As I matured through the corporate world, I saw that many organizations that don’t succeed in L&D are valuing what you know versus what you share,” says Sharon Claffey Kaliouby. “The learning approaches we’re focusing on are a catalyst for change, in creating opportunities to learn collaboratively to facilitate the business goals.”
As a leader in the field of learning and development (L&D), Kaliouby speaks to her life-long love of learning, why paradoxically breaking our educational conditioning is inherent to professional success, and the quandary of the L&D leadership gender gap.
Learning is About Sharing, Not Just Knowing
Named one of the Top 50 Leaders in Learning & Development in 2019 and honored as Learning Professional of the Year in 2018 by The Learning & Performance Institute, Kaliouby is passionate about helping organizations to drive their goals forward by building individual and organization-wide capabilities through education.
“You can spend your entire life doing something that everybody else thinks you should do,” she advises her own daughters. “Or you can do something you totally love and are passionate about, and feel truly alive. That’s the direction you should always go. Stick with your inner gut and don’t let anyone change your mind.”
Kaliouby worked in-house for nearly twenty years before making an intentional move to Learning Pool, a pioneering full-service customized e-learning provider working across a large international client base, from companies to NGOs to higher education.
Kaliouby speaks emphatically about reframing what we value in and how we experience learning: “As we go through our educational system, and almost anywhere in the world, there is one thing that collaboration is usually called: cheating. Collaboration in the school system is called cheating, so we’re educated not to collaborate.”
In academia, success often means not sharing your knowledge but that flips the moment we exit formal education. She notes women are disproportionately represented among top students but not top executives. The early displaced value on autonomous success can also stunt institutional development.
“Innovative organizations are sharing cultures who want employees to share their success and knowledge with other colleagues. You’re not elevated in the organization based on how much more you know than others, but how much you share the knowledge,“ observes Kaliouby.
Learning that Values Your Participation
With Learning Pool, the L&D objectives begin with asking what learning is going to be most directly valuable to the core organizational goals. The strategic approach is that learners not only comprehend the content, but are also involved in their education, with their participation being a factor in the measure of their learning success. Sharing (such as comments in an online forum) becomes weighted by the richness of knowledge the individual holds and shares, rather than their title.
Kaliouby is increasingly motivated by Learning Pool’s Learning Experience Platform (LXP) Stream, which is designed to enable the self-determined learner to find and to access particular courses they need or want for themselves. She points out that the rush to compulsory online education in the past eighteen months widely replicated the classroom rather than customizing education for the positive capabilities of this medium, and this has potentially created resistance to online learning among a whole generation of students. But at the same time, that challenging experience may compel reflection from those students, based on what they truly needed, that compels developments yet to come in the L&D space.
Going Back to Being Human and Being Learners
When it comes to remote working, ‘upskilling’ and ‘reskilling’ are part of the hot themes right now, and with Covid-19, the L&D field has moved towards the human side of business in many ways – such as skilling up on EQ, capacity for empathy and holistic communication skills.
“Some people that were hired as a CEO in 2018 were not equipped to be the chief empathy office of 2020 or 2021. But what’s nice is the human equation is now being valued, as much as learning data analytics in the scientific backgrounds were highly valued,” notes Kaliouby. “We need soft skills now because we’re all in crisis mode, but I hope it’s more than a trend.”
From her perspective, we’re circling back to the 1990’s when family and kids were invited into the office or gatherings. Whereas in the 2000’s, the 9/11 and financial crises put sustained employment into more jeopardy, and it became safer emotionally not to know each other so personally. With Zoom, we’re invited back into witnessing colleagues in their lives outside of work, and this impacts learning too.
“Now, we want learning to be about the whole person. When you’re learning something in your organization, to better the business goals, you also want to be building for yourself too,” says Kaliouby. “You’re building knowledge that’s going to make you a different, more insightful or more aware person, regardless of what the topic is.”
She notes that for the first time, a lot of people have the space and bandwidth to take up guitar or language lessons online, for example, rather than just be entertained. We are in some way becoming learners again, who wish to be effective in all spherical aspects of our lives.
Why Are There Too Few Women Leaders in L&D?
In 2013, Kaliouby became the co-founder of #WomeninLearning, which actively promotes women in learning and leadership – supporting an awareness of gender equality and an environment committed to a more diverse future. Bringing great talent into an industry is not the same as threading that talent up to leadership, and the gender gap at the top of L&D is astounding considering it’s a predominantly female field.
2019 research data showed that while women are coming into the learning field as 2/3 of support roles, and many assume women lead the field, they actually comprise less than 1/3 of senior authority roles at the leadership level. Compared to a male-dominated field like finance, Kaliouby notes, “It’s even worse news because we have more women in the learning sector, and we’re still flipping it: there’s more men than women leaders.”
#WomeninLearning has raised the conversation, even in the context of her own household: “I see my daughter, who is in the workforce, sharing her salary with her friends and speak adamantly that she can’t understand why the guys over there that didn’t do as well in school are making more money. They’re stating, ‘we’re not going to stand for this and we’re not going to stand for diversity of thought not to be valued’.”
Due to a recent company acquisition, Kaliouby has had the opportunity to become more familiar with Higher Education, and finds the approach to managing gender dynamics intriguing: “In Higher Education, the women actively state they don’t care about the title, but they want to earn equal pay. I think in the corporate world, we focused too much on wanting the right title, but if we’re never going to catch up on the salary, that’s to the side.”
Not only does the notion of not having equal room for women in leadership (“space for one”) work against women helping to bring other women up, but Kaliouby notes that the ‘confidence gap’ has a real basis in hiring trends: “Women are hired on their experience not their potential, and men are hired on their potential,” she says. “And that is the biggest disaster in regards to the gender gap in learning.” Women self-select themselves out of applying for a job if they do not have the exact background and this is even more limiting (we can’t get there if we are not even applying for the roles).
She notes that 94% of C-Suite women have all played a sport, and playing sports builds both a grit and resilience, as well as learning what you’re particularly skilled at, and what you’re not.
So she recommends picking up a new sport: “If you pick up something brand-new, you’ll know what it’s like to start and be an entry level person. You’ll know that awkward feeling, the ability not to fully understand your full map, and you might develop another angle of empathy as well.”
A two-time member of the USFA National gold medal women’s sabre fencing team herself, Kaliouby recently began a couple of new sports, including pickle ball. She accredits her athletic background for giving her a perseverance that has served her professional journey.
A Lifelong Appreciation of Self-Development
“I could have been a full-time student forever. That was always my desire, she says. “I do feel like I’m a lifelong learner now.”
When reflecting back on her passion and love for learning, Kaliouby feels the valuing of education in her Irish Catholic family home in Boston imprinted strongly upon her. She witnessed her father get his diploma while employed as a Policeman, and he emphasized to her that the one thing someone can never take away from you is your intelligence. He went on to become a university professor of criminal justice. Though she lost him young, her own passion for learning today carries on his legacy of the drive to realize further capacities and visions that are seeded within oneself.
Both of her daughters, top achievers academically, carried on the family legacy of valuing education and learned Arabic growing up (with mom auditing class with them as well), as their father is Egyptian. In addition to continuing her sports participation with fencing, pickle ball and more, learning sign language is the next personal stretch that Kaliouby has her eyes set on.
