Womanifesto: Celebrating UnionBank’s independent women
Joyce Gonzalez: Whoa-mom!
Nine o’clock in the morning. The Conference Room is filled with well-dressed men and women as if it’s curated for an event. Their hair, styled and polished. Their clothes match their shoes and bags well. The woman in the middle stood up and asked the man beside her to start the meeting with a prayer.
My stiff stance instantly changed into an observant yet relaxed state. This is not an ordinary Sales meeting; this is more like a family gathering.
That’s how I met UnionBank’s Executive Vice President and Center Head for Retail Banking Center, Ms. Joyce Gonzalez. She leads the Bank’s team of revenue drivers, and behind all the success of their team is attributed to her motherly way of leadership.
Please walk us through your journey with the bank.
I’m Joyce Gonzalez. I am the Executive Vice President for Retail Banking Center. I’ve been with the bank for 25 years. I would say it’s 25 blissful years because I would not have stayed this long if I didn’t like what I am doing. For the most part of being with retail banking center, so I’ve seen the bank through the years. When it’s at transformative years from manual to electronic to the present digital times.
What do you like most about your work in Union Bank?
Well, it’s all about people. Dealing with people – both within and outside of UnionBank. I handle people and I manage people; they are my clients.
Can you tell us more about your previous roles in the Bank and what were your learnings so far?
It’s the same job over the years, but with the passing of time my role has expanded, and I have grown in the area of strategy and the scale of the number of people that I manage.
Let’s talk about sales. It’s a very traditional client-facing job. So how were you able to apply the digital transformation into your Sales role?
Oh, it’s not easy. It’s a journey. We’re becoming to be the digital RM and we have to be 5 times better. I think I have achieved that, but before that it’s the discipline. It’s the sales discipline that is probably different from what the industry is doing. First, we do four disciplines of execution and that is very important. So that were very big on that. We you use that in the way you discipline people, you discipline them how they do their call reports. It’s no longer the reporting system wherein they write an email. It’s all digital. It’s on their phone, it’s in the laptop, so we’ve become to be mobile.
Well, the digital RN project is all about changing the mindset of our people. It’s all about giving them the necessary tools, the equipment and the learnings to become five times better than a regular RM.
What sets UnionBank apart from other companies?
What makes us different from the rest is we don’t pay lip service to our mission and vision. We actually pursue to make it happen. We are now the pre-imminent digital financial institution in the country. It came out during the FinTech Festival in Singapore, where we were recognized.
How does it feel to be seen as a mother by your team?
Well, I’m a real mother and I’m glad that they look at me as a mother. I never expected that. I’m actually amazed, and I’m very thankful. I don’t really know what I did, I just give people the time when they need me. I’m there when they need me the most.
What do you like most about your job?
It’s all about how I have trained them and how they have stepped up in their job and I’m so happy seeing these people where they are now. It just gives me a great sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.
What do you consider your greatest professional accomplishment?
It’s how I have grown in the company through the years. I have to give credit to my boss, to my mentor, Mr. Edwin Bautista. I have been with him for the longest time since sixteen or seventeen years ago, so he has developed the me through the years.
Who is Joyce outside UnionBank?
I’m a simple girl. I’m very actually domesticated. I’m a wife and a mother of three kids I have two boys and a girl. I like being at home fixing the house, cooking, and baking. Traveling of course, with my family and friends.
What’s your greatest personal accomplishment?
To have kept my family in top always years. It’s been 30 years and my husband and I have become the best of friends. I can tell him everything and the same thing with my kids.
How is your personal life different from what do you do at work?
I have a very supportive husband. He understands my job. It’s same thing because I said as I said, it’s dealing with people so my kids are not that different from my kids in the corporate world I treat them the same way.
You seem like a very busy for someone looking after the other. How do you manage your time?
I trust people I know how to delegate, so I give them a part of what I’m supposed to do and that’s my way of training them.
You’ve been with the Bank for 25 years. What would be the best advice that you can give UnionBankers? How can we stay that long or even longer?
You have to be committed to what you are doing. You have to like what you are doing and if you like it, it will just come out naturally. You will do things excellently because there’s no right or wrong because it’s always a learning experience. But when you do something, you have to do it well.
If not a banker, what would you have been?
A pre-school teacher because I love kids. Fun to deal with.
With all this success in your career and personal life, what advice can you give your fellow UnionBankers on how one can achieve this?
It is to be good at what you are doing. Be kind to people around you and work well with them. Everything follows.
