Whenever someone asks for help, it’s important to give people your time to help them. You may not realize it, but aside from that person getting something out of it, you are also actually getting something because it is a shared experience. Today’s show features an interview with Erin Linehan, the SVP - Head of Global Functions Compliance at Raymond James. During this interview, Amy Vetter and Erin discuss Erin's journey in the legal profession and the lack of women she had to look up to along the way. This drove her to create a network of women leaders to help break down barriers and open up more opportunities for women.

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Don't Be Alone In The Elevator: Take Time To Network With Erin Linehan

Welcome to this episode of Breaking Beliefs, where I interview Erin Linehan. She is the Senior Vice President and Head of Global Functions Compliance at Raymond James. She’s a frequent speaker at company and industry events, domestically and abroad. She’s the National Co-Chair for Raymond James Women’s Inclusion Network and sits on the RJ Compliance D&I Committee. Erin has received her BS from Cornell and JD, cum laude from Tulane and also holds the Series 7, 9 and 10 licenses. She serves in the following professional capacities as a member of SIFMA’s Senior Investor Working Group, FINRA and SEC’s Senior Investor Roundtable, the Board for the FSDA and the Executive Committee of the Pace Center for Girls, Inc.

She founded and led Southeastern Women in Financial Services, which fosters networking, professional development, the advancement of women in financial services and philanthropic efforts to support financial education, professional development and economic security for women through community partnerships, education and advocacy. During our discussion, Erin shares her journey from how she started in law and the lack of women that she saw as she went up her career journey. This drove her to create a network of women leaders to help breakdown barriers and open up more opportunities for women.

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Erin, I'm glad that you could be with me on this episode. I would love to start from the beginning. You're accomplished and involved, but we always like to know how you got to where you are. Where did you grow up? What was your background? Give us little beginnings of Erin.

I grew up on Long Island in a town called Amityville, which most people are familiar with from the movies and the books. I grew up around the corner from the horror house, if that's your next question. I went on to Cornell University after that. After that, I went to law school at Tulane. After I graduated, I moved to the Tampa Bay area and practice with two different big Florida firms for about five years. I went over to Raymond James in 2004. I was a litigator with Raymond James for several years. I stopped litigating in 2017. At that point, I had taken over a team for dispute resolution to handle client complaints. I began building a team to handle the protection of our senior and at-risk clients, which was a new initiative for the firm. I moved over to compliance. Those teams began to be an enterprise function. Those teams began serving the entire enterprise, including abroad. That was fun and is fun. I started building our marketing, compliance and corporate functions groups. I finally came up with the name of Global Functions Compliance. I used to be head of Dispute Resolution Senior and At-Risk clients, Marketing and Corporate Functions Compliance and nobody liked it.

As far as starting out in Long Island, what hobbies did you have as a child? What were your interests? What did you like to do?

I played soccer and I swim. My family swims. I played soccer from a young age. I did that all the way through graduating high school. I was a violinist. I played violin, which unfortunately I did not continue when I graduated high school, but there was a period of time in high school where I believe I should be on a conservatory. I don't think anyone else believed it. I wasn't that good. My parents were like, “You're going to have to take a little bit more seriously if that's the plan.” That was largely what I was focused on back then.

What did your parents do?

They were educators for a long time. My mom was an educator her whole career when she wasn't at home. She wasn't home until I was in second grade. My dad left teaching to become a financial planner. It’s the industry I'm presently in.

Is that how you first got exposed to it?

A little bit, interestingly enough, my sister was in financial services. Her husband is in financial services. My brother's a lawyer also and he does some financial services work. I have a couple of uncles that were in it. Probably it is a piece of who I am, but how I ended up at Raymond James was how a lot of times young lawyers switched jobs is they didn't like their bonus one day and got on what was known at that time as Monster.com. I posted a resume. Five months later, I got a phone call about it. I was no longer upset about my bonus, which when I look back, it was probably $300 different than what I thought I deserved, but it was real money to me.

Five months later, I was in Australia visiting a friend. I was at Sydney Airport coming back. I was checking my messages for the first time. I didn't have cell phones that had international. I wasn't checking emails. The world was different in ‘04. I had four messages from Raymond James that they'd left over the course of the two weeks I was gone. The last one was like, “If you're not interested in the job, you can at least call us.” Within two weeks, I had accepted the job and moving on. It was originally thought to be a 2 or 3-year stint for me. I thought I'd go learn this different unique practice. I'd probably go back into big law or my old boss and I used to say, “Learn this and then we'll open a boutique firm and do this work.” Once a year, we have lunch and he said, “That's sixteen years ago. Are you ever coming back? It's not looking good for you.”