By: Aimee Hansen
Learning Pool offers innovative learning platforms not only including the LXP Stream, but also a Learning Management System and a Learning Record Store (LRS) titled Learning Locker (one of the most downloaded LRS’ in the world). Learning Pool also offers off the shelf courseware (as well as custom courses). Kaliouby is most proud of the Corporate Social Responsibility courses made available for ALL at no cost on their website – including courses focused on climate change, mental health, stress, anxiety and the uncomfortable truth of racial inequality.
Sara Coelho: Partner, Financial Restructuring & Insolvency, Shearman & Sterling LLP
People, Voices of ExperienceCoelho talks about why her practice is a jack-of-all-trades art, standing her ground as a woman and the creativity of receptivity within law.
The “Liberal Arts Area of Law”
With Shearman & Sterling since 2016, and promoted to partner this past July, Coelho has been in the insolvency practice for fifteen years.
“Any time you have an insolvency situation, by definition people can’t follow the law. When something isn’t working, you get to take a deep dive into why and have to figure out a way to make something of that, and the tools really vary depending on the business,” she says. “Every situation has its own dimensions, so you constantly get to learn something new. If you are a liberal arts major, you would like what I do.”
Coelho continues, “I’m often doing things I have no prior expertise in, for example, negotiating tax debt and tax statutes, because of the underlying needs of the situation,” she further explains. “Sometimes we litigate to get to a resolution of a dispute. Sometimes we create deals. We’ll use any field of law to construct a deal that takes the situation to a better place.”
Her area is so flexible that when students ask her about a typical day, Coelho tells them to give her a year and she’ll say what she was doing in that period of time. Collaboration with other lawyers and financial advisors is critical to her work: often part of the solution is bringing in the expert who knows the tried-and-true approach, and another is confronting an issue alien to anything she’s ever done. Hence, the sophistication of problems, quality of people and intellectual challenges have held her attention in this field.
The Creativity of Receptivity
Coelho feels persistence has served her. She has always been able to put her head down and commit to a project she’s taken on. She’s been called a “lawyer’s lawyer” in that she has an analytical curiosity and loves to go deep into a problem, which means encouraging a spaciousness for unexpected solutions.
“There’s often a real reluctance to bring forward something that is a little off the wall,” she observes, “but you could miss an opportunity that way.”
In law, creativity is often less conceiving of something new and bringing it into existence, but rather an artful receptivity to the hidden key that already exists that you’re not yet seeing.
“So much of law is a very set underlying body of concepts, and people lose track of a big percentage of it. So often there is just something lurking there, that’s pretty direct and obvious, but actually very hard to see if you don’t come at it with an open mindset,” she explains. “It’s a receptivity, an orientation of faith that there’s going to be useful things that emerge. It’s a melding of a creative mindset with the orthodox.”
Staking Her Ground As A Woman
While Coelho admits her field has an inadequate representation of women, especially senior partners, she also often finds there are more women than she realized. She also feels the reputation of being male-dominated deters women from considering a field they might thrive in: “There are women who are thriving in all of the difficult roles and more than you would think.”
At the same time, Coelho acknowledges that she does feels some pressure to be beyond perfect and tends to speak concisely, getting to her point quickly while she has the moment, whereas she witnesses men talk at length without the social pressure to be precise.
“I’m working on trying to take up more time and space, and defending the perimeter to be able to do that,” she notes, “because sometimes you can’t appropriately advocate otherwise.”
Coelho acknowledges that being a woman distinguishes you, but that advantage can backfire if you’re perceived as the woman lawyer and especially if there’s a general assumption of irrelevance.
For example, on a conference call for a major deal where both Coelho and another female counterpart lawyer represented different clients with predictably different perspectives, the opposing side confused their two arguments, because, she suspects, the woman lawyers’ voices were understood as interchangeable. Coelho finds it hard to imagine that same bewildering lack of differentiation occurring for a man.
“Things still go on, but at the same time, you’re just focused on the problem and the work,” says Coelho. She notes that self-validating verbal feedback from highly respected top lawyers has been a touchstone to measure her lawyering and has kept her from falling into an unproductive level of self-questioning, especially when she’s confronted with aggression or doubt.
Clarifying The “Stupid Questions“
In addition to helping associates become familiar with the essential craft of her “renaissance profession,” Coelho seeks to demystify some of the basics that challenged her. When she first began, she felt one of the hardest parts was just figuring out how things got done – down to how you frame an e-mail and how long you wait to chase up on it.
Coelho volunteers information and invites the conversation around questions she found perplexing when starting out, especially if the response she had was reactive or dismissive: “I try to ask, what would have been the most constructive response for me?”
“For example, as a lawyer, to say how much time should I spend on something is a very loaded question because obviously you should do the best job possible for the client. Well, the best job possible might mean thousands of hours or significant expense, and maybe the client doesn’t want that,” she notes. “So there’s always this judgment about how exactly to approach the problem, how much depth to go in and what are the optimal things to focus on. These are complex judgements people have to make, so I like to be transparent about that kind of process.”
Boiling down why inviting questions as a senior lawyer is important, Coelho says: “The stupid question is the most important one to ask because you definitely don’t want to make a stupid mistake.”
For women in particular, Coelho also emphasizes the importance of really stepping back to ask what you personally want, rather than letting the ongoing demands of your external environment, including simply keeping up with the work, dictate where you end up.
An Unforgettable Mentor
Coelho considers her grandmother the most mindful person she has ever met. As a child, Coelho would join her in hanging laundry, picking fruit or doing some other form of tending to ordinary things.
The most unforgettable moment that affected her was listening to her grandmother talk about one single lemon with such elaborate understanding and appreciation that it underlined a whole wisdom of her Grandmother’s way of living in the world: “Listening to her talk about this lemon and what it was, exactly why it had a different flavor than others and how you would use it, in such depth, crystallized for me her way of being and how wonderful that is. And how much better life is, if you can bring that sort of appreciation and experience to whatever it is you’re doing.”
Coelho adores her three and a half year old son, Caleb, and, in addition to being a prolific reader of social sciences “light” and economics, loves to garden – and as her grandmother, tend attentively to the small and sacred matters of the home.
By Aimee Hansen
OP-Ed: The Economic Cost of the Menopause
Guest Contribution, NewsThe conversation is warming up. It’s capturing media attention. Celebrities and even politicians are endorsing the movement to normalise the conversation. They’re shining a spotlight on the necessity to overtly acknowledge the menopause for the sake of womankind.
But there’s another angle here and that is the economic implications that are hiding in plain sight.
Menopausal women are the fastest-growing demographic in the workplace, but worldwide, they’re sliding into perimenopause at an age when they’re at the peak of their careers.
According to the ‘Women in the Workplace 2021’ report by McKinsey, it’s women who are doing more to support their teams and advance diversity, equity, and inclusion.
There’s a plethora of research suggesting that companies with a higher percentage of women in senior leadership positions, are more profitable because women bring a different mindset to the business world and their emotional intelligence is far more superior.
But this isn’t a case for supporting women in business, that’s a non-negotiable. The issue is whose supporting them in doing this critical work and to what cost if their emotional wellness is being tested, and they themselves feel under valued and isolated.
The statistics around this demonstrate the urgency. A 2021 survey conducted by Circle Health in conjunction with the Victorian Women’s Trust revealed some truths about what’s really going on in the workplace:
The results go on to highlight the lack of support available for women in the workplace. Maybe this is due to the blissful ignorance of employers or maybe there’s an inherent embarrassment of poking around in a subject related the female reproductive system.
