Carla Reid, general manager of the Washington (D.C.) Suburban Sanitation Commission (WSSC), offered the final WEFTalk. She took a more analytical approach, describing three distinct types of mentorship that guided her success: organic, provocative, and prophetic.
In a new seminar format for WEFTEC 2017 — a series of short, informal presentations, dubbed WEFTalks — four prominent water leader recounted how influential mentors awakened their potential and helped shape their careers.
She experienced the traditional “organic mentorship” from her family and early supervisors. They nurtured her ambitions and passed on their experiences. During her time at Howard University (Washington, D.C.), however, Reid encountered “provocative mentorship.” A professor urged her to change her major away from her chosen field; the encounter pushed Reid to study harder to prove her professor wrong, spurring her career in water upon graduation. Finally, when she began working at WSSC, the then-general manager taught her about “prophetic mentorship.” He helped open her eyes to the possibility that she could one day become general manager herself, she said. Reid became the first-ever female general manager of WSSC in 2016.
“A mentor can show you the path, but you have to be the one to walk down that path,” Reid said. “You are your most important mentor. There is no ‘we’ in mentor, but there is a ‘me.’”
