Welcome to the Big Careers Small Children Podcast. My name is Verena Hefti. I believe that no one should have to choose between becoming a CEO and enjoying their young children for much too long. Amazing people like I'm sure you listening right now have found themselves stuck on the career ladder when they have children and that leads to gender inequality in senior leadership because. Because those people don't progress to senior leadership and the same stale, often male middle class people leading our organizations. We must change this together. And I hope that many of you listening right now will progress to the most senior leadership roles that you like where you can make the decisions that make our world a better place. Outside of the podcast, I am the CEO and founder of the Social enterprise Leaders Plus. We exist to help working parents progress their careers to senior leadership in a way that works for you and for your families. We have free events and resources on leadersplus.org where you can download helpful toolkits such as on returning from maternity leave, share parental leave, securing a promotion, dealing with workload challenges, or managing as a dual career couple. We also have an award winning fellowship community which is global for working parents who have big dreams for their careers but don't want to sacrifice their family. You'll join an absolutely wonderful group of people, a very tight knit, supportive group of parents who have your back. Together. You'll explore what your career aspirations are and you'll get advice from senior leaders who are also working parents about how to achieve those aspirations. You'll get new ideas to combine your hopes for your careers with your hope for your family. And you are supported by people who are experiencing what you're experiencing yourself. I'm really delighted that a larger majority of our fellows have made tangible changes following the program, be that becoming more senior in their roles, working shorter hours, having better flexible working arrangement. They always impress me so much with the courage that they instill in each other to do what is right for them without apologizing for having a family or apologizing for wanting that top job. Details are on leadersplus.org/Fellowship. Today I'm chatting to Jane Hollinshead about getting to C-suite via Squiggly Career. Her story of being one of the first people working part time in a law firm in the 90s and why she argues for people to see their careers in faces and there's plenty of advice for how to ask for flexible working request. Enjoy the conversation.

Okay, so Jane Hollinshead. I am currently the Chief People Officer at Canary Wharf Group. For those of you that are less familiar with what Canary Wharf Group does - It's the landowner that owns all the land and the spaces in the district that is Canary Wharf. It's extraordinary company that's gone through a huge amount of change in its 30 year history, continues to go through change. My responsibilities are as chief people officer for 1300 employees that we have in our business and I also have group leadership responsibility for ESG agenda, for our customer experience agenda, which is how we engage with our existing customers and future customers, learning and development and group legal function.

So quite a bit on your plate and we should say to our non UK listeners, Canary Wharf is this big financial district in London and when you walk it's. Maybe it's. You're now making a face which our listeners can't see. Maybe that's not the right definition. But basically it has lots of very tall raised buildings and you can see it from very far.

It's true. I mean it is a diversified district, so actually it's probably well described as being a city within a city. So whilst we do have tenants who are from financial services, we also have three and a half thousand residents that live here. We have a build to rent operation with more buildings coming on stream for occupation over the next 12 months. We've just been voted as being the number one retail destination in the UK too. We have 320 retail outlets and five shopping malls and we're also developing 2 million square foot of life sciences in one of our new assets which is called North Quay. So actually quite a lot going on.

Quite a lot going on. And I've been lucky enough to be at your offices for our last two senior directors workshops for the fellowship program. So thank you very much. Yes. And I live 20 minutes on the DLR, as in the local train from Canary Wharf in Lewisham. So also local I should call my shopping more.

Yeah. You're a neighbour.

Absolutely. So your children are grown up?

Yeah, yeah, my children are grown up. So I have two boys, one of whom is 24 and the other is 26. So I had my children relatively young in a previous life when I was a lawyer.

So I want to pick up on that. Having children young, I think a lot of people say that that can have a real impact on their long term career trajectory. You ended up as a chief people officer in this very significant organization. My aim as a social entrepreneur is to help more people have your trajectory. Do you have any? I'm sure you can't put 26 years experience in a sentence or two, but what is it do you think that made the difference? Why did you end up in that role?