Another survey conducted by BUPA in conjunction with the CIPD found that three in five menopausal women, usually aged between 45 and 55 were ‘negatively affected at work’. And that ‘almost 900,000 women in the UK left their jobs over an undefined period of time because of menopausal symptoms’.
While the number of women representing board positions in FTSE 100 companies has increased there is another dimension we must consider if they’re to remain there. So what impact is menopause having on the talent pipeline?
Aside from the risk posed to the pool of talented and skilled female expertise there’s the wider impact on productivity, morale and diversity which all lead back to the bottom line. It’s estimated that 14 million working days are lost each year due to menopausal related symptoms, and in the last 3 years, menopausal related tribunal cases have tripled.
The prevalence of menopause policies is increasing but it’s not enough to just tick the menopause policy box, publish it on the intranet and assume it’s covered. It’s not, and it happens.
I worked for a FTSE 100 company for 17 years, and I know there is a policy lurking behind layers of web pages that nobody knows anything about. More importantly, it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of supporting a woman during this transition. A menopause policy needs to be all encompassing, appeal to employees of all genders, and it needs to have a richness that really supports both the physical and mental impact on women and the ripple effect on colleagues. It needs to engage with stakeholders to understand what precisely that specific environment needs. It needs to weave into a programme that’s immersed so deeply in the culture that it creates a sense of normality. It needs to be quantifiable and the impact measurable.
But there is light on the horizon, and the world is slowly rising from its menopause slumber.
Standard Chartered Bank has partnered with the Financial Services Skills Commission (FSSC) to better understand the challenges faced by women going through the menopause transition at work, and how this impacts the talent pipeline across the UK’s financial services industry. In addition companies such as HSBC UK, Natwest Group and CMS have all been accredited as menopause friendly employers.
In one sense of the word the ‘change’ is here, and it couldn’t be further away in another. We live in an era of equality, diversity and inclusion and we all have a responsibility to play in cracking this taboo.
Look no further than the mirror. If we as women are not comfortable in saying ‘menopause’ how can we expect our husbands, partners, managers and colleagues to get on board with it. It’s easy for me, I’m immersed in my bubble of menopause. I live and breathe it day in and day out although, I admit, I wasn’t at first. What is clear to me is the more I talk about it, the more it’s accepted as the norm, so we need to lead from the front.
We are leaders, entrepreneurs, board members, and there’s no limit to our talent and capabilities. But the responsibility is twofold. As our bodies change, we have a responsibility to adapt. And while there is no legal requirement to introduce menopause policies, employers have a moral, ethical and financial obligation.
Lesley Tait is a Menopause Coach and an Emotional Wellbeing Coach. Lesley specialises in helping corporate women struggling with menopause symptoms resulting in loss of confidence, self esteem issues & performance issues, because of which life & career goals are getting derailed. Find her at: www.hersupremeself.com on LinkedIn, or write to her at lesley@hersupremeself.com
Cheryl Akawie: Head of U.S. Investment Grade Research, PGIM Fixed Income
People, Voices of ExperienceAkawie speaks to holding to your values, the importance of curiosity and why you want to learn from and be the kind of leader you respect.
An Ever-Changing Context
Joining Prudential out of Lehigh University as a finance major, Akawie relatively quickly gravitated from investment auditing to working directly with investments, where she felt her skills and interest would be optimized.
For over 28 years, she’s been working in investments–covering some of the major sectors she began with, such as telecom and cable–and stretching into new sectors such as media and technology.
“Everything changes–the companies have changed, the industries change. Right now, the tech industry is going through tremendous change,” says Akawie. “I’m watching which companies will be winners and losers, so my job stays interesting even within the same sectors.”
Akawie calls herself a ‘credit geek’: “I like to dig into the details of companies and figure out what makes them tick and what they might do next. What will make them successful or not successful as things change–will the big names in linear television be successful when the world has moved to streaming?”
She appreciates how integrated the investment process is from start to finish at PGIM Fixed Income, with hand-in-hand collaboration between analysts and portfolio managers. Taking on a new position leading the U.S. investment grade research team a couple years back has allowed her to support experts across the various sectors, helping ensure the well-established investment process runs smoothly and her teams’ contributions are recognized.
Holding To Your Values
“To me, what has mattered in my success has been being true to myself and not compromising my beliefs. That applies in many different ways,” says Akawie. “For example, I could not be on the sell-side and push an investment idea if I didn’t believe in it. As an analyst, I analyze it and tell it like it is. I’m not going to hold back on my views. Being on the buy-side, we don’t have to buy everything, so it has always been a good natural home for me.”
Going further, she expresses: “I think that principle has stood through all aspects of my career and added to my leadership. You should never compromise your values and you should be willing to stand up for what’s right. You should be willing to stand up for your team.”
Moving into a leadership role has meant taking a more holistic view not only in looking comparatively across industries, but also putting herself in the shoes of others when making organizational decisions.
“If we’re trying to revamp a process, I have to consider what may work better for the team,” she says. “As a leader, it’s important to step out of my role and put myself as the team leader and the organizational leader to consider what is best for the team, regardless of whether it would negatively impact or be inconvenient for me.”
Choosing Your Leadership Approach
Akawie feels her promotion largely came down to her track record on training up more junior analysts across the years. She enjoys working with junior talent and imparting her skills to help develop their ability to analyze, especially appreciating the moment when it all “clicks,” which she argues only happens when the analyst learns to combine fundamental credit research analysis and the relative value decision around which bonds to own.
Her personal leadership approach is to be relatable and approachable, and she keeps an open door policy.
“I had to figure out what kind of leader I wanted to be, and I’ve had different kinds of managers over the years. I’ve had the micromanager, where they want to check over everything that you do. I’ve had the more hands-off manager that recognizes you are a professional,” she says. “I chose to emulate my style more from the latter, because I respected when I was on the other side. I’m here if you need me. I’ll be your coach and advocate. But to get from here to there, use your own style, as long as you get it done.”
Myth-busting: Not All Investment Careers are Investment Banking
In addition to running the investment grade credit research group, Akawie is actively involved in recruiting for the credit research team in addition to sitting on the Talent Council, so she has a special window into the underrepresentation of women.
“It really frustrates me that even now it’s still such a male-dominated industry and in any meeting, there are still noticeably fewer women in the room,” says Akawie, who feels a perception issue plays into this.
“There’s still this perception that all investment careers are investment banking, where you don’t have a life,” she says. “I really wish there was a way to get the message out to young women that there are plenty of fulfilling, lucrative careers that you can have in asset management that don’t involve working 18-hour days and weekends. You can actually live a balanced life while also being a successful investment professional.”
Passion And Curiosity Go A Long Way
Akawie feels that having a passion for investments, as well as a strong intellectual curiosity, is a cornerstone of being a successful credit analyst or portfolio manager.
“Your mind should always be open because you can find investment ideas anywhere. You hear something on the news, or you read an article in Barron’s–you see something not necessarily in your industry, but it could be related,” she notes. “It’s that intellectual curiosity and passion that matters, because it won’t seem like a job, and you’ll have a long and dynamic career.”
Akawie also presses that it’s a measure of intelligence to be honest about what you don’t know, and that it’s critical to remember that in the world of investments, you’re never going to get everything right.
“We’re investing in corporate bonds. They’re not guaranteed. You’re not going to be right 100% of the time,” she says. “One of the harder things when you’re trying to transition somebody from a junior analyst to a senior analyst is developing that willingness to stick your neck out, express your opinion and not be afraid to be wrong. And if you are wrong, admit and own it, don’t make excuses, simply learn and move on.”
