When Katie Doellman, leasing director for RPT in Columbus, Ohio and the 2021-22 recipient of the ICSC Foundation’s Mary Lou Fiala Fellowship, started at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law in 2012, she had every intention of practicing law. She was interested in becoming a criminal defense attorney and worked with a few criminal defense attorneys and the U.S. attorney’s office in Columbus before deciding the field was not for her. “It’s heavy work,” she said. The cases and situations were hard to see and face every single day. “It’s not like the TV shows,” she said.

The traits that would have made Doellman a good lawyer — competitiveness, an analytical nature, negotiating skills and an ability to scrutinize legal documents — are the same traits that make for excellent real estate professionals. That’s what Jeremy Panno, then real estate manager for L Brands, told Doellman during a networking call. The summer before her third year of law school, he encouraged Doellman to apply for an internship in L Brands’ real estate department. She had taken some real estate classes in college and so applied; she landed the internship and later a position with the specialty retailer working on leases for stores like Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret. Managers told her that her curiosity impressed them. “I asked a lot of questions,” she laughed.

Katie quickly moved up the ranks. As leasing coordinator for the Great Plains she executed 35 short-term renewals. Then, as director of the Midwest, she was responsible for leasing 600 stores with an annual rent of $350 million. Doellman, who admits to having a Type A personality, particularly enjoyed the negotiation aspect of the work. “It’s competitive, but it also involves camaraderie,” she said. “The best negotiations happen when you have a relationship and respect across the table.” And it helped that she understood the legalese of lease documents. Though she was negotiating business terms, not lease language, “It made me more effective on the front end of deal making,” she said.

This same expertise helped her at RPT, where in 2019, she started as director of leasing. “I saw an opportunity to grow my skill set by transitioning to the other side of the business,” she explains.

In February 2021, Doellman negotiated one of her trickiest deals. The deal itself is largely confidential, but she can say that as part of the negotiations with a new tenant in Columbus, waivers were needed from two big-box national tenants and one small local tenant. “The two large, big-box tenants I got waivers from easily,” she said. The local tenant, which no one thought would be an issue, was more challenging. “I spent five months negotiating a waiver with them,” she said. “I never read a lease so much or critically thought so much about where my leverage was.”

The attorney she was working with told her any other deal maker would have given up a long time ago, “that the juice was not worth the squeeze.” But Doellman, a long-distance runner who has helped raise funds for places like Make-A-Wish, was determined to make the deal work. She did, in large part, she said, because she leveraged her relationship with the tenant and knowledge of its business. “It was definitely a test of perseverance,” she said.

This sort of fortitude and creativity made some of her mentors believe that she would be a great applicant for the ICSC Foundation’s Mary Lou Fiala Fellowship, a year-long leadership and professional development program to prepare talented young women for senior-level positions in the marketplaces industry. Doellman applied because she was “attracted to the opportunity to learn and work with female mentors who are in positions I would hope to one day achieve,” she said. She learned she won the fellowship in June. “I was excited, honored and very flattered,” she said.

The ICSC Foundation covers the costs for each Mary Lou Fiala Fellow to attend ICSC’s Las Vegas conference, and during the year, each fellow participates in a formal, executive leadership education and training program or in executive coaching sessions to further professional advancement. Longtime, valuable ICSC Foundation volunteer Bev Ricks, principal of Retail Property Solutions and chair of the Foundation’s Talent Committee, shepherds fellows through their experience and will work with Doellman to choose a path for this facet of the fellowship.

Ricks also carefully researches and recommends four mentors to align with each fellow’s experience and goals. For Doellman, Ricks brought onboard Bedrock Detroit COO and executive vice president Ivy Greaner; Liz Holland, who is CEO and general counsel for Abbell Associates and CEO of Consortial Technology; CBIC executive managing director and president of commercial real estate Karen Case; and Borghese Investments president Trish Blasi.

Doellman just finished up her first three months, with Greaner, learning about asset management. “We bonded in that we are both competitive people,” Doellman said. One piece of advice from Greaner that Doellman is implementing: Keep in easy view a sheet of all the deals you’ve done and, as a motivator, a list of all the vacancies to be filled. That way, she can say, “I’ve done one more deal than last quarter or X more deals than last year,” she noted.

In early December, Doellman started her three months of meetings with Holland to talk about capital transactions. These mentors will be great to turn to, Doellman said, as she turns her focus to Boston. Over the summer, RPT acquired a 510,000-square-foot, grocery-anchored center in Dedham, Massachusetts, for $132 million and a trio of shopping centers in the region for $220 million. Boston is a “market I’ve never worked in,” said Doellman. She is excited for the opportunity to build new relationships in the Northeast, which also is a new focus of RPT’s. “Right now, I’m really working on mastery of leasing a shopping center from the landlord perspective,” Doellman said.

Doellman, who is “obsessed with reading leadership books,” hopes one day to be a mentor herself. The best leaders, she believes, “protect, support and respect” their employees by giving them space to grow. “I could see myself excelling in that role,” she said.

The application period for the 2022-23 Mary Lou Fiala Fellowship will run from January through March 2022. See eligibility and requirements here.