Interview with Anthea Rowe

Anthea Rowe made the decision to leave full time corporate employment to start Exmplify Consulting, where she helps mid career women get promoted. We talk about it.

Watch: https://youtu.be/TSjLMK4f_Vk

Unedited Transcript.

Jim Allan: Anthea Rowe of Exemplify Consulting is with me today. Welcome, Anthea.

Anthea Rowe: Thanks so much for having me.

Jim Allan: Thanks for making the drive. We Met. I always like talking about how I made this connection. We Met when you were at StarTech, right? They make little devices that allow you to connect. Now that I say that, I think they'd be a great sponsor for this show because that's what I do. It's all about connecting. So you went on to 3M for a few years. What did you do at 3M, for instance?

Anthea Rowe: Yeah, I was there for two and a half years. So I ran the communications function, which was the charitable giving, 1.3 million dollar charitable giving budget, crisis communications. So if we were being sued or if there were any major customer complaints or product issues, and then employees, what the executives were communicating to employees.

Jim Allan: And you were there for a while, right? Three years? Two and a half years. That's a long time.

Anthea Rowe: Yeah.

Jim Allan: After you were at 3M, you went out on your own. So why did you want to go out on your own?

Anthea Rowe: Two things. I realized that my career path to date wasn't what I wanted to keep pursuing. So I had been saying to colleagues for five or six years, I don’t see myself rising through the ranks in corporate communications. I don't want to be a chief communications officer. And they were like, well then what? What are you doing? Isn't that what it's all about? And I thought, I don't know. And then at the same time, I was experiencing myself and witnessing around me a phenomenon of really hardworking women working harder and harder, but stalling in their careers. And I wondered what that was all about. And I wanted to do something about it. So I kind of took my background in PR and my interest in women's advancement at work and put them together and was like, I want to help women advance at work.

Jim Allan: So here's a direct quote from your LinkedIn page. So I help mid-career women get promoted, personal branding, communication, workplace performance, leadership. Do I have that right?

Anthea Rowe: Yes. I think, yes.

Jim Allan: So women in mid-career, they come to you for advice perhaps, for guidance. If I could overgeneralize for a moment, is there a common issue or problem, quote unquote, mid-career women come to you with? Is there a common issue?

Anthea Rowe: Yes.

Jim Allan: And what is it?

Anthea Rowe: From their perspective, the issue that most women come to me with who end up becoming clients is they feel overworked, undervalued, and underutilized. So they're not coming to me saying I want to earn more. They're actually saying I could be doing more for my company or for any other company and I'm not. And I don't understand why, right? It's like you're kind of sitting on the bench and you're just like, put me in coach. And they're just like, no, no, it's okay. We've got our lineup. So feeling undervalued, wanting to do more, and having these ambitions that don't match up with what they're actually doing. So that's what they come to me with.

Jim Allan: Right. What can you do to fix that? That's not a simple fix. You need to talk to these people for a while, right?

Anthea Rowe: Yeah. So there are things that we can do to fix it. And that's my services. So individuals will hire me. And it's a couple things. It's first, the biggest one is recognizing what's made you successful so far. And turns out that that's not making you successful going forward, right? So our career can kind of be chunked up and you are talking about your daughter and going on to a professional degree and there's how you do in school and then what works for you there, right?

Jim Allan: I'm going to ask you some advice about my daughter later.

Anthea Rowe: Yeah, absolutely. Happy to help. Since you brought it up. I give free advice wherever I can. Free advice. That's why you're here. Exactly. So we have school and then the things that are rewarded and what you get good marks for. And then early career still tends to be similar. It's like if you're a subject matter expert, you know, in videography or in graphic design or in writing media releases or whatever, you're still basically valued for like doing a good job of your technical work and working hard. As you get into mid-career, differentiators are about your understanding of the business and your ability to communicate that, that you understand the business. Right. And what I'm learning from research and from personal experience and from talking to women, people who identify as women, is that they just keep like doing more of what they were good at and what they were praised for, but then being like, why am I not getting promoted? Well, you're not going to get promoted for the things you're good at over here. You need to have new skills. So we work on those new skills.

