“It shows you how powerful a single voice is in this world,” says Mary Inman, who specializes in representing whistleblowers under the U.S. and Canadian whistleblower reward programs. “I think that’s our love as humans for the David versus Goliath story. We still want David to prevail, or at least be heard.”
With an innate penchant for fairness and justice from childhood, Inman says her family could have predicted she’d become a lawyer.
She entered law with the “amorphous notion” of wanting to do good in the world and affect positive social change. What was not clear, even coming out of law school, was what kind of lawyer she would be.
An Unexpected Expertise
After a couple of years clerking for federal judges in Maine and New Hampshire and one year inside Big Law at a large commercial law firm, a headhunter extended her a novel opportunity—join the new San Francisco office of a boutique firm specializing in representing whistleblowers.
Inman went from a passing familiarity with the subject matter to spending 17 years honing her craft with Phillips & Cohen, before joining Constantine Cannon in 2015, now splitting her time between its San Francisco and London offices.
“At the beginning of my career, there were only a handful of whistleblower reward laws. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have chosen a field that has grown exponentially. The success of the whistleblower tool in aiding law enforcement efforts has spawned more and more whistleblower reward programs,” revels Inman. “My practice allows me to aid individual whistleblower clients, while at the same time helping them expose industry-wide frauds—so it’s the best of both worlds.”
With 24 years of specialization, Inman is an author, regular speaker and recognized expert in the area of U.S. and international whistleblower reward laws, with their focus on frauds in financial services, healthcare, automotive safety and government procurement as well as tax evasion, bribery of government officials and money laundering.
Encouraging Whistleblowers to Speak Out
Though whistleblowers are often ostracized, Inman asserts they play a critical role in maintaining the healthy ecosystem of an organization.
“Companies have an autoimmune response to whistleblowers, seeking to expel them from their system,” notes Inman. “However, research confirms my anecdotal experience that they’re actually the good bacteria that keeps a company healthy. Because they have the temerity to speak up and alert you to problems before they metastasize into a public relations nightmare, whistleblowers should be viewed by companies for what they really are — forward indicators of risk and an invaluable part of a company’s risk management system.”
She compares it to interpersonal relationships: “Only someone close to you, who really cares about you, will tell you the hard truths.”
Most countries’ laws focus on the employment law aspects of whistleblowing — whistleblower protection from retaliation and reprisal after they have spoken up, allowing whistleblowers to challenge unlawful retaliatory dismissal, demotion or blacklisting.
U.S. and Canadian law differs in that it also connects whistleblowers with the law enforcement and regulatory agencies who can act on their information and redress the harm. Agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and Department of Transportation (DOT) roll out the welcome mat for whistleblowers. Each agency has a designated Whistleblower Office specially designed to receive and vet whistleblower tips. Credible tips are sent to the agencies’ enforcement attorneys who frequently use the whistleblowers’ information to launch an investigation. If the agency goes on to impose a fine or otherwise sanction the wrongdoer, the whistleblower is entitled to a financial reward in an amount that is a guaranteed percentage of the fine levied or sanction imposed (e.g., the typical award range is 10 to 30 percent).
“What a whistleblower actually wants is someone to do something about the wrongdoing she’s uncovered,” says Inman of her clients. “The North American reward programs ensure that the whistleblower’s concern will be taken seriously and dealt with by the regulatory authority. This active solicitation and empowerment of whistleblowers, using supports like mandatory financial awards and designated whistleblower offices, has put agencies like the SEC on the map with their successful deployment of whistleblower information to impose over $2 billion in fines on companies violating the U.S. securities laws and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Other agencies have taken notice and reward programs have been spreading rapidly both within the U.S. and across the globe.”
The Courage of the Individual Voice
Inman notes that our childhood conditioning creates internal conflict—we were all encouraged to speak up when we saw something wrong and yet we were discouraged from “snitching.”
“Everyone has had a whistleblower moment—a time when you spoke a hard truth, then something negative happened to you, so it can be difficult to figure out what to do when you’re in the heat of that moment,” she says. “Whistleblowers are those people who can’t abide by it, and actually turn off the personal warning signals that stop so many of us—such as the practical need to keep our jobs, a refusal to risk what we’ve worked and trained for and not disrupting our family lives.”
By the time her clients come to her—whether for a financial, healthcare or manufacturing fraud, or other corruption—they have usually had their voices silenced. Inman finds it rewarding to welcome those who have been marginalized, to let them know they’re not alone and to validate their reality in a moment when they’ve often been gaslighted and pushed to doubt themselves.
“There’s something really profound about taking someone who’s ‘in extremis’ and hopefully putting them into a place where they feel empowered again,” she says.
Inman sees it as her responsibility to go beyond being a legal advocate and to help her clients step back and consider what is at stake, not only for the individual whistleblower but for their families as well. With that wider consideration, they can undertake their personal risk/reward calculus and figure out what, if any, action is right for them.
“Once you’ve blown the whistle, you can’t unring that bell,” she remarks. “It’s a life-altering event.”
“Very few companies want to hire known whistleblowers,” notes Inman, who has recently campaigned to challenge companies to walk their talk. “If you truly believe in speak up and it’s not just lip service, then hire a former whistleblower. What says more to your employees that you value speak up than that you have purposefully hired someone who did?”
The Power of the Collective Voice
“Even though you’re the lowest in the pecking order, trust your instincts; you’re often in the best position to know that something’s wrong,” she tells fresh-eyed business students when she guest lectures in business ethics classes.
From the recent Ukraine whistleblower on the Trump Administration to the Me Too movement, Inman has characterized this as a time of “unprecedented speak out”—citing research that says people are speaking out in record numbers since the Covid-19 pandemic began.
She thinks that technology has played a role, with the development of anonymous reporting tools and sites such as WikiLeaks and GlobaLeaks fueling a brand of leaktivism that has allowed crowdsourced journalism models like those employed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to use this data to fuel impactful investigations like the Panama Papers, Luanda Leaks, and FinCEN files, to name a few. She also cites speculation that the rise of the remote workplace leaves workers feeling less connected and for new hires leaves little opportunity for the casual indoctrination about turning a blind eye that can be subtly communicated in the office. She also thinks there’s collective frustration that “the top 1% has become increasingly untouchable.”
“Speaking out is an act of rebellion, of people saying ‘no more’,” says Inman. “It gives me hope and restores my faith that the voices of individual citizen watchdogs can be heard and continue to serve as our first and last line of defense against fraud and corruption.”
Inspiration From Cross-Disciplines
“Don’t just stay in your lane and look at thought leaders in your field,” says Inman. “Adopt a multi-disciplinary approach. Teachings far flung from the legal world have been the most valuable to my career.”
As her husband is a filmmaker, tech and film are two peripheral realms from which Inman derives creative catalysis.
As an example, Inman was inspired by the Callisto app (technology to combat sexual assault)—created after the documentary film “The Hunting Ground,” which focused on the epidemic of campus date rape.
If a student does not want to file a report, the app allows them to confidentially record an assault incident within the Callisto database for possible future reference, in a form of information escrow. But the app also facilitates collective action, allowing the student to be contacted again to reconsider speaking up collectively in the event others subsequently make reports about the same assailant.
Inman was inspired to consider the possibilities of this approach for whistleblowing.
“You’ll take inspiration from the strangest places,” says Inman. “Don’t expect it in your industry. Expect it in the unexpected places.”
Rise to Those Opportunities
“My most defining life lesson is to accept every challenge and say ‘yes’,” says Inman, whose whistleblower practice pushes her out of the risk-aversion common to lawyers. “I’m inspired by my clients. Every day, their moral strength and bravery pushes me to step up my game.”
In the “scrappy creative environment” of the entrepreneurial, contingency-fee plaintiff side of law, Inman has learned to “fake it until you make it.”
“Just take the opportunity and watch yourself rise to the occasion. You’ll surprise yourself,” says Inman. “A lot of people are paralyzed because they’re too worried about making mistakes. Embrace your mistakes. If you’re making mistakes, you’re doing something right, you’re taking risks and trying on something new. That’s where the growth happens.”
One of the risks Inman took was to advocate for taking on a “small case” involving an odious practice in what her instincts told her was a corrupt company. It later turned out to expose an industry-wide fraud and was a very rich lesson in validating her intuition.
