Podcasts about Karen Catlin

The second half of season 2 is all about the view from the bottom: what does it feel like to fail, and more importantly, how do you come back from it? We're creating a safe space for women tech leaders to talk about the worst day of their career — a project gone wrong, a lay-off that came out of nowhere, a startup that shutdown — and how they got through it. Because we never learned anything from the days it all went right.  To kick off this series, Better Allies® series Author and former Adobe VP of Engineering, Karen Catlin joins Brenda to talk about a rocky transition she made from the corporate world to self-employment. Karen had a reality check when she left her cushy VP job at Adobe to start her own coaching company for women in tech. After making only $17,000 her first year (a far cry from her goal of $10K per month), she was embarrassed, and ready to call it quits. But with some encouragement from her husband and mentors, she saw it through, and has since become an accomplished author, speaker and coach on creating inclusive workspaces.  You'll learn how to see things through even when you feel like you failed, the power of a good ‘mentor walk,' and how naivete can sometimes be a blessing in disguise when taking a big risk. For more, check out Karen and her work... On LinkedIn - /kecatlin On Bluesky - @betterallies.bsky.social On Instagram - @BetterAllies On Threads - @BetterAllies On YouTube - Better Allies On the Web - www.karencatlin.com & www.betterallies.com And subscriber to the 5 Ally Actions Newsletter! --- At our heart, AnitaB.org is a connector: we connect women in tech to the organizations, opportunities, and tools they need to advance, thrive, and transform the future of technology. We convene transformative events, lead essential discussions, produce groundbreaking research and white papers, and support the tech ecosystem to shape the future for women in tech.  --- Connect with AnitaB.org Instagram - @anitab_org Facebook - /anitab.0rg LinkedIn - /anitab-org On the web - anitab.org  --- Our guests contribute to this podcast in their personal capacity. The views expressed in this interview are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology or its employees (“AnitaB.org”). AnitaB.org is not responsible for and does not verify the accuracy of the information provided in the podcast series. The primary purpose of this podcast is to educate and inform. This podcast series does not constitute legal or other professional advice or services. --- B The Way Forward Is… Hosted and Executive Produced by Brenda Darden Wilkerson. Produced by Avi Glijansky Associate Produced by Kelli Kyle Sound design and editing by Ryan Hammond  Mixing and mastering by Julian Kwasneski  Additional Producing help from Faith Krogulecki Operations Coordination for AnitaB.org by Quinton Sprull. Creative Director for AnitaB.org is Deandra Coleman Executive Produced by Dominique Ferrari, Stacey Book, and Avi Glijansky for Frequency Machine  Podcast Marketing from Lauren Passell with Tink Media in partnership with Coley Bouschet at AnitaB.org Photo of Brenda Darden Wilkerson by Mandisa Media Productions For more ways to be the way forward, visit AnitaB.org 

James Felton Keith, CEO at InclusionScore and I recap the latest 5 Things (good vibes in DEI) in just 15 minutes. This week, we're talking about groundbreaking firsts at the Oscars,  the rise of women-led boardrooms, Peppa Pig, and more!Here are this week's good vibes:Oscar Gold for Emerald City ThreadsBanking on Women, Leading with ImpactPeppa Pig Gets Accessibility RightAll Paths to Parenthood Deserve SupportCrowning a New Era of InclusionGood Vibes to Go: Bernadette's GVTG: This Women's History Month, a shout out to Karen Catlin who will send you actionable tips to be a better ally at work—straight to your inbox. Subscribe now at BetterAllies.comJames's GVTG: Find the joyful moments every day, not just "work through it" but "joy through it", like the late John Lewis did. Read the Stories.Connect with James Felton KeithSubscribe to the 5 Things newsletter.Watch the show on YouTube. Join thousands of readers by subscribing to the 5 Things newsletter. Enjoy some good vibes in DEI every Saturday morning. https://5thingsdei.com/

In this episode Jennifer welcomes Karen Catlin to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of her Better Allies initiative. From its humble beginnings as an anonymous Twitter account to a comprehensive movement with four published books, Karen shares the evolution of her work in creating more inclusive workplaces. The conversation explores the significant milestones that have shaped conversations around inclusion, from "Lean In" to the racial reckoning of 2020 to the rise of AI. Karen and Jennifer reflect on the courage required to learn in public, the importance of resilience when making mistakes, and why vulnerability is essential for authentic leadership.

In our latest episode, we welcome Karen Catlin, author and advocate for inclusive workspaces, back to the pod for the first time since 2020. Our discussion covers celebrating ten years of learning through Better Allies, shifts in DEI dynamics post-2020, and the increased backlash against DEI initiatives in current times. We discuss the continued importance and evolution of allyship, with practical strategies for individual and organizational support. Karen also shares personal anecdotes, mistakes, and lessons learned in her journey, while providing resources for those looking to delve deeper into allyship. Please note that we're taking a hiatus, but please subscribe to our feed so you can be the first to know when we're back. We've got some fun stuff in the works!Links:BetterAllies.comThe Savvy Ally by Jeannie GainsburgThe Anti Ableist Manifesto by Tiffany YuGood Guys by David Smith and Brad Johnson The Wake Up, Michelle MiJung KimChapters:00:00 Introduction and Guest Announcement00:50 Reflecting on the Election and Its Impact02:35 Evolution of DEI Work03:55 Challenges and Shifts in Workplace Inclusion07:18 The Importance of Allyship11:21 Connecting Through Shared Stories14:19 Welcoming Karen Catlin15:41 Karen's Journey and Insights on Allyship29:42 Newsletter Insights and Language Awareness30:32 Best Practices for Scheduling Events32:03 Challenges with Event Scheduling36:11 DEI Backlash and Media Misrepresentation41:18 The Future of Allyship47:46 Recommended Resources for Allyship52:33 Looking Forward: AI and Personal Growth55:15 Final Thoughts and TakeawaysWant more like this? Here are a few episodes we think you'll love!Being a Better Ally with Karen CatlinBeing an HR Unicorn with Christofer PetersonDigital Accessibility with Perkins AccessDiversity, Equity, and Inclusion with Chris HaighFull Interview with Amaia Arruabarrena, Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at ezCaterFull Interview with Dr. Erika Powell, DEI Certified Professional Diversity CoachFuture of Work Insights from Revelio Chief Economist Lisa SimonGeeking Out about DEI Strategy with Allyson Livingstone from athenahealthManaging Teams Empathetically with Dexter ArverReimagining Inclusion with Mita Mallick Visit us at InclusionGeeks.com to stay up to date on all the ways you can make the workplace work for everyone! Check out Inclusion Geeks Academy and InclusionGeeks.com/podcast for the code to get a free mini course.

Dr. Akilah Cadet is the Founder and CEO of Change Cadet, an organizational development consulting firm that offers services that support embedding belonging into overall company culture, identity and strategy. As a Forbes Next 1000 Entrepreneur her work is behind some of the biggest brands you use everyday. Dismantling white supremacy through storytelling is at the core of her work as a leader, speaker, creative director, producer, writer, editor, co-owner of the Oakland Roots and Soul soccer teams, and author of White Supremacy is All Around: Notes From a Black Disabled Woman in a White World. She literally has all the degrees, lives in and loves Oakland, CA, celebrates her disability, is a proud Beyoncé advocate, and has an incredible shoe game. Karen Catlin is a highly acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She has published four books: Better Allies®: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces (2019), The Better Allies Approach to Hiring (2020), Belonging in Healthcare (2022), and The Better Allies Way: A Workbook for Being More Inclusive at Work (2024). She also emails a roundup of “5 Ally Actions” to over 60,000 newsletter subscribers every week. Previously, Karen spent 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Adobe. During that time, she witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears and focus on creating more inclusive workplaces where everyone could do their best work and thrive. A self-professed public speaking geek, Karen is a highly sought-after and engaging presenter who has delivered talks at hundreds of conferences and corporate events. What you will learn in this episode: What it means to be an “accomplice,” and how it differs from being an “ally” Why allyship can feel performative, and what it actually means to be an ally How to use your voice and platform to do the work as an accomplice Why we must become comfortable with being uncomfortable to be better accomplices How we can become role models for the behaviors involved in making a meaningful difference Resources: Website: https://www.changecadet.com/ LinkedIn Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/company/changecadet/ Facebook Business: https://www.facebook.com/changecadet Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/changecadet/ Twitter: https://x.com/changecadet? Website: https://betterallies.com/ LinkedIn Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kecatlin/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/betterallies  

In this episode of the Call In Podcast, Karen Catlin explores how embracing mistakes can strengthen organizational culture. Learn how to shift from fear of failure to a mindset of growth, and the positive impact this has on employee engagement and retention.   More information at https://betterallies.com/ and https://www.callinpodcast.com/

Description: In this conversation, Karen Catlin explains why job titles matter. Karen discusses how titles can significantly impact an employee's authority and credibility, particularly for women and underrepresented groups. Discover actionable strategies to use titles effectively and boost workplace morale and engagement.

Karen Catlin, author of four influential books on workplace allyship, explores practical tips for engaging and retaining talent. Learn how finding common ground and educating with empathy can transform your organization into a more inclusive and thriving workplace.   More information at https://betterallies.com/ and https://www.callinpodcast.com/

Join us as we dive into practical tips with Karen Catlin, author and advocate for building enduring organizations through curiosity. Learn why being respectfully curious, not furious, is crucial for creating inclusive and diverse workplaces. Discover strategies for engaging and retaining talent, fostering allyship, and navigating challenging conversations with grace and compassion.

Karen Catlin shares her expertise on understanding and navigating privilege in the workplace. Discover how acknowledging and leveraging privilege can lead to more meaningful allyship and stronger, more inclusive organizations.

Here are this week's good vibes:Women's Hockey Continues to Set RecordsMalcolm X Gets His Recognition in NebraskaFour-Day Workweeks in France and GermanyTo Increase Diversity, Hire DifferentlyStolen Artifacts Returned to JapanThis week's Call to Action:If you like 5 Things, then check out “5 Ally Actions”, Karen Catlin's weekly newsletter that's been around for 6 years! Subscribe here to get “5 everyday actions to create a more inclusive workplace.”Read the Stories: https://www.theequalityinstitute.com/equality-insights-blog/5-things-watchedConnect with Naeema Arrastia on LinkedIn and visit Red Rabbit.  Join thousands of readers by subscribing to the 5 Things newsletter. Enjoy some good vibes in DEI every Saturday morning. https://5thingsdei.com/

Summary:Karen Catlin is a 25-year veteran of the tech industry turned leadership coach, acclaimed author, and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She coaches women to be stronger leaders and men who want to be better allies for underrepresented groups. In this episode, Karen talks about the Better Allies approach and creating more inclusive workplaces with everyday acts of allyship. Chapters:[0:00 - 3:54] IntroductionWelcome, Karen!Today's Topic: Creating More Inclusive Workplaces with Everyday Acts of Allyship[3:55 - 13:07] What gets in the way of people actually becoming more inclusive?Being a better ally means getting comfortable with making mistakesWhy it's important to learn how to properly apologize[13:08 - 24:13] Tangible actions that can help you become a better workplace allyThe 7 roles allies can playExample of being a sponsor, an amplifier, and an up-stander[24:14 - 31:11] How allies can help course-correct larger systemic issuesBeing a knight vs being an ally and why they're not the same thingEven if you're not a leader, you can drive systemic changes at your company[31:12 - 32:08] ClosingThanks for listening!Quotes:“People don't want to be better allies, or speak up, or do something because they are afraid of getting it wrong.”“You can take action for one person, but then ask yourself if there's something you can do to have a larger, systemic impact that really would be ideal for your organization.”Resources: Karen's Books Contact:Karen's LinkedInDavid's LinkedInPodcast Manger: Karissa HarrisEmail us!Production by Affogato Media

Here are this week's good vibes:More states strive to make parks, trails accessibleDove and Open Source Afro Hair Library launch Code My CrownCompanies leading in disability inclusion outperform peersCompanies offer more generous bereavement leave in pandemic's wake and expand who counts as ‘family'AI is helping new parents apply for paid leaveThis week's call to action: Listen to this interview with Better Allies' Karen Catlin as she talks about inclusive holiday parties. It's here on the Visible Voices podcast.Read the Stories: https://www.theequalityinstitute.com/equality-insights-blog/5-things-cat-equityConnect with Carlos Herrera: https://www.linkedin.com/in/herreracarlos/ Join thousands of readers by subscribing to the 5 Things newsletter. Enjoy some good vibes in DEI every Saturday morning. https://5thingsdei.com/

In today's episode I speak with workplace ally Karen Catlin and emergency medicine physician toxicologist Kavita Babu. We discuss Karen's book Belonging in Healthcare. We also highlight what belonging in the workplace can mean at the holidays. For 25 years Karen Catlin built software products and served as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Today, she is a highly acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of five books: Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces, Belonging in Healthcare, The Better Allies Approach to Hiring, Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking, and The Better Allies Way.  ​​Kavita Babu, MD is a Professor of Emergency Medicine Chief Opioid Officer, and Director, Division of Toxicology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. She is a graduate of Warren Alpert School of Medicine of Brown University where she also did her residency, followed by her Medical Toxicology Fellowship training at the UMass Chan Medical School.  

Zach sits down with Better Allies founder Karen Catlin to talk about the principles of being a good ally at work. Connect with Karen on LinkedIn. https://bit.ly/45zubTV Check out the official Better Allies website. https://bit.ly/3KPnSU9 Interested in supporting the Living Corporate Kickstarter? Click here! https://bit.ly/43YZE0C

Here Are This Week's Good Vibes:1st Stadium Built for Professional Women's Sports Team Going Up in Kansas City“Illustrate Change,” an Initiative to Drive Greater Diversity in Medical ImageryAmazon Expands Fertility Benefit to Workers in 50 CountriesA Musical Centering on a Group of Young Adults With Autism Is Heading to Broadway This FallCall to Action:Connect with Toby Mildon on LinkedIn for insightful and intelligent posts, particularly on the subject of accessibility. I find his content enriching and always look forward to learning from him.Read the full blog here.Connect with Karen on LinkedIn. Join thousands of readers by subscribing to the 5 Things newsletter. Enjoy some good vibes in DEI every Saturday morning. https://5thingsdei.com/

THANK YOU FOR 5 WONDERFUL YEARS OF FINDING BRAVE, HELPING US REACH THE MILESTONE OF OVER 500,000 DOWNLOADS, AND RANKING IN THE TOP 1.5% OF OVER 3 MILLION PODCASTS WORLDWIDE! We're so excited to bring you this special episode of Finding Brave which celebrates two big milestones that I am very proud of. Firstly, we're celebrating 5 years of continuous publication of this show and, secondly, reaching over 500,000 downloads! And we're thrilled to be ranked in the top 1.5% of over 3 million podcasts globally and to consistently list in the Top 100 Apple Career Podcasts all over the world. I am so grateful to all our amazing guests who have provided so much thought-provoking and informative content that enriches our lives, careers, and relationships. Today, you'll hear brief excerpts of the top 20 most popular episodes of the show since its inception. I hope you love them and find them thought-provoking and enriching, in your life, work and pursuits. I'm very grateful to you, our wonderful listeners, who've been so supportive and encouraging over the past years. Thank you again for all your interest and support of the show. It's been a true joy to bring it to you. I and my wonderful team send our deepest thanks, and we look forward to the next five years together! Here's to Finding Brave in your life every day!   Key Highlights From This Episode: •   Bestselling author Joseph Grenny explains why “80% of the problem (in communication) is pre-verbal.” [01:48] •  Why #1 vocal coach Cheryl Porter encourages you to believe in yourself without a doubt. [03:22] •  The vital importance of distinguishing between a job and a calling with Kathy Caprino. [05:05] •  How to turn your “mess into a message” and what has to happen first, according to success coach Anthony Trucks. [07:16] •  How learning to let go of the future can become a superpower in your life, with futurist April Rinne. [08:47] •  What it means to #1 Communication Coach Dorie Clark to build a “portfolio career”  and why that's essential for success today. [11:00] •  Why forgiveness expert Dr. Fred Luskin believes that you limit yourself when you take things “too personally.” [12:58] • Jason Marc Campbell explains why, in your sales, professional and business growth endeavors, you must not ever compromise on your true mission. [15:06] •  Five essential steps to take when you want change in your career with Kathy Caprino. [16:08] •  Top 100 Financial Advisor George Grombacher on the unforced errors you might be making in your personal finances. [18:18] •  How Simple Courage founder Heather Hubbard believes experimentation propels us  forward like no other action can. [20:45] •  Why Brave By Design founder Laura Khalil stresses that 30% of people won't like you and how understanding that fact frees us. [22:11] •  The importance of recognizing and understanding “privilege” as unearned benefits, with  coach and author Karen Catlin. [23:19] •   Financial coach Catherine Morgan's strategy for relinquishing guilt and shame around money. [25:13] •   How self-help guru Amy Morin defines mental strength and views it as a choice. [27:32] •   What Chief Storyteller Tony Vlahos means when he says your story must “have soul.” [28:34] •   Three aspects of a worthy goal, according to author Michael Bungay Stanier. [30:05] •   Entrepreneur Wendy Pease on the differences between men and women in business. [32:26] •   Why we need to resist some aspects of socialization in order to avoid mediocrity as explained by human performance expert Dr. Nate Zinsser. [33:25] •   Advice for finding clarity through experience, from performance coach Stu Massengill. [35:02]   Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: 186: How to Have Those Difficult But Crucial Conversations With Friends and Colleagues, with Joseph Grenny 187: #1 Vocal Coach on How to Pivot Your Creative Business and Soar, with Cheryl Porter 190: Free Audio Chapter 6 of The Most Powerful You: Losing Sight of Your Thrilling Dream for Your Life 192: Making A Powerful Identity Shift That Will Elevate Your Life, with Anthony Trucks 193: Using a "Flux" Mindset To Better Navigate The Future, with April Rinne 194: How Being A Long-Term Thinker Will Improve Your Life and Career, with Dorie Clark 195: How to Forgive Someone When You Feel You Can't, with Dr. Fred Luskin 196: How to Sell With Love (and Love Doing It), with Jason Marc Campbell 197: The 5 Biggest Blunders Career Changers Make 198: What's Really Holding Us Back From Earning and Having Exponentially More Money, with George Grombacher 201: Are The Stories You've Been Told Supporting or Suppressing You? with Heather Hubbard 202: Build Greater Business Success By Answering Three Key Questions, with Laura Khalil 204: How To Be a Better Ally at Work And Build an Inclusive Culture, with Karen Catlin 205: How To Build Financial Wellbeing Into the Heart of Your Life and Work, with Catherine Morgan 207: How to Build the Mental Strength You Need To Reach Your Great Potential, with Amy Morin 209: How to Tell a Riveting True Story About Who You Are and Why That Matters, with Tony Vlahos 210: How to Begin Doing Something That Matters, with Michael Bungay Stanier 211: Stepping Out From Corporate Life to Entrepreneurship By Buying a Business, with Wendy Pease 212: How Confidence Is the Key, and How You Can Get It, Build It, and Keep It, with Dr. Nate Zinsser 218: Find Your Direction and Fall In Love With What You Do, with Stu Massengill   Seize the Day and Take 40% off my three most popular 1:1 Career and Leadership Coaching Programs! Looking for top-level hands-on career and leadership growth support? Join me this month in one of my most requested private coaching programs, and get the direct coaching, support, mentorship and guidance you're looking for, to move forward fast to your highest, most exciting visions. Check out these three programs and pick the one that fits your needs best: Career & Leadership Breakthrough Program (6 sessions)Jumpstart Your Career Success (3 sessions)Build Your Confidence, Self-Esteem and Impact and Rise (6 sessions) Take 40% off this week on any of these programs! Use coupon code SEIZETHEDAY40 at registration checkout for your savings. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Ready to Advance, Rise and Launch Yourself to the Next Level FAST?  JOIN “THE MOST POWERFUL YOU” 8-WEEK COACHING AND TRAINING COURSE WITH KATHY! Hello! Kathy here. Thanks so much for tuning into today's episode. One quick thing I'd love to share before you go is about my video training program for organizations and professionals, called “The MOST POWERFUL YOU” which is the companion to my book The Most Powerful You: 7 Bravery-Boosting Paths to Career Bliss.  I'm so thrilled that a division of the United Nations brought in The Most Powerful You program as a training tool for members of their staff and other amazing global organizations have done the same. This program brings to organizations real-world, research-based, and transformative training for leaders, teams, and professionals to help them close their leadership, confidence, and communication gaps so they can achieve their highest and most rewarding potential and success in their work and projects. Please take a look at what I'm teaching in The Most Powerful You training and LIVE course, and, if you feel the content would be instrumental for you and your teams, I hope you'll ask your HR and DEI managers to bring this training program to your company. It's truly transformational for work cultures and professionals everywhere, and it generates amazing results. Thank you so much, and here's to you becoming The Most Powerful You!   ——————— Calling all coaches! Do you run a coaching business that focuses on supporting professional women? If so, I've got some exciting news about supporting your coaching growth, success, and impact! Right now, we're opening the enrollment of my private (1:1) coaching training program called The Amazing Career Coach Certification, which is a 17-week, hands-on training program that certifies female coaches in my proprietary 16-step career growth model, which is perfect for coaches who want a deeper dive into learning powerful, proven coaching frameworks, concepts, and skills that teach the 16 most essential steps to build an amazing career that your clients need to know about. And this training will help you become far more effective and impactful in supporting women to thrive today in their jobs, roles, and careers. Through the program, you'll also get access to a powerful Small Business Acceleration program called The Rapid Growth Academy, delivered by my friend and colleague, award-winning business growth expert Matthew Pollard. Through Matthew's program, you'll be taught critical business and sales growth info that will help you grow your business success in the quickest way possible. In my view, there's nothing on the market like it for both new and more seasoned coaches because it targets the two critical aspects of success: how you support your clients to thrive, and just as importantly, how to grow your own business to the next level. For more information, visit certification.amazingcareerproject.com and check out the details. Join me this Winter!   ——————— Order Kathy's book The Most Powerful You today! In Australia and New Zealand, click here to order, elsewhere outside North America, click here, and in the UK, click here. If you enjoy the book, we'd so appreciate your giving the book a positive rating and review on Amazon! And check out Kathy's digital companion course The Most Powerful You, to help you close the 7 most damaging power gaps in the most effective way possible.  Kathy's Power Gaps Survey, Support To Build Your LinkedIn Profile To Great Success & Other Free Resources Kathy's TEDx Talk, Time To Brave Up & Free Career Path Self-Assessment Kathy's Amazing Career Project video training course & 6 Dominant Action Styles Quiz   ——————— Sponsor Highlight I'm thrilled that both Audible.com and Amazon Music are sponsors of Finding Brave! Take advantage of their great special offers and free trials today!   Audible Offer Amazon Music Offer   Quotes: “If you believe in yourself enough in the beginning, those people who believe in you will come along. Sometimes, you have to wait for them but you're not going to find them if you don't believe in yourself in the beginning.” — Cheryl Porter [0:04:14] “We are so caught up in needing to control THE future as we want it to play out that we actually miss all the different possible futures that may play out and how you might contribute to one of those.” — April Rinne [0:09:20] “If you're mission-driven, if you're an impact-driven entrepreneur, then every time you discount yourself, you're limiting the potential energy you can reinvest within your business.” — Jason Marc Campbell [0:15:31] “One of the lessons that I learned very early on in business is – 30% of people are just never going to like you.” — Laura Khalil [0:22:31]  “Mental strength is a choice. It's all about what you choose to do every day [and] getting control of the way you think, feel, and behave.” — Amy Morin [0:28:12] “The way you get clarity in your life is through experiencing, not thinking.” — Stu Massengill [0:36:26]   Watch our Finding Brave episodes on YouTube! Don't forget – you can experience each Finding Brave episode in both audio and video formats! Check out new and recent episodes on my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/kathycaprino. And please leave us a comment and a thumbs up if you like the show!

