Buch lesen: «The Skills»

Introduction

Authority, purpose, confidence, looking like the person in the office who is clearly going places – if there was one thing I wanted to achieve in writing this book, it was to inject a ‘how’ into statements about the workplace based around those words and ideas. How could they be translated into the day-to-day reality of an office, a job interview, a board meeting or a speaking engagement?

I wanted to use the tools of my own trade of broadcasting to answer that question, especially the pressures and perils of live work. But I was also conscious of the gulf between how people in jobs like mine are generally perceived – unencumbered by doubts about their performance – and my own experience of what it can be like in reality. I worried that when teenagers I spoke to in schools told me ‘You must never get nervous’, that was an assumption that might lead them to conclude that a path like mine could only be for someone blessed from birth with an unshakeable belief in their abilities.

I also knew from my own life how self-doubt can make you baulk at opportunities that – were they presented to anyone else – would be perceived as a no-brainer. When the incoming editor of the Today programme asked if I might be interested in becoming one of its presenters, baulk was exactly what I did. Despite nearly twenty years as a journalist, and a long-held ambition to present one of the BBC’s flagship programmes, I could only think of how hard the job would be – the precision required, the pressure, the scrutiny, the pre-dawn starts. I went home and told my husband it was a nice idea but I couldn’t imagine going for it. He looked incredulous. What would I say, he asked, if any of our children ducked out of a potentially great opportunity by saying it would be too hard?

I knew the answer to that one, and it pushed me to go for it. But for the first three years on Today, I fretted about almost every shift. I could not feel at ease in the role, always worrying about what might go wrong and agonising over everything that I did. But then came a moment of change – a point from which my experience started to feel different. Although an element of apprehension remained about what the working day would bring, that worry started to feel manageable and something I could channel. Looking back, it is easy to see that over time I grew into the role and began to feel more at home in it. Yet to me, at first that outcome was never a given. I find myself wondering now, what if I had bailed sometime before that moment of change? I’d be looking back and probably perceiving my uncertainty as evidence that the job wasn’t right for me. I would never have discovered what I can now appreciate – that the passage of time, perseverance and an increasing familiarity made an immense difference.

Along the way I have learned a lot about how more difficult tasks develop your capabilities, and about scrutiny and resilience. My work is on public display, with the low points as well as the high subject to immediate and sometimes fevered comment. It is often intense, both because of unusual working hours – a regular 3 a.m. alarm call – and the pressure that comes from having to quickly absorb large quantities of information. The end result is all about conveying that information in a form that best serves the audience – getting the most salient and important facts, thoughts and opinions out of interviewees, and being as clear as possible in your own thought and speech.

However much that is at the core of my working life, I have always found it much more difficult to convey information about myself, particularly in the way that is essential in the workplace. It starts with how you present your skills and aptitude at an interview and goes on through promotions and appraisals to getting the senior-most positions. As time went on, I realised I needed to deploy the essential tools of my trade – choice of words, body language, ability to distil information and deploying facts – towards my own career development as well as on the television and radio. In an age where myriad information sources and social media mean that attention spans tend to be short, those messages about yourself need to be ever more instantly understandable and memorable.

Why did I find these conversations and messages trickier than my day-to-day work and shy away from anything that I perceived as showcasing or selling it? I had certainly grown up with a strong motivation to be the best that I possibly could be – largely stemming from being the daughter of immigrants and seeing how my parents had uprooted themselves from all that was familiar, strongly driven by wanting to do their utmost for us children. Both came to the UK from Pakistan – my father as a young doctor and my mother when she married him a few years later. There was never any question of me, as their daughter, being perceived differently from my brother; for both of us, the arrival of school reports sparked a gathering around the dining table where my father would read each entry aloud. As long as we appeared to be doing our best, he was satisfied: ‘Aim high,’ he would say, ‘because if you miss what you are aiming for, you’ll still end up in a good place.’

In both my parents’ families, mine would be the third generation in which women had had educational opportunities comparable to men – back in the 1930s, in what was then British India, my two grandmothers were enrolled on medical and nursing courses respectively. In the 1980s, it was the desire for me to have the best possible education that made my parents opt for an English boarding school rather than have me stay in Saudi Arabia, where we were then living. It was a decision that meant difficult airport goodbyes and long separations. Years later, I discovered that quality of schooling was not the only factor. As a teenage girl in Saudi Arabia I would have had to wear the long black abaya, or cloak, and a headscarf every time I left the house. My parents worried that being subject to those constraints as part of my daily life might fundamentally alter my sense of what I could go on to achieve.

