LAUNCHING:

LANA DJURKIN-KÖNIG

Company:

THE BIG QUESTIONS

WHAT IS YOUR PROFESSIONAL TITLE?

I am leading corporate security efforts of EY in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

WHAT DO YOU DO ON A DAY-TO-DAY BASIS?

I am responsible for physical security of more than 50 EY locations in GSA and 18 000 employees. By this I mean, I am responsible for crisis management, business continuity planning, travel security, physical security of locations, asset protection, insider threat and social engineering, meeting and event protection and executive protection.

WHAT DID YOU WANT TO DO WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD AND WHAT CHANGED?

Pity that I can’t really remember. What I do very clearly remember from my youth is that I always wanted to live abroad. Also, what I do very clearly remember from my highs school is that I was always attracted to criminology, security and terrorism somehow. Not a very girly topic, I know.

WHAT ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS DO YOU HAVE?

I have Master of Laws, Master of Science in International Relations and National Security and Master of Business Administration. I know this might be a strange mix, but I can very well explain it. My first wish was to study criminology but my mum was a very prudent woman who understood that from 20 people they are taking per year, my chances are slim so she forced me to secure Law studies and apply to Criminology in parallel.

Since admission and tests for Law came before, I studied harder and got admitted, and I failed in Criminology. But I thought I will just change in the course of study, which I never did (luckily). So after I finished Law, I have started working for Ministry of Defence, and since my country got admitted to NATO and I wanted to work for an international organisation, I studied international relations to understand how the system works.

In 2010 I got deployed to Afghanistan as a part of NATO and my wish has been fulfilled: not only that I understood how the international security system works in reality, but I also got to work for ISAF and observe international terrorism in front of my eyes. Very exciting times for me!

This was a breaking point in my life. I came back and decided to move abroad, start my career in the corporate sector and leave the government. I thought I needed a mental break and enabling in business administration to be able to understand how the private sector works. I also wanted to secure chances for another career, as I was not convinced that companies are just waiting for me as an international terrorism expert, so I have focused my MBA studied on CSR, which was in 2011 a hot topic.

But I got lucky and one of the biggest international companies in the world, head-quartered in the city I live in, offered me a great chance in their corporate security department and that was the beginning of a wonderful private sector career for me.

WHAT’S THE BEST CAREER ADVICE YOU’VE EVER BEEN GIVEN?

If you work less than full time – you will never become a department leader.

It sounds not like an advice, but more like a prophecy. It irritated me at that time, because I was working full-time and having only some months old baby at home and I was burning from stress and needed to slow down and cut down some hours in order to survive. I was very scared of the toll of that decision on my career, although it was only for some months. I felt pushed before the wall – either sanity or career.

At that time I didn’t know that my son will eventually sleep through the night and that I will be able to have some more energy later on, when he is older. I was stuck in the limbo of waking up very early after sleepless nights, driving to work before dawn in order to reach my hours in the office, picking my son from the kindergarten after 9,5h when everyone sees me only leaving the earliest and not coming the earliest, driving back home with an over-tired baby and having guilty conscious all day long, not making anything happen right – either at home, or on work and let a long for myself.

And then loud and clear there it was, the thing what I was afraid of. Choose between being a mother or having a successful career that leads somewhere. But corporate security is a men’s world. There is 1 woman on 10 men in our profession. Men tend to be ex-police and ex-military, pretty conservative and traditional baby boomers generation. This is changing of course as the whole workplace is changing rapidly with millennials coming and dictating the new trends, and female workforce is choosing more and more security as a career path.

So this prophecy was my breaking point and I wanted to prove that it is all possible, to have career and family but I needed to find a more flexible employer.

WHO IS YOUR ROLE MODEL AND WHY?

To be honest I don’t have a role model and I have so many role models. I take from every interaction or every inspiration positive and negative things, and make a mental memo on how I want to and how I don’t want to do it.

I tend to surround myself with role models. My husband is a great role model of a supportive, empathetic human being that puts his family and our well-being on the first place. My sister is a role model of a mother, wife and daughter that is able to sacrifice her own agenda in order to support her loved ones. My boss is my role model of a leader that is kind and supportive, empowering me every day to make my own decisions and find my own way in the company. My pets are my role model of perfect life companions that teach my son how to behave towards animals and my friends are a chosen bunch of people from everywhere that inspire me by their lives continuously.

