1. What is the best piece of advice you ever received? From whom?
After I moved from Germany to Australia via Asia a helpful male colleague of mine advised me, “You don’t always have to come at an issue head on – sideways can be effective, too!” My cultural context had been to get right to business, so the move to Asia and Australia taught me a lot.
When women ask me if they should take an international assignment I say ‘do it’! Nothing gives you the depth of insight into different ways of thinking relevant to business and government leadership than living in a different cultural environment. When you do this you see your own cultural barriers or biases and you experience a completely different way of looking at the world in a way you would never learn if you had stayed in your own cultural context. It teaches you to flex style which is so important as a leader.
Another piece of advice that always comes to mind, and that I've given other women, is to think about how to take up the whole space of a new role you step into and think beyond the constraints of what you perceive to be allowed. I think women are hesitant to push boundaries because they are worried they will not be received well. You should test the boundaries of any new role gently and carefully, but be willing to take up the most space and influence you can.
2. What is the worst advice you ever got? Did you follow it?
I'm terrible at looking backwards so I don’t think I have an answer to this question! The upside of that is I don't spend as much time as I observe some of my women colleagues do, dwelling on who looked at me the wrong way or oppressed me in some way. Of course it happens and it might irritate me briefly, but then I tell myself, ‘OK onto the next thing’.
I work with quite a large number of women and some of them appear incredibly confident externally, but they tell me that they endlessly churn over things that happened, or things they said and later regretted. Apparent confidence can come with internal anguish. So I would flip this around and say, from a positive perspective, “Don’t over-analyze things you can’t control”.
3. Is there any especially important lesson you have learned that you'd like to share with younger women? What advice would you have given your 20 year old self?
Never go into a meeting and not speak - and always speak early. If you don't do this, you can't then churn over the injustice of the fact that you had some great thoughts but didn't share them because no one asked you to. I think this is where taking space starts - you have to be an active participant and you have to be vocal in order to be noticed. I think women often think their performance will speak for itself and one day someone will ring up and say ‘we want to promote you’ …but mostly that doesn't happen.
4. Young women today are asking if it is really possible to 'have it all'? What sacrifices are worth making from your perspective? Which aren't?
The idea of sacrifice is very personal because it depends so much on what your living circumstances are. I don’t think it has to be all about sacrifice, but it does have to be the right balance for you as an individual. I’ve had three children while holding all my roles and I never felt I was sacrificing anything. I really only noticed the extent of how I was identifying as a mother when my children left home. I suddenly realized that emotionally while I thought I was the Director General, actually I was a mother first of all, which was kind of nice.
The way people work has changed so much I’d encourage young women to look at the places they can bring their whole self to work. Can you work flexibly so you can manage career, professional development and the rest of your life – family, children, aging parents, special hobbies or passions - effectively and actually enjoy it?
Setting boundaries early on in your career and setting up a pattern of how you will work is very important to protect your space. The only person who can protect you from burning out is you. No one is going to come to you and say ‘work less’. In my mind, you set up early in your career what your pattern of work is and once you have this it's hard to change. If your pattern is already to not set boundaries then you get to a point where you think you can only work when your adrenaline is flowing like mad and you have to rush, rush, rush. This has long term negative impacts on your overall health so it's much better not to get into this pattern. For me, the moment I feel I get an adrenaline surge that makes me want to work faster I stop and actually go and do something completely different, or I just remove myself from it.
5. How did the glass ceiling - or the 'thick layer of men' as it has been called! - manifest in your career? What techniques did you use to break through?
The fact that I am a woman in senior roles does matter; it continues to be a challenge. The fact is there are a lot more men in senior roles and there often is a greater ease with which men interact with each other. In the context I’m in now, men love talking about sports and that doesn’t interest me, so it excludes me as a colleague. I can’t participate in what is normal conversation because I haven’t watched the latest football game – I never will. Those things of being included or excluded continue all the way through your career and you can't own them. I had to realize it has nothing to do with me, but is rather the cultural context in which they operate. So the reality is I am in a minority and my life is different.
6. What would you most like to be remembered for? Why?
I am passionate about EY’s aspiration of Building a Better Working World and making that a reality by putting in place what I call “systemic disruptors”. Gender inequality as a whole seems a vast, insurmountable challenge, but when you break it down there are real tangible actions we can take to make our workplace culture more inclusive and flexible. What more do we need to actively tackle unconscious bias? Do career coaching programs fit the needs of women or are they one-size-fits-all? Do we have succession planning that puts diversity at the center? I require all my senior teams to actively champion women in the pipeline – what I call “relentless backing” – and to act on this as a key performance indicator. Just as technological advances have generated new forms of prosperity, it is proven that diverse workforces contribute significantly to performance. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to create a truly inclusive environment for the almost quarter of a million people who work for EY and about the role we have influencing how people behave in our local communities and society more broadly.
7. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing this generation of young women?
To be honest, I don’t think that culturally it’s so different to the challenges we faced because until you get to a certain age or certain level you don’t think that being a woman actually holds you back. When I was growing up, the concept that something like my gender could restrict my options was completely incomprehensible to me. So I think it takes until your 30s or mid-30s and you reach a particular point that you suddenly realize there’s something else happening around you.
I think the world is changing drastically as a result of technology and young women going into the labor market and starting their careers need to think about gaining a variety of experiences and perspectives. In my generation, people might have five or six jobs in a lifetime, but the younger generation will have this in a year. So exploring other employment avenues is important: maybe it's working for a start-up for a while, maybe it's going into a tech company, maybe it’s starting your own business or being in the gig economy for a period of time. The systemic impact of technological change is in my view completely underestimated at the moment. If I were at the beginning of my career I would absolutely go and work for a tech start-up because it is so important to understand technology and innovation today.
