The InvestmentNews/IPA Women’s Forum: In case you missed it

How can the financial services industry encourage more women to assume senior leadership roles at broker-dealers, custodians, investment and advisory firms and insurance companies? How can these entities focus better on issues affecting women?
Those challenges drove the creation of The Women’s Forum, a half-day event sponsored by the Investment Program Association and InvestmentNews, held on June 19 in New York City. More than 150 women from all segments of the financial services industry attended the Forum, which will become an annual event with the second planned for early 2014.
The aim of the InvestmentNews/IPA Women’s Forum is to make greater female participation in the financial services business a reality and to broaden awareness of issues and initiatives affecting women in the financial services industry. The June Forum brought together a variety of experts and encouraged discussion among attendees to address issues including mentoring, career advancement, leadership and management.
The discussion and sharing continues on the LinkedIn and Facebook Women’s Forum sites, where information about the next InvestmentNews/IPA Women’s Forum will be posted. Your participation is encouraged. Also, watch INTV’s Women’s Forum Event Video Channel to see interviews with our top speakers and attendees.
About the Investment Program Association: Formed in 1985, the Investment Program Association is the leading advocate for alternative investments in the financial services industry. Among its members are leading broker-dealers and non-listed real estate investment trusts, non-listed business development companies, oil and gas and equipment leasing programs.
For more than 25 years, the IPA has successfully championed the growth of these investments, which have increased in popularity among investors and financial professionals alike because of their important portfolio diversification benefits.
The IPA estimates that more than 1.5 million investors currently own shares in these offerings. In 2012, sales across the industry’s product spectrum exceeded $13 billion.
IPA’s 60-plus member Women’s Initiative Network (WIN) is chaired by Louisa Quarto, president of Realty Capital Securities, LLC, who spearheaded the creation of WIN, which is committed to furthering women’s issues and advocating for women within member organizations specifically and the financial services industry, generally.

Highlights from the sessions

The following are edited highlights of the Forum’s sessions:
Session 1: Mentoring Millennials and Understanding the Challenges of the 2020 Workplace

Speaker: Jeanne Meister; Founder, Future Workplace, Author, “The 2020 Workplace; How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today.”

The workplace of the future is actually here right now, and it is marked by three trends.
The first is globalization, which is reshaping how companies source new talent and develop leaders.
The second is demographics. Do you realize that there are now five generations in the workplace? I like to tell our clients that they should be researching multiple generations the way their organization researches customer needs because each generation has its own specific needs in the workplace.
The third trend is social media. We see that an organization’s social presence is a driver to top talent in the workplace.
These trends are making headlines already, and will have major implications in the future By the year 2030. For example, 22% of the global workforce will be 55 years or over. That, of course, raises the question of whether these older employees have they kept up with their skill sets so that they are productive in their organizations, and whether their organizations are using them as mentors for new people.
Based on projections by the U.S. Census Bureau, by the year 2020, 50% of our workforce will be of millennial age. But who else will be working? Certainly, lots of zoomers, which is my name for boomers who refuse to age. Most of the zoomers working now expect to be working in 2020. Millennials and zoomers see things differently, as our recent survey of 1,189 workers and 150 managers shows.
Here’s a question from our survey that we asked boomers: If you’ve been interviewing young people for a job in the last year, what’s the most surprising question a millennial has asked? If you’re a millennial, what’s the most surprising question someone from another generation has asked?

