Here is an excerpt from an interview of Nancy Mattenberger, Vice President for global consulting services at Infor, New York. It was conducted by Primeast: “Since 1987, we have been facilitating performance improvement in the fields of Leadership, Organisational Change and Teamwork, with purposeful organisations and communities. Some of the world’s most respected organisations trust us to deliver beyond expectations. They rely on us to balance results with personal success in order to facilitate sustainable performance.”

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As part of Primeast’s Women in Leadership series, we interviewed Nancy Mattenberger, Vice President for global consulting services at Infor, New York. Nancy shared with us her journey, the challenges she’s encountered as a female leader, and her tips for those looking to get to the top.

Explain to us your current role and a bit about your team.

I’m Vice President for consulting services at Infor, the world’s third largest business applications company, and lead a team of global consultants. Infor provides beautiful crafted software purpose built for specific industries and micro verticals to simplify the way companies work. To achieve this, we have set ourselves a course of disrupting the enterprise application business and we create compelling experiences for enterprise software users, going beyond just the usual look and feel. In fact, we have our own in-house design company in our headquarters in New York City and have been branded “the world’s largest start up”.

You didn’t start your career in technology, so tell us about your journey.

I started my life as a translator. I moved around a lot in my childhood and have lived in numerous countries. I speak a few different languages and decided to put them to good use, working as a translator in a major international organisation.

I soon got bored and realised that what I really enjoyed doing was managing a global workforce and the challenges that presented, from moving employees and their families from one country to another and ensuring they thrived and adapted to new cultures and environments. Consequently, I went into operational HR, working for a global packaging company with a large mobile workforce and enjoyed assisting staff and their families to move around the world, tapping into my own experience of relocating globally with my family as a child and then an adult. It was during this time that I got very interested in the PwC technology we were using daily to calculate taxes and compensation packages for expatriates and ultimately was offered a job at PwC. They needed someone who actually came from the HR industry, who would be credible in front of HR executives and who could manage an international team. So I moved to London, joined PwC and transitioned from a HR operational role to an IT management role, successfully managing a European team and increasing revenue numbers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

From PwC I moved onto Australia and a job at Kronos, where I held a variety of roles in pre-sales, sales and consulting in the APAC region. I also helped Kronos launch brand new markets in China and India and successfully grow the company footprint across the whole of Asia Pacific for the next 8 years, it was an exciting time and I learnt a lot about launching, expanding and thriving in new markets. It was during this time that I had my first mentor who championed me and helped me grow tremendously in this new role.

I then moved to Oracle to run their Australian ERP consulting services practice and to find ways to compete against tough, low cost competition from offshore companies. I was successful in that role and increased the scope of my responsibilities, taking on the delivery practice of one of Oracle’s SaaS acquisitions and was instrumental in assisting with the transition of the business from a traditional on premise operation to a cloud focused delivery practice.

I enjoyed working for Oracle but wanted to go back to working for a company that was a true game-changer, in a high impact and high visibility position and so I joined Infor a year ago and took on a global position, for which I had to be based out of the US. I relocated to Florida for the outdoors’ lifestyle but commute to New York or to other States to see customers most weeks. It was a really successful move.

With 13,000 people around the globe, Infor could easily be a lumbering corporate giant but instead, it is branded the world’s largest start-up and it truly is! I really love the energy, enthusiasm and the willingness to take risks to be disruptive and innovative in the marketplace. It’s great to see a company of this size invest in its people and their ideas.

What are the main challenges you’ve faced?

I started my career in a junior role and as I worked my way up the ladder I do remember some discussions along the way that were very meaningful. I think people are always trying to put you in a box and so I got a lot of people when I was trying to move from operational HR to IT saying “don’t move out of your lane, it’s not possible”. I even remember a significant conversation with a senior HR VP, who was a woman, saying that as women our careers are limited to female oriented roles such as HR, or being an airline hostess. I couldn’t believe I was hearing that kind of language coming out of the company’s most senior HR representative.

Despite claims that all careers are open to women and men, there is still a lot of discrimination in the marketplace and a belief that once you get stuck in one line of business you can’t move to another. I didn’t listen to what people said, moved industries, tried new things, moved countries, took risks and moved up the chain. For me that risk paid off but if I had listened to all the “no-sayers” along the way, I don’t think I would have gotten very far.

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Here is a direct link to the complete interview.

Infor is a leading provider of business application software helping 73,000 customers in more than 200 countries and territories improve operations, drive growth, and quickly adapt to changes in business demands.