The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘events that shape your life’

Interviewee Name: Mireille Landry, President & Managing Director

Company Name: Solution ML Limited

Website: http://www.solutionml.ca

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Mireille Landry: I was born in Quebec City, moved a couple of times – Montreal, New Brunswick, and Toronto. I married my high school sweetheart and we have one daughter who is 21 years old. I had 21 years of successful corporate leadership career and became a new entrepreneur last year.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Mireille Landry: I don’t have a typical day, at least not yet. I did in my previous roles. The kind of day that I’d like to see typical is that I get up a little bit later than when I was in corporate because I’m not an early riser. I enjoy a bit of reading and reflection time in the morning before it gets crazy. A perfect day for me would be when I have client assignments so I am with clients in the mornings and then have time to do business development later in the day.

Because my business is very new it really is dependent on the type of project I’m working on, so that’s why I say there isn’t any typical day yet.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Mireille Landry: There are a couple of things that I do. I am a very positive person so I surround myself with positive messages. I say my motto, “Believe, believe, believe,” so I keep that close to me. In my office I have pictures of great events, great moments, whether it me family moments or travel, or certificates of accomplishment, and I keep those around me. The visuals are really important and “Believe, believe, believe,” make a big difference to keep me motivated, particularly when the times are tougher.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Mireille Landry: There are a couple of things I would do differently. They are not major but they would be impactful. I would start networking or paying attention to networking much earlier in my life, and nurture that network throughout my life. I also include in that networking with friends and business professionals and all the people in my life. I would also get involved in volunteering earlier. I find it’s great now that in high school they are encouraging kids to do volunteer work to graduate. I think that’s a great thing. That’s one thing I would have liked to do differently, and sooner. And I would have taken a more active role in women and leadership.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

I discovered that I can be a really good business advisor, and I’m absolutely able to be a business owner/entrepreneur. That’s always something that has been in the back of my mind that maybe one day I would do it, perhaps when I’m a little older. As I’ve told you, I launched my business last year and that’s a great discovery to realize that I can be successful doing that and that I love it.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

Mireille Landry: It’s a big advance but it’s not big enough, it’s not good enough yet but it would be women in leadership positions. It’s getting attention so we are starting to see more women in leadership positions, more women on boards, but the percentages are so low and the growth is not in double digits. So we don’t see gender balance on executive teams, in boardrooms, and I think one of the reasons why we’re seeing some advances, some improvement is that there is more focus on developing talent, both genders, not just women. It’s good to see more focus put on developing talent, but it just needs to be done a lot more.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Mireille Landry:

1. There are many players. There are many consulting firms, large and small. So being a small player is even more difficult. I am often up against bigger firms that have great reputation or have been in business for a lot longer. For that particular threat, my perspective is to differentiate myself and work on the relationship, and it’s the personal approach that I can offer that perhaps different firms cannot offer.
2. Another threat is the patience and persistence doing the business development, although you expect results quickly, and it doesn’t happen like that. We need to persevere and persist so from that perspective the threat is really to lose that vision and not hang on.
3. As my business is growing, and customers really enjoy working with us, how fast can I grow, and how quickly can I ramp up to handle higher demands? It’s a threat, but it’s a great problem to have. What I am doing to handle that – I like to say I am proactive and forward thinking – I already have some thoughts on who I would hire in each of the areas of my business practice so that when I am challenged with a fast growth, I’m able to reach out into my network and I already have people who could jump on board and work with me.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Mireille Landry: What we provide is business consulting, but with a people angle. When you look at our website, we say trusted business advisors with a people focus. I like to be able to say to business leaders that we will help them to optimize their business results by leveraging their most important resource which is their people. So if they have challenges and problems, it really is about deconstructing those problems and always taking care and understanding the people impact and how to get the best out of their people. I personally found that that was a huge contributor to my success in my career, expecting a lot but giving back a lot to the people surrounding you. I think that’s very unique because in both streams of business in my firm we focus on the people aspect to make sure that companies and business leaders are successful.

Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

Mireille Landry: Follow-up! I think a lot of people don’t follow up or say something. They don’t deliver. They don’t do what they committed to do. I am strong at the follow-up and delivering on my commitments.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Mireille Landry: I’d like to give an example when I became a manager for the first time. I was passionate and motivated. I had the right intent but I was a little bit rough around the edges, a bit abrasive perhaps in my management style. I was young, and I appreciate the leader who saw in me the future qualities of a leader but I certainly was not a well-rounded leader at the time. Some people on the team had a nickname that was not quite nice for me. I was their Godzilla so I had to really soften my approach. I had to resolve it obviously, and I did. I had some extremely successful years after that. That team that had me that first year in management lived through the process of grooming a new manager. I had to get into mentoring and I was being coached to be better in what I did.

The biggest learning for me is that you can’t force people to do things, you need to coach them and help them to understand the goals and support them. A title is a title. Leadership is not about the title. It’s about helping people do, take action or execute or deliver on the business commitments that you need them to do without them feeling that they are forced to do it. For sure you team has a job, but the best testament is to see people who want to really work with you again – they are lining up to take the opportunity to be led by you one more time. So the biggest lesson for me was that it’s not about saying, “I’m the boss and I expect you to do,” and being short and abrasive like I was in that very first year. I grew and learned a lot that year, and I’m glad that the nickname disappeared.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Mireille Landry: I had many. I talked to you about this first management job, so we’ll use this big break. This was back in New Brunswick and I took on my first management job. As I said, from the outside I looked more like a chunk of coal than I did a diamond. It took lots of massaging and coaching and guidance so I could become a really strong, remarkable leader. That business unit executive who gave me than chance, who not only hired me as the manager of that group but also took on the leadership and responsibility to help me become a good leader and teach me the way. It required a lot of his time, it was a hands-on for him, he needed to coach me closer, and he made a big difference in my career in having a long career in leadership.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Mireille Landry: I’ll fast forward a few years after that, this would have been in 2001. I wanted to complete my MBA. I had decided that I wanted to take my MBA at Queens University, and there was a sponsorship case that I was putting together to present to my company for financial sponsorship. When a business leader makes the commitment to complete an Executive MBA there is a time commitment that is expected of the leader.

And of course your employer needs to support you in that. I built my sponsorship case. I put a lot of work into it. The university helped and coached me in making sure that my sponsorship case was the best or was very strong and compelling. I knew I had the support from a time away perspective. I was looking for financial support, and it was a big failure.

I assumed that the sponsorship case would speak of itself, and the lesson I learned was, you can’t assume that that proposal, that document will do the work. I had not navigated the political web. I had not talked about it off-the-record, offline. I had not done my networking, my due diligence, sure that this was taking no one by surprise. I simply built a big sponsorship case and presented it to my senior leader at the time who sent it up the line. But when it was received by the Canadian CEO at the time, this kind of came out of the blue.

So I had really done a poor job of communicating and navigating. I didn’t have any political savvy for sure. How did it contribute to a greater success? Trust me, I learned. I learned – no surprises. Always have a strategy of no surprises, making sure that you understand who the stakeholders are in any kind of decisions, and being able to read and expect and plan for the outcome and play all the scenarios: the best case, the worst case. The learning from that failure, it was a failure because I was not sponsored, and it was a huge failure for me because I had to delay my entry to Queens University by one year because now I didn’t have a Plan B to pay for myself. It was very emotional for me to postpone for another year. It was frustrating and I was ready to go to university, but I didn’t have the money.

The learning came in handy as I occupied more senior leadership positions within different corporations. It came in handy as well in sales. When you have a business meeting or make a proposal to senior leaders within your company or with clients, you need to look at all angles and always plan what different stakeholders position may be so that you are fully prepared.

Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

Mireille Landry: From a business standpoint I would say the biggest disappointment I faced was the one described above. From a personal standpoint I would say it was not having a larger family. We have one daughter and we were certainly hoping for more.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Mireille Landry: I worked for IBM for 18 years and I decided to leave for another great opportunity. From a professional standpoint that has been one of the toughest decisions I have had to make. From a career standpoint it did impact my life because obviously after that I took on another position with a different company, grew and developed my leadership skills and abilities. I was entrusted with greater responsibilities, large revenue commitments, and that was the beginning of a series of different steps that brought me to where I am today. Had I not made that decision to leave the company although a great company, I would probably still be there because it was difficult to leave something that was secure, good, where I felt fulfilled.

Also, from a business leader standpoint, not from my own personal career, I had to ramp down a team and that was very difficult because I was dealing with the business decisions, and also the human drama and tragedy of people losing their employment. It was because we needed to close down a division, and that was a tough decision to make to decide who could be deployed and who could not be redeployed.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Mireille Landry:

1. This was a really long time ago. When I was a little bit of a crazy teenager, grandfather passed away and it sent me an interesting reflection about how life is priceless. And suddenly the thought that my grandpa could now see the things that I was doing that was not always of good judgement. I certainly think that that made me make better decisions after his passing.
2. When I left IBM for Bell Canada to lead one of their largest enterprise accounts, that ended up being very impactful and shaping my life by making me redefine what success was all about. From a financial standpoint, it was a very good opportunity. But the job ended up being in Montreal and I had to commute back and forth every week and that was very difficult and taking a toll from a family perspective. I ended up coming back to Toronto and leaving that job opportunity. I realized that living in Montreal during the week, and living in Toronto during the weekends was not the kind of life I was looking for even though the dollars and cents were good and the professional role was excellent. It was not the type of life from a personal standpoint that I was looking for. So that was a big event.
3. Becoming a mom shaped my life in big ways. Certainly in growing myself and developing. The way you negotiate with teenagers you need a better approach sometimes. You need to develop additional sets of skills, and you see life differently through the eyes of a child.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Mireille Landry: Going back to school and completing my MBA. As a working mom, I’m really proud of that, and as much as that was for me personally, my daughter when she graduated referred back to that and stated before her peers that I had been such a great role model for her in showing that it was important to have goals  and dreams.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Mireille Landry: In plenty of ways. They’ve been supporters. They have allowed me to walk a mile in their shoes. At times some of my mentors were saying things that I didn’t see just yet, and I believed enough in them. It was easier to believe in them than myself at times, so I would trust them. I think it made me wiser. It was different views and opinions. They were great advisors to me.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Mireille Landry: I would say it was believe in yourself, your clients do.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Mireille Landry: I would like to say, “Great leaders serve. They give back.” If you take the serving leadership attitude, as leaders we get in different ways. Great leaders serve and there is a great book on that.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Interviewee Name: Roger Dacre, Medical Doctor

Company Name: Dr. Roger I Dacre

Website: http://www.doctordacre.com

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I was born in London, England and when I was about six years old my parents moved to Barbados. A year or so later they sent me back to attend boarding school in the UK. I attended medical school in the UK, in London, England and then I emigrated to Canada and did residency or specialty training in family medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. After that I worked for 10 years in my own family practice in Cambridge, Ontario and moved to Toronto about 16 years ago. I opened the practice that I am practicing in now and was practicing there initially alone, and subsequently over the last 10 years with Dr. Lise Paquette.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Usually I try to get to the office before 8 o’clock in the morning and I do the electronic and fax paperwork that is needed to be checked before starting to see patients around 8:30 in the morning. I generally see patients between 8:30 and 12:30 pm and I stop for lunch. My ideal day involves taking a 45-minute walk and then I restart seeing patients at 1:30 in the afternoon and I continue to see patients until 5:00 pm or 5:30 pm. The rest of the evening, unless I’m on call, is spent either for personal time or about twice a week I attend either a medical training meeting or medical administrative type meeting.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

I embrace the ethos of providing quality care. It’s a very conscious attempt to continue to motivate myself through continuing education. Either learning things that I don’t know or teaching things that I do know to people who wish to learn them. When I’m looking at the same problem for a subsequent time, I try to place it in a context that’s specific to that person to make it different and knew to me as well as to that person.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

