In my own case, when I arrived at Paragon Entertainment all those years ago, my unfamiliarity with the television industry was an asset. It prompted me to learn as much as I could. And as receptionist/girl Friday I got to see and hear it all. I was a blank slate, with the desire and curiosity not only to learn the business, but also to bring to it fresh ideas precisely because I was new. And in Isme Bennie, I found the perfect boss for an eager protegée, one who recognized my energy and encouraged my opinions. She threw me into challenges all on my own and also included me in on the high-level business deals she was negotiating. One thing we soon did together was look at shows that we might want to add to the roster we were selling to broadcasters worldwide, from Channel 9 Australia to HBO Ole.
One of the first shows I lobbied for reflected the kind of outside-the-box thinking a newbie can bring. Unlike the dramas and cartoon series that Paragon was known for, I thought the time was right to pick up a bare-bones how-to decorating show from a complete unknown. Her name was Debbie Travis, a former UK fashion model who had worked in TV editing and production. After moving to Montreal to be with her new husband, Hans Rosenstein, a video distributor who’d worked with Paragon, Debbie had time on her hands and she decided to paint and redecorate their old Victorian house. She did it with such style that clients came calling, so many that she and Hans produced an instructional video with Debbie demonstrating her crafty techniques in a show they called The Painted House.
I loved the idea instantly, and Isme agreed. Decorating shows like Trading Spaces and Changing Rooms had recently debuted in the UK and the US, and I had a strong sense that lifestyle-makeover programming was about to take off. Most home improvement programs until then had been of the This Old House variety, where someone with deep pockets took whole properties down to the studs and renovated them top to bottom. But The Painted House didn’t feature historic mansions, just rooms—a makeover of a bathroom, a kitchen, a bedroom. All you need is “a little bit of paint” was Debbie’s motto. It empowered people. She was self-taught and presented fantastically. With her model looks and Lancashire accent intact from her hometown in England’s northwest, she sounded like she’d walked off the set of Coronation Street. As it turned out, The Painted House exceeded all expectations, in Canada and beyond. With infinite possibilities for time slots in the expanding cable universe, in primetime or daytime, it became a worldwide hit. It also proved to me that while I had no talent in front of the camera, I could spot it from behind.
You could call it a sixth sense or intuition. I think of it as an aptitude for stepping outside of myself, and the moment, to ask not whether I personally like something, but whether others will like it—metaphorically becoming part of the crowd and sensing what turns them on. I am not a fan of Monster Trucks, or an avid watcher of figure-skating specials, but I have represented both enthusiastically because I appreciate their appeal to others. I think this ability to have a bead on broad public tastes has always been with me. I love being able to spot “it”—that quality that makes someone or something shine above the rest. And I feel immense satisfaction when I get it right. Even as a kid, I used to listen to new releases from Madonna or early Duran Duran and be able to predict which song would be a hit. A few bars in, I could just tell. I dreamt about one day becoming a music industry executive, plucking potential stars out of the crowd. I dropped that dream in the midst of university applications and career-planning classes. But as fate would have it, I landed in a completely different career that allowed me to pick out the “it” and help make it shine.
The point is that if you’re open to trying jobs you never imagined doing, you might discover strengths and talents you didn’t know you had, or didn’t recognize as professionally valuable. Sure, you may find out that you’re not the right fit for a particular pursuit—but there’s a lot to be said for learning what you don’t like too. Either way, the common thread through all of this is confidence, believing that you have what it takes to capitalize on unexpected opportunities when they come along. But, as studies have repeatedly found, women are notoriously hard on themselves when it comes to recognizing their strengths and their ability to rise to a challenge.
In 2011, the Institute of Leadership and Management in the UK surveyed 3,000 male and female managers and found that women start out with lower ambitions for career advancement than their male counterparts. When it comes to applying for a promotion, 20 percent of men apply for a role despite only partially meeting its job description, compared to 14 percent of women. While 62 percent of men said they’d expected to be managers, only half of the women did. Men were more confident across all age groups (70 percent vs. 50 percent), and that confidence had a significant impact on the trajectory of their careers. With low confidence and lower expectations of reaching leadership and management roles, women, the study found, were less likely to achieve their ambitions. At the management level, the results were predictably similar: half of the women reported feeling self-doubt, while less than a third of male respondents expressed that.
It may be that males are less likely to tell a research team they have experienced self-doubt, or it may be that women are more self-aware and reflective and too often judge themselves and how they appear harshly—something I have struggled with myself. But regardless of what underlying forces might explain the gender difference in self-confidence levels, other research finds that success has as much to do with confidence as with competence. In part, because in the eyes of others, showing that you are self-assured goes a long way to reassuring them that you have what it takes to do the job.
