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Hi everyone and welcome. Hope you’ve had a super week. Today I’m joined by Fiona Macgregor, TAL’s Chief Information and Innovation Officer.

If you don’t know, TAL it is a leading life insurer. They have almost 5 million customers and their intention is to look after people at a very difficult time in their lives.

I run a few programs and love working with the TAL execs and the women on our programs, but Fiona was a standout for me. She is a unique blend of expertise, authority plus warmth, good humour and even vulnerability. This is not just my opinion. As a contractor you get an interesting perspective of how others perceive people in the exec ranks. How they’re experienced. If people like them, trust. It’s fascinating. And Fiona is by far the most popular and it’s no surprise.

She is a great champion of other women. She gives visibility to the importance of women in tech. She has a deep sense of purpose when it comes to achieving business results. She never stops asking questions and she brings a real honesty to all her conversations.

I am not going to read the bio because you will get to hear Fiona’s story firsthand, which is more fun and interesting.

So, buckle up for this one. There are a lot of nice tips and insights that sit within this conversation that are relevant to any woman wanting to succeed in her career – regardless if it’s heading to the c-suite, like Fiona, or not.

So, let’s dive in.

Gillian Fox: Fiona, welcome. It is so good to have you here.

Fiona Macgregor: Thank you, Gillian. It's great to be here.

Gillian Fox: Well, I love that we're sitting in the TAL offices today. This beats my view. I have to tell you at home, looking over the beautiful city scape. So thank you.

Fiona Macgregor: Excellent.

Gillian Fox: All righty. So let's dive in. How would you describe your career journey Fiona?

Fiona Macgregor: Okay. I would feel that I've packed quite a lot in. One of my colleagues describes my career as a zigzag, which I think is quite a good way of looking at it. And I probably feel at this point in my career, it makes a bit more sense looking back at it than necessarily it did along the way. And maybe that's how quite a lot of women feel about their careers. I started out as an HR grad actually for the Royal Bank of Scotland. I started out in what, at the time, was described as a little high-street Scottish bank. I think a few weeks after I joined, we started the biggest ever hostile takeover of a big English bank. And I moved through that period to blag a job, moved out of HR, blagged a job in the innovation team when it was being created. And that was probably when I felt my career journey really took off for me. I found something that I really loved. That the bank was growing. I think we grew to something like 180,000 employees with this enormous market cap.

Gillian Fox: That is huge. The biggest companies in Australia are about 35,000...?

Fiona Macgregor: Yeah, massive and everybody knows the part of the story that came after that with all the events that triggered the GFC. So, it was a really interesting first decade of your career to be in that sort of growth trajectory with a business getting to work all over the world on innovation projects. We looked at online savings business in Germany or wealth management in India. All sorts of different things and having to adapt to that.

And then on the other side, post the events of the GFC, really being a business, whose brand was fundamentally broken and innovation all had to be targeted at trying to rebuild trust in the community. And that actually was when I saw innovation really serve its purpose because people could really see what was needed from a customer's perspective. So I think there was probably a lot in that time that taught me good lessons that I've brought into leadership roles that I've gone on to do later. Just around the consequences of decisions that leaders make and the impact that can have on everyone who works in an organisation. And in that case, everybody in the country.

I actually left RBS after about a decade and became self-employed. I had really fancied starting my own business. So I did that with another former colleague, another female actually. And we did innovation consulting across a range of sectors and actually ended up doing a lot of work with leadership teams on, effectively, how we could help leaders get out of the way so their companies could be more innovative and think about the type of culture and the type of questions they ask to make an innovation culture really flourish. So I was really enjoying that and that was a business that I suppose really made me hone in on what I was good at and what I wasn't, as self-employment does.

Gillian Fox: Yes, it's full exposure.

Fiona Macgregor: It certainly is. Yeah, there's nowhere to hide. But it also really taught me the importance of a network because as you will know, in growing a business, it's really all you've got and making those connections and seeing the sort of collaboration that happened in that part of the economy was really exciting I think, and really positive.

I wonder sometimes if I thought in corporate life, thought that self-employed people were doing that because they couldn't get a corporate job. I had this sort of...

Gillian Fox: Probably...

Fiona Macgregor: It might be true for me actually.

Gillian Fox: ... These days myself after having so many years in this role.

Fiona Macgregor: But the opposite is true, isn't it? There are a lot of self-confident, talented people who just want to tread their own path and who are collaborating all the time and doing interesting things. So, I really enjoyed that period and didn't have a plan to move away from that. But then got a call from a former colleague who'd been headhunted for a job in Australia with a company called TAL. And he was setting up the innovation team and had asked me to come and help do that and run it. So I thought, yeah, you don't often get calls like that.

Gillian Fox: That was a very courageous decision then to pack up everything and come here.

