#7 Dear Lady Leader — Stay the course!
Jan 2020 is when I complete 3 years in my entrepreneurship journey at GreyAtom. Entrepreneurship looked very shiny and aspirational to me…
Jan 2020 is when I complete 3 years in my entrepreneurship journey at GreyAtom. Entrepreneurship looked very shiny and aspirational to me in that 1st year. However, the truth is that the past 3 years have been nothing less than a roller coaster. The world of startups as shown by the media is about companies consistently growing, hitting the next level milestones, raising millions of dollars in funding, always hiring and we wonder — how do they do it? How do they tread such a path? The truth is — It is never as pink as it looks. There have been moments of sheer adrenaline rush and also phases of total burnout, times when it has taken a herculean effort to keep pushing for the next day! While making this journey it’s always a good idea to have a bunch of people you can confide to with your actual burden. Those people may be your co-founders, your mentors/advisors , your teammates or your family/friends.
This phase of life has grown me immensely as a person. When I started, I knew nothing about running a business. I still can’t claim to know it all, but I have gone to depths of building great products, delivering delightful customer experiences, building A+ teams, discovering business models and spotting the right business opportunities and partners over the past few years. Whether I am a successful entrepreneur or not — that we will see, however, I can say for sure that I have grown wiser with more grey hair over the years :)
In this journey, I have also realized how my femininity has been of an advantage as well as how it has held me back at times. And it’s not so much about the macro social factors that I want to talk about but in general the traits of a woman leader that truly pushes us forward and also some roadblocks that we as women need to overcome. Also while I never felt the bias in my early career it’s no secret that female leaders are treated differently from their male counterparts. The bias is real and we must accept it! If you ask people, who are better suited to “lead a massive organizational change,” the majority of people will say a man, according to The Unstereotyped Mindset study conducted by The Female Quotient for Unilever.
However, when a woman gets appointed to the CEO position for a company turnaround and fails, the perception is often because she was distracted by personal factors such as caregiving duties. When a man is appointed to CEO for a turnaround, the perception is often that the company simply couldn’t be saved!
In this post I am going to discuss my thoughts on both — the positives of being a woman leader as well as why we don’t see enough women in leadership teams and why is it so essential to have diversity! “Diversity in teams” was something I had never given much thought to in my corporate career, however, it seems a lot important to me now. Gender diversity in your leadership pool means a greater diversity of thought, which, in turn, leads to improved problem solving and greater business benefits.
Here’s why I think it’s really important to have more women leaders in core leadership positions
Women are realists
While women too want to aim for the moon, they are very aware that the spaceship is still WIP and the engine needs more fuel to take off. Meticulously calculating the launch date and making sure that everything else is in place by then is a skill they have honed as part of the need for them to be good multi-taskers! Maybe that’s why the Mission Mars team truly had many women on it! ;)
Women are holistic problem solvers.
According to researcher Helen Fisher, “when women reflect, they gather details somewhat differently than men.
In any situation, they instinctively are detail-oriented, picking up on nuances and shades of any circumstance — including the opinions of all stakeholders. Then, once these variables of data are gathered, arranging them into cogent patterns, and identifying various solutions to a problem comes organically. Therefore, women are great problem-solvers, even if they are sometimes unaware of the ability!
Moreover, many women are particularly skilled at soliciting and listening to multiple, diverse voices that help in bringing creative ideas to attack a hard problem.
Women are great relationships and network builders.
According to the same research by Fisher, “Women have what scientists call “executive social skills.”
Women tend to be more attuned to changes in tone, body language, and facial expressions and can parse these physical manifestations quickly into information about the mental and emotional states of people around them. Thus, bringing an elevated dimension to each interaction. Because of this, women are specialists at cultivating relationships of depth and trust.
Women are also better Mentors
They empathize. Studies revealed that women showed a bit more democratic/participative leadership styles and a bit less directive/autocratic styles than did their male counterparts.The vast majority of women are conditioned to think of others before thinking of themselves.
They push their mentees to go and achieve their dreams, just like they do with their kids. They don’t judge their thoughts, ideas or dreams — they help you achieve them.
Women can multi-task
They have been taught from childhood to make sure they get good grades, they excel in music or art and also can make a perfectly rounded chapati (pardon for a cliche here, but this is true 80% times) When they get married, they look after the home, family, and work. They become natural multi-taskers and highly efficient at that!
