Interview Archive
14 July 2009: "Because We're Worth It"
11 October 2008: "A Bridge Back to Work"
12 May 2008: "Lynette Stewart: A Distinguished Career"
12 May 2008: "Justice Lowell Goddard: A Woman of Passion"
14 February 2008: "Interview with Estelle Logan"
15 January 2008: "Interview with John Palmer"
5 October 2007: "Making A Difference with HIPPY"
5 September 2007: "Nike Women Who Just Do It"
30 July 2007: "Almost Superwoman:A Guilt-Free Working Mother"
14 July 2007: "Meet The Liontamers"
12 June 2007: "Lisa’s Hummus: A Great Place to Work"
29 May 2007: "A Working Mother's Perspective"
Interview with Gill South: Because We're Worth It
with Galia BarHava-Monteith and Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes
10th June 2009
Gill South is a freelance writer in Auckland and also the mother of two young boys.
Her first book, which she describes as a "Where To for Working Mothers" 
seeks to encourage all women who want to continue the careers and work roles they enjoy - after having children. The book is full of case studies and comments from professional working women in New Zealand and Australia, spanning the public and private sectors, from academia to business to politics and beyond.
The women Gill talked to for her book (including the two of us!) are all unapologetic about wanting to go on working after having children. We want the intellectual stimulation, the social contact, the financial independence. So we go on working because we like working and... Because We're Worth It
Choose how you'd like to experience our interview with Gill:
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A Bridge Back to Work
By Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes
Getting Past the Career Break
Many of our 1000+ members at Professionelle are in full or part time work, or have crafted a self-employed role to flex around their commitments. We have a small minority, though, who have taken a break from work, often to be with their young families. When these women start exploring a return to work, they come up sharply against the challenge of a changed market place - and the challenge of believing in themselves.
A message that came in to Professionelle recently says it all:
I have been out of the paid workforce for 5 years now but am keen to return. However, balancing work and family is a priority and yet finding meaningful part-time work is difficult. Further impacting on this, in fact, probably the real reason for not finding anything, is my current lack of confidence - especially that my skills are outdated. I have an MBA but graduated over ten years ago. Can you recommend anything or anyone who might help me get the kick-start I need to get going again!
Confidence
To date, our response has been to remind women of the value of the skills they’ve been learning whilst caring for family. Our society values paid work over unpaid and those who are at home caring for family inevitably undervalue their efforts and achievements. In a recent article about career breaks, I encouraged women in this situation to be proud of their “Mum’s CV” and to recast their resume in terms of skills and strengths rather than a time-based progression that highlights the yawning gap of unpaid work.
That said, I don’t pretend that getting past the career break is easy. Skills rust, wardrobes date, contacts drift away. The biggest barrier, though, is women’s confidence.
As a gender – and whether working or not – we seem wired to see the ten per cent of a task that we can’t (yet) do, where a man will focus on the fifty per cent he can do. We demand perfection from ourselves, though we’ll forgive much in others. I believe there’s a lot of truth in comments a member sent us in response to a Professionelle survey on what holds women back. She cited lack of confidence, perfectionist tendencies and the assumption that hard work would be noticed and rewarded. “I believe that in today’s world we are own most significant barrier,” she finished.
Return2Work
So we’ve been delighted in the last month or so to learn of a new venture that squarely targets women who want to get back into work and that is designed to build their confidence. It gives women tools and information to assist them to realistically assess the market and themselves. The course-based service is called Return2Work and is the brainchild of Sarah Paykel, who runs her own PR business, SP& Co, and Kate Ross, who owns Kinetic, a recruitment company. Despite the demands of these businesses, and their young families, Sarah and Kate have taken on this new task because they believe they can build a bridge back to work that will fulfil the needs of both the women and employers.
Stepping Back In
Sarah saw mums leave the school gate in the morning to head off for chores, or coffee or exercise. Some were clearly happy with those options, but others she spoke to, her friends among them, felt unfulfilled – yet fearful of making a change. Sometimes, financial circumstances like divorce forced women back, a shift they struggled to cope with. She also met empty nesters with time on their hands, women who had been out of the workforce for a generation, and lacked others in their social networks who could tell them what to expect at work, and how to prepare for it.
As she reflected on all this over a year or so, Sarah said it really drove home the advice she received from a senior woman manager when she was working for Chanel:
Don’t stop. Keep going with work, even if it’s doing your own thing. The hardest thing is stepping out – and stepping back in.
Sarah had taken this advice herself, starting her PR business while carrying her first child. She’d left Chanel to recharge and used the early pregnancy stage to reflect on what she had loved best in her varied career to date (which included a stint as promotions co-ordinator with Vogue in London and Australian Young Entrepreneur of the Year with Lush Cosmetics…). The answer was using PR to re-energise old brands and bring new ones to market. Perhaps inevitably, Sarah found herself bringing Ella into the world the same night that one of her first clients, the NZ Breast Cancer campaign, had its launch!
Kate @ Kinetic
Kate had also never had a career break for children. She did go part time when she started a family, but her Kinetic business became so busy that she had to revert to fulltime sooner than she’d planned.
She has supported valued staff members through career breaks, though, and has four part time mums at present, who have returned after breaks of up to three years. Kate has created positions around the four so that it works for both sides. “In recruiting it takes about 12 months to get consultants to a useful level. You want to keep that knowledge. So I make sure they know when they go to have their babies that the door is wide open for them to come back, and we keep up social contact.”
W agreed that it is much easier returning to the same employer where there is mutual trust and a track record. Galia and I have both done this. There are so many unknowns when you have your first child that the option of returning to a familiar work environment is like a safety line. You don’t have to haul on it, but it’s good to know it’s there! Many of the women who seek jobs via Kinetic after a long career break are considering new roles or new industry sectors - on top of their first experience of part time work. Unknowns pile up on unknowns. “That’s when the lack of confidence hits.”
Kate’s role as the head of Kinetic has meant that she has been the obvious person for her career-break friends to turn to when they began thinking about a return. What salary should they expect? Which employers welcomed part timers? And even: what did people wear to work now?
When Sarah floated her back-to-work concept over lunch one day – they met through their Daycare Liaison Committee – Kate at once saw its potential to help mobilise a large talent pool.
Attitude shift
At Kinetic, Kate had already experienced a significant shift in the attitudes of employers across a wide range of industry sectors. Burned by high turnover in fully skilled part timers like students, firms had began opting for the maturity and commitment of mothers and older women to fill part-time roles. Kate observed,
These women know what their constraints are. They’re all great at juggling priorities, and the mums love the mental and social stimulation. Firms are starting to realise how incredibly productive these women are – they get a lot done in the time available.
We recently posted an article by an Israeli psychologist and lecturer who made exactly these points as he exhorted employers to Go for the Working Mum! It was fascinating to hear the parallels.
Nevertheless, this positive shift among employers doesn’t mean it’s a breeze to find work. “You still need to market yourself,” warn both Sarah and Kate. “But that’s empowering. And once you’ve got some leverage, got a company interested in you, then you can start to negotiate.”
The Course
The core of Return2work’s offer is a week long course that runs from 9.30-1pm every day. The first one is scheduled to start Monday 29th September 2008. “We designed it to mimic being in part time work. The participants have to come dressed for the office. The course makes them get organised every day as if this were work.” The content covers a re-introduction to the market – salaries, sectors, where to find jobs. Psychometric testing is used to reveal each woman’s strengths, while career coaching is available to help clarify whether a revived, or a new, career, is the best way forward. There’s interview practice, CV development and even grooming advice through Max and Bobby Brown.
And after the course is over, there are follow-up sessions as well as the opportunity for the women to keep their group going informally as a source of support and networking.
We know from our Professionelle workshops about the power of sharing experiences with other women. Indeed, creating opportunities for this sort of sharing is an essential part of what Professionelle is about. Hearing how others think and feel clarifies issues, puts goals in perspective and perhaps most importantly, the discovery that we aren’t alone in our fears gives us courage. You don’t even need to be among women of the same age and work background – sharing experiences seems to transcend these differences. The course-based approach that Sarah and Kate have designed thus seems ideal for boosting women’s confidence.
The Power of Choice
No doubt at some point in the course, Kate and Sarah will be asked how they find life, really find life, as professional working women, juggling work and families. After all, the women returning to work after a break will want to know what to expect.
I first asked Sarah and her answer was hugely positive, reflecting the satisfaction she derives from the choices she makes. She began by sharing advice her mother had given her:
Be emotionally and financially independent. You never know what life will hold for you as a woman.
Sarah acknowledged that where that tipping point of independence lies will vary for every woman and that by dint of biology women will always be nurturers who value emotional ties. However, having enough independence to make choices is critical:
I’m so privileged to be able to create my own entities. I love my life. I feel very lucky that I’ve been able to choose to do what I want to do. The reality of it all comes at a cost and we have to tell the next generations of mums how it really is, but having choice is great.
Sarah feels that New Zealand’s small size should be a bonus for working women: “You can access senior people so easily here, and, as professional women, we should leverage that through networking and communicating. We can be very supportive of each other.” But she perceives that the many demands on women professionals mean they can still easily become fragmented and isolated.
She sees New Zealand as a positive environment in many ways and wishes professional women would celebrate their successes more. To make the point, she described how she and her girlfriends had competed in the Taupo marathon recently, running in awful weather but making it to the end.
“Blokes would have gone to the pub for hours, and told stories about it all, how great they’d been. What did we do? Quick shower and back in the car for the long drive home so we could relieve those on child care duty!”
Working Reality
Kate’s view of the reality of being a professional working woman was equally positive. She has “jut a very busy life” with inevitable multi-tasking and co-ordinating and having to think ahead to make sure there are back-up plans for the care of her children. But she isn’t complaining, she would much rather have these multiple roles.
It’s empowering and stimulating! When I leave work I’m fully focused on the kids. I’m sure that I’m a better mum as a result of being at work and having that role in my life.
Kate is in fact in the midst of coming up with another work role for herself – as the creator of “The Outfit”. It’s a soon-to-be-launched job website aimed purely at the part time market. The big sites like Seek and TradeMe apparently have most of their volume in the full time sector and Kate sees this as an opportunity to fill a gap in the market. The Outfit will, of course, complement the recruiting offer of Kinetic and the stepping-back-in-with-confidence offer of Return2Work.
And it will give us at Professionelle yet another suggestion to make to members who write into us, wondering how they best go about making a success of their return to work.
© Professionelle Limited 2008
Lynette Stewart: a Distinguished Career
By Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes
I first saw Lynette Stewart in early March at Auckland University’s brand new Business School, as she addressed a roomful of people. A mixture of whanau, academics and alumni, they’d all come to hear her give a lecture to celebrate her award as a Distinguished Alumna of the University.
She comes from a large Northland family, her father Maori and her mother Scottish. Several of her ten siblings share her taste for public service; one of her brothers is currently New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. Kiwis will know that means Lynette carries the genes for charisma, oratory and political survival! Those characteristics shone through as she spoke about her years of work in Maori health initiatives - and as she adroitly handled some rather loaded questions from the audience.
Lynette is also a mother of five and a grandmother of nine. Impishly, she described herself as “a five foot two squit.” I doubt anyone in the lecture theatre – with the possible exception of her brothers - would have dreamt of agreeing!
After all, she has not only held the Chair of the Northland District Health Board since 2001, but has also been CEO of Te Tai Tokerau MAPO Trust (a Treaty-based health partnership between the then Northern Regional Health Authority and the iwi of Te Tai Tokerau) for twelve years. She recently completed her term of a seven year membership to the NZ National Health Committee and the Public Health Advisory Committee and has participated in numerous National Health and Disability Support Services projects and reference groups. Lynette’s long service and commitment to the health sector was recognised in 2006 with the Companion of New Zealand Order of Merit in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Lynette described the University, where she’d completed her Master of Management degree in 2005, as the place that gave academic legitimacy - “the breath of life” - to her passion for lifting the standards of health enjoyed by Maori. This was something she clearly deeply appreciated.
It also seems to have given her a taste for the scaling the heights of academic achievement: she has since embarked upon a PhD. But as you’ll see in what follows, Lynette Stewart is not a woman to shy away from challenges.
