CEO of Stor.ai.
Image Credit: GETTY
Throughout my 20-year career leading high-tech and startup companies, I’ve worked with a number of inspirational entrepreneurs who I always strived to emulate. I admired my role models’ abilities to handle adversity and negotiate ambiguity. Despite working in an overwhelmingly male industry, I never saw my gender as an obstacle to replicating these attributes and ultimately achieving my career goals.
But the more exposure I’ve had to company boardrooms, the more I’ve come to realize that the gender imbalance at the uppermost echelons of tech leadership genuinely stymies the upward mobility of talented women. With that realization, I now see it as an obligation to support up-and-coming female entrepreneurs in their career development.
Today, I’m the CEO of a digital commerce platform. Having joined the company as the only woman on the C-suite, I’m now actively bringing female leadership to the executive team. Here are some of the key lessons I’ve learned and would like to pass on to aspiring female entrepreneurs:
Navigating Boardroom Dynamics
Like most Israelis, I jumped straight from leaving high school into my mandatory military service, where I served in the Israel Defense Forces’ prestigious 8200 military intelligence unit. I spent my service applying technological solutions to complicated topics, usually with a lot of men in the room. After experiencing that baptism of fire, I saw no reason why I couldn’t make myself heard in business settings as well.
While everyone’s background is different, the reality is that all women in tech — simply by virtue of being in tech — acquire extensive experience in navigating tricky interpersonal dynamics. Vital networking and relationship-building moments frequently take place outside formal meetings, and small talk often feels less natural for women in a male-dominated space.
I’ve learned that employees often flourish under the sort of calm authoritativeness that women leaders often bring, especially when compared to some men who talk loudly and at length. I encourage women to prepare and participate. Feel confident to take a position and invest in building a rapport with everyone in the room. This will enhance an executive’s overall credibility, which makes those tough small-talk interactions significantly easier.
Being A Role Model Within Your Company
There’s a glut of female talent in tech, but all too often highly competent women remain in mid-level management positions. Male executives have even asked me — with great surprise — why skilled managers shy away from taking the step up to more senior roles. They assume that the doors are open but women aren’t taking advantage of available opportunities.
The reality is that there’s a lot of stigma surrounding the potentially detrimental impact of career advancement on women’s work-life balance. My response to that is that executives do work long hours and promotions will come at the expense of family time. I believe that’s a worthwhile sacrifice for some women to make in order to set an example and bring about change, and that lesson has helped numerous women make courageous career decisions.
Even when women decide to take on greater responsibility after having raised a family, there are plenty of advantages to assuming leadership roles at a later age, by which time they are significantly more mature and experienced.
There aren’t many opportunities for training as a CEO; for most CEOs, it’s their first time on the job. As a result, CEOs have to acknowledge that they’re in a constant learning process. It takes a degree of maturity to realize that knowing what you don’t know and enlisting support from colleagues where necessary is actually a mark of confidence.
Managing A Crisis
It’s often argued that women are better crisis managers than men — look no further than suggestions that nations led by women provided the best response to the Covid-19 pandemic. For me, the learning curve started at home: being a mother offered excellent crisis management training.
All enterprises have had to adapt in some way or another in the wake of the pandemic, and having experienced uncertainty is highly valuable when responding to sweeping and unexpected change. Crises also prompt companies to try something different, and many women gain unexpected opportunities in this way — it’s easier for directors to take what they perceive as a risk when there’s less to lose.
To use my experience as an example, I was appointed as CEO at a transition point for the company, and could immediately bring fresh perspectives to aspects of business which required innovative thinking. Nobody knew exactly what impact Covid-19 would have on the industry, but the end result was certainly positive: We rode the crest of a threefold increase in online grocery’s market share to achieve 300% year-on-year growth, scaling up drastically in a short period of time.
Putting Theory Into Practice: What Women Leaders Can Achieve
I’ve consistently tried to internalize the insights I acquired from my years as a lower-ranked employee, and I’ve tried to base my management style on what a younger version of me would have needed and wanted. I know that I’d have appreciated feeling that my opinion matters.
An employee once told me that he’d never worked for a female CEO before and one of the key differences he identified was management through holistic compassion: Employees were no longer seen as merely cogs in the machine. As a CEO, you have to support and inspire the best from the team around you, incorporating everyone’s knowledge to make the best decision for the company.
Having shared my perspectives and fostered a broad network of women entrepreneurs, I’ve had the privilege of seeing more than a few women rise through the ranks of their companies. Perhaps most gratifying, though, is that my 14-year-old daughter and her friends now see having a female CEO in the family as entirely natural. In a few years’ time, an entire generation will enter the workforce thinking the same way, making what now seems extraordinary perfectly ordinary.
Article Credit: forbes