If a woman focuses on competing with herself, she can set goals that fit the bigger picture of her career. “The most useful lessons/advice I’ve learned about how to succeed was the fact that I was constantly told that I always could do better. This has encouraged me to compete with myself and to set the bar higher for each of my attempts,” explained Angela Lee Foreman, the cofounder, CEO, and chairperson of Thriving Table, Inc. “Another useful piece of advice was that I needed to constantly allow myself to get outside of my comfort zone, which had allowed me to grow and enrich myself as a human being.” As Foreman explained, being in your comfort zone does not lead to dramatic growth. It is the challenges and failures that create concrete understanding. Knowing what not to do is often the first step in knowing what will lead to the correct path.
Feeling comfortable outside your comfort zone coupled with thinking outside the box is one true sign of an innovator. In a work setting, this involves thinking past what is provided to what is actually needed. “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than ask for permission,” said Pearlman. “That piece of advice can be helpful if you’ve been raised to stick to the rules. I learned in business (from men) that breaking rules can be very useful. If you succeed, then bosses care less about how you got there.” That can mean taking a risk on a project or even requesting necessary training. As Maya Mathias, author of How To Innovate: Volume 1: Unleash Your InnoMojo and founder at Inventive Links, recommends, “Don’t count on the organization to read your mind and give you the training and development you need. If you feel ill-equipped skill-wise, speak up and ask for what you need. That advice has served me well. Bosses would rather you admit to what you don’t know than to fake it and potentially create a bigger mess down the road.”
Women need to not only look outside the immediate opportunities they have at work, but when viewing their career, not just look at the position above them, but the bigger picture of what they want to achieve. Innovators do not confine themselves to one career track, but instead look at where they can grow and follow their passion. As Sheryl Sandberg puts it in Lean In, attributing the metaphor to Fortune magazine editor Pattie Sellers, her career climb wasn’t up a ladder: “A jungle gym scramble is the best description of my career.”
But the jungle gym scramble is not linear, and sometimes it’s hard to decide when to leap. Bhramara Tirupati, innovation instigator and community builder at The Inovo Institute, cautioned women against taking misguided career advice: “People, even well-meaning mentors, often put us in a box based on their own experiences or understanding of how things work. The truth is you won’t know what you are capable of unless you try it.” Jennifer Argüello, senior tech advisor for the Kapor Center for Social Impact, explained how she often jumped around in her career to learn new skills. All she learned came together to prepare her for her current position. “My career has not been linear. Looking back, I can see a narrative that explains where I am now. I was looking for work every two years early on in my career because the startups I worked for would die. This gave me tremendous resiliency to pick myself up and find new work. I’ve always kept an arc of a max of eighteen months doing the same job. As time has gone by, that arc has tended to shrink as I traverse from one role to the next. I see all the dots, and now it’s time to connect them. As an engineer, I learned how to build technically sound systems that were robust and got the job done. As a product manager, I learned how to listen to the consumer and drive teams to build products people love. As a consultant, I learned how to work with large global enterprises and build customized solutions. As a project manager, I know how to get things done on time, under budget, without burning out my team. As a community organizer, I know how to rally and mobilize people for the cause. And lastly, as a teacher, I know how to impart knowledge and show people how to learn. I have a really good mix of skills to reach my goals, and where I am lacking, I have the capacity to learn what I need to learn to get to the next step.” Instead of waiting for a promotion, she trusted her instinct and moved from a position when she felt she was no longer exponentially learning or being challenged. This compass directed her path.
Danae Ringelmann, the founder of Indiegogo, had no idea she would move from Wall Street to developing a crowdfunding platform. Ringelmann accredits the site to following everyday cues, “connecting the dots as they appeared in front of me, and being true to that. I had to start a company to solve a problem that I was feeling, facing, and witnessing every single day”— the problem of inefficient access to capital for innovators and creators. After Indiegogo launched, other crowdfunding platforms emerged, including Kickstarter. Ringelmann added, “All I was doing was paying attention to where my heart was leading my questioning mind every day, and that lead to me starting Indiegogo.”