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On The Revitalizing Doctor podcast, Karen Catlin shares practical ways to become a better ally and create systemic change in the workplace. But when faced with a colleague assuming a woman employee wouldn't want a new job requiring travel, how will you respond to avoid making assumptions based on stereotypes and biases? Tune in to find out.In this episode, you will be able to:Gain valuable insight into creating inclusive environments, embracing all backgrounds and perspectives.Identify gender biases and work towards fair delegation of duties for staff.Enhance your understanding of how to support diverse identities through pronoun use and allyship.Unearth tools for sparking transformational change and fostering better allyship in your organization.Examine authentic methods of advocating for LGBTQ+ peers and strengthening workplace solidarity.My special guest is Karen CatlinMeet Karen Catlin, an influential leadership coach, revered author, and speaker with a focus on creating inclusive workplaces. Her extensive background in the tech industry, including 25 years at companies like Macro Media and Adobe, exposed Karen to the growing gender gap in the field. Determined to make a difference, she shifted her career to coaching women in leadership and teaching men to become supportive allies to underrepresented groups. Karen has authored several impactful books on fostering ally skills and inclusivity, including Better Allies and Belonging in Healthcare. Armed with Karen's practical guidance and dedication to lasting change, workplace leaders have the tools to promote inclusivity at every level.The key moments in this episode are:00:00:02 - Introduction, 00:05:15 - Reasons for Bias in Medicine, 00:10:46 - Shifting Focus on Good Natured People, 00:13:03 - The Power of Allyship, 00:18:12 - Using Correct Pronouns, 00:15:10 - Encouraging Inclusivity in Public Speaking, 00:16:21 - The Burden of Being an Inclusive Champion, 00:18:12 - Pouring from a Full Cup, 00:22:36 - Benevolent Sexism, 00:25:48 - The Importance of Male Allies, 00:29:20 - Knights versus Allies, 00:31:32 - Advocating for Change, 00:35:02 - Building Resilience, 00:39:15 - Misgendering Colleagues, 00:40:58 - Coaching for Misgendering, 00:44:56 - Moving Beyond Performative Allyship, 00:49:00 - Belonging and Connection, 00:50:48 - Better Allies Resources, 00:51:36 - The Bigger Picture, You can email Karen via her website.You can also find her on Twitter or LinkedInAndrea highly recommends subscribing to Karen's newsletter to stay current on the best practices for allies. Support the showConnect with us: Twitter: https://twitter.com/RevitalizeWomenLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/revitalize-womens-mastermind-groupWebsite: https://www.peoplealwayshcc.com/revitalize

This Week's Good Vibes:A Navy Ship Named for a Confederate Victory Now Honors a Black Union HeroAlaska Airlines' First Class Gets Upgrade With Black Sisters' WineDisability Activists Grace Cover Of British VogueNasdaq Board Diversity Rule Boosted LGBTQ PoliciesBeaches Resorts Grows Program For Guests On The SpectrumThis Week's Call to Action:If you don't already get Karen Catlin's fantastic 5 Ally Actions newsletter each Friday morning, I'd encourage you to subscribe. It's an excellent summary of bite-sized actions (with concrete examples) that we ALL take to promote inclusion at work.To learn more about John Estrada, visit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-estrada-264345/ Join thousands of readers by subscribing to the 5 Things newsletter. Enjoy some good vibes in DEI every Saturday morning. https://5thingsdei.com/

Being an ally and creating a more inclusive workplace culture is a responsibility for everyone, not just those who work in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion roles. For organizations to get diversity and inclusion right, you need to build a culture that truly embraces difference, where everyone feels valued and heard. Only then can you truly begin to thrive. On our latest podcast, we are joined by Karen Catlin, acclaimed author of “Better Allies” and a recognized expert on diversity, inclusion, and workplace equality. With 25 years of experience as a tech executive, Karen witnessed firsthand the decline in women working in tech. Frustrated, but galvanized, she's dedicated herself toward becoming an advocate for more inclusive workplaces. Join Karen and Wendy as they discuss: Karen's personal journey from tech exec to inclusion advocate How we can help women build allies The importance of taking action in the moment Inclusive hiring practices Becoming more comfortable with making mistakes How subtle actions can send big messages For transcripts and other available downloads, please visit the BetterManager website. © 2019 - 2023 BetterManager

Join host William Corless for this latest episode featuring an in-depth conversation with Karen Catlin, author of "Better Allies" and a recognized expert on diversity, inclusion, and workplace equality. With 25 years of experience as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen has seen first-hand the decline in women working in tech and is dedicated to making a positive impact on diversity and inclusion. Join Karen and William as they tackle very relevant and topics in today's workplace and addressing important issues such as: ➢ The different types of allies and how to be a better ally in the workplace. ➢ The language that can be useful when trying to support underrepresented groups ➢ The definition and impact of microaggressions. Find out more about the work Karen does here and be sure to sign up for her newsletter. Karen Catlin – Advocate for Inclusive Workplaces | Coach | Speaker | Author

106. Karen Catlin - Generous Allyship  “One of my favorite approaches for giving people feedback on non-inclusive language or other non-inclusive behavior. And that is, seek common ground and then educate.” - Karen Catlin “Be curious, not furious.” - Karen Catlin Karen Catlin Guest Bio: After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. In 2014, Karen started the Twitter handle @betterallies to share simple, actionable steps that anyone could take to make their workplaces more inclusive. That Twitter handle became the inspiration for three books: Better Allies®: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces, The Better Allies Approach to Hiring, and Belonging in Healthcare. She also emails a roundup of “5 Ally Actions” to over 30,000 newsletter subscribers every week. A self-professed public speaking geek, Karen is a highly sought-after and engaging presenter who has delivered talks at hundreds of conferences and corporate events. Her TEDx talk, “Women in Tech: The Missing Force,” explores the decline in gender diversity in tech, why it's a problem, and what can be done about it. In addition to speaking herself, Karen is determined to change the ratio for who is on stage giving keynotes and other presentations. To support her goal of bringing more diversity to speaker lineups at tech industry events, she coauthored the book Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking with Poornima Vijayashanker. In addition to speaking about her books, Karen coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies for members of all underrepresented groups. Her client roster includes Airbnb, DoorDash, Google, eBay, and Intuit. Her writing on leadership has appeared in Inc., the Daily Beast, Fast Company, and the Muse, and she's consulted on articles for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the New York Times. Karen is a graduate and active alum of Brown University, mentoring students on how to launch their careers. She's also a member of the board of directors of Digital NEST and on the advisory boards for the Women's CLUB of Silicon Valley and WEST (Women Entering & Staying in Technology). In 2015, the California State Assembly honored Karen with the Wonder Women Tech Innovator Award for outstanding achievements in business and technology and for being a role model for women. Guest Favorite Quote:  “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” - Maya Angelou R.O.G. Takeaway Tips: Share the spotlight. Take the 50 Potential Privileges Checklist  Share office housework Set up your profile with inclusive requirements. (closed captions, diverse panels, etc.)  Keep growing on the journey. Subscribe to 5 Ally Actions for specific ideas on how to continue to grow.  Resources: www.karencatlin.com www.betterallies.com Additional Better Allies Content Better Allies Weekly Newletter Karen Catlin on LinkedIn (ln/kecatlin) Karen Catlin on Twitter (@kecatlin) Karen Catlin on Instagram (@karencatlin) Better Allies on Instagram (@betterallies) Better Allies on Twitter (@betterallies) Network Diversity Index Quiz Coming Next: Episode 107, Building Bridges Coaching Tips for Generous Leaders with Shannon Cassidy. Topic: Generous V.I.B.E.   Credits: Karen Catlin, Sheep Jam Productions, Host Shannon Cassidy, Bridge Between, Inc.

105. N.D.I. Network Diversity Index Quote from Interview: “The N.D.I. Network Diversity Index was designed to enable each of us to see one important aspect of our human experience. Our network." - Shannon Cassidy Host Bio:  Shannon Cassidy is Founder and CEO of Bridge Between, Inc. a boutique leadership development firm specializing in behavioral change, executive presence, effective communication, collaborative teamwork, empowering leadership, and conflict resolution. She provides Executive Coaching, Facilitation (team sessions, retreats, conferences) and Keynote Speaking (conferences, annual events, ceremonies) and Mentoring Programs (associations, ERGs, leadership circles) all custom designed. She has a podcast called R.O.G. Return on Generosity that focuses on how to be a corporate generous leader by sharing time, talent and gratitude.  Shannon combines her keen ability to get to the heart of every matter with a proven track record as a corporate leader. Before founding bridge between, she spent years building profitable businesses and driving innovation and leadership initiatives. This real-world experience formed the bedrock of her success, enabling her to provide clients with the strategies, tools, and inspiration to thrive during organizational change and lead with vision, values, and purpose. Shannon has authored several articles and books including Discover Your Inner Strength (2009), The Five Degree Principle: How Small Changes Lead to Big Results (2013), V.I.B.E. A Self-Discovery Journey to Authentic Leadership (2014) and Grounded in Gratitude a one-line-a –day, five-year gratitude journal (2015). Her current efforts focus on the benefits of Generosity at Work. Bridge Between, Inc. provides two free quizzes to help leaders realize their current state as a Generous Leader and how to diversify their networks. Check them out!  Generous Leader Network Diversity Index Favorite Quote on this Topic:  “Inclusivity means not ‘just we're allowed to be there,' but we are valued. I've always said: smart teams will do amazing things, but truly diverse teams will do impossible things.” - Claudia Brind-Woody R.O.G. Takeaway Tips: Audit your network: who do you text? Socialize with? Reach out to for help?  Take the N.D.I. - Network Diversity Index  Make a deliberate effort to improve the diversity of your network in your weakest area:  Personal/ Local Work/ Professional Service Providers Thought Leaders/ Influencers Resources: bridgebetween.com Network Diversity Index Quiz YouTube Channel R.O.G. on Apple Podcasts R.O.G. on Spotify Coming Next: Episode 106, we will be joined by Karen Catlin who shares her thought leadership on Ally Actions. Credits: Sheep Jam Productions, Host Shannon Cassidy, Bridge Between, Inc.

Being an ally is a journey. It takes practice to unlearn biases and to be intentional about advocating for marginalized individuals. Lucky for us, Karen Catlin is here to discuss steps we can take in our own lives to be better allies. Her best advice? Seek common ground and educate. Learn more about Better Allies here: twitter.com/betterallies Don't forget to follow Women In Product Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter to connect with a community of 30,000+ women PMs.

After 25 years as a senior leader in tech, Karen Catlin saw a decline in the numbers of women in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, Karen became an author and coach focusing on helping women navigate the male-dominated tech industry and coaching men to be better allies. In this episode, we discuss hiring for a “culture add” and other tips to create a more inclusive workplace. Subscribe!  Time-stamped show notes are below. You can find a transcript of this episode on our webpage (link below). If you would like to learn more about today's topic: Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create More Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces by Karen Catlin Better Allies Approach to Hiring by Karen Catlin Waking Up White by Debby Irving 20 Books to Help Break the Bias for a More Gender Equal World Today's guest is Karen Catlin - this is part 2 of a 2-part conversation 1:09 Do women need to explain bias in different ways so male allies better understand 2:17 What should male allies do if a woman discusses her experience with gender bias 3:40 How to move from being a bystander to an upstander  4:13, 7:37 Does the U.S. being so litigious hamper conversations about gender bias 5:50 Story of a male boss who says “my wife will be jealous if I interact with female colleagues," how this view helps men get ahead of women, and strategies to counter 9:25 Job description best practices 10:10 Rethink whether a college degree is necessary for all jobs 10:45 Check job descriptions for masculine word choices like rockstar, driven, aggressive, and “right-hand man” because some women won't apply  12:40 Use diverse hiring panels so applicants see themselves on the hiring team 13:51 It's not challenging to find women applicants if you look in the right places and have the right hiring practices 14:50 The difference between a “culture fit” and a “culture add” - we need more “culture adds” and less “culture fits” in organizations today 19:18 Per Dr. Talitha Washington at Spelman College, HBCUs are excellent places to find Black women for STEM and other roles  17:40 Women receive less actionable feedback than men 18:45 The danger of “benevolent sexism” and “gatekeeping” 19:45 Story about male employee saying that a woman wouldn't want a role because of her young children 21:48 Strategies when people are resistant to change - focus on what you can do and don't worry about everyone else 22:35 How to be a “ripple” within your organization 23:25 How to incent people to be better allies through compensation and bonuses 24:21 “Stop trying to change women” is an element of the Parity Prescription 25:20 Strategies to adapt the workplace to be more inclusive of all instead of pressuring women and other people who are underrepresented to change 30:15 Confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson 30:45 Harmful effect of extra credential questioning to try to cast doubt on qualifications 32:38 Women and other people who are underrepresented face “prove it again” bias Where You Can Find Us Website: www.par-ity.com  Follow us on Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn Co-Hosts: Deborah Pollack-Milgate and Cathy Nestrick  Email CathyAndDeborah@par-ity.com with questions or comments

After 25 years as a senior leader in tech, Karen Catlin saw a decline in the numbers of women in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, Karen became an author and coach focusing on helping women navigate the male-dominated tech industry and coaching men to be better allies. In this episode, Karen gives us 10 tips to be better allies. Subscribe!  Time-stamped show notes are below.  If you would like to learn more about today's topic: Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create More Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces Karen Catlin's list of 50 privileges Waking Up White by Debby Irving 20 Books to Help Break the Bias for a More Gender Equal World 1:28 Introduction of Karen Catlin 5:12 What to do if a woman's idea is hijacked in a meeting 8:09 How to understand your own privilege 14:11 How to talk to people who are resistant to change 17:09 Advocate by finding common ground and describing your own learning journey 19:27 Allies will make mistakes 21:47 How to avoid “Just Like Me Networks” 26:52 How White women can be better allies for Black and other women of color 34:42 Practice makes perfect

Host Clara Mount interviews Alex Manrique, Manager of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion at Universal Parks & Resorts. The first half of the show is the Crummer Connections interview recorded and broadcast in Fall 2021. The second half of the show is a panel Q&A session with Alex Manrique and selected Crummer alumni and students, featuring discussions on supporting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and helping employees feel a sense of belonging. 00:44 -- Introducing the panel 02:39 -- Service philosophy, importance of taking care of future generations 08:34 -- Backstory, growing up in Colombia, treating people with kindness 13:47 -- Career journey & turning points, helping employees find a sense of belonging best business advice, resources to support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion 29:20 -- Meet and greet with Alex Manrique 30:37 -- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion practices 45:32 -- Crummer Insider Free Association 49:15 -- Learning and growing as a result of culture change 54:26 -- Creating a culture where employees are valued 56:35 -- Closing message to the Crummer community Books So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo -- https://amzn.to/3s5eTUX Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces by Karen Catlin -- https://amzn.to/3s5SyGD How to Be an Anti-Racist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi -- https://amzn.to/3oaALx2 Resources Crummer Graduate School of Business -- https://www.crummer.rollins.edu Kobe Japanese Steakhouse -- https://kobesteakhouse.com Credits Guest -- Mai-Han Harrington https://www.linkedin.com/in/mai-han-harrington-52a88713/ Production by Victor Media Group, Inc. -- https://victormediagroup.co/ Creator -- J.B. Adams Host -- Clara Mount Executive Producer -- Gerard Mitchell Sound Editing -- Aaron Trnka Production Assistance -- Kyle Sawyer Crummer Panelists -- Kyle Sawyer & Rachel Valocchi

