Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Martha & Indira’s book is Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First. It’s available in hardback (https://amzn.to/48MmR8Z), paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4), Kindle (https://amzn.to/3S8SpQW), and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5).

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
• Own the AI Revolution by Neil Sahota
• Time and Chance by Kim Campbell
• Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy by Bill Griffith

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

• How Inner Work Transforms Your Leadership: Tools for Growth with Jonathan Reams
• How to Avoid the Bad Leader Trap with Barbara Kellerman
• Navigating the Global Storm: Rethinking Leadership for the Future with Cynthia Cherrey

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Dr. Martha Cook Piper was the Interim President and Vice Chancellor of The University of British Columbia from 2015-2016. She also served as the 11th President of the University of British Columbia from 1997 to 2006. Dr. Piper has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Montreal, Shoppers Drug Mart, TransAlta Corporation and Grosvenor Americas Ltd. She has also served as a board member of CARE Canada, the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education, and the Canadian Stem Cell Foundation. She was Chair of the Board of the National Institute of Nanotechnology and served as a member of the Trilateral Commission.

The recipient of 17 honorary degrees, Dr. Piper is an officer in the Order of Canada and a member of the Order of British Columbia.

Dr. Indira V. Samarasekera was the 12th president and vice-chancellor of the University of Alberta from 2005-2015. Dr. Samarasekera is internationally recognized as one of Canada’s leading metallurgical engineers for her groundbreaking work on process engineering of materials. She has consulted for industry worldwide, which has adopted the results of her research discoveries. She was vice-president (research) at the University of British Columbia and held the Dofasco Chair in Advanced Steel Processing. She is the first woman and the first engineer to serve as U of A president.

Dr. Samarasekera is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a member of the Order of Canada, a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] This is Innovating Leadership Co-Creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. We’re recording this interview at the 2023 International Leadership Association Global Conference in Vancouver, celebrating its 25th anniversary.

Today we’re talking to Martha Piper and Indira Samarasekera. Martha served as the first woman president of the University of British Columbia, and Indira served as the first woman president of the university at Alberta. Martha and Indira are authors of the book Nerve Lessons in Leadership from two Women who went first, which we’ll be discussing with them today.

Thank you for having us.

Martha: Yeah, it’s lovely to be here.

Maureen: The title of your book is called Nerve Why Nerve.

Martha: I am crazy almost to the point of addiction about Georgia O’Keeffe. [00:01:00] She lived in the 20th century and was quite remarkable as being one of the first women to be a remarkable artist. She decided she was going to paint the way she wanted to paint.

She wasn’t gonna go to Europe and study with the European masters. She went off to New Mexico and painted flowers and skulls and all sorts of southwest landscapes. She has a quote that I have over my desk that is this. It takes more than talent. It takes a kind of nerve, kind of nerve and a lot of hard.

Hard work. Now, I love that quote because it tells me you don’t have to be particularly talented. And as women we work hard. We know how to work hard, but what we often lack is nerve. Nerve. To say it like we want to nerve to be ourselves, nerve to be unlike nerve to make tough decisions, nerve to go first, nerve to do things our way.

And so when Indira and I were thinking about it, we said, you know, we think maybe [00:02:00] that’s the essence of the book, to encourage and inspire women and men to step up and have the nerve to answer the call and to take the right steps to lead. And that’s essentially how we

Indira: got the title.

Maureen: Thank you. My mom is an artist or was an artist.

We went to the Georgia O’Keefe Museum. Doing that with her and appreciating her art was unique.

Martha: Oh yeah. Yes. Pretty progressive. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, if you go to Santa Fe or him and Abcu or any of those places, you’ll recognize. Almost outrageous, audacious. She was with her art at the time. It’s still outrageous for some people.

Yes.

Maureen: What a great platform to launch the conversation. Martha, help our listeners understand when you did something that took nerve to do, it was authentic and didn’t necessarily go as you had [00:03:00] hoped, and then the nerve to keep going because we often take a step, but then when we’re hit with that complete disapproval.

We kind of whimper and cower. You may have

Martha: felt whimpering and cowering, but you proceeded. You know, the story is quite simply that I decided for my installation at a pretty world renowned university that I was going to have a theme, which was, think about UBC. Think about your role. Think about what students can do, think about the future, think about its history, think about its potential.

