“Some people believe that passion will help you find what you want to do. I don’t really believe in that,” says Nadiya Kreynin. “I believe that you have to know what you want. Knowing what you want and doing something actionable towards it will bring the passion.”
Leading on New Business Development
Moving to the U.S. when she was 20, Kreynin neither anticipated to end up staying in the country nor to end up running multiple businesses in technology. Having completed her undergraduate study in Ukraine, she came to the U.S and by chance started working in the IT industry. By immersing herself in the IT industry and interacting with professionals, she became fascinated with technology and soon found herself at Northwestern University studying for a master’s degree.
For years, Kreynin has run operations for Forte Group, having previously headed up recruitment and talent. Forte Group is a privately owned and globally operated custom software development company with 900 people. Kreynin and her husband are founders and majority shareholders. In the fourth quarter of 2022, they hired an executive team to run and scale it up further. This transition has allowed Kreynin to nurture and grow another new venture that initially rapidly blossomed during the pandemic.
Forte DGTL, formally launched in 2022, is a female-owned and 120-person strong Salesforce Commerce implementations company for global clients and partners. As the CEO, Kreynin is leading the charge, accelerating its growth to new heights. In fact, Forte DGTL was the first to help clients take B2B commerce to live status on the new Salesforce Lightning Platform. Forte DGTL holds the most B2B Salesforce Commerce implementations- ahead of giants such as Accenture.
This year, Kreynin will also be launching a Salesforce based Applicant Tracking product company, providing a shared platform for managers and recruiters.
To say that Kreynin is a force of nature is an understatement.
Finding People Who Make A Difference
Kreynin is always meeting fascinating people. In her twenties, she thought that she could conquer the world. In her thirties, she really began asking, what really makes a difference in creating impact? And when she looked around, she found that in the technology industry, as with most, it was about the people.
“I realized that my goal is to make sure that I’m in touch with the people who make a real difference in this industry,” she says. “Through my life, I’ve encountered people who wanted to achieve something and they stayed steady in that. They were able to change industries and change professions and succeed.”
Kreynin looks for people who are grounded in a strong values system and looking out for others. It’s a touchstone of integrity that one can return to, no matter what is going on. When faced with challenges, such as the war in Ukraine, having core individual and collective resilience and perseverance matters and makes a difference.
“It’s about how many times you stand up and make things happen for the better. It’s not about how many times you’re being pushed or how many times something challenging is happening,” she says. “This world for the past three years has my husband and I asking, ‘what next?’ We went through Covid in the services industry and we actually grew in the process. We are going through the war in Ukraine, and we are helping hundreds of people to find a new profession and support multiple charities.
Kreynin emphasizes, “No matter what comes, resilience, perseverance, and grit are the most important. No matter what is thrown at me, I will deal with this challenge and see what’s next. A lot of people find excuses not to be present and do what’s needed. These three qualities are what made me successful and are ones that I also look for.”
Growing up in Ukraine helped cement these qualities in Kreynin early on in her life. For example, at seventeen years old, she was faced with difficult tasks and had to raise NGO funds. She turned these into learning opportunities and along the way, they reinforced her grit.
“Going through those mission impossible challenges early on helps quite a bit,” says Kreynin. “I often encourage people and tell them ‘don’t find the reason to say no. Find the reason why it’s a yes; why it’s possible.’ At the end of the day, if you want this goal, how do you make it happen throughout all of the challenges you will have? Because challenges are inevitable.”
Know What You Want and Let Passion Follow
Kreynin hated learning English as a child in the Ukraine, but she came to realize that learning it was not about liking to learn English. She needed to learn English to be successful, so knowing what she wanted brought the passion to devote herself. She even wrote prize-winning work for the National Science Academy.
“Some people believe that you have to be passionate about what you do. I don’t believe in that,” says Kreynin. “I believe that you have to know what you want. Knowing what you want and doing something actionable towards it will bring the passion.”
Recently, Kreynin wanted to hire a marketing team but realized she did not have the context against which to gauge candidates’ responses. She took a data analytics and marketing course at the University of Chicago so she could be more enabled to find the right candidate and skills that match her company’s needs. She recommends that expanding the knowledge base and diversifying the ability to work across broad teams are two important traits of leaders. While she may not have planned going to school to help her build her marketing team, she did it because she needs to grow her knowledge base and gain other perspectives.
“It’s a must to keep growing if you’re a leader, or otherwise you will always have blind spots,” she says.
Kreynin also encourages women not to be afraid to start things. We can spend too much time overthinking and over-consulting others. Create the plan and find a way to move a step forward towards what you want and then let that momentum bring the passion with it.
“I don’t have all good days. Sometimes, I have bad ideas where I think that I want to quit all of this,” she admits. “But it’s the desire to achieve something bigger, and knowing it is something that I want and where I can make a big impact on people. Going through the bad days with that thought in mind helps me moving forward.”
Standing Her Ground In Every Room
“I can be one woman in a room of investment bankers. It may even be a half hour before I notice there’s not many other women,” she says. “It’s never been an issue for me to hold myself within the room. I suspect dealing with software engineers for most of my career supports that.”
Kreynin advises that having the perspective that you are going to meet many amazing people in the world is important. Some will be fascinated with you and what you can do. Some will be less interested and underestimate you. What matters most is being okay with yourself as you go through each of those kinds of experiences and learning from them.
“Going through that experience of being the only woman in the room — just walking in and doing it multiple times; having the experience is going to help,” encourages Kreynin. “The fact that you don’t do that or don’t have the opportunity to do that – that you don’t walk in that room and own your place – is what will hinder you.”
In her early days, she recalls holding her tongue in meetings where she didn’t agree with senior leaders. She rationalized that they probably knew better, but several times it turned out that that was not the case. Her perspective would have served the discussion and decision-making well. She recommends not censoring yourself when you have a dissenting opinion. Don’t be afraid to speak up.
“When you question yourself too much, you hold yourself back,” she says. “If you have a thought on how to approach something, you should speak up, because you may end up as the senior person or the person with the most helpful perspective in the room, no matter your age.”
Kreynin notes that being a woman in tech brings its own challenges and benefits: “People tend to make assumptions, and I think those assumptions usually work to my advantage,” she smiles. “Because when they begin to work for me, they are quickly surprised and realize they have to be much better.”
She has found that regardless of her position, some people do tend to underestimate how much she knows, only to be called to attention when the opposite proves true – but that also encourages people to play at the top of their game and to check their own biases.
The Value of Honesty and Directness
Kreynin would consider herself a good judge of character with a sharp ability to read the dynamics of a room. Being in the industry has given her unique insights into the challenges and pitfalls, as well as the qualities that are required to thrive in different roles in technology. In a meeting room, you can expect directness. She manages her teams by providing clear and transparent expectations and support. She feels that it’s critical to surround yourself with people who are open, humble, and can truly support one another through transparent discussions. So when it comes to manager relationships, the ability to be frank, honest, and transparent is important to her.
“If you are not able to talk openly to someone who is your subordinate, and they are not able to tell you what they truly think, because there is fear or intimidation in the manager-employee relationship, then there are a lot of things that you cannot solve at the table,” she says. “That block will create a lot of challenges.”
Selling and Recruiting and Selling Yourself
“I think everyone always sells and everyone always recruits – ensuring our clients are successful each and every day. Those are two jobs in services industries, no matter what your title is,” quips Kreynin. “Our new CEO is selling and recruiting. Our new CFO is selling and recruiting. Everyone in the service industry should be doing that job aside from everything else. Because every time you talk to someone in the industry or not, you’re talking about your company and what you’re doing in the service of the client success.”
When interviewing people for senior positions in her company, she has developed a keen ability to observe how people sell themselves and listen between the lines.
“I like to hear stories from people. So when I hear a story once, I look for consistency. Can they tell the story consistently? I am also listening for holes and areas where I need to dig deeper. I also listen for if they talk badly about employers, as I strongly suspect that if they talk badly about someone else, they will talk the same way about this organization if we were to part ways,” says Kreynin. “I listen for if they talk about themselves from the standpoint of ‘I built it’ or are they talking about being the one to drive a team of people who, together, built it. We know it takes a village to create something better and bigger.”
Making Real Impact in Ukraine
Kreynin is proud to have built different businesses and to be working as a support system for others. She also is highly motivated towards supporting causes in Ukraine, where she has family in Kyiv and the Western Ukraine regions.
One such cause is Friends of Ukraine, a charity that funds the training of Ukrainian men and women to undertake vital de-mining work within Ukraine while also giving them paid work so they can live through the uphill battle that the nation currently faces. Another cause has been helping people in and displaced from Ukraine to reskill in Information Technology so they can earn remote income and continue building their lives. Through the Forte Group educational platform, Kreynin decided they could teach ‘quality assurance’ as a viable skillset. Within two days, they received 2,000 applicants to the program. The company even hired some of the trainees.
“If you’re helping people to change professions or gain new marketable skills, you can make a long-term impact.”