What, The role that I do now compared to the role that I started off with. I mean, it's. It's an interesting question that probably needs some in depth therapy to identify the answer. I think in part, I was never 100% clear about what I wanted to do in my career. So when I started off, I actually wanted to go to art school. That was my great ambition. I, at the very last minute did a huge U-turn and read law at university and was absolutely convinced that I was only going to do a degree in law and then I was going to go back to art. And then I decided that maybe I qualify as a lawyer, but then once I qualified, I go back to art. So I think what was incredibly helpful, both in terms of my career trajectory and also having children, is that I always felt a bit like I was only passing through on the way to something else. It hadn't ever been my lifelong ambition to be a lawyer in an international law firm. And I think in some ways I was also very well supported by the legal profession, which at the time was actually relatively linear. So if you wanted to do different things and you wanted flexibility in your overall career development, you probably had to step outside of law to make that happen. And I think it does come back to how you think as a woman in terms of your own professional development, whether you want to have a squiggly career, and that's how I describe my own career, is actually being very squiggly because it hasn't built within it, Flexibility. You know, you can move on and off ramps depending on what all the other things are that are going on in your life at that time. And I think also going into a profession like law as it was, and I suspect it's really, really different now, it was very, very demanding. And so actually having the sort of mental backstop of thinking I might not be here for the long term gave a certain level of independence and confidence in terms of some of the bigger decisions I was making about when I was going to have a family, how I was going to work when I did have a family, which turns out to be quite helpful. Not having that lifelong ambition only to be a lawyer was quite beneficial, I think, on hindsight.

Interesting. And you mentioned the word off-ramp. Can you describe an example of a time where you felt you were consciously choosing to be off ramp?

Sure. So I worked, like many lawyers in the 1990s and probably now, to pretty insane hours when I was A junior lawyer. And I was probably my own worst enemy in terms of that work ethic. I don't think it was anyone else that was imposing it on me. I just felt as a junior female lawyer in the city, that's the ethic that was needed in order to flourish and survive. But clearly it was absolutely incompatible with having a family. So when I was pregnant with my eldest child, I made a decision that it was incompatible with the work I was doing. So I was incredibly fortunate to have an extraordinarily supportive partner who I worked for at the time who was prepared to back me to work three days a week. So, and this was in 1998, so it's a long, long time ago. And that was a really pivotal period in terms of moving off ramp. If I hadn't gone off ramp, I would have left the legal profession at that point, because it was more important to me that I got to spend time with my kids when they were very, very small than it was waiting, postponing, compromising, in order to keep on committing to my legal career at the time. And there's so many factors that go with that. I was also incredibly fortunate that I had some phenomenal clients who were also really comfortable in backing me to work on a three day a week. And when you've got within, you know, you're thinking about your stakeholders when you make decisions, you know, the ones that are actually paying the legal fees are actually quite pivotal and compelling when you're having the conversation with the partnership about, I still have real value in this business, even working on this flexible arrangement. And in truth, it wasn't flexible. You know, I was being super flexible. And it was only part time by title, not part time by content. And that really, really made a difference. So it was unusual, but it was facilitated by some great clients, a very, very supportive partner. I did have an excellent team around me at the time and a lot of support at home, but it was still off ramp.

It's coming through really clearly how you feel very lucky about support you've received, but you still had to be the one having the confidence to ask the question about getting that. How was that for you? Was it something that you lost sleep over, or did you just one day say, okay, I'm gonna ask if I can work three days?

And that, no, I didn't lose sleep over it. I think it comes back to the conversation we were having just before about maybe another way of putting it is part of having a sort of squiggly career mindset is never minding Too much not caring too much about a certain outcome, because I think if you are not overly invested in any one outcome, you're far more confident in walking away if you don't get the outcome that you seek. And from my perspective, although I was very lucky and very fortunate in terms of the ecosystem that I had within the law firm, it wasn't the be all and end all to me. And so it was something that I was very happy to lean in and ask for, because what did I have to lose? And in truth, I can't remember. I mean, it's obviously quite a long time ago, but I can't remember really caring a huge amount about if they'd said no. Because if they said no, I would have probably, you know, picked my bags up and thought about what I was going to do next. And I think the really important thing for me coming out of that is that the loyalty that was created by, you know, the partner saying to me, yeah, we've got you covered on this and we trust you to do this, even though I'm not entirely sure whether there'd been any other female partners in my firm that had done it before, is that I was very, very dedicated to that business for a long time after because of that demonstration of trust that they'd had in me.

And today you are in a role where you do have overall responsibility for signing off. I mean, I'm sure you're not signing off it personally, the flexible working arrangement, but you do have that power to set the direction. I want to ask you something else. So we run fellowship programs for working parents to support them to progress their careers against the odds. And there are still tons of odds. If you look at the data, mothers with caring responsibilities progress less. They have bigger gender pay gap than other women. There's anecdotal evidence of fathers who work flexibly being impacted in a career progression. It's very different between organizations. But we have, for example, 20% of our working parents work in the NHS, where the structures and systems are. It's harder to get to a yes, let me put it that way politely. And so thinking about your experience, but also thinking about being at the receiving end of these flexible working requests, what are the mistakes people should avoid making when they're asking for something like those three days instead of five?