Recognising Potential
One theme that shone through Lynette’s speech was her passion that all children in New Zealand should be able to realise their full potential. Health and education opportunities were to the fore in her comments. It’s hard to argue with such statements but I sometimes find it hard to truly feel the need and the urgency. During our interview the next day, however, Lynette told me a story about herself. It packed one heck of a punch and when she’d finished, her passion for potential made total sense to me.
First, she sketched for me her mother’s attitudes to women’s role in life: Lynette grew up in a household with a long and largely unquestioned tradition of women living their lives in service of their menfolk. At school, Lynette then told me, her talents for expressive writing went by largely unremarked and unencouraged. Intensely shy, she drifted into marriage and motherhood.
It was only when, aged about thirty and signing an affidavit for custody of her children at the end of her first marriage, that something wonderful happened.
The lawyer handling her paperwork, a man, asked her the confronting question of who she really was. She replied that she was “just a mother.”
He told me I was so much more, and listed the many qualities and strengths he’d seen in me. For the first time in my life, someone finally reflected my true potential back to me. That was the real beginning. I never looked back.
That watershed was half a lifetime ago. Lynette can now point to a career that has led her to numerous senior executive and governance positions across the country’s health and social work sectors. The contributions she has made in that career to innovations in grassroots healthcare through MAPO and other organisations has helped other women realise their potential, too.
For example, Lynette pointed to a large number of Maori women in the Northern region who had successfully studied for higher qualifications in nursing and other disciplines. The resulting broadening of their outlook and aspirations had been very rewarding for them, though in some cases their marriages had sadly not survived the changes. Once the women had tapped into their potential, it seems they couldn’t go back to the way they were before…
Professional Working Women
I was keen to hear Lynette’s views on professional working women. Her opinions were, to me, surprisingly positive and upbeat, but this is a lady who has the strength to rise to big challenges and eventually overcome them. She told me,
Professional women have broken the back of it. We are getting tougher and we are well able to run the race. Yes, we can still feel isolated but we can assist each other. I take responsibility for supporting the development of professional women. And of men, too!
Nevertheless, Lynette pointed to three areas where she felt professional women still needed to dig in and push for more progress:
- Women do not necessarily get the same opportunities to undertake tough roles, which they need to give them essential experience and competencies so they don’t go into jobs ‘half-baked’. "Line managers aren’t so open to women. We need male CEOs with integrity and vision to get women equal opportunities on their merit, and to get us past the situation of being the ‘little woman’ on the staff."
- Men still seem frightened by women and by the prospect of losing power. “It’s an issue of trust. We can all be mates till it gets to promotion time. Then it changes.” Lynette finds this frustrating: “Women should be seen as a great opportunity to get the input of a different perspective, rather than a threat. I accept men and I expect them to accept me, too.”
- New Zealand firms are not good at making it work for working mums yet. Women need to find allies at home and work to help them make it all balance.
Lynette believes that professional women can have it all and do it all, but the key is that women have to decide if a career is something they want to pursue with dogged determination.
The barriers are there, but you smile, you get over it and you get on with it.
She has had her own frustrating experiences of being underrated and overlooked because of being a woman. When her application for a CEO role in an area she knew very well was unsuccessful, she felt deeply disappointed. A senior man on the periphery of the selection process told her that her gender had gone against her despite her better credentials and her evident capability to take on the CEO mantle. He advised her to get out of that particular part of the industry and try again elsewhere.
“That was my worst day – and my best day,” she commented ruefully. She took the man’s advice and, combined with her trademark tenacity, she reached her goal.
Work-Life Balance
We didn’t have time to explore how Lynette had made work-life trade offs herself but we did explore how Lynette supported her team on this issue. In her opinion, helping members of her team achieve work-life balance makes good business sense.
If you want the best from your staff, you do your best for them. I want people’s best thinking and efforts at work. How can they give me that if they’re worried about a sick family member or worried their babies aren’t safe and happy?
I was nodding like one of those loose-headed toy dogs at this point. It was so refreshing to hear a compassionate yet commercial argument. Lynette says she makes it her business to know when her team members have issues at home and she sees it as part of her role to work out with them how best to attend to the problem. “It’s about reciprocity that’s right and appropriate.”
Good employers are those who want to make things work for their workers, she says, whether it’s job sharing or shorter hours or some other mechanism. In her own team, a direct report has twice returned successfully from maternity leave. She has taken enough time off to come back rested, she has been able to breastfeed at work, and she has also at times prepared reports from home. Also, with her husband staying home, she has been secure in knowing their baby has had the best care.
Lynette reckons New Zealand is not good at making it work for working mums yet –
...but any employer can do it, they just have to want to.
She referred to the option of developing ‘risk management’ pools of labour to back up rosters or teams facing intense client service demands. “It’s in employers’ power to change the way they order things in order to get the best competencies from their workers.”
It’s important to note that Lynette applies work-life balance and support to all her team “without fear or favour”, not just to women. For example, she is currently working to restructure the job her direct report does to allow this woman’s husband to pursue his dream of studying for a new career.
Lynette and Leadership
Of course I asked Lynette for her views on leadership. Unsurprisingly, some of her comments echoed the theme of potential. She takes the time, she says, to find out and assess what people’s strengths are. This allows her to enlist these abilities and leverage each individual to his or her full potential.
Her specific responsibilities are to set the direction and handle the risks. While, as a leader, she wants to demonstrate drive and a concern for quality, she strives to achieve this through a collective approach. “You work with others and I’m the leader, but not the boss. Yes, the buck stops with me but it’s absolutely not about the power. It’s about brokerage in its best possible form, negotiating on all fronts to get the range of resources and the results.”
She paused and added with a mischievous gleam in her eye, “I don’t have to be Madam Wonderful!”
Her view is that work should never be about divisiveness and as far as possible it should be positive. “Beating people up is a waste of energy. You need a team that wants to achieve because that generates incredible energy.”
Her Best Advice for other Professional Women
This is a question we love to ask at Professionelle. We never know what we’re going to hear but it’s always very valuable. Some people take a while to sift through possibilities but Lynette didn’t miss a beat. Straightaway, she said,
We are women, so let’s be women. Don’t apologise for being a woman. Femininity is our greatest antidote to the arrogant male.
I remembered a story she’d told at her speech the evening before that illustrated her advice perfectly. The day she’d started as CEO at the MAPO office, a senior male manager from the largest organisation in Northland had come to her office. He’d put his feet up on her desk while he talked to her about her new role and all the challenges she would face.
Lynette had moved round the desk towards him. She’d been wearing a skirt with a ruched hem that exposed a little bit of her petticoat.
“See this petticoat?” she’d asked.
“Lace,” he’d answered. “Very nice.”
“Not lace,” she’d corrected him. “Steel.”
A few months later he’d left, whereas Lynette remains in place to this day…
As we discussed this story, she added,
There’s no weakness in good manners and courtesy, but I’m always prepared to show steel if I’m pushed too far. You need appropriate self-confidence to deal with any oversupply of testosterone.
Five foot two she may, but Lynette Stewart could never, ever, be described as a squit!
Justice Lowell Goddard: a Woman of Passion, Integrity, Humility and Great Intellect
By Galia BarHava-Monteith
Professionelle members were recently invited to attend two special events being run by The University of Auckland to celebrate two Distinguished Alumna award winners for 2008.
The two women awarded this honour were Lynette Stewart and The Hon Justice Lowell Goddard. We both felt that these women had so much to offer to our readers that we should attend their speeches and also seek to interview them for you all.
I had the great fortune to hear Justice Goddard’s speech and to spend an hour interviewing her the following day.
Some Background
Justice Lowell Goddard is a highly respected member of the New Zealand judiciary. Not only has she has been at the forefront of criminal law and procedure in this country for a number of years, she is also the first woman of Maori descent to have been appointed to the New Zealand High Court bench. Justice Goddard is now the first New Zealand woman to hold the position of Chair of the Independent Police Conduct Authority (formerly known as the Police Complaints Authority).
Obviously, this is a woman who’s achieved greatly. She graduated from law school in 1974, and very early on practised on her own as a barrister. In 1988, she and Sian Elias (now a Dame, and New Zealand’s Chief Justice) were the first two women to be appointed Queen’s Counsel in this country. In 1992, Justice Goddard was appointed deputy Solicitor General and effectively acted as the head of the crown prosecution, while taking a hands-on approach and appearing herself in many cases.
If I were to summarise in three words the key impressions that Justice Goddard made on me they would be: passion, integrity and humility.
A passion for humanity
As a young woman growing up in Israel, I had to withstand my father’s strong urgings that I become a lawyer. My brother is a doctor, so a lawyer was all my father needed to make our picture-perfect Jewish family…
I did think about law, very seriously. But I felt that I would struggle with dealing with the ugly side of humanity day in and day out and that it would turn me into a cynical person. Listening to Justice Goddard’s passionate speech, and watching her warm and inclusive demeanour, I couldn’t but help wonder how she’d managed to deal with the underbelly of society for so many years while remaining so passionate and caring. So I asked her, how had she done it?
Her answer was that she’s passionate about the law. She sees the law as the fundamental underpinning of a civil society. In her career she has seen the full spectrum of society, and has witnessed the worst things that can happen. She acknowledges that it is very stressful but she always comes back to the fact that it is the law that underpins civilised behaviour and provides us with a framework to keep the essential principles alive.
It is so refreshing, having met some very jaded and cynical lawyers, to meet someone like Justice Goddard who believes that lawyers can, and should, make a positive difference because the law is the foundation on which civilised society is built.
Indeed, she says that passion – for whatever endeavour you hold dear – is something you should never lose.
“You will only really excel if you have passion, but passion has to be tempered by rationality and objectivity and refined by one’s life’s learning. It needs to be honed.”
Unreasoned passion, says Justice Goddard, is unhelpful and aimless, but passion that is focused, goal oriented, reasoned and tempered by objective thinking will achieve anything.
Thus, in her passion for law, Justice Goddard learnt to be objective and become able to put aside her personal thoughts. Becoming dispassionate does not mean becoming desensitised to suffering – far from it. Put simply, she has taught herself to put her personal feelings aside because as a judge she has to keep calm and professional to ensure everyone receives a fair hearing.
Optimism As An Antidote
It turns out that the secret to Justice Goddard’s capacity to practise in the toughest legal environments while remaining humane and positive is her optimistic outlook:
“Whilst you can be disappointed and horrified, one learns to never be surprised by human beings. They can do utterly deplorable things. But humans are amazing creatures and it is their creativity and ability to achieve incredible things that redeems them. This is probably made possible because of our passion and capacity for extreme behaviour, good and bad. Civilising this capacity and getting people to achieve their highest potential through lawful means is my goal.”
Research demonstrates that lawyers tend to be pessimists. Law is one of the only professions where pessimists do well. This makes it all the more inspiring that this woman, who’s had to change into a robe and gown in the male only facilities when no women’s facilities were available in the courts, can take such an upbeat and optimistic view!
Curiosity about the world - The recipe for success
At Professionelle, we often ask our interviewee what he or she believes makes the successful women they know successful. Justice Goddard believes that successful women (and men) are those who have open, enquiring minds and are motivated to follow through on their curiosity. They want to be extended, in every aspect of their lives, intellectually, socially and professionally.
If you have that, says the Judge, “you are naturally motivated to find out about the world, you are genuinely motivated and you will succeed.”
Justice Goddard’s curiosity about the world is abundantly obvious throughout our interview. That curiosity mixed in with her passion seems to be the recipe for still loving what she does after all these years.
“I love the fact that in the type of law I practise and have always practised, I engage with a large number and a huge variety of people from all walks of life. It is a very broadening experience and this is something that ought to teach humility, realising that there are whole worlds out there beyond your personal social niche.”
Listening to Justice Lowell Goddard speak, it really brought home to me how as a judge she is obliged to see the entire spectrum of humanity and to listen to and experience things that the rest of us would scarcely dare dream of. Her even-handedness, humility and composure, are surely assets in her role of dispensing justice.
Best advice
It is an interesting experience asking people about the best advice they’ve ever received. I have come to believe that the answers tell you a lot about a person, in two key ways. First, the content of the advice itself and second, the quantity – how many pieces of good advice the person can think of. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to find out that Justice Lowell Goddard received a lot of good advice in her career.
