“I think that capitalism has the potential to be exceptionally productive. That said, we’ve messed it up. We’ve distorted it, and it has become a system that is extractive and exclusive,” says Erika Karp. “I think that’s really unfortunate. I want to be a part of a system that is regenerative and inclusive, and I still believe capitalism can be.”
Karp speaks to a childhood love for economics, why ESG takes the ideology out of sustainable investment and being the first out lesbian on her firm’s Wall Street trading floor.
From the Lemonade Stand to the Trading Room
Karp knew from when she was a child that she loved and wanted to be involved in trading and economics.
“While we don’t think about it that way, trading is part of human nature. As kids, we set up lemonade stands in our driveways in the suburbs of New York. Well that wasn’t quite interesting enough,” she remembers. “So I set up a stand with all my old toys, trinkets and baubles. It wasn’t so much about the money, but trading. I loved it.”
When Erika’s sister borrowed money from her as children, she’d pay Erika back with a little interest. And Karp recalls her father, a securities lawyer, getting off the phone with a client and saying: “It’s so wonderful when you’re involved in the stock market and on the phone, and on your word, on your honor, you can do important transactions with millions of dollars.”
Karp remembers that it was on your honor. From six years old, she didn’t know what a stockbroker was, but she knew she was going to be one.
Willing that Capitalism Can be Regenerative
Karp lists her personal values as nature and animals, access to water and the ocean, access to education and healthcare. Towards the end of her first 25 years on Wall Street, which culminated in her becoming Director of Global Sector Research at UBS Investment Bank, she was asked to manage the Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) team.
“I learned organically that when you look at the critical environmental and social and governance factors in a company, in an industry, in a sector – you really do get a lot of predictive insight into the long-term investing process,” she notes. “Being able to align my investment discipline and belief in capitalism with my personal values through the discipline of ESG analysis felt amazing.”
“To evolve capitalism towards something that’s more regenerative and more inclusive definitely takes a systems approach. That means understanding complexity, nuance and interrelationships.” As momentum gathered, Karp began to do work on sustainable investing in cooperation with World Economic Forum, UN Global Compact and the Clinton Global Initiative.
“As I got more involved, I felt a greater sense of purpose and urgency. So I founded Cornerstone Capital Group, which [was] a purpose-built research-driven impact investment advisor,” she notes. After bringing the business to $1.2 billion in assets under management, she took the plunge to merge her impact-focused firm with Pathstone, an independent registered investment advisory firm focused on families, family offices and institutions. It was a symbiotic merger, with Pathstone having a long-standing background in ESG analysis and a strong interest in expanding its impact orientation.
Taking the Ideology Out of ESG
“Years ago, I remember thinking even the word ‘responsible’ implies ideology, it implies right and wrong,” reflects Karp. “So the world of SRI was ideological, political, divisive and tree-hugging, and it just wasn’t adopted as real investing.”
“To some degree, I was subversive. I came to believe that over the long run, ESG factors are fundamentally important to get more predictive insight in the investment process,” she says. “So I was more pragmatic. I didn’t use words like ‘responsible’ or ‘sustainability’ or barely even ‘climate change’. I would talk ‘energy efficiency’ and ‘reputational risk” and ‘political risk’. I knew it was about sustainability in the back of my mind, but I talked about fundamental things to the industry, because I really believe it’s about investment outcomes.”
“Unlike SRI, on the ESG front, we can analyze factors objectively,” says Karp. “Whether or not this touches my values, does it touch a company’s revenues and costs and risk? It’s beyond being ideological now. It’s about investment.”
Karp was invited to join the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), an opportunity to create infrastructure in defining ESG criteria that matters to any given industry or company and offering standards for what to disclose based on material economic and profit outcomes.
“More and more people now understand ESG as an analytical discipline, so that’s great progress,” says Karp. She notes that myth-busting still is an active part of her work – for example busting the myth that ESG factors reduce returns when the research shows not only that this is incorrect, but that integrating ESG factors can potentially increase returns over the long term.
Karp points out the risk of ESG analysis becoming more popular is that it is done flippantly, rather than at a high quality level with skilled managers. She feels ESG practices will evolve with standard disclosure, and technology will become more skilled in discerning the signal from the noise in the data when it comes to informing investment impact and outcomes.
“ESG analysis is a discipline within finance that is the future of finance,” says Karp. “One day, all the different phrases – SRI and impact and values-based and double bottom line, we won’t use them. It’s just investing.”
Being A Leader, Not A Manager
“I would rather be a leader than manager. To be a good leader, you really do have to have a vision, a mission. I want people to feel inspired to get on board with what we’re doing and feel purpose and connection,” says Karp. “Management is structural and systems and measures and accountability are critical. But I don’t love management as much as I love leadership.”
As a lover of learning, Karp also feels she learns most when also teaching. With her wife being a clinical psychologist, she jokes she is clearly not afraid to be analyzed.
“Every leader has flaws. I think I am mostly able to hear about the things that I can do better. I want to evolve, teach and coach,” says Karp. “If I’m not listening or open to input as to how I can be better, that’s not facilitating what I want to do.”
“We have financial capital, human capital and natural capital, which is priceless. The intersectionality of these three forms of capital has to be valued,” she says, when she speaks to her leadership vision. “All need to be respected and they need to become regenerative as opposed to being destroyed or shifted around.”
“We know the value of financial capital – many trillions of dollars,” says Karp. “Could someone tell me the value of the last drop of water? That’s worth more than all the financial capital in existence. That’s how I think of things.”
Being The First Out Lesbian on The Trading Floor
“As a woman, to succeed, you can’t just be good. You have to be great,” says Karp. “I was experienced differently than many of the guys around me. So if I am assertive and articulate, I might have been perceived as pushy or aggressive. It’s hard work to gain respect and credibility while balancing not wanting to be seen as aggressive.”
Karp notes that as a woman, and being potentially more risk-averse, she has found herself and other women to often be more supported in their arguments: “In a conference room full of men, I may not be the first to speak,” she says, “but when I do, I have something to say that affects the thinking of the people in the room.”
“When it comes to being gay, that’s more challenging. While my clients or colleagues are processing ‘she’s gay’, are they also hearing what I’m saying? This is the case with any difference,” says Karp. “Whereas we now know difference has to be embraced, because it’s awesome.”
For the initial years of her career, Karp had been married to a man and was mostly closeted. Even after telling a close colleague, it took her years to come out, and she even recalls jumping out of her first Pride Parade in New York for the couple blocks around where it passed by her office building and jumping back in afterwards.
But after making director, and meeting her future wife, she came out 24 years ago. She did not experience the backlash she feared, and she says even if she had, she would not have cared.
“Even if it did affect my career in some way, I don’t care. I’ll never know. I don’t care, because I feel like being out has made me more productive, more creative, more content than I could have imagined back then,” says Karp. “But it was hard — I was the first out lesbian on a Wall Street trading floor.”
Karp found her firm to be receptive and open to learning, and she made a point of being purposely out and transparent to make it easier for those to come. She introduced a lounge for breastfeeding when she had her babies. Repeatedly, she went to HR at UBS with the questions that had never been asked: about covering costs related to becoming pregnant, about taking leave of absence when her wife carried the baby, about applying the financial assistance with the adoption process for her own children.
“Each time, they came back with a yes,” she says. “There are a lot of benefits we have now that are relatively standard at big investment banks, we didn’t have back then.”
Karp and Sari Kessler have had three marriages. Their first “illegal” wedding was 22 years ago in The BoatHouse in Central Park with their rabbi, friends and family. The second was on the first day that City Hall in Manhattan was giving out marriage licenses for same sex couples, also with her rabbi and this time, with their three daughters present (who are now 19, 16 and 13 years old). The third time was when federal marriage equality rights were granted.
Doing What She Is Meant For
“I know that I’m doing what I ought to be doing, and I know that I’m doing it in an important and honorable way,” says Karp.
She loves nature and water and says margaritas by the ocean with her family would be her happy place. She loves hiking, movies, playing cards and watching her daughters grow up, if far too quickly.
By: Aimee Hansen
Marie Carr: Global Growth Strategy, Insurance and Financial Services, PwC US
People, Voices of ExperienceFrom back when the internet seemed like an insecure and unproven place to do business to Artificial Intelligence (AI), Carr helps companies determine how to grow, particularly by taking advantage of technological changes that redefine customer interactions.
“People now want you to understand them,” Carr says of the client mindset: “I need you to understand me and frame things based not on what you want to sell me but on my unique needs.”
