Now that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ election represented a milestone for women, black women and Asian-American women alike, let’s call for momentum.
Because if organizations are not focusing on elevating significantly more black women to leadership positions, they are likely failing to do so.
Black women face compounded discrimination in the workplace with intersecting gender and racial identities—so while among the fasting-growing entrepreneurs, at least pre-pandemic, black women still struggle to pierce corporate leadership’s glass ceiling.
For how much longer will a lack of diversity results continue to reflect corporate commitment to holding onto homogeneousness in leadership?
The Conversation Is Finally Happening, But It Can’t Stop There
Former Senator Kamala Harris, a black woman and woman of Asian descent, broke new ground as the first woman to become U.S. Vice President. Though highly visible for all in the spirit of “if you can see it, you can be it”, a real shift will be evidenced when she is not an exception, and black women are prominent in influential leadership.
While the sociocultural conversation of 2020 focused on Black Lives Matter, the C-Suite conversation is arriving to the reality that black leadership matters—inducing financial and reputation-based reverberations for companies that continue to fail to move diversity beyond lip-service to a quantifiable reality.
In a commitment to accelerate efforts towards racial justice and equality, McKinsey Academy launched the Black Leadership Academy, with a Management Accelerator program and a Black Executive Leadership Program, to support progression to both senior leadership and C-Suite roles.
Several companies—such as Amazon, Uber, Microsoft, Salesforce, Facebook, Apple, and Google—vowed to significantly increase investment in black leadership and diversity, as well as made tangible commitments to % increases in representation.
Black Women Face Specific Challenges at Work
When we only talk about “women leaders” or “black leaders”, we are missing the point that black women are often sidelined in either discussion—either white women or black men often become the feature players.
Lean In released a report called “The State of Black Women in Corporate America,” which details the challenges and obstacles that black women specifically face—these, in effect, include underrepresentation, lack of support and access, day-to-day discrimination and unrealized, discouraged ambition.
Underrepresented and Undermined
75% of black women identify as ambitious towards their career, while 40% seek to attain a management position within the next five years. But while 37 women lead Fortune 500 firms, none are black, and while 21% of C-Suite leaders are women, only 1% are black women.
Less than 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs are black, with a total of only 18 Black CEOS across the past two decades—Ursula Burns was the only woman among them.
Whereas black women make up 7.4% of the U.S. population, they hold only 1.6% of VP positions and 1.4% of C-Suite positions. White men, however, make up only 35% of the U.S. population and dominate 57% of VP positions and 68% of C-Suite positions.
For every 100 men hired into manager roles, only 64 black women are. Black women request promotions at the same rate as men, but for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 58 black women are.
“The culture of promotion can also exclude qualified black candidates,” writes Jeanne Sahadi, “who may not be part of the social networks that board members and CEOs often use to vet a candidate.”
Black women are both the most educated and the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S., owning 21% of all women-owned businesses and with above average growth rate.
However, between 2009-2018, less than .0006% of venture capital went towards black women-led startups. And black women still earn 62 cents for every dollar earned by white men, compared to 82 cents on average for women.
Not only are black women underrepresented, but when they overcome obstacles to achieve success, their accomplishments are often attributed to external factors. This undermines recognizing black women for their talent, competency, hard work and hard-earned credit of their successes.
Less Support and Access to Leadership
Lean In points out that in a survey of U.S. law firm employees, “62% of women of color with some level of mentorship said the lack of an influential mentor was a barrier to their advancement; only 30% of white men said the same.”
Only 24% of black women say they have the sponsorship needed to advance their career, compared to 30% of women and 33% of men. Black women are less likely to feel their managers help navigate organizational politics, advocate for opportunities for them, or provide opportunities to showcase their work—with affinity bias likely playing a big role. Also, while 80% of white women and men see themselves as allies, less than half of black women feel they have strong allies behind them.
Meanwhile, employees with steady manager support are both more likely to be promoted and to believe they have the same opportunity to be promoted.
When it comes to leadership access, black women are least like to have a substantive interaction with a senior leader—41% never have, versus 27% for all men and 33% for all women. An even greater gap exists with casual interactions with a senior leader—59% never have, versus 40% for all men and 49% for all women.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that research has shown the attrition rate of black professionals in general is higher, with a third intending to leave their company within two years.
Emotional Tax of Daily Discrimination
Between the regular experience of microaggressions and often being the “only” black women in the room, black women pay a lot of emotional tax in the workplace.
“I learned at an early age to silence myself when it came to race, and it was at the expense of my own well-being,” says Minda Harts, CEO and founder of The Memo LLC, a career development company for women of color—as well as author of The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know To Secure a Seat at the Table, who now encourages women to speak about these inequalities.
Lean In reports that black women are more likely to have to provide more evidence of their competence (40%, versus 30% of all women). And while one in ten white women have the experience of someone expressing surprise about their language skills or abilities, one in four black women suffer this microaggression. Women who regularly experience microaggressions think about leaving their job three times as much.
54% of black women often experience being the “only” one of their racial gender identity in the room. Black women who have this “only” experience are more likely to feel closely watched than other women in that circumstance (41% vs. 23% of all women, 10% of white women), on guard (40% vs. 25% of all women, 15% of white women) and pressured to perform (49% vs. 32% of all women, 11% of white women).
Not only that, but black women who are the “only” one are way more likely to feel their personal actions reflect on others like them (50% vs. 30% of all women, 9% of white women), aware they are seen as representatives of their race and gender.
“You have an added burden to succeed,” testified Mary Winston, formerly interim CEO of Bed, Bath and Beyond. “If you don’t, you know there won’t be another one like you for many years to come.”
Unrealized, Discouraged Ambition
Black women are earning more degrees than any other group and are as likely as white men (more likely than white women) to be interested in top executive positions, with increased desire to positively influence company culture and be a role model.
This very willingness to lead can work against black women in a double bind of the communal expectations of women, so that they suffer an ambition penalty.
Over the last 40 years, only 13% of black women Harvard MBAs have reached the most senior executive ranks, whereas 40% of non-African-American Harvard MBAs have.
Black professionals of any gender who do reach the C-Suite are rarely given the roles with high advancement potential, such as profit-and-loss positions, and more likely to be placed in marketing, human resources and administration.
The other reality is that those in power are less likely to validate the issue: a Boston Consulting Group survey indicated that while 43% of black colleagues observed obstacles to advance for people of color in their workplace, only 19% of white men above 45 years felt those obstacles existed.
Organizational Action to Support Black Women To Leadership
The Lean In authors suggest three key actions for companies to address obstacles to leadership for black women—in effect, make the advancement of black women a priority, address bias in both hiring and promotions and create an inclusive workspace.
Make Supporting Black Women a Specific Objective
As black women represent both racial and gender diversity amidst the false construct of default white male leadership, they often fall through the gaps, so the commitment to advancing black women in particular must be intentional.
Supporting black women to advance requires specific and measurable targets— in the consideration pool, in hiring and in promotion, in succession and in retention, but also in mentorship and sponsorship.
The progress against these measures should be visible and diversity targets attached to accountability in performance reviews and financial reward.
Reducing Bias in Hiring and Promotions
Diversity needs to begin with having black women (not just one black woman) represented in the pool of candidacy, as research has shown that a woman, or a black woman, has zero statistical chance of being hired if alone in a pool of finalists.
Beyond insidious bias awareness is training and tools to mitigate that bias, objective checks throughout the process (eg anonymous resume review), and use of technologies that provide truth-telling data and remove levels of bias to level the playing field.
Inclusive Workplace
Finally, organizations need to intentionally cultivate more inclusive workplaces, that reduce the emotional tax for black women, while providing the same casual support and access others receive.
This includes real guidelines to inclusive culture as well as training on anti-racism and allyship beyond affinity bias. It also means reducing the “only” experience for black women so it’s no longer the norm, and addressing the casual and nuanced ways that black women still fail to be invited into network and leadership access.
The conversation of black leadership, and particularly black women leadership, is now glaringly open and on the table. The question is which organizations will carry the talk through to character and action, until our leadership actually fully embodies the results of that commitment.
By Aimee Hansen
Jamila Houser: Deputy Chief Underwriter – Agency Lending, PGIM Real Estate
People, Voices of ExperienceHouser speaks honestly on qualifying yourself, showing up as you and the challenges of leveling up while finding your balance.
Getting Into The Door
With strong natural abilities in math and science, Houser grew up thinking her job options were becoming a doctor or an engineer.
