As the population ages, and old boys’ clubs with it, the largest population cohort since the Baby Boom is entering the workforce with values, attitudes and expectations never seen before. Born between 1980 and 2000, the Millennials, also known as Generation Y, are projected to account for 50 percent of the workforce by 2020 and 75 percent by 2025. Companies around the world are scrambling to figure out how this new breed of worker will fit within their corporate structures. Millennials, after all, are digital natives, the first generation to reach the workplace having grown up with personal computers, smartphones, tablets and rich social media networks. They’re the engine driving the revolution, and new branches of research devoted to figuring them out. Studies find them to be liberal, well educated, racially diverse and disdainful of traditional top-down authority. If predictions are right, they’re poised to downsize and dismantle cubicles and corner offices wherever they find them.
At the same time, the women of Generation Y are emerging as an exciting cohort within a cohort. These young women are more likely than any other females in history to have grown up with a working mother as a role model. While women of previous generations have been far less likely than their male peers to say they intend to pursue leadership roles, a 2014 research paper from the Pew Center has found that Millennial women have higher aspirations to become bosses, or managers, than females of any other age group.
Both my daughters are Millennials. My eldest, born the year after I became president of Paragon, is about to make her way in the world with the refreshing sense that nothing is beyond her reach. And her expectations are high. When she was about ten, she learned that I was named one of Canada’s “Top 40 Under 40” and her question was, “Well, what number are you?” What I tell her about ambition, as I would tell any woman, is that success is not just about climbing. Leading comes from learning, in all its forms, and personal happiness will only be yours when you choose your own ladder.
In the fraught discussions about the dearth of women in leadership roles, there’s been too much focus on reaching the top. Altitude is not the only measure of success. You can choose to be a leader in whatever work you do, at whatever level, because “leadership” is a mindset. It’s how you work: how you learn to grow and spend your personal capital. That mindset can be applied to whatever endeavour you undertake, wherever you choose to invest yourself, or whatever circumstances your life allows. Struggling to make ends meet rarely affords a woman the freedom to pursue ambitions, which, after desperation led me to the classifieds, was the first professional lesson I learned. Still, what you do with what you have can turn tides, whether you’re a girl Friday, lead a Fortune 500 company, a family, a project or yourself. It’s time to think and be leaders in life, in all its spheres.
I wrote this book, using the lens of my own continuing adventures in leadership, in order to explore the forces that can not only derail a rise to the top, but those that hold us back from contributing the unique gifts and insights we have to offer whether we hold a traditional leadership position or not. Those forces may be external, but often, as I discovered, they are internal—and as daunting as any glass ceiling.
But now, when the digital revolution has put unprecedented power in the hands of each one of us, the future depends on finding the best way to use it. That’s not just good for women, that’s good for business, and the world we’re remaking.
[ I ]
First, Lead Yourself
IN THE SUMMER OF 2006, I took the stage for my first “upfront” at the CBC. Upfronts are big deals in the television industry, annual events where networks reveal their primetime schedules for the coming season to generate buzz and pre-sell commercial airtime. That June day, the crowd was thick. Staff, marketers, advertisers and media had all made their way to a cavernous studio on the tenth floor of the CBC building in downtown Toronto, where I was set to unveil a unique new lineup with a whole lot riding on it.
Just four months earlier, I’d joined the CBC as executive director of programming, overseeing drama, comedy, news documentaries and sports. I’d been tasked with the specific mandate of bringing more eyeballs to the network’s shows—ideally, millions of pairs. It was a tall order. At the time, the only CBC show that came close to attracting a million viewers was the Saturday night stalwart Hockey Night in Canada. But my aims were broader than adding eyeballs. As I saw it, they had to be. The CBC was a media company in desperate need of a makeover, inside and out. For starters, the public broadcaster didn’t always see itself as a media company, but rather a government-subsidized cultural institution charged with the woolly mission of delivering authoritative news and content. Aside from news programming and Hockey Night in Canada, most of its primetime offerings were unable to compete for ratings with big American shows, or even with the homegrown fare featured on the country’s private networks. At the same time, its digital content was creaking behind the demand of audiences who increasingly expected shows and information to be available whenever and however they wanted them. The bottom line: the CBC’s ties to Canadians as a valued entertainment source were becoming threadbare. It was getting difficult for the people who worked there to see a way out.
