Rising Star: Sarah Zilenovski, Marketing Manager; ClearSale

Sarah ZilenovskiBefore starting her career, Sarah Zilenovski had always believed you had to choose your area of expertise while still in college; while in reality, as she found you can build your path as you go.

While obtaining the necessary skills is vital, of course, she believes it’s important to plan while keeping an open mind. “We must remember that we can’t control external variables and that the person we are today is not the person we will be in the future. And as we change, so do our dreams and desires.”

And that means that your career might take unexpected twists, which you can embrace if you are confident in your abilities and potential. “I always believed that I could choose the companies or assignments that were appealing to me, not rely on it going the other way around,” says Zilenovski.

A Career Built on Seeking New Challenges

Born and raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Zilenovski moved to the United States in 2015, bringing solid credentials—including master’s and bachelor’s degrees in finance and business management from a top Brazilian business school—and experience.
She began her career in 2007 as an intern for P&G, working on customer business development. Soon after, she was hired as a finance manager for P&G largest manufacturing facility in Brazil. One year later, hoping to become more involved with the business side, she moved back to P&G’s headquarters to work as a finance manager for the commercial team, specifically working with P&G’s distributors and wholesalers.

After five years of a successful career at P&G, she began to think she’d like to try a smaller company, ideally one with a more direct social impact. For her, it was a leap, but she landed successfully at ClearSale, a company fighting against fraudsters—and was the fastest growing medium-sized company in Brazil.

There, she pivoted back to sales and marketing, where she had started at P&G; her first role was to manage the sales team during a large restructuring in the commercial area. That entailed recreating everything from the sales teams’ portfolios to the go-to-market strategy. In addition much of her focus was on the joint creation and customization of solutions with enterprise prospects and clients.

At that point it became clear to her that she preferred combining her business background with her proven communication and analytical skills, rather than leading the sales teams. She was subsequently invited to join ClearSale’s international team, with three other Brazilian peers, to open ClearSale’s first foreign branch, based in the United States, entirely from scratch.

After that successful launch, she is responsible for ClearSale’s global marketing and sales strategy, excluding the native market of Brazil. Zilenovski also recently started her MBA at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, which she says is “a childhood dream, to attend one of the top American schools.” That’s one of the professional achievements she is most proud of so far—working in a position of great autonomy, at a company that trusts her insight and skills, while attending one of the best business schools worldwide.

A Work Culture That Meets All Her Needs

While Zilenovski has had a number of role models along the way, her first positive impressions started at home, with her parents who both held PhDs and instilled in her the importance of investing in knowledge.
In addition, her first boss at P&G, Ricardo Wasserman, gave her an early education in integrity—making it clear that rules are needed to define right and wrong, and there’s no space to question them.
At ClearSale, she finds the current EVP, Rafael Lourenco, to be a great example of being excellent while respecting your own desires, needs and weaknesses, by truly believing that we first must like what we do on a day-to-day basis. “After all, if our work makes us miserable it will be a lose-lose situation in the long term, even if we make it work in the short term.”

And that fits well with her goals of future success, which to her is far more than aspiring to a specific title or salary. For Zilenovski, success comes from working for a company with a high social impact, while considering that work/life balance can be a day-to-day challenge—it’s a marathon, not a sprint, she says. She appreciates she can build a routine that fits what she wants or needs in any given situation, such as flexible working hours and the ability to work from a home office. ClearSale’s culture, which focuses on diversity and flexibility, has been the perfect fit for her. “There are no distinctions regarding gender,” she says. “And it’s important to me that I have autonomy in an environment where titles don’t shape my possibilities,” she says.

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Rising Star: Alex Trevino-McCallum, Vice President of Client Development for Citi Retail Services for the Midsouth and South Atlantic Regions

Alex TrevinoCareer success comes easier when you focus on reinventing yourself professionally, without changing your core values, says Alex Trevino-McCallum.

Her success has come from taking her knowledge about two different industries and meshing them, to the mutual benefit of both.

