Tag Archive for: TIAA

Movers & Shakers: Stephanie Seugling | Director, Business Manager, TIAA

stephanie seuglingBy Cathie Ericson

“What kind of day are you going to make it?” A powerful question that one of Stephanie Seugling’s mentors asked her years ago, and the concept has stuck with her to this day. “It helps me know that whatever happens that seems out of control, you have to learn from the situation and choose how it will impact your day,” she says.

Along the way this phrase has helped her plan for the “hiccups,” knowing that no matter how she is feeling, she can work through the tough spots and help others through them as well.

A Career in Financial Services

Seugling has been fascinated with the financial services industry since her first job as a bank teller in college. It was also the only job in which she physically handled money, but it gave her an understanding of what money means to people – from helping those who needed to pay their mortgage or to assisting those who were excited to be sending a gift or depositing their first paycheck.

After college she joined a different financial services firm as an administrative assistant. From there she took several mobility moves around the firm, working in many areas from marketing to technology, from mergers and acquisitions to process design, before finally landing in treasury fulfillment as an operations executive. Transcending all roles, Seugling noticed a common theme – understand and then take action. She realized that she first needed to get a comprehensive understanding of the opportunities for improvement at hand, and then she needed to execute and deliver the solutions.

In her current role as a business manager for TIAA, Seugling continues to apply this principle. She manages the integration of people and processes for the IT infrastructure department at the firm. “You have to look at the current state and figure out how to blend two different groups coming together to optimize the future state.”

When considering the professional achievement she is most proud of so far, one that sticks out is having been a part of a team that was recognized with patents for developing innovative work processes to enhance the customer experience. The team recognized the approach was novel and was solving a real problem. They conferred with a law firm who confirmed that they were the only ones taking that approach, and they were able to successfully file for patents.

Developing a Recipe for Success

Before joining the corporate world, Seugling leaned on the portrayal of work from TV shows and movies: Everyone wearing suits and dropping the final presentation on the boss’ desk and thus earning a promotion the next day.

“Because of that view, I was one of those kids who couldn’t wait to grow up and be in that environment; it seemed like it was a bit of an escape – like it was going to be easy,” she says. Of course, the day-to-day isn’t as rosy and perfect as the movies, she has found, but she has practiced finding the good in every day.

Along the way she also has learned her own personal recipe for success. She focuses on finding the balance between what you know works in your daily routine, while being able to improvise tailored solutions to addresses specific situations if needed.

Sponsors and Role Models Pave The Way

Seugling names her mom as a key role model – a single mom who instilled in her a work ethic and sense of commitment that she emulates to this day. But she has also been appreciative of other role models along the way, people she was drawn to because of their outstanding work ethic and commitment, with a focus on trying to do the right thing.

Both mentors and sponsors have been key factors in her career. Sponsorship, in particular, she has come to realize has been critical to her rise. “I used to think it was all by luck, being in the right place at the right time, but I realized that sponsorship is the reason for my career,” she says. For example, a series of coincidences introduced her to the woman who gave Seugling her first pivotal job with a financial services company. While she remembers thinking she was lucky, she knows now that she got the job because she was prepared. This same manager advocated for her, and she was tapped into her next role in marketing and the others after that by delivering each and every time.

At TIAA, her roles have similarly been achieved by showing that she was able to deliver and having her previous business partners vocalize those achievements.

Having completed the Emerging Leaders program, Seugling is applying what she learned and continues to take time for on-the-job reflection. The program focuses on designing and implementing strategies, examining social styles, recognizing blind spots and improving your ability to collaborate – among other things.

Paying it Forward

Now, Seugling focuses on paying it back by participating in mentoring programs. “Life is too short to be unhappy and I’m happiest when I am making a difference in people’s lives. I’ve noticed that the people who have helped coach and mentor me have that same type of outlook,” she says.

As a mentor, one of Seugling’s most shared lessons is helping others identify when they should ask for assistance, a lesson she learned early in her career. She had just been promoted into a senior leadership position and was given a large task as an individual contributor. Seugling was excited about the opportunity since it came with responsibility and exposure.

But several weeks into the new role, after continuous late nights, she remembers wondering what was going wrong. She soon realized that she had been trying to do it all on her own.

“My manager assumed I would know to ask for help if I was drowning, but just because you have a new title doesn’t mean that the new guidelines get immediately absorbed,” she says. It was the first time she had realized it was up to her to ask for help so that the team could be successful.