And as part of that, I thought, what a great idea. I’m going to develop thinking caps that are gonna say, think about it on the front, and then UBC on the back. It was just a wonderful idea, just wonderful. And I went to my protocol officer and said, this is what I want. I want everybody to have a thinking cap.

And he said he was a very gracious man. He said something like. Are you sure I didn’t take the cues?

Indira: Yes.

Martha: What I failed to [00:04:00] recognize is that the installation at a university is a very traditional, pompous, sage kind of ceremony, and so when I took my mortar board off and put my baseball cap on and encouraged everybody to put their baseball caps on, I thought it was wonderful.

I go out onto the avenue and realize that it was very, very poorly received. My whole entree into the university was seen as totally inappropriate and that I was a lightweight and I was just a cheerleader. And what do you expect with a woman? And it was tough. I’m not gonna tell you. It wasn’t tough. And then I faced an APEC conference and it was tough.

I was basically being asked to resign. What do you do in those circumstances? Well, I go back to this little calligraphy that I have over my desk that says, just be Martha. Don’t try to be somebody you aren’t. Be true to yourself. You have support [00:05:00] structures. I had my family, I had my husband who supported me unconditionally.

But when it all is said and done, you have to be comfortable in your own skin and if you feel what you have done is the right thing for you. That’s what sustains you every day when you get up. You have to try to block out some of the criticism and realize that not everyone’s gonna be happy with you and not try to be liked all the time, but to try to be true to yourself and your principles.

It’s all about principles. If you start veering away, that’s when you get into.

Maureen: You talked about the APEC conference.

Martha: Yeah.

Maureen: Your decision to go forward was based on principles.

Martha: Yeah.

Maureen: So can you share what the underpinning principles were

Martha: and how they helped you get out

Maureen: of that?

Martha: It’s interesting you asked that this was being done by the government of Canada.

We were just a venue. So all these leaders, the Asia Pacific Economic Conference, these questionable leaders at the time, Jiang Zemin, and [00:06:00] Suharto from Indonesia, people who had defied human rights were coming onto the campus. Students were very upset, did not feel they should be there, and so there was a lot of protests.

What were the principles? The principles were allowing students the right to express themselves, to speak out academic freedom. So when that was being challenged by the government, by essentially where they were gonna put the barriers for the sightlines, for students to be seen and heard, I realized that my principle was whatever I did, I had to support the principle of a student being able to speak out and express their discontent, even if I might not have agreed with it.

And because of that principle, it gave me the nerve. To actually write the Prime Minister’s office and demand that the sightlines be changed. Had I not done that, had I backed away? I knew no one in the Prime Minister’s office, I just was going out on a limb. But had I not stood up for the principle of student [00:07:00] freedom and academic freedom, I would’ve been done because that letter that actually took on the Prime Minister’s office saved me.

There was a commission to look at the issue after the fact. It was both nerve and principle. Yeah, but the principle gives you the nerve, the principle gives

Maureen: you the nerve. If you don’t have the principle, then it’s very hard to find the nerve. Indira, I wanna jump to you. When was a time that you relied on your principles?

To make tough decisions, where going along may have been a little easier.

Indira: One that comes to mind is the case of an honorary degree to a recipient. This was a case where the university has a process to select an honorary recipient. It was a very distinguished individual. He had happened to be the CEO of Nestle, Peter Beck, and he was.

In his subsequent role as the head of the Global Water Council for the World Economic Forum, [00:08:00] he had been engaged with the university on helping us think about water, its importance to the world and so on. And so anyway, committee decides to give him an honor degree, and we have a process when it’s announced.

The academics decide they don’t want this man on campus because of Nestle. Nestle was accused of dissuading women from breastfeeding. It was accused of all kinds of things. The principle for me was that first of all, we were honoring the man. He was being honored for work that he had genuinely done, that had advanced cause of the world.

We were an institution that was committed to a process of honoring people. Through a collective expression of what we had decided was a valuable contribution. Mm-hmm. Just because a few academic decided they didn’t like it, or a few students decided they didn’t like it. It was inappropriate for me to reverse that honorary degree decision, and I took a lot of heat on it because the media immediately decided they smelled blood.

It was all over the [00:09:00] media. Then the people, nonprofit organizations who don’t like the corporate sector were into it. The government was getting a bit uneasy. The Board of Governors was not sure whether this was going to hurt the reputation of the university. And Mr. Beck himself, Peter, to his credit, sent me a note and said, you know, Indira, this is getting too controversial.

