How two investment managing directors built an internal women's network from a boardroom lunch
Ahead of International Women’s Day, Benefits and Pensions Monitor is recognizing several women in the pensions, investment and benefits space who contribute to bettering the industry. Happy Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day!
Connor Clark & Lunn (CC&L)’s Women Collective all started with two women in a boardroom after a meeting.
Lindsay Holtz, managing director at CC&L Financial Group, and Moira Turnbull-Fox, managing director and head of asset management at CC&L Infrastructure, had just wrapped a session packed with senior women from across the firm. Then, Turnbull-Fox turned to Holtz with a pitch.
Within the infrastructure team, Turnbull-Fox had been running an informal quarterly lunch for the women on her team in a sector she describes as having been "very male dominated" throughout her career. The format, she described, was "bare bones."
"We got into a boardroom and we all just brought our own lunch and we had a great conversation," she said. "Sometimes we would be talking about work, and other times we'd be talking about things that were like our kids or our hobbies, or cooking, or what you're doing at the home."
That small gathering filled a hole that formal programming can’t, she argued.
"When you're in a place that you have lots of connections and you feel like secure and supported, you're more likely to enjoy coming to work. You're more likely to be in a place to do your best work," she added.
According to Turnbull-Fox, they were determined not to structure the Women’s Collective with big, rigid objectives that would be difficult to sustain because she believes that structure quickly becomes fragile. For example, if attendance dips or an event doesn’t quite land, the whole initiative risks losing momentum.
Instead, she wanted something informal, where women wouldn’t feel pressured to show up with polished “career issues” for senior leaders, but could talk openly and honestly about whatever is on their minds and build relationships in a relaxed way.
She sees the Collective as a response to how many women, at a broad population level, tend to develop networks: through conversation and shared experience rather than formal networking.
For her, the point is to create space where women from different levels can mix - speaking with peers, more junior colleagues, or those far more senior about anything from a complex work problem to the everyday chaos of home life. What matters to her is not the topic but the connection, and the sense of belonging to a common team and community.
That’s also why she insists the format be flexible: events at different times of day or different formats like breakfasts or coffee chats, and no fixed schedule that ignores real constraints like childcare, part‑time work, or demanding days.
Turnbull-Fox wants the Collective to grow gradually and organically, by word of mouth, and to adapt to the varied realities of the women it serves.
Holtz is also aligned with this approach and roots it in a broader principle she sees across the organisation: initiatives should be relevant to the people they’re meant to serve. That's why Holtz and Turnbull-Fox pushed back against designing an elaborate, top‑down program where they would dictate themes, topics, and messages.
Holtz is of the belief that they can’t possibly know in advance what every woman in such a diverse group need at any given moment. Even for the same individual, what feels useful or urgent may change from one event to the next. Because of that, she wants the Women’s Collective to stay open‑ended, giving participants autonomy to decide what they want from each session and how they want to engage.
“We really wanted to keep it open so that everyone could kind of chart their own course of what they wanted to get out of coming to the women's collective and just create again that forum and that opportunity for people to extract meaningful value and opportunity for themselves," she noted.
For her, the value lies in creating a forum, not a curriculum, where women can seek out the connections, conversations, and supports that are meaningful to them at that point in time. She believes the Collective succeeds when women can shape their own experience and pull-out concrete value and opportunities for themselves, rather than passively receiving a pre‑set agenda.
To that end, Holtz argues that developing and keeping strong people starts with culture, emphasizing that firms gain an edge when they create environments where employees feel supported, respected and stretched. She rejects the idea that high performance and a healthy culture are in tension as both are required.
When people feel they belong, are recognised, and have meaningful, challenging work, they are far more likely to build long-term careers in one place rather than drift to a competitor, argues Holtz.
Turnbull-Fox builds on this by focusing on how performance is managed day to day. She sees fair, transparent, annual performance processes as central to culture, and stresses that they must account for different traits and behaviours across a broad spectrum and not just one “type” of employee.
In her experience, people can wildly misinterpret feedback depending on their disposition, so managers need to know the individual in front of them and respond accordingly. For her, the Women’s Collective is one more mechanism for deepening those human connections, recognising that employees bring their whole selves to work.
As for what comes next, Turnbull-Fox wants the collective to build its own momentum, so participants generate the programming and come up with a defined objective themselves. In the interim, Holtz is focused on expanding to other CC&L offices.
"If everyone's waiting for me to come up with all the ideas for these things, they're probably gonna be disappointed," she said.
"There's lots of external networking events that people can identify, but we identified a gap that was right here at home. It was easy for us to grab that and drive it in the direction that we wanted it to go in.”
