Fall 2007 Mentor Profiles

Morag Barrett
Richard Buchanan
Cynthia Carpenter
Heidi Hollenbeck
Rebecca R Lim
Jacyn Meyer
Michael Turner
Katy Uhl

Morag Barrett
President
Skye Associates LLC

Morag Barrett is currently the owner of her own company, Skye Associates, providing executive coaching and leadership development to companies and individuals here in the Denver area and in the UK. Prior to developing her own company, Morag spent 14 years in the retail and commercial banking industry in various management and training development roles. For the last seven years, Morag held a Director position at Level3 Communications in the telecom industry, where she was responsible for the leadership development of managers and employees across Europe (5 countries), and then became part of the training team in North America as the HR business partner for several large organizations across Level3. Morag is very passionate about personal and organizational leadership development, particularly for the telecom industry, and in early 2007 decided to develop her own company around what she is most passionate about.

Morag is interested in being a mentor because she is passionate about helping others achieve their goals and helping them to take control of the situations they face. She feels that working with the WICT program will enable her to be involved in an outstanding mentoring program and will give her the opportunity to work with new people that she would not otherwise have had the opportunity to meet.

Because Morag has developed her career in the area of leadership development, she has had the opportunity to coach and mentor over a hundred leaders and managers, either as part of the leadership training programs, company mentoring programs or simply because individuals have sought her out. Each person has had their own challenges and needs and it has been a great learning experience for Morag (and the individuals) to work together.
Morag feels that her personal experiences with mentors over the years have been extremely positive for her overall development and she can’t actually recall a time when she did not have a mentor. Her Mentor(s) change over time and have included family, friends, and work colleagues. Having someone who can act as a sanity check and a sounding board has been invaluable to her over the course of her career.

Morag believes that a good mentor is one who listens, both to what is being said and to what is not being said. Someone who can help an individual prioritize goals and identify how to leverage strengths and / or overcome gaps will ensure mentees make progress towards achieving goals. Helping others to achieve results they didn’t think were possible is why Morag chose her career path.

Morag’s leadership philosophy is simple; passion, partnership and success.

• Passion – find something you care deeply about and enjoy doing and have fun
• Partnership – the working relationship is one of equals, mentor/mentee should stand side by side both during the good days and bad days!
• Success – it is all about YOU. The mentees’ success is the most important aspect of the program – the mentor is there to help the mentee achieve that. Without the mentee’s success the mentor cannot be successful as a leader

Morag’s core values revolve around Integrity, Professional & Personal Competence, and Continuous Learning. She brings the following strengths to the program: she is a good listener and she is able to quickly identify and get to the root cause of an issue.
She is curious about what causes people to react the way they do to situations and others, and she has a great sense of humor and optimism.

Morag would be interested in mentoring someone who is open to learning and trying something new, someone who recognizes that they are successful for many reasons, but that those reasons may not be what is required for the future, someone who is open-minded to different perspectives and willing to take a risk by trying something new.

She is most interested in mentoring on the topics Growing as a Leader (Leadership Development), Transitioning from Being an Individual Contributor to a Manager, and
Interpersonal Effectiveness. She can be flexible for locations and times and will work to accommodate the schedule of the mentees as much as possible.

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To be a good mentor, Richard believes in good listening skills, a mentor that can advise (not lecture), and a mentor that will carefully observe results for the purpose of feedback. He feels that he will be a good mentor by leveraging his skills in these three areas.

Richard’s personal leadership philosophy is to give talented people the support and direction to succeed and then let to them do it. He believes that help should be provided but only when asked for or needed. His believes that successful leaders do not micro manage or interfere beyond what is required for people to succeed on their own. His personal values are based on integrity, equity and improvement.

Richard’s strengths include his broad base of experience in the industry - covering technical, creative and programming areas. His broad perspective can provide a foundation that can be valuable in many applications when coaching mentees in the cable and telecom industry.

Richard would be interested in mentoring someone who is new to the industry or any functional area, someone in a related industry, and/or high potential individuals with management aspirations.
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He is most interested in mentoring on the topics Growing as a Leader (Leadership Development), Acting as a Sounding Board, and the Specific Discipline of Cross platform media. He would be most interested in meeting in the DTC vicinity 7-9pm, lunch time, and 4 – 6 Tuesday thru Thursday.

