Dorothy Wright: Public Sector Award Winner, Thunder Bay.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: A Decade of Honouring Achievements

It seemed like a harmless enough newspaper advertisement.

A 10-month contract position for a project development officer attached to the new Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM).

"Literally this (job) looked to me like a lark," says Thunder Bay's Dorothy Wright, who had left public service with the Ontario government in 2002, to retire to her Thunder Bay home with no plans to work.

Yet, she was intrigued that the skill sets required closely matched her own. It appeared to be low-level development work that was a nice departure from a responsibility-laden position at the Ministry of Finance.

"This looked like a 9 a.m.-to-5 p.m. job. I had never had a 9-to-5 job."

In her previous posting as a Regional Director in Mississauga, she oversaw a staff of 300 in three offices, handling $100 million in revenue.

The Rotman School of Business graduate had once been tasked with amalgamating the Ministry's services into one-stop, customer-oriented shops and later helped implement Ontario's new employer health tax.

"It was a great responsibility in Mississauga, one of the richest tax areas of the province and dealing with major corporations."

Certainly, this kind of opportunity would have no more than a five-year air commute between a southern Ontario condo and her family in Thunder Bay.

Wright interviewed for NOSM Founder, Dean Dr. Roger Strasser. Within a day, she was offered the position and asked to start work the next week after Labour Day.

She had no idea what she was taking on.

The following Tuesday, Wright walked into three tiny offices at Lakehead University. No phone. Nothing to write with or on.

Welcome to your new job as CAO of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. The first charter class begins September, 2005.

"I never did get a job description."

It was the biggest task she had ever taken on. She was her own support system.

There were architects and contractors to be hired, support positions to be filled, equipment suppliers needed to outfit the two campuses; all the while drafting recruitment protocols, employee benefit plans, affiliation agreements, organizing fundraising campaigns and designing the governance of a complex, non-profit entity with a faculty of medicine between two universities separated by almost 1,000 kilometres.

In an environment of constant change, regional political sensitivities and pressure-packed deadlines, Wright knew she had to be innovative and be willing to delegate duties.

She wanted to assemble a team...