But while picking up her second undergrad degree at Georgia Tech (in engineering), she realized that designing laptop fans—her final senior test —was not the gateway to her ideal field, as a naturally outgoing people person.
After working in consulting at Accenture, she moved towards a real estate concentration in her MBA at Georgia State, which eventually launched her into 17 years of moving up through the ranks with PGIM Real Estate so far—where she loves the people, culture, challenges and opportunities.
But getting that initial foot in the door was no small feat. Her resume lacked real estate experience and 75% of the job post read like a foreign language. So Houser chose to emphasize from her daily life how she was a bright individual with genuine passion for the space, who could learn and had the energy to come in, figure things out and get stuff done.
“What skills do you think you bring to the space and what is it that interests you most about this opportunity?” Houser advises to ask, emphasizing that as women we too often mistake that we have to tick every box.
“Forget the fact that you have no experience,” she says. “How can you communicate your interest in such a way that you convince them that you are worth the investment?”
She recommends to be aware of the energy you are bringing foremost, come with clarity on what skills you offer and clearly exemplify those skills and how they will add value.
She also attributes her success to managers who had the courage to do something different and invest in knowing and growing her.
“It’s so important that when people are choosing an organization to work with, they are interviewing that manager just as much as they are being interviewed,” notes Houser. “You want to go somewhere where there are people who see value in you and are going to do their part to help ensure your success.”
If You Can’t See It, Can You Still Be It?
Houser admits feeling like an outsider when she initially entered into finance those couple decades ago. The industry appeared to be a conservative, formal and stifled male world where she didn’t belong as a warm and friendly people person.
While there are far more women and women events since she entered the industry, Houser notes that it still takes energy to network in a conference room where she is one of few people of color, let alone senior women of color.
“I think for me personally I have had to get comfortable with being uncomfortable,” she says. Houser has learned to go into new roles as who she is, not measuring her compatibility for the role by the gender, skin color, personality or approach of her predecessor.
“I may not see someone who looks like me, talks like me, sounds like me, but I still see myself in people who are in leadership,” she notes. “You get to realize you’re not that different.”
“I’ve never met a stranger. I just love people,” says Houser. “And I can empathize and understand that the people I’m dealing with are in a large part influenced by the lenses they’ve developed over time. So I can build relationships in a way that allows us to get to know each other.”
Recently, in a Zoom presentation to several heads of business, a simple smile from one gentleman amidst a screen of faces reminded her: “You’re just talking to other regular human beings. You’re here, you have something to say and they’re here to listen to you.”
Leveling Up Your Skills and Brand
“I’ve built my brand on hard work,” says Houser, coming from a line of single mothers. Her own mother completed her Ph.D. across 20 years while also working three jobs.
“Hard work, determination and persistence caused me to rise in the organization very quickly up to a certain point. The earlier promotions happened automatically,” Houser observes. “But there comes a point where those qualities alone are not enough, and moving up through senior management levels requires mastering new skills.”
Houser admits she works to rebuild proficiency and confidence each time she levels up.
“I have to be very intentional about negative speak—especially when I’m going into new positions or new opportunities,” she says of the critical inner voices familiar to many of us. “How quickly can I cut that off?”
Houser is grateful for mentors and sponsors who have witnessed and magnified her strengths as well as been able to point out her subtler blindspots or gaps… and dissolve her false concerns.
With her recent promotion, she’s been facing the common leadership growth pains of moving from the “hardworking” brand she’s confidently built her career on to redefining her value by leading and supporting others to be effective and productive.
“I hold myself to a very high standard, probably unreasonably high,” says Houser, “so when you’re shifting to no longer being the doer but now the manager, you have to tone it down. Moving from colleague, or peer, to manager is a difficult transition that I’m still mastering.”
Rather than assume how her team wants her to support them, her approach has been to get very clear on what support her team needs from her while communicating what she needs and expects from her team.
At first it was difficult not to jump in and put her hand in everything out of habit, but the sheer volume of work has shifted her towards more delegation and trust, so she can focus on where she needs to go now too.
Finding Your Authentic Expression
Houser is an outcomes-driven person who has learned across time to bridge the conversation differently with those who are more process, detail or strategy-oriented, with their own inclinations and gifts.
One of her personal journeys has been finding her authentic expression in a professional setting, and letting that move with her.
“The switch flipped for me with authenticity that I can still be myself but there’s a way to be myself at work,” says Houser, noting her husband pointed out to her that her professional self is as much a part of her wholeness as her Sunday dinner self.
“I have had to wrestle with the idea of authenticity,” says Houser, “and I think I’ve become much more comfortable that I can be who I am and express how I express. I have found the right balance where I bring my authentic self but into the work setting.”
Bringing Others Up With You
“Once it clicked that not only do I have a seat at the table, but people also look up to me,” observes Houser, “I began to take the responsibility to lift others to success very seriously.”
While she used to be focused solely on her own contribution, Houser now spends most of her time looking around to see who she can advocate for, make visible and elevate, building the close mentor relationships she herself has valued as a mentee.
“I especially champion the ones who no one is thinking about, nobody is talking about, they’re not raising their hand,” she says. “They’re fine sitting over there and doing their job every day to a very high degree.”
“That gives me so much joy,” says Houser, “using the skills, the talent, the relationships, the knowledge I’ve gained to help someone else be successful.”
Practicing Self-Care to Show Up For Others
As many women share, being passionate about her job in the remote, 24/7 availability work environment and being a mother of ten and eight year old sons who are distant learning beside her at home has made creating balance more challenging.
“I’ve found that if I don’t take care of myself, I can’t show up and be there for my staff, for my kids or my husband,” observes Houser. “So though I may want to put my hand in all these efforts and do all of these things, I need to put my own oxygen mask on first.”
She has found declaring self-care recharge days and moments for herself to be a necessary grace. She plans to cultivate more intentional quality time and movie nights with her boys.
Houser finds meditative rhythm by running in a women’s group each morning come rain or snow, and gardening continues to be a lifelong love of hers, with a future interest in helping to create urban farms.
By Aimee Hansen
Beyond Kamala Harris: Elevating More Black Women to Leadership
Black History MonthBecause if organizations are not focusing on elevating significantly more black women to leadership positions, they are likely failing to do so.
Black women face compounded discrimination in the workplace with intersecting gender and racial identities—so while among the fasting-growing entrepreneurs, at least pre-pandemic, black women still struggle to pierce corporate leadership’s glass ceiling.
For how much longer will a lack of diversity results continue to reflect corporate commitment to holding onto homogeneousness in leadership?
The Conversation Is Finally Happening, But It Can’t Stop There
Former Senator Kamala Harris, a black woman and woman of Asian descent, broke new ground as the first woman to become U.S. Vice President. Though highly visible for all in the spirit of “if you can see it, you can be it”, a real shift will be evidenced when she is not an exception, and black women are prominent in influential leadership.
While the sociocultural conversation of 2020 focused on Black Lives Matter, the C-Suite conversation is arriving to the reality that black leadership matters—inducing financial and reputation-based reverberations for companies that continue to fail to move diversity beyond lip-service to a quantifiable reality.
In a commitment to accelerate efforts towards racial justice and equality, McKinsey Academy launched the Black Leadership Academy, with a Management Accelerator program and a Black Executive Leadership Program, to support progression to both senior leadership and C-Suite roles.
Several companies—such as Amazon, Uber, Microsoft, Salesforce, Facebook, Apple, and Google—vowed to significantly increase investment in black leadership and diversity, as well as made tangible commitments to % increases in representation.
Black Women Face Specific Challenges at Work
When we only talk about “women leaders” or “black leaders”, we are missing the point that black women are often sidelined in either discussion—either white women or black men often become the feature players.
Lean In released a report called “The State of Black Women in Corporate America,” which details the challenges and obstacles that black women specifically face—these, in effect, include underrepresentation, lack of support and access, day-to-day discrimination and unrealized, discouraged ambition.
Underrepresented and Undermined
75% of black women identify as ambitious towards their career, while 40% seek to attain a management position within the next five years. But while 37 women lead Fortune 500 firms, none are black, and while 21% of C-Suite leaders are women, only 1% are black women.
Less than 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs are black, with a total of only 18 Black CEOS across the past two decades—Ursula Burns was the only woman among them.
Whereas black women make up 7.4% of the U.S. population, they hold only 1.6% of VP positions and 1.4% of C-Suite positions. White men, however, make up only 35% of the U.S. population and dominate 57% of VP positions and 68% of C-Suite positions.