“That’s how I learned about influence and negotiation and explaining the business case for why you are asking for the resource,” she says, information she is quick to share with others she mentors.

She has also been involved in TIAA’s Women’s Employee Resource Group (ERG), as well as the Diverse Abilities ERG for people who are caretakers or are dealing with a disability themselves. As the mom of a child with special needs, she has found that exposing herself to others with like challenges has spurred different ways of understanding problems. “It’s ok to feel overwhelmed sometimes and it’s also ok to be proud and excited and to share those moments as well,” she says.

A Full Life Outside of Work

Always eager to give back to others, Seugling has recently become actively involved in a teammate’s charity, Aislinn’s Wish, which raises money for Sanfilippo Syndrome, a rare, progressive and fatal genetic disorder. “It’s a joy to see people coming together for a common cause and rallying to raise money for a better tomorrow,” she says.

In her spare time, she loves live sporting events, everything from being a spectator at soccer games for her kids, Liam, age 9, and Caleigh, age 7, to taking them to see professional sports teams. She also loves watching live music and experiencing the energy it creates in the venue. Finally, the family loves to travel, especially to New York to visit her family.

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Men Who Get It: Joe Sieczkowski, Senior Managing Director, CTO, Chief Architect/Engineer, TIAA

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“Being a leader who is open to diversity requires a number of qualities, but a key one is being a good listener,” says TIAA’s Joe Sieczkowski.

“So many people listen just so that they can respond, rather than internalizing what’s being said to see if there’s another issue at play. You have to be willing to have your beliefs turned around in the face of evidence,” he says, citing a quote that has been attributed to Mark Twain: “It isn’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just isn’t so.”

A Tech Career Born on Wall Street

joe-sieczkowskiSieczkowski graduated in a short 3.5 years from Lehigh University in the top 10% of his class with a degree in computer engineering and began pursuing a career in finance. As he describes it, “It was ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ on Wall Street where they were realizing it was easier to teach a math guy about bonds than vice versa.”

He began his career at Lehman Brothers, where he took on a series of roles of increasing responsibilities. One characteristic that differentiated Sieczkowski from his peers was his drive to understand the nuances and complexities of each business, even as a technologist. For example, if he was delivering technology for derivative traders, it was important for him to understand how options were priced and how factors such as volatility would affect them. He subsequently held technology leadership roles at Deutsche Bank and then Bear Stearns. At Bear, Sieczkowski worked in the global clearing services division, where they were developing white labeled trading websites for their institutional clients.

With a desire to earn his MBA always in the back of his mind, Sieczkowski took the opportunity to do so during the market turmoil of 2008. During this time, he did advisory work and subsequently joined TIAA in 2011 as Chief Architect/Engineer where he currently leads a cross-functional team of technology leaders in strategy, architecture and enterprise data.

Lifelong Diversity Champion

Beginning with his mom, and leading up to a female CIO at TIAA, Sieczkowski has had a series of women role models who instilled the importance of diversity. He was proud watching his mom as he grew up: She juggled three kids while working and going to school where she graduated summa cum laude. Her career progressed from being a nurse to head nurse to nurse manager and also president of the New Jersey State Nurses Association. With that upbringing, he never doubted the capabilities of women, who have been his colleagues and managers ever since.

That’s why he champions diversity throughout TIAA, realizing that the department’s success depends on the skills of his team. With a proven correlation between innovative teams, success and diversity, he embraces the need to seek diverse points of view to challenge the status quo and ultimately reach better conclusions. “My teams are known for highlighting diversity, and I believe that’s one of the reasons we consistently outperform norms,” he says. “When an employee takes pride in their differences, they are more apt to seek out opportunities that showcase their skills, which in turn helps us perform.”

Groom and Let Go

Sieczkowski takes pride in the leaders he has helped develop, explaining that it’s a four-part process that involves mentoring, grooming, promoting and releasing. “Often that fourth step can be the hardest, but you have to do all four,” he asserts.

“If you insist that you need a certain person on your team, you are holding them back. When you develop talent, it’s in the best interest of the firm to let them fly.” He has taken that to heart, and prides himself on leading a development-focused organization that constantly works to promote people into larger roles.

Part of that evolution in driving female success is bringing in entry-level talent and then making sure they have opportunities to be in front of senior leaders. “When you have outstanding people, you want to make sure they are visible,” he says. “Effectively sponsoring people entails identifying potential and spotlighting and nurturing talent.”

He also encourages his female employees to pursue continuing education, whether formally through a master’s program or informally through the many training opportunities TIAA provides.

