This Girl KAM with Fiona Olivier

Liv: Hi Fiona. Thank you for joining me.

Fiona: Hello, Liv. Delighted to be here.

Liv: So, to kick us off, Fiona, and get things started, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you and your life so far?

Fiona: Sure. I’m Irish and have been living in France for almost 27 years. I’m married to a French man whom I met in university. We have three sons aged 23, 21, and 18. I have worked pretty much all my career in communications, public affairs, corporate affairs. Currently, I work at Sanofi as the global head of corporate affairs for one of their four divisions. I enjoy gardening, playing music (although I’m not great), and running (albeit slowly). So, my hands are in a bit of everything.

Liv: Tell me more about the musician side of you, as we talked about this before…

Fiona: I started learning the violin when I was seven. My father played the violin, as did one of my grandmothers and great-grandfathers. I played a lot until I was 18, and then I stopped for many years. But I picked it up again after a cancer diagnosis in 2013. I realised that music had an incredible healing power and started playing again. Nowadays, I play more Irish music than classical music and love it. There’s a fantastic traditional Irish music scene here in Paris, and I’m getting more attached to Ireland as I get older. I also got involved with refugees who are displaced musicians living in Paris, France, and Europe. I worked with them to give them opportunities to perform and to change local populations’ opinions of people coming from other cultures.

Liv: That’s amazing. How did that come about?

Fiona: Do you remember back in 2015 when it was at the height of the Syrian crisis? There was the photograph of the little boy with the red shorts and the blue t-shirt on a beach and Turkey. His name was Alan. And that photo really impacted me.

I remember looking at it thinking, “What can I do at my level, as a citizen?” Faced with the magnitude of this crisis and I really didn’t see anything that I could do as a citizen. And I got a notion, I read an article about these musicians who were traveling from the UK to the jungle in Calais, which was this really important, informal, terrible refugee camp in on the outskirts of Calais, where people were trying to get to the uk. They’d collected musical instruments. I reached out to them and I said, “Look, can I just meet you there? Can I join you?” And they said yes. So I literally drove up to Calais with my fiddle. I remember the night before I went, I spoke to one of my very good friends who’s a musician here in Paris, and I said “I don’t really know why I’m going. What am I attempting to achieve here? Is this me like trying to feel good about myself?” He said to me, “If you only touch one person and for one minute your interaction with that one person you give them back their sense of agency, their sense of respect, and you make a connection, then you’ve achieved something.”

And so I went with that sort of attitude, not really knowing what to expect, and not really thinking that I was going to change the world. It was an extraordinary weekend. I met so many people, played the fiddle, they sang, we laughed, we cried, and I drove home from that. I didn’t sleep for about three weeks afterward because of what I’d seen and experienced there.

The conditions were just atrocious. But when I came back, I wanted to go back again, but I didn’t really know how or when. So I founded an association, a very tiny little association called Musique Sans Frontières, Music Without Borders, Paris. And since then, every year we do at least one concert and one workshop in a school. We work with exiled, displaced, or refugee and migrant musicians to give them a chance to perform. So it’s literally person by person, step by step. Since then, we’ve actually worked with about 80 musicians in total, touched about 300 kids in total, and over, I would say, through our concerts and stuff like that, over a thousand people have come to our concerts. So it’s small-scale stuff, but again, it’s meaningful. And you can really see when you do these workshops with the kids or when you do the concerts how people’s perceptions change. They’re like, “I remember we did a concert with some people, Uyghurs from China, and I remember afterwards, a number of people came to me and said we had no idea of these people and what they were going through,” or likewise, some musicians from Syria. We brought an orchestra to park to our town, and that was also incredible because it was the first chance they’d had to reassemble in France.

Liv: So you’ve done that now for what, about seven years?

Fiona: That’s right. So yeah, since 2015.

Liv: Quite a time commitment when you have a fairly significant job as well!