At this point in the session, Ms.Meister asked attendees for their responses. Here are some:
“One young man made it very clear that he had no intention of working on Fridays because he wanted to play golf.”
“We get a lot of questions about work-life balance. For someone just coming out of college, it seems a little shocking for that question to come out right away.”
“I recently had a millennial ask me how long it would be before they qualify for a C-level title and a corner office. They also wanted to know the very specific career path they follow and the positions they would have along the way.”
When Future Workplace asked 150 managers about surprising questions they were asked, the responses from millennials was very similar. The answers demonstrate the need for what I call “generational intelligence,” which is an understanding of the needs, desires and work expectations of people in a different generation.
Looking behind the responses, you see what’s really important to the next generation of employees: technology, communication and fast progression. Learning and development is a really big factor.
Millennials, who grew up on Google, also want instant gratification. They want community and collaboration, wellness and fun. They want purpose.
They also highly value flexibility, which surprisingly turns out to be very important among all age groups. American Express found that workplace flexibility — rather than being seen as a perk given for doing a good job — actually pays. At Amex, it has been a strategic initiative by the company’s human resources, information technology and real estate groups, and it has saved the organization $20 million since it was launched four years ago.
For a lot of young people, workplace flexibility doesn’t mean working from home, but rather having control over your schedule and being evaluated on results and not face time.
Interestingly, many companies have a work-life telecommuting policy and other work-life policies, but do a poor job of communicating those policies and training people for a flexible workplace.
Something else we found interesting in our survey: When we asked our sample of employees what else they found important in addition to training and flexibility, the number one answer was financial literacy training.
The reason it’s so important is because student loan debt is now $1 trillion, surpassing credit card and mortgage debt in our country. The average debt load of a young millennial is $30,000. And, again, that’s just the average! So as they enter the workforce, they are looking to their employer for some type of financial literacy training because they realize the seriousness of what they have in front of them.
Mentoring and Coaching: Mentoring and coaching are a key form of development for the next generation leaders and very important for managers.
So what are companies doing to manage an age diverse workforce? In my work I discuss many tools companies can use, but let’s look at just one — reverse mentoring. What is that? It typically means a senior executive being matched with a millennial, with the focus often on bringing the traditionalist or zoomer up to speed on using social media to meet business objectives.
Another form of mentoring is “micro-mentoring,” which is where I think mentoring is going in the future, and which is less of a therapy session and more of a Twitter feed.
Let’s say your company has work site intranet. Essentially, you go out and build your community of peers and managers and invite them to be on your feed, on your activity stream. Then, if you give a presentation or meet a goal or deliver a white paper, you would immediately go on your site and ask your community of peers, managers and key stakeholders for suggestions on what you could do better the next time. Very short and to the point, like Twitter. You get instant feedback.
The point is that millennials — and boomers, for that matter — do not want to wait for the annual performance review which is a wake-up call that many of the HR practices we take for granted today must change.
Is this mentoring? I say yes: It’s mentoring in the new workplace. It’s mentoring using technology where you get instant and immediate feedback.
On many issues, workers are ahead of business leaders. They recognize the importance of flexibility, which is why we have to leverage all types of communication to have important relationships with mentors.
The three takeaways I have in the book around learning and mentoring is that there is going to be a lot less formal learning and a lot more information and social learning in the future, and that mentoring is a part of that.
So the challenge for most of us in organizations is that however much our company is spending and doing in the way of formal training, only a small percentage of adults want to learn or be mentored in a formal way.
When the Harvard Business Review was fact-checking the article I wrote on Mentoring Millennials, to my utter surprise we found that some of the best practices on mentoring happened when young millennials went out on their own and found outside mentors because their company didn’t have an official mentoring program.
So, don’t think that just because your company doesn’t have something official that’s called mentoring, your direct reports aren’t involved in mentoring relationships.
Action Steps
What can you do? First, ask young people in your company if they have a mentoring relationship inside or outside your organization.
Then think about mentoring in new ways, because there are so many myths surrounding it. Here are five:
Myth No. 1: you need one mentor. My view is that you should think of mentoring as establishing a personal board of advisors, and everybody on that board should represent a new skill set that you have to develop in yourself.
Myth No. 2: Your mentor has to be older. Not necessarily.
Myth No. 3: What you are doing has to be seen as mentoring. The truth is, the people involved may not see it as mentoring but more as getting feedback from someone.
Myth No. 4: Mentors chose mentees. Not always.
Myth No. 5: Mentoring is a face-to-face relationship. Actually, you should leverage all forms of communication, including Skype, instant messaging, texting and whatever else is available to make mentoring work.

