Natasha Harvey on tech leadership and empowerment

The tech industry has been slammed in recent years as being a hostile place for women to work. Women represent 17% of the tech population and hold only 10% of leadership roles.

Empowering today’s young women to become tomorrow’s leaders will create more diverse role models in tech leadership and help more girls see the possibilities and positions they can aspire to. Here’s what you can do to make that happen.

1. Be the leader that walks the talk.

Show your beliefs through your actions. Participate in regular diversity initiatives and listen – mention in your communications what you learn from what you hear. Make it the responsibility of your leadership team, hold them, and yourself, accountable.

In particular, involve other senior men who are interested in diversity and inclusion to be ambassadors to support and include women. For change to happen on an organisational scale, men must be a part of the conversation.

2. Design a sh*t hot talent management programme

Start by selecting your future leaders along with a clear set of performance criteria in terms of behaviours, values, and skills that are important to your business.

Then draw up a programme to include the following areas:

• Training and development in business and leadership skills
• Regular structured discussion with line managers (who also need to understand their role) including feedback on strengths and development opportunities
• Internal mentoring to support career trajectory and personal growth
• A plan for rotation through key roles with opportunities to work with multiple senior leaders, in different functions (P&L, general management, sales, marketing, finance…) and, if possible, different geographies, to broaden experiences and exposure.
• Access to leadership-level networking events.

The microclimate for talent development, with commitment from line managers and executive sponsors, is vital to make systemic change.

3. Leverage sponsorship and encourage networking opportunities.

Internally, ensure each young female talent is assigned an executive-level sponsor. Her sponsor will advocate for her publicly, facilitate introductions, recommend opportunities and projects, and make invitations into rooms where decisions are made. They will be invaluable in helping to build her visibility.

Externally, encourage participation at tech and business events. Actively support it by sharing what you’d like to achieve by having the company represented there, and by helping the individual reflect on what they want to achieve on a personal basis. Provide a follow-up opportunity for feedback with the leadership team.

4. Use coaching and discussion to address individual challenges.

Tackle typical blockers to success like under-confidence or imposter syndrome that hold many women back. 1-on-1 coaching promotes self-management, self-reliance, and the ability to handle ambiguity that will help women navigate through professional environments.

Provide a platform for frequent facilitated group sessions with other women. It provides opportunities to bring in perspectives and learning from women in similar contexts, promotes real conversations about real issues, and also gives additional connections and support.

5. Use community engagement to help young women understand their own importance as role models.

Use your high potential women as ambassadors and role models to empower other young women. Get them to lead workshops (with schools, colleges…) and introduce girls to technology, concepts, and roles that they may not normally hear about. Ask them to share their passion for tech and to explain why you need more women in the industry.

6. Don’t forget the broader ecosystem.

Women can’t be empowered in a vacuum – the ecosystem around them has to change too. Educate your teams on the challenges women may face in the workplace.

Every employee needs to know he or she is there on merit, but survival of the fittest is not a meritocracy. It favours the dominant group and as the dominant group in tech, men will experience far more opportunities than women to develop their careers.

Emphasise the need to create a new and level playing field, one with equitable opportunities based on value to the business.

Getting it right will take time, effort, budget, and commitment, but the rewards for companies will be significant. Diverse leadership will not only make you more innovative and better able to manage risk, it will also improve your bottom line.

About the author. 

Natasha Harvey is a communications specialist and certified transformational coach. She runs coaching and mentoring programmes for young women to help build self-awareness, self-confidence, strong communications skills and resilience.
Find out more: www.embraceyourchange.co.uk/women/

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here.
FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 50,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles.

Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully, we can share your story too and reach our global audience. We are agile, responsive, quick and talented, we look forward to working with you!

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking