Erica
Leontine Mazman
Business Analytics Manager, SpotHero
Erica Mazman wants to be CEO. She’s on track to get there. She has been since age 8. “I remember as a little girl being told, ‘Make a wish.’ And I would say something like, ‘I wish that I would get a good job,’” she says. “I’ve always been incredibly career-oriented. And I think it’s served me.”
The daughter of the director of a Boston non-profit and an insurance executive, Erica’s drive has been apparent since she was young. Want to play? No, thanks; I’d rather practice gymnastics for hours. Go for a run? Sure, but I’ll also become a stalwart on the track team and two-time all-star sprinter in high school.
She smiles. “I’ve always kind of known where I want to go,” she says.
After high school, at Trinity College, Erica figured she should steer herself toward either banking or consulting on her way to the C-suite. To prepare, she majored in economics. Well, she didn’t just major in economics. She was the economics fellow for her class and made Phi Beta Kappa. Plus she had a boyfriend. Plus she landed a summer internship at Deutsche Bank where she learned about equity capital markets, mergers and acquisitions, and debt financing—all valuable training. When she had a chance to study abroad junior year, she stayed in the U.S. instead so that she could meet with alums and recruiters. Entering her senior year of college, she had a banking job lined up as soon as she graduated the following spring. In other words, all the pieces were falling into place.
Until they weren’t.
At the very start of the fall semester her senior year, Erica spent three weeks in the hospital. She was diagnosed with a chronic illness that required sustained treatment. The doctors told her to cut way back on her schedule. They even suggested she take a semester off. Go home with your parents, they advised her, and rest up and sleep.
Instead, Erica asked her parents to drive her straight back to campus from the hospital. And, while she did cut back on her classes, she kept slogging through her senior year with the support of her professors. “I really struggled,” she says, “but I told myself I would just make it work.” It was hard, but the following summer Erica graduated and headed to New York for the fulltime job with Deutsche Bank that she’d earned—right on track.
Since college, Erica has continued to build experience and technical skills that are broad and deep. She’s dived into both banking and corporate America, learning about every aspect of business leadership from start-ups to multi-million-dollar corporations. Now, she’s back in school part-time while also earning her MBA at the J.L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. A scholarship fund set up at Kellogg to support women rising in business is helping Erica and women like her to continue their leadership development. Erica was the first student to receive a scholarship from this fund.
She knows her self-discipline has been crucial in all she’s accomplished, but she also credits a capacity that she thinks women have in particular—a tendency to focus on the big picture, or play the long game, in their decision-making. “Which I think is something business today really needs,” she adds. “The more women enter business, the more I think that longer-term mentality will help us set up sustainable companies and keep us grounded.”
Not that doing so will be easy. “One thing we need to work on is being too open and wearing our heart on our sleeves—as women, maybe trusting people we shouldn’t,” says Erica. “And framing our own careers as opposed to letting other people frame them for us. If there’s an area where I think women need to step it up, it’s in being strategic about the relationships we build—knowing when to say ‘no’ and not letting our environments control us.”
If it’s a matter of willpower, Erica will make it to CEO. But here is the cool thing: Her hard work had some magic in it, too. Because it made her wish come true.
This story was published in February of 2020.