The Judge received her first piece of valuable advice very early in her career. In fact, it was when she was admitted to the bar with twenty other graduates. The presiding judge was Sir Justice Maurice Casey who spoke to the newly-minted lawyers about the importance of integrity in the practice of law. His words stayed with the Judge who continues to advocate the importance of integrity in the practice of law nowadays when she herself presides over the bar admissions of law graduates.
Becoming self-aware is another one.
"It is incredibly important to be brutally honest with yourself even though it can be very difficult…. Realising that you can’t do things for other people unless you are well acquainted with yourself.”
It is this self-awareness that has helped the Judge find ways to relate to the full spectrum of humanity she’s come across.
“There have been very few people throughout my career that I have not been able to relate to in any way. These were the paedophiles and the psychopaths. Usually I could relate in a professional way to anyone, no matter what they’d done.”
Throughout the interview I came to realise that it is this self-awareness and humility that are key to understanding the role of judges, who are tasked with adjudicating without being judgmental. As Justice Goddard puts it, “It’s not about you, you’re not there to be judgmental, it’s about the people who are before the Court, the weight of the evidence and where justice lies in the end.”
Doing the right thing, what you believe to be right, with integrity and humility is how I’d describe Justice Lowell Goddard. And she uses others’ words, too, in this case those of the Reverend Manu Augustus Bennett, Bishop of Aotearoa, who told her many years ago, “You do what you think is right, no matter what others think. You are not here to be popular.”
On Family, Work-Life balance and “making it all work”
The Judge has three step children and one biological grown-up daughter who is also a solicitor. I asked her how she had done it, being a mum and accomplishing so much professionally. Her answer is that she had a very hands-on mother who helped a lot with raising her daughter. But of course, as we all know, women are very good at juggling it all!
Justice Goddard is emphatic that family has to come first. She is very supportive of women taking time out to be with their families and structuring their careers so that they can do so on a continuing basis. She is painfully aware that her generation of women had a sense of making it ‘just like the men’.
“We were awfully driven. I think women now have a much more balanced and healthy view about life, about balancing family, career, social and physical health.”
The Judge realises that many professional women still feel anxious about taking time out to ‘just’ be mums.
“I think that women shouldn’t feel anxious, but make the choices that reflect what’s really in their heart. If it’s having children and a family, they shouldn’t feel guilty and feel like they ought to pursue their professional goals.”
Family and children are the most important thing, says the Judge. When women who she works with take maternity leave and say, ‘I’ll take the minimum’, Justice Goddard always tells them to wait until they have the baby because “until you have the baby you just don’t know. You don’t know if the baby will be healthy and you don’t know how you will feel yourself.” She advocates that women who are about to have children should not overcommit themselves.
Like John Palmer, Chairman of Air New Zealand, Justice Goddard thinks that motherhood is as good as an MBA. The multi-tasking, budgeting, organising, and accomplishing projects like the kitchen renovations, are all excellent training for management. “When I see my daughter and her three young children, how she manages to work part time, to have a wonderfully active social life and romantic marriage and she can do it! She just keeps going.”
It is unsurprising that the Judge regards her own daughter to be her best achievement by far. She doesn’t think she had a lot to do with it. “I don’t deserve the credit, it’s all her.”
On Barriers
In her Distinguished Alumna speech, the Judge did not linger on the barriers she faced. She is not the lingering type. Her reply to my question on this topic was matter-of-fact,
“I’ve personally experienced barriers and I still do.”
At times, she finds that it’s her contemporaries and even younger men who are the worst, whereas many older men have been supportive of her throughout her career. She says some discrimination is due to the traditional attitude of ‘another bloody woman spoiling the fun’ and some due to men feeling threatened by powerful and smart women.
Men and women compete differently, she says. Men are more overtly aggressive in the market place, whereas women tend to rely on cleverness. Women have to make a stand about being included and other women will support them. She doesn’t believe you need to compromise your feminine side to take a firm stand, “You just have to make sure you’ve got a very good case and then just go for it!”
Exclusionary behaviour, says the Judge, will survive as long as the incumbents can get away with it. Joining clubs is important if it’s where things are happening. Women have started to create their own networks and that’s very powerful, but it’s still important to make a stand.
“Do it by being clever, by asking the un-answerable question.”
And she closes our interview by telling me the story about the Wellington Club, whose members fiercely resisted admitting women, a state of affairs that continued till 1992. Sir Robin Cooke, Baron Cooke of Thorndon finally achieved the seemingly impossible in the Annual General Meeting that year. He simply asked if anyone could provide him with an intelligent and rational argument as to why women should be excluded.
Funnily enough, no one could.
© Professionelle Ltd
Interview with Estelle Logan
by Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes
Late in 2007, a friend who publishes Franchise New Zealand magazine alerted me to some interesting news in his industry. Estelle Logan had been elected to Vice Chair of the Board of the NZ Franchise Association and was the first woman to have ever held this position. Together with husband John, Estelle owns the VIP Home Services franchise in NZ and their business has repeatedly won industry awards for Franchise System of the Year and for Franchisee of the Year.
If you’ve been around the Professionelle community for a little while, you’ll know we like to celebrate success and to ask professional women about their journeys and what advice they can pass on. I interviewed Estelle in VIP Home Services’ busy Manukau office in mid-January.
It’s over twelve years since the Logans moved into franchising. Before that, John owned a building firm that made pre-nail trusses and frames, while Estelle was at home with their three children. Her energy and drive spilled out of the home, however, and into a raft of committees.
Early Lessons in Management
She cut her teeth on her local Plunket and preschool committees. When the family moved to a 16 acre block in the early 90’s, she became heavily involved with the local country primary school. It needed a hall. “I wasn’t into the PTA. That was just fundraising.” Instead, Estelle formed and led a Hall committee, leveraged John’s trade contracts and had the building up and ready for use. In nine months!
She joined the school’s Board of Trustees and became Chair. Changes in roles and responsibilities caused by the Government’s introduction of Tomorrow’s Schools made it a turbulent time. “The school Board was a great training ground for dealing with people issues and learning about human nature,” Estelle reflected. She observed that New Zealand’s culture is conflict-averse and that many people prefer to skirt round problems.
A key lesson I learned was that once a situation has been revealed, you have two options: deal with it or get out. And I’ve learned that if I speak up, I have to carry it through. It was good to discover I could do that.
She also learned that investing time to do research and get the facts straight paid off by helping her to make the appropriate responses. “That was a lesson for all parts of my life. It saves you a lot if you do your homework!”
As her children moved on to Intermediate, she became the co-ordinator for the school’s exchange programme with a Japanese school and ran it for seven years. This involved hosting students each year as well as travelling to Japan. Dealing with a new culture that places great emphasis on trust and respect was a new challenge. Estelle says that the experience has paid off for her enormously in the franchising business, where she often meets people from different cultures.
Somewhere in all this, Estelle also found time to work at Telecom’s Directory Assistance and be a Tupperware Manager with a unit of 25 sales people, for several years. She credits that role with teaching her how to sell!
As I listened to Estelle, I could see what a great example she was of John Palmer’s recent views on this site that time spent running a home and participating on community boards can provide people with an excellent grounding for later business management and governance roles.
A Shift to Franchising
Eventually, her husband suggested Estelle might like to pour some of her prodigious energies into something that would benefit the family’s finances. They began looking for a business to run together but were disillusioned by the lack of transparency in the ones they checked out. “Two sets of books,” Estelle said. “That wasn’t us.”
As time dragged on, John began to talk about buying a lawn-mowing round as a stop gap. That quickly led them to franchising opportunities and to VIP Home Services. When they heard that VIP Home Services was looking for regional master franchisors, Estelle’s interest leapt up a notch. “That sounded a lot more like me than just handling a round!” It seemed to offer them the right level of financial return, without the hassle of too many employees, plus flexibility for childcare. At that point, their children were 4,7 and 9.
In the end, they acquired the VIP Home Services master franchise for South and East Auckland and also took on a round. The training for their new business took them to Adelaide for a month, and they had to leave their young children behind with family members. It was hard, says Estelle, but it did mean they could focus 100% on what they needed to learn.
Skill-based, not Gender-based, Roles
She vividly remembers that the trainer addressed his tips on selling to John even though John kept pointing out that Estelle would be the one taking this role. “Women can’t sell lawn-mowing,” was the trainer’s attitude. “He wasn’t being arrogant,” Estelle recalls. “But I was something totally new to him. They’d never had a woman involved in taking on a master franchise before.” She adds that she later spent three months on the lawn mowing round, so that she could fully appreciate the practicalities of running one.
During the first 18 months, John concentrated on building up lawn mowing rounds while Estelle developed the VIP Systematic Cleaning System. They then moved into the office full time and quickly discovered they needed to clarify what each could best bring to the business. They used Australian Graham Pierce’s Personality Testing (similar to Allison Mooney’s personality and leadership trait testing) on themselves, and continue to use the test for all their master franchisees to this day. “It’s a good way to think about your adversaries’ styles, too!” she adds.
The exercise demonstrated their different styles and preferences and the extent to which their natural strengths and temperaments make them a highly complementary team. John likes to dot the I’s and is at his best on the inside of the business, handling the finance and developing administrative systems; Estelle’s test classified her as “powerful”; she enjoys the external interactions, to do with selling, training, leading and mentoring.
It isn’t about gender. It’s about skills and strengths. With John and I, this is the best way for us to allocate roles. We’re equal but different. He doesn’t feel threatened or belittled by me doing what I do best.
In a similar vein, she hopes that when she contributes to discussions on the Franchise Association Board that she is seen first and foremost as an experienced franchisor, rather than a woman.
Values
Estelle understands not only what her strengths are, but also her values. My time talking to her, combined with press articles I’d read about her beforehand, strongly conveyed to me the emphasis she places on ethical behaviour. She agreed, acknowledging the importance of this value in the franchise industry. “The values held by the franchisees we select mirror our own,” she says.
She delivers her honesty in a forthright way. “I’m always honest and say it as it is. People call me up because they know I’ll say what I think, not what they want to hear. And our franchisees know I’ll be tough and honest…but fair.”
As part of the desire to be fair, VIP Home Services’ systems and prices are the same throughout NZ. “We’re strong on that, and on compliance. We’re selling a tried and tested model and we want people to succeed.”
Estelle has certainly been confronted by the double standard in which men who are direct and strong are seen as assertive leaders whereas women with the same attributes are dismissed as bossy and pushy. She advises,
“Learn to get over it. Accept yourself. These qualities should be seen as a bonus to others, something to grow with, not something to destroy or hide from.”
Estelle believes that women are more value-driven than men; in other words, that they make decisions for reasons other than money. We discussed this and agreed that men may place more emphasis on money as a means of protecting what they value: their families. This would logically reflect the fact that men tend to bear the burden of being the main provider, and tend to have fewer socially acceptable options to “opt out”.
Women’s Strengths
Individual women have their specific strengths and values that they bring to their roles, as described earlier. Over and above this, however, Estelle sees women tending to have greater strengths than men in the “human touch” area. In her experience, women:
- Have more insight into what makes people tick
- Look beneath the surface more and do not take things at face value so readily
- Have emotional empathy that allows them to support others. Women and men both call her to discuss personal issues that affect, but also go beyond, their businesses
When the Logans assess candidates for holding master franchises, Estelle looks for a team that has both genders.
“Diversity is essential, an opportunity to blend different perspectives.”
Women in Senior New Zealand Roles
Numerous recent press articles have commented on the fact that women are largely absent from the senior echelons of NZ organisations, especially in the private sector. Research we’ve conducted at Professionelle shows the situation for professional women is not improving. I asked Estelle for her views on this and she pointed to three factors.
- Although it is certainly improving, the burden of domestic work has fallen more heavily on women. “Women are still juggling.”
- New Zealand lacks a critical mass of women who have made it to the top “in their own way as women, rather than in the guise of men in a men’s world.” She pointed as a hopeful sign to the growing number of women entrepreneurs who are succeeding in their own way and on their own terms.
- Women at the top in NZ are seen as women first, and providers of skills and strengths second. “We need to get to the point where we’re not gender-related any more, but skill-related, leadership and personality trait-related…” Estelle perceives that women at the very top in this country are not truly accepted in those roles by society at large.
Mentoring
A recent survey we conducted on the site asked about the value of mentoring to women’s careers; 100% of respondents said it was important. I therefore asked Estelle about mentoring.
