Sponsors are powerful allies for women: Deloitte partner Margaret Dreyer - Women's Agenda

Sponsors are powerful allies for women: Deloitte partner Margaret Dreyer

margaret dreyer

margaret dreyer

 

Margaret Dreyer says she fell into accounting by chance. But becoming Deloitte’s first female audit partner and making the move from South Africa to Australia was no accident, requiring hard work, sacrifice and a little support along the way.

The senior Deloitte partner and head of the Inspiring Women program at the firm credits much of her career to getting a sponsor early on – especially working with Deloitte Australia’s current CEO Giam Swiegers back in South Africa.

Her life in Sydney is a world away from the childhood she spent surfing in Durban. The daughter of an electrician and a housewife, Dreyer was the first in her family to go to university. Good at accounting in school, she thought she’d give it a shot at university and found herself one of five women and 300 men in the course at university in Pretoria.

From there, Dreyer started in Deloitte’s Pretoria office where she met Swiegers, worked her way up to partner and later made the move with the firm to Australia.

She was strategic about the partnership appointment, cautious of how she could balance the new responsibilities with family life. Pregnant with her second child at the time, she made a detailed plan in collaboration with the partnership regarding how she could deal with her pregnancy, maternity leave and workforce re-integration while working through the process.

“It was challenging in those days combining motherhood and a career in a professional services firm,” says Dreyer. “There were no role models. You’d look up and it was all just men. And there were certainly no women up there with kids!”

She believes the support of a strong sponsor through Swiegers, who also happened to be her mentor and Pretoria’s office managing partner, helped. “He absolutely went in to bat for me. He knew me really well, understood what I was capable of and, most importantly, understood the business case for retaining talented women.”

The latter point was important in South Africa during the 1990s, a period when professional services talent was hard to come by and those with qualifications were leaving the country. “People would get their qualification, get practical training, become chartered, some stayed a bit like myself, but then they’d leave,” she says.

Dreyer personally had no plans to leave until 1996/97 when the realities of South Africa’s then political situation hit her business life. Attending an audit committee meeting with Swiegers, the two opposing shareholder factions showed up with armed guards, immediately creating a hostile environment. “That day I got in the car with Giam and said, ‘I’m leaving’. And he said, ‘So am I’.”

Dreyer is positive about her home country and says that was the worst experience she had. However, she notes the move to Australia was one of the best things that could have happened for her family. They landed in Adelaide at first – a place that didn’t excite her in name but one she believes provided a valuable experience for making connections – and shifted to Sydney 18 months later.

Ever since, her career’s continued beyond the partnership level. She now sits on the Deloitte board and spends the bulk of her time as an audit partner.

But it’s her role leading the Inspiring Women initiative, Deloitte program for attracting and retaining female talent, which she says has been a key turning point for her career since arriving in Australia, simply because she knows how such programs can affect change. “We had four female partners in 1998 and we had 95 this year,” she says. “I’ve always been passionate about helping other people achieve and here I could spread my wings wider than just my immediate team and make a difference. I feed off that and it just provides a lot of satisfaction.”

Dreyer believes there’s a whole other career available in professional services after becoming partner, as long as you have the drive and support to move on. “As you move, things happen. I got to lead Inspiring Women, I got on the board. Things happen that re-energise and re-inspire you,” she says.

She puts her success with the firm down to having a sponsor, and advises women to pursue such powerful allies to acquire that extra bit of support for getting ahead.

Career success, she happily says, is now about doing what she loves. “It’s not a status thing. It’s doing what you’re passionate about and actually having an impact on either your clients or the people you work with. I see myself as successful because I can do that.”

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