Why don’t I just not come? And I said, no, Peter, we made the decision to honor you. We are going to stick by it. So again, when it gets hot in the kitchen, you don’t stop cooking. You have to continue to say, we made a decision. We had done all of our homework to decide this man was being honored. It wasn’t my decision alone.

Obviously was decision. Mostly the business school. It’s a question of saying what does a university stand for? And it troubles me today that a lot of universities recoil. At the moment. There’s a protest and someone doesn’t like a speaker. Whether they’re extreme left or extreme right or some topic, everybody just disappears and reverses course.[00:10:00]

You have to have the nerve to say, what does the institution stand for? If we are an institution that entertains all kinds of thinking and diversity of thought, then we better stick to it. And that was my example and it was. It was hard in the kitchen.

Maureen: It sounds like in either case, you would have

Martha: risked your tenure.

Yeah. In my particular case, in apec, there were calls to resign almost immediately because what happened was when the leaders left the campus, they met on campus, but when they left, there were huge protests and the protestors went and stopped the traffic, the blocking of the leaders exiting campus. And so the RCMP came out and pepper sprayed the students to get them out of the way to get these leaders out.

There was only one way out to the airport. No student was injured, no student was hurt or killed or anything. But it was a very difficult time. [00:11:00] I was being held responsible for this event as if I had caused it. And of course, it’s not so much me, but the university and I represent the university. And so there were huge protests asking me, not asking me, demanding.

That I be terminated and that I resign. And there was a huge commission struck to look at it all, and it was a big news in Canada. And so yes, you know, you take consequences of your actions and you acknowledge if you’re wrong. If you’re wrong, you do acknowledge that. But if you think you’re principled and you think that you have something to defend, you have to stand up for it.

Maureen: In a time that is so informed by fundamentalism and polarization, this seems a really important message that often folks are backing down. They are deferring to the mob or the popular opinion, and I have to believe many of them [00:12:00] don’t support that opinion, but they’ve been bullied or intimidated into acquiescing to those opinions that the two of you happen to be sitting here.

As women. Because we often attribute that courage to men. Mm-hmm. Not women. And yet both of you have made principled decisions stuck with those used nerve and all invoke two other words you used in your book, grace and Grit. It’s all about grit and grace. I think we began to look at that. How did you.

Build that grit, both of you, because you’ve both demonstrated it over and over again.

Indira: Well, I think it’s true experience, and I’ll tell you two quick stories because I think you have to have had what I call. Challenging experiences where you develop grit and that allows you to take the next one on. My one was when I was doing my PhD on steel processing of all things my supervisor said to me, well, your models are all very [00:13:00] nice, but I want you to prove that what you’re predicting is true.

So could you please go to this steel plant and make measurements on an operating continuous casting machine? And I thought, oh my goodness, right? So I went to the steel plant, no ladies washrooms, all male workforce. You know, you have those pulpits where you have very obscene photographs of women, you know?

That was the old culture. And then I was doing my experiment overnight, and I had to go and get a few hours of sleep. I came back, my entire equipment had been removed and shoved into a closet, and I had to go hunting for it. I could have quit and gone home. I wouldn’t have got my PhD. I found the grit to speak to the operators, appeal to them to get my equipment back.

So I developed that I can do it under the most hostile circumstances. So when I experienced it as a university president and a very quick story, I went to India with the intention of elevating University of Alberta’s profile in India. So I went to the most prestigious university, one of the IITs. Now they only talked [00:14:00] to MIT and Harvard and Cambridge and so on, and who are we?

Right? And I remember the guy who received us wouldn’t allow us to see the president, didn’t think I was worthy of that and had this meeting and left us with a bunch of underlings while he was running in and out with his phone, basically telling me, yeah, whatever. At the end of the hour he said, oh, I’m really busy.

There was really no engagement with these professors. And I said, oh, by the way, here’s some of the reasons if we work together. As Canada and India as IIT and U of A, we can talk about energy transition, energy security, and I can find resources. Oh, really? Oh, by the way, I think our president may have 10 minutes to speak to you.

That was grit and grace. I could have walked out the meeting really annoyed with him and taken the slap in my face and just lost the opportunity. I stuck with it and we became brave whales later on and we laughed at this story when I used to say, my goodness, I thought you were just awful. [00:15:00] But it’s about finding the nerve, the inner resources to say, I came to do a job.

He has disrespected the institution I represent. I’m not gonna allow him to get away with it.

Maureen: My first leadership role was in a steel company. We were implementing an ERP.

