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Chief Change Officer™
#283 Katie Curry: Risk by Training, Reinvention by Choice
00:22:06
Katie Curry didn’t just study risk—she lived it. From communist Bulgaria to Wall Street, from rating credit to leading creatives, this Gen X leader has turned reinvention into an art form. In this episode, she shares how to build mental toughness, reframe failure, and lead with both power and humility—without ever chasing a playbook.
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- [00:05]
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- [00:20]
Vince Chan
Angel soft.
- [00:22]
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- [00:45]
Vince Chan
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show. Chief Change Officer. Hi, I'm Vince Chan, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change, progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. In today's episode, I'll be chatting with a dear friend from Yale days, Ekatrina Curry, or as many know her as Katie. Katie and I share a background in risk assessment and measurement, well trained and developed through years of working with banks, fund houses and insurance companies. But when it comes to her career, Katie has taken her understanding of risk to a new level, stepping out of her comfort zone with a deliberate approach. Approach. Like me, Katie has her share of navigating and overcoming multiple rounds of reinventions through diverse cultures. In her case, from small town to Big Apple, from Bulgaria to United States, from communism to Wall street, from New York City to Yale School of Management, from established credit rating agency to a tech innovation company in the insurance industry. Loss of adventures, loss of failure, loss of success, and loss of resilience. Here comes my good old friend, Katie.
- [02:37]
Ekatrina Curry
Happy to be here with you on the podcast. I grew up in Bulgaria, I grew up in communism, and I grew up in a small town. My first big part of my kind of reinvention or transformation was coming to the United States and getting educated. I was traveling on a tour bus in New York City. I was going in downtown in the financial district, and I said, you know, I would really love to work here one day. I was very fortunate to start my first role at Citi. Citi is a great training place at Citi. What really helped me was understanding what my skill set is and what I bring to the table. So I spent a few years there. It was a great experience. I learned a lot. But I knew that I wanted to get deeper in finance. I needed to really build my skills. So I wanted to go to business school. I thought I was going to go to school in New York City, but was admitted to Yale. And I just wanted to go for one weekend to see what I would be missing by choosing NYU over Yale.
- [03:51]
Vince Chan
Okay.
- [03:52]
Ekatrina Curry
And so I went for the first time to visit the campus and the college. And I met a number of students who took me on a tour. Complete strangers. They just took me on a tour. They spent the day with me, talking and sharing Kind of their goals and their career journeys and why they're there and why they picked som. I just felt so drawn to the place and I felt like, hey, this is where I want to be. So I had to make a pretty big pay pivot. I gave up my job. I went full time to the school of management where you and I met many years ago.
- [04:31]
Vince Chan
Your finance career is centered around risk. So what does risk mean to you in life and in career?
- [04:41]
Ekatrina Curry
After business school, I was interested in risk. Risk is a theme of my career and my journey. It's understanding risk, it's quality, quantifying risk, it's mitigating risk, it's addressing risk, and it's also taking risk and taking opportunities. And so I took a role at S and P Global. I did about four different jobs there throughout my long tenure. I started as a credit analyst. I work on the most difficult transactions. Interest rate derivatives. Credit derivatives. They wanted to delve deep and really have a good understanding of capital market.
- [05:21]
Vince Chan
Yeah.
- [05:22]
Ekatrina Curry
But after a few years, I had an opportunity to lead a credit analyst team. And I found that I really enjoyed the human aspect, the people aspect and the leadership aspect, learning about how to lead, what makes a good leader, and how not to lead. I made a lot of mistakes at that time and I learned a lot of things afterwards. I had an opportunity moving to operations, a pretty big pivot going from credit analysis to leading operations teams. There's a lot of talent and tools. Companies in many cases overlook the impact of these teams and they overlook the process improvements and the value that these teams can provide. So I enjoyed that team was one of my favorite teams to lead. Everyone was on there, typically on their first or second job out of college, and there was an energy and excitement and there's such an opportunity to upskill. So that was my favorite part about that team is using new tools and upskilling and trying new things. And then I pivoted into a very different team leading a creative team, leading the global editorial and translation team. And so that was journalists and ghostwriters and translators. And this is a very different personality of a much more creative team. So how you lead a team of creatives is very different from how you lead a team of operators versus a team of credit analyst. And I love that evolution and learning as a leader, what is needed? How can I be most helpful to this particular team? And then I pivoted. And about a year ago, I moved from kind of the large established New York company to an amazing company, Millennial Specialty Insurance and Lease Track a company that's been in growth stage, it's a part of a public company, but it's a company that's still maturing and it's growing fast and it's expanding and it's a very different challenge and it's a really exciting opportunity. Look at the themes of my career. Part of it is, like I said, it's around risk, part of it is around people and leadership. And a big part of it is about learning.