When women add so much value in organizations, why is it that we still have so much under-representation of this powerful force on the boards or even senior leadership levels. Even now only 5% of Fortune 500 companies have a Woman CEO. Less than 10% of startups are all women-led. Even in large organizations, you see a huge gap widening after the initial 5 years of career. Less than 20% of females who graduated from Yale and Stanford are in growth careers post 10 years of their work lives.
In a world that’s talking about Startups, development, and progress, why do we have only a few women who are making a mark in the industry? There is something wrong and again I definitely don’t mean to list socio-economic barriers here.
Let’s understand the traits of a woman leader that are her biggest obstacles
Women constantly Self Doubt
The number one reason for this is their confidence in themselves. Can I do it? Am I worth it? Who will support me? What if I fail? We are groomed to be excellent and that is the biggest roadblock in our success. We just don’t take it easy. It’s okay to fail, to cry, to repent, to regret. But it’s not okay to never try. A woman will grab a senior role only when she feels she is 100% ready for it, whereas her male counterpart will just go for that position even if he feels 50% there yet! That need for women to be perfectionists at everything sometimes becomes their biggest enemy.
The perception that women don’t understand tech as well as men
To be honest, I have faced this quite a bit in the initial days at GreyAtom myself. I built the data science curriculum at GreyAtom from the ground up — filling in whatever gaps I had by pouring over books, hours of video content and reading voraciously for over 6 months. However in those first few months, many folks I met would stop short of engaging in a detailed tech conversation, thinking I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between hyperparameters and parameters in a machine learning model.
I also know of a woman co-founder and CTO who has always had to deal with quizzical looks whenever she introduced herself in various forums. In a multi-founder company, it is often assumed that the woman would be on the business side and never on tech front!
Women are not thick-skinned
Men tend to shake off rejection or bad decision making more quickly than women but it’s absolutely true that entrepreneurs are made or broken by how they bounce back from adversity. Women need to develop a thicker skin.
Women don’t reach out for mentorship
One key reason women don’t rise is that they are less likely to have mentors in senior leadership. Women earn 40 percent to 50 percent of degrees in science and engineering, and they represent 30 percent of the software industry workforce. But they are less likely to have information about how to become an entrepreneur, to see female role models and to know venture capitalists. Also they don’t reach out enough. It’s totally cool to ask for an aspirational leader, founder in a startup space similar to yours to mentor you. It’s not like you go out looking for mentorship — but you can always start discussing smaller problems that you face and see if you are able to validate your thought process , bounce back ideas off someone who has seen this journey at a different level of scale than you.It is important to find ‘quality’ mentors as this can often be the difference between success and failure.
Women need a strong ecosystem around them
As trivial as it may sound, if women need to grow in leadership roles, they need to have a strong ecosystem — of doers at home. A husband who takes equal responsibilities, an extended family that looks after their kids and a small army of folks who can help you with whatever daily chores you can outsource! The importance of having this kind of ecosystem is sometimes overlooked. When women get overwhelmed due to the lack of this kind of support system, they just decide to quit! I have been extremely lucky to have a support system in my family and extended help who have been helping me out unconditionally! Between me, my mother in law, my mother and my son’s nanny — a question sometimes is — who is the REAL mother to my son!
Women don’t assert themselves enough, they don’t stand up for themselves
There is a thin line between being aggressive and being assertive. A lot of times, in fear of being judged as aggressive, women end up not being assertive as well. When they are in a room full of people and they have a drastically different value proposition they end up not speaking up.This stays with us when we quote our rates in our business proposal, when we negotiate our terms with our clients when we propose our idea to an investor or even in our teams. We just don’t like to assert our thoughts, views, our rates openly. Sometimes in meetings, if you don’t assert your presence firmly, you get sidelined very easily in the conversation.
Women don’t talk enough about the impact they make
Women hate to talk about themselves and their skills. They feel it’s not so feminine to talk about themselves. Women need to tell stories about how they overcame challenges and how they still delivered what was expected! Women hesitate to claim their fame to succeed.
In a nutshell — We need more women in leadership roles — in start-ups, in large organizations — pretty much everywhere. So Dear Lady — Stay the course, overcome your challenges as I did mine. Take in all the feedback; filter out the noise and the naysayers; learn from your mistakes and try not to make them again. Advocate for yourself and practice self-care. Realize your worth and contribute to the world! But whatever you do, DO NOT GIVE UP!!