Indira: Yes.

Maureen: And I was doing leadership stuff. So I walk in and I say, you know, I think you have a leadership problem. Yes. He’s six six and I’m five three.

And he looks like you weighs 600 pounds. Yes. He looked like he. Should be running a steel plant and he slams the door and he says, tell me who it is and I’ll kick the asses. And I’m thinking, I can’t jump out the window. Yes. ’cause I’ll get injured. Yes. He’s standing by the door. I am, you know, this new leadership consultant first.

How do I get outta here and not die? Yes. It just invoked every bit of survival. Mechanisms. That’s good. But I don’t remember what I said, but I did manage to exit the room, but it was an environment that was not at all. [00:16:00] Open and welcoming, especially to women. No. Yeah. I didn’t use the men’s restroom, but I wasn’t gonna Not do say I went to the men’s restroom.

Oh,

Indira: you

Maureen: did? I did because I had no choice. Interesting. And how did they respond? Well, I can’t remember. I just went.

Indira: I had to go. Yeah. And

Maureen: that’s grit.

Indira: Well, and they’d come in and then they’d realize that there was some, a woman was there in one of the stalls and then they’d rush out. They’d just probably see by your shoes.

Right. So I think that’s the principle again. I mean, you know, I think it’s about taking those difficult situations, not forgetting what your goal was, what your objective was, not taking it personally. Is me. You know, I’ve been insulted, put down and thinking about what you’re here to do and then do it gracefully.

Maureen: It would be easy to be angry, and I think we’ve all gone through that. I’m angry, pissed, but invoking the [00:17:00] grace. Even when the feelings may not have been graceful.

Indira: How did you do that? You know, I think it comes down to how passionately you care about the job you are doing, the institution you’re representing for me.

It wasn’t about me, it was about the University of Alberta. I was going to advance it at all costs. In the case of the PhD, I mean, I had a personal interest in getting my degree. I had a goal, you know, when you talk about leadership, which is the place where I had to do this, not once, many times I had this happen.

On so many occasions, I’d go somewhere and it’d be kind of discounted or dismissed. I didn’t take it personally. I said, I am going to advance this university no matter what it takes and I’m gonna stick with it. And if I walk out the room or I get mad, it would be a lost opportunity won’t come again. I have this one chance to get this done.

And I think you certainly exhibited that. I mean, I was her vice president research. I learned a lot from watching her. And I think you watch other leaders and you draw inspiration from those [00:18:00] who’ve. Demonstrated that grit in grace. I think grace is one of the secret weapons we have.

Martha: Where it comes from is interesting, but if I look at my own grit, I attributed a lot to the fact that I grew up in a family of four children and I was third.

Between two boys and we were only about, one brother is 16 months younger and another one’s 16 months older. And I meshed in this environment where I was just at their mercy. I mean, they controlled me. You do this, you do that, go out and fix the ski jump, go build the building or whatever. I had to stand up for myself.

I had to say, I’m not gonna do that. I’m not gonna swim out there and put my life in danger to soap up your ski jump for you. And so part of it was how I was raised, but I tend to agree that you build up the capacity through difficult issues to realize that the sky [00:19:00] isn’t falling. It may look like it’s falling, it may appear, and you’re frightened.

But because you’ve survived other efforts, and my story is, uh, when I was in Montreal, I was a physical therapist, and in order to work in Montreal, you had to speak both languages. And I did not. I had come from the United States. I had taken 10 years of Spanish, I couldn’t say a word of French, and I had to learn French or at least attempt to learn French in order to work to get a license.

And I then had to go out and work at this hospital for children. It was a French hospital. It was the only job I could get. And I don’t know if you know Montreal, but there are English sections of the city and French sections of the city. I would get on the bus in the English section and ride it, and I’d be fine for the first mile, mile and a half where everyone on the bus was speaking English, but as the bus traversed through the city, it went into the French section to [00:20:00] the hospital I was working at.

All the English would have exited, and the only language being spoken on the bus by the time I got to the hospital was French. I didn’t understand at least two thirds of it. Then I had to go and treat patients in French and talk to doctors. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, ever. I wanted to quit.

It would’ve been easy for me to say, I’m outta here. To this day, I’m not sure why I prevailed. Other than, I guess I was determined. Yeah, I was determined to not fail and the fault of failure was mine. It wasn’t, people weren’t doing me in, it was my ability to either succeed or fail. And I think so often that’s what grit is about.

