As managing partner of EY’s Melbourne office, Annette Kimmitt heads up a team of more than 120 partners and 1,600 staff – but she didn’t always believe she could do it.
Joining EY in 2005 as a partner in the technical accounting team, Kimmitt’s role at the firm has transformed significantly since then. But while she’s thriving in the role of managing partner today, she was initially hesitant about taking on the position.
When Kimmitt received a call from a senior partner offering her the role of managing partner, rather than saying yes and snapping up the opportunity she proceeded to tell him all the reasons why she wasn’t ready for the job, including the fact that she was the “new kid on the block”, having only been with the firm for two years.
“I basically vocalised all of my reservations and he said to me, ‘The way that you’ve just responded – do you think your male colleagues would respond in the same way? Don’t make us change our minds. Let’s start [this conversation] again,'” Kimmitt recalls.
“I didn’t realise I did that and I became very conscious of it. That phone call was a life changing moment for me … It started to fundamentally change the way that I thought about [my career] and I noticed that women weren’t promoting or supporting themselves in their career development, to the point where women were not putting their hand up – and I’m as guilty of it as the next. I didn’t lean in, I didn’t put my hand up and I’ve regretted it ever since.”
Since that moment Kimmitt has realised the importance of putting herself forward for opportunities and making her career aspirations known.
“Make sure that those in leadership are actually aware of what those ambitions are because if you just sit back and wait and expect to be noticed without actually sharing those career goals, you get overlooked,” she says. “Now I’m prepared to put my hand up and self-nominate, which is a really uncomfortable thing to do.”
Kimmitt credits that phone call for much of her success at EY, teaching her to stop sabotaging herself and to be more proactive about managing her career – something she hadn’t thought too much about before joining EY.
“My career sort of unfolded by luck and opportunity. I happened to be in the right place at the right time in a lot of cases,” she says. “I got to EY and started to think, ‘What path do I carve out for myself?'”
Prior to joining EY Kimmitt was a senior project director with the International Accounting Standards Board, based in London, for four years. Eventually deciding it was time to return home to Australia with her husband and two children, she was looking for something new and a chance to work within the accounting world as it dealt with a wave of reform off the back of the Asian economic crisis and subsequent corporate collapses.
With offers from two of the big four, Kimmitt landed at EY, choosing the firm because it was “the right fit” but also because one of her biggest mentors, Ruth Picker, was a senior partner there – and still is.
“Ruth was a very good friend of mine and somebody that I looked up to as a role model. That she was there was quite instrumental in my decision to join EY,” she says.
Throughout her career Kimmitt has relied on mentors such as Picker as well as her family – in particular her mother – to figure out what was next for her.
Back when her children were born, Kimmitt reverted from full-time work to part time, eventually taking a break from her career to be a stay-at-home mum. But life as a stay-at-home mum didn’t last very long, with Kimmitt quickly realising it wasn’t working for her.
“It didn’t work out for me. I wasn’t very good at it. After six months of trying my husband said to me, ‘For all our sakes, you need to go back to work!” she says.
Offered a role back then at the Australian Accounting Research Foundation, Kimmitt was uncertain about taking on a full-time job and leaving her daughter in day care all week, but her mother gave her the shove she needed.
“I remember being sat down by my mother who said, ‘You haven’t done all this study and work to turn down an opportunity like this. These things don’t come up all the time,” she says.
“My mum and my husband are the cheer squad back home who, whenever I have self-doubt, push it out of me.”
With her mother helping out with the care of her daughter, Kimmitt’s career took off from there. Glad she made that choice back then, Kimmitt still relies on the help of her family to juggle all her responsibilities.
“I’ve been married 28 years and it’s genuinely a partnership, and has been from day one, balancing the needs of the family. There are no traditional roles in our household and my mum and dad have been this incredible safety net underneath all that,” she says.
“I have a single diary, which my EA Sally runs, and she completely integrates home, family and work.
“The flexibility that I’m afforded at EY, to move between family and work commitments, just works. It was advice Ruth gave me: It’s going to be hard but you have to hand over your diary management to your EA.”
Annette’s career tips:
• Put your hand up: Be prepared to tell people what you want in your career. Don’t just wait to be noticed.
• Don’t try to be a superwoman: You can’t and no one can be a superwoman. You have to ask and accept the help from those around you.