Ruth travels the world to find the best CEOs, CFOs and CIOs for a whole range of high-level organisations. She’s managing partner at MERC, Ireland’s leading executive search firm – a role she balances with being a mother to four children all under the age of 12.
In the latest Broadly Speaking podcast, Ruth talks us through the key attributes needed for leaders in today’s world, what organisations are looking for before they hire and the trends that she sees emerging.
Managing a team of 2,000 employees is a huge responsibility, but Anne O’Leary takes it all in her stride. As chief executive of Vodafone Ireland, she has worked hard to build an inclusive, flexible and empathetic culture.
Anne does not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach to people management. Instead she is focused on understanding what works for individual employees and their lives outside the office. She not only talks the talk on work-life balance but this former triathlete, who still has a passion for exercise, lives it too.
When entrepreneur Nikki Evans quit her well-paid management consulting job in London to move home to Ireland during the recession and start a pre-paid gift card business, people thought she was bonkers. But last year, over a decade after launching her business and a few pivots later, she sold her company for €6 million.
Now Nikki is chief executive of the fintech business she founded, Perfect Card, and is keen to keep growing it. She has built an “output-focused” work culture and considers her ability to make decisions to be one of her biggest strengths as an entrepreneur.
Broadly Speaking, hosted by Margaret E. Ward, goes behind the scenes to find out what motivates, frustrates and intrigues the people who lead. Featuring in-depth interviews with founders, innovators and senior executives, this leadership and management podcast is for people who want to lead or are fascinated by those who do.
She'd just become partner at Accenture, and Vivienne Jupp assumed she'd be joined by lots more women in the partnership ranks. She wasn't. The veteran board member and businesswoman began to notice two things: people talked differently about women than they did about men and men talked about going home to "babysit" their children. Vivienne decided to look under the hood and change things, practically, from the inside out. After all, this is a woman who travelled to Mexico City at the age of 15, to swim for Ireland in the Olympics. She's just stepped down as chair of the board of CIE, but she remains on as chair of CIE Tours. With decades of high-level business experience she shares the secrets to her success with Margaret E Ward, which include getting the blood circulating in the body and working out your own definition of work-life balance.
Podcast Length: 25:41
Trish Long is the General Manager and Vice President of Disney in Ireland. She's also worked with Oprah. How did she do it? She shares her remarkable and unplanned path with Margaret E Ward, one that began with her bargaining with her father to stay in school at age of 14. If you've ever beaten yourself for lacking focus or commitment in your career, Trish's story is for you. From nightclub worker to pirate radio presenter, and from secondhand bookshop employee to director of a rape crisis centre - Trish's road less travelled shows that it really is OK to not have it all figured out before you take that first, second or even third step. She reveals her tools of success, which include "owning fear" and being her "strong feminist" self at work.
Podcast Length: 32:15
Fionnuala Meehan had "no clear career path" after her arts degree. So she took a job in a call centre where she was regularly pranked by German teenagers. She had her first child while still working in the call centre, then later moving on to work for internet giant AOL. Next stop was Google, where she now manages 650 staff as head of Irish operations, while also raising three children.
How does she do it? She's on the 5.30pm train home, she gets 8 hours sleep a night and she coaches, instead of "manages", her team. Fionnuala reveals her simple tools for resilience, how to understand millennials in order to get the best out of them and the home life set-up that allows her to work at such a high level. The tech boss also talks switching-off and if it's true what they say about Google - are the beanbags and free food just a ploy to get employees to work longer hours?
Ellvena Graham, OBE, is currently chairman of ESB, Ireland's electricity supply board, but in 2008 she was a director in the Royal Bank of Scotland when it lost £24.3bn - the biggest corporate loss in British history. How did the daughter of a mechanic from a rural town survive? She tells Margaret E Ward, through deep exhales, how she navigated those unimaginable days of the financial crash, what they taught her and how anyone can lean into crisis. There is a way out, she says, but solutions take time.
Ellvena talks about the practicalities of keeping your cool when a storm rages around you, why comfort zones are sterile grounds for growth and how she wishes she spread her wings earlier. She is also very real about good long nights of sleep, and other basic hacks that can sustain you in business.
And our panel of experts talk about the sticky issue of boundaries - what to do when your boss rings and emails you at home.