Fiona: For sure. I think, again, we’re modest in what we’re doing. If we were fully committed to this, we could probably do so much more. We could maybe seek proper funding, be a bit more ambitious in the planning. But look, we’re doing what we can and also having fun and enjoying it as we’re going along. But it’s true. My kids are a little bit older now, but my youngest fellow was only about 11 or so when we started. The kids have been great because at the start, I used to tell them they had to come to the concert because they had to help out at it. There would be a bit of grumbling at the start, but now I think over the years, like my youngest one has been to all of our concerts. He helped at the bar, and it gets them involved a little bit. So it’s maybe just a little bit part of what happens now. “Okay, I’m almost, oh, she got one of her concerts, we’ve got to go.” So…

Liv: Yeah. But what a thing to imagine then, from that age, through their teenage years to be exposed to say those experiences and those different cultures that many people like say who are coming to these concerts have had no idea and no exposure to at all. It’s a really positive thing, isn’t it, for teenage boys who have such a narrow view on the world normally?

Fiona: I actually think teenage boys are great. They have a tendency to consume more news and current affairs than girls, which I see in my teaching at the  University. It always disappoints me that the girls aren’t consuming more of that. I would always advocate to the girls that I teach to read up on what’s happening in the world and not just limit themselves to what’s being pumped out to them in their social media algorithms.

Liv: Yeah, absolutely.

Fiona: Because you have twins. Are they girls or boys?

Liv:I have twin girls, two two-year-olds, a 10-year-old girl, and a nine-year-old boy. And they are all very different in personality! My boy is very sensitive! He’s an emotional rocket, bless him. Our guinea pig died at the weekend, and he’s still beside himself!

Fiona: But you know, isn’t it wonderful that he’s able to have those emotions that so many men have not felt able to express for so long?

Liv: Absolutely. I’m sure growing up at a time when there’s much more openness around emotion, is a good thing.

So, tell me about what drives you?

Fiona: I would say it has evolved over the years. When I was younger, I was probably a bit more driven to get the career going, prove myself, get a decent salary so I could afford the nice things. I’m really honest, and I would say that probably was me. I liked the nice handbags and the nice shoes. Great shoe collection, by the way. But I think in maybe the last 10 or 15 years, that has really changed. Maybe it’s because I’m more comfortable with myself, or just my priorities have shifted. Now I want to be useful. I do like being valued and recognised for my work. I’m not gonna deny that. But I kind of do like to feel that I’m doing something, I’m making some kind of an impact somewhere, whether it’s on a small scale or on a broader scale.

So, in my personal life, it’s on a small scale, working with musicians. But through my professional work, changing policy or working on access programs that will help a broader number of people is what drives me. So, feeling useful. Feeling like I’m actually helping advance, make the world a better place. God almighty, it sounds like I’m giving a Miss World’s speech here, but it’s really to be useful.

Liv: Yeah. Has that changed? You touched very briefly on your cancer diagnosis. Would you mind telling me a little bit more about it? I presume it altered your outlook in many ways?

Fiona: Definitely. I’m absolutely happy to talk about it. At the time, I felt that if someone working in healthcare, like me, wasn’t able to talk about and articulate what I was going through, how would people without those opportunities be able to express themselves? So, I felt a certain obligation to talk about it.

Anyway, in my experience, I was 43 when it was picked up during a routine mammogram. It was a total shock, and it was hard to believe. But that first year was really crappy. I had a couple of surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and all the rest of it.

I think the impact on my family was significant, although I didn’t necessarily understand it at the time. Looking back now, I see how they each dealt with it in their own way. My husband and three kids were all fantastic, but for me, I stopped working during that period. That’s a very personal choice whether to work or not to work through cancer, and I chose not to work because I felt I wanted to focus on myself at that moment. I didn’t think I would be able to deliver at work and manage everything else.

It was the right choice for me, but it may not be the right choice for others. During that time, I did things like mindfulness classes, started running thanks to a couple of friends of mine, and spent time tending to my garden. I also picked up the fiddle and started doing all of these things. It helped me to enjoy the small things and just take it one day at a time. I actually stopped and smelled the roses. It sounds silly, but that’s part of mindfulness, really living in the present moment.

I would say that’s what got me through it. It also changed my perspective. Rather than seeking out the ultimate goal or trying to achieve ultimate success, it’s just about living in the moment and enjoying the small things, the interactions with people, one step at a time, one person at a time. That’s how I got through it, and that’s how it changed my perception of things.

Liv: Is that something that you still keep up with now? Is it perhaps a barometer at times of stress?

