ALLIES | SPONSOR

Allies Sponsor with John Schwarz, Maggie Chan Jones and Gavriella Schuster

As part of my series on ALLIES here is the interview for the “S” in Sponsor. 

Wise words from both Maggie Chan Jones and John Schwarz as they share their story of sponsorship in the Avast board room.

To quote Maggie: “sponsorship is a partnership of achievement and advocacy.  Sponsors are those who are at a higher level in an organization who see the potentials in you as a protégé and next generation leader.  They may challenge you to a bolder vision for yourself, help open doors to new opportunities, provide visibility, and expand your network.  They are the ones who speak positively on your behalf even when you were not in the room.  Sponsors are most often “earned”.

Very often, people use mentors and sponsors interchangeably.  But I love this analogy to distinguish the two roles.  Mentors shine a light on the door and sponsors kick it open for you.”

Maggie Chan Jones is a long and influential business advocate of DEI.  She founded Tenshey, Inc. in 2018 and currently serves as CEO. Through Tenshey, Maggie focuses on elevating more women and underrepresented leaders into leadership roles.

She is a Board Director at Avast and Open Systems. 

Maggie is also a renowned author of the book Decoding Sponsorship which I highly recommend you read, and I am delighted to have her join me today to speak more about that and share one of her stories alongside one of her own sponsors John Schwarz.    

John Schwarz is a very accomplished leader. He is a Founder and Chairman of Visier, a software business focused on delivering analytics applications to business users. He currently serves as a director of Synopsys Corporation, Teradata Corporation, Avast Corporation, and as an advisor to the Dalhousie University.

In the interview Maggie and John share their story in the Avast board room.  How John sponsored Maggie’s nomination into and more importantly participation in the board room.  What that looked like and the actions he took to be her ally.

Please click the link below to listen to the full interview.

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Igniting a new flame: what’s next

Igniting a new flame
Igniting a new flame

I am excited to share that after 25 years of working on and leading some of the most innovative Microsoft products and launches, working across multiple business transformations and partnerships, I have left Microsoft. I have joined forces with several prominent organizations poised to address one of the most critical blockers in future technology innovation – diversity, equity and inclusion. 

I have joined the board of several leading organizations including Women in Cloud, Women in Technology Network, International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners, the SHE community, the Women’s Business Collaborative, Corent Technology, chairman of the advisory board for Artificial Solutions, and strategic advisor to Berkshire Partners to focus on bringing more diversity, equity and inclusion into the tech industry. 

This is a big change for me to be able to do something that I am truly passionate about, and use my voice and you, my network, to drive change. Here’s why.

5 years ago I had a rude awakening.  I was speaking to a room of women and transgender people talking about their various experiences at work.  As I was listening to them tell their stories of times when they felt dismissed, disconnected, overlooked or invisible, I realized that many of the specific experiences they had were shared experiences.  There were commonalities in the microaggressions that they were experiencing. On their own these were small, but over time built up into insurmountable walls for many of these women to progress and succeed in their teams. 

As I ruminated on their experiences and interactions with the members of their teams, I realized that I too had experienced many of these same microaggressions over the course of my career.  But I had attributed the reasons for those bad experiences as being my fault – something I had done or said that had brought about the microaggression against me.  As a consequence I had pivoted, changed my behavior, developed ways to respond and succeed in the face of those challenges.  What I realized though, was that I had also become numb to the microaggressions. It wasn’t that these things still didn’t happen to me, but I had worked for so many years on my response to them that it was second nature to respond, and I no longer noticed. 

I also realized that my numbness was a bad thing.  I was now a leader in the organization and if I did not address these microaggressions with more intention, it would not correct the unconscious behaviors that enabled those actions from continuing.  That was when I decided that I needed to take intentional action to become an ally and to act with greater intentionality. 

Over the last 5 years, my awareness has been tuned to look for these opportunities and I have become more conscious about what behaviors my allies have employed to successfully support and sponsor me over the years and how powerful those moments were in my career.  I have decided that I want to spend all my time building momentum, educating people and raising their awareness to the power of allyship and the behaviors allies demonstrate.  I would love to live in a world where everyone had an ally in every room they walked into. 

I want to thank Microsoft, the Microsoft partner community and all the allies that have supported me along my own journey.  I look forward to our continued collaboration and your support in making my dream a reality. 

Being an ally is so critical to enabling women, non-binary people, LGBTQ people and people of color to thrive in your workplace, your communities and in our lives that I will be building on my framework on how to BeCOME an ally delivering a series of articles and talks over the next few months on what those behaviors that #ALLIES demonstrate are.

As part of my network of allies, I would like to encourage you to share your stories.  Who are your allies, what did they do for you, how did that make you feel?  Let’s work together to build this momentum and create a more inclusive workplace.

I hope you will join me in this endeavor by committing to #BeCOME an ally and to take intentional action to increase the diversity in your own organizations. 

Please follow me to learn more and #BeCOME an ally today!

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#empowHER50 Celebrating Women Powering Microsoft’s Trillion Dollar Shift with Gavriella Schuster

Thank you Mariana Carvalho and Women in Cloud for this Spotlight of my 25 years at Microsoft as part of the 50 year Celebration!

One of the top skills I learned at Microsoft was the importance of inclusion. If I had not focused on including others in my ideas, in the way I planned and executed initiatives, campaigns and programs, that there is no way I would have been successful.

Once we had identified a market opportunity, my focus was how to craft objectives and an agenda that would attract those around me to want to work towards it. How I could identify their WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) and ensure that what I was doing would drive success for those around me. I learned how to engage others, how to share my ideas when they were nascent to bring in other points of view and make those ideas stronger. I learned that nothing at Microsoft got done as a tops down command – everything was organic from the ground up. In the early days of my career when there was so much to be done and so few resources to do it. We all needed each other and we needed to pull together to capture the vast opportunity ahead of us. There was no right or wrong way of getting things done – almost everything was built from the ground up creating a foundation for the future.

As you read this interview, you should know that behind everything I ever accomplished there were hundreds of people both within the company and within the Microsoft Partner community that worked to achieve our objectives. I never did anything alone.

I very often have likened my role as a team leader to that of the first ball in Newton’s Cradle of Balance Balls. I started something, but it was others who kept it moving and helped it become something I could only dream of.

I am grateful for all of the great leaders who empowered me and gave me the opportunity to keep trying through the failure until we found success. And I am especially grateful to my peers, those who worked within their teams, hashtag#mspartners, Women in Cloud, The WIT Network who believed in our many missions and made them a reality.

When you are in the midst of working, you seldom take the time to look back at the progression of your career. I know that the decisions I made to move to new roles at Microsoft were not made by a desire to move up within the organization but through a desire to make a difference. I had a desire to continually learn new skills, to push myself to new experiences, to build more bridges within the company and within the community and to make an impact. I am thrilled that as I look back on my career, that this is precisely what I wanted to achieve.

Thank you Microsoft for giving me the platform and the empowerment to make my dreams come true.

Read the full interview on Medium.

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