It’s about your ability to confront an issue. As far as grace goes, you know, I always say grit is what you do. Grace is how you do it. And my advice would be. Try to put yourself in your [00:21:00] opposition’s position because if you’re doing something gritty, somebody’s not gonna like it. Try to hear what their concerns are.

If you can try to understand why they’re not happy and not necessarily change your opinion or change your position, but at least acknowledge that there’s another side to this. And be quite generous when you actually announce what you’re doing or your decision or actually have to do it. I think it goes a long way.

People aren’t gonna change their opinion, but they will respect you for at least acknowledging that there is another side to the controversy. But I do think women are better. We don’t hold a monopoly on grace. But I think it is one of the things we’re a little better at than our male counterparts in listening and then being able to explain, and this gets to the principles.

You may not agree with me. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, but this [00:22:00] is why I’ve decided what I’ve decided. Don’t keep it in the dark. Be clear. This reason and this reason, and this reason is why I have decided to do X. You may not agree, but at least you know where I’m coming from. That’s. The courage and the nerve to not just go make a decision and

Maureen: hope people forget it.

Martha: Yeah.

Maureen: But in the light transparency. Exactly. Being open and then occasionally acknowledging if you’re wrong, somebody says something that really, I hadn’t thought of that. Mm-hmm. Maybe there’s something to that, and everyone wants to hear that in a way, right? Yeah. Yeah. Not that you didn’t think of it, but I said something that was so valuable.

Yep. It made you. Think people wanna be heard uhhuh and heard authentically, not just we consulted. Check, check, check. No one really heard us. One of the other things you talked about this morning that was so important is building the team. And you both talked about

Indira: it, and I love the wand

Maureen: [00:23:00] story.

Indira: I’ll tell the one story I had become vice president research.

Martha Piper was president. I didn’t know her at all. She had been on campus for about two or three years by the time she had decided to find a new vp. And I did not have a long history of academic administration. I had not been a dean, I hadn’t been a director. I hadn’t been any of that. My first day on the job, I go into the vice president research office.

I’m already feeling pretty amazed, right? Like I went from professor yesterday to VP research in 24 hours. Like, whoa, this is pretty nice. And there was an envelope on my desk. President’s office was collect. Woo. So I opened this envelope and inside I was expecting a letter, a typical letter that you’d get giving me instructions about what my job was all about and what the expectations are.

Because I knew she knew that I didn’t know how to do this job, though she’d appointed me. I opened the envelope and in it is a hairy. Potter. Want, think about it. A Harry Potter want. I was just like, [00:24:00] whoa. And a little handwritten note that she does so well in her beautiful handwriting. Dear Indira, welcome to the team.

Let’s make magic, Martha. Unbelievable. Right? I never forgot that, right? I can tell it and I, I can see it like it’s yesterday. The power of it was, first of all, he was a leader who was doing something completely unconventional. She was gonna be a very innovative person to work with. She expected you to really do unusual stuff, magic, and she was building a team, right?

She was creating an environment in which I felt welcome, really powerful. And so I took a page out of her book in team building, and one of the stories that is actually not even in the book, but that I like to tell, was that when you are building a team, they need to feel that you have their back, particularly if you’re the president.

And if you go to a board meeting, you have board members criticizing [00:25:00] facilities or the finance department or the admission cycle or whatever, you need to be able to, first of all, defend your people and take the heat to buck stops on your desk, but also let them know that you understand the actions they’ve taken or where they may have.

So I used to have these sessions that I called the couch, come to the couch, and so it was a couch session. So after a particularly difficult time, they’d all come over to my house, the president of the house, and as I said, I would all give them a little bit of alcohol to loosen them up and we would talk like it was in a psychiatric.

That’s where I got the idea from. If you’re a psychiatrist, you go to the office and they have a coach where you’re supposed to sit and talk about your problems, and it was enormously therapeutic, but it let the team know that we were a team. This was not Don Hickey’s problem, or Phyllis Clark’s problem or.

Carl Amin’s problem as provost, it was our problem and we were together and we were going to figure it out and I think it [00:26:00] built a lot of loyalty and camaraderie and goodwill. How often did you talk to your team? Every week. If I was in town. Now I have to say as president you did a lot of traveling. Well, the provost I talk to every day ’cause they are your number two and you know you are in communication with them all the time.