You played the violin and were into it. Thinking you would be a musician. What got you into becoming an attorney in the first place? Where did you start in college going from high school?

I started in college, they called it Natural Resources at Cornell, but it was Environmental Science. I had this image of myself as a Greenpeace warrior. I wasn't necessarily behaving like one. That was who at 17 or 18 years old I thought I should be.

Why did you think that?

I don't care about the environment by all means, but it was probably more of a hobby than what I saw as a career. Cornell has all these amazing and you do a lot of your fieldwork on their property. They have lots of different forests and woods. I'm sitting in some woods and the second day of collecting salamanders and marking them, someone turns to me and they're like, “Erin, what's your plan? What do you want to do?” I was like, “It’s not this. I liked to camp. I like the outdoors, but it's not this.” I signed up for some of the general ed classes at Cornell. I took a business law class.

Who asked you that question?

I don't remember. It wasn't a good friend. It was another student in the class. That was the moment where I was like, “This is not where I see myself. This is not it.” I took a business law class with a professor called Dale Grossman. I still remember her name. I loved the class. I loved her. I immediately asked her to be my advisor. It started at that point. I started focusing on the fact that I thought I'd love law school. I wasn't sure what I would do with it, but I thought that it would be something I'd find interesting. I thought that I was going to be a transactional lawyer.

As a lot of young lawyers do or law students, they envision themselves as being an international transactional business deal person. It seems super sexy, work travel and all that. I ended up working for a firm, quite like the firm. For me, it mattered less what I was going to be doing. I started doing real estate litigation as it was my first job. What I learned when I went to Raymond James and started having a lot of work travel is horrible. That is a young person's aspiration. Other work travel is maybe more interesting, but the work I got is a lot of times in conference rooms and hotel rooms. It’s not a lot of the fun stuff.

You’re isolated. You're flying somewhere else to go work.

There was one period of time where I woke up and had to grab the notepad on the desk because I had no idea where I was. I'd been to different places. I was like, “I'm in Memphis. What am I doing here?”

Did you do any work when you switched over to law school to know that you would like it?

I continued to take law classes at Cornell and became a business major. They called it something at Cornell. I was in the ag school. Cornell has seven different colleges and a couple of them are state-funded. They're called Land Grant. I had started in the Land Grant School because that's where the Natural Resources program was. I stayed in it. My major at the time was called Agricultural Economics. By my senior year, they had changed it to Agricultural Resource Managerial Economics. I went from AgEc to ARME. I never took an agriculture class. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but that's the nature of the school.

Was there a time that you missed playing the violin?

There have been numerous times with that for many years that I've missed it. I tried out for the orchestra in my sophomore year at Cornell. I never went to look to see if I made it. I thought I was horrible at the audition. I didn't even think it was worth it because I hadn't been playing in 1.5 years. I was like, “I'm going to do this because I should do it.” I was like, “That's not even worth a walk back.” My son has asked, “What’s that?” That's my violin. At the beginning of the pandemic, he's like, “Let's take it out.” We took it out. A string had popped and he said, “Can we order a string?” We ordered the string and we still haven't taken the next steps. I'd like to. It's always, “When I find the time or make the time,” everyone could find the time to start taking lessons again. I always fear of picking it up because it will make me sad how much I've lost.

Violin is tough because I had to pick it up a couple of years ago for one of the concerts I was doing. They found out I had played the violin and when you're not practicing violin every day when you're younger. It's not like a guitar where there are frets.

There was this one song that I competed with in high school. I still think to myself, “Could I pick it up with my fingers?” I could play this song by heart. I played it thousands of times. I can still hear it in my head until this day. If I picked it up and couldn't make my fingers work, it would be too hard. I'd rather assume I could, even though that I can't.

That was one thing that I walked away from picking it up again. That's a personal thing that I can't be bad at because it was something that I had put many hours in. I can pick up a new instrument like bass guitar and not give a crap.

I'd love to play the guitar or to get better at the piano. The reading is in the violin. It's personal to me. The fact that I let it go is one of a great loss to me.

