The Agile Executive. Marianne Broadbent
make trade-offs consciously, sometimes unconsciously, and sometimes just intuitively. It helps if those trade-offs are clearly articulated to yourself and those around you.
In Executive Search work we are constantly contacting people about their next potential career opportunity. We live every day with candidates, or potential candidates, weighing up the level of disruption they might want to cause their families by moving interstate or moving to a new country, or their colleagues by leaving.
Moving to a new role can create a whole set of new demands, particularly in the first few months when you are working to get your head around what is expected, dealing with a new environment and, sometimes, a new industry. Maybe, it might just not be the right time.
It’s helpful to take the longer view on your career, and sometimes to ‘hasten slowly’ and stay where you are for a while, as it suits your current circumstances.
Company director and board chair Kathryn Fagg started her career as an engineer on oil and gas rigs in Bass Strait. She later moved to management consulting with McKinsey, and then had senior executive roles with ANZ Banking Group and BHP Steel/BlueScope. She emphasises the need to clarify what is important to yourself, your family and to your employer. Be clear about what you can do and about the ground-rules.
There will always be trade-offs on both the career and home fronts. Decide what they are, what can work, and then get on with it.
You can have it all, just not necessarily at the same time
While the sentiment that ‘you can have it all, just not at the same time’ has been credited recently to Oprah Winfrey, I first heard it stated more than ten years ago by Jude Munro, the then Chief Executive of Brisbane City Council (one of the largest municipalities in the world). She was addressing a cross-section of executives about the approaches the Council was taking to ensure they had a sufficiently diverse workforce, and that they did not lose good people who could otherwise be better supported through family-friendly policies and practices.
Her willingness to articulate that she knew we all had to make different choices at different times, that working for BCC was not an end in itself, was refreshing, particularly at the time. I made a conscious decision to stay in a career in my 20s that suited my circumstances. At the time, teaching gave me a bit of flexibility to take on further study while also managing a growing family.
We women have the wombs so, for now, on average, we are more likely to take a bit more time out than men. But who knows what will happen in time, and already significant numbers of men and women are making decisions that mean each of them, at some stage, will work in paid employment less than full-time.
Seeing this more shared engagement of both men and women, and same sex couples, with their families today is just terrific. It opens up the options to parents much more than has been the case in the past.
Becoming a parent can result in different skills
Having to be accountable for the care and wellbeing of others—children, a parent or another family member—forces us to exercise, or uncover, our abilities to prioritise, make trade-offs, ask for assistance, and delegate.
Alisa Bowen is a digital leader who has worked for many years at the nexus of digital consumer technologies and business model disruption inside traditional media organisations. Today she is based in Los Angeles as an international technology executive for the Disney organisation. She is aware that she has always been something of a workaholic and earlier in her career she had difficulty trusting others to do their jobs well.
She was used to working in male-oriented environments. It was with some fear and dread quite a few years ago that she told her boss she was pregnant with her first child. She was concerned about how she would balance everything and keep up her performance if she could not work eighteen hours a day, six days a week.
She was surprised with the reaction of her boss, which went something like, ‘This baby will be the making of your executive leadership, because you will just simply have to delegate. And you’ll learn for yourself that sheer hard work is not enough. You will have to work smarter, not harder, to keep advancing’.
Alisa notes that her boss was one hundred percent correct and that is when she began to focus more on building teams and networking based on meaningful connections and relationships. She wishes that she had learned earlier on that life is not a sprint but a marathon.
Alisa later came to realise that as her children got older they often needed their parents more—for spiritual guidance, academic support, discipline and emotional involvement.
These things can’t easily be outsourced but, with her demanding travel schedule, at least Facetime, WeChat or Skype allows a parent to have some form of regular presence, if not there in person.
Trade-offs need to be made at different stages
Having one parent take a career pause or a role that is less demanding in terms of constant availability has been common for women, but not as much for men.
It usually comes about from a good discussion on how to get things done, how to identify different priorities and what timely trade-offs need sacrificing.
Taking the ‘foot off the career pedal’ is the description that J.P. Morgan’s Lalitha Biddulph uses to describe how she and her husband Ross approached making choices when their children were under five years old.
They decided that Lalitha was experiencing considerable ‘career runway’ so Ross took three years out of the workforce and then returned to work part-time for the following five years. They believed this approach was important to ensure that their children had the values they believed would be important to them.
Glenys Beauchamp, Secretary/CEO of the Australian Department of Health, took nine years out when her three children were young and doesn’t regret this at all. At the time she had to resign rather than take leave. It meant that when she rejoined the paid workforce, she took a role considerably more junior than the one she had left nine years before, and also had to rebuild her personal confidence.
As her career re-ignited, she and her husband made choices that included his career then taking a back seat, so that one partner was always able to have more time with their three children.
Christine Kilpatrick, Chief Executive Officer at Melbourne Health, shared that, earlier in her career, she and her husband invested heavily in nannies so she could return to work within a couple of months. Her view is that if you stay out of the workforce for too long, it is too hard to get back in. She says it’s important to have a career that suits you and you never know what lies ahead.
That period of taking time out, for women and men, has a different impact depending on the nature of career and work.
For early or mid-career academics, a break can have a greater impact than many other areas.
Jane Den Hollander, the Vice-Chancellor of Deakin University from 2012 to 2019, instituted a new program to address that issue.
While on maternity leave, staff at Deakin were allowed to have a research assistant in order to keep their work progressing. This meant that when they returned to full-time, academics were able to continue more easily, rather than from a dead stop. Their research had continued, and there were publications in the pipeline. This made a world of difference and kept gifted academics in the profession.
The right child-minding arrangements require persistence
Where there are babies and children involved, learn to embrace the ensuing chaos.
We took our first child each morning, from the age of about five months, to the home of a woman who turned out to be a children’s book author. It was a bit chaotic, but she loved kids, and I am sure fed his imagination wonderfully.
Returning to work four months after our second child was born was more problematic. Just as I thought it was not going to be possible, we came upon a wonderful Scottish woman, Dinah, and her husband, Bill.
Our kids went to her home for the next seven years. It did mean of course that when our second son, Andrew, started school and