Tag Archive for: State Street

Leah Meehan: Enterprise Data Governance, Measurement and Reporting, State Street

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Leah Meehan“The most important thing is to listen to your gut. Whatever it is, the voice in your head, there’s something that just drives you,” says Leah Meehan. “I have zero regrets in life because I’ve made every decision I had to make with the best information I had at the time.”

Meehan also talks about translating between worlds, the most important time you’ll ever invest in, diversifying your personal board of directors and creating balance through a fake commute.

Listening To Your Gut

With a master’s degree in criminal justice from Boston University, Meehan’s path threw a curveball. After about five years of working as a Correctional Program Officer, Meehan knew that civil service was not for her.

She did not resonate with the annual cycle of indiscriminate pay raises for which performance was irrelevant. She was one of four women out of a class of 84, and often had to remind herself that she had earned her place there as a woman, just like everyone. But what leaving really came down to was the undeniable knowing in her gut and heart.

“I started talking about leaving, and people thought it was crazy because the retirement package is so good and the stability and pay are good,” she recalls. “But it was one of those things in my gut that I knew I had to do, no matter, and I’m so glad I did.”

Once she first crossed to the private sector with Fidelity Investments, Meehan was involved in employee background investigations and from there she moved to analyzing behaviors related to money laundering. From there, she eventually moved towards her current focus on data governance, now with State Street.

Translating Between Two Worlds

With data and analytics becoming an even bigger part of our lives, Meehan’s work is moving and expanding, faster than ever.

She loves the ability to reach through the hard evidence of the data to prove or disprove something that the client perceives, sometimes opening up a whole area of insight they had not even considered.

“I’m a visual person and when you visualize data, it’s amazing how that can get across to people in different ways and in different languages. It doesn’t matter if you’re an introvert, an extrovert, a data person or not,” Meehan says. “When you see a visualization you know what that means—there is an art to that.”

To craft a compelling story for her clients with the data, she has to be able to listen closely and bridge the numbers with what is important to them.

“If you’re not gearing your data towards your audience, it can be totally lost on them, or falsely interpreted,” says Meehan. “You have to understand what the client is doing, what’s important to them, what their end goals are, what their process is, how they view success or failure and then you need to interpret that in the data.

“I think my job over the last 15 years has developed to be an interpreter between the technical and the business side,” she continues. “That middle section is where I live.”

Investing In Fostering Connection

Meehan feels that the most valuable mentor-mentee relationships she has developed over the years are those that came together informally, through meeting casually and recognizing a connection.

“I’ve also been lucky throughout my career to have several people sponsor me, and I mean they would go into a room and fight for me—a job, a raise, a promotion, taking on a new project,” she says. ”I’ve been fortunate to have that, and I’ve also worked hard at fostering those relationships.”

Meehan recognizes that with work to do and often pending deadlines, dropping everything to go for a half hour coffee can sometimes feel like time not well spent.

“But to me, it’s the most important time,” she iterates. “If you make those personal connections with people, it will help you down the road, personally and professionally.”

Even now, she finds nothing more rewarding as a manager than watching her team members grow and advance to dreams they have aspired to, no matter where it might take them.

“I encourage that, and to think I had a small part in their progress makes me happy,” reflects Meehan. “When I see my team doing well, spread out over the years at various firms doing what they love, and still coming back to me to let me know how they are or to ask for references, that’s what makes me the most proud.”

Diversifying Her Board of Directors

Meehan is a big believer in cultivating your own personal board of directors—the people that you can call on as advisors from a personal and professional standpoint. Recently, she’s been focusing on bringing in a greater diversity of perspectives to bounce ideas off of.

“I realized the people I go to often are very similar to me, so when I go to them for advice, they’re probably going to give me what I want to hear,” she observes. “So I have one person on my board who has been a friend for a long time, and he tells me ‘how it is’. He does not hold anything back, to the point it sometimes upsets me, but he’s helping me to move ahead; I need more of those people, to diversify my board.”

