Interview with Rosemary McCarney
Invisible Mentor: Rosemary McCarney, President and CEO
Company Name: Plan Canada
Website: http://plancanada.ca
Turning Ideas into Action
I interviewed Rosemary McCarney in January 2013, but as I was reading the transcribed interview, I realized that the information she shared is still relevant. Before you start reading her interview, I have a few tips to share on turning ideas into action:
- Receive the ideas: Listen to what Rosemary McCarney is saying in the interview, then write down five of her ideas that resonate with you.
- Expand the ideas: What's one of the five ideas that you want to build on?
- Apply the ideas: What projects are you working on that you can apply the one idea?
Part One: Introduction
Avil Beckford: In a couple of sentences, tell me a little bit about yourself.
Rosemary McCarney: I’m the CEO and President of Plan Canada, part of the International Federation of Plan. We work in about 70 countries around the world and I’ve been the CEO of Plan for six years and my background has very much been in the law and financial area where I entered the International Development field about 25 years ago, so most of my career has been in international development with that particular lens.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Rosemary McCarney: At Plan it’s hard to say that there’s a typical day, to be quite honest, I can have a day, that’s heavily focused around the business side of running a very large charity. We’re one of the oldest and largest children’s charities in Canada, and so the business operation, obviously, has to occupy a significant part of my day, but I think that what I’ve got is a great team that kind of enables all of that to happen, the plumbing in the background, etc. and we make our strategic investments in IT or finance systems and HR systems and so my day is not the typical one of a CEO running a large organization, whether private or public because my day is very much a global day.
I started my day this morning with an international conference call where we were talking about the strategic evolution of our global “Because I am a Girl” campaign, which culminated this year with the inauguration of the International Day of the Girl recognized by the United Nations. And in Canada, [myself included], we were very involved in making that happen, having the UN declare that day, so now, of course, we’re planning the strategic outcomes of what we’re going to do with investments made, the global fora where we want to continue to bring attention to the particular vulnerabilities of adolescent girls because of their age and gender and the disproportionate impact of poverty and stigma on them.
So I started my day very early this morning with that, I’ve actually been trying through the morning to keep an eye on, trying to get through the first draft of our next State of the World’s Girls report which will come out in October 2013, and this year’s report is on girls in emergencies and disasters and that’s always uppermost in our minds because when I open up my email in the morning, there’s usually anywhere from, five to 15 crises that have happened in our countries of operation around the world so while Canadians might read about what’s going on in Mali overnight because it’s in the Globe and Mail this morning, they’re talking about what’s happened in Mali with the militants taking over another part of the northern part of that country, I’m reading about that a while before the Globe and Mail because we have operations on the ground and real staff on the ground and worrying about children and their families who are being displaced so we’re in full operational mode before Canadians might read about that but that’s true of stories in anywhere from 5 to 15 countries every morning that may have had a devastating mudslide or an earthquake or flooding or where conflict has broken out, such as in Mali, so that’s kind of how my day starts and that may change quite dramatically depending on where we have operation occurring and how we need to gear up for an emergency response.
And another part of the day can be getting a call from, say, our country office in Zimbabwe about a world food programme that we’re running there that’s a multi-million dollar, multi-year programme that is nutrition focused in hard hit areas of a country like Zimbabwe where hunger is acute and widespread and it may be that the supply chain is struggling with something and they need technical assistance or they need some additional financial assistance to make sure that the supply chain stays unbroken so we’re getting the emergency food aid or the nutritional supplements to children because, of course, you can’t have breaks in those supply chains. Or renegotiating those kinds of contracts that are taking place in multiple countries around the world and then, somebody from HR may come in and say, we’re struggling with recruiting for this particular role or job and here’s our short list, but I think we might have to go back into the market and then expand that search, and try to think if we can we do some organizational workarounds on that. So there’s HR issues and my day is running the business side of Plan, addressing domestic issues that may be happening, to if the minister makes a statement on a particular area of the world where we work, then the media calls me for a response to that, to just the operational issues on the ground that we run into in the fulfillment of the mission which is to advance the rights and opportunities to children everywhere.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Rosemary McCarney: I don’t think I have any trouble being or staying motivated. I think when you enjoy what you do and you feel that you’re able to provide value to what you’re dedicating your life to, whether it’s in the not for profit sector or it’s in the for profit sector, it’s in public service. I think if you have a real passion for what you’re doing, I think motivation is not something that you spend a lot of time contemplating. I think sometimes what you might contemplate is, do I have the energy and am I making sure I’m marshalling and harnessing energy properly because these are demanding roles, but to be quite honest they’re also highly energizing roles and I would say to people, you know, if you’re struggling with motivation in your job, you’re probably in the wrong job and might want to rethink about not what I want to be, but what do I love doing.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you now know, what would you do differently?