Women aren’t the only ones with work to do on this front. I’d say the far more insidious and stubborn barrier to women’s advancement is still the entrenched belief that men are better suited to leading than women are. When McKinsey & Company investigated the factors that hold women back, it found that while companies have worked hard to eliminate overt discrimination, “women still face the pernicious force of mindsets that limit opportunity.” Based on surveys of 2,500 men and women, interviews with 30 chief diversity officers and a review of 100 research papers, the 2011 report concluded that both male and female managers continue to remove viable female candidates from the running, often on the assumption that women can’t handle certain jobs and take care of their families. At the same time, the study found that men are more often promoted on their potential, but women on their accomplishments. The upshot is that no matter how confident a woman may be, she has to do more than a man to prove she’s worthy of advancement. This implicit bias is not easy to overcome, because it’s hard to single out.
If there’s good news to be drawn from the report it’s the conclusion that companies now have every incentive to change those mindsets. When McKinsey researchers asked business executives to list the most important leadership attributes needed for success today, the top four—”intellectual stimulation, inspiration, participatory decision-making and setting expectations/rewards”—were traits more commonly found among women leaders.
The fact is that the very idea of what constitutes a leadership “strength” is expanding to encompass a wider and more eclectic range of qualities—and increasingly they’re those generally considered to be feminine. Top business schools that have delved into this keep coming up with the same answers: the growing need for emotional intelligence in the corner office, social and interpersonal skills, the ability to actively listen, forge relationships, build teams, engender trust, drive consensus and communicate complex ideas simply. There are still enduring leadership traits considered more typically masculine, such as being focused, driven, decisive and assertive. But I think what’s worth noting is that in the past neither men nor women have typically viewed “feminine” attributes as qualifying females for the corner office. Yet the greater appreciation women have for the diverse skills they bring to the table, the better able they are to help an organization succeed in these changing times, and themselves too.
Figuring Out When to Fold
/> KNOWING WHEN TO LEAVE A JOB can be as pivotal to career success as knowing when to take one. By the late nineties, that time had come for me at Paragon. Major changes were under way in the broadcast industry that would also change the distribution business. For years we’d been selling shows to a growing and hungry roster of international broadcasters. But as those networks matured, they saw increasing value in creating, not renting, the programs they aired. The days of selling a movie-of-the-week to multiple networks for millions of dollars were ending. This was most obvious to me on a trip to a broadcast festival in Cannes where I had two networks in Germany bidding fiercely for a TV movie starring General Hospital soap star Jack Wagner. The competition was driving up the price considerably, when, literally overnight, one of the networks withdrew its offer. When I asked why, I learned that my two vying networks had just merged. The bidding war was over. Consolidating would not only allow them to acquire that movie for less, it would give them a better shot at creating their own content.
The penny dropped hard for me. I didn’t want to stay on the side of selling programming to networks. I wanted to build a network that made and commissioned its own programming. At the same time, the principals at Paragon were running into financial trouble over losing bets they’d made on feature films. They’d taken to drawing on the profits from the distribution division so that my division’s bills were suddenly going unpaid. I didn’t like the outlook for the future.
When a headhunter contacted me about becoming general manager and vice-president of programming at Trio/Newsworld International, a US cable channel that reached thirty million American homes, I didn’t hesitate—even though it meant leaving behind my “president” title. Earlier that year, I’d given birth to my first child, and Paragon’s CEO, concerned that my departure might say too much about the overall health of the company, told people I was leaving because I wanted to “take it easy” since becoming a mother. I made it my business to let him and my contacts know that slowing down had nothing to do with it. I was leaving for a better professional opportunity.
The content at Trio had been built to appeal to Canadian expats in the United States with a lineup of all-Canadian shows, like Traders and The Littlest Hobo. But its owners, the Desmarais family of Power Corporation, realized the independent channel could no longer stand alone in a sea of ever-greater consolidation among broadcasters. They intended to fix it up to sell it, revamping the network’s programming to increase its popularity and profitability in order to make it more attractive to potential buyers. In other words, if I did my job well, eventually I wouldn’t have one. Trio would be sold. But, to me, gaining the experience of reinventing and rebranding a network made the move worthwhile. (And Paragon went into receivership six months after I left.)
To boost its value, I figured Trio had to break away from running only Canadian shows, so I set a plan in motion to transform it by infusing it with international shows that would appeal to the viewer curious about the world around them. (This was before people could find everything from everywhere online.) Picking up movie packages and original dramas from around the world, such as Cracker with Robbie Coltrane from the UK and the Rebus detective series featuring Scotland’s John Hannah, I grew the network’s worth and profile within a year. Big players came calling, including Disney and NBC. By 2000, the transformation landed Power Corp a handsome sale of the channel to USA Networks for US$155 million. The Desmarais family was so happy with the deal that they gave everyone who had worked at the company a DVD player, an expensive gift at the time. They wanted to fly me from Toronto to their head office in Montreal for a dinner in order to present my gift to me in person. I was nearly eight months pregnant with my second child and I tried to decline. They wouldn’t hear of it, and so I went, waddling, and after the dinner they took me aside and handed me an envelope. Inside was a cheque, for more money than I had ever seen in one lump. It wasn’t part of my contract (I didn’t have one) or my compensation, but a thank-you for a job well done. Their generosity touched me deeply and taught me a great deal about the importance of respecting the people who work for you, and showing how much you appreciate their contributions, just as I had learned from Isme Bennie the value of rewarding initiative.