Fiona Macgregor: Yeah, it was a bold move and bolder when you look back on it. You think, well yeah I did that. It was probably good timing for me and my now husband in terms of our circumstances at the time and we thought we might not get another shot to do this and if it doesn't work out, then we'll go home.

Gillian Fox: Worst case scenario.

Fiona Macgregor: Absolutely. Yeah. And I've found in TAL just a culture and a place that I've really enjoyed and another business that's been on a really great growth trajectory and given me personally a lot of opportunities. Not least moving into an executive role on the exec team as chief customer officer and then moving into my current role, which is on the technology and delivery side. So I've had real support and sponsorship to do different things and to stretch myself and contribute in different ways to this place.

Gillian Fox: What do you think has enabled you to be so successful? And it is an awesome organisation. It's a great company, but what do think when you think about your own skills and capabilities or maybe mindset? What has enabled the success that you've had, do you think?

Fiona Macgregor: I think I've had a bit of luck, Gillian, because I've been in companies that have been growing and it's great being part of a business that is succeeding and is on a growth trajectory. So I think that's been part of it. I guess though, I tend to bring a real focus on progress. I think my Mom would've said, I always have a bit of an inner restlessness so I'm always looking for progress. Some of my team would say when they put work in front of me, I have a tendency to say it's a good start, which drives them mad.

Fiona Macgregor: That was the end version? But I do have a restlessness to make progress, to make things better. I like corporate life because I like the idea of making businesses better. I like the idea of good business. I think we serve a really important purpose, particularly in a business like this. So I think that real drive for progress. Listening a lot. Because I'm from an innovation background, I got used to, I guess, the reality that you don't need to be an expert. And actually sometimes if you are an expert, you make a lot of assumptions about how things are or how they could be. So that curiosity and ability to listen...

Gillian Fox: Which you are very good at. Yeah.

Fiona Macgregor: Thank you.

Gillian Fox: What inspires you to stay so committed to the role and you do put a lot of energy and focus into everything that you do. What inspires you?

Fiona Macgregor: I think what I've realised over the years is I like to do purposeful work. My husband and I don't have kids. That's something that didn't happen for us. And so I get a lot of purpose through the work I do and I want to leave things and leave people, particularly better than I found them. That's probably what drives me.

And when I was joining a life insurance company coming from an innovation background, a few of my friends said, really? But it's very purposeful work. My dad was medically retired at 47 and so I really understand the value of what we do and the impact that has on families and the ability for parents in particular to make sure their kids have the futures that they'd intended for them. I can relate to that. It's personal for me. Therefore, the sort of energy to make a business like that better and successful, is important to me. The purpose matters.

I guess I would say also though, I like a bit of good humour in life. I like people. I'm inspired by people who bring some of that lightness and generally my friends and family. A lot of them are not in corporate gigs. They work in arts or photography, or media or other sectors and they keep me very grounded because they're not that interested in what I do. I heard my husband say something about she does really good spreadsheets. So that was my life's work distilled.

Gillian Fox: Well I'm still dining out on your lovely comment, when we were all setting up for the executive presentation and I think he said it was your nephew...

Fiona Macgregor: Yeah.

Gillian Fox: And how do they describe you?

Fiona Macgregor: Fixes up the computers and the printers, yeah. Which by the way is a job I would not be very good at. But yeah, everything started to still down. My mom will say to me, what exactly is it that you do again Fiona?

Gillian Fox: Oh well I'm quite sure of that. All moms are very proud of us, but they don't have any idea what any of us do. That's for sure. So, let's talk about women in tech.

Fiona Macgregor: Yeah.

Gillian Fox: Because it's such an interesting space and it's had some terrific spotlight in recent years, but it is significantly underrepresented.

Fiona Macgregor: Yeah.

Gillian Fox: What do you think we can be doing more of, less of, or better when it comes to attracting more women and retaining more women in this sector?

Fiona Macgregor: I feel like this is a real your country needs you moment because Australia really needs to be a more tech-led and enabled economy.

Gillian Fox: So true.

Fiona Macgregor: In theory, we've got all the characteristics to make that true because we have a history of innovation, and we have some very interesting, innovative and scientific sectors. Yet still, we seem to see we're just not getting enough women through. We've made a lot of progress in TAL with the cyber team. We were kind of building that ground up over the last couple of years and the leader who headed up the team, he had a real intent to make that gender-equal team, which he has done.

Gillian Fox: Great.

Fiona Macgregor: And I have to say it's so exhilarating spending time with the women in cyber who are doing, they’re security architects and engineers and yes, just really energising to see women do that.

Gillian Fox: And it’s led by a man.