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Cynthia began her career in the cable industry at Encore (later Starz Encore) in 1991. Since then, she has held marketing roles with Time Warner Satellite Services (Primestar), High Speed Access Corp, and Rainbow Networks. She is a graduate of Class 2 of the Betsy Magness Leadership program, and she is a long-standing WICT Member.

Cynthia would like to be a mentor because she finds it very rewarding to share her experience with others, who may benefit from what she has learned. In turn, she find that she always learn from the people she mentors.

Her prior mentoring experiences include serving as a mentor in the Patrick Mellon mentoring program through NAMIC/WICT. Additionally, she has mentored employees at Level 3 through a formal mentoring program. She is currently being mentored by a Senior Executive at Level 3.

Cynthia feels that a good mentor is a great listener, an objective observer, and an empathetic guide. She believes she would be a good mentor because of her depth of experience, both as an executive and as a mother, and she is enthusiastic about sharing her time and experience with others who want to invest in their professional growth and development.

Cynthia’s leadership philosophy is that a successful leader is honest, fair, energetic, collaborative, creative, visionary and positive. Operating by example, following your values and acting decisively are also hallmarks of a good leader. Her core values are integrity, love, and gratitude.

Her strengths include coaching and developing others, strategic marketing, planning and budgeting, communicating and public speaking. She would like to work with someone who has a specific goal she/he would like to achieve and whose heart, mind and energy are focused on that goal.

She is most interested in mentoring on the topics Growing as a Leader (Leadership Development), Balancing Work and Life, and Navigating the Political Landscape. She works in Broomfield, so she would prefer to meet in the North Metro area. She is happy to meet before work, during lunch, or after work.

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Heidi Hollenbeck
Sr Director – Voice Operations
Comcast – Cable Corporation

Heidi Hollenbeck is a senior IT & Operations Executive with over 15 years of strategic leadership experience. She thrives in roles where she significantly impacts corporate profitability through development and implementation of mission-critical information systems.

Heidi is currently a Senior Director, Voice Operations/National Engineering & Technical Operations with Comcast, providing leadership for a staff of 230+ in a variety of technical support initiatives including provisioning errors, capacity conversion cleanup, Time Warner migrations, and Tier 2-3 VOIP support. She is focused on a long-term strategy to develop an application that consolidates multiple OSS systems and managing a change from centralized to decentralized operations. Within a few months of hire, her efforts resulted in significantly enhanced service quality, subscriber retention, profitability, and scalability. Heidi also serves on several Comcast committees including Engineering Education Council, Commercial Services Advisory Council, Enterprise Trouble Ticketing system restructure – network and customer issues.

Previously, Heidi served as a Director of Billing Operations and Information Technology for Sprint-Nextel Communications, providing strategic leadership of technology and operations to ensure cost-effective $44-billion revenue stream for over 50 million subscribers.

Heidi believes mentoring provides support and planning so individuals take the time to focus on their career. She believes it’s through self-awareness that enables a person to provide a positive impact to their job and community. She honestly finds it very rewarding to help others find a new perspective or work through a difficult situation and build their self-confidence to tackle anything.

For Heidi, leadership is having the confidence to make decisions and drive a team forward especially through ambiguity. It’s about doing succession planning before the need arises. It knows that together the team will be much more successful than as an individual. Knowing that life is a journey with many paths and keeping positive will guide you through the bumpy rides.

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Rebecca is recognized as one of the top creative and consumer experience leaders in the interactive media industry.  Her expert knowledge and skills are unique in that she has designed, developed and deployed leading products for broadband, on-demand, interactive, and linear television. During the past 25 years she has helped create and manage some of the most innovative startup products and services for broadband, broadcast, international and cable television.  Rebecca is a translator between technology and marketing.  Her passion is to build the best possible user experience. She has hands-on experience in many disciplines including usability, product management, application development, content strategy, web, broadcast, interactive TV, cable infrastructure, operations, web analytics, marketing, and distribution. She is a solid manager, a team player and a leader with excellent organization communication skills.  She has co-authored several pending patents. 

Rebecca is active in industry groups committed to evolving media; they include the CableLabs Enhanced TV Programmers Group, The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Interactive Media Peer Group, The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Advanced Media Executive Committee, AFI Digital Content Lab, CTAM On Demand Consortium and the Microsoft Vista MCE Beta Group. 