Session 2: Maximizing Human Capital, Capitalizing on Women’s Core Strengths

Speaker: Cecile Munoz, CEO;US Executive Search

Why aren’t there more women in financial services?
That question stumps us just as much today as when I started my firm almost 22 years ago.
The simple answer is that not enough women are being hired. So in my role as an executive recruiter, I realize that I need to push a little harder to find great women to hire, and I’m happy to do it.
Let’s look back at where we were 22 years ago. At that time, when we helped our clients within the advisory population, it was never a question of finding good women in general. At that time, women worked in the areas of human resources, marketing and service. There were some wholesaler positions, but those tended to be focused more on service too.
For the other positions that I was retained to find, I was always asked to look for hard-chargers, for someone who would climb the hill, plant the flag and die on their sword. Since those are not words that resonate with women, or at least very few women, it’s really not surprising that there are not more women in this industry.
So where are we today?
Women account for 50% of the population, 50% of the private wealth, and two thirds of American households are headed by women. We control $16 trillion in assets. So what’s the issue? This shouldn’t be like solving for pi. How do we get women into our industry when we are the client base and control the majority of wealth?
Let me share some ideas.
The first is that the imagery around financial services is not especially positive. When I talk to young people — often at the behest of an executive who has asked me to provide career advice — what I find remarkable is that the majority of these individuals, especially the women, are not even thinking about a career in financial services.
They tell me they want to do something important, meaningful, that has value and helps others. They want a balanced and financially sound life.
When I tell them that the financial services business will allow them to do all that, their response, typically, is that Wall Street is a bunch of aggressive males who no one likes, that it’s unstable and all about profit.
I chuckle because I want to remind them that their dad or uncle was the one who asked me to talk to them. But after we’ve had our conversation, at least I feel that I’ve helped open their minds to some degree.
The way that I’ve been able to influence my clients is to demonstrate to them the business value of why we need to embrace a strategy of recruiting women into financial services as a core component to the business plan.
To go from niche to strategic hiring, firms should ask themselves this question: if, over the next five to ten years, there’s a risk that you could lose 70% of your assets under management, what would you do differently?
That’s usually the point where their faces get really white and they want to start thinking about other things, but that’s the reality. If you think that not bringing in female talent at a real meaningful leadership level won’t have dire consequences in your ability to speak authentically to your market and to authentically engage your high-net worth or mass-affluent clients, you will be behind a very big and very ugly eight ball.
The most dynamic and successful leaders I have had the great privilege of working with hire ahead of growth because they know that their greatest assets walk in and out of the door every day.
And those assets have to reflect current and future demographics, as well as the purchasing power and reality of the marketplace, which increasingly consists of women and millennials. The numbers are there. It’s not opinion or feeling, it’s fact.
What is the female competitive advantage? We’re great at building and retaining relationships, we’re high communicators and listeners. Women are much better at sharing their ideas and engaging others, and not afraid to ask how they’re doing or if they can do something better. We’re much more comfortable raising our hand and asking a question.
Doing all that allows us to learn and grow, and also allows us to engage in a dialog.
One of our clients saw a revolutionary change in the dynamics of their leadership group when they took away the white boards. They realized that the minute you turned around and started mapping things out you disconnect from your audience.
Women’s ability to communicate, to push out information and then listen allows for stronger teams to be built, for more diversity of thought, and for more engagement of teams across departments and organizations.
We generate more referrals than men because we love to talk about the things that work for us and to share ideas and best practices. We are much more engaging than men in terms of talking about our organizations. So from that brand perspective, giving a woman an opportunity to talk about your organization is really tremendous.