I would try to avoid moving practice after 10 years. When I moved from Cambridge to Toronto, I basically had to start again. It was if it was the first day of work again. Family medicine like many personal service industries is very much based on the trust and relationship between myself and in this case the patient and that just isn’t something that you acquire overnight. You only acquire that over the passage of a number of meetings and the development of the relationship. That is something you can’t buy from someone else, so you have to earn it for yourself.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

It’s kind of a business and personal discovery. I’ve always been proud of the way I treated the staff in my office and I see it as a matter of pride for me that I treat my staff with kindness and respect. I always assumed that this would produce a good outcome. I found that doing that does not always produce a good outcome. There are factors in the staff rather than in me that might indicate that the outcome wouldn’t be good.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

It’s difficult to single out one particular thing because this is an industry which is crawling with innovation. It really is. I tried to think of three of the ones that affect me, but there are many in the industry as a whole. They are treatments for anticoagulation, the treatment for obesity with bariatric surgery (you are operating on obese people to help them lose weight), and treatments for diabetes. If you were to look at five years ago and look at now, these three areas are completely different than they were five years ago. I have to completely relearn all areas on a regular basis.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

1. I’m in a business which is funded by the government and consequently one of the big risks to us is government whims or changes in government policies as a result of elections and the fact that governments are fighting with how to use limited resources.
2. The second issue is organizational fads. There seem to be an unlimited number of ways to organize the delivery of medical care and none of them seem to be superior to the other ones and you get people either civil servants or government ministers, or academic people all trying to impose their own particular fad on the rest of us.
3. The third thing is regulation which is both good and bad. Regulation in our industry seems to result in shortages of lots of things, and it stifles innovation because anything that’s outside the normal range is suspicious to regulators.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

I can’t claim that the services I provide are unique, but I try to be noticeably outside the norm in terms of my commitment to providing not just good diagnostic care, but efficiency in the way the office is run.

Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

I think that many of them have very poor office organization and pay little attention to customer service. I have colleagues who think it’s a matter of pride about how long people have to wait in their waiting room rather than a matter of shame.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

I had a critical employee who left suddenly. We were left with having to recreate the skills that were needed for that role. In small businesses I think that sometimes you can have part of the process knowledge of the business in the hands of just one employee, and if that employee is gone you have to learn it all from scratch and sometimes that’s difficult. When this employee left we realized that we had invested too much in one position in terms of the process knowledge of our practice. We have replaced that role with two people doing part-time work, and my partner and I have decided to take a more active role in running certain parts of the business for the future.

There was a lot to learn from that. We realized that we needed to have little manuals. We already had manuals to describe all the little functions that are needed, but we realized that we needed to be more careful and that those manuals were kept up-to-date, and that we had multiple staff members who are able to perform the different functions.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

In a way, it’s a bizarre story in that I don’t remember who gave me in what I consider in retrospect to be my big break. But I was at a social function, and I had just failed to get into medical school, and one of the people at this social function was describing the name of one of the teaching hospitals in England, which had a particular interest in people who were applying for the second time to medical school. I used that information to put that particular medical school at the top of my list of five places that you are allowed to apply to at once. And I actually got into that particular medical school the following year. I don’t know who it was, and it gave me the opportunity to get what I considered to be my big break, which was my chance to learn medicine.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

It’s similar to the other question in that my failure to get into medical school the first time, I consider to be my biggest failure. I had been predicting that I would get in and it was a big surprise that I didn’t. What it taught me is that I’m responsible for my own successes and I need to believe in myself and in my ability to pick myself up when I’ve had a reverse and make the thing happen.

Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

Probably my biggest disappointment at the moment is the way I’ve been handling my employees and certainly I know when I had a small practice there used to be a blurred line between the boss and staff relationship and friend relationship and as the office got bigger, we’ve made an effort to keep it more professional, not unfriendly, but just not the same way. I always thought that good behaviour would be rewarded with gratitude and I realize looking back at everything that went on this year and three years ago when a similar thing happened that it is my lack of inattention to the signs that this is happening. I’m trying to learn to be more objective in the way I look at the relationships with my staff. We have not taken the annual review as serious as we should and so we are going to put a lot more effort into doing that in a more professional way in the future.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

There were two really. One was the decision to emigrate to Canada from the UK and the other was to move from Cambridge, Ontario a small town of 120,000 to Toronto. They have had a very big impact on my life because they completely transformed the environment in which I practice medicine.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

1. The most significant was qualifying as a doctor.
2. The second was choosing and qualifying as a family physician as opposed to some other type of doctor.
3. The third one was a personal one, which was coming out as a gay man.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

I think it’s a dynamic accomplishment in the sense that it’s the accomplishment of bringing freshness to my practice of medicine.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Looking back on my life I didn’t realize that the first three of the mentors I would describe were mentors but they were. The first was one of my teachers in primary school, I say primary and middle school. His name was Mr. Arthur and I think he taught me that it was okay to be inquisitive, and it was okay to be an individualist outside of the mainstream. So that was a very important lesson to learn. The next mentor I had was Keith Warshaw who was my tutor in high school and he taught me that the world works in a certain way and you have to look at how it works and you can’t break the rules without realizing there will be consequences. He wasn’t saying the rules were right or wrong, he was saying they are there and you have to pay attention to them. I then had a mentor in medical school and she really taught me that it’s really important to do the work that needs to done rather than to think that you can take short cuts to it. And finally Dr. May Cowan, who was my professor at McMaster University who I still turn to for advice even today, and she just taught me so many things about how to be a good family doctor.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

The message was that quality and achievement comes from honest work.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

I would say to people, you need to decide what you want to do and aim to learn and practice this with integrity.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Today I present Donna Whitney, and as usual there are many lessons to learn. Her response to the question, “Tell me a bit about yourself” was quite long, but weaves a very interesting tale that we can all learn from. One potent lesson for me after reading it was, if it doesn’t feel right, walk away, don’t compromise your values. I have to think about how to present it so I’ll do that for tomorrow. From the information presented in this interview, what are five takeaways? How can you use the information in your situation?

What’s a typical day like for you?

There is no such thing as a typical day for me, I wish there was. Because our business is very much an entrepreneurial start-up within a really large organization, we are everything. I am sales and marketing and distribution, and finance. Of course I do not do all those things without the support of the right parts of the organization, but really, we do most of the heavy lifting ourselves.

How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

I don’t know that it’s a conscious thing for me. I absolutely love what I do, and when I don’t love what I do, I end up changing what I do so that I love it. It’s never been the same thing one day to the next. I seem to change my job title every 18 months.

If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

I think that I would be kinder. I think there are a lot of people in my working experience that I could have shown a lot more grace to, especially in the early years when you are struggling to make your mark you get a sense that everything matters so much. In the grand scheme of things, 10 years from now you aren’t going to remember the offences you had to bear. I would have turned my cheek a lot more and be a lot more forgiving.

What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

I’ve discovered Grooveshark and I really quite enjoy it. It’s an online radio that allows you to stream music for free.

What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

Probably IPTV and the introduction of new entrants that make it possible for people to do things in a different way. That helps my team because that is the niche in which we play in. So every part of the traditional Rogers business is being assaulted by new competitors and new ways for people to do the same things.

What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

1. The first threat would be the larger organization taking over our entrepreneurial start-up because then it wouldn’t be a start-up. If we were to be ingested by the larger organization then it would be much more difficult for us to do things the way we now do them.
2. The inability to deliver on all the opportunities that we have, and this threat has to be managed by making sure that we have the appropriate processes and people in place to do what needs to get done.
3. The third threat would be taking on too much all at once because there is an awful lot that can be done and ought to be done so it’s a question of timing.

What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Everything! I think what’s truly unique about what we do is that we do it within such a large organization in such a small way. It really is the best place to be in the company.

