THE JOURNEY TO CEO
Six lessons from Angela Brown, president and CEO of Moneris
KEEP INVESTING IN YOUR CAPABILITIES, THINK ABOUT THE IMPACT YOU HAVE AND THE WAY YOU ARE COMMUNICATING AND CONDUCTING YOURSELF. IT’S A VERY IMPORTANT PART OF BEING IN THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY AND IS UNDER-EMPHASIZED AS A KEY SUCCESS FACTOR. — ANGELA BROWN, MONERIS PRESIDENT & CEO
It’s still lonely at the top for women in CEO roles in Canada’s largest companies. The numbers tell the story of just how rare it is for women to ascend to the highest levels of decision-making in business. According to the latest research from Catalyst, just 24 Canadian Tsx-listed companies, or 3.5 per cent, had a woman CEO in 2019. On average, women represented just 17.9 per cent of executive officers in S&P/TSX Composite Index companies; this at a time when women represent nearly half of the workforce (47.4 per cent) in Canada.
Angela Brown is one of the very few women who has made the climb. As president and CEO of Moneris Solutions, she leads Canada’s largest provider of mobile, online and in-store payment solutions. The company has approximately 1,800 employees supporting some 300,000 merchant locations in every province and territory and processes about 3.5 billion transactions every year.
Brown, an award-winning payments industry leader, has held Moneris’s top job since 2013. Under her leadership, the company has secured its position as an innovative market leader in Canada.
With the explosive growth of digital payment adoption through the pandemic, (Visa reports its tap-to-pay transactions grew more than 30 per cent over the past year), she is focused on diversifying Moneris’ growth opportunities. “We have the technology chops to compete globally, and I want to enable that. It’s an exciting time.”
Here, Brown shares her journey to the C-suite, lessons learned and best advice to anyone starting their climb. Get off to a good start with a great company and learn
as much as you can I started my career right around the time the book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t by Jim Collins came out. It emphasized that not all companies are created equal. I knew I wanted to start my career with a company that was identified as great.
Procter & Gamble was very advanced when it came to attracting women. I was recruited to a team led by Violet Konkle, whose last position before she retired was president and CEO of The Brick. She was a role model.
I was in an operations/ distribution type of stream. They put us on many courses to develop ourselves as managers, to learn the latest tools and thinking around the job function we had. I worked
on designing packages for efficient storage of products on the trucks, in the warehouse and on store shelves. We got involved in some pretty advanced thinking about efficiency that has stayed with me. Learning as much as you can sets you up for everything that comes afterwards.
Gain broad experience I’ve had both line functions
and staff functions. A business needs great people in both roles and you have to find out what you truly love doing. I’ve had people say to me, ‘You are an operator.’ It’s true. I enjoy working across a complex business. Moneris is very cross-functional, and getting the orchestra to play together and make great music is the biggest challenge and a lot of fun. Challenge yourself (On leaving consumer packaged goods for financial services) I was young, ambitious and felt the need to move into something different. I did my undergrad in economics and always found the economy and the way the financial system runs really interesting.
Changing markets was another big leap. I moved to the U.S. with CIBC and loved the experience. When I was presented with the opportunity to move back to Canada to work with Visa, the fact that it was going to be a growth opportunity with a bigger job was fascinating to me. You have to keep challenging yourself.
Prepare yourself for bigger roles Throughout my whole career, I’ve worked with really good companies. When you look at the leadership of those companies, you see smart, capable, inspiring people who encouraged people to further grow their business and themselves and their skills and capabilities. I never had a specific vision for my career, but I aspired to get a few levels beyond where I was, to learn and become as proficient as I could in what leadership was doing. This led to being head-hunted to be CEO of Moneris. You can’t necessarily say ‘please call me if you have a CEO role’, but it struck me that it was absolutely something I wanted to do and that I felt ready to do. Create balance for yourself Be protective of your energy and time. Make sure you are taking care of yourself by getting rest, exercising and eating right. I cannot tell you I did all those things perfectly, but in general I would quickly correct if I felt myself getting out of balance. This is really important, especially when your children are young. Understand how you are being perceived Everybody has something they are dealing with that challenges their ability to be heard, to be taken seriously. Wherever you sit in business, you have to have self-awareness. How are you coming across? Think through the impression you’re creating, the confidence you are exuding or not, the competence you have, how you manage competing priorities.
Keep investing in your capabilities, think about the impact you have and the way you are communicating and conducting yourself. It’s a very important part of being in the business community and is under-emphasized as a key success factor. As you move near the top, there is a lot of competition. You have to decide how you are going to compete and how comfortable you are with that.