New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author Linda Davies wrote this guest article for theglasshammer.com about how she succeeded as an investment banker and then made the leap from corporate life into full-time self employment as a novelist. This is surely a dream that many people share, but is it really that easy?
The GH: Linda, tell us about your career in finance in the city of London?
Linda: When I first stepped into the hallowed streets of the City of London as a callow twenty one year old graduate fresh out of Oxford, I only ever intended to stay for a few years.From when I was a little girl, I had always wanted to be a writer.Corporate life was a means to that end.
In the City, I had two objectives: one was to make as much money as I could legally in as short space of time as possible, and the second was to prove a point to myself and whoever I fancied might be watching.
The City lured you in with the promise of money but it had another USP that appealed to my young and foolish ego: it prided itself on its hair-cloth-shirt toughness, insinuating that you had to be something of a superhero to survive let alone thrive.
There weren’t any super heroines back then in the American investment bank I went to work for.I was the first woman they employed in European corporate finance.Back then, the glass ceiling was at entry-level and I was thrilled to have smashed it.
The work was an intellectual challenge, but the environment was not a fit for me..
Dealing in astronomical sums of money and being lavishly rewarded can be very corrupting, can lead you to think that you deserve the money, that you are entitled to the money, and that you need that amount of money to live a satisfactory life.
I had a plan and I stuck to it. I deviated occasionally and allowed myself indulgences, but the greatest indulgence of all is time and money buys time in my opinion. After seven years as a leveraged buyout and high-risk specialist, it was time to leave.
I had for several years been searching for a plot, and then, one day, I was sitting at my desk, feeling particularly annoyed with my boss, and wondering idly how much trouble I could cause financially, when the bare bones of a story leapt into my head.
It was a totally illegal plan, it would have made a lot of money, but I like to sleep easy at night, and so instead of doing it, I wrote about it. After six months, I knew that this plot could turn into a book.
I was young, free, and single. After seven years I had saved up enough money. It was time to take a risk, to turn my back on my large six-figure salary and bonus, and the status and security that went with it.
I remember the day I handed in my notice. I felt as if I had jumped out of an airplane without a parachute. It seemed like I was in freefall for weeks afterwards. It was a gloriously heady feeling.
The GH: Ok, so that is definitely a moment that some people would consider scary, possibly even risky! How did you go from quitting your day job to realizing your dream?
I wrote for 18 months, refining the plot until it was time to test the reality of my dream. Through a friend of a friend I was introduced to a literary agent. I went to see him, handed over my manuscript. It was a Thursday.
Then in some strange feat of serendipity, a kind of fortune favors the brave moment, a bizarre thing happened over the weekend.
About four months earlier, I had written a speculative letter to the Sunday Times, where I suggested writing an article about my experiences in the City. I was contacted a few weeks later by the editor of the Sunday Times Magazine who said absolutely, yes please, do write an article for us about what it is like to be a woman in that extremely testosterone-fuelled environment.
I had no idea when the article would appear, but, as luck would have it, it came out, covering six pages, on the Sunday immediately following my Thursday meeting with the literary agent.
This produced two rather wonderful and wholly anticipated results: one, an auction ensued amongst a number of publishing houses to buy my novel and two, I was contacted by about six different highly prestigious and successful financial boutiques and offered jobs (I have to say at this point, nothing in my article suggested that I wished to return to finance.)
This was 20 years ago.The book was Nest of Vipers – an adrenaline fuelled insight into the life of an investment banker, Sarah Jensen, who was recruited by the Governor of the Bank of England to go undercover in her investment bank to investigate an insider-trading ring that stretched from a central bank to the Mafia. Unbeknownst to her, she was also working for MI6.The novel went on to be published in over thirty territories and to be optioned three times for movies.
I am now on book number 13. Jumping out of my investment banking career had been a risk worth taking on every level.
The GH: What advice would you give our readers today?
I suspect that a number of you reading this are contemplating or have contemplated leaving the corporate system and so my advice to you would go along the following lines:
* While you are inside the system, be wary of buying into it and into the lifestyle to match it if you are intending to leave it, particularly in highly paid professions such as investment banking. Investment banking is a great way to amass money, but only if you do not spend like an investment banker.
* Many women in corporate life can still in some ways feel like outsiders. As the first woman employed by Bankers Trust’s European corporate finance department, I was patently and obviously an outsider and always felt like one. That was a real advantage. Relish and use that feeling. It gives you perspective, the ability to stand aside and look at your position and your broader options in the outside world and gives you greater flexibility in terms of the choices you might go on to make. There is no wonderfully set career path stretching out ahead of you. You have far greater freedom to make it up as you go along.
It’s been shown in personality tests/behavioral profiles that entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly outsiders. Being too wedded to corporate life can blunt your desire and ability to take risks with your career. Being an able quantifier of risk for your organization often does not extend to being able to quantify risk as regards your own life.
I’m a contrarian by nature and it’s led to some odd but potentially beneficial opportunities: the first was my Sunday Times article which I had thought was a very public exercise in boat-burning, in deliberately removing any fallback position, any hint of a Plan B should Plan A fail.I believed that the very absence of a Plan B would make me work harder to ensure Plan A worked!
How contrary was it then that my article and my attitude produced all these offers. I’m sure had I gone knocking on their doors the week before those same doors would have remained closed to me.
Being an author these days really means that you are an entrepreneur so a lot of my experiences and the lessons I have drawn from them can be applied across the spectrum to different areas of entrepreneurship besides writing.I hope some of these above might be of help.For those of you who are budding writers here are a few tips that have helped me.