Fiona: I think it fundamentally changed me in that I feel like I’m a better person. That sounds a bit ridiculous, but I feel like I take time now to do stuff and enjoy it. I do loads of stuff, probably too much stuff, to be honest with you. But I was always a bit like that; I never really sat still anyway. Now I’m doing it, but I’m doing it with things that give me energy, or like I’m doing it because it’s stuff that I really enjoy doing. Yeah. So, there’s a certain satisfaction in that. Work is important to me, and my job is important to me. I’m in a role where I’m probably always on, like my phone is always in my hand. Working in corporate affairs, you’re working with external stakeholders, media, patient advocacy groups, and policymakers. You’re constantly in touch with the external world, and you’re at the front end of a lot of issues and crises when they happen in healthcare. Having that kind of job, which is a lot of tension and sometimes pressure, being able to take the time to do these other things maybe gives you a bit more balance and perspective.

Liv: So on that note, you touched on work a little bit there. Tell me a little bit more about what led you into this particular career route.

Fiona: I studied communications at Dublin City University and started in 1989. When I was applying to that course, I remember the career guidance teacher at my school, Laurel Hill, in Limerick, saying to me, “But nobody from this school has ever gone and done that. Why would you go and do that?” I was in a school where everything was possible. The nuns were brilliant and used to tell us that everything was possible and pushed a lot of us into STEM, actually. I think they were hoping that I would go and do something maybe more in STEM or in teaching. But even back then at school, I was involved in a hundred different things, set up the photography society, played sports, played music, and all that kind of stuff. So I went into communications, and one thing led to another thing, and one country led to another country. It broadened out a little bit more from communications to public affairs, patient engagement, and then the broader corporate affairs, which includes all of that. So, it’s a bit like a rolling stone that gathered momentum and gathered new experiences.

Liv: Do you ever think about sliding doors and pivotal moments? Is there a point in your life where you think things could have gone very differently, and you consider a whole different career and a different world for yourself?

Fiona: I think my life is made up of sliding doors, actually. There were different trains that I didn’t take, and I’ve taken a lot of trains. If I had not done the course in communications, I think I would have been in a very different place. I almost went to Aberdeen to study physiotherapy, which was the other option that I had on the table. So it could have led me down a totally different pathway. Another major sliding doors moment was in my early twenties. I had a couple of years’ experience in Dublin under my belt, and my then-boyfriend, now-husband was French. He was moving to Poland to do his national service for a French company. All my friends were going to places like Australia, London, and New York to have these fantastic experiences.

Then I announced that I was going to Poland. This was back in 1994, so it was a very interesting time. The country was opening up, and I went over there. My first job was in an Irish pub, where I was hired to make the pop authentically Irish by teaching Irish dancing, fiddle, and giving talks on Irish history and literature. It was a bit of an unusual year, and I did all sorts of interesting things. I think it gave me a huge sense of resilience and taught me that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. After that experience, I realized there’s a lot I could do if I just get over myself and say, “What’s the worst that’s going to happen to me if this doesn’t work?”

Liv: Did you move straight from Poland to France? How did you end up in France?

Fiona: Well, at the end of the year in Poland, I was thinking that I really wanted to be successful in communications. After spending a year in Poland, I wondered if anyone would take me seriously because of the type of work I was doing. So I thought, “London is the centre of the communications industry,” and I moved there. I worked for Whitbread, specifically for Beef Eater restaurants and pubs, as one of the PR managers. That was in 1995, around the time of the Mad Cow crisis.

You can imagine how challenging it was being a young PR manager for a company called Beef Eater during the Mad Cow crisis. I remember looking out one day into the office car park, which was next to one of the Beef Eater restaurants, and seeing German TV crews there, wanting to understand how we were coping with the beef crisis. I stayed in London for two and a half years, and my husband and I got married during that time. After we got married, I stayed in London for about a year, but my husband was in Paris. We were commuting to see each other every weekend, which was crazy.

One weekend, I decided that I was moving to Paris because there weren’t many job opportunities in Ireland, and London was not going to be home for either of us. My husband is French, and I am Irish, and we wanted to live in either Ireland or Paris. This decision was a little crazy because even when we got married, we didn’t plan where we were going to live or how we were going to be together. It took us a year after the wedding to figure everything out and for me to move to Paris. I’ve been living here since 1997.

