Aine Leddy: Information Technology Business Partner, AIG Investments

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Aine Leddy“Curiosity is a hallmark of who I am and has been a huge enabler to my success. I am trying to grow all the time,” says Aine Leddy. “One thing I found when I first came to the U.S. decades ago was that many people were specialized, deep and narrow. I always aspired to know a little bit about everything.”

Leddy speaks to elevating to the C-Suite, cultivating intellectual curiosity and being proactive in expanding your ability to lead.

Stepping up to the C-Suite

Irish by birth, Leddy emigrated to the U.S. in the late 80’s while training to be an oil trader. Finding that her personality was not suited to the aggressive trading environment, she moved into financial services at Morgan Stanley, where she received an analyst training that she likens to an in-house Executive MBA.

After holding a variety of financial roles across 22 years at the firm, she reached an inflection point while working as the finance partner to the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the investment management division, Marianne Bachynski, AIG Investments+ Chief Information Officer, at the time. Technology was developing to become its own branch of the business, and Leddy was given the opportunity to step into a Chief Operating Officer (COO) role with overview of the IT business.

“I’m a big picture kind of person. I find closeness to decision-making and strategy very compelling. I love to ideate and be in a position where you can see ideas taking shape and then ultimately come to fruition,” says Leddy. “I enjoy the increased personal responsibility to make things happen as well.”

After a few transitions, Leddy began working at AIG in September 2020, motivated by the opportunity to learn about the insurance industry at a highly reputable firm, expand her skillset and reunite with Bachynski. While she has yet to be in the room with her team due to the need to work virtually, she’s been highly impressed by the collaboration, communication, cutting-edge performance, and progress on the big, gnarly technological issues like cloud migration.

Being Curious with Breadth

“I personally like to know enough about everything ‘to be dangerous’ and went out of my way to equip myself with that knowledge,” she says. “That curiosity has served me, particularly with my entreé into the tech COO world. I could show up at the table and enter right into a discussion about the business strategy and where technology fits in, and that was apparent to the people who have given me the opportunities.”

As a teacher’s daughter, Leddy prides herself on being super-prepared and putting the “sweat equity” into knowing her stuff, and it’s a hot-button for her to watch someone trying to wing it when they clearly haven’t done the same preparation. Despite this, she has learned to take in stride the out of left field questions as she is also prone to be the one to ask the question.

Being curious as a principle means the willingness to reveal what you don’t know: “I think a lot of women think it’s better not to ask because maybe you should already know. So, I might soften that by prepping my question with, ‘I probably should know this, but would you mind explaining it anyway.’”

Nine out of ten times, the person next to her will thank her for asking because they were wondering the same thing.

Taking Action in Empowering Yourself

Leddy emphasizes it’s critical to be solution-focused: “I do like to ideate and strategize, but I’m also an action-oriented person. You can sit around and admire the problem for a long time, but ultimately, you have to get the stuff done.”

She feels that taking personal initiative in growing yourself is foundational, as she, too, often hears people defer the responsibility of their learning limitations to their organization, when she argues you can be proactive yourself.

“Training is out there. It won’t always be the customized training that you do as part of the code of conduct or something like that,” advises Leddy. “But you can go and talk to someone with a different skillset than yours. There’s tons of information out there for you to train yourself, and there’s so much you can do for yourself in terms of expanding your horizons.”

When Leddy glances around her senior circle of peers at AIG Investments, and at some of her previous employers, she’s invigorated by the presence of women leaders. She has found herself fortunate to be in environments that reward intellectual curiosity, foremost, and where she felt she could be herself.

“Some women feel they need to be more aggressive to be successful. I never felt I had to be anybody other than who I am,” says Leddy. “When you bring your authentic self to the table in any situation, you’re going to be more successful.”

Being Willing to Move, But Also Move On

“You don’t realize how immersed you are in a culture until you have to get to know another one. I think switching companies taught me to be more open and not to bring my bias from another culture,” says Leddy. “That includes listening upfront and taking in how people work, work together and what’s important to leaders in one company versus another.”

Earlier in her career, while putting three children through college and being motivated by a compensation-focused opportunity, Leddy learned that you don’t always know whether something is going to be a good fit until you’re inside of it.

“I tell those I mentor that you cannot know all of the elements of anything ahead of time, you just can’t. So, if you want to switch departments or companies or even careers, you think you are going in with ‘eyes wide open’ but you may not be,” she says. “The lesson I learned is that if it’s making you miserable, change your situation as quickly as you can, learn from what you don’t want and then move on. Don’t stay where you’re unhappy.”

Staying True to What You Want

While Leddy feels she was most often mentored on business skills, her mentorship has always begun with listening into: what do they really want?

She’s found that it tends to be guidance on the softer side of matters, such as how she managed to get promoted while her kids were little and still feel present in the home. Leddy is known by her peers for being grounded and ‘unflappable’, and she carries that grounding to her mentees.

One thing she imparts onwards is never be afraid to ask for a raise or promotion but be solid in arguing your case for why you’ve earned it. She also advises to not get caught in emotional defeat when you don’t receive what you want, but be resilient, prepare to go back in and to argue your case again.

“I think women do ourselves a disservice, because we take things personally and get annoyed with our manager if we don’t get the raise or promotion,” she observes. “Whereas men seem to think, ‘If it doesn’t happen, I’ll get back in the ring and I’ll fight the good fight again next year.’ Ultimately, promotion is a numbers game. It can’t happen for everybody all of the time, so rather than take it so personally, elevate your case and prepare to ask again.”

Leddy has been married for almost 33 years and her three grown children are now in their mid-late twenties. She loves her Peloton bike and taking in the sun in her garden. She is a huge reader, a passionate etymologist and prides herself on living holistically to enjoy all aspects of her life.

By Aimee Hansen

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Marie Carr: Global Growth Strategy, Insurance and Financial Services, PwC US

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Marie Carr“I’ve spent my career helping companies grow in a way that takes advantage of disruption and new trends,” says Marie Carr.

From back when the internet seemed like an insecure and unproven place to do business to Artificial Intelligence (AI), Carr helps companies determine how to grow, particularly by taking advantage of technological changes that redefine customer interactions.

“People now want you to understand them,” Carr says of the client mindset: “I need you to understand me and frame things based not on what you want to sell me but on my unique needs.”

Carr champions adoption of new technologies that can help companies create better experiences for their customers, as well as actionable data that facilitates those positive experiences.

But what’s led Carr to where she is now and how has it related to her choice of careers? She cites motivation, how faith supports her, and how to find and respond to mentorship moments.

A Motivating Mission

“I went to business school to become a better entrepreneur,” says Carr, who decided early on to get her MBA at University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

She soon began to receive feedback that she’d make a great management consultant and realized that interning at a consultancy could support her education. She joined Diamond Technology Partners for a summer and twenty-five years later, long after PwC acquired the firm in 2010, she still loves where she is.

“I’ve been very blessed to work with leadership whose mission I believe in,” she says. “It’s easier to stay when you’re working with leaders who are building a culture that’s consistent with your values.”

She was initially inspired by Diamond founder Mel Bergstein’s vision in “forging a new path.” At the time, it was “unheard of” for a firm to grow to become publicly traded so that employees could own their own stake in it.

“To be able to work in something that you’re good at with like-minded people that also have a mission of greater good,” says Carr, “was a rare combination.”

With PwC, Carr found a new mission—to help build the advisory practice and ensure that what “was excellent about Diamond became part of PwC’s DNA.”

“Ten years later, folks who were younger consultants are coming into leadership positions and living those values,” says Carr. “It’s been a good journey.”

Overcoming Adversity and Keeping Faith

Carr feels her parents and faith instilled within her the ability “to never let temporary circumstances determine what your ultimate success is going to be.”

“Whatever adversity you have to overcome, overcome it,” says Carr, describing her parent’s motto, who both experienced tough challenges in childhood. “You can’t let the fact that there may have been discrimination stop you,” she says.

Raised in faith, Carr learned to trust in a greater power, which has enabled her to be comfortable in herself and have less anxiety than some in a high-pressure field.

