The large Common Room at the IET building in Savoy Place was the venue for the drinks reception for W-Tech's evening networking event. On the wall just above where I sat gulping my mineral water is a group portrait by June Mendoza of various past Presidents of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. It looks very much like an old boys' club:
But here's what the room looked like on the evening of the W-Tech event, crammed full of professional women! Quite a contrast:
Speaker: Suzanne Doyle-Morris, 'executive coach with a passion for helping female executives succeed' and author of Beyond the Boys' Club: Strategies for Achieving Career Success as a Woman Working in a Male-dominated Field.
The session was run as an interactive workshop, so the laptop stayed firmly in its bag for this hour, but I promised a quick write-up of all the sessions I attended, so here goes!
Suzanne was an incredibly bright and lively presenter and clearly had a wealth of insight to share, so the session was too short by far. Her Cambridge University PhD involved investigating the experiences of successful business women working in male-dominated fields, and her book, soon to be available on Amazon, covers a similar subject area. On the basis of this session, I'm ordering it, despite my usual prejudice against business / self-help books and enthusiastic Americans! It's also worth noting that while the workshop was focussed on women seeking to move into leadership roles, I felt the advice was good for anyone of either gender.
With plenty of slots for paired/tripletted discussion followed by feedback to the full group, the workshop was a great window onto other women's working experiences. It's difficult to capture this kind of thing in writing - the atmosphere in the room was a large part of the success of this particular hour - but here are a few of the things that particularly struck me:
Women often move to other companies to gain promotion, in preference to being promoted in their own company where they'd have to become a boss to their peers. We seem to find it harder to accept that kind of change in dynamic. Work on dealing with this if you recognise it within yourself - it is easier to move up within an organisation that knows your track record.
Don't think in terms of 'us and them' - if you accept an us and them mindset where the boss is 'them', you'll be limiting your chances of attaining leadership roles as you won't even see it as a possibility.
Bad bosses we have known - one participant from somewhere in the Square Mile gave a particularly horrendous set of examples of 'the bad boss' - including revenge and sabotage - leaving the rest of us exceptionally grateful we didn't work in her company!
Learn from the anti-mentor - so you've got a bad boss. Fine - you can still learn from them about what not to do! Examples from the group: leadership by fear; passing the buck; claiming credit for others' work; superiority complex coupled with refusal to listen to or acknowledge the skills of their team member. All things not to do.
Qualities of an ideal boss (from group discussion) - consistency and fairness; respecting and playing to the strengths of their team; inspirational; fun to work with; gives positive feedback, not just negative; has "the guts to have the hard conversations"; is an advocate for their employees; fosters an atmosphere of trust.
Diverse teams are often more creative, according to research.
Gender differences in responding to the feedback sandwich - you know that one good thing, one bad thing, one good thing approach to appraisals? Anecdotally, bosses have often reported that female employees will focus far too much on the negative, finding it demoralising even when delivered in this way. Male employees, on the other hand, will often fail to hear the message that they need to improve in some areas if it's wedged in the middle of a 'whole lot of "You're great!" ' So there's probably a need to find a different technique in both cases!
How to successfully make the move from peer to boss - in advance of that promotion, start aligning yourself not just with your peers, but with those in the rank above. Ask to go for a coffee or lunch with them. And go shopping! You need to dress for the job you want in order to project the right air of professionalism. Then, once you get the job, accept that while it may be difficult, you need to disengage socially from your former peers at least to some extent. Some of the ways you previously used to mix and mingle may no longer be appropriate. But you can help smooth the path by being prepared to act as an advocate for them and their skills once you're in your new role.
How to deal with challenges from your staff - "Frankly, it's the boss's job to understand what will get their staff's buy in!" So, work to understand your team member's motivations - whether that's status, interest, travel, etc - and try to show them the benefits to themselves of doing what you want them to do.
Final tip: "Look first to see what your staff want before you go in with your request [and align the two] - that's what being a good boss is all about!"
Web links:
Pink alert! Ah yes, a pink butterfly is the perfect thing to indicate this book might be useful for career women...