Kreynin and her husband also support LeoDoc Foundation for Doctors Online in Ukraine. Before the war started, they invested in an online telehealth platform (Doctors Online) for people in Eastern Europe. Since the war began, they have supported a fund that helps this platform providing free medical consultations to the Ukrainian people who otherwise have no access to medical help. Talking about impact, Kreynin and her family are certainly making a difference.
Kreynin cherishes spending time with her two children, aged six and ten. Additionally, she finds solace and peace in nurturing living things and has established a serene morning ritual of tending to her garden while savoring a cup of coffee.
By Aimee Hansen
LaShonda Fuselier: Head of Multi-National Corporations Subsidiary Coverage, Corporate and Investment Banking, Wells Fargo
People, Voices of ExperienceAn Innate Passion for International Perspectives
That unique international aspect is what magnetized Fuselier to banking and what has kept her at Wells Fargo for over 18 years. Despite growing up in a small and rural town in Louisiana, her fascination with gaining international perspective started early. She took her first flight at 20 years old to Belgium. After graduating Dillard University with degrees in accounting and French, she interned in Paris and went on further to obtain her MBA from Emory’s Goizueta Business School – with an international exchange at HEC Paris.
“I love the need for a global perspective for us to be able to serve our clients. My clients are headquartered outside of the US in my current role, and I love working across borders and across cultures,” says Fuselier. “I love thinking about not just how these factors [cross-borders and cross-cultures] impact the business but also the individuals in the businesses.”
As a leader, Fuselier encourages new hires to not only execute on the “what” they are responsible for, but to also go beyond and consider the “why” (“why is it important?”) and “how” (“how can I add value/make it better?”). Embracing this herself, two years ago, while discussing the next potential stage of her career development, she pitched a new role to the Head of Corporate Banking – the one she presently finds herself in. This coming fall, she’ll host an inaugural Multi-National Corporations Conference as a means to be more consultative to Wells Fargo’s international client base.
Finance Is a Relationship Business
Growing up in a small town with hardworking parents, Fuselier was raised with a strong work ethic and sense of responsibility.
“Your word is your bond, my dad always said,” she shares. “I grew up in a family where if you say you’re going to do something, you’re going to do it. And if you want something, you’re going to have to put a little sweat into it.”
On top of trust-building, she’s recognized she possesses the important relational skill of making people feel comfortable: “You might think we’re talking finance. It’s numbers. But those are table stakes,” she says. “It’s a relationship business. People do business with people they’re comfortable with and they trust.”
Learning What Is In Your Control
Sometimes, it takes a difficult experience to learn how to be a leader.
While Fuselier has had many great managers, that has not always been the case. At times, she has even found herself offended by some past managers’ lack of leadership skills. Always committed to engaging professionally, she does surmise, she may not have engaged productively in one situation where she felt a past manager was not a great leader: “I have a tendency sometimes to stand on principle,” she says, “and so I focused on what I saw as the injustice about how this person was leading.”
But a colleague of hers with the same manager just focused on the work and ultimately had a better experience. As a result, she endeavored to engage more productively and constructively moving forward and it improved her experience.
“From that tough experience, I learned that you can’t control others. You can’t make someone a great manager,” she said, noting there will always be individual high-performers that are not as suited to be managers. “What you can control is everything that you do. You can control how you respond to the environment and use that response to make it better.”
Engaging and Empowering Others As a Leader
Today, Fuselier’s leadership is in part catalyzed by that experience. Fuselier has a clear view of what it takes to be a great leader and manager, which is a lot about encouraging and empowering her teams – in the same way some managers have done that for her. She advises mentees to “approach every assignment as an opportunity to develop and demonstrate your capabilities.” And as a leader, she prioritizes finding chances for others to do just that.
“It’s a practice I’ve developed to engage and empower others. One of the most rewarding aspects of being in leadership is when I have the opportunity to facilitate leadership opportunities for others and pull them out of their shell,” she says. “It feels really good when I get a chance to support somebody from behind and see them in the spotlight developing their skills, accomplishing things and being recognized.”
Fuselier likes to let her team take front and center where possible and be there in support. If someone mentions they don’t like public speaking, then they can expect to be invited to the next opportunity to push their comfort zone – and later on, they often express their gratitude for it.
“I subscribe to the theory that the best leaders – not only with words but through their actions – encourage and inspire others to achieve their best,” she says. “That is how some of the most influential leaders have impacted me in my career, and I aspire to have the same impact on others.”
Building Connection and Credibility
Many times, Fuselier has been the only woman in the room, person of color in the room, and certainly the only woman of color in the business room. Being culturally raised to believe that she had to be twice as good to earn half as much translated early on into over-preparation and focus. But it’s also gone further at times. Knowing that banking is a relationship business, LaShonda would try to find ways to connect with clients beyond the work. For example, with some clients she would research the highlights of the weekend’s local sport match – even if she had never been to that city.
“We talk within the community sometimes about assimilation and if it’s appropriate or inappropriate,” she says. “Even though I’m not a huge sports fan, this wasn’t an example of me losing my identify. Just like anyone who is new, you’re looking to connect and establish credibility, especially when you’re not like everyone else,” she says. “Once I could establish that connectivity and credibility, I felt like I could combine that with my unique perspectives to drive more meaningful dialogue and impact around the business.”
Once she gained credibility, it became easier to truly connect on a personal level.
“As I talked about things that mattered to them, they started to open up and we started to talk about things that reveal how much we have in common,” she says.
Fuselier has also learned to leverage being a unique voice in the room – whether on a transaction or an organizational decision. For example, she has been an advocate for diversity in recruiting. She also notes that being the only woman of color in the room at times means people will not forget LaShonda, and she’s willing to let that work for her, too.
Impacting Upon Diversity and Inclusion
Fuselier co-chairs the DEI counsel, is an advisor for the Black Connections Employee Resource Network (ERN) in EMEA, and is part of the steering committee of the WomenGoFar ERN.
This year, catalyzed with the idea from Judith Barry, Head of WomenGoFar, Fuselier created an initiative called Double Dimensions that tailors content and opportunities towards women of color within CIB.
“I’ve never been a ‘diversity person’ or someone who is solely responsible for diversity initiatives, but these are important, so I’m always eager to invest the time. However, what’s most important to me is that I’m not viewed as someone who is in my primary role solely because I am diverse,” says Fuselier. “I have always worked to demonstrate that I am a highly talented, hard-working, effective, successful banker who happens to be diverse.”
But with her and Wells Fargo’s passion for DEI, she has found the opportunity to develop and demonstrate her leadership, communication, collaboration and strategic planning skills beyond her client work while also building relationships with colleagues and leaders internally and on a global scale.
“It creates a real connection to the organization that keeps me going even on a day when you don’t get the transaction that you want or it’s not the best opportunity day,” she says. “It makes me feel like this is where I want to be.”
Fuselier’s gift of making people feel comfortable comes into its own in creating a permissive space for brave conversations.
“I think I give people the sentiment they can be themselves and say what they’re thinking. I’m not going to be offended,” she says. “I think people are often taken aback by just how open I am. So when I say ‘candor,’ which is an important value at Wells Fargo, I mean it – I’m going to be really open and so can you. That facilitates the type of environment where we can be collaborative and successful together.”
“Leadership is About Behaviors”
Some years ago, a mentor advised Fuselier to “own your position.”
“My younger mentality and work ethic was I’m going to execute to the best of my ability based on what they tell me to do and I’m not going to ask questions,” she reflects. “But that advice is about feeling empowered to do what you need to do to be successful and also to identify new opportunities and raise your hand to run with them.”
Tying back to creating the role she’s in now, Fuselier is a big advocate of catalyzing agency and ownership. It’s that notion that spurred her to create the Corporate Banking EmpowerHer women’s conference to foster professional development and greater engagement of women across the business. Now in its second year, the conference will be led by mid-level vice presidents and associates. More women will have the chance to step into leadership, develop their skills and be recognized for new contributions.
“You don’t have to be at a certain level or in a certain role to be a leader. Leadership is about behaviors,” she says. “It’s not about titles.”
Speaking of International Perspectives…
As at work, so it is at home: Fuselier’s entire family loves travel, culture and languages. In addition to her French, her whole family practices Spanish and her youngest daughter is studying Mandarin. They visit a few countries each year and like to seek out the cultural culinary delights – most recently they have been Egypt, UAE, Spain, France, Jamaica, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Netherlands, and Ecuador!
By Aimee Hansen
The Guilt Gap: Why Women Feel More Guilt Than Men and How to Overcome It
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!If you share that internalized guilt, it doesn’t have to follow you around forever. Learn more about why the guilt gap exists and how to overcome it.
1. Feeling Rushed to Achieve Milestones?
Everyone’s felt the pressure to reach a big milestone. Whether that’s graduating from college, landing your dream job or starting a family, the stress can lead to guilt when you don’t accomplish those things quickly.
You’re not alone if the pressure stresses you out. A recent survey found 40% of Americans feel like they haven’t reached their life milestones fast enough. When stress turns into guilt, it’s time to shift your perspective.
Solution: Focus on Your Accomplishments
Recognizing and celebrating your accomplishments can reverse the guilt that may come with working toward long-term goals. Instead of looking at your timeline negatively, reflect on how many incredible things you’ve done in the meantime. Setting aside time to do this regularly could battle your guilt on your journey toward your goals.