She leverages her own curiosity to convert the occasional missed call into a learning experience: “I often review, and I’ll ask what did I miss? What could I have done differently? And, then you make a better investment decision next time because of what you learned this time.”
Being A Leader You Would Respect
Akawie has found informal mentorships are the most valuable kinds of mentoring, which comes back to being open and approachable.
“To be a mentor or to be a mentee, you have to open up and not be afraid to share parts of yourself–so that people actually get to know you and they’re willing to share their secret sauce,” she says. “And I think that comes from having personal relationships. If everything is just business, I think it makes it hard for that relationship to develop.”
When choosing who you wish to learn from, Akawie goes with whom she truly respects. For her, that’s someone who takes pride in their work and gives their full energy, earning the respect of their team, because this is what she values and wishes to do.
Akawie loves traveling the world and seeing new cultures, which have included Africa, Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. Currently, she’s steeped in her latest passion of home remodeling.
By: Aimee Hansen
Women in Facilities Management: An Opportunity to Lead?
Career Advice, Guest Contribution, NewsA 2020 report by the ILO painted a discouraging picture: the report found that only limited progress had been made for the full and effective participation and equal opportunities of women in leadership positions in the workplace.
The report, prepared for the Empowerment and Progression of Women’s Economic Representation (EMPOWER), found that was true of every country in the G20, which includes the United States, over the past 10 years.
It gets even worse for American working women regarding the gender-based quality of their working environment, with a 2018 survey placing the United States a lowly 20th out of 29 OECD countries in the so-called ‘Glass Ceiling Index.’
“Pink” vs “blue” jobs
In a 2019 report, The Economist concluded that, even with strides made by women in typically ‘male’ industries, the tendency in the U.S. was that men still tended to pick “blue jobs” while women still opted for “pink jobs”. This, unfortunately, seems to prevail in the facilities management industry.
Women in Facilities Management, the only professional organization in the U.S. focused solely on furthering the advancement of women in commercial facilities management, notes that “…even today, facilities management continues to be one of the most male-dominated career paths”. The same organization cites a recent study that found that men still outnumber women in facilities management leadership roles by an astounding nine to one.
For the record, male-dominated occupations are those that have 25% or fewer women in them, which could certainly describe the facilities management industry in the U.S.
Benefits of more women in facilities management
Generally, there are many benefits to having more women in management positions. A major survey of 745 female and male corporate leaders conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership found that workplaces with more women tended to be better to work for all employees, regardless of gender. Employees in those organizations also felt more dedication to their organization and found their work more meaningful work. Interestingly, they also suffered less from burnout.
Industry experts have asserted that women could actually be uniquely qualified for leadership roles in facilities management. How so? It mostly boils down to emotional intelligence (EQ). Women, who tend to have higher EQ rates than men, benefit from attributes such as self-awareness, self-management, strong social skills, and, very importantly, empathy.
Even for a mostly technical, ‘nuts and bolts’ industry such as facilities management, every one of those attributes can only be beneficial for employees, resulting in higher productivity rates and overall efficiency. This is backed by research specific to the industry that found that gender-diverse teams make better decisions and are better at complex problem-solving. It was also shown that having more female leadership resulted in improved work culture.
Case studies: successful women in FM
Fortunately, there is a growing number of American women who have risen to leadership positions within the FM industry. This only bodes well for the industry. Below are three such case studies:
Case study 1: Cheryl Carron
Cheryl Carron is the Global Operations Lead for Integrated Facilities Management (IFM) and Experience Services (ES) for JLL Work Dynamics. She leads a global team of experts that enable the delivery of IFM and ES products and services to the company’s clients worldwide. Charron has had a career spanning nearly 30 years in real estate and integrated facilities management. Prior to joining JLL Work Dynamics in May 2021, Cheryl served as President of IFM, North America, for Sodexo, the latter of which has won numerous quality workplace-related awards in recent years.
Case study 2: Elizabeth Vasek
Elizabeth Vasek is a facilities manager at the Ford Foundation in New York City. She has openly discussed how she encountered a lot of “mansplaining” early in her career, which included men explaining technical terms to her in a patronizing tone. She did find this intimidating but found that she could overcome these sexist obstacles by asserting herself and not being afraid to ask questions when needed. She found that having a mentor and being part of a network of fellow women professionals helped immensely in building her knowledge and growing her self-esteem.
Case study 3: Jill Frey
Jill Frey is the owner and president of Cummins Facility Services (CFS), a national multi-faceted facility management company based in Marion, Ohio, that services Fortune 500 companies across the US. CFS is a 100% female-owned enterprise that provides janitorial, landscaping, snow removal, HVAC, security, floor care, and light maintenance services to clients in various industries. Frey took over managing the family business in 1994 and turned it into the FM success story that it is today.
“Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor”
In the conclusion of this article, it’s worth noting what Michelle Bachelet, the former President of Chile, once said: “Educational equality doesn’t guarantee equality on the labor market. Even the most developed countries are not gender-equal. There are still glass ceilings and ‘leaky pipelines’ that prevent women from getting ahead in the workplace.”
Her analogy of glass ceilings and leaky pipelines seems tailor-made for the facilities management industry.
It’s an industry that will undoubtedly benefit from a growing and more equitable number of women in leadership roles. And every woman in the FM industry would do well to remember the words of the brilliant author, Aldous Huxley: “Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor.”
Bryan Christiansen is the founder and CEO of Limble CMMS. Limble is a modern, easy-to-use mobile CMMS software that takes the stress and chaos out of maintenance by helping managers organize, automate, and streamline their maintenance operations.
Sharon Claffey Kaliouby: VP Strategic Alliances, Learning Pool
Movers and Shakers, PeopleAs a leader in the field of learning and development (L&D), Kaliouby speaks to her life-long love of learning, why paradoxically breaking our educational conditioning is inherent to professional success, and the quandary of the L&D leadership gender gap.
Learning is About Sharing, Not Just Knowing
Named one of the Top 50 Leaders in Learning & Development in 2019 and honored as Learning Professional of the Year in 2018 by The Learning & Performance Institute, Kaliouby is passionate about helping organizations to drive their goals forward by building individual and organization-wide capabilities through education.
“You can spend your entire life doing something that everybody else thinks you should do,” she advises her own daughters. “Or you can do something you totally love and are passionate about, and feel truly alive. That’s the direction you should always go. Stick with your inner gut and don’t let anyone change your mind.”
Kaliouby worked in-house for nearly twenty years before making an intentional move to Learning Pool, a pioneering full-service customized e-learning provider working across a large international client base, from companies to NGOs to higher education.
Kaliouby speaks emphatically about reframing what we value in and how we experience learning: “As we go through our educational system, and almost anywhere in the world, there is one thing that collaboration is usually called: cheating. Collaboration in the school system is called cheating, so we’re educated not to collaborate.”
In academia, success often means not sharing your knowledge but that flips the moment we exit formal education. She notes women are disproportionately represented among top students but not top executives. The early displaced value on autonomous success can also stunt institutional development.
“Innovative organizations are sharing cultures who want employees to share their success and knowledge with other colleagues. You’re not elevated in the organization based on how much more you know than others, but how much you share the knowledge,“ observes Kaliouby.
