“Walk through the bloody door” and channel Beyoncé is clearly the best career advice out there. And, when you take into account who is giving the advice and from what position they are giving it, it really is.
Last week the women of EG’s cross-sector network, REWIRE, gathered at GVA’s City headquarters for the curiously titled event How to be a rock star and inspire a generation.
With a panel of high-achieving women, including Madeleine McDougall, head of commercial real estate at Lloyds Banking Group; Lynda Shillaw, chief executive of Manchester Airports Group; Emma Sinclair, entrepreneur and co-founder of Enterprise Jungle; and Ros Goode, senior director at GVA, the session looked at each panellist’s journeys to their current positions, what lessons they had to learn along the way and what having a mentor or being part of a tribe could do for career success or to teach you how to be a rock star.
The panellists said that having access to a trusted sounding board was key to being able to progress, whether it was a WhatsApp group with 11 other female founders like Sinclair, where she can get advice on “doing something complicated with convertible loan notes or admit ‘I need a heart emoji because I’m having a really bad day’” or Goode’s running group with its mix of ex-bankers, teacher and others who would accidentally mentor her.
Collecting people
“I would collect people throughout my career,” added MAG’s Shillaw. “People I had worked alongside, people I worked for, people who worked for me, people I have met on transactions. I’ve built a group of about 10 people of all ages from all sorts of backgrounds who are my sounding boards. They are the people who tell me how it is.”
But how do you find that group of people or individual? For McDougall it was about finding the person you wanted to be, targeting them and then just going to speak to them. She pointed out that that person did not have to be perfect, as the best lessons came from mistakes, not getting it right all the time.
“I have found that I learn just as much from people that get it wrong as I do from the people that get it right. And when you find that the mistakes they have made are the mistakes you are making, you find you learn more. If you are doing everything right you are not actually learning that much. You have to fail to get things right,” she said.
And that was the overriding message from the women on the panel: do not be afraid of failure.
For Shillaw, the message came to her from one of her board members during her time at BT and was simply about using doors.
She said: “What he [the board member] said was that every now and then a door would open and every now and then he would go through it and there would be some stairs and he would go up and everything would be okay. But every now and then there was a great big chasm on the other side and he would fall through it not knowing where it was going to end but that it was always okay in the end.
“That one thing stuck with me and now the one piece of advice I give is to go through the bloody door. You have to be brave. If the door is there, go and have a look on the other side. There is not a lot that can go wrong that you can’t change.”
Goode agreed. She said that although she thought attitudes were changing among women, there still existed a trend of women not taking themselves out of their comfort zones. However, this was where she said mentoring had a role to play.
Get over self-criticism
“With mentoring, a lot of women can overcome these challenges,” said Goode. “It is about being brave. The only person who is going to be critical about you is yourself. If you can get over that issue, then what is the worst that can happen?”
“No-one cares as much as you think they do,” added Sinclair. “You are not the centre of the known universe. If you are a bit nervous or worried about what people think, quite frankly and quite possibly, a lot of people don’t give a shit, so just get on with it.”
McDougall agreed. She said: “One of the best pieces of advice given to me was, if you are nervous, make out you know what you are talking about. No-one really listens. I tried it out, said something completely outrageous and no-one was listening!”
For all the women, confidence was key when it came to their success and that could come in the form of not sweating the small stuff, faking it until you made it and being entirely prepared.
“If you don’t ask, you don’t get,” said McDougall. She advised people to make the most of one-on-one discussions with line managers, set expectations, and determine what needs to be done to meet those expectations.
“However, if you find you are asking and are constantly getting no’s, back yourself,” she added. “Back yourself that you can start another career somewhere else. You have got to have that confidence in yourself.”
And, concluded Sinclair, if you don’t yet have that confidence in yourself, think Beyoncé. If the superstar popstress needs alter ego Sasha Fierce to get her through stage nerves, then you can have one too.
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