Episode 56: Family First: Be Present And Available To Those Around You With Tashia Batstone
Society is rapidly changing because of various factors, and therefore career-driven people only have so much time in their hands to chase after opportunities. Nevertheless, the concept of "family first" must never be set aside since it is the place where everything about you began. Amy Vetter explores this topic with Tashia Batstone, SVP for External Relations and Business Development of Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada. She talks about how her father, also an accountant, inspired her not to be afraid to dream big, all while being a hands-on mom and wife. Tashia emphasizes how keeping a learner's mindset can help a lot in achieving your goals without sacrificing your relationships.
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Family First: Be Present And Available To Those Around You With Tashia Batstone
Tashia Batstone is the Senior Vice President for External Relations and Business Development at Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada. She is responsible for providing strategic direction and operational oversight to the leadership teams of precertification, education, research, guidance and support, member development support, international and corporate citizenship. Her key role is in expanding CPA Canada’s stakeholder relationships in Canada and internationally, developing business opportunities within existing and new channels, and promoting market brand activities to enhance the vision of the CPA as a pre-eminent, globally respected business and accounting designation.
She has been appointed as a Technical Advisor on the International Federation of Accountants board and serves as a member of IFAC's Technical Advisory Committee. She oversees CPA Canada’s Foresight: Reimagining the Profession. A comprehensive multi-stakeholder initiative design to shape the future of accounting profession as it adapts to these global trends including technology, economic, environmental, geopolitical, and societal shifts. In addition to her professional activities, she is the Vice-Chair of the board of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, and a member of the audit committee of the Anglican Foundation of Canada. My interview with Tashia centered around her career journey and the advice that her father gave her along the way that helps to shape it. She has been able to put family first as she is taking on roles and responsibilities, and still achieve her dreams at the same time.
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I'm with Tashia Batstone. Tashia, do you want to give a little background on who you are and where you're from?
I’m from CPA Canada. It stands for Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada. I'm the Executive Vice President of External Relations and Business Development with CPA Canada. CPA Canada is one of the largest professional bodies in Canada. We’re represented by 220,000 accountants in Canada, working as one of the largest accounting bodies in the world. We are focus on influencing and enhancing the relevance and value of the Canadian CPA profession. My role here as an External Relations and Business Development means I'm responsible for precertification programs, member development supports, and a lot of our research and knowledge development. During the pandemic, I’m in Newfoundland. Although I have a place in Toronto, I'm coming to you from St. John's, Newfoundland.
I am bad with geography. You have to tell me where exactly that is.
It's an island on the Northeast Coast of Canada. It's about a four-hour flight from Toronto.
Is there any significance of being there?
We were talking about my story a little bit. I grew up here and I've lived here most of my life. My husband and my children decided that they weren't ready to move to Toronto. I've been commuting back and forth between Newfoundland and Toronto for many years.
Maybe you can start from your beginnings. We always like to get into the story behind how you took the path to where you are now. You said you grew up in Newfoundland. What did your parents do? How big was your family?
I came from a small family. I have my mom and my dad. My father was an accountant. I start there. I have one brother. My mom was working in healthcare as well, but she spent a lot of time taking care of the family, which shapes your values. She was very engaged. She was a great mom, engaged with the family and with the kids. My dad spent a lot of time working. It was the very traditional style of family life, but it does shape your perspective. I went to university here and decided to pursue my accounting designation, which I did.
When you look at your career path and what grounds, you spend a lot of time as you get older, thinking back as to what drove you. For me, I've always had a strong sense of curiosity and I take great pleasure from teaching and sharing my learnings with other people. When I finished my accounting designation, I was working in a public accounting firm, and it wasn't making me feel fulfilled. I had an opportunity to go back to the university that I had gone to and done my degree to teach at the university, and to become an academic. That's what I did. I chose to leave the for-profit world and go back into academia. I spent the next fifteen years of my career teaching, researching, and enjoyed it.
