Working mum from Cork finds balance on Wall Street

She’s one of the most powerful women on Wall Street, managing director of a multi-strategy hedge fund, and on her way to a “really important” early morning business briefing.

As the executive takes her seat at the boardroom table, a colleague bends over and asks if she’s “been through the wars”.

“Yep,” she smiles gracefully. Little did he know, she thought, that she’d been awake all night with a sick child, the same child that she’d just rushed to the doctor before racing to this appointment.

Deirdre O’Connor is a member of the US Women’s Bond Club and GOAL USA and has been named as one of the top 50 on Wall Street for two years running. She’s also a former managing director of Goldman Sachs.

But as she left that high-powered meeting, the mother of three from Cobh, Co Cork, caught her reflection and got a shock, all too familiar to working mums.

The mother of three had chaired the meeting, where vast sums of money were at play, in a “lovely cream suit”, completely unaware that it was dappled with fruit-flavoured tiny hand prints. To keep her son quiet at the doctors, she’d given him lollipops to suck on.

In a wide-ranging yet relaxed speech that covered everything from leadership to work-life balance, Ms O’Connor, managing director of a US-based hedge fund, told the 100 women at the Network Cork/Cork Chamber of Commerce lunch how being turned down for promotion early in her career was a game changer for her.

In the years before the job had come up, she’d put in inordinate hours at her desk, rarely leaving work before 11pm and working at weekends rather than partying with friends.

She had made herself an expert on every subject matter she ever worked on, was a stickler for detail and firmly believed she was “on track” for this promotion. But it wasn’t to be and she was “absolutely devastated”.

Now at the highest echelons of the financial industry, she says she “learnt so much” from that rejection. “I learnt you can’t control everything but you can control how you react to something. I learnt that positivity is a force multiplier and figuring out how out to dig deep in tough times is key... Not all decisions will go your way and you have to learn how to be positive about that,” she said.

“It would have been very easy to blame other people, to blame my manager. But when I asked him what I had done wrong, he said ‘you did everything right, but the senior folks don’t know you, you need to get out there’... I said ‘isn’t that your job?’ and he said ‘No, that’s your job’.”

In her efforts “to get out there”, she worked hard the following year to network with a range of colleagues across her company and especially those who would decide on future promotions. As a young trainee with the company, she hadn’t received any formal training and so she devised a potential training programme that she believed she would have benefited from. “The head of department loved the training programme” and that was how she got to know him.

“That year, I probably did 20% less work but got 20% more exposure,” she said.

From there on, she also sought out mentors who would help her understand the company’s organisational culture, people “more senior with more insight” and also sponsors, something more personal than a mentor — “somebody who will stick their neck out for you, pound the table for you”. She believes such relationships are key to climbing the corporate ladder.

The former CIT student also spoke about how motherhood has made her a “better leader” as she “nurtures” people who “are not best performers” more than she did previously. She also says she’s become more focussed in work as she works from 8am-6pm and after that, her time is for her family.

There are, of course, the odd all-nighters such as the Facebook IPO which happened late in the evening. But she says she makes sure however these are “few and far between”.