My Early Career

Today I have the best job with the best organization of my whole career. As Chief Financial Officer of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, I have achieved excellent alignment of my skills, knowledge and experience with my passion and values. It has been a long journey.



I graduated from Central Colchester High School in 1968. At the tender age of seventeen, I began looking for a job. The Bank of Nova Scotia was the only employer I could find that was willing to hire someone so young.

I started as a bank teller and soon learned one of life's many difficult lessons. The Bank treated wealthy customers very differently from ordinary people and this was difficult for a farm boy from Nova Scotia to accept. One such customer always got access to the branch ten minutes after closing time because he did not want to stand in line. Another wealthy customer was exempted from paying service charges on money orders and bank drafts. Another customer came looking for the Branch Manager on summer afternoons when he could find no one else to play golf with without any regard for the work load of this man. After about a year, for several reasons, I quit my first job and moved to Alberta.

I decided to become an accountant and found a job as an accounting clerk. With the energy of a twenty year old, I worked during the day and studied on evenings and weekends. I rotated through all of the various clerical positions in typical accounting departments. To this day, I believe I still have an ability to understand and connect with employees at the lowest levels in organizational hierarchies because of starting my own career this way.

Looking back, in terms of healthy workplaces, there has been much change since the early 1970s. The pace of work and the expectations imposed on employees was much more reasonable back then. The manual systems of the day were labour intensive and could only deliver information slowly and this was entrenched as normal. The positive and negative impact of technology was yet to come.

The most unhealthy aspect of my early workplaces was the treatment of female employees, although along with much of management, I accepted the organizational cultures I was in as being fine. These cultures were almost completely male dominant. There was daily sexist humor at the expense of the female staff who had been conditioned to just laugh along. I witnessed some behaviors that were clearly abusive of women. Fortunately, much of what was normal over thirty years ago would not be tolerated today.

By 1976 at twenty-five years of age I had completed my accounting studies and passed my final examinations. In fact, I received the Gold Medal for being at the top on my class in Alberta! I was now a professional accountant.

During this time I was working for a small business man, Stan Reeves, keeping his books and helping him with financial analysis. He had many business interests including retail outlets, real estate developments and investment portfolios. The variety was great experience at a young age. In a small business environment an accountant sees every transaction and has a much better learning experience than in a large business where the scope of a job can be very narrow.

The stage was now set for a major step forward in my career. I joined a large conglomerate as Divisional Controller for CESSCO, an oilfield sales and service company. CESSCO was owned by Aerojet-General based in California which in turn was owned by General Tire. This was Big Business and I was the youngest divisional controller in the group. The annual controllers' training conference offered some of the best professional development of my career. Years later I would smile when being introduced to a new leading-edge concept that I had long been familiar with.

Locally I reported to the general manager of the division, Walter Royal, and I learned much from this seasoned manager. He had come up on the sales side of the company and his management style was that of master manipulator, mostly with good intentions and positive results. I could never get him to make the salesmen fill out their expense accounts properly, but instead he taught me that there was far more to achieving success in business than keeping neat and tidy accounting records. This was boom time in Alberta with big profits, big raises and big bonuses. Before my thirtieth birthday, my career was on a steep, upward trajectory.

But the boom ended suddenly. The price of oil collapsed and the Federal government passed the National Energy Program, still hated in Calgary to this day by those who remember. The division I worked for lost 80% of its sales in six months and the executives in California acted quickly. My boss was terminated and I was asked to liquidate the division. Selling off inventories at distress prices is not pleasant work but terminating long-term employees with very modest severance packages was emotionally traumatic. For the first time in my career, but not the last, I saw grown men cry at work. When an organization fails, employees who committed their whole working lives to it lose much more than a job. For many there is a loss of identity and a collapse of social networks. Consistent with the times, there was not one discussion about the well-being of employees. The focus was on cutting losses and getting the job done fast. Expressing concern for the mental health of an employee would have been very strange, but at that stage of my life the thought never crossed my mind.

After about six months of this ugly work, I was the only employee left and it was now my turn. As an incentive to do the dirty work, I had been able to negotiate an enhanced severance package. With this settlement my wife and I travelled for two months to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji. The trip was great therapy.

For about the next nine years during the 1980s, I worked for Alberta Wheat Pool, a large agri-business cooperative. Here I learned why cooperatives have captured less than one percent of economic activity in a free market. When owners and customers are one and the same, the result is an unresolvable conflict. Cooperatives seem to be more like political systems than businesses. The organization can only make a profit from the owner/customer who consequently is seldom satisfied.

Three serious droughts and an industry downturn hit Alberta Wheat Pool hard while I worked there. Cost cutting and employee terminations were necessary. Although assured otherwise by the CEO and senior management team, the first round of cuts proved inadequate. Employees understandably lost trust and became cynical as a second round of cuts was implemented.These were still not enough and the Board asked the CEO to retire.

"Big Don" Heasman was hired to save Alberta Wheat Pool. For two years he did his job as he led the painful re-organization and downsizing. But he was intensely disliked by many because he seemed to enjoy the task and few believed he cared much about the employees. His style was management by intimidation. It was common knowledge that he had a copy of the book Tough Minded Management on the corner of his desk. Under his leadership I again saw grown men cry at work. After financially stabilizing the organization, it was apparent that few of the remaining employees were willing to follow his leadership during better times and he was fired. Unfortunately, "Big Don" died prematurely of a heart attack in 2004, just as he was about to retire.

Because the skill level of senior management was quite low, at Alberta Wheat Pool I learned how not to do things. I also learned that it is almost impossible to sustain a healthy workplace environment when organizational survival is at stake. I had personally survived three emotionally draining rounds of downsizing but was left burned out and unmotivated.

There were two other aspects of my time with Alberta Wheat Pool which significantly affected my life well beyond the dimension of work. For several years I worked in the business development area evaluating new investment opportunities. One of these projects took me on a business trip to the south of France, a rather nice assignment. It was interesting work but Alberta Wheat Pool was retrenching rather than expanding. Frustrated by organizational realities and highly motivated to actually do something more than look, I asked for and received permission to pursue a couple of opportunities on my own. I was now an aspiring entrepreneur promoting deals. I quickly learned that to have credibility I had to put some of my own money at risk. I saw great potential in one venture and invested both sweat equity and cash. To my great disappointment, it failed but I have never regretted trying. I was focused on making money and if I had succeeded, I would be a different person today.

During the third round of downsizing, I emerged as one of eighteen candidates competing for six positions. Based on my career success to date, I was quite confident that I would be one of the chosen six. Alberta Wheat Pool had retained an industrial psychologist to evaluate each of us and he recommended against my selection. I was stunned. Still in my thirties, I was not ready to accept career plateau. In a follow-up interview I demanded an explanation and I'll never forget what the industrial psychologist told me. "Your career goals, your lifestyle choices and your values are not in alignment. You will not succeed until you resolve this" he said. I was still angry over missing out on a promotion and did not accept, or really understand, what he was saying. But I thought about it later. This became an issue to wrestle with during my male mid-life crisis and I was thinking deeply about many things.

Today I see clearly the wisdom of those words that were so hard to hear twenty years ago. I believe a healthy workplace enables employees to align career objectives, lifestyle choices and values. For both the employer and the employee, this is a significant challenge.

I left Alberta Wheat Pool and took a six month break from working. It was a time of re-charging, reflection and refocusing. I have been quite a different person since.