Our Turn (3 page)

Owning Yourself

IF THE FIRST TASK OF LEADING
is to figure out your goals, the first responsibility has to be the capacity to lead yourself—to understand and stand up for your values, your vision, and yes, your own style. To be anything other than authentic will inevitably compromise your confidence. It will
also compromise the trust others place in you. You can't lead effectively, or for long, without earning and keeping the trust of people you work with. Authenticity matters, and it matters more today than it ever did. When the line between public and private has blurred, when so many interactions take place in a virtual sphere, a leader has to walk her talk. No one should be defined by the expectations of others, especially not by those who feel it's their business to dictate what success looks like.

When I was at the public broadcaster, sometimes there were suggestions—whispers, blogs, innuendo—that my success had to involve sex, one way or another. I even ended up on the cover of
Frank
magazine with talk-show host George Stroumboulopoulos amid allegations we were dating—we weren't! But the gossip magazine, along with more than a few souls at the CBC, assumed there had to be something going on. George had had a show on CBC's Newsworld when I arrived, and after I'd watched it, I thought here's this great young interviewer who could bring to the network a quirky late-night chat show that featured Canadians. At the time, there was no other late-night show that did that. But people assumed that we had to be fooling around or why else would I promote this dude with an earring who used to be on MuchMusic. Which is how the rumours, and our pictures, landed in
Frank
, and then became fodder for a rather rape-y fictional sex scene in my office that an odious blogger dreamed up.

It was a campaign, the first of a few I've seen, this one designed to keep me in my place and send a message to George that he hadn't earned his success. Landing multiple
awards and critical kudos—as well as a place on US television and now as the host of the most popular show on Canadian TV,
Hockey Night in Canada
—was one way George responded. I didn't shrink from supporting George's ongoing growth with the network, but ignoring the whispers wasn't easy. Though it helped a lot when other women, many of them producers in TV and radio, told me they had also experienced the same kind of rumour campaign on the shows they had helmed.

But my daughters didn't have the benefit of that perspective. Suddenly, I had to tell my girls not to look at things in the paper, not to believe things they happened to see, or hear, and that if they had any questions they should ask me about them. My oldest daughter, who was eleven, took to policing the web on my behalf, “reporting abuse” whenever she spotted nasty comments online. But by the time all of this unfolded, I had already had my inner reckoning. And I was determined not to change a thing about the way I looked, dressed or acted to please or to counter the petty and salacious judgements of a few.

Unfortunately, women have been boxed in by social stereotypes for so long (virgins, vamps, mother hens, gossips, dumb blondes, shrews, bitches and on and on it goes) that we pay a high price fighting our way out. We can be so fearful of falling into one of these categories that we become afraid to be ourselves, afraid of not being liked or accepted, not taken seriously, of ruffling feathers. In the end, it's tempting to throw all kinds of walls up around our true selves. On a flight recently, I read an article in
Porter
magazine that once again explored the idea that self-doubt among high-achieving women—a.k.a.,
Imposter Syndrome—has become a chronic condition of the twenty-first century. What stuck with me were the words of a fifty-five-year-old CEO of a very successful PR firm who said of her professional self, “I put her on when I go to work.” She viewed the successful professional that she presented to the world as a fake, and was finding it harder and harder to “put her on.” Her closet told the story: she chose clothes to suit the tastes of the people she was meeting that day, cladding herself in hippie suede to meet the creative types, florals for clients, black suits for business. She had dressed to please others for so long she had forgotten what pleased
her
, which left her angry, feeling isolated and exhausted. I didn't doubt it. But I take heart in the fact that, increasingly, women are talking openly about the pressures, both internal and external, that they face when they attempt to fit like square pegs into limiting, imaginary holes. The only hope of overcoming these kinds of pressures is to drown them out with smarter voices—our own included. The spontaneous words of women I didn't even know reminded me of that in those early days at the CBC; with the reach of social media, women's voices are carrying far and wide.

At Twitter, the movement to stop defining women by how they look or what they wear is one of the more popular conversations on the platform. #AskHerMore, for instance, encourages red-carpet reporters at the Oscars and other awards ceremonies to ask female celebrities about more than their frocks and accessories. The hashtag was launched in 2014 by the Representation Project, a California-based group that aims to eradicate harmful stereotypes, especially those that hold women back, and it's not just celebrities who
champion the cause. As one woman tweeted last March: “Bradley Cooper gets asked about the community of actors and Lupita [Nyong'o] gets asked about her dress.” As Reese Witherspoon said, “We're more than just our dresses.”