Learning that Values Your Participation
With Learning Pool, the L&D objectives begin with asking what learning is going to be most directly valuable to the core organizational goals. The strategic approach is that learners not only comprehend the content, but are also involved in their education, with their participation being a factor in the measure of their learning success. Sharing (such as comments in an online forum) becomes weighted by the richness of knowledge the individual holds and shares, rather than their title.
Kaliouby is increasingly motivated by Learning Pool’s Learning Experience Platform (LXP) Stream, which is designed to enable the self-determined learner to find and to access particular courses they need or want for themselves. She points out that the rush to compulsory online education in the past eighteen months widely replicated the classroom rather than customizing education for the positive capabilities of this medium, and this has potentially created resistance to online learning among a whole generation of students. But at the same time, that challenging experience may compel reflection from those students, based on what they truly needed, that compels developments yet to come in the L&D space.
Going Back to Being Human and Being Learners
When it comes to remote working, ‘upskilling’ and ‘reskilling’ are part of the hot themes right now, and with Covid-19, the L&D field has moved towards the human side of business in many ways – such as skilling up on EQ, capacity for empathy and holistic communication skills.
“Some people that were hired as a CEO in 2018 were not equipped to be the chief empathy office of 2020 or 2021. But what’s nice is the human equation is now being valued, as much as learning data analytics in the scientific backgrounds were highly valued,” notes Kaliouby. “We need soft skills now because we’re all in crisis mode, but I hope it’s more than a trend.”
From her perspective, we’re circling back to the 1990’s when family and kids were invited into the office or gatherings. Whereas in the 2000’s, the 9/11 and financial crises put sustained employment into more jeopardy, and it became safer emotionally not to know each other so personally. With Zoom, we’re invited back into witnessing colleagues in their lives outside of work, and this impacts learning too.
“Now, we want learning to be about the whole person. When you’re learning something in your organization, to better the business goals, you also want to be building for yourself too,” says Kaliouby. “You’re building knowledge that’s going to make you a different, more insightful or more aware person, regardless of what the topic is.”
She notes that for the first time, a lot of people have the space and bandwidth to take up guitar or language lessons online, for example, rather than just be entertained. We are in some way becoming learners again, who wish to be effective in all spherical aspects of our lives.
Why Are There Too Few Women Leaders in L&D?
In 2013, Kaliouby became the co-founder of #WomeninLearning, which actively promotes women in learning and leadership – supporting an awareness of gender equality and an environment committed to a more diverse future. Bringing great talent into an industry is not the same as threading that talent up to leadership, and the gender gap at the top of L&D is astounding considering it’s a predominantly female field.
2019 research data showed that while women are coming into the learning field as 2/3 of support roles, and many assume women lead the field, they actually comprise less than 1/3 of senior authority roles at the leadership level. Compared to a male-dominated field like finance, Kaliouby notes, “It’s even worse news because we have more women in the learning sector, and we’re still flipping it: there’s more men than women leaders.”
#WomeninLearning has raised the conversation, even in the context of her own household: “I see my daughter, who is in the workforce, sharing her salary with her friends and speak adamantly that she can’t understand why the guys over there that didn’t do as well in school are making more money. They’re stating, ‘we’re not going to stand for this and we’re not going to stand for diversity of thought not to be valued’.”
Due to a recent company acquisition, Kaliouby has had the opportunity to become more familiar with Higher Education, and finds the approach to managing gender dynamics intriguing: “In Higher Education, the women actively state they don’t care about the title, but they want to earn equal pay. I think in the corporate world, we focused too much on wanting the right title, but if we’re never going to catch up on the salary, that’s to the side.”
Not only does the notion of not having equal room for women in leadership (“space for one”) work against women helping to bring other women up, but Kaliouby notes that the ‘confidence gap’ has a real basis in hiring trends: “Women are hired on their experience not their potential, and men are hired on their potential,” she says. “And that is the biggest disaster in regards to the gender gap in learning.” Women self-select themselves out of applying for a job if they do not have the exact background and this is even more limiting (we can’t get there if we are not even applying for the roles).
She notes that 94% of C-Suite women have all played a sport, and playing sports builds both a grit and resilience, as well as learning what you’re particularly skilled at, and what you’re not.
So she recommends picking up a new sport: “If you pick up something brand-new, you’ll know what it’s like to start and be an entry level person. You’ll know that awkward feeling, the ability not to fully understand your full map, and you might develop another angle of empathy as well.”
A two-time member of the USFA National gold medal women’s sabre fencing team herself, Kaliouby recently began a couple of new sports, including pickle ball. She accredits her athletic background for giving her a perseverance that has served her professional journey.
A Lifelong Appreciation of Self-Development
“I could have been a full-time student forever. That was always my desire, she says. “I do feel like I’m a lifelong learner now.”
When reflecting back on her passion and love for learning, Kaliouby feels the valuing of education in her Irish Catholic family home in Boston imprinted strongly upon her. She witnessed her father get his diploma while employed as a Policeman, and he emphasized to her that the one thing someone can never take away from you is your intelligence. He went on to become a university professor of criminal justice. Though she lost him young, her own passion for learning today carries on his legacy of the drive to realize further capacities and visions that are seeded within oneself.
Both of her daughters, top achievers academically, carried on the family legacy of valuing education and learned Arabic growing up (with mom auditing class with them as well), as their father is Egyptian. In addition to continuing her sports participation with fencing, pickle ball and more, learning sign language is the next personal stretch that Kaliouby has her eyes set on.
By: Aimee Hansen
Learning Pool offers innovative learning platforms not only including the LXP Stream, but also a Learning Management System and a Learning Record Store (LRS) titled Learning Locker (one of the most downloaded LRS’ in the world). Learning Pool also offers off the shelf courseware (as well as custom courses). Kaliouby is most proud of the Corporate Social Responsibility courses made available for ALL at no cost on their website – including courses focused on climate change, mental health, stress, anxiety and the uncomfortable truth of racial inequality.
Women in Tech: Is a “Widespread Cultural Reset” on the Horizon?
Career Advice, News, Women in TechnologyCOVID-19 Disproportionately Affected Women In Tech, Too
A recent tech report by Kapersky showed that over half of surveyed IT professionals felt that women in senior tech roles had increased and gender equality had improved.
But nearly half the women in tech felt COVID-19 effects had delayed, not accelerated, their own career progression, largely due to the challenges of balancing home/work life while taking on a disproportional amount of cleaning, childcare, and homeschooling responsibilities. Four out of every ten women felt these pressures had kept them from pursuing career changes, and the same amount felt men had faster career progression. Not to mention that male-majority teams dominate female-majority teams at nearly a 5 to 1 ratio.
Another 2021 “Women in Tech Report” by TrustRadius shared that women were equally as likely to claim the pandemic had a negative impact on their careers as a positive one. But men (54%) were more likely than women (42%) to perceive the remote work office in the past year had been positive for women.
57% of women in tech felt burnt out, relative to only 36% of men. Women in tech were more likely to have worked overtime, taken on more responsibility at work, and have much greater childcare responsibility than male counterparts. They were also twice as likely to have lost their jobs or been furloughed since the pandemic began.
The report found that “bro culture” remained pervasive in tech firms, but interestingly only 63% of women in IT/engineering roles reported this, relative to 80%+ in sales and marketing roles in tech firms.