Failing Fast and Focusing on Output

While he is an official sponsor of a group mentoring program, he also believes it’s in the informal actions where he can make a difference, and that supporting emerging talent through stretch assignments should be part of each leader’s job. “You have to let them know that it’s ok to fail,” he says, adding that his department understands the value of “failing fast.” When they undertake an innovative initiative, they’ll term it a “fast fail pilot,” knowing that they have the chance to watch it for four to six weeks to see if it will be effective and move on if not.

As leaders consider opportunities for women, there is one key area where they should be focused: output. “We have to remember that flexibility thrives when we focus on the outputs of performance and effectiveness, rather than time. It yields a better work environment and a better work product.”

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Voice of Experience: Jaclyn Berryman, Director, IT Communications & Human Capital Programs, TIAA

Voice of Experience- Jaclyn Berryman (F)By Cathie Ericson

“I always encourage the members of my team to escalate solutions, not just problems,” says Jackie Berryman, Director, TIAA. She has tried to instill a proactive, solution-oriented mindset in the members of her team. In reflecting on her career so far, Berryman identifies this can-do approach as having enabled her to tackle complex challenges that others may have shied away from.

A Varied Career Provides Constant Opportunity

After studying communications and journalism at Northeastern University, Berryman joined Credit Suisse in the Fixed Income division, first on the call center desk and then as an internal account executive, transitioning from answering questions to selling products. After earning her master’s in corporate communications, she decided it was time to segue out of sales and into a role aligned with her desired career path.

Berryman worked for the Department of Education (DOE) in the division of family and community engagement, which fosters student achievement by strengthening partnerships between families and educators. In her role, she oversaw the communications efforts to more than 860,000+ families, which included communication of all translation and interpretation services for the Department. “It was life changing to travel all over the city and work with different demographics,” she says. She remained there for nearly four years before she joined TIAA.

Measuring Her Success

Joining TIAA, a firm whose roots were in education and helping others, felt like a natural progression from the DOE. As Director of Communications and Human Capital Programs for IT, Berryman oversees internal and external communications for the department. Additionally, she runs strategic professional development programs for employees and entry-level rotational program, known as the Technical Associate (TA) Program, for recent graduates and interns.

While success in communications can be challenging to measure, one of Berryman’s metrics which really shows her contribution to the company’s evolution is a recent technology innovation award. TIAA was in the bottom 250 in the prestigious Information Week awards, but bumped up to 136 when she came on board. They subsequently vaulted to No. 21, and this year were named to the Top 10 overall and No. 3 for business and finance.

Through her work with the TA Program, Berryman is spearheading the efforts to bring in a diverse set of top talent at the entry-level. Berryman is particularly delighted that the TA Program continues to increase its female and minority representation, which bodes well for the IT pipeline. “This is a great industry with tons of opportunity and innovation happening across the industry,” she says. “Women are making a wise choice when they pursue a career in technology.”

Building a Strong Network from the Start

“When women begin their careers, they should realize that it’s important to build a strong network right from the start, focusing not just on mentors, but also the peers with whom you will align yourself as you move up,” says Berryman.

She has seen this firsthand many times, but one recent experience stands out. After participating in an emerging leaders program, she leveraged the relationships she built and now can call on them to act as speakers for the IT town halls she coordinates. “Having relationships throughout the firm is incredibly valuable to your career,” she says. Expanding on this point, Berryman excitedly shared she accepted a new role with a former manager at TIAA and will begin later this month.

The Importance of Life-long Learning

Berryman focuses on helping those around her develop their professional skills. “It’s imperative to be a lifelong learner about technology and the business,” she says.

While some learning is done in books and classrooms, Berryman figured out that some valuable lessons are learned the hard way. “Pick up the phone when you find yourself going back and forth with someone via email. Sending an aggressive/confrontational email when you’re frustrated isn’t worth it” she says, adding that she learned when a careless missive escalated. “Once it’s sent, it can be misinterpreted and you can never take it back. It’s so much easier to pick up the phone in that type of situation,” she says, drawing on the Maya Angelou quote: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

In trying to foster conscious inclusion, Berryman co-founded the IT Women’s Council and has been a lead of the IT Diversity and Inclusion Council since she arrived. Under her leadership, the councils have worked to increase conscious inclusion and increase representation and sponsorship across the IT organization. They have done this by launching a successful Group Mentoring Program, holding popular D&I training for IT employees, as well as co-hosting external panels to discuss these pressing topics.