A large part of her role in the business is mentoring franchisees and bringing out their potential. This is the part of the work that gives her the most satisfaction. A successful franchise can be a way for people who would have had scant chance otherwise to turn their lives around and to achieve something.
She told me about a Maori father who took on a lawn-mowing round to give his sons an opportunity away from the dole. One son dropped out very quickly but the others kept going. They struggled through the first winter because of their approach to handling the inevitable bad weather. Estelle persuaded them to keep going and coached them through the next winter. With her extra support and advice they made a success of the round. The son who stayed in the business longest was able to sell the round some years later to achieve his ultimate dream of becoming a trucking owner operator. “Our franchisees’ success is our success,” she said.
Efforts to lift their franchise’s credibility with banks helped their franchisees with financing but also lifted the Logans’ industry profile. “A lot of people call me now for advice and I’m happy to share it. They ring because they see me as integral part of the industry and because I’ll tell them the truth as I see it…” She ended with the comment: “It’s nice, as a woman, to know that you have credibility in the industry…”
It’s worth adding that her place on the Franchise Association’s Board seems to owe a lot to her learnings on the school committees: if you think there should be some changes, you have to be prepared to carry it through! There are currently three women and four men on the Board, who are a mix of professional advisors and active industry participants like Estelle.
And what about mentors for the Logans themselves? Estelle said they hadn’t found specific business mentors to work with them but they were able to tap into ideas from everyone in the VIP franchise system. They also have wider networks available through the Franchise Association, in part as a result of the contributions they've made to others.
Work-life balance
Most families these days need both parents working to some degree, Estelle reckons. For women with children she thinks that means some tough compromises particularly in how much they can see their children. These trade-offs can be hard to swallow.
Her own travel schedule has at times kept her away from home a lot. The bonus was the opportunity that gave John to form a close bond with his children by taking a much larger role in their daily care. But she remembers the time she came home from a trip and one of the children fell over…and ran to John for comfort. “They have a great relationship with their father, which is wonderful, but at that moment, it hurt.”
“When we first started in the business we ran it from a home office. This meant we were available 24/7 and during the first two years it sometimes seemed it was nothing but work!” The benefit of working from home was that Estelle could work around the children’s activities and schooling. “The washing could be done in between phone calls and I can remember in those early days I had a number of ironing customers and it always ended up getting started around 11pm! That’s when all was quiet,” laughed Estelle.
However, the time came when a home office was no longer workable and the Logans transferred to an office in Penrose. Again, flexibility planned a huge part: they dropped the children at school at 8.15 and went into the office at Penrose from their lifestyle farm in Patumahoe, then back to collect them by 3pm. The afternoons were devoted to the children and when they were in bed – it was back out to the office.
They reclaimed their weekends with the move to Penrose. No longer would they return calls on a Saturday & Sunday unless in an emergency, and they began to get the franchisees to appreciate the Logans had a life and family outside of work! No matter what, family did come first. There wasn’t a school trip, parents’ day, or camp that one of the Logans didn’t attend. They worked the business around the children and, for them, that was ideal. As a result they encourage their franchisees to do the same.
Taking a week’s break every school holidays during the year became the norm and provided quality time with their children. “And let’s face it,” says Estelle, “with two working parents the children do get some extra privileges and treats!”
She summed up the work life balance issue this way:
The most important thing is you have to be passionate about what you are doing. Working mothers do compromise, but if you are really passionate and love what you are doing, it makes the difference.
Best Advice
The best advice Estelle ever remembers being given was:
In stressful situations, respond, don’t react.
She feels this is particularly pertinent advice for women. “We are more emotional,” she believes. “We feel things more keenly than men and we find it harder to compartmentalise. John can walk out of the office and leave it all behind. I can’t! It helps to vent the emotion and then you can focus on the issue and see what needs to be done.”
Wrapping Up
Estelle had a plane to catch and I had run over on time. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and hope that our readers will find useful ideas and perhaps even inspiration from what Estelle had to say.
VIP Home Services offers lawnmowing, cleaning, window and ironing services too. At Professionelle, we’re often surprised by how many busy professional women still carry out a lot of these ‘inside’ tasks themselves. If your New Year’s resolution was to figure out a way to “make it work” for you a little better, maybe outsourcing some of these jobs is an option worth considering…
©Professionelle.co.nz
Back to Top
Interview with John Palmer
by Galia BarHava-Monteith
Chairperson of the Year
I have no doubt that the vast majority of our readers know who John Palmer is. The Listener’s September 2007 article about the ‘most influential people who shape our world’ had this to say about him: “Regarded by many as one of the most effective corporate chairmen in the country, Palmer commands enormous respect in the business community.” Little wonder. John is the Chairman of both Air New Zealand and of Solid Energy, is the only Kiwi on the AMP board, and is also a director of Rabobank Australia, World of Wearable Art and various horticultural companies. Moreover, he has just been voted 2007 Chairperson of the Year in Management magazine.
John was originally a tobacco and kiwifruit farmer. In one of our conversations, he described himself as ‘accidentally’ ending up as a professional director when he was asked to become involved in Trustbank Canterbury during the time of New Zealand’s banks’ rapid amalgamation. In the 1990s, he had the unenviable task of bringing the nearly broke Kiwifruit Marketing Board back on track and was instrumental in setting it on the path to its current form as Zespri. John Palmer also chaired Wrightsons through the late 90s and early 2000s.
A Rare Treat
I’ve had the great fortune to work alongside John over the last couple of years on a governance project, unrelated to Professionelle. It is both heartening and humbling to work closely with, and learn much from, someone of his calibre. The project only lasts a few days each year, but I have learned a great deal from John and by watching him operate over the short time we work together.
From time to time I have mentioned Professionelle to him and on one of those occasions he told me that he believes motherhood to be a fantastic preparation for management. When I mentioned this to a friend who is also a Professionelle member, she said, “You’ve got to interview him!”
John Palmer doesn’t seek the limelight and is seen to be media- and publicity-shy, so it was with great trepidation that I asked him for an interview. To my absolute delight, he agreed!
I found the hour I spent conducting this interview to be a rare treat. It’s not often you get to hear thoughts and reflections on a topic close to your heart from one of the country’s most respected business leaders. I found what John Palmer had to say very encouraging and uplifting, and I’m sure many of our readers will as well.
Women’s unique contribution to the business world
I started by asking John what he believes women bring to the world of business. John was very considered in his responses. After giving this issue some thought, he told me that what ‘good’ women bring to business leadership is what all good people bring: smarts, energy, and the willingness to work hard and learn. John sees those qualities as the universal prerequisites for all people who want to become successful in their business career. He emphasised this view throughout our interview.
Beyond these prerequisites, John does believe there are unique contributions that women make. Firstly, women, in his view, tend to act more collegially, and more openly. They share their aspirations, feelings and concerns, a behaviour he sees as very important in group dynamics. Capable women, according to John, bring an ability to get the most out of people in group situations, so much so that “the dynamics of a group of capable people that doesn’t have a woman in it will be missing something.”
Secondly, John is a strong advocate of having the right people to set and implement the best strategy in modern business. As such, he believes that the unique contribution that experienced and capable women make is their ability to ‘read situations’ and to have an intuitive understanding of what the underlying people dynamics are.
One of the things I found about working with women is that they are more creative and have a different ways of seeing things. I find around the Board table that, given the same level of experience, women are much more perceptive than men. They see behind the issues, they see the dynamics and understand all the elements.
Before you ask, yes, Air New Zealand does have a woman on its Board!
Women’s success in business
John believes that the same things that make men successful in business apply to women. You just can’t bypass the need to be bright, energetic, hard working and always willing to learn! Personally, John has never felt threatened by a capable woman and has never distinguished between men and women. This might well have something to do with him being the only boy in his family, bracketed by two older and two younger sisters!
After a little probing from me (I didn’t need to do much), John openly acknowledged that some men do feel threatened. Fewer, these days, he reckons, but they are still around. “They’ll never admit it, but you observe it. They never see the importance of those ‘soft’ elements in business, so they don’t see the need for having women.”
John believes that it is the inability of some men to realise the importance of dealing well with the ‘people aspect’ of business that leads them to dismiss the need for a ‘female perspective’. And this inability is something that holds those men back from being as successful as they could be.
John fully acknowledges that his perception that women are better at the interpersonal side of business is something of a generalisation and that there are many women who are also good on the ‘hard’ numbers side. His own personal bias is also towards numbers. Over the years, he’s observed a greater proportion of women working in marketing and human resources. These areas were traditionally seen as the ‘softer’ sides of business. This view, John observes, is now obsolete, as modern business leaders realise that getting the ‘soft’ bits right is a crucial part of the “good to great journey”.
What I do now, the single biggest thing I have to focus on now, as a chair or a director is essentially about strategy and people. You can’t get good strategy or deliver a good strategy without the right people. This means getting the right skills in the right place, it means that you have to give raw talent opportunities to shine. It’s not about getting the whip out and driving people to distraction.
I think most of our readers will take heart from John’s view that it is inevitable that New Zealand’s businesses will have many more senior women in the near future, simply as a function of the increased education and opportunities women now have access to. Organisations will have to adapt to make it work for women, and men, who seek greater flexibility. In a tight talent market where many of the people who hold crucial skills are women, businesses will have to adapt, or, in John’s view, lose.
On the current dearth of senior women in New Zealand businesses
John’s optimism (I suspect he would simply call it realism) about the future of women in businesses leadership is heartening, especially as he is a business leader with a broad background and whose mana and calibre are widely respected. Given all this, I had to ask him why he thinks women are so under-represented in senior roles today.
In his considered manner, his answer came in three parts.
Firstly, he pointed out, women’s access to the same education and opportunities as men has only happened relatively recently. Women in their thirties today, in his view, are much better educated and worldly than their mothers’ generation. It is only a matter of time before they will become leaders in the business community.
The second factor is that a lot of the pioneering women found it more rewarding to work in the public sector. His observations are that women chose the public sector partly because there were greater opportunities there and partly because they were attracted to work in health, education and welfare.
Finally, John acknowledges sexism has been a barrier for women’s advancement, especially in the past. In some cases, men who would never admit to having an active bias against women nevertheless never gave women opportunities to shine and advance. John believes these attitudes are becoming progressively less common.
Mother manages best
This interview was triggered by John’s comment to me that motherhood is a great training for the business world. Naturally, I asked him to elaborate on that.
John is a strong and passionate advocate of the importance of motherhood and families. Before he answered my questions, he emphatically told me that “one of the sad things is that motherhood and parenting have really been devalued. There’s a lot of pressure, overt and covert, on women to say ‘I’m going to put my career ahead of having children’. I think it’s sad that really successful young people are denying themselves the joys of parenthood.”
He acknowledged that motherhood can be seen as detracting from women’s career progress and that this was true, especially in the past, as many managers did ‘penalise’ the career progression of women who chose to have children. But he personally believes that motherhood does nothing but further enhance able women’s competence.
John sounds a caution for managers who still see motherhood as detracting from career commitment: “It is natural that women will have children. You need to accept that they will do it and that they’ll take a break. That might hamper your own business for the short term, but surely after a while they’ll want to return and then they’ll be much better people and managers as a result of their experiences as mothers.”
“Motherhood throws many into a situation of dealing with the vast unknown,” says John. “It is coping with this vast unknown that leads women to grow as individuals”. When asked to elaborate, he looked at me with some surprise - after all I am a mum! - and added that in most cases women have to manage multiple tasks often at a time where money and time are at a premium. Mothers need to prioritize and make decisions almost every minute of every day. All of this gives them fantastic managerial skills as well as an opportunity to truly evaluate what is important for them personally. He sees these as highly desirable attributes for successful business leaders.
Yes, he acknowledges, when a woman who takes a career break returns to work, she will be at an immediate disadvantage to one who hasn’t left and to her male colleagues. But he goes on,
My bet is that, within five years, the one who took a break to raise children will become more valuable because of the skills and experiences she gained as a mother. In some ways she’ll be even more valuable than those people who took a more single minded approach.
Even though I spend a lot of time in my own life thinking about women and work and career and motherhood, I have to confess that I’ve never thought about motherhood in this way. I found myself agreeing with every word John said, but the sceptic at the back of my mind was saying ‘that’s all fine and well, but employers still don’t seem to see it this way’.