Most of the other vice presidents I will see individually once every two weeks or once a month, depending on their portfolio. But, uh, we would have a meeting every week as a team. We would talk about the issues. They would have a chance to tell the team what they were doing, what the problems they were encountering.

It was a very important to get together. We were very fortunate living in Alberta, the most beautiful scenery in the world. And we would have three retreats a year. One in Bam, one in Jasper,

Maureen: one in Lake Louis, I mean. Great way to build a team. And Martha, you selected her. You had a team when you took over the President’s role.

Some states, some left. Tell our listeners a little bit about

Martha: how you navigated that [00:27:00] process. I wish I knew the formula. I wish I could say, do this, do that, ask this question, do that. You’ll get the right people. Some of the people I put together in my team were exceptional and some didn’t work out, so I don’t have that magic formula, but I tell the story about Indiraa, who was.

Probably one of the best, if not the best vice presidents I ever had the opportunity to work with. Uh, when people ask me, what’s your legacy? When I hate that question, I always say, endear is my legacy. Why that I take all the credit for her accomplishments? But it’s a great story in that when I was appointed the president of UBC, there was a period of time I was still at the U of a University of Alberta.

And a scholar from UBC came to give a lecture at U of A and I went to the lecture. I didn’t understand a word of it, it was a renowned scholar. And afterwards I went up and introduced myself and he, [00:28:00] he wasn’t impressed, but he said, I do have one piece of advice for you. I said, what’s that? He said, well, you keep your eye on Indira Ara.

She is amazing. Now this is a name you won’t forget, right? So I go to UBC for three years. I’m there. I never meet her. I know about her because she’s winning every award you can think of. And I’m out there promoting the university on behalf of her and saying how wonderful we are because we have people like in dear out there doing wonderful research and please give to the university.

So when I get her application across my desk to be vice president of research on any checklist, she would’ve failed. She wasn’t a dean. She hadn’t been an associate, she hadn’t been an associate anything associate director. She hadn’t chaired a committee. She hadn’t been a vice president or associate vice president.

She had been the head of a department. Any of the things that you would typically look for for a vice president. I [00:29:00] mean, these are the top four or five people that you are depending on to do the work of the university. But what did I remember? I remembered what this man had told me, and he was held in such high regard and was such a wise person.

And was phenomenally recognized around the world as being remarkable. I thought that’s the name he told me to keep my eye out for. I better interview her. I take her to lunch, and the rest is history. I tell this story because it’s the power of sponsorship. He was sponsoring her, he was advocating for her.

She didn’t know. In fact, she did not know this story until we wrote the book. She never knew. She didn’t know the person who, I mean, she knew when I told her who it was. She knew of him of course, but she had no idea the power of individuals supporting for and advocating for the bright stars that you see in your [00:30:00] organization.

We don’t do enough of that in promoting the people who we think can be the next leaders, and that’s a message that we make in our book. The Difference between mentoring and sponsoring. And we now are committed to sponsor as many bright people that we find because we think that’s really an important way to promote leadership.

Maureen: Thank you for sharing that, because I think people often confuse mentoring and sponsoring.

Martha: Yeah. Well, let me ask you one question. Do you know any men that have mentors? How many men versus women? Women mentor to death? We are into mentoring. Mentoring is when you actually ask someone, would you advise me?

Would you be my mentor? Would you help me understand things? Mm-hmm. And they give you advice and you either take or leave it and you have a relationship with them. Sponsors work in mysterious ways. They often are people, you have no idea who they are, but you have made an [00:31:00] impression on them. You have said something in a meeting.

You have sat next to them at a dinner and said something that they thought was pretty impressive, and usually they have watched you. They have been impressed by you, but usually they’re people of renowned.

Indira: Yeah.

Martha: There are people who are well thought of in the community who can influence just by putting their name with yours, and they don’t do it frivolously.

They will not put their own reputation on the line for someone who they don’t thoroughly respect. Think it’s going to do a good job, but you have no idea who’s gonna sponsor you. You don’t go out and say, would you sponsor me, please? I’ve had people ask that, and it’s a dumb question. Dumb. It is a dumb question, right?

Would you be my sponsor? No. These are people who do it quietly under the radar. And as Indira and I have looked at our book as we went through our whole stages of, [00:32:00] you know, our career. We recognized that at every step of the way, there was a sponsor in the background promoting us. Mm-hmm. And in our case, it was always men.