Carr champions adoption of new technologies that can help companies create better experiences for their customers, as well as actionable data that facilitates those positive experiences.
But what’s led Carr to where she is now and how has it related to her choice of careers? She cites motivation, how faith supports her, and how to find and respond to mentorship moments.
A Motivating Mission
“I went to business school to become a better entrepreneur,” says Carr, who decided early on to get her MBA at University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
She soon began to receive feedback that she’d make a great management consultant and realized that interning at a consultancy could support her education. She joined Diamond Technology Partners for a summer and twenty-five years later, long after PwC acquired the firm in 2010, she still loves where she is.
“I’ve been very blessed to work with leadership whose mission I believe in,” she says. “It’s easier to stay when you’re working with leaders who are building a culture that’s consistent with your values.”
She was initially inspired by Diamond founder Mel Bergstein’s vision in “forging a new path.” At the time, it was “unheard of” for a firm to grow to become publicly traded so that employees could own their own stake in it.
“To be able to work in something that you’re good at with like-minded people that also have a mission of greater good,” says Carr, “was a rare combination.”
With PwC, Carr found a new mission—to help build the advisory practice and ensure that what “was excellent about Diamond became part of PwC’s DNA.”
“Ten years later, folks who were younger consultants are coming into leadership positions and living those values,” says Carr. “It’s been a good journey.”
Overcoming Adversity and Keeping Faith
Carr feels her parents and faith instilled within her the ability “to never let temporary circumstances determine what your ultimate success is going to be.”
“Whatever adversity you have to overcome, overcome it,” says Carr, describing her parent’s motto, who both experienced tough challenges in childhood. “You can’t let the fact that there may have been discrimination stop you,” she says.
Raised in faith, Carr learned to trust in a greater power, which has enabled her to be comfortable in herself and have less anxiety than some in a high-pressure field.
“It’s not just about my own ability. I have confidence in and the ability to appeal to a force higher than myself. That’s helped me to be more patient, to put myself in other’s shoes, to not be so hard on myself,” says Carr. “You have to be able to center yourself, because you’re often going to find yourself in an environment that’s not going to affirm you. So, the ability to affirm yourself is really useful.”
Learning from Everyone
“I’ve learned a lot through observation. I’m very much a student of everyone. My dad taught me that ‘even the village idiot can teach you something’,” she says. “As I got older, I learned not to rush to judgment but instead ask, how do I learn from who I’m interacting with?”
She continues, “I’ve also found that people are very generous in helping you if you help yourself. Lots of people have given me advice in the moment, so I became good at getting feedback without being sensitive or defensive,” she says. “I’ve tried to learn from everyone, because there are a lot different paths to success.”
As she’s moved through her career, Carr has realized that she hasn’t always been aware of who’s advocating for her. As a result, she makes a conscious effort to advocate for others who she feels deserve a voice in the room.
Playing sports, particularly basketball, helped shape Carr’s approach. Being on a nationally ranked basketball team in high school meant being open to coaching and learning to do things differently to improve.
“Basketball is a team sport that really requires everyone to be able to fluidly move in and out of roles, that ability to adapt,” says Carr. “It has made me always look for what I could do to draw out the best of someone I’m working with.”
Leave It Better Than You Found It
Coming from a long line of ministers and pastors, Carr approaches management consulting as part of fulfilling her desire to serve.
Her mother advised her to always invest in people. For her, helping companies to grow and adapt is about affecting all the people who depend on the work to support their lives and families. She enjoys helping people and companies reach their highest potential.
Carr has run a financial summer camp on wealth empowerment and financial literacy for several years now, working in the community with younger generations to envision their possibilities.
“We’re accountable to making a difference in the world, says Carr. “You have to leave it better than it was when you got here.”
By: Aimee Hansen
OP-Ed: 9 Ways Working Moms Can Successfully Work From Home with Their Children Present
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!, Guest ContributionIf you’re a working parent considering making your home your new permanent workplace, you’re bound to have some moments when your work and home life intersect. While it’s ideal to have your kids in child care or to have someone present and watching your kids while you work, sick days and school holidays will likely mean you’ll need to simultaneously juggle caring for your kids and caring for your work obligations at least some of the time this coming year. Here’s how to handle working from home with your kids present long or short term.
1. Set Expectations. First, set expectations with your kids about the day’s activities and what you are doing and why. Ask them for what you need and explain the boundaries.
2. Distract Wisely. Give them age-appropriate distractions; it can be helpful to only allow screen time at these moments to keep their attention longer. Have a reward system in place to reinforce good behavior.
3. Plan Ahead. Try to set up calls on days or times your kids aren’t there or during normal nap times. Perhaps arrange for grandma or grandpa to stop by right before your call and read a favorite book to your child. Or ensure your calls are with another understanding parent if your kids are present. If you expect your kids to interrupt you, proactively let the person on the phone know in advance that it may happen, and explain the situation and how you’ll handle it.
Concentrate on your highest priority work to-dos and those that require the most intense level of attention first. Start your day before your children wake up. This valuable time will be free of interruptions and will have your full attention. If you only have time to work on a few things, make sure they’re the ones you really care about or that really need to get done.
4. Get Active Early. Depending on your schedule, play with your kids early in the day. Kids hate waiting, especially for our attention. Instead of making them more and more frustrated as you make just 1 more conference call, give them the attention they need at the start of the day and get them moving with fresh air and exercise, if possible, early on. Take a walk outside with your kids first thing in the morning when you wake up. When you finally do need to sit down and hammer out a few tasks, they won’t be so antsy, and you’ll be able to fully concentrate.
5. Think Outside the Box. Consider an alternative schedule, especially if you have a partner who is also working from home. Mom may take the 6:00 am to 2:00 pm shift with the kids, then “go to work” in her home office, and dad works 2:00 to 8:00 pm. Or divide up the day. Think about working in 2-hour shifts, switching off with your partner or another caregiver.
6. Consider Your Space. Designate areas of your home for specific tasks, and create visual cues that let your kids know you’re off-limits while you’re in those spaces. Your garage, the basement, a bedroom — these can all serve as work areas. When you physically separate from your kids and take yourself out of their line of vision, you’re less distracted, and your kids are less confused about your accessibility. As the saying goes, “out of sight, out of mind.” A red stop sign or a cutout of a hand on your office door is a clear indicator even to young children that work is in session and reinforces that you’re not available at the moment.
7. Create Structure. Set your kids up for success during important meetings by creating structure. For preschool and elementary children, set up interesting activity centers in their playroom with model clay, craft paper and markers, or books they can interact with while you’re away for a short time. For older children, make a list of 10 activities they can do when they feel bored and put it on the refrigerator as a reminder for the times you’re off-limits. Use times you’re completely off-limits to have them dedicate effort to traditional schoolwork or online learning.
8. Feed the Beast. Plan ahead for food needs. Cut up fruits and vegetables in advance and put them into containers labeled “Meeting Snacks.” Make mini quesadillas with protein and veggies, cut them into triangles, and set them out right before your meeting starts. For older kids, set out ingredients for sandwiches or salad before you head into a session with a client or coworker so it’s easy for them to put together a snack while you’re away.
9. Be Honest. Be transparent with your business partners about the fact your kids are in the home with you. The more honest we are about how our home and work lives intersect, the more we normalize that experience for others, and, ultimately, push employers toward considering our whole-person needs as they create policies and culture.
Above all, give yourself grace. Accept that when you’re trying to do two jobs simultaneously, you’re bound to sometimes be less than perfect at both of them. Take breaks with and without your kids. Definitely don’t add even more to your proverbial plate — the errands, the vacuuming, that toothpaste you still need to buy — it can all wait. And, remember, if you eventually find yourself longing for a little more separation between your work and home life, that’s okay, too.
Whitney Casares, M.D., M.P.H., F.A.A.P., is the author of The Working Mom Blueprint: Winning at Parenting Without Losing Yourself. She is the Founder and CEO of Modern Mommy Doc and host of The Modern Mommy Doc Podcast.
Silke Soennecken: Head of Risk Management, Commerzbank New York
People, Voices of ExperienceSoennecken speaks to growing through challenge, retaining your power as a woman and letting go for others to grow.
When Things Turn Upside-Down, Learning Curves Go Up
As a Managing Director at Commerzbank New York, Soennecken is tasked to oversee governance and strategy for all risk management in the region, and is responsible for the bank’s entire North American credit portfolio. Based at a branch rather than head office, she enjoys the vantage point of gleaning how initiatives flow and come together, while gaining insight into areas of risk management that interrelate with her expertise in corporate credit.
