Most Influential Women in Payments Conference: Paying it forward: Mentorship means business

Hear senior women discuss how a mentor helped forge their career paths and why it is important for the future of their institutions to help the next generation create a successful path.

Transcript:

John Adams (00:09):

Welcome back. I am John Adams. I'm the Executive Editor of Payments at American Banker. I've written about payments, FinTech bank technology for about 20 years. I wrote about bank advertising before that. I wrote about mortgages before that in capital markets and local small town sewer authorities before that. Now, one of the things that all of jobs have in common is I had very good, very skilled, very thoughtful people who encouraged me, who pushed me to get better and were very helpful and invented at every step of the way. And that's what we're here to talk about today. We're here to talk about mentorship and how mentorship can have a positive impact on the business itself. And we have a great panel here. I thought we would start if you could introduce yourselves and discuss your role at your company.

Brooke Major Reid (01:15):

Hi, good morning everybody. I'm on West Coast Time. My name is Brooke, Major Reid. I'm the Chief Capital Officer at Affirm. Prior to that, I was the Treasurer of Macy's. Prior to that, spent a number of years, so really happy to be here today to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart. Growing up in finance, as you can imagine, was never easy, hasn't been, and even without the macro strains, it's always good to have people who you can lean on and get advice from. Good to be here today.

Mary Ann Francis (01:49):

Hi, Mary Ann Francis, IBM Consulting Global Payments and Strategic Initiatives. I'm actually a legacy banker. The new term I've heard is recovering banker a lot. I don't think you're ever an ex banker. So I ran the Commercial Trade and treasury division of, at the time was the eighth largest bank in the us. You would now know it as PNC. And so I've always been very, very involved in the payment space, especially back in the day when females in financial services was not really happening a lot. And I do serve globally, so my role is global, so I sit on a lot of boards in South Africa, Australia as well as Europe. So very involved in all of the Geos. And it's very interesting as you can imagine, not only just how the different Geos work, but the cultures within those geos and how men and women work with each other.

Dondi Black (02:39):

And I'm Dondi Black. I manage the product partnership and enablement teams inside of tesis, the issuer solutions, which is a global payments company. Much like Mary Ann, I am a Recovering Banker. So I've been in the industry for, we'll just call it three decades plus a little. And obviously I'm in a very unique position. I was sharing with someone a moment ago inside of my company today I am the first woman to hold my position and I am the only woman on our executive leadership team. And so that brings some unique challenge and some unique opportunities and definitely inspires me to be creative when thinking about how I optimize impact and create opportunities for others. So very happy to be part of the conversation today.

John Adams (03:32):

Now mentorship can mean that way. When I think of mentorship, it mean a couple of different things. I was wondering, when you were mentoring somebody, what are you doing? In other words, what does the act of mentorship, what does it look like? What form does it when you're mentor, what does that mean and how are you helping them?

Mary Ann Francis (03:57):

I'll take a stab If this morning's conversation was very interesting because mentoring I think needs to be defined in a couple different ways. It's not always, and I know we're talking female to female, but it's not always to promote somebody. It's sometimes to keep somebody so that they don't leave. And other times it's just to make them a better employee. When I was managing, I had 15 directs and hundreds of indirects. But when I would do the one-on-ones with them and I'd say, do you want my chair one day? Do you want to sit where I'm sitting? As hard as it took me to get there. And six or seven of them would say yes, and six or seven of them would say, no, I'm quite content being a key contributor. I'm, I've got three kids, I don't have time for that. Now the key becomes what do you do with their response? If you want to sit in my chair, I'm going to manage you, mentor you completely differently, right? I'm going to take you on C-suite calls. I'm going to give you projects, I'm going to test you every now and then you have that interesting employee who says, yes, I want to sit in your chair. And you're like, yikes, maybe, maybe not. And so what you do is you give them a chance to live your life and they either step up or they come in and go, I've changed my mind. I'm going to remain the key contributor. And again, just to have somebody be better, that's mentoring as well. Just have them be better at their job. And back in the day, got you beat. Jesus was a baby. When a female had, there was no such thing as part-time. There was no such thing as working remotely. It was out of the question, especially in a bank. And I had a female employee have a child and she's just one of my best. And she came to me and she said, can I come in at nine and leave at three? Well basically part-time. And I said, yes, as long as you get the job done. FYI was taken to HR for creating this chaotic environment. I said, she's getting a full-time salary, but here's what I care about the work. I don't care what time she comes in and I don't care what time she leaves. If the job is done, then that's fine. So I mentored her to keep her and now she's got grown kids and it's wonderful. But I just think we have to define it. It's not always to just take the next career step to make people better and more importantly to keep them because you really want to keep your good ones.