Jim Allan: So why women, did you just see an underserved niche that you think you do well in? Is that?

Anthea Rowe: Yeah. So combination of personal experience and so sense making around my own career and being like, huh, you know, I had bosses, you know, throughout my early career talking to me like my career director.

Jim Allan: Like mentors and things.

Anthea Rowe: Yeah. Yeah. And then I felt like it kind of went like this and it wasn't necessarily attributed to having kids. Like I was, you know, working full time every time I came back from mat leave and stuff. And so personal experience and then I started researching it to be like, what am I doing wrong? And finding all this evidence of ways in which, you know, we think we live and work in a meritocracy and we really don't, right? And so instead of getting mad about that, I just was like, well, what can we do?

Jim Allan: Right. So I mean, I see this stuff in the paper sometimes. Like what do you put on your, what you've mentioned having you've got more than one kid, right? Child. What do you, what's your advice to people when they have that gap on their resume potentially? Sometimes people don't come back after whatever it is these days a year, right? You could take three years off. I don't blame you for doing that. It's important work. Parenthood. But like what do you what's your advice to the women in the workforce when they've left it for a few years?

Anthea Rowe: It's not a problem if you can demonstrate that you have proof of the skills and proof of accomplishments in the field that you're applying for, right? So yeah, one year, not a big deal. You know, five to seven years the challenge is not why were you not working. It's prove to us that you understand the current industry needs, right? Prove to us that you can help our company, you know, digitize their marketing. Prove to us that you can write.  So that's where it's really the onus is on the individual applying to a job to know, like to stay current, even if you're not working, to know what skills are needed, what experience is needed, and you've got it.

Jim Allan:  I think you wrote an article or maybe something on your website you call it the mid-career stall, right? So why does it happen and what can you do to prevent or fix it?

Anthea Rowe: Yeah, so the mid-career stall speaks to the what I mentioned earlier about how the assumption that just knowing the technical parts of your job really well and working really hard is enough. What for some reason women tend not to realize as well as maybe their male colleagues is you have to spend, you know, at least 20% of your working time, your career effort on letting people know what you do. You know, the aphorism now is-

Jim Allan: Promoting yourself.

Anthea Rowe: Yeah, self-promotion. And I mean, you know, all my clients cringe and you know, get really nervous at the word self-promotion because it is kind of, it's fraught too for women, right? We're kind of taught to be modest and stuff. So it's really the mid-career stall.

Jim Allan: Is that a gender thing or is it a Canadian thing or I used to, but even in my own it's not a natural thing for me, but I used to call it shameless self-promotion because it is something I'm not 100% comfortable with, but it has to be done, right? It has to be done. You have to let people know that your services exist, et cetera, right?

Anthea Rowe: Yeah, and I'd argue like our interpretation of shameless as Canadians is probably really different than how an American, you know, or even an American on the East Coast versus an American on the West Coast because there's even differences there. Yeah, culturally, you know, across gender, geography, there's just different expectations of how much people will talk about themselves, right? So it's not exclusive to women, 100%. You know, I have male clients.

Jim Allan: Oh, you do. I was going to make a joke. I was going to say, so is it just women or if I came to you with a bucket full of gold, would you so I'm glad you laughed at that.

Anthea Rowe:  would happily, happily throw stuff at me, right?

Jim Allan: So, okay, so men women, but you specialize in women because that's your experience, right? You can relate to your clients a little bit better.