Rosemary McCarney: It’s a great question. I think one of the things that I’m poor at is balance, and I’m not even sure I strive for it. Well, I’m pretty sure I don’t strive very well for it, and therefore it must not be terribly important to me, but I do think it’s important and I think that for too much a chunk of my life, that I haven’t had that great balance so, you play many roles in life – I’m a partner to the person I married 33 years ago, I have three children who are at difference stages in life, in university , university-leavers and then I have this amazing role that is multi-faceted, and I have a volunteer side to my life so you’re playing all of these different parts, and I don’t think I’ve always been really good at managing the attention that each of them needs at any moment in time. I’d start earlier being more conscious of, I don’t know whether I’d call it balance or just equilibrium or just making sure that all of those key roles you play in life are somewhat in harmony and integrated.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Rosemary McCarney: You know it’s funny, I don’t think life is made up of big breaks, but I think that what all of us try to do is create opportunities for what you strive to do for the life you want to lead, but I would say, for me, the breakthrough opportunity that I had was being able to go to law school. I think that was a fundamental shift, and I know some people might say that sounds kind of strange but, I think what it did is it not only shifted my world view on how to effect change and how to do it effectively and efficiently, but it gave me the tools to be able to do it, the skill set to be able to do it and so I often say to young people who come into my office and say, ‘I really want to do what you’re doing’ and ‘how do you do that’? I often say law school is just a great training degree for whatever you want to do because it trains you to be a really rigorous, analytical thinker and that will never not be a required and essential tool regardless of whether you’re doing medicine or finance or any role at all. It’s just a great training degree. So for me when I think about the big pivots in my life, the decision to go to law school and the ability to do so made a huge difference.
Part Two: Career
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Rosemary McCarney: I don’t think I’ve ever had someone who I would identify in a classical sense as a mentor. I think you make a point in some of the stuff you talk about around invisible mentorship and I would say tacit mentorship as opposed to formal mentorship, I’m not sure that I ever would have been comfortable with formal mentorship because you need to reach across a broad range of personalities and characters and experiences and so I think if I was to point to a single person and I shared this with some of my team earlier this morning, is the kind of those conversations you have with parents at impressionable ages can really take you on a course that because of their age and stage of life, if you’re listening well, it doesn’t mean you always have to agree, but if you’re listening well, can really set the stage for thinking more broadly than a young adolescent often is equipped to do.
Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn from by observing them from a distance. In that capacity, what is one piece of advice that you would give to others?
Rosemary McCarney: Well, I think that what’s really important and the kind of core message that I got as well is that what you want to do is with the right preparation and the right amount of hard work is that whatever you really set out to tackle, you’re going to be able to do it. And that’s not a pipe dream at all, but when you think about often in the charitable sector and in international development, people say to young people, ‘you can change the world’ and I always think yes, you can but it takes a lot of hard work and it takes skil,l and to be able to change the world in small ways and big ways and to create momentum for change, prepare yourself in every possible way – intellectually, emotionally, psychologically and make sure that your values are really solid because you’re going to be whipsawed in any number of ways and pushed to make compromises and accommodations to go after the big target. The big goals are ok, but just make sure where your lines are, and to do that, I think that you just have to be very purposeful in your preparation across all of those facets.