I think it's always a good place to, to start in your thinking, to work out the interdependencies that exist in any negotiation and being able to think in the shoes of the other person that's on the Other side of the conversation is incredibly helpful. And for me, there's an aspect of what does the individual want in terms of their flexibility, but also recognition that there is displacement definitionally and commonly created by that change. And does the displacement that's caused by that shift in working patterns put more pressure on your colleagues? And so I think thinking about the individual versus the team is always something that I would imagine, would demonstrate a certain level of maturity and nuance that as an employer would make you take seriously that type of thought process. I think also recognizing what the demands of the employer perspective is also something that is sometimes missing. And when I think back to, you know, my own personal circumstances when I did work part time, and I 100% get that the world has changed an enormous amount and that when I did it, I was more of an outlier and an anomaly than, you know, the society and the world of work that we find ourselves in today. I was always very mindful of not overburdening those around me with the consequences of the decision that I was choosing to make for my own personal shift. So I think that would be something that in the position that I find myself in now, would give me some degree of reassurance about the role that that person would play within the organization and in the bigger ecosystem.

Yeah, I think there's something that comes through from your answers which is about taking responsibility for the system so understanding like you did, that the clients are the ones that will need things to be delivered and thinking through how you can make that work.

Yeah.

Clearly you somehow brought them on board because they were supportive of this arrangement.

Yeah, that's a very good summary that summarized it far better than I explained it. And the impact on your colleagues and your team members. Team wellbeing is a consideration as well as individual well being.

Absolutely. And I've seen many examples in the parents, we support that when they started talking to their teams rather than coming up, you know, saying this is the solution I want, but actually talking to the teams, understanding what the other people think and want to do, and coming to solutions collectively, it can be really a helpful approach.

I think also that the other aspect of it is the ongoing fluidity of the flexible working arrangements. So again, maybe this is something that's more apparent to me with hindsight, you know, because I my children are no longer children. But it's not a static arrangement. Caring responsibilities by their very nature will fluctuate. And I think if people are only ever thinking of one specific point in time, then it's not recognizing that this is actually quite a long term iteration. And it's, to your point, around what's off ramp and on ramp. And you know, in some ways I felt that I was a lot more grateful for being around my children when they were teenagers. And that's when genuine flexibility matters, because you cannot predict when your teenage children are going to need you, because they probably can't predict when they're going to need you. And that is in some ways infinitely more difficult to manage because of the unpredictability at that age, as opposed to babies, which is, you know, bar catastrophes and emergencies, is actually relatively able to anticipate. And when I had children that were older, were teenagers, at that point I was running my own business. I was neither a lawyer nor was I doing this role because I set up my own business, which I then ran for six years where I was running my own consultancy practice. And at that point I had utter flexibility in terms of how and where and when I did work, which is probably running in parallel to the on ramp, off ramp conversation we're having. And my definition of what a squiggly career might look like.

I think it's really empowering to hear how you had all these different directions in your career that were fulfilling in different ways at different points. I guess the question in my mind is why you ended up in a C suite role or how you got onto that on ramp again. Because when you look at the FTSE Women Leaders Review, that's where there are massive amounts of women missing. And one of the root causes is that the stopping progression around age 35, 40, when children are young, and then never getting onto that on ramp again. What happened in your case, how did that on ramp come about?

In practical terms, it came about because I'd been running my own business, as I said, for five or six years. That business had been a one woman consultancy business where I had been working with various real estate industry, not for profits listed PLCs, advisory companies. And I was introduced to the chief exec of Canary Wharf Group, who was relatively new to the UK and new to Canary Wharf Group as a business. And having learnt about what his plans were, what some of the opportunities and challenges were, I decided that it was a one off opportunity that I was never going to get again. And I was in the very, very fortunate position of being able to say, yeah, I'm in, I'll do it. And at that point I wound up my consultancy business to jump into C suite, big corporate life again. And I do think it's, this is all linking in, threading into the sort of theme of this conversation, you know, which is some elements of it are opportunistic. I had had my children relatively young age, not very young age, but a relatively young age. So at the point when I hit my early 50s, I did have the autonomy and the freedom to decide that I want to jump back into mainstream corporate life. And I think there's a lesson in that because it also goes back to what I was saying about flexibility not being a static issue. And I think for me, one of the reasons why I had children early is because I wanted to create as much autonomy when I was older to go do all the things that I might not be able to do when I was in my 30s. And this whole gig of being a working woman is I wonder how much we think about the fact that this is a long game and we're in it for a long game. And so if you any think or are only absorbed by what's going to happen in the next two years or three years, you might not be building a plan for what you might want to do in 20 years. And so if you then layer on top of that that agility in terms of how you stay on track in the intervening period, then I think it just gives some tenure and resilience to your career over a longer period of time. And in my case, that did enable me to have the opportunity to jump at this as a role much later on in my life. And in all truth, if I'd taken a very linear role of just being a lawyer for my entire working career, I probably wouldn't have lasted the course because I either would have burnt out or I would have given up one or the other. So having that inbuilt resilience and that approach of not caring too much, I think gives you the tools to create longevity in the trajectory that is your, Your own personal career. That might just be my own personal experience.

