Tag Archive for: authenticity

Charlene Kennedy: CEO, PGIM Private Capital (Ireland)

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Charlene Kennedy“One of the key attributes of a great leader is authenticity, therefore I refuse to have separate work and home life personalities” says Charlene Kennedy. “ I believe it is time to change the message that women or indeed anyone, needs to adjust their personalities to fit with the corporate world.”

Kennedy speaks to starting out her working life as a mom, leading from authenticity and vulnerability, and holding your vision.

Going Into Her Career as a Young, Single Mom

Kennedy gave birth to her first son in her final year of law studies so being a working mom was her reality from the start: “When I think back, the image that really stands out is sitting at this desk in my little college apartment, the baby in a rocker, and me rocking the baby with my foot while working my way through big, thick law books.”

As a single mother, Kennedy completed her law licensing exams and then secured a role with PricewaterhouseCoopers in their corporate finance team where she qualified as an accountant.

Shortly before the banking crisis, she joined Bank of Scotland Ireland, and was there until the company exited the Irish market. Kennedy then reassessed where she wanted to live and moved to the north coast area of Ireland to enjoy the lifestyle and support of family while growing her own. It was there where she joined Prudential. Coinciding with the arrival of her third child, she moved into PGIM Private Capital, and became CEO of their Irish entity 18 months ago.

“It’s been an extremely challenging but also a very rewarding year. My legal background, my finance background, my banking background, every single one of those aspects I use and weave together in my day-to-day role as CEO,” says Kennedy. “Each twist and turn along the way led me to being the right person for this role at the right time.”

Why Being a Mom Enhanced Her Career

“In my early 20s, most of my peers and colleagues were out partying at the weekend. I think being a mom really focused me on my career,” reflects Kennedy. “I was either at work or studying, or I was looking after my son. I was very serious early because I had a lot of responsibility, which from a career aspect is very helpful.”

She still remembers her weekly and daily schedule, as keeping to a rhythm was important in making her full life work: “Those years built resilience. I gained an ability to deal with challenges, because I confronted so many of them early on.”

Being Led by Curiosity and Desire for Growth

“I am extremely curious. I believe that knowledge and perspective bring a deeper understanding of what you are doing and why you are doing it. The bigger picture perspective allows you to deliver over and above what your role allows and creates opportunity for you and your company,” says Kennedy.

An essential ingredient to self-development in leadership, she feels her curiosity has truly come into greater value in the C-suite, where Kennedy is constantly interpreting “what does this mean?”

Kennedy has learned to embrace that she’s wired for growth more than comfort.

“I’ve had to accept about myself, and my personality, that I always want to be involved and be moving forward,” says Kennedy. “Even when I have taken jobs that could be a Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm, which are good from a lifestyle perspective, I could not just say stop and enjoy it. I couldn’t help but to involve myself in other projects.”

She has learned to manage her own drive to intentionally balance both family and work, which calls on those boundaries she learned young. Today, she is mom to three sons, who are 18, 4 and 2.

“I come home and I put down the phone or the laptop in a corner for family time,” says Kennedy. “I block out my calendar so nobody can put meetings in when the kids are home from daycare so I have those hours exclusively with them, and then I’m open to a meeting with colleagues once they are in bed.”

Holding To Your Vision

Along with many women in her generation, Kennedy feels she was strongly influenced in her worldview by seeing Mary Robinson, a lawyer, who had studied at Trinity College in Ireland and at Harvard Law School, become the first female president of Ireland in 1990: “My mother sat me down in front of the TV during the inauguration and said, ‘If a woman can become president of this country, there is nothing in this world stopping you from being who you want to be and doing what you want to do.’”

Kennedy feels that she internalized that message as a young woman, as did many women in her generation, and it has fortified their sense of belonging to their dreams.

From early on, Kennedy learned the value of keeping your eyes set on the big picture, regardless of situational challenges. “There have been hurdles and challenges along the way, but I don’t focus on them, I focus on where it is I want to go, and the hurdles eventually fade away, and I keep moving forward.”

“That’s the resilience I built,” she says.

Being Authentic as a Woman Leader and Embracing Vulnerability

The biggest skill that Kennedy has leaned into more in her CEO position is vulnerability.

“When you come from a technical background, whether it’s on the law side or the finance side, you pride yourself on technical knowledge and knowing everything about everything,” she notes. “As you step into leadership roles, that isn’t always going to be the case. You have to learn to be comfortable with not knowing everything and turning to others for guidance.”

“I like to surround myself with people that are a lot smarter than me and people from different backgrounds and perspectives. I embrace their challenge and feedback, and actually feel quite uncomfortable in an environment where everyone agrees with me.”

Kennedy has observed that if we truly value authenticity in leadership, then we should not encourage women to fit into a corporate mold that precludes the ability to be themselves.

“I love to see people push the boundaries a little. My husband, as a joke one year, bought me a book on defiant Irish women. I loved it. I keep that book on my desk, and it reminds me that we can achieve great things. You can be professional and successful, but you can also be yourself.”

Beyond all the advice one might receive on how you need to be and how you need to act as a leader, Kennedy suggests one benchmark: “At the end of the day, when you look back, how do you feel about how you behaved as a person? If you want to be proud of what you did, the way you do that is to be true to yourself.”

Being Approachable and Team-Oriented

Kennedy’s first partner she worked for at PwC is among her most inspiring leaders—and one she would want to emulate. He was personable, down-to-earth and approachable, but extremely knowledgeable and effective in his role. Those qualities inspired the organic support and loyalty of his team.

When it comes to managing her teams, Kennedy pulls from her experience playing team sports to emphasize the team approach: “We all have our roles and we all have to equally put in our input in order to deliver on a team focus,” she notes. “We all have our responsibilities, but we all need each other. It’s never about just one person, and when someone is overly focused on only themselves, it is disruptive.”

With time, the one thing Kennedy has improved on is embracing mistakes, and knowing that one mistake does not define a career nor negate your many accomplishments. She remembers a time when a mistake would have overtaken her focus, and she’s had to learn to overcome that tendency to beat herself up.

