This weeks episode looks at what we can we learn from Leaders who were successful male leaders who have transitioned.

One of our expedition members, Yvette Hopkins, thought that the insight of what trans women have experienced as being both male and female in the workplace would be fascinating and she was right!

Antonia Belcher speaks about transitioning into being her authentic self how that authenticity is powerful in both herself and her leadership.

Jackie Gavin speaks on how as a man you have to prove yourself to be strong, the ruler of the roost but in being a female you are able to have a more honest and open conversation.

A powerful episode that gives a truly unique perspective on leadership. Enjoy.

Julia Middleton 0:01

Julia Middleton 0:43

Welcome, welcome, welcome. Julian Middleton, expedition leader on this 27th episode of the Expedition Podcast. I hope you enjoyed last week. I loved doing it and sort of insight into what's — it was only three members spoke on last week's podcast and think there are 24 members in all and think about how much those three members were thinking and not thinking and playing with. And think if you had all 24. I was brought up French and my first language is always French and there's an expression 'boure'. Your head is boure, it is absolutely stuffed full of ideas and thoughts of all 24 members who are throwing ideas and thoughts and questions, masses of questions. We're landing as many issues as we're raising. So the episode last week was so much fun to do.

Julia Middleton 1:40

This week is a really interesting one too. It's again, with a member of the expedition. And it's with Yvette. Yvette, right from the start, said in her very quiet way I think we could learn a lot about leadership, and an approach to leadership that resonates with women, from leaders who have transitioned from being male to female, people who were successful, senior and successful male leaders who are now senior and successful female leaders. Their insights must be extraordinary. So Yvette started these conversations, and then chose two people that she and I would interview for the podcast to give you a sense of what she's been discovering. And she's, she's quite right. Their leadership insights are like gold dust. First is Tony, Tony Belcher, Antonia Belcher, who is in the construction and property world, hugely successful. And then the second person is Jackie Gavin, whose career spans everything from the military, to government and now in the energy world. And both of them have talked to us about what it's like to be a leader, as a man, and what it's like to be a leader as a woman. So Yvette and I started with Tony. Both of us, our Questions were sort of tumbling out of us. We had so many. Tony first.

Julia Middleton 3:23

Tony, talk to us about transitioning from being a male leader to a female leader.

Tony 3:30

Okay, so I use a phrase called power, power of authenticity, because I talked to people about me being authentic myself. Obviously, for a big part of my life. I wasn't authentic. I was either hiding my true identity, or I was living a double identity. So for five years, I was Antonia. I was a nocturnal Antonia after work, finding my my true self in a progressive, managed way, which would have been alien to everyone else, but it's just what I did. I had to find myself. and when I found myself and I realised that I was really Antonia, I worried whether all the things I've been able to do as a man were going to disappear. All the strengths that I had, as a man, or or the strengths people perceived in me as a man would disappear because I was now a woman. I was dressing as a woman. I was wanting to behave as a woman. I was being the woman I knew I was. I found the easy way to deal with it was to say I'm now authentic. It is now really me. This is the person I've always been. I've just had to sort of do it under another idiom, under another persona. But my authenticity is powerful. It has a power. And I began to realise that that power was there because of the reaction of others to me. I had one of the biggest asset management clients you could have, who was generating millions of fees a year in the firm. And when I transitioned and started working as Antonia, wearing a dress, wearing makeup, turning up at work as the woman I knew I was, I was really nervous about telling them about what I'd done. And I avoided going to see them. If there was a meeting on I'd send a junior, a deputy. And this was picked up by my lieutenant who, who was very I was relatively close to from a business perspective. And he just said to me, he said, you know, you've got to go out there, and you've got to go and see them. And I said, yes, yes, yes, all in good time. And within a week or so, the head dice from this organisation just walked into my office, uninvited, and I realised it was my lieutenant that had sort of engineered their appearance. And door opens, and I just saw them. I was sitting at my desk, and I smiled. And the gentleman, concerned, quite senior man in the industry, he just turned around and said, Antonia, you know, we don't come to you and ask you to work for us for the way you look, we come because of your brain. And, and that was powerful for me and gave me a bolster to my power. It was just someone saying, you know that you are powerful, despite how you look, because of the way you operate, because of your brain power. And you know women and men, we've got equal brains, and dunno, might argue that women's brains could be better. So the power lies within rather than outwardly, in my view.

Julia Middleton 6:44

God, it's so hard, isn't it? To to judge how far you can push things?

