Ann Cairns of MasterCard: The Art and Science of Team
Chemistry
This interview with Ann Cairns,
president ofinternational markets at MasterCard,
was conducted and condensed by Adam
Bryant.
Q. What were some
early influences for you?
I grew up in
the northeast of England, in a small mining village near Newcastle. My dad was
a shoemaker who originally made shoes for miners. I grew up in a period when
Margaret Thatcher was closing down mines across Britain, so there was very high
unemployment in my town.
That had quite
a big influence on people living in the area because, as kids at school, you
would be thinking, “What can I do to
make the best of life?” You realize that education’s important and that you
need to spread your wings. So that was a
big influence.
I won a scholarship at the age of 11 to go to a British
grammar school. The headmistress, a nun, had a chemistry degree from Oxford. She was
very pro girls doing science. It was an all-girls school, and there were a lot
of scientists in the school. It seemed pretty natural to me to go to
university to do math.
Tell me about your mother.
She’s still alive. She’s 85,
and she’s a very confident woman. She
worked as a pharmacist’s assistant. She was quite scientific. And she’s
also a very good singer, a soprano. My
dad was a club comedian, too, so they were both performers. They would
often do cabaret in the area at night.
When you went to university, did you have an idea of
what you wanted to do?
None whatsoever. It was a time when, if you were well
educated, you were in a position to get a good job, because only about 10
percent of the population went to university back then. I didn’t study math
from a vocational point of view. I studied it because I loved the subject. I
majored in pure math, actually, and then went on to do a master’s degree in
statistics.
While I was doing my master’s, British Gas rang up the
university and asked if anybody was doing statistics who could come into the
research area and design experiments for physicists, chemists and engineers.
The university sent me along for the job interview, and I got the job.
I became much more interested in the engineering side and
offshore exploration. But first I had to pass a weeklong offshore survival
course. The guy running it was an ex-Royal Marine. I was the only woman in the
course, and he kept making me do everything first.
After about the third day, I went up to him and said, “You know, I’m really fed up with this. What’s this all
about?” I told him it felt like
discrimination. He said, “No. You’re such a little girl that if you jump
off the platform, all those 47 guys behind you who are terrified are going to
say to themselves, ‘Look, she’s just done it.’ ”
And
were you O.K. with that?
I was, because I understood there was a reason he was
doing it, and it was a positive one, not a negative one. He was not trying to
show me up. He was trying to help make other people more confident about it. So
that was O.K.
You started early in
management roles.
I was managing about 50 engineers in my late 20s. It was
comfortable for me, though. The thing
about engineers is that they are people who are very expert at what they do, so
you don’t have to know everything that they know. You just have to be somebody
who can help build a team and put things together. And I was always pretty interested in understanding everybody’s
specialization and how it all worked.
You then shifted into banking and moved up the ranks
quickly. What are some leadership lessons you learned along the way?
In my mid-30s, they started doing 360-degree reviews,
and I was getting pretty good reviews from my boss, and I was getting great
reviews from my people, but I wasn’t getting such good marks from my peer
group.
It’s easy to be competitive
with your peer group as you’re climbing up the ladder. But over time you
realize that in order to make your group effective, you have to think in terms of
being one team, and how can you make those relationships the best they can ever
be. You’re not trying to compete now. You’re trying to really make this
work.
You see companies where
people at that level are competing against each other, and then you see other
companies where they’re not, and it makes quite a difference.
Any more thoughts on
building a team?
You think about what each
person will bring to the team, but you also have to think about them as
individuals, and where they’re going from and to, because they’ve all got their
own paths and things they want to achieve.
I’ve had people
work for me who are very creative or can be very disruptive, and sometimes
they’re the same person. I’ve seen other people take them off teams because
it’s just too hard to manage people in that situation. But my view is that if you can get the best out of
people, then it’s worthwhile putting them on a team and making sure that
everyone else on the team actually knows this person’s characteristics.
And then you constantly
reinforce what the good is, and you build mutual respect so that you don’t
create a team of mediocre people who are all happy with each other and don’t
challenge each other. You want people who can challenge each other without
creating this peer problem of, “I don’t like you because you said such-and-such
in the last meeting.” If you’re the boss of the team, you can stop that from
happening without stopping the conversation flow.
The other thing that’s really important about building a
team is that your team has got to respect you and they’ve got to feel safe.
So you create that safe environment, and they’ve got to feel that you’re always
acting in their interests.
nb:
-simple past tense in bold
-present perfect tense in bold and italic
