Women in Leadership Roles: Landing on Your Feet
We caught up with three women in leadership roles, to discuss their success in business.
Amina Kamal
Senior Partner, St. James’s Place Partnership
Amina has carved a very successful career in a notoriously tough and male dominated industry. She has been advising clients about what to do with their money for over 26 years and is now using her knowledge and experience to mentor young female professionals in the company.
“My role is to act as a sounding board, someone to bounce ideas off and be open but not judgmental”
But her life hasn’t been easy, in fact it has been turbulent, with a major decision having to be made early on in her life which luckily landed her on her feet.
“Originally I wanted to pursue a career in medicine, but due to being thrown a curve ball prior to starting at University I was forced to rethink what I wanted to do. Consequently, my sense of duty to support my family at a young age meant I had to give up on my academic path, change direction and go out and find a job. I fell into an internship at Lloyds Bank International and took to it like a duck to water.
Following my internship I continued in the financial services world, working from the bottom up. This opportunity opened up a world of possibility and although I had a gift for numbers I recognised that to succeed I had to develop a radically different approach to advising my clients and learnt to work in a different way from my male counterparts. This meant I was able to differentiate my service, and stand out in the industry, by looking at every aspect of my client’s financial lives before giving them advice."
"You can’t know everything. I am constantly learning and re-learning.”
Tory Frame
Partner, Bain & Company
One piece of advice which helped Tory realise that all she had to do to achieve something was focus and put in the hours, came from her mother. Once when she took her shopping, her mother proclaimed: “My, you have expensive tastes. You’ll have to work very hard to afford any of it.”
Tory is now a partner with a global business consulting firm and she holds an MBA with distinction from Harvard business school. She also has a degree in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University, where she was secretary of the Union and manager of the university newspaper ‘Cherwell’.
Helen Kelisky
VP GB Sales, Systems & Technology Group Northern Europe IBM
Helen’s ethos which she lives by, is a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent’.
Helen has an important and successful leadership role at technology firm IBM UK and what sets her apart is that she loves making business fun and exciting for the people around her. This is achieved by using considerable doses of humour when needed.
“I have a desire to take on new exciting things, sometimes scary, in order to keep learning, and get a thrill when I’m successful at encouraging others to do the same”.