Host Clara Mount interviews Alex Manrique, Manager of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion at Universal Parks & Resorts. The first half of the show is the Crummer Connections interview recorded and broadcast in Fall 2021. The second half of the show is a panel Q&A session with Alex Manrique and selected Crummer alumni and students, featuring discussions on supporting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and helping employees feel a sense of belonging. 00:44 -- Introducing the panel 02:39 -- Service philosophy, importance of taking care of future generations 08:34 -- Backstory, growing up in Colombia, treating people with kindness 13:47 -- Career journey & turning points, helping employees find a sense of belonging best business advice, resources to support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion 29:20 -- Meet and greet with Alex Manrique 30:37 -- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion practices 45:32 -- Crummer Insider Free Association 49:15 -- Learning and growing as a result of culture change 54:26 -- Creating a culture where employees are valued 56:35 -- Closing message to the Crummer community Books So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo -- https://amzn.to/3s5eTUX Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces by Karen Catlin -- https://amzn.to/3s5SyGD How to Be an Anti-Racist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi -- https://amzn.to/3oaALx2 Resources Crummer Graduate School of Business -- https://www.crummer.rollins.edu Credits Guest -- Alex Manrique, https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-manrique-9736814/ Production by Victor Media Group, Inc. -- https://victormediagroup.co/ Creator -- J.B. Adams Host -- Clara Mount Executive Producer -- Gerard Mitchell Sound Editing -- Aaron Trnka Production Assistance -- Kyle Sawyer Crummer Panelists -- Papaa Kodzi & Kyle Sawyer

Thank you for listening to our Finding Brave show, ranked in the Top 100 Apple Career Podcasts! “When we don't take action, we become complicit with the status quo, meaning we are ok with how things are, how things are unfolding, and how our culture is. That's why it's important to realize that we all have a role to play to stand up, to move from being a bystander of something to an upstander for what we believe is right.” - Karen Catlin Being an ally and building a more inclusive work culture is a job for everyone in the workplace, not just for people who work in Diversity and Inclusion roles. Today's Finding Brave guest shares how being an ally is a journey that starts with a single step, and in this episode, she reveals what we all can do to ensure equality in the workplace, and in all parts of society. After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen is a leadership coach and a highly acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books, including Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces, which we will discuss today. There is so much that we're not aware of that gives us benefits and privileges, but as an ally, the more that we can become aware of and explore these seemingly small things, while not judging or avoiding these issues, the better we all will be. I encourage you to review Karen's list, “50 Potential Privileges in the Workplace” that is linked in the show notes for this episode, and explore the emotions that come up for you with each one. The work won't be easy to do, but it is necessary for us to see real change in the world. And check out our recent interview in my Forbes column on 5 Errors Managers Make When Providing Feedback To Employees. To learn more about today's guest, visit: https://karencatlin.com/  or https://betterallies.com/ 

In the 21st century, it is increasingly essential to put a sense of humanity at the center of business decisions. In this interview, Alex Manrique, Manager of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Universal Parks & Resorts, discusses her approach to service through fostering relationships and embracing the differences of others. SUBMIT A QUESTION: Do you have a question or comment for this guest? Send your submission and Alex will respond to it on the Crummer Hour, our follow up discussion show that is broadcast on WPRK 91.5 FM. Be sure to include your name, hometown, company, and title. Send to clara@victormediagroup.co. 01:49 -- Service philosophy, importance of taking care of future generations 07:35 -- Backstory, growing up in Colombia, treating people with kindness 12:49 -- Career journey & best business advice, helping employees find a sense of belonging Resources So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo -- https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-Talk-About-Race/dp/1580056776 Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces by Karen Catlin -- https://www.amazon.com/Better-Allies-Everyday-Inclusive-Workplaces/dp/1732723303 How to Be an Anti-Racist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi -- https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Antiracist-Ibram-Kendi/dp/0525509283 Universal Orlando Parks & Resorts -- https://jobs.universalparks.com/universal-orlando-resort/life-at-universal-orlando/#uoldiv Credits Guest -- Alex Manrique, https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-manrique/ Host -- J.B. Adams, https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamslearning/ Production by Victor Media Group, Inc. -- https://victormediagroup.co/ Creator -- J.B. Adams Executive Producer -- Gerard Mitchell Showrunner -- Kyle Sawyer Audio Design -- Aaron Trnka Production Assistance -- Rachel O'Bryan

In the 21st century, it is increasingly essential to put a sense of humanity at the center of business decisions. In this interview, Alex Manrique, Manager of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Universal Parks & Resorts, discusses her approach to service through fostering relationships and embracing the differences of others. SUBMIT A QUESTION: Do you have a question or comment for this guest? Send your submission and Alex will respond to it on the Crummer Hour, our follow up discussion show that is broadcast on WPRK 91.5 FM. Be sure to include your name, hometown, company, and title. Send to clara@victormediagroup.co. 01:49 -- Service philosophy, importance of taking care of future generations 07:35 -- Backstory, growing up in Colombia, treating people with kindness 12:49 -- Career journey & best business advice, helping employees find a sense of belonging Resources So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo -- https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-Talk-About-Race/dp/1580056776 Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces by Karen Catlin -- https://www.amazon.com/Better-Allies-Everyday-Inclusive-Workplaces/dp/1732723303 How to Be an Anti-Racist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi -- https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Antiracist-Ibram-Kendi/dp/0525509283 Universal Orlando Parks & Resorts -- https://jobs.universalparks.com/universal-orlando-resort/life-at-universal-orlando/#uoldiv Credits Guest -- Alex Manrique, https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-manrique/ Host -- J.B. Adams, https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamslearning/ Production by Victor Media Group, Inc. -- https://victormediagroup.co/ Creator -- J.B. Adams Executive Producer -- Gerard Mitchell Showrunner -- Kyle Sawyer Audio Design -- Aaron Trnka Production Assistance -- Rachel O'Bryan

There's been plenty of stories recently about how toxic the tech environment has become - whether it's about politics, gender, or self-image. Now, I'm not a huge ‘social media' guy and I would be the first to admit I don't understand the nuances of how this whole game is played. That being said, something needs to change and I'm thankful that people like my guest today for being at the tip of the spear. Karen Catlin was a VP at two of the largest software companies in Silicon Valley. First at Macromedia, and then at a company you probably interact with daily - Adobe Software.After stepping away from the industry in 2012, Karen went on to found her own consulting firm that focused on inclusion and diversity - long before they were on the cultural radar. She is a TedX speaker, an acclaimed author and coauthor of multiple works, and probably one of the straightest shooters I've had the pleasure of interviewing.What starts as a discussion about women in tech becomes a larger exploration of inclusiveness across all spectrums, and it's one I'm thankful I had the chance to be a part of.Enjoy the show!

After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies. Her client roster includes Airbnb, DoorDash, eBay, Intel, and Intuit, as well as motivated entrepreneurs and individuals. Karen's coaching offerings include tactics for increasing visibility, being more strategic, managing stakeholders, negotiation, and cultivating ally skills. Her writing on these and related topics has appeared in Inc., the Daily Beast, Fast Company, and The Muse, and she's consulted on articles for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the New York Times. In late 2014, Karen started the Twitter handle @betterallies to share simple, actionable steps that anyone could take to make their workplaces more inclusive. That Twitter handle became the inspiration for her books, Better Allies®: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces and The Better Allies Approach to Hiring. She continues to tweet and blog for Better Allies, and she also emails a roundup of “5 Ally Actions” to her subscribers every week. A self-professed public speaking geek, Karen is a highly sought-after and engaging presenter who has delivered talks at hundreds of conferences and corporate events. She speaks on a variety of topics, including inclusive workplaces and women in leadership. Her TEDx talk, “Women in Tech: The Missing Force,” explores the decline in gender diversity in tech, why it's a problem, and what can be done about it. In addition to speaking herself, Karen is determined to change the ratio for who is on stage giving keynotes and other presentations. To support her goal of bringing more diversity to speaker lineups at tech industry events, she coauthored the book Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking with Poornima Vijayashanker. Karen is a graduate and active alum of Brown University, serving as an advisor to the university's Computer Science Diversity Initiative and mentoring students on how to launch their careers. She's also a member of the board of directors of DigitalNEST and on the advisory boards for the Women's CLUB of Silicon Valley and WEST (Women Entering & Staying in Technology). In 2015, the California State Assembly honored Karen with the Wonder Women Tech Innovator Award for outstanding achievements in business and technology and for being a role model for women. What you will learn in this episode: Why Karen wanted to make workplaces more inclusive How our words and our actions can speak to people about being more inclusive What simple, everyday actions and language can we take and use to be more inclusive What is the difference between intending to be an ally vs being an ally How do you interject without making the perpetrator look bad How to seek common ground before educating someone What phrases or language is surprisingly racist or non-inclusive What behaviors and language can we stop doing and uses to be better allies Resources: Website: https://karencatlin.com/ https://betterallies.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kecatlin/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kecatlin https://twitter.com/betterallies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karencatlin/ https://www.instagram.com/betterallies/

Karen was a VP of Engineering at Adobe (The Photoshop company) and my amazing place of employment. She began the Adobe and Woman at Adobe network. She's since then been on a journey to teach others how to become better inclusive humans and better inclusive allies - one tip at time. She's an author, a speaker and a coach. Learn how to become less bias when hiring, more inclusive in meeting, more confident in you.

In this episode, we meet a mother-daughter duo, Karen and Emma Caitlin.  Karen is an Author, Coach, and Advocate for Inclusive Workplaces at Karen Catlin Consulting and mother to Emma.  Emma is a Software Engineer for Pinterest.  Karen and Emma each provide their perspective as women in STEM over two generations and Emma shares her thoughts about having a successful mom in STEM and the impact it has made in her life.

Show notes at www.physicsalive.com/ally Karen Catlin, a leadership coach and an acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies for members of all underrepresented groups. In her book and through her online presence, Karen shares how to cultivate an environment where coworkers feel welcome, respected, and supported, how to amplify and advocate for others, and how to use more inclusive language. She gives us the tools to be Better Allies and create a culture where everyone can do their best work and thrive. Today we discuss this in the context of science department meetings and the STEM classroom. Karen Catlin's web presence The Better Allies website Karen Catlin's personal page Twitter: https://twitter.com/betterallies Subscribe to the 5 Ally Actions newsletter Document highlighting 50 Potential Privileges in the Workplace TEDx talk: Women in Tech From the National Center for Education Statistics Degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by sex of student and discipline division: 2017-18 (most recent)

In this interview I spoke to Karen Catlin author, speaker and leadership coach about her book “Better Allies” and everyday actions people can take in the workplace towards being a better ally.Sign up to Karen's weekly newsletter.You can boost company productivity, avoid PR disasters, and build a thriving workplace that attracts the best talent by watching our webinar!

On the PreSales Podcast, James Kaikis and Karen Catlin connect on the topic "Level Up Your Ally Game". Karen, an Advocate for Inclusive Workplaces, talks about why she started a company to promote being a better ally and how we as PreSales professionals can be more inclusive in the workplace.  More information on Karen's newsletter and books can be found at betterallies.com  

A big way to help make a more inclusive tech industry, we need strong allies. In this episode, we are joined by Better Allies, Karen Catlin, to talk with us about allyship. Guests: Karen Catlin - @kecatlin Panelists: Ryan Burgess - @burgessdryan Stacy London - @stacylondoner Shirley Wu - @sxywu Picks: Karen Catlin - Genius Series Ryan Burgess - Inclusion resources Ryan Burgess - Stream Deck Stacy London - Being the glue Stacy London - Foxglove by Tor Shirley Wu - Ellery Studio Shirley Wu - Kontinentalist

Melinda Briana Epler, Founder & CEO of Change Catalyst talks with Karen Catlin, CEO of Karen Catlin Consulting and author of Better Allies, about how we can each build empathy and create positive change for others by first understanding our own privilege. About KarenAfter spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. She's now a leadership coach and acclaimed speaker on inclusive workplaces. Karen shares her expertise in three books: Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces, The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring, and Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking. Learn more at karencatlin.comYou can watch the live show on Change Catalyst YouTube Channel here, with live captioning and ASL interpretation: https://youtu.be/tdEpSDOeLJQThe live show is made accessible thanks to ASL interpretation by in-kind sponsor Interpreter-Now and live captioning by White Coat Captioning.This episode of Leading With Empathy & Allyship is sponsored by AppDynamics - builders of the world's only full-stack Business Observability platform. Join their team to help businesses thrive by turning performance into profit. Learn more at www.appdynamics.com/company/careers Find Leading With Empathy & Allyship useful? Subscribe to our podcast and like this episode! For more about Change Catalyst, and to join us for a live recording, visit https://changecatalyst.co/allyshipseries There, you'll also find educational resources and highlights from this episode.Connect On SocialYouTube: youtube.com/c/changecatalystTwitter: twitter.com/changecatalystsFacebook: facebook.com/changecatalystsInstagram: instagram.com/techinclusionLinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/changecatalystsProduction TeamCreator & Host: Melinda Briana Epler Producer: Juliette Roy Project Manager: Emilie MaasFinance & Operations: Renzo Santos Data Analyst: Sally Moywaywa Director of Marketing: Ariyah April[Image description: Leading With Empathy & Allyship promo with Change Catalyst logo, photos of Melinda Briana Epler, a White woman with long red hair, and Karen Catlin, a White woman with short hair, and text reading “Episode 36: Understanding Privilege & Using It To Create Change”]Support the show (http://patreon.com/changecatalysts)