John must have read my mind because he went on to explain that in his view women in New Zealand are going to be exceptionally well-placed to advance in the business world. We’re short on skills and we’re going to get shorter. The opportunities and choices for skilled people will increase. Accordingly, John believes that, “…the biases and traditional viewpoints will have to disappear because employers will not have a choice.”
On flexible work arrangements
John has mixed views about the Employment Relations – Flexible Working Arrangement Bill that was passed through Parliament in November 2007. His concern is that the bill could be too difficult to manage for smaller businesses. He sees some issues with the legal framework but anticipates that “the market will sort it out because they’ll have to.” On the whole, he believes the bill will force companies to think about flexibility, and that that will be a good thing.
His message is incredibly consistent. “Businesses will have to adapt to employees wanting more flexibility and it is a prerequisite for anyone who wants to employ Gen Y,” says John. It all goes back to the skills shortage facing New Zealand. “Businesses will have to adapt because those skilled people will demand it and businesses that don’t provide flexibility will be in trouble.” New Zealand’s skills shortage, John believes, is a very powerful tool for women who want to work part time and still do demanding and interesting work.
Unfortunately, for those of us who are in professional services, John’s views are that they are generally still behind the ball on understanding the importance of looking after their people well. “Professional services don’t understand how important this is. They generally don’t know how to spell Team.”
All this advancement has a price
I think by now, you’ll have got John’s message about the economic reality of the skills shortage in New Zealand. I hope that you also see that he believes this reality, coupled with women gaining the skills and experiences eagerly sought by the businesses community, increasingly places us in a wonderful position to negotiate flexible employment arrangements. But to him all this has a price society might have to pay.
John sees Generation X as more selfish than the generations who came before us. He wonders what the price will be for a society where more people, men and women, are opting for paid employment and away from more community oriented roles and vocations. He thinks Generation X are less community minded and might not contribute to society in a way previous generations did.
So, you want to become a director?
Many professional women I know see directorships as way to combine meaningful work and flexibility. I asked John for his advice on this. He told me he’s recently been asked that same question in two quite different circumstances. Once was in a rural sector conference in Australia and the other time was by a business person in New Zealand.
He gave me the same advice he gave the other two questioners. Firstly, if you want to be a director you need to realise what a governance role is all about: strategy and people. It is not day-to-day management. A business background might help, but the most important attribute for directors, in John’s view, is the ability to understand how groups of people work and how to be influential within a group situation.
John’s focus on people was one of the key facets of his style as Chairman that the judges in Management magazine commented on. They said of him, “Palmer is a team player who has turned working supportively with his chief executive and top management team into an art form. He is constantly committed to benefiting the organisations he chairs.”
Once people are comfortable with this notion and have decide that governance is what they want to do, he advises them to become involved in their community in a field of interest. One of the biggest lessons to learn is how to become influential in a very diverse team.
People don’t seem to understand that a school committee is really good training for business governance – committees have to deal with diverse stakeholders, tight resources, and people issues. These are the same issues you deal with at the board level. The consequences and the numbers are bigger but the underlying issues are the same.
According to John, “Some top accountants make good directors and some don’t. Some top lawyers make good directors, too… but most don’t!”
John rejects the common view that professional training is enough for becoming a board director. “It is not the skills that you’re trained in that make you a good director, but your ability to work in a group situation and to know how to influence”.
His own greatest learning as a director has been this:
You don’t need to be the smartest person in the room, but you do need to know how to influence others. Unfortunately, many professionals are big on the details but very poor at understanding the people piece. Yet that’s something women understand really well...
Not surprisingly perhaps, the rural group he lectured to accepted his advice, but the businessperson struggled with it.
John Palmer’s advice to professional women
John is adamant that the first thing anyone needs to do is to first and foremost figure out what is important to him or her. He’d give the same advice to men as he does to women: work out what you really want to do, what you can do to get there and who can help you. The key is to figure out what YOU want, not what your parents think is acceptable, or what your peer group deems ‘cool’. Follow your instincts.
If what you want to do is surf than you’ll need to accept that you might not make as much money as others, but you’ll need to figure out how to make a living surfing. Maybe you’ll build surfboards, but you’ll need to be honest with yourself about what your life will look like.
If you want to become a company director think about the area you’d like to get involved in. For example, if you’re interested in food, develop the skills that will be attractive to the people who appoint directors. Remember that the most important attributes to have are willingness to always learn, work hard, abundance of energy and dedication. Go and get it, because it’s not going to fall into your lap!
It’s a new world
I asked John if he’d be willing to share his thoughts and observations about women and their progress in New Zealand’s business community. After some thought, he told me, “When I look at my children who are in their mid-thirties and compare them to my generation, they are much more educated, much more worldly.”
In line with his key message about the changing world of employment in New Zealand he added, ”If the glass ceiling still exists to some extent in some places, it will not exist for much longer because women will have the skills that employers need.”
His final reflection really struck a chord with me:
One of my messages to those women who feel the conflict between family and career is to say to them that in a commercial world of instantly everything, just remember that if you’re 35 you will be working a lot longer than your parents did. If you take a break, it will have very little negative impact over the long term and in my view will ultimately have a very a positive influence on your career.
Hearing this message from John Palmer left me truly feeling hopeful, and I hope it will do the same for you, too.
© Professionelle Limited 2007
YOUR FEEDBACK!
It seems that our interview with John Palmer has really struck a chord with many of you! The feedback has been coming in, and, as we’ve grown accustomed to receive from our members, it is thoughtful and insightful.
Below are some of the comments we’ve received. Please read and enjoy them and continue to send in your thoughts to us!
Back to TopMaking a Difference with HIPPY
By Galia
Meet Jane Hall, a woman determined to make a difference to the lives of children at risk of educational disadvantage in New Zealand
What is HIPPY? (and it’s not a long haired guitar player…)
For the longest time, I’ve been thinking about how I could write for Professionelle about HIPPY, the Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters. Eagled-eyed readers who have looked at our profiles will have noticed that I have a Masters in Developmental Psychology. What we didn’t write is that I earned that Masters for evaluating an early intervention programme – HIPPY.
HIPPY is a home-based programme designed to help parents from disadvantaged backgrounds prepare their children for school. HIPPY supports parents in becoming actively involved in their four and five year old children’s learning. Parents and children work together for fifteen minutes a day with storybooks, puzzles and learning games that help children become successful learners at school. The programme was designed specifically for those parents who may not feel comfortable about their own abilities to teach their children.
I came across HIPPY in 1997, when I was searching for a programme to evaluate. I was, and still am, a passionate advocate of the use of data to determine if things really work. I rang around trying to find a programme that wanted an evaluation carried out, and that’s how I came across Lesley Max, Great Potentials CEO. Lesley was just delighted for me to evaluate HIPPY. What struck me as special about HIPPY (apart from finding out it originated in Israel!) was that it was all about including the parents in bettering their children’s learning outcomes.
The HIPPY programme builds on the bond between parents and children because it believes parents play a critical role in their children’s education. HIPPY offers support that builds upon parental strengths so parents can provide their children with necessary skills and confidence to begin school with a positive attitude toward learning.
Why should Professionelle readers care?
Following the recent horrendous child abuse cases, many of my women friends have told me they were moved to tears reading those accounts in the press. They also told me how helpless they felt and how they didn’t know what they could do to make a difference.
That’s when the light bulb went on: it was time for me to write about HIPPY and Jane Hall, the woman who oversees it all. It’s time to for me to celebrate those who are out there making a difference and for you, our readers, to spread the word to help them accomplish more.
Meet Jane Hall
I met Jane ten years ago; she was the calm, beautifully spoken and almost serene-looking programme coordinator of HIPPY Glen Innes. I still remember the first time we met and how impressed I was with this very white, middle-class looking woman who had braved the mean streets of South Auckland and Glen Innes, cold knocking on unfamiliar doors – more on that later.
Jane’s background is in special education in primary and secondary schools. She started her educational career working with physically disabled children. The work was entirely within the school system and it was very hard to involve parents. As she says, “we naïvely thought that by inviting parents to wine and cheese evenings, we were involving them in their children’s education.”
Frustrated with the conventional education system, its lack of connection with the home, and thus its failure to make a lasting difference to the children’s lives, Jane quit. She left teaching in 1993, and was about to undertake a complete career change and do something completely different.
As she was looking for a new job, Jane saw an ad for the position of a HIPPY coordinator within a Family Service Centre in Otara. Jane had heard of HIPPY a few years prior, when she heard Lesley speak at a special education conference and was impressed by what she heard – how parents in this programme were the agents of change, working with their children at the home.
“It just sounded so sensible”. So when she read the ad, she rang the centre manager and said, “Hello, my name is Jane Hall and this is my job.”
The Power of Positive Feedback
Jane was interviewed by Lesley and Professor Avima Lombard – the Israeli applied academic who created HIPPY. Jane was one of the first six coordinators employed to run the early HIPPY programmes in New Zealand.
Jane is as passionate about HIPPY now as she was then. In her words,“Everything about HIPPY just rang my bell. That parents work with their children and we help prepare them to teach their children themselves. This is a chance to show parents that they can do something they never thought they could – educate their kids!
“These are people who don’t have much education of their own and think ‘how can we prepare our children for school so that they have a very different experience to what we had?’ HIPPY has given them both the confidence to try it and the skills to do it., You can’t have one without the other.”
Jane’s passion came through from Day One and at the end of the four day training, Professor Lombard looked at her and said, ‘You’ll be good at this’.
To this day, more than ten years later, Jane absolutely treasures this memory. “This was the first time someone had said such an openly positive thing to me, and that prepared me and energised me more than anything all the way to where I am today. And that’s what we do for our parents; HIPPY is so well structured and has all the support systems that they CAN become good at this.”
Doing the Right Thing does Protect you from Wild Dogs
The central premise of HIPPY is that a Programme Coordinator is the only professional in any given programme. They are most commonly, as in Jane’s case, former school or early childhood teachers. Interestingly, the people who do most of the teaching in the programme are the parents themselves, not only to their children but also to one another!
Parents who are currently working on HIPPY with their own children, or have recently completed the HIPPY programme, can train to become paraprofessional HIPPY tutors. They in turn coach other parents by showing them how to use the HIPPY materials with their own children.
The tutors are trained and supported by the Coordinator. They meet each week to work through the next workbook that they will deliver to the parents at a home visit, or on alternate weeks at a group meeting.
When a programme is established, the tutors are found within the group, but when a Coordinator has to set up a new programme from scratch – like Jane did in Otara and Glen Innes they have to go door knocking!
So, that’s what Jane did. On her first day in Otara after cleaning the tiny desk in the teacher’s supply room, and proudly wearing her ‘HIPPY co-ordinator’ badge, she walked outside the centre and decided to turn right. She knocked on the first door she came to and introduced herself.
Now let me take a minute here. Imagine yourself going around Otara tomorrow knocking on strange doors! And Jane did this every day for FOUR weeks knocking on up to FIFTY doors every day. It took her one week of knocking - two hundred and fifty doors! - to find her first tutor.
Was she scared? She was once stopped by a policeman who asked her what she was doing knocking on doors in Otara. After she’d explained to him what HIPPY was all about his response was, “I wouldn’t let my wife do that’. In fact, I don’t think Jane’s husband was that pleased either, but I also don’t think he had much of a choice given the depth and strength of her passion.
Jane was only scared of the dogs. Once she recalls walking into a cul-de-sac of Housing New Zealand houses where a pack of mean dogs came out and chased her. She ran out of there as fast as she could and just sat in her car crying. ‘Pathetic really, but I was so scared’, she said.
Other than that one memory she felt quite safe. As Jane says, she had a badge which made her feel safe, but more importantly, the absolute belief she was doing the right thing. Despite her complete ignorance of Otara’s cultural norms and realities in the early days, she never once had a rude response. “I didn’t know who was who or what so I went everywhere including to the gang houses. I was so naïve. But I found that if you expect people to be good and you talk with respect to them about their children they just respond to you.”
And all those years later, she is now overseeing the implementation of new programmes as well as running existing ones of which there are currently twenty one.
Does HIPPY work?
Yes, it does. Since my thesis there has been more research carried out in New Zealand, and, with the programme operating in many other countries, too, international data supports local findings. The data is consistent: HIPPY children are generally better equipped to succeed in school and they perform better on a variety of educational measures than children from the same environments who did not attend HIPPY.
