Voice of Experience: Colette Taylor, Managing Director and COO of Americas Institutional at Russell Investments

ColetteTaylorBy Gigi DeVault (Munich)

A well-stocked kitchen cabinet is more than a reassuring comfort; it can get you through some hard times. If you ask Colette Taylor, Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of Americas Institutional at Russell Investments and founding president of Russell’s Women’s Network, about her “kitchen cabinet,” she will not talk to you about shelves lined with orderly packages of staples and foodstuffs. Referring instead to Harvard professor Bill George‘s cabinet concept, she will tell you about a cabinet of advisors on whom she can lean for support in difficult times—times like those from which executives across the globe are emerging and through which they are leading their firms. In 2009, Taylor’s own personal board of directors, made up of coworkers, professional coaches, family members and friends, created a platform on which she could strip away distractions, get back to basics, and focus on relationships.

Getting back to basics can mean becoming leaner as an organization. This can be bad news for a program that receives corporate support, such as mentorship programs. As Taylor says, “A formal mentoring program can get lost because it can be considered less of a priority. But mentoring is always going on whether there is a formal program or not; people continue to reach out.” To get the most benefit from a mentoring program, she might remind you to look into your own kitchen cabinet. “One of the things that I have learned is that mentoring can have two facets—one for developing specific skill sets focused on the ‘professional,’ and one for work/life balance. Sometimes those are two different mentors because they are such different conversations. There is tremendous value in hearing from a diverse set of perspectives. This can uncover something you have never thought about—an idea from left field.” And that maverick perspective may be just what is needed. “I’ve been both a mentor and a mentee. I enjoy being on both sides; when you are a mentor, you are getting mentored at the same time. If you are really open to the mentoring relationship—really listening— it can change you.”

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Playing for Success: A Conversation with Ellen Leikind

BooksBy Kathryn Nilsson Reichert (New York City)

Ellen Leikind is the founder of POKERprimaDIVAS, a company that provides corporate team-building programs that teach women how to play poker and use what they learn at the table to enhance their business skills. She is also a successful marketing executive who spent more than 15 years in the corporate world working for several Fortune 500 companies. The more she played poker, the more she saw the similarities with the larger game of business and personal fulfillment. Her new book, PokerWoman: How to Win at Love, Life, and Business Using the Principles of Poker, positions the card game as a metaphor for life.

TGH: Why poker?

EL: I decided to take a break from my career and during that time, I started to play poker again. And that’s when I started to see the connections between what you need to play poker, and what you need to survive in the boardroom and have a rewarding life.

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Honoring Black Enterprise’s Top Ten Most Powerful Women in Business

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iStock_000006262297XSmallBy Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

This year the iconic publication Black Enterprise (BE) celebrates its 40th anniversary. Since 1974 the magazine has featured prominent African American business women in a way that other publications have failed to. In 1991, the magazine published its groundbreaking list of the “21 Women of Power and Influence in Corporate America.” In 2006, it was a list of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business.”

BE rang in 2010 with their most comprehensive list to date, profiling the “75 Most Powerful Women in Business,” as written by BE’s careers and lifestyle editorial director Sonia Alleyne. Alleyne’s rundown of the most prominent African American business women made its way into the hands of the publication’s nearly 3.7 million loyal readers and it is her hope that seeing successful, strong, black women will influence some of the publication’s struggling female readers to continue their fight.

“[We honor these women] to show that it is possible. The benefit men have in business, particularly in the corporate environment, is that they have so many role models; successful men who recognize potential in other young men and offer the necessary support and guidance to make sure they succeed as well. Women have historically operated outside of that network, but when we highlight women who have made it to the senior ranks of an organization or in their own business, it serves as a powerful source of inspiration to others who might be silently struggling in their companies wondering if it’s possible – or if it’s even worth the effort,” Alleyne said.

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5 Ways To Increase Your Employability

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increase_employabilityBy Elizabeth Harrin (London)

While things are looking better for job seekers, the financial sector has not yet returned to its pre-recession state. There are still fewer jobs around. And even if you aren’t looking for a new job, the risk of more redundancies hangs heavy in the City. Nobody wants to be out of work at the moment, and although it’s a bit late for New Year’s Resolutions, you still have time to commit to improving your employability this year. Here are The Glass Hammer’s top five tips for improving your CV or resumé.

  1. Speak in public

    Enough already with the excuses. You will not die if you stand up and speak in front of a crowd. Cutbacks means fewer industry events this year but there are still plenty of conferences and seminars looking for speakers. You are an expert in something, and you only have to know a small amount more than the rest of the room to look like that expert. Speak at an industry conference about a project or initiative you have worked on – no one will know more about it than you and case studies are a perennial favourite on the conference circuit.