Rebecca was honored with the “Woman of Technology” 2005 Award from Rocky Mountain WICT and graduated in Class XIII of the Betsy Magness Leadership Institute.  She was named by CableWorld Magazine as one of the Top 50 Women in Technology 2007.

Rebecca is a Guest Lecturer at the University of Missouri, School of Journalism, Digital Convergence, 2007. She is also active in charity groups including the ARC, the Mile High Down Syndrome Association and Cable Positive.

Rebecca is interested in being a mentor because one of her goals from the Betsy Magness Leadership Institute was to do more mentoring.  She welcomes the opportunity to work in the Rocky WICT Mentoring program to help the mentees but also to learn better mentoring skills personally.

Rebecca’s previous experiences as a mentor include experience as the leader at the WICT Leadership conference mentor luncheon, she is an informal mentor to several industry people who are at different companies, in different roles and at different levels, and she  also served several years as a mentor at the American Film Institute Content Lab. 

Rebecca believes that industry knowledge, self confidence, risk-taking, patience and understanding are some of the key attributes of a good mentor. She believes that she exhibits all of these traits and she is willing to teach and share.  WICT also now has a focus on encouraging women in technical roles.  Rebecca feels that she can help forward that goal via her experience in the industry.

Rebecca believes that effective leadership means giving team members the platform to succeed.  People always perform better when they are respected and appreciated.  Leaders recognize that along with responsibility comes authority and accountability.  Measuring success in an objective way and providing tools for self development keeps colleagues satisfied and motivated.

Rebecca describes her core values in two facets:

In Leadership:

• Encourage confidence and experience as a motivating factor, not fear or failure
• Wouldn’t ask someone to do something I wouldn’t do myself
• Always look for the best in people and try to cultivate it.  A team is only as good as its weakest link

In Life:

1)  Treat others as you want to be treated.

2)  Always ask the question instead of pretending you know the answer

3)  Live in the present and enjoy the ride!

Colleagues from Rebecca’s many different backgrounds would describe her as smart, talented and someone they enjoy working with.  She is a team player with natural leadership tendencies.  Many times she is the only woman in the numerous technical and development meetings she participates in.  She doesn’t cower from asking the tough questions, trying to get clarification or offering ideas (even the dumb ones!).  She believes that this inspires a more open dialogue and the team gets to its goals faster.  She often bridges departments to bring technology to marketing and vise versa.  These are some of the strengths Rebecca brings to the mentoring relationship.

Rebecca would like to work with women interested in technology or new media; however she’s open to whoever is part of the program.

She is most interested in mentoring on the topics Growing as a Leader (Leadership Development), Enhancing Career Opportunities (Networking), and Technology.  Rebecca’s best location to meet is in the DTC or Park Meadows vicinity from 8-9 a.m., around lunch time, or 5-7 p.m. M-F.  Several sessions may need to take place at Starz Headquarters if she is working on a deadline.

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Jacyn Meyer
Affiliate Sales Director
Starz Entertainment, LLC

Jacyn has nineteen years of cable programming experience including basic, premium and PPV services. She has held several positions including administrative assistant, coordinator, district manager, director, and vice president. Jacyn was a Betsy Magness Alumnae of Class 8. Jacyn has a considerable amount of WICT involvement including holding the co-Director of Programming/Events Position in the Rocky Mountain Chapter She was formerly President of the Texas Chapter.

Jacyn’s educational background includes a BA in Professional Development from Amberton University in Garland, Texas and an MBA from the University of Denver. Her extracurricular activities include teaching at the Women’s College and being a facilitator on the facilitator track with Women Within International.

Jacyn is interested in being a mentor because her personal mission statement is to be a catalyst for education and personal development. As a mentor she will be in a position to do both.

Jacyn has had the good fortune to always find someone in every organization she has worked in to either formally or informally mentor her. She knows the value of a healthy mentor/mentee relationship. As a mentor she has offered her services to others in and outside her organization and she has been asked unsolicited by people in her organization to mentor them.

Jacyn believes that a good mentor takes a personal interest in the development of the mentee, provides honest feedback, and reflects back to the mentee his/her potential. She believes that her very nature makes her a good mentor as she is a good listener, empathetic and honest.

Jacyn’s leadership philosophy is to lead by inspiration. She sees the world of endless possibilities and believes that nothing is impossible. If people are provided with a vision and how important their own mission is to accomplish that vision, great things can happen on an individual level and throughout the organization. Her core values include respect, empathy, and achieving goals.

