From sales rep to corporate trailblazer

Janice Lee has been working in corporate Jamaica for over 30 years. Born and raised a stone’s throw away from her current place of employment on Spanish Town Road, Lee’s ambitions were never to become a corporate giant.

Led by her Christian faith, she told The Sunday Gleaner, “I believe that one of my purposes in life is to pour into other women because I believe that sometimes as women we don’t encourage each other a lot and I just like to do that.”

Looking back at her early life, Lee said entering the workforce against the tumultuous backdrop of political violence and disenfranchisement forced her to find joy in the small things.

“When I entered the corporate world, I was very ‘happy’, let me say that in quotation, to just be working. I never saw myself at that time as a manager or in charge of a department, however, as time went on like maybe after about 10 years, I saw women moving up the chain in corporate and I started seeing myself.”

Reminiscing, she said, “When I entered the workforce, what we see now in terms of middle management and all of that, that wasn’t the case. You’d have a few of them. Like the HR (human resources) manager would be a female but I never saw like a financial controller or a managing director as a female. There were certain positions that you knew as a female you would be in. When I look around, women worked as accounting this or whatever but we were never, certainly not in my experience, we were not in charge of a department.”

Starting her journey as a sale’s representative at the Jamaica Broiler’s Group, Lee’s penchant for people had her quickly moving up the ranks until soon she was a supervisor.

Though the political violence had reached its peak in the early 1980s, opportunities for women were also on the rise.

“It was an exciting time for me. Actually when I left high school, I didn’t go to university, I went straight into the work world. And when I saw the possibilities and the potential that women had, it actually led me into going back to university and when I left Jamaica Broilers I had an MBA. It opened my eyes to possibilities.”

Degrees firmly in hand, Lee stunned her contemporaries when she became the first female distribution manager at the Jamaica Broiler’s Group.

“The distribution manager is the person who had to deal with all the drivers, all the contractors who are all men, all the sidemen and all of that so it was felt that that job was a man’s job. But when I was promoted, I remember the managing director at the time called me and say ‘Bwoy Jan, you’ve silenced all the critics because the men enjoy working with you and you’re doing a great job’. That was such a validation for me,” she said chuckling.

Lee was climbing the corporate ladder, but simultaneously she was watering the other branches of her life, donning the hats of mother, wife and leader in her church. Her faith bleeding into other parts of her life, Lee learnt quickly not to treat people like monoliths.

“One of the things I’ve come to realise is that my staff don’t leave their problems at the gate. Especially for women, when their children are not well you are not going to get maximum performance from them and that is a fact. It is almost impossible.”

She went on, “As leaders in the workplace we have to understand that yes, we want people to come in and produce and all of that but you also have to think of them as the whole individual. My quality manager is not just a quality manager and that’s her life. No she has another life.”

Keeping that philosophy close to her chest, Lee is now the general manager at Caribbean Flavours and Fragrances and through her YouTube channel she not only shares stories from her life, but gives spiritual guidance and encouragement.

“I like to tell people that I am a practising believer. I’m not just a believer in church only. So therefore I view Jesus Chris as my role model. I take my faith very seriously. God is love and he encourages us to love people, if you don’t love people its almost difficult for me to believe that you are a believer and because of my faith in God, because of how I believe God looks at all of of us through the eyes of love, I have no choice but to love people. And when you love people, you see beyond what is right in front of you.”

Marvelling at not just her journey, but how far women have come, Lee shared that excellence is not a gendered-experience.

“For any young person [who] is looking on and saying life rough in Jamaica, no matter which area of the society you come from, if you have your goal and your ambition and you work towards it, you can achieve.”

shanel.lemmie@gleanerjm.com