When Janice Klostermeier started her career in healthcare—an industry she’s served for over three decades—female mentors were very difficult to come by. When she found them, Klostermeier made sure to get the most she could out of the experience—and they gave as well as she received. “It was an all-for-one and one-for-all kind of thing,” Klostermeier recalls. “If we stood together, it made the whole team stronger.”
Now, as executive vice president and chief financial officer for Hollywood Presbyterian Health Center in southern California, she’s always eager to help associates with their respective journeys. Sometimes that means watching a mentee accept a position at a competing hospital, as she recently discovered. But if their phone conversations are any indication, the bonds remain. “We bounce ideas off each other without crossing [boundaries],” Klostermeier says. “We both know the daily issues that come up, and when she left [the organization], I didn’t have another female to lean on here at my level. We lean on each other.”
Klostermeier strives to be a mentor in more formal ways, as well. From Pay-It-Forward programs at which she speaks at high schools to the Los Angeles Boys & Girls Club, which named Klostermeier chairman of its board of directors this past January, she shares one of the most important pieces of advice she’s ever gotten.
“When asked where you see yourself in five years, don’t be afraid to tell the interviewer, ‘I want your job. I want to do what you are doing,’” Klostermeier says. “Remember, it’s not arrogant, and it’s not egotistical to state where you want to be.”
