Finja Kütz, Formerly Market Leader, Oliver Wyman

Finja Kütz didn’t always know she’d be a great consultant, but she had a feeling she might be. When she went into the office at Oliver Wyman, straight out of university, she found that she clicked with the company instantly, so she withdrew all her applications for other jobs. “I felt like that was my thing, for whatever reason,” she explains. “It just worked!”

It was, she says, a gut decision, but trusting her instincts paid off. “There was never a plan to be in a consulting firm for 20 years,” says Kütz. “That just happened to be the outcome. I stayed there because there was always a new challenge coming up when I was ready for one.” Kütz loves a challenge.

That’s just as well, because moving upwards in the firm meant blazing a trail: “I think I was the second woman that the Oliver Wyman company had ever promoted internally,” she says, “but the first had long left before I joined. For most people around me I was the first they’d ever seen. In a lot of my subsequent roles I was the first.”

I’m comfortable with how I’m doing it

Because of this, each step up the ladder required persistence and stamina, as Kütz found she had to convince her colleagues that she really wanted to take on more responsibility. “There was a bit more of a hurdle [as a woman] but once you made that hurdle there was a wave carrying you forward because everybody was excited, saying, ‘Wow, this is great, we now have a woman that wants to do this.’”

Thankfully Kütz found that she was able to carve her own path without feeling any pressure to erase her femininity or adopt any macho behaviours from her male colleagues in order to compete. “I never thought, ‘do I need to be like the males?’” she says. “I was the way I was, and I wasn’t trying to imitate somebody.”

Just do your stuff and be yourself

This kind of self-assurance, we sense, is typical of Kütz, who is impressively unfazed by other people’s opinions. For instance, the question of how to balance work and motherhood may be contentious, but Kütz ignores pressure from others to do things a certain way. “I’m comfortable with how I’m doing it,” she says, “and I don’t care as much what others do.”

She recalls her children’s kindergarten teachers ruling against her choice to bring in extra support at home: “The teachers at one point said, ‘Oh, children should not be catered for by third parties for more than 6 or 7 hours a day.’” Kütz disagreed. “I just didn’t consider the nanny to be a third party. She was part of the supportive group for the children, and they had a very strong emotional relationship with her,” she explains. “The kindergarten teachers saw that differently, but I just didn’t hear that criticism.”

There are, according to Kütz, several other things that help her keep that slippery work/life balance in check. “I could not do what I’m doing, and I would not enjoy a family life, if I wasn’t sharing it equally with my husband,” she says. “For me that’s full stop.” It also helps that she had children when she had already been a partner for several years, which gave her more flexibility. “That’s what makes it easier for me; there are times in a career when that is very different.”

Kütz is keen to set an example for younger colleagues, for whom it’s inspiring to see a woman putting her foot down and committing to doing things her way. “I know that there are a lot of junior colleagues who feel encouraged when I say, ‘No, I just need to go home.’ They see that I’m pulling my weight at work and also that I’m using the flexibility I have to spend important time with my family.”

Bringing every experience to the table

Kütz is very aware of her status as a role model. Knowing that there were so many more junior women who would look at whether she’d make it or not was a driving force in her career.

“I still feel a sense of responsibility,” she says. She takes various steps to ensure that women coming up through the company feel supported. “I’m very outspoken when I feel that something is going wrong and they’re not being given the right opportunities. Then I’m looking to support them as much as I can, coaching them for their next career steps.”

More often than not, that coaching role has a big motivational dimension to it: “I tell them to go for it! Many of the women I speak to are daunted by the prospect of taking on the top roles, and find it difficult to envision themselves as partner. It’s scary because it feels so far away. They’ll often say ‘this is great, I really enjoyed the last career step I made, and this is so much more fulfilling, but I don’t want to become a partner.’”

“I tell them, ‘Listen, you just told me how great this step is, so what’s the next step?’” Nevertheless, Kütz doesn’t advocate women having a grand plan about their careers, because doing so can often be unnecessary and intimidating. Instead, she likes to encourage women to take a step back and think: “I don’t need to plan for the next 10 years. It’s enough to look at the next one or two years.”

She suggests that the tendency to focus too much on the challenges for women in business can also contribute to them feeling daunted at the start of their careers. “I don’t want to talk those challenges down,” she stresses. “I think there is a lot of unconscious bias that women are exposed to, which we need to get rid of. When something like that comes up it’s absolutely right to raise it and protest.” But it is, she says, important to recognise that, as a woman, it’s helpful not to let fear of these challenges have power over you, or hold you back. “Frankly, at times I think it’s good not to think about them too much. Just do your stuff and be yourself. Focus on what you bring to the table. That inward focus, I think, can be very depressing, and frustration is not a good starting point for a successful and fulfilling career.”

Has Kütz ever felt frustrated by the way she is treated as a woman in business? “I think initially it was more difficult because—as a younger woman—you’re often not really taken seriously,” she says. “I can think of several times when I came into a room and felt I had to justify my presence there by telling people that I’d been doing the thing we were talking about for five or six years.”

However, as time has passed, silver linings have begun to appear at the edges of what were dark clouds: “We’re at a point now where I sometimes think that being treated differently can be an advantage.”

“When I started having children, I was annoyed that clients always asked me about my children. They didn’t ask my male colleagues about their children. Then I realised this is actually great because it gives me an entry point to have a much more private conversation with them. If they’ve asked me about my children I can ask them about their children, their wife, the wine cellar they’ve got… I’ve started to actually use that.”

“But that only came with a certain level of seniority,” she qualifies. “At the beginning I found it more difficult to actually hold my ground.”

The fact that Kütz often ends up having very different conversations than her male colleagues do with clients proves to her that a team made up of both men and women will be particularly strong. “Women have different experiences from men because, for example, people assume they are more emotionally intelligent, or assume that they’re not as analytical and decision-oriented.” Whether or not this is true—and Kütz is quick to point out that it often isn’t—is almost beside the point: “What’s important is that their experience is different.”

It’s a comment that, for all the strength of her feeling about women in the workplace, reveals Kütz’s inner pragmatist, and possibly even her inner consultant: “I think bringing every experience to the table is important because it opens up new perspectives and new ways of looking at things and asking questions.” In other words, it doesn’t just right a wrong, it leads to a better solution.