All of this support helped to propel me forward through my teenage years, but sometime during university I think I became less sure of myself and more self-conscious. I would have gained so much more from the experience of university had I been more willing to ask questions, to take risks and to test out arguments in front of my lecturers and fellow students. Instead, I was rather too cautious, apprehensive that I might have misunderstood, misjudged or appear uninformed. Something of that persisted in the first part of my professional life, when I was a producer first at Bloomberg TV and then at the BBC, before getting into presenting at the age of twenty-seven. I would mull over running orders and scripts in search of the ideal turn of phrase or link between one story and the next. I would approach new projects, such as working on the Olympics, almost like an exam – setting aside time for preparation, making extensive notes in advance and trying to cover every base. Working on Today knocked that search for perfection out of me for the most basic of reasons: the shortage of time focused the mind like nothing I had previously experienced, forcing me to trust my instincts and judgements and helping to give me a new-found courage.

I look back now and wish that I had kept hold of my self-belief all along the way. Instead, somewhere between entering the workplace and having to rise to the challenge of a particularly exacting role, it took a back seat. The socialisation of girls and the way they can then end up deferring to their male peers was certainly a factor, but later on it was also hard to hold on to a sense that I could make it into senior roles through the intense periods of pregnancy and early parenthood. The top of my chosen field, as in many others at that time, was one where women were under-represented, and women of colour more so.

Even today, and even in the most progressive nations, too many companies and workplaces can be gender-mapped into a pyramid shape: women and men represented in equal numbers at entry level but the presence of women tailing off dramatically the more senior the role.1 At the beginning of 2018, just seven women were leading FTSE 100 companies, fewer than the number of men called David occupying the same positions.2 A century after the first woman was elected to Parliament at Westminster, around two-thirds of British MPs are men,3 with a similar picture among partners in law firms in England and Wales, where only a third are women.4 On the airwaves, a 2018 study of the UK’s six most prominent broadcast news programmes found 2.2 male experts appearing for every female one.5 In some professions, even the entry level is seriously out of kilter – only around 12 per cent of all engineers in the UK are female.6 After the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the actor Emma Thompson called the lack of women in the film industry a ‘gender dysfunction’, part of a malaise within the system. ‘There are not nearly enough women, particularly in Hollywood, in positions of power. There aren’t enough women at the top of the tree – in the studios – who could perhaps balance everything out. There aren’t enough women on set. This is part of our difficulty.’7

I still find myself in settings that are overwhelmingly male, often at conferences – including the high-profile World Economic Forum, in Davos, where many of the women present are journalists or conference staff. It can be intimidating to look around the room and become conscious of being one of a small minority. Or you can see it as a galvanising moment. At Davos, I was once in an off-the-record media session with the Iranian president when, as the questions began, I debated whether I had one worthy of asking. And then I realised that as there were only about ten women in a gathering of well over a hundred people, if I didn’t speak up, the session might well end without a female voice being heard at all. Suddenly, the principle of participation seemed far more important than the actual question. I stuck up my hand and spoke.

We are in a time of increased awareness about the importance of representation across so many groups, but when I hear people say confidently that their daughters won’t experience the same realities and the same barriers, I am not convinced. My generation has had opportunities that most of our mothers did not, but we’ve also come up against obstacles that many of us expected would be gone by now. Work and childcare remain a difficult balancing act for too many women, and the bulk of home responsibilities are also mostly ours. Gender pay gaps illustrate the paucity of women in higher-paid roles, while equal pay claims raise questions about how women are perceived and valued in comparison with their male colleagues. Those gaps can be there even when women are in the most pre-eminent positions – such as Claire Foy in the lead role of Queen Elizabeth in The Crown, who was paid less than the male actor in the supporting role of her husband Prince Philip.

It seems to me that men set off on their careers with an expectation of advancement, unburdened by the questions or worries that can dog women – especially what may lie ahead of them in terms of juggling a career and family life. Bearing the weight of childcare responsibilities can reduce the ability to take advantage of salary-boosting job offers, because women are more tied to their commute, working hours and keeping their routine unchanged. And when they take up part-time and flexible working options the result can be a disproportionate wage penalty, a promotion penalty or simply a perception that their priorities now lie elsewhere. Ellen Kullman, who was one of the most powerful women in American business when she was running the corporate giant DuPont, has said that during her time in that company, women were being promoted every 30–36 months, while men were moving on every 18–24 months. The women seemed to be regarded as needing longer to show their capability.8

Perceptions can also be a barrier to women’s own sense of their potential. I know that when I close my eyes and conjure up an image of someone at the top of my chosen profession – a main presenter or a prominent interviewer – I see a man. I see a white man, as it happens. This reflects the reality of the world that has surrounded me in my time in broadcasting, but there is an internal effect, too, which makes it harder to imagine yourself in those pole positions one day. Early on in my career, there were times when I felt my suggestions weren’t taken as seriously as a man’s might have been (‘Stick to what you’re good at’ was one comment from a manager when I offered an opinion beyond my core brief). And even now, there are times when a prominent contributor walks into the studio and looks across at my co-presenter, and I imagine them wishing he was doing the interview with them rather than me.

