Tiffaney McClendon, CEC
Integrity & Impact in Leadership
Discover Mentorship
and what it can do for you
I mentor aspiring and ascending professionals who seek to advance their careers by strengthening their leadership skills and gaining guidance that supports both personal growth and professional success.
When selecting someone to be a mentor and help guide your personal and professional journeys, it helps to know a bit about the perspective they bring to the relationship.
Click or scroll to learn more about me, my journeys, and whether I might be the right mentor to help you navigate your own journey.
About Mentorship
One-on-one mentoring is a long-term, relationship-based approach to development and growth. Mentors share their personal experience, expertise, and skills, in addition to offering advice, assisting with networking, and helping mentees navigate their career paths. This relationship is built on trust and mutual respect in order to offer support and ongoing encouragement.
While it's true that mentorship is a relationship where one person advises the other, it can and should be beneficial and developmental for both parties. In mentorship, there is trust and camaraderie built over time, and in the best scenarios, both individuals are able to learn from one another.
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Though mentorship and coaching both have two people connect with the goal of growth and development, they are not the same. Mentorship is more personal, with mentors sharing about themselves and their journeys in ways that coaches do not. Mentorship allows for a more in-depth relationship where both parties learn about the others' triumphs, struggles, history, hopes, and personalities.
Mentorship can help people grow personally and professionally. It can last a short while or years. The best mentorships are ones where the individuals are able to relate to each other, start from a place of respect, build a foundation of trust, and be open to growing together.
If you are are interested in learning more about mentorship by me, please reach out. I'd love to connect with you.
My Personal Journey
I have many identifiers that help create my unique perspective as a person and my drive as a professional. I'm a black woman who grew up in the state of Alabama in the southern United States. I'm a woman of faith, but in recent years, I've had a deconstruction of my relationship with organized religion. Despite my background and status as a resident of "The Bible Belt," I do not identify as a "Christian."
I'm the mother of a child with autism and have conditions of my own that are classified as disabilities. In both my income level and living conditions, I am considered solidly middle class. I'm an elder millennial, technically a Xennial, which is a micro-generation bridging and having commonalities with both generation X and millennials. I'm a cis-gender female with she/her pronouns and am part of the LGBTQIA+ community. I'm plus-sized. I have liberal political leanings, and yet maintain some conservative personal values from my childhood. ​Each one of these things helps make me who I am and inform how I experience the world.
My perspective informs how I guide, advise, and encourage those I mentor. All these things listed above help shape the way I approach personal and professional development with openness, curiosity, and acceptance. ​​
My Professional Journey
My professional journey spans more than 30 years and covers a variety of industries including retail, entertainment, nonprofit, education, hotels, banking, and zoos & aquariums. My experience ranges from cashiering to collections, entry level to staff management, hiring and recruiting to training development and facilitation. I've worked in administration, communications, and customer service, as well as marketing development, sales strategy, DEAI advancement, conservation education, and staff learning.
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Through 15 years of managing people, overseeing departments, and developing leaders, I've established an inclusive and responsive managerial approach favoring the coaching style of leadership. I believe that important elements to successful leadership include emotional intelligence, accountability, effective communication, positive motivation and influence, proper training, and empowerment. I also believe that life and work must co-exist in harmony and balance.
Real life should never be sacrificed or diminished for the sake of work. Instead, work should make life more fulfilling and help fuel passion and satisfaction.​​