Michele Coleman Mayes’ curriculum vitae is a study in summiting, culminating most recently at the top of the law department at Pitney Bowes Inc., the world’s dominant producer of postage meters, mail equipment, and related software since the early 1900s.
Mayes entered the legal industry via the U.S. Department of Justice, where, in less than five years, she made the first of many ascents in her 31-year legal career upon her promotion to chief of the civil division in Detroit. Thereafter, Mayes turned her focus to corporate law.
“People coming into the company learn quickly that diversity is an imbedded value here, but simply because we’ve achieved our targets doesn’t mean we no longer need to pay attention to the issues.”
-Michele Coleman Mayes
“My transition [from the government] came at a time when firms were very focused on the clients a prospective attorney could bring with him or her,” says Mayes, who bypassed the conventional route up the corporate ladder for a more direct approach. “I couldn’t very well bring the USA with me, so I went with Plan B and entered directly into a corporate law department.”
The move in-house—which took her eventually to the tops of the Burroughs, Unisys, and Colgate-Palmolive legal departments—proved challengingly new, with shifts from litigation to transactional law, and government to high-tech and consumer-product industries. Mayes’ pragmatic approach to professional development served her well both then and now: “I asked questions and turned to those who had been in the business long before me,” says Mayes. “Sure I stubbed my toe many times, but I learned along the way.”
Today, Mayes stands at the helm of an ever-evolving Fortune 500 company in a heavily regulated field, still learning and still excited by the work that she does. “The world is dynamic and the company must be able to adapt to this. Part of the stimulation [of my current role] comes in anticipating the next trend and managing risks effectively,” she says. “I look internally and externally to see if there is a risk we need to guard against.”
The vigilance Mayes’ department pays to corporate matters is mirrored in the company’s approach to diversity. “Long before the government applied pressure on contractors, Pitney Bowes took a progressive approach to diversity matters,” says Mayes. “In fact, Pitney Bowes held a conference on race relations in the year I was born.”
“People coming into the company learn quickly that diversity is an imbedded value here,” says Mayes, “but simply because we’ve achieved our targets doesn’t mean we no longer need to pay attention to the issues. We constantly gauge our performance, and understand that we can’t take our foot off the pedal if we want to maintain our momentum.”
Looking at the slow but inexorable growth of Fortune 500 minority women general counsel, Mayes says that keeping the pipeline full is key to growing these numbers even more. “This doesn’t mean that all the attorneys in the pipeline will succeed, or that all will aspire to general counsel-or even deserve to achieve it,” says Mayes, “but it is natural that companies will pull talent from that pipeline as it fills and as ideas or preconceptions about minorities in positions of power change.”
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From the May/June 2005 issue of Diversity & The Bar®