From Retail to Banking

That philosophy is why Trevino-McCallum excels in her current position at Citi Retail Services, relying on her extensive background with her retail partner, Home Depot. She began her career there as a cashier at the age of 19 and worked her way up through various roles for the next 21 years. Along the way, she built relationships with subject matter experts throughout The Home Depot, including the store credit manager from Citi, which powers The Home Depot credit card. The Citi credit manager confirmed to Alex that joining the Citi team could be a great move for her career path.

While it was a hard decision, given the loyalty she had built up with Home Depot, she also believed she could bring a high level of knowledge to the position, since she knew the culture and people at the store so well. Although she lacked direct banking experience, her knowledge gained as the liaison between Home Depot and Citi made her an ideal candidate. The position required exceptional relationship-building skills and persistence to ensure associates were familiar with the credit options available—both traits where she excelled.

Trevino-McCallum transitioned to Citi Retail Services four years ago, moving from Mississippi to Atlanta, in itself an accomplishment as she was starting fresh with no support system. And that’s the professional achievement she is most proud of so far–having the confidence to pivot her career with this current role. As she becomes a resource rather than the “newbie,” she sees her decision validated every day.

And she appreciates the ongoing challenges of her position, assisting both Citi and Home Depot in navigating changes in the industry, and focusing on helping Citi become even more ingrained in the retail partner culture, then adapting those lessons to other retailers and specialty stores to keep expanding her personal development.

Family as a Barometer of What’s Important

Although Trevino-McCallum spends a great deal of time on the road overseeing 30 to 40 stores, she’s able to be home almost every night, which has been a game-changer for her. While her job is challenging and fast-paced, it enables her to prioritize her core values both at work and at home with her family.

While she has always put her family first, now they are able to sit down to dinner together most nights. “We’ve always made a conscious decision to slow down and enjoy time together, and this role allows us to do that,” she says.

This focus on family came early, with both her parents as important role models. Trevino-McCallum says that her mom is the strongest woman she knows—displaying empathy and compassion combined with grit. “Although she’s been through a lot both personally and professionally, she continues to see the bright side of everything,” she says. And Trevino-McCallum says she learned her ability to balance from her mom, whom she describes as “the queen of juggling.”

Her dad had a professional career that she aspires to, as she always admired his commitment and drive. “He was a great team leader and gained trust and engagement with those who worked around him,” she says. However, she notes that sometimes that came at the expense of family time so she aims to land somewhere in the middle.

Trevino-McCallum constantly works on accelerating her skills, and appreciates the opportunities that Citi offers via a wide variety of functional groups. She has a healthy curiosity in the business, including partner management, which would highlight her experience in building close relationships, as well as interest in operations and marketing, which would utilize her skills in team building and networking. She recently put her hat in to be part of the “SET” team (Store Execution Team), focused on delivering tools and skills to the larger Home Depot Field Support organization promoting efficiency and effectiveness.

To feed her desire for continuous development, Trevino-McCallum pursues individual learning via “Degreed,” a Citi-hosted learning platform, while remaining connected across the organization as a member of the women’s network in Atlanta. A highlight of her participation has been supporting a learning day for Girl Scouts that mirrors the “Shark Tank” model, allowing the girls to experience the corporate world in a creative manner.

In her time off work, Trevino-McCallum loves to read and travel, and although she relishes her time with her family, including those daily dinners, she says she and her husband look forward to an empty nest when they’ll have more time to start a mission of finding nearby hidden beaches.

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Rising Star: Sue Reager | CEO, Translate Your World

Sue Reager“People are right when they say, ‘If you fall, get back up again,’” says Sue Reager.

Her strategy after failing? To mope for a few days, then stand up and say to herself, “Okay, was the direction I was traveling worth pursuing, or should I go somewhere else? And if the destination is the same, is there another path to get there?

“It really is true that when you fall down, you just say ‘Drat!,’ and get back up again,” she says, a philosophy that has paved her successful and innovative career path.

A Varied Career, Focused on Finding the Perfect Fit

Reager’s career path has always been one of blazing her own trails, starting with becoming a professional choreographer at age 14. She started college, but midway through began teaching college instead, which she says was her first discovery that it is possible to follow a different path when you use your initiative.

After teaching her second year, she realized that the 10th year would essentially be the same as the first and she needed a new challenge, so she set her sights on a career switch and spent the next 20 years working for major media in 34 cities and 17 countries.

