recounts Edwards. “But it was such a great opportunity that I was not going to pass it up.” Her instincts proved correct. Not only did the appointment ultimately lead to the position that made Edwards the fi rst woman general counsel on Wall Street, but it also led to successive general counsel roles, assur- ing her status in the pantheon of fi nancial chief legal offi cers.
Front-line Decisions Teri Plummer McClure spent eight years after law school in three diff erent law fi rms, becoming a skilled labor and employment practitioner along the way. Back from mater- nity leave, Plummer McClure found herself at an impasse. “I realized that billing hours for the rest of my life was not what I wanted to do,” she says. “T en a partner from one of my prior fi rms called to let me know that UPS was hiring in-house, and off I went.” While the risk may have appeared minimal from the
outside, little could have prepared her for what she found when she arrived at UPS. “T ere was one employment attorney and me,” says Plummer McClure, “for a company with 280,000 employees, at a time when legislative and legal forces were lighting up the employment litigation docket.” Springing into action, Plummer McClure presented a
proposal for forming a labor and employment group, along with several structural and organizational changes for the law department. While taking this initiative would earn her leadership of the group, gaining acceptance within the com- pany’s homegrown culture was a diff erent matter. Realizing she was being seen and treated as an outsider, Plummer McClure relied on a mentor-navigator to help her learn the distinct language and political and cultural nuances of the company, which helped her rise in the law department. T en, she confronted a risk-infl ection moment that
changed everything. “My boss told me I needed hands-on experience if I wanted to grow within the company,” she relates, “and asked if I was willing to shift to the operations side as a district manager.” Unlike many UPS employees, Plummer McClure had
not started out loading packages on a truck, but here was a chance to at least partially close the cultural gap by assum- ing responsibility for some 4,000 employees involved in pickup and delivery operations. “It was a huge risk,” she says. “I would be losing my position; there was no guaran- tee of promotion; and I had to move my family to central Florida. It took a lot of gut-wrenching discussions with my family before we made our decision.” When the soul-searching was over, the family headed
off to Florida. “Let’s see,” muses Plummer McClure. “I was a company outsider, a lawyer, a black woman, and I had no operations experience. Walking into that warehouse the fi rst day with all the truck drivers and tractor trailers— that was interesting, to say the least.”
MCCA.COM
“ Let’s see, I was a company outsider, a lawyer, a black woman, and I had no
operations experience...” —Terri Plummer McClure
In a word, her experience as district manager was
“phenomenal.” “Had I not taken on that role, I would not even have been considered for general counsel,” she says. “T e skills I learned in central Florida, in terms of learning the business from the ground up and understanding how decisions are made on the front lines, are absolutely invalu- able to me now.”
True Aims Just what is the “right” kind of risk? “Battlefi eld condi- tions” aptly describes the risks that Anastasia Kelly took in successive moves to troubled companies, starting with Sears, Roebuck and Co., then struggling in the wake of a bankruptcy scandal, its law department decimated. Here once more is the story of a woman encountering risk on three fronts: professional, personal, and in accommodating her relationship with her family. “T e job meant we had to move to Chicago, and the
kids did not want to go,” explains Kelly. “My husband, Tom told them to support what he called ‘Mom’s Excellent Adventure.’” Kelly’s tenure as general counsel at Sears had a less-than-excellent ending: despite helping to turn the company around, she was eventually replaced by a new executive team—before she assumed an even riskier post as general counsel of bankrupted, scandalized MCI WorldCom. Knowing little about the telecom industry, Kelly saw
opportunity, not risk. “You can always learn what you need to know about an industry at the upper level,” she says, “and I’ve never turned something down just because it might not work out.” As it turned out, things worked out just fi ne. “T e company came out of bankruptcy, and more than 60,000 people kept their jobs,” says Kelly. Risk taking is not for everyone, Kelly says. “You have to
have the adventurous, change-oriented personality for it. “Risk is uncomfortable for people who prefer predictability.” Fair enough, but generally speaking, it’s those coura-
geous trips into the unknown that produce great career results. When you take risks, you create, enhance, and optimize your options. D&B
JULY/AUGUST 2011 DIVERSITY & THE BAR®
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