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.

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This week nine cities around the world, including Toronto, are celebrating Social Media Week 2011. From the session Business 3.0 – Strategies and Tactics that can be leveraged to help small companies grow their business and brand here are five tips.

Panellists

Chris O’Neill: Country Director, Google Canada

Jonathan Lister: Country Manager, LinkedIn Canada

Carissa Reininger: Founder & President, Silver Lining

Sean Stanleigh: Editor, Your Business, Globe & Mail

1. What are your objectives? What do social and digital media mean to you? Create a social and digital media strategy then build relationships and share.
2. Play with the platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to understand what they can do.
3. Find out who the influencers are and get them to help you spread your content.
4. Be clear about what you do, who you do it for, figure out the best way to do it then seek the best tool to help you do it more efficiently.
5. If you are selling consulting services and higher priced products you are in the relationship business and you have to take the online relationships you build, and build them further offline. That’s the only way you will make a sale.

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.

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When it comes to taking control of your professional development,  how do you rate yourself?

I spent this weekend at Podcamp Toronto, the first time I have ever attended. I am not going to focus on the the sessions I attended, but on what the organizers said during orientation, which resonated with what I have  consistently said on this blog.

Podcamp, the unconference, is different from other conferences because it’s organized by participants for participants. Connie Crosby, one of the key organizers emphasized that participants are responsible for their own learning, that is, take control of their own professional development. With that in mind, participants were encouraged to leave sessions if they felt that they weren’t getting what they needed (A concept called The Rule of Two Feet), and attend others to see if there was a better fit for them.

Other key aspects of Podcamp unconferences are the sharing, paying it forward and flexibility. Presenters who are also participants share their knowledge, wisdom and experiences so that others may learn from them. Many who have attended previous unconferences subsequently present at later unconferences, honoring the idea of paying it forward. And when you attend these unconferences, there are slots left free for sessions that participants can fill if they want to expand and continue a conversation, or start a conversation they see missing. Traditional conferences can learn from the flexibility of unconferences, as well as practice the Rule of Two Feet to increase attendee satisfaction.

A model such as this, fills some very basic needs, and people learn from their peers or those who have traveled further down the path they are on. When the economy slows down, training budgets are the first ones that are  slashed. How do you respond when this occurs? Do you place your professional development on hold, waiting for the economy to pick up? Or are you proactive  and take your professional development into your own hands? I hope it’s the latter and that you are taking care of your continuous learning.

How might you apply the idea of the unconference to your life? What are ways in which you can take care of your professional development? One way is to get a group of friends together, where each friend would present to the others on a topic that they are very knowledgeable and/or passionate about. This could be organized as a potluck dinner because food makes everything better. Each person in the group would benefit, and may even learn about a model or concept that could be applied in their field or industry.

Another way to apply the concept is to teach others what you know, so that they may learn, and in the process you will deepen your knowledge in the subject.

Let’s keep the conversation going, please comment.

Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the left side) by email or RSS Feed. I created a Mini Learning Toolkit and you can grab a copy by clicking here.

For your research and writing needs, consider my firm Ambeck Enterprise for white papers, articles, fact sheets, anniversary booklets, you name it. Since I am the best kept secret you may not know this, but I have over 15 years research and writing experience. I KNOW content. And if you cannot figure out which books to read for professional development, I am your WOMAN, I can assist you with that too.

On February 22, 2010, from noon to 1 pm EST, I will be the guest speaker on a teleseminar on women re-inventing themselves. If you can attend, the call in details are Conference Dial-In:  1-712-432-3100, Conference Code:  932589.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons via Apture

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Spending the time to do quality work and build a good reputation matters. Over a year ago, I interviewed Bob Fugere who was hired as an Interim Executive Director for a Non-governmental Organization. The interview drives home the point that a good reputation matters, what do you think?

Interview With Dr. Robert Fugere, Consultant

Challenge: I had been managing and advising Canadian and international NGOs for more than twenty five years until I retired, but my most challenging assignment came when I offered to be the six-month interim Executive Director for a local environmental group.

This group had a seventeen year history of excellent secondary research, good neighbourhood projects, and most of all, effective lobbying of city councillors. A bookkeeper and canvass manager (with five contract street fund-raisers) were the support staff; most of the content work over the past seven years had been carried out by four campaigners.

I knew when I started that two of these campaigners had just moved on to better positions elsewhere and the third one -whom I was replacing- was going off on maternity leave. My assignment from the Board was to “hold the fort and prepare for a strategic planning process”.

Within six weeks, I discovered that our $500,000 budget seemed to be overspent by $100,000. After two months the remaining senior campaigner informed me that he was leaving to run in the municipal election.

