Calm and capable in a crisis

Mar 5, 2021

Barbara Jeremiah is not a woman to be fazed by an unparalleled international crisis. Having worked in some of the world’s toughest industries, she was able to draw from significant reserves of experience to help support the companies she’s involved in today.

Barbara spent her entire working career with global aluminium producer Alcoa and has served as a Non-Executive Director for companies involved in mining, metals, natural gas, oil and engineering, and as Chair of the board of mining firm Boart Longyear.

She retains non-executive directorship with Aggreko and joined the board of the Weir Group in August 2017. In January 2020 she took on the role of Senior Independent Director, part of which involved stepping into the Chair’s position if necessary. And in February and March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic kicked into high gear, she was asked to do just that.

She believes her extensive experience helped to find ways of offering relevant support, advice and ideas to her colleagues on the management team.

“I’ve had the benefit of the aluminium industry being incredibly cyclical,” she said. “I’ve faced ‘near death’ business experiences before. And most of the people who were serving on the board at the time had survived the global financial crisis of 2008, so we knew that we could also survive this.”

“I think that if you believe your company is well positioned to be successful, and you have a good management team like we do, you’re well-placed to offer ideas, support, and to challenge where necessary. It will always be up to management to execute ideas, but as a board we were able to have some very robust discussions with them about what this crisis means for our business, and how we can get through it.”

“It’s certainly going down as one of those experiences I’ll never forget!”

That’s saying something, because Barbara’s career has been packed with experiences, achievements and accomplishments.

An Ivy League scholar, she studied political science and history at Brown University, before going on to complete three years of law school at the University of Virginia — passing up a role with the US State Department in the process.

“I had always wanted to do international work,” she says. “I had applied to be a foreign service officer with the US State Department in the time between college and law school — but that’s a long application process. I did actually move up on the list and was offered the role, but in the meantime I’d been accepted into law school. So I thanked the state department and said I was going to focus on law school.”

After graduating law school, Barbara interviewed with law firms, government organisations and corporations before applying for a role with Alcoa in her native Pittsburgh.

“They had a very large in-house legal department and they hired straight from law school,” she says. “I secured and accepted the offer and I knew it would someday give me the opportunity to do international work, because Alcoa was a global company.

“I was at Alcoa from the time I graduated law school in 1977 until I retired in 2009, and I spent a little more than 20 years as a practising lawyer in the legal team before moving over to the corporate side.”

“There were two jobs I really aspired to throughout that time. One was to be their general counsel. The other, which was even more challenging, was to lead their corporate development group — and that’s the one I got.”

“I took over leadership of that group in 1998, and mostly tried to stop practicing law and let our legal department do the legal work while my team and I did all the other fun stuff!”

The ‘fun stuff’ for Barbara was in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures and strategic planning. Her role in the legal team, she says, gave her the opportunity to work with various business units within the company and to learn about each of them and their needs.

“Sometimes in law it can seem like we’re just telling clients what they can’t do,” she says. “We can be sort of ‘rule bound’. But I really enjoyed working out problems with my clients — we very much thought of our business units as our clients. So I embraced the opportunity to learn about the business and help solve their problems.

“I got to work on some regulatory matters — I graduated law school as a number of important environmental acts were being introduced to the US — so I had the privilege of being their first hazardous waste expert. I got to deal with our Superfund sites, for example, where there are high levels of pollution requiring a long-term clean up strategy. That was really helpful later on for doing diligence when buying another company.

“Ultimately, I progressed into working on deals, which I enjoyed, and most of which were outside the United States. So that has given me great experience for moving over to the business side.”

It’s not necessarily surprising that Barbara often found herself the only woman in the room, especially in the early stages of her career. Aluminium production, like many engineering-based industries, is heavily male-dominated. What is perhaps slightly surprising is that she never felt it held her back.

In fact, before moving into the corporate side of the business, she was offered the position of plant manager at an aluminium smelter in Washington State. “At the time, I was discussing the offer with a friend who worked in HR,” she says.

