Voice of Experience: Pam Flaherty, President, Citi Foundation
by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)
At the age of 21, Pam Flaherty, President of Citi Foundation, was well on her way to achieving her childhood dream of becoming an ambassador. While waiting to get called up into a Foreign Service Officer class, she was accepted into the M.A. program in International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. It was there that she learned more about the realities of life in the Foreign Service and decided, for a variety of reasons, that “it was not the way [she] wanted to go.”
Fluent in Arabic and French and still enamored with all things international, she obtained a position as an assistant to a very senior international monetary advisor at Citi in New York. She explained, “Citi [was a good fit because it] is a global company and was very receptive to people with odd kinds of backgrounds. I started out by doing economic research, which I knew a fair amount about [because economics was a heavy part of the requirements at John Hopkins]. But, from the moment I got here, I realized I was more intrigued by the business environment and solving business problems than by the research I was doing.”
Flaherty continued, “I had an chance [to do the business problem solving] since I worked on it right from the get-go. This is an era when women were not hired in their training programs, yet I got to work for a very senior person.”
She raves about the opportunities her position, and her boss at the time, afforded her. “[My boss] was fantastic, and I got exposed to lots of senior level people in an era when financial service was increasing. Women were just beginning to emerge. Quite frankly, being a woman at the time provided more opportunities than obstacles because, if you did really well, by definition you stood out.”
One of the opportunities landed Flaherty with a young, up-and-comer at the Bank— John Reed—who later became Chairman of the Bank. “My boss at the time, the head of the international group, asked me to go work on a task force with John Reed to dimension our opportunities in the consumer goods globally. At twenty-one years old, I got to travel all around the world with John and his team scoping out which countries we should focus on and how we could organize the emerging consumer bank.”
Years later, it was John Reed who advised her that she needed to take a break from the ‘intergalactic stuff’ within the Bank to really understand the business from the ground up. She became a retail branch manager on Wall Street, a job she loved. “I always tell people it was the best job I ever had. I loved that job because …[it was like] I was like the president of my own bank [in my branch]. Long range planning was planning into the following week. I learned that even though there were many things that I could not control—I couldn’t create new products, I couldn’t control the prices—I could focus on things that did make a difference. I could motivate my team.”
Flaherty also enjoyed the client contact that came along with the position. “I was in touch with customers all day long. There is nothing like having to deliver for real life customers to foster a sense of responsibility and achievement. I went on to run a bunch of branches.”
When John Reed first became chairman in the 80s, he asked Flaherty to be the head of Human Resources, a position which she cites as the most challenging job she’s ever had at Citi. “It is a unique animal and all the tensions and changes of the organization are almost encapsulated in the human resources function. It was a time of great change at the Bank and I’d never had a human resources job before. It was like jumping right into the fire.”
She handled the challenge the same way she handled becoming a branch manager with no prior retail experience. “You have to figure out how you are going to add value from day one. And you have to figure out who is on your team and how you are going to rely on the team.
She added, “I had two great advantages going into the job: first, people believed that I understood how the business worked because I had been a line manager at the branch level, and, second, I had the credibility that came with having a good working relationship with John Reed.” She stuck it out in that position for four years until she left to run all of the retail business for New York.
It was in that retail role that Flaherty experienced “one of the most stunning learning lessons” of her career, when she was forced to find a way to dramatically decrease the business expenses in a short period of time. “I ran a business that had 6000 people and, in the course of a year, we had to decrease that to 4500. Of course, we did it with great respect for people, treating them very well. But, what I learned was that, even in a business where I thought I ran our expenses in a very tight manner, by forcing ourselves to get rid of layers of management, we actually became a more effective organization and were able to improve our service to customers at the same time. It was a real eye opener.”
In the mid to late 1990s, John Reed again asked her to come back up to the corporate level to work for him in something he called “community relations.” She spent a few years working on CSR matters related to the community reinvestment act and community development financing, later expanding her focus to include international issues such as sustainability.
Out of those efforts and a strong partnership with Citi’s real estate group grew the LEED gold certified “green” building that Citi built in Long Island City in New York. “I had been pushing the green agenda here for about eight years; buildings are part of that. We are creating a culture where it is not just building one building, but where sustainability is being incorporated into everything the real estate group does. We have a commitment to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 2011. Not only do we have this wonderful building in New York, we also have a commitment that every new building we build anywhere in the world will be environmentally certified. It has expanded to all of our data centers globally, which are now being built in a totally different way so as to conserve energy. And we were the first company to be able to announce that we had more that 100 branches environmentally certified, which means that everything in the interior is certified.”
A little over two years ago, Flaherty assumed responsibility for the Citi Foundation. She has since re-engineered and refined the Foundation’s strategy. “We have gone through a process where we now have a very clear sense of what we are focused on and how we do our business. It has given us greater impact and greater ability to do exciting things. Our mission is to economically empower individuals and families. We are trying to help people help themselves. We are trying to be very relevant to the broad issues we are addressing but also extremely relevant locally.” Of the experience, she said, “It is a wonderful privilege to be the head of the Foundation. I recognize that most people just don’t have this opportunity.”
She stresses the importance of getting “buy in” at the top and at the bottom of the organization. “Top down 100% doesn’t work. You need to have relationships and figure out how to work with people. You also have to have a sense of where the business people are coming from. And you have to understand their constraints and motivations so that you can craft things and not ask impossible things. There is nothing like building on success, so you want to start by doing things that really are win-win and then go to some of the more difficult issues. It takes a tremendous amount of convincing.”
But it is clearly something Flaherty is good at. “I understand that this is not an issue of telling people what to do. It is about guerilla warfare and infiltration, finding people who can understand and get excited and who can be change agents. That’s what I continue to do across the organization—find people who can be believers and who understand that the real key to success is finding a sweet spot, the point at which you can do things that make a real difference in the world and in communities but at the same time are positive for our business. And that’s really what it is all about.”