“It’s not just about my own ability. I have confidence in and the ability to appeal to a force higher than myself. That’s helped me to be more patient, to put myself in other’s shoes, to not be so hard on myself,” says Carr. “You have to be able to center yourself, because you’re often going to find yourself in an environment that’s not going to affirm you. So, the ability to affirm yourself is really useful.”

Learning from Everyone

“I’ve learned a lot through observation. I’m very much a student of everyone. My dad taught me that ‘even the village idiot can teach you something’,” she says. “As I got older, I learned not to rush to judgment but instead ask, how do I learn from who I’m interacting with?”

She continues, “I’ve also found that people are very generous in helping you if you help yourself. Lots of people have given me advice in the moment, so I became good at getting feedback without being sensitive or defensive,” she says. “I’ve tried to learn from everyone, because there are a lot different paths to success.”

As she’s moved through her career, Carr has realized that she hasn’t always been aware of who’s advocating for her. As a result, she makes a conscious effort to advocate for others who she feels deserve a voice in the room.

Playing sports, particularly basketball, helped shape Carr’s approach. Being on a nationally ranked basketball team in high school meant being open to coaching and learning to do things differently to improve.

“Basketball is a team sport that really requires everyone to be able to fluidly move in and out of roles, that ability to adapt,” says Carr. “It has made me always look for what I could do to draw out the best of someone I’m working with.”

Leave It Better Than You Found It

Coming from a long line of ministers and pastors, Carr approaches management consulting as part of fulfilling her desire to serve.

Her mother advised her to always invest in people. For her, helping companies to grow and adapt is about affecting all the people who depend on the work to support their lives and families. She enjoys helping people and companies reach their highest potential.

Carr has run a financial summer camp on wealth empowerment and financial literacy for several years now, working in the community with younger generations to envision their possibilities.

“We’re accountable to making a difference in the world, says Carr. “You have to leave it better than it was when you got here.”

By: Aimee Hansen

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Silke Soennecken: Head of Risk Management, Commerzbank New York

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Silke Soennecken“You are motivated and grow when you are being challenged,” says Silke Soennecken, “when you have to use your resources to get your head around things you didn’t think would ever happen.”

Soennecken speaks to growing through challenge, retaining your power as a woman and letting go for others to grow.

When Things Turn Upside-Down, Learning Curves Go Up

As a Managing Director at Commerzbank New York, Soennecken is tasked to oversee governance and strategy for all risk management in the region, and is responsible for the bank’s entire North American credit portfolio. Based at a branch rather than head office, she enjoys the vantage point of gleaning how initiatives flow and come together, while gaining insight into areas of risk management that interrelate with her expertise in corporate credit.

As a risk manager, she thinks that despite the challenge, it is precisely the unexpected and unprecedented moments that provide the strongest learning experiences and opportunities to grow your skillset.

She experienced this first-hand in September 2008, when she joined Commerzbank just one month before the financial world fell into crisis, and then again this past year with the pandemic. Now Soennecken approaches these big upheavals with some fascination by observing how various players respond and react to crisis on all levels.

She notes her “extremely analytical mind” gives her the ability to remain curious and agile, as she is naturally prone to dissecting how the many pieces of a system work together and interact with each other—including considering the consequences in a scenario when one piece fails.

Flipping the Worst-Case Scenario

Soennecken had a first-hand experience of a worst-case work challenge, when years ago, her firm initiated a significant restructuring. Consequently, she witnessed a mass exodus of her entire 25 person department over just a few months, including team members she thought she could not afford to lose.

Tasked with restructuring the department, and never imagining she would end up doing it alone, she recalls a “breakdown moment” in the bathroom after the last person announced they, too, were leaving. However, beginning with temporary patches, Soennecken stood up and began to rebuild the entire department.

Although she had a private office, she instead moved her desk to the middle of the open floor, where anyone who joined would have access to her. Only after a three-year journey rebuilding the team did she return to her office with an open door policy.

“Rebuilding was hitting rock bottom where there was nothing left, and then climbing out from there to create a completely new department,” she recalls. “I didn’t know what to do except to put myself right in the middle and build from the inside out. I was just put in charge and swam my way out. But when I look back, I’m proud of the approach I took, and of what I accomplished.”

For Soennecken, the most impactful part of this experience was learning via unsolicited team member feedback about how her collaborative approach positively impacted their individual and collective growth.

Staying Confident as A Woman

“I had the advantage that I found progressive male mentors that supported me,” says Soennecken, “but I also found a lot of opposition along the way for being a woman.”

Having worked in banking for a few decades, she remembers earlier in her career being the only woman in rooms of men where she was asked to pour the coffee. Though she recalls wondering ‘why her?’, the request wasn’t entirely out of the norm at the time, and she wasn’t equipped to confront it like women are today.

“I wasn’t entirely aware that I was sometimes being treated in a way I shouldn’t have been treated,” says Soennecken. “As a consequence, certain elements of confidence were lost along the way that I didn’t notice I was losing, until I look back now.”

Today, she can recognize the minimizing ways in which she was talked to or handled as a woman, and how that wore down her natural confidence, while other habits arose to compensate and created a double bind.

“I ended up being a little harder than I was expected to be. I even had a coach for supposedly being too straightforward when talking to people,” she says, “but I think it was, in part, a consequence of navigating through a world where I had to push with my elbows to try to be heard. Now I know that I could have used a more feminine approach to get what I wanted without having to try to act like a man.”

In retrospect, Soennecken observed she could have used her intuitive and relational skills—such as sensing someone’s feelings about confrontation or mirroring their conversational tendencies—to achieve the influence she instead struggled for.

“Our sensitivity as women can work against us, but I realize I could have used that sensitivity to my advantage in interrelating,” she reflects. “It would have spared me some stress along the way.”

The Danger of Over-Explaining

Soennecken believes that it is important to encourage gender diversity in managerial roles, but on the flip side, women need not be required to champion every woman when it’s more objectivity that is needed.

When asked, one way she’s personally observed how women can undermine their own power is by defending themselves too much in the meeting room.

“We often think we are being attacked personally,” she says, noting many moments when she’s listened to another woman get drawn into over-explaining herself, going further only to lose her ground.

“If you make yourself small by defending yourself too much, by giving a lot of explanation for something that could be a simple answer,” she continues, ”then you lose all your power and the advantage you might have had.”

‘Letting Go’ For Others to Grow

Over the years, Soennecken has adapted from guiding people with a hands-on approach, to guiding people while letting go.

“When you are hands on, you do things a certain way and tend to believe others should do it the same way. But people have different approaches, and it takes time to admit to yourself those approaches are fine, and so are the consequences,” she says. “You are supporting the growth of people by allowing them to also make mistakes. You’re going to support and guide them, but there’s purpose in delegating and giving others the opportunity to grow and shine in their own way.”

As a mentor, she notices when people are stuck: “You see that someone is in the wrong job, but they are afraid of changing, finding the right job and really being happy. They’re making a big effort, but they can’t grow because it’s not what they want to do.”

“The potential is in embracing the unknown, not in staying in their comfort zone, but you get a lot of resistance because most people don’t like change. The success story happens when finally somebody embraces the change that is good for them,” she says. “You can help them realize the potential is there, and trust and support them, but they have to ultimately make the decision.”

When it comes to finding fulfillment at work and advancing up the career ladder, Soennecken feels it’s about going beyond. Being interested and doing “the extra” is what creates the sense of fulfillment for her.

“If you come to work every day and you type five pages because your job is to type five pages, you’re not going to progress,” she gives as an example. “But if you come in every day, and instead of typing five pages, one day you decide the pages could be a different color or a different layout or you can type eight pages or a book, then you grow.”

Never Forget “The Little Heart”

“You cannot have a more loyal employee than if the person has a personal situation, and you show you can be supportive,” says Soennecken. “Never forget about the personal side of the people you work with. It’s what I call ‘the little heart’ and everybody has ‘a little heart’. Very often, I think about ‘the little heart’ of my colleagues, regardless of their role or responsibility.”

When it comes to non-business workplace issues, for example redesigning seating arrangements, she knows certain things are important to people, and if she can accommodate a request, she will. While you can’t please everyone, she has found it makes all the difference to thoughtfully consider all parts of someone in the decisions she makes.

