Pam Rogers (BBA ’82) spent her life in risk management, and the way she sees it — so has everyone.
“How many of you decided to get out of bed this morning, get dressed, get here, and come to this event?” said Rogers, who previously served as executive director for enterprise risk management, and currently is an ELC Fellow in Global Product Stewardship, for The Estée Lauder Companies.
“You’re a risk manager. You could’ve rolled over in bed and pulled the covers over your head. You could have not driven here, not walked across the street to get here. … Everything we do in life is about managing risk. We don’t think about it in our personal lives because we do it every day. That’s the skill set of a risk manager.”
The key to having a great life and a successful business is not to minimize risk. It’s to optimize it, she told University of Georgia students at the UGA Chapel on Nov. 13 as part of the Terry Leadership Speaker Series hosted by the UGA Institute for Leadership Advancement.
A life of minimized risk means no challenging new roles, no big moves, and limited vulnerability. You have to take smart risks to continue to grow.
Rogers spent a career managing risks at some of the world’s largest corporations and small startups fighting to find their way. She’s worked at tropical farms and in warehouses full of shampoo and auto parts.
And through it all, she’s open to the people around her and the job ahead of her.
“If you go in with the attitude that this is going to be a fun, positive adventure, then you end up with a lot of fun, positive adventures,” she said about her career trajectory and willingness to change courses.
Rogers took a job with General Motors after graduating with a risk management degree from the Terry College in 1982. A few years later, she decided to chart a different path — taking over risk management for a regional drugstore chain.
“When I was about 27, I decided to leave General Motors, which no one did,” she said. “But about four or five years into my career, I decided it was time to be a number one, and General Motors was not going to be able to give me that opportunity for many years.”
She left a company where decisions were made with numbers rounded to the nearest million to a drugstore chain where every shampoo sale mattered. The job taught her that understanding the people she worked with — and their situations — was as important as anything she learned about risk management principles.
She made mistakes in that first big role by assuming she knew how all businesses operated, but her boss gave her a second chance, she said. Her time at the drugstore chain and that second chance helped every future role because she learned to listen and assess each situation on its face.
“(As risk managers) it’s our role to know what’s going on everywhere in the organization and to influence others to do what we want,” she said. “They don’t work for us, but we want them to think about risk and weave risk thinking into what they do every day. … That’s what leadership is about. It’s about getting people you don’t control to go in the direction you want them to go, even though it may be a different direction than they normally go.”
After 40 years and 14 companies, Rogers still believes that listening and respecting the people she works with is the superpower fueling her career.
“As you’re moving through your career, it is about those connections you have with people — genuine connections,” Rogers concluded. “When you’re thinking about how you handle your career, think about how important it is to listen to people, to get them to trust you — not to follow you because you decide what their pay is but because they trust you and want to follow you. That’s true leadership.”