The point is that not only should we not allow outdated ideas to box us in, we should go further and take pride in the traits that distinguish us as individuals, the characteristics, whatever they may be, that make each of us different. To be sure, it's still a man's world, and a white man's world at that, but if today's chiefs and rulers are any barometer, the winds of change are blowing everywhere. All around us is evidence that leaders can be who they want to be, project whatever image they want to project and be recognized for what they achieve, not judged or held back by their gender, youth or high heels, the colour of their skin or the sex of their partner. The rules are being rewritten, and in many cases, erased. We're living in a time when the premier of Canada's most populous province is openly lesbian, where a black man is the president of the United States, where the founder of Facebook can lead one of the world's largest companies in a hoodie; and a woman can run the CBC in heels—high and red.

The highest-paid female chief executive in the US is a beautiful case in point: She started life as a man. Martine Rothblatt, who earned $38 million in 2013, and made a previous fortune as a founder of Sirius radio, went on to launch United Therapeutics, the Maryland-based pharmaceutical company she now runs. A recent
New York
magazine profile of Rothblatt quoted a friend of Martine's who said the subject of her gender never came up: “Bright people don't talk
about these things. The body is but a shell. It's the mind and the heart that count.”

Hiding who you are is not a value in the information age. And, like it or not, despite all the ways you think you can be anonymous on the Internet, hiding is increasingly harder to pull off when social media makes it possible to share parts of our lives, and the lives of others, in intimate ways: family photos, movies we watch, celebratory milestones, wins, losses, likes, dislikes and ordinary moments. The more we share the more we invite others to connect, and connections are key to building networks in the personal and professional spheres of our lives; networks, as we all know, are the breeding grounds of opportunity. The ability to be yourself, and show the world all the ways you are who you are, has become something to trade on. It might make you uncomfortable or wistful for walls, but in the web-driven selfie world, there is a perceived value in a certain vanity; it's not a character flaw, it's a commodity.

Mommy bloggers have made small fortunes reviewing products that feature in their families' lives. Job interviews are becoming desk-top auditions. (Jennifer Lawrence actually landed her Oscar-winning role in
Silver Linings Playbook
with a Skype audition from her parents' home in Kentucky.) Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat create celebrities bigger than movie stars, and not just the Justin Bieber variety. Consider Michelle Phan, a struggling young student and waitress in Florida, who uploaded how-to makeup videos, attracted more than a million views, got a $1 million contract from Google to create more; four million clicks later, she found herself sponsored by L'Oréal with her own line of cosmetics.

Standing out amid the world's noise and clutter, online and off, can be an advantage, a competitive edge. And after a few bruising weeks, that's how I came to see my own story at the CBC. Fighting dated perceptions that success had to look a certain way, or that smart and serious had to mean bland, was a key battle in the war to modernize the network. At HGTV and the Food Network, I'd seen how we could create domestic “stars” in Canada, but it did mean bucking convention and then taking on that all-too-Canadian urge to clip its tall poppies. To succeed I had to cultivate a bit of a red-carpet sensibility at the public broadcaster, to recast it as a place where hits were made, stardom was possible and women could still be “more than just our dresses.”

[ II ]

Next, Buy into Your People

A COUPLE OF YEARS INTO MY TIME
at Alliance Atlantis, I organized a field trip. The executives from HGTV and the Food Network were, as you might imagine, passionate about helping people live their best lives and were expert in the ways of duck confit, Le Creuset cookware and elegant decor. Increasingly, the program pitches that caught their discerning eye reflected the best in taste and style, shows that would elevate the experience and expertise of the audience. They were aimed at people who had all the right knives and all the right pans and all the right tastes. The lives they presented were exquisite, the locales even more so. I asked, “But what about the people watching in Moncton who only have time to shop for their potatoes and their pillows at Walmart? How do they relate to
Fine Cooking
and
World of Interiors
when they're reading
Canadian Living
?” We had focused so hard on presenting the best, most exotic and aspirational shows that we were at risk of building a dreamland that depressed rather than inspired.

Without a real research budget to prove my instincts about our target audience, I decided to take the networks' executives
on a train ride out of Toronto and as far west into suburbia as a GO ticket could carry us. I had a real estate agent meet us at the other end and show us around four houses for sale—two-storey family homes and townhouses—and I told the executives to take a good look inside each one. They were homes decorated with care, down to the accent cushions bought at the local big-box store
.
The restaurants in the neighbourhood served good solid family fare, and, on a big celebration night, people went to Milestones, not the local bistro. We glimpsed the world of people living their best lives while shopping at Costco and ripping recipes out of magazines they picked up in the supermarket checkout line. And my reasons for giving us all a peek into those lives were straightforward: We had to get out of our little urban bubble. We had to recognize that people, their choices and their aspirations, were different everywhere, and those differences mattered.