“What I learned is that when a place is that corrupt, that’s not the only bad thing that they’re doing. As we investigate, that corruption is going to expand,” says Inman. “I love the psychology of what makes people decide to cross that ethical line.”
Your Voice Matters Because You’re A Woman
Inman accredits her grandmother, a county clerk of court, as her original mentor. She used to take her to court and whisper, ‘We need more women lawyers.’
Reflecting back on University of Pennsylvania Law School, Inman now realizes what a powerful mentor Professor Lani Guinier was for her (now at Harvard Law School)—because she was a passionate woman that deeply inspired Inman to throw herself into her vocation.
“At a formative phase like law school, it’s so fundamental that you have a woman who inspires you,” says Inman. “I don’t think at the time I assigned as much significance to it as I do now.”
Since then, most of Inman’s mentors and champions have been men with daughters. She is passionate about mentoring, including speaking to her sons’ classmates about being a woman in law.
When it comes to empowering her own voice, Inman takes license from the research that public companies with women on their boards are more effective than those who don’t.
“That gave me the empirical data that my voice is valuable precisely because I may have a different perspective. I feel more compelled to speak out because I’m often the only woman in the room and I often offer a very different perspective,” states Inman. “It makes intuitive sense that we’re better when we’re challenged and have different points of view. So being a woman has encouraged me to speak up and share my mind, especially in male-dominated situations.”
Her sons are 19 and 14, and she’s been taking up surfing lately to share time with them. Inman’s other passion is yoga, and the alchemical practice of sitting with discomfort and staying present.
By Aimee Hansen
Why a Women’s Retreat Is Not Really About Getting Away
Career Advice, NewsWhile a week away offers a break, in my experience a woman rarely goes on retreat just to step away from her life. Instead, the underlying motivation is often the opposite—a restless desire to step into her voice, and into her own life, more fully.
What a woman often yearns for is a big, wide open space away from the status quo routine and constant noise to listen inwards and reconnect to her inner truth, to catalyze the internal momentum to clarify and heed what she hears, and perhaps to surround herself in an atmosphere of support that will validate and even magnify her voice.
Cyclical Time and Cyclical Rebirth
In the day-in, day-out focus on “doing” in life, it can be easy to move through the motions, stay close with the inertia of our current trajectory and just keep going. But from the physiology of our bodies to the seasons of nature—with the continuous cycle of birth, bloom, death and rebirth—a feminine sense of time is not linear, but cyclical time.
So that moment arrives, yet again, when what once created personal meaning or fulfillment no longer animates us. Or perhaps a key role or circumstance is stripped away, and the sense of value and safety we derived disappears with it. Or perhaps we just sense our “stuckedness” and discontent, though we can’t put a finger on what needs to change. We are asked to meet ourselves all over again.
We repeatedly come to a kind of crossroads with self, and we are supposed to. We ache to shed a skin, to break out of the limitations of a fixed identity, to evolve into our next adventure or creation—even if we cannot yet know what that looks like or how it will show up or take form.
The openness to listen to our own voice and allow ourselves the life-giving force of staying true to our inner truth — to move with it as it shifts—is part of the ever-unfolding path of personal evolution, and reflects feminine integrity, even if at times it renders us somewhat unrecognizable to our former self.
Whether we will be asked to make changes inside or outside, and often both, we come to realize the deadening feeling of ignoring our own voice is far more dangerous to our well-being than avoiding the fear of change. We are nudged towards the necessary discomfort, and often uncertainty, that comes with growth, like metaphorical labor pains in the cycle of our own rebirth.
Catalysts For A Crossroads Moment
In her best-selling book Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live, Dr. Martha Beck speaks to three kinds of catalytic events that can cause a re-evaluation of life and transform your self-definition:
Transitions require a willingness to give credence to your inner voice. Transitions can only be self-validated, which necessitates emotional courage, as others may not understand your changes or decisions, and sometimes, until you get through it, you may even struggle to explain them to yourself.
Reconnecting With Your Voice
“We’re often blind to what creates our limits and blocks,” writes Nicki Gilmour, CEO and Founder, Evolved People (theglasshammer.com). “We all have goals, but we need to surface our subconscious gremlins, who are trying to thwart are best-laid plans for change by creating hidden competing agendas.”
When we seek to reconnect with our voice, we often find that unconscious limiting beliefs and self-sabotaging patterns are holding more sway in our lives than we realized, even if we have visited them before. Unexamined, they will run us in a circle of repetitive limited experience so that even as the characters and stages change, the familiar plot wears itself out in our interactions and relationships.
Just as time is not only linear, emotional and spiritual growth also does not happen in a straight line, however. The growth of becoming conscious of limiting beliefs and patterns often feels like a spiral outwards, returning to familiar themes in new iterations with a little more distance from the red-hot center of pain. We begin to hold increased perspective, as both experiencer and witness, and a greater ability to respond rather than be highjacked by emotional reactivity.
Sometimes, as explored in Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal The Heart by Tara Bennet Goldman, entire schemas or lenses of skewed perception are at play which require the piercing light of our conscious awareness, if only to open up the 1/4 second opportunity of choice in what we do with how we feel.
We can also question and rewrite the narratives through which we tell the stories about ourselves, those around us and our lives. We come to find that we all have deep stories through which we shape our stories and through which we write our lives, but they do not need to be set in stone.
If we are open and fundamentally teachable as a student to life, we will keep unfolding ourselves to reveal more of who we are. Life opens up relative to how receptive to our own tender being, with all her feelings and all her contradictions and all her needs, we are willing to be.
Ultimately, stepping into our voice comes down to self-allowance and not trying to constantly earn our value through the endless outcome-focused “doing” of the patriarchal paradigm, but rather claiming our inherent self-worth.
We surround ourselves with others who can remind us should we forget, because unlike the mythical solo journey, a tenet of the “heroine’s journey” is to recognize support is available from soulful allies along the road.
Walking Back Towards Yourself
When you come again to a crossroads of self; when you reach a moment where you can no longer distract, ignore, or downplay your feelings, needs or intuition; when you can neither watch yourself hustle for approval nor conspire against your own deeper desires; when you will no longer believe in a culturally-defined success if it isn’t also aligned with your own truth—then, you step through a new doorway.
What you find is more of who you are waiting there, if only you are willing to receive her, if only you are ready to follow her wherever she may take you. When our value is self-possessed, we are free to be and move and create, from the inside-out.
To me, a women’s retreat is never about that one week you stepped away from your life. It’s not really about getting away, but getting in. It’s about walking back towards yourself and stepping further into the truth of who you are.
In addition to lead writer for theglasshammer, Aimee Hansen is the Creator of Storyteller Within Retreats, Lonely Planet Wellness Escapes recommended women’s self-exploration retreats focused on connecting with your embodied inner voice, through writing, yoga, movement and more, to animate your unique expression. Her next luxury retreat event on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala takes place July 31st – August 9th, 2021 with 12 spaces available.
Lindsay Rosner, CFA: Principal at PGIM Fixed Income
Movers and Shakers, PeopleAs a fixed income investor, Rosner can talk about the credit markets all day long, but when it comes to professional development she speaks to investing in yourself. For her that means taking your seat at the table and not being afraid to bring your whole self to work.
During the pandemic, she’s seen more kids, dogs, and spouses than she ever imagined could enter the workplace, but those interactions have helped bring a real human element to business, and for Rosner that’s a step in the right direction.
Insisting on Personal Happiness Factor
While every job has its grunt work – she remembers taking breakfast orders as a Wall Street intern – Rosner looks for work that enlivens her and the people around her.
“I started on Wall Street right out of college. There were some unhappy people,” she recalls. “Fortunately, I worked with quite a few clients who were happy. So, I tried to find myself a job that would prove both professionally challenging and personally satisfying.”
Rosner loves constantly learning, addressing problems, finding solutions and being part of developing and implementing new products.
Recently, she’s animated by exchange traded funds (ETFs) in the fixed income space, allowing access to diversified investments with lower dollar amounts, as well as Environmental Social Governance (ESG) factors and increasingly ESG funds. While governance has always been fundamental to the bottom-up credit analysis conducted by Rosner and her PGIM Fixed Income colleagues, she enjoys being part of the broader ESG conversation which increasingly has shifted to include not only an emphasis on governance, but also social and environmental criteria.
