CPAO Marianne Monte Named Crain’s New York Business Woman of Influence

Chief people & administration officer Marianne Monte won the Crain’s New York Business mentor award at the Women of Influence event, recognized for building up women through her role, mentorship, and by advocating for policies that help women become leaders both within and outside of Shawmut. Read more about Marianne’s influential achievements below and in her Crain’s profile here.

Inherent to Marianne’s role as CPAO is the development of talent companywide—she drives the continued growth and success of Shawmut by working on this with executive leadership. A critical focus within this is the development and promotion of women in the male-dominated construction industry.

Marianne partnered with CEO Les Hiscoe to develop Shawmut’s Diversity Leadership Council, a cross-functional group of employees nationwide who act as champions and allies to drive the company’s work to create a diverse, equitable workplace. Thanks to Marianne’s leadership, the Diversity Leadership Council, and the work of many people across the company, in an industry that’s just 10% women, Shawmut has 31% women in its workforce, with goals and KPIs in place for executive leaders to continue to increase this number.

Understanding that up-and-coming women leaders need to have managers that will support and advocate for them, Marianne led the launch of Shawmut’s Inclusion Learning and Awareness Plan. Developed for employees to learn about, understand, and interrupt unconscious biases, trainings provide managers the skills to become inclusive, equitable leaders.

Leading the industry, Marianne and Shawmut launched sponsorship relationships, pairing high-potential, underrepresented employees—including women—with executive sponsors. These relationships leverage sponsors’ experience to bolster sponsees’ career aspirations, with the goal of promotion to the leadership team, and also breaks the cycle of affinity bias. A sponsor herself, Marianne also leads the program—which in its first round of sponsorships saw 95% retention; 50% of sponsees promoted during the 18-month relationship; 30% promoted to the senior leadership team; and 100% reporting increased feelings of engagement.

Marianne led the charge in switching Shawmut over to a focal point review cycle, to eliminate the influence of the business cycle, disrupt the potential for evaluator bias, and ensure pay and promotion practices are consistently and equitably applied. When Shawmut engaged a law firm for a salary audit, Marianne and the executive team rectified areas of gender-based inequity to establish pay equity, and created a scalable, operationalized model for Shawmut to regularly review and work to maintain pay and promotion equity.