Kylee Fitzpatrick - Being a Leader is not easy. Your Story Matters.
Kylee Fitzpatrick - Founder & CEO, TEAM Women Australia
Kylee is leadership coach and consultant specialising in resilience. It was 2014, following the disruption of her own leadership journey juggling a senior leadership role in the corporate world with taking care of her family, Kylee discovered the power of storytelling to build resilience and advance as a leader despite adversity.
Kylee had a long and successful career working in Media, as a researcher and marketer for some of the country’s most iconic media brands. It was a hot time to be in the media industry, working for Murdoch Magazines during the launch of Marie Clare, New Woman, Men’s Health, Better Homes and Gardens TV; before moving to Hachette Filipacchi to take over the Australian operations of Elle Magazine and launching Elle Cuisine, then onto News Corp Australia where she worked on the launch of Body and Soul, and some years later moving to community media where was the architect of the company-wide rebranding of some of the countries leading local newspapers.
It was April 2011 when returning to work after her third child (in three years) that Kylee thought “I can’t do this anymore”. As much as she wanted to return to her job, she says “I couldn’t see how to make it work without it having an impact on my family and, back then, there weren’t any flexible options for those of us in senior leadership positions. I negotiated a part-time role but within months I was frustrated.”
Relegated to a corner office without a team, I was bored and (truth be told) bitter. Despite no longer having parts of the job I loved, and worked so hard to achieve, I was unwilling to resign myself to the prevailing story “this is as good as it gets”.
It was thanks to a conversation with a close friend who politely says, “you need to get out of here, you’re not realising your potential”. Honestly, I didn’t like what he said, but I knew he was right, so without much thought, like a dog with a bone I got into action - I returned to study, taking on a post-grad certificate in Change Management (the irony) with the AGSM, UNSW. I signed up with the Change Management Institute and got myself a mentor (still one of my most dearest friends). I called up a friend to coach me and I stock piled up my beside table with a stack of books from ‘The Great Work of Your Life’, Google’s ‘Search Inside Yourself’, Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ and among many others Robin Sharma’s ‘The Leader Who Had No Title”.
It wasn’t easy - I was doing everything in my power to get myself into a position where, again, I could continue my role as a leader and have the experience of being a contribution again. Notwithstanding my own challenges, it was a challenging time to be working in an industry where multiple restructures were now the norm. Adding more fuel to the flames I was in a role where I was putting people’s names on a list for redundancies.
The devastating blow came on March 5, 2014, my son’s 7th birthday. It was a day like any other, until I opened up my emails to discover a message from our CEO with news that a colleague, and friend, had lost his life (to suicide). It was the first time I ever remember crying in the office. It was a tough day and yet I knew I had to put on a happy face to celebrate my sons birthday. No sooner had I walked in the door that night, not having mentioned a thing to the family, I sat with a glass of wine and my husband was upset, “The business has gone into administration and I’m afraid we’re going to lose the house”.
It was this moment that triggered one of the most valuable lessons of my life: It doesn’t matter how great we are at creating inspiring visions and putting well-intended plans to achieve our goals (even though they’re necessary), if we don’t have what it takes to bounce back from the set backs and adversity that surrounds us. What good is it, if we spend our lives turning to alcohol, food, sex or drugs to compensate for the surmounting amounts of stress, loneliness and grief that comes with the high-pressured and high-demanding lives were all living.
Personally, the initial breakthrough happened with the acknowledgement of my own judgement: recognising the story I told myself that “I can’t do this” was preventing me from standing up for myself and pursuing what was really important. Instead, I backed out thinking “I should be grateful for having a job while taking care of kids”.
It’s easy to blame the company, the boss, a lack of equality and the culture on why we can’t have what we want; but, as a leader, I realised none of that was really the problem, I’d only be shooting myself in the foot and if I really wanted “things around here to change”, the I knew I had to do something about it.
While writing my next chapter, reading through all those books and taking advice from my support crew (study buddies, coach, mentor and friends), it was the conversations with other women who were equally frustrated and desperately wanting to advance as leaders, that had me realise I wasn’t alone, the problem was much bigger and surprisingly (after throwing myself into research I discovered it was) universal…
Women were struggling with their return to work after having children, they were being held back from advancing as leaders for all sorts of reasons, and there was an appalling level of discrimination against women that was preventing them from achieving their goals to advance in their career while taking care of their family.
Being a leader is not easy, but with a lack of resources to help women work through the challenges, change remains a distant vision.
The journey of transformation, to rewrite our future despite what is happening around us doesn’t happen over-night, but I having combined my skills in strategy with the 10 years I’d spent as a leadership coach, I discovered three simple practices that when applied to any area of our life can produce immediate and unprecedented breakthroughs - no matter who we are or what we do.
I call it the A-Game:
Acknowledgement: We cannot change what we don’t acknowledge. It’s not always easy to be truthful to others about how we feel or what we think, but its certainly easy to tell the truth to ourselves. Then and only then do we have the ability to make change happen.
Accountability: We cannot predict or change what happens around us, but when we authentically own that we are accountable for how we show up and how life turns out, we have enormous power. Win or lose, when we dust ourselves off we have invaluable lessons that propel us forward.
Taking Action despite our Attitude: Sounds easy, but it’s not given how many of us fail at taking the actions we know to take. When we take action despite what we think or how we feel we realise that we are much stronger than we give ourselves credit for. Not taking action is what leads to the downward spiral of doubt.
In 2014, when we launched TEAM Women Australia, our mission was simple - to make it easier for women to access the resources they needed to better navigate the complexities of life and at the same time ignite their passion, grow their influence and amplify the impact they wanted to have with their families, communities, organisations, society and the world.
We didn’t quite anticipate the impact it would have, but as it turned out, bringing women together from different backgrounds, cultures and experiences to share their story - being authentic about the harsh and often brutal reality of life, ignited a fire in everyone’s belly. Collectively women united through tears and laughter to lose the guilt, perfectionism, doubt and fear to rise strong.
With diversity, came compassion. With compassion, came courage; and with courage came confidence in removing social barriers to advance as a leader and get paid what we’re worth - no matter who we are or what we do.
While being a leader is not easy, I’ve come to realise that our access to leadership lies not in putting more pressure on ourselves to be more and do more, nor does it lie in climbing the corporate ladder, having a title or list of academic credentials, nor does it lie in simply having a vision or clarifying a purpose and creating a plan.
Being a leader, and inspiring leadership, lies in our ability to acknowledge and be acknowledged, to be heard, accountable and taking action despite what we think, how we feel or what we believe; and while all of that sounds simple, in a world where technology is rapidly advancing the way we live and work, the key to success lies in our ability to identify and remove the barriers that hold us back, to be resilient and advance towards our goals despite adversity.
Kylee’s story is one that many women face as they move through their career, start a family and continue their pursuit to advance as a leader.
With a passion for advancing women and empowering leaders in the business of disruption, Kylee works full time as a Consultant, Coach and Mentor specialising in leadership transformation, resilience and wellbeing. She is an ambassador for Flexible Working Day and The Mentor Evolution, a powerful speaker on resilience and the power of storytelling to advance leaders, and an advocate for the transformation of workplaces enabling inclusion and diversity.