00:00
Stephanie
My name is Stephanie Slocum. I am the founder of a company called engineer’s rising LLC, where I am a leadership and business coach for women in stem.
00:10
Chris
Well, great to have you on the show, Stephanie, thank you for joining us. So how did you get into this? What’s your, what’s your background?
00:17
Stephanie
Okay, so I should first start out with, I just said I founded a company. It was never in my life plan to found a company. So I like many people. When I went to university, I struggled to figure out where I should go, but I knew I liked math and science and I found the major of architectural engineering, which is the kind of art and science of both architecture and engineering squish them together. I spent 15 years designing the parts of buildings that hold them up. The structure of those buildings and what I realized along the way is that I really, I love the analysis design part of the technical fields, but I also really loved the people part. I found great joy in mentoring, other people, teaching non-technical skills, particularly for women, but for men to my people. I ended up putting all of that into a book.
01:19
Stephanie
I am also a writer, so I I’m the weird technical person that has loved writing since as long as I can remember. I put all that into a book just to kind of see what would happen and put it out into the world. At that moment in time, this was a side project. I was working full time in engineering for someone else. I put that book out into the world. I pretty quickly got asked to go do speaking for young professionals groups, and I was taking vacation days to do that. That was the first moment I realized, oh, wait, someone will pay you to come talk about topics that I’ve loved talking about. Six months after that book came out, I ended up resigning from my engineering job and jumping into mentoring, coaching other women. Full-time I like to say I have the best job in the world because I get to blend all of the kind of technical analysis data sensibilities with the business stuff, which I also geek out on.
02:22
Stephanie
So yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing. And that was three years ago. So to give you a context.
02:28
Chris
Yeah. I was going to ask her, I was going to ask when it goes to three years ago. I think, I mean, how did you find that shift then between a full-time engineering role into being speaker, mentor that’s so that’s quite a shift. How did you, how did you deal with that tipping point?
02:47
Stephanie
Yeah, so I found it to be very challenging as a technical person. I had no background whatsoever in for example, marketing and sales. That was not, and I would never, I, the people part, but I’m also an introvert. I would never have considered myself a people person. Like I’m not the person or at least in my prior engineering life, who would have been all gung ho on networking, going to events, that thing. At first I’m like, okay, well I just need to learn the thing. I just need to go to marketing and sales things and learn from other people who have done it before. I pretty quickly realized I had a lot of mindset challenges that came from the technical background. For example, a perfectionism tendencies, which I imagine a lot of our listeners have,
03:40
Chris
And I have that as well. I think that I had an issue with sales and marketing.
03:46
Stephanie
Yeah. Yeah. So, as an entrepreneur, if you have perfectionist tendencies, what that does is you’re like, okay, I have to have, my program has to be perfect before I stick it out into the world. I would work on something for months and months, and then I would put it out and then no one would buy it. That was about the first year and a half, two years of my business that I would do. These things work really hard, put in all the hours to do it, put them out into the world. I realized that, okay, like we are objectively smart people, right? Like we’re in technology. It’s not that I couldn’t figure it out it’s that I needed to find people who had done this before to help me. I think that lesson applies no matter what field you’re in and that recognizing, okay, you can very much accelerate your path to being successful.
04:42
Stephanie
If you have people, whatever you want to call them, mentors, your board of directors, people you can talk to and say, okay, how can I do this better? It was at that point, I learned that about things like market research. Talking to your clients and finding out what they want, whether your client is an individual person and you’re running a company or your quote unquote client is your direct manager and finding out, okay, what’s important to them. That giving, helping them get what they want means you can be more successful in your role.
05:18
Samuel
If that conflicts with your introversion of going out there and having to talk to your customer and various things like that.
05:27
Stephanie
Yeah. At first I struggled from what do I say, syndrome we’ll call it that. I also felt like, I felt like if I was going out to talk to people, I didn’t know that meant that I had to have like something ready to sell them. I was stuck in this kind of brain trash land, which is what I call those a saboteurs internal saboteurs that show up when you’re doing something that is out of your comfort zone. I, what I ended up doing is I had another entrepreneur friend that they’re like, okay, you need to reframe this for yourself. You need to think of it as talking to people to find out what their needs are, what their challenges are, what they’re struggling with and kind of help co-create with them, how you can solve this problem. That got me thinking about, okay, like, how can I turn this?
06:26
Stephanie
Not from feeling like this is a sales conversation I’m having with someone, but two, we are like problem solving together. I even as an introvert, I love other people’s stories. Put me in an individual or small group situation where I could ask people, okay, like what are you dealing with? No, really how, what, how is your day to day? I really want to know, I’m not just asking that the seizure sleep and transforming it into, okay. I want to know your story and what your challenges and understand how I might be able to help. Shifting to that mindset of service really was the kind of game changer for me and how I approach all of those conversations. Because I started my business as I alluded to, but maybe haven’t said directly yet because I wanted to make a bigger impact in the world than I felt I could have in my technical design roles.
07:22
Stephanie
Coming from this place of service, really tapping into, okay, what matters to me and how I show up in the world. Translating that into the market research sales process was kind of my path to being more comfortable in that space.
07:39
Samuel
Did you notice any kind of immediate benefit from having spoken to your potential customers and all the rest of it?