I think you're absolutely right. Aviva Wittenberg Cox, who I've also interviewed for this podcast, talks about the phases of a women's career, and she says exactly that you need to accept that there are different phases and that if you ever come to one of those mentor networking events, I will introduce you to her. She's fantastic. And she said the 50s are the golden age. I think for those of us who are children, slightly later might be slightly later, but we'll all work till 70 anyways, probably, so that's something to look forward to. Well, if you like working, that's okay.

I think there's another bit which does augment that point. And again it comes back to not being too linear and taking a few risks, which is I don't think I would be in the position of doing this job I'm doing now if I hadn't built over the preceding 30 years a whole different set of skill sets. Because I think the more senior roles that you do, technical expertise is less important. It's more about have you got good judgment, are you sufficiently agile to join dots on things like risk or opportunities. And that comes. And you can talk about that being intuition, but in truth intuition is just a whole series of experiences that you've accumulated over the years. And I also served as a non exec on quite a few boards of very, very different organizations. You know, one was a big G15 housing association in London, one is fund manager in real estate, one was People Advisory board. And so when you start collecting all that experience over the years, it does give you a real wealth of examples and incidents to fall back on when you're in that senior role where you do need to draw on that experience to exercise good judgment. And also the other thing is that I think by the time you hit your 50s, you've probably been through different degrees, but a whole series of different crises. And in my case I was a practicing lawyer during the financial crisis, which was actually pretty hard work.

That sounds like an understatement.

And knowing that things are very rarely as awful as you might imagine, but equally things and never quite the nirvana you hope for does give you a certain bit of grit in the system that once you get older you can deploy it very similar to parenting.

You strike me as someone very resilient just by having carved your own path in the way that you did. Was that a natural thing or is it something that you consciously trained yourself to be? And if yes, how.

I suspect I'm probably quite resilient to start with. There was a couple of instances where I realized that I wasn't quite as resilient as I thought. One, when I was actually had small children where I was still practicing as a lawyer and I didn't see the warning signs and I actually got very ill and it was something that affected my immune system and I had to take six months out of work and I suspect it was because I was just trying to be everything to everyone all at once and I was the one that was suffering. And I think that was a bit of a Damascene moment for me because I realized that if you are going to Be resilient. You've got to turn the volume down on quite a lot of things, otherwise you will just fall off the edge of a cliff. That was quite game changing for me because I realized that I wasn't completely indefatigable. And if you're going to have a long and successful and fulfilling career, you do have to treat it as a marathon and pace yourself. So I think there was that which made me recalibrate a bit in terms of what resilience meant to me. I think the other thing is, and it's. I'm sure there's so many people that you've spoken to that say the same thing. I think children make you resilient, they make you grounded. You realise that there's very few things in your life that are going to matter as much as your children and it just completely repositions your focus, I think. And that definitionally can make you a bit more grounded and resilient about how you approach your career. It's not all about you, the individual anymore. It's, you know, there's other people that you have to be responsible for.

Yeah. It really strikes me how you share how confident you were in negotiating and saying in your head when you would walk away, which was because you had other things in your life that were important by the sound of it, I mean, or reckless. Well, it worked out in the end, didn't it? Yeah. I'm struck by what you're saying, is that having that C suite role, it's been absolutely critical to have those different experiences that you got because you weren't saying this is the one path and let's just take one step after another up the career ladder? Yeah. That's really lovely to hear. Thank you for sharing. Was there any stigma that you had as a result of being the first person to trial a new arrangement or the first person to change? I'm probably not the first lawyer to.

Leave a job and do something else.

But, you know, I'm sure a lot of your peers kept up on that normal in quotation marks, career ladder.

Well, they were probably better lawyers than I was.

I can't comment on that.