02:31 - Karen’s Superpower: The Ability to Simplify Things * Simplifying in a Team Context 05:55 - Better Allies (https://betterallies.com/) – Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces; Triaging and Curating Research * @BetterAllies (https://twitter.com/betterallies) * Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces (https://www.amazon.com/Better-Allies-Everyday-Inclusive-Workplaces/dp/1732723303) (Book) * The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring (https://www.amazon.com/Better-Allies-Approach-Hiring-ebook/dp/B082WR7F86) (Book) * Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking (https://www.amazon.com/Present-Techies-Guide-Public-Speaking-ebook/dp/B01BCXHULK) (Book) 14:15 - Maintaining Anonyminity (at first); Prove It Again Bias (https://genderbiasbingo.com/prove-it-again/) * Channeling White Men; Men Listening to Other Men * Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (https://www.amazon.com/Whistling-Vivaldi-Stereotypes-Affect-Issues/dp/0393339726) (Book) * [Podcast] 'Whistling Vivaldi' And Beating Stereotypes (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125859207) * Reduce the influence of unconscious bias with these re:Work tools (https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/fight-unconscious-bias-with-rework-tools/) * Build the Culture Instead of Fit the Culture 26:09 - Culture Add + Values Fit * Recognizing Bias Instead of Removing It * Meritocracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy) 32:11 - Network Effect: Venturing Beyond Homogenous (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/homogenous) Networks * Marginalization + Privilege Can Be Self-Reinforcing * 50 Potential Privileges in the Workplace (https://betterallies.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/50-potential-privileges.pdf) 41:58 - Doing This Work is Everyone’s Job 48:12 - People to Follow * Minda Harts (https://twitter.com/MindaHarts) * The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table (https://bookshop.org/books/the-memo-what-women-of-color-need-to-know-to-secure-a-seat-at-the-table/9781580058469) * Jeannie Gainsburg (https://www.savvyallyaction.com/about) * The Savvy Ally: A Guide for Becoming a Skilled LGBTQ+ Advocate (https://www.amazon.com/Savvy-Ally-JEANNIE-GAINSBURG/dp/1538136775/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=savvy+ally&qid=1608561617&sr=8-3) * David Smith (https://twitter.com/davidgsmithphd) & Brad Johnston * Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace (https://www.amazon.com/Good-Guys-Better-Allies-Workplace-ebook/dp/B08412XCHB/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=good+guys&qid=1614095097&sr=8-3) * Corey Ponder (https://www.coreyponder.com/about-me) * Learning the ABCs of Allyship (https://www.coreyponder.com/single-post/abcs-of-allyship) 51:13 - The Decline of Gender Parity in the Tech Industry * Women in Tech -- The Missing Force: Karen Catlin at TEDxCollegeofWilliam&Mary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uiEHaDSfgI) 58:15 - Making Statements and Changing the Status Quo Reflections: Rein: Getting better at praxis: for every white dude with a beard you follow on Twitter, go follow 10 Black women in tech. Damien: How bias can interfere with an action right before the action happens. Chanté: We’re all allies. We cannot do this work alone. Today you might be the ally, tomorrow you may be the bridge. Arty: Expanding our homogenous networks. Change takes courage on all of our parts. Karen: Turning period statements into questions or adding “until now” to those statements. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. REIN: Welcome to Episode 224 of Greater Than Code. Take two. So full disclosure, we recorded this or more specifically, didn't record this conversation so we're going to do it again. I'm your co-host, Rein Hendricks, and I'm here with my co-host, Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Thanks, Rein. And I'm here with my co-host, Chanté Thurmond. CHANTÉ: Everyone, Chanté here. And I'm here with Arty Starr. ARTY: Thank you, Chanté. And I'm here with our awesome guest today, Karen Catlin. So after spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice-president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen is a leadership coach and a highly acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books: "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring,” and "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking." Welcome, Karen to the show! KAREN: And it is a pleasure to be back with you and to be having this conversation today. Thanks so much for having me. ARTY: And we very much appreciate you being here again with us. So our first question we always ask at the beginning of the show is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? KAREN: Okay so, my superpower is the ability to simplify things and I joke that I think I acquired this superpower simply as a coping strategy because there's so much information out there. We're all bombarded with things and maybe my brain is just not as big as other people so I constantly am trying to simplify things so that I can understand them, remember them, convey them, and so forth. And I'll share, I think it served me well, not only as I embarked on my computer science programming school and just trying to like grok everything that I was trying to learn as well as then entering the field initially as a software engineer. Again, simplifying things, divide and conquer, break things down into those procedural elements that can be repeated and generalized. Certainly, then as I moved into executive roles as a vice-president of engineering, you're just context switching all day long. Again, I just had to simplify everything that was going on so that could really remember things, take notes on things, and make decisions based on what I thought I needed to do. Yeah. So that's my superpower. ARTY: That's a great superpower. So in the context of the workplace and you've got teams trying to things out, maybe a design problem you're working on, trying to solve. How does simplifying things come into play in a team context like that? KAREN: Well, it comes into play a lot of ways. I'm remembering one example where there was some interpersonal conflict between two people and I was hearing both sides, as one does, and talking to them both. I got them both in a room because they just weren't seeing each other's point of views, I thought, and they were just working at odds to each other. Hearing them both talk, I was able to say, “So at the heart, this is what we're all trying to do. This is what we are trying to achieve together,” and I got them to confirm that. That was the first step in simplifying just the discussion. They were getting a little emotional about things. They were bringing in a lot of details that frankly, weren't necessary to really understand what was going on and I was able to focus them on that shared purpose that we had for the project. It doesn't even matter what it was. Actually, it was so long ago now I can't quite remember what the issue was, but I remember hearing afterwards one of the people say, “You are so good at simplifying things got down to the heart,” and I'm like, “Yes, I am. That's my superpower.” ARTY: It sounds like even more than that, or maybe a slightly different frame of just the example you just gave. It's not only simplifying things, you are distilling the essence of what's important or what someone is trying to say, and getting at what's the underlying message underneath all the things that someone's actually trying to communicate, even if they're struggling too, so that you can help two people may be coming from different directions, be able to understand one another. That's pretty powerful. KAREN: Well, thank you and I love the way you've just framed it, Arty and oh, those are big shoes to fill. Woo! I hope I've been able to do that in a number of different settings as I think back, but that's yeah, it is powerful. I think I probably still have some stuff I can learn there, too. CHANTÉ: Arty, thank you for teeing up this because what I am curious about in relation to what Karen just mentioned as her superpower, which I think is amazing, is obviously, you have authored a number of books. When it comes to allyship, it sounds like this is a great time where we can get somebody to distill and to simplify and not to oversimplify because there's an art to it. But I would love if you could maybe take us down the pathway of how did you arrive at this moment where you are authoring books on allyship and maybe you could give us a little bit of the backstory, first and then we could get into the superpower you've used along the way in your tech journey. KAREN: Okay. CHANTÉ: And how you're coaching people. KAREN: All right. Chanté, thank you. Yes, I'm happy to. So the backstory, first of all, I never set out to become an author, or to become a speaker, or this expert that people tap into about workplace inclusion. That was not my goal. I was doing my job in tech. I was a vice-president of engineering at Adobe. I was leading engineering teams and realizing that there was a decline happening before my eyes in gender diversity. Now I started my career in tech a long time ago and I started at a time when there was sort of a peak period of women studying computer science in the United States. And so, when I started my career, it wasn't 50-50 by any means, but there was plenty of gender diversity in the teams I was working on, in the conference rooms I was in, in the cube lands that I was working in and I saw a decline happening. So while I was still at Adobe, I started our women's employee resource group—goes back gosh, like 14, 15 years now—and I've started mentoring a lot of women at the company and started basically, being a vocal advocate to make sure women were represented in various leadership meetings I was in, on stage, at our internal events and conferences, giving updates at all-hands meetings, like well, thinking about that. I love doing that work so much and loved doing that work less so my VP of engineering work, I must admit. So about 9 years ago now, I decided to do a big change in my career pivot in my own career, I started leadership coaching practice. A leadership coaching practice focused on helping women who are working in tech in any capacity, any role. But women working in this industry, I wanted to help them grow their leadership skills so they could stay in tech if that's where they wanted to be and not drop out because they felt like, “I just can't get ahead,” or “I'm seeing all the white men get ahead,” for example, “before me.” So I started this coaching practice. I soon realized, though that I had a big problem with my coaching practice and the problem wasn't with my clients—they were amazing. The problem, I don't think was me. I think I'm a decent coach, still learning, still getting better, but decent. And realized the problem really that I was facing is that before I could truly help my clients, I needed to make their companies more inclusive. All of them were working at tech companies where the closer you get to the leadership team, to the C-suite, to the CEO, just the mailer and paler it got. With all due respect to anyone who's male and or pale, I'm white myself, anyone who's listening, who's male and/or pale, like that's just what the demographics were and still are in most of our companies. Also, that coupled with this mentality of, “Hey, we are a meritocracy. People get ahead in our company based on their merits, their accomplishments, the impact to the business.” When in reality, that's not what happens because if it were then the demographics across the company would be uniform, regardless of what level you are at. So the white men were getting ahead more than others. So I was like, “I need to make their companies more inclusive. In fact, I need to make all of tech more inclusive to really help my coaching clients,” and yeah, laugh, right? A big job, one person over here. Now, what's the first thing anyone does these days when they want to change the world? You start a Twitter handle. So I started the Twitter handle @betterallies. I started in 2014 with a goal to share simple everyday actions anyone could take to be more inclusive at work. In hindsight, I was leveraging my super power as I started this Twitter handle. I leveraged it because I started looking at the research that social scientists do about diversity in the workplace and not just gender diversity, but diversity of all kinds. The research that shows that they were uncovering, that shows the challenges that people of non-dominant genders, as well as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, identity, age, abilities, and so forth. What are the challenges these people face in the workplace as they navigate that? Others are doing this great research and I really am—and this builds on what Arty was saying—I used to think I curated this, but really, I was triaging the research. I was triaging it to simplify it, get it to its essence, and figure out with all this great research that gets published, what is someone supposed to do with it? How is the average person who works in tech supposed to take action with this great research that's out there? So I triage and curate and I do it not just based on the research, but also what I'll call cautionary tales that appear in our news, in our Twitter feeds, and so forth. I'll give you two examples to make it real. One is based on research. There's research that shows that men interrupt women more than the other way around and so, based on that research, I go over to Twitter and I type in something like, “I pledge to notice when interruptions happen in the meetings I attend and redirect the conversation back to the person who was interrupted with a simple, ‘I'd like to hear Chanté finish her thought,’” and something like that that's research-driven. Then the more, the cautionary tales that pop up in the research or in the news that we consume, I remember a few years ago when there was so much that was coming out about Uber and its non-inclusive workplace. Just one of the many things we learned about was that the CEO at the time and founder, Travis Kalanick, he was using the nursing mother's room for his personal phone calls. That's not cool because then the nursing moms can't get in there to do what they need to do. So I would go over to Twitter and just a little bit of snark added, I was like, “I pledge not to use the nursing mother's room for my personal phone calls unlike Travis Kalanick at Uber,” [chuckles]. That kind of thing. So I'm just tweeting a couple times a day. I start getting Twitter messages to this anonymous Twitter account—by the way, it was anonymous at the time—and these Twitter requests would be like, “Hey, does anyone at the Better Allies Initiative do any public speaking?” and I'd be like, ‘The initiative? Huh, it's just me tweeting a couple of times a day. Okay.” But I wanted to speak about this topic and I want to retain my anonymity. So I would write back and say, “Yes, one of our contributors does some public speaking. We'll put you in touch with her,” and I go over to my personal Twitter account type something in like, “Hey, I'm Karen Catlin. I contribute to Better Allies. I love public speaking. What do you have in mind?” So I started speaking on this whole approach of everyday simple actions people could take, the Better Allies approach, and every time I gave a talk, someone would ask, “Hey, Karen, do you have a book? Because we want more of this.” For a few years, “I kept saying, no, I don't have a book. I don't have a book. I don't have a book, sorry.” But I did finally write my book. In fact, I've written two books on the topic—"Better Allies" and also, "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring.” The Better Allies book, I just released a second edition. It's been out there for 2 years. I've learned so much that I wanted to do a full update on the book. So I've just released that a few weeks ago. CHANTÉ: I have a follow-up question then, because Karen, you mentioned that you wanted to maintain your anonymity when you started off that handle and I would just love to hear maybe why that's so important when you're doing this work of allyship and accomplishing in this space? KAREN: Yes, and I don't know if it is important for everyone—and I'm not anonymous anymore. I have claimed credit for this. As soon as I published my books. Writing a book is a lot of work; I'm going to claim the credit. But I didn't in the beginning because okay, I'm going to say this. A lot of people thought it was a man behind the Twitter handle and I must admit, I was kind of channeling white men that I have worked with over my career and thinking about what would they really do? What could I get them to do? All of my tweets are first person, “I pledge to do this,” “I will do this,” I'm going to do this,” and there were people I have friends even who were like, “Hey, have you seen this @betterallies Twitter handle? I wonder who's behind it. I'd like to interview him for my podcast,” That type of thing. So I think that there were people out there who thought it was a white man behind the Twitter handle and I was comfortable with that because not only was I channeling these white men I had worked with in the past, but I also think that there's power in men listening to other men. I'll just say that. I have actually gotten speaking engagements when I've said, “I'm a contributor.” They're like, “Are there any men who could speak because we think men would like to hear this message from another man.” So anyway, that's kind of why I started out with that anonymous Twitter handle and with this character behind the scenes of this fake man. [laughs] But now it's okay. I say that I curate it, it's me, and I'm comfortable with that. I still do it first person because I think that white women can also be allies. We all can be allies for others with less privilege than ourselves in the workplace and I think it's important for us, everyone to be thinking, “This is a job I can and should do to be inclusive at work and to look for these everyday situations. I can take ally actions and make a difference.” ARTY: How's that changed things like, revealing your identity and that you're not actually a big white dude? [chuckles] KAREN: I know. Well, I never really said I was a big white dude! Or even a small white dude, or whatever. But I think it's fine. I claimed the association with the Twitter handle when I published my book and it was just time to just own it. It's not like people stopped following me or stopped retweeting or anything like that. It's only grown since then. So Arty, it's a good question, but I don't know. I don't know. REIN: And this is more than a little ironic because when you were talking about your coaching—and I'm going to read into this a little bit, but I think you can confirm that it's backed up by the research—to appear equally competent or professional, women have to do more and other minoritized groups have to do more. So what I was reading in was that part of the problem you had with coaching was that to get them to an equal playing field, they had to be better. KAREN: Yes. What you're describing, Rein is “prove-it-again” bias and this is well-researched and documented. Prove-it-again means that women have to prove themselves over and over again where men just have to show potential. This often happens and I'm going to give you just a scenario to bring it home. Imagine sitting in some sort of promotion calibration discussion with other managers in your group and you're talking about who gets promotions this cycle. Someone might say, “Well, I'd like to see Arty prove that she can handle managing people before we move her to the next level.” When Arty, maybe you've already been doing that for a few years; you've already managed a team, you've built a team, whatever. “I'd like to make sure she can do this with this additional thing,” like, make sure she can do it with an offshore team or something. “I want to see her do it again.” Whereas a man's like, “Ah, Damien's great. I know he can do the job. Let's promote him.” Okay, totally making this up. But you see what I'm saying is that this is what the prove-it-again bias is. So whether it is women have to be twice as good or something like that, I don't know if that's exactly what's going on, but they have to deal with this bias of once again, I have to prove that I'm worthy to be at this table, to be in this conversation, to be invited to that strategic planning meeting, to get that promotion, and I don't want to coach women to have to keep proving themselves over and over again. Instead, I want to change the dynamics of what's happening inside these organizations so it is a better playing field, not just for my clients who are mostly women, but also, anyone out there who's from an underrepresented group, who might be facing challenges as they try to navigate this world that really has been designed for other people. ARTY: Wow, that's really enlightening. I'm just thinking about this from a cognitive science perspective and how our brains work, and then if you're making a prediction about something and have an expectation frame for that. If I have an expectation that someone's going to do well, like I have a dream and image in my mind that they'll fit this particular stereotype, then if they just show potential to fit this image in my head, I can imagine and envision them doing all these things and trust that imaginary dream in my head. Whereas, if I have the opposite dream in my head where my imagination shows this expectation of this person falling on their face and doing all these things wrong, I'm already in a position of having to prove something that's outside of that expectation, which is so much harder to do. So this is the effect of these biases basically being baked into our brain already is all of our expectations and things are set up to work against people that culturally, we have these negative expectations around that have nothing to do with those actual people. KAREN: Thanks. Arty, have you ever read the book, Whistling Vivaldi? ARTY: I haven't. I am adding that to my list. KAREN: It explores stereotype threat, which is exactly what you've just described, and the title, just to give you some insight into this, how this shows up. The title, Whistling Vivaldi, is all about a story of a Black man who had to walk around his neighborhood, which I believe is mostly white and got just the concerns that people didn't trust him navigating this public space, his neighborhood. So what he would do, and I don't know if it was just in the evenings or any time, he went out to walk to be outside, he would whistle Vivaldi to break the stereotype that he was a bad person, a scary person because of the color of his skin. Instead, by whistling Vivaldi, he gave off the feeling that he was a highly educated person who studied classical music and he did that so that he could navigate his neighborhoods safely. It's awful to think about having to do that, but this book is full of these examples. It's a research-driven approach so, it's a great book to understand stereotype threat and combat it. DAMIEN: So in the interest of us and our listeners, I suppose being better allies, you spoke about stereotype threat and gave an example there. You spoke about prove-it-again bias and specifically, with prove-it-again bias, I want to know what are ways that we can identify this real-time and counter it in real-time? KAREN: Yes. With prove-it-again bias—well, with any bias, really. First of all, reminding yourself that it exists is really important. At Google, they found that simply reminding managers, before they went into a calibration, a performance calibration meeting, probably some rank ordering exercise of all the talent in the organization. Before they started a calibration meeting, they were all given a 1-page handout of here's the way bias can creep into this process. That simple act of having people review the list of here's the way bias creeps into the process was enough to help combat it during the subsequent conversation. So I think we have to remind ourselves of bias and by the way, this resource I'm describing is available as a download on Google's re:Work website. I think it's R-E-: work. There's a re:Work website with tons of resources, but it's available for download there. So that's one thing you can do is before a calibration meeting or before you're about to start an interview debrief session with a team, is remind people of the kinds of bias that can come into play so that people are more aware. Other things, and I'll talk specifically about hiring, is I am a huge proponent of making sure that before you interview the first candidate, you have objective criteria that you're going to use to evaluate the candidates because otherwise, without objective criteria, you start relying on subjectivity, which is code for bias. Things will start to be said of, “I just don't think they'd be a culture fit,” which is code for bias of “They're different from us. They're different from me. I don't think I'd want to go get a beer with them after work,” or “If I had to travel with them and get stuck on a long layover somewhere when we can travel again, I don't think I'd enjoy that.” People just instead say, “I just don't think they'd be a culture fit. So you get away from that by, instead in your objective criteria, looking for other things that are technically needed for the job, or some values perhaps that your company has in terms of curiosity or lifelong learning or whatever your company values are. You interview for those things and you figure out how you're going to measure someone against those objective criteria. Other way bias creeps into interviews is looking at or saying something like, “Well, they don't have this experience with Docker that this other candidate has,” but really, that wasn't part of the job description. No one said that the candidates needed Docker experience, but all of a sudden, because one of the candidates has Docker experience, that becomes important. So instead of getting ahead of that, make sure you list exactly what you're going to be interviewing for and evaluating people for so that the bias isn't there and bias, maybe all of a sudden Docker becomes an important thing when you realize you could get it. But it may be that it's the person who seems the most like the people in the team who has it and that’s another – you're just using that as a reason for increasing that candidate’s success to join your team because you'd like to hang out with them. You'd like to be with them. You would want to be getting a beer with them. Does that help, Damien? DAMIEN: Yeah, that's very helpful. The framing is an absolutely pre-framing before an evaluation, before an interview what biases can happen. That's a wonderful tool, which I am going to be using everywhere I can. And then what you said about culture fit and really, every subjective evaluation is, I think the words you used was “code for bias.” Like, anytime you have a subjective evaluation, it's going to be biased. So being able to decide in advance what your objective evaluations are, then you can help avoid that issue. Culture fit is just such a red flag for me. You said, I wrote down the words, “culture built,” right? Decide what the culture is – because culture is important in the company, decide what the culture is you want and then interview and evaluate for that. KAREN: Yeah. Oh, I love that. Build the culture instead of just fit the culture. I've also heard people say, “If you ever hear someone say, I don't think they'd be a culture fit, respond with ‘Well, I think they'd be a culture add,’” or Damien, to quote you, “I think they build our culture instead of just fit in.” Really powerful, really powerful. CHANTÉ: Yeah. I agree with you all and Karen, I'm not sure if you knew this, but one of the many things I do, which takes up most of my life, is I'm a DEI practitioner and I have a firm, and I also work in-house at a company, Village MD, as a director of DEI there. So one of the things that I talk a lot about is culture add and one of the things I'd love to see more companies do is to think about like, basically take an inventory of all the people on your team and try to identify where you're strong, where you're weak, and look for the skills gap analysis, basically and say, “What don't we have here,” and then, “Let's go hire for that skillset or that expertise that we don't have that we believe could help us build this thing better this year.” That's going to require people to do that exercise, not just once because your team dynamic shifts usually a few times a year. So if you're a high growth company, you should be doing that probably every quarter. But imagine what the difference would be if we approach interviewing and promotion building from that lens instead. KAREN: Yeah, and Chanté, the way you framed it is amazing. I love it. You said, “What do we not have that we need to build our product to deliver to our customers?” I don't remember the exact words you used, but that I think is important because I've also, in conversations I've had around culture fit and culture and everything, someone say to me, “Well, wait a second, Karen, what if you we're evaluating a white supremacist? It's clear, there are white supremacists and we don't have one of those yet on the team. Does that mean we should open the doors and let them in?” That's when it's like, you can use the way you've just framed as “Well, if we're building a product for white supremacists, then yeah, probably.” But to be more serious about this, it's like what's missing from our team structure, from the diversity within this team, that is going to allow us to deliver on our product, on our offering better? I think that's important. Another lens to apply here is also you can still do values fit. Make sure people fit with the values that you have as a company and that should allow you to interview out people who don't fit with your values and just to use that example of a white supremacist. That would be the way to do that, too. REIN: I think it's really important to say that ethics still matters here and values fit as a way to express that. One of the things that I would maybe caution or challenge is—and this isn't a direct challenge to you, Karen, I don't think—but it's been popular in the industry to try to remove bias from the equation. To do debiasing training and things like that and I think that that's the wrong way to go because I don't think it's cognitively possible to remove bias. I think instead what we should do, what I think that you're talking about here is being aware of the biases we have. Accounting for them in the way that we hire, because the same heuristic that leads to a bias against certain demographics is the one we use to say, “We don't want white supremacists.” KAREN: Yeah. Plus a hundred, yes. [laughs] I agree. What I was going to say, Rein to build on what you just shared is that it's important to see things like color, for example, to understand. Even if you feel you're not biased, it's important to see it, to see color, to see disability, to see someone who is going through a transition, for example, on their identity. It's important to see it because that allows you to understand the challenges that they are facing and if you say, “I don't see color, I just see them as their new identity, post-transition. I don't see their disability; I just see the person,” it negates the experience they're having, as they are trying to navigate the workplace and to be the best allies, you need to understand the challenges people are facing and how you can take action to help them either mitigate the challenge, get around the challenge, whatever that might be, or remove the challenge. ARTY: So you're not being empathetic to the circumstances by pretending that they don't exist. KAREN: Yes. Well said, yes. REIN: It’s the idea that you can be on bias that I think is dangerous. I want to call back to this idea of a meritocracy; the idea that every choice we make is based on merit and that whatever we choose is indicative of the merit of that person is the bias that is harmful. KAREN: Woo, yes. I can't wait to refer to that. I can't wait to come back and listen to you. What you just said, Rein that is powerful. REIN: Because becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? We're a meritocracy so everything we've chosen is means – if we chose someone that means that they have merit by definition. There's no way out of that trap. KAREN: Right on. CHANTÉ: Yeah. When you say that, it makes me think, too of just the sort of committal to always transforming and iterating. So if you come in the door saying, “Listen, there's no way we can eliminate bias all the time.” We're going to make the assumption that we're always being biased and therefore, what things can we put into place and what tools can we use? What resources can we leverage here to make sure that we're on a pathway for greater inclusion, greater accessibility? Therefore, making our organization more diverse and more innovative. I think, like Rein, I just want to really underscore that because that is something that I've had to really try to lead with versus add to the conversation later. So I'm appreciating that you brought it up today. Thank you. REIN: It’s like some of the choices, some of the evaluations we're making are subjective. We can't make them objective in every case; I think what we want is a framework that allows us to do these subjective evaluations in a way that accounts for bias. DAMIEN: So that's amazing. Where do we go from here? ARTY: One of the things we talked about last time with regards to various people getting promoted, this effect of maler and paler as you get closer to the C-suite, is that one of the effects of that is when you're sitting down to hire someone, well, who do you know? Who's on the list of people that I know within my network? So one of the huge biases we end up having isn't necessarily a cognitive bias, it's just a effect of where our attention has been and who we've been hanging out and who we have relationships with that are preexisting. These existing network effects also keep us in the thinking and stuff and making decisions within the context of those networks. We promote people that we know. We promote people that we have relationships with. So even just some of the dynamics of if you've got existing C-suite dynamics that is dominated by men and you've got these dynamics where it’s difficult for men and women to have relationships for various reasons, things that get complicated, that those sorts of things can end up creating a self-reinforcing effect, too. I'm wondering what are some of your thoughts on some of the ways that we can expand our networks and expand the people that we know to shift some of those systemic effects? KAREN: Yeah. Most of us have homogenous networks. Homogenous networks meaning people who are just like us because we have something in common with them, whether that is hobbies that we share, music we like talking about, food we like to go out to enjoy whatever we have things in common. So most of us end up having a –and it's true. Most white people have networks that are full of other white people and this also is friendship circles. There's again, social science research out there that shows that we tend to have networks full of people just like us. As you just were saying, Arty this impacts so many aspects of work in terms of who we hire, who we recommend, who we promote, who we even ask to take on some like stretch assignment or tasks such as giving the update at the all-hands meeting for our team, or going in and exploring some new technology that might be on the horizon that we could leverage. Who are we going to trust with these stretch assignments are people that we know and the people that we know are the people in our network. So it is important to look to diversify our network. There's so many ways to do this. When I give talks, I share some of these ways. One is literally when new people join your team or from a different demographic than you, get to know them and get to know their work and their career goals and down the road, look for how you might be able to connect some dots. But really, take the time to get to know people who you might otherwise just like, “Oh yeah, they're joining the team, whatever,” but set up that virtual coffee or whatever. The other thing you can do is join Slack groups or other discussion forums at your company for people from that demographic. After checking first, if you'd be welcome and invited, of course, but many of these groups will be open to allies and if you are wanting to join that discussion groups so that you can sort of understand the conversation, understand the challenges, get to know some of this talent. That's a great way to do it. You can also go to conferences that are designed for members of other groups that you're not a part of. Again, asking first permission, if you'd be welcome as an ally, but in tech, there's so many of these, but there's lesbians who tech, there are Black women in tech or Black coders conferences. There are Latinas in tech. Meetups and things like that. So there's so many opportunities to go and hear incredibly talented speakers talking about the technology and the projects and the work that they do and it's a great way to expand your network. I'll share my favorite hack that I do when it's in-person and I'm going to a meetup or an event. I'm an introvert, I will let everyone know that. It's hard for me to go into a networking group like the meetup that's happening and there's some pizza and some drinks before it starts, or that conference reception. It's hard for me to go into a room like that. So when I do, I quickly scan the room and I look for someone who's standing by themselves or sitting by themselves, who is from a different demographic and I go over and say, “Hi.” That's the easiest introduction for me as an introvert is to go find someone who's all by themselves and maybe feeling a little awkward that they're all by themselves too and it's a great way to strike a conversation and again, to expand my network, meet some new people, not just my friends that might be coming to the same event. DAMIEN: So one of the things that I want to call attention to, too with what you're saying there is that this marginalization and privilege is self-reinforcing. You don't have to have – even though we all have cognitive biases, they aren't actually necessary for marginalization and privilege to self-reinforce and in fact, because that actually takes effort to undo these things. If we just go along, if we pretend not to see color, or whatever, we are actually reinforcing the problems that exist. KAREN: Yeah, and Damien, on that note. In my book, and it's also a free download on my website, betterallies.com. I have a list that I've curated of 50 ways you might have privilege in the workplace. I like people to read through this list and think about all the ways they have privilege that others might not. The top of the list are “I'm a male,” and “I'm white,” and those are the top two things. But then it gets into more nuanced things and nuanced things being, “I'm not the primary caregiver for someone else.” Well, why is that something we should be aware of as allies? Well, when you're the primary caregiver, that means you may have to drop things at a moment's notice to take a child or a parent to a doctor's appointment, for example, or you might be interrupted in your work. So there's privilege when you don't have that caregiving responsibility. Another one is that you actually have budget enough spare money so that you can do after work outings with a team that aren't company sanctioned. Like, “Yeah, I can afford to go out to dinner,” and gosh, this all sounds so weird now with the pandemic and how long it’s lasting. But “Yeah, I can go out for drinks or dinner with my team after work and pay my way,” or “I can do that whitewater rafting trip on the weekend that people are getting together with.” Even though it's not company work, it's still networking and that builds bonds that builds relationships and sure, work is going to be discussed. It also includes things such as “I am not holding a visa,” which means that I have confidence that I maybe can take some risks with my career. “I can move teams, move to another manager, try something new out because I have confidence that I'm not going to potentially lose my job, which means losing my visa, which means losing my ability to live in the United States.” So there's so many ways that we have privileged that I think at first blush, we might not realize and I think building on your point, Damien it's important for us to understand this privilege so that we can be understanding of how and why we should be diversifying our network and getting to know people who have different levels of privilege than ourselves. REIN: And if you're like a white dude who's like, “This is a lot to keep track of.” Yes. When you don't have them, it's obvious. KAREN: Yeah, you can be oblivious. Otherwise – not that you would be, Rein. I'm not saying that, but one can be very oblivious. REIN: I’m probably oblivious of like, at least 30 of them, so. DAMIEN: For people who are marginalized every axes, we really cannot be unaware. It's dangerous. Those of us who were unaware of it, suffer disastrous consequences. So in places where you are privileged, if one of the privileges is to not be aware of it and yes, it is a lot to keep track of and yes, as everybody else has to keep track of that stuff. KAREN: Yeah, and building on what you both just said, this is just like technology in some ways and let me explain what I mean by that. Let's not take it out of context because there's some nuanced stuff I'm about to share. But in tech, there are so many areas of specialty, whether that is in data science or product security or accessibility related engineering or internationalization engineering and, and, and like, there's so many areas of expertise. And Rein, you’re like, “As a white guy, how am I supposed to keep track of all of this?” Well, it's hard. I get it because the field keeps changing, things keep getting innovated on or brought to the surface and the same thing, I'm sure that Chanté sees this in the DEI space. We are learning all the time about how to create more inclusive workplaces where everyone can do their best work and thrive. It's the same as like what am I learning about writing the right kind of code that is going to have lasting impact, that is going to not cause incidents over the weekend [chuckles] when we all want to be doing something else? When it's not going to down the road because technical debt that is going to have to be retired? So yeah, it's hard work. I don't mean to say it's not, but we need to make sure we have people who are thinking about this around us, who are reminding us, who are teaching us the best practices so that we are getting ahead of this versus falling behind. REIN: One of the things you said last time that I really want to make sure we bring back up is that doing this work is everyone's job. KAREN: Yes. Yeah, and Rein, I think we got into that conversation talking specifically about product security, software security. You can have a team of people who are software security specialists/experts. In fact, when I was at Adobe in my department, that was one of the groups in my department was cross-engineering product security specialists and they know this stuff. They are paying attention to the landscape. They know when those zero-day incidents happen and what the response is like, and what bounties are being paid and they know all of that because they love it. They're paying attention to it, but they can't solve the problem for the whole company. They cannot make sure that every piece of code is hardened so that the viruses don't get injected. There aren't security violations. What they need to do is educate others, be there to support them when things go bad. But it's really about educating every engineer to be using the libraries the right way, to be allocating memory in the right way, whatever so that we don't have those security violations and it's the same thing with being inclusive. I have so much respect for anyone and Chanté, it sounds like you do this work, but like, you are responsible for diversity at a company and are looking top down at what are the measurements we're going to have? What are the quarterly or annual goals that we want to have to improve our diversity? How are we going to measure that, make it happen? But we also need people in every corner of the organization, in every code review meeting, in every interview debrief, in every casual hallway conversation, or a chat in a Slack, we need all of those people to realize they have a role to play in being inclusive and have some awareness of what it looks like to not be inclusive. What someone from a different demographic is experiencing in a way you might not and what are some of the ways you can take action? So I see so many parallels there and I firmly believe, it's something I say all the time like, you don't have to have the words “diversity inclusion” belonging on your business card to make a difference. It's inclusion as a job for everyone. CHANTÉ: Yeah. That's one of the things I wrote down that I wanted to make sure that we directed folks to. I love that on your website. That was one of the things that before I ever even knew you were going to be a guest here. That's why I started following you. I love that and I want to actually dive into that because one of the things that I hear often from people when I'm doing this work, they're like, “You're so good at this.” I'm like, “Yeah, but this is a skill that you have to work towards.” So it's just like any other thing you want to make a lifestyle. You have to wake up that day and make a decision. If you're somebody who wants to eat healthier, then you wake up every morning and you have decisions to make. If you are a yogi like me, you might decide that you want to get on your yoga mat or you might want to pick up a book and read the philosophy instead. So it's a lifestyle. I'd love it if you could maybe tell us a little bit about your journey because it's humbling to hear that you got into this work knowing that you wanted to coach women in tech, but you didn't necessarily aspire to be thinking about and writing about allyship, but that became a part of it. So what are some things that you did early on, or what are some things that you're doing now in terms of showing up every day and being a better ally? KAREN: Yeah. I think that one thing you have to be comfortable with and it's hard, but I do this a lot is being an ally means realizing you're going to be wrong some of the time, because you are constantly stepping outside of that comfort zone that is just so safe—"I know how to navigate this kind of conversation, using these kinds of words and everything”—and you have to keep stepping outside that comfort zone so that you are taking some risks and you're going to make some mistakes. You are. I make them pretty regularly. I might put something in a newsletter. I send out a weekly newsletter called 5 Ally Actions with 5 ideas and things people can take and I get emails back from people who disagree with me or say, “If I had written that, I would have changed it slightly this way,” or whatever, and I'm comfortable with that because I approach everything with this mindset of curious, instead of furious. I want to be curious about why someone's giving me the feedback and what's underneath there and what can I learn from it as opposed to getting furious at them for giving me feedback and like, assaulting my expertise, or whatever, or my voice. So curious, not furious, I think is an important thing here and I want to give a shout out. I learned that phrase from a podcast I was listening to and it was Kat Gordon, who has something called The 3% Movement, which is all about getting more gender diversity in the creative industry, like the ad industry. So hat tipped to Kat Gordon for that. So getting back to you got to get comfortable with making mistakes and when we make a mistake, acknowledge it, apologize. Heartfelt apology, folks. Apologize and then figure out what you're going to do differently the next time. That's what it's all about. So the journey is real. No one ever gets an ally badge or an ally cookie. In fact, I will tell you, I recently searched on LinkedIn in job titles for ally. I was curious to see how many people put in their job titles. There are people out there who have claimed it and I don't think that's right. Unless someone else has told them that, in which case, okay, someone else has said, “You are an ally,” maybe you can put that in your title and claim the badge, but it's really not about that. It's about being on a lifelong journey really, to be inclusive, to keep learning, to keep understanding how things are changing, and not putting the spotlight on yourself. Opening the doors for other people and just stand right behind that door and realizing that it's not about you. It's so hard to do this at times because we all want to be like, “Hey, look at the cool thing I just did for somebody else.” We want that feedback, but being an ally means stepping out of the limelight and letting someone else shine. CHANTÉ: Those are great. Thank you so much, Karen, for that. I want to ask one more question since we're there. In terms of not making it about ourselves and not necessarily centering ourselves and taking action in the moment and not giving ourselves the allyship title, if you will, who are some people that you either align yourself with or that you learn from, whether it's up close and personal or from a distance? Like who are people that you feel are providing you with gems and knowledge so that you are then sharing with folks like us, that we can at least either put in the show notes or give a shout out to? KAREN: Yes! Oh, I love this. So many people. One, I will say right off the bat is Minda Harts. Minda Harts is a woman, a Black woman, and she wrote a book called The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Get a Seat at the Table, I think is the byline. She and I spoke on a panel together a few months ago and I learned so much from her. I learned a lot from reading her book about the experience with Black women in the workplace, but then also, on the panel and since then, I feel that we have a nice professional, Twitter kind of friendship going on, which I just value so much. So I learned from her and what she shares all the time. Another person I learned from is Jeannie Gainsburg. Jeannie Gainsburg is an LGBTQ educator and wrote a book called The Savvy Ally and The Savvy Ally is all about – the funny thing is she and I connected. We realized we went to college together or the same class, but we didn't know each other in college, but we have the same mindset of understanding something and then distilling it into how an ally can show up. With her perspective, it's all about being an ally for the LGBTQ community and I've learned so much from her. In fact, I've quoted both Minda and Jeannie in my second edition pretty heavily. I also have learned a lot from David Smith and Brad Johnson. They recently published a book called Good Guys and their approach is also incredibly similar to mine, but they focus completely on how men can be allies for women and they don't focus on other aspects of allyship. But very much I learned about, they're the guys who are talking to other guys and basically saying, “Hey dude, it's your responsibility as a man in a professional setting to be an ally.” Like, it's part of your job to meet with the women on your team and sponsor them and support them. So, they tell it in a real way. Oh my gosh, I feel like I learned from so many other people, too and I'm forgetting, I'm not thinking holistically. So anyway, those are four people it's nice to give shout outs to. CHANTÉ: We put you on the spot so thank you, Karen. [laughs] KAREN: Okay. Here's another one. Corey Ponder, he works in tech, but he also does speaking and writing about diversity and inclusion on the side and he is a Black man. I just learned about his experience and perspective in such a real, raw way and I value that a lot. DAMIEN: Karen, I'd like to ask you a bit about something you brought up really early in our conversation today. You mentioned that before you got into this work with Better Allies and that sort of work, before you became a executive coach, leadership coach, you noticed a decline in gender parity in the tech industry. Can you talk about what that decline was, how it might've happened? KAREN: Yeah. So first of all, Damien a question for you. Were you surprised when I said that? DAMIEN: [chuckles] Well, no, not at all. I actually just today read about one of the earliest computers at NASA which is a woman, a Black woman, that the astronauts explicitly by name depended on, for example, Apollo 13. So I wanted to hear your story about what happened. KAREN: Yeah. Okay, okay. I asked only because there are many people who, when I just drop that into the conversation, they ended up coming back to it minutes and minutes later or towards the end of any kind of interview. At any rate, what happened? So I have theory and actually I gave a TEDx talk about this, exploring the theory. I won't do all 20 minutes of my TEDx talk, but when I decided to study computer science, I was a senior in high school trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life kind of thing, what I wanted to study in college. My father said to me, “Hey, well, Karen, you're really good at math and you enjoy making things. You're always crafting and sewing and knitting, and you like solving problems. I've just been reading this article about this new field called computer science which seems like it would combine all the things you're good at and maybe you would enjoy making software and by the way, this is what people earn in this field.” [chuckles] I have to admit, I grew up in a very humble financial household and so, I wanted to make sure I could support myself and earn a living when I graduated from college. So I'm like, “Okay, I'll study computer science. I'll learn how to build software.” That was 1981, the year I graduated from high school. Now get this, I had never touched a computer. Okay, we didn't have – I mean, 1981 was the year the IBM PC was released into the field. The Macintosh did not come out until 1984. So in my home, we did not have computers in the part-time jobs I had after school and summers, no one had computers and certainly, we didn't not have computers in my high school where I could learn to code where it would probably would have been in basic. This was a situation for many people across the United States. Going to college in the early 80s, if you wanted to study computer science, many people were coming with no experience. Maybe a little more than me. Maybe they had taken that basic class, but very little experience. It was almost like a level playing field at that point and we were encouraged to pursue this. My graduating class from college, I went back through my yearbook not too long ago to count, there were 38% of the computer science degrees went to women in my class and that statistic 38% is very similar to what was happening across the whole United States. According to the Department of Education, the year 1985, when I graduated from college, 37% of all computer science and information science degrees went to women. So that was pretty good. Now, fast forward 20, 25 years and that number dropped to a low of about 17%, I think and the overall number also went down of how many women were getting these degrees. And now, you don't have to have a computer science degree to work in tech necessarily, but in many tech environments and tech companies, the engineers are incredibly valued and are very visible and are paid very well. They are an incredibly important part of any tech company. So my point is that there used to be a lot more women computer scientists and it did drop. I do think it's this level playing field that I started at, but the decline happened because I believe a society, we as a society, started thinking and encouraging our young boys to get involved with robotics, with tinkering, with coding classes, with summer camps where you might learn to do coding or programming robotics. We encouraged our young boys more than our young girls and over time, that meant that a girl, if she wanted to go to the summer coding camp in her neighborhood, would show up and see only boys there, or see only a very small number of girls and be like, “Well, maybe this isn't for me.” Or coding assignments in colleges that were much more aligned with masculine interests and more feminine interests. Things that might be more – oh, I don't even really want to get into stereotypes. I don't even want to go there, but things that would be more appealing to an 18-year-old boy than an 18-year-old girl who just have different interests and just became self-fulfilling. What we're seeing now though, is that graph is moving in the right direction. The numbers are inching upwards because there's been so much focus across the United States – and hopefully, around the world, but across the United States, in terms of gender diversity is important in this field and we should be welcoming of all and we're making changes to all of these programs and encouraging our young girls to study this field, get involved with STEM, and pursue it when they get to college and beyond. DAMIEN: Yeah, you avoided giving an example so I'll give one that you reminded me of, which is for a very long time, the standard, the most common image used as an example of compression algorithms was that of a undressed woman and so, we can – KAREN: Lena. Her name is Lena. Yes, actually I know her name. She was someone when they were working on an image compression algorithm like, “We need a picture,” and someone just grabbed the Playboy magazine from their cube, took the centerfold out, and used that. REIN: You do. [laughter] Or at least as you did. The effect here is really interesting and also, really, it makes me very sad, which is that computing became seen as a prestige job. Once men realized that there was something to this, it requires expertise, they decided that they were going to do it and when they did—there's research that shows this both ways. When men enter a field, it raises the prestige and increases wages. When women enter a field, it lowers the prestige and decreases wages. KAREN: Yeah, that's a problem, but real. I don't mean to at all disagree. It's a real problem. ARTY: Just curious. Do we reinforce these things by saying them as a statement like that with a period versus bringing it up as a question? REIN: Yeah. ARTY: I'm just wondering. REIN: What I’m trying to do is describe and not be normative, but I think that's a valid point. ARTY: In my life coaching thing recently, we were talking about statements with periods and it's really easy to define the world of expectations of ourselves, define the world of expectations of everyone else for all time and all affinity as a statement with a period. As we go and do this, it creates these reinforcing effects, and then we go and do things and enact behaviors that reinforce those belief systems. So we're sitting here talking about biases and how all of this stuff gets baked in her brain and one of the ways that it gets baked into her brain is by making statements of “Well, this is how it is period.” I realize you’re making a statement of something to challenge, but I think it's something that we really need to think about that if we want to change the status quo, it starts with reimagining it different. Coming up with a different statement, with a period even as a starting point, and then letting that lead to questions of how do we go and manifest this new reality that is more what we want. KAREN: Can I embarrass myself? [laughs] ARTY: Yes, of course. KAREN: Okay, right. [laughter] KAREN: So I have two children. That's not embarrassing. They're in their early 20s now. That's not embarrassing. I had read, when they were younger, that there is research done that said that if you tell a girl just before she takes a math test, that girls aren't good at math, that her score will actually go down. This is the embarrassing thing. So before dropping my daughter off for like her PSATs and SAT exams, I just said, “Remember, girls are really good at math and you are really good at math, too.” [chuckles] So maybe already changing the narrative by using different periods statements, too [laughs] making up alternate realities. Oh gosh, I can't believe I just shared that story. My daughter would probably be so embarrassed. DAMIEN: That’s a modern story and I don't think there's anything to be embarrassed about there and I think Arty brings up an amazing and very valuable points. The suggestion I want to make in response to that is, because what Rein was describing is a fact and I’m sure it's important to know about and to know that it happened—and I'm already using that language now: it happened. In the past when men went into a field, it became more prestigious and higher paid. When women into a field, it became less prestigious and higher paid. And that's what has happened in the past and by stating it that way, now we can go, “Okay, what are we going to do now?” REIN: There's a thing I learned from Virginia Satir that I probably should have done here, which is when you find one of those ends with a period sentences Arty, like you're talking about, you add until now at the end. So when women enter a male dominated fields, wages go down until now. ARTY: And now they go up. Now they go up because everyone wants women because they're so awesome. Women bring so much awesomeness to the table so wages go up. The more women you have, the better the wages. CHANTÉ: Period. KAREN: Yeah. [laughter] Yeah, and—yes, and—the other kind of way to look at this is, I've been doing a lot of work with how might we statements and so the question is, how might we change the trajectory? How might we imagine the future of work where all people and all identities are welcome and we are building towards a future that is literally more equitable and more accessible for all? So how might we do that? We can maybe answer that question today, or we can invite folks who are going to listen in to weigh in when we post this online and talk to us on Twitter. ARTY: I love that, though. I mean, I think if we really want to change the status quo, part of that is realizing that we're the ones who make it. We're the ones that create our reality and our culture is just a manifest of all these beliefs and things that are in our head emerging from all of us. If we realize that we're actually the ones that are in control of that, that we're the ones that are manife

