Speaking to Power

Luck is when your lottery numbers are called. Luck is when Publishers Clearing House brings an oversized cheque to your home. Luck smacks of a randomness that requires little effort on the part of the fortunate individual. And luck has no bearing on the rise of a successful female leader in Alberta’s business community. That requires hard work and focus, and a secret ingredient important to all businesses of today and tomorrow.

Only the women who have scaled the corporate hierarchies and lived to tell their tales know the secret of female leadership. To break through the glass ceiling of some of the province’s top companies they didn’t need protest signs, charred bras or affirmative action suits. It’s not what unifies these women; it’s what sets them apart from their male counterparts and even from each other. It’s the variety of perspectives they bring to their professional endeavours. Really, it’s about their diversity. And luck? Ha.

These women cannot be generalized into the demanding dictator, the touchy-feely team leader, the collaborative commander or the super boss; they are as diverse in their leadership styles as they are in their histories and hopes for the future. Each is a leader, not just of her present board, university or corporation, but of the young women and men of the next generation. In spite of the still miniscule number of Canadian females in senior executive positions, the following women have successfully risen to the upper echelons of their companies. And it took more than just luck.

At least until Bernie Kollman explained her strategy.

“It was a combination of good luck and good timing,” she says of her ascent to become IBM Canada Ltd.’s vice-president, public sector Alberta, in an industry not lacking in men. She adds that she needed hard work, dedication and loyalty.

While she attributes a portion of her success to luck, Kollman is being modest. She rose through the IBM ranks since graduating from the University of Regina in 1986. She says her results do the talking for her, not her gender.

“My friends will tell you I’m an adamant supporter of not generalizing by gender. I’ve had difficulty along the way, but so have my male counterparts. I work in a male-dominated industry. I’ve always worked where I’m a minority, but I don’t ever feel that way.”

And whatever progress they’ve made towards equality at work and in the home, women continue to be in the minority at the top rungs of business. In the annual Rosenzweig Report on Women at the Top Levels of Corporate Canada released in early 2009, only 7.2% of top executives were women. To find out what barriers still exist and what the next generation of leaders can expect, Alberta Venture spoke to some of the province’s most powerful women. Their stories are telling and their perspectives are often unexpected.

Margot Micallef, chair and CEO of Vista Radio Ltd. and president of Oliver Capital Partners Inc., entered the business world when she was 25 years old. “I didn’t know there was a glass ceiling, so my attitude was I could be anything, go anywhere, do anything.” Her gender did make her advancement challenging, but it didn’t stop her. “The most blatant experience I had was when I was working on a file with a more senior – male – partner in my law firm, and one of the bidders on a property we were selling refused to deal with me because I was a woman.” If he wanted to bid, he was told he would have to deal with Micallef, who was running the file. “And that was that. The reluctant and sexist bidder dealt with me and we just moved on. If the hurdles were all that blatant, it would be very easy to overcome them.”

Other challenges are not as malicious but just as discriminatory, as Peace Hills Insurance CEO Diane Brickner discovered at a previous insurance company, where she worked as an underwriter in the mid-1970s. When an opening for a field representative’s job became available, Brickner jumped at the chance. “It was a road position, and you had a company car and an expense account and you had a particular territory.”

Her boss at the time refused her the position. “I remember him calling me into his office to say, ‘I just can’t give you the job. What would happen if you were on the road and you had an accident or a flat tire? You would be in a hotel room by yourself.’ I wasn’t offended that I didn’t get it – it wasn’t that he thought I couldn’t do it, but he was just worried about my safety and he made that very clear.”

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