A mainframe computer command centre in Sydney, Australia, 1990.
It is lunchtime and, as usual, the guys are huddled in the corner
playing cards. Canasta normally, but sometimes poker. The game is
hotting up, but the lights on the control panels are still winking
and next door in the tape room the tapes are still turning.
Jacqueline Guichelaar, who joined the company only a few months
earlier straight from high school, is keeping the show on the road.
She had been hired by financial services company AMP (see panel,
CV: Jacqueline Guichelaar) as a tape operator, about as humble as
it got in the IT world in those far-off days. But she is sure as
hell determined that she is not going to remain a tape
operator.
That is why for the past few weeks, every spare moment, she has
been in the command centre asking the guys what they are doing and
how everything works. She wants to know, for instance, what happens
to make a light flash as a signal that a tape must be changed. She
is hungry to learn.
And the guys are keen to teach her. After all, if Jacqui can
keep the tapes turning during lunch breaks, those poker sessions
are going to be a whole lot more absorbing.
But what is absorbing Guichelaar is that she is taking the first
steps into a stellar IT career. Today, she has made it to chief
technology officer of enterprise services at Deutsche Bank UK,
running a team of more than 400 IT professionals. Yet who knows
where her combination of focused determination and fizzing energy
may take her in the future?
Key lessons
Guichelaar's career is an object lesson in how to look after
number one without treading on other people's toes. And the first
lesson is that you need to take charge of your own development.
Hence that hanging out in the command centre. She started her
career as a shift worker and recalls: "On a night shift, there are
some hours where you could sit there and do nothing, but I filled
my time with things to do to
improve my skills."
There have been several seminal moments in Guichelaar's career
and each seems to provide a key lesson. Take the time she became a
team leader, two years after taking the tape operator job. "I think
I learnt that I really cared about the quality of the work," she
recalls.
The work she's talking about was not rocket science. It involved
printing out simple documents, such as invoices and statements, and
mailing them to clients. But she decided that being particular
about the way you did things - in this case, making sure the
printing was neatly done - marked out the people who delivered
superior performance.
Tougher lessons were to come. Shortly after she'd moved to
Paxus, her next employer, and become a shift leader managing a team
of 10, it was involved in a merger. "Everyone in the IT operations
was called into a room by the department head. He said, 'OK, guys,
I've got two lists here. The first list I read out, I want you to
go into one room. The second list, you go into the other room.'
Everyone knew what was happening. It was an absolutely disgraceful
way to treat people."
Guichelaar was in the room of people who were staying. But she
was incensed by the way the sackings had been handled and left
three months later. It was a valuable lesson in how not to treat
people when you reach senior management. She joined IBM, where she
stayed for seven years in ever-more senior roles - and learnt many
more valuable lessons.
The first was how to get through a tough
recruitment process. She'd been one of 73 applicants for the
job. Through a series of interviews the hopefuls were winnowed to a
shortlist of five. "It was a very rigorous process," she says. "I
had six meetings and was interviewed by 13 people. I was
petrified."
She hadn't expected to get the job. So why does she think she
succeeded? "In those interviews, I was very honest about what I
knew and what I didn't know - what I understood and what I could
execute, and where I might need more experience and coaching. An
interview is a two-way process - I wanted to know as much about the
company as they wanted to know about me, because it was my decision
as well."
Nowadays, Guichelaar is more often the interviewer rather than
the interviewee. She believes many IT applicants are not very good
at summarising their strengths and their weaknesses. "If you ask
someone who is very good at what they do, what their development
areas are, they will usually say something like, 'I don't get
enough exposure to senior management.' I say, 'why don't you go and
look for it, because you have the ability to drive yourself?'."
Guichelaar drove herself hard at IBM. For example, she reckons
she attended around 50
training courses while she was with the company. Some lasted
little more than a day. The longest, a month away from her
Australian base in the United States. "I've always looked for
courses that were directly correlated with what I was doing at the
time," she explains.
For example, when she first had to manage other people, she
found difficulty in the sometimes tough and direct discussions that
are needed when team members are under-performing. She got some
training in team management and learnt a lesson: "I discovered the
best way to build skills is to learn how to do something and then
go back and do it straight away," she says.
Inner strength
It is tough getting to the top in IT if you are a man - even
tougher if you are a woman. When Guichelaar was handed a plum
project during her time at IBM, she had an unpleasant encounter
with a colleague who had expected to get the job. He implied she
had got the job by using her feminine wiles.
"I didn't walk away from that. I put him straight on why I
believed the company had chosen me - it was because I had skills in
certain packages. If someone is becoming emotional in a discussion,
I try to take the heat out of it." Six months later, with the
project successfully delivered, Guichelaar explained to her
antagonist what she had done. "He apologised to me for being an
idiot at the time," she recalls.
One important lesson Guichelaar has learnt as she has moved from
one company to another is never to burn her bridges. She always
seeks to leave a company on good terms, because there is always a
chance of going back. After leaving IBM, she joined a CSC bid team
pitching for a massive contract from Deutsche Bank. The team lost
out to IBM, but Guichelaar had impressed the Bank's senior
management and later they offered her a job managing a huge
outsourcing project.
It was the biggest challenge she had ever undertaken with a lot
of internal politics to handle. She learnt two critical lessons.
"First is that, if you're to complete a big controversial project,
you absolutely need the support of your managers from day one," she
says. "The second is that you need to rely completely on your own
abilities. You must have an inner strength that carries you forward
in the face of the opposition you face."
When Guichelaar decided to quit Deutsche Bank and take a dream
job at National Australia Bank, she carefully applied her own rule
about no burnt bridges, even though senior managers at the Bank
implored her to stay. As a result, when she returned to Europe a
year later, she walked into a new job at Deutsche Bank - her
current role as chief technology officer of enterprise
services.
Perhaps the biggest lesson from Guichelaar's experience is about
approaching a career with an enthusiastic state of mind. As she
says: "What I have learned, is that I thrive on getting
involved."
CV: Jacqueline Guichelaar
1989: Tape operator in mainframe computer department at
AMP (Australian financial services company), later to become
Computer Sciences Australia.
1991: Moved to Paxus,
computer services provider based in Sydney. Promoted to shift
leader after a year.
1993: Joined IBM in
Australia as a shift manager. In the next seven years, held eight
positions within IBM, ending as an account executive, managing
relationships with major clients.
2000: Hired by CSC
in Sydney as member of a team bidding for major accounts. Worked in
Germany on team bidding for Deutsche Bank account.
2002: Moved to Frankfurt to take post of chief technology
officer with Deutsche Bank, responsible for IT infrastructure in 32
countries in EMEA region.
2006: Achieved life-long ambition to hold one of the biggest IT
jobs in Australia - general manager of technology operations at
National Australia Bank.
2007: Joined Deutsche
Bank UK, based in London, as chief technology officer of
enterprise services (the investment banking arm).
Guichelaar's role
Jacqueline Guichelaar reports to Rolf Riemenschnitter, the
bank's global chief technology officer. She has more than 400
people working in her operation across the UK, and the Asia Pacific
region. She has seven direct reports for: (1) data centre projects,
including technology transformation (2) service delivery, including
interacting with the rest of the business on IT priorities (3)
production operations, including managing the production
environment (4) production support, which includes the technical
support staff (5) strategy and governance, which includes data
centre policy and governance (6) communications and planning and
(7) a chief operations officer who is responsible for "horizontal"
functions such as compliance, project management, vendor management
and financial reporting.