For every 100 men hired into manager roles, only 64 black women are. Black women request promotions at the same rate as men, but for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 58 black women are.
“The culture of promotion can also exclude qualified black candidates,” writes Jeanne Sahadi, “who may not be part of the social networks that board members and CEOs often use to vet a candidate.”
Black women are both the most educated and the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S., owning 21% of all women-owned businesses and with above average growth rate.
However, between 2009-2018, less than .0006% of venture capital went towards black women-led startups. And black women still earn 62 cents for every dollar earned by white men, compared to 82 cents on average for women.
Not only are black women underrepresented, but when they overcome obstacles to achieve success, their accomplishments are often attributed to external factors. This undermines recognizing black women for their talent, competency, hard work and hard-earned credit of their successes.
Less Support and Access to Leadership
Lean In points out that in a survey of U.S. law firm employees, “62% of women of color with some level of mentorship said the lack of an influential mentor was a barrier to their advancement; only 30% of white men said the same.”
Only 24% of black women say they have the sponsorship needed to advance their career, compared to 30% of women and 33% of men. Black women are less likely to feel their managers help navigate organizational politics, advocate for opportunities for them, or provide opportunities to showcase their work—with affinity bias likely playing a big role. Also, while 80% of white women and men see themselves as allies, less than half of black women feel they have strong allies behind them.
Meanwhile, employees with steady manager support are both more likely to be promoted and to believe they have the same opportunity to be promoted.
When it comes to leadership access, black women are least like to have a substantive interaction with a senior leader—41% never have, versus 27% for all men and 33% for all women. An even greater gap exists with casual interactions with a senior leader—59% never have, versus 40% for all men and 49% for all women.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that research has shown the attrition rate of black professionals in general is higher, with a third intending to leave their company within two years.
Emotional Tax of Daily Discrimination
Between the regular experience of microaggressions and often being the “only” black women in the room, black women pay a lot of emotional tax in the workplace.
“I learned at an early age to silence myself when it came to race, and it was at the expense of my own well-being,” says Minda Harts, CEO and founder of The Memo LLC, a career development company for women of color—as well as author of The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know To Secure a Seat at the Table, who now encourages women to speak about these inequalities.
Lean In reports that black women are more likely to have to provide more evidence of their competence (40%, versus 30% of all women). And while one in ten white women have the experience of someone expressing surprise about their language skills or abilities, one in four black women suffer this microaggression. Women who regularly experience microaggressions think about leaving their job three times as much.
54% of black women often experience being the “only” one of their racial gender identity in the room. Black women who have this “only” experience are more likely to feel closely watched than other women in that circumstance (41% vs. 23% of all women, 10% of white women), on guard (40% vs. 25% of all women, 15% of white women) and pressured to perform (49% vs. 32% of all women, 11% of white women).
Not only that, but black women who are the “only” one are way more likely to feel their personal actions reflect on others like them (50% vs. 30% of all women, 9% of white women), aware they are seen as representatives of their race and gender.
“You have an added burden to succeed,” testified Mary Winston, formerly interim CEO of Bed, Bath and Beyond. “If you don’t, you know there won’t be another one like you for many years to come.”
Unrealized, Discouraged Ambition
Black women are earning more degrees than any other group and are as likely as white men (more likely than white women) to be interested in top executive positions, with increased desire to positively influence company culture and be a role model.
This very willingness to lead can work against black women in a double bind of the communal expectations of women, so that they suffer an ambition penalty.
Over the last 40 years, only 13% of black women Harvard MBAs have reached the most senior executive ranks, whereas 40% of non-African-American Harvard MBAs have.
Black professionals of any gender who do reach the C-Suite are rarely given the roles with high advancement potential, such as profit-and-loss positions, and more likely to be placed in marketing, human resources and administration.
The other reality is that those in power are less likely to validate the issue: a Boston Consulting Group survey indicated that while 43% of black colleagues observed obstacles to advance for people of color in their workplace, only 19% of white men above 45 years felt those obstacles existed.
Organizational Action to Support Black Women To Leadership
The Lean In authors suggest three key actions for companies to address obstacles to leadership for black women—in effect, make the advancement of black women a priority, address bias in both hiring and promotions and create an inclusive workspace.
Make Supporting Black Women a Specific Objective
As black women represent both racial and gender diversity amidst the false construct of default white male leadership, they often fall through the gaps, so the commitment to advancing black women in particular must be intentional.
Supporting black women to advance requires specific and measurable targets— in the consideration pool, in hiring and in promotion, in succession and in retention, but also in mentorship and sponsorship.
The progress against these measures should be visible and diversity targets attached to accountability in performance reviews and financial reward.
Reducing Bias in Hiring and Promotions
Diversity needs to begin with having black women (not just one black woman) represented in the pool of candidacy, as research has shown that a woman, or a black woman, has zero statistical chance of being hired if alone in a pool of finalists.
Beyond insidious bias awareness is training and tools to mitigate that bias, objective checks throughout the process (eg anonymous resume review), and use of technologies that provide truth-telling data and remove levels of bias to level the playing field.
Inclusive Workplace
Finally, organizations need to intentionally cultivate more inclusive workplaces, that reduce the emotional tax for black women, while providing the same casual support and access others receive.
This includes real guidelines to inclusive culture as well as training on anti-racism and allyship beyond affinity bias. It also means reducing the “only” experience for black women so it’s no longer the norm, and addressing the casual and nuanced ways that black women still fail to be invited into network and leadership access.
The conversation of black leadership, and particularly black women leadership, is now glaringly open and on the table. The question is which organizations will carry the talk through to character and action, until our leadership actually fully embodies the results of that commitment.
By Aimee Hansen
Rose-Gaëlle Belinga: Technology Associate, Morgan Stanley
People, Rising StarsBelinga speaks about her unique journey into software engineering and her passion for applying tech acumen to better the world.
The Power of Simple Innovation
Growing up in her family home in Yaoundé, Cameroon, Belinga was inspired towards STEM at an early age by her parents, both family trailblazers who attended university in science fields.
While inclined towards STEM, what piqued her interest in technology was a simple can opener.
When her uncle gifted her book on inventions, she was inspired to learn that the can opener was not invented until 40 years after the can, meaning that people had accepted a harder way to do things.
“Someone said there must be an easier way, and if it doesn’t exist I’m going to go ahead and invent it and everybody is going to benefit from my invention,” says Belinga.
The notion of making a big impact on lives from a simple innovation catalyzed her passion for technological innovation.
Another Kind of Language
After high school, she moved to the U.S. and attained her bachelor and master’s degree in software engineering from Auburn University, alongside a bachelor of arts from Oglethorpe.
But coming from Cameroon, where neither computers nor internet were prevalent at that time, when a professor recommended that she take his Java course, she assumed he was referring to the island in Indonesia.
When that same professor described software through the example of the plane that senses, provides data and course-corrects for the pilot, steering the plane most of the time, she saw that “software was almost the spirit in the machine” and realized tech could complement any field of interest she would have.
As a polyglot, she now counts her programming proficiency among her Bulu, English, French, and German fluency, as well as Latin, Hungarian and Spanish languages she can speak at some level.
“Programming languages also have the grammar and spelling and syntax and all,” she notes.
In 2012, she joined Morgan Stanley after first summer interning there, and loving the company culture, complexity of problems, richness of technology and mobility of opportunities inside the organization.
Leveraging Your Difference
When Belinga moved to an engineering school with 96% caucasian and mainly male student peers, her initial sense of imposter syndrome was offset by being actively supported by her student peers and a Moroccan professor who advised her to leverage her differences.
“My professor told me that when he goes into a classroom, he doesn’t know who the best students are. But when he sees a female student or person of color, they get his attention right away,” she recalls from her junior year. “That’s how my professor challenged me, not to look at being underrepresented as holding me back but as an advantage – and let my work speak for itself.”
Those words stayed with her. When she first began employment, Belinga used her voice to call out those who assumed she was part of the administrative staff rather than the engineering team. But she has never considered her gender nor ethnicity as a barrier to her possibilities.
“Instead, I am showing that the abundance mindset is a thing,” says Belinga. “I’m here for a reason, and everyone I work with knows that. I now get more responsibility than some of my colleagues because I stand out and my team knows I can deliver.”
She mentors to keep your long-term interests in mind when making job decisions – such as advising a friend against moving to a position that was perhaps a diversity quota win for the team but not the best move for him personally, or advising a mentee into a PhD track so she could arrive to her desired focus of tech research.