Brooke Major Reid (06:18):

I think that when I look at mentorship there's a personal element to it relative to say sponsorship. So as you talked about the idea of promoting, to me that's a sponsor. So you have a sponsor and a mentor, and my mentor told me that sponsorship that you tell your sponsor, the good, the good, the good. And you tell your mentor the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I found that to be really interesting because a mentoring relationship is born out of something that's really personal. Somebody who understands your context, a place where you can go and be what I call in the technical term raggedy. It's hard to be let your guard down and be kind of on coiffed in front of your boss or your teammates, but you need that place to go where somebody understands your context. And to your point about what we are trying to accomplish in that relationship, I think it's really helping that person, like you said, be better but better with respect to what is important to them. And so as you build a mentoring relationship, it's a real investment in that personal context, that journey, that arc, the highs and the lows. And it starts with wanting and needing somebody to be honest with you. So I think the distinction there between say sponsorship and mentorship is really are you invested in partnering in a way that feels very personal as you grow in your career and in your personal context? So that young woman, she relied on, you was both a sponsor and a mentor in that she was raising a family and really juggling a very personal context that had interwoven in connectivity as we all as men and women relate to balancing both regardless of your context. So I think it's been something that I've had to become comfortable with making that distinction as I was coming up, but also providing that space for people. Do they want my sponsorship? Do they just want to get promoted and therefore I'm laying out the arc and what needs to happen or are they looking for a personal connection that will allow me to guide and navigate their journey professionally and personally? So that's how I think about it.

Dondi Black (08:42):

I think for me, we all have had the opportunity to be mentors but also to be mentees. And I think that when I think about my own career and trajectory as a mentee, what I needed from a mentor was very different at different stages of my career. And so very early on I was looking for access to opportunities. I was looking for in some cases the opportunity, how do I go build the skills that I've been told I don't have and I need later in my career? It was really less about that and it was more about learning how to be a self-advocate, learning to self-promote the right way, learning how to harness confidence when the moment demanded it. And that was something I just wasn't innately comfortable with yet. And where I am today, the relationship I have with my mentors in a lot of ways it's about inspiration. It's about what should next look like for me where I am, because I've never been where I am today before. And so as I think about what's next, I'm looking to my mentors to really help me find that inspiration and channel that. And so I think that's also an important consideration is going into it knowing what the moment calls for, where you are in your career, what you need to get out of it. And I think it's a lot of what Brooke you're talking about, we heard Carol talk about it this morning. It's that authenticity. Both parties have to really understand what is the need, therefore what am I going to give to this person and what am I going to get out of it?

John Adams (10:25):

We've already heard in the first couple of panels this morning a lot about corporate culture, a lot about how corporate culture is changing and how does mentorship help contribute to that either inside an organization or just even in general.

Dondi Black (10:43):

I'll jump in first with this one. I think it's really interesting where we are today, and you're right, we heard some of this morning, but if you think about what we experienced with the pandemic women were adversely affected four to one in terms of leaving their careers, leaving the job force. And I think that what we know is that when individuals, when humans, regardless of their gender, but when they are mentored, we know that they are five times more likely to be promoted. And when they are mentored, we know that they are three to four times more likely to stay. And so it kind of gets to maryanne's points earlier when she's mentoring someone, is she mentoring them to promote them or is she mentoring them to stay? And I think that recognizing what has changed yet again, this paradigm shift in terms of gender inequity in the workplace, what we're facing now following this pandemic, we're all in the middle of something that's literally, it's live, it's dynamic, it's changing where we are. And so as I think about the opportunities to mentor men and women in my leadership team, I'm very cognizant of that aspect of it, of understanding what is unique about the women on my leadership team and what mentorship can mean for them. And I'm also very cognizant of that as I talk to my senior leaders about my male senior leaders, about the opportunities to mentor young women because that is equally important is that they see it as an opportunity to improve their perspective, to improve their outlook and understand what someone's own background, for example, may bring and may in terms of innovation. I mean, we are in a business of innovation. We are in a business of creativity. We are in an industry that is equal parts art and science. And so difference of perspective really matter. They make a difference in the bottom line. And so I think that's what I'm certainly keeping in mind as I talk to my own team.

