Q&A with Maddy Baker
March 28, 2024
Beyhan Zor (MBA for TELUS ’23) interviews Maddy Baker (MBA for TELUS ’21) in the final conversation of this four-part series celebrating women alumni of the MBA for TELUS now in senior leadership roles. Baker is VP customer experience excellence and Zor is manager, products & services at TELUS.
The award-winning MBA for TELUS is a custom MBA in Strategic Leadership developed by the Gustavson School of Business for telecommunications client TELUS. Students are TELUS team members who are nominated to UVic by TELUS.
Beyhan Zor: Let’s get started with your journey and how MBA influenced that. Are there specific moments or decisions that stand out in your career journey to becoming a vice president that you’d like to share?
Maddy Baker: First thing that comes to mind is how the MBA really helped me get clarity on my own career. One of the reasons I chose the MBA is because I'd never formally studied business. My undergraduate degree is in French and Spanish. I'd been in procurement my whole career and then during the MBA I transitioned into the business solutions team. One of my big “aha!” moments during the MBA was actually thinking more in terms of my career and development and not on what I knew functionally, but instead the role that I could play from a leadership perspective. I really started thinking about opportunities differently: One of the things I know I have a brand for is creating a strong team, building structure, creating organization and really driving things forward. I believe that really helped me think about what I wanted to do after the MBA. Within the business solutions team, I took the opportunity to lead a project with an outside consultant. Ultimately the role I'm in now came from working on a project where I had to go and take a look at a business unit area and see what was working well and what we thought could be done differently. Having clarity on what I was good at but also having the MBA credibility--my leaders understood that I knew enough about every different area of business--really helped get me that opportunity and then helped me advocate for myself when we were talking about leadership opportunities within that team.
BZ: Tell me more about your current role and how that opportunity presented itself.
MB: I think it was just a combination of things. Timing was critical. There were a couple of different opportunities I was discussing with my leader at that point in time, which gave me clarity on where I could provide the most value. One of the things that I think is really important for women in particular is having confidence in ourselves. A big moment for me last year was when we were talking about potential roles for different people in the organization. My leader at that time said ‘who do you think would be good for this role?’ and I actually said ‘me’. That was the first time I said that out loud. I thought it was a good opportunity for me and I was ready for it. So, I think it was a combination of all those things but the MBA definitely gave me the confidence in myself, the confidence in my business capability, and the confidence in my leadership that I felt that I could put my hand up instead of sitting in the background and waiting for somebody else to put my name forward.
BZ: On that subject, what are your thoughts on the importance of having a mentor or a champion in your career, especially for women?
MB: I think mentors and champions are huge and one of the exercises that I loved in the MBA, which I use with lots of other people, is the personal board of advisors.
I love the concept. If you're an athlete you don't just have one coach that helps you with everything. You have different people within your network and your own board of advisors that you can work with on different things. I was very fortunate that my previous VP, Chris Jensen, really encouraged me to think about not just what I know but also how I position myself, how I build my brand, and how I build my network. I think it's really important, particularly for women, to feel like they have that personal board of advisors around them creating opportunities. That exercise really made me realize a lot of people who helped me get to my current career level wouldn’t necessarily be the people who would get me to the next level. And that encouraged me to reach out to different people who would help mentor me including a number of senior leaders within TELUS to help build that brand. Because if you want to get to the next level, of course you need to have credibility and know what you're doing, but it's also down to everybody else around the table saying yes.
BZ: Have you noticed any differences in leadership styles especially when women are at the table?
MB: I think a diverse group of people brings diversity of ideas. And sometimes having different leaders at the table, particularly women, brings a different tone to the conversation. I often find it to be more collaborative, particularly in the business unit I’m in at TELUS. We have some really strong women leaders. I’ve learned a lot from just observing how they operate and how they manage meetings and provide their perspective and opinions. They get their point across in a quietly confident, rational way, which people respond to in an open way. This makes the conversation collaborative, positive and focused on what can we do and how we can move forward rather than getting hung up on what we did wrong or what we should have done. I don’t think this leadership style is either female or male, but just kind of emotional intelligence, empathy and acknowledgment that people have different things going on in their lives.
BZ: What experiences shaped your career trajectory?
MB: At quite an early point in my career when I was living in London, I was on the procurement team for another company. There was a big procurement transformation and I was asked by the head of procurement to manage the recruitment process for 125 roles in 32 different countries. First, I thought this had nothing to do with procurement and I didn’t have the right experience. But I took on the special project and tried to be innovative. We used this technology that was new at the time for the recruitment industry. At the end of that project, we shortened the average hiring process significantly and the technology we used ended up being adopted by a bunch of other talent programs across the world. I think that was the first time I realized it's not just about learning one thing and being focused on that one thing. It's more about sometimes taking a risk and thinking creatively. The impact you can have is way bigger than what you could have imagined. After showcasing myself there, I was asked where I wanted my next opportunity to be and ended up moving to Philadelphia, their North American headquarters. So that was a big pivotal moment in my life which is not really career related, but I think particularly important for women whose careers don't go in straight lines.
BZ: So how did you end up in Vancouver?
