By Jessica Darmoni

“Imagine you start a new job and your boss gives you a Mac, but you are used to a PC,” said Michelle Ann Gitliz, Founder & CEO of Change Agents Technologies, Inc. a SaaS company that leverages its proprietary AI and automation platforms to transform how businesses manage compliance. “It’s a condition of your job to work with it and at first it feels unfamiliar or uncomfortable but eventually you adapt because it is part of the workplace. AI will likely follow a similar path. Many future jobs will require workers to collaborate with AI systems whether they feel ready or not.”

Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept reserved for tech companies and science fiction movies. It is rapidly becoming part of everyday life, shaping how we work, communicate, create, and make decisions. Yet for many women, AI can still feel intimidating, overly technical, or disconnected from reality. The truth is that understanding AI is not just about career advancement; it is about empowerment, safety, and maintaining agency in a world increasingly driven by technology.

Leveraging AI for Efficiency and Modernization

“Engaging with the technology allows people to understand both it’s strengths and it’s pitfalls,” says Gitlitz. “One of the most important things to understand is that AI is a tool and like every major technological shift before it, the people who benefit the most will be those who learn how to use it wisely. “

Nancy Li is a Los-Angeles based consultant helping firms leverage AI and Machine learning to scale and scope their organizations.

“Many organizations genuinely want to improve efficiency and modernize legacy systems,” she says. “The reality is that implementation is difficult. Most businesses are still trying to figure out how AI can truly augment workflows.”

She estimates that we are still several years away from full-scale adoption across industries and that AI must solve real-world problems.

In the meantime, there is an important opportunity for women to learn, experiment, and position themselves ahead of the curve instead of being left behind by it.

A Successful Use Case

According to Li, there is one major area where AI has already demonstrated measurable success: programming and coding. AI systems can now assist with software engineering, data analysis, automation, and workflow optimization. However even in those fields, humans are still essential. Someone has to guide the system, verify the output, and determine whether the result is useful, ethical, and accurate.

Li believes the future workforce may evolve into teams of “quality control managers” overseeing AI-powered systems and digital agents. That future raises a fascinating question: what does work look like when technology can perform many of the repetitive tasks people once did for a living?

The answer may depend less on technical expertise and more on judgment, creativity, discretion, and taste. AI can generate endless amounts of information, but it cannot fully replace human intuition or emotional intelligence. Knowing what you want, understanding your goals, and evaluating whether an AI-generated solution actually makes sense will become critical skills.

Understanding AI as a Matter of Safety

Women do not need to become engineers to participate in the AI economy. However, they do need enough familiarity to ask informed questions, challenge assumptions, and protect themselves.

Gitliz reminds people not to click “agree” on terms of service without reading them, or hand over personal information without considering the consequences.

“Your data is valuable. Your birthday, browsing habits, preferences, and online behavior can all be used to build detailed profiles for advertising and targeting.,” she says. “What matters is knowing the options exist, understanding the terms of use, and recognizing the impact these tools can have on your life.”

Women especially should understand how their data is collected, stored, and used. Learning the basics of AI and digital systems helps people recognize risks, identify manipulation, and make informed decisions online. You cannot safeguard yourself from technology if you do not understand how it works.

Cathy Yoon, General Counsel at Harmonic, emphasizes that the human element is still essential when leveraging AI systems. She believes that AI is good to fill in workflow gaps but that humans still need to verify outputs.

“Verification is essential because AI systems can still produce inaccurate, biased, or misleading information,” she said. “Learning how to question outputs and confirm facts will become just as important as learning how to generate them.”

Meritocracy Matters

There is also a larger cultural shift happening around merit and opportunity. Increasingly, employers and industries care less about where someone went to school and more about what they can actually do. In some emerging industries, especially digital assets and technology, AI literacy will become the new college degree and a baseline expectation rather than a specialized skill.

“This creates a unique opportunity for women from diverse backgrounds. AI has the potential to level certain playing fields because access to knowledge is more open than ever before,” says Li.

People can learn independently, build portfolios, launch businesses, automate workflows, and develop expertise outside traditional institutions.

The goal when women approach AI should be informed participation. The women who thrive in the AI era will not necessarily be the most technical. They will be the ones who stay curious, ask questions, protect their data, verify information, and learn how to use technology to supplement their strengths rather than replace them.

AI is coming whether we embrace it or not. The safest and most empowering choice is to understand it well enough to shape how it shapes us.

The post Why Women Need to Learn AI — Not Fear It appeared first on The Glasshammer.

By Jessica Darmoni

“Historically, much of the derivatives business has been passed down through oral tradition,” says Jamila Piracci. “People learned through mentorship or by being in the right place at the right time. While this helped some people, we need to make sure as an industry that we formalize an information sharing process and purposefully strategize succession.”

The Glass Hammer was first introduced to Jamila Piracci when she was the Vice President of Over-The-Counter (OTC) derivatives at the National Futures Association (NFA) where she led a team in designing one of the most significant regulatory frameworks in modern derivatives markets.

Following the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, Piracci was hired by NFA to establish its swaps regulatory program. The effort required coordinating within the well established futures industry self regulatory body to create processes, recruit staff, and develop oversight mechanisms for swaps market participants. By the time she left NFA to relocate to Texas with her family, the swaps program had approximately 120 professionals, including examiners, risk specialists, auditors, and quantitative experts.

The experience gave Piracci a front-row seat to one of the largest regulatory transformations in derivatives history. Her experience with swaps oversight at NFA, combined with her past roles at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and ISDA, provided a particularly valuable perspective as the markets evolved. She has a unique ability to help firms understand not only the technical requirements but the spirit of U.S. regulatory frameworks. For emerging leaders entering the futures industry, understanding both the structure of these markets and the policy forces shaping them can be daunting without a formal information sharing process.

Building the Future Workforce

Piracci is working to fix that with work grounded in education. As part of her involvement with the Futures Industry Association (FIA), she contributes to industry development initiatives designed to cultivate expertise across derivatives professionals.

Piracci serves on the FIA Board and is a member of the board’s Membership and Market Structure Advisory Committees. She also instructs a virtual “Swaps 101” course through the organization’s training programs. The course introduces newcomers to the fundamentals of swaps markets—an essential area of modern derivatives trading.

“FIA’s educational initiatives aim to build expertise from the ground up, ensuring a steady pipeline of knowledgeable professionals in the industry,” she explained.

Her own entry into the swaps world reflected a different dynamic. Early in her career, she was handed the 1999 ISDA Credit Derivatives Definitions booklet and told that if she wanted to understand the field, she should read it from start to finish.

“I learned a lot from that experience,” she recalls. “But I also had mentors along the way. That was partly because of where I worked. However, I started wondering what happens to talented people who don’t have access to those same networks?”

Programs like FIA’s educational initiatives aim to answer that challenge by making industry knowledge accessible to anyone interested in learning about derivatives markets.

Democratizing Knowledge

Piracci believes that education and transparency are essential for the long-term sustainability of financial markets.