As a risk manager, she thinks that despite the challenge, it is precisely the unexpected and unprecedented moments that provide the strongest learning experiences and opportunities to grow your skillset.
She experienced this first-hand in September 2008, when she joined Commerzbank just one month before the financial world fell into crisis, and then again this past year with the pandemic. Now Soennecken approaches these big upheavals with some fascination by observing how various players respond and react to crisis on all levels.
She notes her “extremely analytical mind” gives her the ability to remain curious and agile, as she is naturally prone to dissecting how the many pieces of a system work together and interact with each other—including considering the consequences in a scenario when one piece fails.
Flipping the Worst-Case Scenario
Soennecken had a first-hand experience of a worst-case work challenge, when years ago, her firm initiated a significant restructuring. Consequently, she witnessed a mass exodus of her entire 25 person department over just a few months, including team members she thought she could not afford to lose.
Tasked with restructuring the department, and never imagining she would end up doing it alone, she recalls a “breakdown moment” in the bathroom after the last person announced they, too, were leaving. However, beginning with temporary patches, Soennecken stood up and began to rebuild the entire department.
Although she had a private office, she instead moved her desk to the middle of the open floor, where anyone who joined would have access to her. Only after a three-year journey rebuilding the team did she return to her office with an open door policy.
“Rebuilding was hitting rock bottom where there was nothing left, and then climbing out from there to create a completely new department,” she recalls. “I didn’t know what to do except to put myself right in the middle and build from the inside out. I was just put in charge and swam my way out. But when I look back, I’m proud of the approach I took, and of what I accomplished.”
For Soennecken, the most impactful part of this experience was learning via unsolicited team member feedback about how her collaborative approach positively impacted their individual and collective growth.
Staying Confident as A Woman
“I had the advantage that I found progressive male mentors that supported me,” says Soennecken, “but I also found a lot of opposition along the way for being a woman.”
Having worked in banking for a few decades, she remembers earlier in her career being the only woman in rooms of men where she was asked to pour the coffee. Though she recalls wondering ‘why her?’, the request wasn’t entirely out of the norm at the time, and she wasn’t equipped to confront it like women are today.
“I wasn’t entirely aware that I was sometimes being treated in a way I shouldn’t have been treated,” says Soennecken. “As a consequence, certain elements of confidence were lost along the way that I didn’t notice I was losing, until I look back now.”
Today, she can recognize the minimizing ways in which she was talked to or handled as a woman, and how that wore down her natural confidence, while other habits arose to compensate and created a double bind.
“I ended up being a little harder than I was expected to be. I even had a coach for supposedly being too straightforward when talking to people,” she says, “but I think it was, in part, a consequence of navigating through a world where I had to push with my elbows to try to be heard. Now I know that I could have used a more feminine approach to get what I wanted without having to try to act like a man.”
In retrospect, Soennecken observed she could have used her intuitive and relational skills—such as sensing someone’s feelings about confrontation or mirroring their conversational tendencies—to achieve the influence she instead struggled for.
“Our sensitivity as women can work against us, but I realize I could have used that sensitivity to my advantage in interrelating,” she reflects. “It would have spared me some stress along the way.”
The Danger of Over-Explaining
Soennecken believes that it is important to encourage gender diversity in managerial roles, but on the flip side, women need not be required to champion every woman when it’s more objectivity that is needed.
When asked, one way she’s personally observed how women can undermine their own power is by defending themselves too much in the meeting room.
“We often think we are being attacked personally,” she says, noting many moments when she’s listened to another woman get drawn into over-explaining herself, going further only to lose her ground.
“If you make yourself small by defending yourself too much, by giving a lot of explanation for something that could be a simple answer,” she continues, ”then you lose all your power and the advantage you might have had.”
‘Letting Go’ For Others to Grow
Over the years, Soennecken has adapted from guiding people with a hands-on approach, to guiding people while letting go.
“When you are hands on, you do things a certain way and tend to believe others should do it the same way. But people have different approaches, and it takes time to admit to yourself those approaches are fine, and so are the consequences,” she says. “You are supporting the growth of people by allowing them to also make mistakes. You’re going to support and guide them, but there’s purpose in delegating and giving others the opportunity to grow and shine in their own way.”
As a mentor, she notices when people are stuck: “You see that someone is in the wrong job, but they are afraid of changing, finding the right job and really being happy. They’re making a big effort, but they can’t grow because it’s not what they want to do.”
“The potential is in embracing the unknown, not in staying in their comfort zone, but you get a lot of resistance because most people don’t like change. The success story happens when finally somebody embraces the change that is good for them,” she says. “You can help them realize the potential is there, and trust and support them, but they have to ultimately make the decision.”
When it comes to finding fulfillment at work and advancing up the career ladder, Soennecken feels it’s about going beyond. Being interested and doing “the extra” is what creates the sense of fulfillment for her.
“If you come to work every day and you type five pages because your job is to type five pages, you’re not going to progress,” she gives as an example. “But if you come in every day, and instead of typing five pages, one day you decide the pages could be a different color or a different layout or you can type eight pages or a book, then you grow.”
Never Forget “The Little Heart”
“You cannot have a more loyal employee than if the person has a personal situation, and you show you can be supportive,” says Soennecken. “Never forget about the personal side of the people you work with. It’s what I call ‘the little heart’ and everybody has ‘a little heart’. Very often, I think about ‘the little heart’ of my colleagues, regardless of their role or responsibility.”
When it comes to non-business workplace issues, for example redesigning seating arrangements, she knows certain things are important to people, and if she can accommodate a request, she will. While you can’t please everyone, she has found it makes all the difference to thoughtfully consider all parts of someone in the decisions she makes.
Speaking of little hearts, Soenneken is the single mother of two bright, energetic twin six-year-old girls. She feels the pandemic has helped to highlight what is most important in life and is enjoying the unexpected, but welcome, togetherness with her family.
By Aimee Hansen
Three Ways to Move Into The Self-Care of Thriving
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!, NewsToo much of self-care talk focuses on topping up the energy you have depleted so you can survive the daily grind. Self-care is not really about getting by, but committing to yourself and your authenticity so you can thrive.
Prioritizing self-care is about restoring your energy and your connection within, so that life becomes more energy-generative.
Here are three ways to practice self-care so you can feel more alive in your skin:
1. Get Back Into Relationship With Your Body
How often have you overrode your body’s messages – be it forgoing rest, healthy food or physical activity – while striving to do everything else that seemed ‘more important’? Women are especially prone to burnout at work and the long hours game has a disproportionally damaging effect on women’s health.
Overvaluing the mental urge towards productivity while disconnecting from our physical bodies moves us away from health and the feminine wisdom of our bodies. When you lose intimacy with your body, you lose the ability to access gut feelings, intuition and valuable emotional guidance.
As Stephen Covey would put it in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you also make the mistake of prioritizing production at the expense of nurturing your production capability, which is only good for short-terms external wins but ultimately exhausts your ability to show up, especially for yourself.
This summer, really get into your body. Not just as a means to another end, such as running off the stress or shedding pounds. And don’t just recharge your body: you were not born to be a battery. Moving your body is not the same as being in a listening relationship with your body. Instead, re-attune to your body. Restore the connection with self, starting here.
Consider a yin yoga class, a restorative yoga class or perhaps 5 rhythms dance. Or let the sun pour in through your skin for twenty minutes. Do something new or slow or fast that brings your awareness back to the simplicity of your ‘being’ and the innate guidance of your body.
Your ‘doing’ will only benefit from bringing it into balance with your ‘being.’
2. Experience “Immersive” Time
“We wake up in the morning and we say, ‘I didn’t get enough sleep.’ And we hit the pillow saying, ‘I didn’t get enough done,’” says Brené Brown.
We conduct our busy work lives in linear time, which helps gives rise to the cultural narrative of scarcity, and the persistent feeling that you can never do enough. But the one-way march of time is just one left-brained frame for experience where we often end up “hustling for our worth,” as Brown puts it.
The seasons of nature and the physiology of the female reproductive body reveal the right-brained frame of cyclical time. What psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as a state of Flow and the Greeks called kairos is yet another experience of time that is alive, creative, connected and synergistic.
