Voice of Experience: Jennifer Lee, Regional Managing Director, Wells Fargo Private Bank

JenniferLeeBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

For nearly 20 years, Jennifer Lee, Regional Managing Director at Wells Fargo Private Bank, has shaped her career around building businesses and leading people. One of the key pieces of advice she has to offer based on her experience is to give skeptics the opportunity to share their views.

“Listen to dissenting opinions on your team,” she advised. “I fundamentally believe that human creativity and innovation stems from discomfort. If you have a team of people solving problems and you all always agree, at worst, you are probably leaving some of that innovation and creativity on the table.”

“At best, you can address the objection before it comes up again. If you think about all of the greatest corporate blow-ups in history, there was probably a dissenting opinion. If someone had paid a little more attention to them, it may have been different. It’s an important checking method for everybody,” she added.

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Trailblazers Discuss Business Diversity at Consortium 2013

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Strength in NumbersBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Yesterday, hundreds of institutional investors and small and diverse fund managers converged at Consortium 2013, for networking, career development, and discussion around the future of the industry.

Renae Griffin, Founder and Principal of RG & Associates and founder of the conference, opened the morning with what she called “a new Consortium tradition.” She encouraged attendees to stand up and shake hands and begin to network with one another. “That sets the stage for what’s going to be happening for the rest of the day,” she said.

The importance of building relationships was a common theme expressed by the morning’s speakers, a diverse set of leaders that included Jamal Simmons, Political Analyst and Principal at the Raben Group; Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Obama; Marx Cazanave, Co-Founder and Former CEO of Progress Investment Management Company; Sonia Gardner, Managing Partner at Avenue Capital; Reverend Dr. Al Sharpton, Founder and President of the National Action Network; Robert F. Smith, Chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners; and Sue Toigo, Founder of the Robert Toigo Foundation.

All of the speakers are trailblazers, having entered business or politics at a time when these fields were barely open to women and minorities. Jarrett commented, “Diversity is good for business. CEOs who don’t get that, globally, they are not going to do well.”

She added, “As companies try to be competitive in the global marketplace, diversity is a strength.”

Strengthening Diversity

Jarrett, who spent much of her session discussing her journey into politics and her work with President Obama, shared a few thoughts on why companies need to develop more inclusive workforces.

She said, “Studies say that when you have women on boards, companies tend to be more profitable. That’s no surprise to me and probably no surprise to the other women in this room.”

Strengthening relationships amongst women and minority professionals will help send a message about the importance of diverse groups, she continued. “We have to build networks, such as the network you have right here in this room, and you have to make it a priority.”

“The leaders who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow recognize the importance of diversity,” Jarrett added.

Learning from Trailblazers

Toigo began her career in politics and then moved to business. She explained, “At some point it occurred to me that it wasn’t necessarily politics or legislation driving our community, but money was driving the politics.”

She and her husband, Robert Toigo, began leading groups of investors on trips all over they world, but were dismayed to realize that all of the participants were white men. “America is the most diverse country in the world. Why are only white people running money? How is anything going to change like that, if the people controlling the money come from one small subsection?” she asked.

That was the impetus behind the Toigo Foundation, the notion that changing society would require changing the face of business. For over twenty years, the Toigo Foundation has provided MBA fellowships and internships for women and minority professionals, and has since added lifelong mentoring, career development programs, and networking.

“We are a family and we are going into year 25,” she said. The group now has 1,000 alums and 125 current students. “This is a tight-knit group and it’s one-on-one, and it’s helping one person at a time do what they do best.”

Sonia Gardner is another woman working to change the face of business. With her brother, she has built a thriving company, Avenue Capital Management. “My family is an example of the American dream. We came here when I was four and none of us spoke English,” she recalled. “My parents sacrificed everything so we could have an education.”

In 1990, she and her brother founded a small brokerage firm, starting out with no capital. “We had a lot of nerve – or naivete,” she said. Nevertheless, the business did well, and a few years later the pair founded Avenue. Eventually, they had to make a choice – they couldn’t do both – and they chose to close down the brokerage firm and continue on with Avenue. The brokerage firm would have been easy to keep – it was doing well, but Avenue had more potential. “When you come to a crossroads in your life and you have to make a decision, do not follow the easy road,” she advised.