Tony 6:51

Yes. And, and obviously, people will listen to what I'm saying, in certain jurisdictions, and be very comfortable with it, be very inspired with it. But then in other jurisdictions, they would listen to it, and they'd stay really silent and would want to want to be inspired by it. And would want to take credence from it, but would have to stay very hidden because of, you know, just because of the way society works in those areas,

Julia Middleton 7:19

Too right. There is this vast variation in speed of change across the world that is often overwhelming and very confusing. Talk to us now, Tony, talk to Yvette and I bet about what kind of leader were you when you were a man?

Tony 7:36

Interestingly, I ended up going into an industry where it is notoriously full of bullshit. All right. You're almost taught, and I was taught from a very young age, if you don't know the answer, don't let the client think you don't know the answer. Just make something up that sounds convincing. Whereas today, of course, we're taught the opposite. We're taught, no, there's nothing wrong with telling the client you don't know, that you can go away and find the proper facts and investigate and come back with a proper answer. But when I was young, it wasn't done like that. And, and therefore, it made me somewhat arrogant, it made me somewhat adversarial, that I was almost taught to be adversarial with contractors, because they were the villains, they always tried to charge too much for the work they do. And they needed to be put in their place. And so as a young man, working in London, trying to get my feet under the table, I was being made into a bit of a hard person, a bit hard persona in the work environment, which obviously if you know, you now know me, and if you appreciate that, at the time, I was trying to hide something that frightened the life out of me, is a bit odd. But it made me the way I was. Now I find that men naturally do this. They, if you don't tell them, this is interesting, because I get involved in a lot of careers work and stuff now, and we're trying to tell kids don't, don't bullshit, don't lie. Don't try and fabricate an answer that sounds convincing. Investigate it, tell the client you need time to do it. Men still don't want to do that today. They still want to shoot from the hip, they still want to answer. I think they see it as something that is male. They see it as something that is inherently leadership material. It marks them out as a potential leader. And I think you still see this a lot. I saw it a lot. And I'm forever telling what I was, when I was working, telling my younger guys, don't do that because you don't need to do that. And I was forever telling the girls that the boys will do this. And if you don't sort of compete at the level playing field, you'll just find you'll get pushed back. The classic examples for me, you know, I would be running a new project for a client, it would need a month or two's blue sky approach to it to make sure we've scoped it right from the start on, I would bring boys and girls together sit them down in a room and say, Mike, we got an afternoon now, where we're just going to free think, we're going to blue sky, what's going on here, and we're going to come up with all the potential tangential issues that could sit there. And I don't want anyone to be afraid to say what they think. No one's gonna get anything wrong. It's all about using the time and being experimental. I can guarantee that we would sit there for hours on end talking about things. I'd go back to my desk, either that evening, or the following morning, I'd get a call from one of the girls. And she'd say, he was talking a load of bullshit wasn't he? I go, what do you mean? She said, Well, that's never gonna work. Why, why? Why did you let him go on about it? I just said, because that's what we decided to do. That's what we agreed to do. I said, why didn't you challenge him in that meeting? Because you've been wasting my time now sitting at that meeting by not challenging what happened. Why, why? And I said, if you've got a better idea, and they go, well, I was thinking this could work and I said, well, you didn't mention that yesterday. Why didn't you mention it yesterday? Again, you're wasting my time, you're wasting the firm's time, I just found it just carried on and on and on. And I had to just say to the girls, don't be afraid of being wrong. Don't be afraid of looking a fool. You know, there are environments to do this. And we just give ourselves the permission to do it. So do it. You know, I mean, the real, the good example is if you look at a male CV and a female CV for a job, you'll find the guys have upped the ante on all their, all their things that are marginal, and the girls have taken them down. And this was my experience anyway. Because when I interviewed the girls, I'd say, you know, you put here, you've done a bit of this, how much have you done? We start talking about it, and I realised they'd done more than, you know, it's masses that they've done on that subject, whereas the boys, you challenge the boys, and you find they might have done one example of it. And they made it sound like they did it for six months of the year. It's just that balance.

Julia Middleton 7:41

Well, which balance? Do you want both to move towards the centre? Or...

