WOMEN CAN LEAD WAY
Valuable traits for business
In her upcoming book Our Turn, Kirstine Stewart argues that women not only have an unprecedented shot at key leadership positions but all successful leaders will need to harness the traits usually attributed to the “pink ghetto” — sensitivity, good communication skills and the ability to juggle multiple tasks.
She should know. Stewart was the first woman to lead CBC’s English programming, the first hire, as managing director, at Twitter in Canada and is now the VP of media for Twitter across North America. She talks to National Post’s Anne Marie Owens — who can claim a major first herself, as the first Editor in Chief of a national newspaper in Canada — about what it takes to get to the top. And how women can get out of their own way.
Q. When I read about how you got your start — the same year as me — with an ad in the Toronto Star for a Girl Friday in film I thought, ‘ Can you believe that in 1988, there was an ad in a newspaper that said Girl Friday?’ A. I know.
Q. How do you make sense of that now? A. I guess it was a different time but it does kind of show you how, even though we feel like it’s taking forever for the needle to move, there has been a monumental shift in the way that women are treated at work. You don’t have a Girl Friday in the office any more.
Q. Where were you headed at that time? A. I thought I was going into publishing because I had an English Lit. degree. I even did an internship in my last year at University of Toronto at a publisher and they said, ‘ When you get out, the job is yours.’ But then the downturn started, and the job disappeared. So I learned my first lesson about five- year plans and just being ready for anything.
Q. You’ve never been a ‘ This is my next step’ kind of person, have you? A. No, and I find that interesting, because a lot of the time women get cast as ‘ ambitious’ — a word that kind of labels them. Men get ‘ driven’ and ‘ determined.’ Once I was described as having a ‘ figure skater’s frozen smile’ or something. I can’t imagine a man ever being described that way.
Q. You tell a story about your first launch as head of programming at CBC — you had bold ventures, you had a whole new agenda, you were doing it at a different time of year. You were worried about how this was going to sell but the shock ( or not shock really) was that afterwards it was a lot about how you looked, how you presented, what you wore. A. I was actually mortified. I was determined that I was going to cut my hair and drop all my shoes to flats but in the end you realize that you have to be yourself and not allow others to put their expectations on you. I think that limits not just your comfort level, your confidence, it actually limits your potential. It doesn’t let you speak when you should. It doesn’t let you contribute as you should. It inhibits you in a way that goes beyond outward appearance.
Q. A big theme in this book is that you believe this is a different time and it’s actually better for the kind of skills and leadership styles that women tend to have. A. I think there’s an opportunity to lead differently because businesses have to be run differently. No longer can you sit just dictate from on high how a company is going to be run. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone has an expectation — and clients, customers, are increasingly much more important. Flexibility, collaboration, the ability to move things forward are incredibly important, and if you think about how women have been labelled — as multitaskers, as communicators, as empathetic — those are
incredibly valuable traits now.
Q. What kind of conversations do you want us to be having right now? A. To me, it’s around how we take advantage of this moment. If this is our turn and there are opportunities that haven’t existed in the past, how do we make sure that door doesn’t close. How do we, as leaders, create opportunities for the people in our workforce. How do we start claiming space. I think there is space out there for women that there never was in the past. This interview has been edited and condensed.