Risky Business
THE JOB PROSPECTS FOR ME in Canada after leaving Trio were grim. Canadian cable networks had yet to take off and there was little demand for my particular brand of programming expertise. I had no choice but to cast a wide net. The new owners of Trio had mentioned the possibility of a broadcasting job in New York, but with a toddler and a newborn, and a husband who had just finished teachers’ college, the idea of putting in long hours in Manhattan didn’t make sense for us. But then a headhunter told me about a major job opportunity in Denver that sounded close to perfect, if slightly intimidating. The job would put me in charge of programming at Hallmark Entertainment, which had seventeen channels and an international audience of fifty million viewers. I was nervous about moving to a new country, the biggest entertainment pond on the planet, with two babies in tow. There were plenty of reasons to find a more comfortable arrangement to curl up with. But Denver struck me as family friendly, and the opportunity to gain experience in the international cable market and expand the skill set I had been growing for a decade outweighed my apprehension. And I wasn’t wrong.
At Trio, I had a clear mandate to broaden the audience base and shake up the status quo. At Hallmark, my role was essentially mine to create. When I arrived in Denver, the networks’ schedules were geared toward airing the shows in the Hallmark Hall of Fame Library, a rich repository of programs and television movies stretching back to the 1950s. But the lineups tended to have little to do with the interests of its international audience. In fact, a recent Employee of the Month had been lauded for finding a way to maximize the number of times a show could be broadcast by using a program that worked out the run dates and spaced out the repeats. It was called a “schedulizer,” and was designed to benefit the company as rights holder over the viewer. The audience didn’t factor into it at all. The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All just doesn’t mean much to people watching in Australia or Japan, for instance. But no one wants to hear, especially from the new boss, that they are pursuing the wrong definition of success and serving the company’s narrowest interest.
So I told these employees that their approach was important in maximizing the benefits from the rights we held, but I suggested that they could create a bigger business picture by serving, even potentially building, audiences where we had them. I commissioned research to understand our viewer base, research that informed the way we redesigned our schedule. There would be no more one-schedule-fits-all and no more being only a movie channel. We picked up the broadcast rights to Star Trek in Asia, where research showed audiences were keen on the old-school sci-fi series. For women in Latin America, who reported that they often watched television while they did household chores like ironing, we featured the emotional dramas they said they enjoyed.
Every tweak to the lineup represented a departure from what the company had been doing—and a risk. But they’d hired me, an outsider, which indicated that management was ready to take risks.
By its nature, television is all about taking risks: you select a show and invest in its development and have no real idea if it will succeed until after it goes to air. Since many shows do fail, you have to live in that space that drives accountants crazy. They always want to know how many will fail—two shows out of ten? Five out of ten? By contrast, as the person in charge, I had to allow for the possibility of failure. If you never fail it means you are never trying anything new. Success means you’ve made more right decisions than wrong ones, but you can’t let failure define you. Making a big generalization here, but Canadians tend to be risk-averse, too worried that we are only as good as the last thing we did. Whereas in the States, the emphasis was not on what you’d done that had worked or failed, but what you were going to do next. At Hallmark, I learned to be
less intimidated by failure, because failure was not cast in the same devastating light as it was back home.
Over three and a half years, we built a wide and diverse international audience, which made Hallmark Entertainment yet another attractive property, and eventually, it was sold. But even before that happened, I knew it was time to go home. It was just after 9/11, which had deeply affected my colleagues, and not only in our New York office. My oldest daughter was just about to start grade school and I was tired of not getting to eat Shreddies. But with every job that followed, I carried a little bit of that American-daring sensibility with me. In 2003, when I became the senior vice-president of programming for the Alliance Atlantis specialty channels, the experience I’d gleaned at Hallmark allowed me to do what I felt needed to be done, and that meant shaking things up.
The job involved responsibility for programming the broadcaster’s lifestyle channels, which were in need of renovation. A lot of the shows were of the strictly instructional variety: how to plan a party, set the dinner table, plant begonias. But as I’d already seen in the US, reality-based shows that told a story as they imparted information were gaining real traction with audiences keen not only to learn, but to learn while being entertained. Tastes were changing and we needed to get ahead of the audience. Not long after I arrived, I heard a pitch from the team for a show from a contractor named Mike Holmes that seemed to fit this bill perfectly. At the time, Mike had been featured on CTV doing lunchtime news break how-to segments. But he saw potential in recasting himself as a kind of vigilante contractor, the big guy who comes in to nail the crooked contractor who wrecked your home with shoddy installation or substandard plumbing that flooded your basement.
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