That same spirit carried into how she thought about giving back. As a student at Rutgers, she joined the board of the university’s dance marathon, a large student-run effort that raised money for children with cancer. “When I was a kid, my mom would take us to charity walks and events, but this dance marathon was the first thing I was really deeply involved in,” Pereless explains. Throughout that experience, she saw firsthand how much effort goes into something before anyone sees the result. So much of it was about the logistics, the turnout and the people willing to do the unglamorous work and actually show up.
“You don’t always have to be the leader,” she says. “Things don’t happen unless people actually show up and execute.”
Pereless went on to help start and serve on the Emerging Leaders board for The Community Food Bank of New Jersey and she continues to make charity a part of her life and her kids’ lives. As a mother, food insecurity, especially for kids and families, is something she has focused on in her charity work and she hopes this example will teach her own kids the value of giving back and showing up for others.
Core Principles in Practice
Focusing on the work and volunteering where others shied away was a concept that carried through into Pereless’ career, too. Early on in her career, as an analyst, Pereless raised her hand to work for a manager who was known for being more difficult. The experience was demanding and, at times, exhausting, but she knew it also accelerated her learning and prepared her for taking on new challenges as her career progressed.
Throughout her career, Pereless has focused on building that same support system at work that she experienced growing up. There's no better example than how she arrived at Morgan Stanley. Two colleagues left for the Firm first and she got a call that same morning saying they'd be in touch. Nine months later, when the noncompete cleared, she and two other colleagues followed. Now at Morgan Stanley, she’d already worked with some of her team for the better part of two decades, across two firms. Before that gap between jobs, she jokes, she and one of her colleagues had never spent more than two weeks apart. For Pereless, that continuity and commitment to one another means a lot. It creates a level of trust that's hard to replicate — and that's hard to explain unless you've experienced it.
“Working together for as long as we have, through different phases of life and firm phases, you feel you always have someone who understands what you’re dealing with and where you came from,” she says.
That perspective shapes how Pereless leads. “I was lucky enough to mentor a woman who was having her first child when I was having my second,” she says. “Ten years ago, we didn’t have nursing rooms on every floor. We were walking to the health center on another floor or figuring it out in whatever space we had. I was able to help her navigate some of the challenges of a working mom going back to the office after my experience with it — those kinds of things matter.”
She doesn’t frame it as formal mentorship. It’s closer to what she’s experienced throughout her own career: Someone being available and helping you navigate the important moments.