* Write a whole draft before you begin editing.Writing and editing at the same time is a dispiriting and inhibiting process.Just get the first draft down and then you can play around with it.
* Make use of the most current technology to help you.I don’t type really well or very quickly but I have always typed out my novels on my desktop computer.However, just over a year ago, an old friend of mine who is an investigative journalist told me I was mad not to write about the story of my kidnap and detention in Iran.I started to think about it, suggested it to my agent who leapt at the idea.He said, look if you can write it in the next two months, we can publish it at the same time as your latest thriller, Ark Storm, which was due to be published nine months later.
Two months is a tight deadline, especially for someone who cannot type very well.So I did something I had been contemplating for a while.I installed Dragon Dictate voice recognition software on my computer.And I dictated the book, the memoir, which would go on to be called Hostage, Kidnapped on high seas, the true story my captivity in Iran.And I discovered a very welcome side benefit.I had wanted this memoir to sound much more intimate than my novels. I wanted it to read as if it were a tale being told at a dinner party perhaps to someone I had just met, one of those rare and special human beings who manage to elicit the most candid of confessionals.
And it worked. The act of dictating bypassed the overthinking intellectual part of my brain and turned out to be some of the best writing I have ever done. Instead of having to do my customary ten drafts I did only three.
If you are writing Instead of dictating, still read your work aloud. You will pick up many infelicities and awkwardnesses in the writing that silent reading and editing just will not detect.
We all know the maxim, write what you know, but also research and use what you know. Dictate great snatches of fabulous dialogue that you have heard in the workplace into your phone and then email them to yourself to save them and use them.This hones your ear for dialogue and also keeps fresh the characterizing lexicon of whatever workplace you happen to be in and will render your book much more immediate and real to readers.
Remember, everything is material. As I found during my seven years in the City, there’s always a silver lining.
Linda Davies’ latest book, Longbowgirl, a novel for children and Young Adults, is published on September 3rd by Chicken House Books.
To find out more about Linda and her novels and her memoir, Hostage, please see: www.lindadavies.com
www.longbowgirl.com
You can also find her on Twitter @LindaDaviesAuth
Are Investors the key to increasing the number of women leaders?
Career Advice, Leadership, This Month's FeatureFor nine years theglasshammer has reported on the stagnant numbers of women on boards and in senior management. Yet there is an ever growing body of research the latest of which comes from McKinsey in January 2015 that shows that companies which commit to diverse leadership are more likely to have financial returns as much as 35 percent above their national industry median.
So, why is there still a disconnect? What can give companies the carrot or the stick that they need to do better beyond fluffy aspirational goals and lip service when it comes to promoting women?
One group that can help create change are investors. State Street’s newly launched ETF index fund – the SSGA SPDR SHE Gender Diversity ETF as well as the Sallie Krawcheck endorsed fund – the PAX Ellevate Fund allows for options when as an investor you want to see companies hire and promote women into senior leadership.
So what has changed?
Simply put, there are three things that are changing the game:
Firstly, data for who is on boards and in senior management team has only been relatively newly available. BoardEX and MSCI have dedicated teams to produce independent data on the gender breakdown of large companies’ executive teams.
Secondly, the continued bifurcation of the market is providing more choice for investors. ETFs and other passively managed and more commoditized products are in direct conjunction with more actively managed fund approaches and is certainly driving down costs and increasing transparency.
Thirdly, investors want to live their values and are more aware of what their values are
We aren’t just talking about a handful of aware women putting a few dollars into their pension plan. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) announced its initial investment of $250 million in the SSGA Gender Diversity Index, a large- cap U.S. stock index primarily tilted toward companies with a greater than usual number of women in senior leadership positions.
CalSTRS Chief Investment Officer Christopher J. Ailman. “We are entering a new era of impact investing — one based on looking for values or purpose that generate investment returns based on diversity of thoughts and perspectives, while also creating change with our capital. I believe it’s time to change the face of Wall Street and corporate America.”
What is the SHE index?
The SHE index itself is an index which is based on a methodology involving measuring the number of women at senior management levels in the largest firms.
The resulting product is an ETF that tracks a newly created, proprietary gender diversity index comprised of the largest companies in the US with senior women leaders relative to other firms within their sector. Rather than wait for companies to take action themselves or rely on legislation to be enacted, SHE provides a way for people to fight the gender gap directly by investing in companies that put a premium on women in leadership positions.
Jennifer Bender, Managing Director and creator of the SHE index explained to theglasshammer.com that prior to launching this ETF product, Statestreet has been working with rule based large data sets on the institutional side of the business. She comments that it seemed like a natural transition to provide retail investors with the same ability. She comments,
“If investors want to vote with their feet plus get the long term equity return they are looking for then this product allows them to do this.”
When asked about how the companies are picked for the index, Jenn Bender explains that top firms are picked to meet specific criteria using independent research. She explains,
“We want the index to be sector constrained so that we have similar sector weights as the US large cap universe which ensures we have a diverse group of industries represented. The companies in our index have the highest ratios of female senior managers in their sector. “
Walking the talk
Allison Quirk, executive vice president and chief human resources and citizenship officerat State Street believes that it is another way to tackle gender equality work.