2. Feeling a Sense of Competition?
Women may feel a more significant guilt gap in the workplace if there’s a toxic environment. A sense of competition among co-workers can be healthy — unless it becomes all-consuming. The result is a sense of frustration that may lead to guilty worries that you’re never doing enough to be worthy of your spot on your team.
Research backs the reality of women feeling pushed or called to do more in their jobs. A recent study found women have significantly higher corporate social responsibility than men — especially in the first decade or two of their careers.
Solution: Practice Saying No
Telling someone no means you’re reserving time for your mental health. You’ll have less stress, which might be the primary factor intensifying your guilt.
However, you might also feel guilty when you say no to someone. It’s easy to think spreading yourself thin is healthy because it helps others. In reality, it only leads to burnout that takes the joy from your daily life.
Practice saying no to little things and work up to bigger things. It’s a healthy way to value your time and mental health. Use your reserved time for more practical efforts, like self-care habits or resting. There will always be other opportunities to grow or help others when your guilt and stress aren’t draining your energy.
3. Feeling Guilty About Your Self-Care?
When parts of your life feel unmanageable or outside your control, the daily stress and anxiety can negatively affect your mental health. Self-care is a helpful resource to reduce that stress, but you might feel guilty about taking time for yourself.
Researchers found that 19% of single women feel selfish for setting aside time for their self-care. The same research concluded that 86% of married women feel the same way. Selfish feelings can come with extra guilt because you don’t want to let anyone down by spending time on yourself.
Solution: Pursue Healing With Self-Care
Life isn’t always perfect for anyone, so you’ll need self-care to maintain your mental health at any age. This guilt that comes with taking time for yourself can be extra exhausting if you’re one of the 31% of millennials with depression or another mental health condition.
It’s harder to process and release lingering stress when your mental health feels frayed. Self-care habits ensure you’re putting your needs first so things like stress and anxiety don’t degrade your quality of life.
Consider which activities or habits might relax you the most. An evening walk, an aromatherapy diffuser or an adult coloring book could reduce the anxiety triggering your guilt. Research shows self-care behaviors are equally effective at home compared to socialized environments. You don’t need to attend an in-person yoga class or exercise group to improve your mental health.
Starting healthier self-care habits may require the hard work of setting your negative feelings aside. As you get used to prioritizing your needs, the sense of selfishness and corresponding guilt will fade with practice.
4. Feeling Guilty for Pursuing Your Career?
Whether through messages they receive from loved ones, movies or TV shows, women can feel pressured to have specific chapters in their lives. People might have celebrated you starting a career after graduating college, but eventually, they started talking about when you would get married, settle down and start a family.
Those things can bring some women immense joy. Other women want to focus on their careers. When you’re caught in the middle, research shows gender stereotypes trigger guilt when women work longer hours and pursue their careers more purposefully. This specific guilt may feel impossible to overcome, but it’s manageable if you prioritize your dreams.
Solution: Cheer Yourself Toward Your Goals
Overcoming this guilt requires daily work, but it could bring you peace. Commit to cheering yourself on when you wake up each day. Everyone has the right to live a life that makes them happy — career-oriented people are no exception to that rule.
If you aren’t sure which path will make you most happy, consider making a pros-and-cons list. Compare potential futures and listen to your gut instinct. Whichever seems most enjoyable to you will give you the confidence you need to overcome this particular type of guilt.
5. Feeling Like You Can’t Make Mistakes?
When women carry immense responsibilities, letting one of them fall to the side can feel devastating. Guilt may crop up when simple mistakes happen because you don’t want to let anyone down.
One study found that women feel more guilt when they don’t care for their loved ones efficiently. Making mistakes of all sizes account for 10.5% of the reasons participants felt guilty every day. It was the largest mistake category for both men and women, with women feeling the worst about mistakes that compromised their loved ones’ care.
Although no one wants to make mistakes purposefully, the stress of fearing mistakes isn’t healthy. People make accidental bad choices every day. No one can live a life without doing things they regret.
Solution: Look for the Lesson
It’s much easier to use this guilt positively when you reflect on your mistakes. See if you can learn a lesson from the moments that make guilt follow you like a shadow. Was there something you could have done differently? If so, make a purposeful commitment to avoid the same mistake in the future. Acknowledge how your guilt helped you learn and let it go.
If you can’t find a lesson from your guilt, that’s fine, too. It won’t always appear after a learning opportunity. When that happens, it may help to thank your instincts for trying to learn and help you grow. Let your mind know everything’s OK so it can relax. It may ease your guilt back to a manageable level where you can release it or let it passively simmer until it evaporates.
Start Erasing the Guilt Gap
Guilt could make you feel locked into place or shamed away from your dreams. Overcome it by recognizing the source of your guilt and the little truth it holds. It takes courage and bravery to fight internalized misogyny, but it’s possible with a daily commitment to making life more enjoyable for yourself.
Mia Barnes is a freelance writer and researcher who specializes in mental wellbeing and workplace wellness. Mia is also the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Body+Mind magazine, an online women’s health publication.
(The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com).
Tiffany Fleming: Vice President, Client Onboarding & Trading Documentation, PGIM Fixed Income
People, Voices of ExperienceFollowing in Her Mother’s Footsteps
Prudential runs in Fleming’s family. Growing up, Fleming’s mother worked for Prudential while raising three children as a single mom. Fleming dreamed to follow in her mother’s footsteps but wanted to pave her own way by earning a job based on her own merit.
At a career fair at 16-years old, Fleming omitted her mother’s name from her Prudential application and accepted a position in Human Resources as part of a co-op program where she worked after school. Looking back, Fleming smiles when remembering her mother’s excitement, which turned to frustration, when she found out she would not be receiving the employee referral benefits.
After graduating from college and holding various positions within Human Resources, Fleming accepted a full-time position with the Prudential Mutual Fund Investment Management department (now PGIM Fixed Income), after she became the first person in her family to graduate from college.
From Self-Criticism to Self-Encouragement
“Throughout my 33-year tenure at Prudential, I’ve held different roles that have helped me identify my strengths and areas of improvement,” she says. “We all have areas that we feel comfortable and confident in – where we’re on our A game – as well as those areas where we’re not.”
Stepping into those areas has been tricky. Especially once Fleming was asked to take on a new role, with a new manager, after working for the same one for most of her career. In this role, she was given the opportunity to take on a stretch assignment, working with the COO of Fixed Income, doing management fee work, which she thought was totally outside of her wheelhouse.
She went in feeling worried about failing. Months later, when asked if she thought she did a good job, Fleming responded that the assignment didn’t represent her best work. She was asked who told her this, and it was then she realized that the expectations that she placed on herself weren’t always what others expected.
“Even when he told me I did a really good job, I still didn’t feel like I did. However, I must have done a good job because I ended up getting promoted shortly thereafter,” she reflects. “I’ve learned that sometimes the expectations I have for myself are not the expectations others have for me, and I need to embrace that more.”
Fleming admits that sometimes she still puts too much pressure on herself and used to turn to her mom for reassurance and guidance before losing her to breast cancer when she was just 30-years old.
“My mother played a really big role in my life, giving me positive reassurance and building up my confidence. She always acknowledged when I did a good job and that she was proud of me,” she recalls.
Since her mother’s passing, Fleming has worked on reprograming herself to find that voice of self-confidence from within. “When I do find it, it tells me that I can do anything I put my mind to, which is exactly what I always tell my four daughters.”
From Productivity-Focused to People-Focused
As a leader, Fleming is empathetic and encourages the people around her – but it wasn’t always that way. In her early years of leadership, she was so tough that she found out her team nicknamed her, “the warden.”
“When I first started at PGIM, I was very demanding. I was all about getting the work done by all means necessary, and I didn’t think much about the people aspect,” she says. “I had blinders on. I was tunnel-focused on the results I could generate and how much I could do.” It was not until one of her direct reports gave her feedback that they did not feel seen or appreciated that she took the time to reflect, becoming more aware, which ultimately contributed to a change in her management style.
“This feedback made me realize that I was not the type of leader that I wanted to be. It made me realize that you’re only as good as the people that you work with and for,” she says. “I didn’t put the same focus on people as I placed on getting the work done. I wasn’t very aware of how I made other people – the ones I interacted with daily – feel. It takes teamwork, collaboration and partnership – without those things, you can’t get much done.”
The other catalyst in softening her leadership approach was becoming a mother. She notes that even her Myers Briggs personality test results, before and after motherhood, are like night and day.
“Becoming a mom was a life-changing event that required me to step back and really look at myself. It changed how I viewed work, the world and life in general,” she says. “Today, I ask how I can be a better manager, provide opportunities, coach and develop my team. People first. Work, second. When people feel supported by their managers, it tends to increase how fulfilled they are by the work they’re doing.”
Looking back, Fleming’s biggest regret is that she did not realize sooner how important it is to support people – but now it is her passion. When she moved into a new role in 2020, she didn’t realize how much her team enjoyed working with her. In fact, many members of her team mourned her departure – a testament to her growth as a leader.
