Five Tips on Climbing the Corporate Ladder
Al Zollar is general manager of Tivoli Software, an IBM subsidiary that generates $2 billion in revenue a year. Mary Winston is CFO of Scholastic Inc., the company known for publishing the Harry Potter novels in the United States. Carlos Valle is a senior manager in institutional bonds at Merrill Lynch. Each is a minority member who climbed the corporate ladder, overcame the obstacles and advanced.
What can any striving Hispanic or African American learn from their success? If Zollar, Winston, and Valle can overcome the obstacles, why can't you? Here are 5 tips based on their success.
1. Create your own success plan
Mary Winston started her career as an auditor at Arthur Andersen, but that was only a steppingstone. Her goal was to become a chief financial officer. As she moved on to become manager at SBC Ameritech, then director of business development at Baxter International, and controller at Visteon, she never lost sight of her target: becoming controller. Create your own success plan, never lose sight of your target, and keep advancing, step by step.
2. Learn to task risks
Ken Roldan, CEO of Wesley, Brown & Bartle, an executive recruitment firm specializing in diversity, encounters many minorities who are satisfied with their current position and decline opportunities for a higher paying job at a company in a different city. They don't want to relinquish their comfort zone or consider working in a town with few Hispanics.
Ms. Winston moved her family (her husband is a consultant, so it facilitated making the moves) to Detroit, Toronto, and finally to New York. She knew that in order to advance, she would have to relocate and take risks. It is doubtful she would have been named CFO if she stayed at the same firm.
3. Focus on interpersonal skills
Many auditors know how to analyze a balance sheet; it's a given for the job. What separated Ms. Winston from her competitors were her interpersonal skills. She worked hard at improving them, took communication classes and listened to the 360-degree performance feedback. Just as author Daniel Goleman in "Emotional Intelligence" made the case that social skills are just as important as cognitive ones, Ms. Winston's rise up the corporate ladder suggests that mastering communication skills matters as much as, if not more, than demonstrating technical know-how.
4. Avoid the race card
When something goes wrong for many Hispanics or African Americans, they immediately think they've been discriminated against. When Mr. Zollar joined IBM in the late 1970s, one client refused to work with him because Mr. Zollar was African American. Defended by his manager, Mr. Zollar worked 12 hours a day on the assignment. When he completed the work, the client was so impressed with Mr. Zollar that he asked to keep him on the account. Mr. Zollar didn't get angry or give in to the race card; he used his performance to impress the client. Just like batting .300 in baseball, performance wins out.
5. Don't limit yourself in finding mentors
When Mr. Valle was starting out at Aetna Insurance, he was mentored by Helen Young, an investment officer. Ms. Young was while and Mr. Valle was Hispanic, but she saw a spark in him and helped him navigate the corporate terrain. Mr. Valle ended up finding multiple mentors, all informally and on his own, and mostly because he was open to other people and didn't look only for minority mentors. Those mentors provided him with challenges that led to his promotion.
Al Zollar, Mary Winston and Carlos Valle are profiled in "Minority Rules: Turn Your Ethnicity into a Competitive Edge" (Harper Collins 2006), co-written by Gary M. Stern with Kenneth Arroyo Roldan. Any questions or suggestions for future columns, write Ken Roldan or Gary Stern at www.mrules.com.
Source: HispanicBusiness.com (c) 2007. All rights reserved.
