Transcript:
Kiran: Hi, my name is Kiran Bishop. I'm 17 years old, and I became interested in finance during my freshman year of high school. As I became part of financial clubs, I realized that a great deal of the time, I was one of, if not the only girl in the room. This feeling of being disconnected from everyone around me while simultaneously being in a room full of people is what inspired me to create this podcast, Woman Who Earn.
I created this podcast to help young girls like me gain knowledge and wisdom from industry professionals on topics ranging from how to break into finance to how to deal with unique challenges posed by being a woman in the industry. It is important for me, and I hope that it is also important for you, that feeling alienated by a situation out of your control does not inhibit your motivation to pursue whatever you want.
This is Women Who Earn.
On today's episode, I'm joined by Ms.Scher, who is the Chair of the Global Financing Group within Global Banking and Markets at Goldman Sachs. She serves on the Partnership Committee, Investment Banking Executive Committee, and the Global Inclusion and Diversity Committee.
Susie is a global sponsor of the LGBTQ+ network and a senior advisor to the Investment Banking Council for Advancement of Racial Equity. Previously, she was co-head of the Global Financing Group. Before that, she was co-head of the Americas Financing Group. Earlier in her career, she served as Head of Investment Grade Capital Markets and Risk Management in the Americas Financing Group.
Ms. Scher first joined Goldman Sachs in 1990 as a summer associate and rejoined the firm as a vice president in 1997. She was named Managing Director in 2001 and Partner in 2006. She's a trustee of Little Red Schoolhouse and Elizabeth Irwin High School. She serves on the board of directors of the Posse Foundation and the board of trustees at Middlebury College.
She earned a BA in political science from Middlebury College and an MBA in finance from Columbia University School of Business.
Thank you so much for joining me today. I think we can just start with my first question, which is, how did you get to where you are today?
Susie: Wow, I could spend half an hour answering that question, but I'll try to be concise and then we can move on to other questions.
So I had no idea what I wanted to be or what I wanted to do in my career, and when I was in college at Middlebury, you didn't have to be quite as organized as you do today. So, I had just started my senior year exploring job opportunities, and one of the areas I ended up becoming interested in was investment banking. I don't think I even understood what investment banking was at that point in time.
It's just that it seemed like a really dynamic industry. It seemed like the people in it were smart, hardworking, and fun to be around. And so, I set my sights on working in investment banking. And from there, I got my first job at a firm called Solomon Brothers, right out of college. I spent three years at Solomon and then decided I wanted to further invest in my sort of business and finance education. So I went to Columbia Business School, and it was there that I figured out what parts of the business were most interesting to me. And we can dig into that and talk about it a little bit. But the thing that most interested me was working with companies.
And I still do that today. Companies, big and small, are helping them achieve their business and financial objectives. And then, importantly, I also work in the markets. I really liked the way things that happened in the world affected me. Things that happened in the markets, whether that's the equity market or interest rates.
And so I built a career in something that we call capital markets, and we can drill into that further. I went from undergrad at Middlebury College Analyst at Solomon Brothers to longtime partner and business head at Goldman Sachs.
Kiran: Thank you. That was very comprehensive. So having started as a summer associate in 1990 and progressing through various roles to becoming a partner in 2006, can you reflect on some of the key skills or attributes that have been instrumental in your career advancement?
Susie: Sure. I think the two characteristics you need to have to succeed in investment banking or really in any business are hard work and intelligence, maybe in that order. Okay. And so those are the very straightforward aspects of what can cause you to move over time at a place like Goldman Sachs.
But the other thing that I'd say is really, really important, and sometimes maybe doesn't get that much attention is high EQ. My job is to understand the markets and to help companies raise financing in the equity and debt markets, but those companies are just humans and they're my clients and understand who they are as humans and know what they may need and how they think and how they might react to us and our ideas is an incredibly important part of my job.
The other aspect of EQ or connection or sort of this personal aspect of the business is working at Goldman; even though Goldman is known as a star firm, we are not a star system. We are a collaborative system, and working with my partners and my colleagues, from our most junior colleagues right out of undergrad to people who run big businesses to my bosses, the CEO and president of Goldman.
Understanding how to work together and drive towards a goal for our clients is every bit as important as that starting point, working really, really hard and being smart and understanding what it is we do in the markets.
Kiran: Do you think having good EQ is something that you came out of undergrad understanding, or was it really an attribute that you learned along the way?
