Our Turn

by Stewart, Kirstine;

  I was intrigued by the drama he was selling. For most people, their homes are the biggest—perhaps the only—investment they’ll ever make. Then someone comes along and takes advantage of their efforts to make improvements and puts their greatest asset at risk. This was real-life drama. If Holmes could rescue them from that fate, he was more like a white knight than a vigilante. That tweak to the concept made Holmes on Homes something unique in the home-improvement genre, a show that wouldn’t just demonstrate how to repair a broken tile, but would tug at viewers’ hearts.

  The team was nervous. Personality-driven narrative was a risky venture. Building a whole show around a relatively unknown guy was not a safe bet. And building a show around one person whose name was in the title was asking for it. What if viewers didn’t like Mike Holmes? The show would die. If we pulled it off, he’d become a celebrity and could leave the network for the big time someplace else. Building him into a star would give him power the networks were reluctant to share. Talent was considered safest when it remained nameless and faceless, and therefore interchangeable. But not taking this risk meant passing up on the potential of great reward. As I had learned, sharing power and investing it in others comes back with big dividends.

  I decided that Mike Holmes needed to be front and centre. And who would pass up a title like Holmes on Homes? No one else on TV looked like him—this big strapping man with a buzz cut and overalls. Mike had the perfect look to play a white-knight character, and I was sure the show would be a hit; the possibility that its popularity would ultimately cost us Holmes sounded like a short-sighted reason not to try. If we cultivated a trusting relationship and committed to supporting Holmes’s development, he’d have every reason to stay. In the end, it was my call and my risk to take, and I took it, knowing I had spotted “it” in Mike Holmes and I didn’t want to let it get away.

  There’s been a sea of ink spilled on the way leaders, and women in particular, regard risk-taking. Most of it has cast women as being almost biologically risk-averse, genetically driven to cautiously mind the cave and pick berries with babes strapped to our backs. According to the evolutionary stereotypes, we weren’t out hunting and confronting death at every turn, so what do we know from risk? It’s a bias about the real nature of women that media and popular culture have spun into the contemporary workplace. Some studies have even considered whether the global financial crisis of 2008 could have been averted if more women than cowboys had been in charge. But there’s real danger in putting stock in prehistoric depictions that suggest women, by nature, are prone to play it safe, because the characterization can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hard fact is that females are socialized to be restrained. Even before girls go to preschool, they’ve ingested the cultural expectation that good girls sit still and behave, and they’re rewarded when they do just that. This is why so many girls are at the head of the class.

  But in the business world, that mode of the behaviour is the ball and chain we have to sever to succeed. And there is lots of evidence that we’re making that break. The trouble is that for too long the very term “risk” has been defined in masculine terms, both physical and financial, as though risk-taking is simply about going brave with biceps and piles of cash. But in the workplace, a risk is any situation that carries the potential for negative consequences. Any time I changed a program lineup, altered a schedule or chose to invest in a new show, I was taking a risk, especially if there was opposition. The risk was not just that ratings would suffer if I made the wrong decision, but that my credibility as a leader was on the line. Failure in my job was public.

  Increasingly, researchers are recognizing that there’s more than one kind of risk, that men and women tend to perceive risk differently and that when you take these distinctions into account, you actually find that the old saw about women being risk-averse is mostly a steaming hill of myth. If girls have been brought up with expectations of being seen but not heard, boys have learned that boyish behaviour includes pushing boundaries and breaking rules. All grown up, men tend to define risks in terms of the visible, as in betting the farm or bungee jumping. Women, on the other hand, are more apt to define risk in terms of the invisible, as in taking a position that puts your personal capital on the line. Often, that includes the sense that there’s a risk to speaking up—as in raising your voice, if not your hand.

  That’s not just my take, that’s at the core of the more recent explorations into gender and risk-taking. A 2012 Tufts University study, for instance, backed by the Institute for New Thinking in Economics, reviewed 28 papers on the subject and found that the gender differences around risk-taking have been exaggerated. A survey of 650 female managers by the Simmons School of Management in Boston found about 80 percent of the women reported regularly taking risks in their professional lives around things like pursuing a major change initiative, or new programs, but that these pursuits are not recognized as risk-taking in part because of societal expectations that women are risk-averse. Columbia Business School’s report in 2011 concluded that both sexes are equally risk-prone, but in different ways. Simply put: men took more risks with money, women with social situations, a category that included things like launching a new career in your mid-thirties and sharing an unpopular opinion in a work meeting. And finally, there’s the added nuance of context. As a recent Wall Street Journal article explained it, using the example of a conservative money manager who likes to ride the fastest motorcycle on the highway in his off-hours: even the cautious can become daredevils in the right context. Today’s context demands that everyone be at least a little daredevil.