The concept resonates with broader developments in financial technology, particularly in digital assets. One of the central ideas in that space is democratizing access to financial opportunities and reducing barriers to participation. Piracci sees similarities with education.

“Information should always be democratized,” she says. “The more people understand how these markets work, the more people can participate responsibly.”

By creating structured learning opportunities, the industry can attract new talent and reduce a reliance on informal knowledge transfers. She credits this mindset to her time at NFA, which has become a foundation for her later career values.

“I was responsible not just for recruiting the staff but I also had to ensure they were trained. We built a training program partly based on my experience and partly on NFA’s existing new staff training program,” she said. “I am most proud that the staff became beneficiaries and later leaders of the training structure that we built together methodically over time.”

A Passion for Public Interest

Longevity is a theme that runs through Piracci’s current work too. Today, at Roos Innovations she works with federal regulators, commodity and energy market participants as well as trade associations to help firms build responsibly and endure transitions. Her work also extends to financial services firms seeking registration with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). These engagements often involve creating healthy dialogue and, in some cases, building the pillars necessary for firms to function as regulated entities.

“Many companies today want to become U.S. regulated market participants, ” she says. “This includes commodities firms, as well as digital asset firms and prediction market companies, some of which come from overseas and want insight into how to work with U.S. regulators.”

She also believes that financial markets ultimately serve a broader purpose.

“Transparent, well-regulated markets protect participants but also ensure broader economic growth, which is essential for long-term societal health,” she said.

That philosophy extends into her public service roles. For the past two years, Jamila has served on the CFTC’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee, where she was appointed by former CFTC Commissioner Summer Mersinger. The advisory committees provide recommendations and insights to the Commission, helping regulators understand market developments and stakeholder perspectives.

Jamila’s commitment to the public interest also includes extensive work with industry organizations such as Life:Powered, a nonprofit dedicated to improving America’s energy literacy, and the Committee of Chief Risk Officers. Through research and written analysis, she contributes insights on how policy decisions affect consumers and energy markets as well as how they impact risk management choices that have become increasingly more complex.

Skills for the Next Generation

Looking ahead, Jamila believes the most important skill for emerging leaders will be adaptability.

“The ability to learn new things matters more than simply amassing new facts,” she says. “The real skill is learning how to learn differently.”

In a world defined by technological innovation, regulatory change, and evolving market structures, professionals must be able to pivot quickly.

She describes this not merely as managing change but managing volatility.

“This requires a recognition that change is constant and must be embraced rather than resisted,” she says.

A Mission to Share Knowledge

Throughout her career, Jamila has worked at institutions central to the derivatives ecosystem, including regulatory bodies and an industry association. Those experiences gave her insights into how markets function at both policy and transactional levels.

Rather than keeping that knowledge within a small circle, she sees sharing it as a responsibility.
Whether advising firms, supporting industry groups, or sharing knowledge with other professionals, Piracci’s work reflects a commitment to adaptability, education and a talent pipeline that will guide the markets of tomorrow.

In closing, she is reminded of the quote by American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler, “the illiterate of the future will be those who can’t learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

The post Powering the Future: Jamila Piracci, Founder of Roos Innovations appeared first on The Glasshammer.

Ida Liu built her career at Citi around this insight. After years in investment banking in New York and Hong Kong, she detoured through the fashion industry — serving as Global Head of Sales and Marketing at designer Vivienne Tam before returning to finance with an idea: a Fashion, Retail and Entertainment practice at Citi Private Bank, followed by the creation of the firm’s North America Asian Clients Group. Her cultural fluency, her language skills in Mandarin and Spanish, and her understanding of Asian ultra-high-net-worth families became a competitive differentiator that propelled her from managing director to Global Head of one of the world’s most prestigious private banks. Today, as CEO of HSBC Private Bank — which she has described as the one institution she would have considered joining — she oversees $566 billion in invested assets and customer deposits, with her background as a central part of her value proposition.

It is a formulation that captures the particular challenge facing Asian women who have risen to the top of financial services and the Fortune 1000. They have had to break through not one barrier, but two: the persistent underrepresentation of women in senior finance roles, and the equally stubborn phenomenon that leaves Asian professionals clustered in technical and mid-level positions while remaining conspicuously absent from boardrooms and C-suites.

Yet a remarkable cohort of Asian women has done exactly that, ascending to roles that were unimaginable a generation ago. Their paths differ, from investment banking to asset management, from private wealth to regulatory fintech but their hard-won lessons form a coherent body of wisdom for women navigating the same terrain today.

A new book, Walk Away: Step Out to Step Up by Singapore-based author and executive Sally J. Clarke and US based co-author Deborah Overdeput, adds a compelling dimension to that wisdom. They gather the stories of high-achieving women across Asia who discovered that sometimes the most powerful career move is not pushing harder, but instead stepping back with clarity and intention to then reach their goals more effectively.

The Landscape: Progress, But Not Parity

The headline numbers tell an optimistic story. Yie-Hsin Hung, president and CEO of State Street Investment Management, leads one of the world’s four largest asset managers with more than $5 trillion in assets under management. Lisa Su runs AMD. Susan Li is CFO of Meta. These names have become shorthand for a generation of Asian women who have reached the commanding heights of corporate America and global finance.

But the structural picture is more complicated. According to a 2023 study by KPMG and Ascend, a global network for Asian professionals, directors of Asian ancestry hold just 6.4% of Fortune 1,000 board seats, far below their share of the educated workforce. Research by MIT Sloan’s Professor Jackson Lu has found that East Asian Americans in particular advance to senior roles at lower rates than both white and South Asian peers, a disparity that persists even after controlling for qualifications. The bamboo ceiling, a term popularized by Jane Hyun in her 2005 book Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling, is not a relic — it is a present-day reality, shaped by cultural stereotypes, implicit biases, and leadership frameworks that were never designed with Asian women in mind.

“We’re chipping away at the glass ceiling,” Liu observed recently. “But when it comes to the bamboo ceiling, there’s still a lot of work to do.”

A Cultural Nuance: Visibility Is Not Vanity: It is Strategy

One of the most consistent themes among Asian women who have reached the top of financial services is the deliberate decision to make themselves seen and heard, even when cultural upbringing inclined them toward restraint.

Ida Liu has spoken openly about conducting “elevator pitch sessions” through Citi’s Asian heritage network, coaching Asian women in the art of self-advocacy. The inherited norms of humility that serve as virtues in many Asian families such as being modest, not boasting, and deferring to the group can quietly derail careers in an industry where visibility and sponsorship are currency.

“Communication is key, and networking is everything,” she has said, describing the advice she wishes she could give her younger self.

Yie-Hsin Hung’s trajectory illustrates what deliberate visibility can achieve. A mechanical engineering graduate of Northwestern and MBA from Harvard, she spent years at Morgan Stanley and Bridgewater before becoming CEO of New York Life Investment Management in 2015 — where she became the highest-ranking Asian American and female executive at the parent company. She was the first woman and first Asian American to chair the Investment Company Institute’s Board of Governors in its eight-decade history. These firsts were not accidents. They were the product of sustained engagement with the networks, associations, and platforms that allow leaders to be recognized beyond their immediate organizations.

