winners of the Top 100 volunteer their time to mentor young women, said Jeffery.
“She’s a real role model,” she said.
Allerton Firth, who is also a WXN mentor, knows the value of mentoring relationships. She started climbing the ranks at Ford in 1990, holding HR positions in Michigan and Minnesota before moving to the Canadian headquarters and, over the years, she has benefited from formal and informal mentors.
“I had some pretty candid feedback from some mentors about some of the strategies I was picking and what the impact of those strategies would be and some additional considerations that I really took to heart,” she said. “I’m not sure I would have seen those blind spots on my own.”
One mentor, in particular, stood out. He was also in the automotive industry and was able to give Allerton Firth a new perspective she hadn’t expected, given she already worked with so many men in the industry.
“He taught me a lot around the value of networking,” she said.
“As women, as young women and as busy women, we often underestimate the value of taking the time to develop and establish a network, a network that is really service-oriented, in a proactive way.”
Too often, women will wait for someone to offer help instead of going out there and asking for it, she said. Women need to be more proactive in their careers, in building their networks or in seizing an opportunity for development, said Allerton Firth.
“You have to go get the responsibility and the authority and the power. You can’t wait for somebody to come and offer it to you,” she said.
While Allerton Firth helps all employees advance at Ford through formal HR programs and mentoring, she also focuses on building informal relationships with employees at all levels in the organization by spending time with them in casual environments, such as the company gym or cafeteria.
“It’s important to me that our employees know me and feel comfortable speaking to me to create and establish a relationship and basis for trust so that when I’m needed, I’m accessible and I’m a known entity to them,” she said.