From a social media perspective, women and millennials are far more engaged in higher users of social media, be it Facebook, Tumbler or Instagram. This gives companies a wonderful opportunity to allow talent to push out much more information about the organization and the value of working in that organization.
Let me point out another potential competitive advantage among women — although it sometimes holds us back.
Women are much more self-critical than men. We analyze everything we do, want to measure it, and want to know how we can do better.
When we speak to a woman prospect, here’s how she typically will respond to an extensive position description:
“Here’s where I’m great, but here’s what I don’t have and I’d love your feedback as to whether you think this is the right position for me.”
A man typically will say:
“This is great; it’s like you wrote it for me. I have everything you need. This is fantastic. When can I speak to the client?”
How that translates into the workforce or inside of an organization, is that a woman leader will always take a step back as she barrels down the do-more-with-less highway. She’ll take a little pause and ask herself and her team about what else they’re doing, how they can do better, where they might improve and whether they’re missing something. She’ll also reach across departments and ask the same questions.
Men, typically, will keep barreling down the highway and hope that everybody else jumps on board and straps on a rocket and gets there along with him.
Women, in contrast, are natural team builders and have a high adaptability to social settings. But we’re not as aggressive as men in raising our hand and asking for help to go to the next level or for being considered for a promotion.
We believe that our great work and our tireless effort should speak for itself. As a result, we take a seat back and wait to be recognized for our work because we have had to work twice as hard to be considered half as lucky or half as capable. Unfortunately, that strategy is not working for us.
Men, historically, have been promoted on possibility — the possibility that a man can do the new job. Women typically are promoted on experience.
We find that when we suggest a skilled and intelligent woman for a leadership position who may not have the specific experience a company desires, often the company will be interested initially but then not move forward.
In the absence of companies being willing to take that brave step, we’re going to continue to keep hiring the same people over and over and over again, hoping for a different outcome.
Perhaps we’re limited by the words we use. I can’t tell you how many position descriptions or calls to action still carry the words “aggressive,” “stop at nothing,” or “do what it takes.”
There are many times when I bite my tongue because I wonder if the people using those words actually can hear what they’re saying. At the same time, women are limiting themselves by the words they use and the way they think — and by their reaction to these words.
Because we are self-critical and second-guess ourselves, we discount our strengths, don’t raise our hands and don’t ask for the promotion.
We recently handled a very high profile position. It was the second-in-command of a particularly large broker-dealer, and there was a woman who should have been the natural successor.
As part of the interview process, she self-selected out because she said she wanted to spend more time with her children, as well as other things. She said that if the company wasn’t willing to let her do that, it was fine, because that’s what the company needs.
I asked if she had ever talked to CEO about what she wanted. If she worked up a plan about what she wanted, could she talk to the CEO and say that she is the natural choice for the promotion and here’s plan detailing how she would get it done?
She hadn’t done that — and most women don’t, despite how formidable they are in so many ways.
When women we’ve recommended have gone through the interview process for leadership roles, they often tell us that they hoped they hadn’t talked too much or pushed their ideas too aggressively. Men would never say that.
I advise women to say what they should say, but find a way to do it that feels comfortable and brings the message into the context of what the company is trying to accomplish.
It will take women to repair financial services, to regain the public’s trust and to do all the good we can do. We’ve solved greater problems than including more women in the financial services business, but this one still eludes us because we think about it as a women’s issue instead of as a core issue for the success and growth of an organization.
Empowering women must be part of an overall corporate strategy, not just a singular issue for a certain portion of the organization.