So while my mission was to reverse the spiral of falling ratings and revenues, I knew none of that could happen without modernizing the organization and shoring up morale—quickly. I also knew I couldn’t do it alone. Without everyone playing hard on the same side, we’d never reach success of any kind. Which is why the first test was mine. No team wants to follow a coach they don’t trust, and to many inside the CBC, I was a stranger (and to some, short on credibility). If people—staff and the public—were to believe the public broadcaster could again become meaningful and relevant, there had to be evidence of it in that first lineup of shows I commissioned. If I didn’t make a splash, I’d sink.
A Lone Wolf Can’t Get There
UNDERSTANDING THE BIG PICTURE and the prize you’re playing for is an asset no matter what level you work at, but for anyone who hopes to lead, it’s essential. You have to know where you want to end up in order to chart the way forward, whether you’re talking about a project or an entire organization. Good leaders have a clear view of the goal, and they’re passionate about reaching it. At the CBC, it looked a lot like having to cross a minefield to get there: low resources, high expectations and forests of doubt stood in between. But I believed it could be done. The challenge was to make others believe it, too, and equip them with everything they needed to succeed. But to find out what they needed from me, I first had to explain where we were headed. It’s like taking a trip: what you pack depends on your destination. If you’re setting sail for Aruba or Alaska, the contents of your suitcase will be wildly different.
Any time a leader steps up to share her vision, she also needs to be ready to invite debate, to ask questions and gather input and alternative views and take it all into consideration. There’s no shortage of studies that find women excel at this aspect of leadership: communicating and doing it in a way that helps to build teams and relationships. Communicating goals, for instance, is about much more than simply telling folks what the results have to look like. It’s a chance to motivate and inspire people by framing objectives in terms of opportunities, as in, “Here’s what we’re after, here’s where we need to end up and I think we have it in us—how can you help get us there?” Building and then articulating a vision is the first natural step in collaborating. Today, when no leader can succeed, let alone survive, as a lone wolf, collaboration is the key to the future. It’s also another trait of a woman’s leadership style. In 2014, the Ketchum Leadership Communication Monitor released a global study based on polling 6,509 people in 13 countries across 5 continents that found that a more “feminine” communication model is “one of the defining facets” of the new leadership era. The survey revealed that women not only scored better than men when it came to communicating in an open and transparent way (62 percent vs. 38 percent), but also in the ability to bring out the best in o
thers (61 percent vs. 39 percent). I was counting on my ability to do that as I made plans to explain CBC’s new programming vision to staff and outside producers across the country.
Just eight weeks into the job, I hit the road on a multi-city tour to tell producers that the CBC had hours to fill and that each one of them was an opportunity. I brought my programming team, who were new to me but known to many in the audiences. I spoke to huge groups of people in hotel banquet halls and convention centres, letting them know exactly what CBC-TV wanted and what we didn’t—series over movies of the week, and dramas, comedies and reality stories with casts that reflected the many cultures and colours of the Canadians watching—people who looked and sounded like them, their friends, their neighbours. I opened the doors wide to new program pitches. I streamlined the sluggish approvals process to make sure selected shows moved quickly into development. I reviewed scripts, revamped schedules and overhauled plans for packaging and promotion to give our new picks the best pop off the top. It was a hell of a pace. But I knew I wasn’t just up against the clock. Suspicion and skepticism greeted my every move.