Champion of Inclusivity
Fleming never appreciated how much being a Black woman in a senior leadership role inspires others. To her, it was where she was always headed.
“Although My mom would encourage me to do a good job and work hard, she didn’t stress that I had to work harder or differently than others to be recognized, rewarded and valued. She taught me to be a good, caring and kind person to get ahead, so, I didn’t have the awareness that I think others did.” Fleming added, “It was much later that I started to realize the subtleties of being a woman – and being a Black woman – and how, in some cases, I would feel excluded, not considered or given the same opportunities as my peers.”
With Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) continuing to increase in importance and visibility, Fleming has made it her mission to lead with a “people-first” mindset that is inclusive of all backgrounds when growing talent. “There are so many areas of diversity that I’m continuing to learn about. My children are teaching me things about diversity that I had not been exposed to,” she says. “I’m so motivated by feeling like I am a part of something bigger than myself, and it’s important that others have the opportunity to share that same feeling – the feeling of being part of the team.”
Currently, Fleming is a member of the Culture Council, in which she was a founder and co-head, a sponsor of PGIM Fixed Income’s Black Professional Alliance affinity group and a member of the Black Executive Leadership team at PGIM Fixed Income. In addition, she is proud to serve as an ally to other affinity groups. “I’m an ally of every walk of life. I enjoy meeting new people, learning about different cultures and forming connections about how much we have in common.”
Stretching Her Comfort Zone – Again
In January 2020, Fleming decided to step out of her comfort zone again. She accepted a role in Client Onboarding after having spent more than 25 years in Operations.
“I kept saying, ‘Why would I do this to myself? I have another eight to ten years before I retire. Why would I take on a new role, possibly not do well and risk my reputation that has taken so long to build?’” she says. “My husband said to me, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’”
It was then she realized that this role, although challenging and outside of her wheelhouse, would enable her to learn and grow. “I can’t be someone who preaches to my kids about how you can do anything if you put your mind to it, work hard and take chances, and that the worst that can happen is it doesn’t work out. How could I not take my own advice?” she says.
So, Fleming took the plunge, taking on a new role right before the pandemic hit. More than three years later, she is still judging herself for being out of her comfort zone: feeling like she always has more to learn and is not performing at her true best. Yet, she is getting the same feedback that she is doing great. She has a supportive manager and is encouraged that her team members admire how easy she makes it look to excel in her role while juggling her husband, three younger children (who are highly involved in high school athletics), grandchildren and her 80-pound super doodle, Oreo, who is the love of her life.
“I’ve realized that others look to me as an inspiration, and I have that influence,” she says. “If they see that they too can be successful as a mom, a wife and a grandmother, it makes me feel good. I am learning not to downplay my capabilities or others.”
Not Counting Herself – Or Others – Out
One of Fleming’s daughters taught her a lesson in not underestimating yourself or others. Recently, at a track meet, Fleming assumed her daughter wouldn’t make it to the finals, although she did not share this with her. After all, she was up against a lot of girls who were much older than her and had faster times –they were stiff competition. However, her daughter defied Fleming’s expectations, and not only made it to the finals, but took home bronze and won a school grant. This taught Fleming that all things are possible with hard work and when you believe in yourself.
“I tell my children not to count themselves out, so how could I?” she reflects. “I need to remember how strong that voice that I dig deep inside of me is – that voice that empowers me to accomplish my goals is the same one I am teaching my daughters to use to accomplish theirs.”
By Aimee Hansen
A Checklist for Women Moving Abroad to Work
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!The best way to minimise stress before a big move is to be prepared, so be sure to tick off these five steps if you’re planning to pursue a new life overseas.
1. Research visa requirements
Securing a visa is one of the most complicated aspects of moving abroad, so begin your research as soon as possible. If you have a job lined up, your employer may be able to advise you on the most suitable visa to apply for. In some instances, your employer may need to submit evidence to support your application.
Consider your long-term plans and how visa laws could affect them. Some can be extended or transferred into permanent residency visas, while others could prevent you from applying for permanent residency in the future. If you haven’t chosen a destination country yet, researching visas could help you decide where to move. For example, Estonia, Iceland, Luxembourg and Germany are some of the easiest countries to secure a work visa.
2. Examine your finances
It’s important to feel confident you’ll be able to support yourself in a new country, so examine your finances carefully and research financial matters in your chosen destination. Look into average living costs and compare them to your current living costs. Ask yourself what kind of salary you’ll need to live comfortably, and research the job market to determine whether that salary is achievable. This information will also help you to negotiate pay with a prospective employer.
You should also research other matters such as tax rates and pension schemes to get an accurate idea of your monthly take-home pay. If you expect to buy a property abroad, either immediately or in the future, research typical interest rates and criteria for loan approval.
3. Learn about local labour right
Each country has unique labour rights and it’s vital you familiarise yourself with the laws of your destination country. When you’re educated about your labour rights, you can make sure your employer is abiding by them and you won’t be faced with unexpected surprises if certain rights you’re used to aren’t applicable in your new job.
If you’re yet to settle on a destination, learning about labour rights in different parts of the world could help you decide where to move. Some countries have significantly better rights for workers than others, making them more suitable for expats looking for a new start in their career. Belgium and Greece are two of the highest-ranked countries when it comes to labour rights, with Finland following closely behind.
4. Budget for moving expenses
Moving abroad can be incredibly expensive depending on how far you’re travelling and what you’re bringing with you. On top of shipping any belongings, you’ll also have to consider the costs of transferring money, hiring storage space and insurance. When importing household goods and vehicles, don’t forget to factor in customs duty and compulsory quarantine costs.
If your move abroad will be temporary, it could be more cost-effective to put your household goods in storage and rent a furnished home. Those making a permanent move should compare average costs of new furniture and appliances in their destination country with the cost of moving their existing goods. If you’re moving abroad because your employer has transferred you or you’ve been headhunted, you might be able to negotiate a relocation package where your employer covers part or all of your moving costs.
5. Connect with fellow expats in your destination country
One of the best ways to prepare yourself for a move overseas is to chat to people who have gone through the process themselves and are living in your destination country. They can share tips, point you towards local resources or services, and even provide practical support to help you get settled in when you arrive.
You can find expat community groups online and via social media. Your employer may also be able to direct you to local expat groups, or it might host its own group if it regularly hires international applicants.
Look forward to new opportunities
Moving abroad is a complex process, but the five steps outlined above will help you prepare for this exciting new phase of your life.
(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com).
Nadiya Kreynin: Chief Executive Officer, Forte DGTL and Chief Operations Office, Forte Group
People, Voices of ExperienceLeading on New Business Development
Moving to the U.S. when she was 20, Kreynin neither anticipated to end up staying in the country nor to end up running multiple businesses in technology. Having completed her undergraduate study in Ukraine, she came to the U.S and by chance started working in the IT industry. By immersing herself in the IT industry and interacting with professionals, she became fascinated with technology and soon found herself at Northwestern University studying for a master’s degree.
For years, Kreynin has run operations for Forte Group, having previously headed up recruitment and talent. Forte Group is a privately owned and globally operated custom software development company with 900 people. Kreynin and her husband are founders and majority shareholders. In the fourth quarter of 2022, they hired an executive team to run and scale it up further. This transition has allowed Kreynin to nurture and grow another new venture that initially rapidly blossomed during the pandemic.
Forte DGTL, formally launched in 2022, is a female-owned and 120-person strong Salesforce Commerce implementations company for global clients and partners. As the CEO, Kreynin is leading the charge, accelerating its growth to new heights. In fact, Forte DGTL was the first to help clients take B2B commerce to live status on the new Salesforce Lightning Platform. Forte DGTL holds the most B2B Salesforce Commerce implementations- ahead of giants such as Accenture.
This year, Kreynin will also be launching a Salesforce based Applicant Tracking product company, providing a shared platform for managers and recruiters.
To say that Kreynin is a force of nature is an understatement.
Finding People Who Make A Difference
Kreynin is always meeting fascinating people. In her twenties, she thought that she could conquer the world. In her thirties, she really began asking, what really makes a difference in creating impact? And when she looked around, she found that in the technology industry, as with most, it was about the people.
“I realized that my goal is to make sure that I’m in touch with the people who make a real difference in this industry,” she says. “Through my life, I’ve encountered people who wanted to achieve something and they stayed steady in that. They were able to change industries and change professions and succeed.”
Kreynin looks for people who are grounded in a strong values system and looking out for others. It’s a touchstone of integrity that one can return to, no matter what is going on. When faced with challenges, such as the war in Ukraine, having core individual and collective resilience and perseverance matters and makes a difference.
“It’s about how many times you stand up and make things happen for the better. It’s not about how many times you’re being pushed or how many times something challenging is happening,” she says. “This world for the past three years has my husband and I asking, ‘what next?’ We went through Covid in the services industry and we actually grew in the process. We are going through the war in Ukraine, and we are helping hundreds of people to find a new profession and support multiple charities.