The lesson is practical and simply put, attend the conference, join the board, take the speaking engagement, even when the instinct is to let the work speak for itself. In financial services, work rarely speaks loudly enough on its own.

Build Relationships Across, Not Just Up

Traditional career advice emphasizes the importance of senior sponsors and sponsorship remains genuinely critical, particularly in an industry where promotion decisions are often made in rooms that exclude the candidates being discussed. But the Asian women who have reached the top of financial services have often distinguished themselves by investing equally in lateral relationships: peers, direct reports, colleagues in adjacent functions.

Yie-Hsin Hung has described her leadership philosophy in terms that go beyond conventional hierarchy. She has spoken of the importance of “engaging people’s hearts” alongside their intellects, of leading organizations that live and breathe their values, not merely execute their strategies. At State Street Investment Management, she introduced performance management processes centered on career conversations and real-time feedback, and launched leadership development programs that explicitly teach communication skills and emotional intelligence. She has made building a diverse leadership team a stated priority, noting that the senior leadership of her organization is now more than half women.

The Walk Away contributors echo this orientation toward community and reciprocity. As Clarke writes in the book’s framing, recurring refrains heard from high-achieving women across continents include the necessity of mentorship, the importance of building networks, and the value of lifelong learning. These are not soft supplements to technical excellence; they are the architecture through which Asian and Asian American women in finance have most reliably built the sponsorship, the visibility, and the trust that formal credentials alone rarely confer.

The implication for women building careers today: the relationships you cultivate with people at every level and the reputation you earn as someone who develops others, not merely outperforms them will matter as much as any individual achievement when senior roles are being filled.

By Nicki Gilmour, founder and CEO of theglasshammer.com and Evolved People Coaching.

The post Shattering Two Ceilings: What Top Asian Women in Financial Services Have Learned on the Way Up appeared first on The Glasshammer.

“Leaders should hold complexity without the temptation to collapse it,” says Pooja Mishra Prahlad. “They should want to look at things from different perspectives and think deeply to earn the answer.”

As a partner at Goldman Sachs with more than two decades in the industry, Prahlad’s call to slow down, reflect, and resist the easy path is a throughline for how she moves through the world. She leads with curiosity, comfort in ambiguity, and a conviction that the best things, whether careers, relationships, or ideas, are built with time and intention. Now as Head of Americas Equity Structuring, she continues to be energized by innovation, by the people around her, and by a belief rooted in her own unlikely journey and her father’s before her: a single opportunity given to the right person at the right moment can change the trajectory of generations.

An Unexpected Arc

Prahlad grew up in a world far removed from Wall Street. As the daughter of a Naval officer, she spent her childhood moving across India, living in identical government-issued houses, and attending the same schools as her neighbors, in a community where, as she puts it, “nobody ever discussed money or invested in the stock market.”

That upbringing, Prahlad says, turned out to be more preparation than limitation.

“The life I led in India was a great foundation for being able to adapt to a new set-up and new people. The Indian Navy is very diverse. You have people from all over the country with regional differences and language differences, a diversity born of meritocracy working towards a greater good. There is so much celebration of that in the culture.” This has led her to fundamentally believe that a truly meritocratic organization breeds a diverse environment.

Like many academically strong students in India at the time, Prahlad studied computer science and worked briefly at a software firm. But she quickly realized something was missing. ” Even though I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of problem-solving, I wanted to have more of the advisory piece.”

Business school brought Prahlad to a Goldman Sachs internship in London, and it proved transformative. The energy of the equity trading floor, and the combination of analytical rigor with constant interaction, felt like a natural fit.

“It ticked all those boxes of a job that involves thinking, but also working with a lot of people,” explains Prahlad. She joined full-time in 2005 and has been at Goldman ever since.

Innovation at the Epicenter

Today, as a partner leading equity structuring, Prahlad builds bespoke solutions for clients navigating a rapidly shifting landscape.

“It sits at the epicenter of a lot of innovation,” she says. “In my job, I have a vantage point to a changing landscape — market structure changes, regulatory changes, macroeconomic changes. And you get to read the tea leaves of what it means for clients.”

The other thread running through her work is the one she didn’t anticipate loving as much as she does: the trusted advisor relationship. “It’s a real privilege to work with clients and have them not just rely on you for expertise, but to rely on you for counsel. That’s become more and more meaningful as I’ve grown in my career.”

Her North Star

When asked who has inspired her most, Prahlad speaks movingly about her father. His own life followed an improbable arc, from a small village with no local high school to higher education, a Navy career, and later aviation, all made possible by a relative who chose to support his education.

“What is amazing about his journey is I never saw him allow struggle to rest heavily on him. He was so bright, but also so funny. You would have never known what his journey had been.”

The lesson Prahlad took from her father’s example is one she returns to often: “What people remember is who you are with them and how you treat them.”

The second lesson shapes how she leads today: “It’s possible to change not just one person’s life, but generations after them, by giving someone an opportunity.”

That belief now shapes how she approaches her own role. Reflecting on her rise to partner, Prahlad challenges the idea of a replicable formula. She credits a willingness to embrace innovation, change and discomfort, and the mentors and sponsors who opened doors at pivotal moments.

Not All Doubt is Counterproductive

As a mentor, Prahlad notices one theme that surfaces repeatedly: self-doubt. Her take on it is more nuanced than one might expect.

“Not all self-doubt is bad. It’s healthy to doubt your opinion without doubting your ability. It can make you want to work harder. It can make you think more deeply about the consequences of your actions to others. Our culture sometimes demonizes a little bit of doubt, but it’s not necessarily bad.”

The problem, she says, is when it tips into paralysis. “Confidence comes with action. Take a step in the direction you want to go, then take another step, then take a third step. If you fail – fail fast, that’s the best way to overcome the doubt and lead to clarity.”

Earn the Answer

When Prahlad speaks about leadership and the future, her focus consistently returns to responsibility, both to ideas and to people. She believes the financial industry is in a generational moment of change, shaped by new technologies, evolving approaches to risk, and shifting models of capital allocation. Within that landscape, she offers three principles.

First: sit with complexity. “Resist the pull toward quick, serviceable answers. The distance to an answer is so short now, especially with AI. It’s easy to stop there, even when it’s not the best answer…Spend time to earn the answer.”

Second: stay curious. “As you grow in your career, you end up teaching more than learning. It’s really important to stay curious and create the time for that.”

Third: bring people with you. “If you want to go far, you can’t go alone. Having conviction in your view, articulating your vision clearly, building trust and earning people’s followership over a long period of time require investment of time and energy. They are not a quick solve.”

Opportunity Can Change Everything

Outside of Goldman, Prahlad’s life remains anchored by her family, now by her husband and thirteen year old son. “Whatever the demands of the day, my husband and my son are where I return – in every sense of the word. I learn from them constantly – they both move through the world with a hunger to understand it. They keep me honest about what growth looks like”.