Mary Ann Francis (12:50):

So I have two favorite quotes that I use consistently, and one is never lower your bar and the other is make them need you. So too often females in particular will go, I have to get along or I'm going to work 75 hours or be good at what you do to identify what you want to do, be good at it and make them need you. I say it at least once a week to my mentees. Now they're like, but they won't give me a code. Some places if you're consulting, you have to have a code to answer the phone. You have to write, it's like a law firm, you have to write down every minute of the day. I'm like, do some missionary work for a little while. Prove your worth to them and make them need you and it will work. If you show them that you have what it takes, they'll go, oh God, I need to call Maryanne and get her in the meeting. It's very powerful and a lot of women don't do that. They just acquiesce and just say, I'll be the administrative assistant of the meeting. Don't take yourself there, be an equal at the table and whatever. Just don't lower your Bar. Don't settle for work that you think is subpar from somebody else, not just from you, just because the guy over here's been here 15 years does not mean his work is better or good. I mean, I've run into that consistently with my background. I can say to somebody, yeah, that's just not meeting my bar. We need to take that up a notch. That is a very uncomfortable situation for a lot of men. And so what do we get called? We don't get called assertive, do we? But I just won't do it and I've got my decades as well. So it becomes easier when you earn your street Cred when you've proven you've got that backdrop to prove it. But those are just two quotes I use consistently no matter what the age of the mentee is because everybody just feels this need. Well, I'll just go in the shadows or I'll just hide one. Do it. Just do it. Keep yourself out there.

Brooke Major Reid (14:40):

Yeah. I had a mentor and she told me three things, and this was a particularly raggedy moment. She said, don't go executing on my advice until you can own it. What she understood about what that moment was that it may not be landing appropriately in terms of who I am and how I show up and execute and their nuances to that in terms of how you actually create impact in an organization. The other thing she told me, which is going back to what you said is don't pick up other people's baggage about you. It's like whatever your background, whatever it is, you already have your own stuff that you're working through. And it's very difficult to navigate in terms of what Dondi was saying about sometimes it's not what the, what's pretty easy. You need to get analytical skills, you need to get this, you need to, it's very tactical and it's very straight forward. There comes a time when the How is what's more important and nuanced. So the other thing she said to me was, you have to make sure, and I think that it coming from all of my conversations with mentors, it's something I've used is what is your desired outcome? What is a desired outcome within the culture and within the context of how you're operating? And that informs your how. So there's some people who when you're talking them them through a very difficult situation, it's very hard for them to see their agency and how they can activate their impact and their power. And so mentorship really comes from understanding deeply what are the blockers, what, what's kind of holding the person back from showing up in the way they need to have impact. Because at a certain point, it's about having the impact in the way things, having an impact in the organization and informing the way things need to be as a leader and what you're trying to model. So from that perspective, it's a very nuanced conversation around what are you really trying to accomplish and how does that show up in the organization? How do you accelerate that and how do you really define that for yourself and others around you? Because perception is the co-pilot of reality. And one of the things that we have to be careful of is how things are perceived. And even if we don't like it, we have to understand that's how it's being perceived and how we break through those barriers.

John Adams (17:04):

One thing I didn't want to mention, we certainly open for questions. Does anybody has a question? Can ask at any time? One of the things that I heard this morning that I thought interesting was the idea of feedback of candid feedback. How difficult is that and how difficult was it to learn how to be give feedback when it isn't always necessarily looked like positive? We know if there's something that somebody needs to know about themselves that might not be easy for them to hear. How difficult is it to do that and how did you learn how to do that?

Mary Ann Francis (17:43):

I'm a very direct person and so I've had three bosses in a just air quotes. I treasure the fact that you will knock my face off, you will give me the honest truth. So you're the first person I come to for that honest truth, whether it's about the person or the work or whatever. I just think when you build a reputation of being really honest, you still have to be a human. But if you build a reputation, being honest, not just about your work, but coaching people and having their back when somebody thinks you have their back, that's just the best position to be in. And I don't care if it's a 10 o'clock phone call and they want me to look at an email that I think having somebody's back is just invaluable. And so you have to figure out how to say it. But I just think being honest and direct is just, finesse is a good word, whatever, but just being truly honest, for me it wasn't hard. That's just my DNA. And as the years passed, it got easier obviously, but then am I talking to a 60 year old guy or am I talking to a 22 year old freshman or kid out of college? So you just have to adapt to the person. Some people are hurt very easy, some people you can knock 'em between the eyes and they still don't get it. I mean, right. You have to look and finesse yourself with each of the parties that you're ultimately trying to give that feedback to.