When asked about the new SHE index, she sees the importance of reflecting the work State Street continues to do the inside to create that pipeline of female leaders with an external commercial product that aligns with the State Street culture. She comments,
“It is good for business to ensure women have what they need to navigate – it is our responsibility to engage the entire talent pool to ensure a sustainable pipeline of female leaders. We have eighteen female EVPs now who each sponsor other women just below them, this effort along with our male colleagues taking the lead also on mentoring and sponsoring women, means that we really believe we will see the rewards of paying it forward. “
With 27% of their SVP’s and 23% of their EVP’s being women, it seems that this firm is taking gender parity seriously.
State Street’s SHE fund also has an innovative charitable component to it that focuses on the next generation of women leaders. The company will take a portion of revenues and direct them to the newly created Donor Advised Fund, which will in turn support organizations that inspire and equip girls to be future business leaders – particularly in industries where women have low representation today, such as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).
Pipeline at all levels is what more firms need to think about.
Power – How Do You Feel About This Word?
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!Power is sometimes seen as a dirty word for women and many will tell you that they do not want it (even if their data says otherwise), yet power is really just another word for authority and control over what you are responsible for delivering. You should want some power, as otherwise you might find you lack the resources to follow through on your remit.
Own your personal power as you see fit, but at work it is equally important to ensure your authority to execute on a task is aligned with the level of responsibility you have to see it all get done!
By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
Contact nicki@glasshammer2.wpengine.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work
Voice of Experience: Wendy Mahmouzian, America’s Head of Corporate Services and Real Estate and Global Head of Hospitality, Goldman Sachs
Voices of Experience“You have to understand that we’re all somewhere different on the work/life spectrum, and there’s no one answer to the question on how to achieve balance. It’s up to you to determine what it takes to make you feel comfortable and allow you to bring your best self to work,” she says. “It might be your family, sports, culture or education that allows you to achieve that balance, enabling you to bring 100 percent of yourself to work and perform at your best.”
For Mahmouzian, performing at her best has meant constantly learning new skills and being willing to take on new challenges, all while continuously looking for ways to solve problems and create new opportunities for clients. During her 20-year career at Goldman Sachs, she has spent the latter half with the Corporate Services and Real Estate (CSRE) team, first as global chief of staff and now as head of the team for the Americas and global head of hospitality. She joined the firm in the Global Investment Research division and subsequently co-managed the Securities e-Commerce group. Common themes in all of her positions have been contributing to transformative change and enhancing engagement with clients.
A Diverse Set of Priorities That Range From Crisis Response to Sustainability
One of Mahmouzian’s most significant undertakings was leading the team in 2009 that opened the firm’s world headquarters at 200 West Street, overseeing the startup of operations and multi-month migration of employees to the new building. Ensuring that everyone in the new headquarters could be productive on day one was a significant undertaking.
She remains focused on improving the firm’s workplace strategy to respond to business needs and creating a high-performance environment that enables the flow of business, promotes client engagement, maximizes productivity and reflects the firm’s commitment to sustainability and inclusion. She is currently involved in a number of projects, including refurbishing existing buildings, developing new campuses and ensuring that the firm’s spaces meet the needs of employees, clients and guests.
Reviewing past milestones, Mahmouzian notes the vital role her team plays in supporting the firm during key events, including Superstorm Sandy. During the 2012 storm, she organized the team that managed the firm’s response. “We focused on protecting the firm’s assets, particularly its people, and making sure that the business remained up and running throughout the storm and its aftermath,” says Mahmouzian. “The intersection of planning, communication, managing risk and being nimble enabled the team to ensure the firm’s business continuity and was a hallmark of our response.”
Mahmouzian also helps manage the firm’s environmental and operational impacts through innovative strategies in energy efficiency, investments in green building and initiatives to ensure a sustainable and inclusive supply chain.
Advice Along the Career Ladder
For Mahmouzian, patience and listening were skills she developed over time, but she also notes the importance of individuals’ establishing their own voice and speaking up. “You have to learn how to balance soliciting the opinions of team members with articulating your own view as well,” she says.
She also advises women, especially those early in their careers, not to be deterred by a historically male-dominated field like real estate, but to seek as role models more experienced women who have succeeded professionally in the space. “Your capabilities will make you successful, so don’t be intimidated by a room full of people that look different from you.”
While Mahmouzian also supports hospitality, a typically female-dominated field, she says it’s important for both hospitality and real estate to cast a wide net and seek diverse talent that is accretive to the team and delivers for clients.
“Embrace the strengths of those around you and use them to your advantage – engage, encourage and enable,” she says, adding that as she has become more senior, a big part of her job is supporting high-potential talent and creating a platform for their success.
Helping Evolve Women’s Initiatives
One of the projects that Mahmouzian undertook in the CSRE division was to help formalize the division’s women’s network. A cornerstone of this effort was establishing a signature women’s conference that features speakers and a wide range of professional development initiatives to enhance participants’ skills. Over the years this conference has evolved into a global event via video conferencing. She is also proud that many male colleagues have increased their attendance and advocacy. “It’s gratifying that they are eager to support and sustain broader efforts to advance women in the firm,” she noted.
Work/Family Balance Comes From Being Present in the Moment
For Mahmouzian, balance depends on being present in the moment. “With today’s technology, demands are coming from all different angles, and we need to remember that five minutes of focused attention on a challenge or in a discussion will yield a better outcome than an hour of distracted work. Take the time to listen, interpret and have a clear mind,” she says.
She brings that ethic home to her husband and two daughters, whom she calls her “support network.” Being present in the moment is the best way to ensure we have quality time, she says, adding that they love to ski and value the time they spend together as a family.
