Lessons - Working as a Woman in Tech | Maggie Chan Jones - The Founder of Tenshey

What was your experience as being a really incredible women tech leader as you rose through the ranks? Have you noticed anything because I'm sure that of course over the years it's gotten a little bit better compared to when you first started during the dot com and whatnot as you rose through the ranks, talk to me about your experience being a woman leader in tech. Well, so I personally feel really fortunate that I, you know, let me take a step back. So if you look at the broader industry as an example, you know, McKinsey and Lynn and every year they do a study on women in the workplace. And over the last five years, when you look at the percentage of women in the C suite and the percentage of women of color in the C suite, they don't really change that much. And you know, right now is roughly only about 21% of the C suite of women and only 4% are women of color. So you know, when you look at the workforce starting out at 50 50, well, how do we get from 50 50 to 20% or to 4%. So knowing that and also being in tech, I remember in my early days in tech, most of the time I would be in a meeting and I was the only woman in the room or definitely the only woman of the of color in the room. Nowadays, that still happened and it doesn't, you know, I mean, we do the thing that I like and I love seeing the progress is I definitely a lot more meetings now when I go into that I see, you know, like I definitely see more diversity, but it is still a minority is not an equal playing feel yet. So that is why I personally believe that when you think about sponsorship and when organizations thinking from a diversity, equity and inclusion perspective, you have to be very intentional looking at your workforce, seeing where you have gaps, where you have, you know, opportunity to improve and focus on development area that can help you to really create an inclusive environment. And my, you know, my view is that until you have representation, you're not going to have inclusion and until that happened, then that's where people, everyone can feel like they belong allowed you to get that CMO position at SAP. How can we unpack that strategy that allowed you to not, I guess not strategy, but of course the mix of your career skills, plus the fact that perhaps you had sponsorship, plus you had a company that wanted to bring in just the best talent and that's what they were looking for and they brought you in. I'm trying to figure out, how do we get more, you know, Maggie's, you know, CMO, SAP, how do we get more of those and what we've had to get there? Yes. I, first and foremost, is really understanding or knowing where you want to go and having the clarity, having that clarity for your career north star, right? Not everyone want to be a CMO, so you have to at least, you know, first point is, is that where you want to go? And then the second piece is, how do you take intentional steps to get there? Because you know, you may say, you know, for example, I may be mentoring an executive and, you know, and one of the things that I always say to people I mentor, especially when they are thinking about their career journey is, where do you want to go? Where do you want to take your career? Which was the exact same fashion that I got back in the days at Microsoft and so understanding where you want to go is important and then the steps that you take has to be very intentional. And more so when I talk with executive women, right, they may be at, you know, one or two level be, you know, they may be at one or two level below the C suite. Those steps become very critical because that would determine which path you are going to take and will help you to get those type of roles. So going back to, you know, my own journey, I was having a lot of fun at Microsoft, I, you know, my career was going well. And that was back in 2012 and Cloud was taking off. So that was great. At the same time, I also knew that, you know, there were so many layers between where I was and where to achieve marketing officer role it was. So I'm like, okay, you know, when I was looking at opportunities, I actually was offer a role to go to China to, you know, to do a business unit lead for the marketing side. And then another opportunity came across was to be a senior vice president of marketing at level three and level three at that time was a Fortune 500 company. So between the two roles, even though both were really amazing and, you know, honestly, if I could clone myself, I would do both. But, you know, knowing that my longer term goal was to become a CMO one day, then, you know, taking the role, taking a bigger risk to leave the company I was comfortable with and going to level three at that time was, was very intentional. And then, yeah, go ahead, Scott. No, no, I was going to say so what I also want to understand though. So that makes sense to me. So being intentional about where you move your career. But the reason why what I'm trying to unpack is, why is there that 4% that 4% of underserved groups, marginalized groups and women see sweet leaders. I'm sure a lot of women, I'm sure there's a lot of women that for, I'm sure a lot of everyone that doesn't have that clear direction, but I think a lot of them probably do. So it's about having that clear direction as to where you want to take your career. But then after that, how do you, how do you move the needle on that? How do you bridge that gap? See a lot of women that do have that very purposeful driven, like, you know, laser vision on what I need to do next, this, this and that to get to the C suite. That is exactly right, Scott, like you have your ambition, you know what you need to do from building your own competencies. Then it's really about sponsorship. It's really about getting the right sponsors and who can advocate for you, who can give you visibility and open doors to new opportunities. So in the case of my own journey, getting to become the CMO of SAP at that time was, you know, an executive recruiting firm reach out to me about this opportunity. And you know, that took a while at the beginning, but one side spoke with the chief HR officer at that time, Stefan Rees, and we really connect and use like, you know, you need to speak with our CEO, Bill McDermott. And after speaking with Bill, that's when things became clear. Bill was a sponsor of mine and, you know, I went through the rest of the interview process knowing that I have his support and, you know, getting to that was very critical. And, you know, and on the other side, someone like Bill and Stefan really understanding that they need to make big bets on talent is also very critical because without that, I wouldn't I wouldn't have got to where I got to.