Kirstine Stewart Found Success Where She Least Expected It

The potential of possibilities!

Many successful women have found their success, by planning their advancement carefully, building their skills and resources, and leveraging their mentors, coaches and champions. Sometimes this isn’t enough. We all know advancement for women is tougher than it is for men often even when it is not perceptually so in your work place.

Yet women are succeeding in every field and are proving themselves often better suited to today’s more collaborative outsourced market place than their male counterpart. The question is not why; this has been well debated and documented. A far more important question is how can you succeed beyond your dreams despite this reality?

Kirstine Stewart the Executive Vice President of CBC for English Services, Carol Stephenson, the Dean of the Ivey School of Business and Sylvia Chrominska, Group Head of Global Resources at Scotiabank found the same answer to this challenge. They worked, trained and networked hard, but more importantly they stayed open to possibilities in fields they had not trained for, and had not planned to succeed in.

Kirstine Stewart proved the wisdom of being open when she didn’t get the job she had dreamed of as a publisher and instead joined Paragon International, a program distributor as a “Girl Friday” where she found one of the country’s best mentors and champions. She left only after she had risen to the top seven years later. By being open to the opportunities, coaching and skill building, presented in this very average job, one many would consider demeaning, she eventually leveraged this track record to manage a budget in excess of $500 million and lead a staff of more than 5,000. To hear her amazing journey in her own word click here.

From Girl Friday to the most powerful woman in Canadian media including television, radio, digital, and worldwide syndication deals, it is quite a ride as she continues to turn what others might consider adversity into opportunity.

Her participation in the digital music strategy is her legacy. She has made a significant contribution to moving CBC toward its future in a digital world.  It has also led her to her next diamond on the side of the road – the opportunity to play a big role at Twitter, starting with the establishment of Twitter Canada.

So she has gone from a staff of 5,000 to virtually none because she is leveraging her current strengths at the top of a slow moving organization punctuated by outsider influencers to play in a bigger, faster moving more challenging and potentially more rewarding game.