What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

If you say that my field is large telecom, one of the things that large telecoms do incredibly poorly is being responsive and flexible to customers. If you’re saying that it’s people who do the things we do and are doing them poorly, it’s that we capitalize on the fact that we have a huge brand, and it really helps to open doors when you are carrying a Rogers business card. And a lot of those smaller companies don’t have that advantage.

Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it.

There are always technology challenges. There is always a problem that needs to be solved, and I have been blessed with an amazing team that looks at issues as opportunities. And I don’t say that to be cliché in any way, shape or form, they truly do see things that way. I think another major challenge that any group faces is to maintain a healthy culture, and that has a lot to do with establishing boundaries up front and we’ve done that, we’ve sat down as a team and talked about our personal values and our values as a team.

What lessons did you learn in the process?

1. From a technology standpoint, one thing that we’ve learned is that it needs testing before you sell it. We’ve had a few hiccups where things seemed to make sense and not defy the laws of physics in principle, but in practice things never go as they appear. So rigorous testing and making sure that you build a demo lab is a must. It’s also important to have your customers as partners so that you can do that learning together. There should be a degree of agility and responsiveness by both partners to adjust to the things that happen along the way.
2. The more important one is establishing that team trust and integrity, and that’s been key for our overall success.

Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

My big break came from David Robinson for sure. And that was the break from marketing traditional “I’m going to create this piece of collateral or view this marketing brief” to the switch to technology, to engineering. And really David Robinson was a huge proponent, advocate and supporter of me in those early years, especially when I don’t have an engineering ring, and I certainly don’t intend to. My guys are engineers and I think there has to be a bridge with those with marketing and that kind of skill set meshing with the people with technology because there is such value in marrying those two things together. I would have been a propeller head by interest but not by design, and Robinson took me under his wings and knew that about me but brought me in anyway, and gave me the biggest opportunity of my career so far.

Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

The biggest failure that I’ve ever had and it wasn’t a monumental thing, had a lot to do with being more gracious in certain circumstances. I remember this one time I had a client that just drove me over a fence, this person was like nails on a chalk board and I could have been a lot more professional, but I let it get to me one day and I lost my temper. For the long-term repercussion I’m sure that no one remembers it but me, but it left such a profound impact on me to realize that, it was just work and I should let it go. I think what I took away from that is the ability to take myself a lot less seriously.

What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

It would probably be how the music industry treated people back in the eighties. The experience has made me more sensitive to the diversity of people coming into circumstances and trying to appreciate where they are coming from.

What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

I think it is having to let someone go, pulling the trigger when you have to fire them. I’ve had to do that now on a couple of occasions and I think one thing I’ve learned from those decisions is to make them slowly, cautiously and transparently so that when you are approaching that time in someone’s career, you let them know what’s coming down the pipe as soon as you can.

What are three events that helped to shape your life?

1. My experience in the music industry
2. Moving to Toronto
3. The move from marketing to engineering

What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

My ability to make sour dough bread, it’s kind of an art form.

How did mentors influence your life?

During different parts of your life you have different mentors for different purposes. I think that I’ve learned a lot of grace and maturity from the spiritual leaders and giants in my life. I am a huge fan of John MacArthur, and R C Sproul. From a work perspective, I think some of the giants in the company, the women that I have the pleasure and honour of working with really teach me a lot about the strength of women within this corporate environment because there are so few at the upper echelon levels.

What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Speak less and listen more.

Which resources (books, movies, training etc.) did your mentors recommend to you?

The Tipping Point was a very good book. I had a mentor Maxine Armstrong – who I still consider to be a mentor – who was a great wealth of reading resources, so I’d have to say that that was a big one. In Moments of Magic the message was consistent and my mentor at Tronica referred that book to me. One of the members of my team recommended that I read Hoops which was by Greg Jackson the basketball coach. That was a really good book.

As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Be patient with yourself and listen to really hear, not just to absorb the information, but to understand it. It’s an entirely different thing from hearing a message and understanding the message. I think that too often people rush past the information so that they can contribute their own thoughts. It’s not about being heard, it rarely is about people hearing you, it’s what you hear from others that matters.

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