Karen Catlin bio: After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen is an acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books: "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," "The Better Allies Approach to Hiring,” and "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking."    “We all need to build our network *before we need it…” -Karen Catlin

Karen Catlin is a leadership coach and an acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. After spending twenty-five years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, she witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. She coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies for members of all underrepresented groups. Her client roster includes Airbnb, DoorDash, eBay, Envoy, Intel, Intuit, and Segment, as well as entrepreneurs and individuals. Karen's coaching offerings include tactics for increasing visibility, being more strategic, managing stakeholders, negotiation, and cultivating ally skills.  To help more people cultivate ally skills, she wrote Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces. She also published a companion guidebook, The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring, with best practices to recruit and hire people from underrepresented groups. In 2020, her unique approach to allyship was featured in the BBC's Ally Track tool. Follow her on twitter @kecatlin Dr. Peter Tomaselli  is an emergency physician and medical educator  in Philadelphia. He sees allyship and equity as crucial to providing a safe and effective learning environment and a healthy workplace. His other academic interests include professionalism and hospitality in medicine. Follow him on twitter @pjtomaselli In this episode we discuss Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces The highly-acclaimed, practical guide for how to be an ally in the workplace, now in its 2nd edition. Subscribe to the weekly 5 Ally Actions Newsletter.