Anthea Rowe: Yeah, and because there are, I mean, it comes down to we all have default communication styles and we don't tend to question them because there are defaults, right? The way we have a conversation, they are, like you said, affected by where we live. Canadians tend to wait longer for someone to finish a sentence before jumping in, but it's not always universal. So we have default styles. We assume that they're just the way they are. What maybe, what women tend to not realize is that their default styles often undermine their credibility at work. So you know, and I just said, if a woman tends to be self-deprecating, you know, tends to look down, not make eye contact, tends to speak quietly because they have smaller vocal cords and higher voices. They literally don't get hurt as much. Like these things in a culture that, I mean, most workplaces are predominantly male-led, right? The number of leaders. So they tend to value more masculine communication styles. So I just teach awareness of that and give my female clients and male clients awareness of when you go into a situation, who's the person with power? What kind of communication style do they have and what's going to help you get heard? So knowing that, it doesn't mean oh, you women are supposed to talk and act like a man. It doesn't. It's just saying, you know, if you use hedges, like filler words, if you speak really softly, don't be surprised when men interrupt you. Right? And then here, what can you do about that? So to answer your question about men and women, I do have many male clients who just tend to have more softer voices or are less comfortable promoting themselves and look around and wonder why they haven't gotten a raise or promotion at work.

Jim Allan: You write or you say there are moral and social reasons many women struggle to talk about their own work. What do you mean by that?

Anthea Rowe: Yeah. Morality fascinates me, I swear. I'm going to have to do a PhD on it. That we tend to value modesty, especially in women, and expect it, and we tend to punish women who are perceived as immodest in the sense of talking about themselves or bragging. Right? I did a fascinating workshop with some Girl Guides. I told you my eldest daughter is in Girl Guides, where I was teaching them to talk about accomplishments, and they were so uncomfortable with it and said, it feels terrible, I'm bragging. And then we have we tend to socialize boys generally to talk about their accomplishments and even the way they see themselves or if you see boys like on the playground, right? They'll be like, I can throw the ball farther than you. I can throw it farther than you. I'm faster than you. And that's okay. Right? That's an accepted kind of figuring out of their hierarchy. Girls, I mean, if you tell a girl that you're better than her at something, like you're not going to be her friend, right? And so some of that socialization, which nobody intends tends to happen. So I think I've circled away from your original question.

Jim Allan: Well, you said moral and social reasons. So when you say moral, is that moral? I think of religion when I hear the word moral.

Anthea Rowe: Yeah, maybe it's more about values or virtue. So the virtue of modesty, of being demurrer and self-deprecating and not bragging is, you know, a lot of people socialize as women tend to be praised for that, right? Like you didn't speak up, you didn't brag. So then if that's what you've been told is the right way to behave.

Jim Allan: Well, young ladies act in a certain way and that's reinforced from the crib, basically, like on this, right?

Anthea Rowe: I can see how decorum kind of, yeah. It's like, you know, even photos from paparazzi of celebrities getting out of the car and they're trying to get, you know, shots up their skirt or something and it's like still reflects somehow on the celebrity that if she, you know, wasn't wearing underwear or something and it's like, well, like we're valuing, like her modesty is very important. And so this kind of you have to be modest goes against what is the reality in a workplace, which is like we operate in capitalism, which by definition is about competition, right? And that plays out in companies where, you know, you're competing to for a limited number of roles potentially, but you also want to show like I have a good idea that's going to help the company or I have results that have, you know, grown sales. If your values of being a good person go against what gets rewarded, you're not going to do what gets rewarded, right? So you're not going to talk about yourself. You're going to say, oh, my work should speak for itself.

Actually I have a great personal story that illustrates that. So modesty being a virtue, my boss and I were standing around one day catching a quick like tea in between meetings and we were talking about our male colleagues who we were like, oh my gosh, like seems like they spend all their time creating presentations for the executives, right? And we were like not just laughing at it, but feeling like smug and virtuous because well we're too busy doing real work to just spend time presenting to execs. And then ask me like, so this was three women standing around feeling good about ourselves because we were like working hard and not talking about ourselves. Well fast forward six months, like ask me out of those two groups of people like who got huge promotions, moved across like to another country, family paid to relocate, right? It wasn't the women who were feeling smug because they were virtuous. It was the men who very justifiably were communicating like their projects, their results, to people who had power to promote them, right? So here we were being like we're good people. We don't look for, you know, we don't brag. We just do the work. Well, like who's winning, right? So that's when I was like questioning our values or whether it's morality that maybe too intense.