No. I didn't face stigma about the way I chose to work when I was working part time at all. I think probably somewhat naively, I deluded myself into thinking that if I was going to do it as a role model, then there'd be an influx of other female lawyers that did it. But, you know, that wasn't something that really took off during the time that I was practicing. I think there is definitely a sentiment and maybe less so now, but when I was transitioning from working in private practice as a lawyer into mainstream corporate world or consultancy world or however you want to describe it, and possibly a UK thing that it's very hard for lawyers to make that jump out of private practice. And there was a fair amount of challenge about whether this was a sensible thing to be doing. And I did get lot of very well meaning advice about the fact that it was a bad idea and I really shouldn't be doing anything as rash as, you know, setting up my own business as a consultant. And that consultant was not in any way, I didn't have a practicing certificate. I mean, I was making a career change completely. That was a little bit disappointing because obviously sometimes the very nature of careers is such that they don't enable you to take things to the next level or to move in a more tangential way. I think in my case it probably just encouraged me more to make it work because I do think that there are so many women out there that are building up fantastic transferable skills but they quite, sometimes they don't recognize that they are transferable and they're kept within a silo and, and there's a huge amount of capital in the transferability of those skills and you know, so much that you can do with them if you reflect on what they might be and where you might take them.

Looking back, is there any advice that you would give to your younger self? Anything you'd do differently?

I wouldn't get worked up about absolutely everything. I wouldn't sweat the small stuff. I absolutely wouldn't try to be the perfectionist that was so important to me when I was in my 20s. I would have worked hard to be better timekeeper. One of my Sons, still aged 24, tells me how I was always late in the school playground, which makes me feel absolutely awful.

Oh, it makes me feel awful because I said that to my mother all the time. It makes me feel really awful actually - shouldn't be saying that.

And you know, just to enjoy what you do. Don't do something if it doesn't give you fulfillment unless there is such a critical driver why you have to continue to do it, you know, and I think I don't say that lightly because it's a really, really big deal these days. You know, cost of living is a huge problem. It's, you know, the job opportunities aren't there and you know, people clearly have to consider the financial constraints on the decisions that they can make. And that's, you know, I think that's, that's very, very difficult because that's a great source of stress, isn't it? You know, if you don't have the, to be in the privileged position where you can actually look for something that gives you more flexibility because it has such an economic impact on what you want to provide for yourself and your children, then you're not really in control. And, you know, that's, that's one of the great causes of stress. But, you know, I guess the other side of that is don't underestimate your value.

Excellent advice. So if someone is listening to this and can identify with this picture of being stuck in a rigid career ladder, in a rigid role, perhaps, and they want to start doing something about it, but they're so busy that they can't find the headspace. What would be a simple five minute things they could do this week to get started, to move into a more appropriate class.

I was thinking about this and there's a very good friend of mine who I'd known in a professional capacity as well as a social capacity. And I spoke to her when I was thinking of, you know, making a big jump, and I got her to do the analysis of what she thought that I would be good at in terms of next steps. Because I think those that know you well are far kinder and more generous about your skills and attitudes than you are. And I think if you are really lacking the brain space or the time for reflection about what are your strengths, what are your skills, what are those possible big leaps that you can make in a very different direction. Get someone else to do it for you, because the chances are it's going to be much more objective and probably much better for your own self confidence to see someone else write that about you than you write that about yourself. And for me, that was quite a big point in terms of some of the decision making that I made about what I was going to do in the next stage of my career to have that third party input.

That's such excellent and practical advice. Thank you very much. If people want to find out more about your work, your organization, where should they head?

Well, Canary Wharf group is going to be all over the Internet, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, TikTok.

Yeah, you're the second podcast guest today that mentioned TikTok.

I feel like I really need, believe me, that's not something that I'm all personally all over, but that's how you can find out about Canary Wharf Group. And I'm on LinkedIn too.

Lovely. It's been such a pleasure Jane to talk to your absolutely brilliant storyteller. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you very much for the invite. I've enjoyed it.

I really appreciate you listening. Thank you so much and I always love to hear from our listeners. If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, just go to Verena Hefti and I'd be delighted to hear your feedback And your suggestions or just have you say hi.

Likewise, if you do feel passionately about gender equality and you want to support a female led podcast, then please do leave a review and share it with a friend. Just because at the moment podcasting is still a very, very male dominated environment. Most of the top charging podcasts are led by men. I really love all the people who've joined from the podcast, our fellowship program and if you want to do the same then please head over to leadersclass.org/Fellowship in order to get access to a community of support to help you combine an ambitious career with young children together with people who have your track. See you next week.