Episode 179: Sixtyish and Loving It: Perseverance and the Midlife Career Change
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
In this show I sit down again with a guest who was a regular during the first few years of this podcast. A lot has changed during that time.
“That evolution, from why should I have more women in my workplace? to how can I get more women in my workplace?, that has come about because this has become a mainstream topic. So I am really pleased because I think that is genuine advancement in my lifetime.”
In the past Heather McGregor and I have talked about everything from perceptions of women’s appearance at work to getting ahead without guilt...to the horrors of being fired.
This time, we’re talking transitions - in life and work. Coming up.
Heather McGregor used to write a column for the Financial Times under the name Mrs Moneypenny, and I read it avidly for years. I first got in touch with her after her book Mrs Moneypenny’s Career Advice for Ambitious Women, was published.
And looking back I will admit I was a bit intimidated by Heather at first.
She is no nonsense, candid, opinionated, successful - for many years she owned and ran a headhunting firm in London. She wants to help people with their careers - and she particularly wants to help women who as she puts it ‘want to go places’. But she doesn’t sugar-coat anything. Those feel-good inspirational quotes are not for her. Rather, her views are bracing...
These clips come from a conversation we had in 2013.
“Yes, I don’t do guilt. If you feel guilty about something it can just weigh over you like a cloud, eats at your self-confidence, you feel terrible all the time. That drains you of energy to do anything useful, or to move forward in your life.”
A bit later in that interview she told me parenting was an individual decision...that she personally would not have been a good stay at home mother. She said she respected women who took that decision to stay at home fulltime.
“But I see far too many women who make that ultimate sacrifice and then 20 years later are in my office saying, ‘Oh my goodness, my children have left home, I have no qualifications and no relevant work experience…my husband may or not have left as well, and I’m now on my own and I have no way of earning a living.’ Well, you’ve had 20 years to plan for that, I’ve got no sympathy.”
When we last spoke in 2015 Heather was still running her own business. She’d poured a lot of herself into that business, which she’d bought from the founders in the early 2000s. But not long after our last conversation, she made a big leap. Then in her mid-fifties, she left her business, and took a job as executive dean of Edinburgh Business School, it’s part of Heriot-Watt University. She left southern England for Scotland and a totally new career. She’ll turn 60 on her next birthday.
First, I asked her what prompted the career change.
“Well, actually I wanted to do something at the next stage of my career that would make a big impact and, and, you know, running a head hunting business as an entrepreneur was making a big impact in many ways, you know that I set up my own foundation to help minority ethnic young people to get jobs after university because I felt they were very disadvantaged, and that work continues.
So I'd managed to make something of an impact as an entrepreneur, but I felt I would make a much bigger impact on a global scale if I came to run a business school and not just any business school, this business school owns the largest distance learning MBA program in the world. So moving from influencing a few hundred people's careers to you know, tens of thousands of people was just such an amazing opportunity.”
AM-T: “Even though you made this decision willingly it must have been quite a transition to go from your identity frankly as a business owner, even though you’re in another top job,…can you talk a little bit about what that was like and how long it took to feel, ‘this is me now’?”
“Well, there's the personal and the professional transitions that you have to make to do things like this. From a personal point of view, you know, I had a child still in high school at the time that I came here and he was in his final two years in high school. So he was absolutely not willing or wishing to be uprooted and moved to Scotland. So the first thing I had to do was leave behind my family home, intact, with my husband in it, and my son going to school every day - and then go home probably three out of four weekends.”
Eventually she persuaded her son to board at his school during the week. Her oldest son and his girlfriend moved into the family home so her youngest had family to come home to on weekends, and her husband came north to be with her. So that was the personal side.
In a way she says the professional transition was easier.
“Well getting the title helped. So overnight I became a professor. And so therefore I started introducing myself as a professor and that made it a much more straightforward professional transition. But in order to really make that professional transition, what I needed to do wasn't so much adopt my new persona as leave behind the old one. And I couldn't really do that until the staff in my business were able to really step up and run the place completely without me. And from deciding to go to that actually happening, it was probably about a year.”
Heather sold her business to her staff for what she says was a modest amount of money, with the agreement that they keep up the foundation she founded.
She says it’s a pretty unusual thing she’s done, this career switch...and it’s been bumpy at times.
“Not many entrepreneurs give up to go and transition into a full-time job. I mean, that was the really hard thing. Transitioning from owning and running your own business to a full-time job in the public sector. I had never worked in the public sector. This is not a private university. This is a public university that is largely funded by the government. And that is a totally different environment to work in.”
AM-T: “Was that a bit frustrating in some ways?”