“Chronos is clocks, deadlines, watches, calendars, agendas, planners, schedules, beepers…Kairos is transcendence, infinity, reverence, joy, passion, love, the Sacred… We exist in chronos. We long for kairos. That’s our duality,” writes Sarah Ban Breathnach, in her NYT bestseller Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy. “Chronos requires speed so that it won’t be wasted. Kairos requires space so that it might be savored. We do in chronos. In kairos we’re allowed to be. It takes only a moment to cross over from chronos into kairos, but it does take a moment. All that kairos asks is our willingness to stop running long enough to hear the music of the spheres.”
This summer, drop into immersive time more often. A key quality is that the experience of presence and participation themselves are the reward of this time, not the result.
Perhaps it’s getting lost in adventures with your family or a deep conversation. Perhaps it’s a long walk or drive in nature. Reading a book. Cooking a homemade meal. Dancing or painting or writing or meditation or playing an instrument. Whatever activity makes you forget both yourself and the world because you are so inside of it, that’s the gold.
In a feminine sense of creativity, we do not forgo self-care in order to labor ‘at all costs’ for what is, relative to our health, an abstract outcome. We value and care for ourselves throughout the process as the experience is the creation. Tapping into immersive time increase your well-being, your creativity and your productivity, too.
3. Rediscover How To Use Your “No”
Halfway through the year is a good time to step back and ask where your time and energy is going and whether it’s adding up to create fulfilling meaning for you, rather than just ticking off your list or other’s needs.
As in Covey’s famous time management matrix, are you steadily putting energy and resource into the Quadrant 2 area of “not urgent but important” in your life? This is often the hardest area to devote yourself to when life pulls from all directions, so take a break to get an overview of your energy investment relative to your real values and desires.
More than ever, our energy is susceptible to be whittled away by low importance matters of false urgency, as 24/7 responsiveness and social media addiction has become normalized. Look at the hours you’ve spent on the phone in a day and ask if you deposited anything in the investment bank of your heart? How much was truly connection and how much was distraction?
When our commitments, as demonstrated by habit, are not aligned with our values-based desires, we begin to feel the pain of disconnection with self.
Realignment of energy with values is going to require emotional attuning.
One question that can be useful is to ask: What is the one thing I am getting angry/resentful for not doing? If you’re giving all your energy away except to the thing that’s really important to you, you will begin to feel like the world is crashing in on your personal boundaries. Now, how can you choose time to prioritize what you yearn for? Can you let discipline come from love?
As part of trauma exploration, Gabor Maté, M.D. talks about how most of us ‘wisely’ adapted to give up our authenticity for attachment as children. But when we continue to forgo our authentic needs, due to the stories and guilt we’ve cultivated, it causes stress, suffering and disease. He asserts that if you can’t say ‘no’, your body will.
According to Maté, women have a harder time saying no and suffer the health consequences. One essential step in self-care, and restoring your authenticity, is relearning how to give an authentic ‘no’ – whether in work or personal life.
Maté suggests to ask the following questions around saying ‘no’:
Thrive, Not Survive
This summer, think about self-care not as a way to survive the grind of your life, but to step a little further into thrive, whatever that authentically means for you!
By: Aimee Hansen
Note: We are taking a publishing break and our own advice and we will see you on Monday 12th July, and remember we have over 5000 articles to read in the archives if you are missing our cutting edge career insights!
Erika Karp: Chief Impact Officer, Pathstone
People, Voices of ExperienceKarp speaks to a childhood love for economics, why ESG takes the ideology out of sustainable investment and being the first out lesbian on her firm’s Wall Street trading floor.
From the Lemonade Stand to the Trading Room
Karp knew from when she was a child that she loved and wanted to be involved in trading and economics.
“While we don’t think about it that way, trading is part of human nature. As kids, we set up lemonade stands in our driveways in the suburbs of New York. Well that wasn’t quite interesting enough,” she remembers. “So I set up a stand with all my old toys, trinkets and baubles. It wasn’t so much about the money, but trading. I loved it.”
When Erika’s sister borrowed money from her as children, she’d pay Erika back with a little interest. And Karp recalls her father, a securities lawyer, getting off the phone with a client and saying: “It’s so wonderful when you’re involved in the stock market and on the phone, and on your word, on your honor, you can do important transactions with millions of dollars.”
Karp remembers that it was on your honor. From six years old, she didn’t know what a stockbroker was, but she knew she was going to be one.
Willing that Capitalism Can be Regenerative
Karp lists her personal values as nature and animals, access to water and the ocean, access to education and healthcare. Towards the end of her first 25 years on Wall Street, which culminated in her becoming Director of Global Sector Research at UBS Investment Bank, she was asked to manage the Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) team.
“I learned organically that when you look at the critical environmental and social and governance factors in a company, in an industry, in a sector – you really do get a lot of predictive insight into the long-term investing process,” she notes. “Being able to align my investment discipline and belief in capitalism with my personal values through the discipline of ESG analysis felt amazing.”
“To evolve capitalism towards something that’s more regenerative and more inclusive definitely takes a systems approach. That means understanding complexity, nuance and interrelationships.” As momentum gathered, Karp began to do work on sustainable investing in cooperation with World Economic Forum, UN Global Compact and the Clinton Global Initiative.
“As I got more involved, I felt a greater sense of purpose and urgency. So I founded Cornerstone Capital Group, which [was] a purpose-built research-driven impact investment advisor,” she notes. After bringing the business to $1.2 billion in assets under management, she took the plunge to merge her impact-focused firm with Pathstone, an independent registered investment advisory firm focused on families, family offices and institutions. It was a symbiotic merger, with Pathstone having a long-standing background in ESG analysis and a strong interest in expanding its impact orientation.
Taking the Ideology Out of ESG
“Years ago, I remember thinking even the word ‘responsible’ implies ideology, it implies right and wrong,” reflects Karp. “So the world of SRI was ideological, political, divisive and tree-hugging, and it just wasn’t adopted as real investing.”
“To some degree, I was subversive. I came to believe that over the long run, ESG factors are fundamentally important to get more predictive insight in the investment process,” she says. “So I was more pragmatic. I didn’t use words like ‘responsible’ or ‘sustainability’ or barely even ‘climate change’. I would talk ‘energy efficiency’ and ‘reputational risk” and ‘political risk’. I knew it was about sustainability in the back of my mind, but I talked about fundamental things to the industry, because I really believe it’s about investment outcomes.”
“Unlike SRI, on the ESG front, we can analyze factors objectively,” says Karp. “Whether or not this touches my values, does it touch a company’s revenues and costs and risk? It’s beyond being ideological now. It’s about investment.”
Karp was invited to join the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), an opportunity to create infrastructure in defining ESG criteria that matters to any given industry or company and offering standards for what to disclose based on material economic and profit outcomes.
“More and more people now understand ESG as an analytical discipline, so that’s great progress,” says Karp. She notes that myth-busting still is an active part of her work – for example busting the myth that ESG factors reduce returns when the research shows not only that this is incorrect, but that integrating ESG factors can potentially increase returns over the long term.
Karp points out the risk of ESG analysis becoming more popular is that it is done flippantly, rather than at a high quality level with skilled managers. She feels ESG practices will evolve with standard disclosure, and technology will become more skilled in discerning the signal from the noise in the data when it comes to informing investment impact and outcomes.
“ESG analysis is a discipline within finance that is the future of finance,” says Karp. “One day, all the different phrases – SRI and impact and values-based and double bottom line, we won’t use them. It’s just investing.”
Being A Leader, Not A Manager
“I would rather be a leader than manager. To be a good leader, you really do have to have a vision, a mission. I want people to feel inspired to get on board with what we’re doing and feel purpose and connection,” says Karp. “Management is structural and systems and measures and accountability are critical. But I don’t love management as much as I love leadership.”
As a lover of learning, Karp also feels she learns most when also teaching. With her wife being a clinical psychologist, she jokes she is clearly not afraid to be analyzed.
“Every leader has flaws. I think I am mostly able to hear about the things that I can do better. I want to evolve, teach and coach,” says Karp. “If I’m not listening or open to input as to how I can be better, that’s not facilitating what I want to do.”
“We have financial capital, human capital and natural capital, which is priceless. The intersectionality of these three forms of capital has to be valued,” she says, when she speaks to her leadership vision. “All need to be respected and they need to become regenerative as opposed to being destroyed or shifted around.”
“We know the value of financial capital – many trillions of dollars,” says Karp. “Could someone tell me the value of the last drop of water? That’s worth more than all the financial capital in existence. That’s how I think of things.”