Do you listen to classical music?

Not as much as I used to. A friend of mine from the orchestra in high school, she has continued on to become a professional musician. Her type of music she plays, she calls Chamber Soul. I listen to a lot of her music, which is her cello. She sings and it’s a keyboard. Her name is Shana Tucker. You can follow her on social media or otherwise. It’s like the strings music I do listen to like her. I have a lot of admiration for it. It brings me back to a day when we played together for years and years. Whenever she says, “I'm going to come and do a concert down in Tampa, but you have to perform.” I was like, “I need a lot of notice.”

I find that point an interesting pivot point. Going back to that story that you wanted to go to school for music and your parents saying, “If you're going to do that, this is what you have to do.” Why did you make the decision to not work harder at it?

It was a couple of different things. It goes down to the knots, taking the path of natural resources. It was going to be a bigger lifestyle decision, both from when that becomes your job. I was much more competent and passionate about it probably than I was that I'm going to go be a Greenpeace person. I had been playing for a long time. My dad had real concerns about the ability to make real money. The chances of even if you committed in a way that you're not there yet. I was practicing a fair amount, but not for the Juilliard amount. I may be able to make a living as a professional musician. I was sure I wasn't going to be able to.

The power of those words is important because someone could have said the exact opposite thing and you have been like, “Maybe I can.” There's a generational difference. That happened to me. I went into accounting where I was music and art and wanted to go more into the art space. It was the same thing that was said to me, “You won't make as much money.” One of the things that I've been hyper-conscious of as a parent because of that mindset that was in my head. One thing I realized was accounting never came easy to me. It was one of the things that I had to work double as hard as everyone else. It didn't make sense to me. The debits and credits were in opposite directions as far as I could tell.

You phone it in becoming a lawyer and an accountant, it's a different hard work.

If you're not a hard worker or committed, you don't have a career either. That was one thing that I was thinking with my own kids, if you're passionate about something, you'll work hard at it. You can't always worry about the outcome. Even your path it's gone in different pivots of where you thought and you have to allow someone to, could they be passionate enough and work hard enough. If they don’t work hard enough, they're going to learn their lesson.

My son, you do the whole first day of school, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “We want to be a YouTuber.” I was like, “What does that even mean?” He's like, “I'm not sure. It's what people do.” I’m going to support more Xbox time to reach their dreams.

I have heard that there are professional teams on this and coaches.

We're talking about it and I was like, “What do you think goes into being a YouTuber? I’m happy to support it.” “It's what you can hack and do these glitches.” “You probably need to learn how to code. Let's think about getting you a coding class.”

I went through the same decision process with music because I was in an orchestra for the city. I had two things happen, one, I played violin and I would audition for this symphony here. The conductor hated me. He’d make these eyes. He didn't like me. One year we were at the symphony and watching the Cincinnati Symphony. We were sitting there and my mom turned to me and said, “What about the viola?” I'm like, “No, I don't feel like I can play the violin.” She's like, “What about it though?” I'm thinking about it through the whole concert. I'm like, “I'd be a good viola player.” I tried out with the viola the next year and got in. He was like, “That's your instrument?” I was like, “Shoot.” I got the goal of getting in. With that symphony, one concert a year, you would play with the professional orchestra. Stan Mate was from the orchestra and so forth. I remember my junior year looking around going, “This would be my office.” It’s not a hobby anymore when your hobby becomes work. That's a decision of where you want your hobbies to be and where you want your work to be.

Through the different organizations I'm involved with, I have meetings with people who run nonprofits and do all this amazing work. I was like, “What an amazing job that is.” They're doing such great work. At the end of the day, work is still going to be work. I'm sure they have crappy days like I do.

Let's get into that a little bit. You have a lot of outside organizations that you work with and volunteer internally. What has started that passion, especially around women since many of these organizations are women organizations?

I found throughout my career that both when I was at the firms and that was also one of the reasons that I was ready to move on to Raymond James, but also when I got to Raymond James. I didn't have much to look up to. At the firms I used to work for, my thought was these women are successful at work. It looked like they were less successful personally or they had a robust family or personal life and were viewed as not successful at the office. I thought like there was nobody's life I admired. That was one of the reasons that made moving over to Raymond James easy. Raymond James in 2004 was a different place than it is now. I found I had a similar abyss of lack of women in senior leadership roles in 2004 and women to look up to.