MB: I decided to move to Vancouver for personal reasons. I'd been living in a separate country from my partner for three years and decided I wanted to be in Vancouver. What that meant is I actually took a step back in my career. I'd been a director at my previous company and then I took an individual contributor role at TELUS to be in Vancouver with an organization that I thought was very strong and I knew I could have a trajectory with. That was a big moment for me to realize that sometimes to take a step forward, I have to take a step back in some ways. The opportunities I’ve had at TELUS, including doing the MBA for TELUS program, is not something I would have had if I'd have stayed at the same organization. It's a good reminder--and I always talk about it--that sometimes you have to follow your heart and it's not always about your career. It's also about going down a path you don't imagine and sometimes it takes you to different places.
BZ: Do you think living in all these different places and having a different educational background contributed to your success?
MB: 100% I do! I've lived in many places around the world. As I said, I studied languages as a degree and it's interesting now I'm leading a multinational team. And I'm thinking back to when I lived in Eswatini, South Africa when I was 18 and, later, what it felt like when I lived in Mexico where I was speaking Spanish as a second language. It really helped me be effective in my communication and my understanding of the cultural practices. Of course, what we learned in the MBA program around working with different cultures was also really valuable. All of these experiences tremendously helped me in my current role leading a global team successfully.
BZ: What aspects of your work excite you the most and keep you motivated to come to work every day? How do you keep your enthusiasm every day while keeping your team engaged?
MB: One thing I really loved when I started the MBA was the class on change. One of the books I loved that I recommend to everyone is Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.
You really have to think about what the future can be like, set that vision and get excited about it. In that book they talk about directing the rider, motivating the elephant, and shaping the path. One of the first things I did with my new team is I got everybody to write a destination postcard to themselves from the end of 2024 looking back at all the great things that they’d achieve. What really excites me is having a team that used to be many different teams in many different locations and bringing them all together, getting them excited and believing in what we can be and all the value we can bring to our customers and each other. Then bringing that reality to life.
And for me, there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing people achieve great things whether it’s getting into the MBA program or seeing people that I have worked with winning awards or getting a promotion. I think ultimately it comes down seeing people achieve things that they thought that maybe they couldn’t. You want to give people the ladder they can step up.
BZ: What are some of the key things from your MBA that you apply to your day-to-day work or even personal life?
MB: The “reflected best self” exercise with Elango [Dr. A.R. (Elango) Elangovan] where we had to get people that we knew personally and professionally to write what they saw as your best self was very interesting and insightful. As someone who doesn’t live near home I always feel guilty that I’m not present enough. Actually, every single best-self profile talked about how I show up and care. That was really meaningful for me personally to just believe in myself a little bit more and not give myself a hard time.
BZ: Yes, I remember that exercise ended up being way more powerful than I thought and left a big mark on me as well.
MB: Then secondly, it’s about the network that you build during the MBA. It's like having your own little community that you can go to, even within work, if you're having a hard time or you don't know how to tackle a problem. It's a really safe space to go and talk to somebody and trust that it will be done in a respectful, confidential way. These are people that you trust, some of whom became some of my best friends.
BZ: Love that and I can’t agree more. Are there any theories or frameworks that you use at work?
MB: One of the things I've been thinking about a lot in my day to day is the four frames [structural, HR, political and symbolic frames, from Reframing Organizations, by Bolman & Deal], and how everyone can have slightly different values or ways of framing situations. Knowing these frames really helped me identify those and pay attention to them.
Another one I think about all the time and use pretty much every day is the design thinking methodology. It's just something that I'm really enthusiastic about. As I'm building teams I'm consciously trying to think about where I can create roles that focus on having that methodology and thinking. Even during the MBA, the project we did on how to improve our help desk operations--that is still being used today using Kumar's design thinking methodology. It was such a great feeling to know we came up with a concept that is now a successful business area at TELUS. I never would have had that in my toolkit before the MBA.
BZ: Is there any advice that you would like to give to current or aspiring MBA students, especially those trying to become leaders in their organizations?
MB: Yes, absolutely! MBA is a great opportunity to learn things, test things and really build that toolkit that you're going to carry forward. You might come across an article about something like design thinking in your normal life, but if you actually used that concept in a bunch of projects it's going to be way more meaningful and you're actually going to embed it a bit more. I see it as an opportunity not just to complete the MBA but actually to learn to refine your toolkit that you're going to carry with you for the rest of your career.
Second, use the MBA to build your network with the people around you whether it's the professors or the other students. I think there's also a really amazing alumni network which would probably give me a different type of relationship than I would have otherwise. Definitely build your network and take the time to get to know people.
And lastly, use the MBA as an opportunity to really refine your own thinking about the role that you play, what you enjoy, what motivates you, what type of roles you can be successful in. Because it opened a number of doors in my mind about what level of the organization I could get to and what different roles I could do.
BZ: When you look back on your MBA journey, is there anything that surprised you in terms of the qualities or the skills that you developed?
MB: Yes, we've already talked about the clarification in your own brain on what kind of thing you're good at. And the piece around self-confidence and self-assurance was more than I expected. It was more than a learning experience in some ways, it was like therapy at the same time.
I also have the openness and courage to try new things even if they may not work out because I feel like trying to do something is better than maintaining the status quo.
BZ: Is there any message and advice that you would like to share with aspiring female leaders, in particular?
MB: I would say just be yourself, be authentic and don’t be afraid. We can be ourselves as leaders. And as a generation of female leaders we can really redefine what we think leadership means to us and how we model that. Second, really think about finding mentors and continuing to be a student in order to learn from those around you. Third, find your network and use your network. I believe women want to see other women do well. If you are a woman who wants certain things for your career and if you reach out to another woman, generally, they'll probably make time for you. So, it's worth going outside of your comfort zone and reaching out to people to take that step.