Speaking of little hearts, Soenneken is the single mother of two bright, energetic twin six-year-old girls. She feels the pandemic has helped to highlight what is most important in life and is enjoying the unexpected, but welcome, togetherness with her family.

By Aimee Hansen

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Erika Karp: Chief Impact Officer, Pathstone

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Erika Karp“I think that capitalism has the potential to be exceptionally productive. That said, we’ve messed it up. We’ve distorted it, and it has become a system that is extractive and exclusive,” says Erika Karp. “I think that’s really unfortunate. I want to be a part of a system that is regenerative and inclusive, and I still believe capitalism can be.”

Karp speaks to a childhood love for economics, why ESG takes the ideology out of sustainable investment and being the first out lesbian on her firm’s Wall Street trading floor.

From the Lemonade Stand to the Trading Room

Karp knew from when she was a child that she loved and wanted to be involved in trading and economics.

“While we don’t think about it that way, trading is part of human nature. As kids, we set up lemonade stands in our driveways in the suburbs of New York. Well that wasn’t quite interesting enough,” she remembers. “So I set up a stand with all my old toys, trinkets and baubles. It wasn’t so much about the money, but trading. I loved it.”

When Erika’s sister borrowed money from her as children, she’d pay Erika back with a little interest. And Karp recalls her father, a securities lawyer, getting off the phone with a client and saying: “It’s so wonderful when you’re involved in the stock market and on the phone, and on your word, on your honor, you can do important transactions with millions of dollars.”

Karp remembers that it was on your honor. From six years old, she didn’t know what a stockbroker was, but she knew she was going to be one.

Willing that Capitalism Can be Regenerative

Karp lists her personal values as nature and animals, access to water and the ocean, access to education and healthcare. Towards the end of her first 25 years on Wall Street, which culminated in her becoming Director of Global Sector Research at UBS Investment Bank, she was asked to manage the Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) team.

“I learned organically that when you look at the critical environmental and social and governance factors in a company, in an industry, in a sector – you really do get a lot of predictive insight into the long-term investing process,” she notes. “Being able to align my investment discipline and belief in capitalism with my personal values through the discipline of ESG analysis felt amazing.”

“To evolve capitalism towards something that’s more regenerative and more inclusive definitely takes a systems approach. That means understanding complexity, nuance and interrelationships.” As momentum gathered, Karp began to do work on sustainable investing in cooperation with World Economic Forum, UN Global Compact and the Clinton Global Initiative.

“As I got more involved, I felt a greater sense of purpose and urgency. So I founded Cornerstone Capital Group, which [was] a purpose-built research-driven impact investment advisor,” she notes. After bringing the business to $1.2 billion in assets under management, she took the plunge to merge her impact-focused firm with Pathstone, an independent registered investment advisory firm focused on families, family offices and institutions. It was a symbiotic merger, with Pathstone having a long-standing background in ESG analysis and a strong interest in expanding its impact orientation.

Taking the Ideology Out of ESG

“Years ago, I remember thinking even the word ‘responsible’ implies ideology, it implies right and wrong,” reflects Karp. “So the world of SRI was ideological, political, divisive and tree-hugging, and it just wasn’t adopted as real investing.”

“To some degree, I was subversive. I came to believe that over the long run, ESG factors are fundamentally important to get more predictive insight in the investment process,” she says. “So I was more pragmatic. I didn’t use words like ‘responsible’ or ‘sustainability’ or barely even ‘climate change’. I would talk ‘energy efficiency’ and ‘reputational risk” and ‘political risk’. I knew it was about sustainability in the back of my mind, but I talked about fundamental things to the industry, because I really believe it’s about investment outcomes.”

“Unlike SRI, on the ESG front, we can analyze factors objectively,” says Karp. “Whether or not this touches my values, does it touch a company’s revenues and costs and risk? It’s beyond being ideological now. It’s about investment.”

Karp was invited to join the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), an opportunity to create infrastructure in defining ESG criteria that matters to any given industry or company and offering standards for what to disclose based on material economic and profit outcomes.

“More and more people now understand ESG as an analytical discipline, so that’s great progress,” says Karp. She notes that myth-busting still is an active part of her work – for example busting the myth that ESG factors reduce returns when the research shows not only that this is incorrect, but that integrating ESG factors can potentially increase returns over the long term.

Karp points out the risk of ESG analysis becoming more popular is that it is done flippantly, rather than at a high quality level with skilled managers. She feels ESG practices will evolve with standard disclosure, and technology will become more skilled in discerning the signal from the noise in the data when it comes to informing investment impact and outcomes.

“ESG analysis is a discipline within finance that is the future of finance,” says Karp. “One day, all the different phrases – SRI and impact and values-based and double bottom line, we won’t use them. It’s just investing.”

Being A Leader, Not A Manager

“I would rather be a leader than manager. To be a good leader, you really do have to have a vision, a mission. I want people to feel inspired to get on board with what we’re doing and feel purpose and connection,” says Karp. “Management is structural and systems and measures and accountability are critical. But I don’t love management as much as I love leadership.”

As a lover of learning, Karp also feels she learns most when also teaching. With her wife being a clinical psychologist, she jokes she is clearly not afraid to be analyzed.

“Every leader has flaws. I think I am mostly able to hear about the things that I can do better. I want to evolve, teach and coach,” says Karp. “If I’m not listening or open to input as to how I can be better, that’s not facilitating what I want to do.”

“We have financial capital, human capital and natural capital, which is priceless. The intersectionality of these three forms of capital has to be valued,” she says, when she speaks to her leadership vision. “All need to be respected and they need to become regenerative as opposed to being destroyed or shifted around.”

“We know the value of financial capital – many trillions of dollars,” says Karp. “Could someone tell me the value of the last drop of water? That’s worth more than all the financial capital in existence. That’s how I think of things.”

Being The First Out Lesbian on The Trading Floor

“As a woman, to succeed, you can’t just be good. You have to be great,” says Karp. “I was experienced differently than many of the guys around me. So if I am assertive and articulate, I might have been perceived as pushy or aggressive. It’s hard work to gain respect and credibility while balancing not wanting to be seen as aggressive.”

Karp notes that as a woman, and being potentially more risk-averse, she has found herself and other women to often be more supported in their arguments: “In a conference room full of men, I may not be the first to speak,” she says, “but when I do, I have something to say that affects the thinking of the people in the room.”

“When it comes to being gay, that’s more challenging. While my clients or colleagues are processing ‘she’s gay’, are they also hearing what I’m saying? This is the case with any difference,” says Karp. “Whereas we now know difference has to be embraced, because it’s awesome.”

For the initial years of her career, Karp had been married to a man and was mostly closeted. Even after telling a close colleague, it took her years to come out, and she even recalls jumping out of her first Pride Parade in New York for the couple blocks around where it passed by her office building and jumping back in afterwards.

But after making director, and meeting her future wife, she came out 24 years ago. She did not experience the backlash she feared, and she says even if she had, she would not have cared.

“Even if it did affect my career in some way, I don’t care. I’ll never know. I don’t care, because I feel like being out has made me more productive, more creative, more content than I could have imagined back then,” says Karp. “But it was hard — I was the first out lesbian on a Wall Street trading floor.”

Karp found her firm to be receptive and open to learning, and she made a point of being purposely out and transparent to make it easier for those to come. She introduced a lounge for breastfeeding when she had her babies. Repeatedly, she went to HR at UBS with the questions that had never been asked: about covering costs related to becoming pregnant, about taking leave of absence when her wife carried the baby, about applying the financial assistance with the adoption process for her own children.

“Each time, they came back with a yes,” she says. “There are a lot of benefits we have now that are relatively standard at big investment banks, we didn’t have back then.”

Karp and Sari Kessler have had three marriages. Their first “illegal” wedding was 22 years ago in The BoatHouse in Central Park with their rabbi, friends and family. The second was on the first day that City Hall in Manhattan was giving out marriage licenses for same sex couples, also with her rabbi and this time, with their three daughters present (who are now 19, 16 and 13 years old). The third time was when federal marriage equality rights were granted.