ESG factors are more and more part of the conversations Rosner has with her institutional and retail clients, but also part of the conversations credit analysts are having with Chief Financial Officers and Treasurers because those factors can and do impact the cost of financing.
Investing in Your Value Equation
Early in her career, Rosner was positioned in the equities division of Lehman Brothers as the firm was going under. She found herself in a precarious position that she has not since forgotten and that has informed her decisions.
“Two years out of college on the trading floor means that you are only beginning to understand the markets and risks of positions. You’re deftly quick in putting together the morning meeting packets, have mastered ordering lunch for 40 people and frequently assist senior traders; However, you aren’t in the driver seat yet.” she states. “When Lehman was facing bankruptcy, I saw all the more senior people who I’d been assisting every day interviewing to get their lives figured out, and I quickly learned I needed more marketable skills and a wider network.”
As Barclays purchased Lehman Brothers, Rosner was never out of a job, but realizing she was on her own was a harrowing experience that taught her a valuable lesson: “I will never put myself in a position again where I don’t have the skills. If something happens totally out of your control, you have to be ready.”
Despite many views on the trading floor that a CFA designation was not necessary for a trading role, Rosner attained her CFA as a personal insurance policy and to fortify her credentials. Rosner has since chosen to keep her knowledge and skillset wide, rather than niche.
“Even within your organization, you have to think about the opportunities for specific roles or jobs through the lens of what is best for you,” she says. “For me, I’ve always chosen to pursue roles that are broader.”
Claiming Your Seat at The Table
Rosner emphasizes that you have to actively claim your seat at the table and occupy it with your whole self.
“If you want to be involved in the conversation, you don’t sit in the seat in the back of the conference room,” she asserts. “If there are not more seats, you should pull your chair up to the table and get involved to the appropriate degree.”
Rosner admits she has leaned towards over-preparation in claiming that seat.
“Diversity is not where I’d like it to be in the industry. That’s not only from the gender standpoint. It’s racial diversity as well. I care tremendously to see that change,” says Rosner. “With fewer senior women, I always over-prepare. If that comes across as confidence, I’ve made it look easy. But the fact is, I have a lot to prove.”
But she has also learned to embody her own skin fully.
“You get to a point in your life where you realize you have to be yourself. The path forward isn’t going to happen unless you are,” states Rosner. “That means bringing all of you to the table, not being ashamed to talk about having children, etc. There are times where I will question if the analogy I use, or story I tell, will resonate with the room, but you have to be yourself to be successful.”
Bringing Your Whole Self
“I speak loud. I use my hands. I’m pretty emotive. I have a lot of facial expressions. I bring a little bit of my personal life into my work life, whereas some draw a hard-line,” says Rosner. “I just think, this is the whole me. You need all of it.”
When starting out, she remembers taking training classes for client lunches. “There’s so much importance placed on professionalism, and some of it is so contrived,” she observes. “At the end of the day, these are people too who you’re working with.”
Rosner has long invited back her sense of self-deprecating humor to the office, as part of what helps build connection and relationships, and part of her own professionalism.
“You don’t connect with people when it’s all buttoned up. I love being a storyteller, telling a story and making people laugh,” she says. “We all have those relatable, funny moments and experiences and people will remember those interactions.”
“You’re not always going to connect by talking about a company’s balance sheet. Instead, be vulnerable. Being yourself allows others to be themselves,” she notes. “People value that you remember their kid was going to an important doctor’s appointment and ask what occurred. That’s being real.”
Building Your Village
“I think everybody needs a village. So much is building that village of men and/or women who support you, professionally or personally,” notes Rosner. “It’s all give and take. You have to help somebody in order to get it back.”
While she’s found you can learn from any partnership, Rosner has often benefited the most from the informal mentorships where “often you don’t realize it’s a mentorship until later,” even when the benefit might be tough love.
“Everyone can offer something. There are different times in your career where you’ll need different people so it’s important to keep those contacts,” she notes. “You may not need them for three years, but in a moment you realize that person is the perfect person to give advice on this issue, and you reach out to them.”
On the flip-side, Rosner notes that seeing people who she mentored do well is as rewarding and fulfilling as if it were her own success.
Working From Home
With a three year old and a twenty month old at home, Rosner has enjoyed and needed the flexibility of the remote workplace, whereas the previous expectation was full team presence on the trading floor. The pandemic has put into consideration whether that’s as critical as once believed.
Rosner notes that the remote workspace has brought more recognition and valuing of a perspective that women have always been able to offer.
“Women really have a pulse on what’s going on in the family and the balance sheet of basic consumers in the country,” says Rosner. “You can bring that kind of knowledge to bear, and it’s actually valuable in my work setting now.”
She’s also found the remote workplace means she can be available more easily to chat with others when it comes to mentoring and networking, and even more so with those outside of her organization.
Rosner loves spending time outdoors with her little ones and is enjoying the arrival of spring.
By Aimee Hansen
“Knock Again When a Door is Shut” – and Other Lessons We Learned From 10,000 Women Graduates
Breaking the Glass Ceiling, Featured, NewsIn addition, Goldman Sachs women vice presidents and associates selected to be 10,000 Women champions – serving as mentors to the Growth Fellows – discuss why they wanted to become involved in the program.
Learn more about Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women program, a global initiative that fosters economic growth by providing women entrepreneurs around the world with a business and management education, mentoring and networking, and access to capital.
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10,000 Women Growth Fellows – entrepreneurs who previously participated in the 10,000 Women program and who were selected to participate in a series of training, networking and coaching sessions with senior leaders across Goldman Sachs – shared their experiences building businesses from the ground up and challenges they’ve overcome:
Amanda Obidike, founder of STEMi Makers Africa from Nigeria: “I come from a community where women are afraid to dream, they are afraid to excel. From this background, it has been a challenge – sometimes you don’t get the same types of partnerships, or opportunities because people ask, ‘how are you, as a woman, managing this organization?’ Amidst these hurdles, I’ve learned resilience, I’ve always learned to knock again when a door is shut.”
Raquel Molina, founder of Futuriste Tecnologia from Brazil: “I have always done things that were considered ‘for boys.’ When I began in the drone field and started Futuriste Tecnologia, people were surprised to receive information about drones from a woman. In situations where we are questioned about our expertise, we need to keep calm, share our knowledge and show that we are experts. Slowly but surely, people are beginning to understand the importance of women in the workplace.”
“When we provide tools to women entrepreneurs, we’re not only helping to elevate their business, we’re also elevating their communities,” said Asahi Pompey, global head of Corporate Engagement. “Goldman Sachs is proud to have supported more than 10,000 women throughout the world – and countless communities – since the program’s inception in 2008.”
Goldman Sachs women serving as 10,000 Women champions, a role in which they serve as mentors supporting the entrepreneurs throughout their fellowship, shared why they were driven to participate in the program:
Learn more about the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women program.
Anna Thomas: Vice President, Private Banking Technology at Brown Brothers Harriman
People, Voices of ExperienceThomas speaks to managing work and family, the value of executional and relational strengths and how bias often feels like what goes unsaid.
Managing Career And Family
As a lover of mathematics entering into computer science, Thomas worked with a Professor to research computer simulations of ancient mathematical algorithms based on Indian Vedic scriptures when she worked in MIT India.
After coming to the states to attain her Masters in computer science and a few years of work in tech in the telecommunications industry, she moved to apply her skills within the financial services world. But a week into her job at J.P. Morgan, initially as a consultant, she discovered she was pregnant with her second son. The manager at that time was very supportive and continued to give her larger opportunities.
After a C-section, she planned to take a three-month maternity leave, but the firm was going through an intense merger, and they asked if she could return after six weeks. So even in 2003, Thomas found herself remote working on a desktop computer that had been sent to her home, with the close support of her mother with her new baby.
After moving up to VP in Barclays and changes of firm, Thomas took on a Global VP role at Experian in which she managed 200 technical professionals across 13 worldwide locations. She traveled for work, spending only one week each month at the home office in New York. Her husband agreed to take a job close to home to make it all work.
“I had a very supportive husband and very independent kids too,” she says. “When I think about it, I’m don’t even remember how we did it all. My sons were able to do everything other kids did (ice hockey, karate, baseball, soccer) and mom still had a demanding job.”