The same spirit extends into her broader commitments. Prahlad sits on the board of the American India Foundation, focused on livelihood and education for women and children in India, and supports the Nudge Foundation, which works with communities living in ultra-poverty. Their missions mirror the chance once given to her own family.

“The world has more talent than it has opportunity,” she says. “Anything that I can do to bring opportunity to people who have the desire to transform their lives is very important to me.”

In a fast-moving, efficiency-driven world, Prahlad embraces depth: depth of thought, of relationships, and of responsibility. She is a leader guided by curiosity, sustained by people, and anchored in the conviction that opportunity, when offered thoughtfully to the deserving, can change everything.

“I genuinely believe in what I bring to the table,” she says. “But it is also important to recognize that through the arc of life, there were discrete moments where people came in and did their bit. It’s my turn to do that now, for people who come after me.”

By Jessica Robaire

The post Pooja Mishra Prahlad: Partner, Head of Americas Equity Structuring, Goldman Sachs appeared first on The Glasshammer.

At a certain point in your career, honest feedback becomes surprisingly hard to come by. Not because people around you lack opinions (they may have plenty) but because hierarchy has a way of softening, managing, and redirecting those opinions before they reach you. The higher you rise, the more curated your information environment tends to become.

That means you may be making daily decisions about how to communicate, how to lead your team, and how to show up in the room with less real data about your impact than you think. Waiting for candid feedback that the culture is unlikely to deliver isn’t a strategy. Actively seeking structured ways to see yourself clearly is.

Psychometric assessments, used well and debriefed with a skilled coach, are one of the most effective tools for doing exactly that. In a recent piece Beyond the Performance Review: The Assessments That Build Self-Aware Leaders we introduced four tools our coaches at Evolved People Coaching use most often. Here, we take a closer look at one: the DiSC assessment, and what it specifically opens up for leadership effectiveness and team development.

What DiSC Actually Measures

Unlike assessments that focus on aptitude or potential, DiSC is behavioral; it describes how you tend to act, not what you are capable of. It maps four dimensions: how you respond to challenge and control (Dominance); how you engage and energize people (Influence); how you handle pace, change, and stability (Steadiness); and how you approach accuracy, detail, and process (Conscientiousness).

If you’ve read Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Idiots, you’ll recognise these as the Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue profiles. Erikson’s core premise is worth holding: communication happens on the listener’s terms, not the sender’s. DiSC makes that dynamic visible.

Here are five ways that translates into more effective leadership.

1. It Shows You the Gap Between How You See Yourself and How Others Experience You

Most senior leaders have a clear sense of their strengths. Fewer have an accurate read on how those strengths land when overused, in the wrong context, or with someone whose style differs sharply from their own.

Consider a leader who scores high on Steadiness — Erikson’s Green. She may pride herself on being calm and consistent. But Greens tend to internalize conflict, and under pressure can become passive and hard to read. In a moment of organizational turbulence, that composure can register not as steadiness but as disconnection and without awareness of how her style is landing, she has no way to address it.

DiSC gives you a framework for asking not just what am I doing? but what is that creating for the people around me? — which is a different, and more useful, question entirely.

2. It Helps You Communicate With People Instead of At Them

Communication failures at senior levels are rarely about clarity or intent. They’re almost always about style mismatch, delivering messages in the way that makes sense to us, without accounting for what the person across from us actually needs.

A high-Dominance leader (Erikson’s Red) who values directness and speed will experience a detailed, context-heavy briefing as burying the lead. Reds want information that is succinct and results-focused. Meanwhile, a high-Conscientiousness colleague  (Erikson’s Blue) who needs the full reasoning before committing may experience a bottom-line-first approach as dismissive. Neither is wrong. They are operating from different defaults with no shared language for naming the difference.

DiSC provides that vocabulary. Once you can identify someone’s style, even approximately, you can make targeted adjustments: leading with data for the person who needs it, creating space for dialogue with someone who processes out loud, getting to the point with someone already three steps ahead. Small shifts, but they compound significantly over time.

3. It Shows You How Your Style Plays Out Across the Real Work of Leadership

One of the most useful sections of the DiSC report we offer at Evolved People Coaching covers management: how you direct and delegate, motivate, develop talent, manage up and how your tendencies shift under stress.

That last piece matters more than most leaders realize. Erikson is instructive here: under pressure, default behavior doesn’t soften, it amplifies. Reds become more demanding. Yellows become more chaotic. Greens become passive-aggressive. Blues become hypercritical. Knowing which version of yourself shows up when the stakes are high and how that lands on your team is some of the most valuable self-knowledge a leader can have. The report makes these tendencies specific and situated, which is what makes them actionable.

4. It Turns Team Friction Into Useful Data

Style differences shape team dynamics in ways that slow progress, create tension and impact team effectiveness, especially when there’s no shared framework for naming what’s actually happening.

Erikson is direct about which combinations create the most friction: Red and Green are opposites: one fast, task-focused, and blunt while the other is slower, relationship-oriented, and conflict-averse. Yellow and Blue create a different kind of tension: one shoots from the hip, the other wants precision and finds the energy exhausting. These aren’t personality flaws. They’re predictable collisions between people operating from different defaults.

When DiSC is used at a team level, those dynamics get named. The team member who seems resistant to change may simply be a high-Steadiness profile that needs more context and transition time. The colleague who dominates every meeting may have a high-Influence style that generates real energy but needs structure to channel it. Both become navigable the moment they’re visible. Our team development workshops use DiSC as a starting point for exactly this, helping to move teams from recurring frustration toward a common framework for understanding where the friction is coming from.

5. It Expands Your Range Without Requiring You to Perform Inauthenticity

DiSC is not asking you to become someone you’re not. Erikson makes this point firmly: you cannot and should not try to change someone’s fundamental behavioral profile. A Red will not become a Green. Attempting to force that creates frustration on both sides.

What DiSC offers is awareness of the difference between your core behavior, how you act when nothing external is shaping you, and the adapted version you bring to professional contexts. Most leaders have more range than they use, particularly under pressure, when the instinct is to narrow and fall back on what has always worked.

A leader who defaults to independence can learn to build in deliberate moments of consultation. One who defaults to collaboration can practice holding a position when the room pushes back. Over time, that adaptation stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like genuine range.

A Closer Look Is Worth It

DiSC is not a clinical instrument and its advocates wouldn’t claim otherwise. What it is, particularly when debriefed well, is a practical window into the behavioral patterns that shape how you lead, communicate, and show up under pressure. For leaders who want concrete insight into their impact, it is consistently one of the most actionable starting points available.

If you’re ready to close the gap between the leader you are and the leader you intend to be, we’d welcome a conversation. Visit evolvedpeoplecoaching.com to explore our coaching programs and team development workshops, or reach out directly to discuss whether DiSC is the right place for you to begin.