Superstorm Sandy offered a situation that allowed her to test the merits of this approach. Her family understood that she needed to continue working throughout the weekend in response to the storm: “They knew that in this crisis, my focus was to protect the firm and our people, and they gave me the freedom to do what I needed to do.” As the crisis subsided, her work team returned the favor, ensuring she could hand over the reins to be with her family. “Being present is the cornerstone of success, whether it’s work or family.”
Intrepid Woman: Linda Davies, Banker to Bestselling Author
Intrepid Women SeriesThe GH: Linda, tell us about your career in finance in the city of London?
Linda: When I first stepped into the hallowed streets of the City of London as a callow twenty one year old graduate fresh out of Oxford, I only ever intended to stay for a few years.From when I was a little girl, I had always wanted to be a writer.Corporate life was a means to that end.
In the City, I had two objectives: one was to make as much money as I could legally in as short space of time as possible, and the second was to prove a point to myself and whoever I fancied might be watching.
The City lured you in with the promise of money but it had another USP that appealed to my young and foolish ego: it prided itself on its hair-cloth-shirt toughness, insinuating that you had to be something of a superhero to survive let alone thrive.
There weren’t any super heroines back then in the American investment bank I went to work for.I was the first woman they employed in European corporate finance.Back then, the glass ceiling was at entry-level and I was thrilled to have smashed it.
The work was an intellectual challenge, but the environment was not a fit for me..
Dealing in astronomical sums of money and being lavishly rewarded can be very corrupting, can lead you to think that you deserve the money, that you are entitled to the money, and that you need that amount of money to live a satisfactory life.
I had a plan and I stuck to it. I deviated occasionally and allowed myself indulgences, but the greatest indulgence of all is time and money buys time in my opinion. After seven years as a leveraged buyout and high-risk specialist, it was time to leave.
I had for several years been searching for a plot, and then, one day, I was sitting at my desk, feeling particularly annoyed with my boss, and wondering idly how much trouble I could cause financially, when the bare bones of a story leapt into my head.
It was a totally illegal plan, it would have made a lot of money, but I like to sleep easy at night, and so instead of doing it, I wrote about it. After six months, I knew that this plot could turn into a book.
I was young, free, and single. After seven years I had saved up enough money. It was time to take a risk, to turn my back on my large six-figure salary and bonus, and the status and security that went with it.
I remember the day I handed in my notice. I felt as if I had jumped out of an airplane without a parachute. It seemed like I was in freefall for weeks afterwards. It was a gloriously heady feeling.
The GH: Ok, so that is definitely a moment that some people would consider scary, possibly even risky! How did you go from quitting your day job to realizing your dream?
I wrote for 18 months, refining the plot until it was time to test the reality of my dream. Through a friend of a friend I was introduced to a literary agent. I went to see him, handed over my manuscript. It was a Thursday.
Then in some strange feat of serendipity, a kind of fortune favors the brave moment, a bizarre thing happened over the weekend.
About four months earlier, I had written a speculative letter to the Sunday Times, where I suggested writing an article about my experiences in the City. I was contacted a few weeks later by the editor of the Sunday Times Magazine who said absolutely, yes please, do write an article for us about what it is like to be a woman in that extremely testosterone-fuelled environment.
I had no idea when the article would appear, but, as luck would have it, it came out, covering six pages, on the Sunday immediately following my Thursday meeting with the literary agent.
This produced two rather wonderful and wholly anticipated results: one, an auction ensued amongst a number of publishing houses to buy my novel and two, I was contacted by about six different highly prestigious and successful financial boutiques and offered jobs (I have to say at this point, nothing in my article suggested that I wished to return to finance.)
This was 20 years ago.The book was Nest of Vipers – an adrenaline fuelled insight into the life of an investment banker, Sarah Jensen, who was recruited by the Governor of the Bank of England to go undercover in her investment bank to investigate an insider-trading ring that stretched from a central bank to the Mafia. Unbeknownst to her, she was also working for MI6.The novel went on to be published in over thirty territories and to be optioned three times for movies.
I am now on book number 13. Jumping out of my investment banking career had been a risk worth taking on every level.
The GH: What advice would you give our readers today?
I suspect that a number of you reading this are contemplating or have contemplated leaving the corporate system and so my advice to you would go along the following lines:
* While you are inside the system, be wary of buying into it and into the lifestyle to match it if you are intending to leave it, particularly in highly paid professions such as investment banking. Investment banking is a great way to amass money, but only if you do not spend like an investment banker.
* Many women in corporate life can still in some ways feel like outsiders. As the first woman employed by Bankers Trust’s European corporate finance department, I was patently and obviously an outsider and always felt like one. That was a real advantage. Relish and use that feeling. It gives you perspective, the ability to stand aside and look at your position and your broader options in the outside world and gives you greater flexibility in terms of the choices you might go on to make. There is no wonderfully set career path stretching out ahead of you. You have far greater freedom to make it up as you go along.
It’s been shown in personality tests/behavioral profiles that entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly outsiders. Being too wedded to corporate life can blunt your desire and ability to take risks with your career. Being an able quantifier of risk for your organization often does not extend to being able to quantify risk as regards your own life.
I’m a contrarian by nature and it’s led to some odd but potentially beneficial opportunities: the first was my Sunday Times article which I had thought was a very public exercise in boat-burning, in deliberately removing any fallback position, any hint of a Plan B should Plan A fail.I believed that the very absence of a Plan B would make me work harder to ensure Plan A worked!