I had, after all, been brought into the public broadcaster by Richard Stursberg, the executive vice-president whose bids to make the CBC popular and profitable had also made him some enemies. Stursberg had headhunted me at Alliance Atlantis, where I had remodelled the content of its specialty channels, including the Food Network and HGTV, with hit shows that made household names of Mike Holmes, Sarah Richardson and the Designer Guys. This had typecast me as “Richard’s gal from lifestyle TV”—i.e., the queen of froth. Before my stint at Alliance, I’d run programming at the multiple international broadcast channels of Hallmark Entertainment based in the United States, overseeing a $300 million budget and staff located worldwide. At Paragon, I’d been on the other side of the table, selling to international broadcasters, including the BBC and the CBC too. But my track record hardly registered with some CBC veterans who doubted I knew anything about running serious television. My unconventional profile puzzled them, perhaps even scared them. I was an outsider, so outside that no one had seen me coming. In many ways, that first upfront was really my coming out.
Traditionally, fall marks the start of a new television season. As summers fade and school starts, networks have touted fall launches for their new shows for almost as long as televisions have flickered in North American living rooms. But I opted to break with tradition, and put my money on the dead of winter. Before cable, PVRs and the Internet upended standard notions of programming schedules, I bet that a January launch for many of the shows would give the CBC’s new lineup the chance it needed to shine outside the shadow of September’s big American debuts. Inside the CBC, people rolled their eyes, believing this decision was yet further evidence that I was out of my depth. But my instinct told me that launching in a dead-of-winter lull that leans toward post-holiday hibernation in front of TV sets was worth the gamble.
So there I was onstage at that upfront, ready to unveil my first CBC-TV schedule. Knowing I was injecting enough surprise in the schedule itself, I stuck to the CBC’s dry-as-toast format of years past in presenting it (on Mondays at eight, we’ll have this … at eight-thirty, we’ll have that …). The highlight, I hoped, was the content. We introduced Dragon’s Den, where entrepreneurs pitch venture capitalists for investment, Intelligence, Little Mosque on the Prairie and The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos, many of which would become big hits. I discussed the strategy behind the new programming and timing, and the plans to revitalize the CBC. And I told the crowd, “The stakes are high, the need is urgent, but the rewards will be great.”
Yet in the media coverage that followed, what I’d said seemed to grab only slightly more attention than how I looked. Media reports described me as the “whip-thin” blonde in a dress and high-heel shoes. They noted my relative youthfulness and long hair. One blogger actually dubbed me the “kittenish programming mistress.” When I eagerly checked to see the press reaction to the new lineup, I realized that my appearance had somehow become the frame of the story. I was mortified.
Women are invariably scrutinized, and criticized, for their appearance. The higher they climb the more subjected they become to the dated biases of others. Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, has been singled out as a fashion icon but also skewered for being “too elegant.” For a time, Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits had their own paparazzi. This kind of attention, sadly, speaks to the relative novelty of having a woman at the helm—and to the archaic pundits, and now the Internet hordes, still drawing lines around how women should look. More than three thousand years after Egypt’s first female pharaoh sat bare-chested on her throne in a man’s kilt and a full metal beard, women still wear the pressure to conform like a heavy cloak. After that first upfront, I donned mine.
Comments on my looks have always struck me as a kind of litmus test for attitudes toward women in leadership. By old standards, I embody the unexpected, and did at the CBC in particular. Unlike the older men who had come before me, I was in my thirties, and yes, blonde. In my first week on the job, I was mistaken for my own assistant (“Can you give this memo to Kirstine when you see her?”) Being underestimated can have its benefits as well as its drawbacks. While the scrutiny tends to make women particularly hyperaware of their looks, the truth is that at some point all leaders, male and female, make very conscious choices about what their appearance projects. Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie is as deliberate as the demure cardigan couture of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.
What nagged at me was the suggestion that a nice dress and high heels projects an image that says “This woman lacks substance.” By the media’s measure, my appearance painted me as someone who spent more time shopping than working. It signalled “trivial and frivolous.” Influenced by old models of feminism, it’s an attitude too often perpetuated by women themselves: to be taken seriously, a female must eschew makeup, choose sensible shoes over pumps, resist any garment or accessory that might raise an unplucked eyebrow about her ability to do a job. Otherwise, she could set back generations of feminist activism. And, initially, that’s how I reacted to the media spin.