“I’ve learned to be easier on myself throughout the years. It’s still not easy and it’s something that I have to work at. I have found ways that help me relax, such as exercising and going to reflexology on a regular basis,” says Kennedy.

Kennedy’s sons are her greatest achievements. After hiking to Everest base camp back in 2012, she loves to hike in the mountains of coastal Ireland around Donegal with her family, where she relishes the energetic high of an expanded perspective.

By Aimee Hansen

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Sara Coelho: Partner, Financial Restructuring & Insolvency, Shearman & Sterling LLP

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Sara Coelho“I’m open to things going in a lot of different directions and to seeing things in a different way than people expect,” says Sara Coelho. “I really try to foster that approach, because novel solutions bubble up.”

Coelho talks about why her practice is a jack-of-all-trades art, standing her ground as a woman and the creativity of receptivity within law.

The “Liberal Arts Area of Law”

With Shearman & Sterling since 2016, and promoted to partner this past July, Coelho has been in the insolvency practice for fifteen years.

“Any time you have an insolvency situation, by definition people can’t follow the law. When something isn’t working, you get to take a deep dive into why and have to figure out a way to make something of that, and the tools really vary depending on the business,” she says. “Every situation has its own dimensions, so you constantly get to learn something new. If you are a liberal arts major, you would like what I do.”

Coelho continues, “I’m often doing things I have no prior expertise in, for example, negotiating tax debt and tax statutes, because of the underlying needs of the situation,” she further explains. “Sometimes we litigate to get to a resolution of a dispute. Sometimes we create deals. We’ll use any field of law to construct a deal that takes the situation to a better place.”

Her area is so flexible that when students ask her about a typical day, Coelho tells them to give her a year and she’ll say what she was doing in that period of time. Collaboration with other lawyers and financial advisors is critical to her work: often part of the solution is bringing in the expert who knows the tried-and-true approach, and another is confronting an issue alien to anything she’s ever done. Hence, the sophistication of problems, quality of people and intellectual challenges have held her attention in this field.

The Creativity of Receptivity

Coelho feels persistence has served her. She has always been able to put her head down and commit to a project she’s taken on. She’s been called a “lawyer’s lawyer” in that she has an analytical curiosity and loves to go deep into a problem, which means encouraging a spaciousness for unexpected solutions.

“There’s often a real reluctance to bring forward something that is a little off the wall,” she observes, “but you could miss an opportunity that way.”

In law, creativity is often less conceiving of something new and bringing it into existence, but rather an artful receptivity to the hidden key that already exists that you’re not yet seeing.

“So much of law is a very set underlying body of concepts, and people lose track of a big percentage of it. So often there is just something lurking there, that’s pretty direct and obvious, but actually very hard to see if you don’t come at it with an open mindset,” she explains. “It’s a receptivity, an orientation of faith that there’s going to be useful things that emerge. It’s a melding of a creative mindset with the orthodox.”

Staking Her Ground As A Woman

While Coelho admits her field has an inadequate representation of women, especially senior partners, she also often finds there are more women than she realized. She also feels the reputation of being male-dominated deters women from considering a field they might thrive in: “There are women who are thriving in all of the difficult roles and more than you would think.”

At the same time, Coelho acknowledges that she does feels some pressure to be beyond perfect and tends to speak concisely, getting to her point quickly while she has the moment, whereas she witnesses men talk at length without the social pressure to be precise.

“I’m working on trying to take up more time and space, and defending the perimeter to be able to do that,” she notes, “because sometimes you can’t appropriately advocate otherwise.”

Coelho acknowledges that being a woman distinguishes you, but that advantage can backfire if you’re perceived as the woman lawyer and especially if there’s a general assumption of irrelevance.

For example, on a conference call for a major deal where both Coelho and another female counterpart lawyer represented different clients with predictably different perspectives, the opposing side confused their two arguments, because, she suspects, the woman lawyers’ voices were understood as interchangeable. Coelho finds it hard to imagine that same bewildering lack of differentiation occurring for a man.

“Things still go on, but at the same time, you’re just focused on the problem and the work,” says Coelho. She notes that self-validating verbal feedback from highly respected top lawyers has been a touchstone to measure her lawyering and has kept her from falling into an unproductive level of self-questioning, especially when she’s confronted with aggression or doubt.

Clarifying The “Stupid Questions“

In addition to helping associates become familiar with the essential craft of her “renaissance profession,” Coelho seeks to demystify some of the basics that challenged her. When she first began, she felt one of the hardest parts was just figuring out how things got done – down to how you frame an e-mail and how long you wait to chase up on it.

Coelho volunteers information and invites the conversation around questions she found perplexing when starting out, especially if the response she had was reactive or dismissive: “I try to ask, what would have been the most constructive response for me?”

“For example, as a lawyer, to say how much time should I spend on something is a very loaded question because obviously you should do the best job possible for the client. Well, the best job possible might mean thousands of hours or significant expense, and maybe the client doesn’t want that,” she notes. “So there’s always this judgment about how exactly to approach the problem, how much depth to go in and what are the optimal things to focus on. These are complex judgements people have to make, so I like to be transparent about that kind of process.”

Boiling down why inviting questions as a senior lawyer is important, Coelho says: “The stupid question is the most important one to ask because you definitely don’t want to make a stupid mistake.”

For women in particular, Coelho also emphasizes the importance of really stepping back to ask what you personally want, rather than letting the ongoing demands of your external environment, including simply keeping up with the work, dictate where you end up.

An Unforgettable Mentor

Coelho considers her grandmother the most mindful person she has ever met. As a child, Coelho would join her in hanging laundry, picking fruit or doing some other form of tending to ordinary things.

The most unforgettable moment that affected her was listening to her grandmother talk about one single lemon with such elaborate understanding and appreciation that it underlined a whole wisdom of her Grandmother’s way of living in the world: “Listening to her talk about this lemon and what it was, exactly why it had a different flavor than others and how you would use it, in such depth, crystallized for me her way of being and how wonderful that is. And how much better life is, if you can bring that sort of appreciation and experience to whatever it is you’re doing.”

Coelho adores her three and a half year old son, Caleb, and, in addition to being a prolific reader of social sciences “light” and economics, loves to garden – and as her grandmother, tend attentively to the small and sacred matters of the home.