- [07:57]
Vince Chan
Ah, I'd like to learn more about your learning habit these days. We'll come back to you on this, but go back to your transformation, the changes you've gone through. So in your life so far, you've moved from Bulgaria to United States, from New York City to New Haven, Connecticut, then back to New York. From banking into credit rating agency and now into insurance in a growing venture. So through all these different stages and forms of transformations, what's your approach to managing changes over time?
- [08:37]
Ekatrina Curry
I don't even think about these as transformations. It's more about kind of reinvention and reinventing myself and trying to understand and figure out what can I contribute to my new situation, to my new role? What impact can I have on my team? How can I drive business, drive growth and drive improvement for my company? I remember when you and I were at Yale, we heard Merrill Lynch's then chairman, David Kamensky. He talked about when market is calm, he actually creates challenges for his team so that they can learn and grow through these challenges. And when the market is turbulent, he just leaves them alone and lets them operate. And it gave me a lot of thinking. And at first I thought, what a jerk. I never want to work for him. But as I matured as a leader, I came actually to understand and maybe appreciate that this reinvention and assessing and seeing the new situation and understanding how can I be most helpful? What do I have to contribute? What have I done before that I may be able to bring here and help this particular problem, this particular team, this particular company. A key part of that is the ability to pivot, the ability to handle change and not to be. Of course, there's a natural kind of nervousness and anxiety about switching roles or switching industries, but building that mental toughness so you can look at change more from the lens of excitement than from the lens of fear, even when it's forced upon you. And sometimes change is just going to come because outside of your control. I think the key part of this mental toughness is to make a decision that you're not just going to come out resilient on the other side, you actually going to come out stronger. It's like going to the gym, right? When you lift weights, you don't just maintain muscles, you actually grow and you get stronger and then you're able to take, take on more problems and solve even bigger and hairier and more challenging problems. When I'm dealing with failures and stress and change, I think about, okay, how can I come out stronger on the other side? And when my kids are dealing with that, how can I help them? Or when my team is dealing with that, how can I help them so they come out actually stronger? It's the concept of post traumatic growth. I think for those in the audience that want to look it up, it's an interesting concept.
- [11:35]
Vince Chan
Mental toughness, the broader term is resilience. Now since you bring up the term mental toughness, so let me move on to the next question about the mental side of things. You and I come from a very strong business education background. And in business education program we are trained to be highly analytical, strongly logical, especially for business. But even when it comes to managing our life and career, we, we, we have been very thoughtful, but also very analytical. A lot of back and forth analysis, pros and cons. But we have our psychology. We're after a human and business education is light on that kind of training. So when it comes to your reinvention, how you balance the logic side of you as well as the psychology side.
- [12:40]
Ekatrina Curry
Of you, I think the way I approach this and the way I think about it is one is you have to know yourself and know your risk tolerance and your risk tolerance evolves over time, right? You may have a high risk tolerance early in your career. Maybe your risk tolerance is a bit lower when you're raising your family and then you may be ready for another, you know, exciting move or jump later on. So knowing yourself and, you know, for me knowing myself and my risk tolerance was, was very important. The second part is I had spent a lot of years being very focused on outcomes, being very intense and intent about what I'm doing. And I have now moved into a phase of exploration and looking at the various opportunities and being less focused on a precise planned path, but embracing these opportunities, embracing kind of the fun, the exploration, the curiosity and even the magic. And I, that was a major shift for me. I think it happened with experience, with age, where I was able to kind of embrace, like you said, both the hard and logical decision, but also these intuitive, exploratory, pursuing, you know, fun and pursuing, exploring outside of my comfort zone.
- [14:06]
Vince Chan
Speaking of resilience, of change, of reinvention, a lot of people are risk averse. If I keep using the risk concept, you know, they have fear of failure. They're afraid that they will fail. That's also another fear, fear of judgment. They don't like to be judged, they don't like to be questioned. What's your personal definition of failure and success after so many years on Wall Street?
