Be ready for trade-offs to achieve
MARNIE Baker says one of her biggest challenges in building a career that has taken her to the top job in Australia fifth largest bank was overcoming the myth that women could have it all.
“Life is a trade-off,” the managing director of Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, and a mother of three, told a women in leadership discussion in Geelong.
But Ms Baker argued women needed to be much better at accepting their choices, whether they were to prioritise work over family or vice versa.
She said many women in her life had probably advised the wrong thing in saying she could have the best of both career and family life.
“With everything you do, you are making decisions and you are trading things off against each other,” Ms Baker said.
She said women had to be “kinder to ourselves” in accepting those choices and that it was OK to make to make those trade-offs.
Ms Baker joined Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott in speaking at the women in leadership forum presented by the Geelong Manufacturing Council’s Women in Manufacturing Network on Wednesday.
They spoke of the importance of mentors for female business leaders, the need for tenacity and resilience, self-belief, to take a risk and have a go, and to prepare for success in running an organisation by understanding the key operational and financial roles.
Ms Westacott said the chance of failure in corporate leadership was minimised if women had exposure to the company.
“If you don’t understand how a business runs and operates, how it makes its money, how it manages its risks, you are just setting people up to fail,” she said.
The two pushed aside a concern the #metoo movement would stymie men from being role models to women in the workplace, a key to improving the gender imbalance in leadership roles.
“I think it is about building cultures of respect in an organisation,” Ms Westacott said. “I also think people know the difference when behaviour is uncomfortable, out of line, or crossing the line.”