Session 3: Maximizing Relationships: Best Practices from Successful Mentorships

Panelists:
Brenda G. Gujral, Director, Inland Real Estate Investment Corp.
Erica McGinnis, Senior Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer, Advisor Group
JoAnn McGuinness, President and Chief Executive Officer, Inland Diversified Real Estate Services LLC

Moderator:
Evan Cooper, Director of Custom Content and Programming, InvestmentNews

MR.COOPER: Erica, talk about the program at Advisor Group, specifically, how it started, why it’s important and what you’re doing.

MS.MCGINNIS: We call our new women’s initiative “Generation One.” It’s designed to help support our female advisors at the Advisory Group broker-dealers.
It’s more than just mentorship. There are a couple of driving stats that really brought us to where we are today. First of all, women outlive men. And more and more of our clients are women. Many want to work with a woman advisor, but when we look at the advisor population within the Advisor Group broker-dealers, only about 15% are women.
So all of our strategies are designed around how to bring more women into the business and how to take care of that 15% population that’s already with us, which is where the mentorship program comes in.
We have to make sure that they have what they need to be successful, which may not be about GDC growth alone.

MS.MCGUINNESS: We took a bit of a different approach to our new mentoring program at Inland. We have a higher proportion of women in our employee base — almost 60%. And 42% of our officers at Inland are women.
In fact, we did a bit of a reverse mentoring experiment in which we put together a group of new employees and asked what they would potentially change about Inland’s culture and what they would like to see us do. The mentoring program was one of the key things that came out of that.
Actually, we’ve been doing mentoring programs informally within some of our companies and departments for a very long time, and they’ve been phenomenally successful. When we put out a program formally, we were shocked at how many people were coming out for it. Hundreds of employees showed up for a kick-off event.
Our program works two ways. There’s a group of women who act as mentors with whom employees can schedule appointments. And there’s a more structured program with an educational component covering such things as how to network, how to build relationships outside the organization, and how to meet and prepare for working with a mentor.

MR.COOPER: Brenda, what’s the value of having these kinds of programs?

MS.GUJRAL: The value is immeasurable in so many ways. I’ve been mentoring on a very informal basis for what feels like a gazillion years, and I’m delighted we finally have a formal program.
Women must take advantage of all the things that are available to them today — and there is far more available than when I started.
I understand the value of a mentoring program because I had a mentor when I was 20 years old at my first real job, and she was much older than I was. She was invaluable to me.
Then I was lucky enough to have my first male boss be a fabulous mentor, and I worked for him for nine years. I left twice to have my two children and he hired me back, because he said you can do everything I need you to do with your eyes closed.
Quite frankly, I have no idea where I would be or what I could have accomplished without my mentors.

MR.COOPER: I’ve often wondered whether informal mentoring relationships send signals that somebody lower down in the organization is getting close to someone with power, which can raise questions of who’s in favor with whom. Is that an issue?

MS.GUJRAL: I’m not sure. I never look at myself as a powerful person so, from my perspective, I always think that I have this open door policy and most people can come in and talk to me. Most people usually do, or at least if they don’t, I’m not aware of it. I guess I’d have to ask JoAnn because she knew me when we were doing informal mentoring and I didn’t even know I was mentoring her, quite frankly.

MS.MCGUINNESS: I consider Brenda as one of the people who has absolutely been a mentor for me in my career and I don’t think I would be here if it weren’t for some of her guidance.
One of things that was most valuable for me as a mentee was that I felt that opportunities were afforded to me because of the relationship that Brenda and I had developed over the years and because Brenda was in meetings when senior executives were discussing potential opportunities and good candidates for those opportunities. She would act as an advocate for me.

MR.COOPER: How did it work? You said it was informal, but did you know you were her mentee, and did Brenda know you were her mentor?

MS.GUJRAL: No. I mentor people just by being who I am, and that’s what I mean by it being informal. Now that we have a formal program, I’m a little more cognizant of what I say and do, and I tell people to go and seek out others to learn from at all levels so that you can be a mentor.
If you find someone who is a great leader whom you respect and look up to, then emulate what they do. Maybe that’s what Joann was doing and I wasn’t aware of it. I’m not sure, because we never really talked about it.

MR.COOPER: Erica, tell us a little bit about what the Advisor Group wants to get out of your more formalized program.

Ms.MCGINNIS: First, I just wanted to note that I’ve never had a mentor. Over the years, my husband has told me that I should go out and find one, but I never have. Part of why I think a formal mentorship program is such a great thing is because I didn’t know how to go and ask for one. I used to think that if I approached a senior executive, I would be putting them out. They’re too busy. How can I ask somebody who has a much bigger and busier job than I do to take time out and mentor me?
I also want to say that mentorship is different from sponsorship because I do think that I’ve had sponsors in my life, which I would define as somebody who is several levels above you who watches you as your career progresses and opens doors for you. You may or may not know about it, but it’s different from mentoring, which is more formal and often involves learning from each other.

MR.COOPER: When you wanted a mentor relationship, what did you specifically want to get out of it?