Creating Balance in Covid Times

Certainly the remote working office has impacted office dynamics, including going from wearing a suit everyday to yoga pants. But the stronger impact for Meehan has been on her work-life balance.

“In the beginning of Covid, we thought we were the lucky ones because all of our friends with kids were really struggling with homeschooling,” says Meehan, speaking for her husband and herself. “But then we went through a period where we worked more online, and our work-life balance got thrown completely off.”

Meehan realized that her friends with children at least had some consistent schedule of making dinner, putting kids to bed. Her husband and her did not have the external pulls on attention, so could work into the night and barely make dinner.

“We had to take a step back and create some boundaries,” says Meehan.

In her remote home office in Boston, she has now created a “fake commute” at both the beginning and end of her workday to mimic the transition of her twenty minute walk to work—she goes on a walk and may do yoga or meditation. She blocks off an hour in the middle of the day as well for herself, and has dinner with her husband.

Together they share a passion for travel, have summited Mount Kilimanjaro a few years back and are bound for Antarctica in 2023.

By Aimee Hansen

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Change Leader: Deborah Lorenzen, Managing Director, Head of Enterprise Data Governance, State Street

Deb LorenzenDeborah Lorenzen is the head of Enterprise Data Governance at State Street. We caught up with her to discuss what is energizing her as we enter 2020 and what she hopes to achieve for herself and for others as a change leader for women in the workplace.

Nicki from theglasshammer (NG): Deb, we have profiled you before and you have attended as a panelist some of our career events over the years. I have always held you in high esteem as someone who walks the talk when it comes to helping other women and as a change leader for systemic issues. What lessons have you learned from 2019 and this decade generally to take into 2020 and the next decade?

Deb Lorenzen (DL): If you really want it you have to keep after it, even when it is hard. You just have to keep turning up for the fight. That said, if you are not having fun anymore, quit. That might sound blunt, but honestly, if you aren’t finding joy in what you spend much of your life doing you won’t be successful. So stop, regroup, and find the thing that gives you joy.

From a job title perspective my career path looks non-linear. I’ve always been curious about the next challenge. The strong thread that has held it together is executing on strategic change programs, whether that was acquisition or divestiture, global operating model changes, launching a new product or service into the market or closing down something that wasn’t successful, as well as the inevitable regulatory change. Diving into these change opportunities has provided the chance for me to live and work around the world, provided value to the firms and people who have been part of these efforts, and fed my own leadership journey into how operating models and organizations work.

NG: What excites you about 2020?

DL: In January 2020 I will begin teaching my first MBA course, an elective titled Executing Strategic Change at Providence College. Having spent much of my career driving major change programs it is exciting to pull all of those examples back out to consider what made them successful, and what I would do differently in hindsight. I’m looking forward to the exchange of ideas with a group of future thought leaders. Preparing the course has also been a good reminder of how much has been accomplished during my career.

NG: What trends in your industry are of particular interest to you?

DL: Right now, my focus is on Data Governance and how we help long-standing firms make the shift from application-oriented architecture to properly data-driven architecture. This is the classic example of a strategic change program where we are trying to change the engine and the tires of the bus while still driving down the highway. Fortunately, we have a fantastic team who are all focused on getting this done, and we have leadership in place who both understand what we need to do and are driving resources into place to support our goals.

NG: What is the one thing you know now that you wish you had known when you were first starting your career?

DL: There are so many things I wish I had known. Having grown up in a rural environment with more cows than people, there were very few accessible role models for working in the global financial markets so I couldn’t even have articulated that was what I wanted to do. In hindsight, I wish I had known all of this existed much earlier than I did. These days I spend as much time as I can mentoring new entrants to the financial world on how things work – how you manage salary and benefit negotiations, which lines of business or functional roles give you the most opportunity, how you find out what they are saying about you when you are not in the room so you can do something about the perception. There is no rocket science inherent to these lessons for readers of Glass Hammer, just value in remembering to ‘each one – reach one’ whenever we have the chance.

