Lucy McCollum

I attribute my success to the community values I grew up with. My mother was a social worker, and I observed how the community rallied around each other, with people always helping one another. Even though there was poverty, nobody went hungry, and that stuck with me. As I have traveled, grown and matured, I am always looking out for the next person. That drives me all the time, in my corporate life and in any space I get into. I'm always wanting to look out for the person next to me. I've even gotten in trouble for looking out for people too much. There was a woman on my staff who was drinking a lot, and my bosses told me to get rid of her because she was taking the team down, but I could see her potential. I supported her and worked with her even though she was letting down the team. She ended up losing her job, but many years later she turned her life around and started a sober living group. She thanked me for supporting her and not throwing her out to the wolves. I think my biggest achievement is that I have never dropped anybody. I always look out for the people around me.

The best career advice I ever received was to not stress out, not to burn out, and to ask for help. I also learned invaluable lessons from an elderly lady I met early in my career when I had just left college and gotten my first job selling insurance. I was having a tough time and wasn't doing very well, and I was crying. This lady held my hand in an elevator, gave me coffee, and told me that even though I might not believe her at that moment, I was doing the best I could and doing very well. She said that right at that moment I may not be getting the results I wanted, but to just keep doing what I was doing and things would be different. She gave me two names and taught me the art of networking right there and then. She showed me how when you know someone who knows somebody who knows somebody, that's how networking works. That's how I started getting places.

I would tell other women not to allow that word 'women' to get in their way. Sometimes we get caught up in that word, and yes, it's real that we do have a disadvantage when we get in boardrooms and in the workplace. Many times we have a disadvantage, and that name 'you're a woman' gets in the way. But we have to decide that we are walking in, and it's not our body that's working in, it's our brains that are walking in. Our performance is what's working in. We have every right to be in that boardroom just like everybody else. Any space that we walk into, we're working in because we qualify. I've worked in every space, and I'm not just a woman, I'm a Black woman. That's even another thing. I'm not just a Black woman, I'm an African woman, and I'm an immigrant woman in America. I have several disadvantages. So I've always walked in and thrown all those labels away. I walk in with my brain, and I say my brain is really good. I tell myself that. I don't allow all those quote-unquote labels to go into that space. I can give what I have, and it's just as good as anybody else's.

The values most important to me are authenticity, kindness, and hard work. I believe one has to be very authentic, and that's very important to me. Kindness is essential, and hard work rounds out what I consider the core values that guide both my work and personal life.