Fiona Macgregor: And led by a man and with his clear intent to make that happen and the patience to do the hard work to find the candidates and to be creative around how to think about that. I always loved that Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote. Women should be in all the places where important decisions are made and I guess in relation to tech, women should be part of the decisions about the country we're building, the problems we're solving, the illnesses we're curing. Women should be part of all of that because we would naturally, of course bring a different perspective to all of those things.

So I think we need to talk more to girls and to women later on in their careers just about the potential of these roles. Maybe we need to describe them a little bit differently. Maybe they're seen as just mathsy, but a lot of these digital roles are about applying technology to very human issues. Almost to make the world feel more human. We've got to stick at this, and we've got to get more women and more people generally into the tech sector because we're going to rely on that very heavily in future.

Gillian Fox: I know you go to the gym because I've had calls and you're like, I'm just walking to the gym. Which is fantastic. I love my exercise too, but you're very busy. The job takes up a lot of time. You've talked about having a social life with friends outside of corporate. How do you manage the work-life balance? And I hate that language. I think of it as work-life effectiveness.

Fiona Macgregor: Yeah.

Gillian Fox: Because the balance part is tricky, right?

Fiona Macgregor: Yeah, very.

Gillian Fox: How do you manage the things and the intensity of the workload and making sure that you have a life as well?

Fiona Macgregor: Yeah, it’s probably no surprise to say this is definitely not something I always get right. I have good intentions and it's something that I periodically have to reset. I can't believe I'm going to use a sporting analogy, but I heard Gary Neville, so ex premiership footballer talking about that he needs to have mini retirements periodically so that he can be in the right mental state really to do the jobs he does. And that actually really resonated with me because I have a sort of personal operating rhythm of having some time off every quarter. And I find if I don't do that, I notice pretty quickly that things get quite out of balance for me. So I've learned over the years, that's my sort of cadence and it's down to me to protect the conditions around that and make sure I do it.

We all have different versions of that. Some people like to work all year, take a big long break at Christmas. That's what works for them. We've all got our own version. So I think knowing your own boundaries and rhythm is really important. I'm quite a simple soul, I think in terms of the things I do to keep that balance. So I do like to work out, go to Pilates. I use acupuncture actually for when I'm feeling... if I feel a bit scattered in those busy spells. If the mind just feels a bit scattered. I found acupuncture very helpful for both relaxation and just focus. And having friends who are outside of sector is such a tonic. We can go and see art stuff or go to a music gig, go for a Sunday roast, walk the dog, do the sort of stuff that just keeps you really grounded. That's really important to me. I will say finally that I do like reality TV and that is a subject of some judgement from some of my colleagues.

Gillian Fox: Is there a favourite?

Fiona Macgregor: I probably would go for the Gogglebox as the favourite of all favourites.

Gillian Fox: You like that too?

Fiona Macgregor: But that's ethnographic research, isn't it? You just need to make it sound a bit more...

Gillian Fox: Sophisticated.

Fiona Macgregor: A bit fancy. Yeah, there's a lot of people watching reality TV who don't admit to it in corporate life, I surmised. Yeah.

Gillian Fox: It reminds me of my days being in newspapers and the readership survey would say that everyone's reading the broadsheets, the more affluent version, but the actual sales would indicate otherwise.

Fiona Macgregor: Absolutely.

Gillian Fox: Yes.

Fiona Macgregor: Absolutely. Yeah.

Gillian Fox: How important do you think is it for women to identify positive enablers in their careers? So people who will help them progress in their careers?

Fiona Macgregor: For me that's been critical and certainly when I look back on my career to date, that's been a big part in helping me succeed and helping me also bounce back. I think in more challenging times, I think it's important for everyone, but as your work has shown, women in particular we're very over-mentored and under-sponsored and we need people around us who can be a voice on us. Who can spot opportunities for us. And at times I think who can help us with some of the tendency around negative self-talk and imposter syndrome and some of the things your work helps women focus on a lot.

So it been very important for me. There are two or three people throughout my career, male and female, who have been enablers and sponsors for me. I would say in this current role, where I've moved into something that is not my pure background and the team therefore around me has been much more important, I think what I've really learned is that sponsors can come from all places. They're not always just more senior than you. I feel I've had real advocacy and support from the team around me who happen to be predominantly male in the tech team. That has been a real insight for me and really refreshing.

Gillian Fox: If you're going to sponsor someone or support them or advocate for them, what do you look for?

Fiona Macgregor: I generally look for somebody who brings an interesting collection of skills. So I like to sponsor people who I feel have skills that will help a company bridge issues. Translate across things. Cause I think often a lot of the difficulties in a big company are that you just get different language in different areas of specialism. And people who can move across those specialisms and translate and connect the dots and help things move forward; companies need more of those. They need more of those T-shaped folk and they're hard to find.