Computer Weekly's reporter Rebecca Thomson reported on W-Tech - her story 'W-tech starts the drive to bring women in IT together' went online yesterday at 4pm. I was a bit busy in requirements meetings for our forthcoming platform upgrade, but it's worth a read. If you were there, what did you think of the event?
Speaker: Stephanie Small
Stephanie Small from Hewlett-Packard (HP) is going to take us on journey through a career in project management in this session - a career she admits she fell into, but nevertheless has really enjoyed! Stephanie is a career-changer, who started out in the airforce, but was forced to look for a new career when she began a family, thanks to (now-extinct) rules.
(Around now my laptop battery finally went flat... So the rest is post-blogged from my notes taken at the event...)
Stephanie's presentation was essentially an introduction to starting and building a career in project management.
What makes a good project manager?
What are the key factors to think about when considering whether project managment suits you?
What is project management not about?
The Apprentice! The 'project manager' role on the tv show isn't really project management - it's just task management. True project management is much wider ranging, and needs a broader set of leadership skills than some of The Apprentice candidates exhibit!
Should you take a course in project management?
Academic study is useful, although it's practical experience that you'll really need to get that first - or next - job. However, getting the training under your belt helps as there's a lot of competition, as most people will be qualified. Plus the courses will give you the language of a project manager.
Practical tips on getting practical project management experience before you get the job
What project management networks can you join?
The PMI, APM and BCS project management specialist group are all good places to start.
How do I move from a technical project management role to a business-focussed one?
Most companies are already looking at project management from a business perspective, but if yours isn't yet, try to find a mentor who can help you to learn about or shadow business/commercial aspects, such as project finances, contract negotiations, and so on.
Where next after a project management role?
Pink alert! We were also treated to a brief glimpse of the video of HP's 'fashion meets technology' pink Vivienne Tam netbook - one of only two 'pink' items I saw on the day (the other was a butterfly on the cover of Suzanne Doyle-Morris' book...)
Final tip on career management for project managers - and others - remember that the time, cost, quality triangle isn't just a project management principle, it's a career management one too! Time and effort / cost are needed to achieve the quality!
While getting lost en-route to the session on 'How to be the boss you wish you had' (which I'll blog from home, as it was interactive so I didn't get chance to dig out the laptop during the session), I found a whole board in the IET building celebrating women in engineering:
Ada I know about, thanks to Ada Lovelace Day - the others I'll have to check out later...
The only other female image so far is the woman dancing with this chap here at an Electrical Engineers' ball:
Update - the women celebrated on the IET information panel:
Hertha Ayrton was elected the first female member of the IET, in 1899. (But wasn't allowed to join the Royal Society because she was married.) She helped improve the arc lamp, invented a fan that was used to clear trenches of gas in WW1 and may have part-inspired the character of Mirah in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.
Dame Caroline Haslett was the first secretary of the Women's Engineering Society. There's a room named after her on the third floor of the IET building.
Amy Johnson was the first woman to fly solo to Australia. Probably more of an adventurer and aviation hero, really, but you did have to get involved in the mechanics of flight back then...
Gertrude Entiwsle designed machines used in power stations at Battersea and Croydon, pretty much my home patch! Early in her career she had to suffer the indignity of the men hammering metal to warn each other of her approach as she entered work - how's that for full-on discrimination?
Ada Lovelace is known as the first computer programmer. And there's a room named after her in the building too.
And finally, the IET website has an online exhibition detailing women's struggle to become accepted in engineering and related professions.
Oops. Overloaded my laptop, so crashed for the start of this session. (And thanks to forgetting to build in a lunch hour, getting a bit of a sugar-low crash in my own system too! Must rectify that after this session.)
Few notes though from what was said:
As technology advances, there will often be a social backlash aginst it (e.g. think of the athlete with artificial leg banned from competing as the technology of the prosthetic might have given him an unfair advantage).
Ironically, though, there's often less of a backlash against technology that's viewed as being for the purpose healthcare.
Evolution designs for efficiency in nature - so should we in technology!
Ageing population will bring about different needs and culture.
Q: What skills should adults and children be developing for the future?