How contrary was it then that my article and my attitude produced all these offers. I’m sure had I gone knocking on their doors the week before those same doors would have remained closed to me.
Being an author these days really means that you are an entrepreneur so a lot of my experiences and the lessons I have drawn from them can be applied across the spectrum to different areas of entrepreneurship besides writing.I hope some of these above might be of help.For those of you who are budding writers here are a few tips that have helped me.
* Write a whole draft before you begin editing.Writing and editing at the same time is a dispiriting and inhibiting process.Just get the first draft down and then you can play around with it.
* Make use of the most current technology to help you.I don’t type really well or very quickly but I have always typed out my novels on my desktop computer.However, just over a year ago, an old friend of mine who is an investigative journalist told me I was mad not to write about the story of my kidnap and detention in Iran.I started to think about it, suggested it to my agent who leapt at the idea.He said, look if you can write it in the next two months, we can publish it at the same time as your latest thriller, Ark Storm, which was due to be published nine months later.
Two months is a tight deadline, especially for someone who cannot type very well.So I did something I had been contemplating for a while.I installed Dragon Dictate voice recognition software on my computer.And I dictated the book, the memoir, which would go on to be called Hostage, Kidnapped on high seas, the true story my captivity in Iran.And I discovered a very welcome side benefit.I had wanted this memoir to sound much more intimate than my novels. I wanted it to read as if it were a tale being told at a dinner party perhaps to someone I had just met, one of those rare and special human beings who manage to elicit the most candid of confessionals.
And it worked. The act of dictating bypassed the overthinking intellectual part of my brain and turned out to be some of the best writing I have ever done. Instead of having to do my customary ten drafts I did only three.
If you are writing Instead of dictating, still read your work aloud. You will pick up many infelicities and awkwardnesses in the writing that silent reading and editing just will not detect.
We all know the maxim, write what you know, but also research and use what you know. Dictate great snatches of fabulous dialogue that you have heard in the workplace into your phone and then email them to yourself to save them and use them.This hones your ear for dialogue and also keeps fresh the characterizing lexicon of whatever workplace you happen to be in and will render your book much more immediate and real to readers.
Remember, everything is material. As I found during my seven years in the City, there’s always a silver lining.
Linda Davies’ latest book, Longbowgirl, a novel for children and Young Adults, is published on September 3rd by Chicken House Books.
To find out more about Linda and her novels and her memoir, Hostage, please see: www.lindadavies.com
www.longbowgirl.com
You can also find her on Twitter @LindaDaviesAuth
Mover and Shaker: Mary-Kate Ryan, Manager, Advisory Consulting, PwC Ireland
Movers and ShakersThis advice from one of her role models, Eleanor Roosevelt, has always resonated with Mary-Kate Ryan.
“This wisdom is still up-to-date as a great analogy of how women must challenge ourselves in the workplace. Men are more apt to claim they are the right person for any given task, while women often feel ‘imposter syndrome,’ where they’re not sure they have the capability they need. But we all know that if you put tea in cold water it’s not very good, but put it in the thick of things, in the ‘hot water,’ and you see how well it works.”
Ryan’s career has been a series of hot water scenarios that she has willingly put herself in and come out stronger. After studying economics and finance in university, she and two of her sisters opened a successful fashion boutique in Dublin which she managed for eight years, attracting a devoted clientele – think Beyoncé caliber!
She says that looking after the business and seeing the fruits of her labor in a niche market was a wonderful training ground throughout her 20s where she had to learn to be adaptable and willing to take on any role; then as she built a team, acquire a comfort level to let go and allow the team to develop as well.
After a brief stint in another business with one sister, she noticed a curiosity about the corporate sector, specifically management consulting, as she approached her 30s. Deciding to act on that gut instinct, she took a career break to go back to university and earn a master’s degree in Management Consultancy at UCD Smurfit in Dublin, something she said feels even more important at that point in your life, because you are more committed and yet able to fully appreciate the freedom of being a full-time student. She made the most of her time there, building up her network and even playing on a touch rugby team that went to the MBA Rugby World Cup in North Carolina.
Learning the Ropes in a Corporate Environment
Earning top honors in her class, Ryan felt confident that she could parlay that success into the skills needed for management consulting and joined PwC Ireland. Some people were confused by her move, expressing that she had been living the dream with her own company, but she enjoyed the leap to the corporate environment. “One of my key skills is my adaptability. I am good at jumping into new situations so I put my head down and figured out the culture.”
Since then she has enjoyed her work on long-term projects in complex environments, overcoming challenges and working with high-performing teams.
She credits her robust support network with helping her along the way. “Sometimes you just need a few conversations that remind you how capable you are and that it’s fine to not know everything because you will learn what you need to,” she says.
Her projects helping organizations integrate after a merger can be quite intense. “The change management and personnel aspect is very interesting, as each situation entails complexity and ambiguity,” she says. “There’s no magic formula and that’s what keeps it exciting.”
When she first started at PwC, she assumed it was going to be a dog-eat-dog environment but was pleasantly surprised at her experience. “Business is always going to be competitive, but I soon learned that high-performing people are also very nice and accessible.” She found that building relationships with clients worked in the same way. “As I got to know them, I found that they were more supportive than you would imagine. We all are just trying to do the job well.” And she adds, PwC offers a diversity of backgrounds that allows its employees to nourish all the aspects that make each person individual.
