NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Two accomplished female leaders shared the stories of their journeys to getting where they now are, how their careers have pivoted, the light bulb moments they experienced, where they have found a surprise byproduct in being a female leader, and more in remarks to a credit union group.
The lessons learned, positive and negative experiences and other observations were shared during the Women’s Leadership Luncheon at Origence’s Lending Tech Live 2025 event. The discussion featured Linda Armyn, president and CEO of Four Leaf FCU in New York, and Sheryl Connelly, a futurist and consumer trends expert who spent a long career at Ford and who also keynoted the Lending Tech Live meeting.
The discussion was moderated by Linda Hanson, VP-client support with Origence.
Here is some of what was discussed and shared:
Hanson: Share with us a pivotal moment in your career in your path to leadership.
Armyn: I didn’t want to be CEO. I just kind of thought, ‘OK, my CEO’s going to retire and I will be a consultant.’ Honestly, that was what was in my head, that (a new CEO is) going to come in and they’re going to want to start fresh.
I was chief strategy and marketing officer at the time and then, during the pandemic, with our crisis planning I was really running point on everything and I was crossing all business lines and, in a weird way, I was enjoying the work in being able to keep my company moving forward. At that time I said myself, ‘Oh, I want to be the CEO.’ A light bulb went off. I went and had a conversation with my boss and I said I would like to throw my hat in and he said, ‘I would love for you to do that and if you didn’t I was going to talk to you about it.’
Connelly: (When I was young) I wanted to be an artist, and I remember this as if it were yesterday. My older brother and I were driving through what you might call a sketchy part of metro Detroit and there was this unhoused gentleman who was selling carnations out of a bucket, and my brother said, ‘If you study art that’s where you’re going to end up.’ I absolutely believed him. I’m horrible with finance, but I decided that was what I would study.
It Looked Glamorous, But…
When I get out of college I did what every other unemployed college grad did at that time due largely—for those who are old enough to remember it—to the popularity of a television show called LA Law. It made law look glamorous and sexy and fun. So, I went to law school and quickly realized that was not true, so I hedged my bets again and I started working on an MBA. I went to law school during the day and worked on an MBA at night. It makes me sound a lot more driven than I am; I was unemployed. I did go on to practice law just long enough to know that I had made a horrible, expensive mistake.
I wrote to Ford Motor Co. and asked to be considered for a role in tax compliance. I thought this was interesting and Ford would find me irresistible. They did not. I ended up getting booted over to marketing, where a gentleman said, ‘I don’t know why you are here but I will give you an hour.’ Five interviews later Ford offered me a role in marketing, sales and service, but I was still waiting to hear from finance. (A person at Ford told me) ‘You didn’t graduate from one of the schools we typically recruit from and you don’t have any experience.’
Who Did You Piss Off?
So, I was wholesaling cars to dealers. I’m not a car person. I thought this was just until I get my big girl job. I never fell in love with the product but I did fall in love with the people. That was going along well enough but I wasn’t thriving and was waiting for my real life to start. My father passed away as my second daughter was born. I was so miserably unhappy. I found myself on a team I could hide out on. It was the Trends and Futuring team. My friends were like, ‘Who did you piss off that you ended up over there?’ But it turned out to be the best thing ever in my life. I worked in futuring at Ford for 20 years. It was divine intervention. I’m really glad I took a chance.
Hanson: Linda, you are first female CEO of a very large credit union. What kinds of challenges or insights did you encounter as you took on that role?
Armyn: It’s a common question I get a lot. I didn’t have challenges taking on the role as a female. In the path to CEO you feel a little push-back at times as a woman; some of that yin and yang of competing with some of the other men. But in our organization that was not so impactful.
What I really underestimated was the impact of being the first female on the rest of the organization and that was really telling. I had young women coming to my office—I have a really open door—I do Lattes with Linda—we sit and chat. A lot of times I have a lot of young women come to me…and they say ‘I see a future for myself because you are in that seat.’ I really underestimated the power of that.
‘It Takes a Village’
I think where being a woman in leadership really helped me is I am a ‘It Takes a Village’ person.’ I truly believe it. Our culture at Four Leaf is, ‘We win together, we lose together.’ It’s really critical. And that’s a trait very much associated with women, to be very collaborative. I’ve leaned into that. I feel it’s really helped us get through the last two years as we’ve been making a tremendous amount of change. We brought in new systems. We did a rebrand. We’ve been running hard and it’s really about making sure everyone is on board and everyone is OK and that we are moving the company forward together, so that one area is not achieving their goal at the expense of someone else.
I would say the woman thing has helped me more than it has inhibited me.
Hanson: You spent 27 years at Ford. The auto industry is notoriously male-dominated. What strategies did you need or did you not experience that?
Connelly: Oh, I experienced it. I remember I was one of the first women to be promoted to the regional office in a very, very long time. A few months later I became pregnant…I told my boss ‘I just wanted to let you know that I’m pregnant,’ and he goes, ‘Wait. What!’ He goes, ‘Is this something you planned?’
We used to say about that sort of culture that ‘The dinosaurs are retiring but the eggs have been left behind and are just starting to hatch.’
‘Dramatically Different’
Decades later, I think the company is dramatically different, but I do think that there’s always opportunity for improvement, and to me it just comes down to a numbers game. If you look at the number of women in board positions and at our corporate officers, they’re still mostly male but it’s better than it’s ever been before. So, women have excelled.
I think they have excelled through consistency. I think they have excelled through really hard work. I don’t know a woman who doesn’t feel like she’s got to give 150% of what her male counterpart has to do just to get noticed. It’s not always that way but I think for a lot of women my age that was the strategy, to go the extra mile, to do the extra thing, to take on extra work.
Armyn: When I started in banking (at Bank of New York) I was told to wear black, to pull your hair back, to basically look like a man. I was the only woman in this group and once we were having lunch with the president in this very fancy room with the silver and the china and they said, ‘Oh, Linda you sit there.’ And I said, ‘Does anybody else have assigned seats?’ And they said, ‘No, just you.’ I asked why, and they said it was because the woman has to sit to the right of the man with the highest title because they would defer to me first.
It was just a whole new learning experience for me because I was really naïve.
About the Status Quo
Hanson: I’ve heard you say ‘The status quo exists because it works.’
Connelly: Often, the person arguing hardest against change is doing so because the status quo works well for them. It can be so subconscious to the way we think.
Change is hard and I think you have to be really, really deliberate about it.
It’s exciting to see this moment in time where you see male and female leaders being super-deliberate about what they bring to work and how they change the conversation.
One of the most interesting things is that there is this motherhood penalty. When you look at men and women and men being paid more money, women hit their child-bearing years and they take time off and their male peers just keep going, and then (women) are trying to catch up. It’s those years where you start to see the (income) gap.
One of the things companies have stepped forward to change is we now have paternity leave, not just maternity leave. So, men get that time off, too, and it balances the scale. I thought that is just like a wonderfully elegant solution for a problem that people have been grappling with for so long.
Armyn. One of the things that came through clearly in our research was, more than the pay gap was the time gap, because (women) have to take care of the kids, they have to take care of their parents. It’s a hidden time gap that people don’t really talk about specifically, but it’s exists.