"What I’m really good at is bringing bureaucracies to life,” said Laura Nashman.
As an executive who prizes humility over most other leadership traits, the CEO of the BC Pension Corp. was almost reluctant to acknowledge her flair for breathing new vitality into organizations.
But for nearly a decade she’s been in the midst of executing a strategic plan for one of Canada’s largest pension services, with the goal of transforming the organization through to 2021.
The plan, Nashman said, is a living document of sorts – something that is never meant to sit on a shelf as it’s being carried out.
“I can say on my reputation that if you asked any employee in the organization about it, they would have some familiarity with it,” she said.
To date, the nine-year plan has achieved each of its key milestones, delivering a new pension payment system, six websites with online pension estimators, a new member service centre and an e-submit pension application for more than 500,000 members.
“It’s something that people connect to and understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, the time frames in which we’re doing it and what we’re trying to achieve,” she said. “That sense of common purpose is so powerful for people.”
Nashman’s efforts to instil common purpose in large groups can be traced back to her teens.
Growing up in the 1980s, Nashman, who originally lived in Toronto before moving to the West Coast, spent her summers as a counsellor at her family’s camp in Ontario.
There, between 400 and 500 children would descend on the grounds at its peak.
Nashman took on a leadership role beginning when she was about 14 years old – an “unusually young age,” she admitted.
She’s unsure, however, if it was because she was constantly immersed in the family business or she just had a knack for the job.
“I was developing and growing myself but I was also fostering a positive experience for young people, helping kids in difficult times,” she said. “I learned early on what fulfilled me and what energized me was doing important work that affected the public in a positive way.”
She returned each summer until graduate school.
By then Nashman was still contemplating what she wanted from a career after studying economics and history at the University of Toronto.
More traditional grad school options, such as law school or a master of business administration program, were churning out a plethora of graduates each year.
“I did want to distinguish myself and focus in on a part of the world of business that I felt I had a particular natural aptitude towards, which was the relationship of people in organizations.”
She continued her studies at the University of Toronto, earning a master’s degree in industrial relations.
It was then that she developed an interest in equity principles in organizations.
And her grad studies coincided with a period in which federal and Ontario governments were introducing policies and laws supporting the pursuit of equity for women in the workplace.
Employers were struggling to comply with the new legislation at a time when affirmative action policies were getting mixed reviews in North America.
Nashman’s studies and the country’s changing attitudes towards pay equity landed her a consultant job in her mid-20s at a boutique firm helping Ontario employers implement the new policies.
“Once again I was positioned at a very early age [with] the opportunity to take on quite a bit of responsibility,” Nashman said.
One of her client organizations, Legal Aid Ontario, later hired her as its director of human resources and labour relations.
“That’s when I started to really hone in on … doing the work I was capable of doing in organizations that were making a meaningful contribution to society,” she said of working for the non-profit, which partners with private lawyers to provide people of limited means with access to counsel.
Her next career move brought her to the Region of Peel, where she worked as commissioner of employee and business services.
The new job saw her assume broader corporate service responsibilities including procurement and purchasing.
Meanwhile, Nashman’s embrace of the outdoors hadn’t waned since her teenage years at summer camp and continued to influence her career decisions.
“As my career developed and my family developed, we had interest and aspiration to move west,” Nashman said.
When the opportunity with the BC Pension Corp. arose in Victoria, “it was an absolutely perfect fit.”
Her husband and her twin sons relocated to the West Coast in 2008.
And the sons, now 21, would make annual pilgrimages back to Ontario to spend their summers at the same camp Nashman worked at growing up.
Her persistence in setting a high bar for herself in her career has also influenced how she spends her vacations.
Last August she travelled to the French Alps, cycling six to 12 hours a day to cover just shy of 2,000 kilometres in two weeks.
“There’s very few people that would call this a vacation, and I recognize that and I wouldn’t impose that on anybody,” Nashman acknowledged.
“There will be a time in my life where there will be the museums and the wineries and the other things in these wonderful countries, but right now it’s a fairly intense exposure to these amazing places.” •
Join us to celebrate this year’s honourees at the 2018 BC CEO Awards November 15, 2018, hosted at the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel. For tickets and event info, visit www.biv.com/ceo.