Technological Philanthropy
“Because I stand out,” she shares, “I try to take advantage of the platform to open the door for others, such as encouraging colleagues to go to under-served high schools to teach computer science or encouraging male colleagues to mentor female students.”
She emphasizes that it can’t just be women helping women or people of color helping people of color, but everyone can step up.
Belinga is animated by technology philanthropy, putting her tech acumen to work for the greater good, not only teaching computer science to students in locally under-served high schools in the New York/New Jersey areas, but also making tech vocations accessible in places where they have been absent.
“One thing that has always made me sad was that I had to leave my support network, my family and everything I knew in order to pursue my studies and seek a better lifestyle,” she reflects. “It would have been nice if those opportunities had been made available locally.”
So Belinga is dedicated to being a part of the change she wants to see. Volunteering in partnership with Global Code and TurnTabl, she has traveled to Ghana with fellow volunteers the last few summers, apart from this past summer.
Partnering with Global Code, they instruct a three to four week crash course which empowers the community students to envision a tech solution project to help the local community – and together they develop the prototype.
For example, due to youth urban migration for education and work, elders did not always have immediate family to call on, let alone an equivalent of 911. The students created a necklace for elderly in the village with an embedded device and three buttons, pre-programmed to make calls or send messages for support in case of falling or emergency.
The best students from the Global Code program can then apply to the Turntabl program to be placed in contract technology jobs (with mentorship) for companies in North America, Europe and Asia from their home country, without having to relocate from their families or support system, as Belinga once did.
Envisioning What is Possible
Catalyzed by her passion for technology philanthropy, one of Belinga’s interests is Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR), which she researches as part of an innovation program that allows employees to dedicate 20% of their time to exploring new solutions or technologies.
“Wouldn’t it be great if with a headset we could allow different people to collaborate in the same virtual room?” she asks, whether an office or in a classroom.
Along with the benefit of collaboration, 3D data visualization animates her. She imagines her nephews being able to explore a village in the rainforest or to hear someone speak her native tongue, Bulu.
She also sees the potential of AR/VR to shift how we think about the issues we need to collectively confront, such as by immersing us in the reality of places most affected by them. Her first contact with the power of AR/VR was standing in middle of Times Square as she experienced it submerged according to sea level rising scenarios.
“AR/VR has the potential to help us see how the actions we take affect other people we don’t see,” she says, “so we can build more emotional intelligence and motivate ourselves to tackle it together.”
Belinga is an active member of the FIRE movement. For her, it represents finding life hacks to make your biggest dreams (if health, wealth and time were no issue) happen in the here and now.
She is currently polishing up Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” on the violin to fulfill her brother’s wish for a public performance (it will be her first) at his wedding this summer.
By Aimee Hansen
Check-In: Let’s Put Self-Love On the Conversation Table.
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!Yet self-love is an internal orientation from which to envision and navigate our lives—be it personal or professional, and it is what fosters self-worth, self-respect and self-care.
So as we near Valentine’s Day, let’s invite self-love to join this conversation.
Is Self-Care Enough?
According to Psych Central, “self-care is any activity that we do deliberately in order to take care of our mental, emotional and physical health.”
But we often talk about self-care as a momentary respite from a hectic life in order to restore our energy, or a set practice we do before the day runs away from us.
“Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure,” writes Brianna West writes in Thought Catalog.
“Self-compassion is regarding yourself compassionately. Self-care, by contrast, is treating yourself compassionately,” writes Charlie Gilkey, “…Self-care without self-compassion discharges a debt, usually with suffering somewhere else.”
Self-care spa dates alone are no proxy for cultivating a state of self-love as your foundation for experiencing yourself and the world. Without self-love, superficial self-care can be the coping mechanism or distraction from living a reality that is painfully out of alignment with your needs, desires, meaning fulfillment or growth.
Self-Love Means Self-Valuation
“Self-love means finding peace within ourselves — resting comfortably within the depths of our being. We might find temporary respite by doing something to nurture ourselves,” writes John Amadeo, Ph.D. in Psychology Today, “But a deeper inner peace requires cultivating a certain way of being with ourselves — a warm and nurturing attitude toward what we experience inside.”
Self-love is by definition an ability to meet ourselves where we are, loving and accepting of this moment of “me” right now, right here. It asks us to create expansive change from a place of love and respect, rather than shame or fear.
“Self-love is not simply a state of feeling good. It is a state of appreciation for oneself that grows from actions that support our physical, psychological and spiritual growth,” writes Deborah Khoshaba Psy.D. “Self-love is dynamic; it grows through actions that mature us.
“When we act in ways that expand self-love in us,” Khoshaba continues, “we begin to accept much better our weaknesses as well as our strengths, have less need to explain away our short-comings, have compassion for ourselves as human beings struggling to find personal meaning, are more centered in our life purpose and values, and expect living fulfillment through our own efforts.”
As “actions that mature us,” self-care can include listening within with radical self-honesty. It can mean making the sometimes difficult, heart-aligned, self-discerned choices and changes that create a more integrated life.
“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing,” West writes, pointing out that self-care often means doing the thing you least want to do — whether it’s figuring out your accounts or leaving the position or relationship or forgoing the immediacy of a compulsive habit to self-parent yourself into making the choices that nurture your growth.
“Self-love means having a high regard for your own well-being and happiness. Self-love means taking care of your own needs and not sacrificing your well-being to please others,” writes Jeffrey Borenstein, M.D., President & CEO of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. “Self-love means not settling for less than you deserve.”
Increasing Heart and Mind Alignment
According to HeartMath Institute, which studies the effect of heart activity on brain function, the mind and the heart (which has its own neural network) are constantly in two-way communication.
The heart actually actually sends more signals to the brain, influencing both emotional processing and higher cognitive faculties, than the brain sends to the heart. Your brain is constantly responding to your heart.
A big part of self-love is coming into that place of acceptance and self-validation where your mind and heart are more aligned more often, and you create from this space.
When you’re out of alignment with the core pulse of your inner being, you may feel life is hard and that you’re stuck. You may feel disconnected with yourself and sense that something is generally off, no matter what you do.
You may often feel foggy and lack energy or animus or vision, like your personal meaning has drained of color. You may feel like you’re living an external reality that does not match, or no longer matches, who you feel you are inside, and your self-care is your attempt to cope.
Sometimes, you can be in a moment in life where your meaning-maker is in cyclical change: where what used to fulfill you no longer nourishes you the same and perhaps your personal evolution calls for something more.
However, when you are deeply honest with yourself, deeply accepting of yourself, and honoring and validating your needs while acting from personal alignment, you begin to feel less stress and more vitality. You do not block any emotion because emotions can provide data and feedback.
You feel a greater sense of wholeness and peace within yourself and connection to yourself, to others and to the world. You are more curious and more creative. You feel mentally and physically more solid and have greater resilience for accepting yourself even in your struggles.
Questions To Check-In With Your Heart:
– How open are you to feeling all of your emotional experience? Do you block, disallow, distract or escape from experiencing certain emotions? Can you accept yourself in both uncertainty and vulnerability? Do you practice bringing awareness to your emotions as information?
– Do you trust in yourself — and at least as much as you trust others? Do you listen to your own voice as the authority in your life? Are there areas in your life where you could gently build up more self-trust and inner accountability? Are you able to forgive yourself?
– Do you create the space to intentionally check-in with your heart? Do you slow down and get still enough to discern the signals of your own truth from the collective noise, or do you keep the wheels spinning so you can’t? What would you hear if you did?
– Do you self-validate your experience and your own needs? Are you compassionately aware of your needs and willing to take responsibility for them and clearly communicate them? Or do you invalidate, dismiss or disown them? Are you willing also to own and validate your inspirations and curiosities and desires for expression?
– Are you willing to listen to and even act upon the wisdom of your gut and heart? Or are you dismissive of internal callings or yearnings if they fall outside of your mental framework of what’s rational or realistic?
– How honest can you be with yourself? Are you attached to any concept or identity of yourself that inhibits your ability to know yourself more deeply and possibly, openly? What questions are you unwilling to ask yourself?
– Are you willing to say “no” from love? Have you created boundaries as a healthy container for honoring your values, your energy and your time? Are you willing to choose yourself?
– Do you know what you value? Are you willing to act in alignment from your values, even when it’s difficult? Do you live with intention and are able to make the choices that nurture your center and further your growth?