Along the way, she was able to acquire mentors and sponsors, which she says came about naturally because she showed she was interested, curious and enthusiastic. “Bringing those aspects to the table didn’t have immediate rewards but they put me on people’s radar. A year or so later, someone would think of me and present me with an amazing opportunity,” she says.
For example, even while working offsite, she kept in touch and because of her initiative was offered a project in Dubai with a client with whom she really wanted to work. “It came about because I maintained a network and let people know what I was interested in. If you share the views of what you want to do and have the right conversations, it will naturally happen.”
Multicultural Assignments Feed Her Work/Life Balance
In addition to her work in Dubai, she has enjoyed other international assignments because of what she’s learned about global and multicultural issues. “When I was working in Ireland, there were mostly similarities in terms of approaches, but the international assignments have shown me I can build a team of people with different backgrounds and still be able to see the commonalities,” she says. “You learn not to make assumptions, but instead to really listen and understand people’s motives and objectives.” For example, if someone is being resistant in a meeting, it could be because they don’t agree, but it also could be because they don’t understand and you have to draw them out.
She says that has made her more open-minded and perform better in cross-functional teams, as well as making her gravitate toward more global assignments with an eye to what else she can learn.
Her love of travel extends to her personal life, where she spends as much time as she can trekking and traveling, exploring her interest in different languages, cuisine and cultures.
“As Eleanor Roosevelt said, ‘Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.’ I believe that approaching life with a curious mind keeps you invigorated and allows me to bring that level of enthusiasm to my work.”
4 Tips to Calm Yourself and Your Stressed Team
Career Advice, Life HacksTip 1: Stop Multitasking
Women in financial services are resolute multi-taskers with a high probability for getting stressed out to the max. A Stanford study revealed the cognitive dangers to media multitasking. Scientists have theorized that humans simply cannot adequately process a conglomeration of various free flowing information at one time. However, that fact has not stopped female professionals from trying. Without a doubt, individuals who have mastered multi-tasking positions have acquired an invaluable skill. This, however, is a double-edged sword. Their perceived gift is stress-inducing, which means it comes with a high price. Multiple tests showed that heavy multitaskers not only consistently underperformed light multitaskers, but the flood of tasks was actually detrimental to their cognitive control. On the other hand, workers who prioritize and give individual projects full attention are actually more productive.
Tip 2: Understand the macro-environment
Financial services is a particularly stressful industry because of widespread restructuring, increased competition, and globalization. Immense changes in the economy have had a significant impact on professionals in the industry. The stress resulting from work-related irascibilities in the financial industry should not be ignored or minimized. Massive acquisitions and mergers have made headlines for years.
New developments in technology require finance professionals to acquire and utilize more technical expertise, and to perform increasingly difficult tasks with a broader skill set. Additionally, domestic and international competition has raised the bar as to what is expected of financial services. Toss in a lack of meaningful communication and a loss of teamfocus, and you have the recipe for exacerbated tension and frustration in the workplace.
What starts out as irritation from miscommunication or fatigue from a heavy workload, often leads to more serious difficulties such as burn out, anger eruptions, physical illness, loss of self-confidence, workplace violence, and insufficient staffing. Understand the reason is sometimes bigger than you and that there are certain factors in the macro-environment that cannot be overlooked.
Tip 3: Identify the source of the stress
It is unreasonable to think that one can revolutionize the entire financial services industry and make the workplace stress free. However, with expert advice, you can change the environment of your own workplace in order to reduce your stress level and the stress level of your teammates. How do you bring about a more positive atmosphere? It’s crucial to first identify the source of the stress. Is a particular project weighing everyone down? Has there been a lot of overtime? Is new technology causing stress in the office? Once you identify the stress, then you can begin the process of alleviating it.
Leaders don’t wait for staff to come up with something to make the workplace healthier. Take the initiative by providing team support and by giving each worker clear training and goals. Instead of having the type of staff meeting that allows for endless rambling, set a clear agenda that conveys a constructive tone, one that prevents individuals from monopolizing valuable time. Meetings that are productive and focused create a true haven for support rather than add to the team’s boatload of stress.
Tip 4: Think ahead
A proactive leader thinks ahead. Don’t wait until everyone is at the breaking point before you decide to act. When your team is assigned a project, use insight to determine what the team needs to deal with the challenges associated with the project. If certain tasks, changes, or clients are likely to impose extra stress on your team, then have a clear stress management plan ready. Keep the lines of communication open, and encourage feedback and team engagement. Obviously, you are not going to eliminate or even reduce to an innocuous level every source of stress in the financial services industry. However, it is both insightful and pragmatic to take advantage of every available resource and opportunity to minimize personal stress and the stress of your team. To start with there are always some simple, practical, common-sense things a good leader can do to stay on top of or avert a potential problem: When conflicts arise, settle them quickly; give the needed attention to individuals on your team; listen actively to them when they make suggestions or face difficulties; institute a strategy that will make it easy for them to transition from one project to the next; give them constant feedback and make them feel respected and valued.
Even though female professionals face highly stressful circumstances in the financial services industry, they can manage pressure by keeping the workplace positive. Multi-tasking and aimless staff meetings are not the solution, but part of the problem. Workers need to know that they are valued as team players, and they need to have clear goals on which to focus, and toward which to work. By honing their exceptional communication skills, women leaders avail themselves of yet another useful skill in managing stress.
By Kathleen Delaney
Always Number Two At Work? How To Be The Boss
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!Reflect upon gender roles- maybe you were told to be a “nice girl” when you were little, while your brother was told to “go get ‘em tiger”.
