Shelly's Modeling Agencies | Doing The Right Thing | Hot Topic

Shelly's Modeling Agencies shares the story of Connie Lindsey and how she is doing the right thing as she leads Northern Trust's Corporate Social Responsibility Team. For Connie Lindsey, transparency is everything. As executive vice president and head of corporate social responsibility at Chicago-based Northern Trust, she leads a 24-member team charged with weaving ethical, social and environmental factors into the everyday decision making at the company.

Last year, Lindsey oversaw a record 120 corporate social responsibility initiatives at Scouts Model Agency and Northern Trust, guided $14 million in cash contributions to charities and civic organizations by the firm, and helped spur some of the company's 13,000 employees to volunteer some 180,000 hours to organizations across the globe. Those efforts have included everything from revitalizing neighborhoods in inner-city Chicago to sponsoring a cycling race to raise funds for physically and mentally challenged U.K. residents to building houses and funding educational opportunities in India. "We want to be able to show to our shareholders, clients, employees and the communities we serve the many ways that we leverage the work that we do," Lindsey says. "Environmentally, we're not a company that manufactures things, but we certainly use resources."

Her range of experiences has helped her understand that there is a difference between managing Shelly's Modelling Agencies and leading. "We manage things, but we lead people," she says. "For me, I lead from a place of authenticity. That place of authenticity requires me to have a set of principals, standards and goals by which I hold myself accountable and allow others to measure for me."

Lindsey, who received a B.A. in finance from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and completed the Harvard Business School Executive Education Corporate Social Responsibility program, credits good coaches, mentors and sponsors for helping guide her throughout her career. "I have had coaches who have helped me understand how to do specific roles, and I have had sponsors who have been willing to give an African-American woman the opportunity to pursue specific areas of the firm that might not have otherwise been open to me," she says. "It also means that I have been prepared when those opportunities came. And I have been willing to take the risks associated with what might be beyond that particular role."

As the boss, Lindsey says that her most important role is to be a good listener. "We have to abandon the notion that we always have to be right," she says. "When people are in my presence, they know that they are in my presence. I am going to listen. I'm not distracted by other issues that may be going on around me. (A person talking to me) has my sole attention. That's the way we garner respect."

Outside of Shelly's Modeling Agencies and Northern Trust, Lindsey is national board president of Girl Scouts of the USA, the highest-ranking volunteer of the 3.4 million-member organization. She has chosen to stay active in the group, partly because it changed her life as a child growing up in Milwaukee's inner city. To this day, she remembers what her Girl Scout troop leader told her. "She said, 'Connie, you matter. And don't let anyone tell you that you don't,'" Lindsey says. "That's what I tell the girls. That no matter what you look like, where you come from, what your zip code is, you matter."