By Aimee Hansen

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Anna de Jong: Head, Client Advisory Benelux and Nordics, PGIM Fixed Income

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Anna De Jong“A lot of people will tell you this or that can’t be done, and that goes for your personal and your professional life, but don’t take that as a given,” advises Anna de Jong. “Have the confidence and be strong until you get the answer that works for you.”

De Jong speaks about how the journey you take is what shapes you, the importance of knowing yourself and having the confidence to pursue the important questions.

What Defines You is the Journey You’re On

After growing up in a small village in the north of Holland, where she felt her limbs wanting to stretch even as a girl, de Jong adventured for a half year opportunity in London that became fifteen years between Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and other firms, thriving amidst a diversity of people, experiences, inspiration and opportunities.

Just when she reached the point of considering a move back to Holland for family motivations two years ago, PGIM Fixed Income approached about her current role in the Netherlands, which met the professional trajectory she also wanted. With London life having felt as much like home to her, de Jong reframes the question of where are you from to what it’s really about.

“It’s not where you’re from that matters. It’s just a box that people want to put you in. Ultimately, it’s about the journey that you’re on and the journey that you take that opens doors, or closes them,” she reflects.

It’s About The Personal Factor

The people factor has always magnetized her to her work. “In my field of work, I work for my clients and prospects, and I need to very quickly understand who I’m dealing with and how to progress things,” says de Jong. “You must be able to read people quickly in order to be successful, and that still holds today. I think that human element is what makes me most content in my work.”

De Jong advises that when working closely with others, it’s important to know yourself so you don’t lose your own intentions in any deal or interaction: “I’ve learned you need to hold your ground. You must understand yourself in order to do well professionally, but also personally. That’s a journey I also help other people with: stick with your convictions, yet be open to learning.”

Being approachable is important to de Jong: “I don’t think in different levels. I’ve learned from all walks of life and different parts of business and people,” says de Jong. “I’m always available and listening to everybody around. I am genuinely interested in people, and I think if you can understand what’s going on, then a lot of things make more sense, and it also matters when achieving the right results.”

De Jong notes that while remote working has been validated, being together with your team and clients is invaluable for creating connection and work culture.

“Covid is a lonely time, I think,” she reflects. “And ultimately you spend so much of your time at work. It’s good to see people, but being behind a screen also hides a lot. There’s no longer an excuse for saying that we can’t work from home because we all clearly can, but it’s also important to be with colleagues and have face-to-face time.”

Knowing and Balancing Your Values

“Someone once told me that when your career takes off, something else is going to suffer. For a long time, I was convinced that you have to work very hard while other things would have to take a backseat,” says de Jong. “ I have become of the opinion that’s entirely untrue. You are actually more successful when you understand what is really important to you and cultivate personal satisfaction, as well.”

Years ago, a friend introduced de Jong to a four pillar system. The four pillars represent what is personally important to you and emphasize keeping what matters to you in a balance. She uses the analogy of a chair, it can function with three but ideally needs four legs to be fully stable. For de Jong, she values home and family, friends, work and health: “If one gets out of whack, it makes the rest volatile and you do not perform as well, personally or professionally. It can be a juggling act, but you don’t have to forget about what’s important in your personal life in order to succeed in professional life and vice versa. In a way, they all become one.”

When the work aspect of life becomes too much, de Jong feels it’s important and okay to speak up about that, and not fall into the cultural notion of having to keep everything separate. Personally, she doesn’t resonate with a sense of being “successful” that connotes “achieving the best results regardless.”

De Jong does not perceive that getting the result, no matter what the impact on others or personal life, can ever be success. Rather, she speaks more to harmony and co-creation from a place that is aligned with your internal values.

When it comes to her personal success, “I do my work with lots of pleasure and have happy clients who are keeping and raising assets,” she notes, “but it’s also being home with my daughter and husband. It’s as elementary as that.”

De Jong feels well-matched by the atmosphere at her workspace: “PGIM Fixed Income has this fantastic work culture, that when I joined just felt like a warm blanket – where people work together, give each other challenges and opportunities. It’s been really fantastic.”

With a desire to keep growing, she is curious about pursuing courses in ESG investing and being able to mentor even more in that space.

Guidance For The Journey

“Some guidance that really stuck with me is to ask the same question until you get the right answer,” she notes, having tried this out in areas like promotion as well as anytime you’re immediately told something isn’t possible. “I will continue asking a question until I get the answer that I think works best.”

De Jong tells mentees: “Know, embrace, respect yourself and dare to be different. You have to be yourself, because if you don’t know who you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. It’s the journey you’re on that defines who you are. Embrace that.”

She emphasizes accepting and learning and being willing to let something go when it’s not the right thing. The more honest and non-judging you can be with yourself and others, feels de Jong, the more trust you build and the more you create results together. She has always advised women to be kind to each other, as it can be especially tricky to navigate in banking or finance when you first begin as a woman.

The hardest experience she’s had was in a previous role when she returned from maternity leave only two and a half months after having her daughter, and found part of her region moved from her remit and no expanded team as anticipated. Reflecting, she realizes the feeling that she could only take such a short leave was a red flag in feeling supported.

De Jong feels both men and women can contribute to normalizing parental leave by embracing it, and notes that her own husband has been a huge support.

Vocalize and Invest In Your Needs

De Jong now realizes that earlier in her career, she was often too scared to really ask for what would fulfill her, and so she often got something else. She feels it’s important to be very clear when you’re not satisfied.

“I would get frustrated but nobody seemed to notice, and then I would hand in my resignation and people were so surprised and often disappointed,” says de Jong. “They would ask, ‘why did you not tell me before?’ And I seriously thought I had, but clearly hadn’t been very vocal about my dissatisfaction.”

De Jong enjoys her four-year-old daughter, playing piano and is still looking for an experience in Holland akin to the community volunteer hub she loved in London. Her favorite volunteer work has been a charity she helped create called Launchpad Labs, which offered workspace and mentoring to those with challenging backgrounds.