Doing What She Is Meant For

“I know that I’m doing what I ought to be doing, and I know that I’m doing it in an important and honorable way,” says Karp.

She loves nature and water and says margaritas by the ocean with her family would be her happy place. She loves hiking, movies, playing cards and watching her daughters grow up, if far too quickly.

By: Aimee Hansen

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Caroline Samponaro: Head of Transit & Micromobility Policy, Lyft

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Caroline Sampanaro“One thing I learned through my community organizing training with Midwest Academy is this idea of leadership: that giving power away is how you grow a powerful movement,” says Caroline Samponaro. “I focus on imparting that message to those I manage: how are we giving away power to build a strength of team and community that can be that much more successful?”

Samponaro speaks to how social issues led her to transport and the journey to feeling confident in her voice.

Social Issues Led Her to Transit

An epic bike ride through Japan is what first set Samponaro, an anthropology major at Colombia University at the time, on the unexpected trajectory of working in transportation.

While writing a thesis on the topic of bike activism, she then began to ride around New York City. She discovered an intriguing intersection between social issues and transport. While working as a paralegal, she started to participate in monthly Critical Mass bike rides on Fridays, an action to create safety in numbers for cyclists by reclaiming the streets.

After challenging an arrest while on a bicycle, she co-founded a group, with other law students and lawyers, called The FreeWheels Bicycle Defense Fund, that raised funds and provided legal support to help cyclists challenge their charges.

“I didn’t come into transportation from a planning or policy perspective initially,” says Samponaro. “I was intrigued about the way that it was an intersection point into cities and government and social issues.”

Though she gained entry into law school, she instead began in a working in transportation in a non-for-profit and never looked back. After twelve years at Transportation Alternatives across various advocacy roles, feeling her impact was limited in scale, she decided to move to the private sector with Lyft as the company expanded its scope to include micromobility.

Affecting Inclusion through Transport

Transportation is a pervasive industry because it touches most people on a daily basis, and Samponaro’s work is disrupting the norms we take for granted that weren’t always norms.

“In the U.S., we’ve spent more than a century building the private automobile into everyday life,” notes Samponaro. “There are New York Times articles from the introduction of the automobile era which reflect the public’s uproar over the invasion of these automobiles onto the streets, which traditionally had been used as gathering places, stickball locations, parks, food markets and all the things.”

“We also heavily subsidize single-occupancy vehicle trips to mask the massive toll this form of transportation takes on society – free parking, cheap gas, roads designed entirely for vehicular traffic. It’s not surprising that roughly 77% of Americans drive alone in their car to work. As we face big challenges like climate change, housing, and equitable access to transportation options, removing the single occupancy vehicle from day to day life is part of getting at the root of the problem,” she says. “Lyft as a company is challenging the premise of the single occupancy vehicle through rideshare, our large-scale bikeshare programs and the ways that we provide our customers with trip planning to integrate transit into a daily commute.”

Samponaro’s line of work in micromobility is focused on creating a network of shared bicycles and scooters that functions like a public transportation system. Though bike activism originally drew her into urban biking, she feels her work is helping to remove the identity politics from riding a bike, while overcoming some of the disadvantages of not owning a car.

“At the end of the day, if we’re trying to transform the way people get around, and make it more equitable and safe, it’s important that when people choose to get on a bike to go to work, they’re not making an identity decision,” she notes. “They’re making a practical one, with a tool that is available, easy and affordable.”

Bringing A More Diverse Human Element to Transit

“In the context of biking and micromobility, often the market is orientating itself towards the perspective of a young white male,” Samponaro observes. “I’ve tried to find opportunities, whether through my own perspective or bringing in the perspective of other women, to make sure we’re inserting a broader view into how we plan our programs and welcome people to our systems.”

For example, street designs generally make the thought of shifting to a bicycle both scary and implausible: “You have to be daring, and you shouldn’t have to be thinking about whether you’re risking your life in your transportation choice. That’s not logical, so I think that impacting the systems around people’s choices become the ways you ensure equity and access.”

“It’s important that there are engineers building models and algorithms to make non-driving easier and more attainable,” notes Samponaro. “I’m most excited about my work when I’m bringing the human dimension to that essential product development. Given how much this area impacts the lives of people, having a people-centric perspective on the work of transportation has been an asset that I can bring and that I find great satisfaction in.”

A Culture of Belonging

“Growing up, I just passed as someone that people assumed was straight. So I struggled mostly in the context of work with a feeling of being closeted, unless I chose not to be,” says Samponaro. “Always coming out over and over again has its own challenges.”

Working in a highly male-dominated industry, she has often been the only woman or one of few women at the table. As a married lesbian mother of 4.5 year old twins, the years have brought internal and contextual changes that have helped her feel confident in embodying her own voice.

“Getting to a place of success and building my career trajectory involved feeling bad about myself at times and being slightly insecure that it wasn’t going to go my way, whether it was the raise or the promotion,” she notes. “If I spoke too loudly in the meeting, was I going to be called out for being rude, as opposed to be appreciated for being assertive? As I became more senior, the biggest feedback I received was that I was not being considerate enough in my tone, the kind of feedback that I feel men don’t receive. So the context of being queer just layered on top of those feelings of insecurity and asking if I belonged.”

Samponaro notes that achieving successes is different than having an inherent feeling of ease and belonging: “The overwhelming sense I used to have was as hard as I was trying and as good as I was doing,” she recalls, “I wasn’t going to get asked to that drink or get added to that bike ride or get included.”

Samponaro accredits much of the belonging and encouragement she now feels to being in an environment where there is a dedicated emphasis on building an equitable company culture.

“I have personally grown to a place where I could feel belonging, but then Lyft is just a wonderful place to work in terms of the emphasis it places on creating affinity groups, recognizing people’s differences, celebrating them and creating opportunities for that to be happening all the time,” she observes. “There’s so much structure built around ensuring that the company is doing equitability, right. The intentionality is key.“

Now that she feels more confident in her voice, Samponaro seeks to become the ally that she realizes she may not have dared to be: “ln my attempts to make sure I kept my job and kept growing in the way I wanted to, did I do enough speaking out on behalf of others around me? Did I do enough ally work? I think the answer, probably up until recently, is ‘no.’”

Samponaro is recognized by those who mentor her for her focus and determination to create change through the work she does. She has learned to embrace her sensitivity and capacity for empathy, though at times challenging, as an asset which has enabled her to truly impact the communities she serves.

By Aimee Hansen

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Natalie Tucker: Head of Strategy & Operations, Radioligand Therapy

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Natalie Tucker “As a professional golfer, you either hire someone to run the business side of your career, or you run it on your own. I ran my own business, raised nearly a million dollars in capital, hired my whole team and traveled around the world,” says Natalie Tucker. “It was a great experience that taught me a lot about business.”

Tucker shares some unique insights from the golf course to apply in the workplace, why you should focus on influencing the influencers and the price she once paid for feeling unable to bring her whole self to work.

From the Golf Course to Health Care

Tucker was a professional golfer for ten years before she retired her golf clubs at the competitive level and moved into healthcare.

Though she realizes being a professional athlete, especially as a woman, is an inspiration to others to embrace your gifts and follow your dreams, she also felt compelled to find avenues to more directly impact the lives of others. Having been surrounded by the business of health as a golfer, she was magnetized to go into healthcare while leveraging the science-inclined side of herself.

“Being a professional athlete was fun and entertaining, but for me, it felt like something was missing. In my work now, I feel I am helping people and bringing value to them,” says Tucker. “The patients benefit from our work, and you really feel like you’re making a difference.”

After a period of working in a company that focused on artificial intelligence for skin cancer detection, she attained her MBA from Yale, before moving into consulting for pharmaceutical companies. Eventually she joined Novartis – where she heads strategy and operations for a business unit focusing on radiopharmaceuticals for the treatment of patients with various cancers.

Lessons For Navigating the Course of Business

In a unique training ground where her personal career depended not only upon her athletic ability but also on her business prowess, Tucker acquired many valuable lessons as an athlete that she continues to draw from, over 10 years after leaving the golf course.

