BIV C-Suite Awards: Leadership at Central 1 informed by years of C-suite experience
Central 1 president and CEO Sheila Vokey said she puts in much longer days today than she did through much of the early part of her career.
Decades ago, her focus was on work-life balance because she had two young children and wanted to ensure a strong family life.
“It was always a challenge, when my kids were younger, to have that comfort with a work-life balance,” she said.
“When my kids were young, I really leaned in on having a strong family network, and I couldn’t have gotten through, or been as successful in my career, without that support.”
She chose jobs that enabled her to balance work with family time and has been an advocate for remote work and work-life balance during her tenure atop Central 1, which provides services such as digital banking, payment processing and treasury services to credit unions primarily in B.C. and Ontario.
She joined Central 1 in 2018 as its chief financial officer and was named its interim president and CEO in February 2021, when previous top executive, Mark Blutcher, stepped down.
At that time, the COVID-19 pandemic was continuing to disrupt workplaces, and Vokey was able to ensure that her organization operated efficiently while the vast majority of Central 1’s more than 750 employees were largely working remotely.
“We really completely opened up our working-from-home policy,” she said. “We have very, very hybrid-work practices, and it is really valued by our employees.”
After an extensive search, the company’s board of directors decided to appoint Vokey as Central 1’s president and CEO In January 2022.
“Being interim CEO was an interesting and tough time,” she said. “The beauty of it was that it gave me an opportunity to ask a lot of questions to our members and really seek to understand what we were doing well and not doing so well.”
Originally from Montreal, Vokey moved to the U.K. for six years when she was four years old. On her return to Canada, the family settled in Ottawa, which became home for most of her life.
She completed a bachelor of commerce at McGill University but returned to Ottawa afterward to article for KPMG, starting in 1985. She stayed nearly six years as an audit manager.
“I left KPMG predominantly because I wanted to be able to have a family. Back in that era, KPMG hadn’t yet advanced to how the accounting firms are today and were much less supportive of women in their childbearing years,” she said.
“I looked up and I saw a bunch of managers, senior managers, really struggling to stay in an accounting firm and have a family.”
She jumped to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. as a comptroller, where she said corporate life was much better. When the company wanted to shift her role to London, Ontario, she instead found a job at the Canadian Tourism Commission, which allowed her to stay in Ottawa and work as a CFO for the first time.
Her nearly 15-year stint at the Bank of Canada started in September 2001, as a CFO.
“My boss offered me a lateral move,” she said of her decision to be the bank’s chief risk officer starting in June 2014.
That role gave her more breadth of experience.
She was seconded as CFO to Payments Canada, an organization that operates a payment clearing and settlement system across the country, and she wound up staying more than two years.
When a headhunter called Vokey and suggested she take a job in Vancouver as CFO at Central 1, she decided that she was ready to make a big move, leave her hometown and swim in some unfamiliar waters.
Her daughter had finished university and was living in Vancouver, she said, so the geographic move made sense.
“My partner at the time was living abroad so it didn’t really matter where I lived in the country,” she said.
“I saw coming here, to be honest, to be my last job before retirement, and I wanted to take the opportunity to work in an organization where I could use the skills I’d learned, but also explore the rest of our country.”
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