A: Being able to evangelise; being able to understand and translate tech talk; translating it into business models. But essentially, science, and communication. Cultural trends are moving towards greater specialism in skills, but also a greater level of interlinking between disciplines, so the need to be able to communicate across disciplines is increasingly essential.
Speakers: Jane Lewis, PFE from Microsoft UK and Eileen Brown IT Pro Evangelism Manager
(Aside: Jane Lewis kicked off by mentioning this was the first time she'd presented to a room that's almost women-only. Looking round, I can count one chap on the back row.)
Change of pace for this smaller session in the Faraday Room - this time we're looking at technology rather than ways of working. And the subject is unfied comms - introduced with a Devil Wears Prada spoof. (You know the bit where they're all waiting for an alert that the boss is about to arrive? That bit.) Fun idea, but the clothes aren't as good! And, erm, it's just crashed twice right at the good bit (voice-interaction and a round-table device). But you guys at home / in the office can watch it here right now. (I'll have to wait till later.)
First demo - Touch. Eileen Brown shows off Microsoft Surface, the spill-resistant coffee table with a multi-touch computer built in. The key differentiator to Surface's multi-touch interface, according to Eileen is that it recognises direction, orientation, different points of touch (e.g. fist versus finger) - thanks to 5 cameras. And it also reacts to specially tagged physical objects, allowing them to interact with the virtual objects onscreen - e.g hotel key cards with chips embedded.
Certainly seems quite intuitive - easy enough for a volunteer to interact with and stack photos. And for two people to join together to choose the right sequence of French words for a language learning game. ("Like Twister!", as one attendee aptly commented!)
Answers to tech questions: Surface is programmed in standard MS programming languages. It's an Intel box running Vista Business, £8.5k for the consumer / end-user box, and £10k for the version with the SDK.
(The Surface link here will take you to the videos my colleagues James and Faisal took at the demo they attended a while back.)
Second demo - Voice and Presence. Microsoft Office Communicator. Jane Lewis demonstrated this unified comms suite, with IM, VoIP, LiveMeeting etc all in one interface, complete with presence engine that can be embedded throughout other Microsoft apps like SharePoint. Jane demonstrated this briefly, including the voice-activated directory. I have to say, I wasn't too impressed by the computerised voice's attempt to read out or recognise names. Bit too hit and miss to make it a viable alternative to text input so far, on the basis of this demo. But it did get there in the end. (Echoes, coughs, etc, are apparently all a bit of a problem to the technology at the moment, so it didn't like the packed room. Can't imagine, then, how it would actually work well for Ms Hathaway, with her tray of coffees, running down a busy NY street begging it for information and connections!) So for now I think I'll continue to steer clear of the voice interaction tools! (Spec wise the client application is available now for corporate set-ups - and compatible with Vista and Windows 7.)
LiveMeeting with a round-table video device was more impressive. Microsoft claim to have saved huge amounts in meeting / travel costs through use of this and associated tools. Used for video-conferencing, the round-table webcam device (possibly this one) is able to follow the voice of the speaker, keeping them centred in the video (so long as you've got enough speed and bandwidth!) even if they're moving around the room (a bit). So the speaker has the freedom to present properly while the remote attendants can still follow all the action.
I'm guessing, though it wasn't clear, that with multiple participants it would also swing to follow whoever's speaking at any one time, so that you get a more real feeling of being 'in the room' if you're the remote participant at a meeting held like this.
(Tech details: 5 cameras and 4 mirrors are used to give the wide panoramic view of Jane pacing the room that we saw.)
Anyway, this seemed to work well, albeit rather jumpily on the shared (with me, for one!) wireless access.
Pretty impressive, and would love to get the chance to try this for some of the cross-channel technical meetings I've recently tried to attend via voice-conference only. I think it's been around for a while now - do any of you have practical experience of using this kind of set up?
What a way to get crowd engagement! Christian Ioannidis kicked off her session on 'how to behave in all-male team' by asking everyone in the packed room if who'd ever been the only woman in a meeting at work to raise their hands. And it was pretty much a full show... For those of you wondering why events like this are needed, that is a large part of the answer...
