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Murphy’s Making History
by Patricia Harty
 At
just 44, Kathleen Murphy CEO of U.S. Wealth Management, ING U.S. Financial
Services, has been named to Fortune’s “50 Most Powerful Women”
list.
He sign on Kathleen Murphy’s desk reads “Thou Shalt Not
Whine.”
“Even if you did whine, it had no impact,” Murphy laughs when
she talks about growing up in an Irish-American household with two sisters
and three brothers in Wallingford, Connecticut.
The Chief Executive Officer of U.S. Wealth Management, ING U.S. Financial
Services, based in Hartford, Connecticut, Murphy was recently named to
Fortune’s “50 Most Powerful Women” list, and that’s
nothing to whine about.
Being part of a large family and growing up in a house she describes
as “kid central” where “you learned how to get along
with people” helped put her on the road to success, as did playing
team sports, which she says “taught me how to be part of a team.”
She was also “fortunate,” she says, in the helping hand she
received from others.
In high school it was a history teacher who got together with other teachers
and put her in advanced placement classes. In her first job out of law
school it was “one of the big guys” who was tough on her but
who also gave her a lot of confidence. “He sort of reached down
and threw me into the deep end of the pool.”
The pool analogy is perfect for Kathy, who twice went to the state championships
with her high school swim team. She wasn’t a natural athlete but
she stuck with it, rising at 5 a.m. to swim for two hours before school
and again for three hours after and lifting weights to prepare for competitions.
She believes that if you work hard and accept the challenge you can achieve
what you set out to do.
“I tell a lot of young people I work with: You don’t have
to be the smartest person in the room, but if you have a positive attitude,
if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves, work hard, be a team
player, people will gravitate to you,” she says.
Kathy doesn’t have a lot of tolerance for the bureaucracy and the
political intrigue in organizations. “It’s not really a naïve
view, because the political crap ultimately catches up with people. If
you don’t get caught up in that and you focus on getting the job
done right, you will get rewarded,” she says.
At just 44, Kathy is top of her field, but she didn’t start out
with a long-term ambition. “It’s probably part of my Catholic
upbringing, but I’ve always been a little bit fatalistic,”
she says.
She was in her final year at Fairfield University and doing on-campus
interviews when she finally decided what she wanted, or rather, what she
didn’t want to do.
“I remember being in an interview for a lower end women’s
clothing store to be a manager or something, and I thought to myself,
‘Oh my, I’ve got to get on a different track here.’”
That was when Kathy decided to go to law school.
After college, she worked at a big Wall Street firm, got a glimpse of
what that life was like, and realized that she didn’t want it. “I
just didn’t want to do the boring work for the first three or four
years, so I decided to work in corporate law where you could do more interesting
work more quickly.”
In 1985 she joined Aetna, and held a variety of positions working her
way up to General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer of Aetna Financial
Services, which was what she was doing in 2000 when ING acquired Aetna.
Kathy moved from legal to the business side of ING, a
company where half the workforce and over half the management are women.
“One of the things that I’m conscious of, particularly in
the insurance industry, is diversity in the sales organizations,”
she says. “You’ve got to have a workforce that reflects your
customer base [over 60 percent of ING’s
customers are women]. It’s not just politically correct. It’s
business.”
And business is good.
In the past year, as Fortune pointed out, ING’s earnings have grown
12 percent, and 29 percent over the past three years. “You know,
people congratulate me about Fortune [making the list], but I just got
the recognition and this was an absolute team effort” Murphy says,
“ Sometimes you have teams and sometimes you have a bunch of individuals,
and it’s teams that deliver these kinds of results. My job is just
to make sure that the team is challenged and organized.
“And I’ll tell you,” she adds, “Ginger Brennan
has probably been our top salesperson for the last 15 years. An Irish
lass (laughs) working in the New York/New Jersey area, and she sets the
standard of sales excellence.”
“We are proud of Kathy for this recognition, and we are equally
proud of ING for establishing a global work environment that embraces
and encourages diverse leadership,” said Tom McInerney, ING Executive
Board member, chairman and CEO, ING Insurance Americas. “Kathy is
an outstanding leader and has an exceptional vision for ING’s wealth
management operations, but more importantly, Kathy is a role model for
other future leaders within ING to emulate.”
Through her participation in an international women’s mentoring
program, Kathy is also a role model for disadvantaged women in other countries.
Farzana Chowdhury, one of only two women among the senior management at
BRAC Bank in Dhaka, Bangladesh, “shadowed” Kathy last May,
and told reporters, “It was inspiring to see a woman manage an entire
division of one of the largest financial services companies with so many
women colleagues.”
The benefits of the mentoring program are mutual, Kathy says. “You
see what these women are up against and you see how bright they are and
how committed they are and the chances they take. And it puts what we’re
going through [in the U.S.] in perspective.”
She’s proud of ING’s commitment to the mentoring programs
and children’s education. “ING globally has focused its corporate
giving on a program called ‘Chances for Children.’ We also
sponsor the New York Marathon, and several other marathons. We sell orange
shoelaces, and all the proceeds go to ‘Run for Something Better,’
which is a marathon that helps with physical fitness programs across the
country,” says Kathy, who is also on the board of America’s
Promise, and other charitable organizations.
Kathy’s own interest in volunteering stems from her Catholic upbringing.
In high school she was part of a church-based program that did volunteer
work for children. And when she got out of law school she taught CCD (Confraternity
of Christian Doctrine) at the local church. She admits that she even had
“a fleeting thought” that she might have been a nun.
“There was a while there where I was going to church every day,”
she admits. Church was an important part of the Murphy home. “My
father was much more quiet about it and my mother was much more visible
with the rosary and all that.”
She likes to take her four-year-old son Jack to Mass with her. “He’s
still young enough that most of my time is spent telling him to sit still,
but we’re trying to establish a pattern. I think it’s important
to drag him along with me and make him sit there,” she says.
Kathy met her husband, George Hornyak, in high school. “We dated
in our senior year, and then went our separate ways for college, and then
got back together and finally married a few years after I was out of law
school.”
Before she married, Kathy and her sister went to Ireland on a budget and
toured around. Her great-grandparents on both sides were Irish immigrants,
and she says that her Irish
heritage was very much embedded in her history. “There was a lot
of pride in being Irish. I mean our names were Charles, Patrick, Daniel,
Mary-Ellen, Maureen, and Kathleen.”
Kathy recently joined the boards of the Michael Smurfit School of Business
at University College, Dublin, which gives her one more reason to visit.
How does she manage work, mother, travel?
“I will tell you, fitting it all in is tough. I travel a good deal
during the week and I try not to do a lot of social or business events
on the weekend. If I have to go to a black-tie I will, but I don’t
seek them out. I just really try to carve out time [for the family],”
she says.
The other side of the “Thou Shalt Not Whine” sign, the side
that only Kathy can see from her side of the desk, reads, “Well-Behaved
Women Rarely Make History.” I ask her what the truism does for her.
“You know, looking at the quote reminds me to push myself harder
and take some risks. If you just lump along you’re not going to
get outstanding results. You really do have to try harder and take some
risks and it will pay off.”
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