NG: What, if any, are the main barriers to success and/or challenges for women in your industry?

DL: I used to say that in New York there is so much competition they will take you out for any excuse they can find. I still believe that is true today, and not just in New York. The thing we have to keep working at diligently is making sure the successful excuses aren’t based in gender bias. Ensuring leadership understands inclusion also helps; tying compensation to actual progress is useful but imperfect. Putting daylight on hiring practices, promotion processes and open opportunities is useful as it forces leaders to think through their decisions in a different way.

NG: What advice would you give to young women in the industry or thinking about entering the industry?

DL: For new entrants I would tell them to just go for it. They shouldn’t listen too long to the stories from my generation because the rules ARE actually different now and they shouldn’t get bogged down in our histories. Newer entrants should use the network available – those of us who have been at it for 20+ years – as for the most part we’ll tell you anything you want to know about how the industry works. If we were to change anything we should simply dedicate more support to the next generation. We’re standing on the shoulders of giants ourselves, and we should give the next generation a hand up.

NG: What bright spots are there for gender equity at work?

DL: Working in the finance I learned long ago to ‘follow the money.’ On that front, the movement of institutional money toward Environment Social Governance (ESG) over the past few years is hugely gratifying. The impact is being seen right now in movement toward gender inclusion on Boards as well as investment in firms that reflect ESG goals and inclusive teams. The leverage available by focusing Institutional funds – pension plans in particular – toward ‘good’ goals is helping to make meaningful improvements in the marketplace.. At State Street we are helping to lead the move toward ESG by providing knowledge and infrastructure.

More locally, State Street has a group of ‘Leading Women’ made up of Executive Vice Presidents. They have been doing a great job of being visible and offering their wisdom and experience through lunches and speakers series. They represent a fantastic group of role models and the activities they are driving are helping to inspire a new generation of leaders.

NG: Outside of work, what is ‘sparking joy’?

DL: One of my joys is sitting on the Advisory Board for Global Female Leaders, an annual economic summit in Berlin where we join leading women from around the world representing politics, business and philanthropy to discuss the geo-political landscape and economic trends. Not only do I get to spend one long weekend each year surrounded by some of the most amazing women I’ve ever met, but I’ve also developed relationships that have provided insight and opportunity, as well as the confidence, to extend my life’s work in new directions.

On the personal front, our house is incredibly active right now, with three school-age children and all of the activities that brings, feet in two countries (my husband is Danish and I’m from California), and a full-time career. Teaching in the Providence MBA program will keep my mind active in the Spring. Beyond that I’m coaching 5th grade travel basketball as well as sitting on the Board of the travel program, and I’m co-leader of a Junior Girl Scout Troop. We are, at the behest of my eldest, fostering dogs for a rescue program here in Massachusetts, and have three puppies we began fostering at 7 days old thriving in the corner of her bedroom.

My hopes for the coming decade are to watch my children’s generation finish their education and enter a workforce that is more inclusive than we have today, with a set of clear rules for the game that are the same for everyone – a big ask, I know. For my part, my shoulder will still be on the wheel, mentoring, teaching, working, speaking truth to power about how it still is and what needs to change. And if culture can be defined as ‘how you get things done around here,’ I’ll continue driving for the continuous improvement of an inclusive culture.

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Voice of Experience: Hannah Grove, Chief Marketing Officer, State Street

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Grove_Hannah headshot 2015“The person who will have the most direct influence on your career is you,” says State Street’s Hannah Grove. She advises women to speak up for what they want, but also to help other women along the way. “It used to be that women were so focused on how to get through the glass ceiling themselves that they were hesitant to help one another as they feared it would dilute their own efforts. But we need to pay it forward,” she says, adding it is women’s responsibility to be instrumental in eliminating the gender divide for her daughter’s generation.