“Helping others is a great way to stay on your feet to understand the bigger picture and that helps in your personal space and helps with your work,” says de Jong, “It helps to ground those four pillars and understanding what is important.”

She emphasizes investing in yourself and your personal happiness, as well as listening to your body. She loves exercise, baking, and continuing to learn and grow.

By: Aimee Hansen

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Natalie Tucker: Head of Strategy & Operations, Radioligand Therapy

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Natalie Tucker “As a professional golfer, you either hire someone to run the business side of your career, or you run it on your own. I ran my own business, raised nearly a million dollars in capital, hired my whole team and traveled around the world,” says Natalie Tucker. “It was a great experience that taught me a lot about business.”

Tucker shares some unique insights from the golf course to apply in the workplace, why you should focus on influencing the influencers and the price she once paid for feeling unable to bring her whole self to work.

From the Golf Course to Health Care

Tucker was a professional golfer for ten years before she retired her golf clubs at the competitive level and moved into healthcare.

Though she realizes being a professional athlete, especially as a woman, is an inspiration to others to embrace your gifts and follow your dreams, she also felt compelled to find avenues to more directly impact the lives of others. Having been surrounded by the business of health as a golfer, she was magnetized to go into healthcare while leveraging the science-inclined side of herself.

“Being a professional athlete was fun and entertaining, but for me, it felt like something was missing. In my work now, I feel I am helping people and bringing value to them,” says Tucker. “The patients benefit from our work, and you really feel like you’re making a difference.”

After a period of working in a company that focused on artificial intelligence for skin cancer detection, she attained her MBA from Yale, before moving into consulting for pharmaceutical companies. Eventually she joined Novartis – where she heads strategy and operations for a business unit focusing on radiopharmaceuticals for the treatment of patients with various cancers.

Lessons For Navigating the Course of Business

In a unique training ground where her personal career depended not only upon her athletic ability but also on her business prowess, Tucker acquired many valuable lessons as an athlete that she continues to draw from, over 10 years after leaving the golf course.

Maintaining Calm Under Pressure

Tucker gives credit to her professional golf career for helping her learn to manage pressure and anxiety. Her ability to retain her LPGA Tour Card, and therefore her job for the following year, depended on her performance in a single four-day tournament. When the stakes are that high, with six-figure sponsors on the line, you have to stay in your center and focus.

“If you play poorly over four days, you lose everything. You lose your income, you have nothing,” she recalls. “So there’s a lot of pressure. I had to learn ways of self-calming: how do I quiet my mind, take two minutes and just relax, and empty everything out? I did that on the golf course to get through these really hard moments.”

“This is a hundred percent applicable to business. Before I go into an interview, before I give a presentation, before I talk with the CEO of the company – I take two minutes just to calm myself. All of the methods that help maintain an even keel transfer from golf to business.”

Visualizing Your End Goal and Pathway To Success

“In playing professional golf, you spend a lot of time visualizing or mentally planning what you want to accomplish,” she notes. “The best way to be successful in business is also to think about what you’re trying to accomplish, and ask yourself ‘What does the end goal look like?’ ”

Once you know where you want to go, it’s about setting the plan for how to arrive to that outcome.

“Unless you have a vision of where you want to go and a plan of how you’re going to get there, you’re not going to make it, this is true in golf or business,” observes Tucker. “When you play a tournament, you plan every single shot in advance and visualize yourself accomplishing it – For example, for each hole, you look at where the pin is, and you think of the best angle to approach it. This angle informs every shot ahead of it. It’s starting with the end in mind to inform your first move.

In business, not only do you need to identify ‘what good looks like’ and sketch a project plan for how you’re going to get there”, says Tucker, “but you also need to ask yourself who you need to bring in.”

Bringing In Your Support Team

“Running my own business as a professional golfer taught me how to work with people, and not just for the purpose of ‘transacting’. I learned how to understand what others’ needs are, and the importance of that knowledge to build a strong relationship,” says Tucker.

It’s a misconception that being a golfer is not also about being part of a team, as her team was essential to overall success.

“When I came into business, I thought I could be successful if I worked hard enough, but that’s not necessarily true. You have to bring others along with you for the ride,” she notes. “Similar to golf, the more you can bring the right team on board, the more successful you will be.”

Tucker feels that dialogue is what gives rise to the best solutions, as the combined insight from others is what often catalyzes the best path, not just your own thinking.

Influencing the Influencers

Previously very focused on personal performance, getting out of her comfort zone and moving towards greater focus on interconnectivity has ultimately been highly fulfilling and encouraged versatility.

“Taking the time and really getting to know people has been the most rewarding part of my career. I’m really happy that I’ve adjusted my style of work to look beyond the work itself, and broaden my perspective to focus on people.”

One of the biggest adjustments that Tucker felt coming into business, as a performance-focused introvert, was the necessary need to navigate the more strategic connections that are so often a large component of being effective in the business world. In golf, the bottom line of Tucker’s success was her performance down to the numbers. If she performed well, the right people would come to her.

“The hardest part about the corporate world is there’s no black and white success criteria. There’s nothing that says if you do well on this project, you will be promoted,” says Tucker. “It’s performance over time and there’s a whole communication network that took me a long time to understand, and adjust to.”

As she had to do with raising money in golf, Tucker has learned to engage beyond the people in her team, and not necessarily by going three levels up for visibility either. Her strategy has been to develop real connections with influencers to the decision-makers.

“What I see too often is people only building relationships with those people who are like them and in their comfort zone, often at the same level or nearby in the office,” she notes. “But people would really benefit by looking at an organization and asking: who are the key decision-makers, and who are the influencers to those key decision makers?”

“People often want to go directly to the key decision maker and say ‘get to know me’, but if you get to know the influencers of the key decision makers, you become an influencer in the organization as well,” she has realized. “When joining an organization, this is a good first step for those who are more introverted and looking to quickly create positive impact on the business because you’re able to have honest dialogues on key matters. It’s about reading the organization, and learning about its people – not their title, but who they are, and their communication networks. Once you understand the communication network of an organization, you can navigate it well.”

The Price of Not Bringing Her Whole Self To Work

As a professional golfer twenty years ago, Tucker’s brand was critical to her ability to raise funds and support her athletic career – and she went through a very tough lesson as a gay woman who did not feel she could risk being her whole self.