Intervention: Unbiasing Systems and Caregiving Support
In identifying the best tech companies for women, Anita B concluded from their 2021 Top Companies for Women Technologists report that those organizations which focused on unbiasing systems such as recruitment and performance management, rather than just training on raising awareness of bias, had much stronger representation of black women and Latinx women. The report found that companies with mandatory training on unbiasing the hiring process have 20% more tech women and tech women hires.
When it comes to women of color, companies that provide caregiving support as a benefit had higher levels of black and Latinx women, especially at the senior and executive levels. Companies that conducted intersectional pay audits had 30% more women hires, 90% more black women hires, and 80% more Latinx women hires.
Wake-up Call: “Widespread Cultural Reset”
Accenture’s Resetting Tech Culture 2020 report found that an inclusive culture that enables everyone’s voice to be heard at both the academic and professional levels is the “master key that unlocks opportunities for women who are studying and working in technology.” The pillars of “more-inclusive culture”, underpinned by 40 specific factors, are “bold leadership, comprehensive action and empowering environment”.
For example, only 1 in 20 tech women feel like an “outsider” in more-inclusive colleges, whereas 1 in 4 women feel this way in less-inclusive colleges. Among more-inclusive cultures, all women are much more likely to see a clear pathway from studying STEM to a related career and are much more likely to enjoy their jobs. And while literally half of women in tech roles among less-inclusive cultures feel they are made to feel their job is “not for people like them”, this drops to 16% in more-inclusive cultures. Also, in more- inclusive workplace cultures, the likelihood of women advancing to manager and beyond by age 30 increases by 61%; for women of color it increases by a staggering 77%.”
But Accenture found that HR professionals tend to significantly undervalue the importance of building a more-inclusive culture and support in retaining and advancing women in tech roles, only 38% seeing it as effective, when it’s the number one reason why women leave tech jobs, and alongside with more role models, the top factor listed for attraction.
Accenture is advocating for a “widespread cultural reset” to drive the much-needed change in tech, projecting in just one example, that if every company had a culture like the top 20% more-inclusive ones, annual attrition of women in tech could drop by 70% and 1.4 million more women would be retained by 2030.
Overall, Fortune points out that women need the same conditions to thrive in tech as anyone needs to thrive: “encouragement; hands-on tech discovery in school; the presence of role models in leadership positions; mentorship; executive sponsorship; fair pay; workplace inclusion; and the flexibility to parent while employed.”
By Aimee Hansen
Loredana Crisan: VP, Messaging Experience — Messenger & Instagram
Intrepid Women Series, People, Women in TechnologyQ. You’ve gone from studying musical composition in Romania, to product and graphic design in tech, to heading up the entire product experience on Messenger. What thread have you followed to be where you are?
My formal education is in classical music, and I didn’t study STEM or design in school. It would have been easy for people to brush me off and assume I wasn’t qualified for a career in tech. However, my educational background in music composition and the years spent practicing an instrument has helped shape my focus on long term outcomes and helped me develop my own leadership and problem-solving skills.
My success was not a straight path, especially not being an American and not trained as a designer. But, I never thought of these as hurdles, instead I remained open to opportunities.
I did not make an explicit decision to work in tech — I joined a start-up as a sound engineer. We were working on a product, and I really wanted to make that product better. To do that, I had to switch mediums from sound to visuals. Using my creativity from music, I went from different mediums, sound to UI. Moving to Product, I went from creating the experience to executing the experience, and leaning into the vision for how people use the experience.
Q. How do you see the tech industry as enhanced by non-traditional candidates like yourself?
As a product team leader, when recruiting, I seek out qualities like resourcefulness, creativity, and other traits that don’t necessarily jump off the page when reading a resume or browsing a LinkedIn profile.
I’d encourage all product leaders to be more open-minded throughout the recruitment process. Just because a candidate’s background differs from the conventional, doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified.
Q. We understand you are passionate about “relinquishing gender stereotypes” in the tech industry. Tell us more about your experience as a woman in tech.
I honestly wish the world was a lot less gendered. Biases exist of course, but looking at my tween kids, they’re starting to reject these constructs and it’s so much freer for them.
I’ve worked in male-dominated industries quite a bit. I have a deep belief that regardless of gender, if you overcome imposter feelings, you learn, develop and grow. I don’t stop to think about what would have happened if I wasn’t a woman.
I’ve learned to embrace my inner self and inner weirdness and break away from stereotypes – even gender. You can see this expressed in artwork we design on Messenger. We’re hoping to help people express how they really feel whether that’s through an AR effect, camera sticker, or 360-degree immersive background.
Q. You emphasize “creating vs. achieving” as a secret to your success. Can you expand on what this means to you?
In a music setting, you don’t just pick what you want to play and skip ahead to the performance. It’s all about what goes into the preparation and development of that performance.
This is true for product teams too. Focusing on the outcome exclusively robs your team of the joy of paying attention to the details. To set your team up for success, allow them to focus on the flow of making something exciting every step of the way.
For example, earlier this year when we unveiled Soundmojis, our team was focused on creating fun, delightful sounds that could be used across a broad range of contexts. In one instance, our sound engineers even travelled to an organic California farm to record actual goats! By allowing my team to be creative and enjoy the process of developing the Soundmojis, we were ultimately able to create experiences that are also fun for our users.
Q. You have paralleled building a team of experts to auditioning a band and compared working with teams to creating a symphony. Can you tell us more?
The beauty of an orchestra performance lies in hearing very different instruments come together to create one harmonious and complex piece of music. Whether you’re performing in front of an audience, developing hardware, or creating a new user interface (UI), putting together an effective team means thinking in a holistic manner.
If you were to hire only cellists for an orchestra, the resulting music would be limited to their specialist capabilities. It would miss the rhythmic beat of the percussion section, the timbre of the brass section, and so much more. Similarly, if you have a team made up of designers, your product may have a beautiful UI but clunky functionality supporting it. It’s only when you have the right mix of skills, along with an open work environment, that all the necessary elements can come together.
Also keep in mind that generalists can give your team more flexibility whereas specialists bring a high level of expertise in their field. When working on a project, having those generalists involved can help ensure every part of a product is getting the attention it needs throughout development. Any good team needs a mix of specialists and generalists to bring a variety of skills and perspectives to building products.
When we’re working, I like to tell my team to “mind the gap” – meaning the gap between what they do, whether that’s engineering, design, or business strategy, and what their teammates do. This is where the real opportunity lies for teams to be creative, push boundaries and deliver innovations to users.
Q. What particularly fascinates you and propels you each day?
Life happens on Messenger. Anything that can happen with friends and family can happen together on the app. It’s interesting to work on a product that has so much humanity baked in. When I decided not to be a musician anymore, I wanted to go back to school to learn psychology. Of course, much of psychology has to do with relationships. I was interested in how people relate to one another. Messenger is a place where people grow old and form new relationships.
Q. What does it mean to “push the boundaries” in your work? What are some of the key trends that grasp your attention, and where do you think we are going next?
To push the boundaries in modern communication means to continue to innovate how we can bring people together and build close connections via Messenger. Some key messaging trends that grasp my attention would be the evolution of multimedia, audio, and video.
Over 1.4 billion images are sent every day on Messenger–meaning nearly every 1 in 20 messages sent on Messenger is a photo. For the true math whizzes, that’s about 12,000 photos per second! While photos will always play an important role in visual communication and building close connections, I suspect that audio will begin to override image messaging as the trend continues to rise. Messenger hit an all-time high with people sending more than 400 million voice notes daily.
