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There’s no doubt that the world of business is tough, competitive and unforgiving of damaging mistakes. Accordingly, you’d think that to carve out a top career and reach the highest echelons in a large company you’d need to be ruthlessly ambitious and excel in machiavellian-style scheming and office politics.
But you’d be wrong. To succeed certainly takes a bucketful of determination, hard work and talent, but also a passion for the job, a genuine concern for employees and a positive and engaging personality, as Catherine Barton proves.

Catherine, who is just 34 years old, is one of the youngest of about 670 partners at Deloitte, the business advisory firm, which has more than 11,000 people working for it. An insurance and actuarial expert, she became a partner at 31– remaining Deloitte’s youngest partner for two years – having been promoted to Director aged just 29.

Last year, Catherine was named in the prestigious Management Today ‘Top 35 Women under 35’ list, which highlights achievements of female talent.

As a partner in Deloitte’s insurance practice, Catherine provides actuarial advice to a number of international insurers. She also leads a team of actuaries and is very involved in developing more junior members of Deloitte’s insurance team and has a particular interest in encouraging more women into the profession.

Actuaries are the professionals who work out statistics and risks for insurance purposes – you’d expect Catherine to be a slave to number crunching and spreadsheets, with a head for figures rather than the cut and thrust of business.

Catherine’s position now couldn’t be further from this! She wins valuable contracts for Deloitte, manages her team and helps determine overall strategy.

She says: “I was a very technical mathematician and heavily into maths and science, so it made sense to become an actuary, where maths was such a big part.

Now I do much less of the maths bit, although for years that was all I did. I love all the other stuff – the marketing, the operational management of the team and the people development. “I do the sign-off on the numbers, but I don’t do all the detail myself. I am very numerate and I apply that to my clients, but I don’t do the detail of the number crunching, I look at the bigger picture.”

Catherine left her school in Liverpool to study maths at Oxford University and by her own admission had a great time with the social and society aspects, although she admits she wasn’t so keen on the academic work: “I loved university but my degree wasn’t really the right one for me. I had a great time – I was on all sorts of college committees and coxed in a rowing squad. I probably didn’t spend enough time studying.”

Thanks to sponsorship from Royal Insurance through university, arranged while she was at school, Catherine had spent two summers in Liverpool working at the firm’s life insurance actuarial department. She emerged from Oxford with a maths degree but also with bucket loads of practical experience and abilities as well as a CV packed with evidence of people and ‘soft’ skills.

Her background made her choice of career straightforward: “When I came to the end of my degree I didn’t know about anything but actuarial work so I thought I’d apply for that. I thought doing consultancy would be good because of the variety of work, rather than working on the same project year in, year out.” Catherine applied to three firms and received job offers from all of them. After meeting up with teams from all three companies she chose to go with a company based in Epsom, Surrey –
at the time one of the UK’s leading actuarial consultancies.

“There used to be a lot of under- representation of women going into the actuarial profession, but it’s a lot more balanced now – about 40 to 50 per cent of our graduate intake are women now. I found it challenging during my first year but then I got a really interesting client and loved it from there,” she says. “I had a fantastic mentor and he coached me all the way through.” Catherine qualified as an actuary in 1999. She was promoted to senior manager in 2001, at the time her employer merged into Deloitte. She admits: “It was an accident of history rather than a career decision but it has worked out very well for me.” She was made a director at Deloitte in 2003 and then a partner in 2005.

The pathway to success
“I think I scraped through my interview to make Senior Manager – I wasn’t used to the interview thing. But then I thought ‘What do I need to do to get to Director? What are the skills that I need, what do I need to demonstrate?’

“In 2001 I had worked for a large client – I developed the client relationship myself and brought the work in and it generated a big chunk of fees. That was the foundation for my promotion to Director. It was more than a typical senior manager would do so it demonstrated certain skills relatively early.”
Success breeds success, as Catherine found out: “If you demonstrate your enthusiasm about something, good things tend to follow. People know that if you get an opportunity you’ll do your best with it.

“It’s also about growing the contact base of people who know who you are, so you can pick up the phone to them and talk about what you’re doing. I’ve never been a hard-sell person – I’m much more focused on networking relationships. If I meet somebody five times and they never give me anything, then fine, at least I’ve got to know them. And you never know when they might need something or know someone who might need something.”

She adds: “I tell our junior people to start building their contacts from the outset. I wasn’t encouraged to do that when I started and it was only after I qualified that I was told I could take clients out to lunch – I wish I’d been doing that three years earlier. It’s also important you don’t network just for self-motivation or for a specific goal because people can see through that.”

Business is never plain sailing, and overcoming challenging situations or difficult people is one of the key skills necessary for a senior manager dealing with both clients and staff. “I always remember the client is right,” says Catherine. “If the client isn’t happy then we’re not meeting their needs. I try to understand an issue from the other person’s side to help work out what’s causing the problem. Usually it’s not down to just not getting on – there’s often some sort of extra pressure that’s driving it.

“Good questioning skills are really important – being able to gently probe what’s actually wrong and what’s going to make things work. You sometimes need to accept that some people operate in a way that you don’t and you have to try to work around it. You need a range of different skills and responses you can apply to different people.”

Critical appraisals
When it comes to criticism, Catherine says honesty is important. “I try to be straight with people as that tends to help with conveying a difficult message: ‘This is the feedback you’ve got, let’s talk about how we can work with it.’ Not being unnecessarily accusatory is important.” In many ways Catherine sees negative feedback as being as important as positive praise. all the other stuff – the marketing, the operational management of the team and the people development. “I do the sign-off on the numbers, but I don’t do all the detail myself. I am very numerate and I apply that to my clients, but I don’t do the detail of the number crunching, I look at the bigger picture.”