Being The First Out Lesbian on The Trading Floor
“As a woman, to succeed, you can’t just be good. You have to be great,” says Karp. “I was experienced differently than many of the guys around me. So if I am assertive and articulate, I might have been perceived as pushy or aggressive. It’s hard work to gain respect and credibility while balancing not wanting to be seen as aggressive.”
Karp notes that as a woman, and being potentially more risk-averse, she has found herself and other women to often be more supported in their arguments: “In a conference room full of men, I may not be the first to speak,” she says, “but when I do, I have something to say that affects the thinking of the people in the room.”
“When it comes to being gay, that’s more challenging. While my clients or colleagues are processing ‘she’s gay’, are they also hearing what I’m saying? This is the case with any difference,” says Karp. “Whereas we now know difference has to be embraced, because it’s awesome.”
For the initial years of her career, Karp had been married to a man and was mostly closeted. Even after telling a close colleague, it took her years to come out, and she even recalls jumping out of her first Pride Parade in New York for the couple blocks around where it passed by her office building and jumping back in afterwards.
But after making director, and meeting her future wife, she came out 24 years ago. She did not experience the backlash she feared, and she says even if she had, she would not have cared.
“Even if it did affect my career in some way, I don’t care. I’ll never know. I don’t care, because I feel like being out has made me more productive, more creative, more content than I could have imagined back then,” says Karp. “But it was hard — I was the first out lesbian on a Wall Street trading floor.”
Karp found her firm to be receptive and open to learning, and she made a point of being purposely out and transparent to make it easier for those to come. She introduced a lounge for breastfeeding when she had her babies. Repeatedly, she went to HR at UBS with the questions that had never been asked: about covering costs related to becoming pregnant, about taking leave of absence when her wife carried the baby, about applying the financial assistance with the adoption process for her own children.
“Each time, they came back with a yes,” she says. “There are a lot of benefits we have now that are relatively standard at big investment banks, we didn’t have back then.”
Karp and Sari Kessler have had three marriages. Their first “illegal” wedding was 22 years ago in The BoatHouse in Central Park with their rabbi, friends and family. The second was on the first day that City Hall in Manhattan was giving out marriage licenses for same sex couples, also with her rabbi and this time, with their three daughters present (who are now 19, 16 and 13 years old). The third time was when federal marriage equality rights were granted.
Doing What She Is Meant For
“I know that I’m doing what I ought to be doing, and I know that I’m doing it in an important and honorable way,” says Karp.
She loves nature and water and says margaritas by the ocean with her family would be her happy place. She loves hiking, movies, playing cards and watching her daughters grow up, if far too quickly.
By: Aimee Hansen
5 Ways To Become a Better LGBTQ+ Ally
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!, LGBT celebrationAccording to Fast Company, “Allyship refers to everyday acts which challenge behavioral norms and support members of marginalized groups through an awareness of the issues being faced by others.”
A team of professors in Harvard Business Review view “allyship” as: “a strategic mechanism used by individuals to become collaborators, accomplices, and coconspirators who fight injustice and promote equity in the workplace through supportive personal relationships and public acts of sponsorship and advocacy. Allies endeavor to drive systemic improvements to workplace policies, practices, and culture.”
Here are five ways to be an accomplice in creating cultural inclusion:
1. Cultivate Awareness and Empathy.
A lot of advice for being a better ally focuses on self-education. But what is the objective of that? Cultivating awareness and empathy.
A prerequisite of support is cultivating awareness of realities and painful disadvantages that you do not have direct experience of: becoming aware of the bias and discrimination and understanding why it causes harm. The absence of having to experience that reality is what we call ‘privilege’.
Allyship requires a willingness to open your eyes and place yourself in another’s shoes as they tell you how that experience exists for them through their eyes.
In their March 2020 survey of 2,000 LGBTQ+ employees and 2,000 straight employees, in partnership with NYC LGBT Community Center, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found an interesting insight.
Natural allyship is on the rise, because the separation between young LGBTQ people and their straight peers is more narrow. Compared to their older counterparts, straight employees under 35 are 1.6 times more likely to know LGBTQ colleagues, 3.6 times more likely to join ally programs and 3 times more likely to find value in colleagues being ‘out’.
The younger the employee group, the greater the awareness of discrimination. For example, only one-fourth of straight 55-64 year olds witnessed any discrimination in the past year, compared to 57% of their LGBTQ+ peers. But 85% of straight 18-24 year olds witnessed it, much closer to the 91% of LGBTQ+ who also did.
That change reflects a much smaller gap and increased sensitivity in the ability to see certain behaviors as harmful to certain groups, even if you do not belong to the group.
By expanding your exposure to the stories of others, whether through personal connection, documentaries, books or following LGBTQ+ leaders and media, you increase your awareness of the nuances of discrimination and build empathy. Start here: Are you aware of the common microaggressions that LGBTQ+ people experience?
2. Recognize Identity As Personally Defined and Fluid.
As theglasshammer covered recently, social identity is increasingly becoming more personal, intersectional, fluid and multiple. But more than anything, identity is increasingly self-identified. The myriad range of LGBTQ+ experiences are far from universal.
It’s important to realize that language matters, and not make assumptions about the identity or orientation of another person or about what that belonging means for them.
By allowing others to tell you about themselves through their voice, rather than make assumptions, you remain curious and allow others to find their authenticity. An inside-out connection that begins with the internal connection with self, and interacting with others and the world from the space of that inner truthfulness, is the basis of authenticity.
Being conscious of your own language helps to avoid making assumptions, such as using gender-neutral terms like ‘partner’. Honoring a person’s self-identity includes observing the personal pronouns that people choose for themselves and normalizing that choice.
Certain short-cut assumptions are well-conditioned in our brains, so it takes effort to not make those automatic leaps. But when it comes to another person’s life, it’s far more connective to show up by listening to them before you assert assumptions about who they are.
3. Embrace The Growth in Discomfort.
“Allyship is not knowing it all and never making mistakes. That’s impossible,” writes Freddy McConnell, host of Pride & Joy BBC podcast. “It’s putting in the effort and not expecting trophies.”
Allyship requires vulnerability, because you’re going to be clumsy at times. As McConnell writes: “When my friend came out to me as nonbinary, I practised their pronouns in private. Being trans does not imbue me with a special gift for unlearning familiar speech patterns.”
It’s not about getting it right or wrong, but about being open to learning. Before we challenge any unconscious bias, stereotypes or assumptions in the culture around us, we often foremost come to confront the existence of them within ourselves, even as part of the LGBTQ+ community.
Often the roots of rejection (of others and self-rejection) are shame-based beliefs and conditioning. Evolving involves unlearning that cultural conditioning, including the habit to shame ourselves if we get it wrong.
A willingness to be wrong, admit when you’re wrong, own your mistake and be receptive to guidance is what is valuable to a growth mindset and to keeping the focus on your intention of better allyship.
“Allyship is actually more about the mistakes than the things that you do right,” says human rights advocate Maybe Burke, who conducts allyship training on behalf of the Transgender Training Institute. “It’s about how you deal with those mistakes and move forward.”
4. Treat Ally as a Verb.
As suggested in a University College London (UCL) blog: “Think of ‘ally’ as an action rather than a label.” Being an ally is not about whether you consider yourself as an ally, but how you show up in support consistently.
In their research, BCG found that only 34% of straight employees always intervene when they see an encounter. As written in HBR: “When you witness discrimination, don’t approach the victim later to offer sympathy. Give him or her your support in the moment.”
Remaining silent is a comfortable form of passive collusion—it assures that heteronormative assumptions and microaggressions remain invisible, insidious and unchallenged within the fabric of an organizational culture, and puts the emotional burden on LGBTQ+ people to be the only ones calling out these behaviors. It also makes it more vulnerable for them to do so.
Are you willing to speak up when you hear something that feels wrong or discriminatory or does not sit well, inside of your heart? And will you be that voice in the room, even when the LGBTQ+ person may not be in it? Are you being an ally (verbing it) in the moment it’s called for?
5. Uplift LGBTQ+ Voices.
Ultimately, allyship embraces an interdependent lens: a culture is not really working for anybody if it’s not welcoming and nutritive for everybody. An organizational culture needs to be a win-win for all employees on all levels to be maximally effective.
That’s why performative allyship is dangerous—it comes from a place of ego protection, does not integrate win-win and keeps the focus on the appearance of allyship (the guise of doing good) rather than fundamentally being aligned to real organizational change for everyone’s good.