At one point, one of her major sponsors told her that he had heard rumors she was gay. If true, he made it explicit that this would be a dealbreaker for continued sponsorship.

“Now this was 20 years ago, and times were different, but I hid who I was. I changed my image, tried to behave and walk differently, and it destroyed my career,” Tucker states. “I was trying to be someone I wasn’t, and I wasn’t authentic to myself or to the world around me. If I could do it over again, I would have behaved differently, even though it would have dissolved my access to income at the time. Trying to hide who I was made it impossible to be great. I couldn’t be my best without being my full self.”

After leaving golf where success was so dependent on her image, Tucker found the protections of the corporate world to be a huge relief.

“There was a transition period, where I learned how to be who I was, without feeling that I was going to be retaliated against,” she notes. “Today, everybody knows my wife, Marion. I finally feel like I have the ability to be open, and to be who I am. But it was a learning experience for me, and it definitely wasn’t easy along the way.”

In addition to loving cooking, Tucker loves to be outside enjoying nature whenever she can, and still loves to compete. These days, squash, tennis with her wife (who she jokes is ‘not that bad’ on the court against her) and basketball, to stay in shape, are her sports of choice.

By Aimee Hansen

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May Nazareno: Northeast Director of Major Gifts at IGNITE

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May Nazareno “Who you are right now in this moment is a gift. It is an offering that is meant to be shared, and you really don’t know how it sparks another person from the other side,” says May Nazareno. “What I’m trying to always ask is: can I create space, within myself and anyone I engage with, can I create the space for us to be truthful and real?”

Nazareno speaks to activating leadership in girls and young women, catalyzing change through storytelling, and how the world needs all of who you are.

Fundraising For The Future Pipeline Of Female Leaders

In her role, Nazareno creates a community of stakeholders across the Northeast who helps IGNITE “build a movement of young women who are ready and eager to become the next generation of political leaders.”

Founded in 2010 to address the lack of political parity in the US, the national organization seeks to increase the number of women as elected officials, appointed to public boards and commissions, and in supporting leadership positions that make it possible for women to occupy those political spaces. By creating multiple entry points for young women to advance in political leadership, IGNITE pushes for a large-scale solution that has the capacity to flood the political pipeline.

Currently, with a team of 17 women who operate under a budget of less than $3 million, IGNITE is the only non-partisan organization in the US that provides sustained community-based training and support to nearly 13,000 + women and girls across 36 states. Currently, a top ten finalist for the $10 million dollar Equality Can’t Wait Challenge, IGNITE’s goal to train 100,000 women each year starting in 2025 could be in reach.

Her Own Bittersweet Experience In Leadership

For Nazareno, advocating for IGNITE is personal. “I had never seen myself as a political person, nor did I think that being part of the student government was an option for me when I was in high school or college.” She admits she fell into student government while in college, “because someone asked me to,” and that the opportunity to run for her university’s vice president position: “was entirely because the secretary of the Student Union just said to me: ‘what do you have to lose?’” Nazareno was met with a lot of resistance from her male peers – and even from other women. “It was the late 90’s and everyone’s questioning if you’re qualified enough.”

Despite Nazareno winning her election by a landslide, and during her tenure, raising significant funds and forging interconnectedness between different cultural and identity-based groups – she faced a hostile environment with no collective support behind her. “What makes IGNITE personal is that the typical IGNITE woman comes to our programs with a desire to solve problems in her community – rarely with a desire to run. And yet, when she goes through our trainings, she learns how to push past her fears of being isolated and pitted against the boys club – because we help her create a ‘girl gang’ of support. I often think what if IGNITE was around when I was in college? What would have happened to my life if I met other women like me, and got the mentorship and the networking needed to navigate a political life? Undoubtedly, I would have considered public service as a calling.”

Though highly encouraged on the path, Nazareno admits she was burned out. Her experience as an elected student leader at her university was surrounded by so much divisiveness – that while she considered pursuing law school – she turned to study playwriting.

“What I cared about the most was figuring out how to foster a shared interconnectedness between students who were passionate about their own identity politics. What were the things that we could understand and respect about each other rather than focusing on what drives us apart? And I knew that law wasn’t going to answer those questions. I didn’t want to tell people what to think. I didn’t want to get caught up in ‘I’m right’ or ‘you’re wrong’. I wanted to come from a place of encouraging deep self-reflection,” she recalls. “At the theatre, you watch conflict and see both sides of the story. You sit in the audience and decide for yourself.”

Catalyzing Dialogue Through a One Woman Show

To the disbelief of her parents, Nazareno rescinded her law school applications and set off to Seattle to become an actor, despite warnings that she’d be cut off from her family.

“I had a bag of clothes and a few books, my laptop, and my yoga mat – and there I was in this hostel in downtown Seattle when 9/11 hit. My Dad used to work at the World Trade Center…,” she laments. “And yet, everyone around me saw this moment as an isolated NYC problem.” She perceived it as both a national and international affair and watched as knee-jerk political reactivity took hold.

“I was impacted by the need to find a way to break through the bubble, not even having words for that. It’s 2001, we have no idea what’s happening, but you hold onto your bubble – to whatever you can to salvage any sense of normalcy,” she said. “The bubble cracked for me in 2003 when I had a family member who was the personal aide to Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the Brazilian United Nations Special Representative for Iraq, go missing.”

De Mello’s death in a hotel bombing in Baghdad and the presumed death of her family member, who then reappeared, catalyzed her to write a one-woman show entitled Dead Woman Home that she took to Seattle, San Francisco, Off-Off-Broadway in New York, and the Philippines. Nazareno’s intention was to challenge the depersonalized perceptions and opinions about war and the Iraqi people that could justify an almost instant reaction to go to war.

“This was my very first play and I wrote it almost twenty years ago. At the time, I wanted to ask audiences: do we realize the implications and the unnecessary incalculable loss of innocent life? Can we sit with that? If I was sharing this play now, what I really want to ask is this: today we live with growing hatred towards others – and often because there’s nothing left to feel anymore. Who among us still have the courage to love?”