In my thesis I looked both at educational outcomes for children and social outcomes for caregivers. HIPPY parents’ self-esteem was statistically significantly higher than that of a control group of caregivers from the same schools.
I think we can all agree that once someone is taught how to do things for themselves they are that much more likely to feel better about themselves and to change how they interact with others.
However, HIPPY is not a programme designed to stop violence in the home. It’s a hopeful programme, based on education, and one families are proud to belong to. To protect this important factor, HIPPY stays away from commenting on issues of child abuse; they don’t want their participants to think for a moment that the programme is about anything other than improving their kids’ chances for success through education.
HIPPY is a programme that teaches parents to speak to their children, respect their children and positively interact with their children. By its very nature it probably does a lot more to stop abuse from even occurring than many other, much costlier options.
What can you do to help?
I asked Jane what you, our members, could do to help HIPPY. Here are her suggestions:
- Spread the word! Send this article to people you know who might find it interesting. Check HIPPY’s website and tell people you know about HIPPY and the wonderful work of the Great Potentials Foundation.
- Fund raise! HIPPY and Great Potentials have to constantly fund raise to support their activities. If you have experience in fund raising, they’d love to hear from you.
- Every other week the mothers meet in a group setting with the local coordinator. If you have a life skill that you can share with them like budgeting, preparing a CV or cooking on a budget, please contact Jane to see if you can contribute your time in one of their meetings.
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Back to TopThe Nike Women - Debbie and Mary who just do it
Galia interviews Debbie Mayo-Smith and Mary Lambie
Debbie Mayo-Smith and Mary Lambie recently wrote a little book called “101 Quick Tips for Surviving your Kids". I met with them to find out more about these two well-known New Zealand women and to get their perspective on the issues we try to cover and address at Professionelle.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Debbie and Mary, let me tell you, meeting with them was quite an experience! This is not surprising given that between these two young-looking women they have nine children, including two sets of twins and one set of triplets. Yes, you’ve read correctly, Debbie has six children comprising one set of twins and a set of triplets and a singleton. Mary has ‘just’ three kids which includes her own set of twins.
It’s not surprising then that when they met about eighteen months ago they just clicked.
Why the 101 Tips Book?
When I met them, it was very clear to me that if anyone could and should write a book on this topic, it’s these two. After all, who could be better qualified to write a book about surviving kids than mothers of multiple births? However, Mary emphasised to me that ‘Surviving the Kids’ was Debbie’s brain child.
Debbie is an international Business Speaker and until ‘Surviving’, her focus had been on business outcomes. But given her not-so-ordinary family circumstances, many people over the years have urged her to write something about the topic of juggling work, kids, relationships and staying sane! Which, let me tell you she is - very sane, that is!
So when Debbie met Mary in the Viva radio station, the light bulb went on for her. She could see almost immediately the possibilities for the two of them to collaborate on a quick tip book for all caregivers.
Not so hard
For someone who has never written a book, the task of producing something like this seems challenging. To Debbie, this is her sixth book. Nonetheless, she seems to have found the writing experience a great one because it all “just made sense, you know that something is right when it just comes.”
To Mary, whom Debbie describes as “a practical, lovely and down to earth woman’ the task wasn’t at all daunting. Mary told me that in order to write her share of the book she simply did the most sensible thing: she observed her children at play and reflected on the challenges of parenting. And as she says, once you do that, it all comes out.
Mary, who has many writer friends, said that fiction writers who spend huge chunks of time researching, writing and editing can often get sick of their book. She never suffered this “because the subject was so familiar to me it came very easily”.
The book is already proving to be a great success. With three thousand copies pre-sold three days after the first day, it is, in fact, nearly sold out.
Sharing with others
From our conversation it seemed to me that what gave both Debbie and Mary the most pleasure from the book was being able to share with others their thoughts and tips on how to make life easier. In Mary’s words, “it’s all about the sisterhood and looking after each other and sharing good practical ideas.”
Mary has placed a personally dedicated copy of the book in each of her children’s treasure boxes. I got the impression that to her that was the best thing about this achievement. Debbie’s children, who are older, apparently just laughed when they saw the book.
Outsourcing – the key to making it work
It was abundantly clear in our conversation that both these dynamic and high-achieving women firmly believe that they can’t do it all. They both have domestic help. They both believe that they should do what they are good at and what the best, most productive and financially viable use of their time is, without regrets, because no one person can ‘do it all’.
To date, in all the interviews Sarah and I have conducted, that has been a common theme. And I must say that I wholeheartedly agree.
Mary has help with her three and Debbie used to have two au-pairs to share the load when the kids were little. Now that her oldest is eighteen, he helps out, and they no longer have an au-pair.
Challenges – we all have them
I must say that, to me, these two women seemed like juggernauts. According to Sarah, a juggernaut is an ‘irresistible force moving through the landscape’. As such I had to wonder if they face any challenges at all.
Thankfully they do, and ones that I believe we can all relate to. Debbie’s challenge, perhaps not surprisingly, is to keep eight people happy,
“If I’m away too much of the time it becomes a strain on the kids and my husband. But I would never be happy just staying at home.”
Her way to overcome that particular challenge is to ‘share the joy’. Debbie is very thankful that she gets paid to do what most people save up for – staying in beautiful resorts while she’s on her speaking circuit.
She tries to take her children with her to those exotic locations. They get to enjoy staying in a fabulous resort and she gets to do what she loves and to be with those she loves while she does it
Debbie did however get into trouble once when she left her then ten-year-old triplets by themselves briefly and they managed to lock themselves out of their room. Other than that one time, she has managed to bring some of her tribe with her without glitches.
Mary’s challenge is to maintain the balance, making time for work, family, herself and not becoming too consumed with guilt. She believes that kids are pretty robust and can put up with a lot. I think that both Mary and Debbie with their extensive parenting experience believe that there is a contemporary tendency to ‘molly coddle’ children a bit.
I found myself really relating to one of the challenges they voiced, a challenge that is new in my life. As entrepreneurs, doing what you do is all-consuming and the challenge is sometimes to be able to step away from it.
Debbie heard a wonderful quote that seems to sum it up. “When you’re an entrepreneur, your business is like a seductive mistress and you want to spend all your time with her.”
Celebrate your achievements and success
Not surprisingly, when I asked them about their greatest achievements, they both mentioned their kids first. In Mary’s words, “having children is jolly hard work and if you survive that, that’s a great achievement.”
Mary has many things to celebrate and be proud of, which she does. Healthy, happy children, and successful businesses including a Subway franchise. She also thinks that people get too obsessed with achievements and perhaps sometimes it is good to stand still. She does acknowledge, however, that she’s not one to do so.
Debbie has given birth to six healthy children and that is a major achievement in anyone’s book. What is even more staggering is that she breast fed them all including the twins and the triplets. At this point I didn’t need to hear anything more in terms of her achievements!
But wait there’s much, much more. She’s managed to develop an international business with six children under five and write six books in the process.
Have they received any good advice?
I love hearing about what other people consider to be great advice they’ve received, and with these two, I was really intrigued to find out what this would be. Interestingly, they seemed to be taken by surprise by the question.
Debbie then remembered hearing advice that an executive in an office she worked in dished out to everyone: “ activity equals success”.
Although not aimed at her personally, she listened and took it on board - and I think no one can doubt she has also lived it!
Having it all
Neither Mary nor Debbie feel like they have to compromise anything in their busy lives. Perhaps the key to that is because they are both self-employed entrepreneurs who have complete autonomy over their time.
A long time ago, Debbie took a hard look at all the aspects of her life, what she was passionate about and where she could make money. She also acknowledged that while she couldn’t do it all, she could concentrate on doing the things that gave her pleasure and were the most profitable.
Debbie is also an avid user of technology (her last book was “101 Quick Tips on Email and Google"), and as such has maximized her ability to master that particular beast. She believes it takes her an hour to do what takes six hours and two people in most other offices.
Mary feels that output and busyness are linked. “I don’t feel like I have to compromise anything, the more I do the better it gets.” She also says that she doesn’t need much sleep and feels that sleep is over-rated.
Regrets? Not many
Mary’s regret was not working hard enough as a student. She started a few degrees and only finished one. She believes that in today’s world degrees are very common and what differentiates how good they are is largely to do with grades. “I didn’t discover hard work until I was 30”.
Although she wished she would have worked harder, she still believes that “all the things that happen do so for a reason; it isn’t my personality to have regrets.”
Not surprisingly perhaps, Debbie has none.
Their advice to other professional women
Debbie has some clear thoughts about making life easier for us:
- Get assistance for domestic chores whether or not you have children.
- If you have children, do what you love with them and don’t feel guilty about not doing the things you don’t love. In her case the latter is watching the kids play soccer on a rainy Saturday morning, which is something I can relate to.
- You can do anything and accomplish anything. The trick is to break it down to bite-size pieces.
Mary was reluctant at this stage; she thinks people are smart enough to figure things out for themselves. So these are her observations:
- The world is your oyster.
- Don’t forget that you only get one chance and there is no dress rehearsal.
- Be happy, and if you’re not, then do something about it.
- You can only be successful if you’re content inside.
Before we said our goodbyes, I asked them where they see themselves in ten to fifteen years’ time. They weren’t sure exactly what that would be, only that they will be working and doing well in whatever it is they do. And their number one goal? To be healthy and happy. Everything else flows from that.
Back to TopAlmost Superwoman: A Guilt-Free Working Mother
Galia interviews Alison Andrew
I’ve known Alison since we met at Fonterra during the merger. Alison was the CEO of Fencepost at the time, and over the years we’ve developed a close friendship. I count myself very lucky to have had her as a friend and advisor. She’s given me so much invaluable career and life advice which I’ve cherished and tried to share with others.
When I was living through Fonterra’s restructuring, it was Alison’s wise words that kept me going. She was the one who pointed out that I was feeling so miserable because I was a person who was used to being in control - and this was a situation I had no control over. In her straightforward manner, she challenged me with, “So what are you going to do about it, girl?” She then talked me through the situation and we came up with a great strategy to increase my sense of control over my life at work.
Ever since launching Professionelle, I’ve been pestering Alison for an interview, and finally she agreed! I believe she has some incredibly insightful things to say and it’s great others can have a chance to read them. I hope you find this interview as interesting, useful, and thought-provoking as I did.
Current work role
Alison is now one of the most senior women in Fonterra. She recently moved into her new role as Commercial Director, Fonterra Ingredients. It’s a role which acts as a link between Corporate Finance (part of the corporate structure in the company) and the Ingredients business unit. A big part of the role is to manage performance and provide general business advice to the unit.
The funnel approach to career – from a specialist to a generalist
Alison trained as an engineer but quickly became a generalist in her business career. She has undertaken many diverse corporate roles both in line management and staff functions. She has also worked in many industries and in companies ranging in size from small start-ups to large corporates.
She has clearly enjoyed the variety of roles and industries she’s worked in, but she does sound a word of caution,
“There is a danger that as a generalist you’ll be really good at nothing in particular. You can become too generalist”.
Alison’s emphatic career advice to those who are thinking of undertaking a wide business career is to train as a specialist. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to generalise later in your career if that’s what you want. She sees her own training as fundamental in teaching her a methodological approach and clear thinking skills which she believes set her up very well for her wide ranging and diverse career since.
Focus on the important, not the urgent
Alison had only been in her new role for about a month when I interviewed her. She says of it, “Having a new role is always a challenge; my focus is to grow the business. It is challenging in a company like Fonterra where one needs to do a lot of internal interfacing to make things smoother for the business units.”
As a senior manager, an ongoing challenge is both to delegate and to make sure staff are accountable with what’s been delegated:
”My challenge is holding people accountable and ensuring they make decisions where they should be made, rather than trying to continually push things up and duck accountability!”
Alison is passionate about truly adding value. Delegation is critical because it frees her to focus on the issues where her experience means she can really make a difference.
“In my particular role I want to make sure I focus on doing the important things rather than the urgent - but not important! - things. I want to figure out how I can move the dial rather than be an important administrator. I constantly ask myself: how do I make sure I actually add value?”
Life, not work, is her greatest achievement
Alison has two sons, one aged ten and the other thirteen years old. She rates them, plus her marriage and her family to be her greatest achievements. She also considers herself lucky to have a great family while being able to manage a successful career spanning different roles, companies and industries.
