Letters from Rona / Working Life / Sort by date

Perhaps it's partly because I never had a daughter that the greatest joy I found in corporate life was mentoring gifted young women who today are leaders in their field. Then there's the protegee I will call Ellen. Her blazing intellect, zest for challenge and seemingly unquenchable energy made her the go-to person for the toughest projects---until the light went out of her smile. What looked at first like a bad day became a sour week and then a spiritless month in which Ellen rarely emerged from her office. She kept the door closed and the window covered with paper. When she started missing her deadlines, I had no choice but to confront her. She admitted that while we all thought she was working, she'd been staring at her computer screen, unable to write or even read. Depression had paralyzed my star employee. [more]

I expected to remember Helen Thomas, the legendary White House correspondent who retired this week at 89 after holding presidents to account for close to half a century, as a model for my own old age---scrappy, tenacious and relentlessly committed to her craft. "I think I'll work all my life," she once said. "When you're having fun, why stop having fun?" Why, indeed. [more]

Assignment: delve into a $12 million sex discrimination case for Toronto Life magazine. Writer: young woman with no agenda or interest in gender disparity. Result: a feminist conversion and a story that says what older women with big jobs have been saying for years over a second glass of wine. However the case unfolds, that's news. [more]

No matter what field you're in or how accomplished you are, there will be times when you find yourself perplexed by a challenge you've never faced before. So you turn to a trustworthy pro with the contacts or the know-how to point you in the right direction. A person like my friend Leslie, a busy self-employed consultant who gets a buzz from sharing what she's learned. [more]

I do my best to steer clear of movies so new and hot, you can barely find a seat, but I made an exception for Up in the Air, starring George Clooney as a corporate hit man who flies all over the country firing people with cheerful sang-froid. Although I've never lost a job myself, I'll remember 2009 as the year I lost count of all the notes I sent to friends and colleagues who had just been booted out of theirs. [more]

In 1976, when we still believed in "having it all" and "glass ceiling" was a skylight with pretensions, I landed my first magazine job. Career gurus told me I should learn to act more like men. These days it's career-minded men who are being told to emulate women. So says Men's Health, the modern guy's mentor on every aspect of manhood from getting laid to getting ahead. [more]

William Safire, the formidably prolific author, columnist and self-described language maven who died this week in his eightieth year, was in the end a man of his word. Nearly five years ago he called his final-Op-Ed column for the New York Times "Never retire." When I first read that column one weekday morning in January, I had just begun what most people would call my retirement. But I scorned that word. [more]

Among the best perks of editing Chatelaine was being able to take my culinary dilemmas to a maven who knows home cooking the way Alain Ducasse knows haute cuisine---Food Editor Monda Rosenberg, since 1977 a trusted mentor, friend and kitchen confidante to millions of Canadian women (and no small number of men). [more]

If I am ever rushed on a gurney to Emerg, with a tube up my nose and a throng of doctors yelling orders in my wake, I want the first face I see to be Nurse Jackie's. Nothing stands between TV's stalwart nurse and her patient---not meddlesome relatives, not by-the-book hospital brass, not MDs determined to be heroes no matter what the cost. And certainly not her own limits. [more]

The obituary section lies open on my desk. A woman smiles up at me, lighting up the page as she used to light up rooms, podiums and bars in many countries. The words have the familiar laurel-wreath ring of all ceremonial tributes: "Alison Youngman died peacefully at home on March 8, concluding a short illness with the dignity, grace and good humour that had defined her life as a lawyer, volunteer and champion of women's leadership. [more]