From my perception of what was happening here was that the girls, I mean, I don't know, I'll come back to your question about the balance issue. But from my personal, what I saw is, the girls needed to be exposed to this environment, once, twice, thrice, they needed to learn from it, because they found it difficult just to be thrown into it. And to do it for a first time. So after I'd spoken to them, and we did another one, I'd see they were a bit more chippy about things. And after we'd done like half a dozen, they were giving the boys a good run for their mone. In terms of the balance, do you raise the girls? Do you lower the blokes? I'm not sure you do. Only insofar as both things are valuable from a business perspective, when you're running a business and you're trying to get the best out of people, because the way the blokes are, the girls can learn from it if they want to learn from it, and they want to compete. And I think the last 20 years is, the blokes have now understood the power of things like empathy, and collaborative work in an inclusive environment. They recognise that. That's new for men, because it didn't really exist, it didn't exist when I started.

During your transition time, I just find it fascinating that you said, I want to take some things, I want to leave some things. And you did it in a way that was specific to leadership.

As as Anthony, leading a team of about 20, I was more isolated. I was the leader. The buck stopped with me, I made more decisions. And I had, this this wasn't... I wasn't like this just overnight. It had taken 20 odd years of working in the industry, and building the team that I had. So I had created this persona where I was at the top. I made the decisions when a decision needed to be made. I wasn't a fence sitter. I would make a decision quickly, having done my research, but in property, you know, you can be right one day, you can be wrong the next. It's very market driven. So so there's always that issue. So I was sort of alone. I was alone as that male leader, and I knew I was a bit alone. And as I say for five years, I was in this period where I was Anthony during the day, and at night I was Antonia and I was going out and finding my life as a woman and I was meeting people who were like me, and I was talking about this this part of me that I had locked up, this part of me that was different to the persona I was creating in terms of the work I was doing. As I became this more successful leader, built the team and people, a lot of people were relying on me, I had to produce a lot of money, to justify their existence, to justify my own, but to justify the composition of the team. And what the team was doing was stepping up all the time in terms of attracting new clients and bigger projects. So in doing that, it had made me the leader I was, but what I didn't like about it was my isolation. I didn't like that. Certainly for the female members of the team, my connection with them was a lot less. I found myself talking more to the guys because I felt the guys needed more control.

But the more you talk to someone, the more you have a rapport. It can be a good report, it can be a bad rapport, but you do have a rapport. And so when I was going out as Antonio in the evening, I was talking to people who had the same problem as me. I was empathising with them, I was understanding, I was learning from them, I was learning... in many ways, I was learning what to do, what not to do, the pitfalls. I was learning how people were expecting me to behave, because I was watching what they were doing and seeing how people reacted to them. So it was a big learning experience for five years. So when I made the decision after that five year period, because I couldn't lie, and I couldn't cheat any more by leading this double life on my family. I decided that as I transitioned, I didn't want to be that, that lonely. And I think I was partly lonely because when you have a problem that you can't admit to people, it makes you a bit lonely. It makes you lonely in the head, because you say, you know, I'm not really this person. It's a masquerade. I'm lying and deceiving these people as to who I truly am. So it's a with a breath of fresh air that you transition. But of course, as you suddenly wake up to transitioning, you're destroying so many people's lives who depended on that man that you were, and suddenly telling them that you're not that person. So you have to handle it carefully. And it's going to evolve over a period of time. But I realised I wanted to be more empathetic. I wanted to be more collaborative. I wanted to be more sharing in the way I work. I probably wanted to share the leadership to a degree. I did actually share the leadership. I actually brought two other guys, alongside me and I started delegating a lot more at the leadership level. I just changed the way I worked. And it was around this question of empathy. Now, the interesting dynamic for me, of course, is I started taking hormones at about year four, year five of my five year double life. And I did feel what the hormones were doing. I did, I did feel a change in me. And I suppose in a way, I'd always had to be resilient because I was hiding this thing. I was trying to work in a male dominated arena, thinking, I'm a bit of a falsehood, but it made me resilient. I could fight with the best flow. I could be adversarial back, I could be arrogant back. But it wasn't the way I wanted to work from that point on. It wasn't the way I wanted to be. I wanted to be much more collaborative. I wanted to be much more empathetic about the way I was working, not necessarily about the decisions I was making, or I still had to make decisions. And I could still make quite hard decisions as the woman I was, as the woman I was allowing myself to be. I was that woman. That's the difficulty when I talk like this. I wanted to be perceived as a softer, less dictatorial leader in becoming Antonia.

Thank you, Tony. Thank you so so much. That was fantastic. Yvette and I then went on and spoke to Jackie. Very, very interesting because of course, Jackie had a similar experience and came in many ways to similar conclusions. But it was really, really interesting and fun to go deeper with Jackie, on some of the issues that Tony had raised.

What do you love about being a woman leader now?