    How do you get to be a speaker? It’s really easy – just ask. Look at the fliers that fall out of your industry publications or look on the internet for forthcoming events. By the time the schedule is published it will be too late for you to attend that session, but ask for your details to be put on the call for papers list and next time they are looking for speakers you’ll get a notification. You’ll be asked to prepare a short abstract about your presentation. The organisers take all the abstracts and choose those that would make a coherent conference schedule.

    If that still sounds too scary then start small with a talk at your local professional institute branch. Or offer your services to a women’s network – they would love to hear about your career journey. If you are just starting out, talk to university groups about how you landed your finance job.

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Hunting and Gathering: Networking with Men

networking_with_menBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

I’ve never been fond of the imagery associated with the phrase “hunting and gathering,” conjuring up visions of big cavemen-types hurling spears at bison, while their female companions gingerly pick berries nearby. In fact, research has shown that this is often a bit more of a stereotype than a hard-wired reality. For example, a study of the Philippine Agta culture showed that women hunters regularly outperform their male counterparts – and mixed-sex groups do best of all: “Their rates are even better when they combine forces with men: mixed hunting groups have a full 41% success rate among the Agta.”

Why the scholarly introduction, you ask?

It seems that a similar division of the sexes is taking place in the business arena as well – even if it is within the bounds of the corporate auditorium, the conference room, the multi-purpose area. The line of discussion says that one reason women still lag behind in corporate leadership positions is because their networking style is simply different then men’s – preferring to seek out deeper professional connections than embarking on the broader approach associated with men: collecting casual acquaintances and leveraging them when the need arises. Women are hunting for a few deep, professional connections, rather than gathering many casual ones.

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SEC Changes Help Women in the Boardroom

SEC-boardroomBy Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

In July of 2009, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a number of revisions to their rules. These amendments were designed to improve the amount of disclosure shareholders of public companies receive as it pertains to: compensation policies and practices that present material risks to the company, stock and option awards of executives and directors, director and nominee qualifications and legal proceedings, board leadership structure, the board’s role in risk oversight, and potential conflicts of interest of compensation consultants that advice companies and their board of directors.

At the time, the major hope was that these amendments would enable shareholders to better evaluate the leadership of public companies, but it quickly became clear that – if adopted – these new rules could greatly assist in promoting true diversity in the boardroom.

In response to these proposed revisions, the SEC received over 130 comment letters from various organizations offering their opinions and suggestions on the proposed amendments. Not only did the SEC take these opinions into consideration, but they even adopted several of the amendments to their rules late last year. One of the organizations that responded to the SEC’s rule revisions with a comment letter was the InterOrganization Network (ION), a nearly six-year-old organization dedicated to advancing the number of women in leadership positions as corporate directors and executive officers. Of particular interest to ION was the SEC’s decision to require disclosure of the qualifications of “directors and nominees for directors and the reasons why the person should serve as director of the company.”

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Why it is Important for Men to Support Women Breaking the Glass Ceiling

glass ceilingBy Dr. Eric Shoars, author Women Under Glass: The Secret Nature of Glass Ceilings and the Steps to Overcome Them

When I began researching glass ceilings there were questions as to why a man was tackling the issue of in the first place. After all, this is a women’s issue, isn’t it?

My personal reason for supporting women breaking glass ceilings is very simple. My mom was part of the first all-women insurance sales team in Iowa for American Mutual Life in the early 1960s. Her career aspirations were thwarted due to factors related to the glass ceiling. Mom is 82 now and the question “what might have been” often comes to mind when I think of how far my mom’s career could have gone if not for the artificial barriers that held her back.

Now, as I look at my step-daughter, nieces, and great-nieces, I don’t want to have to look at their careers and ask, “What might have been?” But that’s me. Why, then, should other men take up the cause? Quite simply, it is in the best interests of our economy and our society to do so.

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Voice of Experience: Lynn Tilton, CEO, Patriarch Partners

Image courtesy cnbc.com.

By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Over the course of her 28-year long career, Lynn Tilton has walked a winding road from Yale to her current position as CEO of Patriarch Partners, a $7 billion investment firm.

At the age of 25, Lynn Tilton was the single mother of a 2 year old, working 100 hours a week and putting herself through business school. An overachiever from a young age, Tilton played on the national tennis circuit while growing up and went on to play tennis for Yale. Her life turned upside down when her father died during her junior year. “Until that point, I was a golden girl, a nationally ranked tennis player and Yale student. That’s where my world all unraveled and started to change.”

She continued, “The number one loss is death of a working parent because it causes the family structure to change and the children to be left behind.”

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