Nazareno wanted to hear what people thought about our occupation in Iraq and connected with teens in juvenile detention centers, vets, and high school and college students from low-resourced communities. She intended to reach new audiences who didn’t have access to theatre and create space for civic dialogue that would inspire social action. Indeed, her play galvanized a group of grad students in the Philippines to submit policy strategies to the UN.

“When I met those grad students, I could have never predicted that kind of response to my play. It finally hit me: stories have the power to change people’s perception of themselves and the world around them.”

Flipping The Story to Empower Perspectives

After two years of touring, Nazareno returned to the U.S. and decided to try event management and fundraising. “I was proud that my show broke even during its run. I didn’t have any formal training in the logistics of producing my show. Everything about me was just scrappy and I wanted to formally learn how to raise funds.”

Nazareno landed a job at Stanford, where she was taken under the wing of Lorraine Alexander, who mentored her. “I was lucky. Lorraine was my first teacher and along the way, I met Theda Jackson-Mau and Kim Gerstman who also showed me the ropes. Learning from them ultimately changed my life. I realized that everything up to this point was preparing me to tell stories that inspire people to question their position in the world and what they can do with that position,” says Nazareno, who took a step away from the politics of theater. “In many ways, that’s been the throughline of my work. We all have stories, and our stories give us the capacity to influence and lead, but what does it mean to be a leader and how can we lead in a new way?”

“We are all part of the solution for a more just world,” says Nazareno. “That’s what I’m trying to get across in my work. When I was a teenager, I heard Mother Teresa speak at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and I was moved when she told us that God doesn’t have hands, but our hands.” Nazareno is adamant about IGNITE because the organization trains young women who come from historically marginalized communities to develop their leadership potential and recognize how their lived experiences are essential to creating a democracy that represents our country’s diversity.

“The narrative is often ‘I come from a low-income neighborhood, I was raised by a single parent, my father is in jail, my brother was killed, I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. I’ve got no credentials to lead and zero cash. Who am I to run?” says Nazareno. “And we flip the script and say: who are you not to? We’re here to convince each young woman that her whole life is what makes her qualified to lead. Right now, out of the 520,000 elected offices across the country, women hold 30.5% of municipal offices, 30.9% of seats in state legislatures, and 26.5% of seats in the US Congress. If we dramatically broaden our audience, and just 0.1% of young women run in the next decade we will dramatically increase the pool of female candidates in America.”

“Women are the backbone of our democracy,” Nazareno adds. “We have to shift our understanding and challenge this notion of ‘leadership material.’ We need to show young women that their leadership is needed and there’s a path to realize their ambitions. If we can do that, we can change the way we think about women leaders in America.”

“Right now, there are many people – mostly men – who sit in local government who have little or no visceral sense of what it means to live day-to-day in the communities where our young women live. This is why we train young women to realize that they are the best representation of what their community needs and what needs to change.”

“We’re at this tipping point where it’s abundantly clear that if we want our country to continue to thrive we have to invest in child care, mandate equitable pay for women, keep children and women safe from domestic violence and gun violence as national priorities, and make access to healthcare a fundamental human right – among a whole host of other things. Who knows these issues better than women? That’s why we must elect more women to get a seat at the political table, and that’s why IGNITE gives girls and young women the tools, networks, and resources to succeed in this environment. Not only will they run, they’ll win. And not only will they win, but they stay in the game…” says Nazareno. “In the midst of COVID, 13 IGNITE women ran for office across the country last year. This year, 21 IGNITE women have declared their candidacies. – That’s why I wake up every morning truly inspired.”

Showing Up As Who You Are

Nazareno feels the pandemic has been another huge catalyst to breaking our bubbles, realizing our interconnectedness, how deeply woven our lives are and how dependent we are on one another. Amidst so much divisiveness, she sees that we’re all presented with this question: how are you going to show up to this moment?

When it comes to reflecting on her journey and what motivates her day-to-day, it’s exactly that question. Nazareno’s own father came from humble means and wanted to become a cinematographer. But with his mother’s disapproval, he became the engineer he was expected to be. Nazareno dared the opposite.

“What I carry from his story is that while we make sacrifices and concessions along the way, we can’t forget the spark that lives inside us – especially now. As I see it, that spark is the essence of who you are. And it’s a choice to share it with others or hide it. How am I showing up? What am I bringing to the table?” she questions. “Am I really bringing me, or am I consciously dimming my spark, and if so, for whom – and why? And is it worth it? Or can I trust that bringing all of me – whatever that is in this moment – is enough?”

By: Aimee Hansen

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Lindsay Rosner, CFA: Principal at PGIM Fixed Income

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Lindsay Rosner “What’s guided me throughout my career is looking for people who are both happy and genuinely interested in what they’re doing,” says Lindsay Rosner about her career journey. “I want to see that personal happiness factor.”

As a fixed income investor, Rosner can talk about the credit markets all day long, but when it comes to professional development she speaks to investing in yourself. For her that means taking your seat at the table and not being afraid to bring your whole self to work.

During the pandemic, she’s seen more kids, dogs, and spouses than she ever imagined could enter the workplace, but those interactions have helped bring a real human element to business, and for Rosner that’s a step in the right direction.

Insisting on Personal Happiness Factor

While every job has its grunt work – she remembers taking breakfast orders as a Wall Street intern – Rosner looks for work that enlivens her and the people around her.

“I started on Wall Street right out of college. There were some unhappy people,” she recalls. “Fortunately, I worked with quite a few clients who were happy. So, I tried to find myself a job that would prove both professionally challenging and personally satisfying.”

Rosner loves constantly learning, addressing problems, finding solutions and being part of developing and implementing new products.

Recently, she’s animated by exchange traded funds (ETFs) in the fixed income space, allowing access to diversified investments with lower dollar amounts, as well as Environmental Social Governance (ESG) factors and increasingly ESG funds. While governance has always been fundamental to the bottom-up credit analysis conducted by Rosner and her PGIM Fixed Income colleagues, she enjoys being part of the broader ESG conversation which increasingly has shifted to include not only an emphasis on governance, but also social and environmental criteria.

