The NEW SUPER women
It’s no longer enough to raise children and run a company. Today’s top female bosses are ultra-fit too
CATRIONA MARSHALL, 50, chief executive of the Hobbycraft arts and crafts shops, likes to start her day at 6am with an hour-long run. Every week she runs 32 miles, cycles as far as London to oxford and builds up her strength in the gym. But even that level of demanding exercise isn’t enough for Catriona. in 2015 she cycled from one end of France to the other — almost 1,000 miles. Last year she cycled 600 miles across ireland.
this year she’s training to climb up a sheer cliff face in Snowdonia, spend the night hanging precariously in a tent pitched several hundred feet from the ground and then abseil down in the morning. alongside all this extreme activity, she’s also been putting extreme effort into building up Hobbycraft.
the two enterprises, she says, are mutually beneficial. Stamina from one feeds into the other.
‘they both teach you a lot about yourself and about what motivates people — how to get the most out of others,’ she says.
next weekend her goal is to run her personal best in the 10km — 45 minutes — as well as to achieve peak productivity in the Hobbycraft distribution centre. a striking number of female high flyers are devotees of extreme fitness.
Anne O’Leary, CEO of Vodafone ireland, competes in triathlons where you do a 1.5km open-water swim, cycle for 40km and finish with a 10km run.
Ursula Burns, the chairwoman of Xerox, schedules an hour with a personal trainer twice a week at 6am.
In fact, increasing numbers of female
superbosses are taking part in gruelling Ceo Challenges, where top executives are pitted against each other in extreme endurance races, such as triathlons and 100-mile mountain-biking races.
‘ They like to conquer things that most see as insurmountable,’ says Ted Kennedy, who founded the challenges that sees Ceos competing around the globe. ‘These people work every minute of every day at accomplishing their goals.’ why should it be any different during their precious spare time?
Harriet Green, 55, a global executive at IBM and the former Ceo of Thomas Cook, reportedly gets up at 5.30am to lift 16kg weights. ‘I do generally think people eat and sleep too much,’ she has said.
Green filled her top team at Thomas Cook with a marathon runner, a triathlete and a former gymnast. She says this was just what she needed to turn around the troubled travel company.
It’s a far cry from capitalism’s male-dominated days.
GeTTInG ahead used to mean drinking and smoking with colleagues after hours, which contributed to heart disease and executive paunches.
A turning point came in 2001 with the publication of The Making of A Corporate Athlete in the Harvard Business review.
The authors, psychologist Jim Loehr and executive coach Tony Schwartz, argued too much focus had been put on the brains of leaders and not enough on their bodies.
Physical fitness, they believed, was what was needed in an effective leader and bosses should adapt the training mentality of elite, high performance athletes.
Today, it’s all about being ‘lean’ and ‘fit’ — both the company and the body of its top boss.
The number of Ceos who did marathons doubled between 2001 and 2011, according to recent research by the University of Cologne.
‘Costs are rising — we need fewer good people to work harder and be more productive,’ says Catriona Marshall, who sees exercise as a de- stresser and has instigated a culture of fitness at Hobbycraft.
‘The healthier, happier and more engaged people are, the better results you get.’
Since being appointed Ceo in 2011, Catriona, who lives in Cheshire and Bournemouth with her husband, Mike, an entrepreneur, has introduced plank challenges (holding a press-up) and sitting squat challenges (braced against a wall with your thighs parallel to the floor) into her offices.
‘For everyone who did it I gave £1 to charity.’
She ensures teams are entered for marathons and has set up a cycling group.
‘A hardcore of six of us go out at 6am and cycle around the new Forest,’ she says. ‘It’s a chance to have a chat about what’s going on at work.’
She has also equipped each member of her core team with a Fitbit — a device that measures how many steps you walk — and challenged them to do one million steps in 100 days to raise money for charity.
‘when they finish, they hand over the Fitbit to the next team and they take on the challenge,’ she says.
‘At Hobbycraft we eat cake all the time — we have bakeoffs and suppliers make novelty cakes — and part of it was a reaction to how much cake we eat.’
Her team are right behind her. ‘She has really raised fitness as an agenda within the office,’ says David westman, marketing and Pr manager, who ran a half-marathon last year and is training with 53 colleagues for a 22-mile trek.
Josephine Bush, 47, lives in Bristol with her husband, Damian, a vet, and their two children, Felix, 14, and Hugo, seven. A senior tax partner at accountancy firm ernst & Young, Josephine works long hours and travels abroad.
‘I just had a week’s holiday skiing in Austria, but I think I only managed a day and a half skiing because I had reports to review and documents to get out.’
DeSPITe her busy schedule, she is a devotee of extreme sports. She has done the Marathon des Sables, ‘ the toughest footrace on earth’, where she ran six marathons in seven days in the Sahara desert, while carrying all her food and equipment on her back.
‘every night you are managing your feet, looking after your blisters.’
Last year she did the Yukon Challenge — 444 miles kayaking along the river, sleeping in tents on rocky outcrops.