Susie: So I didn't understand that I had it and I didn't understand that it was necessary for business. In fact, I just thought I'd need to be good at math, understand the markets, and understand complex concepts. But over time and looking back, I've come to understand how important EQ is, and looking back through my life, I think all of my success has actually been attributed to EQ in conjunction with the IQ and hard workpiece. I think it has not only made me successful at what I do but also chosen to do things where EQ is an important part of success, right? Not that you don't need EQ to be an engineer, but being an engineer is very IQ and technical and math-heavy.
I didn't choose to go into a profession where EQ wasn't the most important thing. Some people might argue with me that it's not the most important thing, but for my success, it's really been the fuel to my success over time.
Kiran: Yeah. Thank you. Do you have any tips on how to form or maintain lasting connections or build up good relationships with your clients or with other people who you're working and collaborating with?
Susie: So I'm going to use an analogy. And I'm actually guilty of this too. So a lot of times when you meet somebody, and you hear their name, and you say your name, you then forget their name because you're so focused on your own name. The analogy and the tip in EQ are understanding when you're working in business; you're focused on whether you’re doing a good job and success and whether your content is good, and the most basic is my spreadsheet, correct? And is the model correct? And do I know how to do the job of the job?
So the tip would be to hear the other person's name, meaning to see the other person, whether that's your colleague that you're working with or your boss or somebody who works for you, or very importantly, your client and understand where that person is, where are they if possible, even in their life what might they be dealing with? And also, what makes them tick? What are their goals and aspirations? So the tip would be: Don't forget the soft stuff, even though to succeed, you've got to have the hard stuff. You've got to have the modeling skills. You've got to understand finance. You have to work your butt off. You have to be intense and driven and all those things in trying to succeed, but you can't do that at the cost of prioritizing the human connection and the human relationships. The goal might be to win the piece of business, give the best advice, and execute the financing, but the human connection underpins it all.
Kiran: Right. So make sure you remember the other person's name, but not at the expense of knowing your own.
Susie: Yeah. That's a great way to put it. I love it.
Kiran: Well, thank you. You're currently the chair of the global financing group. And I was just wondering what aspects of your role you find most rewarding and or challenging.
Susie: Yeah. So, at this point in my career, Because of what I'm doing day to day is working a lot with founder-led companies, either private companies or, recently, public companies.
And just working with those companies in general is really rewarding because, not that it's not fun to work with very, very big companies like the apples and the Procter and Gamble's and the Pfizer's of the world, that's rewarding too., But there's something really unique about working with founder-led companies because what you're doing is you're helping people with their baby, their brainchild, their passion.
And so in my current role, I'm just loving that, like tonight, I'm having a drink with one of my CEOs who, a company that we took public a couple of years ago, and I just love spending time with her and talking about how she's taken the business from an idea to now a relatively large public company. So that's a really rewarding part of my job. The other thing is, I've always loved being an expert. That's one of the reasons that's an itch that this job scratches. And when I started out in the business, the difference between your average human and the experts, that gap was huge, right?
Because there was no internet. All you had was the, if you weren't an investment banker and you didn't work on Wall Street, all you had was the Wall Street Journal, and maybe you've got the financial times. And if you worked in the business, you had access to other things like Quotron or Bloomberg.
So you were like a super expert. Now we have the internet, we have CNBC, and we have podcasts, but even so, I'm still more of an expert than most, and so I love it. Talking to people and helping them think through one, the art of the possible, like what they might be able to do to achieve, I need to raise capital, can I do it? How much can I raise? What should the timing be? I also love interpreting what's going on in the world and how that might impact the markets and, therefore, companies, either financing needs or business plans. And so, this period of time, I guess all pairs of time seem complex and fraught. There's a lot to talk about, but today, there's so much to interpret, right? We're now a couple of years out of the pandemic and this period of incredible equity and capital, the market created really by the government and the Fed to save the world from the pandemic economically and then backfired because the economy got overheated and interest rates were too low.
Well, then we went in the other direction and the Fed raised interest rates to try to slow down the economy and bring down inflation. And everybody last year predicted a hard landing, or, most people meant, a recession or a very high probability of recession, but that didn't happen. In fact, not only did it happen, but it seems like we're in a much better place than we thought we'd be from an economic perspective.
Interest rates are starting to come down and the equity market is very strong, but, there are a lot of buts, Russia, Ukraine, the war between Israel and Hamas, what's going on in the Middle East, China always out there, and then an election year, and a very complicated one at that.