Preserving Weekends For the Family
Thomas said her secret was not only designating the weekends solely for family time and home, but also making sure she was “home every day” in another way.
“I still wanted them to have home cooked Indian meals and the heritage,” she recalls. “So I would block off Sunday and bulk cook different dinner dishes for the whole week to eat while I was away.”
“Also, I made personal days off and when I was here, I was committed, not on my Blackberry,” she recalls—whether volunteering to read at her son’s childcare or going on a field trip as a volunteer and getting to know her son’s friends and having them over on the weekend.
Skills of Success
Much like her Sunday approach or how she plans out family vacations, Thomas puts a lot of her business success and leadership capacity down to her strategic and executional strength.
“My passion is to plan, lead and execute,” she says. “You stay disciplined and that’s how you can actually get through whatever you need to do.
Simplification has been another asset to her leadership style.
“Being a woman, you come with a different perspective and empathy, a diverse way of looking at decisions,” says Thomas. “You sit around the table and sometimes there are very complex ways of thinking. It’s often easy for me to make it practical and lay out simple, practical solutions.
“Everything starts with the end in mind—everything has to be for the business. I am very client-centric. If I do something, is this going to be valuable for the client? And that’s how I start thinking about anything, any solution,” she says. “How do I get there? What are the issues in between? Everything else becomes the means to get there. How do I go in steps?”
When it comes to failing, Thomas recommends to be agile with failure too.
“I want to see what happens, and if I am going to fail, I want to fail fast, learn from my mistakes and get up and run again,” she says. “Everyone is going to fail at some point. Everyone is going to have their bad projects. Try to just do it in small cycles, learn fast, and then apply your learning and keep moving.”
No Matter the Work, Leadership is About People
Thomas emphasizes that even in a technical or product development role, what you are really working with is people. She feels parenting transfers to help, too.
At the end of the day, any technology, finance, or other field that you’re talking about, is ultimately about the people who do the work,” she says. “To understand people—have empathy with different perspectives, different personalities, and awareness of context—is critical to your success.”
Due to her background, Thomas offers a keen sensitivity to, and ability to navigate, cultural differences.
“I have the benefit of growing up in a different country and being exposed to different cultures, so that helps me to understand and work with cross-cultural teams,” says Thomas. “For example, in Asian culture, unless you actually reach out and ask, someone will often think it’s disrespectful to provide their view of things. I grew up in that culture, so I know and I can actually coax and ask someone to speak up. I can come from that angle.”
For her, the most nourishing part of work is the “people agenda” and mentoring.
“Something I’ve learned is that a mentor-mentee relationship is always a give-and-take. You are teaching and learning from everyone at the same time,” she says. “There’s no age or experiences that are little. There is a perspective of a person. I have the breadth because I managed a number of things, but down the road, you may have the depth of something I can rely on.”
Bias Can Be The Untold Factor
Thomas has often been the only woman in her technology-based team. One of the things she has experienced as an Indian woman in technology is that ethnic and gender bias is not always easy to point at, but often feels like the elusive thing going unstated.
“When you’re put up against a promotion, you’re in the top two, you have nine out of ten credentials and someone else only has seven out of ten and they get it, you wonder. I rarely have that explained, and I’ve had that experience more than once,” she says. “It’s an untold thing. If my performance exceeds all expectations every time, why not? It’s often unclear what the breaking criteria is.“
She has at times received vague feedback as to skills she would need for a role, as other women have spoke to. In a past firm, when a boss she’d worked with across two firms appointed her to a CTO role because of her change-agent capacity, she experienced a senior male peer visiting her office to attempt to intimidate her away from the role.
“I reported him and I kicked ass taking on that role,” she says. Not surprisingly, she has found that attempts at suppression only comes with visibility and achievements.
In any organization, Thomas looks for opportunities to constantly stay current and update her self and her technology proficiency. Growth is a critical objective for her and she has learned to move on from situations where that is thwarted.
Enjoying Home
Thomas is currently enjoying home life with her husband and her 15 year old son. She likes doing the small mundane things she didn’t always have time for all those traveling years, whether errands to the store or Netflix binges. She still keeps her Sunday meal preparation routine, and her 19 year old son requests his favorite Indian dishes from childhood when he visits from college.
By Aimee Hansen
Nneka Orji: Chief Operating Officer, Morrinson Wealth Management, UK
People, Voices of ExperienceNneka speaks to speaking up when it’s uncomfortable, why mentoring is a key part of people management, and the value of knowing who you are.
From Consulting to COO
After acquiring a Masters of Engineering degree from Oxford, Nneka went into consulting in 2010, first with Accenture and then with Deloitte UK.
Born in India and having grown up across Nigeria, France, Trinidad and the UK, Nneka loved the variety of working with different people and cultures to address diverse problems at a challenging pace.
She earned frequent promotions across her ten year stint in management consulting. As she kept learning, the lifestyle of business travel suited her.
During her time at Deloitte UK, she did a secondment as Chief of Staff for the Chairman’s office. Considering him her first sponsor—a leader who cared, pushed and supported— Nneka gained insight into the mechanics of being in an influential position, running a large organization and interacting with leaders.
She joined Morrinson Wealth Management as Chief Operating Officer in 2019. Nneka highlights that it’s a misconception that she works only with people with great wealth. Often she’s working with clients who are trying to make the earnings they have work best for them.
“They’re trying to plan ahead and look at: How can I make the most of what I’m earning? How do I build a life that’s in line with what I want to deliver for my family, for my loved ones?” she says. “Giving them the financial education, awareness and savviness to manage their own finances and to live the lives they want is really fulfilling.”
Daring the Discomfort of Using Her Voice
While accustomed from school and engineering to being in male-dominated environments and often the only black person in the room, let alone black female, Nneka says that the playing field of financial services has still compelled her to thicken her skin, become more assertive and use her voice.
Several times, she has braved speaking up in a tough moment—both in support of fairness for others and for herself.
Nneka recalls one compelling example from her consulting days when she was in a meeting focused on the consideration of candidates for promotion. When she heard more senior colleagues vaguely describe why a certain female manager was not ready for promotion—such as from a “gut feel” or because of “cultural fit”—she challenged her seniors to be specific, direct and transparent.
“I said, ‘Why is it gut feel? Why do you think she’s not ready? Have you actually given her feedback?’” says Nneka, recalling they hadn’t. “I said, ‘It’s not fair on that individual to give these vague responses. We need to be really clear. She wants to progress. If there’s concern, it’s only right that we tell her, rather than effectively leading her on.”
“I was definitely challenging beyond the point they were comfortable, and I walked out of the room knowing I had pushed,” she recalls. “It’s not that I had anything to gain personally, but I felt that it’s only fair to everyone to have someone to speak for them, on their behalf. If I was in her situation, who would stand up for me?”
While she could have deferred to her senior colleagues, Nneka chose a clear conscience. Nneka reflects the discomfort was likely because she was touching on affinity bias or another elephant in the room that may have been unconscious, but so often proliferates the status quo.
“These kind of decisions affect people’s careers, successes and progressions, how much they’ll get paid and how much they can save and invest and so on,” states Nneka.
Speaking up for herself, Nneka has stood her ground amidst men twenty years her senior, only to earn their respect from her work. She also once directly expressed disappointment in a senior partner’s response and leadership when after three years of working for him, she approached him to talk an issue with one very difficult female client and his immediate suggestion was she must have done something wrong to invite the conflict.
“I feel it’s important to make sure it’s clear what you will stand or what you are willing to accept, in terms of basic respect,” says Nneka.
Supporting Others To See Their Potential
“I haven’t had formal mentors to be very honest,” says Nneka, though she has leaders to bounce perspectives off of. “But you can put together the strong points that you see in different leaders and create almost your own fictional mentor in that way.”
She’s inspired to emulate the leaders whom she looked forward to working with—who pushed her in the best way and with whom she came to learn more about herself and her abilities.
“I do see mentoring as a core part of managing, because you can manage as a task manager and the tasks will get done,” Nneka notes. “But what I’m trying to do is to be an inspiring leader. I try to instil a sense of raising aspirations; maybe a team member started their career thinking this was your limit, but actually they have so much more potential, if they want to do more.”
Nneka values communication and saying or hearing it like it is, so nobody suffers in silence while their needs go unknown.