07:48
Stephanie
Yeah, absolutely. The first benefit I noticed was that I didn’t have to try and sell things as hard. So what do I mean by that? People would have a conversation with me. We we’d talk about challenges and things like that. I would tell them, okay, well, I’m going to take this conversation and think through, okay, what could I do that might be able to help you here? I would kind of having a second conversation and I would share what I did. I just very kind of casually because I am recognizing about myself. I’m never going to be a like hardcore closer sales person. And that is completely cool with me. And I’m like, okay, are you interested? Would you, would you like to sign up for this? Most of the time, if they accepted that second call and ended up being a yes. For me, it was finding a way to sell in a way that was authentic.
08:45
Stephanie
Once I found that it became a lot easier, which ultimately resulted for more revenue and more success for me once found that path,
08:57
Chris
You go through a similar cycle with the actual speaking engagements you were doing as well, because I think I’m probably better on a one-to-one basis rather than on a large platform basis. I think it’s difficult, isn’t it? I think that knowing what to say and the value in what you’re saying, all the stuff you were saying then is like, it’s it eats away at you when you’re in the midst of these conversations? I’m wondering, did you have to get over that same thing with your public speaking?
09:25
Stephanie
Yes, I did. And, and let’s talk about that for a moment because if I even went back five years ago and I saw my future self as a paid public speaker, I would have laughed at even that concept. The first time I had to give a presentation in my technical career to anyone besides just a small team in like a conference room was 10 years in. So this is not something I practiced. This is not something I had done a lot of. I’d heard, oh, go toastmasters are going to go to different things like that. For me, what it came down to is I am a writer, as I mentioned. Spending a lot of time preparing and I would literally write out scripts of here’s what I’m going to say. I’d write out bullet points, outlines all of those things. I’d spent a lot of time preparing the presentation and practicing it.
10:21
Stephanie
I would get to a point where, okay, I have this presentation now I need to go give it to lots of people. I literally looked at this as you’ve got to put in the hours of practice. I mean, it’s not just preparation, but giving it to people. Like for example, in the first year of my business, I went around and gave some paid, but a whole lot of free presentations on the same topics. That I got very comfortable, for example, with storytelling, which is another really good skill that a lot of technical people don’t have, or if you used to have it, you haven’t practiced it. We don’t know, we don’t know how to tell stories. I had to kind of relearn that and put in the reps, what I will say is, okay, so that first time I gave a presentation, 10 years into my career, I was physically shaking.
11:13
Stephanie
I had practiced a ton. I had even down to writing in every single word I was going to say in my PowerPoint thing, but I was still physically shaking. I still got really nervous. Does that feeling go away? I imagine some people are asking and yes it does, but I’ve given, I don’t know, 50 presentations in the last year alone to more than 5,000 different individuals. At some point you start to think, okay, like I’m excited instead of feeling the nervous butterflies, it’s, I’m excited to share this and see how this might, how attending this event or listening to me speak might make a difference for someone else. Again, I’m coming back to that service thing. For me, that service is what has kicked me out of, I’m an introvert. I would much prefer to kind of hide in my office, create stuff, put it out in the world and not get feedback on it.
12:08
Stephanie
Yeah, like I would, if I was doing what was comfortable, that’s what I would do. What I’ve realized is if I want to have the impact in the world that I want to have, that message has to go way out beyond my desk in my office. It has to get out into the world.
12:25
Chris
Yeah. You got to get outside your comfort zone. Absolutely. Have you changed your style of presentation? You still actually like writing everything out.
12:35
Stephanie
Absolutely. In the beginning I was writing every single sentence out I have on certain topics of my presentation. For example, one of them is popular topics that I speak on is developing professional role confidence. Developing confidence in your abilities, in your job and that particular topic I can now kind of go off the cuff on, because I’ve given a version of that presentation so many times, but last month I gave an entirely new presentation and guess what? Almost, almost everything I think I was every other slide now was still written out for me. It’s because I’m a writer because I process things in written or visual form. So like I love infographics. I like drawing out things so I can see visually analogies. I don’t do so well on improv. For example, I’m not, I don’t tend to be an off the cuff kind of person.
13:39
Stephanie
I found a process that works for me. Then, after, since I’ve practiced so much now I’m to the point that I don’t have to write everything down because I know me showing up with all the knowledge I have on the, on whatever topic I’m speaking on, that is going to be enough. Some of the, this is also a worth issue in terms of thinking like, are your perfectionist tendencies, like, why are they there for me? This was kind of a, like, if I want to play armchair psychologist for a moment, for me, it was coming from this place of, okay, I’m not a speaker, even though I’ve spoken now a lot, I’m not a speaker. I’m not this, I’m not that like, we have all these identity stories. We tell ourselves about what we are and are not. For me on the speaking side, I had so much ingrained, oh, I’m not a speaker.
14:32
Stephanie
I’m not a speaker that I was very likely over-preparing because I felt like I wasn’t good enough to just show up just as I am.
14:42
Chris
Yeah. I went through a similar cycle, to be honest, I am well early on, I was a vice president of my student union, which I don’t think you quite the same thing in American universities. Maybe you do on my show, but it was like a student representative from, for my university. It was a paid position full time. You either take it as a gap year whilst you’re studying, or you do it when you F when you’ve graduated, which I did. We had to do presentations to all of the students across the campus, which was, quite big and daunting. One of the first tasks that you had to do as an elected officer. I was really uncomfortable with that because I had speeches that had been written for me. Eventually I had to just get to bullet points. Cause I couldn’t read all of the words and actually presented at the same time.
