News | RTL Group | Berlin, 09/22/2014

Anke Schäferkordt is Female Manager of the Year

Anke Schäferkordt, CEO of Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland and Co-CEO of RTL Group, is the recipient of this year's prestigious "Mestemacher Award: Female Manager of the Year.” She accepted the prize administered by the Gütersloh-based industrial bakery Mestemacher at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin on Friday evening.

Since 2002, the award to promote gender equality has publicly highlighted the leadership skills of women by presenting role models for young female managers. At the awards ceremony, Ulrike Detmers, a shareholder and member of the senior management of the Mestemacher group, praised the winner: "Anke Schäferkordt is a sagacious strategist who has successfully worked her way to the top in the man's world of business. Her entrepreneurial achievements play a big role in RTL Group’s success as a media group.” 

In his laudatory speech Gunter Thielen, former Chair of the Bertelsmann Executive Board and Supervisory Board, said: "The jury has selected an outstanding winner in every respect - professionally and personally. Anke Schäferkordt is a doer with a strong propensity for realism. A woman who has remained down to earth despite all her successes. This combination alone makes her a real anomaly in the sometimes loud media business."

For Schäferkordt, said Thielen at the end of his speech, gender equality is less something to be talked about but rather something that she personally takes for granted. " I can’t remember a single situation where the fact that she is a woman played a role for her in business matters or before taking on a new task. And I’d say that's the most important message this Female Manager of the Year Award can send to young female talent. Simply: Trust in your skills, and remain true to yourself!" 

In her off-the-cuff acceptance speech, Anke Schäferkordt said she was very proud to join the ranks of the prestigious award’s winners and that – while she could easily speak for as long as 120 minutes with no preparation whatsoever on the future of television – this acceptance speech was an unfamiliar task. After all, she said, it meant she had to talk about herself rather than the business, and to talk for the very first time about how she managed ​​to attain a top leadership position in business as a woman. Looking back, she initially noted that she hasn’t followed a lot of the traditional advice of recruiters. "I never had a fixed career plan. Instead, I’ve always allowed myself to be guided by what I enjoy. And to this day I've always stayed true to one group of companies, another thing many consultants expressly advise against.” And yet, Schäferkordt said, it all worked out.

After her speech Anke Schäferkordt took the opportunity to thank the team she had the pleasure of working with over the years and she also thanked Liz Mohn and Gunter Thielen, who were present in the hall. "At Bertelsmann I’ve always been able to work the way that I love: namely, as an entrepreneur in the greater enterprise.”