Additionally, video has become an extension of messaging, especially as keeping in touch took on a new level of importance as a global pandemic sent us all indoors. We had to adapt to a new way of communicating and with the pandemic in full swing, we saw the number of people in group video and audio calls nearly double earlier this year compared to last year, with time in calls growing 150%. To create a space where you could hang out and connect with your closest friends, Messenger also introduced Rooms and offered a virtual living room space to enjoy new memories when they couldn’t be in-person with Watch Together. It’s exciting to see all of the ways people are using the platform together.
Women In Tech: Why Tech Is Increasingly Desperate For Women
Career Advice, News, Women in TechnologyGlobal Acceleration of Tech Transformation
In 2019 and 2020, technology compromised 10% and 10.5% of US GDP, nothing compared to where it will go. The 2020 McKinsey Global Survey of executives reports how much COVID-19 has accelerated the global tech revolution: speeding up digital customer interactions by three years and digital products/services by seven years.
Whereas executives had envisioned shifts such as remote working capabilities and increased used of advanced technologies in business strategy to take 454 and 635 days respectively, these shifts happened in real time in just 10.5 and 25 day in 2020.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that tech and computer related occupations will grow by 13% from 2020 to 2030. Tech occupations have a median annual wage that are 117% more than median annual wage for all occupations.
The Dice Tech Job Report shows that after a dip in 2020, tech job postings were up by 30% in Q2 of 2021 versus a year ago, creating “one of the hottest market since the dot-com era.”
Shortage of Tech Talent Is Most Acute in U.S. Financial Services
Meanwhile, a shortage of tech talent is considered the top restraining factor for adopting 64% of new technologies, and Korn Ferry is forecasting that by 2030, 85 million jobs could go unfulfilled globally, resulting in a $8.5 trillion talent shorted.
The U.S. financial services sector is anticipated to be most affected by the talent shortage, resulting in a $435.69 billion shortfall forecast, a third of the global sector total, and is anticipated to be in acute deficit within the financial services sector. India is the only country projected to have a surplus of highly skilled finance and business services tech talent by 2030, with current surplus countries such as China, Russia and UK losing that footing.
“Global financial services players are already experiencing skilled-talent shortages and are set to face the greatest talent gap of any industry sector in the next decade,” states Michael Franzino, President of Global Financial Services at Korn Ferry. “Financial services leaders need to act now or they will forfeit substantial growth opportunity.”
Women’s Representation in Tech Industry
According to the Anita B report, 2021 Top Companies for Women Technologists, women’s participation in tech (among their wide sample of firms with 100+ tech employees) slid by 2.1% from March 2020 to January 2021, to just 26.7%, a backslide after five years of progress. (Tech giants such as Apple, Facebook, Netflix and Google did not participate, where women make up about 25% of tech positions.) 18% fewer women were brought into tech positions due to hiring freezes in 2020 with a rebound in January 2021, women representing 31% of new hires that month. The share of women being promoted remained steady.
Among the participating companies, women as tech CEOs jumped from 3.9% in 2020 to 10.0% in 2021. While white women were represented from entry level (13.1%) to executive leadership (15.3%) at similar levels, representation for women of color declines as the ladder goes up. And while Asian women begin almost in parity to white women at 12.6%, they only comprise 3.7% of executive seats.
In the UK, The Guardian notes that despite the decade long agenda of boosting female representation in technology, “the percentage of women employed in tech in the UK has barely moved from 15.7% in 2009 to 17% today. And women hold just 10% of leadership roles in the industry.”
Pioneered by Women, Now Unable to Attract and Retain Them
The underrepresentation of women in STEM is a persistent theme, with hurdles across seven different levels including the drastic erosion of women’s sense of belonging in the STEM field.
“Ironically, America’s tech industry started as a majority-female industry. As Mary Ann Sieghart notes in Wired, during the 1950s and ’60s, roughly 90 percent of programmers and systems analysts were women,” writes Victoria Mosby in BizTech. “By the 1990s, however, men held most of those positions.”
As recently as 1984, women comprised nearly 40% of computer science majors at U.S. universities, and women comprised 35% of tech workers. Today, fewer than 1 of 5 Chief Information Officers at the 1,000 biggest companies are women.
Accenture’s Resetting Tech Culture 2020 report shares that women leave tech roles at a 45% higher attrition rate than men, and 50% of women who take a tech role drop it by the age of 35, 2.5x more than attrition in other positions. Meanwhile, there’s a huge disconnection between HR leaders perception and the women working in tech: HR is twice as likely to perceive it’s easy for women to thrive in tech.
What needs to shift? Next week, theglasshammer focuses on how COVID-19 has impacted women in tech and why tech is crying out for what Accenture calls a “widespread cultural reset”.
By: Aimee Hansen
Stephanie Schultz: VP & Head of Partnerships, Amex Digital Labs
People, Voices of ExperienceSchultz talks looking ahead of yourself in the job hunt, going for the win-win in strategic partnerships, working in a get-it-right fintech culture and the merits of adaptive leadership.
“It’s About The Next, Next Job”
Having no clear idea of what exactly she wanted to do after college other than live in NYC, Schultz graduated with an economics and business degree from Lafayette College – feeling she’d have the breadth to explore her options while getting her feet wet.
But in 2009, she inherited a tough job market in which few of her peers were landing any positions. It was tempting to take the first offer that came – an executive assistant role at a small audio-visual music company – until a previous internship manager questioned whether it was the direction she truly wanted to go.
“She was the one who really encouraged me that whenever I was to think about a job, it’s not about that job. It’s about the next, next job,” reflects Schultz. “That was so important, because in the moment, I had not thought that way – and it was hard to turn down a job at a time when no one was getting them, but I did.”
Schultz kept applying, including at American Express. She did not get the first role she applied for, but the hiring leader recommended her for another better-suited opening, which she then landed.
“I didn’t plan to be working in fintech or at a financial services company, but I was attracted to the brand and the values of the company,” says Schultz. “So thinking about the next, next job, I realized I could spend a long time at Amex, learn a bunch of different things and really launch my career.”
Twelve years on, she’s moved from product development to heading up partnerships for Amex Digital Labs, the innovation hub working to make Amex a leader in fintech. Her team is focusing on developing the next generation of products, customer benefits and membership experiences across the evolving digital landscape through partnerships with both major tech companies and start-ups.
The Strategy of Win-Win Partnership in Fintech
“There is so much disruption happening in payments, which has really excited me and kept me passionate about the work itself,” says Schultz. “The technology is continuously evolving and so are customer needs. Payments are so foundational to everyday life, so it’s exciting to keep learning, to be on the cutting edge of improving and innovating, and to make a tangible impact in something that people do every single day.”
A recent product Schultz introduced, called Send & Split, was created in partnership with PayPal and Venmo, synonymous with peer-to-peer payments. Rather than create their own platform, the Amex Digital Labs team worked with PayPal and Venmo to develop a unique digital integration within the Amex mobile app to create a better customer experience – enabling Card Members to send money to friends and family without the standard Venmo or Paypal credit card fee. Her team also developed value-added features like enabling the splitting of transactions, such as an AirBNB stay or dinner, making it seamless to share bills and ease the social interactions between users.
Not only does she have a reputation for getting stuff done, but also for being able to navigate the tougher territories of strategic partnership. She feels if you come from a receptive solution space, there is often a win-win meeting ground to be found amidst conflict.