Liv: I think it’s nice that being together was more important to you than logistics.

Fiona: You’re right. My mom had a great expression when she married my dad. It didn’t matter where they were or if they had money or anything. They would travel the roads together because they were in love.

Liv: That’s so lovely. So, where were you working when you had your first child, and what was it like?

Fiona: I worked for a PR agency called Ketchum in Paris. I was hired by them to work on a project for FIFA because it was the year before the 1998 FIFA World Cup, which took place in Paris, as all the football fans on your podcast will know. At the time, the French didn’t really care that the World Cup was being played in France. FIFA and the 12 official sponsors wanted to create a little bit of excitement. So, I was hired to manage this project, which was basically to bring the World Cup trophy around France and to organise events and other activities.

Liv: And how was that then? How was life juggling agency life and young children?

Fiona: Juggling agency life and young children is not always easy, and it wasn’t easy back then. But we managed. This is something that you were talking about, childcare, at the start, Liv. I know in France, it’s very different. The French government has been very good to promote and help women with childcare and to encourage women to get back into the workplace and so on. But we made a decision, and look back then, our salaries weren’t fantastic. We made a decision to have a nanny. We couldn’t afford a nanny by ourselves clearly back then, so we shared a nanny with another family. It was a brilliant experience, and we still remain very friendly with that family. They had a baby the same age as our son, so we shared the cost, and she would come one week to our house and one week to their house. I think it really saved us because we didn’t have any family in Paris. My husband pitched in, and that was really the only way we could have done it. So we made it work, but a lot of, let’s say, my salary went into the childcare or a lot of his salary, whichever way you look at it. Basically, one of our salaries went into the childcare.

Liv: It’s essential, though, isn’t it? Everybody has a different experience, and it is entirely personal, but I could not not work. I need the support of childcare, and I think my kids benefit from it as well. But yeah, each to their own. I very much respect and love my childminder! 

Fiona: After the first couple of years when we shared a nanny, that family moved away, and so we had to find a new one just for us. And we did, and her name is Paula. Paula has been with us since then, so she’s been with us for over 20 years. Now she works part-time with us, but you can imagine she’s just such an integral part of our family. She’s seen my three boys grow up. She’s fantastic, and a lot of my success is thanks to Paula… I think I should tell her that!

Liv: You should! I think you should make her listen to this actually. (laughs)

So, on that note, what are your thoughts on work-life balance?

Fiona: I’m not going to set myself up as a role model for work-life balance, but I think I do have a decent enough work-life balance. I mentioned earlier that I am on call a lot because of my role, which can require me to address issues that arise over the weekend. But other than that, I try not to work on weekends unless it’s necessary. If I’m not dealing with a crisis, I find time to take micro-breaks, like walking around the garden for five minutes, when I’m working from home. When my kids were younger, I would sometimes slot in a couple of hours in the afternoon to take them on a school outing to the local farm or take a half day, depending on the situation. Occasionally, I would be at the school gates to pick them up. My life is mixed with all sorts of stuff, but I try to find the right moments to do something meaningful. I’m not someone who is fully dedicated to work from morning until evening, but I’m okay with things creeping in and out because that works for me. However, I would never expect that from anyone I work with because people have different ways of functioning. It’s important to understand what works for people and what they need for their work-life balance and mental health and wellbeing.

Liv: So, tell me a little bit, what sort of support have you received in your career? Do you have a particular mentor or are you a mentor for anyone else?

Fiona: I do mentor people, and I love doing it. I think it’s a great way to learn, and I actually learn more from them than they do from me, to be honest with you. I mentor both men and women. Personally, I’ve never had a mentor myself, but I’ve been good at knowing who I could reach out to for advice on different things at different times within my professional network. I’ve always enjoyed those conversations where I can trust the people I’m speaking with and discuss something that’s happening at work or to do with a career change. What I would say, though, is that a sponsor is as important, if not more important than a mentor. A sponsor is somebody who will advocate for you or speak up for you in an organisation. They are the people who look out for you and would speak up on your behalf in senior executive meetings and so on.

That’s the first thing. And then the other thing I would say, and it’s only something that I really realised in the last year or so, is having somebody who helps you with your blind spot.