Ana Aboitiz-Delgado: CX Curator
I have always been a believer that art is happiness that can be found everywhere. UnionBank’s Chief Customer Experience Officer and Center Head for Consumer Finance, Ana Aboitiz-Delgado, is a testimony that those who love art can find happiness wherever art is present. When I was curating her career story, I was amazed at how passionate she is in driving innovation for the bank and creating delightful experiences for our customers.
Ana believes that women are born multi-taskers, and I’ve witnessed how good of a multi-tasker she is when we were putting this issue of Phenom together. We scheduled her for the cover shoot, while her hair and make-up were being done, three UnionBankers arrived, and they had a meeting then and there.
Aside from being a banker and marketer, she is also a wife, a mother, a dog mommy, an art enthusiast, just recently, she has been awarded The Agora for Outstanding Achievement in Marketing Management. She is the first and only banker to receive this award, and that reinforces how excellent customer experience becomes a growth driver for the company.
Please tell us about your career journey before and with UnionBank.
I’ve been with Union Bank for eight years now. I’m a balikbayan. I started in UnionBank the first time in 2004 as a Retail Product Manager under Edwin’s group. After that, I left to pursue an opportunity in Citibank, where I was a Corporate Product Manager.
I then pursued my MBA and came back to UnionBank in 2011. I’ve held multiple positions across different departments. I started first in Customer Segment Management, and then moved on to lead the SME Banking team. Then I started in Credit Cards, where I spent several years in various positions – first as Marketing Director, then eventually went to lead the team until I ended up also assuming the role of Chief Customer Experience Officer. I started that group up about three years ago, and then late 2018, I was assumed the position of Center Head of Consumer Finance Center.
What is it like to be seen as a powerful career woman?
I don’t like to think of myself as powerful or a woman alone. I want to see myself as just someone passionate about what she’s doing. I love what I’m doing in the bank leading innovations and working with all the great people we have here. I guess the way I would answer that question is just somebody passionate about what she does and who’s driven to make a difference in whatever you take on.
Who is Ana outside work?
Outside of work, I am a mom, a wife, dog mommy as well, and an art enthusiast.
What do you love about your job?
What I love about my job is it allows me to come to work every day driven with the passion really to change the way banking is done not just in the Philippines, but hopefully also around the region and around the World. Every day I’m excited to come in and work with the teams to really drive innovation in the banking industry and redefine what it means to have a joyful banking experience.
What do you consider as your best career decision?
The best career decision I made was actually to choose not to pursue a career in Museum Curation. I graduated with a degree in art history and painting, and I thought that I would pursue a lifelong career working in a museum. And I started a job in an art gallery and soon found out that while I loved art, the work in a gallery was quite boring. So, I took a leap of faith came home and decided to take an opportunity to work with UnionBank as a Product Manager, and the rest is history.
I really loved the culture of UnionBank. I love the ability to be myself here and the ability to work with great people and deliver innovations.
Where will you be and what would you be doing if you weren’t with UnionBank?
I actually would not change a thing about where I am today. I know it sounds cliche and probably boring, but the truth is I’m really happy where I am I feel like I’ve found the right place. And I can’t imagine doing anything else.
What is your greatest strength or weakness, if any?
My greatest strength is my positive attitude. I think it’s allowed me to have just a clear outlook on life, and it’s helped me get through the tough times and my greatest weakness is the fact that I am quite impatient.
What is your decision-making process?
I’ve chosen the priorities in my life, and I make my decisions around those priorities. I choose to prioritize my family, my work, and my health, right in that order. So when push comes to shove, my family is always gonna come first, then work then health, and that’s how I organize my time.
What is your favorite UnionBank value?
I think the value in Union Bank that most inspire me, and I think that really gets me going is magis. I am a person that does not like to just take the status quo I like to challenge it I find excitement in it, and I think that’s the value that will make our world a better place, of course, it can’t be achieved without our other values but that’s my favorite one.
What’s your advice to young women wanting to succeed in their careers?
I think the only thing that makes a woman different from a man in terms of career is the fact that many women feel beholden to certain beliefs or biases that societal norms have put on them. So I think what’s taken me this far and my advice to young women would be to take or make the choice not to be beholden to those biases.
Society tends to put this pressure on women and make them think that they don’t have the ability to manage – being a wife, being a mom, and being a career woman at the same time. I think that’s why Nature has made women great multitaskers because we can do it all. And it just takes prioritizing your time and making time for everything in your day.
