Female financial service leaders extol the value of mentorship

Penny Pennington, managing partner at the financial advisory firm Edward Jones in St. Louis, spoke about how her perception of corporate banking was sculpted in 1985, after she finished a management training program within Wachovia Bank, by the mentorship of a female banker.

"I don't know how they knew that I needed to be under the tutelage of a strong woman corporate banker that was doing all kinds of deals in the Southeast, but that was my image of corporate banking as I was first starting out," Pennington said.

"Now, I realized that maybe that was unusual. Maybe I was lucky, but I also realized that I was hearing all kinds of things in the background conversation about what it was like to be a strong woman in corporate banking, in the 1980s in the South."

Despite exiting the banking world roughly 15 years later and jumping into the securities and wealth management markets, Pennington continued drawing from the insight she gleaned from her mentor, and "that is part of the soundtrack that I've had in my head as a strong women leader during my tenure in the industry," Pennington said.

For women leaders who occupy multifaceted roles, being able to juggle all the responsibilities associated with their titles can afford the chance for a seat at the table.

"In a multi-stakeholder world, where we as leaders have to satisfy the needs of clients and colleagues and every community where we serve … we're asked to draw on threads and put together this sort of theory of the business or theory of the future, I find that women are particularly adept at doing that," Pennington said. "If you feel like that's part of your superpower, and nobody else is thinking that way, that's exactly why you need to be at the table."

Kate Burke, chief operating officer and chief financial officer at AllianceBernstein in Nashville, Tennessee, said she got her start at Bernstein Research as part of a small team of women working alongside roughly 100 men.

"I've been fortunate to always have a very strong group of women peers that I've been able to lean on during my entire career, share our experiences as well as the passion for continuing to elevate women within the firm, and work together to try to make the firm more inclusive place for all people," Burke said.

Burke said that with the support of mentors, she gained the confidence necessary to tackle challenges across the organization — in spite of her uncertainty about whether she was knowledgeable enough to do so.

"Women are particularly adept at taking pause and listening to what is being said, and then coming in and trying to provide a clarity or provide a communication of what the two points of views are … [it] is a skill that women use astutely because we've learned to do it over time," Burke said.