With a new six-month-old son Alexander, Berryman doesn’t have much spare time, but she loves to ski, read, travel and visit the beach.

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Mover & Shaker: Teresa Burrows, Director, Program Manager, TIAA

Teresa Burrows“Change is difficult and hard, but it can also be fascinating and extremely rewarding if you embrace or seek it. Having this perspective has allowed me to grow in my career and my personal life,” says TIAA’s Teresa Burrows. Adapting to change is a learning process, she adds. “You need figure out how to balance both your emotional and logical sides to help successfully lead yourself and others through change.”

The Path to TIAA

Burrows is no stranger to change. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania where she studied economics, Burrows took a different path from her educational background and went to work for Andersen Consulting as a consultant where she was in a variety of roles from software developer to business analyst. Building upon the experience she had at Andersen, Burrows next became a business analyst in the Information Services division of Putnam Investments. After encouragement from her manager to expand and change her role, Burrows soon moved into project management and program delivery, ultimately leading the technology strategy and delivery for International and Institutional Defined Benefit systems.

In 2005, a former manager presented Burrows with the opportunity to relocate to Charlotte NC to come to TIAA and work with her doing IT program delivery. Since joining, she has helped implement numerous technology initiatives for the Institutional business before landing in her current role as a technology program manager in TIAA‘s new Digital organization. She appreciates the challenging, fast-paced, fluid environment. Burrows is proud of the team that she’s assembled, and their ability to adjust to constantly changing priorities and needs. “It is gratifying that I can inspire and motivate them to deliver great work,” she says.

Right now, she’s excited about a recent organizational change that gives the team an opportunity to take on exciting, new projects in different business areas. “I’m excited to transfer the knowledge that we’ve gained from working on the institutional side of the business to the individual/retail side, while forming relationships with my new partners,” Burrows shares.

Role Models Teach Lessons Along the Way

Growing up, Burrows emulated the hard work ethic of her parents, both of whom were Chinese immigrants and successful entrepreneurs. When she started her career, Burrows assumed that keeping her head down and working long hours would foster success, but she’s since found that working “smart” by using the right tools and working collaboratively within a team is more fruitful.
Along the way, Burrows says she benefited from informal mentors, both peers and managers, even some of whom weren’t her own. They offered advice or perspective and helped her advocate for herself while serving as admirable, empathic and honorable role models. “The best manager that I ever had took the time to understand me, my career aspirations, the team and the business, and those are the qualities I try to portray,” she reflects.

She also knows that it’s important to learn from less-desirable situations, noting a time earlier in her career when issues arose on a key project. Rather than communicate their troubles and asking for help, the project leader was instead only concerned with how that would look. As a result, there were fairly significant issues with the delivery of the project. The situation showed her that when there are problems, you have to ask for help. “When you are transparent and open with your business partners, people can put their heads together to form a solution,” she says, noting that your client is likely to respect that strategy and step in and try to be part of the solution.

She says her success over the years has come from strong relationships she’s built with her team, peers and clients, both external and internal. “You can build the relationships you need to be successful by establishing a culture of respect, truly listening to people, offering empathy, following through on actions and being transparent and honest when there are issues or problems,” she says.

Tackling Gender Issues

Although the financial services industry, and in particular IT, are largely male dominated, Burrows has found her path to be largely unencumbered by gender stereotypes. In fact, one surprising situation she remembers occurred during a project she undertook when she was with Putnam. A Japanese partner firm wanted to build a website to provide investment portfolio account information. “While there were a surprising number of gender and cultural considerations that could have impeded on the project’s success, we were able to take these into account and ultimately it went really well,” she says.
At TIAA, she is an active member of the Women’s Employee Resource Group. She appreciates it as a valuable resource for its webinars and events, but particularly because of the networking opportunities that help her connect with women with whom she may not otherwise cross paths.

Life Outside Work

With two sons, ages 13 and 15, Burrows leads an active lifestyle. The family loves to travel and hike and tries to visit a national park each summer, with an upcoming trip to her home state of Massachusetts planned.

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Voice of Experience: Jennifer Tsahalis, Managing Director, Head of Planning, Execution & Operations, TIAA Digital

jennifer tsahalis featuredAs a woman in a male-dominated industry, I’ve made sure that my male counterparts know what I bring to the table to ensure I have a seat with them,” says TIAA’s Jenn Tsahalis. Although tech and finance are both male-dominated fields, Tsahalis shares that she hasn’t felt gender discrimination, always assuming positive intent.