15:27
Chris
I thought I found it really quite an quite difficult challenge to move, to making it more natural rather than it being quite wooden. I think that presentation skills thing is really quite difficult to master.
15:41
Stephanie
It is it is. I mean, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it or what there’s a saying that, at your funeral, people would rather be in the casket than doing the public speaking, like one of the top fears, but on the same token, if particularly if your field is in a technology based field where let’s be Frank, the bar is really low for public speaking. Like you don’t have to be good, you have to be willing to do it. If you’re willing to put of effort into practicing that and getting away from the wooden newness of it, that can make you really stand out.
16:28
Chris
See, I think that’s quite an inspiring thought. I don’t think I’d really thought about it like that for a, from a technology perspective that the bar is really low. Yeah. Well, yeah, it is quite well. It’s not inspiring from an industry perspective, but it’s an inspiring from an individual perspective that if you think you’ve got something to say, then actually, yeah, you probably can go out and do it and not necessarily worry about it. Cause I think that’s one of the things that we all fear is like, who would want to listen to me, ?
16:54
Stephanie
Yeah. This is something, I mean, I know I definitely struggled with both. Who’d want to listen to me and how do I make my point? Because I think we’ve all had the experience of sitting in a meeting. We have a brilliant idea. We say it and it gets shot down immediately. You’re like, oh, this is a brilliant idea. Why can’t anyone else see it? Public speaking has also helped me be able to just do basic stuff, like articulate my ideas better in a meeting or a group setting or in any other kind of setting where you’re talking like a zoom call.
17:32
Chris
So, so in leading up to writing your book, did you get that same who wants to listen to what I’ve got to say?
17:38
Stephanie
Absolutely. The impetuous for writing the book was actually, I hit a point in my career. I mean, I was mentoring and coaching other people this, but I also was looking for resources and I didn’t find a resource that is precisely like my book. So my book is called she engineers. It is essentially all the things that I wish someone had told me when I started my career in engineering, basically all the non-technical things that you need to do or know or understand to be successful because there’s a lot of, what will I call them? Unwritten rules in your career. Like we can go to school and learn a lot of the technical stuff. We learned a lot of the technical stuff on the job and by doing it, but then there’s all these other rules that no one tells you about. Like, if you want to get promoted, how to cultivate a relationship with decision makers in your firm, if they’re not like your direct, the direct people you’re working with, how do you do that?
18:43
Stephanie
Or like, lots of people don’t even know you need to do that. All those things went into the book. I got to the, I would say the final hours before publishing it and I sell, I self-published the book I had, I still had all those doubts. I was like, well, do I really want to put this out in the world? Because there’s literally, if you’re self publishing a book, there’s literally a button that you press that like publish, okay, now it’s out there. I’m sitting there at my computer being like, okay, here’s the button, am I sure I want to press this button? What if my book is crap? What if like, what if everyone hates it? What, like all these, what ifs? What if it’s terrible, who’s gonna want to listen to me. And I kept not coming back. I have three daughters and I have seen firsthand the impact between my daughters and the people I’m mentoring and the people I work with, the impact that just one person either believing in you or showing up at the right moment with that pertinent piece of advice can change your entire career trajectory for the better I’ve seen the impact that can have.
19:56
Stephanie
I thought to myself, okay, if me putting out me being willing to be vulnerable and putting this book out into the world can help even one other person to not have to struggle in the same ways I did. Would it be worth it? And I’m like, absolutely. It would be worth it. So I shut my eyes. I like, fingers crossed, press the button and the book came out into the world.
20:21
Chris
It’s got quite a lot of very positive reviews on it, on Amazon as well, which is, must be really lovely to be able to see.
20:28
Stephanie
It is it is. I also, I mean, I, I do have a couple, people who weren’t thrilled with it as well.
20:35
Chris
Well, there’s always one.
20:37
Stephanie
Yeah. Well that’s actually, when I go on Amazon, I’m like, okay, book reviews. If they have no like one or two star reviews and I’m like, are these reviews fake?
20:49
Chris
Yeah. I saw something the other day where someone had said, if people, if the, if you haven’t got some haters, then you’re not trying hard enough, which I got to think of this quite. That’s quite a positive way of looking at it as well. Isn’t it?
20:59
Stephanie
Exactly, exactly. But the,
21:01
Chris
The goal then, so, I mean, it was, it I’ll be honest. I haven’t read the book I’m afraid, but the it’s very female focused, I suppose, in terms of like how to help other females get on in engineering and specifically in constructing. In constructing in construction, which I imagine is probably quite a male dominated world.
21:19
Stephanie
Yeah. Most of the people in my world are typically are in technology construction or somewhere related into like architecture building stuff. Because what I have found is that this exact stories are different, but the problems are the same. The book is really for the young ish. First 10 years of your career, ambitious woman who is trying to figure out what’s next for her. Now that said, I have been told by particularly owners of small engineering firms of which there are tons in fields like civil engineering, for example, that they have given the book to all of their project managers and client facing people to read because so much in it was relevant to them. I talk a lot about things like first figuring out what you want in your career, but then also how do you acquire those skills and how do you show up in a way where you’re demonstrating your knowledge and how your skills align with the business bottom line?