It turned out to be a trip worth taking. Not only did we bond as a team, the shows they pitched after that fact-finding mission had a whole different feel. We went from gourmet fare and unpronounceable ingredients to shows such as
Licence to Grill,
from
Dream Castles
to
Property Virgins
, programs that invited everyone to explore exciting but accessible possibilities on the home front. Sure, it was still worth seeking to inspire and elevate viewers, but if you make them feel like they don't belong in the tent, they'll never enter it, and you'll never reach them at all.

The experience of that field trip to the suburbs came back to me in those early months at the CBC. In many ways, it looked like the public broadcaster was losing touch with the people
it was serving, and the distance was costing them dearly by every measure that mattered. CBC's staffers were committed to producing high-quality, critically acclaimed programming, but making shows that would also reach the wide audience of taxpayers who supported the broadcaster seemed less their focus. They had also lost faith in their own abilities to create hits. Of course I couldn't put the staff of the CBC on a train anywhere to help connect them with viewers, but I could go to them to talk about why we
had to
think beyond the white walls of our headquarters on Front Street. It would also give me the chance to hear from them directly how they felt about the network, what mattered to them, and whether, together, we could reach that common ground.

If the first step in leading is to know yourself, discovering what matters to those around you lands right behind. You have to understand a corporate culture before you can hope to change it. And in these times, when technology is forcing all enterprise to adapt to the rapidly changing market, that's a principle with broad applications.

I knew it wouldn't be easy. Of all the challenges I faced when I arrived at the CBC, getting the team to embrace a new culture of possibilities was the most daunting, as it tends to be in any organization. New leaders can be tempted to simply clean house, sweep out the personnel of past regimes and surround themselves with a new guard. I could tell I had surprised a lot of them by not firing them all and starting from scratch. But coming into a workplace as storied, and complicated, as the CBC, I knew I needed the help of people with a history at the organization who understood how things work, and what didn't work. I had to depend on their experience to
even get a footing in the place. Digging deep to find out what people know, what they value and what their goals actually are is key to having influence—and influence, not control, is the new power, a concept I'll tackle in a later chapter. It comes down to emotional intelligence. Exercising that kind of smarts was never thought to be a necessity in the corner office, but today it's indispensable. I don't think you can ever truly change someone's internal value structure. But by learning what they value most and what they want to achieve, you can work out where their ideas intersect with and support your overall vision. You can't get buy-in from people until you have bought into them.

I could prize promptness above all, and expect everyone to show up to every meeting on time and prepared to work. You could think meetings are the worst waste of time because being out in the field getting the job done is your top priority. But we are not that far apart in our shared values. You and I both value dedication to the job, we just approach it differently. If you can demonstrate how those values fit within the broader framework for the success you envision—show that you really are shooting for the same net—suddenly you find you're on the same side, building a team that you can lead in new directions.

Research has found that women tend to be particularly good at finding common ground, asking the right questions, the right way, and actively listening for points of potential connection. In a 2011 survey, the
Harvard Business Review
examined how these “nurturing” competencies of leadership vary between women and men. Using data from 7,280 international leaders in corporate, government and organizational
spheres, private and public, it found that women significantly outscored men in their ability to inspire and motivate others, communicate powerfully, collaborate, build relationships and establish long-term goals. The idea that female leaders are naturally nurturing, sensitive and compassionate might sound like a motherhood issue, but the research discovered that women also excel in areas of taking initiative and driving results, characteristics long thought to be strengths associated with male leaders. That the
Harvard Business Review
, a venerable bastion of management insight, took the time to analyze these soft-touch attributes, speaks to the larger point that they have become crucial traits of modern leaders, male or female. Increasingly, being a nice guy is simply good for business.

Whether being a woman shaped my efforts to bridge differences and build a unified team at the CBC, I can't say. I do know that it wasn't customary for the male leaders who came before me to leave the so-called “white fortress on Front Street” to travel across the country and ask the CBC's own people what they thought was up with this place and how they would define success for the CBC. I made it my business to speak to as many people as I could—one-on-one, over coffee, at town halls—from television, radio, news, advertising, marketing, all departments.

For many of the employees I talked with, “metrics” was the big worry. They feared that I'd be sitting in a corner office dictating how we'd get a million viewers an airing, and that any show that missed that mark would fall from the schedules. They were also sure that chasing ratings would mean I'd be about “dumbing down” the CBC, because
in their interpretation, popular could only mean lowbrow, which fuelled fears that the public broadcaster was about to lose its identity as the country's hallowed purveyor of high-quality content.

