LinkedIn launched its content series The Mentors Who Shaped Me and several TV newsers have weighed in on the topic. NBC’s Kate Snow, Dylan Dreyer and Tamron Hall, MSNBC’s JJ Ramberg and ABC’s Ginger Zee, Mara Schiavocampo and Deborah Norville have all participated.
Dreyer discussed how hard work, luck and a mentor helped her career:
When I was least expecting it, I met a meteorology legend: John Ghiorse. He built his reputation talking New Englanders through the Blizzard of ’77. I didn’t quite know who he was when I first met him because I grew up in New Jersey (and I wasn’t even alive in 1977), but he soon became the man who would shape me into the meteorologist I was to become.
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Ramberg tells us how a senior producer helped her early on:
When I was 21 and got my first job as the receptionist at NBC Nightly News, a woman named Cheryl Gould was the senior producer on the show. While I was grateful to have gotten a job in such a dynamic environment, I was itching to get out from behind the desk where my key task was taking messages and directing calls for all the producers and correspondents. I wanted to be in on the action. Early on, Cheryl took me out for coffee and said, “I know you want to be doing more, but make yourself stand out as the best receptionist that ever sat in that chair and someone will notice you and you’ll get promoted.” She was right.
Schiavocampo says feedback isn’t only for performance reviews:
My mentor and I stayed on the phone for well over an hour that day, with her giving me advice on everything but my performance: the importance of building and maintaining good relationships; what kind of image I should be working to project; how the hierarchy of the company was set up. That day, she taught me all of the things I needed to know (but didn’t know I needed to know), summarized by what she called PIE: Success is 10% Performance, 30% Image, and 60% Exposure.