“I was told that it was not acceptable for women to work around the world — — however I went anyway. I would definitely never call those the ‘good old days,’,” she says, noting that was the moment that she learned she could make her own decisions, take care of herself and face the world without fear.

Along the way she discovered that because people do business in their own language, she had to study languages every night — grammar, verb conjugations, pronouns, adjectives – all the idiosyncrasies of various languages. But that can be daunting since it takes three to five years to learn to speak a language well enough to efficiently conduct business.

When she was invited to go to Korea on year 20 of her global jaunt, she realized that she didn’t want to start all over again learning a new language and instead returned to the United States determined to solve the language problem.

Opening Up a World of Possibilities

Her first step was to learn how to code, which allowed her to offer her services in code correction for major tech companies that were localizing applications into other languages, but were finding their code was altering the target language. She learned over time that the developer engineers were all making the same mistakes and that what they coded would never work in Japanese, Korean or other Asian languages. Upon further research, she determined that all of these developers were following what they had learned at the university, and the books were wrong.

That discovery led to her first invention, which was a way to localize extremely complex audio products like telephone systems without touching the code.

Then she began to help the speech industry by providing voices and special recordings that create the phonetic information required to generate text-to-speech technology. Her efforts led to her latest invention that is the successful integration of the great language companies of the world under one “roof,” resulting in truly excellent business applications that create cross-language communication.

It was around age 40 that Reager discovered she had something to offer the world that she had not yet recognized. “I am an inventor with a brilliant mind,” she says, adding that this realization was like a seismic shock. And, as she says, life has been really fun ever since, with a reason to leap out of bed every morning.

Right now her company is pioneering four inventions and three software programs designed to bridge the communication gap and thus enable one person to provide global education, customer service, tech support, medical professional language support and more effective 911 emergency services worldwide in dozens of languages.

“To me it is almost beyond exciting that using our software will allow one teacher to teach in 78 languages through live real-time subtitles,” she says. The company has also created a way for small business to attract and serve customers who speak other languages; in the past only huge companies could effectively expand globally due to the expense of translation and the need for special personnel to be hired to service those customers. Her company’s software takes over that job, enabling a small company to communicate, sell and serve around the world.

Reager’s company adds an additional focus: that of empowering wounded veterans to perform fulfilling jobs, as well as enable those who are deaf or blind to work in business on equal footing. “Our invention is revolutionary in this respect,” she says.

Moreover, they have invented a device called the “Eye-Belt” that is a belt that acts as eyes for blind people, telling them how to maneuver around obstacles. As more features are added, it will also tell the blind more about the person in front of them. “Our goal is to provide a new freedom to people who have been limited in the past,” she says.

A Company Culture Devoted to Equality

One of the reasons Reager believes her company has been so successful is because it is run on the basis of consensus, which is more of a Japanese style of doing business, and means that everyone involved needs to agree on a given direction. Anyone who feels strongly that the direction is wrong is encouraged to fight for their viewpoint, because there is probably a good reason for it.

“The concept of equality permeates our company culture,” she says. “Each voice has equal weight and equal merit, and if one person accidentally tries to overpower another, we simply pull the rug out from under them. We are very honest with each other, and we do not criticize.” Without levels of hierarchy, the lines blur between the “worker bees” and executives, eliminating commands and “royal decrees.”

This equality in the office is a perfect metaphor for the equality they are trying to create by removing language barriers around the world.

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Rising Star: Kavita Joseph, Lead IT Business Manager, TIAA

Kavita Joseph featured“My primary aspiration in life is to pay it forward,” says Kavita Joseph. “Breaking the stereotype takes more than a little nudge and I want to be that voice for women standing at the all-too-familiar crossroads in their lives. My mentors empowered me and I want that for others.”

Forging Her Own Path

Joseph, a Lead IT Business Manager at TIAA, had a nontraditional upbringing compared to many of her peers. Although women were encouraged to attend school and have a job where she grew up in India, they were rarely expected to pursue a career. Even in light of this cultural challenge, Joseph was successful in overcoming the stereotypes and pursing her dream of having a fulfilling career.