Maintaining Calm Under Pressure

Tucker gives credit to her professional golf career for helping her learn to manage pressure and anxiety. Her ability to retain her LPGA Tour Card, and therefore her job for the following year, depended on her performance in a single four-day tournament. When the stakes are that high, with six-figure sponsors on the line, you have to stay in your center and focus.

“If you play poorly over four days, you lose everything. You lose your income, you have nothing,” she recalls. “So there’s a lot of pressure. I had to learn ways of self-calming: how do I quiet my mind, take two minutes and just relax, and empty everything out? I did that on the golf course to get through these really hard moments.”

“This is a hundred percent applicable to business. Before I go into an interview, before I give a presentation, before I talk with the CEO of the company – I take two minutes just to calm myself. All of the methods that help maintain an even keel transfer from golf to business.”

Visualizing Your End Goal and Pathway To Success

“In playing professional golf, you spend a lot of time visualizing or mentally planning what you want to accomplish,” she notes. “The best way to be successful in business is also to think about what you’re trying to accomplish, and ask yourself ‘What does the end goal look like?’ ”

Once you know where you want to go, it’s about setting the plan for how to arrive to that outcome.

“Unless you have a vision of where you want to go and a plan of how you’re going to get there, you’re not going to make it, this is true in golf or business,” observes Tucker. “When you play a tournament, you plan every single shot in advance and visualize yourself accomplishing it – For example, for each hole, you look at where the pin is, and you think of the best angle to approach it. This angle informs every shot ahead of it. It’s starting with the end in mind to inform your first move.

In business, not only do you need to identify ‘what good looks like’ and sketch a project plan for how you’re going to get there”, says Tucker, “but you also need to ask yourself who you need to bring in.”

Bringing In Your Support Team

“Running my own business as a professional golfer taught me how to work with people, and not just for the purpose of ‘transacting’. I learned how to understand what others’ needs are, and the importance of that knowledge to build a strong relationship,” says Tucker.

It’s a misconception that being a golfer is not also about being part of a team, as her team was essential to overall success.

“When I came into business, I thought I could be successful if I worked hard enough, but that’s not necessarily true. You have to bring others along with you for the ride,” she notes. “Similar to golf, the more you can bring the right team on board, the more successful you will be.”

Tucker feels that dialogue is what gives rise to the best solutions, as the combined insight from others is what often catalyzes the best path, not just your own thinking.

Influencing the Influencers

Previously very focused on personal performance, getting out of her comfort zone and moving towards greater focus on interconnectivity has ultimately been highly fulfilling and encouraged versatility.

“Taking the time and really getting to know people has been the most rewarding part of my career. I’m really happy that I’ve adjusted my style of work to look beyond the work itself, and broaden my perspective to focus on people.”

One of the biggest adjustments that Tucker felt coming into business, as a performance-focused introvert, was the necessary need to navigate the more strategic connections that are so often a large component of being effective in the business world. In golf, the bottom line of Tucker’s success was her performance down to the numbers. If she performed well, the right people would come to her.

“The hardest part about the corporate world is there’s no black and white success criteria. There’s nothing that says if you do well on this project, you will be promoted,” says Tucker. “It’s performance over time and there’s a whole communication network that took me a long time to understand, and adjust to.”

As she had to do with raising money in golf, Tucker has learned to engage beyond the people in her team, and not necessarily by going three levels up for visibility either. Her strategy has been to develop real connections with influencers to the decision-makers.

“What I see too often is people only building relationships with those people who are like them and in their comfort zone, often at the same level or nearby in the office,” she notes. “But people would really benefit by looking at an organization and asking: who are the key decision-makers, and who are the influencers to those key decision makers?”

“People often want to go directly to the key decision maker and say ‘get to know me’, but if you get to know the influencers of the key decision makers, you become an influencer in the organization as well,” she has realized. “When joining an organization, this is a good first step for those who are more introverted and looking to quickly create positive impact on the business because you’re able to have honest dialogues on key matters. It’s about reading the organization, and learning about its people – not their title, but who they are, and their communication networks. Once you understand the communication network of an organization, you can navigate it well.”

The Price of Not Bringing Her Whole Self To Work

As a professional golfer twenty years ago, Tucker’s brand was critical to her ability to raise funds and support her athletic career – and she went through a very tough lesson as a gay woman who did not feel she could risk being her whole self.

At one point, one of her major sponsors told her that he had heard rumors she was gay. If true, he made it explicit that this would be a dealbreaker for continued sponsorship.

“Now this was 20 years ago, and times were different, but I hid who I was. I changed my image, tried to behave and walk differently, and it destroyed my career,” Tucker states. “I was trying to be someone I wasn’t, and I wasn’t authentic to myself or to the world around me. If I could do it over again, I would have behaved differently, even though it would have dissolved my access to income at the time. Trying to hide who I was made it impossible to be great. I couldn’t be my best without being my full self.”

After leaving golf where success was so dependent on her image, Tucker found the protections of the corporate world to be a huge relief.

“There was a transition period, where I learned how to be who I was, without feeling that I was going to be retaliated against,” she notes. “Today, everybody knows my wife, Marion. I finally feel like I have the ability to be open, and to be who I am. But it was a learning experience for me, and it definitely wasn’t easy along the way.”

In addition to loving cooking, Tucker loves to be outside enjoying nature whenever she can, and still loves to compete. These days, squash, tennis with her wife (who she jokes is ‘not that bad’ on the court against her) and basketball, to stay in shape, are her sports of choice.

By Aimee Hansen

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Noelle Ramirez: Project Manager, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, PGIM

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Noelle Ramirez“I bring to the table my lived and learned experience as a woman, a lesbian woman, a Hispanic woman,” says Noelle Ramirez. “The things that kept me quiet in the room before are the things making me speak the loudest in the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion space.”

She speaks to showing up visibly to create belonging, how to expand the diversity of recruitment, and the prerequisite importance of culture.

Being The Representation You Want To See

Given her love for people and their stories, Ramirez chose to study immigration throughout her undergrad at Dartmouth. During recruiting season in college, she never saw herself, as a Puerto Rican woman, in asset management. Literally. The recruiters and classmates on that track did not look like her.

“I didn’t see myself, and the lack of representation was something that I shied away from,” she recalls. “But a lot of my perceptions were really misperceptions. I just did a talent research project at PGIM, where we found there’s a huge perception issue for the wealth and asset management industry felt by not only women, but also Latinx individuals, Hispanic individuals, black individuals: I don’t see myself, so how could I go that route?”

So when Ramirez moved to a focused diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) role in asset management, she did so with intention.

“I can be the representation that I want to see and make an impact in an industry that needs more people like me,” she says. “Highlighting different voices is something I want to do—you don’t have to be a math major or male or straight in this industry. You can show up, do a good job and succeed. I found there’s some amazing, diverse people in this industry. They’re just not the voices we have traditionally highlighted first.”

Casting A Wider Net for Recruiting

“The most rewarding piece of my work is to create an opportunity and open a door, where traditionally that door may not have existed,” says Ramirez, “to be able to put that spotlight on someone who might not have been seen and say, ‘I see you and there’s space for you here.’”

In the Latinx talent space, Ramirez experienced one of her biggest moments of impact when she and a colleague dared to cast a wider net. They traveled to Hispanic-serving institutions in Florida, well outside of the typical target schools, and met Luisa Maria Machado Artimez, a first generation American who came to the US at the age of 12 from Cuba and served in the US Army for a year before starting college. Ramirez found Luisa to be “one of the most inspiring young women that I’ve ever worked with and probably will ever know.”

Ramirez and her colleague agreed they wanted to find a way to invite Luisa into the industry via an internship at PGIM. She joined the summer program, was a star performer and is returning next year.

“That’s why I do this work. It’s easy to make the case for casting a wider net when you know someone like Luisa has been brought into the organization and succeeded,” she says. That’s when the higher-level support comes and then you can create an entire strategy around that.”

Making the Business Case

“You’re not going to move mountains when it comes to DEI in a month, or even a year. We’re fighting things like systemic racism that have been in place for generations,” she says, “so it’s important to celebrate small wins.”

Ramirez emphasizes being strategic and data-driven in the DEI sphere.

