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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BeCOME an Ally | Breaking through the gender equity divide

BeCOME, Connect, Outreach, Mentor, Empower

Have you ever been fed up with something and thought to yourself, “WAIT! Why am I putting up with this?” I had one of those moments a few years ago and it set me on a path of change—a path that took an exciting turn a few months ago.

In November 2020, I had the honor of giving a TEDx talk about something that has brought me heartache for years: the gender equity gap in the technology industry. After 30-years of regularly being the only woman in the room, I’m hopeful that sharing my story on the TEDx stage will be a catalyst for scalable change.

BeCOME and Ally: How to achieve gender equity

In the talk, I share personal stories about feeling invisible at work, as if I’m wearing an invisibility cloak that I just can’t take off. I know many of you can relate—you know, when you share your perspective in a meeting and are met with deafening silence? I can’t tell you the number of times that’s happened to me.  

To be fair, I’ve worked with many kind and inclusive allies throughout my career. And Microsoft, like many organizations, have taken this challenge head-on—making great strides with allyship training and a clear focus on creating a culture of diversity and inclusion. It’s been encouraging to see the progress we’ve made so far.

Unfortunately, in our industry as a whole, there just isn’t enough forward movement. So, by sharing my personal experiences, I hope to create a force-multiplier effect, where we can harness collective power to make change and ultimately bring gender equity to technology. But if we don’t act fast, we’re in trouble.

When I started in the technology industry in 1991, 36% of the computing workforce was women. In 2019, that number had fallen to 27%. We’re going the wrong direction, and it will soon get even worse.

The jobs being displaced through digital transformation disproportionately impact women and people of color. And that creates a perfect storm: by percentage, there are fewer women in technology, there are more jobs in technology, and yet there are more women being displaced by the technology. This is truly a crisis.

The good news is, we have the collective power to do something about it. Through technology democratization, purpose-driven leadership and male allyship, we can close the gap of inequity and create a new narrative. 

We need to add 8 million women to the technology workforce in order to achieve gender equity in the industry. With roughly 4 million in tech today, we have a long way to go. But with your help, we can create access and opportunity. We can #BeCOME agents of change by embracing four simple actions.

Connect | Make intentional connections with women in your network. Reach out and give women access to you and everyone in your community.

Outreach | Examine recruiting practices, hiring practices, and supplier selection practices. When you post a job, do you screen out candidates or do you screen in for diversity?

 Mentor | I would not be where I am today without the many men and women who have mentored me along the way. When you mentor, you blaze a trail for others to follow.

 Empower | The most impactful thing you can do for another human being is to empower them—to lift them up and create an inclusive environment that gives voice to everyone and allows people to be heard and seen for who they are.

In my TEDx talk I share examples of people I know who are walking the walk, like @Jennifer Didier who is the President and founder of our partner @Directions Training. Tired of seeing only men in her training programs, she set aside profit and created a scholarship program to bring free technical training and technical certification to women. And through her single intentional act, she has fundamentally changed the career trajectory for 70 women.

Another example is @Mal McHutchinson from @Interactive IT in Australia. He helped sponsor an organization called Male Champions for Change, which is dedicated to driving for gender diversity in high-tech.  And within his own organization, he has made a commitment to make his cyber security practice 50% women. That’s intentional leadership.

Through connection, outreach, mentorship, and empowerment, we can build healthier workplace cultures. We can attract new employees, customers, and investors. We can increase opportunities for all women and build a new generation of leaders that understand the value of equity.

We can do it. But it will take intentional action. I hope you’ll join me on this journey.

Over the next four weeks, I’ll be posting articles here on LinkedIn about each of the four actions we can take to #BeCOME agents of change and help women take off their invisibility cloak.

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