Keeping Up with Connelly

Connelly’s drive is exceeded only by her desire to polish off everything that’s on her plate — and more — faster. “I keep myself running pretty hard managing competing priorities,” she says. There’s the demanding job, wife and mom responsibilities, and heavy involvement in community affairs.

Look to Dad for the origin of her relish for challenge: Neil F. Hartigan, chair of the World Trade Center in Chicago and a former Illinois lieutenant governor, attorney general and Chicago deputy mayor under Richard J. Daley, instilled in her the mindset that she could do anything she set out to try.

“And here I am! I had a great example of leadership in my life,” she says. “My father was exceptional.”

Connelly’s association with JPMorgan began at First National Bank of Chicago, where she spent summers interning. Once she completed its First Scholar three-year management training program — after picking up a bachelor’s in international relations from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and, while still a trainee, an MBA in management from Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management — she purposely sought “the scariest and least likely job [she] could potentially succeed in,” she recalls.

It was currency trader — and the start of something big. “There was no automation. It was live. You had to be aggressive, and you had to do math in your head very quickly — I don’t particularly love math. But I just had to go after that job and try it. And I loved it,” she says.

After working as a foreign exchange trader in the capital markets group, she jumped over to Continental Bank, also as a currency trader. But two years later First National recruited her back to run its foreign exchange forwards, or currency swaps, desk.

By 1998, when Bank One acquired First National, it was Connelly who oversaw the merger of Banc One capital markets group. As she continued to move up, Connelly hungered for client interaction.

“The one thing I hadn’t done was run a sales group,” she says. So it was on to the firm’s product planning group, where she managed one of the largest teams in downtown Chicago. From there, she was appointed director of the Midwest region.

Despite her early exposure to politics, Connelly, whose four children by husband Matthew, in the real estate business, are three to 14 years old, has no ambition to throw her hat in any ring, any time, any place.

She says: “My own experience is that it’s very hard for families to go through what you go through in politics. Once was enough for me.”

—

Freelance writer Jane Wollman Rusoff is a Los Angeles-based contributing editor of Research and is the founder of Family Star Productions.