“For some people, it really is showing them exactly what they are missing by not caring about this,” she notes, “creating that story and walking them to that finish line, so they can take the step to make the change in the organization.”

For example, one of her DEI focuses has been on identifying where core Latinx talent is concentrated in the organization, to establish allyship to support that talent in moving towards more leadership positions.

“The Latinx population is becoming the majority minority—this is, the fastest-growing population, a more educated and entrepreneurial population, set to become the majority homeowners in the next 20 years,” she observes. “If the industry doesn’t have a strategy that’s going to capitalize on this talent, we’re completely missing the boat from a business perspective.”

She notes the “three P” factors that are barriers to Latinx recruitment in the industry:

  • Perception: This is not an industry that I see anyone like me in.
  • Talent Pipeline: I don’t even know or understand what asset management is, so how would I choose it?
  • Passion & Purpose: Can I feel good and passionate about wealth creation?

“If we don’t know the barriers to address,” says Ramirez, “then how are we going to work towards them as an industry?”

“Job hunters today are looking for a career that aligns with their values and that they can feel good about – and rightly so, we should feel passionate about purposeful in the work we do every day.”

Ramirez feels there needs to be more emphasis on getting different voices out there to attract a diverse talent pool as well as sharing stories about how companies are doing good and can align with your values, like PGIM’s huge investment in the community of Newark, New Jersey.

Put Culture First and Create an Inclusive Environment

When it comes to advice on making career-related decisions, she tells others: “Culture first. Seek out advice from people that are already there. What has their experience been? Do they feel comfortable? Do they feel like they can bring who they are to the table? If the answer is yes, that’s a good place to start. It takes away a lot of productivity and energy to not be who you are.”

“Go somewhere where you can be yourself. I’m very passionate in my delivery and it’s part of my culture. Making sure I’m in an environment where that doesn’t have to be shut off is important,” she says. “Look for environments that are ready to receive you, because that’s where you’ll be your most productive, innovative, creative and strategic.”

Another core component of Noelle’s team’s work is to create a safe space so that people can comfortably share as little or as much about their own experience as they wish.

“I’m a lesbian. I can talk about my partner every Monday morning. I would say as an industry, we are behind in creating safer spaces where people can be 100% themselves,” she notes. “We have an LGBTQ+ Think Tank at PGIM, which is comprised of Out leaders across the organization, which is thinking of ways to highlight LGBTQ+ voices and to give them a platform to share and educate.”

For me, I made the conscious decision to be out at work, especially when I joined the DEI space, because I felt like there weren’t many out people that I could go to and seek advice from, and I wanted to be that for someone else.”

Of her own intersectional identity, Ramirez notes, “I’m a white passing person and there’s privilege in that. Early on in my career, it was much easier to just blend. But moving into the DEI space, all of the things that made it uncomfortable now instead legitimize me and give me a platform to stand on.”

“How am I going to show up today from my voice?” Ramirez notes it’s a daily struggle. “From your voice to your hair to your clothes to your delivery, these are not necessarily things that are on everyone else’s mind.”

Ramirez is a huge athlete and since her father introduced her two years ago, she’s been obsessed with one the world’s fastest growing sports: pickleball—which combines elements of badminton, table tennis and tennis.

Played by people of all ages, not only has it allowed her to get outdoors daily during the pandemic, but she’s also made close friends with people she would have never otherwise met. Though her partner is more inclined to music than sports, she also often joins Ramirez on the court.

By: Aimee Hansen

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Anna Salek: Partner, Private Client Team Leader, Shearman & Sterling LLC

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Anna Salek“Junior level women lawyers sometimes ask me for career advice, and I find the reoccurring theme is that they do not have a good understanding of their professional value,” says Anna Salek. “Very often, women grossly underestimate their value.”

Salek talks about her genuine appreciation for cutting-edge legal work, the growth in a lateral move, the two-way street of value and daring to do what scares you.

The Gratification of Top-Tier Work

“I get immense satisfaction from solving complex problems,” says Salek, who enjoys tackling legal issues that perhaps no other firm has been able to solve sufficiently or that have never before even been considered.

As the private client team leader at Shearman & Sterling with over 20 years of direct experience, Salek works with high-net-worth individuals and families to meet their wide range of legal needs and specializes the areas of trust and estates, tax planning and not-for-profit law.

“I am lucky to work at a top-tier firm like Shearman where the clients are interesting and the legal work is challenging,” she says. “I love the cutting-edge work where often there’s no precedent and the client is relying on my judgment and experience.”

Salek joined Shearman in early 2019 to lead their private client team and was drawn there by the firm’s rich history, impressive client base and dynamic women.

Be Willing to Move To Expand

“I think women, more than men, are more prone to say, ‘they’ve been so good to me here’ and view moving on to another firm as being disloyal or ungrateful. Well, that’s fine that they’ve been good to you – they should be good to you,” says Salek. “But you should also be good to yourself and not be shy about exploring other opportunities.”

While the practice of trusts and estates is generally gender diverse, it is more often men who head up the practice, so replacing C. Jones Perry at Shearman when he retired as team leader was a strong leap ahead for women in leadership in law.

“I was very dedicated and happy at another top-tier-firm where I grew up as a lawyer, and I stayed there for a long time. But moving to another firm made me a better lawyer as it allowed me to grow in different directions than I otherwise would have,” says Salek. “Making a lateral move can help you grow professionally, but equally as important, you are bringing value to your new firm by contributing your own unique skills, experience and perspective.”

“I’m not suggesting women should job hop or even leave their job, but I do think everyone should consider it from time to time – even if only to confirm how good you have it. Men change firms more frequently than women, and it’s not a bad thing. With each move you’re not only likely to increase your compensation, but it’s also a huge personal and professional growth opportunity.”

Know Your Self-Worth

On a similar thread, the guidance that Salek consistently emphasizes to junior level women lawyers is to value themselves as professionals.

“You are valuable to your firm. It’s not just a one-way street. I find that women sometimes almost can’t hear that,” iterates Salek. “They’re reluctant to ask for anything—equity, more compensation. a flexible work schedule, for example – or give themselves credit. Reminding women of their professional contributions to their firm is what I end up doing in almost every single one of those conversations.”

The Relationship Side of Private Client Work

On top of being challenged by the academic intricacies of her practice area, Salek loves the client interaction and deep relationships involved in her area of law. She enjoys working with individuals and families, many of whom have been long-term generational clients of the firm.

“The clients I work with tend to be extremely interesting people,” says Salek, for whom “field trips” to clients’ homes and offices are as much a part of her job as being behind her desk.

“When people invite you into the world of their personal finances, they inevitably invite you into their family and personal lives,” says Salek who feels that women especially thrive in cultivating relationships and trust.

“Not only do you have to be a proficient lawyer, you need to be personable and trustworthy. There’s just an element of being trusted that’s not something you can learn and that quality has helped me a lot, second certainly to really knowing what I’m doing,” she says. “I have clients who are women who have said they picked me because they prefer to work with a woman, and I have had male clients who say the same thing.”

Do What Scares You

“My advice to junior lawyers would be: don’t shy away from things that intimidate you. In fact, seek them out. Do something that scares you every day,” Salek says. “I’m not talking about skydiving. I’m talking about challenging yourself. Don’t like public speaking? Do a webinar, go sit on a panel. Don’t think you know enough about something? Help a client with that particular issue or publish an article about it. Shy? Invite someone you would like to get to know or learn from for lunch or coffee.”

Salek credits her own integration of this advice for having made her into a more confident lawyer today.

”I feel women especially don’t like to be outside of their comfort zone, but that’s the only place where you can grow,” she says. “It’s really important to push your own boundaries.”

Practicing Work-Life Integration

A rewarding aspect of her work has been the pro bono cases where Salek has been able to champion people and organizations in critical financial wins, where she sometimes gets as involved in interpersonal dynamics as with her private clients.

Salek finds that for her, work enters home life and home life enters work, so she embraces the work-life integration approach of keeping both in even keel, rather than “the two-iPhone approach” of work-life balance, which she feels is a false separation of parts of life that live inside of the same universe.

