The daughter of two H.R. executives from upstate New York, Lisa Shalett never envisioned herself becoming the Chief Investment Officer of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, overseeing more than $250 billion in assets under management and providing asset allocation guidance to some 16,000 Financial Advisors and millions of clients. While she went to Brown University and studied applied mathematics and economics, her path to finance was not linear. In truth, she was a “frustrated liberals arts major” who chose her major based on an affinity for math and economics as well as a desire for professional applicability, she says. “I didn’t grow up with means, so I knew that post-graduation, I would need a stable job to pay off student loan debt.” She spent the first six years of her career in management consulting, where she found stability and utility, but ultimately realized that she had sacrificed her work-life balance in the process. “I wish I could tell you I was a person with a plan, but I wasn’t,” she says. And so, in 1994, she quit her job with the Boston Consulting Group and began searching for a new career.
With preconceived notions about Wall Street, Shalett was apprehensive about shifting into finance. “I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I wanted to be in New York near my family,” she recalls. “I loved working in client-facing businesses, solving analytical problems and working in teams.” Shalett’s job search ultimately led her to the investment firm Sanford C. Bernstein in 1995, where she found a culture that she felt reflected her values. “I made the greatest decision of my career, taking a job as a sell-side analyst,” she says. “The rest is history.”
Making a career change was not easy. There were moments when Shalett was not entirely comfortable in her new role. “From a young age, I learned that it’s better to say, ‘I don’t know,’ when you don’t know the answer,” she says. “While success is equated with being prepared in a work environment, there’s no way that everyone knows everything.”
Today, a piece of advice Shalett gives to those nascent in their careers is to take an acting class. “We all get too self-conscious. We all have our own imposter syndrome,” she says. “Sometimes you must fake it ‘til you make it... It’s not inauthentic; when we walk into rooms in professional settings, a certain level of performance is required.”
Embarking upon her Wall Street career, Shalett realized early on that she loved the puzzle of the market and sought to apply the skills she learned as a consultant—understanding the process and teaching others how to do it differently and better—to her new day job. By 2002, Shalett had ascended to Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the independent sell-side research house at Sanford C. Bernstein, with responsibility for all global operations, including research, sales and trading, and annual revenues of close to $500 million.
Shalett joined Morgan Stanley in 2013 and describes the move as “amazingly satisfying”: “I got a blank sheet of paper,” she says, “a chance to build a wealth management research organization from scratch.”
Developing a Team Rooted in Principled Advice
Today, Shalett leads that organization—Morgan Stanley Wealth Management’s Global Investment Office—a group of more than 250 professionals driven by a desire to help advisors and clients better understand and navigate the markets. “None of our competitors have this integrated value proposition, where the people who are doing due diligence are connected to the people who do asset allocation, who are connected to the committee that is setting the high-level, tactical market calls.”
Shalett is also Chair of Morgan Stanley’s Global Investment Committee (GIC), senior investment professionals focused on sourcing diverse perspectives from across the Firm to deliver investment views to wealth management clients. “We look for the best ideas on every topic, taking advantage of Morgan Stanley’s scale and access to the best thinkers in the business,” Shalett says. “The GIC’s spirit of debate, alongside a history of transparent and attributable performance, will afford us the opportunity to give even more refined advice going forward.”
The Global Investment Office continues to grow under Shalett’s leadership. Recently it integrated Morgan Stanley Wealth Management’s Financial Planning team, which supports and amplifies the organization’s value proposition to clients. “You cannot do accurate asset allocation without a plan,” Shalett says. “Building portfolios simply based on assessments of risk tolerance, in this day and age, is primitive. We now have it all under one roof.”
As head of the Global Investment Office, Shalett prioritizes this integrated approach and emphasizes a collaborative culture, which she says is built on a foundation of trust among the members of her team. “Leadership is something that is earned, and to have people want to follow you, they have to trust you. Once you have that foundational understanding, it’s much easier to then relate to people with vision, with mission, with inspiration.”
The opportunity to support the free exchange of ideas and help people make sense of a complex, ever-evolving market remains a key motivation for Shalett. “Knowing that my work life fosters my engagement with the world around me is what gets me jumping out of bed at 5:07 every morning,” she says. “I am proud to wear the Morgan Stanley badge every single day.”
Outside of Morgan Stanley, Shalett is an advisory board member on the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, the NYC Chapter of iMentor and the Madison Square Boys and Girls Club of New York.