When Nneka took on managing others, she didn’t realize how rewarding it would be. “When a team member comes and says I’ve developed so much over the past year because of your influence, it gives me a strong sense of fulfillment.
Nneka has been a formal mentor for over a decade, with the Social Mobility Foundation, working with graduate mentees with a socially or economically challenged background, and also with the Cherie Blair Foundation For Women, working with entrepreneurial women in countries like India or Kenya or Israel.
These experiences have enriched her so much, she also considers them “reverse mentoring”.
“I like to see how different people think and how different people’s life experiences have shaped who they are, and how that informs their thinking,” says Nneka. “There’s something about learning about someone else’s perspective on life, and being open to finding out something that you might not have known. That’s the thing I love the most.”
Knowing Who You Are
Nneka feels her support system, both her family and working with people who have her best interests at heart and gave her a platform, has supported her fast growth.
She recommends being “intentional about choosing who you work with”—seeking out people who accept you for yourself and push you in a good way while having your back.
She feels that early on, her parents helped her to know who she was, down to pointing out the reality that she would often be unique in the room—as a black female in the schools she was in, and in her working life, especially as she moves up in leadership.
“Some people would say you shouldn’t necessarily point out or emphasize the difference,” reflects Nneka, “but I think it was so helpful in terms of me knowing who I was and who I am, and being true to myself. Of course I wasn’t always as confident in this respect and I’ve grown a lot since, but being comfortable in your own skin, in terms of your own history and culture, is critical. As long as you know who you are, you know your motivations, your boundaries and you make decisions in line with these.”
Nneka has worked some long hours, and suspects that subconsciously she has been motivated to overwork as a proactive measure against casual suggestions of gender or ethnic minority initiatives playing into her promotions, a frustrating undermining of accomplishment that black women are more likely to be subjected to.
“Sometimes you don’t have to work as hard as you do to get the outcome that you want,” she has come to realize. “I think that’s probably a lesson I am still learning.”
Nneka loves to travel, workout, dance and listen to both crime podcasts and inspiring podcasts during long walks in the sunshine—such as Oprah Super Soul Sunday, HBR Women At Work, The Wallet, The Tim Ferriss Show.
She’s inspired by “people who find their purpose and commit to positively influencing communities – small or large”.
By Aimee Hansen
Grace J. Lee: Litigation Partner, Shearman & Sterling LLP
People, Voices of ExperienceLee shares on defining your own success, aligning with your personal priorities, and challenging the stereotypes of who you need to be in the role.
From Literature to Law
Lee contemplated a path in comparative literature, but was hesitant to commit to a life in academia. She also had been considering law school and discovered that law fulfilled her interest in causes for justice and allowed her to apply her literature skillsets.
“As a comparative literature major, I did a lot of exercises in explicating texts—you take a passage from a literary work, consider why the author chose the words they did, and where it fits in the broader context of the work,” says Lee. “In legal work, I was interested in interpreting words—words in statutes and court decisions. And making arguments about how certain language should be interpreted, based on word choices and the context, to support a thesis.”
Now in her 15th year at Shearman & Sterling (S&S) in New York and D.C., she is an industry expert—working with financial institutions and corporations on securities and antitrust litigation, commercial litigation, and regulatory investigations.
Defining Her Own Success
“Don’t buy into how other people define success. If you have a view of where you want to be in five or ten years, stay true to that,” says Lee, “as opposed to feeling like you need to be or do something that might be completely divorced from what makes you professionally and personally satisfied.”
While attaining partnership was a meaningful step in her career, it does not define her success, and she points out that many smart, successful people do not opt into or attain partnership.
“I think success is a very personal thing. For me, being able to have the different spaces of my life come together is success,“ she notes. “I’m able to have a career that I find fulfilling and kids who are fairly well adjusted. My kids see that what I do is not at their expense, and that my professional space means something to me.”
Aligning With Your Personal Priorities
For her personally, becoming a parent changed and clarified her priorities in a way that she never anticipated.
“I had a vision of the type of parent I wanted to be, and the type of lawyer I wanted to be,” says Lee. “I also realized that if I couldn’t be the parent that I wanted to be, then I wasn’t going to be happy even if I succeeded as a lawyer, and that became my guiding principle.”
To make this work, Lee did her best to fulfill her visions of both roles. She prioritized coming home to put her children to bed every night, and then working a second shift, often late into the night. “What that meant was that what could have been a work day that ended at 9 or 10 pm if I worked through the evening in the office became a work day that often ended well past midnight, because I took the time to go home, spend a little time with them, and put them to bed.” But for Lee, the personal sense of having given something the best that she could under the circumstances, was what was the most important.
“In order for me to not be resentful of the fact that I have a demanding job but instead grow in it, I had to make sure that I wouldn’t look back 20 years from then and feel that I had sacrificed my values as a parent to be a lawyer. I gave my best to both roles so that, many years from now, I hopefully wouldn’t feel that I had pursued one at the expense of the other and question those choices.”
Knowing her choice is her own, she emphasizes that your own priority is never wrong, whatever it is—it’s about aligning your life with your self-discerned priority.
“The trouble is when you’re trying to do something that doesn’t align with your values just because you feel like you have to do it,” says Lee. “I think that’s where the discord and the struggles really materialize.”
Lee finds it helpful to introduce the two parts of her life to each other. “After a long week, the physical office building was not the place I would have chosen to go to on a weekend. But it was important for my kids to be able to visualize me at work during the day, where I spend more time than I do with them.” So on some weekends, Lee brought her kids into the office where they would walk through the halls, sit at her desk and pretend that they were working. Lee also naturally incorporates her job as a parent in her conversations at work.
“Some people—especially women at least as I have observed—shy away from talking about their kids at work because they think they will be taken as less committed. I want people to understand that I have another demanding job that I absolutely love. It’s important for me to feel that my work is a safe space where I can talk about my kids, and the challenges and the demands of parenthood instead of pretending that I don’t have those issues.”
That openness has also paved the way for real meaningful discussions with mentors who have helped her navigate the intensity of BigLaw while striking the balance she personally seeks.
“So many great partners who have been mentors and friends over the years really helped me as I was trying to figure out my priorities and my definition of success. They didn’t just tell me what to do to get to the next step in BigLaw. They asked me what I wanted in life and in my career and shared their personal stories. Those discussions could get very granular—like, ‘What are your stressors? Let’s identify what they are, and see if it’s solvable.’” Even when the stressor was outside of Lee’s control, being able to identify it helped more than just feeling stressed.
Her mentors have also often become her sponsors, advocating for her and helping her to advance in the organization and with clients.
Growing Through The Process
“Take on as much as you think you can reasonably handle. And then stretch that a little. See how that works. And if that works, stretch it a little more. Do the very best to not turn down work,” says Lee, who focuses on the notion of building her personal value rather than billing hours.
“My brand and my value come down to my experience. The level of experience and breadth of different types of cases you get because you’re working more and stretching a little is huge. That experience becomes a big part of your value as a lawyer.”
For Lee, it’s not a particular case or moment that has been rewarding for her, but the relationships and overall growth that come with the process of working with her teams and clients to solve issues. “It’s the journey from Point A to Point B, from Point B to Point C, and so on, and then seeing the growth from Point A to Point X. It’s not any single moment, but it’s many blocks of moments of where I was and where I am now.”
Being Yourself, Not an Expectation
Though Lee works with many women, the industry and partnership ring are more male-dominated, so she values that her own trajectory helped to set an important precedent.
“It’s natural to look for someone you can identify with in the role you want to be in. I hope that I might be able to be that person for some.”
Just as Lee rejects the notion of adopting anyone else’s idea of success, she also challenges the notion that you have to be anyone else’s version of a lawyer.
Especially as she became more senior, Lee confronted expectations about how a successful lawyer looks and acts—such as the stereotype of litigators being loud and argumentative—but those expectations didn’t always match the ways that Lee speaks or acts. Lee believes that you don’t have to fundamentally change who you are, or embody certain mannerisms every day, to be an effective advocate. “Having people from different backgrounds and with different tendencies in the leadership roles helps dismantle that and challenge that notion.”
Playing By Ear
Lee played the violin as a child, and as a parent follows the Suzuki Method with her children, which teaches children to pick up music through exposure and repetition before actually reading music, akin to how they pick up their mother tongue before they learn how to read.