With roots aligned in marketing, public relations and communications, Grove has worked across Europe and America, first for smaller entrepreneurial companies and for the past 17 years in the global marketing group of State Street. While there, she is proud that she has helped evolve the marketing organization from a service function to one that is more proactive and integral to the company’s success.

“Our service is inextricably linked to business success, so we have developed this into a strategic function that’s deeply embedded in the client experience. It’s an achievement that we’ve built over time, through an amazing team. One of my secrets to success is hiring people who are better than me.”

One of the key strategies she has helped implement is an effective social media platform, an important tool that allows a company to engage in two-way dialogue and offers the ability to listen and customize messages by audience. “Corporate speak is vanishing, as there’s a push toward personalization, relevance and context. It’s a more viral, authentic approach and has tremendous possibilities, even in a B2B setting,” she says, adding that the team’s motto is getting the right content to the right person at the right time.

At the same time, there’s no denying that transparency can be overwhelming in the complicated and complex financial services industry, and yet focusing on openness and education can go a long way toward restoring the reputation of the industry at large.

Speak Up to Move Up

Reflecting on her career, Grove says she wishes she had known earlier that it’s ok to say “no.” She believes that women fall into the trap of wanting to take on everything to prove themselves and while it can be a good instinct, you have to put yourself on a “budget” or else you will easily become overwhelmed by a “go-to” reputation.

She also urges women to ask questions. There’s no way you can understand everything in the industry – in her experience, questions are a sign of curiosity and engagement, and you should want to surround yourself with people who ask questions and aren’t afraid to disagree with you.

In addition to asking questions, women should be sure that they make their voice heard at meetings. “Don’t ever be at a meeting where you don’t have a speaking role; I’ve never seen a man sit silently at a meeting,” she says. Even if your role at a meeting is to be an observer as a learning experience, she says there is always still a way to contribute, whether you’re asking a question or making a comment.

Finally, the advice to speak up extends to speaking up about your career. “I can’t tell you how many times women have come to me because their career isn’t moving as they’d like – maybe they’ve been overlooked for a promotion or don’t feel they are receiving a salary commensurate with their contributions. But when I query whether they have asked for what they want, nine times out of 10 they haven’t, and people aren’t telepathic,” she says. “And if you don’t get what you think you deserve, often you start resenting it and you quit in your mind. The reality though is that you’ve done that to yourself; you haven’t had it done to you.”

Championing Inclusion and Diversity as Corporate Values

Grove is part of State Street’s “Leading Women,” a group of 14 executive vice presidents who act as both a support network and a business strategy network. As part of their outreach, they are focusing on sponsorship of the next cadre of senior female leaders to help them develop and establish the gravitas, networking and visibility they need to feed into the pipeline. Through those women paying it forward, they expect they will touch 2,500 women across the country.

The company also has a global Professional Women’s Network with a dozen chapters that focus on networking, personal brand, public speaking and other professional skills.
For more than five years, Grove has acted as the executive sponsor for State Street Pride and Friends, the company’s LGBT employee network, which has seven chapters globally. Grove has been named to the OUTstanding LGBT Leading Ally Executives list, by OUTstanding in collaboration with the Financial Times. The lists recognize business leaders who are outspoken and unwavering in their support for LGBT people in the workplace and professionals who go above and beyond their day jobs to improve the working environment for LGBT employees.
“State Street has a real commitment to diversity and inclusion that manifests itself from our CEO on down; it’s not just a check box acitivity,” she says, as evidenced by the fact that the company earned a perfect 100% on the 2016 Corporate Equality Index (CEI), a national benchmarking survey and report on corporate policies and practices related to LGBT workplace equality, administered by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.

Giving Back

Grove, who has been married 23 years, has a high school senior and loves to travel with her family. She is also active in Women’s Lunch Place, a day shelter for women and children in Boston that strives to give women back their dignity, serving 200 guests a day.
As president of the board, she and her daughter volunteer every second Saturday. “It’s amazing how much poverty is in our cities which is why I am passionate about this cause. If you ever think you have a bad day, it really puts your life in perspective.”

