Our Turn (4 page)

I don't disagree. But in my view, this is where the digital age can serve women well. Now more than ever, agility and decisiveness have to be core strengths of leadership, and when women have so many characteristics essential for leading successful teams, we have to trust
the way
in which women tend to make decisions. We are inclined to be information gatherers, to seek input and do our homework.

There's fascinating research, for instance, including a 2012 report from Barclays Wealth and Ledbury Research, that finds women are less likely than men to buy shares in companies they know little about, regardless of whether analysts dub it a “hot stock.” And that cautious research-before-investing approach results in women trading less often than men—and losing less than men. The Barclays study found that women investors are more likely than men to make money in the market; a seminal 2001 report from behavioural economists at the University of California found women's returns outpaced those of men by an average of 1.4 percent annually. Gathering information and input—a ton of it—in order to make informed decisions fast has never been simpler. Knowledge of all kinds is a click away, whether it's you or the team that's mining it.

Some may consider this research-style approach cautious, or even overly cautious. Others would say it's smart. And today technology gives us the tools to gather information deeper and faster than ever before. So those informed decisions can come quicker than ever before. A 2013 study from researchers at McMaster University's DeGroote School of Business surveyed six hundred board directors and found that
how
women make decisions makes them better corporate leaders. Companies with women on their boards are well known to outperform those who don't have female members, and the DeGroote paper found that women's collaborative, information-intensive approach is more likely to result in sound decisions—even if they are those that rock the boat. So when it comes to swift decisions, women need to be courageous, take a moment to draw upon all that they've learned, heard and seen, and then move forward.

After the months I'd spent in conversation with people at the CBC, for example, what I had to do next was show them we could deliver. Nothing does more to galvanize a team than positive results. Which is why I couldn't afford to wait until my second season on the job to demonstrate that success was possible. The network needed an almost instant hit to quiet the naysayers and lift the gloom. They had to see that we had the goods to create a smart hit—and all I had to do was my job, which was to exercise my influence to make that happen, starting with spreading the word.

In the not too distant past, one of the tried-and-true ways to let people know about a new program was to promote it during peak hours, and preferably during a show with a massive audience. At the time, the only show that captured a million viewers on a weekly basis was
Hockey Night in Canada,
an American hockey blogger once dubbed this country's crack cocaine. That made it a powerful vehicle to draw attention to other shows and everybody at the network vied for its promo spots—including me, the boss. I saw it as the perfect launching pad for
Little Mosque on the Prairie,
but reaction from our sports department was less than warm. They weren't in favour of donating valuable airtime to promo a show that they thought would never attract the same kind of audience that tuned in to hockey on a Saturday night. Hockey dudes aren't going to watch a show like
Little Mosque
, they told me. But hockey wasn't just for the guys, I said, it was for families—families watch hockey and they'll watch
Little Mosque
. Sure, it was a risk, but as I told the sports department, sparing the new show a couple of promos wouldn't kill them.

The
Little Mosque
premiere was scheduled for a Tuesday night in January, and we pulled out all the stops to stoke interest in advance with an extensive promo campaign. This included handing out Christmas cookies at malls, gingerbread women dressed in hijabs. It was, after all, a comedy. (I did turn down the marketing pitch to fly an ultralight plane around the CN Tower trailing a promo written in Arabic: um, what were they thinking?) The show would follow the
Rick Mercer Report
, which claimed a weekly audience share of close to a million. I asked if Rick, the biggest star on CBC's primetime schedule, would do a personal throw to the show during his sign-off that night, and he agreed.
The National
also aired a piece, “Will
LMOP
save the CBC?” The little show with the strange title also brought CNN, Fox News and a whack of other media calling to hear more. On the day it debuted, the BBC carried an online story on
Little Mosque
that became the most downloaded article on its website. No pressure …

The day after
Little Mosque
's first episode aired, I was sitting in a boardroom with a bunch of finance types reviewing budgets when the person in charge of scheduling sent me a message. The daily ratings report card had just come in and her one line of text read “218 OMG.” I was bewildered. After all that effort, only 218,000 people had watched? But then I looked at the message again. Was it actually saying 218,000 or did it mean 2.2 million? I pushed back from the table, opened the boardroom door and down the hall I heard screaming. Of the most glorious kind. They were
celebrating.
It
was
2.2 million. We'd never seen any number like that, and the record stands today.

