Meet the 31-year-old who mentors the CEO of a $44 billion company

BNY Mellon

Mentoring programs at banks are pretty standard.

Every year, a wide-eyed class of analysts and associates start their graduate and post-graduate programs with goals to change the world (or at least make a lot of money).

They get paired with a mentor, usually a senior executive, who can show them the ropes at the firm.

BNY Mellon, however, does things a little differently. Three years ago, it piloted a program called "reverse mentoring."

Darah Kirstein, an employee at the company, was asked to mentor a senior executive of the firm. Not just any senior executive though — the then 28-year-old was asked to mentor Gerald Hassell, the CEO of the $44 billion company.

"It was a little intimidating," she said. "At the time, 1 Wall Street was our headquarters, which is a very historical building. Bank of New York is also a very historical bank, and here I am walking into the CEO's office."

Kirstein graduated from Penn State with a degree in information sciences and technology and took her first job at BNY Mellon in the technology leadership program, a rotational program with exposure to different areas of the business.

Kirstein and Hassell meet once a quarter, either in person when she is in New York or via Skype when she is in Pittsburgh, where she is based.

BNY MellonHassell has a "Darah list" and often uses the millennial as a sounding board for ideas. He wanted to downsize the bank's real-estate footprint and asked her opinion on desk sharing. He wanted to know where people her age were investing, how they were investing, and how the next generation consumes information.

One of the biggest challenges for Kirstein was not knowing in advance what questions Hassell would ask.

Her father and sister are engineers, and an aptitude for technology runs in the family. Trips to CompUSA were like field trips for Kirstein, and she remembers growing up tinkering with things, pressing buttons, and trying to figure out how they worked. "That's where a lot of my confidence came from," she said.

Hassell pioneered the program. He specifically wanted a program geared toward mentoring senior executives about technology.

The bank's chief information officer, Suresh Kumar, selected several employees from the firm's technology leadership program for a one-year pilot. Kirstein missed the first meeting among the mentors to assign the mentees, and, as luck would have it, she was paired with the CEO.

That was three years ago. While other relationships have fallen by the wayside, Kirstein and Hassell's relationship has evolved.

BNY MellonNine years with the company later, Kirstein felt that she hit a crossroads in her career. She had been working part-time after her second child was born and was debating whether to come back to the company full-time.

She liked spending time with her family, but said she didn't want to go down the "mommy track." She emailed Hassell in December to schedule a meeting for career advice, and he responded, "It was about time I helped with you something."

The CEO blocked out an hour and a half out of his schedule to discuss Kirstein's short-term and long-term career objectives and the path she should take.

"It has always been a two-way street," she said. "Every time I step into this office, I learn something. He is a very curious person. A lot of our conversations would be begin with, 'So tell me about ...'"

Kirstein has since returned to the bank full-time and remains positive about her experience. She said she believe that social media has given millennials very high and unrealistic expectations of their future career paths, and so "they constantly bounce around, trying to land that dream job."

"The reality is," Kirstein said, "really cool opportunities can exist just where we are."

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