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Erika Irish Brown, Chief Diversity Officer, Goldman Sachs

Erika Irish Brown“Be Bold and Take Risks to Be an Agent of Change”

“If you expose people who are smart and hard working to opportunities – and provide them with an access point to begin a career – success follows,” says Goldman Sachs’ Erika Irish Brown.

As Goldman’s new Chief Diversity Officer, Brown is responsible for driving inclusive culture initiatives and efforts related to the firm’s recruitment, retention and advancement of diverse professionals.

She notes she is genuinely passionate about promoting diversity and inclusion in the financial services industry. “The sense of purpose I have for my work drives me every day.”

A Beneficiary and Proponent of Diversity and Inclusion

Brown’s first introduction to financial services came via a year-long internship as a college student, which was offered specifically to students from underrepresented minority groups by a state-run bond agency. She describes the internship as a huge win given her alma mater – the State University of New York at Albany – did not send a high volume of graduates to Wall Street at that time.

This internship helped her land an analyst role at Lehman Brothers, which she says was a life-changing opportunity. “Very often, people ask me, why am I so committed to diversity and inclusion?” says Brown. “One reason is because I got my start on Wall Street as a beneficiary of what we now call a diversity and inclusion program.”

After working in investment banking at Lehman, Brown went on to issue bonds for the City of New York and served as a Presidential appointee at the US Treasury in the Clinton administration, ultimately earning her MBA from Columbia University and serving in roles at Morgan Stanley and Black Entertainment Television. She enjoyed the financial markets, the fast-paced nature of her work and the variety of people she was able to work with, but added: “It was a different time – gender, ethnic diversity was low.”

Brown took an interest in the diversity and inclusion (D&I) space, serving as a recruiting liaison for both on-campus and experienced hires – on top of her day job as a banker.

Prior to the financial crisis, Brown began her first ‘official’ diversity-focused role, once again, at Lehman, where her team focused on enhancing diversity at the vice president level and above. Post-crisis – and a brief stint on the Obama administration’s Treasury transition team – Brown joined Bank of America, where she built a team focused on executive diversity recruiting. From there, she went on to serve as Bloomberg’s chief diversity officer, building the company’s D&I platform from the ground up.

“Being considered a subject matter expert on diversity globally has made me very proud,” says Brown. “This is not easy work, it is not easily measured and you have to be bold and take risks in order to be an agent of change.” This risk-taking has led Brown to Goldman Sachs, where she has a large, global platform to influence diversity.

Evaluating and Developing New Approaches at Goldman Sachs

“It was important for me to come in and listen, learn and talk to people,” says Brown of her approach to her new role at the firm last year. “I wanted my expertise to be informed by the culture here.”

After connecting with stakeholders across regions and divisions and gaining a global perspective, she now feels well informed to have opinions, make assessments and execute on the best practices and strategies that will work for Goldman Sachs.

Brown outlines some of the many opportunities in the D&I space she hopes to focus on in the coming months:

  • Enhance the Goldman Sachs brand as an employer of choice in diverse communities;
  • Embed D&I practices into all aspects of the Talent process;
  • Advance the firm’s inclusive culture and work environment; and
  • Ensure accountability for furthering D&I at every level

Her team has the support from CEO David Solomon and the firm’s Global Diversity Committee. Brown notes that it is crucial to have senior leadership setting the tone – particularly when diversity impacts each and every area of a company, from business performance to client engagement.

“Today, no topics are off the table in the workplace, and people expect to bring their authentic selves to work,” says Brown. “I’ve seen firsthand that this approach has been adopted at Goldman Sachs as well.”

Recommendations From a Life-Long Learner

Describing her roles at several investment banks and why young women should pursue financial services careers, Brown says, “The skills sets you develop in a short period of time, the amount of responsibility and high bar for expectations, and the seniority of people – both internally and clients – that you engage with is empowering.”

Her advice to women as they progress in their careers is to continuously innovate and be life-long learners.

“Ask yourself – are you pushing the envelope, taking risks and being ambitious,” says Brown. “We should all reflect upon our legacy and ensure we make a difference in our workplace – it can be anything from launching a new product to creating opportunities for others.”

Outside the office, Brown continues to push for change in her community. As vice chair of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, she works to ensure the Central Brooklyn community has access to housing, education and economic development opportunities, arts and cultural activities and capital for small business owners.

Brown stresses: “giving back is important to me – anything I can do to contribute and give back to others, I’ll do.”

And, a mother to three sons, Brown also keeps busy on the slopes, skiing in the winter with her family and cheering on from the sidelines of elite AAU basketball games. “We’re very active as a family, and our time together is so important and a priority to me,” she says.

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Miriam Wheeler, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs

Miriam WheelerTo progress in your career, you have to get out of your comfort zone, says Goldman Sachs’ Miriam Wheeler, who was recently named a partner at the firm – a role that will come into effect in the New Year.