After many years of feeling such a gap there and such a gap of like a tribe in conversations with women, who were similarly situated, but not to say at Raymond James, who either worked at firms who did this work or worked at other broker-dealers. We'd see each other at industry conferences or other times we worked together. We started talking about could we be our own people to look up to? Could we have our own network? That's in 2016 with a woman named Andrea Greene, who is a Bressler & Amery in Birmingham. She and I founded SWIFS. The basis was there's not enough of us around. We need to be able to make sure we take care of each other. We did that as a true grassroots organization and we're now at about 150 members throughout the Southeast.

We want to develop a tribe to fill the abyss that we were all feeling within our own firms or within our own world. A couple of years of building that, Raymond James saw what I was doing, noted my passion in this space. The spring they had asked me to become a national co-chair of WIN. I always laugh because this spring I got promoted and became a national co-chair of WIN. All I needed to do was start working in my dining room.

A piece of it was I was talking to a friend of mine in HR at Raymond James. It’s like a little pouty about why is no one ever asking me to be involved with WIN. I wasn't going to anything. When I first started at Raymond James, I went to one event. I didn't enjoy it. I didn't feel like it spoke to me. In 2004, I was done. I got voted off. It went in a different direction. As time passed, I was like, “I'm so in this space, why does no one ever ask me to part of things?” My friend turned to me and like, “Does anyone know? This is a non-ranging organization you're running and granted there are Raymond James members, but does anybody know?” I was like, “I don't know.” I realized the importance of self-promotion or having those conversations and making sure people understood what I was doing and where my passions were. That worked out.

That’s important especially for women. Women look at that stuff as political or egotistical or whatever. How did you go about letting people know that this was an interest and these are things that you do because we do have to speak up? Everyone notices themselves. They're not seeking to see what someone else is doing.

I would say one piece of it is I became pretty active on social media with what I was doing through LinkedIn. We have some people at the company and in the industry. Many people rely on LinkedIn a lot. I started talking about it more. Candidly, I got over myself and scheduled meetings with people and said, “I want to talk to you about this piece or about this part of my life you may not know to see how we could work together or how I could add value to what you're doing.” I began those conversations. Those individuals started paying more attention to what I was posting on social media and what I was passionate about and what I was doing.

It spiraled from there quickly. I would give a spill to my team to review time. I always say like, “Don't ever think your manager knows everything you've done.” I made that mistake once. I got a raise that I thought was subpar. I went to my manager and I said, “How could I possibly get this raise?” He said, “It's what everybody got.” I was like, “I'm not everybody. Here's why I'm not everybody.” He was like, “Okay.” He went and got me more money. I thought, “I'm never going to not have my manager know everything when they go into budgets.” From there, I became comfortable with the year-end process of vomiting everything into that review.

For women, the self-promotion is uncomfortable. We talk about it a lot. SWIFS has been talking about self-promotion for so long as being something we need to get over and start doing. It's one of the first things when young women or young associates at all come and talk to me about and trying to pick my brain. I said, “Do not be shy about making sure people know what you're doing, what you're interested in and what you've succeeded in. Network as much as you can to tell as many people as possible because no one knows if you don't tell them.” Don't assume that they know. Don't assume the person above you is telling people what you're doing. Don't let them control the narrative, control your own narrative.

I'm going to call it an elephant in the room, which I do when I speak at women's conferences about this topic. At least in my experience, women are not good at helping other women. We create these organizations. We talk about these issues, but putting into practice of a women leader, seeking opportunities for other women, a woman that works for a woman leader, not tearing that woman leader down because that's spots now taken. They won't have an opportunity. What have you seen in practice that has worked to have women help women?

I wasn't sure about the women's group at Raymond James, but I thought I had a need for something. I started organizing these lunches of a bunch of different women at the company. When we were talking about, “Let's make sure we include this person or let's make sure we include that person.” To your point, someone said, “I would prefer not to include her.” I'm like, “That’s not what's going to happen here. This is inclusive, not exclusive. I don't want to be part of that. That's not going to accomplish here.” I will tell you then that particular woman started scheduling lunches. At the same time as the lunches that I was putting together and I was like, “I can't win. This is frustrating.”