ESG factors are more and more part of the conversations Rosner has with her institutional and retail clients, but also part of the conversations credit analysts are having with Chief Financial Officers and Treasurers because those factors can and do impact the cost of financing.

Investing in Your Value Equation

Early in her career, Rosner was positioned in the equities division of Lehman Brothers as the firm was going under. She found herself in a precarious position that she has not since forgotten and that has informed her decisions.

“Two years out of college on the trading floor means that you are only beginning to understand the markets and risks of positions. You’re deftly quick in putting together the morning meeting packets, have mastered ordering lunch for 40 people and frequently assist senior traders; However, you aren’t in the driver seat yet.” she states. “When Lehman was facing bankruptcy, I saw all the more senior people who I’d been assisting every day interviewing to get their lives figured out, and I quickly learned I needed more marketable skills and a wider network.”

As Barclays purchased Lehman Brothers, Rosner was never out of a job, but realizing she was on her own was a harrowing experience that taught her a valuable lesson: “I will never put myself in a position again where I don’t have the skills. If something happens totally out of your control, you have to be ready.”

Despite many views on the trading floor that a CFA designation was not necessary for a trading role, Rosner attained her CFA as a personal insurance policy and to fortify her credentials. Rosner has since chosen to keep her knowledge and skillset wide, rather than niche.

“Even within your organization, you have to think about the opportunities for specific roles or jobs through the lens of what is best for you,” she says. “For me, I’ve always chosen to pursue roles that are broader.”

Claiming Your Seat at The Table

Rosner emphasizes that you have to actively claim your seat at the table and occupy it with your whole self.

“If you want to be involved in the conversation, you don’t sit in the seat in the back of the conference room,” she asserts. “If there are not more seats, you should pull your chair up to the table and get involved to the appropriate degree.”

Rosner admits she has leaned towards over-preparation in claiming that seat.

“Diversity is not where I’d like it to be in the industry. That’s not only from the gender standpoint. It’s racial diversity as well. I care tremendously to see that change,” says Rosner. “With fewer senior women, I always over-prepare. If that comes across as confidence, I’ve made it look easy. But the fact is, I have a lot to prove.”

But she has also learned to embody her own skin fully.

“You get to a point in your life where you realize you have to be yourself. The path forward isn’t going to happen unless you are,” states Rosner. “That means bringing all of you to the table, not being ashamed to talk about having children, etc. There are times where I will question if the analogy I use, or story I tell, will resonate with the room, but you have to be yourself to be successful.”

Bringing Your Whole Self

“I speak loud. I use my hands. I’m pretty emotive. I have a lot of facial expressions. I bring a little bit of my personal life into my work life, whereas some draw a hard-line,” says Rosner. “I just think, this is the whole me. You need all of it.”

When starting out, she remembers taking training classes for client lunches. “There’s so much importance placed on professionalism, and some of it is so contrived,” she observes. “At the end of the day, these are people too who you’re working with.”

Rosner has long invited back her sense of self-deprecating humor to the office, as part of what helps build connection and relationships, and part of her own professionalism.

“You don’t connect with people when it’s all buttoned up. I love being a storyteller, telling a story and making people laugh,” she says. “We all have those relatable, funny moments and experiences and people will remember those interactions.”

“You’re not always going to connect by talking about a company’s balance sheet. Instead, be vulnerable. Being yourself allows others to be themselves,” she notes. “People value that you remember their kid was going to an important doctor’s appointment and ask what occurred. That’s being real.”

Building Your Village

“I think everybody needs a village. So much is building that village of men and/or women who support you, professionally or personally,” notes Rosner. “It’s all give and take. You have to help somebody in order to get it back.”

While she’s found you can learn from any partnership, Rosner has often benefited the most from the informal mentorships where “often you don’t realize it’s a mentorship until later,” even when the benefit might be tough love.

“Everyone can offer something. There are different times in your career where you’ll need different people so it’s important to keep those contacts,” she notes. “You may not need them for three years, but in a moment you realize that person is the perfect person to give advice on this issue, and you reach out to them.”

On the flip-side, Rosner notes that seeing people who she mentored do well is as rewarding and fulfilling as if it were her own success.

Working From Home

With a three year old and a twenty month old at home, Rosner has enjoyed and needed the flexibility of the remote workplace, whereas the previous expectation was full team presence on the trading floor. The pandemic has put into consideration whether that’s as critical as once believed.

Rosner notes that the remote workspace has brought more recognition and valuing of a perspective that women have always been able to offer.

“Women really have a pulse on what’s going on in the family and the balance sheet of basic consumers in the country,” says Rosner. “You can bring that kind of knowledge to bear, and it’s actually valuable in my work setting now.”


She’s also found the remote workplace means she can be available more easily to chat with others when it comes to mentoring and networking, and even more so with those outside of her organization.

Rosner loves spending time outdoors with her little ones and is enjoying the arrival of spring.

By Aimee Hansen

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Grace J. Lee: Litigation Partner, Shearman & Sterling LLP

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Grace J Lee“As I was progressing within the BigLaw structure, the most important thing was not defining my success by the way that some tend to view it,” says Grace Lee. “I resisted my initial tendency to buy into the notion that if I didn’t make partner, that was somehow failure, or spoke to my skillset or my value.”

Lee shares on defining your own success, aligning with your personal priorities, and challenging the stereotypes of who you need to be in the role.

From Literature to Law

Lee contemplated a path in comparative literature, but was hesitant to commit to a life in academia. She also had been considering law school and discovered that law fulfilled her interest in causes for justice and allowed her to apply her literature skillsets.

“As a comparative literature major, I did a lot of exercises in explicating texts—you take a passage from a literary work, consider why the author chose the words they did, and where it fits in the broader context of the work,” says Lee. “In legal work, I was interested in interpreting words—words in statutes and court decisions. And making arguments about how certain language should be interpreted, based on word choices and the context, to support a thesis.”

Now in her 15th year at Shearman & Sterling (S&S) in New York and D.C., she is an industry expert—working with financial institutions and corporations on securities and antitrust litigation, commercial litigation, and regulatory investigations.