Allyship at work is how each and every one of us, on an individual level, can support and empower underrepresented groups to ensure everyone can thrive at work - and that only leads to more goodness for the company. Today, author, speaker, and inclusive workplace expert Karen Catlin and I discuss how to be a real ally, what allyship means, and a shocking new way to look at privilege in your life. She shares practical tips on how to be an ally in your everyday interactions, thus creating a more engaged, inclusive workplace. Key Takeaways:Being an ally is very simple - it is using your position of privilege to create an opportunity for somebody else.Privilege doesn't mean you didn't work hard, it is just something we have because of the social groups we belong to. You can have a ripple effect in your own company. Pick a couple of things and just get started, others will pick up those behaviors and act in a different way as well.  "The first step to being a real ally is understanding that someone else's situation may be different from yours, and you can't discount it just because you've never experienced it yourself." —  Karen Catlin About Karen Catlin, Author of “Better Allies”: After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen is a leadership coach and an acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books:  "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring,” and "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking." Connect with Karen:  Website: KarenCatlin.comTwitter: twitter.com/betterallies & twitter.com/kecatlinLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kecatlinInstagram: instagram.com/betteralliesCheck out all of Karen's books: BetterAllies.com  Don't forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy Connect with Maria: Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.comLearn more about Maria's brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.comHire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-RossLinkedIn: Maria RossInstagram: @redslicemariaTwitter: @redsliceFacebook: Red Slice

Allyship at work is how each and every one of us, on an individual level, can support and empower underrepresented groups to ensure everyone can thrive at work - and that only leads to more goodness for the company. Today, author, speaker, and inclusive workplace expert Karen Catlin and I discuss how to be a real ally, what allyship means, and a shocking new way to look at privilege in your life. She shares practical tips on how to be an ally in your everyday interactions, thus creating a more engaged, inclusive workplace. Key Takeaways:Being an ally is very simple - it is using your position of privilege to create an opportunity for somebody else.Privilege doesn't mean you didn't work hard, it is just something we have because of the social groups we belong to. You can have a ripple effect in your own company. Pick a couple of things and just get started, others will pick up those behaviors and act in a different way as well.  "The first step to being a real ally is understanding that someone else's situation may be different from yours, and you can't discount it just because you've never experienced it yourself." —  Karen Catlin About Karen Catlin, Author of “Better Allies”: After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen is a leadership coach and an acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books:  "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring,” and "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking." Connect with Karen:  Website: KarenCatlin.comTwitter: twitter.com/betterallies & twitter.com/kecatlinLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kecatlinInstagram: instagram.com/betteralliesCheck out all of Karen's books: BetterAllies.com  Don't forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy Connect with Maria: Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.comLearn more about Maria's brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.comHire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-RossLinkedIn: Maria RossInstagram: @redslicemariaTwitter: @redsliceFacebook: Red Slice

In this episode we talked about Diversity and specifically Diversity Awareness. While Diversity may be seem as part of an initiative a company takes on to  ensure people of diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures are treated as equal, diversity is also an individual responsibility. Our guest today, Karen Catlin, is an advocate for inclusive work spaces. After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a Vice President of Engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, she noticed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. therefore, she decided to switch gears. She became a Leadership Coach to help more women become leaders and coach men who want to be better allies for underrepresented groups. She is the author of two books on the topic Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces and The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring. In todays’ episode we talked about her background and career shift. We also discuss specific steps you can take now to become an ally and help foster diversity. To get in touch with Karen Catlin, her website: https://karencatlin.com/ For resources and updates, visit our website https://hardcoresoftskillspodcast.com/ Follow us on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/hardcoresoftskillspodcast/ ),  Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/hardcoresoftskills/) and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hardcoresoftskillspodcast

Karen Catlin is a former VP in tech, leadership coach, speaker, author, and advocate for inclusion in the workplace. She also mentors students on their career goals. We talked about her interests in women entering and staying in tech, her public speaking book “Present! a techie’s guide to public speaking”, and her favorite speaking topics. Learn more about Karen at https://karencatlin.com/. TEACH THE GEEK teachthegeek.com anchor.fm/teachthegeek youtube.teachthegeek.com @teachthegeek (FB, Twitter) @_teachthegeek_ (IG, Twitter) --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

When you commit to being an ally at work and want to take meaningful antiracist action, there are various roles you can take on, to fit with who you are, where you are and what you are particularly good at. We talk about some good examples of this in our new episode: Recommending Black people and people of colour, actively talking about their expertise and skills. Inviting an investment in the person you’re recommending. Inviting people to be visible with their knowledge and expertise, creating room on a podium. Amplifying people’s voices to make sure they’re getting room to be heard. Inviting diverse people and perspectives when you see they’re not represented. Investigating, reading about, researching knowledge and experiences. Speaking up and speaking out - being the opposite of a silent bystander. Creating safe spaces for people to tell their stories, share their experiences. This is our invitation to you to make a well-informed choice on how you want to participate. Choose what is most resonant with who you are and what you have the opportunity to do. Understand the value that it provides. And keep it going. Working together, we’re moving the needle. Referenced in this episode: '7 Examples of What Being an Ally at Work Really Looks Like', by Karen Catlin https://www.themuse.com/advice/what-is-an-ally-7-examples

This is the third episode of a three-part special series on allyship. What makes a great ally? In this episode, we’ll break down the 5 keys to be an effective, non-performative ally — including dozens of practical actions you can take in your organization right away.    Thanks to our guests Corey Flournoy, the Global Head of Inclusion and Diversity at Groupon; Daisy Auger-Dominguez, Chief People Officer at VICE Media; Julie Kratz, a TEDx speaker, inclusive leadership trainer and the author of the book Lead Like an Ally; Karen Catlin, author of Better Allies; Nichelle Grant, the Head of Diversity & Inclusion at Siemens USA; Toby Mildon, Diversity & Inclusion architect at Mildon and host of the podcast The Inclusive Growth Show.   Resources mentioned in the show:   Free privilege toolkit: hivelearning.com/privilege   Research from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that shows that the average American (Black and white) has a very racially monolithic friendship group: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/25/three-quarters-of-whites-dont-have-any-non-white-friends/?wpisrc=nl-wnkpm&wpmm=1

This is the second episode of a three-part special series on allyship. The vast majority of people are well-intentioned and want to be inclusive - but various factors hold them back from stepping up to be an ally. In this episode we dive into the barriers to allyship, and some practical tips to overcome them — including some critique of call-out culture and its nasty older brother cancel culture. Thanks to our expert guests Daisy Auger-Dominguez, Chief People Officer at VICE Media; Karen Brown, founder of Bridge Arrow; Karen Catlin, author of Better Allies; Sonja Gittens Ottley, Head of Diversity & Inclusion at Asana; Sumaya Sherif, Director of Operations for Ally Squared; Toby Mildon, Diversity & Inclusion architect at Mildon and host of The Inclusive Growth Show podcast. Resources mentioned in the show: Our guest Toby Mildon’s podcast, The Inclusive Growth Show: https://www.mildon.co.uk/podcast Free three-step framework to address a microaggression: hivelearning.com/calloutmicroaggressions Free Workout to Set expectations: Address problematic language: hivelearning.com/calloutmicroaggressions