What I try to do is similar to when you think about where we are in our racial social justice issue. I've always tried to say, “I don't think that's productive for women. I don't think that's what we should be doing.” The last thing you want is for the stereotype of women having catfights to be proven anywhere. The change in dynamic at Raymond James with many women who are now in VP and SVP and on the operational committee and on the executive committee. It's going on. I don't feel it like I used to. Things have gotten a little bit different. I had a bunch of women over at my house for dinner and we were excited we were going to do it quarterly. Now not so much. Jodi Perry, who's the president of one of our broker-dealers. She was there and a bunch of Raymond James.

She said, “It's nice to be at a place where I look around this room and they're not all my close friends. They're my colleagues and most I've worked with, but not all of them. I don't think there's a person in this room who would stab me in the back. If anyone in this room wanted my help for anything, I'd help them.” There is a supportive vibe amongst the women at Raymond James. That's because we're getting to a place where there's a lot of us to help each other out. I always stand by the messaging is don't be alone in that elevator. Bring more people on the elevator that you ride up or when you get to the top, you go back down and you get more. There are a lot of women who are doing that at the company now. I'm not going to be foolish as to believe we don't have the elephant in the room.

What do you think shifted that?

There were more women in leadership, so there was no longer this fear that the spots for women's growth were limited. That's part of it. The hiring and promoting of women became more common, more commonplace and that there were women at the top that made it feel less like we were all scrambling for a piece of the pie. Equality is not pie. They want more doesn't mean there's less for you. It's not pie. That helped. Even like within SWIFS, I had known allegorically, there are some issues amongst some of these women at some of these different firms. I've seen that as the relationship has been built, go away and now women at different firms who might compete for Raymond James business or other broker-dealer business referring to each other work.

We had to cancel our spring symposium in May 2020. We had a virtual happy hour. It would have been our fifth conference. I said, “Does anyone have a great SWIFS story?” A couple of different women talked about the referral of work between two competing firms. One woman said, “I had a hearing I couldn't cover. I got caught up in a scheduling conflict. I knew I could call another member of SWIFS. At a different firm who would then make money off of it and that they would take care of it, take care of it well, and the client would be satisfied.” I thought to myself, “That is exactly what I was trying to promote. You called women even though they're at a different firm rather than somebody else.” We need to keep thinking about it and being intentional.

It does go to show having these associations help keep it forefront and build those relationships feel like you're in a silo because many women don't think to network. They go in to work hard and think, like you said, “Why aren't people noticing my work?” where men spend a lot more time on the networking.

I've had a big switch on that in the last few years as well. I was sitting with a friend of mine having lunch at work. We were talking about how she had gotten passed up for this job. I was like, “I don't understand it.” She says, “No, he was always here having coffee with somebody.” She's like, “I wasn't having coffee. I was doing the work.” I was like, “The women are busy doing the work because they have so much else to do at home that they can't take the break to network because that's a half-an-hour that might cost them time with their kid or grocery shopping or the other things they have to do.” They want to do the work. They can get that done to do all their other responsibilities. It's also a little more uncomfortable for women. Whereas it was natural for men to network and that people hire people they have relationships with, they know what their interests might be. I wasn't doing that.

Many more people I talk to them all the time now about what I'm interested in, what I want to do, how I can partner with folks. My work has become much more satisfying and it's more enjoyable. I feel like you start to develop the rhythm, the recognition and the work you want to be doing. I treat it as part of my job as opposed to something extra that I'm doing that's taking away from personal time. Make sure you meet with X amount of people this month and who are folks who are touching base with. Be more deliberate about it particularly virtually because you're not making the connections in the cafeteria or in the hallway. You have to think about, “Who haven’t I spoken to a while? Who haven't I had a meeting within a while? Have I done something interesting that I want to make sure this person knows?” It takes time to put time into it. Once I started doing it, I felt like I made a real difference in my career.

How many of those reach outs do you do a month?

I would say 5 or 6.

Do you plan for 1 or 2 a week?

Yeah. When I got a new executive assistant a few months ago and gave her access to my calendar, I kept thinking, “Nicole is going to say, ‘Do you sit around and have coffee?”’

Those are important for the future, whatever.

I try and have a new person, 1 or 2 new people a month and then maintenance on other relationships for the other, 3 or 4 coffees.

