After 32 years with Air Canada working in the US, Lisa Pierce has left her home in New York and moved to Toronto as Managing Director, Canada and USA Sales.
"After all my years with Air Canada, I feel like an honorary Canadian, and now I've finally moved here. In the beginning, I didn't choose to work for Air Canada but there is no way I'd ever work for another airline. It's part of my DNA, my blood," says Pierce.
Pierce has always wanted to work in the aviation industry since she was a little girl.
"It was always my passion. When I was growing up, I'm half Irish and half Puerto Rican, it was a big deal culturally to go to the airport and greet people coming in or see them off. I remember going to JFK when I was young and always wanting to work for an airline."
TravelPulse Canada met with Pierce in her new downtown office the day after one of Canada's iconic sports broadcasters was fired, ironically to discuss diversity throughout her career as a woman.
"I do notice a difference coming to Canada, not that there's less diversity in the US, but I feel like in Canada it's much more open, much more celebrated. I can't explain it, it's a feeling. Living and being here in Canada I definitely notice a feeling of inclusion." She jokes that at a recent Leafs game, she was greeted with "sorry after sorry" as spectators had to move past her seat - something that she says wouldn't happen at Yankee Stadium or Madison Square Garden. It's a sentiment the company's (very funny) marketing campaign featuring Sandra Oh was based on.
Pierce started her career working literally, from the ground up. Her first position with Air Canada was as a call center representative in NY, fresh out of college where she had received an arts degree. Living on her own she kept also working as a waitress to help pay the bills.
"I remember when I first started, I still remember to this day, the HR manager telling me that because I was working for a foreign airline in NY that I wouldn't go very far. And I didn't really care because I wanted to work for the airline and that's what I did."
Pierce then worked as an Airport Agent before moving on to be Customer Service Manager at Newark Airport, a position she applied for three times. She was so eager to work at the airport, she took the part time position and says she took a leap of faith and told herself she'd "figure it out".
Two years later, Pierce was promoted to Station Manager at LaGuardia airport, which was a big deal because the airport is a large operation for Air Canada. She was eventually responsible for the Northeast region and then all airports in the US before taking on the role of responsibility for all airports in Canada, (except Toronto's Pearson International). It was around that time the airline began preparations for its sponsorship of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver.
"I was tasked with heading up the whole project to get us operationally ready, obviously we were spending a lot of money as a sponsor and branding and we needed to make sure we put our best foot forward operationally.
It was probably one of the best learning experiences I've had as I had to work with many other departments I might not have dealt with normally, like the Vancouver Airport Authority and the Olympic governing authorities. It was a great opportunity to see the real benefit of teamwork. If one thing doesn't go right, it creates a back log of everything else."
In our Women in Travel series, TravelPulse Canada has often discussed the changes women have seen over their careers in how they are perceived in the industry. Pierce mentions a story from her days at LaGuardia that has always stuck with her and quite frankly, rather shocked us.
"It's actually pretty scary how far we've come and how far we've yet to go. When I was at LaGuardia to be station manager, there were only two men and it was the boys club. There was a club called the North Beach Club made up of my peers at other airlines and service companies that operated at LGA and whose mission was to give back to the community and raise money, to give back to employees at the airport who needed it. It was a very noble cause..But they also did other things that you wouldn't even consider doing today.
They asked me to become the first female member of the club which was a bit scary for me, and I don't necessarily know I wanted to do it, but I felt I had to. So I did and there were men who were actually going to leave the club because I was joining. They didn't allow women. Still to this day I don't know who it was in that club that didn't want me to join but there were other men who felt strong enough that said if they weren't going to allow women in the club, they were going to leave it."
The year of this literal boys' club mentality? 1999.
Pierce praises Air Canada's diversity policies, saying the important thing about diversity is the word itself.
"It's about having a group of people that work together, who think different ways and who come from different backgrounds because collectively, you can solve problems more effectively. My team at one time was mostly women and I actually had a conscious thought that we needed to have more men on the sales team to have their perspective too."
Pierce counts Lucie Guillemette among her role models and has often also been inspired by women who have worked for her. She says she's not someone who looks at things from the perspective of a society who might be preventing her from achieving something - she says she is in control of her own success.
Pierce has worked on many projects over the course of her career that were scary for her because she started them with no background and had to learn from scratch. She relied on the teams she worked with who are very knowledgeable, something she does in her position now while trying to ensure she stays connected to the ground.
It's one of the reason her offices have always been in the airports she's worked in.
"Advancement is a good thing and a bad thing sometimes because the more responsibility you have, the less you can be involved in the day to day operations. You have to trust your team. It's an important balance to let them do what they know best while staying connected and grounded to what's happening in the field."
Pierce says one secret to her success is that she's a huge believer in being yourself and being authentic, and that we're all human and we all have different talents. She feels women in general doubt themselves more than men, and are more likely to hold themselves back.
What's her biggest piece of advice to women in the industry today?.
"Have confidence, if you think you can't do it, you need to change your mindset, because you can. You need to be able to take a chance. Don't hold back."
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