About Rachel
Rachel Fink, Commercial Director, Legal, in our New York office, is one of our five Women in Leadership scholars. Read on to learn her aspirations as part of this program.
Women in Leadership (WIL) is IFM’s inaugural scholarship program designed for senior women identified as future executive leaders. The program aims to support female talent to achieve their career aspirations and help build a diverse succession pipeline.
“I was absolutely thrilled to be selected as one of the five recipients, it really is such a great opportunity,” said Rachel.
As part of the program, each participant is matched with an executive sponsor from the Global Strategy Team or Board, as research has shown that women are over mentored and under sponsored. This ensures our top female talent have a leader of influence - who has a seat at the table - talking about them, advocating for them, and looking for opportunities to advance their careers.
“As part of my WIL scholarship and sponsorship I’m looking to develop skills and prepare for being a Board Director, as it’s something I’m striving towards in my career development”.
“Carol Gray, IFM Board Member, is my sponsor. We’ve had several discussions, which have been extremely beneficial and really is key to the program. Carol’s experience and wisdom have helped support my career aspirations,” outlined Rachel.
As part of the sponsorship Rachel has also enrolled at Harvard Business School, and in March, she completed a course at Cambridge University in Boston.
“The four-day course was the perfect opportunity to take tangible steps towards obtaining a seat on a Board. It was also valuable to meet and build relationships with like-minded executives,” said Rachel.
“Throughout the course, alongside my cohort of around 50 peers that are also leaders in their industries, we analysed a set of case studies of different companies and decisions that boards of directors made. This analysis and debate expanded my thinking of the appropriate role of a director, especially in a time of crisis. It also served as a catalyst to examine the role that I, and the rest of the IFM team, should play when managing our infrastructure assets.”
At IFM we believe supporting women to achieve their career aspirations is critical for achieving gender equality. The program design was a deliberate step away from typical women in leadership programs that assume all participants require the same development based on their gender. Our individual scholarship program enables participants to tailor their experience to meet their specific learning goals.
IFM has been working to strengthen our leadership capability, build communication capability for our leadership cohort, and address accountabilities and delegations.
Underpinned by our leadership capabilities, our development programs target inclusive education and leadership, strengthening trust across the enterprise and enabling career development.
We invest in building the leadership capabilities of our people, to better deliver our strategy and purpose - to protect and grow the long-term retirement savings of working people.
This is an integral and ongoing component of our Inclusion & Diversity objectives and builds on commitments made on leadership development in the 2021 Engagement Survey Action plan.