“I feel that throughout the years at Amex, I’ve been the person at the helm of some of the more complex questions or unique products,” reflects Schultz. “When a lot of people are saying it just can’t be done, that is the point at which they bring me in to help lead and figure it out.”
Her approach is not to force or strong-arm an outcome but rather – in the context of long-standing relationships across multiple lines of Amex business, complicated initiatives, and unchartered territories – to seek and find a workable and lasting solution for all involved.
“Building relationships is core to what I do, and it’s about thinking of the bigger picture and setting those partnerships up for success,” reflects Schultz. “I used to enter a negotiation feeling as though it’s my side versus your side. Throughout the years, I’ve completely shifted my perspective: it’s not me versus you. We’re in this together, and we want this to be a lasting partnership. So how do I find what really works for both of us? It’s about being real and authentic and transparent with your objectives, and what you’re both trying to achieve, and how you can get there most effectively, together.”
An Integrated Culture of Doing it Right
One of the hardest moments at work was the day Schultz told her boss she was pregnant, because she realized she was anxious about moving towards a time of managing multiple priorities, with family first, and how big of a change it would personally be for her.
“That was a difficult moment to navigate and come to that realization, but now has been the greatest gift of all,” says Schultz. “Becoming a mom has helped me to be more efficient and effective at prioritizing my time and has been a net positive thing on who I am as an all-around human being and empathetic leader.”
Fintech is not at all a “move fast and break things” culture as you might expect, because with working with heavy regulations and major tech companies, the work culture is far more focused on doing it right than just doing it fast.
“The culture at American Express has been something that has kept me in this role. It’s a culture that welcomes the diversity of perspectives and ideas and makes the space for that,” she observes. “You would think the culture might have multiple layers of hierarchy and you have to navigate that, but that has not been my experience. The expert is in the room while the presentation is happening.”
Former Amex Vice Chairman Ed Gillian, whom Schultz was inspired by, was often on the ground floor around projects that were driving digital transformation, working beside managers and analysts.
Digital Labs also has creative ways of cultivating inspiration, as ideas come from any direction. Regularly, her team has inspiration calls where they can share anything, from an article to a new app feature, that may be inspiring them. When it comes to ideas from the ground up, the team has a forum and toolkit to equip anyone with the spark of inspiration to be able to go from idea stage to concept and then to action, while also having access to the investment and resources to get the project off the ground.
Being Adaptive in Leadership
The one thing she most wishes to impart on her mentees is the power of belief and the feeling of being championed, pointing out how teacher Rita Pierson inspired a classroom of struggling students in an underprivileged community to succeed by reframing the way they perceived themselves: “I think that sometimes people’s potential can be redefined based on what other people see in them. There were moments throughout my career when I didn’t necessarily see myself having that potential, but I had a mentor or a sponsor who saw that in me. Everybody deserves that.”
Within the Women’s Interest Network in Amex, Schultz is involved in the Ready To Lead program, mentoring and creating connections for aspiring leaders from other business units. She’s often found mentoring more like building a relationship, and particularly in her role, she often learns about new features and products from her mentees.
When it comes to being a leader, Schultz is thoroughly committed to supporting the unique working processes of each individual she manages, rather than imposing her own style of work.
“I have a more adaptive leadership style with my team. Some people might want me to roll my sleeves up and get in and white-board with them. Other people might prefer to take the challenge away and come back to me later with ideas,” says Schultz. “I personally feel I am there to set the charter for the team, to set the vision and the goals. I believe in a model of service to the people on my team. What works for you to be effective and then how do I flex my support based on what you need, to be a sounding board and roadblock remover and helpful guide along the way?”
While her style is more casual than the normal latitude of management approaches in financial services, being authentic in her own leadership has resonated and served her team and success.
Schultz spends as much time as she can with her toddler, Cooper. Since becoming a working mom, savasana has gone from the pose she could not stay still for to a treasured and glorious moment.
By Aimee Hansen
Op-ED: The Power of Intentioning: Are you ready to answer the #1 most important question for your life?
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!, Guest ContributionOn a spectacular Arizona day in late January, 2020, when you can be lulled into thinking all’s right with the world, I was hiking with a friend. Then boom! I tripped on an unseen pebble, put my hand out to catch myself and knew immediately from the snap and the pain that I had broken my wrist. The first broken bone I’d ever had.
It’s never the mountains that trip you up. It’s the pebbles on the path.
Within 6 weeks, as everything shut down because the whole world had been tripped up by coronavirus, I realized I should have seen it as an omen. The year of broken bones I called it. Broken almost everything. More like two years now. And when will it stop?
We’ve all been through a difficult time of so much loss and grief.
The pandemic tripped us up. Ground us to a halt. Changed so much about how we see the world and each other. Maybe it changed how you envision your career and life from now on.
So there’s no better time to answer the question that prompted me to write my book, Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. This is without a doubt the #1 question you need to answer to be in the driver’s seat for the rest of your life, not the backseat wondering where life is going to take you next.
Your power TO WHAT?
What does that mean? Here’s the backstory.
I started writing Intentioning well before Covid-19 reared its ugly head. I interviewed over a dozen women whose stories form the basis for a new set of Leadership Intentioning tools to build on the 9 Leadership Power Tools in my last book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power.
In No Excuses, I explored women’s culturally learned relationships with power. I realized ambivalence about power was a key to why women hadn’t reached parity in leadership of any sector despite all we’d done to open doors and change laws. So much female potential was not being realized.
We needed a different idea about power than the oppressive narrative of history that’s based in fighting and wars and the assumption of scarce resources. By shifting the paradigm to the expansive, creative, generative, abundant idea of power TO, women’s would say, “I want that kind of power.”
Now, after a decade of teaching and coaching women how to embrace their power on their own terms, I realized the necessary next step is to ask, “the power TO WHAT? How am I going to use my power once I know I have it?”
Your answer will enable you to clarify your intentions.
Identifying and getting what you want out of life can seem like a daunting task, even more right now, when you may be uncertain about whether you’ll be working from home, whether your children will be safe, and if your job will exist at all. And it isn’t automatic that a woman will want to walk through an open door or even see it as a possibility. She may feel ignored or not respected, exhausted from experiencing microaggressions. She may fear she’ll be passed over for a promotion at work, that it’s too late to start over when her profession or company changes, or that for whatever reason she’s not good enough.
This doesn’t have to be how you live your life and I don’t want it to be that way for you.
Yes, the COVID-19 pandemic and another pandemic of belatedly acknowledged racial injustice created huge disruptions in every part of our economy and social structures.
But that is, or can become, a good thing.
We are in a season of disruption. We are in a season of rebirth. The two have much in common.
Disruptions of this magnitude are the best opportunity we will ever have to make long needed structural changes. Because when the world is in chaos, people and organizations have to think differently to survive. Ideas that wouldn’t have been considered previously become solutions.
So here’s a quick overview of the 9 Leadership Intentioning Tools that will enable you to achieve your goals once you answer that #1 question for yourself:
The Self-Definitional Leadership Intentioning Tools
The Counterintuitive Leadership Intentioning Tools
The Systems Change Leadership Intentioning Tools
I wish you great intentioning.
Bio: Gloria Feldt is the Co-Founder & President of Take The Lead: Breakthrough diversity and women’s leadership solutions for individuals and companies, and author of Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. On her website, you can get her free workbook that accompanies the book and will help you answer your #1 question, get the most from these tools, and make a plan to achieve your highest and best intentions.