“When I was 20, very few girls in India moved out of their parents’ homes to live in the big city, but my parents supported my decision to live independently and pursue higher education. I am proud and happy that I was able to break the cycle because it inspired my younger sisters and cousins to do the same thing,” she says. “The whole concept was unusual at first. But my proudest realization came years later when I noticed that not only my family, but my small community in general, had turned a corner in viewing women’s careers as not just an indulgence, but as something very essential.”

Joseph credits her mother for being an exceptional role model. In a society where women were mostly home makers, her mother was the head mistress of a reputable school and also largely in charge of raising her and her two sisters since her father traveled frequently. “Looking back on those years, I can see that my mom was always on top of her professional game, was very sought after in the academia, and through it all she modeled an excellent work/life balance. So growing up as her daughter, observing her tenacity, passion for life and constant pursuit of excellence, influenced me heavily.”

Joseph began her career on an inside sales team, which she describes as “trial by fire.” “I made the classic mistake of not speaking up enough and owning the outcome. I struggled initially because I did not know how to navigate that. Eventually I asked for help and found my very first mentor. That was the beginning of really understanding and realizing the importance of reaching out, building relationships and that it is okay to step outside of your comfort zone.”

After a different role in operations, Joseph joined UBS’s Wealth Management division in Marketing Strategy and Development, before eventually moving to IT. She says her biggest accomplishment was being part of the team that built the first mobile platform for UBS Wealth Management’s field staff, a disruptive program that redefined the way things were done and won the CIO award for technology innovation.

“Due to security concerns, financial services firms are typically conservative when taking technology risks. It was exciting to find the balance between pushing barriers in providing mobile access and allowing our financial advisors to untether themselves from their desks so they could spend time in front of their clients.” Joseph went on to become the program manager until joining TIAA in 2015 in a position in the IT Business Office working on strategic programs.

Mentors Make the Difference

“It was a fairly challenging transition to IT, and I was successful due to my hard work and because I had a mentor who invested in me. Even though my mentor wasn’t a tech person, she made sure that I had the support and tools that I needed to make the transition and that made a big difference,” Joseph says.

Based on this positive experience, Joseph made a conscious effort to coach and mentor others: to be there for them as others had for her. “Diversity programs are great platforms to meet people and learn from their experiences. When I joined TIAA, one of the first things I did was to sign up as a member of one of the local diversity council chapters. Very quickly, I had built relationships with a number of people outside of my group, and that was an investment that will pay off in time.”
She is currently active in TIAA’s IT Women’s Council and helped to spearhead the launch of an IT Group Mentoring Program. This program facilitates visibility, mentorship and coaching for program participants as they aspire toward growth. Although the Group Mentoring Program only has been in existence for a little more than a year, there has already been excellent feedback from the first group who completed the six month-long coaching cycle. “The program has introduced a positive change in the culture of the organization” she says. “I feel like a proud parent.”

Learning to Balance

The Group Mentoring Program is not her only baby, as Joseph also has a five-year-old son. “Work-life integration is all about prioritizing on a daily basis because they are both real commitments. Your personal brand is at play every day. This is something I really appreciate at TIAA – that the culture recognizes you on a personal and professional level.”

She and her husband love to travel, but these days tend to stick closer to home, spending time exploring Manhattan and local Jersey haunts together with their son.

Joseph remains active in philanthropic endeavors, sponsoring a program with her family that provides artificial limbs for children in India.

Giving back to others, whether via these activities or through mentorship, is what brings Joseph joy.

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Rising Star: Betsy Wille, Senior Director, IT Risk & Information Security at TIAA-CREF

,
Betsy-Wille“I was raised with a strong work ethic, so I was well aware of the need to work hard and earn the respect of your colleagues,” says Betsy Wille, who learned throughout her career that it’s not enough to just put your head down and count on that to take care of your progression. “Ultimately everyone is responsible for their own career, and building relationships will matter.”
 
Wille spent the first two years of her career at a big accounting firm in the IT audit area, which provided a great foundational start, allowing her to see a variety of companies and technology models. Her exposure to all the options led to her decision to help build solutions in a company, and she started with an engagement at Bank One just before it became JP Morgan Chase.
 
