I have been fortunate in my career to work in many places around the world enjoying different cultures and ‘ways of working’. I have also been fortunate to have worked with some amazing bosses who taught me a lot. The one thing I learnt that to be a great leader you need to blend passion and energy and have an intuition on how to work with and manage people. The other thing I learnt that to have these qualities it was irrelevant whether you were male or female and indeed without upsetting some of my former bosses perhaps the best was indeed a woman who had a presence and personality, which could inspire a room full of people and an agency of hungry talent. The lesson is simple; gender and prejudice has no bearing in capability and leadership.
When I relocated to the MENA region, I attended a pitch to get an understanding of where UM was heading and the type of work we were doing. It was a great presentation and genuinely world class work, though I remember half way into the meeting I looked around and there was only one woman and her role was not a decisive one. Could it really be that in this region only the men could do the big roles? As I travel around the region I can’t help but feel that too many times people are in their roles purely because of gender and that the true talent within many organizations is held back because they are female. There are pockets of excellence where I see some amazing female leaders emerging in key roles, though there remain exceptions. The quicker people are promoted on merit rather than gender the stronger the region will become.
In other parts of the world, diversity at the work place is taken more seriously and this can be reflected within our network itself. At IPG Global, women (on a group level) constitute more than 50 percent of the managerial roles, while 40 percent of our boards of directors are women. IPG has also launched the Women’s Leadership Network (WLN) which promotes the advancement, retention and recruitment of women and works to help position IPG agencies as employers of choice and as catalysts of change in the communications industry in order to achieve significant business results. This program extends to all our offices around the world.
Following suit, we at UM MENA are conscious we need to do more to ensure that the best people are nurtured and trained and that the right people get the leadership roles, which means more women will by right take more leadership roles. Currently, 44.2 percent of our staff consists of women while 30 percent of them are in managerial roles and above, which shows that we have made great strides with women since 2013. We are also proud that two of our offices are run by women in Cairo & Beirut; that we have leadership positions in Dubai, Qatar, Morocco and Bahrain to name some of our offices.
We will continue to promote the best at UM and as such more women will have leadership roles and we know we will have put them there because they are simply the finest and no other reason. And when your workplace is home to a diverse and equal workforce you know you are creating an invested community of employees thereby benefiting the company through a world of opportunities.