With the method being based upon a parent-teacher-child triangle, Saturdays and even family summer holidays have often been focused around music classes and Suzuki camp. “It’s a refreshing change of pace. In my kids’ violin instructions, we are much less concerned about how quickly they can master something than we are at how perfectly they can learn it. An entire month can be spent dedicated to making sure they can play one musical phrase correctly.” Lee also loves how music brings her family together, including playing violin duets with her children.
Rounding back to literature, Lee is looking forward to reading a book she picked up some months ago at a local bookstore. “It was a ‘blind date’ book where the book is wrapped and you don’t know what it is, but it instead lists other books of similar sentiments. I loved the idea of it and all of the books that were listed on the wrapper, so picked it up with a lot of anticipation.”
By Aimee Hansen
How To Disrupt Gender Bias in the Virtual Workplace
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!, NewsLast week, theglasshammer.com explored the impact of the virtual office in either neutralizing or amplifying pre-existing dynamics of gender bias.
Ultimately, the gender bias present in our cultural paradigm is also present in our offices, and this week we explore how to address it.
How Leaders Can Diffuse Gender Bias in the Virtual Office
An article in the World Economic Forum asserts that when it comes to bias in virtual meetings as in any context, “changing the environment in the room – rather than changing women’s behavior – should be the goal.“
“If we build a world in which women’s voices are valued and listened to,” says Jessica Preece, associate professor in political science at Brigham Young University, “they will speak up without having to be told to.”
“Smart companies create inclusive work cultures so that all employees actively support each other, particularly marginalized groups. Allyship and curiosity should be at the heart of a manager’s leadership, regardless of gender, to create a more inclusive, welcoming workplace,” says Serena Fong, Vice President, Strategic Engagement for Catalyst.
As leaders, meeting chairs can set the tone and expectations upfront, including implementing ground rules for discussions that mitigate some of the communication challenges and gender imbalances, such as a no interruption rule in Zoom calls.
As written in Forbes, reducing interruption requires the self-reflection of questions such as “Is this person making a point I need to add onto?” and “Am I listening equally to everyone in the room?”
Calling out when gender imbalances occur is another approach to being an ally on Zoom, as exemplified by an associate professor who let the men dominating the virtual conversation know that she was happy to hear their input, but also wanted to hear from the women.
Introducing positive interjections, such as “that’s a really valuable point” to validate, amplify and give pause of consideration to women’s voices is another strategy for leveling the field.
Putting workflow systems in place that ensure communication flow, project tracking and clear administrative responsibilities will also help reduce the amount of extra work picked up by women.
According to Fong at Catalyst, leaders should embrace these five key strategies to disrupt gender imbalances and build a more flexible, equitable and inclusive workplace for all:
How Women Can Ally Together in the Virtual Office
While not responsible for correcting gender imbalance, women can still be allies to one another in subverting gender imbalances of the virtual workplace.
“If you see a colleague being ignored or is trying to speak, say something. If you learn about an act of bias, think about how you can address it,” says Fong. “It may not seem like much, but it is infinitely better than ignoring it.”
Carol Vernon, founder and principal of Communication Matters, recommends for women to set the stage early for speaking up in a virtual meeting rather than waiting to have the perfect compelling thing to say, and to take the lead in introducing non-verbal expression to the meeting.
Another way of subverting bias is by actively reinforcing ideas that another woman has brought to the table and then re-accrediting the idea as hers, as While House staffers did during the Obama administration.
Women leaders have also told theglasshammer.com about actively inviting female colleagues who hold valuable insight on a topic to share their viewpoint, as well as instant messaging with coworkers during meetings to enhance solidarity and encourage each other to speak.
Nicki Gilmour, Leadership Coach, Organizational development specialist and founder of theglasshammer.com adds, “Creating psychological safety as the leader in the virtual room matters also, as who you authorize to not only speak but to demonstrate expertise matters. People will take their cues from you in person or otherwise about who is truly authorized to speak up. Asking for different people’s viewpoints from their perspective will not only add value but level the playing field for the quieter, more hesitant people on the call.”
Virtual gender bias is really just the same dynamics at play in a new space, but perhaps the playing field also allows for new disruptions.
By Aimee Hansen
Mary Inman: Partner and Head of International Whistleblower Practice, Constantine Cannon LLP
People, Voices of ExperienceWith an innate penchant for fairness and justice from childhood, Inman says her family could have predicted she’d become a lawyer.
She entered law with the “amorphous notion” of wanting to do good in the world and affect positive social change. What was not clear, even coming out of law school, was what kind of lawyer she would be.
An Unexpected Expertise
After a couple of years clerking for federal judges in Maine and New Hampshire and one year inside Big Law at a large commercial law firm, a headhunter extended her a novel opportunity—join the new San Francisco office of a boutique firm specializing in representing whistleblowers.
Inman went from a passing familiarity with the subject matter to spending 17 years honing her craft with Phillips & Cohen, before joining Constantine Cannon in 2015, now splitting her time between its San Francisco and London offices.
“At the beginning of my career, there were only a handful of whistleblower reward laws. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have chosen a field that has grown exponentially. The success of the whistleblower tool in aiding law enforcement efforts has spawned more and more whistleblower reward programs,” revels Inman. “My practice allows me to aid individual whistleblower clients, while at the same time helping them expose industry-wide frauds—so it’s the best of both worlds.”
With 24 years of specialization, Inman is an author, regular speaker and recognized expert in the area of U.S. and international whistleblower reward laws, with their focus on frauds in financial services, healthcare, automotive safety and government procurement as well as tax evasion, bribery of government officials and money laundering.
Encouraging Whistleblowers to Speak Out
Though whistleblowers are often ostracized, Inman asserts they play a critical role in maintaining the healthy ecosystem of an organization.
“Companies have an autoimmune response to whistleblowers, seeking to expel them from their system,” notes Inman. “However, research confirms my anecdotal experience that they’re actually the good bacteria that keeps a company healthy. Because they have the temerity to speak up and alert you to problems before they metastasize into a public relations nightmare, whistleblowers should be viewed by companies for what they really are — forward indicators of risk and an invaluable part of a company’s risk management system.”
She compares it to interpersonal relationships: “Only someone close to you, who really cares about you, will tell you the hard truths.”
Most countries’ laws focus on the employment law aspects of whistleblowing — whistleblower protection from retaliation and reprisal after they have spoken up, allowing whistleblowers to challenge unlawful retaliatory dismissal, demotion or blacklisting.
U.S. and Canadian law differs in that it also connects whistleblowers with the law enforcement and regulatory agencies who can act on their information and redress the harm. Agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and Department of Transportation (DOT) roll out the welcome mat for whistleblowers. Each agency has a designated Whistleblower Office specially designed to receive and vet whistleblower tips. Credible tips are sent to the agencies’ enforcement attorneys who frequently use the whistleblowers’ information to launch an investigation. If the agency goes on to impose a fine or otherwise sanction the wrongdoer, the whistleblower is entitled to a financial reward in an amount that is a guaranteed percentage of the fine levied or sanction imposed (e.g., the typical award range is 10 to 30 percent).
“What a whistleblower actually wants is someone to do something about the wrongdoing she’s uncovered,” says Inman of her clients. “The North American reward programs ensure that the whistleblower’s concern will be taken seriously and dealt with by the regulatory authority. This active solicitation and empowerment of whistleblowers, using supports like mandatory financial awards and designated whistleblower offices, has put agencies like the SEC on the map with their successful deployment of whistleblower information to impose over $2 billion in fines on companies violating the U.S. securities laws and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Other agencies have taken notice and reward programs have been spreading rapidly both within the U.S. and across the globe.”
The Courage of the Individual Voice
Inman notes that our childhood conditioning creates internal conflict—we were all encouraged to speak up when we saw something wrong and yet we were discouraged from “snitching.”
“Everyone has had a whistleblower moment—a time when you spoke a hard truth, then something negative happened to you, so it can be difficult to figure out what to do when you’re in the heat of that moment,” she says. “Whistleblowers are those people who can’t abide by it, and actually turn off the personal warning signals that stop so many of us—such as the practical need to keep our jobs, a refusal to risk what we’ve worked and trained for and not disrupting our family lives.”
By the time her clients come to her—whether for a financial, healthcare or manufacturing fraud, or other corruption—they have usually had their voices silenced. Inman finds it rewarding to welcome those who have been marginalized, to let them know they’re not alone and to validate their reality in a moment when they’ve often been gaslighted and pushed to doubt themselves.