So, you ask the question, what's fun or cool or interesting about my job right now? That's what I do every day, all day I listen, and I learn, and I read, and I talk to my colleagues, and I scan the world. And then, I try to interpret that and help my clients. I don't predict, I don't have a crystal ball.
That would be dangerous, but I help my clients navigate the markets and think about what might transpire and how they can set themselves up to succeed, whether all of the good things play out or all of the bad things play out. That's my job. It's really fun and interesting.
Kiran: Thank you. You've been involved in various leadership roles with Goldman Sachs, such as being co-head of different groups and now chairing the global financial group. How has your leadership style evolved over the course of your career?
Susie: Well, that's a very good question because although I think I had an innate leadership style, when I was younger, my leadership style was, I would say, leading with aggression more than calm relaxation. One of the reasons you can succeed in this business is because you're confident and you're driven.
And, the word that keeps coming to mind is bossy and in charge. I hate that word. But that was my early leadership style, this way of not asking people to do things, but telling them what to do. That is not a good leadership style to use to rise up in an organization, to manage large groups of people, to bring them along, to raise the next generation, and to find your successor.
And maybe it's just the difference between being in my 20s and my 30s and now in my 50s and being able to feel more relaxed. But I think I'm a much more relaxed and calm leader than I was 20 years ago. I don't let my anxiety get the best of me. And, I've always been collaborative.
I wasn't running around yelling at people. I was sometimes maybe less patient than I could have been, and in the last, let's call it, in my last few jobs in the last decade, I'd like to think I've become the kinder, gentler version of myself, and I think I like this version.
Kiran: Yeah. And do you have any general tips for leading groups of people?
Susie: One of the things we do, when we get a new job and a promotion, is this concept of the boss or the head or the manager or the leader and even our understanding of what a leader looks like, it seems like on TV or in books. I mean, it's kind of like when you ask kids, What does God look like?
Right? God is an old white man with a beard, right? Or you could say your God is Jesus, but in this country, in the U S, what does a leader look like? We grew up, especially my generation, and a leader looked like the president of the United States, the CEO of a company. And no offense to straight white men, some of my best friends are, and I have a couple of sons who are, but first of all, I think people, younger people, should find role models and see themselves as future leaders. And listen, we've now had a black president. One day, hopefully, we will have a female president. So, number one is to find your role models in all different sorts of leaders. That's number one, but number two, think of leading. I don't want to be as squishy as to say, like a lead from behind. I mean, sometimes you have to lead from the front.
But leading means developing the next generation of talent and helping people achieve, their goals and get to the highest level they can. And so some of the things I'm most proud of, in fact, the thing I'm most proud of at Goldman Sachs, is not like the deals I've done or the companies I've helped, although that's been very fun, it's the people I've brought up behind me and below me.
Some of those people are people in their late thirties and early forties who I've worked with since they were 21, 22, and 23 years old. That's leadership, helping those people get from the day they walked into the door for the first jobs to, and some of them now have jobs that I had. And I love that. That's been really, really important to me.
Kiran: Thank you. As a leader, how do you prioritize work-life balance, and what would you give to other people who are aspiring to achieve the same sort of success in both their personal and professional lives?
Susie: So there's one thing I always think about when I think about work-life balance, and that's a little bit of an old concept, especially in a world where we have mobile devices, the ability to log in remotely, and some people don't like that, that work and home have blended. I love that because it's given me the ability to be everything I want to be at work, but also take care of myself and be a parent to my four children.
A perfect example is, I'm home now because I knew we had this podcast, and I was in the office in the morning, and I told you already that I'm meeting a client for drinks later, but in between, I'm taking my 11-year-old to an orthodontist appointment and I'm going to my 14 year old's high school basketball game to watch her. Actually, it's a perfect example of work-life balance: the game's an hour, and the client wants to move drinks earlier, so I'm going to go to 45 minutes of the game. And so the way I have thought about work-life balance is, and I've always done this even pre-mobile device and log in remotely, is it's got to be seamless, and you have to sometimes be willing to make tradeoffs, and you have to have hard and fast rules.
So, for example, one of my hard and fast rules is I never miss a birthday, a kid's birthday. I'll miss my own birthday. I just don't, I won't. And if something comes up, and it's on one of my kid's birthdays, I try to move it or avoid it or get somebody else to go because that's important to me. That's sad.
I certainly miss a lot of things because sometimes you need to work and not be present at home. And so, I do think about these things a lot. One other thing, and this is actually the thing that, for some reason, popped into my mind. Often, when we talk about work-life balance, we discuss it with women.