Catherine left her school in Liverpool to study maths at Oxford University and by her own admission had a great time with the social and society aspects, although she admits she wasn’t so keen on the academic work: “I loved university but my degree wasn’t really the right one for me. I had a great time – I was on all sorts of college committees and coxed in a rowing squad. I probably didn’t spend enough time studying.”

Thanks to sponsorship from Royal Insurance through university, arranged while she was at school, Catherine had spent two summers in Liverpool working at the firm’s life insurance actuarial department. She emerged from Oxford with a maths degree but also with bucket loads of practical experience and abilities as well as a CV packed with evidence of people and ‘soft’ skills.

Her background made her choice of career straightforward: “When I came to the end of my degree I didn’t know about anything but actuarial work so I thought I’d apply for that. I thought doing consultancy would be good because of the variety of work, rather than working on the same project year in, year out.” Catherine applied to three firms and received job offers from all of them. After meeting up with teams from all three companies she chose to go with a company based in Epsom, Surrey –
at the time one of the UK’s leading actuarial consultancies.

“There used to be a lot of under- representation of women going into the actuarial profession, but it’s a lot more balanced now – about 40 to 50 per cent of our graduate intake are women now. I found it challenging during my first year but then I got a really interesting client and loved it from there,” she says. “I had a fantastic mentor and he coached me all the way through.” Catherine qualified as an actuary in 1999. She was promoted to senior manager in 2001, at the time her employer merged into Deloitte. She admits: “It was an accident of history rather than a career decision but it has worked out very well for me.” She was made a director at Deloitte in 2003 and then a partner in 2005.

The pathway to success
“I think I scraped through my interview to make Senior Manager – I wasn’t used to the interview thing. But then I thought ‘What do I need to do to get to Director? What are the skills that I need, what do I need to demonstrate?’

“In 2001 I had worked for a large client – I developed the client relationship myself and brought the work in and it generated a big chunk of fees. That was the foundation for my promotion to Director. It was more than a typical senior manager would do so it demonstrated certain skills relatively early.”

Success breeds success, as Catherine found out: “If you demonstrate your enthusiasm about something, good things tend to follow. People know that if you get “If you demonstrate
your enthusiasm about something, good things do tend to follow”

“If all you are told on a project is ‘that was excellent’, how do you know what to do to improve? Simply being told you’re really good doesn’t help you achieve the next step in your career.” Catherine adds: “For the last three years I’ve assessed directors for promotion and it’s really helped me to focus on what sort of skills are necessary for management and leadership success. Things like developing commitment, creating a vision and bringing a team along are all crucial.”

Catherine says that watching and learning from others at work is essential if you want to emulate the best performers. “Role models are very important. You need a range of people to draw from so you can choose which way you’d like to work”

Breaking glass ceilings
Catherine has reached the top in what many people would see as an industry populated mainly by men, especially at senior levels, so has her gender been a help or a hindrance?
She says: “Being a woman has done me no harm at all. Being young and female in a male-dominated insurance world means people remember you.

“For today’s graduates and women at Deloitte it’s an equal playing ground – no business today can afford not to be. Everyone is viewed on their skills and merits. In the senior grades there are more men than women, but this will change as the more balanced graduate intake moves upwards.

“Everyone’s very acutely aware of trying to make sure the glass ceiling doesn’t exist. The challenge is helping women to have career paths that develop as their life changes. There’s no reason anyone can’t be equally successful with the same amount of effort and opportunities.” Catherine adds: “The thing I found more of a challenge was age rather than being female. When you’re 27 and your senior clients are in their 40s and 50s it’s very hard. They did take me seriously but I had to work that bit harder to prove myself.

“As you get more experience you become more confident about what you know and don’t know. Here, everything is assessed in a structured way on skills and competence so I don’t think there’s a glass ceiling in terms of age. It is all to do with ‘are you doing the job that you need to be doing to justify your grade?’ I’ve never been held back by age or being female because my progress has been based on my skill set. I’ve always been respected for what I’m doing.”

Catherine is now heavily involved in talent management so she’s ideally placed to know what targets those embarking out on their careers should aim for.

“As a new graduate, you should put effort in and be enthusiastic,” she says. “Go the extra mile but also define what your barriers will be – it’s quite a skill to create a balance you’re happy with. Everyone’s capacity in terms of how much they want to work is different. You need to work out where your boundaries sit but also acknowledge that this will have an impact on what you can achieve.

“It comes down to a lifestyle choice. I do work hard and do an awful lot, but I have always had some boundaries – I try to keep the weekends as my own.” She adds: “I could cut down my hours but the parts of the job that would end up going would be those that I enjoy the most – the business development and keeping in touch with contacts.”

Catherine has achieved more in 13 years than most people will do in their entire careers, but she insists she still has a long way to go. “I love the challenges and there’s a lot of variety. The job is never the same – you’re always juggling balls. I get real highs and lows from pitching. I love the thrill of the chase, and the euphoria of winning a large pitch is fantastic. Similarly it’s pretty tough when you lose out.”

Catherine’s formula for success

• Go beyond your job description – reach higher. Try to do work that gets you noticed at a higher level.
• Network – get to know as many people in your industry as you can, and even those outside of it. You never know when someone will need you or help you.
• Watch others who do their job well and learn from them. Similarly, take note of behaviour or actions that are ineffective.
• Get mentoring from someone with a lot of experience and seniority.
• Learn from mistakes – they are just as valuable as the successes.
• Diffuse disagreements by putting yourself in the other person’s shoes
• to understand their problem.
• Honesty and tact are crucial – be straightforward in all dealings.
• Be enthusiastic and have a ‘can-do’ attitude.

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