“There’s something really profound about taking someone who’s ‘in extremis’ and hopefully putting them into a place where they feel empowered again,” she says.
Inman sees it as her responsibility to go beyond being a legal advocate and to help her clients step back and consider what is at stake, not only for the individual whistleblower but for their families as well. With that wider consideration, they can undertake their personal risk/reward calculus and figure out what, if any, action is right for them.
“Once you’ve blown the whistle, you can’t unring that bell,” she remarks. “It’s a life-altering event.”
“Very few companies want to hire known whistleblowers,” notes Inman, who has recently campaigned to challenge companies to walk their talk. “If you truly believe in speak up and it’s not just lip service, then hire a former whistleblower. What says more to your employees that you value speak up than that you have purposefully hired someone who did?”
The Power of the Collective Voice
“Even though you’re the lowest in the pecking order, trust your instincts; you’re often in the best position to know that something’s wrong,” she tells fresh-eyed business students when she guest lectures in business ethics classes.
From the recent Ukraine whistleblower on the Trump Administration to the Me Too movement, Inman has characterized this as a time of “unprecedented speak out”—citing research that says people are speaking out in record numbers since the Covid-19 pandemic began.
She thinks that technology has played a role, with the development of anonymous reporting tools and sites such as WikiLeaks and GlobaLeaks fueling a brand of leaktivism that has allowed crowdsourced journalism models like those employed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to use this data to fuel impactful investigations like the Panama Papers, Luanda Leaks, and FinCEN files, to name a few. She also cites speculation that the rise of the remote workplace leaves workers feeling less connected and for new hires leaves little opportunity for the casual indoctrination about turning a blind eye that can be subtly communicated in the office. She also thinks there’s collective frustration that “the top 1% has become increasingly untouchable.”
“Speaking out is an act of rebellion, of people saying ‘no more’,” says Inman. “It gives me hope and restores my faith that the voices of individual citizen watchdogs can be heard and continue to serve as our first and last line of defense against fraud and corruption.”
Inspiration From Cross-Disciplines
“Don’t just stay in your lane and look at thought leaders in your field,” says Inman. “Adopt a multi-disciplinary approach. Teachings far flung from the legal world have been the most valuable to my career.”
As her husband is a filmmaker, tech and film are two peripheral realms from which Inman derives creative catalysis.
As an example, Inman was inspired by the Callisto app (technology to combat sexual assault)—created after the documentary film “The Hunting Ground,” which focused on the epidemic of campus date rape.
If a student does not want to file a report, the app allows them to confidentially record an assault incident within the Callisto database for possible future reference, in a form of information escrow. But the app also facilitates collective action, allowing the student to be contacted again to reconsider speaking up collectively in the event others subsequently make reports about the same assailant.
Inman was inspired to consider the possibilities of this approach for whistleblowing.
“You’ll take inspiration from the strangest places,” says Inman. “Don’t expect it in your industry. Expect it in the unexpected places.”
Rise to Those Opportunities
“My most defining life lesson is to accept every challenge and say ‘yes’,” says Inman, whose whistleblower practice pushes her out of the risk-aversion common to lawyers. “I’m inspired by my clients. Every day, their moral strength and bravery pushes me to step up my game.”
In the “scrappy creative environment” of the entrepreneurial, contingency-fee plaintiff side of law, Inman has learned to “fake it until you make it.”
“Just take the opportunity and watch yourself rise to the occasion. You’ll surprise yourself,” says Inman. “A lot of people are paralyzed because they’re too worried about making mistakes. Embrace your mistakes. If you’re making mistakes, you’re doing something right, you’re taking risks and trying on something new. That’s where the growth happens.”
One of the risks Inman took was to advocate for taking on a “small case” involving an odious practice in what her instincts told her was a corrupt company. It later turned out to expose an industry-wide fraud and was a very rich lesson in validating her intuition.
“What I learned is that when a place is that corrupt, that’s not the only bad thing that they’re doing. As we investigate, that corruption is going to expand,” says Inman. “I love the psychology of what makes people decide to cross that ethical line.”
Your Voice Matters Because You’re A Woman
Inman accredits her grandmother, a county clerk of court, as her original mentor. She used to take her to court and whisper, ‘We need more women lawyers.’
Reflecting back on University of Pennsylvania Law School, Inman now realizes what a powerful mentor Professor Lani Guinier was for her (now at Harvard Law School)—because she was a passionate woman that deeply inspired Inman to throw herself into her vocation.
“At a formative phase like law school, it’s so fundamental that you have a woman who inspires you,” says Inman. “I don’t think at the time I assigned as much significance to it as I do now.”
Since then, most of Inman’s mentors and champions have been men with daughters. She is passionate about mentoring, including speaking to her sons’ classmates about being a woman in law.
When it comes to empowering her own voice, Inman takes license from the research that public companies with women on their boards are more effective than those who don’t.
“That gave me the empirical data that my voice is valuable precisely because I may have a different perspective. I feel more compelled to speak out because I’m often the only woman in the room and I often offer a very different perspective,” states Inman. “It makes intuitive sense that we’re better when we’re challenged and have different points of view. So being a woman has encouraged me to speak up and share my mind, especially in male-dominated situations.”
Her sons are 19 and 14, and she’s been taking up surfing lately to share time with them. Inman’s other passion is yoga, and the alchemical practice of sitting with discomfort and staying present.
By Aimee Hansen
Is Gender Bias Amplified in the Virtual Workplace?
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!, NewsThe dissolution of physical boundaries between home and office and classroom very rarely affords a woman with children “a room of her own” in which to conduct her professional life, unlike her male counterparts.
And now the remote workplace itself—the virtual meeting room and Zoom office—is introducing a mixed bag of gender-related impacts, neutralizing some imbalances while magnifying others.
How the Virtual Meeting Room Could Neutralize Gender Bias
As of February, researchers in Forbes reported that sentiments towards moral, motivation and collaboration related to the virtual workplace have been dropping into negative territory since November among executive leaders. Yet women leaders remained more positive than men—especially in relation to impact of the virtual workplace on productivity, decision-making and communication. Women leaders were more positive about the chairing of online meetings and that it sets the space that ‘ensures all team members can contribute to meetings’.
While men are socialized to establish dominance and position in team communications, women are inclined to establish relationships and build trust. Some research has indicated that virtual media, with a lack of non-verbal cues and three-dimensional richness, can led to greater misunderstanding in communication, but also diffuses the ability for men to dominate team interaction.
“With completely remote-meetings, the physical and social dynamics of in-person conversations unhinge the norms of hierarchy,” speculates UX researcher Allison Yu. “In Zoom, everyone is literally on an equal grid.”
Yu points out that when the active speaker is everyone’s primary focus on a Zoom screen, the act of cutting someone else off simply becomes more blunt. The virtual office also mitigates height bias, which favors men.
Whereas access to senior leaders is generally lower for women and women of color especially, Yu argues access becomes more equalized in a virtual workplace where some of the more exclusionary casual networking meet-ups, cultivated through affinity bias, aren’t as frequent or prevalent.
How the Virtual Meeting Room Is Proliferating Gender Bias
On the other hand, the virtual meeting room is also playing out to magnify pre-existing gender dynamics—such as male executives winning competency points for speaking longer while women lose them, passion expressed by women leaders being perceived as overemotional by male counterparts, men being 33% more likely to interrupt their female than male colleagues (manterruption), women speaking up 25% less than men in the meeting environment, and live reverbalizaton and appropriation by men of ideas previously introduced by a female colleague.
According to Catalyst research, 1 in 5 women has felt ignored and overlooked by coworkers using video calls. 45% of women business leaders say it’s difficult for women to speak in virtual meetings and 42% of male business leaders agree. Additionally, 31% of women and queer/non-binary respondents reported “getting talked over, interrupted, or ignored more frequently during virtual meetings than those held in person” in a July 2020 survey by the Society of Women Engineers.
In September, University of Iowa Grad student Claire McDonnell shared a video call recording on TikTok entitled “live footage of being a woman in STEM” that went viral within 48 hours. The clip shows her repeatedly being interrupted by fellow male students when pitching project ideas and having her own ideas appropriated and re-presented by her peers, though she was the only with with actual work experience with the topic.