After that a quick biology lesson - women have 20 million more neurons apparently, though I'm no neurologist or biologist, so I can't vouch for this (or be sure I've taken it down correctly!) but the basic point made is that yes, there are differences, broadly speaking at least.
Going on from that Christina presented a chart showing results from a sample survey of half million people - giving evidence that men have, on average, a greater mental preference towards the analytical/logical, left-brain modes of thinking, while women have a greater preference towards the emotional/communicative, right-brain modes.
And that, she goes on to posit, sets up the potential for a clash of broadly male/female cultures. Winning versus fairness. Single-focus versus multi-tasking. Etc...
One great example I could really relate to: questioning and discussing a decision may come naturally to the right-brainer / female way of thinking. But it can get you in trouble! Don't make the number one mistake, says Christina, of telling your boss: 'No!' or pointing out faults when the decision's already been made! Yup, I've made that mistake in the past too, though at least not to the CEO... I, like Christina, learned this the hard way: the time for debate is only before the decision's taken, if you don't want to risk offending the hierarchy and making things difficult for yourself. (Even if you're right...!)
Top tips on being a woman working in a man's world:
If the leader says jump, jump! Never publicly undermine the team leader's decision. Only question when things are still up for debate.
Try to stay goal focused and get on top of your multi-tasking tendencies - the single-focussed male-brained observer won't see how well you're juggling lots of tasks, they'll just think you're disorganised. (And when you simply must do it anyway, don't mention it!)
Don't let yourself be intimidated. Remind yourself that power language and gorilla play is all part of the act. You don't have to join in, but you don't have to feel intimidated by it either. (Practical tip - if you're asked for numbers and don't want to join the one-upmanship game, just say 'enough!', confidently. The mystery will impress!)
Networking - the old boys' network does exist - so you have to network to succeed. That might mean going down the pub with the guys, even if you don't really want to. But if you want a way in, ask for advice on something you're working on and get flattering those egos...
Don't take things personally! Women often have more of a tendency to do this. But it's not personal - to the all-male team even a crude joke is often just viewed as banter and a game. Let it go and move on.
Get out there - don't hide. Don't expect your work to speak for you - you have to be visible to key decision makers.
Finally, for everyone, male or female:
Embrance working in a cross-cultural style - embrace diversity of thought, and in practical terms, get yourself both male and female mentors so you can benefit from both styles of thinking.
Personally, I wish I'd been to a session like this about five or six years ago, as following some of the tips could have saved the naive younger me a lot of trouble. But I had to learn from my own mistakes - hopefully other attendees here might avoid ever making them!
From the Q&As:
One woman raised discrimination in her office - men saying women shouldn't work in IT as they simply couldn't think technically - how to deal with that? Christina's suggestion is to get the facts to back you up - show them the proven achievements of women in the field, yourself or others. (Some of the Ada Lovelace Day blog posts out there could be a good source of inspiration for this research!)
Microsoft has fielded the speakers for this session on "Having fun and being a great technical professional".
In his intro, Andy Gitsham laid out his position: "Work hard, play hard" is too 90s - now it's all about "Work smart, live smart"... Which seems to be in part about flexibility in working patterns and increased customer focus. Oh, and using Bing as your preferred search engine...
Beatrice Nicoli and Kate Stanton-Davies, two of the company's premier field engineers then took the stage to explain what their roles are like on a day-to-day basis, as they try to put the PFE mission statement of 'improving clients' IT health' into practice. (Bingo cards out folks: Windows 7, Microsoft Office...)
So what does Kate see as some of the key benefits of working for Microsoft in the PFE area? Working with "talented people who openly share their knowledge and experience", the opportunity to get involved, and that work/life flexibility referred to by her colleague Andy.
Kate's personal experience has included 15 years in IT, starting out as the only female support engineer with her first employer - an experience she says she got used to accepting as the norm, but that was never a problem. Until joining Microsoft, though, she did find balancing work with family commitments was sometimes an area of concern, and so spent much of her career as a freelance. However, in her 18 months at Microsoft she says she's been able to leave this concern behind. In fact in her summing up slide she said it was: "The most family-friendly and flexible IT company I've worked for!"
