I had a great opportunity to interview Lydia Drasic (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydia-drasic-482a4914/?originalSubdomain=ca) who was a former executive director at BC Centre for Disease Control. She had been working as a female leader in the public health care system of British Columbia since 2004. Originally she was a public health nurse and decided to go back to higher education when her daughter started to go to elementary school. That study opened her skills in management and working in organizations and how to apply the learning to Public Health services. After her graduation from MBA, she started to work for the Simon Fraser Health Region. At that time BC was moving from a local focused health system to a provincial regionalized system. She was one of the members dedicated to build a standard health care system for British Columbia.
1. What is the greatest challenge you have faced or are facing as a woman in leadership?
As a female leader, she always felt that she had to lead to do more, perform more, perform better than her male counterparts. There was more pressure for female leaders to do things more and better to provide an image of one step ahead gained, whereas male leaders seemed to be more relaxed to do things because female leaders often felt they did not have extra chances and would lose their reputation easily. She thought the biggest challenge for a female leader is “perfectionism”.
Perfectionism also affected her thinking of balancing the family and her career. It was another challenge and dilemma. Her husband was so supportive that she did not have a lot of issues in fact. However, the pressure came from herself having own expectations as a good wife, as a good mother who stays at home and spends more time to do a lot of things for family always made her feel guilty and torn.
Another challenge for her as a female leader was she needed to speak out for herself to be evaluated by the organization. She noticed at times female leaders got less pay and were not promoted as readily as male colleagues and that female leaders seemed not to be good at negotiating, showing their contribution properly. She said it was very important for female leaders to make the organization acknowledge their contribution.
2. What is something that you do that helps you to meet or deal with this challenge?
While she was working as a female leader, having mentors and life coaches helped her to get through her challenges. She had a female CEO who took good care of female leaders and became a good role model to show how to lead, speak out, and behave. When she was stuck in hard situations, she tried to talk to mentors or coaches to help ground her and help her out of the mess to think clearly and sort out her ideas to solve the situations. She mentioned it is very important to choose and have some people who you speak to. Mentors are people who she wanted to be in the future and coaches are people who helped her clear her mind.
3. Do you have any other advice or encouragement for women in leadership?
As a female leader, maybe for all of the leaders, one of the things she thought that is so important is to see and say what are your values and what is your interest and what are your excitement to contribute and shine. Also knowing your strength and weakness of yourself is especially important for this modern complex society. You need to be very clear where you need help and a guide. Building your strength as well as knowing your weakness will let you know what you need to learn and you can shine and contribute more. She suggests we have mentors and coaches in order to know ourselves.
Secondly, be brave to set the time to shut down from work and figure out how to balance career and family life. Still most of women do the most part of house works. Being a woman means 24/7 working. Take care of yourself well, nurture yourself. Females tend to make things better for other people, family and organizations and easily put themselves second or third. Take care of yourself as a precious object, then you can do things perfectly the way you want.
You always have to be true to your heart. You have to follow your integrity. If you don’t do that, everything will mess up. As long as you are leading from your heart, and from your sense of kindness, your sense of passion, then it will work. And if there is not a fit, look for something else. Don’t fight to the point where you are so down. Before that, you should leave. Do not stick to the position for the reason you don’t want to change or you want money from that position. Be brave to walk out and find where you can give your passion. There is something waiting for you. For that, you should know your interest, passion, skills, and strength to prepare for your chance.
We talked for two hours and she gave me so many treasure phrases and encouragements from her experience. I would express my greatest gratitude to Lydia.