Green Money: No time to waste for women to shape a better world

After she had her first child and came back to work, my then-colleague Amy Orr (now of Boston Common), shared with me an interesting observation: she was getting more done at work, and with more impact. The urgent need to get home at the end of the day had sparked within her a new sharpness and focus to her workdays.

Amy’s experience proved part of a pattern that I’ve since observed across the financial industry: Many women seem to behave as though they don’t have time to waste, and this leads to better relationships, greater excellence at work, and ultimately, greater positive impact on real humans.

Take Kelly Baldoni of Impax Asset Management, who moderated the opening panel of a Pensions & Investments event honoring influential women last year. Kelly led by confessing that the previous year’s event had left her feeling insufficient – not a CEO, pressured by working motherhood with littles, wondering what kind of success was even available to her. Her vulnerability shaped the opening discussion into a raw and applicable discussion on leading from the middle.

The panel also eschewed introductions, in order to get into the real meat of the conversation, with a wave of the hand, a casual, “Our bios are in the app.” I thought of countless panels I’ve attended wherein “introductions” took the first 30-plus minutes, leaving little time for panelists to say anything more than skin-deep, and leaving attendees like myself left with scant new information, soon forgetting even the names of the speakers.

By contrast, the entire P&I event was designed to push ego aside and focus on genuine relationships and actionable information – implicitly challenging us all to do the same.

Likewise, for years, the High Water Women symposium was the most helpful conference I attended in the values-based investment industry – remarkably, because High Water Women was not really an “industry organization.” Their core programs focused on financial literacy training and annual backpack and holiday gift drives, and, secondarily, they “also pioneer[ed] conversations around impact investing.”

Read that again. I found the really cutting-edge information of the values-based investment field – including not only what had recently happened, but what was happening next – at an event hosted by a nonprofit founded by women in the financial industry who focused primarily on getting kids their school supplies! Their speakers included some big names, but also activists and academics plucked from obscurity to share their vital insights and boots-on-the-ground experiences.

My theory: these women didn’t have time to waste on ego-boosting. They were movers and shakers focused on getting real work done.

These kids needed backpacks; those women needed micro-loans; and we in the industry of financing the world’s great needs needed to get together to talk about what to do next.

How to harness the “thruster effect”

I think of this pattern as the “thruster effect,” a combination of behaviors that lead to better work, greater positive impact and moving things forward.

Thrusters work as a double metaphor. In a spacecraft, they are fiery boosters combining power and directionality, used to propel a rocket forward or course correct. As a physical exercise, they are the combination of a front squat and an overhead lift. Deemed “the most draining of all exercises,” I find them an efficient way of getting a full-body workout and getting out of the gym and on with life.

While I learned the thruster effect from observing financial industry women, there’s nothing about these behaviors that are exclusive to women. We all have the ability to be rocket boosters who get the right work done.

First, let go of ego

Humility, the art of self-forgetfulness, is the first component. Letting go of ego saves a lot of time and mental bandwidth for focusing on what matters. If it’s a panel discussion, what matters isn’t your name recognition; it’s sending the audience home with actionable information they didn’t have before. (Do that and the name recognition will follow).

Note as further proof that High Water Women is the rare nonprofit that actually chose to responsibly sunset when they felt that they had run their course, folding their various programs into other organizations. (The symposium is now hosted by 100 Women in Finance).

Focus on what matters: the whole human

Focusing on what matters starts with the topic at hand (meeting, panel, etc.) but also means recognizing real problems in the world, understanding people’s lived experiences and pain points, and addressing them in our business and financial decisions.

For many years, much in business culture has prized the compartmentalization of our lives, as though the worker doesn’t go home to a family, or have health concerns or community commitments.

Women have often been balancing these concerns and commitments in a much more intensive way, between unequal responsibilities at home and unequal contributions to childbearing.

Perhaps as a result, many of us have resisted a culture of compartmentalization. We’re bringing our whole selves (and sometimes our babies) to work, casually recognizing that the same person handling a client negotiation at 9 a.m. was handling a toddler negotiation at 9 p.m.

Outcomes of the “thruster effect”: better relationships, opportunities, and impact

Bringing more of our “whole selves” to our workplaces has led to better benefits and flexible working structures, but those vital changes are not our topic here. Rather, it’s the next level impacts that are fostered when working women and men can thrive as whole persons in their workplaces, boosting their potential “thruster effect,” with three fundamental outcomes.

Deeper relationships: Bringing a more integrated and vulnerable self to your work relationships strengthens the bonds that turn the wheels of business. As a newbie mutual fund wholesaler, I groaned at the thought that I was going to have to follow sports in order to build relationships with male financial advisors. Experience taught me that instead, many men welcomed opportunities to talk about their families and communities, and that these conversations provided me with much better fodder for building and maintaining strong working relationships. I’ve also seen this principle at work in the Women in ETFs (WE) network and gatherings. A fun, supportive, and intelligent community of both women and men, WE has become an essential component of the still-nascent ETF industry, where there’s a lot of indispensable information one can really only learn by talking to others who know the ropes.
Greater opportunities: Keeping the whole human in mind unlocks opportunities – from small efficiencies to entire markets. We see those efficiencies in how sidewalk cutouts for wheelchairs, dictation software for the blind, or ADHD productivity brain hacks can also aid walking, seeing, and/or neurotypical people. We’ve seen new markets unlocked as businesses and investors have responded to the challenges of early parenthood with new or massively redesigned products, like milk pumps, catchers, and thermoses; bassinets, sleepsuits, and swaddles; postpartum care kits and medical devices, a car seat/stroller combo, bottles, and more. These innovations emerged thanks to people who brought their marketplace skills to bear after experiencing or paying attention to unmet, real-world needs.
Real-world impact: At Praxis, real-world impact is our north star, emerging from six core values that start with respecting the dignity and value of all people. This includes small children, the elderly, the ill or disabled, the poor or systematically oppressed – in fact, all kinds of people who might fall through the cracks of systems that look at humans only for their economic inputs and outputs. Every single one of us, and those we love, fall into one or more of those economically unproductive categories at various points in our lives. But only by keeping all humans in mind can we shape business decisions, economies, and ultimately a world in which we all thrive. This is what it means to do work that truly matters.

As we collectively forge ahead into a world of AI, quantum computing, and other world-altering changes, may we apply the thruster effect – not merely watching what happens, but intentionally propelling great work, in the right direction, for the benefit of all.

This story originally appeared on Green Money.