And this is an unusual one, and it really only came to light in the last year. As I said, one of my colleagues, one of my peers in my current company really plays that role, where he helps me see things that I may not have seen otherwise. And I think I do it a little bit for him as well, and it just happened by chance because, in this instance, he’s been in the company a long time, really understands the culture, and I was new and I just learned a lot from just listening to him.

And then over time, from a business perspective, I also pick up a lot. So sponsors and people who help you with your blind spot are as important, if not more so, than a mentor.”

Liv: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. And I don’t think anyone has talked about sponsors so much before, but it is a conversation I had with someone recently offline. It made me wonder if more people should be encouraged to find sponsors as such. Again, particularly females in the industry who aren’t necessarily great at advocating for themselves.

Fiona: Yes, though it’s not like someone is going to declare themselves your sponsor. But it’s building those kinds of relationships with people who there is trust, they see what you do, they recognise you for your skills, your expertise, and what you bring to the table, but they’re not necessarily your boss. But they can advocate for you. So it’s almost like an organic exercise.

I think it happens over time and probably would take a year or two being in an organisation to start building up that network of people who you could consider your sponsors.

Liv: And different people have impacts in many different stages of your life and career, don’t they?

Fiona: Absolutely. I think that’s really true. That as you grow, so do they. And somebody might be the right fit or person for you at a particular moment in a particular role, and then you change, or the role changes or they change or their role changes, and so you move apart or not. And I think that sort of notion of organic, to me, is important because it should never be something fixed. Things just evolve all the time.

Liv: So Fiona, I’m conscious of time, so I am going to let you go soon, but I do want to just touch on with you what advice, if you could go back and give yourself advice to your younger self before you even started on your career path. What would it be, do you think? And also, what advice would you offer other people joining the industry?

Fiona: We talked about childcare. I would say if you’re a young woman thinking about or hoping to have kids, then get yourself set up with good childcare. It’s an absolute must and do whatever it is you need to do to keep that childcare robust and safe. Preserve it. The other thing that I tend to say a lot to younger women is to keep financial independence. I’m not saying that you should have separate accounts. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is to have options. I think I’ve seen instances where women have no form of financial independence or agency, and their options are limited if things ever get tough.

Another thing I would say is to nurture your friends. I’m absolutely privileged to have a fantastic bunch of friends from college days and before and now who have stuck with me through thick and thin. When I was sick, when my job was going great, or when my job wasn’t going great, because I think that sisterhood is so important to be able to talk to people about what’s going on in your professional and personal life. People who understand you. The last thing I would say is that maybe it’s less related to healthcare, but it’s essential to have something for yourself, like an activity or hobby, that is not work or family-related. It’s important to have some kind of outlet.

Maybe on healthcare, I would say it’s a fantastic industry to come into. It has changed a lot in the years I’ve been there. Try to understand the external world and the healthcare ecosystem in which we operate because it is having such an impact on the industry. The industry needs to change, and the more connected you are to what’s happening outside of your organisation, the better value and impact you can have because you can bring that into the organisation. 

Liv:  That’s so true. Thank you. Will you do me a favour, Fiona? Will you send me the details of your charity, and I will add it to the episode show notes just so that people can go and have a look at it.

Fiona: I certainly will. There are a few links to nice videos that people can look at there. There’s no fantastic website now or anything, but I’ll send you what I have.

Liv: That’s great. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I know there are more stories of Poland. I’d very much enjoy a glass of wine in Paris talking about your year in Poland one time!

Fiona: Oh, definitely. I would love that. I’ll welcome you at any time! Liv, thank you for the opportunity. I hope that this will be of interest to some of your listeners, and maybe I’ll have the opportunity to connect with some of them in the future.

Musique Sans Frontières Paris creates social impact by providing displaced / exiled musicians with performance opportunities through concerts, and workshops in schools. The association supports musicians with their professional insertion, and contributes to enhancing the understanding of other cultures by local populations. Since 2015, the association has worked with over 80 artists, touching around 300 kids and over 1000 adults. The most recent concert was with Orpheus XXI (an Erasmus-funded educational and intercultural project for refugees founded by Jordi Savall) in the Paris suburbs (video clip here: Concert Ensemble – Orpheus XXI – Meudon 2022 – YouTube).  For further information contact: [email protected]