Over the years if she was excluded from a meeting or important conversation, for example, she didn’t automatically assume it was because she’s a woman, but because the team wasn’t yet aware of her strengths, talents or ability to add value.

While Tsahalis has worked in financial services technology for many years, she initially attended the University of Vermont where she majored in Electrical Engineering, a path chosen because the school didn’t offer courses in architecture, her intended career of choice at that point.

During the course of interviewing for her first job after college, Tsahalis was particularly intrigued with Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, where she says “it was less about the bits and bytes and more about how you think and how you get work done.” She moved to Boston to work for them, which she says set her career path on its current trajectory. “Accenture taught me many essential skills. Their focus on the thought process and their encouragement to never stop learning has stuck with me.”

Building a Legacy of Success

During the tech bubble days in 2000, Tsahalis had a short stint at Razorfish, before deciding to pursue her next role as a tech lead at Fidelity Investments in the Health & Welfare Benefits Outsourcing division. It was there, while working Fidelity’s NetBenefits product that she says she found her niche and moved into technical project management. In her eventual role as Technology Delivery Manager Tsahalis ran some of the largest and most complex systems in the history of the firm, developing a reputation for bringing highly complex systems and highly matrixed teams together to deliver results.

Following her success at Fidelity, Tsahalis was offered an opportunity to join Merrill Lynch, helping to build the company’s digital presence. In her role as Director of Program Delivery for Online Channels, she led the design, development and delivery of the 3- year program to launch MyMerrill.com and Merrill Edge.com before moving the eventual ongoing day-to-day program delivery of the firm’s client facing (online, mobile, IVR and call center desktop) channels.

It was during this post-launch period that Jenn helped create a process that transitioned this launch of a brand new platform into a steady state development machine and is a period about which she is particularly proud. For Tsahalis, the satisfaction came from overcoming people and process resistance and developing a delivery methodology that made projects run both smoothly and transparently. “I’m one of those people who loves process,” she says. “It was gratifying to develop a process that would make someone’s job easier, in order to give them more time in the day to focus on being creative and innovative.”

In July 2015, Tsahalis joined TIAA as the Chief Operating Officer for the TIAA Digital organization – a group that spans both business and technology and is at the heart of TIAA’s quest to become a true digital company. Different from her technical program delivery past experience, she says working in a business operations role provides unending learning opportunities and challenges, all of which are immensely fulfilling and provide the same opportunity to establish right-sized processes and to grow professionally.

“It is fascinating to work on the business side of the TIAA Digital organization, developing strategic operational plans and delivering essential metrics,” she says. “Automating and improving both the customer experience and our back office operations is imperative to success, because in reality, every company must now become a technology company,” she says. “And this is absolutely true of a firm like TIAA.”

Investing in Each Other

Whether working on technical projects or driving business operations, Tsahalis has found one constant theme. “It’s important for women to support each other, regardless of their career stage,” says Tsahalis. “The workplace can be competitive and this sometimes can cause women to face off against each other. After experiencing some of this in the past, I’ve made it a focus to bond with my female peers and to invest in their teams and their goals, which helps to keep the competitive vibe at bay and better serves us in the long run.”

At TIAA, she has made it a point to join relevant groups including the company’s Women’s Employee Resource Group and the IT Women’s Council, where she recently participated in a panel discussion for International Women’s Day. “The panelists were fantastic – very transparent and candid. We really helped some of these younger women think about how they can manage their career and still have a good life balance,” she says. “I learned so much from the panelists myself – women really can do amazing things and I was inspired by my peers.”

Inspiring the Next Generation of Women

While Tsahalis says she didn’t understand the need to join women’s networking groups earlier in her career, she believes they can be of huge benefit to women because these groups offer an easy way to meet people, build your brand, contribute to a community and potentially even to find a mentor. She also encourages women to look to men as mentors to take advantage of the different perspective they can offer.

Tsahalis advises young women to have a vision for where they want to go and to reach out and build the relationships to get there. That’s an important topic for her as the mom of two daughters: Lily, age 11, and 18-month-old Violet. With a husband who’s also in IT, they focus on helping their daughters understand that they can aspire to any career.

“We spend a lot of time really encouraging them because we see the logical way their minds work to process information. Lily has become a very rational person as she applies logic and the principles of science to every decision – helping her to cut through the drama that can be associated with 6th grade girls.”

Tsahalis says that when she was growing up, she wasn’t aware of all the career options that were available and only landed in Electrical Engineering by accident. She is happy that girls now have so much opportunity presented to them through a wide variety of programs in their schools and communities.

