Georgia Woods: Executive Vice-President, CIO Canada at Canada Life

Tell us about your career journey.

I went to the University of Toronto, studying computer science and math. My dad suggested I study computer science because he thought technology would be the future – he was the visionary for sure. I’ve been working in technology for more than 30 years now. It has been faced-paced with lots of investments, exciting projects, and great opportunities to learn and grow. I have pushed myself to do different things, I always put my hand up and showed a lot of curiosity and interest. I think the university experience around constant learning and always wanting to do something new and different has stayed with me – and I think people see that. 

The other dimension is that I never felt there was ever any challenge that was too difficult. Although there is always that initial reaction like, am I up for this, or do I have what it takes, you honestly just have got to get past that and go and build a team, work with people. There is always a solution to a problem and the process of working with people has been a great experience for me.

I am also married, have three children, and was on maternity leave three times. Every time, I came back to a different role. I took my maternity leave as an opportunity to try a different job. This was a great way to move around a little bit within the different companies I was working for. After my third maternity leave, when I came back, I went to Chicago for a year and a half, and my husband stayed home with the kids. So, he was a stay-at-home dad while I did my job in Chicago and commuted every week. When I returned to Canada, within 6 months I got promoted to my first executive role. The lesson here is to not limit yourself to thinking about how you are going to manage work and work-life – you find a way. We are so resourceful as women. You must count on your support system and if there is something you really want to do, just pursue it, do not put limits on yourself.

Make sure you remain open to ideas and continued opportunities. When I was evaluating what I would do after that third maternity leave, I took the highest-risk option, but I knew it would be the most exciting option. Since my husband was at home with the kids, I did not have to worry about the family, I knew it was taken care of. I could really focus on work, the challenges I had in front of me, and the things I needed to accomplish. It was quite liberating. When you think about the traditional paradigm where the man is the primary breadwinner and the wife is at home taking care of the family and the house – this is not the only answer anymore, and change continues. I always thought about my kids and missed them a lot, but I knew they were with their dad and well cared for. This allowed me to focus on my work and push myself harder than I have ever pushed myself. In some ways, I was testing my upper limit. I had the perfect conditions to allow that to happen, and that is rare, so I wanted to take full advantage of it. The counterbalance is that I missed out on a lot as well. I think this is a common theme for working moms. I think for me, I really wanted to see how much I could personally accomplish, but I also know that I did miss out on a lot as a mom, especially when my kids were younger, and unfortunately, I won’t be able to recapture that time together. 

I would encourage all WIM members to never lose the desire to learn. When you talk about lifelong learning, it is not just words on a page, you really need to embrace that. This is what keeps you energized – it is so great to learn something new. Otherwise, things can get dull, boring, and repetitive. 

What does your role as Executive Vice President and CIO at Canada Life entail? 

It is a fantastic job for me. I am the head of technology at Canada Life. I think I have at least four roles here. The first is leading all the technology teams for Canada Life, so I have that leadership role around investing in technology, running the technology, changing the technology, adopting new technology, and seeking out new opportunities for us. These are the key components of my technology leadership role.

The second really big role I have is working with all my peer groups and business partners. I work with my boss who is President of Canada Life, and then my colleagues who are all the business leaders. I love having this engagement with my business partners and understanding strategically where they are going to make sure what we are doing on the technology side aligns with what the business wants to do. I spend quite a bit of time with all my business partners: people from HR, people from management, all people from different staff roles so we can make sure technology is best positioned to support the company’s future.

Thirdly, I am also the Executive Sponsor of our Women in Leadership Employee Resource Group. My role is to lead how we are advancing women at Canada Life. I take this as an opportunity for me to give back and help foster a more diverse culture. I sponsored our membership to a network called the Black Professionals in Technology Network (BPTN), so we have a great pipeline of Black talent coming in. This is all about really advancing our HR agenda including diversity and inclusion. As a senior leader, I have a huge responsibility to coach, mentor, and just create a more diverse and inclusive workforce.