As written in the New York Times, Georgetown University professor Deborah Tannen asserts that the remote workplace amplifies pre-existing conversational imbalances in who gets heard. Whereas men will tend to be argumentative and speak longer to convey authority, women will often be succinct, self-deprecating or speak in more indirect ways to not take up more space than necessary and be likable.
“Women are systematically seen as less authoritative,” said Jessica Preece, associate professor in political science at Brigham Young University. “And their influence is systematically lower. And they’re speaking less. And when they’re speaking up, they’re not being listened to as much, and they are being interrupted more.”
As put forth in Fast Company, women also have weaker informal relationships at work and office politics are still at play as “the official virtual meeting represents only a fraction of interactions, and real power dynamics will move backstage, excluding women as needed.”
Research also shows more women (46%) are struggling with group work than men (37%), often picking up more of the undefined, collaborative-based tasks and carrying the load of remote office housework. Also, “when faced with poor visibility or communication on what their colleagues are doing, many women compensate by working more,” an impulse which can be amplified by lack of co-presence in the remote working office.
How to Diffuse and Disrupt Virtual Bias?
While the flexibility of the remote workplace is generally supportive to gender equality, and virtual meeting rooms could counter or neutralize aspects of gender bias, the last year has revealed that entrenched cultural gender dynamics will reveal themselves, sometimes more so in altered circumstances. If gender inequality is inherent within our culture, it’s frankly alive and well in our virtual offices.
Next week, we will explore how leaders, managers, allies and women colleagues can play a role in addressing and mitigating the dynamics of virtual bias.
By Aimee Hansen
Alison Hoover: Partner, Banking Transformation Leader and Advisory Diversity & Inclusion Leader, PwC U.S.
People, Voices of ExperienceHoover talks about going part-time after motherhood, growing her leadership confidence and how she is approaching diversity by championing the upside.
Braving the Part-Time Conversation
Four years into consulting, Hoover went on for her MBA at Kellogg School of Management. She joined Diamond Technology Partners, the hot tech boutique, after and continued on with PwC, when Diamond was acquired in 2010, where she is currently the banking transformation leader.
But her career almost ended abruptly after she had her first baby. Hoover returned to the office, after 12 weeks of leave, on a Monday morning in 2002. By Wednesday at 5pm, she had quit her job.
“I literally threw all of my stuff in the trash, all the notebooks and articles and old project folders.” And she recalls saying, “There’s no way I can do this. I have this baby. It’s impossible.”
After moving to Washington, D.C. to be near family, she decided on her daughter’s first birthday that she did want to work, but part-time. She decided to brave the conversation where she was a “known commodity.”
Hoover phoned a Diamond partner in Chicago and proposed to be their person on the ground in D.C., to help build the firm’s newly started public sector practice, at three days a week. Successful, she ended up being the first to pilot a part-time work arrangement.
For seven years, Hoover worked part-time, upgrading to four days a week once she became a director because “I felt like at three days a week, I could be an individual contributor. I didn’t feel like I could effectively manage other people.”
While still in her part-time stint, she had a second daughter and became a Partner at PwC.
“Honestly, if I hadn’t had the opportunity to work part-time, I don’t think I would be in consulting at all anymore,” she reflects. “Maybe I made partner a year or two later. I’ll never know, but the flip-side is I wouldn’t be here at all. I wouldn’t be sitting in a leadership position.”
Asking, Receiving Support and Valuing Yourself
“You have to ask for what you need and what you want,” Hoover notes. “No one’s going to be mind reading that you need it and give it to you. Sometimes, you have to lay these things out.”
Hoover not only had to ask for part-time, she also had to train her teammates to consider when she was available and not. It also helped that her husband is a huge supporter of her and has been an active co-parent, and she notes that having people around her—a husband, parents, colleagues, partners—that believed in her, maybe even more than she believed in herself, mattered.
Her bosses even reflected to her that she could work at 80% and still get as much done as others, so she didn’t need to sweat the clock.
When she made partner, Hoover remembers a PwC leader advised her: “’You are a partner now. Work when you want to work. Do the work that you need to do, and don’t worry about the rest.’”
Hoover had to get past the hesitation of asking for support from others by reminding herself of the value she added, and that giving and receiving support were more than reciprocal.
“When you’re giving it, it’s what you’re supposed to do, it’s your job,” she comments. “When you’re asking for it, somehow it feels like a favor. I think that’s how we’re wired.”
Stepping Up To a Leadership Mindset
Prior to becoming a partner, Hoover remembers wondering aloud where the senior women were to support her. Someone in the room called out: “You’re a director, you’re pretty senior now. Who are you turning around and reaching to?”
It was a teachable moment.
“I realized that I had been so self-focused, wondering where the help was above me, that I hadn’t considered that someone might actually be looking to me to help them,” admits Hoover. “There’s the little factor of that voice, ‘Who am I to help anybody else?’”
Hoover realized that even if you still have your own learning curves or insecurities, others are taken their cues from you as a leader. You have accrued guidance to give to others.
“What you realize, more and more, and especially as a partner, is that while you might feel like the same person in your own head,” she says, “your positional authority and tenure creates an obligation, and there is something valuable you have to share.”
When appointed to lead the banking transformation team, Hoover was tasked with leading more senior and more experienced partners. Initially, she stepped tentatively into the role, until a boss pulled her aside and reiterated she had been chosen for a reason.
“Sometimes we all need that kick. It gave me more confidence,” she recalls. “He was giving me permission, in fact a mandate, to lead these other partners.”
“So much of consulting is built on expertise and knowing the most about a given topic, but there’s so much about leadership that is not just about knowledge but behaviors and other skills,” Hoover notes. “That was a mind shift for me, that I didn’t have to know everything about everything to lead other people.”
She prides herself on her integrity of word, ability to get things done and adeptness in leveraging her network for other people’s benefits.
“I think one of my biggest and best skills is being that connector who is bringing things together, connecting ideas and people, to help them advance whatever their agenda may be,” she says.
Affirming A Culture of Inclusion
“As one of the fewer women leaders, I feel a great responsibility to be present and accessible and visible,” says Hoover, noting it’s a personal choice, as often the responsibility for showing up for diversity falls too much on the shoulders of the under-represented.
Hoover is also PwC’s U.S. Advisory Diversity & Inclusion leader, and she falls into stride when talking on D&I. Having significantly less than 50% women in the partnership ring (PwC transparently publishes their diversity report) is one priority.
“My focus is twofold. There’s the very public, very visible things like representation. Who are we hiring? Who are we promoting? Who are leaders?” says Hoover. “But I think so much of those outputs is the result of the small, everyday decisions that the majority, for the most part, are making. Who gets staffed on a project? Who gets called on in a meeting? Who makes the dinner reservations? Who talks first? Who gets the chair at the head of the table? Whose e-mail are you responding to first?”
Hoover threads that conversation across conversations and decisions—suspecting those “everyday nudges help to tweak behaviors that over time add up to massive impact. “
“It’s often much more who are you helping versus who are you hurting, because I think 99% of the time, people are not intentionally discriminating,” she pinpoints. “How do we harness the good intentions of our leaders to create a more inclusive culture on a regular basis, and change all of the things that people unconsciously do that are not increasing inclusion? A lot of what I’m very focused on is subtler culture dynamics. Like, what does it feel like to go to work every day? How much do you believe in your ability to succeed and to make an impact?”
She indicates that her approach to that conversation is to positively reinforce the inclusive-habits that leads to organizational wins—more “carrot” than “stick”.
“How do we tell those stories where people are actually doing better or winning because of their inclusive behavior? Every time we get that note from a client impressed at the number of women present and speaking in the session,” she says, “I want to celebrate the successes, advancements, achievements and accomplishments.”
As well as accountability metrics, Hoover emphasizes the importance of top leadership in driving cultural change.
“I think everyone’s looking for that silver bullet around implementation, and cultural change is always a challenge, regardless of what element of culture you’re trying to change,” observes Hoover. “But those key decisions—tone at the top, who are your leaders, who and what you’re celebrating, transparency—go a long way.”
Outside of work, Hoover loves to cook homemade meals, spend time with her 15 and 18 year old daughters, keep up with politics and enjoy the outdoors as much as she possibly can.
By Aimee Hansen