That's important. An entrepreneur has to be out networking and making new contacts for new businesses. It's internal sales. You can't think that you don't need to build those relationships for other things. That's a great exercise and something for people tangible that they can do even if it's once a week.

When I was litigating, my relationships developed quickly. I was traveling with people. We were traveling together. We are flights delayed together. We're getting dinner in the hotel. I had strong relationships amongst the businesses I represented, which was mainly our private client group and our retail business with broker-dealers. When I started moving into managing dispute resolution and senior at-risk clients, and more broadly into compliance at an enterprise level, I didn't have relationships at this company I'd been in for several years. By all means, PCG is the largest business Raymond James has. Outside of other support pieces to PCG operations or IT or any of that. I had organically grown the other relationships and I realized I had missed an opportunity and how to catch up.

I'd like to end with some rapid-fire questions. You pick a category, family and friends, money, spiritual or health?

It’s family and friends.

I'm going to ask you four questions. In the category of family and friends, things or actions that I don't have that I want.

I don't think I'm unique, but what I don't have is the ability to be with family and friends more and hug them like the physical contact piece. You’ve lost the ability to squeeze a friend. Hugs release many great endorphins as a result. My son has gotten the grunt of that because I can't stop squeezing him. He loves it. I feel like he’s okay with it.

Things or actions I do have that I want.

I have an amazing tribe of women friends, either from work, college, organizations I'm involved with, high school, within my family, lots of strong, motivated, caring women. They challenge me. They inspire me. They support me. Most importantly, they make me laugh.

Things or actions I don't have that I don't want.

To buttress off the last answer and I'm not interested in surface relationships from a personal standpoint. People to go out with or people you feel like you should be friends with. The last few years have shown where people's values are in a lot of different places. What I've realized is I don't want to invest my time with people whose values I don't share. We're all busy. I don't have toxic relationships and I'm glad I do not.

It's funny how we change our perspective as we get older. Things or actions that I do have that I don't want.

This is also pandemic-related and I would say that I have physical distance between me and my mom. She is a snowbird that lives about a mile down the street with me. She came down in March 2020 and then we kept her hostage. We wouldn't let her fly back to New York. We were with her every day for five months and then my son and I, we rented an RV and we drove her home because she needed to get home. We were lucky we did because we got home and then her sister passed away unexpectedly. Because we did that, she was able to see her sister before she passed. We came back down without her. We all knew we needed space. All three of us agreed it was a lot of together time. To know that I didn't want space and definitely don't care for that.

We've shared a lot of great tips, but is there anything you want to make sure that you want people to walk away with from our conversation?

In my experience is one thing is to not be afraid of failure when I've made that job change over to compliance. When that happened and when they asked me to do that, I got nervous about stop being a litigator. I felt like who I was, but what it was I was a successful litigator and I was scared. What if I wasn't as successful as a manager or building compliance programs? That's turned out to be an epic decision in my career that changed the path of things. Don't be afraid of failure. Don't be scared to ask for feedback. Feedback is the greatest gift you can get. I felt like I had been banging on the door in my job for a long time, banging on a promotion that I could not get that door to open. I saw feedback that I finally got as someone giving me the key and then acting on it was how I got it unlocked. Without that, I would have continued to have felt that I wasn't getting where I thought I needed to be.

Don't ever estimate the power or the effect you can have on other people that by leading by example, by helping somebody else. Whenever someone asks me help, that request that they think I can offer advice and guidance, that means something to them. That's a blessing and they always deserve my time. I’m walking the walk, not just talking the talk and giving people your time to help them. You get a lot out of that. That person gets a lot out of it. Kim Jenson over at Raymond James, she always says, “Even when I mentor people, they're always mentoring me too.” Maybe they don't know it, but it's always a shared experience. You can help people and you can change people. That power is something everyone has and helping somebody else is the greatest satisfaction I have.

You've definitely demonstrated that with all the different organizations you're involved with, started and lead. Thanks for making your impact for women in your field. I want to thank you for joining me and sharing your story.

Thank you, Amy. I appreciate it.

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During this interview, we talked a lot about the pivots in Erin’s journey from starting in music going into environmental sciences and into law. No matter what age you are, it’s important to see if the work that you’re doing or the goals that you have are still in alignment with who are. We do shift and change over time, who we are as a child, what we might have imagined as the things that we want to do. Sometimes we get stuck in a rut without opening our eyes to see what’s working for us. Her pivots in her life and keeping her eyes open to what opportunities are out there was important to finding the right positions and work to align with who she was and what she wanted to accomplish.

