WIT At Work

In this episode, we cover:

• Why Cathy decided to keep working in engineering after earning an MBA and a law degree. (0:27)
• How money enables power and why women should strive to achieve both. (4:57)
• The importance for leaders to generate positive energy within the workplace. (6:35)
• How position and influence impacts the relationship between management and employees, and the importance for leaders to build trust with team members. (10:48)
• The ways decision making changes as a person moves up the management chain, and why Cathy makes a point to learn the personalities of each of her employees. (13:15)
• Subverting sexist stereotypes in the workplace: Cathy’s take on why women should strive to keep the “emotional volume” at work low. (17:00)
• Tips for balancing job and home commitments as a working woman. (18:53)
• Why Cathy believes being “risk-averse” is holding women back. (24:10)
• When and how to say “no” to accepting added responsibility at work. (26:20)
• What has changed in regard to gender equality, and why there’s still a long way to go. (28:23)

Quotes from Today’s Episode

It’s an unfortunate reality, but power is, to a huge extent, a function of money. People buy policy, and they buy positions of influence as well as access to people who have influence. Lobbyists and media leverage don't come cheap. So I believe that women need to control half of the world’s money so that they can have half of this power and influence, too. - Cathy (5:55)

People just want to feel good, and being around people who are positive feels good. People want to follow and please those who make them feel good. So, as a leader, you should try to generate positive energy and make people feel safe and happy because it helps you lead and because it's contagious — it makes the whole workplace a little better. - Cathy (7:44)

When you are a senior leader, everything you do and say resonates louder. It's like having a megaphone. We see this among other senior leaders and expect them to act accordingly, but it can take a while to internalize it's suddenly something we need to pay attention to. - Monique (10:14)

It's best to keep the emotional volume at work low — whether that’s positive or negative. Women are still fighting the stereotype that we are too unstable to lead, so you want to seem in control and not weak. Negative emotions are especially bad because they make others feel negative, too, and then that feeling gets associated with you. A lot of men aren't raised to deal with their emotions very well at all, so if you seem upset at work, some men may feel like it's their job to protect you. And that's just a terrible power dynamic to have at work. - Cathy (17:09)

No matter what you hear, treat feedback as a gift and don't react in real-time. If you're upset, take your time to get past your instinctive reaction, and give your frontal cortex — your rational brain — a chance to recover. Then you can process the feedback and learn from it. - Monique (18:28)

If you’ve made a conscious decision to put most of your energy into your home life, then you've made a rational investment decision based on your goals and your values. Once you've done that, don't beat yourself up if you look around and notice that you're not getting promoted as quickly as your peers who live for their work. Your career might not be zooming, but you're probably going to have great kids. And it's not like you failed — you've only made a different investment choice, that's all. - Cathy (19:49)

Links:

• Harvard Business Review on Leadership Skills
  • Research: Women Score Higher Than Men in Most Leadership Skills
  • “Women scored at a statistically significantly higher level than men on the vast majority of leadership competencies we measured.”
• Pfeffer Article: 
  • If You Want to Change the World, You Need Power: Part 1
  • Pfeffer reveals the seven essential personal qualities you need to build organizational power and influence
• NY Times Morning Consult Survey:
  • Nearly Half of Men Say They Do Most of the Home Schooling. 3 Percent of Women Agree.
• Harvard Business Review risks: 
  • Do Women Take as Many Risks as Men?
  • “The majority of studies that point to men having a greater inclination for risk-taking define risk in physical and financial terms. They don’t point to risks like standing up for what’s right in the face of opposition, or taking the ethical path when there’s pressure to stray — important risks that I’ve found women are particularly strong at taking” 
• Men who are employed in jobs that are strongly associated with women, and vice versa, are more strongly penalized for making mistakes than those in positions associated with their own gender.
  • “Gender-incongruent leaders are judged more harshly on the basis of small mistakes than leaders in gender-typical roles.”

Transcript

Monique: Welcome to WIT At Work, the podcast where we talk about how women in technology can achieve liftoff in their careers. I'm Monique Barbanson, your host. 

Monique: Thanks for joining me today to talk about how women in engineering can advance to senior leadership at tech companies. Today, I'm chatting with my friend Cathy about her role as senior director of engineering at Cisco Systems, where she led a 150-person team responsible for developing software running in the internet backbone routers. Could you start by telling us a little bit about your journey to becoming an executive at Cisco Systems?

Cathy: Well hello, Monique. And thank you for letting me help kick off your new podcast. So, the story of me goes—the short version of the story of me goes, I grew up in a small town in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where I was in the first generation of my family who got to go to college. I went to Stanford where most of the engineering courses had, like, two women in them. And while I was there, I interned for HP and then later IBM. 

And after graduation, I went to work for a couple startups. The first one didn't make it. And the other one was Metaphor where we met. And Metaphor was bought by IBM. I spent about a year at IBM, and then I moved on to Cisco Systems. 

And while all this was going on, while I was working full time, first as an engineer, and then later as a manager, I went to school at night. And it took forever. It took me about six years, but eventually, I earned an MBA and a law degree. It was while I was at Cisco, three weeks away from taking the bar, already cramming for it, that I was offered a director-level promotion. And so I had this huge fork in the road; do I become a lawyer that I've been working so hard to do but I might not like it, or do I stick with engineering and take on a more exciting role and continue to be surrounded by engin...