  In the digital age, leaders need to innovate constantly, moving in directions no one has ever has gone before. Everything is risky. We are living in the time of the unorthodox. In many ways, women are primed to take advantage of that unorthodoxy because our mere presence as leaders is still so novel that it instantly signals a new approach—as it did for the young women I met in the halls of the CBC. The same Caliper study that profiled the gender differences in modern leadership strengths, for instance, found that women leaders are more likely to push back against established ways of doing things, because women are more likely to view them as “old rules”—stale dictates from a bygone day that are holding back progress. It also concluded that women tend to act with urgency in changing the old ways and coming up with innovative solutions, perhaps because, as I learned in my career, our credibility and future effectiveness as leaders depends on it.

  From Paragon right through to Twitter, I’ve always been less interested in what has been than what could be. My own sense of urgency comes in part from realizing that taking the right risk, with the right result, has a major impact on my personal capital. If I am going to be an effective leader, I have to be seen and trusted to lead effectively. I have so often been the newcomer, the underestimated young blonde brought in to shake things up, that if I don’t move quickly and notch up items in the win column, I soon won’t be able to lead at all.

  And that was the story at Alliance Atlantis as well. Sure, it would have been easier to make yet another how-to gardening show, but in the end developing Holmes on Homes—despite the risks—not only produced a hit and a homegrown celebrity, it helped to invigorate the HGTV brand in Canada and bring it fame and success in the US. With a new lineup of personality-driven shows and reality-based narratives (which included creating household names like Sarah Richardson, Michael Smith and the Designer Guys), we started a trend. We weren’t buying our hits from the US, they were buying from us. And soon after, the CBC sought me out. Talk about an interesting job for someone who had embraced being a risk-taker.

  In her book Stop Playing Safe, Australian author Margie Warrell writes that the more chances people take, the less they overestimate negative consequences and the more comfortable they become with taking chances, or as she put it in an interview, “The more often we step out of our comfort zone, the more we build our tolerance for risk-taking.” I can attest to the wisdom of th
at.

  Slipping into Something Uncomfortable

  ON PAPER, TAKING A JOB AT the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation seemed like a mad thing to consider. At Alliance Atlantis, I was sailing a sturdy ship on a sea of high ratings and revenues. I worked with an amazing, invigorated team. Why would I leave it to become programming chief at the embattled CBC, facing challenges that pundits described as Herculean—probably one of the most thankless posts in the broadcast world. Why would I swap my comfy perch for a hot seat?

  In the fall of 2014, I moderated a panel discussion at a symposium for Women in Payments, an organization that represents females working in finance. Sitting on the stage were eight successful female CEOs and entrepreneurs describing their experiences and trading insights on how women in the workplace can get ahead. As I looked out at the room full of women who had come to hear their stories, I asked myself what it was that distinguished these women up onstage. As the discussion continued, I realized the common link that united us: at one time or another, each of us had pushed ourselves to take a position that was not only unfamiliar, but a deliberate plunge into the decidedly uncomfortable.

  Whether it was taking a job with a perpendicular learning curve or walking away from the security of a steady paycheque to strike out on one’s own, we had all of us taken a chance on a professional opportunity that cast us far out of our comfort zones. These zones are the mind states we occupy when our ability to do a job well becomes so effortless that it outweighs any anxiety about actually doing the job. It’s generally low-risk and stress-free. There are times in a career when the comfort zone job is precisely what you need—when havoc breaks out in your personal life or you’re hatching entrepreneurial plans while carrying on with a day job. But I have always felt that comfort-zone jobs invariably lead to boredom and restlessness. Stepping into an uncomfortable zone can be scary, but it also can be a wild and exhilarating ride driven by raw curiosity—your own. There’s a curiosity about the job itself, but also about whether you have the stuff to do it.

  Did the CBC sound like a daunting challenge? You bet. Even as I went through the lengthy run of one-on-one and panel interviews, I continued to turn over the pros and cons of actually taking the job. Ultimately, the words of a good friend silenced my concerns. Donna Bevelander, an executive at Alliance Atlantis who had once headed up media operations at CBC, told me that it would be a tough job, with too many masters, and a massive bureaucracy notoriously inhospitable to women. But, she said, it was also a place teeming with some of the smartest people in the country, and that it was the biggest sandbox I would ever play in. That was the point that was irresistible to me. But I wouldn’t have wanted to play in that sandbox if I thought there was nothing I could bring to the job.

  I’D LIKE TO THINK THAT the goal of engaging the audience was the hallmark of my four-year run as head of television programming at the CBC. Not everything worked. There were shows I commissioned that never made it to air and others that were cancelled. I faced philosophical challenges of “whither the CBC.” But there was something to learn from every setback and failure. And there were certainly more wins than losses. I was proud of the evolution I was steering and utterly humbled by the hard-working teams who pushed to remake the broadcaster into the successful media company I knew it could be. When Richard Stursberg left the top job in 2010, my fellow senior execs at CBC lobbied Hubert Lacroix, the network’s politically appointed president, to make me Stursberg’s successor. I’m sure their support had something to do with me being “the devil they knew,” but I believe they also felt that I had put the CBC on a good path.

