23 January 2019

Meet Michelle - Citi VP and Ye! Coach

Ye! - Hi Michelle, tell us about yourself?

Hi Ye! Community. Michelle Beynon here! I was born in Philadelphia, PA, USA but grew up in New Jersey. I now live in Tampa, FL with my husband and two college aged daughters.

Ye! - Tell us a bit about your work?

I am a VP at Citi serving as an ICG OPMO Health Check evaluator. We ensure that essential policies, procedures and practices are being adhered to during the life of a program. We score programs and allow for remediation, aka we find a remedy or solution for a problem. We provide guidance where needed and we conduct training to strengthen skillsets for program and project managers. We perform assessments on projects that use Waterfall, Iterative and Agile methodologies.

I targeted an IT career early on and came up through the programming, systems analysis and project management track. After years of being execution focused, I have now switched to a methodology governance roll which allows me to use the full breadth of my experience.

I have a BS in Information Systems, and MBA in Strategic Management and am a Certified Project Manager and a Scrum Master (ask me what this means during the session of you’re interested!).

Ye! - Can you share a key insight about your success?

Key insight to success is to be a good listener; always be learning; be open to feedback and work hard and be open to new opportunities.

Ye! - Did any mentors help you along your journey?

I have had a few mentors who have been helpful along my career:

One gave life guidance to enter a growth field with good earning potential. I found this helpful because life can be expensive, especially if you have a family and like to travel. Now, I am now employed by a company who offers a nice (and necessary) employee benefits. This is very important to me and my mentor helped me understand the importance of balance.

Another mentor gave me work guidance when I decided to switch industries. I remained in IT but switched industries, so I needed support to understand this new business sector. Working with this mentor gave me confidence. Because of this, later, I did not hesitate to explore opportunities in other industries. To that end I have worked in insurance (life, health and property and casualty), pharmaceutical manufacturing, utilities, and finance and mortgage.

The last two mentors that I had both provided guidance for style and grace. They were both strong in relationship building, engaging participants and team building and behavior. These concepts have been vital since it is important to internalize and fully comprehend that most of the work that we do is with the help of others. Some people share openly, some are difficult to get close to, some people are hard to work with and some are very affable. These mentors helped me to embrace all types of people and have gratitude for differences and the richness this variety brings to both work and life.

Ye! - What can you offer as mentor yourself?

Now, as a mentor myself, I think the most important thing that I can provide is observation and feedback. Often, we have a view of what we do and how we act, that we see through a distorted lens: we inflate or conflate negatively or positively, as meets our needs. I spend my time in the mentorship space working with young adults to provide experienced based guidance for both life and work events. I like to stress that course correction is expected to be constant, ongoing and will eventually get you to your goals, and finally, that if you don’t like where you wind up, you can get up and try again!