The post Five Ways Your DiSC Profile Can Make You a More Effective Leader appeared first on The Glasshammer.

By Jessica Darmoni

“You should always ask,” says Laura Magyar, Partner at Patomak Global Partners, as she talked about her time at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). She asked and was subsequently approved to spend a year abroad working at the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) during her tenure. “You don’t lose anything by asking.”

In an era defined by rapid financial innovation and shifting regulatory landscapes, Magyar’s career stands as a testament to courage, adaptability, and vision. Her journey, from a young professional in Chicago to a global leader shaping the securities industry, offers more than an inspiring success story. It provides a blueprint for future generations navigating industries where change is the only constant.

Redirection, not Rejection

Magyar’s career began in Chicago at one of Merrill Lynch’s top-producing offices. As a Series 7 registered sales assistant, she gained early exposure to the inner workings of financial markets and developed a deep understanding of client relationships and revenue targets.

“During my time at Merril Lynch, the Financial Consultant that I worked with was considering moving to management, and we discussed having me take over his book of business. However, as time went on, it became clear that he was not going to transition to another role, and I needed to decide if I wanted to be on the financial advisor track or pivot.”

She chose to move in another direction. While working full-time, she attended law school at night. Her initial goal was to become a defense trial attorney, but financial realities reshaped that ambition. She recognized that her industry experience was not a detour, but an asset. Instead of abandoning finance, she deepened her expertise in it.

“Many of my professors worked at the SEC, and I was encouraged by them to apply for a role there,” she says. At the time that I was applying for a position, the SEC was receiving hundreds of resumes for positions, and unless you knew someone working there, the chances of someone reviewing your resume and calling you for an interview were slim.”

Many would have interpreted that as a closed door, but Magyar treated it as a delay.

She joined a Chicago law firm as an associate. While most of her work focused on securities litigation matters, she also handled CFTC-related matters. Looking back, she recalls that many of the engagements she worked on as a consultant after leaving the SEC were CFTC rules and regulation matters.

Protecting the Integrity of the System

Finally, on a frigid Valentine’s Day weekend, she flew to Washington, D.C. to interview for an attorney role in the SEC’s Office of Compliance, Inspections, and Examinations. She got the job, and that opportunity became a 15-year tenure that would define her leadership style and influence.

In Washington, she rose to Branch Manager, working on high-profile issues. Her work intersected with significant market events, including investigations related to the Flash Crash and the Knight Capital (KCG) trading incident. These were moments that tested the resilience of financial markets and demanded accountability. Through them and countless other market events and investigations, she saw firsthand how regulation is about protecting the integrity of the system. Working on these matters also evidenced the strong collaboration across SEC Divisions (e.g., enforcement, Trading and Markets, Exams).

While at the SEC, Magyar created a program to examine SEC-registered foreign-domiciled broker-dealers. She led her teams in examining firms outside the U.S. for compliance with SEC rules and regulations. It also sparked her desire to work internationally, and she boldly asked the Division Director if she could spend a year at the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the SEC, the FCA. There was no stipend. No housing support. No financial incentive. She had to fund the move herself and find a place to live when the exchange rate was nearly 2:1.

“In addition to the cultural differences, I was able to experience firsthand the differences in regulatory approaches.”

Magyar worked for six months in the Division of Supervision and six months in Enforcement, gaining a comparative lens that would later shape her strategic thinking.

A Proactive Pursuit of Opportunity

When she returned to Washington, leadership had changed. The Division Director who had approved her Secondment had left, and both new and existing leadership did not see the benefit of this opportunity or the knowledge she brought back.

“Not only did I feel I had to prove that my year abroad had been worthwhile, but I faced the reality of government career progression,” she explains. “Positions open only when someone leaves, and even then, advancement is uncertain.”

Rather than wait indefinitely, she made another bold move into the private sector, joining Promontory Financial Group (now owned by IBM). There, she learned the intensity of consulting, which included short deadlines, strong personalities, constant pressure to secure projects, and managing billable hours.

“Networking became essential,” she said. “It was up to me to build relationships so that I always had a pipeline of work. Significantly challenging, while my experience was in securities, I did a lot of work related to commodities/CFTC and banking. So, I learned a lot, and this further expanded my toolbox.”

When IBM acquired Promontory, she transitioned again, joining Patomak Global Partners, founded by SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. The firm’s securities focus aligned perfectly with her background. Ironically, her first major project centered on swap dealers regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which required her to get up to speed on the relevant rules, regulations, and best practices quickly.

While she now leads the firm’s Securities Compliance Practice, she learned to build complementary teams, bringing in specialists when necessary and eventually hiring in-house talent to preserve both expertise and revenue. Regulation, she realized, is never static. It demands continuous learning, humility, and the courage to admit when new voices are needed.

That philosophy is central to how her work will impact future generations.

“Adaptability is a leadership superpower. The next generation of financial leaders will not thrive by mastering one static domain,” she says. “They will need flexibility, openness to change, and the willingness to evolve alongside the markets.”

The Responsibility of Leadership

Though Magyar never formally had coaching, she recognizes the huge value in mentoring and finds opportunities to mentor junior staff and share feedback. She understands that experience has compounding value—and that the responsibility of leadership is not merely to perform, but to prepare others.

Magyar’s story is about one woman’s ascent in finance and law, but also about reshaping the relationship between innovation and regulation. It is also about proving that integrity and ambition are not opposing forces and showing future generations, especially young women in finance and law, that courage, curiosity, and conviction can open doors once thought closed.

Her legacy will not be measured solely by the cases she handled, the practices she built, or the revenue she generated. It will be measured by the relationships she builds, the young leaders she supports, and by the generations who learn that asking boldly and embracing change are not risks—they are necessities for shaping the future and a successful career.

The post Powering the Future: Laura Magyar, Patomak Global Partners appeared first on The Glasshammer.

This Earth Day, the conversation worth having is less about individual behavior and more about the systems we’ve left unchanged. Jharna Saha, Co-Founder and CMO of Enlog, is working on one of the most overlooked of them: what happens to electricity once it’s inside a building. Enlog enables buildings and facilities to continuously optimize their electricity use through autonomous intelligence — reducing energy consumption by 20–25% without the heavy infrastructure overhaul that traditional retrofits require. Energy efficiency is increasingly becoming a new currency for businesses, one that delivers clear ROI, often with payback periods as short as 6–8 months purely through energy savings.

“What inspires me is building toward a world where efficiency isn’t dependent on awareness or manual control,” says Saha. “Where buildings aren’t passive consumers, they’re responsive systems. That future is technically possible right now. The gap is in how we think about this problem, not in the technology.”

We spoke with Saha about what drives her, what she’s learned building a deep tech company, and the future she’s working toward.

Start with the System, Not the Person

Saha’s path into energy didn’t begin with engineering. Her first job was in marketing, working on Earth Hour, the campaign where people switch off their lights for an hour to make a statement about energy. It was there that a contradiction became impossible to ignore.