22:32
Stephanie
I came at engineering very much with a business, bent a business mindset in terms of, okay, how does my role fit into making my firm money? I firmly believe when you know that and can articulate it and can maximize what you’re doing day to align with that. You can basically write your own ticket to wherever you want to go in your career or your business. Because, I started out going into engineering because I love the technical work, but at the end of the day, what keeps you employed is how you, in some way, shape or form have to be making your employer, or if you’re an entrepreneur, your own business money. Keeping that in mind, as you’re moving forward is what will protect you. At least to some extent when the inevitable, economic downturns, layoffs come is how well you can tie your value to that.
23:30
Chris
What was the impetus for actually stringing this altogether into it, into a book then? Was it that you learned, a whole load of things that if you’d known earlier to your point, then you probably would have got there faster or that thing. What were the things that you learned then? There a brief summary of like, I wish I hadn’t done this.
23:51
Stephanie
Okay. Actually. I would say that the core, I think the core message of the book, which I think applies to everybody, no matter where they are, is this idea that you have got to own your path. So what do I mean by that? All the way up through school, even up through college, our paths are generally laid out for us. We are told to go to school for a certain length of time that when you’re in these classes, pass this test, do this homework. If you do well, eventually that will lead to a job. It’s very formulaic for the most part. Do a, B, C, D E F G go on your way. All of a sudden you get out into your first job. If you’re anything like me, you see, okay, you only see your manager, your first manager is you see it as your teacher.
24:51
Stephanie
You look to your manager and you say, okay, manager, you need to tell me kind of what I need to do, what my options are for where I can go. This very broad field, and you kind of abdicate your responsibility for your career to someone else. You wait for someone to show up and tap you on the shoulder and say, Hey, you’re good at this. You should go do that. Now, in reality, that’s not how works. In reality, you need to be able to speak up for yourself, advocate for yourself, decide for yourself where you want to go, what skills you want to apply and be open to the opportunities that will get you there. This book kind of walks you through. Number one, how do you figure that out? How do you figure it out as a woman in a male dominated field, where there can be a lot of double standards, unconscious biases that will show up even from very well-intentioned people.
25:51
Stephanie
I mean, I’m fortunate to be able to say all of my managers, I’ve worked with all very nice people, all, very well intentioned. This stuff still shows up. I do it. We all do it. And, and just being able to figure out, where you want to go and owning and being a hundred percent responsible for, okay. If I’m not where I am right now, what can I do right now to help me get to where I want to go again? I feel like our school systems and I have complete utmost respect for teachers. All of that, I believe we’re working in a broken system is what’s going on here, but it creates this challenge that people get into their careers and they don’t take ownership. When they do try and take ownership, they don’t know how or where to go so that they’re not just spinning their wheels.
26:40
Stephanie
That is the core message of the book, the core thing I learned, and I want to distill, both to my three daughters and then the next generation.
26:51
Chris
The difficulty was, I suppose, then not knowing what the path was to begin with is that the case?
26:57
Stephanie
That’s some of the difficulty, I would say the other piece of it is the, how do you deal with uncertainty? I find myself, this is something I am still working on to this day and I will continue to work on it. When I talk to technical folks, and at the time I wrote the book, I actually could not articulate it like this, but I see it. Clearly now that I wanted to share it is that often we look for certainty where there is none. For example, a lot of people have been brought up on this idea that going to get a job and working for someone else means job security. Well, let me tell you, as having lived through a number of economic downturns where entire office is closed, entire firms, closed departments laid off all of that. It doesn’t matter how technically gifted you are.
27:53
Stephanie
If your firm goes under the firm, you’re working workers under. This idea that working for someone else is job security is a myth that we’ve essentially kind of created to maybe make us feel better.
28:11
Chris
These are the things that have been in place for, a hundred odd years now where, you go to school and then you learn enough that you can go and have a job. You work for the man for the rest of your life, and then you die. It’s not particularly inspiring. It’s also, geared to you, do all of your learning in school, and then you’re done. You just, then you’re just a laborer for whatever purpose. And, maybe you get promoted and you get to be a manager, but that’s about it. So, yeah, I think it is rooted in that.
28:45
Stephanie
It definitely is. We, I see this often that people, okay, so let’s say someone says, oh, I’m going to do all the work and figure out, exactly where I want to go. Okay. Then now I have a career plan. Well, and now I’m not going to deviate from that career plan because this is my plan. What happens is when you’re so focused on the path, you’re w you’re going on, you have blinders to potentially all the opportunities going on around you, and we’ve seen entire industry suffer from this. Like, if you were in the newspaper industry, in the nineties, you may have, you’re like, okay, I’m going to major in journalism. I’m going to go into newspaper writing. The internet, like hadn’t really appeared yet.
29:33
Chris
Oh yeah. Yeah. My, my wife studied publishing at university. You know,
29:37
Stephanie
There you go. Like, there will be a lot of jobs. There are jobs now that weren’t even thought of. Weren’t even in the realm of the dream world. When I graduated from college, which I’ll age myself here is about 20 years ago, now that you can do now. I feel like the same thing can be said, for example, entrepreneurship, that it used to be that you couldn’t start a company as one person, like you had to have a team. You had to go raise a bunch of VC capital. You had to have a physical location, rent an office space, all of that. Now one of the things I will often encourage people to do is at least start either a side hustle or a blog or a podcast or something that you can own. Why? Because what I found is, remember I said the core message of a lot of the things I talk about is this idea of owning your own thing.
