What happens when work falls out of alignment with life? Leader, coach and non-executive director, Eilish Jamieson, shares a story of what happened when she had to make choices about her career.
Ten years ago, Eilish Jamieson was working as an executive director at the investment bank Goldman Sachs. It was a job she loved. She describes her experience like “putting a kid in a sweet shop”; the perfect fit for a curious mind who had embraced the “courage over comfort” mantra for most of her working life. She was – on the outside looking in – at the peak of her career. But on the inside, she felt conflicted.
Eilish was leading a team in London and talking to her bosses about relocating to New York. She had three children under the age of six. She had ageing parents. She also had what she describes as a “health scare”. Sitting down with a coach to talk it all through, she started to download her predicament. It was spilling out of her, uncontrollably, for the first time; a visceral and powerful monologue about ‘doing it all’. It was also the moment that changed her life.
“In my head, I needed to be a Goldman leader; I needed to go to New York; I needed to be the best mum; I needed to care for my parents,” she remembers. “I reeled off this list and my coach challenged me: ‘Who is saying you need to do all these things?’ The question floored me. I was silent for a few minutes. I had told myself I needed to do everything. But what I needed to do was prioritise; to make choices which suited that stage of my life. It was a real revelation; until then, I dealt with anything put in front of me.”
From Ireland to London
Eilish grew up on the west coast of Ireland in the small village of Creeslough in County Donegal. She was born as the youngest of four children in the Callaghan family, jostling for position with two older sisters and a brother. Her father worked as a plumber in the local construction industry, her mother as a dress maker. In many ways, her experience was typical of the time: freedom to leave the house, to go where she wanted, to play in the surrounding fields. But she also knew that it wouldn’t be forever. Across the border in Northern Ireland, the Christmas lights of Derry/Londonderry lit her up. Living close to political conflict also broadened her perspective.
Eilish developed a reputation for asking: ‘But why?’ She became conscious of economic differences and inequality; the haves and the have nots. Friends lived on farms, and she was struck by the dominant patterns of inheritance, where land was passed down the male side of local families. At the time, credit unions were preferred to banks, community lending organisations where her mother knew the people who ran them, and she trusted them. People would also get to a certain age and leave the area. There were lots of children and old people. But why?
In the mid-1980s, Eilish’s dad became one of those people to leave, moving to London to take advantage of a building boom and the promise of new economic opportunity. To begin with, the rest of the family stayed in Ireland, but after a couple of years of running the household and hearing his stories, her mother decided to join him. In the middle of the summer holidays, as Eilish was getting ready to turn 12, the children were asked to pack a suitcase because they were going to visit their dad. The siblings thought they were going on holiday. But they didn’t come back.
Can you imagine arriving in London from rural Ireland? In the summer of 1988, the Callaghan family landed at Heathrow, met Eilish’s dad, and got on the London Underground. They travelled into the city, and then south under the River Thames, getting off the Victoria Line at Brixton on a busy Saturday afternoon. From there, they got on a bus. The cultural chaos of south London, the intensity, the noise, and the rush… “Wow,” Eilish remembers, as she absorbed life through the moving window. It couldn’t have been more different to Creeslough.
Within a couple of days, her mother had spoken to the parish priest and asked about Eilish attending a local school. Within a week, she had an interview. It hadn’t yet occurred to her that she was actually going somewhere new in September. She joined a group of children who already knew each other and felt a strange combination of excitement and extreme shyness – to begin with, they couldn’t understand her accent.
London was fascinating. It was everything all at once. Each day, she would surface into the sunshine, the energy and the… newness. This fed her natural curiosity and her love of new places and people. Going to the supermarket, walking down the street and hearing different accents, she felt the potential. She was also struck by how many people were starting businesses, making a go of it. Quite quickly, she realised the value of her own ability to get up and go; later that helped her to get a Saturday job and start earning money.
But she was also naïve. When the IRA actively targeted London, a young girl with an Irish accent stood out. Eilish recalls being in Woolworths, the high-street retail store, queuing up to buy ‘pick and mix’ sweets. When she spoke to the lady at the checkout, an elderly man behind her got angry and started throwing abuse; so much so that that lady serving said: ‘Just leave, darling, just go’. Eilish understood the tensions – it was obviously horrendous, what was happening – but there was a dichotomy in her mind: she loved her new experiences but realised she wasn’t always welcome.