It has taken me a while to feel I have a right to be in that room, in a position that allows me to question some of the most powerful people in the land. It’s what I think of as the third phase of my career. During the first, when I got a foot in the door of the news industry, I felt an immense thrill – although there was also a period on overnight shifts when it was hard to feel energised about anything at all. I certainly didn’t think about a future as a presenter, which was a world away from my life at that time. However, the business programme I was working on at the BBC sometimes got producers to do short on-camera wraps of the day on the financial markets. After doing this a few times I was offered some reporting shifts. Then, one week, there was a gap in the business presenters’ rota and I was asked to fill in, my knees shaking under the studio desk as I did so. I never went back to being a producer and in the next few years the opportunities came thick and fast – I had a stint based in Singapore and one in Washington, by which time I was with the international channel BBC World News.

Then came what I now think of as the middle phase of my career, coinciding with an intense period in my personal life – twenty months after the birth of my first son, I had twin boys. Returning to work after my second maternity leave was all about keeping the show on the road – life needed to be as simple and manageable as possible, in order to meet the needs of the family and keep my hand in at work. As the domestic rhythm became a little more settled and just a little less intense, however, I started to wonder what the next stage of my career could involve. Radio 4 had been a companion to my life from the age of seventeen – when a wise person advised me that listening to it would be good preparation for university interviews – and I knew I would love to work there one day. But I had no experience in radio production or reporting, let alone presenting on this medium. The only way I could gain valuable experience and get my voice on air would be to use my days off to do occasional shifts, filling in on news and other factual programmes in the hope that it might stand me in good stead for any future opportunities.

None appeared to be forthcoming, though, and this was an odd and often disheartening time – making ad-hoc appearances on unfamiliar programmes, wondering if I was in danger of becoming a jack-of-all-trades. What motivated me to keep going was the strong sense that I had but one life to see how far I might progress – I didn’t want to look back later and wish I had tried a bit harder. I realised, however, that the speed with which my career had taken off when I started presenting on television meant that opportunities had come my way without me having to push for them. I had got used to that, and I was now lacking an essential skill: being able to make a pitch for myself. I went to see one BBC editor after another, asking if they might try me out, but I found myself struggling with straightforward questions about what I wanted to do. In my quest not to come across as unrealistic or full of myself, I failed to have compelling answers that were true to who I was and where I wanted to go in my career.

Over time, there were some valuable lessons: I learned to hone in advance exactly how I wanted to use each meeting and be clear about what I was asking for; to be ready to turn my energies towards a new avenue if the first one didn’t work out; to keep an open mind and explore multiple options, even though that sometimes felt overwhelming; to do my best to express my hopes and ambitions without apology or diffidence – even if it felt excruciating at some moments and pushy at others. From there I started to think about nurturing a set of skills that might be relevant to career troughs as well as peaks, adaptable to different settings and transferable even in the event of a complete career change. Every projection about the future of work suggests that mobility will be increasingly important – perhaps the disruption will even bridge some of the workplace gender gaps we see today, if it becomes more common for men and women to shift gear, go part-time or take time out for family reasons.

Today, when I contrast my experience of working life with that of my mother, I feel a deep gratitude. For all the emphasis on education in my family, the idea that it could be used to forge a career and for that career to exist alongside motherhood, is a novel one. My mother gained two degrees in Pakistan and became a producer at Pakistan Television when it was first set up in the 1960s. But all around her it was accepted that marriage and motherhood were more than likely to bring a career to an end. After her marriage brought her to the UK in 1972, I was born in 1973 and became her full-time job. She told me years later that there were times when she would watch the Asian programming coming out of the BBC in Birmingham and long to be a part of it, to use her experience and have an identity in this new country beyond that of wife and mother. It was never going to be possible; my father was working long hours as an NHS doctor in Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire and any family members who might have helped out were far away. Childcare and travel costs would have been an unjustifiable addition to an already tight household budget.

It is not in my mother’s nature to be bitter about what might have been, but her experience reminds me not to lose an appreciation of the doors that have been open to me, one generation on. Changed attitudes to women and to ethnic minorities have both played a key role in my life chances – not so long ago it would have been hard to imagine someone with a name like mine fronting a national news programme. That is not to say that I find my own combination of motherhood, marriage and work easy – or even always manageable. I often think back to what I heard the then head coach of UK Athletics, Charles van Commenee, say just ahead of the London Olympics. Having coached many athletes to medals, he said he always tried to make them appreciate that pressure would be an ongoing part of their lives. ‘I tell them – it’s uncomfortable out there,’ he said. The words resonate with me because alongside the many privileges of my job are the difficult aspects – in particular the scrutiny. I cannot have one without accepting the other, and I have but this one life to make the most of what comes my way.