Tag Archive for: authenticity

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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