“This made me aware of needing to understand others,” she says. “I do like to understand people’s political beliefs and social backgrounds. I don’t believe that anyone wakes up in the morning to discriminate and do harm. These norms are often unconsciously adopted and taken through life; they can drive our choices and behaviours and have a negative effect. If we don’t take on board how others think or feel, we will only every get stalemate, or worse.”
What’s the worst thing that could happen?
At 16, Eilish had already decided she wanted to train as an accountant. She also decided that her next move would look different to her friends. So, she found a specialist college that offered accounting A Level, and enrolled. She thought, quite plausibly, that this would give her the best chance of getting into the best university to study accountancy. But there was a problem. The college announced it was closing after the first year and offered her two options: relocate somewhere else or continue at home with little support. What did Eilish, the self-starter, do? She finished her A Levels on the kitchen table.
Before she left college, Eilish recalls a conversation with one of her teachers. Where would they advise studying for an accounting degree? City University, perhaps Kingston, but the best place in the country to go… The London School of Economics. That was it. Eilish applied. She tells me she didn’t really expect to get in. Her A Levels weren’t as good as she’s hoped for – perhaps not surprising after studying at home, she suggests – but LSE did offer her an interview. What’s the worst thing that could happen? She received an offer.
“That gave me real confidence about throwing my hat in the ring,” says Eilish. “If you look at the different stages of my career, there’s an element of me thinking that I’m not as qualified as I should be, or I’m probably not ready; but I’ll give it a go anyway and see how it turns out. Thankfully, my ego is not so big that I don’t mind a bit of rejection. There isn’t much to lose, but there is a huge amount of upside.”
In the mid-1990s, the graduate jobs market was fuelled by university milk rounds. Employers would pitch up on campus selling careers to young and fresh-faced graduates. But after the second year of her studies, Eilish had already secured a placement at accountancy firm KPMG. She says it was very much a means to an end; finding somewhere to qualify, but she also felt the firm was a good fit for her personality; a starting point on a journey that would become a rollercoaster.
The early years were frustrating. Her best friend was a photocopier; otherwise, she remembers reconciling bank statements, not the “sexy work” involved in financial audits. At the time, finance was also a male-dominated industry. Eilish was in the minority, with an even smaller number of recruits from her social background. Some were the children of partners or had experience of this world. But no-one in Eilish’s family had worked in finance; very few had run their own business or had leadership responsibility. Eilish questioned the work, and her place.
It was hard to break the mould. But she did, eventually, find a way. After three years, Eilish decided to transfer to KPMG in Australia, to work on projects she “didn’t understand” rather than on those she could “do in her sleep”. She says the Australian market was smaller, more creative and influenced by the entrepreneurial Asian economies. During her time in Sydney, Eilish opened a door to more of what she wanted: those exotic financial products that helped businesses grow. The kid had her first taste at the sweet shop. But only by breaking something that wasn’t working.
“A persona often gets created around people: who they are and what they do,” she says. “In the workplace, we tend to overlook people’s potential to do different things because they get labelled. Back then, people would often say to me it was easier to do something different by leaving the firm and coming back. When you’ve broken the mould, you get to decide. How do you rebuild something that is more aligned with what you want to be doing?”
The kid in the sweet shop
At this point in the interview, I ask Eilish what it was like working at Goldman Sachs. She pauses, smiles, and suggests that the 13 years she spent at the bank could form the chapters of a book, not just an interview. Then she explains about the kid and the sweet shop, before telling me that the sweet shop is still quite tempting. A week before our interview, she went back to the firm’s office in London to celebrate the retirement of her old boss. When she left the event, she remembers saying to an ex-colleague: “It could have been yesterday when I left, not ten years ago.” Then she says to me: “It felt like home in many ways, and not at all in others.”
The London office of Goldman Sachs is located on Plumtree Court, flanked by Farringdon Street to the east, on the fringe of the City of London. Walking past last summer, I remember looking up at ten floors of glass, neatly aligned desks against the windows and small figures in meeting rooms; matchstick men and women inside a distant bubble. Friends worked at Goldman after university, and I remember them talking about the hard work and long hours. The Economist recently reported a matrix of work-life balance and leadership at 900 companies in 19 industries. Goldman ranked as one of the lowest for work-life balance, but better-than-average for leadership.