Within six months her boss was asked to build a new infrastructure within the company, and she said she’d be delighted to be involved. She spent almost 14 years there, and says she had the good fortune of spending time working in a wide variety of areas of information security because the company’s culture encouraged changing jobs and roles every year or two. That meant she was able to sample everything from operations to strategy, practice development and management.
 
One of her favorite opportunities was in 2009 when JP Morgan Chase entered into a unique partnership with Syracuse University. Wille helped establish operations at the new JPMC Technology Center on Syracuse University campus as part of a larger collaboration focused on academic internships, curriculum development, applied research and community engagement.
 
For two years, she helped open the site and partnered with the existing corporate development program to help bring in talent as early as their junior year to intern with them.
 
“I was able to work with impressive young people early in their careers and it was so refreshing to see the stars in their eyes,” she said, adding that it proved to be a successful model for building talent in the IT field. The job center proved that skills could be developed, despite the historic reputation that successful candidates needed experience and subject matter expertise.
 
She spent several more years at JMPC, until she decided in 2014 it was time for both a change and a new challenge. A former colleague had previously left to become Chief Information Security Officer at TIAA-CREFand soon called Wille to consider a position in the information tech and informational security department.
 
An Exciting Time in the Industry
 
“The fact that I landed in information security and cyber security is so fortunate because I find it so interesting; it literally changes daily,” Wille said. With the amount of financial fraud and security breaches increasing, she knows it will continue to be a fast-moving industry.
 
“As a financial institution we have an even more critical role in protecting our customers’ data and money,” she said, adding that they take seriously their role as a company that has a focus on providing financial services for those who serve others, such as teachers, non-profit workers and professors.
 
A Need to Attract Women
 
She has found that women and people of color are underrepresented in the field, particularly looking upwards in the management hierarchy and leadership roles. And she believes it could get worse, since the numbers of women and people of color pursuing IT fields are declining rather than growing. Therefore recruitment has to remain an ongoing goal.
 
She works to stay engaged with colleagues through a relatively new program, the IT Women’s Council, a program designed to bring together women and allow them to explore different topics related to career growth.
 
Sponsorship has played a major role in Wille’s career ascension and she looks forward to returning the favor. She says she was very fortunate to have advocates, typically people for whom she worked closely, such as managers or colleagues, whom had experienced her work product.
 
For her part, she hasn’t found formal mentors to be as impactful or organic, but she has enjoyed both the insight and camaraderie from a tight group of girlfriends who are in the same stage of their careers. “We struggle with the same transitions so our get togethers are a perfect blend of social and work talk,” she says. “They know me better than anyone and give me honest and transparent feedback.”
 
Outside of Work
 
An avid runner, Wille has completed 13 marathons and her first triathlon. “I love being outside and being active, and it’s a release when I can get lost in my own thoughts.”
 
She is currently the president of the Junior Board for Youth Guidance, a school-based program that has had a major impact on Chicago youth, particularly those in high poverty or at-risk neighborhoods.
 
Though she has wrestled with the idea of working for a non-profit, she recalls talking to someone who reminded her that she had a whole career ahead of her and plenty of time to pursue that path in her later years, after first creating some financial stability. “That was a freeing moment for me, and allowed me to take a breath and pursue my career, knowing I will still have the chance to do something different at a certain point.”
 
Wille’s family is still in Chicago and she appreciates being close with them, as “each one brings a different element to my life,” she noted.
 

By Cathie Ericson

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Rising Star: Olamide Bello, Assistant Vice President of Private Placements, Voya Investment Management

By Cathie Ericson

“Women, and everybody else in the professional environment, must recognize that sponsors and mentors are critical to your success. Maintain your relationship with them – it’s like a bank account; you can’t withdraw what you haven’t saved,” says Olamide Bello, who credits these strong relationships as a key factor in her career ascension.

Bello is the first to admit that her career is atypical – although she studied physics in college, her first job was at a bank in Nigeria. She soon realized that banking wasn’t for her so she joined Accenture, a global management consulting firm, where she quickly realized how much she enjoyed working in the team environment. She decided to pursue her MBA at Emory University, and after graduating accepted a position with Voya Investment Management (Voya IM), where she has been for more than six years.