Brooke Major Reid (19:07):

The cool comment about or the term feedback is a gift whether you want to unwrap it or not. I think in a mentoring relationship relative to say a kind of direct report relationship, I think it's a little nuanced when it comes to mentoring. It's always for me a conversation, why do you think that happened that way? Tell me how you felt or why do you think so? And so why do you think the CFO interpreted what you were saying in that way? And that helps the person actually own, because a part of what feedback is really owning the context and the content and having it land appropriately is what you're striving for. So that conversation where you're building that accountability and ownership in the process, and then they can see where they make, they may have done something or could have done something differently and take that as a learning for the path forward. One of the things about mentoring is that I never want to create this fallacy of it's going to be easy. So in those relationships, I'm incredibly vulnerable. 98 things out of a hundred, maybe 99 that didn't go so well and probably a hundred things that didn't go so well. But at the end of the day, it's what was the process and the journey and who had my back in order to tell me, well, this is what you could have done differently. Why don't you think about that and unpack it? And so when you talk about feedback and you were looking at your team, or is it a mentoring relationship? I think the mentoring relationship allows you to go even deeper. And in terms of the direct, I totally agree. The direct report, you always want to be honest, you always want to be authentic, but you also want to be empathetic with respect to how that is landing for that person. Because at the end of the day, you both want to be better. You both want something out of this particular feedback or piece of comment information that you're imparting.

Dondi Black (21:08):

So for me, it was hard. It was really hard. It was hard to receive honest feedback, criticism, constructive criticism. While all the positive intent in the world, it was hard to receive it. And it was incredibly hard to give it. For me personally, I think someone shared this morning, spent years sit in the corner, do a killer job, rock their face off, and one day they're going to come and they're going to go, you are fantastic. You're promoted. And that's just not the way it happens. And so prior to learning those skills around self-advocacy and learning what that looked like for me, I had an opportunity where I had a leader, a male leader, and I would regularly performance reviews all great, fantastic, do you need anything different from me? Are you getting what you need? Yes, perfect. Wonderful. You're great, you're great, you're great, you're great. And then passed over for a promotion. And I went and I said, you know what happened? And he said, you're just not strategic. I'd love to show him today that I'm actually, but that was the message. And I just really struggled to accept that. And so I went and I talked to HR, and HR went and talked to him, and then they called me in and they said, well, here's kind of what they see when you're in meetings and you're got an idea. This is how you're showing up or this happened. And suddenly there was all of this context that I had never heard before. And once I got control of my emotions and I could swallow that, okay, now I have something actually that I can do something about, I can act upon, I can go to people that I trust and I can say, Hey, listen for this in this meeting. Cause I'm trying some things out and I want to know if I'm showing up differently. But suddenly I had a tool, I had something I could do something with. And that's why I made the comment this morning that is so important because the reality is this man was just, I was the only female on his direct report team, and he really just didn't, was uncomfortable giving me that feedback. And so there was number one, then when I became a leader, I had to how important that was and find a way to impart that to my team. And I will tell you the first biggest test I had for myself where I failed, I failed a few times before I got it right. And we talked a little bit about this when the four of us talked last week or the week before. But when we talk about diversity and we talk about inclusion, it's not just gender, it's gender, it's racial, it's ethnic. And so this whole concept of equities or inequities in the workplace gets a lot more complex when you bring intersectionality into it. And the first time I failed miserably as a leader at giving that honest, candid feedback was when I was dealing with an employee of a different race. And I suddenly felt really out of my depths. I struggled, how do I say this? Because I was so afraid that she was going to assume that some constructive criticism that I was prepared to give or that I really needed to give her, that it meant something other than what my intent was. I was worried about how it was going to be judged and I really struggled. And fortunately I had a toolkit of mentors. I collect mentors, I've never given one up. And I had an amazing, amazing mentor that I was able to go to and I said, look, this is what I'm really cha, and I know what the right thing to do is, but I'm really having a hard time with this. And the advice they gave me was say that say, Hey, listen, I need to have this conversation with you and I'm a little uncomfortable because I'm not sure how you're going to feel about this feedback, but I really know this is important to you and you deserve this. And so I did that and it made all the difference in the world, me being vulnerable, me being honest and saying, Hey, I'm uncomfortable in this moment, but I need to say this thing that I'm uncomfortable saying immediately kind of deflated the tension. And so it's hard and it's not easy and you have to practice it. And if you are mentoring someone and that's a struggle for you, then you need to reach out and ask for help. Because if you don't, then you really are not doing you're, you're not getting anything out of that relationship and they're not going to get the best of you out of that relationship either. So I think it's something you just have to keep being really intentional about.