Public Speaking for Techie's James Taylor interviews Poornima Vijayashanker and they talked about Public Speaking for Techie's In today's episode Poornima Vijayashanker talks about Public Speaking for Techie's. Poornima Vijayashanker is an entrepreneur, engineer, author, and speaker who has made her mark in the tech world. A graduate of Duke University, Poornima was the founding engineer at Mint where she helped build, launch, and scale the product until it was acquired by Intuit. Following the acquisition, Poornima went on to launch Femgineer, an education company for tech professionals and entrepreneurs who want to learn how to build software products and companies. She regularly speaks at industry events around the world and has authored the book, How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products, as well as co-authoring Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking with Karen Catlin. Having served as the Entrepreneur in Residence at 500 Startups, Poornima has also lectured at her alma mater's Pratt School of Engineering. What we cover: Why speaking is a multivitamin Public speaking for techie's and the curse of knowledge Lack of diversity in keynotes and panels Resources: Poornima Vijayashanker Website Please SUBSCRIBE ►http://bit.ly/JTme-ytsub ♥️ Your Support Appreciated! If you enjoyed the show, please rate it on YouTube, iTunes or Stitcher and write a brief review. That would really help get the word out and raise the visibility of the Creative Life show. SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW Apple: http://bit.ly/TSL-apple Libsyn: http://bit.ly/TSL-libsyn Spotify: http://bit.ly/TSL-spotify Android: http://bit.ly/TSL-android Stitcher: http://bit.ly/TSL-stitcher CTA link: https://speakersu.com/the-speakers-life/ FOLLOW ME: Website: https://speakersu.com LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/JTme-linkedin Instagram: http://bit.ly/JTme-ig Twitter: http://bit.ly/JTme-twitter Facebook Group: http://bit.ly/IS-fbgroup Read full transcript at https://speakersu.com/public-speaking-for-techies-sl074/  James Taylor Hi, it's James Taylor, founder of SpeakersU. Today's episode was first aired as part of International Speakers Summit the world's largest online event for professional speakers. And if you'd like to access the full video version, as well as in depth sessions with over 150 top speakers, then I've got a very special offer for you. Just go to InternationalSpeakersSummit.com, where you'll be able to register for a free pass for the summit. Yep, that's right 150 of the world's top speakers sharing their insights, strategies and tactics on how to launch grow and build a successful speaking business. So just go to InternationalSpeakersSummit.com but not before you listen to today's episode. Hi there. It's James Taylor. I'm delighted today to be joined by Poornima Vijayashanker. She is an entrepreneur, engineer, author and speaker who has made her mark on the tech world, a graduate of Duke University. Poornima was the founding engineer at mint where she helped build, launch and scale the product until it was acquired by Intuit following acquisition Poornima went on to launch with femme Junya, which is an education company for tech professionals and entrepreneurs who want to learn how to build software products and companies. Now, she regularly speaks at industry events around the world and she has authored the book how to transform your ideas into software products, as well as co authoring present a techies guide to public speaking with Karen Karen Caitlin, having served as an entrepreneur in residence at 500 startups. Poornima has also lectured at our alma mater, which is Pratt School of Engineering. It's my great pleasure to have her join us today. So welcome Poornima Poornima Vijayashanker thanks for having me today. James Taylor So share with everyone what's going on in your world just now. Poornima Vijayashanker Well, we have started our six week online competent communicator course. And we're in the middle of it. It's great to see so many first time people who have been speaking for a while, learn a new approach and apply that and I know this is where a lot of people realize, wow, this course is tough or this is getting hard. So it's great to see that there's still Sticking with the program that they're getting through it, that they're at least diving in to try our new approach. And that is my sort of day for today is focused on giving them feedback on that new approach. James Taylor I mentioned. You know, obviously, you had this basic set, you've been very successful career in tech. When did the speaking part of you get started? When did you find you develop this love of speaking and speaking to, especially at conferences that you speak today? Poornima Vijayashanker Yeah, well, actually, I have been speaking for a very long time I in my youth was a very shy kid, and I figured around middle school that life was going to be hard if I didn't do something to change that. So I joined my middle school in high school Speech and Debate Team, and I was really glad that I did you know, it helped me Ace my college interview, and then go on to ace my first job interview, and then do more complicated things here in Silicon Valley, like, evangelize the companies into the startups that I started, help recruit and pitch investors. For me. public speaking is definitely a multivitamin and it's Something that Karen Catlin, my co author and I really evangelize it's, you know, it's a thing that people don't recognize. And it's definitely hard to get started in, especially if you have a fear of it, you're not sure if you're an expert, not sure where to speak. But once you get going, you start to see a number of benefits, as well as the people on the receiving end who hear your message. And so I have been applying public speaking any way I can. And I found that I benefit from it in terms of a business and building a personal brand. But the people who are listening also get a chance to connect with me, James Taylor and who are those? Do you have a kind of any early mentors and you're speaking over the particular speakers that you look towards? These are all I like, I like what they do in terms of how they present or how they think, Poornima Vijayashanker you know, I didn't because I didn't know any better. So when I started to speak, I, this was back in 2008. There weren't a lot of resources out there for technical Speaking there were four general public speaking. And I had learned them again in high school. And in college, I had a great debate coach who helped me not only with debate but do things like extemporaneous speaking, and improv improvisation. So I had a great coach in that capacity. But when I transitioned into industry, I noticed that one there weren't a lot of technical folks speaking in general, or the styles is not quite developed. And two, there weren't a lot of women or other folks that I could look up to. So I just honestly started to develop my own style. And then periodically I would come across great resources. You know, Scott birkins, got a good book. There is Reynolds who's got that great book on, on doing slide design. And so I started to pick up elements here and there, but quite frankly, it wasn't until I was pretty deep in that I realized, Oh, I have kind of cultivated my own framework from best and worst things that I've experienced. So I didn't really have somebody that I looked up to initially or had as a mentor. It was a lot of it was just audience feedback, and getting a sense of what was working and what wasn't. James Taylor I mean, you think of, I think of some of the best keynotes I've ever seen. And some of them are actually product keynotes. So I think, you know, the classic Steve Jobs at the Moscone Center near where you you're speaking from today, you know, he's a classic, you know, there's that that but often feels like in, in the kind of tech world in that kind of Silicon Valley world, that a lot of the speakers are in the either the marketing the sales or the biz, biz dev world, they're kind of getting more natural speakers. Are you starting to see that change now, within the more engineering community, you know, the people are actually building the stuff and creating these incredible products actually, you know, coming bit more To the fool there. Poornima Vijayashanker Yeah, it's in the last couple years, just as there's been an explosion in terms of conferences worldwide for marketing and for sales and for product. There has definitely been a interest to do more technical conferences. technical courses have been going on forever, I think. And in my early career, like around 2004 2005, I would go to some of these. But there were pretty big gating factors, you know, you had to really take the time to submit a proposal, there were a couple major conferences happening at Moscone Center around the world. And now you're seeing there's a lot of unconferences. There are smaller regional conferences. There are conferences that have started to add a technical component. And so it's been great that there's more and more interest, but as a result, we need more speakers. And you start to see more technical folks saying, oh, maybe it's time that I branch out, and I do More public speaking to recruit to do product demos, or just to showcase the technical work that I have done in my team has done or my company's done. So you're starting to see more and more of that. But I would say, Yeah, for the last 10 years, it's definitely been on the rise. And I anticipate more technical conferences coming out, just like there are other conferences in verticals. James Taylor So this is the whole Silicon Valley tech sector has also come into the spotlight a lot recently, in terms of lack of diversity as conferences I saw, I saw one the other day and I think it was like 40 speakers at this event and there was not a single woman, you get this. So that's the first kind of like, okay, so I'm getting because you're coming from an engineering what and there's obviously there's that there's a strong sense in the engineering side and take that there needs to be a big rebound in terms of creating greater diversity, more inclusion there as well. What's happening when it comes to the more technical conferences and those kind of events are they Really now having to basically take a look at what they're doing and completely kind of rethink in terms of how they're appealing to speakers how they're bringing in speakers how they're potentially betting speakers. Poornima Vijayashanker Yeah, well, I will say this, there's really no excuse because Grace Hopper celebration, which is the largest technical conference for women, has over 10,000 attendees and grows every year by probably 20 or more percent. And they don't have a problem getting women to do technical talks at every level, whether it's entry all the way up to senior level executive positions and sea level suites, right. So if they can, if they can manage to scrape at you know, that many attendees as well as speakers and turn people away, then I think that there is a big market for getting speakers into some of these other events. So I push back a little bit in terms of how aware people are how much of a priority it is for them. For my personal experience, what I have noticed is there is definitely an interest. You know, women certainly want to get out and speak. They're certainly full of doing it. They have to they're either far enough along in their career or there is even early folks who are like, there's I have something to share, right. And what I've noticed the last couple years, is there are conferences that are adopting a code of conduct in terms of diversity of speakers, diversity across not only genders, but you know, people of color, etc. And so the conferences who are more, I would say aware and with it are adopting these policies, not only to recruit speakers, but also how they conduct the conference itself. And I think it's getting getting with the times and recognizing this because the ones that do end up attracting more attendees, attracting the type of attendees that they want And it ends up being a more vibrant conference that lasts for many, many years. So this is something I think that people have to start to invest in if they are going to consider doing this conference again, having it be successful and having it be profitable because at the end of the day of conference as a business, right, James Taylor the other thing I often think about is a speaker's when we speak at a conference, we keynote a conference, We're often asked by that, that meeting planner, that event conference organizer to recommend a speaker for the next year. And I, I was thinking about it a lot, you know, you and I were in a mastermind group has actually predominantly female as well in that particular group. And, and I was thinking about as well as okay, because this question comes in so often from event planners, like who would you recommend? And I, I used to, I used to be okay, well, I'd recommend this guy because he was very similar to me be spoken with a different subject from me. And so it was, it was I was going into a default position and without without giving any thought, and it was just like it was thoughtless. Okay, this person, I know him, I like him, I think he would do a good job for the client. And it's what it's made me do as a speaker. And in terms of, you know, my continual development is having to rethink, okay, I need to have a much broader sense of who's out there, who's, who's doing like, Great stuff. And so this is a training for me. I don't know if you'll find finding this in terms of, because it's so much business is referral based, you know, for other speakers. Poornima Vijayashanker Definitely. And I mean, you have a sense of who the best speakers are. So, one of the excuses I hear from a lot of folks says, Oh, well, everyone was just too busy. Like, literally all the women who know how to speak. We're just too busy. James Taylor That day, they were Poornima Vijayashanker like, oh, what was it International Women's Day, like, what what was the reason right? And I think what it means is that a they don't think about it early on enough because they're waiting until the last minute, right? It's not Maybe a month or maybe two months out, or sometimes even two weeks, I've heard so many requests from people, sometimes even two days before saying, Oh, can you get me some money, nobody's gonna drop work or even get the time off to come and speak at your event with that much lead time, right? You've got to start thinking earlier, three months, six months, if you want to get on people's calendars, if you want to be taken seriously and be known as a professional, you know, organizations, so start to do it earlier on and make that a priority. And then of course, if you have situations where people say, Oh, I can't do this, or you know, I just happen to have a conflict, then having them suggest somebody else, but but the other place is to have your own watering holes. So for example, earlier this year, my sponsor actually tasked me with putting on a panel. And, you know, the sponsor said, Well, here's a panel for you, please moderate it. And I took one look at that panel, and it was me and I think there was one other woman and the For guys, and I was like, I can't do this panel, you know, and I pushed back. And of course, my sponsor and I have been working together for four years. So I had that ability to speak up and he is a great ally, had he not, I probably would have just said, like, sorry, I'm too busy can't make it right. Or you probably wouldn't be my sponsor. So I took the time and I said, Look, this panel is just not attractive for these reasons. And if you want me to moderate this, here's what I want to see. I need you to cut out at least two spots, and I want to replace them. And I'm happy to bring you people but what I don't want to see is four guys and one woman and then me as the moderator, that's not a very balanced panel. So he kind of tasked cast me with Okay, fine, go find the people make sure that they can speak here's kind of the background. And I already had a couple watering holes. You know, I am part of a couple slack communities. Obviously I have my own network. I have students that I train, so I have a lot of places that I can pull from. I still found it a little challenging. I won't say that people just trickled into me But within a couple days, I was able to get people to say I'm interested. And then from there, I went through their profiles to see that they had spoken. They had either a YouTube video or they had spoken somewhere before that could vouch for them. And I ended up actually, surprisingly, getting to women. And then what ended up happening was one of the guys who was on the panel, I couldn't make it. And so he gave up his spot to a female colleague, and the panel ended up being five women or was like four women and one guy, which is kind of coincidence. We didn't really planned it to be that way. But I gotta say, what ended up happening was, there was a awesome audience turnout, we were pretty much sold out. The people that came out said, Oh, somebody really put a lot of thought into this panel. And a lot of women came out saying, Oh, I looked at the roster. I saw that it was a great representation of women who are doing pretty advanced stuff. I mean, We had somebody who was doing augmented and virtual reality, we had someone who was a product manager for the last 1015 years. So these were not like, oh, let's just find somebody who's a recent grad or flexibly up the street, these were experienced individuals, right? Taking the time to think through who needs to be there, why and how that's going to reflect the audience and how they perceive this panel was important. So you've got to have somebody that's going to push back a little, as well as pluck the folks and say, these are the people that need to be on this. This is how it's going to operate. And that, of course, takes time, I understand. But if you don't put in that effort, then you know, people are gonna be like, Oh, this is just like any OLED panel. You know, why bother? And you're not going to get the response that you want to see. James Taylor Yeah, I mean, I think I was I heard from a speaker in Singapore the other day, saying, Yes, it is. I'm actually getting home our speaker together, we're going to refuse to be on all matters. panels we get things like this normal panels to be basically declined now, and we say okay, we think and we get it sometimes it's it's just, they haven't thought they're just not. It's just like it's like as you say it's last minute, I'll just, you know, they're not really thinking in any kind of way in terms of what potentially is going to be in the best interest of the audience in terms of having diversity of ideas and those people diversity of ideas as well. I'm wondering, so my wife is a an engineer. She's a mechanical engineer by trade. So I often test out my keynotes and her because her brain is very different to mine. She thinks much more analytically, you know, she's into the detail and stuff like that as well. So I'm very lucky I've kind of got that person that I've got that techie person to test out things on. For someone that doesn't have that. How should they be if they're working out their keynote and then knowing they know they're going to be speaking to more technical audience does have to be engineers, maybe scientists are more technical audience anyway. How should they be thinking about preparing If they're not necessarily a technical person themselves, Poornima Vijayashanker so I read a really interesting book recently by Angie Panzer, and it's all about writing for the workplace. And I thought that the takeaways apply to speaking as well. And the one thing that she mentioned in her book was how a lot of times when we write, if the writing is very dense, if it's convoluted, then the reader looks at the writer and says, Oh, this person, just, you know, isn't a very good writer, and isn't a very polished person or professional person, because of the cognitive load they put on the reader. Now, if the writer instead uses simple language, despite what level the reader may be at, right, the reader immediately gets it they kind of flow through the book, and they're thinking wow, I totally understand all these concepts. I was able to finish the book you know, cover to cover and they feel empowered, right. Same same rules apply to being a Speaker, it doesn't matter whether you are going in front of a technical audience or a lay person audience, you have to take the time to say, I'm presenting this information, there may be jargon, there may be concepts that are or things that, you know, I discovered that other people may not know, right, the curse of knowledge. So how can I best convey it in a way that's easily digestible? Not patronizing, you know, so that's the tone depends, and depends on how you how you phrase it and how you deliver it in your tone. But if you can incorporate that, then audiences are going to feel like wow, this was a very polished speaker, a professional speaker, a knowledgeable speaker, because you've done all the work for them. So regardless of who your audience is, whether it's technical or non technical, I always encourage people to do that. And it does work. That's the thing like once you start to do it, you're like, wow, I felt like I had stripped a lot of the content out I made the message simpler. I had a smaller table. takeaways are fewer takeaways. And people were thankful, you know, nobody said it was too watered down. And nobody said it was too dense. It was just right. And that takes a level of practice. But I would encourage your people in your audience to think about that, how can I take my message, regardless of the audience, and make sure that it's simple, because the people on the receiving end are going to are going to judge the quality of the speaker based on how simple you make it. James Taylor It's really that that line, which someone said, Kevin, which famous author said, it's Sorry, I'm having to write you a long letter, I didn't have time to write your shorter letter, because the writing the shorter takes so much more work. And you have to really think, you know, much, much more intensely about how do I want to distill this down. I'm also wondering, now you're saying this, I'm reflecting on some of the some of the speakers I really like and they often speak as three different levels so that there's so even if I'm not attending, I go and listen to them speak. I understand cuz they're speaking of the usual most consistent and things like that. So, you know, they'll relate it to maybe foods or things I get as a non technical person. But then there's another level up, which is maybe the more executive level and that executive executive level to certain using certain concepts there. And then there's another level again, when they using whether it's in terms of certain jargon, or they're giving clues. They're giving a sense at this point. I know what I'm talking about here. But I'm also having to create a create a talk and I think that's, that's must be a fine balance to be able to, to get a get a message across in that way. Poornima Vijayashanker Sure. Well think about this way, even your executive who has a million things going on in their head, they, they've got thousands of people pitching them, they've got emails coming in, they have their own decisions to make, right even if you were to take the time and put something into a simple analogy, or contexts that they're going to get in the first you know, 30 seconds or three minutes. You have just now saved them from having to do that load, right that that cognitive load. And so even for the folks who are like that, I find that it's very, very helpful to make the jargon of the company to demonstrate that you know what they're talking about, right? So if you say something like, Oh, yes, I understand that this company you guys use, okay, ours okrs mean, blah. Here's how I think you know, what I'm talking about relates to that. So you can you can kind of get your foot in the door and demonstrate credibility. But again, think about what that person on the receiving end goes through on a day to day and really take the time to say, How can I present this information? Because my sense is you're going to want to get something out of that relationship later on. You may want to go on to do consulting, you may want to get hired on again, as a keynote speaker, you may want a referral, right? And so when you've done that heavy lifting for them, Then all of a sudden, they're like, Oh, this person was fantastic, right? And it, it becomes this thing that people, like, I can't put my finger on it. But that's essentially what they're doing. And, and storytelling is one format to do that in analogies or another. But you've really got to think about that cognitive load on your audience member. James Taylor I'm thinking that's sometimes the benefit of being the closing keynote speaker, as opposed to opening is if you can get in a few days early to the event, and you can spend time and then you quickly get to hear the language of, of the delegates, what the toys but if it's an industry you don't know about, there's downsides, obviously, to be in a closing keynote, a lot of people thinking about leaving, where am I going to go? Like, I've got to catch my flight, but there's definitely some, some benefits there. So you're, I know you have this this, this course, which is really helping, the more more techies, you know, speak whether that's because they have to go and present product launches or whether they have to present to the teams or selling an idea, maybe to a client as well. What when when you start getting you know, working with those people When people say kind of going through that course, what is the what is the aha moment? Do you see from them where they suddenly go? Oh, okay. Oh, this this concept is just opened up his knees changed my paradigm on how to speak what was the thing that you tend to find there? Poornima Vijayashanker Well, I think the first is because so many of these folks don't tend to be presenters on a day to day basis, like a salesperson or a marketer would be their first resistance is Oh, I'm just not a natural speaker. Right? And, and getting them over that initial hump of you're going to be nervous. Everybody's nervous nerves are okay, here's how to manage that nervousness is the first hurdle. And so we do that through some pretty simple exercises that have nothing to do with anything technical, right? We just, we make it really, really easy. One of the first exercises I do is describe to me your favorite dessert, and that's something anybody can do. Right? And then they see Oh, that was it was kind of challenging to do, but I did it and it works. makes them realize that they can achieve something. The next phase is, I'm not an expert, right? Because even though people may be technical, they may think that they are not as big as the next person. Or maybe they're not far enough along in their career, or they don't have something novel and earth shattering to share. So the second thing that we help them do is really extract their expertise by looking at what they've already done, and realizing that there are people out there who may be less experienced or less knowledgeable than them. And those are the folks that want to learn. And so that's kind of the second breakthrough moment they have. And then the third is explaining to them just like building a product, no writing software or hardware or whatever they're working on has a process, there is a process to creating a talk. Once they get over that, then they're like, Oh, well, now I know like how to put this together, but up until then, they feel like it's a mystery and that you have to be really good. charismatic and you have to be leading like, a billion dollar company like jobs in order to do it. So. So once we get to walk them through these three phases, they immediately have a sense of I can do this going forward. And yes, I'm still going to be nervous. Yes, there's going to be moments where I'm going to need to break down abstract concepts, I'm going to need to practice my talk, right? But those I would say, are like the three pillars that we build on, so that by the end, everybody in our course, is doing at least a five minute lightning talk. And it's, it's pretty transformative, you know, recording them throughout. And then at the end, sometimes they say, Oh, you know, I was really nervous. I don't know how I did. So we make them go back and watch it. And the next day, they're like, Oh, my gosh, I didn't recognize myself. It's like what the majority of students say. So it's fantastic to be part of that process. And to see how awakened they become and to see that they can, they can do it and they just, they just needed somebody to kind of guide them along and to help hold them accountable through each of those steps. James Taylor Now you're in the land of tech. So I want to make a couple of quick fire questions here. What is that app that you're using just now the or the online tool? Do you find really useful for yourself? Especially for the speaking part of you it could be in terms of how you prepare or it could be in terms of how you get your speaking gigs or deliver on your on your speaking What? Are there any tools you really enjoy using? Poornima Vijayashanker Yeah, unfortunately, I don't have a lot of tools that I use to get engagements I find that most of my engagements I have to just do sort of the general sales process of cold calling or cold outreach to people through email following up. I will say that what has helped a lot this year in particular, is my YouTube channel. So having and that I've been building for the last four years. So it's kind of funny that it was only recently that I'm starting to get more and more interest. And the thing about my youtube channel is I have a variety in In terms of the content that I produce, I have some short videos that are about a minute to five minutes long. I have longer videos that are interviews that I do for my monthly or weekly web. And then I have ones that are probably 15 or so minutes. I also take any previous talks that I've done, and I put them up there so that people can see. And that ends up being one a really great source of interest and to credibility, because at the end of the day, if somebody is paying me to come and speak at their conference, they want to know, okay, can this person actually deliver? Yeah, and having that video, no matter how long or short it is, can get your foot in the door and also help close the deal, versus a lot of people I know, don't have a video, and it doesn't have to be something highly produced. You know, one of the earliest videos I did was just me standing in front of a camera speaking to people talking to them about what Fungineer was. I was about three minutes. Long as if you can create a simple explainer video, you can use that in so many places, certainly on YouTube, but in your email signature, you know, as people request a sample, and I feel like that is really, really critical having that piece of video, and if you can emulate a audience setting, because I have a couple where I'm speaking to people, getting those audience reactions can be valuable, because a lot of a lot of organizers want to see how the audience reacts to what you're saying. So I also have my like TEDx talk in there. And that's very helpful. James Taylor No, that's gramming I think YouTube is such a powerful place. Because, you know, when I talk to meeting planners, it's like the number one if they're looking for, let's say, a speaker on innovation, that that they go to YouTube first is that it's the place to go. And then the other interesting when they'll if they're looking at speakers, because of the way that the the, the recommendation engine works on YouTube. If you've got your tagging, right, and your titles and a bunch of other things right, then you can actually get seen by the people who have Wherever you whoever you know that there will be a guru in your topic, you could get seen, you know, after that video, you know the recommended videos as well. So I think that's great. I think that's it. That's a great suggestion. What about books you mentioned Scott Burke and his book was a great book on on speaking, it was another book. It doesn't have to be on speaking, but maybe it could be on. It could be on, you know, the world of tech. It could be some of it some of the topics that you talk on. Poornima Vijayashanker Yeah, well, actually, right now I'm diving into a Patsy rodenburg book on presence, the second circle book, and I did that because I understand how to be present with my audience. I've been doing this for so long, but I need to be able to convey that it to my students, and I need to have a resource to do that. So I've actually found her book really helpful, because she very clearly explains why some people kind of get stuck in their own head or their maybe two outward, you know, it's sort of the overly salesy person or the old Really bubbly person? And how do you kind of rein that in and present with your audience? And again, that's where you develop the connection with your audience. And so for me, I'm, I'm currently reading that, and I think it's I think it's a great read. So I would recommend it for people who have maybe started speaking, but they feel stilted, or maybe they don't feel as connected with audiences, or if they're just looking to say, hey, how can I move better in my own body? How can I be a little bit more dynamic of a speaker? I think it's a great read for them to get started on. James Taylor Great. We'll put a link here as well. What about if you were to let's make you wake up tomorrow morning. You have to start from scratch. No one knows who you are. You've never been booked to speak before. You have your LinkedIn profile is being wiped clean. So what would you do? How would you restart especially the speaking part of your business in your career? Poornima Vijayashanker I honestly say I would go back to basics and basics for me. We're doing some in house training with my team. So when I was at mint, one of the things I did early on was train all the employees because I was literally the first engineer there, right? So I had to sit down with them and explain, here's the architecture, here's how you get started. So and that's a very kind audience. It's your peers, you can't really mess up and they're not going to grade you if you're doing a lot of thumbs up verbal tics, etc. So I started there. And then from that point, I thought, okay, I wonder if I can go out and take this information and spread it to other people. So I actually approached unconferences first, because the thing about unconferences is there's no I mean, they have standards, but there's no high barrier. You don't have to sit down and spend hours and hours crafting your proposal talking to a bunch of organizers. You literally come up with a topic, you throw something up there and then now people have started voting on what they would like to see but still It's pretty simple, and it's very casual. So you can then get an audience of about 510 or 15 people to come to your talk, and start, start there, maybe get a few testimonials from the folks who attended so that they have a sense so that you have them to then go out and get more speaking engagements. But but that's how I would start, I think I would just go back to what I had originally done, because for me, I think that that's a very organic way to do it. And it's also a way where you're improving as you go along. Right? You're kind of starting in a place where you feel safe. Because a lot of people, you know, they're like, Oh, I want to speak at a conference and then all of a sudden they get really nervous, right? So start where you feel safe. go from there, there's no there's nothing wrong and doing baby steps. And then once you get to a level where you're like, Oh, I could give the same talk again and again, I could do it at conferences, etc. Then start reaching out to people But I would, I would kind of follow a bad approach. The key thing though, is setting a milestone setting a goal and saying, I'm going to do at least one talk quarter talk of sense for your schedule. I think consistency is really the key. And like anything else, it's that consistent practice getting out there and doing the speaking. And you'll find that as you start to do it, it has a snowball effect, more people want to reach out to you more people are aware of you. And you then get to be in a position where you decide, you know, what are the things that I want to invest my time in? Where do I want to speak? Who do I want to reach out to James Taylor pretty we could speak about loads of other things related to this topic, especially in terms of being an evangelist and influence so within your industry and within your, with your company, because there's so many different ways to go, where would be the best place if people want to kind of learn more? Where should they be going now, if you want to learn more about you and the work that you're doing, and maybe we can take those next steps, Poornima Vijayashanker feel free to reach out to me on Twitter. I'm @Poornima James Taylor Well, I love that we're going to have that link here. And I'm actually going to be reading that book as well because I want to pick up all these, especially when you're talking about process as well. And I love I love when we can start breaking things down into process. So pretty much thank you so much. It's been a I love just when we have we have our conversations as well. And I think you're doing amazing, amazing things. I look forward to actually catching you on stage at some point really soon as well. And I wish you all the best is engineering creases. Thank you. Poornima Vijayashanker Thanks for having me. James Taylor Today's episode was sponsored by speakers you the online community for speakers and if you're serious about your speaking career then you can join us because you membership program. I'll speak as you members receive private one on one coaching with me hundreds of hours of training content access to a global community to help them launch and build a profitable business around their speaking message and expertise. So just head over to SpeakersU.com to learn more. #speakersU #speakerslife

Building inclusive workplaces don’t happen overnight. They require consistent learning, changes in habits, and leadership’s commitment. However, when companies do create inclusive workplaces, the benefits are extremely valuable. Learn five actions you and your company can take to create an inclusive workplace with Karen Catlin of Better Allies. Plus, on Dear Career Contessa, we’ll answer how to tell someone “no” to an informational interview request. Show Notes Weekly Newsletter Sign-Up: http://bit.ly/37hqtQW Follow Career Contessa: http://bit.ly/2TMH2QP   Power Moves book: https://amzn.to/2X1EQWZ 50 Potential Privileges Worksheet: https://bit.ly/31aAhvW Caroline Turner Leadership podcast: https://apple.co/3hTgvuU Expert Karen Catlin: https://bit.ly/2YrG0fl BetterAllies Website: https://bit.ly/2A2dis0 Weekly Newsletter: https://bit.ly/2ASnYKd  SponsorsMiro: https://bit.ly/30u3Bxb Submit Your Career Questions:Email us: info@careercontessa.com DM us: @careercontessa on InstagramCall us: 844-FEMAILS (336-2457) Start collaborating for free at Miro.com/FEMAILS Produced by Dear Media

The world is a dark place, and Felicia and Rachel intro this episode recounting their feels.  The interview starts 15 minutes in, where they interview the wonderful Karen Catlin, author, coach, and advocate for inclusive tech workplaces. Karen spent 25 years in tech as a software engineer, VP, and CEO. Then she moved into leadership coaching, speaking, and advocating for a more inclusive workplace. She's also the force behind the incredible Better Allies, a resource we reference often! Please note that we recorded our interview with Karen on May 15th, 2020. Quick Links: Better Allies Karen Catlin Jacon Collier Our Feminism is Intersectional. Black Lives Matter.   Did you like this episode? Subscribe, rate, review and reach out to us on the social media platform of your choice. Tell us who you’d like to hear from, ask us questions, or just say hi!  