Jacyn brings the following strengths to the mentoring relationship: she is ambitious, goal oriented, and is a good listener and empathetic. She would like to mentor individuals who really take the program seriously and put effort into achieving their goals as part of the program.
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She is most interested in mentoring on the topics Managing and Motivating Teams, Transitioning from Being an Individual Contributor to a Manager, and Interpersonal Effectiveness. She would be most interested in meeting during work hours in the DTC area and on the weekends she can meet in the North Metro area.

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Michael Turner
Vice President, Communications and Content
Hitachi Consulting

Michael Turner is a Vice President with Hitachi Consulting, the global business and IT consulting company of Hitachi Ltd. He is a leader in Hitachi Consulting’s Communications, Media and Entertainment industry practice. Michael has eighteen years of sales and delivery experience in the consulting industry in the areas of information technology, revenue assurance and business process improvement. Prior to joining Hitachi Consulting in 2002, Turner was a partner at Arthur Andersen, LLP, where he served clients in the media and communications industry. Prior to joining Arthur Andersen LLP, Turner was a Principal with IBM Global Services.

Michael holds a Bachelor in Business Administration from Texas State University, and a Certificate in Telecommunications Management from the University of Dallas Graduate School.

His interest in mentoring is centered on assisting other individuals in advancing their careers – particularly those with a desire to lead organizations and/or teams. He has been a mentor for dozens of individuals during his career – both on a formal and an informal level. Additionally, as a mentee, he has benefited tremendously from the coaching of his mentors.

Michael believes that integrity and a broad knowledge of what it takes to succeed in business are key factors in providing a successful mentoring experience. Additionally, being a good mentor requires understanding the mentee’s strengths and helping them leverage those strengths. He has extensive experience in dealing with companies and individuals, and knows how to leverage individual strengths.

For Michael, leadership means working well with others, developing and building out concepts. His philosophy is centered in empowering others to lead.

Michael’s core values are centered on honesty and integrity. He also believes that it is important throughout one’s career to put family first. Michael’s strengths include building effective teams, and creating and maintaining key relationships.

Michael does not have a preference for which types of mentees he would like to work with, and would enjoy working with any mentee committing to participate in the program. He is most interested in mentoring on the topics of Managing and Motivating Teams, Growing as a Leader (Leadership Development), and Balancing Work and Life. His preferred meeting times are over breakfasts and lunches. DTC is best, but downtown also frequently works with his schedule.

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Katy Uhl
Vice President Human Resources
Comcast

Katy Uhl is Vice President of Human Resources for Comcast Programming, located at Corporate Headquarters in Philadelphia, PA. In this role, she is responsible for HR strategy and support for Comcast Networks including, E! Entertainment / Style, G4, The Golf Channel, Versus, International Networks and AZN, PBS Sprout and The Comcast SportsNets. Katy has over fourteen years experience in Human Resources and in Training. She has worked in a variety of industries including hospitality, cable and DBS. Katy joined Comcast in 2002.
Katy holds a B.A. in Commercial Art (which she believes encourages her creative approach) and a M.A. in Organizational Management. Katy is a graduate of the Betsy Magness Leadership Institute and also holds an SPHR certification, a highly respected certification within the Human Resources field.

Katy is interested in being a mentor because she enjoyed being a mentee in the program previously and gained valuable insight as a mentee. She would now like to do the same for future mentees. She feels that she has significant professional and personal experience that would benefit a mentee. Katy has mentored numerous people throughout her career in HR and she also participated in the WICT mentoring program as a mentee a number of years ago.

Katy believes that a good mentor is one who brings solid experience to the relationship and has strong listening and communication skills. She believes that an overall commitment to the process is also necessary for a successful mentoring experience.

Katy’s leadership philosophy is the following: Allow people to find their strengths and experience success through their own efforts. Lead vs. manage whenever possible. She lives by several core values including honesty, integrity and commitment.

Katy’s strengths include great communication skills, an intuitive ability to problem solve, great intuition, and strong personal relationships. Katy does not have a preference in terms of the types of mentees she would like to be partnered with.

She is most interested in mentoring on the topics Growing as a Leader (Leadership Development), Navigating the Political Landscape, and Interpersonal Effectiveness. Katy’s preferred location to meet is in the DTC area, and she does travel so she would prefer to meet on Thursdays or Fridays, and is open to meeting on weekends.

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