“If you’re never uncomfortable, you’re not growing professionally. And even if you fail, you will learn valuable lessons that are relevant for the next undertaking,” she says. When those successes inevitably come, she thinks it’s important to celebrate as a team. “We have a tendency to jump right into the next deal, but giving the team recognition and celebrating wins together helps morale and overall job satisfaction,” she notes.

Exploring Different Areas of Finance

Wheeler joined Goldman as a summer intern in securities in 2004, working in mortgage sales for two years before moving to the finance group. She had always wanted to work in real estate, with a specific interest in land use policy and city infrastructure. She found her perfect fit in the Real Estate Financing Group, a role she finds continuously challenging and interesting. “As a deal junkie, I love the thrill of when a big project comes together for a client,” she says.

In fact, the professional achievement she is most proud of so far was seeing Goldman Sachs vault to the top of the 2017 CMBS (Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities) league table. “It was truly a team effort where we delivered on a lot of transactions. Not only did it represent a huge leap in position, but it signified how relevant we had become to our clients,” she says.

The GS real estate lending platform has expanded considerably in recent years. While the team previously focused only on securitized lending, they now have a much wider array of products to offer clients, including real estate loans that sit in the Goldman Sachs’ Bank USA, which clients have found to be a useful and relevant product offering.

Helping Women Advance in the Industry

As Wheeler surveys college resumes, she is surprised that there are still so many more men applying to roles in the finance sector right out of college than women. “We need to continue to recruit women and educate them on the benefits of a long-term career in finance, as many are self-selecting out of the industry before they even have a chance to begin a career,” she says. In fact, when she looks back over her own career, she notes that initially a lot of the senior positions were predominantly held by men, which can be a barrier to women when they only see men across the table. She is encouraged that the mix is changing, particularly among her client counterparts. “It’s vital to show women who are considering a career here that it is a viable place for them to have a successful long-term career.”

She encourages women who enter the field to build relationships with peers at their level, as those peers will also become more senior over time. “Build as many relationships as possible both internally and externally.—get to know your peers and clients of both genders. You can build great relationships by delivering excellent execution and client service, even if you don’t have a lot in common with someone on the surface.”

As a woman at Goldman Sachs, she has found the firm to be very supportive of women’s family needs, including a robust maternity leave program that she took advantage of when both her daughters, now ages 1 and 3, were born, as Goldman offers 16 weeks of paid leave and the option to extend maternity leave as well. Goldman also offers a month of paternity leave and has recently begun to offer a milk shipping program, allowing women traveling on business to ship breast milk home to their baby. In addition, she has taken advantage of the firm’s onsite back-up childcare, when her regular childcare is not an option. “All the support is incredibly beneficial when you are trying to balance your family and your career,” she says.

Looking ahead to her daughters’ future, Wheeler is excited to think about opportunities that will be open to them. “We all have the responsibility to create an environment where future generations of women can thrive,” she says.

That ethos expands to her philanthropy work as well; as a board member for WIN Partners, she is proud of her involvement with a group that is dedicated to helping homeless women and children transition from shelters to their own homes. Over the past year, WIN has supported 10,000 homeless individuals, including 6,000 children.

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Katie Koch, Partner, Goldman Sachs

Katie KochGiven the sizable success that Goldman Sachs’ Katie Koch has had in her career, it may seem surprising that failure is one of the factors that drives her.

“Taking risks and refusing to be paralyzed by a fear of failure has served me well,” she says, explaining that she has developed a sound personal philosophy and approach to taking risk. “I approach every challenge with a philosophy that my mom introduced to me and my siblings when she would say, ‘What choice would you make if you knew you would not fail?’”

Taking that approach has allowed Koch to make decisions based on optimism rather than fear and has biased her towards taking calculated risks. “When you’re taking risk repeatedly, you’re naturally going to occasionally fail, so it’s important to view failure as fuel,” she says. A quote that has resonated with her came from an inspiring commencement address by soccer superstar Abby Wambach, who said, “Failure is not something to be ashamed of, it’s something to be POWERED by. Failure is the highest octane fuel your life can run on. You got to learn to make failure your fuel.”

If something doesn’t work out the way you wanted it to, figure out why, and move forward with those lessons, Koch advises.

Taking Risks Leads to Diverse and Rewarding Career Path

Although Koch has spent 16 years with Goldman Sachs, it’s as though she’s had several careers, given the diverse portfolio of experiences she’s had – across different divisions, offices (Chicago, London and New York) and four different business lines. One of her favorite roles is working with incoming talent, and she always makes sure to express how this wealth of opportunities allows professionals at Goldman Sachs to experience a fulfilling career – at one firm.