Today Avenue has gone global and has about $12 billion under management. But, Gardner says, it’s important to measure success not only in dollars but in reputation.

“Always, I believe the most important asset you have as a leader is your integrity,” she said. “Your definition of success has to contain an ethical code.”

“The most important element of success is your ability to hold onto your values and not give them up for a short term vision of success.”

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Intrepid Woman: Ambassador Gianna Angelopoulos on the Journey to Leadership

GIANNAANGELOPOULOSBy Ambassador Gianna Angelopoulos, Vice-Chairman of the Dean’s Council of the Harvard Kennedy School

In May 2000, I received a call asking me to take over the Athens Olympic Games Organizing Committee. Three years earlier, I had led and won Athens’ successful bid for the 2004 Olympics. Now I was being asked to rescue an operation so far off its tracks that the president of the International Olympic Committee suggested publicly that the Olympics might be taken away from Greece.

Host cities are given seven years to prepare for the Olympics. We now had four. I had to build and lead an organization the size of a Fortune 200 company. The entire world waited, watching to see whether I would fail or succeed in this Herculean challenge.

I had always wanted to serve my country. As a child, I dreamed of being an ambassador, because it seemed to me that ambassadors had mysterious, glamorous jobs that impacted the fates of nations. When I confessed my dream, I was reminded that I had no family connections, no diplomatic lineage, and, besides, there were no women ambassadors at that time.

When I was born, Greek women were still two years away from winning the right to vote. Growing up on the island of Crete, I had two strikes against me: I came from very modest means, and I was a woman in a male-dominated culture. Fortunately for me, I had a father who was very progressive. When other men would ask him if he was disappointed to have two daughters, he would say: “I don’t need a son, I have Gianna.” He convinced me that I could do anything a man could do.

But to compete on an equal playing field with men required breaking glass ceilings, being bold, and being persistent. At almost every stage of my life, this is what I had to do – and did.

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Movers and Shakers: Marilyn Nagel, CEO, Watermark

MarilynNagelBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

“There are so many things I know now that I wish I had known when I was younger,” Marilyn Nagel said with a laugh. Nagel, CEO of Watermark, continued, “I think the biggest thing I wish I had known is that who is in your network is just as important as the work you deliver. I had a belief that a company was more of a meritocracy and my work would stand on its own.”

“But the truth is, doing excellent work is table stakes. Having a network to support you is what is going to help you and make you successful in the long run.”

That view fits nicely with the work Watermark is doing to connect powerful professional women. “I think that we have to continue to refine our offerings and what we do. We want to help women make their mark in and for their careers, their companies and their communities.”

The group organizes networking events for professional women, development programs, and advocates for diversity, particularly in the boardroom. “I think we are at an inflection point,” she added. “Women are still facing inequality in pay, despite strong data showing that companies are do better when they have a strong gender mix. Open positions are still being filled with people who are already known and that just perpetuates the status quo. But I think pay equity and better board balance will change that.”

She added, “I feel very privileged to lead Watermark, an organization that fits with my values and passion around making a difference. The women I work with are just a treasure.”

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Are We Wearing Work-Family Blinders?

iStock_000014470764XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

An interesting working paper out of Harvard Business School suggests that some companies may be relying on the work-family narrative to avoid facing systemic problems affecting both women and men in their workforces.

The study, written by Irene Padavic, Florida State University, and Robin J. Ely, Harvard University, details the pair’s work with an unnamed mid-sized consulting firm, which was struggling with what its leaders assumed was a retention problem amongst female employees. When the pair dug deeper into the problem – through lengthy interviews with about 100 employees – they found that the issue was not what it seemed.

Women and men were struggling at the firm. Work-family arrangements had become overtly gendered (that is, only women were using them) and highly stigmatized (setting up a flexible arrangement meant stepping off the leadership path and never getting back on). Women partners were viewed by associates as poor managers and poor mothers. Overpromising to clients was systemic, and that required long hours for all staff. Over-delivery was vigorously commended, with junior people working long hours to go not just above and beyond the call of duty, but even going so far as to do extra work that was unnecessary to the success of their project – just to say they put in the hours.