The other thing that we talked about was as she was going through her journey as a woman in leadership creating success, that there was a gap in having a tribe of women that she could network with or look up to. Have the right professional and personal mix that she could relate to that understood the demands of having children and balancing work life as well. It’s important that we figure out how we go about doing that. In Erin’s life, she went and created an organization, a membership association in the Southeast so that more women could start interacting and networking with one another.

One of the other big areas that she noted that has helped her over time that a lot of times this ends up with women that we don’t always toot our own horns or let people know what we’re doing. We assume that people do know is that she relies on as an inhibitor that people didn’t know the things she was accomplishing and doing. Some of the areas that she talked about that are important lessons to bring out is first that she became active on social media. When we become active on social media, it’s important that we understand the message that we want to put out in the world. That we are consistent with that message because if we are not consistent with that message, people don’t believe us. If we are consistent with that message, people start asking us questions or relating to us in a different way. Even if we’re in a corporation, it doesn’t mean that we still don’t have to do the work of putting ourselves out there and letting people know what is important to us, what resonates with us and how we want to align our work with the things that we do.

She also had an important point about scheduling meetings with people and asking how they could work together. A lot of times when we think about networking, we think about it from a sales point of view. Not necessarily as our co-workers or people from other departments or even competitor companies and so forth of where you can get to know one another. See the common areas that you might be able to help one another so that you never know when things come up and you can call upon someone else.

The third tip that she brought up around this was making sure that in your year-end evaluation that you tell everything you’ve done, not downplay it, not leave out certain things here and there. It may be a good course of action to keep notes on these things throughout the year. A lot of times what happens is by the time you get to an end-of-year review, you forget some of the things that you did. Keeping a spreadsheet or a document, keeping all of that updated throughout the year can help you with making sure that you’re telling everything you’ve done throughout the year.

The other thing that was an important point and awareness is that things are starting to shift with a lot of women because of these associations, networks and all the learning and education that goes around to help women support women and women get the support that they need in order to be able to rise to different positions. When we start understanding that we aren’t alone and that we can work together, it can change everything so that it doesn’t look like there’s a scarcity of women in leadership positions that we are more open to helping one another so that we can change the paradigm.

When she talked about networking with people that she had a whole process of making sure that you track the number of people that you want to meet with each month, how many people are new people you’ve never met before or people that you want to follow up with and keep up with as well. This is important and understanding that and also knowing and documenting after those networking meetings what the follow-ups are and when you want to get back with them again. This is no different than sales in a way of creating that network that’s going to help and support you.

Some of the takeaways that she had were first to not be afraid of failure, that change is okay. A lot of times when we take on new positions or putting ourselves up for a new position that we don’t necessarily have the skillset yet. It’s okay to be learning as you go through the process. The other thing that she said was to not be scared to ask for feedback. Acting on that feedback is how she unlocked many of her promotions. Rather than looking at the feedback as negative, how can you utilize that so that you can use it in the right way and be able to improve yourself so that you can achieve the goals that you want? Another tip that she said was not to estimate the help that you can provide to other people and that mentorship is a shared experience. It’s important as we go into collaboration and networking relationships that we define what that should look like and what we want out of it and what the mentee wants out of it so that we make sure that everyone walks away feeling like it was successful.

Important Links:

• Raymond James

• Erin Linehan

• Southeastern Women in Financial Services

• Monster.com

• Shana Tucker

• LinkedIn.com/in/erin-linehan-924a082

• https://www.Facebook.com/erin.linehan.7

• @ErinKathleen1974 - Instagram

About Erin Linehan

Erin received her B.S. from Cornell and JD, cum laude from Tulane, and also holds the Series 7, 9 and 10 licenses.

She serves in the following professional capacities: as member of SIFMA's Senior Investor Working Group, FINRA and SEC’s Senior Investor Roundtable, the Board for the FSDA, and the Executive Committee of the Pace Center for Girls, Inc. - Hillsborough. Erin founded and leads Southeast Women in Financial Services, which fosters networking, professional development, the advancement of women in financial services and philanthropic efforts to support financial education, professional development and economic security for women through community partnerships, education and advocacy.

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