Beatrice picks up on some of the fun you can have in the role - travel throughout Europe, networking, learning from others, bonding events, and finally, a corporate commitment to community and volunteering, with 3 paid volunteer days a year, and various organised volunteering opportunities with partner organisations.
Kate's own volunteering time was spent with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre, helping to deliver training to parents and 5-11 year olds about Internet safety - definitely a worthwhile way to use technical and presentation skills.
Final words from Kate - "we're not just geeks" despite any perceptions that people may have - "we adore technology, are professionals, and love what we do".
(PS. Chat in the ladies loos - turns out I'm not the only one who was a *little* disappointed that this session was so Microsoft-centric, having expected something more general and illustrated by Microsoft employees' stories, rather than just a recruitment presentation - but hey ho, it is largely a recruitment event!)
Image: Abstract art in the IET's Riverside Room.
It's a beautifully sunny day in London, and the walk from Embankment to the IET building on Savoy Place for today's W-Tech women in technology recruitment fair / networking event was pleasant. There's a rather imposing statue of Faraday right outside, which was gleaming in the light, and inside a motley assortment of pictures and monuments to other technological greats. I'm sat gazing at Kelvin right now, who's guarding a small showcase detailing the laying of one of the first telegraph tables... I've set myself a private mission to discover, by the end of the day, whether there are any women memorialised in marble or stone here, given the nature of today's event!
I'm off to the BCS / Women in Technology W-Tech event in London tomorrow, at the IET building. It promises to be a good day, with networking opportunities, a female-friendly recruitment fair and a good programme of seminars and talks. The event's been designed with women in mind, although it's open to men too - but it's nice to feel that for once I'm unlikely to be in the minority gender!
I'm going to sessions on subjects ranging from "Cloud Computing and the Law" to the potentially esoteric "Living in the Future", and if the gods of Wi-Fi look kindly upon me, I'll be live-blogging what I can here on the WITsend blog.
Pity I can't be in two places at once, as there are a lot of sessions I'd like to attend. Not least the evening panel on Achieving as a Woman in the Technology Profession, which I'm sadly going to have to miss thanks to a prior commitment.
Computer Weekly's reporter Rebecca Thomson will also be at the event, and our IT security blogger David Lacey will be speaking on the subject of 'Managing the Human Element in Information Security'.
As well as being there to cover what I can on behalf of Computer Weekly, I'm also hoping I'll pick up some tips for both the future of the website, and, given the state of the media industry today, for ways to use my web project management experience to extend my own future career potential! : )
Maybe I'll see you there!
I don't normally buy the Evening Standard, thanks to having just a single-stop commute between work and home out here in the Greater London suburbs. But last night I'd headed into town for some late night retail therapy in the summer sales up on Oxford Street (I bought this Orla Kiely laptop bag from Debenhams that I'd had my eye on for ages, in case you're interested!) and ended up acquiescing to the 10p offer to help pass the return journey.
Glad I did, as the London Life section featured a piece on the (small) rise in women making it to the boardroom. Admittedly I'm not that convinced the 'Golden Skirts' headline** shows great sensitivity to the issues, but given the number of David 'Golden Balls' Beckham headlines out there we should perhaps be grateful it wasn't worse!
Running off the back of recent news covered on ComputerWeekly.com and elsewhere that Lastminute.com's Martha Lane Fox has been made Digital Britain Champion, the piece goes on to profile some of the few women who've successfully made it to senior executive positions in London now.
It's worth a quick read, for gems like the tip from from Penina Thomson that women seeking board positions should focus equally on "competence, confidence and contribution", and not fall into the trap of thinking competence alone will see you rise up the ranks. You need to be seen to be competent too.
I was also struck by Gideon Spanier's illustration of just how far things have come since the 1960s, "when Dame Stephanie Shirley, founder of software company Xansa, felt compelled to sign her letters to prospective clients as 'Steve'."
Women may still have it hard in some areas of business, but thank heavens there's no need for that kind of mutability any more...
Subscribe to this blog