Jim Allan: Well, what's your biggest success story, would you say? I think you said something on your website. It's not typical, but someone got a job within ten days or something.

Anthea Rowe: Oh my gosh, yeah. They're so great. I mean, I love all my clients. They're incredible when they finally kind of trust themselves. Right. Yeah, so one client was like I never get around to updating my resume and you know, someone's been inviting me for a year to interview informally with their company and I should really get my act together. So I said, okay, great. We can do that. And then I couldn't get a date on the calendar. And then she called me up and was like I have an opportunity to interview with the CEO of a tech company like in a week. So we in five days were like. So you coached her up. Totally. Yeah, I was like we get your career story, you know, buttoned up, great resume and she got the job. So she went from this director to VP, got stock options, all that stuff, crazy, you know, compensation. But actually the one that I'm more proud of is someone who had been in the same job for 17 years and felt mid-career and kind of felt like I don't know whether I could find something different. I should probably just stay here. I think I have a pretty good thing going. But the culture was not a good fit. She was literally sad every day. She just didn't feel like didn't like the way people were treated. And I was like, you can expect to work somewhere where you feel good going to work and not have to take a pay cut. So worked on her on like career story again, you know, and then proactively targeting companies. So instead of saying, well, what's available for jobs? Just like what would be your ideal company even if they don't have anything posted? And she applied to two jobs, which is insane. I would never promise this. And she got the one. And she got a 42% pay increase. The culture is lovely. Like she feels respected and valued and she's meeting interesting people. It's more diverse. And she's just like, who would have thought like I could have a culture that I value more and feel good about every day. And I'm getting 42% more. So I think that's the thing is like not feeling that you have to settle. You know, there's this kind of assumption of like, if I'm going to do work I love, I'm going to have to, you know, be a pauper and not make much money or if I'm going to love the company I work for, I can't expect. It's like, no, you should expect both.

Jim Allan: So in those two instances, what's your process? Do you try to meet and really get to know the person and just try to bond with them and then hype them up a bit, give them some confidence if they don't have it or just direct them. We're going to company X and this is what you should focus on kind of thing?

Anthea Rowe: Yeah, it's like probably 80% technical and then 20% kind of confidence building.

Jim Allan: Do you rehearse it at all?

Anthea Rowe: Yeah, we do a little bit of that. Honestly, most of it most of it is the resume. So it sounds super boring. And I'm not like a recruiter. My background's not HR. But I treat the resume, my background's PR. I treat it like a news release. Like, so what's the headline for each job? What's interesting? And we go through what I talked about earlier where I'm like, okay, this isn't about you.

Jim Allan: So literally rewriting the resume.

Anthea Rowe: Literally rewriting the resume. And so for each one I'm like, okay, you worked at this communications company, like telecoms, selling kind of server type of stuff. Great. What'd you do? Oh, well, while I was there, they were trying to go from a mid-market like servings. They were in two small cities. They wanted to expand across the U.S. I launched a bunch of guerrilla marketing campaigns. You know, literally did like literature drops and like these cool programs. I don't remember them all. In eight different cities, next thing you know, you know, a year later that company has a footprint in sales in those eight cities. Cool. So it's like taking that it's not about you. It's, you know, counter-intuitively your resume is about what did you do for a company. Rewrite the resume and that takes a while. It takes like three or four weeks or, you know, one hour sessions because what they at the end of it, they have what I call your career story which is like not just a better resume, but it's really changing the way you think about your career. Right. So like maybe an example for you, and I don't know if this is the case, but instead of being like I'm an experienced videographer who, you know, can do you know, onsite or, you know, editing, whatever. Maybe instead it's like I have helped, you know, 25 people have their voice heard in, you know, and have built their expertise in 30 industries or something or you know what I mean? It's like who have you helped and why. So yeah, the process is a lot of like let's break down your resume and then like build it back up again and then

Jim Allan: Who have you helped and why is sort of an interesting way of something to grab onto there.