It was also very good because it had a lot of flexibility. I had a young family myself by that time. It allowed me to work my schedule around my children, making sure that I was there and home for them when they needed me. Overall, it was a good opportunity, but then several years ago, I sat back and you take these pivot points in your life where you sit back and you say, “Is this where I want to be in the next stage of my career, the next stage of my life?” I decided that I wanted to try something different.
I moved into the Professional Association and I took a job as a CEO of a regulatory body here in Newfoundland, and then decided to ultimately move up to the national office to take on that position when the opportunity came up. It was funny because when I moved to the national body, I took on the role of the Vice President of Education. I went back to my roots, to some extent, building up this love of teaching and sharing knowledge. I stayed in that role for five years. It was around the time that we had unified the accounting profession. We had gone through a big merger in Canada.
Maybe you can explain a little bit about that.
Family First: Parents must always be available, and that doesn't only mean being in the same room with your kids.
In Canada, the way that the accounting profession was organized was with three different accounting organizations. Ultimately, we felt that given the size of Canada, it didn't make sense to have the profession fractured across three different bodies. In 2011 and 2012, we went through a unification process, which was massive in its intensity. I played a role in that, both from the perspective. I was still working in Newfoundland at that time of the start of the merger discussion. I did a lot of the coordination of the merger activities here in Newfoundland. At the same time, I was transitioning to my role within education and a big part of the new merged profession was the development of a new education model, to educate professional accountants in Canada. I had the opportunity to work with some bright and amazingly talented people to head up the development of that new program.
We spent 3 to 4 years building that program. You get these pivot points in your life. I enjoyed my time building the new program, designing what education was going to look like, but it got up and running and my job there was done. I approached my CEO at that time and I said, “I'm looking for something more and something different. I want to expand my portfolio.” It's important as you go along to signal that you're ready to take on more responsibility. Whenever I mentor somebody, I always tell them that that's a good thing to do, to reach out and signal to the people that you're working with that you're willing and able to do more. We talked a lot and eventually, I moved into the Senior Vice President role that I'm in now. It’s a far larger span of responsibility. It's been interesting and exciting job. I get to travel quite a bit. I worked with a lot of global accounting bodies and interesting people around the world. I built some interesting partnerships and relationships with the profession globally. I've thoroughly enjoyed the work that I've done. It's dynamic and no two days are the same. It certainly keeps you engaged.
There are two different types of people. Some people are good at maintenance. Some people are good to come in for the project, fix it, and move on. Where I suck is if I get in maintenance mode. I get almost claustrophobic. I'm more a turn around. It sounds like you like the challenges.
Transformational change is what I love to do. A few years ago, I started a program at CPA Canada, it's called Foresight. It's thinking about what the next iteration of this profession needs to look like with respect to, what is the role that professional accountants are going to play in the future? How do we incorporate things like ESG, data and digitization? What does that mean for professional accountants in Canada and around the world? It's been a fascinating project to work on that again with some incredibly bright and dedicated people thinking about what is the future and what are the possibilities. It's the opportunity to build and transform that gives me energy.
It's important to know who you are. We always need the maintenance people for the programs that are put into place, but not trying to push yourself in one bucket or the other when it doesn't fit. You have to hire the person that's opposite of you.
I've got an amazing operational team that does all of the day-to-day magic on making everything work and happen. I do find that the most satisfaction is thinking to the future and planning in that strategic visioning element of my role.
I want to go back to your dad. Your dad was a chartered accountant in a public accounting firm. Is that what he does?
He wasn't a professional account. He was a CFO of a hospital board. He worked in the public sector on a hospital board.
What were your interactions with what he did? Did you ever go to work with him? Did you ever see what he did?