It’s no wonder women are leaving the firm, leadership assumed, because, as women generally take the lead at home, they aren’t capable of meeting the always-on demands of the firm. But one piece of evidence tipped the researchers off that something was wrong with this assessment: male and female attrition was roughly the same, coming in at around 25 percent annually for the past three years.

If the problem was only with women, wouldn’t these numbers be different? Rather, Padavic and Ely suggest, the company’s leadership had put on gender-biased work-family blinders to avoid the uncomfortable truth: its culture was not sustainable for women or men, and the fix would not be as simple as putting in place another initiative aimed at flexibility for women.

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A Guide to Coming Out at Work (Again, and Again)

iStock_000007266707XSmallThis article is part of our June Pride series – check back all month as we explore what it means to be an LGBT woman or ally in the professional workplace.

By Robin Madell (San Francisco)

Coming out at work is not a one-time event that’s over and done with in a single revelation. For LGBT professionals, it’s something that must be addressed over and over again to new coworkers, clients, and vendors.

As Marion S. Regnier, a Senior Associate at PwC, told The Glass Hammer in 2012, “Working in consulting you meet and work with new people all the time so coming out is a continuous process. I don’t think there is a one-time solution.”

This is just one of the many challenges of coming out in the office that led us to prepare the following Guide to Coming Out at Work as part of our Pride Month coverage. For advice and expertise, we turned to Regnier to address some of the complex challenges that LGBT professionals face in the workplace around the coming out process, and how to successfully navigate them.

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Does Ambivalence About Women Breadwinners Harm Families?

iStock_000006103713XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Last week Pew released the results of new research on breadwinner moms, a rising demographic within the US population. According to Pew’s analysis of US Census data, women are the sole or primary financial contributor in 40 percent of households with kids under 18.

That’s up from only 11 percent in 1960. That our society has undergone a rapid and tumultuous shift since the Mad Men era is an understatement. This is represented by the ambivalence Pew’s research revealed regarding the well-being of children raised by working women, as well as how women breadwinners might impact the so-called success of a marriage.

Older respondents were more likely to have negative feelings on both of these measures. Given this data, and considering that the leadership layers at most corporations are comprised of people of an older generation than those in their workforce – it should be no wonder that companies are having a difficult time adjusting their cultures to enable better work life fit for working parents.

The corporate environment was structured to accommodate single-income, two-parent families led by male breadwinners. Today’s situation is very different. It’s time for companies to acknowledge that reality. Many of them are, by working to implement family-friendly flex policies and telecommuting. The problem, though, is while the policies are there, having the go-ahead to actually use them is a wholly different story, and this Pew data explains one reason why. Despite the rise of women making money for their families, according to this research, many people are still not completely comfortable with it, especially those who are likely to be in charge.

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Voice of Experience: Carolyn Vardi, Partner, M&A Practice, White & Case

carolynvardiBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Carolyn Vardi, M&A Partner in White & Case‘s New York office, says one of the primary challenges for women in the legal profession is the relationship between time and family responsibilities. “The practice of law is based fundamentally on time: the time you spend with clients, the time you spend on deals, the time you spend on cases. It’s a kind of war on time in how you allocate those hours,” she said. “For women, the question is how to maximize the efficiency of your time.”

Vardi continued, “How do you devote enough time to your career, your families and friends, and anything else of interest? Balance isn’t the right term – there never is a balance. It’s all about where you allocate time at any given moment so you’re most fulfilled.”

“It’s really hard to fit everything in on any given day. That’s true for anyone in the industry, but can be uniquely true for women,” she added.

So what is Vardi’s advice? “Taking ownership and actively managing my time. No matter what your seniority level, it’s never too soon to take ownership over what it is you are doing. As soon as I began taking ownership over my work and career path as well as my personal goals, my picture became clearer and my goals more defined. Without a doubt there are challenges left and right, but when you take ownership over your time, managing everything seems a bit more feasible.”

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