People were beyond happy. They felt exhilarated and exonerated. We had a bona fide hit so big that, ironically, the guys from hockey called to ask me for a promo spot for
Hockey Night in Canada
on
Little Mosque
for the following week. (When it aired in its regular Wednesday time slot, the same premiere episode garnered another 1.7 million viewers.) I suggested we run a huge ad to announce that the show was, officially, “Canada's biggest hit.” The staff was hesitant, unaccustomed to the idea of positive attention—and uncomfortable with vying for it. “Ooooh, we don't know if we should say that …” they told me. But I coaxed them to go along with it, to take a bow and be proud of their great work: it was theirs—ours—to enjoy.

The feeling of triumph buoyed the building, lifting the pressure of gloom and pessimism. I sent Peter Mansbridge a cheeky note asking whether
The National
wanted to do a follow-up to “Will
LMOP
save the CBC?” I felt joy, not simply because of the success, but because people had seen that their success was possible. To me, it was a victory that took us much closer to the goal we were aiming for. Who doesn't feel better about themselves and their organization, more confident, more ambitious, when they know their team can hit it out of the park?

As it turned out, that January signalled the start of a veritable hit parade for the CBC. It's not that all ratings wowed as soon as the shows were launched, as
Little Mosque
's did. But many shows that debuted on CBC-TV in my early years went on to earn loyal followings, such as
The Hour
and
Dragon's Den
(now in its tenth season, having turned the word “dragon” into a national synonym for
venture capitalist),
Republic of Doyle
and
Heartland
, which in 2015 became the longest-running one-hour scripted drama in the history of Canadian television.

I wasn't any genius: change had to happen at the CBC one way or another. The people I led had everything to do with fulfilling what I saw as the urgent need to connect with Canadian viewers. The field trip to the suburbs had evolved. We developed direct and effective methods to tap into the desires of audiences. During the 2012–13 NHL lockout, for example, we relied on an online poll of audiences to find out what famous hockey matchups they'd like to see replayed and their answers determined which games we broadcast. We also made it a point to reach out to new Canadians through focus groups, surveys and interviews, which resulted in us making the move to broadcast
Hockey Night in Canada
in Punjabi. These were initiatives that not only spoke to new successes, and new ways to explore what viewers wanted, but also continued to stoke the spirits of people within the CBC, proving to them that change was possible. I'd drawn on my experience to make that happen, but it also took a certain courage and confidence to ignore the boundaries that others had set. That courage and confidence, I believe, is something that all leaders, but women in particular, have to be able to tap if they are going to succeed.

When I took the stage in 2007 to offer a look at our lineup for the following season, I threw out the old presentation format. The CBC's ratings were the highest they'd been in five years and we had nine new homegrown shows to unveil. Instead of plodding methodically through the primetime schedule hour by hour, we created our own live variety show,
with music, comedy, video clips from the programs to come, live interviews with cast members and a host of CBC talent. We impressed the ad buyers. Our shows wowed our guests. In that moment, it was a celebration of our hard-won success as a team, however fleeting that turned out to be.

[ III ]

What Can Happen if You Don't Follow Your Dream

MY FATHER WAS BORN
in a town in central Scotland. It was a small place, famous for a boarding school where generations of wealthy English families had sent their sons to be educated, but not just the wealthy made the cut. A bequest had endowed a scholarship so that the town's brightest boy could attend the school regardless of his family income. In the late 1940s, my father was that boy. His smarts earned him entry to the academy, where, it so happened, his mother, my grandmother, was also the school cleaner. I've often imagined how my dad felt in those class-obsessed days of his adolescence, trying to fit in with the upper-crust lads while his mother cleaned up after them.

At a time when all graduates went into service, my father joined the army. At a military base in England, he met my mother at a dance. They married at nineteen and twenty-one and within a year they were on a ship to Canada, hungry to carve out a better life. My father took a clerking job at a
mining company and worked his way up to become head of its exploration division in Latin America.