He was very proud of what he did and he had a strong work ethic. At the same time, he was very focused on his family. Both of my parents had family first. You never questioned where their priorities were. He was somebody that I admired greatly. I learned a lot from him. He passed away when he was about 62. It's funny because you still miss them every day. There are many times when I do something or I'm getting to meet a cool person. You're getting to do some interesting work. Sometimes I see him sitting there on my shoulder saying, “I'm proud of you.” Other times, I feel him sitting on my shoulder and say, “You're working too hard. You're doing too much. You're not taking care of yourself.” It’s nice to have it there. He was an interesting man and likes to share what he did. I never went in to be a professional account. He didn't inspire me to be an accountant. I was planning on being a lawyer. I went to university with full intentions of going into law. I took my first Accounting course and fell in love with it. I don't even do a whole lot of actual accounting work now.
My husband has a small business. I get down and even taking care of his book sometimes if the accountant is not available. It's fun getting back into the basics. If you have a passion, you have to find your spot. I always say to my children, “Do what you love because if you do what you love, you will be successful because you'll put passion into it and people will see that passion every day.” That's the message that I was always given growing up. I hope that my children have gotten that message through there as they go into their careers.
My grandfather died when I was three, but the story of my grandfather lived around me my entire life. He was a CPA in 1935 in the United States. It's funny when you say that about on your shoulder. Sometimes I do some things and I'm like, “It's too bad I never knew him.” He was in the very beginnings of public accounting before there was ever the FASB and all the stuff. He went through all that transformation and AICPA was just developing. I always think that too. I'm like, “It would be cool to sit down and talk if you could.”
I have to think about that with my own kids. I wish they had known their grandfather because he would have made a big difference in their lives.
People live on in the deeds that they do and how they pass on. He's living on with you which is cool because it brings more meaning to the work you're doing. You have a picture of what it was like to be in his family when he was doing it versus when you did it. The other thing that I'm hearing a lot as a string of a belief system is about family first. Your parents are both having that. This is what's always interesting because I had a global job for a long time. I think different countries view working differently. I would like to know from a national perspective in Canada how that's looked at. Was it something different that your family was doing? How did they adhere to it? When you believe families first, what did that mean to you? Was it something that was the norm or different?
In my experience, and maybe you tend to trend towards like-minds, but most people that I know, it's family first. Without a doubt, it's a very big part of our culture in Canada. I've lived in the United States for a while and I wouldn't say it's remarkably different than in the United States. I lived in Pennsylvania for about six years. Every family comes at that from a different angle. I started commuting in 2012. My kids were in their early teens, formative years. I missed out on a lot of stuff because I was working away. Sometimes it's different when the woman is working away rather than the father as well. It's a little bit of a different dynamic. It’s looked at a little differently, quite honestly.
Family First: Women have the opportunity to do more in the workplace.
Do you think the kids look at it differently?
My kids always knew I was there. They are digitally savvy. It was a matter of a text or a phone call. If I needed to come home, I was on a plane. My son got quite ill at one point in time. Within two hours I was on a plane and back. That's what you need to do as a parent. You need to be present and be available. You don't always have to be in the same room. You'd be amazed at what you can do through technology. The amount of time that I spent FaceTiming with my kids going through an Algebra assignment or an English assignment or reading versions of assignments that they had written, scanned, and sent to me or anything like that. You can do all those things if you put the effort into it.
I can remember being in Kuala Lumpur when my son was studying for a Chemistry exam and being up in the middle of the night in Kuala Lumpur going through Chemistry problems. Not that I could help a whole lot in Chemistry, but just being able to help them get organized if nothing else. It's a matter of how you prioritize. It's not always easy, but you can make it work with the right supports. I have an incredible husband and spouse who's been my partner for many years. I got that kind of support behind me as well. My husband is a physician and spent a lot of time in our early marriage being gone because he was doing his residency. He was on call. I carried the load of the family responsibilities at that point in time.
I remember him saying to me in 2012 when I was contemplating taking the job, “You took the responsibility of the family for many years. Let me take on that now. You take this is a big career opportunity for you and I want to support you.” He has known it over the years. Having my family around and his parents have been wonderful over the years in terms of supporting us. It takes a village. I've been lucky in my life to have those supports around me. That’s what has helped me be able to focus on my career and being able to do my job well.