30:38
Stephanie
What I found is that when people have something that they own, whether it be a, it can be not make you any money to start, right? It could be something that they own, whether it be your chair of some committee in your industry, you start some group that you’re interested in, the confidence you get from doing that and knowing, Hey, I’m a hundred percent responsible for doing this bleeds over into every other aspect of your life.
31:05
Chris
That’s interesting. You were saying that just having some level of ownership in some part of your life is going to give you more confidence in, even if you just, if, even if you’re content to just work, continue working, doing the nine to five type day.
31:18
Stephanie
Absolutely. Because for some people, the nine to five is the thing for you. Like I’m not at all saying everyone should just, quit their jobs and go start a company. Don’t do that. If you are going to quit your job and start a company, I’d also say, if you can start it while you’re still working for someone else, that is the best. That’s what I did. I’m not saying that ethically, you can do that in all. There’s definitely situations where you can’t do that ethically. I think there are a lot of situations where you can, but again, I think just owning, having something in your life you own, even if it’s just, what I’m deciding today, I’m getting in shape and I’m going to go run that marathon. Again, brings knowing that you can do hard things and that you had a hundred percent ownership of something somewhere else bleeds into your work life in ways that are hard to quantify until you can see the before and after, because there’s a lot of in the workplace, this idea that the person that raises their hand and speaks up, tends to be the person that’s going to get ahead.
32:28
Stephanie
It’s not necessarily the best idea that gets taken in a meeting. It’s often the idea that someone talks the most about. You have that confidence, even you need to get it from outside of work. I, I found through a lot of my research in studying that went into the book and the work I’m doing now, women especially often get a lot of their kind of confidence leadership skills outside of the workplace initially. Eventually their work catches up, but it starts with kind of that foundation of, Hey, I’m going to own this. I know I can do hard things. At work, what happens is people start raising their hand or going after opportunities that before they would have said, no, I’m not quite qualified for that. Or I’m going to, I’m just going to keep my head down and work hard until someone taps me on the shoulder, which usually never happens.
33:22
Chris
Do you think that men and women come into the workplace with different mindsets to begin with them?
33:28
Stephanie
I do. I mean, we come to the workplace with all with a backpack of all that society tells us we should or should not be within our gender roles. For a lot of women, they have grown up with the idea that, being communal people, pleasing tendencies, we will often ask permission. If you imagine the grade school that you wait until the T raise your hand and wait until the teacher calls on you to say anything.
34:08
Chris
I remember trying to ask permission my first job to go to the toilet. I didn’t know if it was a thing I was allowed to do.
34:17
Stephanie
Yeah. Of course, like I’m speaking in complete generalities here because there’s definitely like we have a lot of studies that show, there are definitely some commonalities between what society tells women they should be and what society tells men they should be. These bleed over into every aspect of our work and life, including, how we approach our first jobs. I mean, I’ve definitely seen that there seem to be more men that sh that will adopt the fake it, be comfortable adopting the fake it till you make it thing. If you talk to a woman about it, she’ll say, well, that doesn’t feel authentic to me. Or some version of like that doesn’t align with who I am. I’m not going to show up that way. I’m just going to, keep my head down, keep working hard. Eventually my good work will be noticed, which is again, a complete fallacy for everyone, no matter what gender you are.
35:15
Chris
W when you’re coaching, then through engineer’s rising, when you’re doing these programs, what is it you’re trying to achieve? Are you trying to, are you trying to help women to play within the world that we live in? Or are you, do you want to try and have a bigger impact in changing the culture in the.
35:36
Stephanie
Workplace? Yes. Is the answer to that? Yes. Okay. So often, so individual women. I have a number of one-on-one programs and group coaching programs that are often the person that comes into them is often someone who is frustrated with where they’re at. They may not know what’s next for them. They may be in some career transition, either looking for a new job wants to start a family soon. Not sure how that’s going to fit in, but in all cases, she is frustrated with where she’s at. For those women, often I provide a loving reality check about what they need to do. We kind of craft a plan to get them unstuck from wherever it is that they are stuck. Often when you’re stuck, there is a gap between where you are and where you think you should be. These thoughts of I should have been farther along than I am by now, and understanding where are those, usually those should thoughts about here’s.
36:50
Stephanie
What I should be doing again, are driven by kind of these ingrained societal stereotypes, either related to gender roles or race, or how you were brought up, that you’re carrying around with you, that you don’t even know you have. It’s also the reality that, and a lot of organizations, let’s say for example, you are being treated unfairly for any reason. A lot of times you can’t go to your manager and say, you’re treating me unfairly, stopped doing that and treat me for it. Like that’s not going to get you anywhere. How do you make your business case? How do you articulate your value in that context so that you can move forward from yours, that position. Sometimes that is going to find a new job. A lot of times it’s not. That’s one piece of what I do is helping those individual frustrated with him.
37:42
Stephanie
On the other side of this, I believe that how we fix this problem is we have more diversity in leadership. So we in tech, it still happens. Actually all across all this is engineering stem. Any of these fields, often the reason someone is initially promoted to a manager position is because they were really good individual contributor technically. They’re promoted to that manager position with no manager training, with no leadership training. In some cases, they don’t even want to be a manager, but what they learned was that the only way to get paid more and move up in the organization was to get a manager position. Okay. That happens, we particularly without training, again, all these kinds of like unconscious biases come and that we tend to promote and look more positively on people that remind us of us. This is everyone I do this, you do this.