MS.MCGINNIS: I wanted someone to help me with a difficult boss situation, with a difficult client situation, and to help me find a work/life balance while raising two kids. I don’t think that women can have it all; we shortchange little things in our life constantly.
So I wanted a female mentor who was in the same boat but maybe a few years ahead of me who would be able to give me specific guidance where things were unclear or help me see what I’m missing.

MS.MCGUINNESS: That kind of input is especially valued though when it’s coming from someone from your own company and your own industry who really understands where you’re coming from and has probably been in a similar situation in the past.
Over and over many potential mentees have said that they never would have thought to approach any of the potential mentors in our company. And they really didn’t know how to approach a senior executive.
At the same time, all the senior executives in our company would said that they were shocked that potential mentees didn’t know how to approach them or were hesitant to do so. A formal program makes the matching so much easier.

MR.COOPER: Perhaps the reluctance on the part of potential mentees comes from the fact that they’d be admitting they wanted help. Brenda, do you think your peers would think less of an employee if they came forward as a mentee?

MS.GUJRAL: Absolutely not. I don’t think anything is really outside the realm of anything anymore.

MR.COOPER: What about having a woman mentor for a male mentee, or vice versa. Is that a problem?

MS. MCGUINNESS: One of the things we’ve found is that we have many more people who want to be mentored than we have people who have the ability to give back at this point. Part of that is because we initially approached our program as being just female. So we are planning to open our mentorship program to male mentors. In terms of our overall woman’s initiative, there are lots of places for us to involve our male colleagues, and this is one of them.

MR.COOPER: Let me ask a practical question: How much time does it take to be a mentor and a mentee?

MS.GUJRAL: I always said that if I were ever in a position of authority, or I could make a difference in women’s lives, then I was going to make a difference and mentor them — regardless of the time. I typically spend an hour usually with every person who wants to meet with me and I probably meet with two a week, even after our program got formally established.

MS.MCGUINNESS: I agree with Brenda that it’s an obligation to pay forward. We treat it just like anything else we deal with: It’s scheduled into our calendars, and we commit maybe 10 hours a month with respect to the individual meetings that we do. And, then there’s that formal program we dedicate some time to as well.

MS.MCGINNIS: Our program is probably a little different. Our financial advisors are all over the country, which is different from having a corporate program where people are in one office. Advisors are kind of an island most of the time.
For years, we put on a women’s conference and we’d get great feedback — except people would complain that it was an annual event and if they met another advisor, they wouldn’t see them for a year.
So that got us thinking about creating a sustainable women’s program, Generation I, which happens 365 days a year and allows people to be connected in a more permanent way.

MR.COOPER: Is there anything in your mentoring programs that will allow you to share the findings across your organization?

MS.MCGINNIS: We plan on having a 12-month mentorship program where mentors meet on a relatively frequent basis and then have webinars and other educational avenues for people to engage in.

MS.MCGUINNESS: We try to solicit comments after every event, so we’re starting to share testimonials from some of the people who have been early participants.
We’re also committed to having some purely social events for women to bring together different parts of the company.

MR.COOPER: Where does social media and technology fit in with all these efforts?

MS.MCGINNIS: While we have a national conference and regional meetings to bring together people in person, we know that there will be points in time when we’ll have an opportunity to bring people together over the phone or maybe over Skype.

MS.MCGUINNESS: While we have 700 people on our campus, we have 1,600 employees nationwide, so there certainly is a digital aspect that we are going to try to incorporate into this program.

MR.COOPER: A question from the audience from a zoomer who doesn’t relate well to millennials. How does a mentor address the fact that many millennials lack the work ethic required to succeed and are more concerned with time off than time on?

MS.GUJRAL: I applaud all that’s going on in the business world for millennials. I try to mentor my granddaughters, and I say, more power to them. And business is going to figure out how to deal with it, because it’s here.

MS.MCGINNIS: I totally agree. Millennials are our future and someone needs to figure out how to communicate and deliver advice to them. And, guess what, they want to be on social media and interact with their financial advisor that way.
So, on the one hand, I think we owe it to that generation to tell them how they’re perceived by older people up the food chain. At the same time, all of us need to be open to the fact that they are our future.

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