Exec on the benefits of a diverse leadership

A truly diverse leadership and workforce grants unique advantages to any business that involves a sizeable amount of face-to-face client interaction, according to Rejean Roberge, vice president at CWB Optimum Bank.

“I don’t necessarily think that it’s about how many women and how many men you have sitting around your table to solve those problems,” Roberge said. “But it’s ensuring that you have that diversity in thought and experience at that leadership level so that you can find the best solution for your customers and for your business.”

This approach has some strong scientific foundations, Roberge argued.

“It’s really important to have that distribution of men and women because there’s a ton of physiological and neurological evidence why a man’s brain and a woman’s brain actually respond to the same stimulus in different ways,” she said. “So by making sure you have that distribution of the genders, you naturally will have different perspectives and different ways of processing and looking at a problem to bring that best solution to our customers.”

Read more: Women’s perspectives are much-needed in the mortgage industry, top exec says

However, Roberge added that while the mortgage sector has seen major strides in this regard over the past few years – particularly since the pandemic’s remote-working trend proved to be a significant equalizer – a lot can still be done to cement women’s place as industry leaders and trailblazers.

Events where crucial connections and decisions are established could be planned so that they are “inclusive for different groups, such as women who often hold the responsibilities of their household can be present,” Roberge said. “We have to be careful as an industry not to fall back on some of our previous tendencies and lose some of what we’ve learned over the past two and a half years.”

For more insights on the advantages that greater diversity confers on the mortgage industry, click here.