That’s I think what they would distinguish my advice to a young woman versus a man. In general, another advice I would give is really to find what it is you’re passionate about. You can’t be an effective leader if you don’t have a passion for what you’re doing. People won’t be able to be on board with what you want to aspire for the vision you’re trying to achieve if you’re not passionate yourself. The second thing is to start from a very young age to reflect on who you are as a person. To understand what your strengths are, and to build on those. More importantly to also know what your weaknesses or your flaws are, to work with them and also work on them.
Michelle Rubio: Re-engineered Future
She was one of the drivers of the total culture overhaul for the Bank when we started the digital transformation almost five years ago. For Ms. Michelle Rubio, the Bank’s Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resource Officer, future-proofing the talents does not sound too technical at all. For someone who has been in the field of Engineering for a while, a break in Human Resources could have been destiny for her and the company.
Her approach to HR is no longer just recruitment, training, and engagement. UnionBank HR is setting the bar high when it comes to employee experience, employer branding and communications, and organizational capability, among others. We have been recognized by different award-giving bodies and have been awarded as the Best Company to Work for in Asia and Best Employer Brand in 2019.
Her belief that “when you stop learning, you die” is a testament that UnionBank employees can rely on the continuous capability building and innovation – for us to reach our fullest potential.
Please tell us about your career journey before and with UnionBank.
I started my career journey in an unconventional way. I’m a graduate of Engineering. I have a degree in Industrial Management Engineering and I minored in Chemical Engineering. And at that time, the most logical direction for me was to join the manufacturing industry. I had an opportunity to join a semiconductor company where I started my career as a Statistical Process Control Engineer. At that time, my role was to optimize processes to conduct experiments so that with which we can create or achieve high yields in production for the chips that we manufactured, and my work allowed me to support many change initiatives in processes and the way people work. That led the organization to become interested in me for me to pursue a career in organizational development.
After working at the semiconductor industry, I had an offer to work for Asea, Brown & Boveri, an electrical engineering company, working also with customers on the engineering side. Then I was asked if I wanted to shift into a career in human resources, so I became Country HR Head – looking after five other companies from the Holding Group. I was really enjoying my work in HR, and suddenly my husband had an offer to move to Singapore and worked there. We moved to Singapore, moved our family, and when I arrived in Singapore, I landed a job as a management consultant in the Singapore firm, and my role was to do consulting work with companies and work redesign people developer innovation and Singapore quality class.
Coming back from living and working abroad after three years, I met Txabi Aboitiz, who asked me if I would be interested in considering an interview with Aboitiz Transport and the Bank. And I said would you give me a chance to go for both interviews and I did that’s just that.
So, I went for an interview in Transport, and they were looking for somebody in human resources. I went to the bank as well. But what struck me was the person who invited me to go for an interview. I got an email one day when I opened it, it’s from no less than the Chairman of the Bank, Tito Ortiz. I remember that email said, “Hi, I’m Tito, I’m looking for somebody quite senior in HR and would you like to come and have a chat.”
I set that interview, I went, and I met this very tall and handsome man who talked about the vision for the Bank. And he said, “you know we need to focus on people because we have this very challenging journey ahead of us we want to grow the bank and we want to make sure that we take care of our people and provide them the skill sets needed to meet the challenges of the Future.
Because of this vision and we talked about so many things, I made a decision that, if given a chance, I really would like to join banking. Banking seemed at the time very interesting, not only the work as an HR but the business itself and the vision of Tito Ortiz.
When I got hired in UnionBank, I had a Boss – Bert Belen. He was the HR Head, and he hired me to handle HR services. I wasn’t really that excited about HR services knowing that I’m more inclined to work on organization development and change management. Nonetheless, there were challenges in HR services in terms of process, and I said to myself, “I’m an Engineer I could actually simplify or change processes and study this Bank processes it would be a learning experience for me to learn about banking”.
I did that and then work closely with Bert, shared with him some of the innovations I thought that would be applicable to what we did in HR and the vision for the business. He was receptive to all of those suggestions and even assigned me to work on many of those projects. We partnered the lot, and together with the rest of the team we were able to introduce a lot of programs. Programs like paper skills, we had the Lead Management Trainee program of the bank, which I started UnionBank University, Rewards and Recognition, Employee Engagement, and so on and so forth.
It is in those years, that we were started to get a lot of interest by the leaders on the HR programs that that we develop. So, that’s how we journeyed. We were very focused on what people programs or people strategies would make a difference in the bank because after all, every business issue requires some people’s support. Or every business concern and how the business would grow requires people intervention so that goals can be reached, and people be more motivated to contribute to the growth of the Bank.
What is it like to be seen as a powerful woman?
I find the powerful woman very strange as a label, because maybe I don’t see myself that way. I do what I need to do, and you know HR work is not about just being popular. It requires a lot of making hard decisions and communicating those hard decisions to people – it’s about doing the right thing. I hear this often being said by our President and CEO Edwin Bautista. He always says that let’s do the right thing and we’re aligned in that way.
To me, being in HR at this point in time in Union Bank is very significant for me in my career milestone because of Transformation. In the past, you know being in HR, you read, experience, and implement all those change management initiatives read from a framework implemented.; it’s easy. But transformation is different. You don’t know what’s going to happen through tomorrow things are very what you say complex, and you must adjust and iterate as you go. Things are also uncertain, but as an HR person, you try to create certainty and stability for people so that they will continue to perform to their fullest potential. As a human resource person, to be able to do that to help people navigate through so much change is a wonderful thing.
Outside work, who is Michelle Rubio?
That’s a beauty pageant question. We live a simple life. I’m married to another busy person who has a career and running many organizations and companies for the group. We both have busy lives, but we make time for each other I think the good part of that is understanding what the demands of the work are from us. Therefore, when we are together during weekends, it’s really about quality time and having conversations, doing the things we love, which are simple joys. We live in the South. So, spending time in Tagaytay – riding the bike, playing music, having a glass of wine, playing with our dogs, or occasionally when our son is in town because he is based in Sydney, cooking and just being with each other, and dreaming.
What I love about my job in Union Bank is learning every day, and there’s a saying that if you stop learning, you die, I believe in that. There’s just so much to learn in UnionBank every day, and you get it from all kinds of people you interact with daily. Whether it’s with a ManCom member, with the Chairman, with Edwin our President and CEO, with a union officer, or with an officer of the Bank – there’s always something to learn. And that keeps me excited.
What was your best career decision?
My best career decision was shifting from Engineering to HR. Working with manufacturing and an engineering company and dealing with machines Every day and processes, to me, that’s easy work. Maybe I’m oversimplifying it. But you know where the variability comes is when you start working with people because people have different motivations, have different concerns, they come from different backgrounds.
And you know the high is when you just actually influence and convince them to go to a different direction. This direction that we all want to go and to sell ideas to people and people buy them to be able to create a better life for them because they work in an organization where they can realize their career aspirations. And being at the back to help and support them is a testament to why the best career decision I made was to shift to Human Resource. If I remained in Engineering, it would be a boring life.
I’m not one to dwell on making the wrong decisions, I mean it’s not like all my decisions are made right. I’ve made some mistakes, but I’ve not really regretted any career decision in my life. Because maybe I’m quick to learn and pivot when I fall. The universe has been good to me, and a lot of it is also about luck being in the right organization at the right time was the best gift life offered me. And I really enjoy being in the Bank and being with the people I work with. I’m very practical when it comes to decision-making. I’m also quick, but I like to get the views of others and to weigh in on what others have to say. When I don’t have much time, I look at the risk behind every decision I make because everything that you do has a consequence. So in my mind, I have mental models that allow me to weigh on different options given certain assumptions, and then I decide.
Very collaborative – the decision-making process I have now partly because I use it as an opportunity to coach other people often because I’ve been doing what I do for a long time, and I’ve been there done that. I already know that most of the outcomes, but I still get other people to be involved because, in many instances, it’s an opportunity to coach and also build on the ideas of others to create a better decision.
I never thought about what I would be doing if not in UnionBank. Still in HR, maybe HR director somewhere else.
I bucket everything that I do. I could be very busy, back-to-back meetings, and sometimes overlapping. It’s about compartmentalizing my time, and working with others so that we don’t wait. I’ve learned how to delegate, and I also have a system of monitoring what needs to be done what’s not done and that helps a lot in organizing my busy day.
I’ll just take from the assessments, but I feel this is my strength. I’m very creative, my mind is always working on what’s next, what’s next. My head is filled with ideas on how to do things differently or do things that work.
I’m also very particular about execution because an idea that’s not executed is nothing. So, to me, execution and doing it right the first time, maybe because of my engineering discipline on processes and how things work, has been a strength.
I’m impatient. I want things done right away. For me, we should not lose time, so you know the agile way of doing things suit me so well, and I love it. I wish it had been invented many years ago. It’s the model that we have at UnionBank right now. The agile operating model and agile ways of doing things just appeal so much to me there’s no turning back. Agile is the only way.
What’s your advice to young women wanting to succeed in their careers?
I think for me as a woman you need to do three things: one is to be yourself, study, and always evolve with the changing demands of the business and do your work well and then while you’re at it work hard there’s no substitute.