– Is what you are committing to, through where your energy and action goes, the same as what you want? Can you bring your habitual commitments into closer alignment with your desires?
– Are you still hustling to earn your sense of worth and value from others or do you claim it for yourself? Are you able to embrace growth opportunities or do you shrink at criticism? What is one area of your life where you might need to claim your worth and value?
We are all on a journey of cultivating self-love, and that journey impacts everything about not only how we show up in the world — in every facet of our lives — but also how we experience ourselves as we do so.
When it comes to enjoying that ride, cultivating self-love is probably the richest, most valuable, rewarding work we will ever do.
By Aimee Hansen
(Our “Heart” Coach)
Sheri Crosby Wheeler: Vice President, Diversity and Inclusion, Fossil Group
Movers and Shakers, PeopleSpeaking of her background, she says, “I feel like it has given me the grit, the resilience, the fight, the get-up-and-go that I have to this day. I won’t see myself as ever being down and out, and I won’t stay in a ‘woe is me’ place, not for very long.”
The determination to seek possibilities beyond her circumstances has been vital to Crosby Wheeler’s career trajectory from law to diversity and inclusion (D&I).
When Mentors Are Absent
Throughout law school and her legal career, mentors were missing, and she didn’t know how to reach out.
“I wish at that time I knew that if you’re gonna go down a path, you should talk to people who have been down that path already so they can steer you clear of the potholes and the explosions,” she says, for example missing out on a judicial courtship. “I was just very much ‘I know how to do it’, because before that, I had done it all on my own.”
In the absence of mentors, “I crashed and burned, stumbled and failed,” Wheeler says, “I didn’t do well at my first law firm. And for someone who was used to doing well up to that point, it was kind of earth-shattering.”
Getting back up, however, taught her to take risks and eventually to leap paths.
Vicarious Mentorship
In lieu of mentors, Crosby Wheeler has “professionally stalked” role models she admires. This once led her to eventually join the law firm of a lawyer she followed for nearly a decade. Today, her “professional crush” is Vernā Meyers, VP, Inclusion Strategy at Netflix, who like her, holds a law background.
“I’m watching them from afar. What did they do? I’m gonna try that,” she says. “I tell people that the mentor you think you want to have may not be accessible to you one-on-one. They may not necessarily have the time in their day and career to mentor you, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be your secret mentor.”
Daring to Reinvent Herself
“Now initially, I will say I was fighting it,” recalls Crosby Wheeler about her desire to leave litigation. “I was like, no. I have chosen law. I’m gonna push, I’m gonna strive.”
But there came a moment as a contract lawyer when the work no longer felt aligned, and she realized “something has got to give.”
“In my mind, I always knew,” reflects Crosby Wheeler. “I didn’t know when, I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know where I would be going.” That willingness to stop pushing uphill and embrace the uncertainty of career change is a defining moment she is proud of.
After resolving to change paths, an opportunity appeared and became the shift that led to subsequent bigger moves, including three entirely new opportunities that landed on her D&I responsibility at Mr. Cooper, before moving to Fossil Group in 2021.
Sponsorship and Networking Are Essential
While lacking early on, sponsorship was ultimately key for Crosby Wheeler in reaching where she is now, particularly those people who looked at her, saw the potential and extended her the chance to expand into entirely new areas.
“If someone hadn’t put their skin in the game, I wouldn’t even be in this role,” says Crosby Wheeler.
Crosby Wheeler is now passionate about mentoring others. “To remember when I’m going forward, to continue to reach back to young attorneys, to other professionals,” she says. “To the extent that I can, I do. I know how important that is because some of that was missing in my journey.”
She also swears by a consistent network of friends and colleagues who can pick up the phone to support each other.
“I tell young professionals to right now start building that network. And don’t look at the network as what they can do for you,” she says. “Look at the network as what you can do for them. What can you give them? How can you help them? That is how you build a stronger network.”
“Real Good D&I, Not Feel Good D&I”™
“Now I am seeing that direct impact – the ability to positively impact people, businesses and communities,” Crosby Wheeler says of her D&I experience. “What underlies diversity work, and some legal work, is fairness and justice – and that’s a theme that has been a common thread throughout my life. That is what really speaks to me in this work.”
With racial justice issues at the national forefront, Crosby Wheeler sees this as a moment for companies to advance equity like never before. “More people are focused on it, caring about it, and understanding the importance,” she observes. “More people are willing to have the conversation. That’s what we’ve needed all along.”
“It can feel uncomfortable, but there is growth in discomfort,“ she says. “I don’t know about you, but I like to grow. I like to change. I like to get better. It’s just like people going to the gym. Your muscles are sore because you worked them. There was some discomfort there. Same thing. You’ve gotta work your D&I muscles for you to grow, for you to get better.”
Crosby Wheeler is observing a shift to “Real Good D&I, Not Feel Good D&I”™.
“‘Feel Good D&I’ can also be considered performative,” she says. “‘Oh yea, we just had this potluck and we put up a statement, woo!’ Well, that’s not changing things for people. That’s not changing systems, policies, procedures, laws, so ultimately it’s not changing things.”
An example of “Real Good D&I” is a company being transparent about where they are on the journey, and creating sustained organization-wide accountability to shift it.
“Having accountability that recognizes that it’s everyone’s issue, that it permeates the entire organization. That it’s not ‘that department over there, they’re doing this’.” she says. “No. Everybody is doing this, because this runs throughout the whole company. That’s what it takes – everybody working on it.”
Because “Real Good D&I” is sustained effort and change, it’s hard to gauge by quick metrics.
“It’s not like regular business operations where you’re looking at numbers, where it’s dry and objective,” Crosby Wheeler presses. “This is people, emotions, and feelings involved as well. So you’re trying to change hearts as well as minds. That’s not simple and that’s not easy and that’s not quick.”
Sourcing Growth From Adversity
Crosby Wheeler boldly chooses the experience of being fired from a legal job early on in her career as a key moment in her character development.
“It let me know that I can come back from a mistake, from what I thought was the worst thing ever.” she says. “I remember saying at the time ‘now I’m gonna find out what I’m really made of,’ and I did. I hope that I can exude that for other people to take in, and know they will also be okay too.”
And she does.
By Aimee Hansen
Nhaman Pelphrey: Director, Abbot Downing
Movers and Shakers, PeoplePelphrey speaks about moving from private law practice to wealth management at Abbot Downing, and the valuable insights in personal development she’s gathered.
Be Open to Unexpected Opportunity
“Although it may appear from my bio that my career path was by design,” says Pelphrey, “looking back, each opportunity that was presented at the time felt like a departure from what I was thinking I would do.”
After graduating from The Pennsylvania State University, Dickinson School of Law in 2004, Pelphrey had her eyes set on becoming a real estate lawyer in the booming southern California commercial market. “I wanted to represent developers and be at the forefront of the action.” Minutes into an interview, she realized she had neither the experience nor the know-how.
Though she was quickly told that they needed someone with requisite training to hit the ground running, she remained curious about the firm and built a strong rapport with the managing partners. Although the firm did not have capacity to train a junior attorney in real estate, they took a chance on her and offered her a position in their trusts and estates practice. It was not what she had set out to do, but she gave it a try.
Eleven years later, she had already disrupted her career, two years into it, for the unexpected step of a master of laws degree in taxation from Northwestern University School of Law, and was now sitting in a premier boutique planning firm in Century City, with a client profile of ultra-high-net-worth individuals.
Feeling successful, having served on the executive committees of the Beverly Hills Bar Association and the LA County Bar Association, having cultivated many strong network relationships with the ability to elevate one another, she felt at the peak of her law career—so she ignored the recruiter calls.
Until a colleague and friend, who had herself left private practice for Wells Fargo, urged her to consider going for an informational meeting—emphasizing opportunities at Abbot Downing do not often come around.
“I was accomplishing all the things that defined success to me,” recalls Pelphrey, “so leaving private practice was not a decision I took lightly.”
Six years later, Pelphrey calls the move to Abbot Downing the best career decision she’s made so far, rising from a senior wealth strategist to a director and multi-generational relationship manager for ultra-high-net-worth families.
“When opportunities present themselves, even if unforeseen or not necessarily what you were looking for,” says Pelphrey, “be open to them for they can lead you down paths that you didn’t even know were right for you.”
Rewarding Client and Team Relationships
Pelphrey enjoys the depth of value that she can add through nurturing long-term relationships with her family clients, and feels she works with “the brightest and most personable team.”