Performative allyship fears losing its position or does not really embrace the point.
Speaking up as an ally is not about speaking over, but raising everyone’s voice. Be willing to ask how you can support your LGBTQ+ colleagues in the way that is most meaningful for them.
While your voice will be needed as an ally, your success will be evidenced in the greater space for marginalized LGBTQ+ voices at the center, not the edges, of the organizational conversation—down to the small and casual daily interactions that form relationships and culture.
(If you are a leader who wants to develop your skills as an inclusive leader to leverage diversity and truly understand the topic as a strategic capability, work with Nicki Gilmour on this topic as she coaches male and female leaders and managers who are growing their skills and evolving their behaviors to lead the current and future top talent of their firms. For an exploratory call, please book a session here.)
By Aimee Hansen
Caroline Samponaro: Head of Transit & Micromobility Policy, Lyft
People, Voices of ExperienceSamponaro speaks to how social issues led her to transport and the journey to feeling confident in her voice.
Social Issues Led Her to Transit
An epic bike ride through Japan is what first set Samponaro, an anthropology major at Colombia University at the time, on the unexpected trajectory of working in transportation.
While writing a thesis on the topic of bike activism, she then began to ride around New York City. She discovered an intriguing intersection between social issues and transport. While working as a paralegal, she started to participate in monthly Critical Mass bike rides on Fridays, an action to create safety in numbers for cyclists by reclaiming the streets.
After challenging an arrest while on a bicycle, she co-founded a group, with other law students and lawyers, called The FreeWheels Bicycle Defense Fund, that raised funds and provided legal support to help cyclists challenge their charges.
“I didn’t come into transportation from a planning or policy perspective initially,” says Samponaro. “I was intrigued about the way that it was an intersection point into cities and government and social issues.”
Though she gained entry into law school, she instead began in a working in transportation in a non-for-profit and never looked back. After twelve years at Transportation Alternatives across various advocacy roles, feeling her impact was limited in scale, she decided to move to the private sector with Lyft as the company expanded its scope to include micromobility.
Affecting Inclusion through Transport
Transportation is a pervasive industry because it touches most people on a daily basis, and Samponaro’s work is disrupting the norms we take for granted that weren’t always norms.
“In the U.S., we’ve spent more than a century building the private automobile into everyday life,” notes Samponaro. “There are New York Times articles from the introduction of the automobile era which reflect the public’s uproar over the invasion of these automobiles onto the streets, which traditionally had been used as gathering places, stickball locations, parks, food markets and all the things.”
“We also heavily subsidize single-occupancy vehicle trips to mask the massive toll this form of transportation takes on society – free parking, cheap gas, roads designed entirely for vehicular traffic. It’s not surprising that roughly 77% of Americans drive alone in their car to work. As we face big challenges like climate change, housing, and equitable access to transportation options, removing the single occupancy vehicle from day to day life is part of getting at the root of the problem,” she says. “Lyft as a company is challenging the premise of the single occupancy vehicle through rideshare, our large-scale bikeshare programs and the ways that we provide our customers with trip planning to integrate transit into a daily commute.”
Samponaro’s line of work in micromobility is focused on creating a network of shared bicycles and scooters that functions like a public transportation system. Though bike activism originally drew her into urban biking, she feels her work is helping to remove the identity politics from riding a bike, while overcoming some of the disadvantages of not owning a car.
“At the end of the day, if we’re trying to transform the way people get around, and make it more equitable and safe, it’s important that when people choose to get on a bike to go to work, they’re not making an identity decision,” she notes. “They’re making a practical one, with a tool that is available, easy and affordable.”
Bringing A More Diverse Human Element to Transit
“In the context of biking and micromobility, often the market is orientating itself towards the perspective of a young white male,” Samponaro observes. “I’ve tried to find opportunities, whether through my own perspective or bringing in the perspective of other women, to make sure we’re inserting a broader view into how we plan our programs and welcome people to our systems.”
For example, street designs generally make the thought of shifting to a bicycle both scary and implausible: “You have to be daring, and you shouldn’t have to be thinking about whether you’re risking your life in your transportation choice. That’s not logical, so I think that impacting the systems around people’s choices become the ways you ensure equity and access.”
“It’s important that there are engineers building models and algorithms to make non-driving easier and more attainable,” notes Samponaro. “I’m most excited about my work when I’m bringing the human dimension to that essential product development. Given how much this area impacts the lives of people, having a people-centric perspective on the work of transportation has been an asset that I can bring and that I find great satisfaction in.”
A Culture of Belonging
“Growing up, I just passed as someone that people assumed was straight. So I struggled mostly in the context of work with a feeling of being closeted, unless I chose not to be,” says Samponaro. “Always coming out over and over again has its own challenges.”
Working in a highly male-dominated industry, she has often been the only woman or one of few women at the table. As a married lesbian mother of 4.5 year old twins, the years have brought internal and contextual changes that have helped her feel confident in embodying her own voice.
“Getting to a place of success and building my career trajectory involved feeling bad about myself at times and being slightly insecure that it wasn’t going to go my way, whether it was the raise or the promotion,” she notes. “If I spoke too loudly in the meeting, was I going to be called out for being rude, as opposed to be appreciated for being assertive? As I became more senior, the biggest feedback I received was that I was not being considerate enough in my tone, the kind of feedback that I feel men don’t receive. So the context of being queer just layered on top of those feelings of insecurity and asking if I belonged.”
Samponaro notes that achieving successes is different than having an inherent feeling of ease and belonging: “The overwhelming sense I used to have was as hard as I was trying and as good as I was doing,” she recalls, “I wasn’t going to get asked to that drink or get added to that bike ride or get included.”
Samponaro accredits much of the belonging and encouragement she now feels to being in an environment where there is a dedicated emphasis on building an equitable company culture.
“I have personally grown to a place where I could feel belonging, but then Lyft is just a wonderful place to work in terms of the emphasis it places on creating affinity groups, recognizing people’s differences, celebrating them and creating opportunities for that to be happening all the time,” she observes. “There’s so much structure built around ensuring that the company is doing equitability, right. The intentionality is key.“
Now that she feels more confident in her voice, Samponaro seeks to become the ally that she realizes she may not have dared to be: “ln my attempts to make sure I kept my job and kept growing in the way I wanted to, did I do enough speaking out on behalf of others around me? Did I do enough ally work? I think the answer, probably up until recently, is ‘no.’”
Samponaro is recognized by those who mentor her for her focus and determination to create change through the work she does. She has learned to embrace her sensitivity and capacity for empathy, though at times challenging, as an asset which has enabled her to truly impact the communities she serves.
By Aimee Hansen
OP-Ed: It’s Never Too Late To Be Your Whole Self
Career Advice, LGBT celebrationWhen I started my career in the late 1980s, I could not reveal I was gay (now recognized as lesbian). I knew there were others like me, but they were all closeted, especially some very experienced professionals. My uncle and his long-time companion were gay and, as senior leaders of a major insurance company, they were closeted. They knew they could be legitimately fired for their sexual orientation. They brought women to social and corporate events, lived at separate addresses, and never publicly acknowledged their life together. It was a time when few gay people were open. Even today, just 2% of baby boomers self-identify as LGBT, compared to 16% for Generation Z. When your livelihood and reputation are at stake, you do not say certain things, you stay private and keep your personal life separate from the corporate environment.
That was the example I witnessed growing up. Sexuality was never discussed in my household, and my father was unable to say the obvious truth that his oldest brother was gay. I knew how painful it would be for his daughter to admit the same thing, so I hid my identity from my family for many years. Rather, I believed my personal contributions, scholastic and athletic achievements, and career, would determine my worth. I wanted others to recognize my work ethic and production, not my orientation—especially back then.
Integrating personal and work lives
I met Kathi in 1988 and she quickly became my partner in life. I’m so grateful for our relationship and I’m not sure where I would be without her by my side. We have been a family for more than 30 years. I tell her all the time—borrowing one of the best lines from Jerry Maguire—“You complete me.” We share the same values—we both put family first and share the same foundation of hard work, honest communication, dedication and faith, and we do whatever it takes for us to continue to be close.
It was not easy to come out about our relationship. Both of our families were not accepting, and the last thing we ever wanted was for them to be ashamed of us. We both had attended Catholic grammar school, high school and college. Our inability to reconcile our commitment to each other and our faith with our religious upbringing was devastating.
