I'm a partner in the Real Estate team in the UK and head of our London office. I focus on the real estate investment sector.
My greatest career achievement to date has been mentoring people through the early part of their career in some cases through to partnership.
I've tried to address gender bias and inequality by taking a different approach to business development. I have for a number of years promoted the idea that great business development in real estate is no longer drinking, lunching and participating in or watching sports events with clients. Of equal, if not more value are those who do a fantastic job for the client and really build those one on one relationships. That is a shift (very much for the good) from the way things were when I started out!
We are also now hopefully a lot better at recognising that sometimes female promotion candidates will only say they are ready when they are absolutely 100% ready, whereas their male counterparts might, in some cases be more confident when they are less ready – a generalisation and clearly there are many exceptions but this is something that we've been trying to pick up and acknowledge when discussing career development with all candidates.
I think it is important to break the bias because diversity is a great thing for any business or team – the flip of which is that any sort of bias holds us back. That is both internally, in terms of developing a great team and externally – winning work and growing the business.