Kreynin emphasizes, “No matter what comes, resilience, perseverance, and grit are the most important. No matter what is thrown at me, I will deal with this challenge and see what’s next. A lot of people find excuses not to be present and do what’s needed. These three qualities are what made me successful and are ones that I also look for.”
Growing up in Ukraine helped cement these qualities in Kreynin early on in her life. For example, at seventeen years old, she was faced with difficult tasks and had to raise NGO funds. She turned these into learning opportunities and along the way, they reinforced her grit.
“Going through those mission impossible challenges early on helps quite a bit,” says Kreynin. “I often encourage people and tell them ‘don’t find the reason to say no. Find the reason why it’s a yes; why it’s possible.’ At the end of the day, if you want this goal, how do you make it happen throughout all of the challenges you will have? Because challenges are inevitable.”
Know What You Want and Let Passion Follow
Kreynin hated learning English as a child in the Ukraine, but she came to realize that learning it was not about liking to learn English. She needed to learn English to be successful, so knowing what she wanted brought the passion to devote herself. She even wrote prize-winning work for the National Science Academy.
“Some people believe that you have to be passionate about what you do. I don’t believe in that,” says Kreynin. “I believe that you have to know what you want. Knowing what you want and doing something actionable towards it will bring the passion.”
Recently, Kreynin wanted to hire a marketing team but realized she did not have the context against which to gauge candidates’ responses. She took a data analytics and marketing course at the University of Chicago so she could be more enabled to find the right candidate and skills that match her company’s needs. She recommends that expanding the knowledge base and diversifying the ability to work across broad teams are two important traits of leaders. While she may not have planned going to school to help her build her marketing team, she did it because she needs to grow her knowledge base and gain other perspectives.
“It’s a must to keep growing if you’re a leader, or otherwise you will always have blind spots,” she says.
Kreynin also encourages women not to be afraid to start things. We can spend too much time overthinking and over-consulting others. Create the plan and find a way to move a step forward towards what you want and then let that momentum bring the passion with it.
“I don’t have all good days. Sometimes, I have bad ideas where I think that I want to quit all of this,” she admits. “But it’s the desire to achieve something bigger, and knowing it is something that I want and where I can make a big impact on people. Going through the bad days with that thought in mind helps me moving forward.”
Standing Her Ground In Every Room
“I can be one woman in a room of investment bankers. It may even be a half hour before I notice there’s not many other women,” she says. “It’s never been an issue for me to hold myself within the room. I suspect dealing with software engineers for most of my career supports that.”
Kreynin advises that having the perspective that you are going to meet many amazing people in the world is important. Some will be fascinated with you and what you can do. Some will be less interested and underestimate you. What matters most is being okay with yourself as you go through each of those kinds of experiences and learning from them.
“Going through that experience of being the only woman in the room — just walking in and doing it multiple times; having the experience is going to help,” encourages Kreynin. “The fact that you don’t do that or don’t have the opportunity to do that – that you don’t walk in that room and own your place – is what will hinder you.”
In her early days, she recalls holding her tongue in meetings where she didn’t agree with senior leaders. She rationalized that they probably knew better, but several times it turned out that that was not the case. Her perspective would have served the discussion and decision-making well. She recommends not censoring yourself when you have a dissenting opinion. Don’t be afraid to speak up.
“When you question yourself too much, you hold yourself back,” she says. “If you have a thought on how to approach something, you should speak up, because you may end up as the senior person or the person with the most helpful perspective in the room, no matter your age.”
Kreynin notes that being a woman in tech brings its own challenges and benefits: “People tend to make assumptions, and I think those assumptions usually work to my advantage,” she smiles. “Because when they begin to work for me, they are quickly surprised and realize they have to be much better.”
She has found that regardless of her position, some people do tend to underestimate how much she knows, only to be called to attention when the opposite proves true – but that also encourages people to play at the top of their game and to check their own biases.
The Value of Honesty and Directness
Kreynin would consider herself a good judge of character with a sharp ability to read the dynamics of a room. Being in the industry has given her unique insights into the challenges and pitfalls, as well as the qualities that are required to thrive in different roles in technology. In a meeting room, you can expect directness. She manages her teams by providing clear and transparent expectations and support. She feels that it’s critical to surround yourself with people who are open, humble, and can truly support one another through transparent discussions. So when it comes to manager relationships, the ability to be frank, honest, and transparent is important to her.
“If you are not able to talk openly to someone who is your subordinate, and they are not able to tell you what they truly think, because there is fear or intimidation in the manager-employee relationship, then there are a lot of things that you cannot solve at the table,” she says. “That block will create a lot of challenges.”
Selling and Recruiting and Selling Yourself
“I think everyone always sells and everyone always recruits – ensuring our clients are successful each and every day. Those are two jobs in services industries, no matter what your title is,” quips Kreynin. “Our new CEO is selling and recruiting. Our new CFO is selling and recruiting. Everyone in the service industry should be doing that job aside from everything else. Because every time you talk to someone in the industry or not, you’re talking about your company and what you’re doing in the service of the client success.”
When interviewing people for senior positions in her company, she has developed a keen ability to observe how people sell themselves and listen between the lines.
“I like to hear stories from people. So when I hear a story once, I look for consistency. Can they tell the story consistently? I am also listening for holes and areas where I need to dig deeper. I also listen for if they talk badly about employers, as I strongly suspect that if they talk badly about someone else, they will talk the same way about this organization if we were to part ways,” says Kreynin. “I listen for if they talk about themselves from the standpoint of ‘I built it’ or are they talking about being the one to drive a team of people who, together, built it. We know it takes a village to create something better and bigger.”
Making Real Impact in Ukraine
Kreynin is proud to have built different businesses and to be working as a support system for others. She also is highly motivated towards supporting causes in Ukraine, where she has family in Kyiv and the Western Ukraine regions.
One such cause is Friends of Ukraine, a charity that funds the training of Ukrainian men and women to undertake vital de-mining work within Ukraine while also giving them paid work so they can live through the uphill battle that the nation currently faces. Another cause has been helping people in and displaced from Ukraine to reskill in Information Technology so they can earn remote income and continue building their lives. Through the Forte Group educational platform, Kreynin decided they could teach ‘quality assurance’ as a viable skillset. Within two days, they received 2,000 applicants to the program. The company even hired some of the trainees.
“If you’re helping people to change professions or gain new marketable skills, you can make a long-term impact.”
Kreynin and her husband also support LeoDoc Foundation for Doctors Online in Ukraine. Before the war started, they invested in an online telehealth platform (Doctors Online) for people in Eastern Europe. Since the war began, they have supported a fund that helps this platform providing free medical consultations to the Ukrainian people who otherwise have no access to medical help. Talking about impact, Kreynin and her family are certainly making a difference.
Kreynin cherishes spending time with her two children, aged six and ten. Additionally, she finds solace and peace in nurturing living things and has established a serene morning ritual of tending to her garden while savoring a cup of coffee.
By Aimee Hansen
Leadership and the Challenge of “Pricing the Priceless”
Career Advice, Corporate Sustainability, Leadership(by Paula DiPerna)
Visual ecstasy for free, in theory, is how we’ve largely thought about nature — its beauty timeless and ineffable, and all its systems there around us, stable and present and taken for granted. Aesthetically exquisite, but, unless being drawn upon as raw materials, pretty much doing nothing.
Yet, all of nature is constantly at work, providing countless daily services well beyond the obvious: flowers are lovely to look at, but they provide incalculable pollination services; standing trees can provide lumber, but also soil stability and water filtration when left alone, not to mention sequestering carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels and causing climate change; coral reefs offer divers a paradise but, meanwhile, they are invaluable buffers against raging storms to protect the coasts and indispensable nurseries for fisheries. Yet, just to take the coral reef example, we book coastal property at high value, sea views inestimable, but the reefs themselves are assigned no value at all in our conventional accounting systems.
Our Failure to Financially Value Nature
Meanwhile, while nature serves us for free, climate change wrenches our balance with nature, as extremes of weather unleash forces we can neither fully predict, nor prepare for. Dryness and wildfire conditions so plague California, major insurance companies have declared they will no longer write fire insurance for homes and property there. In Florida, flood insurance is essentially impossible to obtain.
We face urgent environmental problems because of a gaping flaw in our financial systems no longer possible to ignore: failure to financially value the ineffable elements of life on which our environmental and social stability now increasingly depend. The result? Intangible indispensable natural assets taken financially for granted and, therefore, essentially laid waste.
Or in perhaps the most dramatic example of under-valuing nature, how can it make sense to value mere conveniences like Uber, nice but utterly dispensable, in billions of dollars, and our atmosphere, or the biodiversity of life on earth, utterly indispensable, at zero?
This skewed accounting has rendered nature economically invisible and the most tragically unpaid laborer in history. Because nature charges us nothing for its services, we have over-used and pushed those services to the brink.
The Paradox of Our Time
And so we must embrace the paradox of our time—pricing the priceless, by definition impossible perhaps, but nevertheless essential. How to do this—assign nature and its intangible services a tangible and economic value that can be transacted and expressed in credible financial terms? In essence this means treating nature’s services and natural resources as indispensable infrastructure and assets, thus requiring ongoing maintenance and care, compared to the current situation, where protecting nature is mostly viewed as a budgetary cost center, where expenditures should be minimized.