38:45
Stephanie
Unless we are super mindful of that, we’ll just, we create an echo chamber without even thinking about it, an echo chamber of people like us. And so that is the other problem. I would say within the organizations that I work to solve and help organizations set up programs to solve this, because what I’ve recognized is it has to be a, two-prong approach. You can empower individuals and you need to empower the organizations. Yes, I have seen empowered individuals affect change in organizations that I didn’t think they’d be able to pull it off and they did, but I’ve also found it vice versa, because I do think it’s a myth that if your organization, isn’t a hundred percent supportive of you as an individual, while your only choice is to go find coupon, job hopping until you find the right place. Like, yes, there’s a time for that.
39:44
Stephanie
The reality is I think more nuanced and that a lot of organizations, it’s just a matter of how do you present the business case that always gives back to the business case? How do you present the business case in a way that you can get buy-in for the initiatives that allow us to get more diversity into leadership.
40:05
Samuel
With your clients? Who, who are the ones coming to the, or those are the organizations coming to you and saying like, we need more diversity in our leadership, or is it someone else?
40:20
Stephanie
So it’s individuals within the organization. Right? Usually it is one of the frustrated women who I helped who is now trying to start some women’s initiative leadership or otherwise within her organization. Sometimes it comes the other way, but usually it’s someone in that like middle, I’m going to say middle management, who is trying to like, bring that initiative into her organization.
40:52
Chris
Over the last three years or so, have you found that it’s got easier or harder or, I mean, it, cause this has been a huge topic culturally globally, is it getting easier or is that making it worse?
41:06
Stephanie
It depends the, I see two common reactions to see the heightened awareness in the world about racial and gender issues. The two reactions is one, a level of defensiveness towards, I don’t want to be called any IST. Re racist, sexist, whatever is, do you want to add? Therefore I am going to pretend that we are all the same, treat everyone exactly the same and pretend that none of this matters. I don’t want to talk about it at work because that will open up a can of worms. I might be accused of being an Este. That’s one side of this that I think the conversation has polarized people. So there’s one group like that. The other group is like, oh, well, yeah, this is an issue. Let’s start having conversations about this. Even if we’re not quite ready to do anything about it yet, let’s have, start having more open conversations with this, about all the different identities at work, because I have never talked to anyone in the technical fields who did not say man, woman, everyone in between that at some point, and at many points in their career, they felt unappreciated alone, isolated.
42:30
Stephanie
Like no one got them like this. These are very common feelings. We don’t talk about all the pieces of your identity, race and gender are obvious ones that you can see as soon as you see someone. There are differences between, were economic status of the household you were raised in, single parents, two parents, if you were a veteran, like there’s all sorts of different identity things, introvert extrovert that makes every single person unique. It’s, it’s, how do you react to all these things in the world? Are you reacting with defensiveness? Let’s kind of put our head in the sand about this, and we’re not going to talk about it versus, let’s just like our technical problems in our work that we have to know the constraints and the parameters in order to solve the problem. We can’t just design something in a little bubble and push it out into the world and hope it works.
43:32
Stephanie
The people I work with are all the, let’s talk about this. We have an awareness of this, let’s fix this problem. That’s why I said, does it always work out? No, because if I’m talking to someone who is convinced that the way to solve the problem is by pretending it doesn’t exist. Like imagine if we did that in our technical work, how bad the outcome would be, which is going to pretend that particular problem doesn’t exist. Therefore we don’t have to say.
43:59
Chris
That’s where a lot of my consultancy work has come from actually, when this hit the wall for people,
44:05
Samuel
Do you see a future in solving this? Because I feel like it’s a long journey. It really is to get to a place of where we solved this problem. What’s your outlook on when we’d be in a satisfactory place with recognizing all of this? Yeah,
44:22
Stephanie
Yeah. My outcome of when we will be in a satisfactory place. I want to see the percentage of women specifically, who are graduating with stem degrees to match the percentage of women working in the field and in leadership positions. So, I mean, I can talk to engineering specifically because those numbers, I know really well off the top of my head right now, depending on what field you’re in, you have about 15% at the high end and eight to 9%. 15% tends to be in civil engineering. The environmental engineering actually has the most of women. Once you get into like utilities and construction, that tends to be down at the eight, 9%. Those are the retention rates, but we have about 40% graduating with engineering degrees. So we have 40% graduating. We only have 10 to 15% staying in the field. The percentage of women who are leaders like C, and I’m going to say like, you can be a leader wherever you are.
45:33
Stephanie
However, the percentage of women in charge of their organizations is somewhere down like one, 2%. We have a very leaky cup here that we’re pouring. We’re doing a lot of outreach for younger people. Like here’s what stem is. It’s not just sitting in the corner and doing math all day long. Right? What we’re doing a lot of that thing. Even when you pile more and more people into the bucket, if you still have the leaks, it’s going to keep on coming out. Sam, back to your kind of, I think, where you were going with that is, so this is a problem that the retention rate hasn’t actually shifted significantly in 20 years, while at the same time, the number of people graduating with degrees in stem, I think has quadrupled. It’s a lot, we’ve had a lot more people coming in and especially a lot more women.