In addition to taking advantage of women’s groups or other networking programs that may be available at school or work, Tsahalis also encourages all women to speak up for themselves and not to overthink their decisions. It is her experience that many women limit themselves just by not speaking up or trying something new. She believes that working hard, being confident in one’s skills, networking and supporting one’s peers are all keys to a successful career.

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Rising Star: Kavita Joseph, Lead IT Business Manager, TIAA

Kavita Joseph featured“My primary aspiration in life is to pay it forward,” says Kavita Joseph. “Breaking the stereotype takes more than a little nudge and I want to be that voice for women standing at the all-too-familiar crossroads in their lives. My mentors empowered me and I want that for others.”

Forging Her Own Path

Joseph, a Lead IT Business Manager at TIAA, had a nontraditional upbringing compared to many of her peers. Although women were encouraged to attend school and have a job where she grew up in India, they were rarely expected to pursue a career. Even in light of this cultural challenge, Joseph was successful in overcoming the stereotypes and pursing her dream of having a fulfilling career.

“When I was 20, very few girls in India moved out of their parents’ homes to live in the big city, but my parents supported my decision to live independently and pursue higher education. I am proud and happy that I was able to break the cycle because it inspired my younger sisters and cousins to do the same thing,” she says. “The whole concept was unusual at first. But my proudest realization came years later when I noticed that not only my family, but my small community in general, had turned a corner in viewing women’s careers as not just an indulgence, but as something very essential.”

Joseph credits her mother for being an exceptional role model. In a society where women were mostly home makers, her mother was the head mistress of a reputable school and also largely in charge of raising her and her two sisters since her father traveled frequently. “Looking back on those years, I can see that my mom was always on top of her professional game, was very sought after in the academia, and through it all she modeled an excellent work/life balance. So growing up as her daughter, observing her tenacity, passion for life and constant pursuit of excellence, influenced me heavily.”

Joseph began her career on an inside sales team, which she describes as “trial by fire.” “I made the classic mistake of not speaking up enough and owning the outcome. I struggled initially because I did not know how to navigate that. Eventually I asked for help and found my very first mentor. That was the beginning of really understanding and realizing the importance of reaching out, building relationships and that it is okay to step outside of your comfort zone.”

After a different role in operations, Joseph joined UBS’s Wealth Management division in Marketing Strategy and Development, before eventually moving to IT. She says her biggest accomplishment was being part of the team that built the first mobile platform for UBS Wealth Management’s field staff, a disruptive program that redefined the way things were done and won the CIO award for technology innovation.

“Due to security concerns, financial services firms are typically conservative when taking technology risks. It was exciting to find the balance between pushing barriers in providing mobile access and allowing our financial advisors to untether themselves from their desks so they could spend time in front of their clients.” Joseph went on to become the program manager until joining TIAA in 2015 in a position in the IT Business Office working on strategic programs.

Mentors Make the Difference

“It was a fairly challenging transition to IT, and I was successful due to my hard work and because I had a mentor who invested in me. Even though my mentor wasn’t a tech person, she made sure that I had the support and tools that I needed to make the transition and that made a big difference,” Joseph says.

Based on this positive experience, Joseph made a conscious effort to coach and mentor others: to be there for them as others had for her. “Diversity programs are great platforms to meet people and learn from their experiences. When I joined TIAA, one of the first things I did was to sign up as a member of one of the local diversity council chapters. Very quickly, I had built relationships with a number of people outside of my group, and that was an investment that will pay off in time.”
She is currently active in TIAA’s IT Women’s Council and helped to spearhead the launch of an IT Group Mentoring Program. This program facilitates visibility, mentorship and coaching for program participants as they aspire toward growth. Although the Group Mentoring Program only has been in existence for a little more than a year, there has already been excellent feedback from the first group who completed the six month-long coaching cycle. “The program has introduced a positive change in the culture of the organization” she says. “I feel like a proud parent.”

Learning to Balance

The Group Mentoring Program is not her only baby, as Joseph also has a five-year-old son. “Work-life integration is all about prioritizing on a daily basis because they are both real commitments. Your personal brand is at play every day. This is something I really appreciate at TIAA – that the culture recognizes you on a personal and professional level.”

She and her husband love to travel, but these days tend to stick closer to home, spending time exploring Manhattan and local Jersey haunts together with their son.

Joseph remains active in philanthropic endeavors, sponsoring a program with her family that provides artificial limbs for children in India.

Giving back to others, whether via these activities or through mentorship, is what brings Joseph joy.

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