Top female execs share the secret of their success

Cathy Parke-Thwaites has two words of advice for women aiming for the top of the corporate ladder in Jamaica.

“Get qualified,” she says.

“…The door opener is academic qualifications,” she tells All Woman.

“You may be important to your job, but if you have not done a first or second degree, it becomes difficult.”

Parke-Thwaites should know what she is talking about. She has held a series of senior positions in the Dyoll Insurance group and was recently named senior vice president for investment at Life of Jamaica (LOJ).

Her boss is also someone who should know a thing or two about getting to the top.

Essentially, she agrees with Parke-Thwaites.

Continuous training and education are critical for the career woman seeking to get a top executive position, says Maxine MacLure, LOJ’s CEO.

“Continue to get a wide variety of training and manage your career,” she advises. “Even a lateral move can broaden your experience and expose you to things. So continually upgrade your skills. Lifelong learning is what one has to be ready for. Results speak for you. If you can produce the results you will get the promotion.”

This seems to be advice that she has lived by as she moved from being general manager in charge of insurance at the Government’s Financial Services Adjustment Company (Finsac) to CEO of LOJ in just a few years. She was appointed CEO in December 2001, shortly after LOJ was sold to the Barbadian companies — Barbados Mutual and Barbados Life. A key part of MacLure’s role as CEO has been overseeing the merger between LOJ and another local insurance company, Island Life (also acquired by LOJ’s parent Barbadian companies.)

This is her first time managing a private company but she has risen to the challenge.

“The principles that you establish from your training, education and experience can carry you forward,” said MacLure, who holds masters degrees in education and business administration. While at Finsac, Maclure had advised the Government on regulatory policy and guidelines. Coming from a job where she was a senior financial sector regulator in Canada, she became a part of the team that, within a few years, made significant changes to the way insurance companies and other financial entities were regulated in Jamaica.

“When you are coming from a sector that has gone through the kind of trouble that this one did, you would have to expect there would be some kind of regulation. The financial sector recognized that the Insurance Act and the regulatory authority were not adequate for something in the 21st century. There was a need for change,” she said.

For her, gender has never been an asset or an hindrance in her climb up the corporate ladder. She rejects the view that there are male or female ways of responding to a situation, for example. But she speaks passionately about her perception of the role of women in the workplace.

“With the type of environment that the world is moving into, a lot of females deal better in the workplace,” she says. “Women are used to multi-tasking and in most jobs now, many things are going on at the same time and you have to be able to do it.”

A bonus for women workers, she adds, is that females tend to have the skills needed in a ‘conciliatory, more collaborative work environment that is team-oriented.’

Nine out of ten qualified applicants during one recruiting phase at Finsac were women, she says.

Parke-Thwaites takes it a bit further. She is of the view that while there are a lot of women employed in insurance, very few make it to the executive level.

“Women are under-represented at an executive level, but below the executive level it is 88-90 per cent female employees,” she says. “There are about 13 general insurance companies, and one female Chief Executive Officer. Four Chief Financial Officers are female.”

She suggests that although the composition of many company boards does not reflect the high level of female employees in the sector time will take care of the imbalance.

“In the financial services as CEOs and execs become younger, they are more than willing to share with staff. Gender bias does not exist among the younger generation,” she says.

Redundancies and layoffs have been the reality for many persons in the financial sector, but for others it has provided an opportunity to evaluate skills and interests. Parke-Thwaites notes from her own experience that,

“It was tough to lose people, but exhilarating to see something that you are working with grow, and to see staff become stronger and more deeply committed as we gained momentum.”

LOJ’s restructuring over the past year and a half has also led to its share of staff layoffs. MacLure describes it as ‘Disruptive for the people that stay and the people that go.’

“They have a lot of pride and the restructuring was hard for a lot of people who have worked here for a long time,” she says. She notes that the way forward has been to build back confidence in staff and she says this will be achieved over time. “We have to show staff that their trust in us is deserving.”

To survive setbacks and go on to new experiences, Parke-Thwaites notes that persons must think of themselves as team players – willing to take on projects that may seem outside of their responsibility as a way to grow professionally. She notes that the key to advancement will be through education and willingness to work in different areas and to be exposed.

Speaking of her own experience in the insurance and banking sectors, Parke-Thwaites notes that leadership demands an analytical mind that is able to notice trends. Her leadership skills were tested when, after investing in the Dyoll Group, it, along with several other financial companies, suffered a setback in the late 1990s. With assistance from the Government’s Financial Services Adjustment Company (Finsac), Dyoll had to shed most of its subsidiaries. For Parke-Thwaites, this was the time to be focused on goals and be the board member to get on the shop floor and work in the company. Her faith in the survival of the company was strong, she recalls.

“I saw embedded value in this firm that had to survive. You don’t walk away from that. I never once thought that the challenge was too much. We were a small entity, but we looked at our competitors and saw where we had economies of scale,” she says. She notes that there were several factors that equipped her to be ready for the job that included: mentors who were generous with their advice, her MBA education, wide experience gained from volunteering to work outside of her job description, and Mummy’s advice. The last she says was directly applicable to the turnaround of her company saying, “I went back to one of the values that my mother taught me, when in doubt, stick to the knitting.”

By this she says that her mother meant, do what you know how to do, and do it very well.