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Voice of Experience: Fangfang Chen, Senior Vice President, State Street

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Fang Fang Chen“Because we are all different, there is not just one model that works the best. You can succeed with many different leadership styles, and you have to find the one that’s true to you. Acting like ‘someone else’ is challenging and creates too much pressure over the long run,” says Fangfang Chen.

Chen’s own personal style has been built by constantly taking on new challenges in her many career roles. She attended school in China and then came to the United States to earn her MBA at Yale. Planning to stay for only a few years, she ended up staying for 13, embarking on a consulting career and then moving into financial services with AIG and Fidelity Investments before joining State Street in 2007 with the global strategy and new venture group in Boston.

Her eight-year journey at State Street has not been a static one – it has spanned three countries and four different roles. Since it was always her plan to eventually move back to Asia, her first strategy role seemed like a great fit to understand the critical issues the organization was facing and to garner the exposure needed to a diverse and seasoned network.

This role allowed her to build a strong network with senior executives globally, and so when the head of State Street for Asia Pacific region heard of her interest in returning to China, he hired her in 2010.

Chen spent a year in Hong Kong running strategy, and was put up for promotion to senior vice president seven months after she took on this role. When her company opened a bank branch in China, she said she was pleased that her manager had the confidence to move her to Beijing to become deputy general manager. She enjoyed the diversity, as it was a completely different job from her previous strategy role to manage and grow a small branch, in addition to interacting with regulators and clients.

Fast forward a few years, her manager offered her a chance to move back to Hong Kong and assume a chief of staff role, which she seized on as a “great opportunity to work with a smart man and build new skill sets.” Her work involves driving organizational alignment to develop and execute business strategies and management priorities.

“My role is less about tangibly executing a particular strategy and more about navigating the company to build consensus and support to achieve end goals we have set.”

Willingness to Take Risks

Chen said she has always been proud of her desire to take the risk to try new things and not be afraid of failing when taking on something new.

“I’ve never been bored. Moving from location to location and taking on different roles is what has kept my experience fresh,” she said, adding that the organization is one where they encourage mobility and are willing to let their employees take the risks inherent in a new role. “They have the confidence to stretch you and develop you further.”

Her desire to learn new things comes from the excitement of seeing the “nervousness because you don’t know what you’re doing replaced by the sense of accomplishment when you master it.”

A Culture That Needs More Women

As she has climbed the career ladder, Chen has noticed an interesting trend among women. They enter the field in equal proportion and many times even grow faster, but then they plateau, whether from family obligations or other forces. “We need more role models at the top levels to help other women see how they can navigate organizations and respond to the tough questions. Sometimes I feel like I’m working in the dark, and having more women would help illuminate the path.”

Chen believes that authentic leadership is more sustainable in the long term but that women need role models to help them determine their own style.

At State Street, Chen has led the regional initiative of winning State Street the nomination by Asian Pacific Economic Corporation (APEC), as one of the 50 leading companies for women; just one of three American companies selected.

While Chen has long been focused on women’s issues, she recently took a leadership role in the State Street’s Women in Leadership program in Asia Pacific. This program focuses on three different yet interconnected initiatives: “Pay it Forward,” a structured mentoring process for younger women that helps them navigate substantive issues; Professional Women’s Network, which focuses on helping female staff build skill sets in areas such as presenting and networking; and a sponsorship program where key female talents are matched with senior executive sponsors to expand their roles and responsibilities. She also works with organizations such as Women’s Foundation in Hong Kong to build broader networks and sponsorship opportunities.

Helping Hands

For a woman to develop a sustainable career, a support network is absolutely critical. Chen says she is fortunate that her husband is sharing half of the family responsibilities and her parents are lending hands to help out.

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