Back in the billable hours of her private practice legal days, her journey with clients would often end after counsel and creation of the plan. Now she partners with clients from the inception of formulating the plan to the most important and crucial aspect—implementation.
“We really get to know these individuals and their families very well,” says Pelphrey. “We become a trusted advisor and that’s a very gratifying position to be in.”
One thing she appreciates at Abbot Downing is the collaborative nature of her dynamic team. “We raise each other up and put our client’s best interest at the core of what we do.”
Mentors Who Raise You Up, Higher
One of Pelphrey’s first mentors, a big-time tax attorney, taught her a valuable lesson through a bit of playful testing.
As a young associate, she was asked to research and draft a memo on how to structure a corporate reorganization. In the tax partner’s explanation of the assignment he referenced multiple Internal Revenue Code sections that she had never heard of before. When she got back to her desk, she immediately googled the sections. After combing through multiple legal research databases to educate herself on the code sections, it was clear that the code sections were not applicable or even worse, she might have jotted them down incorrectly. She mustered up the nerve to knock on his door and let him know that the sections he quoted cannot be used as part of a structural reorganization.
He congratulated her with a big smile for saving herself several agonizing hours of spinning her wheels, only to fit a square peg in a round whole.
“From that moment on, I realized its okay to ask clarifying questions,” says Pelphrey. “He taught me that asking questions is the best way to ensure that you understand what you’re being asked and what the other person really needs.”
Later in her career, she had another mentor who was highly skilled and well-respective modeled the ability to express complex, technical strategies in a simple and easy to understand manner with clients, treating them like partners.
But what most impressed upon Pelphrey as a lesson was his approach to mentorship in supporting her to learn, hands-on.
“He said to me, ‘I know that you’re capable and my goal is to help you become a highly technical attorney and to be better than I am,’” she remembers. “I heard the selflessness. He wanted to help me be even better than him, not just good as a reflection of him—and his actions were aligned with that.”
At Abbot Downing, Pelphrey eventually assumed the position of her retiring mentor, who groomed her to take over much of his client book. The mentorship first arose because they appreciated each other’s wit and banter, and could together devise creative client solutions.
Not only did he encourage her to expand roles using more of her talents, but he also taught her that being a generous, genuine resource for others will come back to you ten-fold in opportunities.
Embody Your Place at the Table
Throughout her career, Pelphrey has often been the most junior person at the table.
“One of the lessons I’ve learned is if people are asking you to participate, they see that you have an inherent value,” says Pelphrey. “More so as women, we’re invited to be part of something and it’s often easy to second guess ourselves – ‘Am I too young? What is my role?’”
Cultivating personal confidence has become key to her success.
“If I’m at the table with successful and savvy clients, it’s because they know I have value to add,” she says. “We come in as a team and we’re confident as to what and how we can provide for our clients.”
Supporting Each Other and Being a Mom
Pelphrey enjoys gatherings that merge the wisdom and experience of her colleagues and her clients.
She participates in annual events designed to connect with, inform and inspire the younger generations among her client families—as well as women focused activities – where colleagues and clients support each other.
Having a competitive personality, Pelphrey calls herself the tennis and basketball “Kris Jenner equivalent” of a sports mom to her two sons, six and eight years old.
She enjoys supporting their participation and the valuable life lessons that is organically gained through sports.
Pelphrey feels the same when her sons get the opportunity to witness their normally organized parents navigate unknown territory and unexpected turns during international travels.
“I love the kids to see that we don’t always have it all together,” she laughs. “But we end up on a great adventure even if it wasn’t the plan.”
By Aimee Hansen
Abbot Downing, a Wells Fargo business, provides products and services through Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. and its various affiliates and subsidiaries. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. is a bank affiliate of Wells Fargo & Company.
Your Negative Emotions Can Guide You to Value-Based Actions
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!“Effective leaders are mindful of their inner experiences but not caught in them. They know how to free up their internal resources and commit to actions that align with their values,” writes Dr. Susan David and Christina Congleton in Harvard Business Review.
You Can’t Negate Negative Emotions
David, Harvard Medical School psychologist and author of the award-winning book, Emotional Agility, shares in her TED Talk that a third of us either judge ourselves for having “bad emotions” like sadness or anger or grief, or try to push these feelings down.
“Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger,” says David. “Psychologists call this amplification.”
Indeed, research indicates that fighting against thoughts on addiction only magnifies them, restraining thoughts can create more stress and suppressing negative emotions spawns more emotional eating than admitting the emotions are there.
David and Congleton have found that executives and leaders can get “hooked by” negative emotions— buying into them, avoiding situations that evoke those feelings and limiting themselves. Or, by denying the negative thoughts and rationalizing them away, even pushing themselves into situations that aren’t aligned with their values.
Ultimately, suppressing or “fixing” negative emotions often ends up in cycling through the same reoccurring trigger areas of challenge for years.
The Benefits of Feeling What You Don’t Want to Feel
“The conventional view of emotions as good or bad, positive or negative, is rigid. And rigidity in the face of complexity is toxic,” says David. “We need greater levels of emotional agility for true resilience and thriving.“
Positive emotions are simply those we tend to “find pleasurable to experience”—such as joy, satisfaction, love, serenity, interest or amusement. Whereas negative emotions are simply those we don’t find pleasurable to experience—such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, rage, loneliness and annoyance. Neither of these definitions imply the effect of having the emotion is entirely positive or negative within us, just that we judge experiencing it as so.
Apparently, a 3:1 positive/negative emotional experience ratio is necessary for a sense of flourishing, but the balance plays a part.
“One idea in the study of emotion and its impact on psychological health is overdue for retirement: that negative emotions (like sadness or fear) are inherently bad or maladaptive for our psychological well-being, and positive emotions (like happiness or joy) are inherently good or adaptive,” writes June Gruber.
So-called negative emotions have an inherent value. Negative emotions can foster detailed and analytical thinking and less stereotypical thoughts. Feelings like sadness can increase focus and help us to learn from mistakes and assess social situations better.
Negative emotions can facilitate us to go deeper into self-understanding and empathy. Being willing to experience them can build emotional resilience. They help us to evaluate our experience and detect when an area of life feels off and needs our attention.
Experiencing and accepting emotions like anger and sadness are important to our mental health. Mindfulness training has been helpful in overcoming anxiety disorders, not because it eradicated negative feelings but it trained participants to accept them.
Research has shown the ability to hold mixed emotions together at once precedes improvements in well-being, even if it’s unpleasant or difficult. Across a study of ten years, frequent experiences of mixed emotions were strongly associated with relatively good physical health and that increases in them weakened age-related health declines.
“We find that psychological well-being is not entirely determined by the presence of one type or kind of an emotion,” writes Gerber, “but rather an ability to experience a rich diversity of both positive and negative emotions.”
From Emotional Data to Values-Aligned Action
David urges us to realize that emotions are data that “contain flashing lights to things that we care about”—when we get clear on precisely what we are feeling and can respond by taking steps that are value-aligned.
“Emotions are data, they are not directives,” she caveats. “We can show up to and mine our emotions for their values without needing to listen to them.” Rather, we pay attention to how they point to what we value.
David and Congleton suggest four practices derived from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), originally created by Dr. Steven C. Hayes.
Recognize You Are Stuck.
Recognize your own patterns. Where are you caught in rigid, repeating mental loops—your thoughts like a broken record inside that is insistent on replaying? Does the loop feel familiar from the past, like situations you’ve felt before that triggered and created similar contraction? These loops only deplete your mental resources. Notice if you often feel undervalued, for example.
Identify Thoughts and Feelings.
Label your thoughts and emotions distinctively to create emotional distance and clarity of the emotional data. If you feel you have to be available all the time for work, then you can get perspective by stating “I’m having the thought that I have to be available all the time for work.” Then you can look at what you feel and want to do.
Rather than saying “I’m sad” and being drowned by the emotion, you can say “I’m noticing that I’m feeling sad,” and create enough space to look at the data. This is a mindfulness practice that can improve behavior, well-being and promote beneficial changes in the brain.
Dr. Marsha Linehan, creator of dialectal behavior therapy, emphasizes that validating emotions requires accurate—observing and describing the event, thoughts and emotions, perhaps how it feels in your body—not interpretation or assumptions, which can invalidate and cause distrust in your internal experience.
“When he interrupted me for the second time, I felt anger and felt tightness and heat in my chest” is an observation. “I shouldn’t be so sensitive” is not.