My mother worked full-time as a draftsperson until she had children. But even after my sister and I were born, she found ways to turn her natural talent as an artist into extra income. Art was in her blood. Her father was a gifted painter who produced a notable portrait of Lord Robert Baden-Powell, the British baron who founded the Boy Scouts Association (my granddad was one of the original six Boy Scouts). Yet neither my grandfather, a scientist by profession, nor my mother, would have regarded art as a way to make a living. My mother used her artistic talents to make pocket money at craft shows, setting up a booth where she sold beautiful hand-knit sweaters that featured impressionist landscapes rendered in angora, silk and cashmere. In the corner of her booth, I knit, too, well enough that I eventually knit for people on commission, making sweaters and baby clothes.

I was always drawn to the arts—design, literature and music. All through school I played the flute, saxophone, oboe and clarinet. At the University of Toronto, I earned a coveted spot in the creative writing class of Josef Skvorecky. But I wanted to marry my talents with something concrete—a “real” job. I mixed courses in finance and other subjects in with my English lit classes. It's been a mantra of the Baby Boomers and the generations who followed that you should follow your dreams. But in my family, as with many immigrant households, making a good living was the dream that mattered most.

So I decided to go into publishing. Apart from my love of reading, I had no burning desire to actually be a publisher,
but I thought the options of an English lit grad were limited, and teaching was not for me. In publishing I could earn a salary in a job that was at least related to creative writing. But when fate threw me into the television industry, I discovered that I could learn to love the job I'd stumbled into.

Down with the Five-Year Plan

THAT OPENNESS TO NEW OPPORTUNITIES,
however unpredictable or unexpected, has been a major element of my success. When people, usually women, ask about my professional achievements, I can honestly say they have had more to do with taking chances than setting a career goal. I never set out to navigate a route to the top tier of any organization or corporation. To me, the most exciting career paths are those that unfold in unexpected ways. I am anti five-year-plan because in my experience the best things do not flow from making a plan and sticking to it. The key is to believe that you have what it takes not only to meet the challenges you find along the way, but to be open to what you learn on that journey. If you lock yourself into a single dream job you're desperate to attain, you may close yourself off from something even grander.

There's a growing recognition that following one's dreams or passions is no guarantee of success or happiness. Author Cal Newport, a computer scientist at Georgetown University, calls it the “passion trap” and suggests that passion may in fact be the root of widespread workplace unhappiness. In his recent book,
So Good They Can't Ignore You
, Newport argues
that if people only seek out work they love, they are bound to become disillusioned when they fail to love the work they do and essentially find their dreams unfulfilled. The passion trap prevents people from pursuing opportunities that don't match their preconceived dreams.

As technology rapidly reshapes the global economy, relying on your dreams to guide your worklife could hold you back from what can make you truly happy. Traditional industries are being transformed (or failing) and traditional jobs are morphing and vanishing too. Today's list of dream jobs simply doesn't include the many possibilities for work that tomorrow is bound to bring. The US Department of Education, for instance, estimates that 60 percent of all new jobs created over the next two decades will require skills that only 20 percent of the current workforce possesses. The smart approach may be to unhook your ambitions from a particular plan because those plans are informed by the world of today where, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the demand for many traditional vocations is rapidly shrinking. For example, metal and plastic machine workers are increasingly not needed as manufacturing becomes more automated; so, too, mainstream journalists, whose numbers are diminishing along with traditional print outlets; travel agents who find it hard to compete with DIY travel sites; postal workers, as people write fewer letters; and so on. At the same time, new occupations are emerging in the knowledge economy that no one ever dreamed of at those old-school career fairs, jobs like directors of community engagement, brand strategists, chief experience officers. What's hopeful about this from a gender perspective is that none of these titles have a traditional
gender. Say “doctor,” “lawyer,” or “taxman” and people still tend to picture, well, a man. But if you think “industrial-organizational psychologist,” “genetic counsellor,” or “information security analyst”—all occupations the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts will grow robustly over the next decade—likely no gender comes to mind. Which is why today, for women, and men, too, keeping your mind open to the widest range of opportunities will reduce the chances you'll find yourself boxed in.

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.