“I remember seeing large commercial buildings fully running late at night — cooling systems, lights, everything on — in Cyber City Gurgaon. We were asking people at home to switch things off, while buildings around us consumed at a scale no individual action could offset.”

The dissonance stuck. “We expect people to behave like energy experts. Most people can’t, and realistically, they won’t. So why are we trying to change human behavior instead of fixing the system itself?” That question led to Enlog.

For anyone building a career in sustainability or deep tech, this reframe matters: the most durable solutions don’t rely on changing what people do. They change what the system does by default.

Clarity Is What Scales

The journey from that early question to a functioning company wasn’t linear. “Deep tech is not a straight path,” Saha says. “There are long gestation periods, failures, and iterations. Delivering something truly breakthrough takes that. It’s not about small deltas.”

What kept her oriented through it was a commitment to first principles thinking. “You come across many opinions along the way. But real collaboration happens with clarity and that’s how you actually scale.”

That discipline shows up especially during hard stretches. “In deep tech, cycles are long. You’re not just building a product; you’re building trust in a new way of doing things.” When momentum stalls, Saha returns to the ground truth: “What does the data say? Where is the real inefficiency? That clarity cuts through opinion and noise.”

The Two Skills That Will Define Future Leaders

Ask Saha what capabilities will matter most going forward, and she doesn’t name a technical domain. She names two qualities that are harder to develop and easier to underestimate.

“One is emotional intelligence, not just in managing people, but in navigating uncertainty without overreacting. The ability to stay clear-headed when the situation is genuinely ambiguous.”

The second is synthesis. “Leaders today don’t struggle from lack of information. They struggle from too much of it.”

The ability to take multiple signals — data, context, external shifts and quickly identify what actually matters is increasingly where leadership leverage lives. These two skills reinforce each other: emotional grounding creates the conditions for clear thinking, and clear thinking makes decisive action possible.

Let Your Team Raise Your Standard

When asked who has shaped the way she leads, Saha’s answer is her team.

“I’ve watched them go deep into problems that most people would have given up on, break down assumptions, question the obvious, come back with insights that changed how we think about the product entirely. That level of depth is rare. And when you see it consistently, it quietly raises your own standard. You stop accepting surface-level thinking from yourself.”

The environments and people you choose to work alongside don’t just affect output, they recalibrate your baseline.

Knock on More Doors — Simultaneously

The most useful advice Saha has received is also the most literal: knock on more doors.

“Whether it’s partnerships, deployments, or policy conversations, I don’t depend on one path. I keep multiple conversations alive simultaneously. Some open fast. Some take a year. But the moment you limit yourself to one or two, you’ve already slowed yourself down without realizing it.”

Career opportunity works the same way. A single application, a single mentor, a single network, these create fragility. Building in parallel, even when one path looks most promising, is what sustains momentum across the long cycles that meaningful work requires.

The Permission You’re Waiting For Isn’t Coming

Saha has spoken with over 800 students across colleges, particularly young women without access to strong networks early on. The pattern she sees most often has nothing to do with ability.

“Most of them are genuinely capable, but they’re waiting for someone to tell them it’s okay to go. That permission never comes from outside. That’s the thing I try to leave them with.”

Her other consistent message: go deep. “Don’t just execute what’s asked of you. Think about how what you’re building can scale beyond you. Ownership and scalability together is where real impact lives.”

To her younger self, she’d say the same: “You saw the problem clearly. You just needed to trust that seeing it was enough to start.”

A Different Kind of Sustainability

Saha’s vision for the next decade is specific: “I want to help build a world where managing energy becomes invisible. Where buildings understand and optimize their own consumption in real time — without waiting for someone to notice, without depending on manual intervention.” If that becomes standard, she argues, “efficiency, in that sense, becomes a primary energy source.”

As Saha puts it: “The real constraint in the next decade won’t be generation. It will be how intelligently we use what we already have.”

The post Sustainable Success in Sustainable Industries appeared first on The Glasshammer.

The Glasshammer is running a “Where Are They Now?” series where we catch up with some of the professional women who we profiled ten or more years ago. We spoke with Carey Ryan, now Chief of Staff for Citi Technology & Business Enablement at Citi, about her career evolution and the role she plays in powering the future from both a technological and cultural perspective.

Nicki: Since we last spoke, where are you now?

Carey: We last spoke for the first time about 10 years ago, which seems like a long time but feels like the blink of an eye. I’ve held a number of roles since then, all within Citi’s Technology & Business Enablement group (though the name has changed a few times).

Now, I am the Chief of Staff for Citi Technology & Business Enablement. This entails working across both our technology organization and the wider bank to ensure we are effectively communicating and implementing new technologies, both with the goal of strengthening how we work and streamlining the time it takes to get work done.

Nicki: How did you get there?

Carey: In my 20 years at Citi, I have learned the best way to grow is to embrace every opportunity, especially if it allows you to learn more about how a company works. All of the roles I have had have allowed me the opportunity to support key areas of the business, including risk and control, data, and cybersecurity, each of which are vital to ensuring impactful technology can be developed or invested in and scaled to the full firm.

Nicki: Can you share a little about your current work?

Carey: Lately, much of my focus has been driving adoption and awareness for our Citi AI tools, helping us find the best places to practically and responsibly implement AI. This work includes leading our AI Champion and Accelerator programs, which are made up of approximately 4,000 volunteers around the firm who dedicate hours each week to serve as Citi AI advocates.

I also spend a lot of time working with our technology communication teams, each of whom covers a specific but global vertical within the larger technology business. No communication initiative is turnkey, and we always work to find new ways to impactfully reach colleagues with the information they need, be it in-person mediums like executive town halls or roundtable discussions, or through digital channels like email or lobby signage. Technology is the largest organization within Citi, so it’s key to focus on communication to enable change and drive execution while strengthening our culture.

Nicki: Have there been any unexpected or interesting twists in your career trajectory?

Carey: I have always worked in or adjacent to the technology space so, even before I recognized it, I was always headed for a career in enabling companies to leverage new technology to strengthen how they operated. That said, the world looks measurably different than it did when I entered the workforce, and Citi is no different. Some of these changes came quickly, such as the introduction and integration of AI, that has demanded the need to quickly shift priorities without much advance warning.

Nicki: Have any of them taught you a valuable lesson?

Carey: Citi is a large company, so I have had the opportunity to work on many projects with many people. Given this, the two key lessons I would share that always keep in mind is to always remember the end goal of every project and to stay flexible.

Nicki: What inspires you to be a leader and your leadership style?

Carey: My favorite part of my role is collaborating with dedicated and passionate colleagues. Whether it be the implementation of cutting-edge software, the voluntary work of a small team creating new patented technology tool, or an analyst successfully completing their first rotation with the bank – it is the passionate, innovative and solution-focused people that inspire me each day.

As I have risen in my career, I strive to be a good mentor and reliable leader for all members of my team, regardless of level. I’ve been lucky to have had several mentors whose advice I still hold on to, and it’s important to pay it forward. I also can’t help but think of my teenage daughter, I want to set a positive example for her as well as for my teams of what is possible in their careers and how leaders should treat their employees. An example that, hopefully, they will one day share with their own teams and mentees.

