By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)
In honor of Pride Month, The Glass Hammer is featuring an interview with PwC’s Susan Siegmund, the first female partner to sit on the firm’s GLBT Advisory Board. Siegmund’s personal story illustrates the value of GLBT support in the workplace.
Susan Siegmund is a Fort Worth, Texas, based audit partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers and the first female partner to sit on the firm’s GLBT Advisory Board. PwC’s GLBT Advisory Board – the first of its kind among the Big Four firms – is comprised of openly gay partners and professionals with varied tenures, skills and life experiences. The group provides visible role models for PwC’s GLBT professionals and advises firm leadership on the planning and implementation of GLBT initiatives.
“What we are trying to achieve at PwC is making sure everybody is comfortable – that we are bringing our whole selves to work,” explained Siegmund. “We’re trying to build a culture of inclusion, bringing together all of our experiences and stories.”
Siegmund’s own story was a major factor in her decision to get involved in PwC’s GLBT community in the first place, and later to take a more active leadership role.
“I’m excited but also anxious about stepping out and being a role model. I’ve always been more of a private person – I’m a little out of my comfort zone,” she said.
She joined the firm in 1988, and for the majority of her career didn’t think it was important to make a big deal about being out at work. But a relationship she began in September 2001 changed her perspective. “I started a relationship with Teresa,” she said, referring to her partner Teresa Martin. Eventually, Siegmund came out to her family and the two moved in together.
“Over the next few years, I still didn’t come out at work. I thought people already knew. I really didn’t think I was hiding it. Teresa would come to various work functions or parties, but I never formally introduced her as my life partner or my domestic partner,” she explained.
It wasn’t until a crisis forced Siegmund to come out to her colleagues that she realized the value of being open at work.
Voice of Experience: Margo Cook, CFA, Executive Vice President, Nuveen Investments
Voices of ExperienceIn talking to Margo Cook, CFA, Executive Vice President of Nuveen Investments, its clear that what she’s valued the most throughout her career is her ability to be a part of and to build effective teams.
While her career has taken her from The Bank of New York to Bear Stearns Asset Management, and now to Nuveen Investments, she continues to prize her role as a manager and team builder, investigating and working to improve the dynamic and effectiveness of the groups she’s led.
Cook said, “The most rewarding thing is to have a strong team that works together well. They know how to respond to challenges, and move ahead. It may be more time consuming – but a strong team can accomplish more than a group of people acting as individuals.”
Read more
Happy Independence Day!
NewsThe Glass Hammer is taking a long weekend to celebrate Independence Day. If you’re not out watching the fireworks, why not take a few minutes to catch up on a few of our recent most popular stories?
And, don’t forget to check out our Thursday, July 8 event: Women in IT – Staying Technical and Getting to the Top. We’re also planning two more events for this fall, so keep an eye on our events page!
Finally, The Glass Hammer is always looking for more writers. Do you have a story to tell? Email me at melissa@theglasshammer.com and we’ll talk about putting your voice on the site!
The Heart of Risk Management? Data
NewsAt the heart of risk management is data management. This is according to three speakers at the Securities Information and Financial Markets Association’s (SIFMA) Technology Expo. Edward Hida, partner at Deloitte & Touche, Keith Sexton, the global director of the financial markets at IBM, and Chris Church, the CEO of SWIFT Americas were all given the opportunity to explain how their companies were tackling risk management.
Deloitte Surveys Market Participants For Answers
Deloitte & Touche interviewed regulators, securities broker-dealers, banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, and exchanges to find out how they defined and viewed systemic risk. They also set out to discover what information was needed from these financial institutions to identify, measure and monitor systemic risk.
What they came up with was a variety of approaches involving regulators, clearing houses and financial institutions that would help manage and measure a firm’s exposure to risk. The range of solutions involved regulators developing stress tests and financial institutions performing, analyzing and reporting the results as well as regulators developing a consistent standard for enterprise-wide risk reporting across the market.
Hida also described an approach that involved building a trade repository where firms would provide data and where regulators and clearing houses could measure and monitor that information in terms of risk exposure.
Read more
Ask-A-Career-Coach: How Do You Position Yourself for Two Different Careers?
Ask A Career CoachI had a client who had started a business that needed a cash infusion. At the same time, recognizing that cash flow was an issue, he started to explore going back in-house (he had been a successful banker before starting his own shop). He needed to position himself as both an entrepreneur and an employee without diluting either focus or confusing his market. How do you position yourself for two different careers?
I see this conundrum more and more. On the entrepreneur/ employee front, more people are starting side businesses or picking up consulting projects. But even when one is committed to traditional employment, jobs are wider in scope and you may find yourself with a role that is a compilation of several different functions. I reconnected with an old hire of mine from my media days, and she was straddling PR and marketing in the same firm. Consequently, she was unsure how to talk about both without diminishing her experience in either.
Positioning is framed by two things: who you are; and what you are targeting. So the above conundrum seems to revolve around the first half – confusion on how to express who you are. But it really is more about the second – describing who you are in the context of your target. If you are sure about your target, you can easily find a way to talk about your two (or more) sides in a way that adds value to your target and therefore makes you the logical choice, not the outlier.