Calculating the value of the labor performed by nature, known as “ecosystems services,” continues to evolve but estimates have been as high as $125 trillion per year, higher than global GDP, indicating that ultimately all economic activity depends on environmental health one way or another. But this subsidy nature provides our economy remains largely unrecognized and unseen by conventional finance, thus, so does the risk that the subsidy will break down, leaving us likely startled and without the fallback of nature to which our economy is now addicted.
This spring, Susan Berresford, former President of the Ford Foundation, a visionary in philanthropy and a champion of women leaders, received an honorary degree from Bates College. In her remarks she focused on key questions of leadership, likely indeed to be critical as we confront the entwined economic and environmental challenges ahead.
First, she said, today’s leaders must know “am I comfortable being different?” Second: “Can I thrive in situations of ambiguity? There are very few reform efforts in which the pathway for decision making and action is utterly clear. You need to be ready for confusion and uncertainty; in fact you have to like confusion and uncertainty and find opportunity in those moments.” And thirdly, “Do I enjoy managing struggles with generosity? Leadership usually means you are trying to redistribute authority or power or influence.”
Flipping our economic systems so that nature is economically valued, however paradoxical, requires all these qualities, specifically, the courage to see and act anew.
Depreciation of Natural Assets
Renowned economist, Sir Partha Dasgupta, embodies such radical re-thinking. He was commissioned by the Treasury of the UK government to examine questions of nature’s value, resulting in his landmark 2021 review, “The Economics of Biodiversity.” There, he framed today’s environmental dilemma in terms of financial portfolio management, writing, “The view that the biosphere is a mosaic of self-regenerative assets also covers its role as a sink for pollution. Acid rains damage forests; carbon emissions in the atmosphere trap heat; industrial seepage and discharge reduce water quality in streams and underground reservoirs; sulfur emissions corrode structures and harm human health, and so on. The damage inflicted on each type of asset (buildings, forests, fisheries, human health) should be interpreted as depreciation.”
Fortunately, new investment vehicles are cropping up that value and securitize the benefits of nature—such innovations as the Forest Resilience Bond, being pioneered in Lake Tahoe, California; or coral reef insurance, throughout the Meso-American reef system. Still, however, these are experiments and need to come to scale.
All trend lines indicate that indeed depreciation of our natural systems gallops ahead. Certainly climate change advances, even if in zigs and unpredictable zags, and even the best intended plans to switch to renewable fuels, electrify economies, limit deforestation, encourage recycling and cutting down “carbon footprints” lag dangerously behind.
Pricing the Priceless
Time has come for a radical flip in how we conceptualize nature and its value, and implementing this radical change is perhaps the greatest challenge facing today’s leaders across all sectors, requiring fresh optics and views of economic purpose and where best to invest capital.
An exciting opportunity is at hand for institutional and private investors to redeploy capital and financial assets away from environmental “bads” to “goods,” take on the ambiguities and question conventional financial thinking. Otherwise, we risk remaining mere bystanders to forces at work, and that’s one trajectory we simply cannot afford.
By: Paula DiPerna is the author of Pricing the Priceless: The Financial Transformation to Value the Planet, Solve the Climate Crisis, and Protect Our Most Precious Assets, published in June by Wiley and listed by the Financial Times on its roster of “Best Summer Reading: Economics.” Her novel, The Discoveries of Mrs. Christopher Columbus, published formerly in the US, Germany and Turkey, has just been published in Portugal by Group LeYa. She is a member of the Women’s Forum of New York and the Council on Foreign Relations and is a frequent public speaker. She also currently serves as Special Advisor to CDP.
Alexandra Tyler: Managing Director, Digital Transformation Leader, Accenture Song
People, Voices of ExperienceCuriosity and Customer-Focused Growth
Curiosity has driven Tyler’s career. She’s come across specific job positions by asking questions. “I’ve been lucky in that I’ve been able to pave my way in making my own adventure, essentially through conversations with people about open positions they had that weren’t quite right,” she reflects, “and in which we often crafted a new position that matched the needs of the business with my expertise and interests.”
Having studied psychology, she began her career in advertising, where she learned to appreciate the power of understanding what customers want and need.
“If you understand what customers want and need at every stage of their journey and are able to fulfill those needs and desired successes, you can enable growth,” she says. “What do those customers want to achieve and how do you develop the roadmap and path to get there? That is the opportunity. That’s why I’m excited about Gen AI and other innovative capabilities to unlock and enable more insights to meet customer needs.”
Being Focused on People’s Motivations
Growing up as a daughter of first-generation immigrants and raised by a father with a disability, Tyler understood the importance of two important lessons that he imparted: in order to succeed, one must persevere and exhibit true grit. In addition, one must celebrate differences in others.
“I feel strongly about focusing on doing right by others. Ambition goes awry if you don’t have respect for individuals, and if you don’t think about what motivates them,” she notes. “I want to understand what’s important to the people with whom I work. I focus on treating individuals how I would want to be treated – including respecting their differences, talents and expertise.”
In addition to treating her colleagues and team members with mutual respect, Tyler learned the importance of inspiring them to pair their great ideas with great follow-through: “I often see people who are incredible ‘ideators’ – who come up with innovative and breakthrough ideas – but they struggle with execution,” she observes. “The devil is in the details when it comes to lighting up an idea. It takes focus, management and collaboration.”
Freeing Herself To Show Up Fully
“It took me a long time to feel comfortable as an authentic leader. Growing up in the world I grew up in, as an LGBTQ+ individual, was challenging,” she notes. Recently at a bank branch, she saw a sticker related to the LGBTQ+ community about celebrating differences. It struck her to imagine the impact that seeing that message would have made early on in her career.
“When I first started my career, I was lying by omission, often doing what LGBTQ+ people do…not using pronouns for your partner. It’s only in the last ten years that I have been comfortable enough to be honest about who I am and to bring my full self to the equation.”
What you feel you cannot say begins to grow heavy and become a burden. Tyler imagines carrying a sixty-pound barbell all those years. “When I put that burden down visually in my head, it was exceptionally freeing,” she says. “When I freed myself of that burden, opportunities in my career opened up.”
For example, at a work town hall, Tyler recently shared her personal journey and the value of bringing her full self to work. She was commended by the head of her division for showing up as her true self and was applauded for doing so, exhibiting the traits of leadership that Accenture values.
“I cannot tell you how much positive feedback I received just for being true to who I am and being vocal about it,” says Tyler. “Leaders at Accenture have been phenomenal in recognizing the power in whatever differences you bring to work and the ability to bring your full self.” And sharing her experiences of exclusion has built bridges of empathy with others who have faced challenges. LGBTQIA+ peers have approached her inspired by her authenticity and, in turn, let down their own protective walls.
Advocating and Inspiring Others
“Freeing myself up to be myself empowered me to be an advocate for others. It is important for me to pay it forward by being an advocate in my community.”
Tyler is on the Board of Be The Rainbow, an LGBTQIA+ nonprofit organization in her Long Island hometown. On their third Pride March, Tyler is excited to be opening minds and hearts to create a greater platform of equity in which all can have a voice.
In her training and at work, Tyler’s approach is comprised of experimentation and optimization. She often tests the waters, dips her toe in, tries out different messages and approaches. What she found when she ‘came out’ is that the response was much more positive than she had anticipated. She encourages others to consider who they can safely share with – a person, a group – in order to build that positivity. Tyler acknowledges that the experience of speaking one’s truth, no matter the reaction, is alone invigorating and empowering.
The Intersection of Identity and Innovation
Tyler admires that her daughter’s generation wields identity and labels quite differently. “Labels are fluid and I know that my daughter and her friends are comfortable at the same time with no labels or multiple ones: Imagine what you could do if you were not carrying the burden of the sixty-pound barbell, or invisible burden, every day?”
At Accenture, Tyler is fascinated by the intersection of innovation and identity – particularly how removing obstacles around identity frees you up to create and innovate. She considers cryptanalyst Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the film The Imitation Game) who developed the ability to decode messages and the predecessor to the computer, and who was also tortured for being homosexual.
“I think about what more amazing things he could have done. He was such an innovator, even with the constraints of conversion therapy and being tortured,” she notes. “What aperture could have opened if individuals like Turing could have been safe to express their identity freely? I’m interested in that tension for any minority who is held back because of societal constraints or one they put on themselves. I’m fascinated by the intersection of how innovative you are as a thinker and the ability to free yourself up to feel comfortable to think differently.”
Why Failure Is Growth
Early on in her career, Tyler worked on developing and launching a new product that consolidated all utility bills into one billing statement. For various reasons, after two years of pretests and pilots, the project failed to launch. But her functional leader was an innovator who believed in failing often and failing fast. Instead of berating the team, he applauded the risks and innovation and threw the team a “failure party” and handed out awards. The team received their best performance reviews that year.
“I learned the importance of reinforcing that failure can actually spur innovation,” says Tyler. “I was very lucky to find leaders that encouraged failing. I know that it may sound trite but, to me, the age-old notion that failure begets growth is very true.”