Accept and Observe.
Rather than suppress or try to control your thoughts or emotions, even if you can’t rationally justify them or they don’t match how you think of yourself, allow them to be present. Breath ten deep breaths to check in. Rather than making them feel better, this is about making room for your raw emotions to reveal. What is going on internally and externally, and what is the energetic quality of your feelings?
If you can get underneath the emotion, are they giving you a clear signal of something that matters, for which you could respond differently?
Act in Alignment With Values.
“You don’t get to have a meaningful career or raise a family or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort,” says David. “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.”
When you can treat your emotions as data, you can create choices of how you respond to them to act in a way that aligns with your values.
Rather than be absorbed by or pulled into reaction by your emotions, you can be guided by your values, which is a primary focus of executive coaching. You can consider what actions will bring you closer to and further from them.
“When you take values-based actions, you will eventually arrive at a choice point,” tweets David. “Will you move toward your values and act like the person you wish to be, or will you move away from your values and act against them?”
By Aimee Hansen
Linda Descano, CFA®: Executive Vice President, Red Havas
People, Voices of Experience“But it also means that through our tracks, we can leave a footprint behind to follow,” she remarks, “so other people not only avoid our pitfalls, but also accelerate because they build on our lessons and experiences.”
In this interview, Descano shares some footprints to follow.
Allow Intrigue To Guide You
“My career path has been anything but linear,” says Linda Descano, based again in Philadelphia after thirty years away. Instead she has let intrigue and excitement guide her.
“For me, it’s been about finding opportunities to learn…and finding interesting problems to solve with smart people who want to somehow improve the world or make a difference,” she reflects.
Following that spark of intrigue began in university, when she took a geology class to fulfill her science elective for her English Communications degree, then switched her major.
After pursuing graduate studies in earthquake prediction, she pivoted to work on ways to make K-12 STEM education more hands-on, and then joined a team that was developing a ‘brain’ to drive autonomous underwater vehicles.
Descano then joined an environmental consulting practice which led her to eventually become a member of the environmental affairs team at Citi predecessor Salomon Inc. in 1994. She leveraged her understanding of environmental and social issues to join a socially responsible investment program at Citi, which was one of the first—if not the first—on Wall Street.
Descano then leapt to help launch Women & Co. in 2003 within Citi, an award-winning online financial lifestyle resource for women, eventually serving as President and Chief Executive Officer.
In 2012, she became Managing Director and Global Head of Content and Social at Citi. In 2015, Descano pivoted yet again and went from the brand side to the agency side, joining Red Havas as Executive Vice President in 2015.
“My entire career has been questioning, listening and hearing about challenges—friction in the system, opportunities to grow, trends reshaping customer preferences and needs—and being willing to raise my hand and get involved,” says Descano. “I’m always looking to find a way to learn and grow myself.”
Define Your Own Parameters
Early in her journey, Descano experienced professors and colleagues who judged her potential as less than she knew herself capable of—whether due to her Italian heritage, her Catholic upbringing, her weight, her gender, not having a finance degree or not having an MBA.
Time and again, she resisted having others box her in, cultivating inner resilience while growing in self-awareness and managing her own triggers and sensitivities.
“It taught me that people will always see you with perceptions and judgments,” she notes. “And it’s up to each of us to decide—will we let others define the sandbox in which we operate, or will we blow it apart and carve our own path?”
She recalls saying to one such colleague, “I might not have an MBA from Harvard, but I do have an MBA from the ‘School of Hard Knocks.’ So between my brute experience and your Ivy League education, we should together be able to create a stellar program.”
“You have to decide who is going to own and set the parameters for your career and make your choices—don’t put them on autopilot,” she advises. “You have to be the navigator of your career. I set out to become a Managing Director, and that’s exactly what I did.”
Be Intrapreneurial In Your Leadership
“Execution is a passion of mine,” says Descano. “I’m always very focused on ‘I understand the strategy, but how do you execute flawlessly and what’s the right organizational structure?’”
No matter what organization she is a part of, Descano assumes the mindset of the “intrapreneurial executive.”
“When you think of an entrepreneur, you think of people with a lot of flexibility and they’re adaptive. They act as owners. They take initiative. They lean in,” says Descano.
“So as I think of being an ‘intrapreneurial executive,’ I bring that same sense of acting like an owner to the organization I work for. I’m going to be constantly thinking about ways of improving the business,” says Descano. “I act like I own it, as if it’s my investment. It’s working with that same sense of responsibility and drive to make it grow.”
Descano has valued the leaders—both at Citi and Red Havas—that gave her the green lights to create and test and do things differently in order to bring more value to the consumer and community.
“If you just put your head down, you will lift your head up one day and the world around you will have changed and you have not, so how could you be adding value?” says Descano. “It’s so important to deliver, but I believe you have to keep looking around, looking up, looking down, looking sideways— because the world is changing. You have to evolve and grow and adapt.”
Value the Value of Your Network
With incredible female role models in her family, Descano also internalized the importance of helping others and paying it forward.
Outside of her ‘day job,’ Linda has served on the board of numerous organizations dedicated to advancing women and girls, including Step Up, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., and New York Women in Communications (NYWICI). A past president of NYWICI, she remains an active board member and currently serves as the Treasurer.
“I’ve made it a point throughout my career to spend part of my personal time and money investing in paying it forward with women and girls, mentoring both informally and formally.” says Descano. “Sharing your fortune and facilitating opportunities, that’s how you help people move forward.”
Descano considers running Women & Co.— a business focused on supporting women to be their personal best— for over a decade to be the highlight of her career.
In today’s knowledge economy, Descano also advises that the network you build by supporting others is your greatest asset.
“When I’m faced with a challenge and issue, I have a tremendous network of people I can call on to get the benefit of their experience, insights and knowledge,” says Descano. “Part of the power and value that I bring to an organization’s table is my network and relationships.”
Whether it’s getting a 101 on a new industry for a new business opportunity, connecting a client to several women she trusts in a new field they are entering, or recruiting a speaker, her network has been absolutely invaluable to her.
When you are there for your network, you also create a net for yourself.
“When you show kindness, when you’re willing to help others, even if just to listen to them,” notes Descano, “then the days you fall, the days you aren’t the best you could be, the days you get displaced by circumstance, you have all these people that are softening your fall and supporting you, almost like a spring back up.”
Remember We Are All Human
Much of Descano’s work today is designing transformational communications for organizations during times of change—which has never been more salient than now.
One of the big focuses at Red Havas that animates her is person to person (P2P) communications, or bringing the humanity and empathy back to the forefront of communications.
Remembering that we are all human—no matter if you’re talking to employees, customers or a business—is one topic featured in the monthly podcast she has launched as part of a team, Red Sky Fuel for Thought, providing insight into the communications landscape.
When she’s not being an intrapreneur or supporting other women, Descano can be found reading, or listening to True Crime podcasts in her kitchen while making a couple dozen stromboli for her family.
By Aimee Hansen
Interdependent Leadership: We Need More than Independent Leaders
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!As citizens of the Western patriarchal world that idealizes individualism, we are conditioned to strive for independence as the bastion of strength.
But as Covey touched on in the Maturity Continuum back in the classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, independence is not the ultimate arrival point.
Evolving from independence to interdependence is a pre-requisite of stepping into being a true leader and creating human fulfillment in all of our relationships.
Personal Development Journey to Interdependence
First of all, interdependence is neither dependence nor codependence. Only independent people can evolve to be and choose to be interdependent.
Our culture idealizes independence as the ultimate success, when it’s not. Consider the self-made man or do-it-yourself or the exalted lone hero’s journey.
Dependence (You)
When we become caught at the dependence state of maturation, we rely on others or the situation to meet our needs for safety and pleasure, to take care of us, and to take charge or create changes we want.
We abdicate responsibility for our lives to others to develop a victim mentality. It can be insidious, too.
As Dr. Michele Brennan writes, “Evidence of this is seen in individuals who cannot make decisions for themselves, they are afraid to speak their minds, or to advocate for themselves because they need someone to lead them.”
Independence (I)
When we individuate towards independence, we take responsibility for the thoughts and actions required to meet our needs and wants as we’ve identified them. We are self-sufficient and self-reliant.
While we must arrive here to break our dependence, remaining as an island in an interconnected world is not the highest expression of success, consciousness or fulfillment.
Independence focuses only on your needs and desires, can quickly fall into scarcity mindset, and does not place supporting others and being supported as core.