WHAT IS THE BEST THING ABOUT YOUR CURRENT WORKING ENVIRONMENT?

It is the most modern, agile, digital, family-oriented, inclusive, diverse and flexible working environment that I know. I am empowered with technology and trust to do my job from wherever, whenever and how it fits. It’s a full-time working mum dream to be honest.

WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE ABOUT YOUR DAILY WORK ROUTINE IF YOU COULD?

I work a lot. I work all the time. But this is the nature of corporate security, you are always on the stand-by, 0-24, 365 days a year. Crises and emergencies tend to happen on Friday evenings. You can never disconnect. Without the true passion for this job, you are in for a hell ride. Huge responsibility, huge workload. I wish I could remember to take more mental breaks during the day.

WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF PROFESSIONALLY IN FIVE YEARS’ TIME?

I see myself leading and mentoring corporate security teams and teaching students security risk management. I really enjoy what I do and I feel blessed to have my genuine interest and passion as my job.

DO YOU FEEL YOU CAN BE THE SAME PERSON AT WORK AND IN PRIVATE?

Both in my private and professional life I am very disciplined, ambitious and proactive. I do feel that on work I am much tougher than normally. I have already gotten feedback that I don’t act as girly as men are used to by my other non-security female colleagues. This was not meant to be sexist nor derogatory, it was meant to paint that I have a different style of talking to people where I clearly say what I mean and what I need. Maybe not always the best things to do in political corporations, but I rather choose to be concrete than perhaps loved. Another comment was that security is no joke and clarity is needed, and to be honest before that situation I thought I was a smooth operator but apparently I’m not. In my private life I am not really perceiving myself as tough girl, although I guess being brought up by father soldier and working in the army does shape your personality and life style.

WHERE AND IN WHAT ROLES ARE WOMEN IN THE LEADERSHIP STRUCTURE AT YOUR COMPANY?

Our regional CEO is an inspiring woman, mother of 4. Our company is extremely diverse and female leaders are everywhere I look at. Even in the security function, there are quite many wonderful women, and I was certainly laughing after I realised that in my department almost all of us team leaders are female and we are actually not diverse in a way that we are lacking men parity.

DOES DIVERSITY MATTER TO YOU?

I love diversity! I grew up having transgender and gay best friends. I worked most of my career only with men, and I was always lacking some female co-working experience that everyone was talking about. In our team we have Mexican, Swiss, Italian, Croatian, German, male, female colleagues.

HOW GOOD IS YOUR WORK LIFE BALANCE?

I feel that for the job that I do and responsibilities that I have I am actually having pretty good balance. I do sports 4 times per week and I am almost every day - if I’m not travelling - after 17:00 with my son. I do wake up at 05.30 and start working at 06:00 but that is fine for me as I go early to sleep. My sister would say I’m a pitta type – I cherish my sleep and I have a tremendous amount of energy in the morning. Evenings are difficult though.

WHAT QUALITIES DOES BEING IN YOUR ROLE NECESSITATE?

I think you have to have a good stomach to digest all the worst of the worst of the world that we are in the security faced with every day. You need to love topics of terrorism, crime, unrest, geo-politics and have a true passion and intrinsic motivation, probably to make this world a better place.

ANY FINAL COMMENTS?

Here is what I did not know when I was 20 or 30 and I wished someone told me and I have listened to carefully:

It will go away. In life it all comes in phases. Bad ones will not last, but the good ones won’t last as well. Embrace the change and don’t resist it. This is a fight that will make you tired and eventually you will lose. Learn how to accept.
If you have problems to accept your life or your job or any other circumstance that you can influence – then go ahead and influence it. Nothing comes from nothing, they say in Germany. So you are the owner of your destiny, not its victim.
Where do you find power for that? It’s all in you. But you need to take time and slow down and get to know yourself and take a long look into yourself as well to understand how to make a change. You can do this only in peace and quiet and it takes time.