At work, I was private about my relationship with Kathi. Putting up her picture in my office, which no one else would think twice about, felt like a big deal. Instead, I displayed pictures of my immediate family. If my colleagues knew about my private life, they never spoke about it. Business events typically allowed spouses, and sometimes Kathi would attend with me as a “friend”.
Thankfully, mainstream culture became more open and accepting of the LGBTQ+ community. When Ellen DeGeneres came out on her TV show and subsequently appeared on the cover of Time with the headline, “Yep, I’m Gay,” in 1997, it was a pivotal moment. In 2011, same-sex marriage was legalized in New York. When Kathi and I officially got married in Manhattan, my coworkers held a wedding shower for us.
One event stood out to me as a sign of how the environment was changing—an exchange between my 4-year-old niece (now aged 20) and her pediatrician. The pediatrician asked her what she was doing for the weekend and my niece answered that she was going to her Aunt Lori and Aunt Kathi’s lake house. The pediatrician asked for clarification, “Is it Aunt Lori or Aunt Kathi’s house?” My niece put her hand on her hip and exclaimed: “Girls can get married too, you know!” That was a huge moment for me. A 4 year-old was observant enough to know that Kathi and I were a family. In her mind, we were just another couple.
Today, even though the world has evolved, I still get the standard question at an industry or community event, “What does your husband do?” I just throw it out there, “My wife is CEO of our family and is also a Bikram yoga instructor!”
The importance of leadership by example
Leaders are essential to creating and maintaining a culture in which everyone feels welcome. I think they must lead by example. After I joined Jennison Associates in 2017, Jennison’s CEO Jeff Becker and I had dinner. He began asking me about Kathi. Wow, I thought, he and my wife have so much in common! They are both die-hard NHL hockey fans, having played the sport, and both love boating and waterskiing. I recognized that Jeff and I also had much in common—we spoke easily about family, our upbringing, and caring for our elderly parents. It immediately occurred to me: I’m with the right firm—I can bring my authentic self to work.
I believe diversity, equity and inclusion should embrace all parts of the individual. During a recent firm-wide conversation about mental health, several senior leaders publicly shared how mental health issues have impacted their families. It was incredibly powerful and moving. It also reminded me that everyone’s life has challenges, whether a person seems to be doing well or is just going about their business. You just don’t know. We owe it to our colleagues to check in—especially while we are working remotely. I feel strongly that a firm’s culture should allow us all to be more open.
The benefits of diversity and being true to oneself
And that, to me, is diversity. We all have different perspectives. When those perspectives can come together, they deliver a better outcome for everyone. The world has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, and we need to be open to new ways of thinking for the future. Ultimately, there is room for all of us, and no one should be rejected for offering their time, ideas or knowledge to change things for the better.
I’ve had a real opportunity to lean in and contribute. I am very proud of my participation in Jennison’s newly formed Inclusion Council, where I serve as executive sponsor, and my work with our parent, PGIM, on the Women’s Advisory Council and the recently formed LGBTQ+ Think Tank.
I can only say to young people starting out: Just recognize the importance of being true. Don’t try to be someone you’re not. There will be many opportunities in your career—make sure the one you select aligns with your interests and values. I have had a passion for this business since I joined it three decades ago. Today, I’m sometimes asked when I plan to retire. I answer—I’m only 57! I’m not stepping away anytime soon, especially now that I am being my whole self.
By Lori McEvoy, Managing Director – Global Head of Distribution, Jennison Associates
Natalie Tucker: Head of Strategy & Operations, Radioligand Therapy
People, Voices of ExperienceTucker shares some unique insights from the golf course to apply in the workplace, why you should focus on influencing the influencers and the price she once paid for feeling unable to bring her whole self to work.
From the Golf Course to Health Care
Tucker was a professional golfer for ten years before she retired her golf clubs at the competitive level and moved into healthcare.
Though she realizes being a professional athlete, especially as a woman, is an inspiration to others to embrace your gifts and follow your dreams, she also felt compelled to find avenues to more directly impact the lives of others. Having been surrounded by the business of health as a golfer, she was magnetized to go into healthcare while leveraging the science-inclined side of herself.
“Being a professional athlete was fun and entertaining, but for me, it felt like something was missing. In my work now, I feel I am helping people and bringing value to them,” says Tucker. “The patients benefit from our work, and you really feel like you’re making a difference.”
After a period of working in a company that focused on artificial intelligence for skin cancer detection, she attained her MBA from Yale, before moving into consulting for pharmaceutical companies. Eventually she joined Novartis – where she heads strategy and operations for a business unit focusing on radiopharmaceuticals for the treatment of patients with various cancers.
Lessons For Navigating the Course of Business
In a unique training ground where her personal career depended not only upon her athletic ability but also on her business prowess, Tucker acquired many valuable lessons as an athlete that she continues to draw from, over 10 years after leaving the golf course.
Maintaining Calm Under Pressure
Tucker gives credit to her professional golf career for helping her learn to manage pressure and anxiety. Her ability to retain her LPGA Tour Card, and therefore her job for the following year, depended on her performance in a single four-day tournament. When the stakes are that high, with six-figure sponsors on the line, you have to stay in your center and focus.
“If you play poorly over four days, you lose everything. You lose your income, you have nothing,” she recalls. “So there’s a lot of pressure. I had to learn ways of self-calming: how do I quiet my mind, take two minutes and just relax, and empty everything out? I did that on the golf course to get through these really hard moments.”
“This is a hundred percent applicable to business. Before I go into an interview, before I give a presentation, before I talk with the CEO of the company – I take two minutes just to calm myself. All of the methods that help maintain an even keel transfer from golf to business.”
Visualizing Your End Goal and Pathway To Success
“In playing professional golf, you spend a lot of time visualizing or mentally planning what you want to accomplish,” she notes. “The best way to be successful in business is also to think about what you’re trying to accomplish, and ask yourself ‘What does the end goal look like?’ ”
Once you know where you want to go, it’s about setting the plan for how to arrive to that outcome.
“Unless you have a vision of where you want to go and a plan of how you’re going to get there, you’re not going to make it, this is true in golf or business,” observes Tucker. “When you play a tournament, you plan every single shot in advance and visualize yourself accomplishing it – For example, for each hole, you look at where the pin is, and you think of the best angle to approach it. This angle informs every shot ahead of it. It’s starting with the end in mind to inform your first move.
In business, not only do you need to identify ‘what good looks like’ and sketch a project plan for how you’re going to get there”, says Tucker, “but you also need to ask yourself who you need to bring in.”
Bringing In Your Support Team
“Running my own business as a professional golfer taught me how to work with people, and not just for the purpose of ‘transacting’. I learned how to understand what others’ needs are, and the importance of that knowledge to build a strong relationship,” says Tucker.
It’s a misconception that being a golfer is not also about being part of a team, as her team was essential to overall success.
“When I came into business, I thought I could be successful if I worked hard enough, but that’s not necessarily true. You have to bring others along with you for the ride,” she notes. “Similar to golf, the more you can bring the right team on board, the more successful you will be.”
Tucker feels that dialogue is what gives rise to the best solutions, as the combined insight from others is what often catalyzes the best path, not just your own thinking.
Influencing the Influencers
Previously very focused on personal performance, getting out of her comfort zone and moving towards greater focus on interconnectivity has ultimately been highly fulfilling and encouraged versatility.
“Taking the time and really getting to know people has been the most rewarding part of my career. I’m really happy that I’ve adjusted my style of work to look beyond the work itself, and broaden my perspective to focus on people.”
One of the biggest adjustments that Tucker felt coming into business, as a performance-focused introvert, was the necessary need to navigate the more strategic connections that are so often a large component of being effective in the business world. In golf, the bottom line of Tucker’s success was her performance down to the numbers. If she performed well, the right people would come to her.
“The hardest part about the corporate world is there’s no black and white success criteria. There’s nothing that says if you do well on this project, you will be promoted,” says Tucker. “It’s performance over time and there’s a whole communication network that took me a long time to understand, and adjust to.”
As she had to do with raising money in golf, Tucker has learned to engage beyond the people in her team, and not necessarily by going three levels up for visibility either. Her strategy has been to develop real connections with influencers to the decision-makers.
“What I see too often is people only building relationships with those people who are like them and in their comfort zone, often at the same level or nearby in the office,” she notes. “But people would really benefit by looking at an organization and asking: who are the key decision-makers, and who are the influencers to those key decision makers?”