“My greatest achievement? Being able to have a functioning career, a family and a good marriage and stay sane!”
So, how does she make the whole life and career combination work?
“Of course you compromise” says Alison. “Just like in business, you ration to get the best return on your investment, and that’s what I do in my life.”
Over the years, I’ve come to realise how disciplined Alison is. You’ll never find her loitering around the company kitchen having chats. “I measure myself on output, not input and I walk out of the office when I’m done. I don’t believe you have to be seen at your desk to prove you’re working hard.”
In this interview, I finally had a chance to grill Alison about the nuts and bolts of how she makes it work – which, after all, is a large part of what we all really want to know about each other! Now, those of you who might be slightly faint-hearted, take a big breath before you read on (I definitely needed to!). It has to be said that behind every successful working mother there’s a great support infrastructure. Alison is no exception.
“To make it work, you’ve got to have good child care and outsource the administration aspects of running your house,” she says.
She and her husband have a great governess (not a nanny!) who picks the kids up from school and does their homework with them. This lady also helps out with occasional shopping and washing. They also have someone who does eight hours of housework including cleaning and ironing.
Alison is one of the most energetic people I know. She’s religious about getting enough sleep; she declines networking and work socialisation 99% of time. She does, however, go to the gym every day between 5.45am (!) and 6.45. Her kids have their morning jobs to do while she trains and if they get them all done on time, including making their own lunches and stacking the dishwasher, they get to watch a bit of TV which is their incentive.
“I get home at 6.45am, have a shower, dry my hair on the way to the kitchen where I quality check the lunch boxes. If my mother rings in the morning it’s – ‘not now, mum’. The supply chain logistics in our house in the morning are very tight!”
After dropping the kids at school at around 7.45am on the way to work, she checks her blackberry and has her first cup of tea from the thermos – while stalled in traffic.
She gets back home at about 6.30pm and makes a simple dinner with her boys. “We make honey mustard chicken and salad or vegetables, nothing that requires much preparation”. The whole family eats together at about 7.30pm. Her younger son still likes to be read to, so she tries to do that most nights.
Alison is not a big fan of TV. She’s not against it, but it’s simply not her thing. She plays the piano and will finish most nights in a hot bath while drinking her hot chocolate and reading a good book.
The weekends are dedicated to the family. On Saturday the jobs get done and the boys have their sporting activities. Sundays are the family day. The family sails together, or ventures to the west coast beaches where the boys practise their surfing. “Our social life is getting better with the boys getting older,” says Alison. Her focus is very much on balancing those two key aspects of her life: work and family.
Make the time to give something back to your community
Alison has just finished coaching her younger son’s cricket team. My mind boggles… how did she find the time?
“No one volunteered to coach” she says. “I’ve always wanted to give something back. I think it’s important and I think it’s achievable even when you’re a full time working mother time. You just have to be organised.”
Not being able to do the whole school thing with parent-teacher meetings and mum help at the school, Alison decided that she could help with the coaching and get to spend more time with her son and his friends that way. “Mondays are a race to get to the coaching session on time, and then there’s the Saturday morning game.”
The hardest thing about coaching according to Alison is not managing the behaviour of pre-pubescent boys, but that of their parents! “I had to be quite forceful about it – managing the parents so that they’d back off!”
Now that the cricket season is finished, Alison manages the soccer team. She assures me that that is a lot less work…
Look after yourself or you’ll be no good for anything
One thing Alison taught me after I had my first child was to make sure I looked after myself. She definitely makes sure she does. She has regular facials and loves having her nails done but doesn’t do it that often as they always break.
Alison is not a big shopper but she does love her clothes. Her solution has been to find a designer she loves and who will kit her up. Alison’s advice is to find out what things make you feel good. And once you’ve done that to ensure you find the time to do at least one of them reasonably regularly.
Alison and her husband also have a weekly date every Tuesday and have done so ever since their first son was born. Taking care of their relationship is really important to Alison and the Tuesday date is a strictly observed affair, only broken if one of them is overseas.
Don’t be afraid to be human – no one’s perfect
Early on in her career, while she was struggling with adjusting to managing a career with children, Alison had a boss who told her to embrace her humanity.
“He said to me, and it’s stayed with me, that no one wants to follow god. As a leader, you’ve got to demonstrate you’re human, that you have failures and that you’re vulnerable.”
Alison is very comfortable with the choices and trade-offs she’s made in her life,
“I’m very comfortable with my balance between my life and career. I wish New Zealand was a bigger market with more opportunities, but this is where I want to live with my family. You do compromise to stay here. Sometimes having too many choices is hard, having to compromise forces you to think outside the box to get to different places.”
Be clear about what’s important to you!
Alison believes it is totally achievable to be a working mother in New Zealand. She sees the challenge for women coming from their level of choice:
“Women now have too many choices; they can be working mums, working women without children, part time working or not working at all. What women need to do is make a choice. Figure out what’s right for you and go for it!”
She says the key is not feeling guilty about the choice.
“There is no right answer! If you want to work, then work, and enjoy it. Don’t sit at your desk feeling guilty that you’re not at home with your child. And if you want to stay home with your child, do that instead.”
Alison realises that some will find her life incredibly hectic. “I’m a high energy person and I realise not everyone is as ADD as me, and that’s OK.”
Her motto is to be clear about who you are and what works for you and go for it without guilt or regret.
Women’s responses to male-dominated corporate political structures
I asked Alison why she thinks there are so few senior women in New Zealand business. Having been in numerous corporate roles and in many industries, Alison, I believe, has a unique insider perspective on this question.
She believes that the oft-mentioned high profile corporate women in New Zealand are a superficial phenomenon, “a thin veil” at best. “In business, I think there are still a lot of male-dominated environments.” She points to the underlying structures of corporate life as the place to look for dominant male norms.
“You look at the food provided in lunch meetings. What woman would choose sausage rolls and custard squares?” she asks. “And the language is very masculine with male nouns being used almost exclusively.”
Alison described the environment in many large local corporates as insidiously sexist. “It’s not overt, but just under the surface there are these aggressive environments which can capture you.” It’s a challenge to remain feminine and not to ‘become a man’ by buying in to the politics, the dress sense and the mannerisms. In Alison’s view, the reason why there aren’t many women in top jobs is three fold:
- Firstly, she believes a lot of women can’t be bothered with these male-dominated environments. Women will opt for something or someplace else, that’s less aggressive and more fulfilling.
- “Women have more options than men and we don’t feel we have to put up with it like they do. Many men are trapped, and they have no choice but to make it work. That’s why they’re so much less likely to rock the corporate boat. Women don’t have the same unhealthy dependency on their jobs.”
- A second factor she sees limiting the number of women at the top is that it’s more risky for senior managers to promote women into high positions because they are so visible.
- “If a man fails, no one really notices. But if a senior woman fails, everyone notices and for the CEO or senior manager who promoted her there that’s a real issue.”
- The third barrier is affordable and flexible child care.
- “Your children’s safety is paramount. If you’re worried about them there’s no way you can achieve to your best.”
Very early on as a working mother, Alison and her husband moved from centre based childcare to a nanny arrangement. “I knew I needed to work. Working makes me happy. We budgeted for the more expensive care.”
Non, je ne regrette rien!
Alison has no regrets. There are some things she’d like to change about her life – she’d love to work four days and take most of January off, for example. In ten years’ time she sees herself working less, doing more voluntary things, but still living in New Zealand and still making a difference. In her words, “I’m not in need of anything, really”.
If I were to describe Alison in two words it would be ‘well balanced’. And, indeed, as we say goodbye, she shares with me the following story from early on in her career.
“When I graduated top of the class from my MBA in the UK, I was interviewed by a certain management consultancy. They turned me down. I was told I was too well balanced and content! They wanted single minded people who are able to become obsessed with one single thing…”
Well, as an ex-management consultant myself, what does that say about me?!
Meet the Liontamers
by Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes
At Professionelle, we keep our ears open for stories that shed light on how corporate and professional women” make it all work”. Sometimes that means we’ll bring you news of companies that support female employees strongly, as in Galia’s recent piece about Lisa’s Hummus. Occasionally, we’ll invite interesting women to tell their own stories, and at other times - as now - we’ll interview them and bring back to you what we’ve gleaned.
In this article, we describe three women who have forged their own path through career, flexibility and motherhood tradeoffs. They call their company Liontamer.
I admit I was a little nervous about meeting the Liontamer team. It wasn’t only their confident company name. Their impressive CVs and evident skill depth in an area I know next to nothing about also added to a mild case of intimidation. However, when Galia and I sat down with Laetitia, Janine and Vanja, our conversation first roamed around the familiar topics of fashion and nannies. It was clear the three Liontamers were making the most of the opportunity to talk face to face (more on that below).
What do they do?
Liontamer is New Zealand’s first specialist manager of retail capital protected investments. As I understand it, these are funds where the money you invest will hold its value (less inflation) provided you hold the investment for its full term, usually four or five years. They achieve this via the purchase of notes in international financial institutions with a high credit rating like Barclays, UBS or Deutsche Bank. What is at risk is the return – which is driven by the nature of underlying asset eg a sharemarket index. The benefit is that you can combine exposure to high risk-high return financial assets with the peace of mind of knowing your capital is protected. Their website provides a description of their products and how the money flows.
Liontamer launched in 2003 and until recently brought four new retail funds to the New Zealand market each year. Now, however, the team is poised to push into Australia. Not only that, they have also launched a customised fund structure, tailored to the needs of a particular client, in addition to their broader, more standardised retail products. “Otherwise we’d get in a rut…” they say, half-ruefully.
How did they find each other?
Laetitia, originally from Belgium, founded the company after a long career in banking, most recently as director capital markets at the BNZ. Laetitia really enjoyed her work in the area and, encouraged by others remarking that with her deep skills she could develop her own business, she began preparations while still at the bank. She points out that her boss was fully aware of this and that his support eased the transition process.
Then serendipity lent a hand. Janine was in finance in the UK and looking for a way back to New Zealand. She rang the one woman in New Zealand whose name was listed on an industry website in the structured retail products area to ask about job opportunities. That woman, of course, was Laetitia, who thought Janine’s work experience sounded a great match for her new venture... As Laetitia said, “You do the analysis about potential business partners, but in the end it comes to your gut instinct. Intuition plays a role.”
Janine came onboard as a contractor at first and moved to being a shareholder soon after. After the first fund launched, they dispensed with contracts and worked on trust. “I sent her a bouquet of flowers instead!” Laetitia remembered.
To develop the products, they needed specialist legal advisors. Vanja was a senior associate with Bell Gully where she specialised in offers of securities to the public and managed funds. While still at Bell Gully she was seconded to Liontamer for six months. The secondment worked both ways: the Liontamer team gained a specialist inhouse resource, while for Vanja it was “a free look” at the company and its people. After maternity leave, she returned to Liontamer as an employee, initially working three days a week, and now up to four.
What was the attraction of having their own business?
Janine is a natural-born entrepreneur. “Wages depress me,” she says, “I’d much rather have the chance to earn lots on commission.” Laetitia talks about her entrepreneurial skills kicking in once she began to develop the idea. It was also quite simply an opportunity to get a fairer share of the wealth she’d been creating for her employer.
They pointed to a number of other pluses:
- They have all learned more through having to take on much more varied and hands-on roles than they ever would have in the corporate world.
- As principals in a boutique company they have access to the most senior people in their industry. They believe these opportunities would not have been open to them had they stayed as specialists in their corporate roles.
- Full ownership and accountability: “We take full responsibility, and we take big decisions.” As one example, they cited changing their sole distributor over the last twelve months of operation, as they found their work styles were incompatible.
How flexible are they?
They have no office and each uses her home as her work base. This is partly pragmatic. They often have to call overseas in the middle of the night. It’s far more comfortable and safe to do that in slippers at home than in a deserted downtown office. Also, during the day they tend to be out and about visiting clients and suppliers, which reduces the need for formal office space.
Vanja and Laetitia used to meet once a week but it’s now more ad hoc. Board meetings bring them all together four times a year in Sydney, too, and conference calls help them stay connected. A full meet-up doesn’t happen that often, however, which is why they so clearly enjoyed the opportunity over our lunch to reconnect and talk about more than just work!