“Do you know what? I was 55 years old when I came up here and I don't think I could have done it any earlier. I think you have to have the patience of a Saint to work in the public sector in the United Kingdom. And the best way to describe it is even though I was put in charge of millions of pounds of money and people and I was effectively running Scotland's biggest education export business, despite all of this I can only describe it to you as if you want to buy even a pint of milk, you have to consult about 27 people on average, and then you finally get agreement that you're going to buy this pint of milk and you go out and you spend what was a very small amount of money to buy a relatively unimportant item. And then somebody else - a 28th person - will come out of a cupboard somewhere that you didn't even know existed and say, ‘how dare you buy that pint of milk without asking me. I wanted soy!’ And this is what life is like in the public sector. So I have had to learn to consult, to operate under consensus driven decision-making to listen more. None of these things are bad things to learn to do, but it's not possible I don't think for me as a person to have done that before I was in my mid-fifties.”
Not only has she had to adapt to life in the public sector. She’s had to adapt to - or rather she’s helped create - the life of the school during the pandemic.
Heather says while her children have all left home, many of her employees have young kids. A lot are women. Some are single parents. Others are caring for their own parents. She says they’ve all done their best to help eachother out, but still...
“When it comes to academia, you know, sometimes you have to teach at certain times of the day and so we've all got very familiar with each other's domestic circumstances through this and try to provide support, reallocate teaching to other people - but then even that seems, you know, unfair because what ends up happening is that you end up asking people who don't have those constraints to take over more things, which people are always willing to do in an emergency. We've always had that when people have been ill or whatever, but this now doesn't feel like a temporary emergency. This is like more of a permanent thing.”
So what of the future of work for women, as we gradually - hopefully - come out of Covid?
“So I'm much more hopeful about opportunities for women. I mean, I'm naturally an optimist anyway, so you have to apply a bit of a discount to anything I say in this area, I'm always optimistic for women. I think women have so much to offer. And the reason I'm particularly optimistic is I think that the pandemic has accelerated a lot of change in the right direction. So while working at home, if you have home care responsibilities and schools are not open, is not ideal...in a world where schools are open and you can juggle around home care and you can work from home more days a week, I think more women will return to the workforce and be able to take more senior jobs because suddenly it's become completely acceptable to work from home. I think the whole presenteeism thing, it has gone, has been wiped away by COVID.”
AM-T: “Pivoting again to a non pandemic related question…I first talked to you I think the year your book came out, 2012, because it was in one of my very first shows. And I feel so much has changed in those years in that the topic of women and the workplace has gone ‘poof’…it’s been so widely covered and I think Sheryl Sandberg probably sparked that off with Lean In. Lean In gave birth to a whole world of coverage about women in the workplace that simply wasn’t there when you wrote your book and I started this show.”
“I welcome that because I can see it as a natural transition. As you know, I was one of the founders of the 30% club in 2010 with Helena Morrissey.”
The 30% Club is a British-based organization founded to help get women onto boards and into senior management...
“And I remember in those first years, when we used to approach chairmen of public companies and say, you need more women on the board, the answer immediately pretty well unilaterally was, why should I, why should I bother? And we spent all of our time trying to evidence why they should bother and why they should look at this. And the question has changed over that time. And now the question is, how do I? And I think that that has been that evolution, from why should I have more women in my workplace? to how can I get more women in my workplace?, that has come about because this has become a mainstream topic.
So I am really pleased that it has become a mainstream topic because I think that is genuine advancement in my lifetime. What I would say about Lean In is, I was enormously grateful Lean In turned up.”
AM-T: “And actually that makes me think of something else, which is that what Sheryl Sandberg got flak for, for the book, from a lot of readers was that it concentrated very much on what individual women could do to do better at work. Since then there’s been a lot about companies, organizational structures and can structure can conspire against you. And i wonder what you think about that because you’ve always been quite individual - about what we, women, can do to improve our situation and circumstances. I mean have your views changed on the structural side of things?”
“So I think it's - you know, I'm an economist by training as an undergraduate. And I think that this is a demand and supply situation. And I don't think that it's more incumbent on individuals or more incumbent on companies. I think it's a 50% thing one way or the other. And, and if we go back to the 30% Club, because that, you know, it has been a great campaign there's now 30% Clubs all over the world. What, you know, just this week one was launched in Poland. What we have seen is that we started off trying to fix it from a company's point of view. You know, we actually went out to companies and try to actively get them to find ways to put more women on their boards. And so we started as a structural thing as a demand led thing.