They were important conversations to have, in part because they gave me a chance to explain my broader mandate. The one-million-viewer mark was a goal, sure, but really just one step in attaining the big prize, which to my mind was, and always had been, for the CBC to really mean something to more Canadians. During the three-month lockout of CBC employees the year before I started, a discouraging Decima poll taken in the midst of the bitter labour dispute had suggested only 10 percent of Canadians missed CBC programming enough to consider the loss of it a “major inconvenience.” I wanted the network to be more vital than that. I felt Canadians deserved to have something they wanted to watch on their public broadcaster. Otherwise they'd be right to think of it as a waste of taxpayers' money. As I told a reporter in my first interview after accepting the CBC job, my definition of success would be standing on a street corner and hearing someone say, “Hey, did you see that great show on CBC last night?”

But the major hurdle was persuading people that “popular” was not a synonym for “dumb.” Many worried that high ratings and high-quality programming were incompatible. When I asked how they defined “high quality,” they often fell back on the “I know it when I see it” argument. Yet what I saw, and what I tried to persuade many of them to see, was a tragic disconnect that prioritizes winning New York Festivals awards over producing programming that Canadians connect
with—dangerous, especially, when it's the viewers who pay for the CBC.

Producing programs both smart and popular, I thought, was the best way out of the hole we'd fallen into. If we didn't make shows people wanted to watch, we risked losing even more relevancy—and revenue: the advertisers would turn away. At the time, government funding covered about half of what it took to run the CBC. If there was a drop in advertising revenue, we'd be in big trouble. It was a very fine balancing act for sure, but I was certain we could get there. And once we'd earned trust from both the audience and advertisers, we could take them to really interesting and adventurous places. But that would take time. We had to lay the groundwork and build.

For every
Murdoch Mysteries
—one of the most popular and acclaimed series on the network—programmers created the breathing room to try something more risky elsewhere on the schedule, as we did in 2008 with
The Kids in the Hall: Death Comes to Town
. It was a delicate balance but one we needed in order to survive, to pay the bills for essentials such as television news, which, done right, was expensive, and radio, which was less so, but didn't generate revenue. CBC had a lot of important reasons not just to exist but to thrive, and it was putting itself in jeopardy by not grabbing the reins where it could.

Not everyone agreed with me. When I toured the country talking to staffers, I also held town halls, along with the heads of comedy and drama, to ask viewers what they wanted to see on their public broadcaster. I brought my schedule of the new programs I'd lined up, and some in the audience were livid, particularly diehard CBC fans with a long-standing connection to the network. One evening on the east coast, a
famous local actor stood up and said, “How dare you! You're a public broadcaster and you're doing reality TV?”

“Okay,” I said, “is there a public broadcaster you think that we should look up to? Who should we be emulating?”

“The BBC,” he replied.

I reminded him that the BBC broadcast
Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, Dancing with the Stars
and
Who Do You Think You Are?
—all reality-TV programs. And, unlike the CBC, the BBC had chosen to run these popular shows without any need to generate ad revenue. (The BBC is funded by the sale of television licences, and has no need to supplement its government funding with commercials in order to survive.)

That heated exchange was emblematic of the unrealistic expectations thrown at the CBC. But step by step, we renovated the creaky primetime schedule, adding popular shows like
Being Erica
, reinvesting in stalwarts like
The Nature of Things
and
The National
, and
Wheel of Fortune
(yes, we aired that show, too!) started to turn in CBC-TV's favour.

Then Deliver the Goods

THERE ARE MOMENTS AS A LEADER
when speed and decisiveness matter above all else. Being decisive endures as one of the critical attributes of any leader, especially when these days of big data present opportunities, and dilemmas, by the gigabyte. Decision-making has generally been synonymous with taking action, which may be why it's traditionally considered a strength of male leaders, as in a “man of action.” Presumably, in the evolutionary scheme of things, bringing home the bison demanded instant decisions about fight or flight. For women,
who excel at gathering knowledge, encouraging input and weighing options, speed is thought to be less of a strong suit, and there's a cart of psychological baggage that comes with that concept. Making quick decisions increases the risk of making the wrong decision, and fear of risk and failure is notorious for keeping women in the workplace tethered to the status quo (another point I'll be exploring later).

But there's also another dynamic at work, and it's one of the more insidious forms of gender stereotyping in the workplace, whether you call it “the double-bind,” implicit bias or, as it was dubbed in a 2014 Catalyst paper, “damned or doomed.” All these terms describe the idea that a female leader compelled to make fast decisions can be caught in a no-win situation. If she doesn't act fast, she is seen as too soft to lead; if she does, she's viewed as unlikeable. Or, as Sylvia Ann Hewlett, co-director of the Women's Leadership Program at Columbia Business School, describes it in her recent book,
Executive Presence,
women are regarded as ineffective if they “can't make up their minds” and as cold-hearted bitches when they do. Women, Hewlett argues, should at least “appear to be decisive.” That suggests it's better to make the wrong decision than no decision at all—in other words, go brave or go home. Speed is the key.