Koch acknowledges it can be challenging to start over with a new business, team and mandate, but the advantages of working in a new business are immense.

First, she has been able to build a deep network, and secondly, working in different roles allows you to have additional context as you inevitably come across problems you’ve tackled before.

And while she was grateful to be named a partner at the age of 36, the aspect that was most meaningful was having so many people, including her own team, champion her throughout the process. “I believe that the more senior you become, the more dependent your success is on having the best team around you and the right sponsorship above you.”

Living Out a Commitment to Diversity

Koch’s belief in the importance of diversity permeates every aspect of her role at Goldman Sachs. She sees a strong business case for spending time and effort to build diverse teams, and her role helping to lead the equity business – which oversees $65 billion in assets – has proven that diversity of thought is critical to positive investment outcomes. “Successful investing requires the healthy tension of variant perspectives, so it’s a competitive advantage that we have a highly diverse investing team; more than half of our assets are handled by talented portfolio managers who happen to be women, an industry-leading statistic,” she notes.

At the firmwide level, Koch is a champion of Launch With GS, a new initiative that will invest $500 million of the firm’s and its clients’ capital in private, late-stage, women-founded, women-owned or women-led companies, through direct funding, as well as seeding women investment managers who are starting their own funds. “Our ambition is to become a partner of choice for women seeking to scale their businesses and build capital,” she says of the effort.

Sharing Advice That Has Propelled Her Career

Mentoring women is important to Koch, and one lesson that she is quick to impart is that you have to treat a career differently than school. Women in particular excel in the academic environment, where they are rewarded for subject mastery; however, when women transition to a career, they often remain on that path and focus on the content of their role and “keeping their head down.” While it’s vital to be a subject matter expert at your core, she finds women tend to overinvest in this, but chronically underinvest in developing their network.

“I encourage young women to be exceptional at what they do, but also be deliberate in carving out time to meet people in their direct line of business and across their firm, industry and client base, all of which will help you build seniority over the long arc of your career,” she says. “You need to balance what you know with who you know.”

As the beneficiary of a supportive community of other partners, she advises her peers to continue to signal ambition – appropriately of course – and create a plan to articulate career goals to the right people, at the right moment and in the right way.

“It’s so important to think boldly and have a clearly defined top-level goal. Knowing exactly where you want to go allows you to organize your time and efforts toward those aspirational roles,” she says, recommending that while women should focus on outstanding execution in their current role, they should also be asking themselves, “Am I working toward my next job?”

Koch comments, “One of the best ways to prove you are deserving of a job is to act as though you already have the title – even before it is officially yours. That communicates to others that you are hungry, proactive and will bring solutions as a leader.”

One of the programs that was particularly beneficial to Koch was the personal coaching that Goldman Sachs offers, where the coach solicits direct feedback from everyone you work with and provides insight to help you grow as a professional.

Koch noted, “As you achieve early success in your career you can lose sight of how much room there is to improve. This is compounded by the fact that as you get more senior, less people are willing to give you tough feedback directly.”

The coaching process can help you address your blind spots, and Koch found real value in getting this feedback to continue to grow and evolve in her career. She shares, “Once I really opened myself up to the feedback, I learned some profound truths about myself as a professional and a manager. I distinctly remember my coach trying to make the point that people felt shut-down when I interrupted them. I interjected to explain that I don’t interrupt people – I just help them reach a conclusion more quickly. She had to gently point out that I had just interrupted her to explain that I don’t interrupt people!” Taking feedback can be humbling, but Koch believes that self-actualization is only possible when you seek out areas to improve at every stage of your career.

Despite the many hats she wears at work, Koch’s main priority is her family—her husband, two daughters and a son born a few weeks ago. With three children aged four and under, she feels extremely fortunate to have bosses such as Tim O’Neill and Eric Lane, who don’t see successful careers and meaningful family lives as mutually exclusive. “I have had an exceptionally positive experience at Goldman Sachs simultaneously growing my career and my family. I think it underscores the importance for women to choose their employer and their boss wisely.”

“My family is my biggest priority, but I always think of what we say in investing—we won’t get the stock picks right every time, but we try to get it right over time. To me that is the ideal metaphor for integrating life and family. My family can’t come first every time, but they must come first over time, and my goal is to organize my life that way.”

Prior to kids, she and her husband indulged a love of adventure travel; she has been to all seven continents—including Antarctica for her honeymoon—and has climbed extensively from Kilimanjaro to the Alps. For now, most of her adventures take place through books. As an avid reader, she averages about a book a week and frequently trades recommendations with her mom and her team.

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Shital Bhatt, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs

Shital Bhatt

A career is built by playing the long game, chess, not checkers, says Goldman Sachs’ Shital Bhatt.