46:27
Stephanie
And, and we have a very large dichotomy here and where are the people going when they leave the industry? I can actually answer that question too, when it comes to women. A lot of people are like, oh, well, women are leaving because they’re starting families. I’m going to specifically speak to what’s going on in the United States because there’s, again, those are the statistics I’m most familiar with. There was a huge study that was funded by the national science foundation that found that they had, they tracked all the women that had left engineering specifically. And where did they go? They found that most of the women ended up in executive level positions in other industries. So think about that for a moment. From an organizational standpoint, you are spending all this time and money training, your people, training the future leaders, and they’re taking that training and they’re going to other industries like finance is a very popular one where those skills are, in the problem solving skills that you develop as an engineer are in really high demand.
47:38
Stephanie
I would ask to the, I have said this seamlessly, but seriously to organizations and CEOs, why are we shooting ourselves in the foot training people up that are good enough to be leaders in other fields, but for whatever reason, they are not promoted and happy in the technical fields. Again, like it’s not just women, it happens a lot.
48:05
Samuel
That’s so interesting because I, I always thought this is just the bubble that I’m in rather than anything else. I actually thought stem industries were very forward thinking in this kind of stuff. I thought were trying very hard, but that just kind of craps all over that idea because they’re succeeding in other industries, so a topic that often comes up with this type of these types of efforts is about positive discrimination. You talk those numbers and we can talk about, percentages and things like that. Just getting a high percentage isn’t necessarily a good thing or the right thing. How, how do you have any perspective on how we try not to encourage positive discrimination at all?
48:55
Stephanie
Okay. You say positive discrimination, I think what you’re referring to is the kind of tokenism of we’re gonna hire a woman or whatever, or promote a woman for the sake of having a woman on our team. That, is that what you’re referring to? Okay. Again, I’m going to go back to studies because I, I can share anecdotally what I see here, but I think there’s a lot, been a lot of good research around hiring and promotion practices. Let’s start there. If you have two resumes that are identical and you have a name of a person that sounds African-American versus a name of a person that is sounds obviously white, the white person is three times more likely to get called just for the interview. Similar things have been found when it comes to gender as well. One of the low hanging fruits for example, would be to, as you’re looking at, as an organization is looking at who am I going to bring in for an interview, take the names off the resumes, right?
50:02
Stephanie
Then you’re looking at pure qualifications. Obviously when they come in for the interview, you’re going to know that. I mean, that’s a pretty easy starting point for, how do we make sure qualifications are, w we’re hiring the most qualified person, which may happen to be a minority race or gender similarly on promotions. Often we find what it takes to get a promotion is a mystery to most people in an organization. You’re at a level you want to get to the next level, but you have no idea other than your manager’s benevolence, what you need to do to get to that next level. Transparency there, in terms of documenting, writing down, making it clear to everybody like here are the skills you need to do. Here’s the, if you’re in a small organization, maybe the work you need to bring in here’s what you need to do.
51:00
Stephanie
Let’s make a checklist in essential in essence for what you need to do to get to the next level. Now you have metrics to measure yourself against so that when it gets to time for the promotion, exactly. Okay, well, here’s why I’m falling short. This person, checked off all the boxes. So that’s why they get promoted. That creates, again, this isn’t, this creates better organizations for everyone, not just women. That’s what we find over and over again, when we implement hiring and promotion practices that are equitable to everybody, is that putting something in place benefits everyone. It creates less turnover in the organization as a whole, because you don’t have this now resentment for, oh, why did this person get promoted? And I didn’t. That also has, again, the benefit of creating more diversity in leadership within your organization.
51:59
Samuel
Yeah. I think that’s a fair point. The other question I had as well is around what you’re doing is very reactive to women and individuals coming forward to wanting change, wanting to develop, wanted to get promotions and all the rest of it. How are you touching on people who are rightly or wrongly, then not really a driver for change. They are kind of sitting back like, how are you convincing people that there is a change needs to be made more specifically women, because obviously that’s your folks there, but there are plenty of people who just do not see that there’s a problem or whatever, and that their minds to be changed, basically. How, how are you going to about doing that?
52:44
Stephanie
Yeah. Yeah. Again, I want to go back to this idea that I, one of the hard lessons I learned early on in my business was that when I went into convincing mode, I was already going to lose. Like, I wasn’t, I cannot make a point by convincing someone who doesn’t think there’s a problem, that there is a problem. They have to come to that conclusion themselves. Now, one of the best ways that we are convinced to take action or not is when we hear other people’s stories that resonate with our own. We hear a story and we can see ourselves within that person’s story, then we’re like, okay, well, you know that maybe my worldview has shifted . When you hear it again, okay. Maybe it’s shifted a little bit more. I’ve found myself focusing my efforts again, not on convincing because I can throw data and statistics at you all day long, that demonstrate there is a problem, but I also recognize data and statistics.
53:54
Stephanie
Aren’t going to do anything to someone who’s like, no, we don’t have a problem. However, hearing the story of someone that reminds them of their wife or their daughter or someone at work that has struggled with, let’s say, they’re struggling with a harassment discrimination situation at work, hearing that story and making it real for them may make a difference. A lot of my focus, and this is the reason why I wrote a book and I’m hoping to start a second one next year is in gathering the stories of successful women in the field. Like here’s some of the struggles they had, here’s the difficulties they had. Here’s how they overcame it. Because again, like that’s humans are wired to respond to stories. I’ve found my energy and efforts are best spent towards okay. Telling those stories, because those stories convince, but not in a convincing way, they also help people know they’re not alone.
