Don’t solve your company issues in the men’s bathroom: part 5 of an interview with Gloria Nelund

Read the previous installments of our interview with Gloria Nelund, reprinted from Ethix:

• Defining financial success
• Helping the middle class
• Too big to fail?
• Don’t invest in anything you don’t understand

Gender Issues

Let’s talk about gender issues. There weren’t many women executives at Deutsche Bank when you were there. What are the challenges of being a woman in a man’s world?

I was the only woman among the top 200 executives in Deutsche bank. A couple times a year Deutsche bank would gather the top 200 executives in some part of the world to talk about the bigger strategic issues, how divisions were performing, etc. I had been to six or seven of these meetings when there was a woman speaker from one of the groups who gave a talk during the day. At lunch, she sat down next to me and said, “You’re the only woman here in this whole group. What is that like?” My response was, “I am?” Seriously it just hadn’t occurred to me. It wasn’t something I focused on. I was very used to working with men and so I’m very comfortable. It doesn’t matter whether they’re men or women. They’re just partners in this business that I’m in.

There was one time earlier in my career when I was a part of a larger staff of all men. When the conversation got heated, they would sometimes leave the room and go to the bathroom. When they returned they would have a solution to the issue we were dealing with. But they did this once too often. On the next occasion, I followed them into the men’s bathroom. They never did that again.

Often the woman is called upon to carry more of the burden for maintaining a balance between work and family. I was fortunate that my husband was willing to stay home and take care of our son and take care of our house. So I probably don’t have the same balance issues that other working moms have. That helped in some ways, but in other ways it probably enabled me to be a workaholic. I didn’t do a very good job of keeping that balance because I loved what I did, I loved to work.

Research has shown that women are better at negotiating on behalf of others while men are better at getting something for themselves. How has that played out in your experience?

In my experience, that is absolutely true. I can negotiate anything, and fight for anything if it is for someone else; but for myself, I have a really hard time. As a result, I have been taken advantage of quite a bit, not just at Deutsche Bank, but at other jobs. Since I’ve recognized that in myself I have had someone else do important negotiating for me, especially if the outcome had to do with me. I don’t buy cars, for example. I hire someone else to buy cars for me. I’m bad at it, but also I don’t like that experience.

Personal Story

Tell us how you got to Deutsche Bank and how you came to step away from your work there.

I had been working at Bank of America for many years, and had a very responsible position in Los Angeles. But I decided it was time to try something else. Shortly after I started looking, I received and accepted a four-month special assignment for Bank of America, and about two weeks into that assignment I received an offer from a boutique firm in New York, Scudder. I was excited about the offer, but told them I couldn’t start until I completed the assignment. They came back to me asking how much money it would take to start immediately. But I explained to them it was not a matter of money; it was a matter of keeping a commitment I had made. So I had to turn down the job. Ultimately, they decided to wait for me, so I finally escaped the big bank for a new start with Scudder.

I wasn’t there long before Deutsche Bank bought out Scudder, and there I was back in the big bank world again. This created another complication. The job was based in New York, but we were living in Los Angeles. Because of our special needs child, we decided that it would not be good to uproot him from his location, so I commuted to New York for six and a half years. Every week I would get the “red eye” flight from Los Angeles to New York on Sunday night, arrive in New York and go to work for the week. I had an apartment there. Then on Friday night I would fly home for the weekend. If that wasn’t bad enough, every six weeks I had to be in London or Frankfurt because I was on the bank’s executive committee. It was a grueling schedule, and not possible without full engagement and support from my husband.

My expectation, after Scudder had been purchased was that I would be out of a job. But it turned out I was selected to integrate all of the private client businesses and create one private wealth management business from the original Deutsche Bank Private Bank, the Scudder Private Investment Counsel group, and two other acquisitions they had made: Bankers Trust and Alex Brown. We had four very different cultures and four very different businesses that needed to be integrated. When I took responsibility for this, we were losing $30 million a year. We had duplicate offices, duplicate systems and we were operating under a memo of understanding with the Fed for anti-money laundering violations. It was a mess.

In three and a half years we had consolidated a management team and completely turned it around to where we were on target at the end of the first quarter to hit our 25 percent profit margin. It was the biggest accomplishment of my career, and after a party at the Yale Club in Manhattan to celebrate our success, I went back to my apartment and I just had this emotional moment. I thought, “There’s got to be more to life than this.” I just had this most successful, pinnacle accomplishment but I realized I had no friends, I never saw my family, and I decided I just didn’t want to do this anymore. The next day I was heading to Florida and I picked up the book Halftime in the airport.

By the time I’d returned to New York, I’d finished the book. The challenge from it is to think about mid-life, not as a crisis, but as a “halftime.” Pull aside from the battle of the day and assess where you are, what you have done, and what you want to do for the next half. The book suggested not quitting your job until you have a plan, but I ignored that part.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts on what happened after Nelund quit her job, and her principles for success.  Kind permission is granted by Seattle Pacific University and the Institute for Business, Technology, and Ethics for the use of this material from Ethix magazine, where it first appeared March 2012.