Yeah. And so now as women who have led, we feel we need to sponsor as many women as we can, as well as men. Mm-hmm. But you know, we need to step up and do

Maureen: that. Even early on when someone asked me to get them coffee and one of my male colleagues said, here, let me go with you. Even something that simple to say, let me advocate.

That was visible and he wasn’t a more powerful person. But by virtue of his gender at that point in history, he was sponsoring

Martha: you? Yeah,

Maureen: he was sponsored me on me.

Martha: Yeah. He was standing up for you and for your rights and for your reputation,

Maureen: Uhhuh. Yeah. As a peer, I shouldn’t have been asked to get coffee.

Exactly. No,

Martha: that’s, that’s what he was doing. Yeah.

Maureen: Yeah,

Martha: yeah, yeah. That’s what he was doing. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, [00:33:00] we, well, we’ve all had the privilege of sitting on many committees where people are being, you know, nominated and so forth.

Maureen: Mm-hmm.

Martha: Invariably, men have done it well for years and years. They nominate Joe, they nominate Peter, they nominate James, and they nominate each other.

The poor women often have no one nominating them. Yep. And yet they’re no less respected. They’re no less able. Yes.

Maureen: For women to nominate women and men to nominate women. Yes.

Martha: Yes.

Maureen: And to your point, we’ve all gotten where we’ve gotten.

Martha: Yes.

Maureen: With male advocacy. We are not bashing men in any way. We’re saying thank you.

Martha: There’s no question in my mind when I look back that I would never have gotten each of my different stages without men. Who believed in me and who stood

Indira: up for me and who put me forward and pushed me. I mean, I suddenly, as a female in engineering, I had no female colleagues whatsoever. And people have said to me, oh, you must have faced discrimination.

People must have, you know, I said, au contraire. The men who were my [00:34:00] colleagues, mostly older men, there were at least 10 years older than me, were incredibly generous, gracious, supportive, encouraging. Now. Sometimes you can misinterpret their actions, right? They get into an argument with you or a debate at a faculty meeting.

You don’t immediately consider that as an act of discrimination. They’re just debating. And I think a lot of women misinterpret healthy dynamics as being whatever they wanna do, and we talked about the victim mentality. We’re done with being a victim. As women, we have every opportunity to succeed, and it doesn’t matter.

Whether you’re a minority or they have different sexual orientation or whatever it is that’s going on. The days of saying that you’re being put down because of the system are God individuals may discriminate. I think that’s really important. The other thing, I think we’ve come to a time where we need to.

Not set up these sort of structures. You know, we, we are talking about my favorite subject, diversity, [00:35:00] equity, and inclusion, which has a lot of validity, but I think we have to be careful that we don’t carve ourselves up into these little silos. And inadvertently set people back. And one of the stories that I tell in the book that I think is important to tell this audience is I was being interviewed by the newspaper Edmonton Journal.

This was in early two thousands when already there were more women in the undergraduate programs at universities and there were men. That’s true. And this guy said, are you worried about the fact that men are now being left behind? And I said, absolutely. We can’t end up in a place where now men are unemployed.

So I said, I’m gonna be an advocate for white men because I can be, you should have seen the outcry. I was asked to resign because the women got all upset and said, how dare you, women are not in CEO positions. They’re not. I said, that’s not the issue. The issue is there is a gender imbalance now developing.

Young men are being left behind. We need to [00:36:00] begin to pay attention to that. My point is that we got to be. Generous and not become all polarized and

Maureen: not move the tent over to exclude these people versus those people.

Martha: Yes, exactly. Yeah. One time I was called by a president and said, we’d like to give you an honorary degree.

I said, oh, I’m, I’m thrilled. That’s lovely. He. And he said, yes, we’re honoring the fact that you were an outstanding woman president. I said, I’m really not interested in receiving an honorary degree where you’re telling me I’m an outstanding woman university president when there are only two of us in the country.

I said, if I’m an outstanding university president, then I’m more than happy to accept your honorary degree, but if you’re only signaling me out because of my gender. I don’t think that’s honorific. Let’s make it a little generous. Immediately backed. Oh, of course. That’s a, oh, you’re one of the most amazing presidents.

You know, blah, blah, blah. But she was, but [00:37:00] I thought I needed to make that clarity. Yeah.

Maureen: The two of you had a rift at one point. People fall away. We have disagreements how important it is that we. Find a path back to repair. Yes, because your book is a result of that.

Martha: I’ll take this question because I’m the culprit and I am.