“What I thought was most important when I was more junior, the technical and functional skills, need to be supplemented with attributes such as being resilient and having grit,” she says. “I wish I had learned earlier, especially as a woman in the financial services sector and with a minority background, how important it is to recover quickly, persevere and not let challenges get you down,” she shares.

Growing Her Career to Earn Those Two Important Letters

Bhatt joined Goldman Sachs as an analyst in 2004 in the Operations Division, and although she’s spent her tenure within this division, she’s had many different experiences, both in function, moving from derivatives to securities. Also moving geographically, beginning in the New York office, moving to New Jersey, and taking a global opportunity in Hong Kong before finally transferring back to New York in 2016.

While it was unexpected, as she was still at a relatively junior level, traveling and living abroad for work had always been enticing to her; although she had assumed the farthest she would transfer would be London. However, when her former manager asked her to join a team he was building in Hong Kong, she booked a one-way ticket in 2010 having never even visited before, and remained there for five-and-a-half years. “It was an amazing opportunity to learn many different functions, and living in Hong Kong was an equally enriching personal and cultural experience,” Bhatt says.

She considers building a life abroad one of the professional achievements she is most proud of thus far. Having always lived close to home, she found it to be a high-risk/high-reward opportunity, but she figured that if her parents could immigrate to the United States in the ‘70s with minimal support, she could take on this challenge.

Bhatt’s second notable career moment was being named a managing director. Reaching this level was always her aspiration, given the many MD role models she admired, but she also finds the accomplishment significant as a first-generation Indian American. “I was one of two daughters, and my parents wanted to give us a great education to fulfill the ‘American dream,’” she says.

“Telling my parents I was named managing director was one of the happiest days of their life, and it was a meaningful way for me to thank them for what they did to help me persevere and get to this level.” She laughs, since everyone in her family is in the sciences – and her dad always wanted her to be a doctor – that she was proud she could finally tell him she was an “MD.”

Bhatt finds that one of the best parts of the industry is seeing how technological advances will change things for the better. For example, she has been fascinated by the intersection between disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence as they converge with the highly regulated financial sector.

“We are seeing how we can incorporate the best technology available into our controlled environment at an appetite that regulators will be comfortable with. I love seeing how other industries outside of financial services are making it work,” she says.

Helping Build the Talent Pipeline

When considering the challenges of being a woman in the industry, Bhatt believes that key issues are numbers, retention and representation. “There aren’t enough women, so we need to not only attract women as junior candidates, but retain them over a long career.” She says one solution is to help women who are currently in school or graduating discount a misconception that the industry is overly conservative and rigid. “Other people have paved the way as the industry has evolved to be more welcoming, and that will only continue if we bring in even more people who are eager to ensure the industry is more diverse.”

She goes on to stress: “getting women in the door isn’t enough – it’s important for leadership to nurture and grow talent through the ranks by giving their team members interesting and challenging responsibilities.”

In addition, Bhatt believes that as firms work toward equal gender representation, typical stereotypes tied to gender – such as men being “assertive leaders,” and women being viewed as “good teammates” – will evolve.

She says it’s vital that women in top positions take care to spot talent and spend time mentoring the junior population. “Remember that you used to be that analyst admiring the MD and looking for advice and encouragement,” she says. “A good leader can listen to a wide variety of ideas and champion the great ones. It helps the team feel empowered when you listen and assess ideas, then help get the best ideas across the finish line.” She adds it’s equally important to make sure that men are also advocating for women.

Bhatt has benefitted from a number of programs offered by Goldman Sachs, notably when she participated in a program in Asia that brought women in the region together to develop their leadership skills, and provided them with the opportunity to forge connections with senior leaders and one another.

In addition, Bhatt is passionate about the firm’s affinity networks; she was a member, then a steering committee leader and now managing director sponsor for the Operations Asian Professionals Network in the Americas. “I love giving back to this community, and I am honored to be that role model, so if a junior person is hoping to go down the MD road, it will become more accessible when they see someone who looks like them,” she says.

Bhatt is a proponent of maintaining a work/life balance; including understanding when it’s time to engage in new activities to support that goal. While in Asia, she picked up a passion for wellness once she realized that the environment offered plenty of opportunities for socializing – but Hong Kong’s “concrete jungle” didn’t provide many chances for outdoor activities. Bhatt joined a boot camp and practiced yoga, eventually earning her certification – not to actively teach but as a personal achievement. She also traveled extensively in the region, visiting 20 countries across Asia.

One of the driving factors in her desire to return to the United States was family; she has two teenage nephews with whom she is extremely close. “I appreciate that I can give them a picture of a family member in corporate America, and I can help them navigate competitive waters to help shape their paths and give them guidance, such as putting them in touch with the right people and helping them engage in different hobbies and extracurricular activities. In that way, I get to serve as a life coach,” Bhatt says.

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