She is married with two teenagers, a daughter of 16 and a son of 14, and notes one silver lining of the pandemic is that people who were technology-resistant have been forced to embrace technology, opening up more remote working possibilities.

Salek is an avid, hands-in-the-dirt gardener. Her favorite season is spring, and she finds that “observing the earth awakening is so good for the soul.”

By Aimee Hansen

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May Nazareno: Northeast Director of Major Gifts at IGNITE

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May Nazareno “Who you are right now in this moment is a gift. It is an offering that is meant to be shared, and you really don’t know how it sparks another person from the other side,” says May Nazareno. “What I’m trying to always ask is: can I create space, within myself and anyone I engage with, can I create the space for us to be truthful and real?”

Nazareno speaks to activating leadership in girls and young women, catalyzing change through storytelling, and how the world needs all of who you are.

Fundraising For The Future Pipeline Of Female Leaders

In her role, Nazareno creates a community of stakeholders across the Northeast who helps IGNITE “build a movement of young women who are ready and eager to become the next generation of political leaders.”

Founded in 2010 to address the lack of political parity in the US, the national organization seeks to increase the number of women as elected officials, appointed to public boards and commissions, and in supporting leadership positions that make it possible for women to occupy those political spaces. By creating multiple entry points for young women to advance in political leadership, IGNITE pushes for a large-scale solution that has the capacity to flood the political pipeline.

Currently, with a team of 17 women who operate under a budget of less than $3 million, IGNITE is the only non-partisan organization in the US that provides sustained community-based training and support to nearly 13,000 + women and girls across 36 states. Currently, a top ten finalist for the $10 million dollar Equality Can’t Wait Challenge, IGNITE’s goal to train 100,000 women each year starting in 2025 could be in reach.

Her Own Bittersweet Experience In Leadership

For Nazareno, advocating for IGNITE is personal. “I had never seen myself as a political person, nor did I think that being part of the student government was an option for me when I was in high school or college.” She admits she fell into student government while in college, “because someone asked me to,” and that the opportunity to run for her university’s vice president position: “was entirely because the secretary of the Student Union just said to me: ‘what do you have to lose?’” Nazareno was met with a lot of resistance from her male peers – and even from other women. “It was the late 90’s and everyone’s questioning if you’re qualified enough.”

Despite Nazareno winning her election by a landslide, and during her tenure, raising significant funds and forging interconnectedness between different cultural and identity-based groups – she faced a hostile environment with no collective support behind her. “What makes IGNITE personal is that the typical IGNITE woman comes to our programs with a desire to solve problems in her community – rarely with a desire to run. And yet, when she goes through our trainings, she learns how to push past her fears of being isolated and pitted against the boys club – because we help her create a ‘girl gang’ of support. I often think what if IGNITE was around when I was in college? What would have happened to my life if I met other women like me, and got the mentorship and the networking needed to navigate a political life? Undoubtedly, I would have considered public service as a calling.”

Though highly encouraged on the path, Nazareno admits she was burned out. Her experience as an elected student leader at her university was surrounded by so much divisiveness – that while she considered pursuing law school – she turned to study playwriting.

“What I cared about the most was figuring out how to foster a shared interconnectedness between students who were passionate about their own identity politics. What were the things that we could understand and respect about each other rather than focusing on what drives us apart? And I knew that law wasn’t going to answer those questions. I didn’t want to tell people what to think. I didn’t want to get caught up in ‘I’m right’ or ‘you’re wrong’. I wanted to come from a place of encouraging deep self-reflection,” she recalls. “At the theatre, you watch conflict and see both sides of the story. You sit in the audience and decide for yourself.”

Catalyzing Dialogue Through a One Woman Show

To the disbelief of her parents, Nazareno rescinded her law school applications and set off to Seattle to become an actor, despite warnings that she’d be cut off from her family.

“I had a bag of clothes and a few books, my laptop, and my yoga mat – and there I was in this hostel in downtown Seattle when 9/11 hit. My Dad used to work at the World Trade Center…,” she laments. “And yet, everyone around me saw this moment as an isolated NYC problem.” She perceived it as both a national and international affair and watched as knee-jerk political reactivity took hold.

“I was impacted by the need to find a way to break through the bubble, not even having words for that. It’s 2001, we have no idea what’s happening, but you hold onto your bubble – to whatever you can to salvage any sense of normalcy,” she said. “The bubble cracked for me in 2003 when I had a family member who was the personal aide to Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the Brazilian United Nations Special Representative for Iraq, go missing.”

De Mello’s death in a hotel bombing in Baghdad and the presumed death of her family member, who then reappeared, catalyzed her to write a one-woman show entitled Dead Woman Home that she took to Seattle, San Francisco, Off-Off-Broadway in New York, and the Philippines. Nazareno’s intention was to challenge the depersonalized perceptions and opinions about war and the Iraqi people that could justify an almost instant reaction to go to war.

“This was my very first play and I wrote it almost twenty years ago. At the time, I wanted to ask audiences: do we realize the implications and the unnecessary incalculable loss of innocent life? Can we sit with that? If I was sharing this play now, what I really want to ask is this: today we live with growing hatred towards others – and often because there’s nothing left to feel anymore. Who among us still have the courage to love?”

Nazareno wanted to hear what people thought about our occupation in Iraq and connected with teens in juvenile detention centers, vets, and high school and college students from low-resourced communities. She intended to reach new audiences who didn’t have access to theatre and create space for civic dialogue that would inspire social action. Indeed, her play galvanized a group of grad students in the Philippines to submit policy strategies to the UN.

“When I met those grad students, I could have never predicted that kind of response to my play. It finally hit me: stories have the power to change people’s perception of themselves and the world around them.”

Flipping The Story to Empower Perspectives

After two years of touring, Nazareno returned to the U.S. and decided to try event management and fundraising. “I was proud that my show broke even during its run. I didn’t have any formal training in the logistics of producing my show. Everything about me was just scrappy and I wanted to formally learn how to raise funds.”

Nazareno landed a job at Stanford, where she was taken under the wing of Lorraine Alexander, who mentored her. “I was lucky. Lorraine was my first teacher and along the way, I met Theda Jackson-Mau and Kim Gerstman who also showed me the ropes. Learning from them ultimately changed my life. I realized that everything up to this point was preparing me to tell stories that inspire people to question their position in the world and what they can do with that position,” says Nazareno, who took a step away from the politics of theater. “In many ways, that’s been the throughline of my work. We all have stories, and our stories give us the capacity to influence and lead, but what does it mean to be a leader and how can we lead in a new way?”

“We are all part of the solution for a more just world,” says Nazareno. “That’s what I’m trying to get across in my work. When I was a teenager, I heard Mother Teresa speak at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and I was moved when she told us that God doesn’t have hands, but our hands.” Nazareno is adamant about IGNITE because the organization trains young women who come from historically marginalized communities to develop their leadership potential and recognize how their lived experiences are essential to creating a democracy that represents our country’s diversity.

“The narrative is often ‘I come from a low-income neighborhood, I was raised by a single parent, my father is in jail, my brother was killed, I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. I’ve got no credentials to lead and zero cash. Who am I to run?” says Nazareno. “And we flip the script and say: who are you not to? We’re here to convince each young woman that her whole life is what makes her qualified to lead. Right now, out of the 520,000 elected offices across the country, women hold 30.5% of municipal offices, 30.9% of seats in state legislatures, and 26.5% of seats in the US Congress. If we dramatically broaden our audience, and just 0.1% of young women run in the next decade we will dramatically increase the pool of female candidates in America.”

“Women are the backbone of our democracy,” Nazareno adds. “We have to shift our understanding and challenge this notion of ‘leadership material.’ We need to show young women that their leadership is needed and there’s a path to realize their ambitions. If we can do that, we can change the way we think about women leaders in America.”

“Right now, there are many people – mostly men – who sit in local government who have little or no visceral sense of what it means to live day-to-day in the communities where our young women live. This is why we train young women to realize that they are the best representation of what their community needs and what needs to change.”