54:56
Stephanie
They’re not the only ones dealing with those struggles, because how do we affect change? Well, even the people who are the most difficult to convince, if they see that organization X has affected a whole lot of change. Now all the women from organization Y are going to organization X, eventually the people at organization Y will be like, okay, we’re losing our people over there. What are they doing differently? Does that answer your question?
55:28
Samuel
Yeah. I actually think that’s why basically your second book is all about stories. I think that’s totally true when it starts to resonate because yeah. Change happens really from inside where it just clicks, it sounds like it’s ripe for visual, a documentary type of thing as well. If you’re telling stories and all the rest of it. So give Netflix a call. They won’t be able to,
55:52
Stephanie
Yeah, this is one of the reasons I get asked if I will start a podcast all the time and I’m like, I will at some point, not quite yet. I’m appreciative of the work you, Chris and Sam are doing with this podcast.
56:09
Samuel
Well, thank you.
56:11
Chris
I just wanted to return to that positive discrimination thing that the Sam mentioned briefly. So, because this comes down to like that quota thing of people wanting to have a quota on a board, is that a, is that still a positive thing too, for organizations to be having? Or is that a negative behavior? Because I get what you’re saying about, removing the blockers and then making it better for all cause 100% agree with that. Do you think it’s a negative behavior to have quotas or is that a positive?
56:38
Stephanie
So you’re going to love my answer. It’s going to be, it depends. Here’s why we have some organizations that are putting in quotas. If you don’t already have in policies and procedures that make your hiring and promotion processes fair and as unbiased as you reasonably can, it’s very likely you are going to result in a situation where everyone at the very top looks very similar, both in how they physically look and in management and leadership styles. And so how do you mitigate that? If you’ve had decades of essentially creating a leadership echo chamber, and I want to describe this more, because what we see happening when the criteria for getting promoted is not transparent throughout your organization, you are likely to promote people that remind you of you when you’re younger and have a similar leadership style to your own. We are in decades past, we have promoted much more on leadership style than leadership outcome.
57:47
Stephanie
I think as technical people, we can, all, we all recognize that outcomes are critically important to our jobs and how we get to the outcome is less important than that. We meet our deadlines and we get to those outcomes yet for, the leadership paths we have done the exact opposite for decades. How do you fix that problem when this problem has been there for so long, enter the quota situation. I think in order to immediate, like if you want to affect immediate change, the quotas can be a really good thing. However, here’s the challenge. There have been some studies that’s done that have shown, like until you have like one person that’s different, doesn’t do it until you have on the order of 30 to 40% of people who are different in some way from the rest of the group, all you’ve done. If you only have one is now that one person is the outsider for the group and actually can’t really affect any change with the larger group.
59:01
Stephanie
Like you’ve basically thrown the analogy I’ll use is if you are the single guy in the women’s doctor’s office, how uncomfortable do you feel? Right. That’s what women in the technical fields, when they’re the only one experienced experience all the time. While the fair part of me, like as soon as you say quota, I think most of us have this instinctual quota. Like that sounds terrible. That sounds not fair, very biased. We’re promoting people, not because they’re qualified, but because they meet a certain criteria like that is my gut reaction to the word quota. I think I’m not alone in a whole load in that gut reaction to the word quota. I also think that if you want a fast way to start seeing an immediate change in how leadership is run, understanding that essentially we’ve had decades of quotas in the other direction, right?
01:00:05
Chris
Unconscious, yes.
01:00:07
Stephanie
Conscious quotas. We just haven’t defined it. Like we just haven’t defined it like that. The, the quota can help. Now, the other thing is like, we’re talking about behavioral change here. This is hard stuff. This is not comfortable. Most of, most of us went into technology. Not because we love people, but because we like the technical work. You pile that on that, okay, the, this whole people thing, people are much more messy than my nice equations. When you pile that on, then you get extra resistance to either quotas or the types of policies that would enable people with diverse leadership styles to rise up through your organization. And so I think I agree. I can completely see both sides of the quota issue, but the reality is for many technical firms, I mean, the firm has been running a men’s support group for decades, right.
01:01:10
Stephanie
We just didn’t call it that. Now that kind of the women’s empowerment movement has kind of is starting to gain more traction and come of age, there’s all this resistance to, oh, we’re actually going to call it what it is.
01:01:25
Chris
Yeah. I D I think being able to call it things like a men’s support group, but it exposes the hypocrisy, doesn’t it of it. I think if you’re able to do that, then that’s probably something that’s more capable of breaking it down than the negative reaction that everybody has to quotas. Yep. That’s a good final thought. Isn’t it? Have you got anything else to us, Stephanie? There anything else that you’d like to tell us before we close off?
01:01:54
Stephanie
Yeah. I just want I’ve. My final thought is I’m very appreciative of you having me beyond the show, but if all the listeners just have one takeaway for this it’s that you, whatever, wherever you want to go, you can have control over your own destiny. You just have to like, embrace what you want to do and go for it. I believe that every single person has unique skills, gifts, and talents that when you bring it to your work, as long as you’re willing to embrace what they are and not try and hide them, that the sky is the limit for you, that your imagination is the only thing that is holding you back from all the success you want in the world.
01:02:39
Samuel
Wonderful. That was really good. Thank you so much for your time, Stephanie. Thank you very much.
01:02:43
Stephanie
Yeah. Thank you.