As a result, Tyler encourages her teams to take calculated risks and experiment: “It’s okay to fail because you learn and those learnings bring you closer to success. Because you WILL eventually succeed. Perfection at the sake of innovation is failure in itself. You must try and also not be afraid to be curious, and that effort and curiosity are successes in themselves. ”
Tyler has two daughters, 15 and 18, a freshman in high school and college, respectively. Her wife, Beth, is a special education teacher in Queens. Recently, her oldest daughter “failed” to get into her first college choice. After the initial disappointment, she applied to an array of different schools that she would otherwise not have considered. She now feels “at home” at UNC Chapel Hill where she is thriving – an example of how failure can lead to the growth you didn’t see coming.
To be surrounded by her family and watch them grow are her greatest successes, and Tyler now embraces sharing those successes with others.
By Aimee Hansen
How To Optimize Your Leadership Effectiveness When Working from Home
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!According to recent YouGov statistics, women place more emphasis on the importance of job flexibility than their male colleagues. Not only do 57% of women say that flexible working hours are very important (compared to 44% of men), but almost three-quarters of female respondents (72%) said they want a flexible working location compared to just 57% of men.
When it comes to leadership roles, further research suggests that remote working arrangements give more women the opportunity to be in positions of responsibility. In fact, of the 129 remote companies surveyed, 29% had women in leadership positions (CEO, founder or president). Meanwhile, for traditional companies on the Fortune 500 list, this figure sits below 5%.
In this blog post, we will explore a variety of tips and best practices for optimizing leadership effectiveness while working from home. Whether you’re a seasoned remote worker or are still acclimatizing to the modern working world, this guide will provide valuable insights for cultivating productivity, engagement, and overall success.
Encourage constructive feedback/have individual check-ins
Among the many challenges of remote working is the potential feeling of disconnectedness between team members. When in-person meetings happen less frequently and those impromptu morning catch-ups go by the wayside, it’s harder to form meaningful professional relationships with your teammates.
While it’s incumbent upon each team member to make a concerted effort to form these bonds, ultimately the manager has a pivotal role in generating that team spirit and feeling of belonging.
There are a number of ways in which this can be accomplished, but organizing one-to-one check-ins can be a great starting point. Encourage your staff to come to these meetings with honest feedback about things the team or you as an individual could do differently to enhance their wellbeing in the workplace.
Not only do these regular meetings provide the opportunity for virtual contact, but they’re also a great way to ascertain the thoughts and feelings of the team. If they feel able to provide feedback and know that it’s going to be taken seriously, that can go a long way to helping them feel part of the bigger picture.
Balance the company’s needs with the people’s
One of the biggest battles for any business owner is striking a balance between pursuing long-term goals with the individual needs of their employees. Often, owners and managers can become preoccupied with setting KPIs and tracking metrics that the human element to the world of business can be an afterthought. Essentially, leaders need to consider how they can support staff to have a healthy split between their work and personal lives, whilst also ensuring the company continues to move forward.
For some, work and life has been easier to balance since working remotely, with the removal of commutes giving professionals some extra time back each day. For others, the expectation to always be ‘online’ and constant temptation to check back in after working hours makes it difficult to detach themselves from their professional responsibilities.
According to research, women are more likely to do informal work to promote DEI within their company. Female leaders are also more likely to support the ‘people’ side of the business, advocating for the wellbeing of their colleagues and offering support in managing their workloads and personal challenges. However, while this ‘extra-curricular’ support can be invaluable to employees, it can often lead to female professionals overburdening themselves and sacrificing their own wellbeing as a result.
As a manager, it’s important you lead by example, and set your own boundaries when it comes to working hours. You should make it clear when you can and can’t be contacted for work-related issues – consider setting your hours on your digital calendar or workplace communication platform. Not only will this provide clarity around when people can expect a response from you, but it will also hopefully encourage them to do the same, and keep a clear distinction between work and personal life.
Develop your communication skills
Strong communication is one of the most important aspects of effective leadership, but this can be more difficult to demonstrate when face-to-face conversations are no longer an option. When exclusively communicating to colleagues via online communication tools, there is more opportunity for words to be misinterpreted, which could mean they end up having a harmful effect on the team. At the same time, you want to make your presence felt as a leader, and avoid going days without having any contact with your colleagues.
To get the most out of these digital communication tools, it’s important to understand the role of different platforms. For example, you may not need to organize a virtual meeting to discuss a minor query about a piece of work. Not only is this disruptive to your colleagues’ schedules, but the message is likely to be diluted when communicated in this way. Think carefully about the appropriate times to use emails, instant messaging platforms, phone calls or video conferencing, to streamline your communication and have a more positive impact on the wider team.
By: Elizabeth Fletcher – She writes posts designed to help businesses and employees to come together and create a productive, healthy workplace. She believes that good communication and collaboration are key to a happy working life.
(The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com).
Graciella Dominguez: Vice President of Investment Operations, Operations and Innovations, PGIM
Movers and Shakers, PeopleFrom Numbers to Relationships
Dominguez was drawn to accounting due to her love of numbers – concepts like credits and debits that felt concrete and measurable. She began working for Ernst & Young while in college, and then joined Prudential a year after graduating. After switching to a smaller firm for a few years to try out auditing, she returned to PGIM, Prudential’s global asset management firm, where she has been for 23 years.
“That brief experience in auditing really challenged me and gave me a lot of confidence in going to different places, interacting with different people and tracking with different levels,” she says. “It was pivotal for my career, but it wasn’t for me long-term, so I brought what I learned back to PGIM.”
PGIM has grown tremendously during her career, and so has she. Although Dominguez went into accounting because of a love for numbers, her work focused just as much on supporting people as she stepped into leadership.
“You really have to push yourself in areas of unexpected growth. When I started as an accountant, I didn’t realize that interacting with people and building relationships was going to be more central to my experience,” she says. “I have been able to grow my relationships, and they are so important – and rewarding – in accomplishing greater things.”
Facing the Toughest Experiences as a Mother
“What has been most pivotal in my career, and truly in my life, was when I became a mom,” says Dominguez. When it comes to the challenge of dividing your energies between work and home as a working mother, nobody understands what that means more than she does. She lost her 11 year-old son, Alexander, five years ago. Throughout her son’s life journey, Dominguez worked, mostly full-time. One of her key motivators was providing for her son and his needs.
“I think we as women have to lean into all of our experiences. For me, that included leaning into being a mom of a child with special needs. It shaped me both as a person and as a professional,” she says. “I learned from his great strength, determination and courage in his short life.”
Alexander was born medically fragile, immunocompromised, hearing impaired, legally blind and ultimately unable to walk. While parenting a child with several medical needs, Dominguez had to find her voice in advocating for what was important when it mattered most.
“Being a mom to a child with so many medical complexities gave me the confidence to speak up and say, ‘No, I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree with how you’re going to treat my son,’” she says. “And that same confidence to speak up for what I believe crossed over into my work.”
Her motherhood has also inspired her to be a more empathetic leader. “As a leader, I’m more compassionate now,” she says. “Because I understand that people have so much more going on than you see at work. You don’t know the challenges people are facing day in and day out. Everybody has a story.”
She continues, “But at the same time I also expect a lot from people, because I saw my son, who was completely disabled, and his friends who faced the same conditions, show up for school every day with a smile and ready to work. That inspired me and really shaped me. Witnessing that has given me the courage to face anything. That is how I honor his legacy to make him proud.”
Dominguez describes her son as a social butterfly with a sparkling personality and smile that shone through no matter what challenges life threw at him. Knowing him has pushed her to get out of her comfort zone – as an introverted person – and show up more with her own voice to share her story and her son’s legacy.
“I hope sharing my story can inspire people to learn how both amazing and fragile life is,” she reflects. “We all have these gifts and abilities to do good things, so never take that for granted.”
Working with Integrity as a Core Value
Being detail- and research-oriented has supported Dominguez throughout her career, as well as her principle of doing due diligence for the work and her clients. Integrity is the most important value to her – being who you are, being true to yourself and leaning into your experiences.
As such, Dominguez is inspired by leaders who show openness and truly embody their words and what they stand for. “I admire the leaders who truly act and behave from who they say they are and who show up as their authentic selves,” she says. “I respect integrity.”
When approaching any challenge, Dominguez emphasizes process – taking the necessary extra steps and knowing the why behind every decision you make. This comes to the forefront especially when bringing junior members on board – helping them learn processes in a way that helps them appreciate each step and helping them question each decision. She aims to always rise to the challenge to do the best, most complete job for the task at hand.
Using Her Voice as a Latina Woman
As the daughter of Cuban immigrants, Dominguez prizes hard work. “My family came to this country seeking freedom, and that’s not lost on me. My family left everything and sacrificed so much. Their experience instilled in me a strong work ethic,” she says. “My grandparents and my parents (who immigrated as adolescents) understood the importance of education and hard work to succeed amidst challenges, and that drives me. I want to honor their legacy, and my son’s, with how I show up in my own life.”
