On International Women’s Day, we celebrate all of the female leaders that inspire us. We were able to sit down with a few female leaders at AltaLink to hear about their careers, what inspires them and the goals they are focusing on this year.
CAYLA SABY, DIRECTOR, CUSTOMER SERVICE
Tell us about your role with AltaLink
Director, Customer Service, coming on one year. I’ve been with AltaLink for 14 years, and was previously the Manager, Customer Relations. For me, it’s all about connections. I’m responsible for making sure we understand our customers’ needs and ultimately provide an excellent customer experience.
What inspires you and motivates you to do your best at work?
It’s pretty awesome to be one of the people responsible for powering new businesses in the province. Whether we are working to connect a new petrochemical processing facility, a new wind farm, or building a new substation to support residential load growth we understand the impact of each project, and we are literally powering Alberta one connection at a time.
What’s one of your goals for 2019, personal or professional?
I just want to be a good human and raise the next generation of the same. I want to teach my young daughters about empathy and strength, and that hard work is the key to success. When they look at me I want them to see the strong female role model I’ve had in both my personal and professional life – this is totally cheesy, but is legitimately my goal at this point in my life.
ASTRIED SCHNEIDER, MANAGER, SYSTEM OPERATIONS & OUTAGE SCHEDULING
Tell us about your role with AltaLink
My team is responsible for scheduling and coordinating all of AltaLink’s transmission outages, developing system operating procedures and analyzing power system performance including protection and control equipment. Before this role, I was the Manager of Engineering, SCADA and Telecom. I have 20 years of utility experience including protection and control settings, substation design engineering and project engineering, and I’ve been at AltaLink for 14 years.
What inspires you and motivates you to do your best at work?
I am a team orientated person and I enjoy the challenge of building and developing a team, and removing obstacles such that employees are put in a position where they are allowed to thrive and be successful. Our team’s hard work was rewarded in 2018 when one of our key customers rated us at 100% satisfaction, which is a 20 % increase from 2017. These types of results are inspirational to the team and to myself.
What’s one of your goals for 2019, personal or professional?
A priority for 2019 is to complete process improvements around outage planning and coordination. As part of a cross functional team, we are working towards a customer centric outage planning goal which will minimize power outages to our direct customers.
SARAH OLDFIELD, MANAGER, CAPITAL ACCOUNTING
Tell us about your role with AltaLink
I came into my current role from maternity leave, after having my second child, daughter Emily. I am Manager, Capital Accounting, so I get to be involved in all of the fun stuff: regulatory applications, Indigenous partnerships and anything that involves capital spending. Before that I was Manager, Financial Reporting. I’ve done a lot of moving around within finance over the last nine years.
What inspires you and motivates you to do your best at work?
Making things better. I really love focusing on continuous improvement. Little by little making things easier, more efficient, better quality. My team is amazing at embracing change, learning from mistakes, tweaking processes and spreadsheets. I’m really lucky to work with such a positive, dynamic team.
What’s one of your goals for 2019, personal or professional?
I’ve got a 10 km run planned for June, so the goal is to run more than walk.