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Rising Star: Latrisha Whitehead, Project Manager Platform Metrics; TIAA-CREF

Latrisha WhiteheadBy Cathie Ericson

Never accept defeat! Those are the words that have propelled Latrisha Whitehead forward in her fast-moving career, spanning a wide variety of companies and industries.

For just over three years, she’s served in her current role as a project manager with TIAA- CREF’s platform metrics group, where she supports and manages the dashboard development for TIAA Today. TIAA Today Dashboard is a tool that provides near real-time Client Systems data to executives, management, IT, operations and the business to inform them about key platform metrics. These dashboards are intended to provide operational insight to current production performance compared to the peak and average.

Prior to that, she held a variety of business analyst positions in industries that ranged from human resources to finance to entertainment. During her stint in entertainment at Twentieth Century Fox, Whitehead’s position had taken her to California, but she was lured back east by a previous manager from Wells Fargo. Knowing the caliber of her work, Whitehead’s manager asked if she would return to oversee the reporting efforts supporting customer relationship managers and wealth managers.

These many moves taught her one of the most valuable career lessons: to value independence. She says that when she initially moved from her home state of North Carolina for a consulting job, she was worried that she would lack support. “My mom has always been my biggest supporter and it was hard to think about her not being close by. But I knew I just needed to get used to being on my own, and once I gained that confidence, I not only survived, but thrived. I began to see myself in a different light.”

Inspiring Confidence in Others

That confidence she found in herself not only shaped her career positively, but it also impacted others’ views of her. Along the way, she’s worked with a wide variety of managers, all with different styles and expectations. But one thing she says they’ve all had in common is their complete confidence in her abilities. “That’s probably what I’m proudest of in my career,” she says, “That in every role I’ve had and every manager I’ve reported to, they’ve never second guessed or micromanaged me. They’ve known that I will see the task through to accomplish the goal.”

Earning Respect

Whitehead says that before she entered the corporate world, she had the impression that women in in the workplace might not earn the respect they deserved. She had heard stories about women who were ignored or spoken over in meetings and had their opinions overlooked.

Fortunately, that stereotype did not ring true in her case. “I don’t know if it was my personality or the combination of my skills and experience, but I’ve found that no one has ever treated me differently because I am a women,” she says. “When they saw that I was dedicated and results driven, they had confidence in my abilities and my opinion on how we could achieve success.”

That respect has come not just from her managers but her peers as well. Whitehead says that she frequently receives feedback from her managers on positive reports from others in the organization. “It makes all the hard work worthwhile,” she says. Since most of her clients are internal, she appreciates that she can make an impact on the external end user customer through the work that she does. “I’m so customer focused that I appreciate hearing that my role has a direct correlation on our company’s success with our customers. Making sure that your internal customers are supported efficiently gives a downstream impact.”

Every Project Offers A Chance for Success

Part of Whitehead’s job satisfaction stems from her ability to find something exciting and fresh in each new project. From each one, she is able to learn more about the company’s business overall, and get a picture of its direction and how her work relates to aspects that don’t directly involve her.

“My team is always innovating; we have to come up with new and original designs and a fresh outlook for each project.”

She says that a project will often come in two seemingly disparate mockups and her team will pull it together. “It always amazes the clients when we present the finished product, and they find that they can see at one high level something that historically they had to look at in drill-down mode. They think we’ve produced magic!”

Passing it On

Whitehead knows she has been the beneficiary of mentoring along the way, including groups that TIAA-CREF hosts, such as its Women’s Employee Resource Group and a Lean In circle. She actively participates in both, and has found it particularly uplifting to hear and see how other
women are breaking the proverbial glass ceiling.

Over the years, she has seen the benefits of having both mentors and sponsors. She says that it has been impactful to see other women in leadership roles which might have historically been male dominated.

She passes on her valuable experience through her volunteer work with a girls’ mentoring group called Dynamic Youth Mentoring Program where she works with girls, ages 13 – 18, which she knows is a critical time in their development. She and other mentors meet with the girls in group settings, and then one-one-one once a month to do something either fun or educational.

