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Monthly Archives: February 2017

Mentorship vs. Sponsorship for career advancement

27 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by EngineerChic in Career, Diversity, Engineer Chic!, Marketing Yourself!, women in engineering

≈ 3 Comments

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As mentioned in my last post, one of the most critical factors to achieving success in the workplace is finding sponsors – the right sponsors – who will open doors for you and actively support you as you grow. Malcolm Gladwell listed this as one of the 3 critical factors for meteoric success in his book, Outliers (along with 10,000 hours of hard work and a large spoonful of luck) and Sylvia Ann Hewitt wrote a whole book about it: Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor

Until lately, this was a pretty new concept for me. Looking back at my career thus far however, I can definitely see how sponsorship has shaped my path. Let me share a bit of what I’ve learned.

What is a sponsor, and what is a mentor?

A mentor is someone who gives advice. She/he is typically a person more senior than you, who has taken an interest in your development, growth and success and tries to guide you as you define and follow your journey, sharing experiences, knowledge and suggesting course-corrections. You can think of a mentor as someone who helps you passively.

A sponsor, however, is a senior person who actively helps you follow your journey (or leap-frog into a whole new journey you never even dreamed about). They would typically hand you a challenging assignment (giving you that chance to show off your fabulous skills and get noticed), connect you to an advantageous person or opportunity or flat out “bang the table for you” when you come up for a promotion or an assignment.

Why is this important?

I know that the engineer in every one of us believes that she/he should be valued primarily on the virtue of his/her work, but that simply is not the case.

Organizations are made up of people, and despite them being governed by policies, are in the end, just a bunch of human beings being human beings. At every level within an organization, irrespective of company culture, there are “politics” at play. People build networks around their interests, gravitating towards people they get along with and people that can/will help them in some way now or in the future. Little communities emerge at the water dispensers or on the weekends. As individuals in a community achieve greater success, they tend to start creating opportunities for others in that community to also succeed, keeping their “followers” close to them at every level.

Very clearly then, in order to get ahead, you need to be doing a lot more than just showing up to kick ass at your daily tasks!

The sponsorship cards are stacked against women

McKinsey & Co. teamed up with LeanIn.org to do some killer research on Women in the Workplace, and discovered some important – and unsettling – facts.

“Women are three times more likely to rely on a network that is mostly female. Because men typically hold more senior-level positions, this means women are less likely to get access to people with the clout to open doors for them.”

 

20170226

 

Although the number of senior women leaders in a typical US workplace is increasing, senior leadership is still largely dominated by men. This means that a woman is less likely to get access to senior level people who can really open doors for them. This effect deepens the more senior a woman becomes. 20170226_3 201702262

 

So what does all of this mean for you and I?

In the field of engineering, cybersecurity and others, where senior women are still very few and far between, women are even less likely to have access to senior women sponsors. In my last post I talked about how its a total misconception that women don’t sponsor each other. The truth is, they do! What we also need to start doing a lot more of, is actively seeking out male sponsors as well, with the ability to really open doors for us.

It also means that as we progress, we need to be acutely aware that younger women will be seeking us out as sponsors, and that we have the duty to create opportunities for them and connect them to a more balanced network of men and women.

My next post going to be on how to go about finding a sponsor. Stay tuned for more!

 

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Women in cybersecurity: building community and sponsorship

14 Tuesday Feb 2017

Posted by EngineerChic in Career, Diversity, Engineer Chic!, women in engineering

≈ 3 Comments

Its been a few years since I attended a “Women in Engineering” seminar and I must admit that I’ve felt quite disconnected from my original purpose for starting this blog. Having left engineering for consulting, and having made a major career change into IT Infrastructure and then into the adjacent field of cybersecurity, I found it impossible to craft and authentic post as a champion for women in engineering. What would I talk about? What life experience would I draw from?

Today however, my mission was reignited at the RSA conference in San Francisco. For the first time in RSA history, there was a diversity-focused session (finally RSA). I spent 3 hours hearing from prominent and inspiring women in my field, about the very real challenges they faced. And guess what? They were exactly the same issues I had experienced as a young mechanical engineering student, and later, a graduate working in mining in the rural regions of South Africa. Sure, the lingo and the working environments may be quite different, but the experience of being a smart, ambitious woman in a male-dominated and highly exclusive field was the same with this group.

Interestingly enough, the key take-away from today’s sessions was not the need for women to hone their negotiation skills, nor was it to encourage women to “lean in” and emulate more masculine-like qualities to get ahead (I write this despite my immense respect for Cheryl Sandburg and her organization). No, the one thing that the speakers listed consistently as the key to achieving success in your career is one, ironically, innate to us as women: building a support network, a community within which you can feel safe to speak up, reach out and be bold. The last speaker, Valerie Plume (former CIA agent and role-model for women) said that studies have shown that women are able to build higher levels of trust with others and are generally perceived as being far more trustworthy than men. A young speaker (herself still an intern) gave some fantastic advice to a concerned mother/cyber professional, saying that her daughter should take a friend along to robotics club (even one who had no interest in robotics) to help her feel more comfortable among the over-jealous (and quite possibly highly insecure) high school boys, dubbed the “arrogant geeks”. I could relate. After all, I have been surrounded by them since I was 17.

One woman complained that she had somehow fallen into the role of bridging divides in her team, and that people constantly brought her their issues with others to help them figure out. She wanted to know how to get out of this hole. Valerie however advised that she was in fact in a privileged position and that she should rather leverage that POWER and turn it into success. Having listened to Elaine Seat’s simply outstanding talk “Selling your Ideas in the Absence of Authority” a total of 3 times at various ASME events, I am completely with Valerie on this one! (Look out for another post on this topic). Simply put, women should be looking for OPPORTUNITIES use skills so fundamental to being women – the ability to build trust-based relationships – to their advantage in advancing themselves and others in their fields.

A theme that was touched on, yet not explored in a meaningful way (hint for next year, RSA!) was the idea of mentorship and sponsorship. A common misconception is that women don’t support each other. Recent research on this topic suggests this is true in cases of “token diversity positions”, where there is only one spot for a woman on the team (think early-90’s). This creates heightened competitiveness over the one seat at the table, inevitably resulting in any incumbent being treated with disdain. Once women (and this applies to other minority groups too) are confident that they are not competing for the only seat at the table, they do the complete opposite: they throw their support behind each other, even exhibiting the “mini-me” attributes that men have been using to bring their younger-selves along with them as they rise.

Sponsorship is a theme that I will be exploring in the next few blogs. I have been incredibly fortunate to have found mentors, and more importantly, sponsors throughout my career. I’d like to share some of my experiences, as well as hear from others on how they have succeeded in finding effective sponsors. Please reach out with your thoughts.

#RSAConference2017 #RSA #RSA2017 #womenincybersecurity #womeninsecurity #valerieplume

 

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Lego getting it right again

10 Friday Feb 2017

Posted by EngineerChic in Uncategorized

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I was getting myself a new Lego set today and came across some awesomeness.i think we need more of this positive female messaging for our girls! 

Introducing Batgirl! 

Good job Lego! Love the spirit of this super-hero toy set, where the main character is a woman. Love the pink! Thank you for making this wonderful learning toy identifiable to young women…

 

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