At the independence mindset, we’re also prepared for others to lose so we can win. We’re more likely to feel others are in competition or detractive to our goals.
A recent meme emphasis has been “Ultra-independence is a trauma response”—and that could be seen as an individual, national and cultural wound.
Interdependence (We)
Interdependence “comes with the self actualization that we are strong to stand on our own but we are wise enough to understand there is even greater strength in developing a community,” writes Brennan.
At the level of interdependence, we realize that our personal growth and fulfillment is not distinct from, or at odds with, lifting others up, but rather in accord with it.
As Michael Timms writes, “Interdependence is the understanding that your welfare and ultimate success is inextricably connected to the welfare and success of those around you.”
Beyond accountability for yourself, you take accountability for our inherent interdependence and your personal impact on the greater whole.
This is the “we” phase – as written in PM Today – “where the independent adult chooses to increase their circle of concern beyond themselves, to include ever widening groups of people.”
Individuals and organizations that come from this place view themselves as one part of a system of many interconnected parts, all impacting on each other.
How We See Ourselves and the World
Research shows that people with a self-construal as an independent entity will view internal attributes as core to who they are—their “traits, abilities, values and attitudes.”
Whereas people with an interdependent self-construal will view “close relationships, social roles and group members“ as central to their sense of self—personal meaning is contingent upon belonging to the interrelated whole.
Independence mindsets are overall associated with Western European and North American cultures and interdependence mindsets with East Asian and Latin American cultures.
When it comes to perceptual tendencies, people with independent mindsets pay more attention to the focal element of a scene (a bridge in a forest). People with interdependent mindsets pay attention to the context of the whole scene (forest with bridge).
In research, this means that a Westerner will notice small changes to the focal element (bridge) faster. Those from East Asian cultures will notice changes to the context faster (forest). The changes we don’t notice are called our change blindness.
Breaking from strict cultural divides, researchers found that it’s possible to nudge our perception to view the world more interdependently. Even by attuning to the interdependent pronouns “we” and “our” and “us” rather than “you” or “I” or “me” in articles, Westerners became more sensitive to detect the changes in the bigger picture.
The frames through which we think and think of ourselves impact how we perceive the world. The more we focus on our interconnection, the more attention we pay to context and the bigger picture.
Leading From Interdependence
Independent level leadership may refuse to take responsibility for problems or try to shoulder it all alone, may focus on being the solo hero, may raise executive salaries to exorbitant levels, may focus on the organizational win without considering the true ripple effect of the means.
“At best, independent people who choose not to progress to the next level of maturity will be valuable individual contributors,” according to The Ghannad Group, “and at worst, they will contribute to the counterproductive creation and maintenance of silos that prevent effective collaboration.”
“The moment you step from independence into interdependence in any capacity, you step into a leadership role,” wrote Covey.
Ghannad Group writes that “achieving interdependence requires intentionality and insight, courage and humility”—and embodying an interdependent, transformative leader mindset requires “abundance mentality”, “empathy and understanding”, and a “servant’s heart.”
At the interdependent leader level, you grow to adopt some of Covey’s approaches: Your philosophy of human interaction is win/win, seeing life as “cooperative not competitive”— seeking solutions and agreements that offer mutual benefit for all stakeholders concerned, because it’s always the most effective approach.
You seek to understand a situation before seeking to be understood and demonstrate real emotional intelligence. You foster synergistic group collaboration, which allows the collective whole to be greater than the sum of the independent parts and gives birth to new creativity and paradigms.
You seek solution-space for problems which are not your direct responsibility such as crisis, because they are impacting upon the whole.
Interdependent leaders come from a place of acceptance, curiosity and abundance mindset rather than judgement, fear and scarcity thinking.
You have confidence in “being enough” so that you can humbly call on the unique gifts and talents from everyone without judgment, raising everyone up as you rise in your leadership acumen to create the most synergistic, creative and expansive solutions.
You’re dependable, but it’s not about you. Being interdependent as a leader means the strength of knowing your own talents and embracing the vulnerability that nobody can be or do it all themselves.
We need each other and embracing the accountability of that interdependence is the most effective, fulfilling and mature path for humanity—and leadership.
By Aimee Hansen
Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day 2021: Celebrating Black Women at Work!
NewsIf you or someone you know should be nominated to tell their career story on TheGlassHammer around our digital campfire in 2021 to inspire others, we would love to hear from you.
Please enjoy these articles in which each amazing professional gets to tell their story and how each individual has had to navigate the journey as women of color. There are themes like the importance of self-advocacy, sponsorship and organizational commitment to reducing barriers and systemic issues. In particular, Black women already face more barriers to advancement than most other employees, and now, they are shouldering much heavier burdens. Black women are more than twice as likely to say that the death of a loved one and incidents of racial violence across the U.S. have been overwhelming challenges during the pandemic. According to the Women in the Workplace study, now Black women say they cannot bring their whole selves to work and are more than 1.5 times as likely to say they do not feel like they have strong allies at work.
LeanIn and other sources suggest that to better support Black women, companies need to take action by addressing these distinct challenges head-on and fostering a culture that values Black professionals in the workplace. Companies need to emphasize that discriminatory behaviors and microaggressions against Black women will not be tolerated. Also, giving Black women a voice in shaping new company norms, can provide unique perspectives and experiences when creating a more inclusive workplace culture.
1. Veronica Willis, Investment Strategy Analyst at Wells Fargo Investment Institute
Willis discusses a career shift into investment strategy, finding her own stride as a leader, and what the remote working environment has taught her so far.
“I’ve learned a lot of strategies about productivity during this working-from-home time due to COVID-19. I’ve also learned a lot about what really is high and low priority, so now I know what to focus on and I will take this back to the office with me.”
2. Melanie Priddy, the Chief Talent Officer at Katten
Priddy speaks about the value of connections, the need to merge professional development with diversity, and the importance of self-advocacy.
“At the end of day, relationships are the key to everything, regardless of what industry you’re in, or what your profession is.”
3. Beverly Robinson, Client Service Consultant at Abbot Downing
Robinson discusses how she is a woman both of influence and advocacy.
“As an African American woman in Corporate America, I’ve learned that I cannot afford to be thin-skinned when my ideas are usurped, re-mixed or claimed by others. There’s an art to being a woman of diversity, inclusion and advocacy.”
4. Afua Richardson-Parry, Senior Medical Manager at Pfizer Ltd.
Richardson-Parry had always strived to be a hands-on person, prone to learning new things in keeping with the pace of a dynamic and changing healthcare ecosystem.
“Knowing what you’re best at and what others can and should do instead of doing it all yourself allows you to be your best.”
5. Shani Hatcher, Financial Advisor at Wells Fargo Advisors
Hatcher shares how taking a compassionate approach to wellbeing and family time, especially during the current pandemic, has become extremely useful.
“The best thing about my job is helping people. It is humbling that I can be there for my clients during difficult times, I don’t want them to feel alone. I, too, am an individual and a mother dealing with the pandemic, so I tell them we can get through this together.”
6. Devlyn Lorenzen, Business Support Associate at Wells Fargo Advisors
Lorenzen talks about how a turning point in her career helped her develop a renewed confidence and determination.
“Take charge of your own narrative and find people who will speak up for you.”
7. Kacy J. Gambles, SVP Regional Manager of Investment and Fiduciary Services for the East Bay and San Jose California Regions at Wells Fargo Private Bank
Being an African American executive, Gambles discusses her journey in the financial services industry and how proud she is to be navigating the journey as a woman of color every day.
“Be bold, be brave and just be you. Don’t shrink to please the people around you.”
8. Melandee Jones Canady, Delivery Executive at AARP
Over the years, Canady has learned that if you’re not upfront about letting people know your accomplishments, it opens the door for others to create your narrative on your behalf.
“I wish I had been more vocal early on; I was a doer quietly performing my work, until someone pulled me aside and said I needed to start broadcasting more of my achievements.”
9. Claudine A. Chen-Young, Partner at Katten
Chen-Young shares her attention has shifted focus toward mentoring and sponsoring women associates in meaningful ways on a broader scale, an emphasis she continues today.
“What drives me is the impact I can have on other people.”
We look forward to hearing from you and hope that the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. will inspire us and the words of Maya Angelou will be something we live by today and always because there is so much truth to her proclamation of “When you know better, you do better.”
Walk the talk! Everyday.
Contact Allie@theglasshammer.com if you want to be considered for a profile or editorial submission