So I probably have a bias in that direction. That would probably be how I would see myself. And I look for people who bring that sort of collection of skills who often need a bit of sponsorship because they don't fit one specialism. So sometimes when you talk to those women in particular, they're not entirely clear what their career path is and they're a little bit anxious that they're generalists. Yeah, yeah. They feel that they're not an expert in anything when in fact it's exactly that breadth that will serve them so well in general leadership jobs.

Gillian Fox: Yeah. And being able to see their value is incredibly important for them to feel purposeful and confident and all of those things.

Fiona Macgregor: That's right.

Gillian Fox: So going back to imposter syndrome.

Fiona Macgregor: Yes.

Gillian Fox: Do you feel you experience imposter syndrome? And if you do, how do you navigate that?

Fiona Macgregor: Yeah, I mean I definitely do, but it's something I've tried to consciously work on over the years. So perhaps it's dissipated a little. Although it's still there. That voice is still there. I think the thing that changed it for me was actually a tiny little book I found one day in an airport shop. You look at those tiny little business books, and it was about this idea of helpful and unhelpful beliefs that you may hold about things or about yourself. Rather than thinking about what you believe is true or false, try to focus on whether the beliefs you hold are helpful in terms of moving in the direction you need to move and making progress. And I find that really, really useful.

I see a lot of women in their description of themselves stereotype themselves and therefore contain the view of their potential. And I noticed that when I talk to women on your RISE program sometimes when I have that first meeting with them, before you've worked your magic on them, and they tell you their career story and they really limit. They're not a hero in this story. They really limit themselves in their telling of their career path units. All accidental. All of their success is due to others. And I find myself often saying, you need to go away and fundamentally rewrite that version of what you're telling yourself, let alone what you're telling others about what you've done and what you could do in the future.

So I think we have to focus on what is helpful for us and try and really focus on what we bring to roles. When I first stepped onto the exec team, I do recall trying to talk the chief exec out of that and saying, I'm not ready to do this. And I think it probably took me at least a year to feel comfortable in that role. When I moved into this role, which in many ways was a much bigger step, that was a much, much shorter process. You get better at it. If you're prepared to dull out some of that negative self-talk.

Gillian Fox: I think it's a constant work in progress for all of us for the rest of our lives. I don't think anyone fully masters the mind because it's thinking about the way that we think.

Fiona Macgregor: Yeah. And I was thinking back to, in my childhood, I remember my mom and all our friends were circulating a book called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. So, I guess it was a self-help book aimed particularly at women back in the eighties. A lady called Susan Jeffers. And it just struck me. We've been dealing with this for generations, we're going to continue to deal with it, so we've just got to keep doing the work on it.

Gillian Fox: And finally, what has been the best career advice that you've been given in your career, Fiona?

Fiona Macgregor: I think the advice I've been given most often in my life is if the wind changes your face, it'll stay like that.

Gillian Fox: My mother used to say it that to me.

Fiona Macgregor: Okay, that wasn't just a Scottish thing? Good. And even now at work and middle age, people in meetings say, you look like you disagree, Fiona. And I think, no, I just look like this.

Gillian Fox: Concentration face.

Fiona Macgregor: Absolutely. The best advice I think I've been given and I've had this advice given to me fairly recently, so it's advice I come back to and I would repeat a lot also is, sometimes when you're thinking about career moves and jobs in front of you, to stand in the future and look back at the decision. It's difficult from where you stand today to not get overwhelmed by how difficult something might be or whether you're ready for it. Whether you have all the skills and experiences you need. But if you can stand a few years in the future and look back, it gives you perspective, gives you a different vantage point on who you could be at that point in your career and your life. So that's something I've returned to a lot to give...

Gillian Fox: It could be quite inspirational, can't it?

Fiona Macgregor: That's right.

Gillian Fox: That future vision.

Fiona Macgregor: That's right. To give yourself a bit of vision and lift your gaze in relation to your own life. And I've also found it useful to put yourself in your boss's shoes. Not necessarily from the perspective of trying to take their job. More from the perspective of, again, looking at things from a different vantage point and changing your perspective. If you sit in a meeting and for that meeting, you picture yourself being in your boss's shoes, it does change how you look at matters. You do generally tend to broaden your perspective. And if you can apply some of that in your role today, that potentially is going to help you grow.

So vantage points are important. Standing from a different perspective, whether that's different seniority or standing in the future and looking back, those things can be very helpful to just push through some of the barriers and blockers that can get in the way.

Gillian Fox: Yeah. But that's great advice. I think that's great advice, particularly the perspective. Because I think we can go into those important meetings quite fixated with the position we want to hold. Yeah. Fiona, it has been such a wonderful conversation.

Fiona Macgregor: Thank you.

Gillian Fox: Thank you for sharing all your insights and stories and it's just been lovely to spend the time with you.

Fiona Macgregor: It's been great. Thank you, Gillian. Thank you.