“He told me I should take it, that it would make me ‘one of the guys’. He said that if I turned it down, I might not get another opportunity to rise to that level.

“I told him I already felt like ‘one of the guys’ and that the timing wasn’t right for me. I was a single mother with two young daughters and we weren’t ready to move across the country and away from my support network. I was pleased to get the offer, but in the end it wasn’t quite the right opportunity for me.”

As it turned out, rejecting that offer was exactly the right decision. Barbara’s career continued to develop, and instead she became Executive Vice President, Corporate Development. “By then, most of the time I was the most senior woman in Alcoa,” she said. “So I decided it was the right time to start our first affinity network.”

“My CEO at the time trusted me to go off and collaborate with some other senior women who were running businesses within the company. It was really important to us that we created the group as a grass roots effort, not something sponsored by HR, because we knew that sometimes things coming from HR can be viewed with a level of suspicion.

“We had a couple of philosophies. First, we funded the group ourselves. Women who were in the leadership group had their own budgets. We contributed to the cost of the effort from those budgets, and always had a business case for everything we were doing. Secondly, we made sure that everything we were doing contributed to Alcoa.”

The group introduced tools like mentoring programmes, which allowed other women in the organisation to meet and learn from their successful counterparts, as well as tools that enabled conversations about work/life balance — not just for women, but for everyone.

“The programmes and materials we generated were for both management and employees,” says Barbara. “They were designed to enable conversations about how, at various points in life, people might need more flexibility. Not just women with young children, but people who needed to provide, for example, elder care, sibling care, spouse care or childcare.”

“They were about recognising that employees have a relationship with the company, and that the company values them. That was really our approach. We wanted Alcoa to be successful, so we had to offer the best work environment for our employees. It’s about telling them ‘if you’re here now it’s because we’ve selected you, and we want you to succeed’.

“If we have invested in a successful employee, and the alternative is for that person to leave and take all of their knowledge and experience with them, it’s a big loss for the organisation. So we created approaches that would help managers and employees have positive, problem-solving conversations, rather than simply problem-identification conversations.”

One of the key things the affinity group did in its first year was bring the company’s 180 senior women together for a leadership meeting. Keen to keep everything as ‘no frills’ as possible, the group arranged the kick-off meeting in an airport hotel in Pittsburgh in January.

At the time, Barbara was the only female member of the executive council. She invited her council colleagues to attend one of the meeting sessions and offer some remarks. The Chief Financial Officer at the time, a friend and former colleague from the legal department, later took Barbara aside.

“He told me that session was the first time in his career at Alcoa that he’d found himself as a minority in the room,” she says. “He said it had given him some understanding of how that must feel. Which, obviously, was a great talking point for me, but it also offered him an experience he could never have had otherwise.”

“The more you can personalise the messages you’re trying to convey, the more receptive people will be to them.”

As well as finding ways to open up and develop career opportunities for women in Alcoa, the women’s affinity group paved the way for others. That’s something Barbara says she’s most proud of.

“What we did enabled other groups to form affinity networks, like the African American network and the LGBTQ+ network,” she says. “I had hoped something like that might happen.”

“I think we gave folks cover to say ‘I look a little different or I am a little different from the majority group, and it would be a good thing for me to be able to meet up, in person or virtually, with folks who are like me’. It helped people feel that they could bring their whole selves to work.”

As a pioneer in helping women to find their way in a male-dominated world, what advice does Barbara offer women embarking on their careers today?

“The same advice I’ve always given,” she says. “There is no one who will care about your career and your success more than you will. So you’ve got to own it. You have to think about what you want to accomplish, and whether you’re in the right group to accomplish it.

“Understand what it will take to be successful. Don’t be shy about sharing your aspirations with your management. Get the right advice on what you need to do to develop professionally. And make sure you’re not being stereotyped. Do everything you possibly can to give yourself the knowledge, the experience and the tools you need to be as successful as you can possibly be.”

Source: https://www.global.weir/newsroom/news-articles/calm-and-capable-in-a-crisis/

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Calm and capable in a crisis