It's important to have those examples, especially for women to manage jobs like this. It’s not that it's any different if a man does, but it might be viewed differently or women have a harder time making that decision. To understand that you need a community of support, that you can't do it alone, you need to speak up and ask where you need help to do it, and make sure you have that support network.
That's something that we have an opportunity to do more as women, particularly in the workplace. I always say to people, “You need to lean in and make it known that you're ready for that next step.” I'm not sure women always do that as well as men do. You need to be deliberate about how you prepare and how you think things through as well when you're planning for that next step. When I was in my early 30s, my kids were young. I was teaching part-time and staying home with the kids. I remember taking very deliberate steps to stay engaged, making sure that I was keeping current on my technical knowledge that blends to the profession. I’m staying up on current events, staying connected to the right networks, and doing all of those things.
When the time came for me to decide to go back full-time into the workforce, I hadn't stepped away. I have taken a pause, but I kept all those connections and kept up-to-date and done those things. It was deliberate on my part. I knew at some point in time, you were going to return to full-time work. Those are things that we don't necessarily take the time for. If I did look back and say to my younger self, “What are some of the things you did right?” That was one of the things. There are things I didn't do right, but that's one of the things that I did that made a lot of sense.
It's such an important point to bring up because of two things. One is speaking up that you want something, but doing it in a way that's not demanding. Sometimes that comes off as like, “I deserve this,” versus, “What do I need to do to get to the next level and how can I get the help?” The second thing that I see a lot is opportunities do come and women will say no. They think, “I'm not ready for that. I've not done that kind of job before.” It's that confidence in self that everybody that goes into a new job has never done that job before. How you're going to learn and use that network around you to help you be successful. It's the same thing as you said. You took a pause and still used your network. That community of support, whether it's your work community, your family community or friend community are important in getting where you need to be.
I said earlier on in this discussion that I have a big belief in learning. For my whole life, I've been in a continuous learning mode. Some of that has been informal, but some of it has been much more formal. I've been choosing those learning paths to prepare me for where I see the next stage of my journey going, and thinking that ahead. It's not about demanding. It's about opening yourself up to the possibilities. It's about taking chances. I went from an academic environment where I had zero management experience. I got my accounting designation, moved into an academic environment, very little management experience, to being the CEO of a small organization where I had about four staff, to moving into a bigger organization where I had about 60 staff, to moving into the role that I'm in now, where I have about 200 staff within my area.
Going from that in the space of ten years, there was a massive learning curve. There's so much that I didn't know about HR management, organizational design, performance management, all of these things that you've learned about a little bit, trying to pick it up along the way, but making sure that you're asking the questions. There are no stupid questions. You truly have to ask, be interested, and not afraid to show that you're learning. People will respect that, and they'll try to help you along the way. If you demonstrate a willingness to work with them to learn to expand, that demonstrates your willingness to work hard.
It's the extra. The stuff that you learn on your own time that does not necessarily have to be employer-led. It's to make you better in the role that you're doing and looking into the future, making sure you're not just planning for now, but what you need in the future.
Nobody's perfect. You make mistakes along the way and everybody does. There are times when I look back and I go, “That was a learning moment. I didn't know that well.” Rather than beating yourself up, your natural inclination was, “What have I learned from this? How am I going to do it differently when I'm faced with that same situation in the future?” It's having the maturity to recognize. You can't change it, but you can do your best to fix it. You can't necessarily go back, so how do you move forward?
It’s important as you're moving through your career or into leadership positions to be transparent, that people believe in you more, or you're more authentic as a leader when you do admit those times because everybody goes through them.
Everybody goes through times of doubt, “Am I good enough? I wish I had never said that. I wish I had never done that. I should have done this differently.” If you don't go through those points in your career, then you're not challenging yourself.
There are many good things in here. I like to end with some rapid-fire questions. You pick a category, either family and friends, money, spiritual or health.
Family First: There are no stupid questions. You just have to ask about the things you are interested in and not be afraid to show that you're learning.