Nicki: Since we last spoke, can you share any challenging moments, setbacks, or self-doubt you’ve experienced as well as how you have navigated them?

Carey: I’m not sure I can pinpoint just one moment, but every new challenge I am presented with comes with a bit of imposter syndrome when I do not immediately have all the answers. Almost everyday features at least one conversation about something that where either I’m not the expert or the topic is completely new to me. It can be hard to ask questions when you think everyone except you has the answer, but the ability to step out of your comfort zone and know that you add value is a skill that will never go out of style. Self-doubt is something everyone faces, and the unknown is allowed to be scary. The key is being confident in your own ability to learn and adapt to problem-solve when navigating an unfamiliar situation.

Nicki: What skills do you think will matter most for future leaders?

Carey: When I was younger, I always assumed the fear and anxiety I felt about the unknown would go away. That one day I’d wake up and know everything there was to know about my job. But you quickly figure you’ll never know it all, because the world is always changing. Instead, I found the key is to always be ready by learning how to operate effectively with uncertainty and always be willing to learn.

Future leaders must be willing to be agile and adaptive, especially as the pace of change in the world continues to increase. AI is a great example of this. It is an unavoidable technology, and we should be willing to integrate it into how we work.

Nicki: Can you share an invaluable, specific piece of guidance a mentor or someone you admire has imparted on you?

Carey: I’ve had a number of tremendous mentors over the years. What I admired most in all of them was not any guidance they offered me, but the way they all led through their actions. Each of them led with kindness and empathy, listened carefully and accepted all forms of feedback, and were more than willing to change course if something was not working.

Nicki: Has coaching supported you in your journey, and if so, how?

Carey: Yes, I’ve been very fortunate to have had several coaches throughout my career. Coaches who were mentors, coaches whose job it was to support me, and coaches who were my peers. Career coaching offers an objective view of your decision-making. This often leads to introspective reflection on ways you can reframe your thinking, which is invaluable.

We can all sometimes be so goal-oriented, but it’s critical to take a step back and reflect on if we are taking the right steps to reach these goals. I often find myself going into my coaching session with one idea of what we will talk about and coming out with an entirely new perspective. Sometimes, the external guidance that a career coach offers is what one truly needs to help unlock those ‘aha’ moments.

Nicki: We are excited to see what you do next at Citi; we wish you continued success!

The post Powering the Future: Carey Ryan, Chief of Staff for Citi Technology & Business Enablement, Citi appeared first on The Glasshammer.

Most senior women we speak to have done the work. The MBA, the stretch assignments, the careful navigation of rooms where they were the only woman at the table. They have developed sharp strategic instincts, learned to read organizational dynamics, and built reputations on delivering results.

But even with all that experience, there can be a moment where a promotion goes sideways, a team isn’t performing, or a stakeholder relationship never quite clicks. Where the question stops being what do I need to know and becomes what do I need to understand about myself?

That is where coaches who are skilled and qualified in psychometric assessments can be particularly useful as there is value in triangulating this data as a third piece to add to “you, according to you” and formal or informal feedback from others.

Why Self-Awareness Is a Strategic Necessity, Not a Soft Skill

Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, whose research involved studies with nearly 5,000 participants, found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only about 10 to 15% actually meet the criteria when objectively assessed. In leadership, that gap has direct consequences for the people you lead and the outcomes you are responsible for.

For women in senior roles, the stakes are compounded. Catalyst’s well-documented research on the double bind describes a dynamic many readers will recognize: behaviors that read as confident and decisive in a male colleague are routinely perceived as aggressive or abrasive in a woman, while collaborative and approachable behaviors can be coded as lacking authority. The margin for misreading your own impact and for having your intentions misread by others is narrower.

Self-awareness, in this context, is political and strategic intelligence and creates an opening for situational awareness. Understanding how your behavioral tendencies are landing, and to learn to watch if there is a gap between “your intent and your impact” is the growth work in coaching. What you default to under pressure is integral to separating leaders who plateau from those who keep growing.

The good news is that this is not guesswork. At Evolved People Coaching, the four tools we use most often each answer a different question and we work with you to identify which one is the right fit for where you are right now.

Four Questions Every Leader Needs to Answer:

1. How do I naturally behave — and how is that landing in different situations with different people?

Tool: DISC Assessment

DISC maps your behavioral tendencies across four dimensions: Dominance (how you respond to challenges), Influence (how you engage with people), Steadiness (how you respond to pace and change), and Conscientiousness (how you approach detail and process). It is not a measure of intelligence or potential; it is a map of your default operating style.

What makes DISC particularly powerful is what it reveals about the distance between how you experience yourself and how others experience you. Consider a senior leader who describes herself as direct, efficient, and results-focused. Her DISC profile confirms a high Dominance pattern. Her feedback tells a different story: her team finds her unapproachable, and two high performers have quietly started looking elsewhere because they feel that their leader cannot hear their ideas and it is not worth it to bring up risks. She isn’t doing anything wrong by her own logic, but without understanding how her style lands with others and adjusting accordingly, she creates an impact she never intended.

This is the gap DISC is designed to close. Not by changing who you are, but by making your behavioral defaults visible so you can choose when to lean in and when to flex.

2. Is my team actually working — or just coexisting?

Tool: Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team

Individual self-awareness will only take you so far if the team around you isn’t functioning. The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team, based on Patrick Lencioni’s widely used model, assesses team health across five dimensions: trust, productive conflict, commitment, accountability, and results orientation.

The tool operates at two levels. For intact teams, every member completes and debriefs the assessment together. What typically surfaces is a shared picture of where the team is genuinely cohesive and where it is performing a version of cohesion that is actually conflict avoidance or surface-level commitment masking real misalignment. For leaders who have inherited a team, are navigating a restructure, or aren’t getting the performance they expect from talented people, this version provides data where there was previously only intuition.

For individuals, a separate assessment helps you understand how you personally show up as a teammate regardless of whether your whole team is participating. This is valuable for leaders stepping into a new environment, those who have received feedback about their collaborative style, or anyone who wants to be more intentional about their contribution to team dynamics. Rather than waiting for the whole team to be ready, this version puts the insight in your hands immediately.

3. How am I actually landing with the people around me?

Tool: Qualitative 360 Assessment

A qualitative 360 goes directly to the source: the colleagues, direct reports, peers, and senior leaders are all stakeholders who experience your leadership every day. Conducted through structured confidential interviews rather than numerical ratings, it surfaces the specific behaviors that are building your reputation and the ones quietly working against you — patterns that no behavioral profile can predict, because they are grounded in the specific context of your organization and your relationships. There is huge psychological safety for the feedback givers because the data collected is anonymized and themed by topic so no comments can be attributed to anyone.