“We’re at this tipping point where it’s abundantly clear that if we want our country to continue to thrive we have to invest in child care, mandate equitable pay for women, keep children and women safe from domestic violence and gun violence as national priorities, and make access to healthcare a fundamental human right – among a whole host of other things. Who knows these issues better than women? That’s why we must elect more women to get a seat at the political table, and that’s why IGNITE gives girls and young women the tools, networks, and resources to succeed in this environment. Not only will they run, they’ll win. And not only will they win, but they stay in the game…” says Nazareno. “In the midst of COVID, 13 IGNITE women ran for office across the country last year. This year, 21 IGNITE women have declared their candidacies. – That’s why I wake up every morning truly inspired.”

Showing Up As Who You Are

Nazareno feels the pandemic has been another huge catalyst to breaking our bubbles, realizing our interconnectedness, how deeply woven our lives are and how dependent we are on one another. Amidst so much divisiveness, she sees that we’re all presented with this question: how are you going to show up to this moment?

When it comes to reflecting on her journey and what motivates her day-to-day, it’s exactly that question. Nazareno’s own father came from humble means and wanted to become a cinematographer. But with his mother’s disapproval, he became the engineer he was expected to be. Nazareno dared the opposite.

“What I carry from his story is that while we make sacrifices and concessions along the way, we can’t forget the spark that lives inside us – especially now. As I see it, that spark is the essence of who you are. And it’s a choice to share it with others or hide it. How am I showing up? What am I bringing to the table?” she questions. “Am I really bringing me, or am I consciously dimming my spark, and if so, for whom – and why? And is it worth it? Or can I trust that bringing all of me – whatever that is in this moment – is enough?”

By: Aimee Hansen

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Grace Lee: Treasurer & Head of Financial Planning and Analytics, S&P Global

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Grace Lee“I’m completely open to, and actually encourage, my team telling me when I’m wrong. I invite them to convince me that I’m wrong. I love that!” says Grace Lee. “I want us to have the best ideas, and that’s only possible when we are all contributing, debating and challenging each other.”

Lee speaks to ramping up the opportunity for responsibility, why motivating others makes the real difference in impact and why the ability to have a constructive relationship with healthy debates means you must be willing to challenge and be challenged.

Following The Call To Responsibility and Impact

“You do things for three years and then you look for a new challenge,” laughs Lee, recalling what the Head of HR at a previous firm said to her. She is motivated by massive strategic challenges with fast growth curves—and the desire to manage more responsibility while seeing the direct impact of her work.

Having planned to become a lawyer because of her love for formulating a thesis, supporting an argument and conducting a robust debate, Lee deferred law school to follow the investment banking hype out of Columbia University, and took an analyst position in Asia.

While in Asia, she discovered that she was far more drawn to the financial analytics and investor storytelling components of investment banking versus the work she partnered on with international corporate lawyers when on deals.

“The thing that I appreciated about certain aspects of investment banking is you can see the direct impact of your work. When working on an IPO of a company, if the competitive analysis and valuation work you’ve done is compelling, you should see that play out in the markets. Similarly with M&A, if investors deem that the merger makes strategic sense and the valuation is reasonable, you see that reflected in the price performance of those companies,” says Lee. “For me, seeing direct impact is so important.”

After three years in Asia, she moved back to the U.S. headquarters of the same investment bank. Subsequently, she went for a rewarding full-time Harvard MBA, which allowed her to focus on learning and traveling. She highly recommends a full-time MBA, rather than an EMBA, if you have accrued both the experience and finances to give yourself the opportunity.

After Harvard, Lee moved to the equity research group within the same investment bank. The firm had just acquired an asset management firm and she was able to join its financial institutions research team, where she was able to build upon her experiences in investment banking but now, formulate her own theses on which companies made most sense to buy vs. sell. After another few years, she thought “instead of analyzing these companies and the strategic direction that they go, I’d love to participate in the strategy making of a company and see how that transpires.”

She took a big leap to Voya Financial, helping to lead the IPO of the U.S. business for what was formerly ING, a top global financial powerhouse before the crisis.

“In my early 30’s, that was a really transformational experience. We were basically in a start-up environment, but for a massive company with leading businesses,” says Lee. “Before IPO-ing the company, we had to create the story of how the sum of the businesses made strategic sense together, and were far greater than the individual parts.”

When that role eventually evolved to maintenance, Lee moved onto a couple Executive Chief of Staff roles at other firms, before landing at S&P Global, which she came to be familiar with as her mentor from a prior firm had recently joined the company.

Merging Strategic and Analytical Outlook

“Coming from an investment banking and equity research background, we were trained to formulate both the high-level strategic picture, as well as be comfortable with the underlying analytics that support the strategy. For example, the investment case wouldn’t hold for a certain stock if the secular trends for the industry were all deteriorating. It’s valuable to be able to both see the big strategic picture and back that up with analytical horsepower,” says Lee.

Lee feels the ability to influence people is important and something she has honed, as is staying abreast of the macro-environment.

“Our job isn’t static, so to constantly keep educated on how the economy, markets and world is evolving is important,” observes Lee.

Inspiring Greatness In Others

Through both executive coaching and mentorship, Lee has realized that while striving for personal achievement has delivered her this far, the true opportunity for incremental growth and impact now lies in inspiring greatness from others.

One of her mentors shared that a mentor once advised that if you’re operating at 100% as a high achiever, it takes a lot of work to ramp yourself up to 110%. But if a whole team is operating at 70% of their performance potential and you are able to elevate the team to 80%, the incremental impact of that shift is much, much greater.

Lee has embraced this philosophy, particularly as in recent roles, her direct reports and management responsibilities have increased. While she still rolls up her sleeves and does her own modeling or formats her own PowerPoint presentations from time to time, she realized that her impact is no longer measured solely on her performance, but on the camaraderie and achievements of her broader team. “The joy I used to get seeing the price performance of a successful IPO I worked on, I now get watching my employees grow and succeed.  Some of the greatest compliments I have received recently were from my staff who have told me about the profound impact I have had on their professional development.”

More deeply embracing empathy and the softer skills is part of her current leadership approach, qualities which she admits wer not central to her personal achievement mindset.

“Earlier in my career, I focused on quick and seamless execution,” she reflects. “I didn’t much appreciate the softer skills, but now that I oversee a range of initiatives, it is impossible to be that strong individual contributor across all of these. I am also recognizing that what I need to do is empathize and elevate those I work and partner with, as collectively we can all achieve more than any single contributor,” says Lee.

She also notes that leaders she most admires, including executive management at her current company, demonstrate these skills and she feels inspired by them to always do her best.

Setting the Tone And Encouraging Women’s Voices

As a Korean-American woman, Lee is often a unique face as finance in corporate America tends to be white male-dominated. But growing up with a younger brother, all male cousins and having two sons, she isn’t necessarily out of her element.

“At my level you don’t see that many females, but that has not been a deterrent for me. My personality is a bit more direct, and I think that resonates more with my male colleagues,” says Lee. “That being said, the people I’m closest to and develop the closest relationships with are female. The higher you go, there’s fewer women but we really support each other.”

Naturally assertive herself, Lee will often encourage or even nudge her female reports to speak up. “In the reviews I give them, I tell them ‘I know you share good emails and insights with me, but I think everyone would benefit from you sharing those ideas.’”

In the virtual meeting room, she will take the initiative to volunteer other women to speak, mentioning that she knows her female coworker (by name) has ideas to share on this topic. She also IMs with managers and peers when topics come up, either to bounce off possible points or let a colleague know her input would be valued on this topic.

Being Willing to Challenge and Be Challenged

Lee emphasizes the value of being willing to challenge, as well as being willing to be challenged as a leader. “I have strong opinions, but I am the very first person—if you tell me why I’m wrong and give me data points— to say, ‘I’m wrong. Let’s shift.’”

Equally, she is unafraid to challenge her current boss, when she has a different perspective on how to approach an issue. “He’s a very logical man and he doesn’t want ‘yes people, because they add less value than people who will think strategically and then push back. I appreciate this about him and have tried to emulate this in my own management style.”

Lee thinks one of the best and important decisions she’s made is choosing a husband who is also an advisor and coach to her. She also appreciates that he always challenges her, and keeps it real and her grounded. She enjoys spending quality time with him, her six and nine year old sons and also watching Korean dramas.

By Aimee Hansen

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