It was so selfish of me. Indira was my vice president, and I saw in her all the qualities that you’ve seen today and you’ve heard today. She had president written all over and although we never really, I don’t think formally discussed it, no. I was constantly trying to give her experiences where she could see what it would be like, and I believe so firmly that she was going to replace me, which of course is ludicrous because an outgoing president has absolutely no say.

And it was going to replace them, and in fact it would’ve been a kiss of death ’cause they always looked for somebody different. So when she started looking at the U of A to be President, I was not a [00:38:00] happy camper first. It’s a competitor, it’s an outstanding university that competes with UBC. But second, I felt she was rejecting me.

And of course she wasn’t. But I saw this as a personal rejection of my goal for her. Of course she went on and she became just a remarkable president as I knew she would be. But it took me at least five or six years Yeah, to get over it, to get over the personal rejection, to get over the fact that she had turned her back on the university.

I loved, I had worked so hard to try to prepare her. She had gone on and kind of just said, sorry, I’m leaving you and I’m leaving the university. It was so selfish of me because it was right for her and it was clearly right for the country and clearly right for the University of Alberta. So now she’s finished.

She comes back to Vancouver and I don’t really know how we started together. Started to get

Indira: coffee

Martha: together. I don’t remember. [00:39:00] I don’t remember either. One of us must have reached out and we started having coffee. Oh, every three or four months at the same place. Truffles. Truffles. We began to mend our relationship, but even as we took on the book, which is another whole story, it was the writing of the book that really cemented the relationship because as Indiraa said, we knew each other professionally.

We regarded each other professionally. We respected each other professionally, but we didn’t really know each other personally. And when you write a book like this, because the first part of the book is developing nerve, it’s all about our childhoods and our families and having children and our marriages and all of that, you start disclosing things to each other.

Mm-hmm. That make you recognize that this is a person you love dearly.

Indira: Mm-hmm.

Martha: And our relationship. I mean, we are BFFs. Yes. I mean,

Indira: seriously. [00:40:00] Yeah. We live just down the road. We

Martha: live right down the road from each other. We both have four grandchildren who go to the same school.

Indira: Yes. I

Martha: mean it It’s sick. Sick.

It is Cynical’s. So funny. And kids are surgeons and I mean, honest to goodness, they work together. Yes. Unbelievable. In the same hospital. I feel so much gratitude and, and joy in having discovered her. As a kindred spirit,

Maureen: the ability to repair again speaks to grace

Indira: in my view. You

Martha: know, I wish I knew what had triggered it.

I wish I knew what had triggered our coming back together.

Indira: I’m an alumnus of the US of British Columbia. I have a long history with this institution. I did my PhD there. I was a professor. I became her vice president. So I’ve been there 28 years, but I married the University of Alberta. Right. You know, I am deeply committed to that institution and Will always will be.

So we came together and the thing, she had been at the U of A, [00:41:00] yes, she’d been there 12 years. So I couldn’t understand why she had this reaction to my going to an institution in which she had had a great 12 year career. So the misunderstanding was both ways. I was really annoyed with her, you know, because she kept saying, oh, you don’t wanna go there, you gotta stay here, and that’s not a good place.

I’m going like, but you were there for 12 years. So, you know, it’s about really understanding the motive, and I knew that her heart was in the right place. She cared deeply about me. I knew that she was basically reacting to a very personal desire. Having groomed me to see me

Martha: follow her and build on what she had done.

The big conflict for me, it was an unconscious conflict. ’cause of course I had to give a reference for her. Yes she did. And of course I gave her a glowing reference. She is a glowing person and I’m not gonna back away from that. But the whole time I was giving this glowing reference, I’m thinking I’m nailing my coffin.

[00:42:00] You know, I’m, I’m just securing her to leave. It was difficult. The book, I will always be grateful.

Indira: Yeah, me too. For the book.

Martha: Yeah.

Maureen: Many people don’t heal and the courage and the grace and heartfelt ness to come back together just speaks to the quality of humans. You talked about listening and hearing and taking a different point of view, and sometimes time is required.

Martha: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think so. But respect and trust. You know, because we know other people who we could have approached for the book, and I know it wouldn’t have worked. There was something always there. Yeah, there was always a chemistry, always there.

Maureen: Yeah. Thank you both for sharing your personal stories and encouraging women and men alike with the importance of nerve grace.

Grit, respect, listening, the beingness of high quality, principled people.

Indira: Thank you. Thank [00:43:00] you. Thank you very much.