Photo By Kimberly Koonce | Fleet Readiness Center East Commanding Officer Capt. Mark E. Nieto, left, presents...... read more read more
MARINE CORPS AIR STATION CHERRY POINT, N.C. – For one Fleet Readiness Center East, mentorship is about more than helping a handful of individuals chart their career paths; instead, it’s an investment in the depot’s future, and a way to ensure the depot’s continued support of naval and Marine Corps aviation.
“Developing the personal relationship, and becoming a trusted agent for a mentee, helps that person, but it also helps the organization in the long run,” said Donald Jeter, who earned recognition as the FRCE Mentor of the Year during a Naval Air Systems Command ceremony Jan. 28. “We’re all going to leave at some point, and there will be a new generation of leaders who continues the fight of the command. With the mentor-mentee process, we have the opportunity to help shape those leaders of the future.”
Jeter, the depot’s Fixed Wing Division director, served six years in the U.S. Marine Corps after graduating from high school, and started working at FRCE as a sheet metal mechanic in 2001. Since then, he’s risen through the ranks, serving as a work leader, task manager and integrated product team lead. During those years, Jeter served a brief tour as a logistics management specialist at Commander, Fleet Readiness Centers, and that’s where his interest in mentoring took flight.
“That’s where I really got involved with mentoring,” Jeter explained. “It was a requirement at COMFRC that we have three mentors, and I had three really strong mentors while I was there: two civil service and one active-duty military. That really helped me a lot, just being able to have that trusted agent to turn to.”
One of his mentees, Peter Schwartz, said Jeter’s commitment to mentorship shows in the relationships Jeter has with his mentees.
“His mentorship experience at COMFRC really made an impact on him. You can tell he really cares about the topic. It’s important to him,” said Schwartz, a logistician assigned to the F-35 Capabilities Establishment Team at FRCE. “He knows it’s necessary to develop our younger leaders. He’s really trying to develop me, and I appreciate that. Knowing that he’s doing the same for others as well, it made me really want to nominate him for recognition.”
Schwartz said Jeter’s mentorship has helped him successfully navigate the extensive program requirements of the Executive Leadership Development Program and has helped him forge relationships with additional mentors.
“He really set me up for success with that program,” Schwartz said. “Aside from that, in day-to-day work, he acts as a sounding board for me, always giving me advice after a big meeting, giving me advice on how to better communicate my ideas so I’ll get more traction with them. He’s fairly easy to communicate with, and there’s that level of trust there.”
According to Jeter, the trust is what makes a mentorship relationship effective.
“I think a mentor is a trusted agent that somebody should be able to come to and ask for advice or direction, not from a management perspective,” Jeter explained. “A junior person can come sit down and talk to you – whether it’s about a career aspiration, or an idea, or a new way to do something – and be able to have that nonjudgmental discussion with someone who’s a higher rank. That’s what I think of when I think of mentorship.”
Because Jeter has experienced that trusted agent relationship throughout his career, he now wants to provide the same for others.
“Coming up, I’ve always had someone who was in senior leadership that I could go to off the books and say, ‘Hey, this is what I’m thinking. What do you think? What am I not thinking about?’ That’s been good for me, and that’s kind of the way I’ve done my mentoring: I’m here. If you need something, come find me. Let me help you. Bounce ideas off me,” he said. “It’s more a personal relationship where you become that trusted agent they can come talk to. That’s what we should strive for across the command.”
Jeter said he recommends branching out from an organizational “stovepipe” when it comes to finding a mentor.
“I think you should have somebody who’s out of your comfort zone as a mentor,” he said. “You should be able to bounce your worldview off somebody else that’s in a different area. Branching out from your normal comfort level helps you get a different perspective.
“It shouldn’t matter what your pay grade or job description is. You should find a mentor or a mentee that you gel with, that you have similar interests and concerns with, and you should work collectively to grow,” Jeter continued. “If you’re a production person, go talk to someone in engineering or logistics, someone who has a different set of understanding that what you have. I think everybody tries to look at somebody who’s in their wheelhouse when developing that mentorship relationship, and I think that’s a big disservice.”
When the mentor-mentee relationship gels and is productive, it can lead to great things for both the participants and the command. The transfer of knowledge works both ways, Jeter said, which benefits the depot as a whole.
“From a mentor perspective, it helps to have new ideas coming in from fresh new faces that take objective looks at the organization,” he explained. “It’s not just the mentee that learns from the mentor – it’s reciprocal. I think we have a lot to learn from new people who come in with a different viewpoint.”
At the same time, the real-world experience and institutional knowledge possessed by senior leaders can help set the next generation up for success.
“When somebody brings in an issue or concern in that mentoring perspective, a senior manager can talk about whether they’ve tried this before, what pitfalls they’ve found, and how they’d work around the issues if they had the chance to do it all over again,” Jeter said. “So taking that knowledge we’ve learned, and that history, and being able to apply it to new things we undertake in the future is hugely beneficial.”
Helping tomorrow’s leaders become well-rounded in their experience has real-world implications for FRCE, Jeter added.
“I really believe one of the biggest qualities that’s going to be important in the future is having business acumen, where you can understand more than just your department or division’s world, and understand the bigger picture of how the entire depot operates,” he explained. “It’s a huge, complicated, multifunctional animal, and you need people who know it from one end to the other. That’s how we’re going to remain relevant in the future.”
The mentor-mentee relationship doesn’t have to be a formal arrangement, Jeter said. Simply providing a nonjudgmental sounding board for junior team members can bring positive results.
“There is mentorship that happens at Cherry Point every day,” he continued. “There are some people who do the formal mentoring program, but a lot of people I see are doing the more informal mentoring – those hallway discussions where someone will pull a senior manager to the side, ask them a question, ask for advice. And that’s mentorship, too.”
FRCE is North Carolina's largest maintenance, repair, overhaul and technical services provider, with more than 4,200 civilian, military and contract workers. Its annual revenue exceeds $835 million. The depot generates combat air power for America’s Marines and naval forces while serving as an integral part of the greater U.S. Navy; Naval Air Systems Command; and Commander, Fleet Readiness Centers.
| Date Taken: | 02.28.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 03.03.2020 09:34 |
| Story ID: | 364358 |
| Location: | CHERRY POINT, NORTH CAROLINA, US |
| Web Views: | 97 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Fixed wing director earns Mentor of Year honors at FRCE, by Heather Wilburn, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
