TechLeaders, ABI’s leadership development workshop designed to grow the next generation of technical women leaders, is currently having a workshop in New York City. 52 technical women from a variety of leading companies such as Juniper, Sun, ATT, Google, HP, Medco, State Farm Insurance, and Goldman Sachs are here learning from each other.
Kim Perdikou, Executive Vice-President of Juniper Networks, started our first panel with thoughts about leading with passion. Her message is that understanding where your passion comes from as a technical woman is key — don’t confuse drive with passion. Lead with passion rather than drive, and you will be a successful leader. “Passion”, she says, is “when who you are and what you believe in connects with what you do.” Her leadership experience and career has been infused with this passion — she conveys that being true to yourself, and be authentic, rather than trying to fit in and not being yourself, is the way to inspire yourself and others. Risk taking and being readily unconventional are important leadership traits. What does success look like? Is it about task completion? Perdikou says: being a motivator, a communicator, and a decision maker.
Katharine Frase, Vice President of SWG Business and Technical Strategy at IBM, talked about her career path from graduate student to running software operations at IBM. Early on, she saw that women in leadership positions 20 years ago felt a pressure to conform to a certain leadership style marked by long working hours and no work-life balance, and assertiveness. Frase has trail blazed a new path through her motto, “if you never ask, the answer is always no”. As a mother of four and in a dual executive career marriage, she is a role model who successfully balances home and work responsibilities — she says that it’s not how you balance family and work, it’s why you do it. Her other piece of advice — avoid becoming stale and keep learning — “when you can do your job in your sleep, it’s time to change! Put yourself out on the edge of a branch.” Being a manager and being technical are not mutually exclusive — she used a sailboat analogy to show how one navigates between those two sides.
Linda Bernardi, CEO of StraTerra Inc., commented on wanting to do away with the word “diversity” – women are not diversity, says Bernadi: we are 51% of the population. Creating one’s opportunities has been a central theme in Bernardi’s career. At her first interview post graduate school, she was asked what made her think she could do this job that she had never done before – she influenced the situation and articulated why she was the best candidate for the job. She made a transition from technical work to sales in order to teach herself the skills to become a CEO. She leveraged her technical knowledge to become a great sales expert. She then asked to go into operations to complete her skill set. When she decided to become a CEO and form ConnecTerra, hired the best from MIT on her own money – she started her company and her staff on September 10th 2001, a day before the world trade center attacks, a very hard time to be raising venture capital money. Bernardi turned that company into a $30 million organization which she then sold to BEA Systems. Bernardi’s advice is to go in and influence and carry the power inside of you — approach the situation with “let me tell you how I will get this done” as opposed to waiting for others to tell you how to do it. Bernardi advises women to let go of fear — there is nothing to be gained with fear.