Next week, four female business leaders will share their insights and experiences at the Women Mean Business luncheon hosted by the Burnaby Board of Trade.
The guest panelists are Jill Krop, station manager for Global B.C. News; Christine Dacre, vice-president, financial services at TransLink; Corinne Kessel, principal at Greenscape Design and Décor; and Dianne Doyle, president and CEO of Providence Health Care.
Tickets for the event, planned for Thursday, April 6, are $45 for board of trade members and $65 for non-members. The event gets underway at 11:30 a.m. and wraps up at 2 p.m. at the Delta Burnaby Hotel, 4331 Dominion St. Get tickets by calling 604-412-0100.
The NOW caught up with Doyle to learn more about her experiences. She said guests can expect to hear her thoughts on values-based leadership, relationships and workplace cultures.
Is this what you imagined you’d be doing with your career?
No. I was pretty traditional in my choice of career, early on. I was one of these individuals who kind of always knew I was going to be a nurse, and never in my wildest dreams did I know where that wonderful career of nursing would take me. The opportunities that I’ve been given and the learnings in the positions that I’ve had. So I did not think beyond the notion of as a nurse and being in a direct care role working with patients, but early in my career I moved from that to teaching, and then from teaching to management and into an executive position in health care, and it has been so much fun.
Do you ever miss nursing?
I do, and interestingly in my role as an executive, as I go around – we do tours of our different patient care areas to interact with patients, residents, family, staff members – I really enjoy that, and I have a comfort and an ability to approach our patients and residents and family because of my nursing background. I had an opportunity yesterday just to be in an intensive care unit for our babies – it’s called a neonatal intensive care unit – so I saw new parents with this new little, tiny newborn, and so I was able to go right up to them and kneel down beside them and interact directly with them. I like human touch, so I like to, if I’m talking to one of our seniors, I like to go right up to their chair or their bed, wherever they are, and get down to their level and hold their hand or touch their shoulder. Those are things that kind of come naturally from building a career in nursing.
What kind of nursing did you do?
Mostly critical care nursing, so I worked in an intensive care unit at St. Paul’s Hospital. First of all, in an intensive care unit in Victoria at the Jubilee, and then in the intensive care unit at St. Paul’s. I moved from that to teaching nurses and then being a nurse manager in a cardiac area.
what have been your biggest challenges throughout your career?
There’s a couple of things that come to mind. First of all, when you work in the health-care system there is, what I call a big, bottomless pit of needs. There will always be access issues, there will always be unmet needs and it’s trying to determine how do you take finite resources and try and match them with infinite needs. So setting priorities, trying to build consensus about what those priorities are and to meet society’s expectations, which get ever stronger because we have technology and drugs and expensive equipment and interventions that everybody should be able to access that and our health-care system won’t be sustainable if we don’t provide some view of appropriateness or prioritizing our finite resources. So it’s that notion of how do you work in a system and stay upbeat and motivational and meet expectations when really within that system, it’s an endless attempt to try and balance the needs and the resources.
I imagine that’s something you dealt with at each stage of your career?
Yeah, yeah, I did, and interestingly enough, the higher up I’ve gone, the more I’ve been aware of that struggle.
Positions like yours are often dominated by men. how has that affected your own career path? How do you manage?
First of all, I think health care might be different from some other sectors. It’s not unusual to have women in leadership roles within the health-care system because nursing, for instance, is still predominantly a female occupation. … I’ve never really had a sense that I’d been held back at any point at time in my career because I’m a woman. I’ve been blessed to have some great opportunities that have presented themselves to me. I like to think that I was active and strategic at points in time of how I positioned myself to be noticed or considered for executive roles, including the one that I’m in now, but as a leader and a female, I’m often asked to be out and speaking with others who are emerging leaders or aspiring leaders. I do a lot of mentoring and almost all of my mentoring has been with females, intentionally, because I do understand that in the broader society there are barriers for women. There’s lots of good discussion about whether an affirmative action approach where organizations need to set targets for their executive and governing boards to ensure that there’s an equal balance of gender. The other view of that is we need to always, for the sake of the organization, choose the best individual with the best skill set and fit, regardless of your gender balance. So if that approach is still kind of a predominant mindset that’s out there, then it’s the reason why we have to spend so much time ensuring that young women who are interested in advancing to executive and governance roles are supported and mentored and given opportunities to progressively advance. Because if we don’t have intentional strategies around developing that pool of qualified and competent women, then we’ll never address the issue of gender imbalance.
What advice do you have for young professional women just starting their careers?
First of all, don’t see your gender as a barrier because it isn’t and shouldn’t be and doesn’t need to be. Make sure you have the qualifications and competencies within whatever sector that you’re working in. There’s many different routes for people to take to develop leadership skills but having credentials is important. So whether we’re talking about degrees at university or whether we’re talking about certifications in management and executive courses, you need the credentials. You also need, obviously, the experience. So it’s a combination of those two things. Never underestimate the power of the relationships that you build along the way. You never know at a future point in time, who is going to be influential in advancing your career or not, so treat every relationship as an important one, a respectful one and a potential opportunity from which to learn and develop … a network of people who know your skillset, know your career aspirations and are on the lookout for you to connect you to opportunities. I’m very strong on relationships and the importance of relationships, in the role or as your inspiring to be in these roles.
In the sense it goes both ways then?
Yeah, and in any organization when you’re starting out and haven’t had your first leadership or management opportunity, my advice has always been to make yourself noticed in the organization and make yourself noticed outside of your assigned role. So that could be anything from volunteering to run a community event that’s part of the organization’s corporate responsibility. It is the concept of making sure the broader organization, people at the level of the board or senior team, know you, have seen you and have seen you functioning in a way that demonstrates your initiative, your willingness not only to do a great job in the work you’ve been assigned, but that you’re looking to support the organization by offering yourself up and your time and energy and talent to advance things within the organization.
Anything else you wanted to say?
I see myself as a values-based leader. What does that mean? It means I do operate from a set of core values and try and model them myself in my leadership role by trying to find intentional strategies to integrate those values into the work that we do. As a leader, if you don’t have clarity about vision and you’re not having intentional strategies to create a certain kind of culture, I don’t think you’re going to be successful.
One thing I often get asked is … the difficulty of work-life balance. It seems to be more of an issue with women than with men; a sad reality in our society, although it is changing with younger generations than me. The sad reality has been, at least in my generation, women have assumed more of the responsibility for home and childrearing and ageing parent support, so I often get asked that question about how do you find the balance, and I get asked that question by young female leaders who are considering having their first child, ‘Ohmygod, how am I going to do it? How am I going to manage this?’ And you know, there’s never any pack answer to that. Everybody has to find their own way; I’m always willing to share some of my personal experience around that and it has to do with support from (my) husband and family and juggling things, and being very careful and calculating in where you spend time with family. Like I always said to my kids, ‘Hey I can’t to everything that’s happening in your school or your sports life, but if there’s something really important, you tell me as soon as you know about it, and I will do my darndest to get there for you, to show my support.’
How many kids do you have?
We have three children, they’re all young adults now. So through my executive career, I’ve been having and raising children, and it’s worked out fine. I have three very successful-in-their-own-right, well balanced adult children.