I love being true to myself and not trying to be false in any way, shape or form and let me expand on that. So I always felt, in the male space, I was having to force myself forward all the time and make decisions that made me look good. But these days, I'm able to be more relaxed, more engaged more simply myself in my ability to engage in a way that I never ever was able to do before. And just simply being able to be true to myself, being in touch with everything about who I am as a person, my emotions, my feelings, everything.

If you would transition from being a woman to a man, you'd feel the same way?

I don't know if I would actually. I think, again, in the male world, it's almost like you have to prove yourself. So if I'd gone from female to male, would I have been more conscious that I had to show myself to be strong, show myself to be the ruler of the roost? And in that kind of context, I couldn't give you an honest answer on that, because I wouldn't know. I think just simply being myself is more important. But ultimately, I think also, in the female space, you're able to have more honest conversation, people are more apt to listen, sometimes, yes, it's difficult to force yourself into that space. And that's a real real core strength that I feel people are more engaged with me than they ever were when I was a man.

Isn't that fascinating. So what about, if we go back to leadership again, what do you miss about being a male leader? There must be something here. Come on, Jackie, there must be something.

In all honesty, Julia, there is absolutely nothing I miss about it. I suppose, if you were to push me, I would say I would say it's almost like, I have to shout a little bit louder. I have to shout a little bit in a way that allows me to be heard, I suppose. Sometimes, as a male leader, people were more thinking, Oh, well, yeah, it's one of the guys. Fine, we'll go with it. And that has a tendency to do and that's the bias that goes on in the male gender, is they're more apt to say 'ah yeah, well, fine. Okay.' It's that kind of bias that they make with the thought that it's a man, we'll go with it because a man's doing it, and the man's got the strength. But do I miss it? No, I don't, absolutely I don't. I would rather be more in the space where I'm more proud to achieve what I've been able to achieve, because I've fought for what I believe and I fought because it's the right thing to do. And bringing people with you, rather than just going with it just because it's guy. No, bet you get better results. Because you debate, you bring your audience with you. And that's, again, what gets me getting up in the morning because I'm determined to take people with me, rather than actually just going with it just because of the sake of going with it. So I'll honestly say to you, I don't miss it. Nothing. And I mean nothing about it.

You use the word louder. As a woman you have to — do you really mean louder? As a woman, you got to shout louder. Is louder the right word?

Louder is perhaps not the right word. I think it's more passionately. I think, as I see it, as a woman, you're able to be more passionate, because you believe in the subject matter. I don't mean loud, as in loud, loud. I mean, more passionate, more determined, more really, really, in that space where you want to make a difference and see and that's where I get it. I get passionate. Whenever people get me in this mindset they will get that person who will just get the people in the room going nodding their head with the verbal nods and feeling that wow, yeah, that's exactly how I feel. And that's where I drive at that kind of thing. So it's not loud. It's more passionate.

When we talk before you talked about crying.

Hmm. I'm proud to be able to cry. I am not ashamed of crying. I see it as a wonderful, wonderful strength to to be able to cry because, again, I'm in connection with my emotions. When I cry, would I say I cry uncontrollably? No, even at the loss of somebody, I would never say, I sob uncontrollably. I've been there, I've got the t shirt. But I suppose I use it as something that makes me who I am and being in connection, and that my tears will be something that will well up behind me. I think you knew me well enough to know that I'm not afraid to cry. And I will cry because it is a good thing.

Did you feel that way when you were, you know, a man?

Absolutely not. I was not able to do that. I had to show strength. And it's feels like in the real world, if you do cry, then you need to, you need to take time out, you need some time off or you need to get away. So yeah, as a man, did I ever feel that way? No, I don't think I could. I have never ever felt I could cry in front of ... I was. If I did cry, I would cry behind a closed door.

Jackie, when Yvette and I spoke to Tony, she talked about the various bits that women need to make sure that they don't adopt from male leaders. But she also talks about something that she thought the women should adopt from male leaders. And that is the ability, the hunger, the temptation, the willingness to challenge. Do you agree with me? Do you know I was thinking about it. In my head, yes, there's a logic that women have to get better, let's say at challenging, but not necessarily because they're interfacing with men. But because women, we need to be good leaders, and good leaders surely challenge.