She is training to kayak 90 miles in five days up the Gironde river in France, in a recreation of the world war II Cockleshell Heroes expedition, for a military charity. ‘I love taking myself outside my comfort zone,’ she says.
‘You don’t know what you are capable of until you give it a go. You really do have to draw on inner resources to pull yourself through in these events. I’ve seen grown men crying and crawling on their knees.’
The daughter of an engineer, Josephine was educated in state schools around the country (‘My parents moved around a lot’) and read law at Cambridge University.
‘Being bright didn’t make you popular at school, but being sporty did. I wasn’t bullied at all, but sport was a way of managing being an outlier in terms of intelligence and of being accepted and part of the crowd.’
These days she sees sport as important for selffulfilment, giving back (with money raised for charity) and non-work friendships.
She exercises for at least an hour, five times a week. ‘Sometimes I’ll run to work [ten miles] — I’ll get up at 6.30am so I can have a shower there. But my preferred time
is in the evening.’ She has a gym at her home equipped with a running machine, step machine and exercise bike.
‘I constantly feel guilty about the time I’m not giving to my family,’ she says. ‘But I don’t think I’m too obsessed — you can get really obsessed.’
The day we meet at her gym in Bristol, she’d recently been on a walk with her sons — along with a 60lb weight in her rucksack.
‘When I sat on a bench I went flying backwards. I was like an upturned beetle.
‘Sport is not something I’ve engineered as a way of getting forward, but I can see it’s helped me manage my career because it’s given me balance, is healthy for the mind and body and it’s helped me create even greater discipline in my life — you have to be incredibly organised to fit this in with work and family.’
So keen are her employers Ernst & young on the connection between sport and leadership that, four years ago, it launched a Women Athletes Business network (WABn).
The aim is to encourage elite women athletes to become executive high- flyers. The company is mentoring nine women athletes who took part in the rio Olympics.
‘We did some research and found 94 per cent of women in the C- Suite — that’s chief executive officers, chief financial officers or chief information officers — played sport and more than half of those played at university level,’ says Beth Brooke-Marciniak, a former basketball star and Ernst & young global vice chair public policy and leader of the company’s WABn.
Christine lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was a member of the French national synchronised swimming team in her teens and Hillary Clinton played basketball at college.
‘The correlation was clear — the skills (the focus, discipline and ability to improve performance) that enable you to succeed in business is baked into the DnA of these athletes,’ says Beth. She also sees sport as a way to stand out from the crowd.
‘An employer sees you excel at sport and that visibility is going to enhance your career.’ It’s a view that is supported by business experts.
‘CEOs used to talk about job- related skills on their CVs, now they talk about marathons and triathlons,’ says Andre Spicer, who is professor of organisational behaviour at Cass Business School.
‘ It’s a personal branding tactic about communicating the idea of ultra- high performance in all aspects of life.’
According to one business insider. ‘The goal is to build a myth of superiority inside and outside their organisation — that they’re fundamentally different to the lowly ones, who don’t make it to the top.’
But health is an issue for the boardroom. ‘A company’s share price can tank if the CEO has a major health concern,’ says Professor Spicer.
research by the centre for creative leadership found executives with big waistlines and higher body mass index (BMI) readings were perceived as less effective in the workplace, in performance and relationships with colleagues.
‘It’s about being the best you can be,’ says Angela Spindler, 54, who is CEO of n Brown Group, an online fashion firm and FTSE 250 company.
‘We are in a volatile industry at a pretty volatile time. It does require people who are selfstarting, energised, determined to make it through.’
Angela lives near Macclesfield with her husband Michael luger, a former director of Manchester Business School. She has two grown-up children from a previous marriage.
AT THE start, says Spindler, exercise had been a matter of ‘ maintenance’. ‘I’ve always liked to make sure I am in reasonably good shape.’
She did zumba, keep-fit and pilates. ‘But about eight years ago I got a personal trainer and that was the catalyst. I really pushed myself and then pushed myself harder.’
She runs 15 miles a week and this June will do the Duchenne Dash, a gruelling 24-hour bike ride from london to Paris. As part of her training she cycled to her Mum’s house on Mother’s Day — a 45-mile trip.
So how long before this ultra-performance culture filters down and we’re deemed ‘lazy’ for not joining the office team or we’re written off if we haven’t run a marathon?
It is discriminatory, says Professor Spicer. ‘let’s say you love singing in choirs and are not a fitness junkie — that might be looked down upon and not seen as signing up to the corporate culture of wellness.
‘Or if someone is mildly overweight, it may be seen as a sign of laxness — in their personal and professional life.
‘ Many people feel under pressure not just to perform at high levels in work but also outside the office,’ he says.
‘Spending lots of time training might put them under additional pressures and stress, which can then trigger anxiety and stressrelated issues.’
‘Fitness is supposed to be an escape from work, a chance to switch off, but it can become an extension of work.’
Wherever you work, ‘ to be a good employee, you’re supposed to participate in all of these things. It becomes a way of extending the working day.’
The days of being a couch potato are numbered.