Evaleen Jaager Roy is adamant: women can have it all.
“I always said to younger girls I was mentoring, ‘If you want a family and you want a career, hey, don’t let anyone say you can’t do both,’” she said.
Jaager Roy’s words carry the weight of a woman whose career highlights so far include: helping develop Vancouver’s video game industry through her role leading the HR team at Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) (Nasdaq:ERTS), co-creating the EA University, chairing the boards of Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emily Carr University of Art & Design, writing a book and launching her own consulting company.
Plus marriage and raising a 14-year old son.
“You just can’t do it all at once,” she added. “You sometimes need to prioritize one or the other.”
To that end, Roy left the corporate world last year to launch Jaager Roy Advisory Inc. – a step she said combined entrepreneurial dreams with a desire to spend more time with her son before he leaves home for university in a few years. As a consultant, she said, she’s advising companies on business vision and strategy, organization strategy and structure and outcome-based HR.
“I’m working just as hard, but the nice thing is I can control my time just that little tad more so I can occasionally be there at 3 p.m. when he’s coming home to study for a test,” she said. “I don’t want to miss those years.”
To hear Jaager Roy tell it, this is the first hint of a breather she’s taken from a high-intensity corporate career, which she kicked off in 1988 with an MBA from Harvard Business School and finance jobs with General Motors Inc. (TSX-GMM.U; NYSE: GM) and then Westcoast Energy Inc. (TSX-W.PR.H). At Westcoast, she became fascinated with how companies can set the tone, culture and performance of a business and persuaded the company to let her move into HR. Honing her skills with an executive development program in HR from Queen’s University, she built and led Westcoast’s 25-member HR group, which supported 1,200 employees.
In 1999, she became the first HR executive hired by EA – the largest creative studio in the world, then producing 20 top video games a year.
EA, Jaager Roy said, presented all the advantages of a young, dynamic, passionate staff, and all the challenges of figuring out how to develop an eclectic talent base that eschewed all things corporate. Recruitment, she said, was another challenge in the fast-paced creative world of video game development.
“People would come to me and say, ‘Evaleen, I need three art leaders next week or I need 60 engineers in two weeks,’” she explained.
The difference between recruiting success and “getting the pink slip,” she said, was building successful recruiting pipelines by establishing relationships with talent pools like SFU and Emily Carr.
While building those relationships, Jaager Roy carved out the time to chair SFU’s board from 1999 to 2002 – a decision she said stretched her, at age 39, just as she liked to see employees grow and stretch their talents.
“I remember when I walked into that board I was like, ‘Oh my God can I do this?’ And I learned so much,” she said, noting that her tenure as chair saw the board bring about the Morris Wosk Centre for Dialogue, lay the plans for the Segal Graduate School of Business, and hire Michael Stevenson as the school’s president.
Jaager Roy currently chairs the board of Emily Carr, where president and vice-chancellor Ron Burnett says she demonstrates key leadership abilities and the talents of “a consensus-builder of the first order.”
“What I find really heartening in dealing with her is her ability to cut through a lot of chaff and find the right answers to sometimes difficult questions,” he said.
Last year, after Jaager Roy’s EA career had climbed all the way to a role leading global talent planning and community relations for 8,000 employees across 75 countries, she left the corporate world to try something new – her own advisory business, with more flexibility to see her son.
As to how she’s kept sane in the midst of “having it all,” Jaager Roy speaks of carving out space to relax by cooking and gardening – the subjects of her book, Four Chefs One Garden, which she published last year.
“Figure out what’s precious in your life and align your life to it,” she said. “Life goes so fast and it’s so short. Figure out at every point what really jazzes you and make sure you build in time to do it.” •