That left me with one part-time replacement campaigner, two challenging reports to prepare for our major donors, and a lot of sleepless nights, trying to figure out what to do to keep this noble but battered ship afloat. There were only three options to put to the Board:

1. Borrow some staff from other NGOs;
2. Set up an emergency fund-raising campaign;
3. Or quietly close the shop.

Resolution: I leaned toward the last option. That Board meeting was crucial. Two canvassers pledged to increase their door-knocking for the next three months. One Board member from the labour unions declared that this NGO’s work was so crucial for its worker/members that they would put up a line-of-credit loan to see us through the next six months.

Those votes of confidence were enough to permit the hiring part-time of two experienced campaigners who helped prepare two successful grant submissions and the raising of $20,000 from a few key friends who also valued the work we had done.

Lessons Learned

1. In my NGO management classes, I had long taught that our major asset as NGOs was the quality of the work we did, and this experience had proven that thesis
2. The excellent work this NGO had done over many years had built its reputation -and its acknowledged presence- in Toronto’s civil society, so that even with an almost complete turnover of staff, it still merited others’ support. It was this reputation, not the salary level, that attracted the new campaigners, that garnered the unions’ support
3. For me personally, I saw how important it could be to maintain an open, fully-informed and calm hand on the tiller when the seas run high. Though I couldn’t provide either the money or the technical environmental knowledge required, the staff, the Board and the donors all needed to sense that a trusted person would provide the information and maturity to bring each of their partial contributions to a common result

Formula for Success

Good quality work builds your reputation which is a major asset.

If you were in Bob’s position, what would you have done different, and why? Let’s keep the conversation going, I value your comments.

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Have you ever heard the phrase you don’t know what you don’t know? How do you discover what you don’t know?

You constantly have to immerse yourself into situations where you will learn new things.

I have wanted to add videos to this blog to have more variety and perhaps even to do a video review of books, but I really didn’t know much about video recording. I thought about taking a course but wondered if I really needed to do so since I only needed to know the basics.

I heard that Toronto Net Tuesday, a Meetup Group was having an event, Online Storytelling — How to Plan & Produce a Compelling Video at the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto. I immediately signed up for the event which cost only $5. At that price I had absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain.

The event exceeded my expectations. There were three presenters: Jamie Woo, Brad Dworkin and Billie Mintz, who dealt with the Why, What and How respectively of using online videos. At the end of the formal presentations, the nearly 60 attendees went into three groups depending on their interests and the reason they attended the event. I was interested in the How so I went into the group with Billie Mintz.

Before attending events, I prepare myself so that I will gain as much as possible. This also decreases the chances of me being disappointed about the event. I also align my expectations with the cost of the event. At $5, my thinking was that if I got one idea from the event I would be happy. I highly recommend preparing for events, and managing expectations based on what the event costs and what is promised.

What I didn’t know that I didn’t know

Billie explained that the most important thing in selecting a device to video record is the sound. I am supposed to know that except I really didn’t. I am a visual person so I am always interested in the way things look. The picture is important yes, but Billy explained that people will forgive you if you have a crappy picture if they can hear the video clearly. Because I was prepared for the event I knew what questions to ask to get the information that I needed.

How do you prepare for events? What techniques can you recommend? Are there Meetup Groups in your backyard that you can attend?

Take time everyday to discover what you don’t know that you don’t know!

Highlights from Online Storytelling — How to Plan & Produce a Compelling Video

• You can purchase a good quality high definition video camera for under $1,000
• Become familiar with your camera and how it works
• Learn about white balance
• Get a stick microphone or a wireless lav to feed into camera
• Create your videos inside whenever possible to eliminate noises
• Always wear a headphone so that you can pick up sounds that you would usually miss such as the wind blowing
• Think about how pictures go with words for maximum impact when presenting your stories
• What is your visual story? Who is your audience? (Be as specific as possible)
• The power of videos allow you to be “relatable” because viewers can see facial expressions
• Using videos allow you to be more targeted since you customize your message and target to only the people who will listen
• If the video you want to produce is more than you can manage, you have the option to outsource your project to video producers or crowdsource it (an open call to a large number of people to bid on the project)

These are only a few snippets of what I learned at the event. In the future, I would like to attend an event that delves a bit more into creating a compelling story in three to five minutes.

In case you are wondering how to prepare before you attend an event, here are a few things to do before hand:

1. Look at the event agenda if there is one to learn about what will be presented
2. Why are you attending the event? What are you hoping to accomplish?
3. Is there a skill gap that you are trying to fill? What specific pieces of new information are you lacking? Who at the event will have the information you require to fill the gap?
4. Make a list of questions that you would like answered
5. Are there people at the event that you would like to meet? Find out from the event organizers if they can introduce you to those people
6. Manage your expectations and align your expectations with the cost of the event
7. Be open and flexible and expect the unexpected

Photo Credit: Avil Beckford

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