Following gut intuition was a common theme among our ambassadors. A study at Canada’s University of Alberta found that the unconscious can sometimes play a role in helping us achieve a long-term or ongoing goal. The study gave some participants flashes of achievement-related words (like “strive” and “succeed”) for just microseconds at a time before an unrelated test. The participants didn’t consciously realize what they were seeing, but it changed their attitudes, in a subsequent part of the study, toward keywords related to achievement. The study states, “This pattern of findings supports our prediction that with an ongoing goal, such as achievement, that does not have a clear end point or ‘finish line,’ people continue to strive toward it after success experiences.”[1]
This study is supported by the approach of many ambassadors. “I agree that following your instincts is key to success. I rely on them. They are telling me things that I may not yet consciously recognize. I know instinctively if something is wrong with my kids before I can articulate it. Same for business. I know what’s the right thing to do before I can articulate it and definitely long before I will see any results that I can show others as proof,” explained Ana Redmond, CEO and software developer at Infinut.com. From her own experience, “I don't agree that risk-taking is against following one’s instincts. I can take far more risk if I trust my instincts. It’s calculated risk in the sense that I rely on the whole picture as I see it, not just a portion of it if I was breaking it down into constituent pros and cons or dollar amounts. But following my instincts makes it harder to explain to others (men or women) why I am making a particular decision. That is something I am still working on.”
Libby Leffler, strategic partner manager at Facebook, had an interesting inflection point in her career where she followed her instinct…but with a slight delay. She’d been working at Google as a strategist in Online Sales and Operations, but in 2008, Leffler was recruited to go work for Facebook. “I ended up not accepting the opportunity to move right away,” she said. “Google was a huge company. When I was there, there were probably twenty thousand people working there. The idea of leaving all of that to go to the unknown was pretty daunting. I was supposed to join a team of five or six people at Facebook, and it was a small company at the time and really, there was absolutely no way for me to know what it would become.” So she kept her job and spent the next few weeks musing about her decision. She believed in the mission of the company, Facebook’s desire to create a more connected world. “I mean, there was just a ton of opportunity for me at Facebook. I was really just eager to make an impact and have an almost entrepreneurial experience within a company. So that’s what pushed me to end up moving to go work at Facebook in 2008.” Since then, she went on to work as Sheryl Sandberg’s business lead at Facebook from 2009 to 2012 before moving to run partnerships in 2012.
Besides following intuition, another key skill, according to our ambassadors, is to ‘forever be a student.’ It is difficult to be creative if one does not absorb like a sponge all the newness and vibrancy of the world around them. “Learning never stops,” advises Laura Karolchik, owner/creative director at Mobile Chik. “I have witnessed many in technology unable to continue to work in their field because they won’t keep up with changes. Always keep up, attend webinars, seminars, workshops, and take classes. Technology is ever evolving, and you have to keep up to play the game.”
Learning and teaching go hand in hand. Mathias explained what enriches her life most: “Two consistently fulfilling threads have emerged through my eclectic work path so far: (1) the opportunity to accumulate new knowledge and master new skills and (2) the chance to nurture talent and human potential in my work teams and for my clients. Personal growth is an ever-constant goal I hold for myself and others—this is the fuel that gets me out of bed each day and raring to go.” Women have worked hard to break through barriers within their careers, but to create change, these learnings need to be shared.
When tackling biases, awareness is the first step. Nikki Barua emphasizes this as a major catalyst for change: “Engage in the discussion and drive more awareness. Make the role models visible so other women follow. Openly express your support for change within your organization.”
Events and books, including the White House Tech Inclusion day, Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, and The Athena Doctrine by John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio, among others, have been great at opening up discussion about these issues. As more women reach the top, there will be a domino effect in policies and cultures that will help women at all levels.
To transform the fields of STEM and entrepreneurship into a more welcoming place for young women to expand their network and to feel the fulfillment Mathias mentioned, women need to come together and act as role models and mentors to and for each other. As we discussed through the many ambassadors we’ve spoken to who have created change, many have felt the wake of those before them. Role models need to be tangible. Women can create change through making themselves available and relatable to those climbing the jungle gym above and below them. Pearlman described the impact of this bottom-up change:
“I hope that as more women move into leadership positions, women in entry or staff positions will be more encouraged to raise their own career aspirations. When women in the executive suite are no longer a rarity, then perhaps female leaders will not feel they need to be just like the men who came before them and will feel free to encourage and reward more feminine strengths in the workplace, such as collaboration, consensus management, and managing through encouragement and not fear. A more supportive work environment would benefit men as well as women.”
In the end, women need to support women—and, of course, both genders need to support each other. It is easier to take risks when you know there’s a safety net below. Women need to provide each other with that support network, encouragement, and advice that can prepare them to aim high and climb higher. As we’ve discussed throughout Innovating Women, there are numerous hurdles. Our ambassadors have shared ways to overcome obstacles and tactics for tackling day-to-day dilemmas. Even a quick recommendation or compliment after a meeting can have a big impact on another woman’s career. Changing the future of innovation requires women to support each other and for all people to reward and respect the virtuous circle of underutilized power in women who innovate.
[1] Sarah G. Moore, Melissa J. Ferguson, and Tanya L. Chartrand. “Affect in the Aftermath: How Goal Pursuit Influences Implicit Evaluations.” Psychology Press. 2011. P. 453-465.