Defining Her Own Success

“Don’t buy into how other people define success. If you have a view of where you want to be in five or ten years, stay true to that,” says Lee, “as opposed to feeling like you need to be or do something that might be completely divorced from what makes you professionally and personally satisfied.”

While attaining partnership was a meaningful step in her career, it does not define her success, and she points out that many smart, successful people do not opt into or attain partnership.

“I think success is a very personal thing. For me, being able to have the different spaces of my life come together is success,“ she notes. “I’m able to have a career that I find fulfilling and kids who are fairly well adjusted. My kids see that what I do is not at their expense, and that my professional space means something to me.”

Aligning With Your Personal Priorities

For her personally, becoming a parent changed and clarified her priorities in a way that she never anticipated.

“I had a vision of the type of parent I wanted to be, and the type of lawyer I wanted to be,” says Lee. “I also realized that if I couldn’t be the parent that I wanted to be, then I wasn’t going to be happy even if I succeeded as a lawyer, and that became my guiding principle.”

To make this work, Lee did her best to fulfill her visions of both roles. She prioritized coming home to put her children to bed every night, and then working a second shift, often late into the night. “What that meant was that what could have been a work day that ended at 9 or 10 pm if I worked through the evening in the office became a work day that often ended well past midnight, because I took the time to go home, spend a little time with them, and put them to bed.” But for Lee, the personal sense of having given something the best that she could under the circumstances, was what was the most important.

“In order for me to not be resentful of the fact that I have a demanding job but instead grow in it, I had to make sure that I wouldn’t look back 20 years from then and feel that I had sacrificed my values as a parent to be a lawyer. I gave my best to both roles so that, many years from now, I hopefully wouldn’t feel that I had pursued one at the expense of the other and question those choices.”

Knowing her choice is her own, she emphasizes that your own priority is never wrong, whatever it is—it’s about aligning your life with your self-discerned priority.

“The trouble is when you’re trying to do something that doesn’t align with your values just because you feel like you have to do it,” says Lee. “I think that’s where the discord and the struggles really materialize.”

Lee finds it helpful to introduce the two parts of her life to each other. “After a long week, the physical office building was not the place I would have chosen to go to on a weekend. But it was important for my kids to be able to visualize me at work during the day, where I spend more time than I do with them.” So on some weekends, Lee brought her kids into the office where they would walk through the halls, sit at her desk and pretend that they were working. Lee also naturally incorporates her job as a parent in her conversations at work.

“Some people—especially women at least as I have observed—shy away from talking about their kids at work because they think they will be taken as less committed. I want people to understand that I have another demanding job that I absolutely love. It’s important for me to feel that my work is a safe space where I can talk about my kids, and the challenges and the demands of parenthood instead of pretending that I don’t have those issues.”

That openness has also paved the way for real meaningful discussions with mentors who have helped her navigate the intensity of BigLaw while striking the balance she personally seeks.

“So many great partners who have been mentors and friends over the years really helped me as I was trying to figure out my priorities and my definition of success. They didn’t just tell me what to do to get to the next step in BigLaw. They asked me what I wanted in life and in my career and shared their personal stories. Those discussions could get very granular—like, ‘What are your stressors? Let’s identify what they are, and see if it’s solvable.’” Even when the stressor was outside of Lee’s control, being able to identify it helped more than just feeling stressed.

Her mentors have also often become her sponsors, advocating for her and helping her to advance in the organization and with clients.

Growing Through The Process

“Take on as much as you think you can reasonably handle. And then stretch that a little. See how that works. And if that works, stretch it a little more. Do the very best to not turn down work,” says Lee, who focuses on the notion of building her personal value rather than billing hours.

“My brand and my value come down to my experience. The level of experience and breadth of different types of cases you get because you’re working more and stretching a little is huge. That experience becomes a big part of your value as a lawyer.”

For Lee, it’s not a particular case or moment that has been rewarding for her, but the relationships and overall growth that come with the process of working with her teams and clients to solve issues. “It’s the journey from Point A to Point B, from Point B to Point C, and so on, and then seeing the growth from Point A to Point X. It’s not any single moment, but it’s many blocks of moments of where I was and where I am now.”

Being Yourself, Not an Expectation

Though Lee works with many women, the industry and partnership ring are more male-dominated, so she values that her own trajectory helped to set an important precedent.

“It’s natural to look for someone you can identify with in the role you want to be in. I hope that I might be able to be that person for some.”

Just as Lee rejects the notion of adopting anyone else’s idea of success, she also challenges the notion that you have to be anyone else’s version of a lawyer.

Especially as she became more senior, Lee confronted expectations about how a successful lawyer looks and acts—such as the stereotype of litigators being loud and argumentative—but those expectations didn’t always match the ways that Lee speaks or acts.  Lee believes that you don’t have to fundamentally change who you are, or embody certain mannerisms every day, to be an effective advocate. “Having people from different backgrounds and with different tendencies in the leadership roles helps dismantle that and challenge that notion.”

Playing By Ear

Lee played the violin as a child, and as a parent follows the Suzuki Method with her children, which teaches children to pick up music through exposure and repetition before actually reading music, akin to how they pick up their mother tongue before they learn how to read.

With the method being based upon a parent-teacher-child triangle, Saturdays and even family summer holidays have often been focused around music classes and Suzuki camp. “It’s a refreshing change of pace. In my kids’ violin instructions, we are much less concerned about how quickly they can master something than we are at how perfectly they can learn it. An entire month can be spent dedicated to making sure they can play one musical phrase correctly.” Lee also loves how music brings her family together, including playing violin duets with her children.

Rounding back to literature, Lee is looking forward to reading a book she picked up some months ago at a local bookstore. “It was a ‘blind date’ book where the book is wrapped and you don’t know what it is, but it instead lists other books of similar sentiments. I loved the idea of it and all of the books that were listed on the wrapper, so picked it up with a lot of anticipation.”

By Aimee Hansen

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Jamila Houser: Deputy Chief Underwriter – Agency Lending, PGIM Real Estate

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Jamila Houser“People often say ‘if you can see it, you can be it.’ Well if you don’t see it, does that mean you can’t be it?” challenges Jamila Houser.

Houser 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

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