Leaders should challenge all the time. And challenge in a way that is considered, challenge in a way that allows for people to be, again, true have that truism. I often find that, again, just what we're talking about is, let's go with the status quo. Because we like the the stability, we want to have the calmness. And if we're all going to agree, it's all going to be fine. But that's false. So many false levels happen on that kind of thing. I've seen it happen in too many places where I've worked in previous roles that will just nod and smile. Why are we just nodding and smiling? When if there is something that we truly, truly feel that doesn't recognise who I am, that doesn't represent what my viewpoint is, you know what, speak up and find the courage deep within you to be able to do that, and really, really get your voice heard. And that's what true leadership is. Being able to speak up when there is that opportunity to do so.

And you think that's something women should get better at?

Oh, I think if we can find it within us, absolutely. I think the more we can do it, it's not about, again, going back to your analogy about being louder, or being passionate. It's about being that passionate and saying, you know what, I've got a viewpoint here. And I want my viewpoint to be heard. And we can do it quietly. We can do it confidently. And just in the same voice that we would just normally speak in the meeting at about quiet, calm, reassuring way that is such, again, a strength that we should be able to do. And doing it in that way is great leadership. I've always said, even to the day I die, at the end of the day, I'll be on my coffin lid, saying one more thing before you put that lid on. Let's understand, am I really, really dead? Because you're saying I'm dead? Because that's what everybody else has done before. But guess what? I want to question.

Well, there's an expression that you used, which was that leaders should make sure that they invite women in because otherwise they won't come. What did you mean by that? And give me an example.

Again, going back to my previous point about looking in meetings, and we need to look for that. I mean, the great thing about females, we don't miss a thing. Females will capture absolutely everything because they're very visual people. I think leaders need to be more visual, particularly male leaders need to be more visual to bring them in. They need to be listening more. Too often, again, male leaders will not always listen because it's all about themselves self, self, self self. If they start listening to the wider voices in the room, then you know what you're bringing them in, you're bringing them in by different kinds of things. So, again, going back to the example, about being in a meeting, look, to see wherever there are those verbal and nonverbal cues, and bring people in. Look to see and listen to what's been actually said and not what has been said on the surface. But if somebody even says something, and it doesn't really ring a bell with you, be inquisitive, and find out what do they mean by what they're saying. What what is it they're actually getting into? And which path are they going down, rather than this sort of making assumption, because we all know what assumptions do.

But there's also what do you senior women leaders need to do? And I have seen in the past where some senior women do not want to, they want to neuter the position that they're in, you know, not neuter, but you know, make it gender neutral, don't necessarily want to say, Hey, I'm a woman, and I'm going to bring folks behind me, but is there anything that senior women should be doing?

We've we talked previously, about, some female leaders will certainly take on the role of the male leader, all too often whenever they become a leader. And they seem to lose touch with that contact of what made them that leader first and foremost, to be recognised as that leader. You know what, don't lose those skills that got you where you are today. Always look back at those times and say, How did I get to where I am today. And it's those skills of being a great leader asa female leader, that they often have a tendency to forget.

I'm deciding that because you've had the experience of being a male leader, and then a female leader, you're allowed to make these absolutely outrageous generalisations that I couldn't possibly make. But, but one of the generalisations, which is far too aggressive, is the sort of the me and the we, isn't it? So explain that.

So, again, from my perspective, the me is very much a male trait where it becomes all about self. I'm the important one, I've got to do everything I've got to provide everything. I think the female psyche will always look at the wider we, the impact of any decisions that we make. The male psyche almost seems to think I'm making this decision. And that's the way we're going. The path is clear, I'm following it. That's what we're going to do no matter what this is it. I made the decision.

And in certain circumstances, that's what you need.

Oh, absolutely. It is. Absolutely it is. But even just simply checking sometimes, yes, you have to go for it. And yeah, that's the way we're doing. But I've heard what you've said, I'm prepared to listen to what you've said. But I don't often see that in the male psyche. It's the path. This is where I'm going. The female will say, Yeah, I'll still listen. But I'm still going down that path.

Thank you so much, Jackie. And thank you, Tony. And thank you, Yvette. Yvette, who right from the start of the expedition had this hunch that there was so much we could learn from people who had transitioned from being male leaders to female leaders. And I think without doubt, Yvette you have proved yourself right. I'm certainly leading these conversations with a mass of questions. And one or two answers. Mostly more questions as ever. About crying, about challenging and about what it's like to be brought up as a male leader and also about Jackie's messages about leaders needing to be more visual so that they bring people in and and don't leave people out. So another fascinating episode, thank you all so much, sending much love. Talk again next week.

Thank you for listening to the podcast. We would love you to follow the expedition and provide your own stories and perspectives. You can do this by subscribing to this podcast and joining the Women Emerging group on LinkedIn where you can have your say.