Used well, a qualitative 360 is not an appraisal. It is a rare opportunity to hear, in a safe environment, what people genuinely think and what they wish they could tell you directly. Given the depth of work involved, this is an assessment we typically offer as part of organizational engagements, but for the right leader at the right moment, it is one of the most powerful development investments available.

4. How can I change the behaviors that are hindering my highest potential?

Tool: Immunity to Change Mapping

The Immunity to Change Map process is a tool to uncover any hidden constructs in your subconscious mind that might be covert to you and therefore stopping you from doing the things you need to do to achieve your goals (that are overtly set in a goal setting exercise).

Nicki Gilmour, Founder of Evolved People coaching and theglasshammer.com states,

“Truly, this map is so useful early on in any work with our clients because it skillfully surfaces any or sometimes many implicit constructs that form a type of operating system or deep structure that left untouched, would result in most people wondering why they cannot do the day to day behaviors that would easily enable them to achieve their goal. This applies to any area of change, from working out to delegating work, to speaking up at meetings and even changing careers.”

Finding the Right Starting Point

These four tools address different levels of leadership insight: your default style, your team dynamics, your hidden limiting beliefs, and your real-world impact on the people around you. For most leaders, one will be the clear priority based on where you are in your career, what feedback you have received, or what challenge is most pressing. Our role is to help you identify which one that is, and to make sure the debrief and coaching that follows translates the data into something genuinely useful.

For organizations, our team development workshops use DISC, The Five Behaviors, and even Immunity to Change at a group level for leaders to build the shared visibility and common language that turns a group of talented individuals into a genuinely high-performing team.

The leaders who invest in this work consistently tell us the same thing: they wish they had done it sooner.

If you are ready to close the gap between the leader you are and the leader you intend to be, we would love to talk. Visit evolvedpeoplecoaching.com to explore our coaching programs and team development workshops, or get in touch directly to discuss which assessment is the right starting point for you.

The post Beyond the Performance Review: The Assessments That Build Self-Aware Leaders appeared first on The Glasshammer.

“Being with my clients, helping them to get deals done, building new relationships is what breathes life into me and gets me excited.”

Ask Christina Bresani, Wells Fargo’s head of Mid-Cap Investment Banking, about a recent client visit and she’ll tell you about climbing into the cab of a semi-truck in high heels and passing a driving simulator test to show her client that she understood their business. That story captures everything about how she approaches her work: with genuine curiosity, a willingness to go wherever the client takes her, and an infectious enthusiasm that has sustained nearly three decades in investment banking.

After 25+ years as an M&A banker at two previous firms, Bresani joined Wells Fargo in 2024 as head of Mid-Cap M&A within the firm’s Global M&A business. In November 2025, she took on the expanded role of leading the firm’s Mid-Cap Investment Banking Practice focused on serving mid-cap clients and delivering investment banking products and services to the bank’s Commercial Banking clients. It’s a dual mandate she wears proudly, and one that plays an important role in Wells Fargo’s Corporate & Investment Banking growth strategy.

“When you love what you do, it’s easy to put your head down and keep doing it,” says Bresani. “But what I saw in Wells Fargo was a new challenge to do what I love and help build a leading corporate and investment bank that can bank companies along the whole spectrum of their growth – from mid-cap to large-cap and beyond.”

Building Something That Lasts

The challenge of building out and developing the Mid-Cap Investment Banking team is one that Bresani finds genuinely energizing. “Creating a strategy, building a team that’s going to be successful in the near term and the long term, is really inspiring to me right now,” she says. “That’s hiring people. It’s getting the strategy right. It’s keeping people motivated because when you are building something, it’s not always a straight line.”

She notes that the foundation of any great team comes down to one word: trust.

“The goal is to build a team with a talented group of people who have the same values and want to lock arms to be successful together. It’s not only about individual success, it’s about elevating the entire team and constantly learning from our collective successes and failures,” she says. “This has always been important to me as a leader and it’s central to Wells Fargo’s culture.”

A Career That Kept Saying Yes

Bresani started out as an analyst, fully expecting to spend two or three years in banking before figuring out what she really wanted to do. Nearly three decades later, she’s still there — and still surprised by it. “Every year I would say, ‘wow, I want to do this, I want to learn this, I want to get better at this,’” she says. “And I just kept going.”

She credits a great deal of that staying power to the mentors who showed up early and stayed. “I was really lucky in my early days to have two amazing mentors: both men. That’s important for young women in the industry to know – you don’t have to only have female mentors.” Those relationships, she says, were as much personal as professional. ” They were ‘work dads’ in the sense that they really guided me and cared about my professional and personal growth. To form those kinds of relationships really makes a difference in this business which can sometimes be tough”

The Moment That Tests You

When asked about setbacks, Bresani reflects on one of the most universal and quietly defining moments in a banker’s career: the first time a client pushes back hard.

“There is always a point in your career where a client doesn’t like you or doesn’t like the advice you’re giving,” she says. “The first time that happens, it’s really hard not to take it personally.”

Just recently, she watched a director on her team navigate exactly that situation. Rather than letting it become a crisis of confidence, Bresani chose to reframe it. “I told him: this is your pivotal moment. Here’s how we help you pick yourself up. Here’s your opportunity to really do your job.” She recalls her own version of that moment as a first-year director, when a mentor stepped in, defended her and then told her precisely what she needed to do better. “You have to learn that not everyone is going to agree with what you say, and you have to have a thick skin. But ultimately, this is a client service business. Not every client is the same, and you have to adjust.”

Fueling the Long Game

How does someone sustain nearly 30 years at that pace without burning out? Bresani takes it one day at a time and deliberately so. “It’s easy in this job to get overwhelmed with everything that has to be done,” she says. “I’m very focused on what needs to get done today, what can wait until tomorrow, and making sure I am prioritizing what is important versus being driven by what is urgent.”

But the off switch matters just as much.

“I have three children, an amazing husband, a menagerie of animals, and I am committed to exercise even if it means a 4.30am workout. I find a way to exercise because I need it. Whatever it is, it’s important to find those things outside of work that make you happy and fill your energy cup.”

Another factor to staying happy and healthy she attributes to friendship, a group forged at an all-women’s college that has stayed tightly bound across careers and time zones. “We have a text chain,” she says, laughing. “We build each other up. We laugh and say, ‘You will never believe what happened today,” She pauses, then finds exactly the right phrase for it: “It’s a group hug via text.”

Still Having Fun

When Bresani’s kids ask her about her day, they don’t want the deal mechanics. They want to hear about the people. “I come home and my kids say, ‘Mom, tell me about the people you met today,’” she says. “I meet the most interesting people.” That, more than any title or transaction, seems to be the through-line of her career. She still operates by a simple rule she set for herself long ago: “I’ll stop doing it when it’s not fun anymore. It’s still really fun.”

By Nicki Gilmour, Founder and CEO of theglasshammer.com and Evolved People Coaching.

The post Christina Bresani: Head of Mid-Cap Investment Banking, Wells Fargo Corporate & Investment Banking appeared first on The Glasshammer.