“People often want to go directly to the key decision maker and say ‘get to know me’, but if you get to know the influencers of the key decision makers, you become an influencer in the organization as well,” she has realized. “When joining an organization, this is a good first step for those who are more introverted and looking to quickly create positive impact on the business because you’re able to have honest dialogues on key matters. It’s about reading the organization, and learning about its people – not their title, but who they are, and their communication networks. Once you understand the communication network of an organization, you can navigate it well.”
The Price of Not Bringing Her Whole Self To Work
As a professional golfer twenty years ago, Tucker’s brand was critical to her ability to raise funds and support her athletic career – and she went through a very tough lesson as a gay woman who did not feel she could risk being her whole self.
At one point, one of her major sponsors told her that he had heard rumors she was gay. If true, he made it explicit that this would be a dealbreaker for continued sponsorship.
“Now this was 20 years ago, and times were different, but I hid who I was. I changed my image, tried to behave and walk differently, and it destroyed my career,” Tucker states. “I was trying to be someone I wasn’t, and I wasn’t authentic to myself or to the world around me. If I could do it over again, I would have behaved differently, even though it would have dissolved my access to income at the time. Trying to hide who I was made it impossible to be great. I couldn’t be my best without being my full self.”
After leaving golf where success was so dependent on her image, Tucker found the protections of the corporate world to be a huge relief.
“There was a transition period, where I learned how to be who I was, without feeling that I was going to be retaliated against,” she notes. “Today, everybody knows my wife, Marion. I finally feel like I have the ability to be open, and to be who I am. But it was a learning experience for me, and it definitely wasn’t easy along the way.”
In addition to loving cooking, Tucker loves to be outside enjoying nature whenever she can, and still loves to compete. These days, squash, tennis with her wife (who she jokes is ‘not that bad’ on the court against her) and basketball, to stay in shape, are her sports of choice.
By Aimee Hansen
LGBTQ+ Culture is Changing: Are Companies Ready to Redefine Inclusion?
LGBT celebration, NewsLast June, federal protections passed in the Supreme Court for LGBTQ+ people at work and the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies have strong non-discrimination policies. Yet policy is not the same as culture. Building inclusion requires weaving through every single level and interaction of an organizational culture.
As Boston Consulting Group (BCG) authors, in “A New LGBTQ Workforce Has Arrived—Inclusive Cultures Must Follow“, point out: “Yet despite these efforts, the unavoidable fact is that most LGBTQ employees do not feel truly included in the workplace.”
The LGBTQ+ Community Is Radically Changing
According to BCG, many organizations are failing at inclusion because they are failing to understand the changing and holistic identities of today’s LGBTQ+ community. BCG conducted a survey of 2,000 LGBTQ+ employees and 2,000 straight employees, in partnership with NYC LGBT Community Center, in March 2020.
They found the younger generations of the LGBTQ+ community look very different to their predecessors, and these differences matter.
Among the sample, 54% of the LGBTQ+ workforce is women, but that rises to 71% of those aged 25 to 34 and 78% of those age 18 to 24 (Gen Z). The number of women identifying as bisexual is rising strongly, and there’s a marked increase across all genders in those identifying as multiple sexual orientations or ‘other’ orientations.
For example, among the 45-54 LGBTQ+ cohort, 57% identified as gay, 17% as lesbian, 29% as bisexual and only 7% as other. Compare that to the 25-34 cohort – where 15% identified as gay, 15% as lesbian, but 47% as bisexual and 23% as other.
The younger LGBTQ+ workforce is also far more racially diverse than their older counterparts. Only 7% of 55+ LGBTQ+ people are nonwhite, whereas 53% are nonwhite among 18 to 24 year olds. Only 5% among 55+ are Hispanic, whereas 34% of the Gen Z group identify as such. And only 2% of the 55+ community identity as women of color, but 28% among under 35 years do.
“Today’s LGBTQ workforce has undergone a fundamental, generational shift, both in how it defines itself and what it expects of workplace inclusion,” writes the BCG authors, also stating: “Consequently, the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in place at many companies, while beneficial, are no longer sufficient.”
Persistent Gaps In Cultural Inclusion
LGBTQ+ people still experiences gaps in feeling open and comfortable at work.
BCG found that 40% of LGBTQ+ employees are not out at work, and among those who are, 54% are closeted with clients or customers. 36% have lied or “covered” parts of their identities in the past year. Three-fourths experienced at least one negative interaction related to their LGBTQ identity at work in the past year, with 41% experiencing more than ten.
According to McKinsey research, LGBTQ+ women are twice as likely as straight women to feel like an “only” in the room, to feel they can’t talk about life outside of work and to “play” along with uncomfortable sexual discussions and humor. They are about 1.5 times more likely to hear jokes about gender or sexist comments, and to have experienced sexual harassment.
BCG found that half of senior LGBTQ+ managers have experienced colleagues refraining from networking with them, though this is less reported among more junior levels, where the younger generation is more attuned and aware of inclusion.
“These numbers illustrate the difference between diversity (in which a company hires people from different backgrounds) and inclusion (those people feel free and encouraged to bring their authentic selves to work),” writes the BCG authors. “The gap between the two carries a steep price in terms of engagement.”
Culture Impacts The Ability to Thrive
When a person is able to be who they are, they thrive. When they do not feel they can be, or that they must edit themselves, their ability to show up suffers.
Back in 2018, Human Rights Campaign research found that 25% of LGBTQ empties stayed due to an inclusive culture and 10% left because of a non-inclusive culture.
BCG found that LGBTQ+ employees who routinely experienced discrimination were 13 times more likely to have quit a job and 7 times more likely to have declined a job offer because of company culture, compared to those who never experienced it.
“D&I leaders must focus on culture change in order to improve employees’ interactions with colleagues, direct managers, and leadership—what we call the ‘1,000 daily touch points.” writes the BCG research team. “Our research shows that breakdowns in these touch points are a major barrier to inclusion.”
Breakdowns are “comments or actions that highlight prejudice, demonstrate a lack of empathy, or make an individual or group feel isolated or unwelcome.”
When it comes to thriving in a culture, LGBTQ+ employees who did not experience discrimination, relative to those who routinely did, were far more likely to feel recognized for their full potential by their manager, feel they could risk the innovation of making mistakes and trying again and wanted to consistently do their best work.
Compared to closeted peers, out employees were twice as likely to feel safe to speak up. They were also 1.5 times more likely to feel recognized and empowered by their manager and safe to take creative risk.
McKinsey also reports that relative to closeted peers, out LGBTQ+ women leaders are more likely to feel they have equal opportunities and access to sponsors, and a positive and supportive relationship with their manager.
They’re also half as likely to plan to leave their current employer within a year.
Inclusion for All, As a “Segment of One”
Non-discrimination policies and practices, and equal access to benefits and resources, are now the baseline of D&I. But as BCG points out: “These programs tended to cover formal interactions but did not address daily, informal interactions. Nor were they meant to activate the entire workforce around inclusion.”
Inclusion occurs through the informal interactions that make up the 1,000 daily touchpoints of an individual experience. But traditional categorization approaches to D&I (of race, gender and ethnicity) can backfire here as relationships to identity evolve to be personal, intersectional, fluid and multiple, especially with younger generations.
Harvard Business Review (HBR) authors from Boston College found that “employees who identify in ways that do not conform to the norms used to define and categorize them at work are more likely to feel marginalized, and even threatened.”
When the way identity is represented is simplified and misaligned to the complexity with which an individual sees themselves, a person’s sense of “identity autonomy” and “identity legitimacy” are compromised. So is motivation, engagement, performance and satisfaction.
HBR authors found that organizations can no longer assume that identities can be naturally divided into singular or binary categories, that identities that individuals claim in one moment are fixed, that identities are self-certain, or even compulsory.
As BCG also highlights, several demographic factors and life factors contribute to a holistic identity that impacts how one LGBTQ+ person uniquely experiences the touchpoints within an organization. All of this means inclusion comes down to adopting a “segment of one” D&I lens that embraces the self-identified, overlapping and fluid nature of identities, now.
Grant Freeland, senior partner and managing director at BCG writes the “segment of one” approach is about: “accepting colleagues and co-workers as they are—and judging them on the basis of what they contribute to the greater good, not whether you approve or disapprove of the identity they embrace, or whether they make you ‘comfortable’ or ‘uncomfortable.’”
Inclusion is the current, nuanced and necessary organizational work of creating inclusion for everyone by fostering a culture that embraces each individual as he, she or they defines themselves.
By Aimee Hansen