Mary Ann Francis (26:21):

And I just want to echo a little bit that because it goes back to the having the back, because I worked for an Indian firm for eight and a half years, talk about cultural differences in business and everything. And I worked my, prior to this, my boss sat in London. So if they believe that you have their back to start, the hard conversation becomes much easier. I have had every possible ethnicity, religion, but my reputation over the years became, she's got your back. Now when she takes you into the conference room alone, that will be a different conversation. But publicly, I had their back. I did everything I could to see and we all messed up. But when I went into that room, I didn't have to premise it. They knew I had their back and that I wasn't talking to them for any other reason other than this issue, whatever the issue was. And so as you do collect your mentees, and if they trust you, if they believe you, they have their back. It really gets easier. It really gets easier.

John Adams (27:29):

Well, if there's a theme, the topic or two that you think would be in interesting for us all to take away on the topic of mentorship, the subject, how it contributes to inclusion or business outcomes, what would they be? What interests you in particular right now in moving ahead?

Brooke Major Reid (27:53):

Yeah. I would say that what I would hope people take away from this is importance in the mentoring relationship, the importance of authenticity and vulnerability. I think we owe it to the folks we are mentoring to really lay out for them some of the obstacles they are likely to face and why they're facing it. Dondi said something very powerful. She's like, how do you navigate when you've never really been here before? This is it for everything is new. And as you're forging ahead, you're discovering and you're kind of learning, growing, making your own mistakes. And I think the ability to share those mistakes as well as the successes, because sometimes people see, they see people up here and they're like, oh, that must be great to be CCO of a firm and EVP of, it's awesome. I think what I've taken from my mentors is, and so appreciated their ability to be vulnerable. That includes honesty, but also under the investment in me understanding my context. One of my mentors, she's amazing, and she always knew I was not trying to be her. And in her own way, she understood that my journey was going to be informed by a lot of things that she didn't control or didn't inform. And so when you have the mentoring relationship both in it's, it's symbiotic in a way as she's learning from me, but I'm kind of absorbing from her. A part of it too is making sure that you're on the same page and that you're comfortable with the discomfort around navigating those relationships. So like I said, I think authenticity and vulnerability are key parts of a mentoring relationship. I'll give you one little anecdote. I worked in Latin America for a while. I grew up, I grew up in the Caribbean group in Jamaica, and I did M and A for a while in the southern cone. The banking group was out of New York. And I remember this head of this very senior guy. I was what they called the assignments associate. So it was very prestigious honor to be the person doling out the assignments to the analyst. You get to be me chummy with the analyst, and I wanted to be VP. And back to what Dondi said about strategic, everything was great. Your Simon's Associate, that's the great title and honor. And I realized that they weren't really putting me in the ring for VP. And this particular gentleman from Argentina said to me, he said, you're great. You're a great Associate. If you want to continue to be a senior associate, keep doing what you're doing. I'm happy to continue to pay you like a senior associate, by the way, but if you want to be VP, you have to basically get out of that mold of that comfort zone. And so that honesty that he was willing to share in that moment, and it wasn't a formal in review, it was more of that moment where he saw that I was kind of getting comfortable, really getting good at what I was doing and being happy with that, but expecting things to land in my lap and he was very clear. So sometimes those kind of informal conversations around what's required and how you show up, you have to be able to invite those moments and let people know that you're willing to be open to their own honesty and sharing of what's what's required, even if it's not what you would expect in a formal review.

John Adams (31:33):

Okay. Well, I think we are at time. I want to thank this great panel for joining us this morning.