She reports that her current manager is one of the best she has ever reported to, due in large part to the support she receives for both her professional and personal life.

But she looks even farther up to identify a professional role model – none other than First Lady Michelle Obama. “She advances her platform so effectively, but it’s clear that she is comfortable in her own skin.

You can tell that she’s not giving false appearances but is true to herself.”

Running Toward Success

Off the job, she devotes her free time to healthy pursuits. She has completed a half marathon and is currently training for another one and has completed a sprint triathlon as well.

She is involved with a women’s running group called Sole Society that focuses on women’s health, from eating clean to exercising to helping ward off the diseases that attack women.
“We have so many roles, from wife to parent to worker that we need to focus just on ourselves sometimes.”

Her professional success is intertwined with her running, since with both she makes sure to make measurable and attainable goals, and review them often to ensure she is progressing toward them. “I strive for continuous improvement, and beating myself each time, whether it’s in the office or at a race.”

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Rising Star: Kelly Widelska, Knowledge Leader – Global Transaction Advisory Services, Ernst & Young Global

By Cleo Thompson (London), founder of The Gender Blog

For London based Kelly Widelska, an Associate Director at Ernst & Young, knowledge really is power and has led to global opportunities. Following her Masters in Information Management from the University of Sheffield, Widelska joined the accounting giant’s EMEIA management consulting division for two years, prior to moving to Cap Gemini following the sell-off of E&Y’s consulting practice. A year later, she returned to the Ernst & Young fold and headed to China and Hong Kong, where she helped to set up and develop the Centre for Business Knowledge, an internal function for knowledge management, providing programmes, techniques and technologies to help E&Y staff share what they know.

After three years in China, her role expanded into the Far East, after which she returned to the UK in 2005 to a transaction advisory role in a country knowledge management capacity. Her next move saw a shift to a broader cross-firm position, supporting Global functional teams in areas such as Tax, Climate Change and Sustainability and People teams with their knowledge sharing needs. Widelska has been in her current role as Global TAS Knowledge Leader since 2009 and now leads a team of ten as part of a highly matrixed knowledge organisation.

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Rising Star: Nitu Gupta, Vice President of Product Development, Sodexo

Head_Shot-Nitu_Gupta_hi-res_0807[1]by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Nitu Gupta, Vice President of Product Development at integrated food and facilities management giant Sodexo, knows something about the power of leveling the playing field by doing the right thing. Born and raised in New Delhi, India, she had wanted to pursue a degree in economics and math and have her own career. However, her parents’ notion of the right path for a girl was to go into a home economics program and be married soon after graduating from a university.

After studying to be a teacher, she gained entry into a competitive graduate program in food and nutrition, which was the closest thing her university had to a career oriented program. Unfortunately, she had to leave the program when she met her soul mate and moved to the United States. Of the move, she said: “It was quite a challenge. I was learning how to be married and getting used to a new culture.”

She added, “I am very open minded and willing to adapt. I believe if you go into a situation willing to learn, it makes it much easier. Of course, there are going to be conflicts and confusion. But, as long as you stay positive things work out in the end.”
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Rising Star: Heather Paquette, Partner, KPMG LLP

heather_-_2007_-_sm11by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

There aren’t many professional women who can claim that they decided to pursue a career in accounting while they were inside an Italian mountain.  Yet that’s exactly where Heather Paquette, Partner in the Midwest Information Technology Advisory (ITA) Practice in the Chicago office of KPMG LLP, came to her decision.  “As I was working the night shifts [as a U.S. Air Force computer operator for NATO] when I was stationed in Italy…I started thinking about saving for the future, which made me think accounting was where I wanted to be.” 

Following her time in the Air Force, she earned an accounting degree from Southern Illinois University at Carbandale and joined KPMG’s auditing group.  She was soon called back to her tech roots, transferring into the IT group within a year of joining the firm.   She explained: “At the time there was a big push [in the firm] to see if there were people interested in going to the technology team. It was one of those teams that was very entrepreneurial and, if you were a self-starter, it was where you wanted to be. I ended up transferring onto the technology team because I have a CPA background as well as the tech background, which enables me to look at risks and controls related to the use of IT.”

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