We don't discuss it with men. And although in today's modern work environment, men care as much about balance as most of them do, and about seeing their children or their families. And the other thing is we don't talk about ourselves. We talk about work-life balance, so it's a women's thing, and it's about families.
So my 21-year-old, when she was by Mitzvahed, so this was a long time ago when she was 12, her parashah, her Torah portion that she read was about taking care of yourself so that you can take care of others. And in her little sermon that she wrote, she talked about finally understanding why when you're on an airplane and they say if the oxygen mask job drop, put your mask on.
Before you put on others, another mass, right? Because if you pass out, you can't put your kid's mask on. And so that self-health concept of taking care of yourself, these are all things you could find a million podcasts on now, right? Get enough sleep, get enough exercise, eat well.
That is as much an important part of work-life balance as balancing family and office. And so I know that sounds like a lot because you're going to work, you're going to take care of yourself, you're going to take care of your family, but like you're going to be the best employee if you make time for yourself.
Kiran: Thank you. Your commitment to diversity is evident through your role as the global sponsor of the LGBTQ+ network and participation in the global inclusion and diversity committee. What initiatives or strategies have you found particularly effective in fostering diversity and inclusion within Goldman Sachs and, more broadly, the financial sector?
Susie: Yeah, I mean, listen, we've been at this for a long time, and I've been at this for a long time, and if I think about when I graduated from college in 1986, the workforce on Wall Street was almost completely nondiverse. It was almost all male and it was almost all white. And actually, if you look at it, if you want to and you didn't ask this question, I'm going to answer it.
If you think about the business case for diversity, and you look at the market cap of the big banks, the big investment banks, and you look at how diverse they are today in every sense of the world, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation; we're way bigger. We're way more profitable. And that's because of diversity. What's been successful, in addition to, in a merit-based way, hiring the best people for the job and including a diversity lens as we hire the best people for the job, is also just giving folks that maybe don't or didn't fit into the mainstream, and what the mainstream is really evolving and if you came and walked around Goldman Sachs it might not even be that obvious what the mainstream is, but, certainly over the years, giving people who weren't mainstream support whether that's mentoring or sponsorship.
A lot of not just Wall Street, but business in general was an all-boys club, and if you didn't get the inside baseball, now I'm using a sports analogy, but that's all I can think of. If you didn't get the inside baseball, if you didn't get, I don't want to call it like the secret rules; it's just the unwritten rules, so it was hard to succeed. We over time, I have made sure that everybody gets those unwritten rules, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it's much easier to get the secret sauce of how to succeed when there are people with whom you can connect. So, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the more diverse we are, the more we connect with each other, and the more younger people coming in and coming up with the organization are comfortable having the conversations you need to have to succeed.
And the other thing is just looking up and seeing people who look like you, that makes a big difference. And so, over time, it's been quite programmatic, whether those are programs around mentoring programs or sponsorship or recruiting to attract talent to the business who might not otherwise think that they want to work in the business, right?
Because it used to be that women didn't even think of finance as a career. And I think a lot of those things are working, and we will continue at it, and we will continue to evolve so that Wall Street or Goldman Sachs or business looks like the rest of the world. And back to the market cap comment, we'll be more successful for it. The more diverse we are, the more successful we will be.
Kiran: Thank you. And my final question is, what's the best advice you've ever received? How has it impacted you? And do you have any advice for girls who are interested in pursuing what you do or getting into finance, for exploring their interests?
Susie: Yeah. I've been at this for so long, and I've received so much good advice. But I guess the best advice I've ever received consistently over time is to get and give real feedback. So we're nice people in general. And when people ask us what we could do better, We tend to give kind of light answers cause we don't want to hurt people's feelings.
Nobody's perfect. And the better feedback you can get on how you're doing and what you can be doing better, the better you'll get. So, if you're a leader or a manager, don't be afraid to give it, but importantly, don't be afraid to ask for it, and don't be afraid to push people to think about what you could be doing better.
So when you go to your boss and you're like, Hey, what can I be doing better? And your boss is like, all good. You're doing great. You're doing a great job. Well, that feels amazing. Maybe you are, but maybe you go to your boss right after a meeting and say, is there one thing in that meeting I could have done differently or I could have done better that would have made it an even better meeting?
And so, with that feedback, we get stronger. And I guess that's really the best advice that I've gotten over the years.
Kiran: Thank you. And thank you so much for taking time out of your day to do this with me.
Susie: Great questions! It was really fun. Thank you.
Kiran: Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of Women Who Earn. I hope to see you next time.
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