Given that having no office makes sense for their business, they enjoy the obvious cost savings as well as the flexibility it brings. Vanja and Laetitia have young families and working from home in Auckland provides more opportunities to see them. Janine lives in Christchurch to be close to her family, and with no formal office to be at, the fact that she’s further away becomes largely irrelevant.
It’s not just the no-office approach that shows flexibility, however. Liontamer has always relied heavily on outsourcing to keep things very fluid, and to have access to the best skills when they need them. They’re comfortable with flexible hours, too. A fourth team member, Sean, works three to five days per week, shifting with the needs of the business.
A View on Women’s Groups in Large Firms
An interesting observation by one of the Tamers was that while a women’s support group had been available to her, she had felt a career risk in joining. “The employer can just be paying lip service to the issues by having these groups – they want to be seen to be doing the right thing. But you can be marked as a whiner or troublemaker if you actually take part. I stayed well away.”
So do they have all the trade offs sussed?
Not entirely! It sounded like Laetitia is busier now than she ever was in corporate. Her childcare arrangements currently include two nannies… She and Janine both agreed, “You wouldn’t do it all again if you thought back on it all. Mad!”
And yet here they are, on the brink of extending into new products and new countries. “We keep challenging ourselves." I suspect the three of them always have, and always will. They certainly looked as if they were enjoying themselves as they raced off to their next meeting…
Stop Press!
…and that next meeting, in hindsight, could well have had something to do with exciting changes that have occurred at Liontamer in the time it’s taken us to draft this article. The company’s local success and plans for growth attracted the interest of a Belgian bank, KBC Group, Europe's 11th largest bank and #3 in capital-protected products in that region. KBC has J.V. operations in Asia, too. The bank’s interest has not been of the polite and passing variety, either. It’s now official that KBC Asset Management has bought 51% of Liontamer!
Laetitia and Janine will retain full management control. As Janine is quoted in the Christchurch Press as saying, “This is a vote of confidence in the business, which has more than $200 million funds under management.” It’s also a great home-grown success story by professional women and we’re thrilled for them.
And just think – we knew them before they were rich and famous!
Back to TopLisa's Hummus: A Great Place to Work
Galia interviews Robyn Stewart
At Professionelle, we want to celebrate companies who make the effort to become great places for women to work.
When we started working on this site, one of our contacts told us about a friend of hers who’d moved from one of New Zealand’s largest corporates to Lisa’s Hummus and just raves about how good the company’s been to her. So of course, we really wanted to know why that was the case and to share her story with you, our readers.
Meet Robyn
The friend in question, Robyn Stewart, kindly agreed to be interviewed and over an hour, with some beautiful home-baked biscuits, she gave us her perspective on what makes a company great for women and why Lisa’s Hummus is an example of one.
Robyn is the Product Development Manager for the company. She develops all their products, including their vegetarian range, called Bean Supreme. Robyn came back from a seven year stint in the UK where she had worked for a specialist vegetarian company. From the UK, she lined herself up with a job in a large New Zealand corporate.
Personal values
Working for the New Zealand corporate, Robyn quickly found that she didn’t feel like she fitted in. Her personal values seemed incompatible with working in the large corporate environment with all that it entailed.
In the process, she realised that what was important to her, namely work-life balance and workplace flexibility, was more compatible with working for a smaller company. She wanted an environment where people were respected for what they could bring. For Robyn, being able to be creative in her role as product manager was key. She felt that the only way she could be true to what motivates her was to work for an environment without the pressure and expectation to climb the corporate ladder.
Lisa’s Hummus and Sanitarium
Enter Lisa’s, the company which was started up by Lisa Corban and is now owned by Sanitarium. Robyn describes Lisa’s as a company that lives its values of respect for families and respect for individuals.
Sanitarium and Lisa’s are owned by the business arm of the Seventh Day Adventists, something Robyn was a bit apprehensive about to begin with. But, now she says that the Church aspect of the company translates into real values in the workplace. Robyn emphasises that the company places no pressure on employees to participate in church activities.
What makes Lisa’s so great for women?
Robyn feels that Lisa’s core values of respect for families and individuals makes them a great place to work for, right from the word go. “When you interview for a job and you’re of a certain age, you always feel like they don’t want you to leave to have babies. With Lisa’s it wasn’t like that at all. They appreciate the skills you bring and want you to be able to have children and continue to contribute.”
And have they delivered on this interview promise? Well, Robyn is now pregnant. She was a bit nervous telling her boss as morning sickness can be a problem for a product development manager who works with food all day. Robyn was overwhelmed with her boss’s warm reaction. In fact, she was told to take as much time off as she needed to and not to push herself too much.
She’s about to go on maternity leave and the company is working hard on ways to keep her in the loop. She also gets to keep her company car while on leave.
How do they make it work?
Robyn doesn’t think that Lisa’s have specific policies and procedures in place. In her view, the small size of the company and their core value – that family is important - is what makes it work. She cites examples where staff can bring kids to work when they’re stuck for childcare. The school age kids play computer games and enjoy the food!
Robyn believes that the key to making it a great place for women (and men) is Lisa’s approach to flexible work hours. Robyn remembers how when she started at Lisa’s she was at her desk at 8.30 am, and as the day progressed, she watched people constantly come and go. She asked her boss what hours she was supposed to work. His reply was, “Whatever you need to complete the work!”
Robyn says, “Everybody, not just working mothers, works different hours depending on their lives and needs. Even senior managers work flexibly. The only ones with strict hours are the receptionists, but they job share anyway.”
Is Lisa’s different from other food companies?
Robyn believes that women in Lisa’s have a higher degree of control over their roles than in other food companies.
“The food industry is male-dominated like most manufacturing companies. Product developers can be seen a bit as ‘glamour girls’. At Lisa’s we’re taken seriously, we’ve got a strong voice. I always feel that we’re heard and not dismissed.”
Robyn is so enthusiastic about Lisa’s, that she doesn’t actually think there’s anything she’d change about the company to make it an even better place for women to work.
Robyn’s advice for women who are looking for a great place to work
- First, be honest with yourself about what you really want out of life. Advancement? Working your way up the corporate ladder? Status? Money? A balanced life?
- Make sure the company’s values match up with your own.
- Make the effort to really meet the people you’ll be working with. Talk to them at length and see if you click because companies tend to attract like-minded people.
- Ask the senior manager about how he or she views work. Attitudes towards work-life balance come from the top.
And the warning signs?
- See how many women there are in top management positions. If there are none or only a token one, take note!
- A male-dominated and highly competitive culture.
- A reputation for big drinking sessions on Friday nights
- An underlying perception that in order to be taken seriously you have to put in very long hours.
Your feedback
This is our first article with an actual example of a great place for women to work in New Zealand. We’d love to know if we should do more of these and if it’s useful to you. Contact us with your feedback, or you can start a thread or post a reply on our new Bulletin Board.
Your Story?
We’d love to know if you’re working for a great company for women. Please contact us if you’d like to share your story.
A Working Mother's Perspective
Galia interviews Jacquie Sherborne
Introducing Jacquie
I always wonder how women who are in very interesting-sounding jobs got to do what they do. I also often wonder how the heck they manage it all. So I thought I’d ask!
Jacquie Sherborne is the HR manager of The Auckland Regional Council. She has been with the ARC for just a year and is finding it to be a great experience. Jacquie loves being involved in environmentally and socially related causes and is very committed to change and improvement.
Jacquie is married and has two children under five. She works full time from 7am to 4pm so that she can spend her evenings with her children.
How did you get to do what you do? How did you end up in HR and was it planned?
I was interested in the behavioural side of work. I wanted to study psychology, but I was also really interested in the business side of things. So I did HR including industrial relations and psychology. But I really didn’t have much of a clue about what HR actually was. I didn’t know anyone who was doing it and at the time the careers advisor at school wasn’t a strong presence. I think those sources would better serve young people today, and youth would be more aware of that source of information.
I started work in industrial relations and moved on to many different roles in the health, education and corporate sectors and now I am with local government!
When I think back now, on the whole my career is pretty much what I expected it to be in the work I do. What I definitely under-estimated, or didn’t even consider at University, is the politics of work…
What do you love about your job?
I love being able to create, fix and improve things. I love change and continuous improvement – it’s the transformation of HR using systems and technologies and new processes which I get a real kick out of!
I’m at my best in project-based work, which is where the transformation and change comes in. I love the integration of different things like HR and technology which is a little bit risky and edgy type work. It also provides the opportunity to learn new skills and work with other people from other functions (e.g. Finance, IS) and from other organisations as well. The work I prefer to do is all about approaching the old problems differently or at least that is what I certainly strive for. I like selling it to staff through writing, communicating and interacting with them, so that I can bring them along and create a story and sense of interest in the future we are trying to create.
Is there anything you hate about your job?
Hate is a too strong word, but I really dislike having to manage the political interests and expectations of others at times – at least when I think they are motivated merely by self rather than what’s in the organisation’s interest.
What I do hate is financial monthly reporting!
What are your greatest challenges in your work and your life?
Building a high performing and satisfied team and bringing them along with whatever it is we are doing. A real challenge as a manager is developing people and trying to build them and the team for mutual benefit. It is always hard trying to determine the right balance of how much direction a person needs and would like vs. how much you would like. People don’t always give their managers a lot of feedback or let them know what they need!
Of course the greatest challenge is balancing work and the rest of life. It means that I have to constantly compromise. For example, I would love to have done the OXFAM walk in April but there is no way I could work, be a mum, study and train! I am doing some study at present in Project Management so the Oxfam walk will be next year (maybe there is a group of like-minded women who have joined Professionelle who would be interested also?!).
I find it very challenging that I constantly have to give things up, that I have to accept compromise all the time. I am a bit of an ‘all or nothing person’ so having to be 75-80% on things is a bit disappointing at times, but I think it builds wider perspectives. Besides, I have just recently realised that I have probably still got a few years left on the tyres, so everything doesn’t have to be done this year and right now!
How do you make it all work?
I think the biggest thing is managing my own expectations of myself. I think we always have much higher expectations of ourselves than others have of us. For me it’s ‘don’t worry about the state of the house, don’t use your thirty minutes to vacuum, just read a book!’
I also have learned in the last year or so to still do things but drop the intensity a bit, so instead of doing the 100km OXFAM trail walk I’m going to do the 10km Devonport classic. It might not give me the same sense of achievement, but it still means that I am participating in something and being a role model for my kids.
What do you consider to be your best achievements?
My family. I never really aspired to have a family and be a mum and it’s been an incredibly fulfilling and developmental experience so far (not to mention sleep-depriving). It has given me all sorts of experiences that I would never have had from anything else and the best part for me is that I wasn’t expecting any of it.
I have done a few different things that I guess could be considered achievements, like riding the Taupo challenge while pregnant with my first child and doing the Dusky Track in Fiordland. I was surprised to see in the Herald recently that Fiordland was on the list of the top 100-odd things to experience in New Zealand – it can’t have been referring to that track!
What was the best advice you ever received and who gave it to you?
‘Marry a friend’ – my father told me that in a sombre moment. I think I managed to do that one, maybe I could consider it an achievement as I am a bit short there!
What are your thoughts about the reality of being a professional working woman? eg? work life balance ... burnout... glass ceilings?
I believe being a professional working mother is very doable and achievable. I think it requires focus and self discipline and constant organisation. You have to constantly balance, you just can’t overdo one thing. It is very hard but I think anything worth doing for some time has to be a challenge.
I have never experienced the glass ceiling at all. I think I have limited and pre-judged myself in my career more than others ever have.
What advice can you give other professional working women out there?
Work out what you want as early as you can but be open to changing it – and then go after it.
Don’t act purely out of self-interest, it won’t be a fair prize that you win.
If you could do things differently what would you change?
I’d do more Psychology and Finance – learn the numbers side of business earlier. Take more chances. Work out what I want earlier (remember that ‘Sunshine’ song)? Get less emotionally involved – give it up a bit sooner at times!
Where do you see yourself in the next 10-15 years?
Fulfilled, doing something I love – maybe a combination of things. It is quite likely to be outside of an internal HR role. I don’t have a focus in mind, just some orienting values and a core need to be interested and learning something.
Reading the paper in bed at the weekends instead of reading Green Eggs and Ham at 6.30am to a couple of kids who are raring to go!