And then once we got over a certain threshold, then we realized it was also a supply-led thing. The other side, you know, women weren't putting themselves forward, you know, weren't making the individual decisions to get ready for this. I think it's incumbent on every woman to think about what she wants in her career and whether or not she's putting the building blocks in place to get that ready. And I think it's incumbent on every leader to think about how they might have more women in their workplace.
And I've campaigned for women in my life, that will always be my thing. What we really want of course in the workplace is not so much diversity of gender, but diversity of thought, because if you have diversity of thought you will reduce risk.”
I spoke to Heather back in June, shortly after my interview with INSEAD professor Jennifer Petriglieri. You heard Jennifer in the last two shows, talking about dual-career couples. Her book - Couples That Work - and the interview really got me thinking about our relationships and the impact they have on our careers - and how much our work affects our relationships.
AM-T: “Your husband it seems has always supported you and you clearly always discuss these big career moves with him. Talk a bit if you would about how important that partnership has been to you being able to do what you’ve done over the years.”
“I think it's been very important to me being able to do what I've done and stay married. I don't think I would have, you know, I know a lot of people say, well, we wouldn't be here... behind every successful man, there's a very hardworking woman. And behind every successful woman, there's a very supportive man. I like to think that I would still have been successful in whatever I chose to do, whether I'd been married or not. But we have been married for 32 years. It has been a marriage of two halves. As in, for the first 15 years, I packed up and trailed after him all over the world. And I did lots of things in the meantime though, because I knew that one day the opportunity would come for the other way around.
So I studied for my MBA and, you know, I didn't go on a honeymoon. I went and did an MBA instead. And I did that while working and having a baby, and he was very supportive of that. He knew that I wanted to get an MBA and then I carried on trailing around the world, earning much less money than I should have done because every time I'd just got sorted out in a job, I had to move again. And then I thought, right, well, I'm going to get a PhD basically. Cause one day I want to work in academia.”
Heather has always had an eye on the future. She’s always building towards the next thing - even if that thing still seems like it’s a long way around the corner. She studied for her PhD at the University of Hong Kong, but by the time she completed it the family was back in England. She ruled out traveling all the way back to Asia for her graduation ceremony. But the University said she could purchase her graduation gown if she wanted. It was gonna cost her 500 pounds. She decided to look on it as an incentive for her future self. She told herself:
“I'm going to buy my gown, even though I'm not going to graduate, I'm going to buy it. I'm going to hang it in my wardrobe. And it's going to be a reminder to me that I aspire to a university career one day, and the day I finally took it out of my wardrobe and wore it was my first graduation ceremony that I attended in my new job in 2016. And it had hung all those years there as a reminder of what my aspiration was, which was one day to be a university professor.”
She’d made it.
Back around the time of getting that degree, after years of having the second career in the family, things began to turn around. Heather’s husband found his industry changing and his career with it. He wasn’t enjoying himself any more. She now had her PhD in finance, she bought her business...
AM-T: “And when it was your turn he didn’t dispute that or anything, he accepted that…your ambition was at the fore and you were going to honor that?”
“I think he felt very...at the beginning, when, you know, when he was finding it harder to get the big jobs, I think he found that quite emasculating. And so I encouraged him to completely change career. And so he retrained not once, but twice.”
He re-trained in the wine industry and had a nine year career there. Heather’s husband is Australian and as a young man he played cricket for his country. In his third incarnation he became a professional cricket coach in Oxfordshire. All this time, she was the family breadwinner - and still is.
Now her husband is up in Edinburgh with Heather spending a lot of time playing another beloved sport - golf.
I said to her it sounds like they fit Jennifer Petriglieri’s description of dual-career couples that work.
“Well what I would say is, I'm the last person to opine about marriage. I mean, I don't know who's more shocked that we're still married, my husband or me, but what I would say is that it's been worth persevering with, because now that we have been married all this time and we have three children and a granddaughter, and it is very nice. So it's very nice to be able to share those things with somebody and to be able to look back over those 32 years. And even though there've been some definitely very low points and at one point we had to work on separate sides of the world for 18 months, and all of those kinds of things. Now as I approach 60 people say, well, wouldn't you like to be 30 again or 40? You know, I'm loving being this age. And I think it’s a post-menopausal stage of our lives that can be just as rewarding and achieving as every other stage, if you put your mind to it.”
Thanks to Heather McGregor for being my guest on this show. You can find Heather in several past shows - the last one was episode 147 called Forced Out. I will link you to all those under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.
You know where to reach me - I’m at ashley at the broadexperience.com, I am always pleased to hear from you. Listeners make up a big part of this show.
That’s it for this time. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in September.