We've talked a lot about family and friends. Why don't we talk about health?
Things or actions I don't have that I want, as far as my health?
Since COVID happened, there doesn't seem to be enough time in the day anymore. I'm not getting to the gym enough. I'm not working out enough. I was always running and I'm not doing that enough. That's what I need to do more of. I’ve got to find the time to make sure I get it into the day.
Things or actions I do have that I want?
I am very healthy, which is good. I need to take care of myself. I eat well and get lots of sleep. It’s having that self-awareness. I'd like to pamper myself every often. A trip to the spa is always something I treat myself with on a fairly regular basis. Those are important to take the time for yourself.
Do not feel guilty while you're doing it. Know that you earned it. You're better for the people around you. Things or actions that I don't have that I don't want?
I don't drink a lot. I like a glass of wine every now and then. I'm not a smoker. I don't have those bad habits. I also try to not sweat the small stuff. For your own mental health, it’s important. Stuff happens and you can't sometimes control what other people are going to do, and how other people are going to react either. It’s trying to minimize this feeling of self-doubt or concern over something that's happened in the past that you probably can't change.
Things or actions that I do have that I don't want?
It's the amount and the intensity of work. I suspect that's largely related to how we find ourselves in. I was in an interesting conversation with one of my staff. We were talking a little bit about the roles we find ourselves in. She said, “I'm living in one house. In that one house, I'm a mother and a spouse. I have my parents living with me, so I'm a daughter. I'm an employee and there's no separation between any of those anymore.” I thought that was a very insightful obligation. That's something that we're all experiencing now as we work from home. We don't have that separation anymore.
Is there anything that we didn't talk about here, that you want to make sure you leave people with from this interview?
Be true to yourself. It sounds trite but it's true. Focus on the things that are important to you and live life taking a few chances. You only go this way once, so make it count. I said my dad had died young. I looked at his life and he did what he loved. He worked, he loved to fish, spend time with his family. While work was important, he did everything. He traveled. He lived life to the fullest. While it may have been short, it was certainly rich. That's the best observation that I've ever seen.
Thank you for sharing your story. There some great things that I'm sure people are going to learn from, walking away. Thank you.
Family First: Without dealing with regrets, you are not challenging yourself to be better.
It’s nice talking to you. Thank you for the opportunity.
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For our Mindful Moments with this discussion with Tashia. I'd like to start in the beginning when she talked about her father and how family was such an important example to her throughout her career, and the importance that both of her parents put on it, no matter what they were doing. Sometimes that gets lost in our discussions when we talk about career, about how we balance everything that we have, and it's not an easy discussion. A lot of times when we talk about balance of family and career, it can sound like we can be flippant about it. We can act like it's such an easy thing to do when it is not. The way that I saw Tashia incorporating this into the conversation was her using that mantra of family first.
For all of us, if that is what is important to us, to make sure that we are incorporating the right amount of time for our family, for our children, with whatever dreams we have in our own careers, that we do have some guiding principle that we are aligning to. When we peel off from that, we are aware enough to shift our focus. Throughout this discussion, it was important to know how her career and how she moved through the profession. She was very strategic with what role she took on and the schedule that she had. Starting out in accounting but moving into being a professor and working as a professor for many years as her kids were younger, but getting involved with the profession still. She’s still having an eye on, “What are the things that I want to learn? Who do I want to network with?” beyond the current role or career that she was in.
It's important as well that as you're moving through your career, that you're not just going to work and doing that each day. You're also looking on how to expand yourself in that. You've got some guiding light and vision into maybe what you want to do in the future or learning about other areas to get involved with. That was a key thing that helped her later when she started moving out of becoming a professor because she was getting involved with associations throughout her career as a professor. One of the other key moments that she said that was important is about advocating for yourself and letting people know when you're ready for additional responsibilities. A lot of times, I can coach people and talk to them. They're bored, feel trapped and so forth, but they haven't been actively letting people know that they're ready for more responsibility.