Anthea Rowe: Yeah, so then they've got a resume that like, and as they go through the resume I ask questions like so what did you love about working there? What did you hate? You know, where would you love? And then in that process they start realizing like oh yeah like I really loved, I was in alcohol sales, you know, for most of my career, but I really want to do something less or healthier, like something that's maybe not as, you know one client that was the case had been successful, but was like I think maybe I want to look at like selling kombucha or like specialty juices or whatever, right? Like I had a client who was just trying to get a you know, just another job and then he said you know what, as I've been reflecting on this, Anthea my dream would be to work in New York or Chicago. This is someone based in Calgary and I was like cool, let's work on that.

Jim Allan: So your clients, not geographically limited to southwestern western Ontario, so anywhere in Canada, it's an online world now.

Anthea Rowe: Most of my clients are in the US.

Jim Allan: So you have American clients, Canadian clients.

Anthea Rowe: Australian.

Jim Allan: Really?

Anthea Rowe: UK.

Jim Allan: Really?

Anthea Rowe: Yeah.

Jim Allan: Wow. That's really cool. So I wouldn't have known that. You've got to tell me you have to.

Anthea Rowe: I know. What else did I not share?

Jim Allan: You have to promote yourself.

Anthea Rowe: Self-promote. Shame on self-promotion.

Jim Allan: What's the feedback you get from your clients? Like are they happy as a clam that they found you kind of thing? Or because it does sound like half therapy, half career counseling or half resume building or I've run out of halves there.

Anthea Rowe: Yeah, there's a lot of halves, yeah.

Jim Allan: So what's the feedback you get? Because you've got nice things, people have said nice things about you on your, did you make the right decision to do this?

Anthea Rowe: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So I'd say the best measurement of you know, am I doing, is my work effective is, are the people who come to me achieving their goals, right? So if someone says, I want to work somewhere where I like the culture, did I help them get a role in a company where they like the culture? Yes. If someone says, you know, I want more seniority, like I want a higher title or I want more pay. And so far, with almost no exceptions, my clients after working with me have gotten that. So yeah, I'd say like the objective measures are like, yes, it's working.

Jim Allan: Must be very satisfying for you. It is. When there's a good result, right?

Anthea Rowe: It is. But honestly what I find more satisfying is when the clients say, I feel like you really understand what I'm going through. I realized I'm not alone.

Jim Allan: Because you've experienced it yourself perhaps?

Anthea Rowe: And actually it's even less my story and I've even connected some of my clients with each other. And yeah, you mentioned kind of being like therapy. It's, you start to wonder is it me? Right? If you're in an organization and you think you're working really hard and it's not turning into results, you start to think like I must just be doing something wrong. And then when you find out like, oh, other people experiencing it too, you realize, oh, okay. And then when they work with me and realize I can do things about it, you know, some of the best things the clients have said is I felt like you really understood me. I have a totally different attitude towards my career now. And like the best praise is, you know, if someone goes into their new job and starts it, even feeling different about it, right? Rather than feeling like I hope I'm good enough or I hope, you know, I hope they like me. Right.

Jim Allan: So if we wanted to get in touch with you, you have a website. I guess we can. What's the website?

Anthea Rowe: Yeah, it's exemplify.com. Exemplify. E-X-M-P-L-I-F-Y. Or on LinkedIn, Anthea Rowe. I don't think there are too many other Anthea Rowe's, especially in London, Canada.

Jim Allan: I'll put the website at the bottom when you say it. So thanks for coming, Anthea. I really appreciate the long drive here. It's nice to do stuff in person, is it not?

Anthea Rowe: I love it. I love it so much. Thank you so much for letting me come back to you a year and a half or a year after you offered. I appreciate the chance to talk about this kind of stuff. And you asked really thoughtful, really insightful questions.

Jim Allan: Yeah, they were okay.

Anthea Rowe: You care about the issue.

Jim Allan: Well, thanks for coming. I do appreciate it. It's a lot of effort to come and I do.

Anthea Rowe: Thanks for having me.