Avil Beckford: How did you learn to be a leader? What’s your leadership philosophy?
Rosemary McCarney: I’m not sure, I think that observing people who I respect and watching how they were able to navigate complexity and adversity; I think that over life, you’re consciously and unconsciously picking up their tactics and strategies and their attributes. I think that for me leadership is really about distributed leadership and that you surround yourself with brilliant, opinionated people, who share your core, raw values and then you trust them to tackle the big things around you and so we talk about this in Plan Canada that our leadership model is about distributed leadership. So my leadership philosophy is Distributed leadership, and you distribute it by surrounding yourself with brilliant, opinionated people who will challenge you all the time.
Avil Beckford: What big steps did you take to succeed in your field? What is one step or action you have consistently taken that has contributed the most to your success?
Rosemary McCarney: I think that as a female professional, as I was coming through career paths, one of the fundamental things that was important, that I still think is important for young people, men and women, is the educational, academic foundation for what you’re trying to do. For me that was, I went a particular way, with a focus on undergraduate economics and then law and then an MBA with a focus on finance. So I took a particular pathway to where I am today, but I could equally be running a large for-profit organization as easily as I run a not for profit organization because the business of running organizations is about leadership, and building great teams, and getting alignment around process. The educational foundation is fundamentally important but it doesn’t stop as university leavers, it’s a continuous process of education, and if you have a healthy appetite for learning, then you’re going, naturally, I think to orient towards a life of learning, and I think that’s important because everything I did, in terms of that foundation, has had to be continuously built upon as new, different types of challenges coming to the externalities and different challenges that come into the work that I do here at Plan Canada, but I believe that would be true if I was running one of the banks in downtown, Toronto, in terms of the global economic forces that have changed, the supply chains that have changed, how markets have shifted, that you have to love continuous learning, and I would find it hard to believe that that’s not true of most people.
Part Three: Life
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Rosemary McCarney: I think that failures and setbacks in your professional career are not as important as those on the other side of the fence, in your personal life. If I reflect, now that my children are further along and grown, I would say the biggest misses I’ve had is not spending enough time with my kids at formative moments because I was so invested passionately in the work I was doing so that even when I was physically present, I think would be watching my kids play basketball or do this or having a conversation with me, but my head behind the physical presence was running full tilt on something I was excited about at work or wanted to get going on at work. I think one of my biggest lessons is really focus on the moment, be in the moment. I know people use the language ‘be in the moment’ kind of in a lyrical way, but I think there’s something to that, when you’re in the presence of kids, in particular your children, you have to be in that moment as well, and I feel like I kind of naturally multitask and I think that’s probably an inappropriate thing to do when you’re with kids.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Rosemary McCarney: I was thinking about that this morning because I knew you were going to ask that question and I was thinking about that and I mean this in a really serious way; I think one of the most important decisions, and an important decision is by definition tough, but tough doesn’t really mean negative, it means you really better think about this because it’s going to be significant in terms of long-term impact, and I would say one of those big decisions that caused me to pause and second-guess myself, and you can’t laugh, was deciding to get married because if you get that wrong it affects everything. It affects your energy levels, your motivation levels that you have, it affects what your choices are going to be in life in terms of picking up and moving because you’ve got a great career opportunity, whether you have or don’t have or choose to have children, and it just affects everything. I think it’s a really tough decision, I think it’s particularly tough if you take it seriously, it’s particularly tough for women to see a life for themselves, that’s outside of home and family and career and I think it’s still true today. I’ve been married to my first, you know same guy, for 33 years. I had no expectation that was going to work out, I mean, I kind of thought ok, let’s take this a year at a time because the thought of making a decision that was a lifelong decision was just overwhelming to me. So you have to break it, like any complex, tough decision, break it down into pieces and it becomes more manageable, but I think that’s still the biggest decision, it’s a bigger decision than having children, I think.
Avil Beckford: You want to hear something, Rosemary, I’ve been doing a lot of these interviews and most of the responses to these questions have to do with personal stuff so you’re in alignment.
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