There's a difference between complaining about your current situation or doing something about it. When you are still putting a positive face forward. Even if you are bored or you don't love every single thing that you're doing in your day, you understand where you want to be, why you're in that role, and how that role can help you achieve into the future. That was another key thing of understanding how to signal to people around you that you're ready for more responsibility, that you want to be trained or get experiences that might be outside of the things you do, or you're asking. You're being proactive to ask for those responsibilities as well.
Another key point that Tashia made in order to create success was if you're looking for additional responsibility to achieve in your career, you need to have passion around the things that you do. If you don't love what you do, it shows to the people around you. Work is work instead of not feeling like work. It’s how you start molding your career to shift toward the things that you're passionate about, or the outside activities that you do outside of the day-to-day role that can give you that fulfillment that you need.
We also had a big discussion as a woman, as a mother, on how she was able to balance these very high-level roles in the Canadian Association as her kids were in their early teens. She gave a number of good areas of advice. One being that if you are married, not everybody has a spouse that they can rely on. If you are, it's important to have the discussions that you need to have with your spouse so you can get the support that you need. Communication is key to both people being successful, and that you are not mad at the other or someone isn't mad at you for not understanding what you're trying to achieve. That was a key thing. If it's not a spouse or a partner, who can you look in your village of people around you that can help with support so that you can achieve the things that you need to do?
The other thing was being highly aware or being present and available when you are with your children. For many of us that have demanding jobs, it's hard to turn it off because there are other things going on, or people need you. Our kids need our full present attention. She made sure that if she needed to come home, she did. Communication comes into this as well, making sure your communication lines to your supervisors is important as well. Also, if she was traveling, which she travels a lot in her role, using FaceTime with your kids to put the effort into still being present, being there to do their homework, whatever kinds of things that you would normally do when you're at home, you're still making time for that when you're on the road. It's about being deliberate. It's about staying engaged and connected, whether that's with your family or with other networking opportunities for yourself. You're always staying connected to the ecosystem around you.
One of the last points that she made was about learning and how we can never stop learning. There's never a time to be comfortable because things will always change as we've seen. Our life now in this world of technology is a matter of this agility that we need to have in our life. To do that, we need to make sure that we are doing continuous learning. We're choosing learning paths for our future, where you want to go, and making sure you're asking questions of people. There's never a stupid question. The worst thing is someone could say they don't know an answer to a question, and then you go seek further.
It's important to be open in asking those questions, and to not feel like you have to show someone that you know something that you don't. You're going to go further when you learn the right way. Also, demonstrating that willingness to work hard and realize that no one is perfect. The only way that we move forward is when we're learning in the process. When we're transparent, we can be true to ourselves, focus on the things that are important to ourselves by doing what we love, by being present for the people around us, and taking chances with the networks that we've created and our future goals for our career.
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About Tashia Batstone
Tashia is responsible for providing strategic direction and operational oversight to the leadership teams of Precertification Education, Professional Learning and Development, Research Guidance and Support, International, and Corporate Citizenship to ensure high performance in the achievement of business objectives and initiatives.
Tashia’s key responsibility is to expand CPA Canada’s stakeholder relationships in Canada and internationally, develop business opportunities within existing and new channels, and promote market brand activities to enhance the vision of the CPA designation as a pre-eminent, globally respected business and accounting designation.
Tashia has also been appointed as technical advisor on the International Federation of Accountants board and serves as a member of IFAC's Technical Advisory Committee.
In her previous role as vice-president, Education Services, Tashia played a leading role in the development of the new CPA certification program that builds on the best of the legacy education programs (Chartered Accountant, Certified Management Accountant and Certified General Accountant).
Prior to joining CPA Canada, Tashia served for five years as CEO of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Newfoundland and Labrador (ICANL), and was chair of the Professional Learning Committee for the legacy CA profession.
In addition to her professional activities, Tashia serves as treasurer and trustee on the board of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) and on the audit committee of the Anglican Foundation of Canada.
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