Dominguez appreciates working in a culture that also values high integrity and high standards, and emphasizes diversity and inclusion. She is also co-founder of the PGIM Operations & Innovation Latinx Networking group.
“Representation is really important to me as a Latina woman. Earlier in my career I used to observe women in more senior positions. I love working for a company that really values diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, and puts so much effort into their initiatives for diversity and inclusion,” she says. “It’s really important to me to use my voice and honor all the women who paved the way for me. I am also trying to pave the way for other women. I don’t take that responsibility lightly.”
For those beginning to make their mark in the professional world, whom she also learns from, she advises, “Be yourself. Hard work and integrity pay off at the end of the day. Be yourself and be open to possibilities.”
Reflecting back she says, “I wish I would have been kinder to myself as a young mom. Challenges can look so big sometimes, but you will climb them and be successful, and it’s going to be OK.”
Kindness, More Kindness, and Service
“The more I go through life, the more I realize we do not know what challenges people have every day,” reiterates Dominguez. “So above all, we need to practice kindness towards ourselves and others.”
Classically trained in piano, Dominguez has also returned to playing piano since leaving it behind in her early 20s. She is remembering how to read music again and starting out first with greatest hits.
Born and raised in New Jersey, Dominguez is passionate about volunteerism and giving back to the community. She is on the finance council and works with children at her church. In honor of Alexander’s birthday each year, Dominguez and her husband collect and donate books to Cooperman Barnabas Medical Center, the local hospital where their son spent so much of his time.
By Aimee Hansen
Fabiola Gutierrez-Orozco: R&D Director, Global Nutrition Science, Reckitt
People, Voices of ExperienceGutierrez-Orozco speaks candidly about the challenges she has overcome since leaving home at 13 to pursue her education, and the inner growth journey she is pursuing while stepping into a senior global leadership role in STEM. Coming from San Luis Potosi in Central Mexico to the U.S. to obtain a Master’s degree in Human Nutrition, Gutierrez-Orozco was drawn to nutrition science, gut health and the microbiome. One year before obtaining her PhD, she realized she didn’t want a career in academia. Upon graduation, she joined the business world, working in pediatric nutrition, which allowed her to stretch her scientific research foundation into applied nutrition and allowed her to continue to constantly learn.
Perspective and resilience have carried her to where she is today: “Earning my Master’s and Doctoral degrees wasn’t an easy road – coming from Mexico, moving to the U.S., being the first one in many generations in my family to earn a college degree, and then go onto graduate school,” she notes.
“It has been both resilience and the desire to do better not just for myself, but for my family. Initially, the reason I came to the U.S. was to improve my education so I could access better jobs and provide financial help to my family,” she shares.
Indeed, so many factors at a cultural level in Gutierrez-Orozco’s life have challenged her to create mental and emotional resilience. At 13 years old, she had to leave her parent’s house and her hometown in rural Mexico and rent an apartment in a nearby city to be able to attend high school. She then moved farther away for college before moving countries and coming to the U.S. for her Master and PhD degrees.
Cultural Challenges Beyond Her Peers
Incredibly, Gutierrez-Orozco took on a STEM graduate education whilst learning to express herself in English. “I didn’t speak English when I first came here in 2006. I had all the grammar in my head. I could write and read and understand what people said. But, while in class, if the professor asked me a question, I had the answer in my head. I just couldn’t say it.”
She also had to unlearn the need to hide that she was gay. “I had a relationship in Mexico that was in the closet because my family was raised strictly Catholic. So coming here, and trying to find my way out of that was another big change for me.”
While in grad school, Gutierrez-Orozco also perceived that she was not as primed for success as her student peers. “Honestly, growing up in public schools in Mexico, I don’t think I received the best education compared to other people in the same graduate program as me. I always felt a little behind and tried to work harder to catch up and do well.”
That same feeling followed her to the workplace, being self-conscious about other’s projections around her accent or when she comes across unfamiliar words at first exposure – “I can always find the meaning through context, but I often feel like I have to be paying extra attention to keep up.” She credits her wife and daughters, English native speakers, for being fluent now.
The Mindset Shift of Leaping To a Big Leadership Role
In April of 2022, Gutierrez-Orozco was promoted to a senior leadership role, managing a 24-person team of scientists, many with PhDs in chemistry, biochemistry or nutrition. While she’s held managerial roles since 2018, Gutierrez-Orozco has focused her growth on transitioning her mindset from that of an individual contributor to that of a global team leader.
“In my previous managerial roles, I still had at least 50% of an individual contributor role. However, in my current role, I don’t know everything anymore. I don’t have the time to read all the science that I want to read,” she says. “So I’m learning to be okay with not knowing everything and finishing my work day without seeing tangible results because so much of what I have to do now is strategic work. Losing that sense of tangible accomplishment has been a struggle.”
She’s also learned to separate her work-style preferences from what is needed to inspire a team: “I have never liked being the center of attention or the object of recognition,” she admits. “I’m really trying to remind myself that just because I don’t feel comfortable being recognized, doesn’t mean my team members don’t need, and obviously deserve, that recognition.”
Confronting Imposter Syndrome with Executive Coaching
Experiencing imposter syndrome led her to seek out help in confidence-
building and owning her worth – despite cultural messaging – through executive coaching.
“Working with Nicki Gilmour on my leadership journey has really helped me reflect on how these thoughts and the belief that ‘I am not enough’ are holding me back from growing, not just in my role but as a person and leader,” she says. “Coaching has also helped me reflect on ways in which I can leverage my background to help others that might have a similar experience. Lastly, coaching has given me the confidence and courage to move forward on my growth journey as a leader. I know I am not going to get it right at first, or all the time, but I am willing to try and learn.”
To dial down the voices of self-doubt, Gutierrez-Orozco also reminds herself why she took this role in the first place: to provide support and guidance at a time when the entire team was experiencing a significant lack of stability and optimism because her company had just gone through a wave of layoffs that impacted many people in her department. Therefore, when she begins to doubt, she can focus on the good she is doing serving her team. She also reminds herself that her work is not about perfection, but is rather about showing up every day and being there for others.
Modeling Authenticity and Vulnerability As a Leader
One way Gutierrez-Orozco has leveraged her background is by being open at work about who she is, where she grew up, and her life with her wife and family. She also shares when she struggles with anxiety and depression. The impact of her authenticity and her vulnerability has given her team members permission to be real, too, and it has strengthened the group overall, allowing them to work closely together more effectively, and therefore deliver on the company objectives.
“Inside my team, I’ve had an impact with people being willing to share what they might be struggling with and being able to express the need for support. Some have shared that it’s been such a change in the past year”, she says. “In the past, if someone was struggling and brought it up, especially a female, management would have thought that person was just being weak or whining. Or if a woman spoke up and shared her mind in a meeting – and this happened to me, too – she may have been portrayed as too emotional. However, when a man did it, it wouldn’t be looked upon that way.”
She continues: “So I feel there’s been more openness to really be who you are at the workplace. And I believe that when people can truly be themselves at work, they are more engaged, satisfied, and effective,” she says, “So that’s an impact I feel I have had in my team.”
Sharing Your Voice and Not Self-Sacrificing
Gutierrez-Orozco is grateful for the mentorship of a previous manager who brought her to Reckitt through a postdoctoral internship, instilled faith in her abilities and encouraged her to share the value of her voice in the room.
“I will never forget what he told me: ‘People are wanting to hear from you. You have so much to share, so make sure you’re speaking up,’” she recalls. “I often remember that phrase and though I don’t like to be the center of attention, I remind myself I should just speak up, anyway.”
Reflecting on her past, Gutierrez-Orozco would challenge her younger self on the notion that in order to advance in her career, she had to sacrifice important parts of her life, like spending four years away from her wife and daughters and driving ten hours in a weekly commute between cities. Now, she realizes that, even then, she had a choice. It’s about retaining perspective on what’s most important.
“In my team, we’re all scientists and we want to get things done and we want them to be perfect, so we give our best and go above and beyond,” she says. “But I always like to remind my team that the job is important, but so are your health and family. While there are times when you may have to work extra hours to meet your objectives, doing so is never sustainable in the long run.”
You Have More Options Than You Think
Gutierrez-Orozco has learned over the years that part of her success also results from choosing and investing time in hobbies that provide stimulation and relaxation. She lives with a family of runners, and she prioritizes time that allows her to participate in that activity with her wife and daughters. In the last two years, she’s also begun woodworking, and she’s already made a few pieces of furniture.
This same mentality of being aware and having choice applies to career paths. Her daughter Toby is graduating from high school this summer and plans to pursue a biochemistry degree in college, and her daughter Sasha will graduate from college next year with a degree in dental hygiene. “It is great to see their love for science. The beauty of science is that there are so many routes you can go,” she says.
Gutierrez-Orozco emphasizes to her own daughters, and to any young women interested in science, “that you don’t have to choose the whole PhD route. If you begin in science, there are so many options you will have on how to apply that, so don’t feel like you must have everything figured out from the start.”
As she’s learned, there is always more than one choice in any situation – if you only free yourself to make it.
By Aimee Hansen