- [14:44]
Ekatrina Curry
I've had many failures in my career and my life. And I look back and I think that people who have not had failures in, in their life or their career, they're playing it too safe. And so there is a level of expectation that you want to approach your life, your choices, your career, that some things, you know, maybe six or seven out of your 10 decisions will be correct and the other ones will, you know, you will fail. And, you know, so what you will learn. If you have that kind of ability to shake it off and have a little resilience and know yourself and trust yourself, then you can recover from most mistakes. So to come back to this question of success and the way I think about it, I have my personal KPIs that I look at. And I look at success much more broadly. It's not, you know, reaching a certain title, although that's important for me, or a certain, you know, financial remuneration, although that's also important for me. But I'm looking at it much more broadly. I look at the different areas of my life, health and relationship, and am I surrounded by people from whom I can learn? Am I in a place where I can have impact? Is there value that I can actually deliver, drive and bring to my current situation? And as I think on those kind of personal KPIs, whether things turn out exactly the way I planned them or not, I mean, that's outside of my control, right? All I know is that I can do my best. And every day I can ask myself, what can I do? How can I 10x what I'm doing? How can I drive and deliver value and growth? And that's kind of the only thing I can do. So I have to say I am less focused on a conventional definition of success. I'm very focused on the different areas of my life. And do I have energy? Am I healthy? Do I have the friends that, you know, I like to have? Do I have enough time to enjoy my hobbies? I like hiking, I like salsa dancing, I like spending time with my family. Do I have time to do these? And at the same time, Am I driving hard with my team? Am I teaching them things that they don't know? Am I helping them to grow and progress? And there are many paths to success and we've seen it in our accelerated society. You can be successful through growing your community and being an influencer. You can be successful in a more traditional path. You can be successful in being an entrepreneur and a founder. There are many paths. So I think it's time for us to maybe put away the definitions of success that are preconceived and be a little more open to the journey and have fun with it.
- [17:51]
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- [18:17]
Vince Chan
In our culture, the way we've been taught, we often think that being a top notch leader is all about having a flashy title, a fat wallet and a tongue of power. But we are in the era of change. Things are changing around us so rapidly. I believe the measure of success and what it means to be excellent as a leader has evolved. Now excellence is all about resilience. It's not just about how big your title, how rich you are and how much power you hold today, is about how well you bounce back from changes and how long the game you play into tomorrow. Katie, with that in mind, how do you view your leadership style? Perhaps what kind of leader do you see yourself as?
- [19:22]
Ekatrina Curry
So is the leader. I'd like to be powerful enough to heard and charismatic enough to be followed. Because I think that this is the two sides of leadership. My focus is to one, is get things done, two is deliver value with simplicity and incremental progress. And three, is be recognized for having the humility and the wisdom to recognize others and recognize opportunities and ideas that are presented to me and then at home and with my friends. I'd like, you know, for people to see that I am present, that I care and that I'm a hard worker. It was very important for me during COVID I was working in with the operations team at that time and we were extremely busy. Our volume of work just skyrocketed and day in and day out I was at home. Of course my kids saw me, they saw me here working, making calls, solving problems, driving incremental improvement. And I knew that this is, you know, I am being a role model. I am teaching them what does it mean to be a productive human. And now we look back a few years and of course I enjoyed spending time with them during COVID But I am also very grateful that they had an opportunity to see me in action because they usually would not have an opportunity to do that if I am traveling or in the office.
- [21:10]
Vince Chan
So Katie, you and I are Gen X, but you have another identity. You are a mother of two. They're both Gen Z. They're still in school, but at some point they will enter the workforce. In the office you manage a wide range of generations. So as a mother and leader leading younger generations, can you share with us about your tech on working with them?
- [21:46]
Ekatrina Curry
There's a lot has been said about Gen Z being entitled and being impatient, but I think as leaders we need to pivot and evolve and be much more clear, much more transparent understanding that we moving towards a meritocracy. Gen Z appreciates a true meritocracy rather than, you know, a hierarchical culture. I enjoy working with Gen Z. They give me energy, they teach me a lot of things. I have reverse mentors and I've had reverse mentors who are Gen Z and they teach me things that I have not known and I haven't experienced. And of course I look to make it a relationship of reciprocity where I help them and guide them.
- [22:36]
Vince Chan
Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show. Leave us top rated reviews. Check out our website and follow me on social media on this Chan, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.
- [23:07]
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