This month, Jen Senerius, Senior Director, Client Leadership, was named a winner in the Mentorship category of the Path to Purchase Institute’s 6th annual Women of Excellence competition. The following is a profile of the qualities and characteristics that earned her the award.
Jen Senerius has exemplified the concept of mentorship since joining The Mars Agency in January 2020 as Director of Client Leadership on the Conagra Brands business, where she provides guidance, coaching, and reinforces The Mars Agency’s ways of working on a daily basis for more than 30 cross-functional team members.
“Jen has a unique way of leading her team, who rely on her industry expertise and informed, thoughtful POV. She is extremely approachable: Team members consistently praise her ability to build both their skill sets and their confidence when they reach out to her for guidance,” said Kris Abrahamson, SVP-Client Leadership at The Mars Agency, who nominated Senerius for the award. “They also appreciate her method of problem-solving, which involves offering her ideas while encouraging team members to provide their own approaches, and then working together to identify the ideal solution.”
These natural qualities made Senerius an obvious choice to serve as mentor for the agency’s summer internship program, an assignment she characteristically embraced with energy and enthusiasm. The 12-week program involved 11 interns from different colleges, backgrounds and career aspirations participating in various agency activities, daily functional tasks and a unique cross-functional team assignment in which they were tasked with working on an actual business project for a key client. Senerius directly mentored one of the interns who was assigned to the Conagra team for the summer, teaching her the foundational skills that will be needed in her career as a client leader.
For the cross-functional assignment, Senerius led efforts to scope out the project, wrote the strategic brief and challenged two teams of interns to deliver possible solutions for the client’s business need. She worked alongside the two groups to guide them through TMA’s “Pathway to Growth” process and develop insightful, disruptive ways to approach the shopper challenge at hand. The teams ultimately presented their solutions to senior leaders at both the agency and the client. Immediately after the program ended, three of the interns accepted full-time positions with Mars.
“A great internship experience is essentially about constantly learning while exceeding your own limits, and having a great mentor like Jen was crucial for achieving our greatest goals,” stated Bronwyn Lipka and Edson Hernandez, two of the interns who have become Martians, in their nomination. “Her guidance and support had a direct impact on our decisions to join the company full-time when the internship concluded.”