Eilish describes it as a business that removes barriers: to help employees move in the direction they would like to go and “optimise” them in every way. Yes, it has a long-hours culture, but most things are on the table and most things are possible for those who want them. It has an entrepreneurial heart. When she joined in 2003, in the “management controls department”, the bank was doing what she calls “real time mini-MBAs” of its operations. Eilish was asked to research how a particular business, or set of financial products worked, and report back. She loved it. Standing in a room with a whiteboard, dissecting in detail, I can imagine it played into her curiosity and desire to learn new things.
After the financial crisis, the firm was heavily scrutinised, and evolved its leadership and risk management structures, alongside other investment banks seeking to repair their public image. Eilish says it became a more formal and traditional place to work; changes which also coincided with her becoming a mother. But it wasn’t long before her desire to do something more interesting again was clashing with her responsibilities – as a leader in the bank, and at home. She was desperate to do something else without it eating away at her family time; a hard conversation to have back then. The curiosity and the courage hadn’t gone. But a young family had quietly shifted her priorities and colleagues found it hard to see her as someone who didn’t want to work six days a week. Once again, something was about to break; this time, it was nearly Eilish herself.
After her life-changing coaching conversation, Eilish took time to make sense of her predicament. Yes, she had a series of expectations about herself that weren’t true. Yes, they were way beyond what any human being could deliver. But, no, they weren’t unusual. High expectations come with the territory. They are common for women in high-performing roles. Many years of professional and personal conditioning take time to unpick and to change. “If someone had asked me what I needed more of at the time; I needed space,” says Eilish. “Even now, I reach a point where I need to step away from doing things and create the space that allows me to take stock of where I am, and what I need to do. I would never have done that 10 years ago. I probably wouldn’t have done it five years ago. It’s been a real work in progress to get to that point.”
Using values to drive decisions
Since 2017, Eilish has put her energy into other people and businesses, working as a coach and non-executive director on a series of boards. She also works with schools and young people. At the heart of her work is the desire to inspire some kind of change, to create better versions of her clients. Sometimes that is about improving financial markets through her work on the board of the British Business Bank. Sometimes that is about improving leaders by working with them directly. Both matter because boards and leaders will make decisions, and those decisions will impact people’s lives. She aims to open up people’s thinking, challenge their underlying assumptions and ask difficult questions. I can imagine her sitting with an executive leader, and asking: But why?
“The reality is that most leaders need to be able to step back and see what’s actually happening around them,” says Eilish. “I’m often asked to work with people on their relationship skills or their strategic thinking. But those things aren’t what they need to work on. It’s about helping them to be the leader they want to be, to help their teams experience them in a different way; to enable them to have the impact they want. Leadership is not a role, it’s a relationship, and it’s a relationship built on trust, commitment and a shared vision.”
There is a famous phrase about living life forwards but only understanding it by looking backwards. This came to mind a lot when talking to Eilish. From her experience as a young girl on the west coast of Ireland making sense of the world, to being shouted at in Woolworths, and riding the rollercoaster of corporate life; the many facets of her personality and experience have woven together to create who she is and what she stands for. Coaching is an inherently curious profession; being a non-executive director allows her to see the inner workings of businesses; talking to school children – especially girls – allows her to expand their minds with what’s possible.
“My values are integral to who I am, and that will apply to any leader,” she says. “When you can use your values to help with your decisions, it becomes easier to make choices that take you down the right path. Fairness was massive for me growing up. As the youngest, I didn’t get listened to, so it’s not surprising that inclusion is important now. It’s not fair that women starting businesses can’t get funding because most of it goes to men; it’s not fair that a boy growing up on a council estate, who is incredible at maths and science, can’t get a job because he hasn’t gone to the right university.”
In the week following our interview, Eilish tells me she is going into a local school to give a talk. I ask her to tell me what she would say to the students, as if she was giving advice to her younger self; Eilish at the age of 12, arriving in London for the first time. This is what she will say: to put courage over comfort every day, to believe in themselves, and not feel like an outsider. It would be easy, she says, to believe they were a lesser version of themselves because they had a different background. But using their voice, and establishing themselves outside of other people’s perceptions, will help them to embrace opportunities.
She is still taking her own advice. “I’m approaching my next big decade, and people have started asking me: ‘So, are you just going to keep doing the same thing?’ That’s probably the worst thing you could say to me.” Eilish flashes a knowing smile, before leaving the interview to jump on a train into London for a board meeting. Is she about to break something and rebuild it, again?
This article is part of Rupert Cornford’s Substack series called Voices For The Future.