Recommended reading “Nice girls dont get the corner office”.
If you can do it, why aren’t you doing it?
By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work
Voice of Experience: Denise Landman, CEO, Victoria’s Secret Pink
People, Voices of ExperienceTrue North
“I personally have a fiduciary responsibility to create value for my organization and a secure future for my business leaders,” said Landman. “Leadership is a conscious effort. It is a muscle to develop and build, and requires deep introspection. People become leaders when they decide for themselves what and who they will be.”
“For me,” continued Landman, “the best leaders have emerged as being very authentic. Authentic leaders are guided by an inner compass, or true north. Your integrity is what creates a sense of community in the organization that ultimately translates to performance.”
“Building a culture of honesty can only create positive outcomes,” said Landman. “I make mistakes as well. None of us are mistake-proof. It is often that you learn the most through your mistakes. I embrace those mistakes when they occur in my organization.”
How to Market to College Girls
Many people involved in branding want to go straight to product development.
Landman, on the other hand, needed to spend more time thinking about the characteristics of the college girl. “I needed to define her for myself. I would not allow designers to design anything until we had a clear sense of what this eighteen year old girl wants,” said Landman. “Eighteen year old girls are still young and naive, and, in other respects, preparing to be the women they will be in the future. It is a fragile age. I have to go back to what it means to be an eighteen year old, and how to translate this understanding into a product.”
Learning Your Craft
Landman spent the early days of her career perfecting the fundamentals. “It was only when I knew I could be effective with my career choice that I strive for higher levels of responsibility,” said Landman. “I couldn’t have put myself out there if I didn’t have the right stuff. I am a big proponent of honing your craft and knowing what you are talking about.”
Work-Life Integration
Landman adopted two sons (one from Russia and one from Ohio) when she was 50. When asked about work-life integration, Landman said that she and her husband made the decision that he would stay at home and she would continue with her career. “It is such a personal journey, and there is no one blueprint or roadmap to follow,” stressed Landman.“I am learning a lot about how to be the best mom while also being whole and effective in my professional life.It is hard.”
By Hua Wang
Stoking Your Intrapreneurial Spirit
Career Advice, Next LevelIntrapreneurship is entrepreneurship, but within the context of a larger organization. An intrapreneur is “an employee of an established organization with an entrepreneurial mindset,” who thinks more like a start-up owner.
Alyson Krueger writes in Fast Company, “Obviously there have always been go-getters in companies who try to move the needle forward and push the status quo. But never before has there been such a push for employees to take ownership of their own corner of a company.”
Asserted in Entrepreneur, “intrapreneurship is the new entrepreneurship.”
Satisfaction and Engagement Meets Innovation and Leadership
A survey from University of Phoenix School of Business found people who are satisfied in their job are nearly twice as likely to report having the opportunity for intrapreneurship (61%) compared to those who are not satisfied (33%). It’s logical that organizations are being advised to foster entrepreneurial cultures as a way of attracting talent as well as increasing employee engagement.
Murray Newlands writes in Inc., “Intrapreneurs will become the building blocks of a company’s executive teams and leaders. They are the driving force that moves a company forward and they will inevitably rise to the top of the company as they understand the company from all levels. Starting from the bottom, they will see the company as a set of processes in which every process must evolve.”
Intrapreneurs shake up the ladder, which is one way to change the gender status quo. They do not obey traditional career paths, but creates new ones, while changing how things work from the inside-out. There are many articles that advise on the skills to be effective as an intrapreneur. But the first word that comes to mind when we hear entrepreneurial is spirit.
Here are five qualities that seem across the board inherent to stoking your intrapreneurial spirit.
Quality 1: Relentless Curiosity.
Intrapreneurs see the opportunity for something that is not yet there, which takes curiosity, perceptiveness, intuition, and being attuned to seeing trends before others. They also have to be able to question and “challenge current business practices,” not simply fall in line or put their heads-down and get on with it. Intrapreneurs don’t stay in the box. They question the box. Coming up with ideas is a mindset, and it’s value does not hinge on the success or failure of one idea.
According to Claudia Chan, founder of S.H.E. Globl Media, in Fast Company, intrepreneurial employees are asking questions such as,“What do I want to create that is going to fill a white space? What doesn’t exist that needs to exist? There is a hole and they want to fill it. There is a problem, and they want to solve it.”
Quality 2: Risk-Taking Creativity.
Chan writes, “If you’re not uncomfortable or scared, you’re not driving innovation.”
Intrapreneurs bring creativity where it did not exist before, in the form of ideas, processes, and solutions, and they embrace a spirit of uncertainty. As a visionary, you cannot know exactly what you’re doing, because what you’re doing has not been done before. It’s very important to be knowledgeable and leverage your strengths, but also find the right point to make the leap.
Susan Folley of Corporate Entrepreneurs, LLC writes, “This is the great divide between traditional leaders and intrapreneurs – the known and unknown. It is the difference between playing it safe or taking a risk, relying on past experience or experimentation, needing detailed information to decide or leveraging what you know, minimizing risks or maximizing value, asking for what you need or leveraging what you’ve got. They see what is possible. It’s a mindset, a way of operating that is foreign to many of us.”
Quality 3: Daring and Vocal Courage.
Intrapreneurship takes a willingness to step up with your ideas and be vocal, even finding a way to visualize them so they become more accessible to others.