At the time, I wasn’t angry at what was said about how I looked, I was mortified. I felt that I had insulted the place I was trying to represent, drawing attention away from the network’s transformation to shiny, blonde me. My inner critic was off and running … imagining the men, asking, “Who’s that chick on the stage?” And the women thinking “silly girl” or worse—that I was actually trying to court attention. I thought the buzz should have been focused squarely on the content, the controversy of bringing reality TV to the CBC, or launching an unlikely sitcom about Muslims in a post 9/11 world. But the “lifestyle-TV gal” leading the charge seemingly looked too glamorous to be taken seriously. I decided I needed to tone myself down, cut my hair and buy flats. If I wanted to be taken seriously, I had to dress, or dress down, to suit the role.
Then something remarkable happened. In the weeks after I had appeared on that stage, people in the building started to figure out who I was as I walked the halls. No one mistook me for my assistant anymore. One day, about a week after the upfront, a young woman stopped me to say, “It’s so great you’re here. We don’t see a lot of bosses like you … It’s so great to see a woman doing the job!”
It dawned on me that I’d gone from suspect new kid on the block to something of a role model to these young women. Despite my own misgivings, my unconventional looks had distinguished me as a new kind of leader, especially among that emerging generation of women. They saw in me a person they could be. I suddenly realized how easy it can be to cower to criticism and to the idea that you should step back in line. But these women, my co-workers, some younger and others older, made a point to encourage me (“You go, Kirstine!” “Such a breath of fresh air!”). Their support took me completely by surprise and reminded me that the vocal opinion of a stodgy few was meaningless when others—without soapbox or agenda—foun
d the prospect of a new way to lead so hopeful, exciting and maybe even inspiring. Exactly what message would I send by allowing pointed comments in media coverage to rob me of the freedom to be who I want to be? If I second-guessed the way I looked and dressed, and had always dressed—right back to my cash-strapped earliest days at Paragon when I bought the fabrics and Vogue patterns to sew my own clothes—that insecurity would eventually undermine me. Why would I give more weight to the negative comments than those that were supportive? It’s a lesson I have to keep relearning, but in a world where those negative voices can be amplified by the very platforms I now work with, it’s a big part of the strength that keeps me moving forward. Use the positive support around you to build the resilience you need to deal with the negative.
Owning Yourself
IF THE FIRST TASK OF LEADING is to figure out your goals, the first responsibility has to be the capacity to lead yourself—to understand and stand up for your values, your vision, and yes, your own style. To be anything other than authentic will inevitably compromise your confidence. It will also compromise the trust others place in you. You can’t lead effectively, or for long, without earning and keeping the trust of people you work with. Authenticity matters, and it matters more today than it ever did. When the line between public and private has blurred, when so many interactions take place in a virtual sphere, a leader has to walk her talk. No one should be defined by the expectations of others, especially not by those who feel it’s their business to dictate what success looks like.
When I was at the public broadcaster, sometimes there were suggestions—whispers, blogs, innuendo—that my success had to involve sex, one way or another. I even ended up on the cover of Frank magazine with talk-show host George Stroumboulopoulos amid allegations we were dating—we weren’t! But the gossip magazine, along with more than a few souls at the CBC, assumed there had to be something going on. George had had a show on CBC’s Newsworld when I arrived, and after I’d watched it, I thought here’s this great young interviewer who could bring to the network a quirky late-night chat show that featured Canadians. At the time, there was no other late-night show that did that. But people assumed that we had to be fooling around or why else would I promote this dude with an earring who used to be on MuchMusic. Which is how the rumours, and our pictures, landed in Frank, and then became fodder for a rather rape-y fictional sex scene in my office that an odious blogger dreamed up.
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