I think my fourth role is spending time looking outside Canada Life. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. The planet is so interconnected. Now with the pandemic and virtual conferencing, everything is so much more accessible. I love listening to what is going on in the world, talking to different vendors, and attending conferences. I think it is really important to put your head up and be attuned to the world. I try to include a lot of that in every week. I think it also makes me a better leader to see what other companies are doing and see what problems they’re solving. Those are the 4 key dimensions of my professional life, and then of course I have my personal life.

What advice would you give to women who want to enter the tech space?

Just go for it! In school, there weren’t many women in my program. When I was a Chief Information Security Officer, I often found myself in situations where I was the only woman in the room. We are just as capable as anyone. If it is something that is of interest and a passion for you, just dive in, look to work on interesting projects, and build out your technical skills. 

However, I would say there is no substitute for thinking strategically. What I mean by that is thinking about what business problem we are trying to solve and how technology can enable the business. It’s important to learn to speak the business language. I find that as techies, we have our own kind of technical vernacular, but I try to speak with my business partners in business terms. 

I found that throughout my career, one of the roles I had the most was a project manager. A project manager is the one responsible for their team to deliver a new business product, technology, or some sort of change. I encourage anyone pursuing technology to take some time as a project manager because it teaches you a lot. It teaches you about relationship building with your business partner (since they are typically sponsoring what you are doing), it teaches you how to drive change, it teaches you negotiating and influencing, it teaches you about communication, and it teaches you how to deal with issues and problems when they happen. It is a condensed way of learning a lot about how to manage in a large business environment while delivering a change, thinking about how that change gets implemented, and what this implementation means over time. It is about immersing yourself. Be part of projects and see how changes get implemented. I find a lot of people implement the technology and then walk about from it, but I think that is missing half the experience. The other experience is understanding whether you built the right thing and got the outcomes you were looking for, and did you get adoption of the technology. These are ways to differentiate yourself as a person in technology, and business leaders really recognize that. I think it is much more fulfilling.

How do you encourage creativity in your organization?

I think encouraging creativity is one thing we do not do well enough. I find technology people are a little too opinionated. In some ways, it is good to have an opinion and have a perspective. In other ways, it is not as good because people are just stuck on their idea and not open-minded enough. When I think about it as a leader, you present the problem you are trying to solve, and then give your team the tools and guideposts they need. Give them the opportunity to create something new to solve a problem. In some ways, this encourages people to bring their own creativity and past experiences. This is one of the best reasons why we should have a diverse team and create conditions where everyone feels safe to bring their authentic self. If we don’t do this, we are not going to drive creativity and people bringing wild ideas. These are the human and people dynamics. 

With digital being so prevalent now, we can drive a lot of creativity because we think about designing customer experiences as opposed to purely technology solutions. To me, this is one of the biggest, best shifts we have had to make in designing technology solutions. Designing a mobile app or a browser application really forces you to think about the customer experience, and I see that as being synonymous with selling an experience as opposed to just a product. Being in the digital world now is really helping to drive creativity by thinking in terms of the customer, and what kind of experiences we want for our customers. We want it to be frictionless, very simple, and easy to learn. I find this to be one of the most exciting parts of the technology work that we do. 

What has been the biggest learning from your career to date?

I think my biggest learning has been to trust myself and trust my instincts. Not putting limits on myself. It involves having a strong sense of accountability, a high level of engagement, caring about what you are doing and the outcomes. It is not about me, it is about the team and making sure we find really good solutions. It involves giving it your all, and you must acknowledge your mistakes along the way. We are all human, we make mistakes, and you get a lot of credibility and integrity when you own up to your mistakes. 

My father always told me to never lose my integrity when you are working for a large organization. The minute people don’t trust you, it is really hard to earn that trust back. Be your authentic self, have integrity, treat people well, build relationships, and have a good reputation as being someone people can rely on and trust. You will deliver, you will find solutions. Getting this solid name for yourself as someone who is good to work with, has high integrity, and is trustworthy – there is no substitute. You can look at yourself at the end of the day and say, I did everything very transparently and honestly, I did not take advantage of or deceive anyone, I was authentic and tried to do my best work.