Read more
Voice of Experience: Susan Siegmund, Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
NewsIn honor of Pride Month, The Glass Hammer is featuring an interview with PwC’s Susan Siegmund, the first female partner to sit on the firm’s GLBT Advisory Board. Siegmund’s personal story illustrates the value of GLBT support in the workplace.
Susan Siegmund is a Fort Worth, Texas, based audit partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers and the first female partner to sit on the firm’s GLBT Advisory Board. PwC’s GLBT Advisory Board – the first of its kind among the Big Four firms – is comprised of openly gay partners and professionals with varied tenures, skills and life experiences. The group provides visible role models for PwC’s GLBT professionals and advises firm leadership on the planning and implementation of GLBT initiatives.
“What we are trying to achieve at PwC is making sure everybody is comfortable – that we are bringing our whole selves to work,” explained Siegmund. “We’re trying to build a culture of inclusion, bringing together all of our experiences and stories.”
Siegmund’s own story was a major factor in her decision to get involved in PwC’s GLBT community in the first place, and later to take a more active leadership role.
“I’m excited but also anxious about stepping out and being a role model. I’ve always been more of a private person – I’m a little out of my comfort zone,” she said.
She joined the firm in 1988, and for the majority of her career didn’t think it was important to make a big deal about being out at work. But a relationship she began in September 2001 changed her perspective. “I started a relationship with Teresa,” she said, referring to her partner Teresa Martin. Eventually, Siegmund came out to her family and the two moved in together.
“Over the next few years, I still didn’t come out at work. I thought people already knew. I really didn’t think I was hiding it. Teresa would come to various work functions or parties, but I never formally introduced her as my life partner or my domestic partner,” she explained.
It wasn’t until a crisis forced Siegmund to come out to her colleagues that she realized the value of being open at work.
Read more
Getting Out of the Gender Ghetto
Industry Leaders, Leadership“It’s time to get serious about sex”, declared Avivah Wittenberg-Cox in 2008, at the NYC launch of her book, Why Women Mean Business. Co-authored with Financial Times contributor Alison Maitland, the book took the economic arguments for gender change to the heart of the corporate world and spelled out in no uncertain terms that gender diversity is an economic necessity and is good for women, men, companies and their clients.
Two years later, we’re in a very different, credit-crunched corporate world and Wittenberg-Cox is back with the sequel: How Women Mean Business, subtitled – “A step by step guide to profiting from gender balanced business”. The book was launched last week at a London event hosted by Nomura, where the author guided her audience of both men and women through a frank and witty multimedia presentation of the issues covered in her new offering.
“The twentieth century is over. The reality of the world has changed. The last century was driven by manufacturing and the twenty-first century is wrapped up in customer services and technology”, explained Wittenberg-Cox.
“And gender balance has a huge role to play in this transformation.”
Read more
Women’s Financial Confidence Rising, Finds Citi’s Women & Co. Research
Money Talks, News“Women’s one-word association with wealth is security,” said Linda Descano, President and COO at Women & Co., a division of Citi.
Recently, Women & Co. released the results of its national survey on women and personal finance, which measured women’s attitudes toward money and financial decision-making following the recent recession.
Descano said that even before the recession, women saw wealth as a means to security, and now she said, “The women surveyed think the rest of society is finally thinking like them. Their financial values have really held steadfast.”
Read more
Voice of Experience: Avis Yates Rivers, CEO, Technology Concepts Group International
People, Voices of ExperienceStaying ahead of shifting technology, she said, means “hiring the right people with knowledge about the field. They stay on the cutting edge of new technology and know what it means for us and the customer. I wouldn’t be able to do that on my own,” she explained.
“I’m very heavily involved in civic engagement,” she said, pointing to work with the government and politics, as well as non-profit leadership, such as the National Minority Supplier Development Council, the Women Presidents’ Educational Organization and other organizations working to increase opportunities for small, minority and women-owned businesses. She sits on the board of the National Center for Women in Technology.
She continued, “If you’re entering the technology field, understand that your contribution is very much needed and commit to it.”
Read more
In Case You Missed It: Business News Round-Up
NewsFinancial markets fell this week. In the US, the Fed froze rates on Wednesday and financial reform legislation was passed Thursday. The UK will introduce a levy on banks, which is expected to raise £2bn a year. This weekend China ended the peg of the yuan at about 6.83 to the dollar.
Economic Backdrop
Read more
Tips for Re-Entering the Job Market – Get that Senior Level Job Back
Expert AnswersLast month, the New York Times published an article entitled “In Job Market Shift, Some Workers Left Behind.” Catherine Rampell reported that for the last two years, the weak economy has created an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.
This article struck a chord with me because I work in the recruiting industry and hear about the woes of the unemployed masses on an almost daily basis.
One in particular is a neighbor, a former banking HR generalist who has not procured full-time work for over 2 years. “Jane” is in her early 40s with a University of Chicago undergraduate degree and is now at the end of her 401k savings. She fears losing her rent stabilized apartment on the Upper East Side soon, and her attempts to sell her Burberry coats on Ebay recently have failed.
She has come very close to being hired for a number of HR jobs. But in the end, the hiring managers always decided to go for someone who had more computer experience, more hands-on experience in talent acquisition, or with employee benefits. In the past, companies may have been okay with a generalist skill-set that was short on specifics – but no more.
Read more