As shared in her book Daring Greatly, researcher Brené Brown asked Kevin Surace what the biggest obstacle to creativity and innovation was, and he replied that it is the fear of even putting your ideas out there due to worries about ridicule or being belittled, yet “innovative ideas often sound crazy and failure and learning are a part of revolution.”
So it’s necessary to stoke your courage, but according to Brown the culture matters. Ask if the culture you’re in is also rewarding the value of creative courage. If you’re a woman of intrapreneurial spirit full of ideas, be in an environment in which you and your ideas will flourish.
Quality 4: Passionate & Adaptable Resilience.
Once you’ve put yourself out there, it’s important not to let your ideas die upon rejection of one articulation, but foster resilience and passion towards getting to the best work, just as a writer may have to find the real story one hundred pages into her first draft.
Rich Maloof writes in Forbes, “find a granular element of the concept that is undeniably of value.” You can always find the new simplified starting point and with iterative progress, your Plan D may be ten times better than Plan A started out.
Quality 5: Contagious Collaboration.
A large part of intrapreneurship is being able to “assemble” the right team around an idea and foster an enthusiastic start-up mentality – all hands-in, less silos and more shared accountability. If intraprenership requires a learn-by-doing approach, you’re going to need a passionate team willing to learn and relearn with you. You must be able to make a personal vision a team vision.
Intrapreneurial women will not be the first up the ladder. Instead, they’ll invent a new platform to stand on, from which the view looks different for everyone.
By Aimee Hansen
How Digital Could Deliver Workplace Gender Equality in 25 Years
Career Advice, LeadershipBy Aimee Hansen
Earlier this month, we wrote about how the United Nation’s International Women’s Day 2016 effort emphasized accelerating gender equality. A new report from Accenture entitled “Getting to Equal: How Digital is Helping Close the Gender Gap at Work,” asserts that digital is a key factor in accelerating gender equality in the workplace.
Accenture’s report finds that doubling the pace of “digital fluency” among women could double the speed of gender equality at work.
Rather than waiting until 2065, doubling the pace at which women become frequent users of technology would bring workplace gender equality in developed nations by 2040.
Rather than waiting until 2100, workplace gender equality could be brought forward in developing nations by 2060.
The Relationship Between Digital Fluency and Gender Equality
Accenture’s report comes as global talent shortages are being highlighted by the World Economic Forum as well as Manpower Group, while women remain an underrepresented presence that could become part of an evolving and flexible workforce increasingly enabled via technology.
Combining survey data (nearly 5,000 men and women in 31 countries) with published data on digital usage by country to create an econometric model, Accenture analyzed the effect of digital fluency on gender equality throughout the career cycle for an individual. Researchers also looked at the relationship between gender equality and digital fluency across nations.
In their report, digital fluency was correlated with women’s career achievement. The U.S., Netherlands, UK, and Nordic countries have both the highest digital fluency and rank among the top performers in workplace equality.
Large gender gaps in digital fluency exist in Japan, Singapore, France, and Switzerland, and closing them would increase gender equality in the workplace.
In countries like India and Indonesia, generally low levels of digital fluency, and gender gaps within them, are holding back women’s progress.
Nations like Saudi Arabia and Japan illustrate that digital fluency is not the only factor at work, since deep-seated cultural factors also hold gender gaps wider than expected based on the model.
Though it may be argued that over time digital, and its ability to amplify the voices that are so often disenfranchised, could play into challenging the cultural factors that disempower women.
Digital Fluency as an Accelerant, Especially For Women
Accenture concludes that digital skills are helping to narrow the workplace gender gap and level the playing field and that digital fluency acts as an accelerant in every stage of a woman’s career from education and employment to advancement because technology removes many of the barriers that prevent women from working more flexibly. Digital fluency helps men and women but the
the researchers of the report found that being digitally fluent held even stronger positive effects for women than for men.
Accelerating Education
The report showed that when men and women have the same level of digital fluency, women have achieved a higher rate of education.
Women are not simply becoming better educated than they were before. They’ve become better educated than men in 16 of the 31 countries.
Digital fluency played the greatest role in enabling women to access education in developing nations – with 68% of women saying Internet was important to their education (versus 44% in developed nations).
Accelerating Employment
Digital fluency allows for more flexibility in the workplace, which is helping to close the employment gap between men and women in many countries, as more women are more able to find and participate in work.
The report found that “While men and women alike are liberated by the balance that work flexibility affords, women appear to derive greater value from it.”
In the survey, 72% of women (and 68% of men) said that women’s employment opportunities increase as digital fluency increases, with nearly half of women reporting they used digital to access job opportunities and work from home.
Accelerating Advancement
While digital fluency also proved to help accelerate women’s career advancement, the relationship was less significant. The report found that “while digital fluency is having a positive impact on pay for both men and women, the gap in pay between genders is still not closing.”
What is changing is the expectations that it’s possible to close the gap within a foreseeable future, as nearly 60% of Millennial women aspire to be in leadership positions and feel skilled for it, and nearly 3/4 of respondents agreed “the digital world will empower our daughters.” Mind you, those digitally native daughters with better education than their male peers and expanded access to work of many forms across many countries.
According to Julie Sweet, Accenture’s group chief executive for North America, “This is a powerful message for all women and girls. Continuously developing and growing your ability to use digital technologies, both at home and in the workplace, has a clear and positive effect at every stage of your career.And it provides a distinct advantage, as businesses and governments seek to fill the jobs that support today’s growing economy.”