  We had proved to the country, and ourselves, that we could produce a string of smart and popular shows. We won back the broadcasting rights to the Olympics from CTV and Rogers, and even as groups within the CBC argued that no one would ever watch TV on a computer, let alone a smartphone, we expanded our digital offerings so viewers could access our news and programming anywhere, anytime, through cbcnews, cbc.ca and CBC Music (a digital music service started under my watch that provides online streaming of more than fifty-three web radio services, including forty-seven devoted to specific music genres). They were initiatives I hoped set us on a path to modernize the network.

  In January 2011, I was officially named executive vice-president of CBC’s English-language services and in that first year we were making real progress. But, suddenly, progress came to a grinding halt. In March 2012, the government announced it was cutting our budget by 10 percent—$115 million over three years. It was difficult to digest the pain we were facing. Such a budget cut meant nearly 200 hours of programming we could no longer produce. It meant the cancellation of several shows and doling out more repeats. Worst of all, at least 650 people were about to lose their jobs. As awful as it was for me to contemplate how I could do my job with such cuts coming, it was nothing compared to the impact on the many fine people about to be let go.

  What made it all the worse was that I had pushed everyone to work hard for change under the logical assumption that their work would be rewarded. Every triumph we’d achieved had represented the sweat of many; I’d maintained that if we pulled together and reached certain milestones, the future would be brighter. Everyone had done exactly that. Ratings were up. Revenues were up. And now we were to be squeezed despite our success.

  I’d heard that the last time a CBC executive had announced a round of cuts, people had rushed the stage and someone had thrown a chair in disgust. I expected to meet a similar fate. I stood on a brightly lit stage in front of the Toronto staff—with the announcement being beamed into CBC offices across the country—and told them the bad news. They knew it was coming. The signs had been there for days, and they were anxious to hear what it meant for them. I explained how we would deal with the cuts, the values on which decisions were to be made and what our priorities for investment would be moving forward. I couldn’t sugar-coat it. I wasn’t vague. I was too distraught to serve them anything but the straight goods; and they’d earned that honesty. I was moved to tears, but my own feelings didn’t matter. At the end of the day, many of them wouldn’t have a job—but I still would. I felt sadness, mixed with guilt, and with anger of my own.

  And I expected to face anger. It would have been justified. Instead, I was met with resignation: we tried, we succeeded, but some things are out of our control. We would keep trying. The most touching moment happened after I left the stage and stepped into an elevator. A young man, whose new job at the CBC was most certainly disappearing, turned to me and said, “Ms. Stewart, I want to shake your hand.” He told me he thought my job was very complicated, but that no boss had ever shared the inside story around how the tough decisions would be made. He said he had never felt so respected in such a devastating moment. It was a generous gift he offered me at a time when he could have chosen to be angry. And it’s a moment that I’ll always have as a reminder of the value of trusting people with the truth. They will trust you back. The days of controlling the message are so over.

  THAT DAY MARKED THE BEGINNING of the end for me at the CBC. As I went on to implement the cuts, and at the same time roll out an ambitious plan for our Sochi Olympics coverage, I could see that the broadcaster was in serious danger of becoming a symbol of all that was wrong with old media. We had been able to take some risks and invest in innovation because we’d had the success of the new primetime programming to build from. But now, it was all in danger of entering a death spiral. The balance was always tenuous as we tried to keep the seventy-five-year-old CBC on the side of the new and the different. But now, with not enough to go around even to maintain the status quo, old habits and battles resurfaced. Many felt let down by the CBC president, Hubert Lacroix, who had been unable and, some argued, unwilling to fight with his political masters for the stability of the public broadcaster over which he presided.

  The end of the end came on a busy street corner in New York City in the winter of 2012. I had just emerged from another friendly meeting with National Ho
ckey League commissioner Gary Bettman, who was himself leading the NHL through difficult times. (The landscape was changing dramatically for both broadcasters and league, and I knew our budget would leave us little room for negotiating a renewal of our hockey rights. I met with him to lay the groundwork to try to hold on to some version of CBC’s most lucrative show, Hockey Night in Canada.) My phone buzzed with a text from an insider in CBC news, letting me know that Hubert Lacroix had just had his tenure renewed as CBC’s president and CEO. It was as if the stop sign that loomed above my head on Fifth Avenue called to me. Nothing was going to change, when all around the media market, change was everywhere. Lacroix’s renewal signalled a status quo I couldn’t live with anymore. I decided to leave my job.

  Leading the CBC would no longer be about applying my strengths to meet the shifting demands of the new market. My mandate going forward would be more administrative, less aspirational. I couldn’t look ahead and lead a team where success was no promise of reward, where wins wouldn’t necessarily earn us reinvestment, and where people could be punished, not praised, for doing their best work. Spending my days trying to figure out how to keep a big ship afloat with half a paddle wasn’t for me. I found nothing honest or inspiring about it. I had been at the CBC for nearly seven years at that point, and while I’d never describe it as a comfort zone, it was no longer a zone I could inhabit comfortably. I could imagine a CBC, post-cuts, that would focus on its strengths, such as news and what mattered most to Canadians. But there were too many masters to serve and they weren’t ready for the wholesale change that had to come. In that environment, I had nothing left to offer. It was time for me to go.