Karen Catlin After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen is a vocal advocate for inclusion, a leadership coach, a keynote speaker, and the author of three books: "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking" (with Poornima Vijayashanker), "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," and "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring." --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/freeman-means-business/support

Marisa Arce is in her 5th year as a head women’s tennis coach and has nearly completed her first year as the head coach at Depaul University. She started her college coaching career as a volunteer assistant at the University of Oklahoma in 2012 shortly after graduating from the University of Illinois.In this episode we discuss her decision to start her career as a volunteer, if it was worth it and how she has transitioned from volunteer to assistant coach and on to becoming a head coach. We discuss the challenges of combining college coaching and parenting and how she is navigating her new job, her new-born baby and all the other obligations she is facing at this point in her young coaching career. Key points of this conversation have been indexed for easy listening here: 2:14 - When did it dawn on you that your career would be as a college tennis coach?   4:20 - What was the feedback you were getting from the programs that you were applying to?8:35 - What was different about moving into a full-time assistant role?17:05 - "Better Allies" by Karen Catlin - 37% of Women's Tennis coaches are women. 18:20 - Do you think that a male athletic director would have hired you knowing that you were nine-months pregnant at the time? 23:23 - How do you deal with the struggle of having a family and being a coach? What adjustments did you have to make? 29:05 - Are there any lessons that you apply today that you learned from any of your coaches along the way that you're applying to your team today?     

From job descriptions to onboarding, learn how to foster inclusive hiring practices.About Karen Catlin: After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears.Today, Karen is a vocal advocate for inclusion, a leadership coach, a keynote speaker, and the author of Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces and The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring.Karen's TEDx talk "Women in Tech: The Missing Force"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uiEHaDSfgIInfo about the Better Allies books, newsletter, and morewww.betterallies.comKaren's web site with information about coaching and speakingwww.karencatlin.comConnect with Laura Khalil online:instagram.com/forceofbadasseryfacebook.com/CoachingWithCouragelinkedIn.com/in/LauraKhalilInvite Laura to speak at your event http://laurakhalilspeaker.com/speakSupport the show (https://www.paypal.me/bravebydesign)

In our fifth season, we are having candid conversations about diversity and inclusion with our team of experts.  In this episode, allies expert, Karen Catlin, shares: - What she did when she looked around the tech industry and saw it becoming maler and paler - Why all voices need to be included in the conversation about diversity - Types of gender bias and how to "Flip it to Test it" - Specific language to lead like an ally - Trends she sees for 2020 "The Year of the Ally" - Hiring practices to better recruit diverse talent Follow Karen on Twitter @betterallies and get her new book on her website https://karencatlin.com/.

Creating an inclusive workplace culture in which all employees are thriving, the results are soaring, and the defections are non-existent is the goal of every company. One secret to creating this kind of workplace is allyship. Today we talk with Karen Catlin about everyday actions that help in building an inclusive and engaging workplace. Karen is the author of Better Allies, a leadership coach, keynote speaker, passionate advocate for inclusive workplaces and the former vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe. When you finish listening to the episode, make sure to visit the Better Allies website and Twitter handle, check out Karen's website and take a look at her other book: Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking. 

We know that in order to create a workplace that truly supports diversity, women and minorities can’t take this on alone. Karen Catlin is a former Vice President at Adobe, author, keynote speaker and leadership coach. She coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies. Her client roster includes Airbnb, DoorDash, eBay, and Intuit, as well as entrepreneurs and individuals. This conversation is about how you can be a better ally in your workplace to women and minorities. You can learn about Karen here https://karencatlin.com/ Learn about and purchase "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces" https://betterallies.com/ Subscribe to Karen's weekly newsletter "5 Ally Actions" https://betterallies.com/more-content/ Follow @betterallies on Twitter and Instagram Get your Ambitious Everyday Journal for FREE here http://andreajanzen.com/journal Sponsor: https://www.duckish.ca/discount/DIVERSITYATWORK Enter promo code diversityatwork to get 15% off of your order. Duckish ships to the US and Canada.

Sam and I kick off the Fall 2019 season exploring what happened with the Forbe's America's 100 Most Innovative Leaders list, whether it truly reflects merit or, instead, historical privilege, and whether the "man box" had a role. In this season, we'll continue exploring how we all contribute to and are affected by the man box, and where it shows up in current events. Let us know what you think! Resources in this episode: Intro audio from MSNBC (https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/forbes-faces-backlash-for-leaving-women-off-innovators-list/vi-AAH2BaW) Abdu'l-Baha quote: “The world of humanity is possessed of two wings: the male and the female. So long as these two wings are not equivalent in strength, the bird will not fly." America's Most Innovative Leaders List (https://www.forbes.com/lists/innovative-leaders/#1ed1949c26aa) Forbe's Editor's Reflection (https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2019/09/08/opportunity-missed-reflecting-on-the-lack-of-women-on-our-most-innovative-leaders-list/#14ff7321c6b6) Privilege walk (https://edge.psu.edu/workshops/mc/power/privilegewalk.shtml) Recent books written by former Unraveling Pink guests: Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces, by Karen Catlin (https://www.amazon.com/Better-Allies-Everyday-Inclusive-Workplaces/dp/1732723303/ref=asc_df_1732723303/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=266235278092&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=931641627450300950&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9031912&hvtargid=pla-614689803116&psc=1) How to Be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive, by Jennifer Brown (https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Inclusive-Leader-Belonging/dp/1523085177/ref=asc_df_1523085177/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=366446893595&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=18155657442622920792&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9031912&hvtargid=pla-804305575419&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=79033900511&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=366446893595&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=18155657442622920792&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9031912&hvtargid=pla-804305575419) Piloting Your Life: Take the Controls and Be the Pilot in Your Own Life, by Terri Mead (https://www.amazon.com/Piloting-Your-Life-controls-pilot-ebook/dp/B07VJ6RBCP/ref=sr_1_1?crid=316UIQLZBM7XD&keywords=piloting+your+life&qid=1569102733&s=books&sprefix=piloting+your+life%2Caps%2C213&sr=1-1) Elephants Before Unicorns: Emotionally Intelligent HR Strategies to Save Your Company, by Caroline Stokes (https://www.amazon.com/Elephants-Before-Unicorns-Emotionally-Intelligent/dp/1599186586)

Karen Catlin on Retaining WIT, Jonathan Cutrell on Maintainable, Dr. Aneika L. Simmons on Hanselminutes, Sarah Wells on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, and Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt on Tech Done Right by Table XI. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting September 16, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. KAREN CATLIN ON RETAINING WIT The Retaining WIT podcast featured Karen Catlin with hosts Jossie Haines and Jordanna Kwok. Karen, who is a leadership coach and diversity advocate, got interested in tech when she saw an issue of Money magazine with a cover story about successful women with computer science backgrounds and her father pointed out the connection between a career in software and Karen’s love of crafting, puzzle-solving, and mathematics. She started her career in 1985, which was a peak year for women in Computer Science. In that year, 37% of the Computer Science degrees went to women. It dropped to a low of 17% but has started to go up again in recent years. Karen started a coaching practice because she wanted to help women who wanted to grow their careers and stay in tech. She soon realized that, even if she could be the most amazing coach on the planet, her clients would still be facing an uphill battle because they were working in companies that were not the meritocracies they claimed to be. This led Karen to explore an idea: “Instead of trying to fix the women, let’s start fixing the men.” She says there is a role for every man who is working in tech to create a more inclusive workplace on his work team and at his company. Karen says that mentoring programs are a great opportunity for people to pass on advice to someone who hasn’t had the same amount of experience, but there is a trap: studies have shown that most of us mentor people who remind us of our younger self. Karen’s advice is, if you’re doing mentoring, mentor someone who doesn’t look like you. Don’t have a mini-me protégé. Another piece of advice from Karen is to pay attention in meetings. Look out for interruptions. There is research showing that men interrupt women much more than the reverse and that women who are getting interrupted tend to step back and not participate in the rest of the meeting or future meetings. So, when you see people getting interrupted, say something like, “Jordanna was making a great point. I’d like to hear more about that.” Another thing to watch for is what Karen calls “bro-propriation”: a woman says something in a meeting that falls flat and then, later on in the same meeting, a man says the same thing and gets all the credit. An ally can say something like, “Hey, I see that you agree with the point that May was making earlier.” Discussing hiring, Karen says she used to grab old job descriptions and add new requirements to them, reasoning that all the old requirements are still relevant. She says that you should instead try to get your job description down to just five requirements. Research has shown that women apply for jobs when they have all the skills listed in the job description while men apply even if they have little more than half of the listed skills. Karen also says to have objective criteria to use for every single candidate. Ideally, use the same interview questions. She told a story about moving to Silicon Valley with her partner Tim and applying to work at the same company in the same software engineering role. The two of them had interviews the same day. Driving home at the end of the day, Tim related to Karen that his interviews were among the most difficult he had ever had while her own experience was that the interviews had all been easy. The interviewers had dumbed down the questions when interviewing her. They were both offered jobs, but she decided not to take her offer because the company didn’t respect her enough to ask her the same difficult questions they had asked men applying for the same position. She then spoke about the importance of public speaking in gaining visibility and how it can help with both recruiting in the case of giving external talks and with getting your ideas considered.  Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/karen-catlin-on-being-better-allies/id1458996260?i=1000440710563 Website link: https://www.retainingwit.com/karen-catlin JONATHAN CUTRELL ON MAINTAINABLE The Maintainable podcast featured Jonathan Cutrell with host Robby Russell. Jonathan is the host of the Developer Tea podcast and is a senior engineer at Clearbit. Robby asked Jonathan what he thinks are the characteristics of a healthy and maintainable codebase. Jonathan says testing and having a consistent way of testing is critical to maintainability. He also looks at the size of each concept the code expresses to see if it can fit in a person’s head. Robby asked how Jonathan’s teams have achieved consistent testing. Jonathan says that human beings are pretty good at being about 90% consistent, which is almost worse than being 0% consistent. He says to take the load off the human engineer and, for those times when you still need to put the load on them, have a way to proceduralize things such as by having a checklist or template. Robby asked what Jonathan thinks developers often get wrong when they talk about technical debt. Jonathan says that debt is an easy term to throw around because, in the financial sense, it is a very clear concept. Technical debt does not have so clear a definition. You need to evaluate what your team cares about and what has been costly from a business perspective. Some things that we may think are debt are just emotionally difficult to accept: code that we wish was different but isn’t actually causing any real problems or even forecasted to cause problems. One factor that Jonathan thinks should be consistently considered technical debt is code that is staying around but for which you don’t have any kind of validation.  I liked Jonathan’s metaphor for attempting to refactor code that is not under a lot of churn. Picking up code that isn’t changing much and improving its design, he says is like paying off low-interest mortgage debt. There are probably better places to expend our effort. Developers tend to treat decisions around technical debt like one would treat the decision to clean up your house. You have the sense of ownership over your home and, regardless of whether there is risk of future problems, we feel the need to clean things up. They talked about why Jonathan started the Developer Tea podcast. Jonathan wanted a podcast that he could listen to on an afternoon walk for five to ten minutes and learn something new. Most podcasts at the time were much longer and more entertainment-driven, and he wanted something that focused on the more human aspects of the job in a short, inspirational form. He says that the podcast has been one of the most rewarding things he has done in his career. The most rewarding experiences have been when people send him emails about how an episode or series of episodes have shifted the way they think about a topic or even about how they think about their career. They talked about whether there is a correlation between healthy code and healthy teams. Jonathan says there is data around teams in general that says teams that good relationships with their manager and the people they work with have the highest performance and the lowest turnover. These good team dynamics have visible effects on the code. Strong teams, Jonathan says, eradicate fear. These fears are things like fearing that someone is going to judge you poorly when they look at your code. Second, the best teams also know how to come up with the best ideas, which involves one or more team members being able to give up their own idea without attaching a sense of failure to letting that idea go. Third, members of strong teams recognize the humanity of everyone on their team. Robby asked what developers get wrong when evaluating their peers. Jonathan says that people, in general, tend to see everyone around them as inadequate as a way to containerize the rest of the world. This bias helps us to make decisions without being riddled with anxiety about them. The downside of this shows up when we are tasked with evaluating another person. This feeling that everyone else is inadequate combines in a bad way with our natural loss aversion when we try to make sense of things. Most failures are the result of factors that could not be controlled or predicted. With hindsight, when a project is late, we try to think of why it was late and we often come up with a reason, rightly or wrongly. We don’t often come to the conclusion that the project failed because something random happened. As a result, performance reviews tend towards the negative side unless we actively bias away from that. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jonathan-cutrell-healthy-teams-know-how-to-eradicate-fear/id1459893010?i=1000447238745 Website link: https://maintainable.fm/episodes/jonathan-cutrell-healthy-teams-know-how-to-eradicate-fear-LgRTt32R DR. ANEIKA L. SIMMONS ON HANSELMINUTES The Hanselminutes podcast featured Dr. Aneika L. Simmons with host Scott Hanselman. Scott asked Aneika about the talk she gave with her husband Anjuan, “Managing The Burnout Burndown” at the Lead Dev conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2dgOfedI3A. She talked about burnout having multiple dimensions including emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. When you are burned out, the people you work with start to lose, in your eyes, their personhood. Scott asked about how having a culture that depersonalized employees, such as by referring to them as “resources”, might lead to burnout. Aneika talked about how having a culture that values the highly-engaged software developer counter-intuitively increases rather than decreases burnout. She talked about managing burnout with the help of your relationships. When Aneika is looking burned out, Anjuan will often say, “Aneika, let’s go for a walk.” She talked about the American notion of the “protestant work ethic” and how the work itself is valued and makes the worker feel important and gives them a sense of meaning. Those that are not working are made to feel like they are not contributing. Scott connected this to how many Americans do not take all of their vacation days. Aneika talked about the difficulty of achieving work-life balance when pleasing your boss means disappointing your family and vice versa and she described how stress is the cause of many illnesses, telling her own story about getting a sore jaw while working on her dissertation because the stress caused her to start grinding her teeth. Aneika suggested building relationships with your boss and your team so that they see you as a person and not just as a contributor. When they see you as a person, they are less likely to attempt to make you feel small when you need to take time for yourself. Here's Aneika on the relationship between engagement and burnout. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/managing-the-burnout-burndown-with-dr-aneika-simmons/id117488860?i=1000447003518 Website link: https://hanselminutes.simplecast.com/episodes/managing-the-burnout-burndown-with-dr-aneika-simmons-1caMsclq SARAH WELLS ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Sarah Wells with host Shane Hastie. Sarah is the technical director of operations and reliability at The Financial Times. When Sarah joined FT in 2011, the company was full of smart people, but they were hampered by a frustrating set of processes. During the last eight years, they adopted a DevOps culture with a focus on automation. When she joined, it took an average of 120 days to provision a new server. They stopped tracking the improvement when they got it down to minutes. They moved from 12 releases a year to many thousand releases a year. This required pushing decision-making down to the individuals making the changes. Shane asked about how to achieve a culture of safety and experimentation. Sarah says it has to come down from the top. You cannot have a CIO or CTO is saying, “What went wrong? Who did this?” You optimize for the speed of release and for speed of fixing. You do incident reviews, but their goal is to improve things for next time, not lay blame. If you drop a database in production as a developer, that is not your fault. The fault is that it is too easy to do that. Shane asked what a culture of experimentation looks like at “the coal face.” Sarah referenced Linda Rising in saying that it is not an experiment if there is not a hypothesis and if it can’t fail. As soon as something costs a certain amount of money, very few organizations are willing to write it off, so if you’re going to experiment, it has to be something cheap and quick. Sarah gave an example of an experiment to test a design change in which they would show the star-rating on the list of film reviews. The thinking was that this would increase engagement. The experiment showed that engagement went down instead because people were less likely to click to see the full review once they had the star-rating. Shane asked about how Sarah limits the blast radius of changes. Sarah says that by releasing small amounts of code frequently and having an architecture like micro-services to keep components extremely decoupled, you are better able to understand the code you are releasing and the change is localized and less likely to affect distant parts of the product. You can also design your website to have graceful degradation when a particular service is not returning results. Shane asked about Sarah’s preference to buy rather than build. Sarah referenced Simon Wardley’s value-chain mapping and establishing the core thing a business does. For FT, the core business is news, so something like doing their own container orchestration is not part of that. Originally, they did their own container orchestration, but once Kubernetes was available, they moved to it. In discussing the sunk cost fallacy, Sarah says you always have to fight to invest in the technical stuff, so you need a good relationship between the tech leads and the product people to explain the benefits of particular technical decisions. You also need to accept that things change and you won’t always get it right. The flip side of moving fast is that sometimes you get it wrong. She related a quote from Jeff Bezos in a letter to shareholders about one-way door and two-way door decisions. For decisions that are likely a one-way door, invest time in getting them right, but for most decisions, you should just decide, commit, and revisit. Shane asked how the listeners who are working on monoliths that release once a month can get to where FT is at today. Sarah says that you need a continuous delivery pipeline so it takes no time at all to get a release out. The second thing is architectural changes. Get to zero-downtime deployments. The cultural aspects are things like process. Reduce anything that requires permission from an external team. It has to be possible for a team to just get going. She referenced Accelerate by Forsgren about the research that says not to have change approval boards. Architects get embedded in the individual teams instead. You want your engineers to be T-shaped, having one specialty but also having some skill in all areas. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/sarah-wells-on-fts-transition-to-devops/id1161431874?i=1000446732957 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/sarah-wells-on-fts-transition-to-devops DAVE THOMAS AND ANDY HUNT ON TECH DONE RIGHT The Tech Done Right podcast featured Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt with host Noel Rappin. I realize that this is the third time in as many weeks that I have included a podcast episode featuring Dave and Andy talking about the 20th anniversary of The Pragmatic Programmer, but they keep saying different and interesting things on each podcast they visit that I keep wanting to share it. In this podcast, Dave described what being pragmatic means to him. He says that being pragmatic means doing what works, but nobody knows what works. The cool thing about software, which is also the scary thing about software, is that we are constantly reinventing the entire field. Every project is new: it has new circumstances, new technologies, and new requirements. When you don't know what to do, being pragmatic means exploring as much as you can to find out what works, having in place a system of feedback to tell you whether it is working or not, and taking steps that are reversible so that, if you make a mistake, you can go back and fix it. This, Dave says, is the essence of the book. Noel added a fourth variable, the team, that is different every time, and asked what the pragmatic approach is for how a team works. Dave says that a team is a voluntary collection of individuals. You don’t have a team that you put people into; you start with a group of people and try to turn them into a team. The book dedicates a chapter to teams that echos the previous chapters on individuals because teams need to know all the things that individuals need to know: they need to realize that they are going to make mistakes, they need to figure out when they’ve made a mistake, and they need to know how to fix those mistakes and minimize them in the future. As a programmer, your job is not to write perfect code; your job is to create something that does what the customer wants. If there are bugs along the way, that is not an exception; it just the way it is. The same applies to teams. When teams adopt that approach, they lose the incentive to blame people for things and they take on collective ownership. Andy says that the one thing that is unique to teams is an underlying trust of each other member of the team. You are much better off with relatively small, stable teams. Every time you add someone to or remove someone from a team, it is a new team and you need to start over building relationships, building trust, and learning to work with each other. Noel asked how they would compare The Pragmatic Programmer with the Agile Manifesto since they were involved in the creation of both. Dave suggested thinking of Agile methodologies like XP as a roadmap and The Pragmatic Programmer as your car. Noel said that, in re-reading The Pragmatic Programmer, he was struck by the emphasis on taking small steps and “not getting in front of your headlights”. Andy says that is critical idea because we fall into the trap of taking on too much at once all the time. Small steps, Dave added, also mean you can more easily undo and you are less likely to fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy because your sunk costs are smaller. Noel asked if the way in which developers learn has changed in the last twenty years. In reference to books versus StackOverflow searches and watching videos, Dave made the point that the distinguishing aspect of a book is that the content is curated; putting it together was difficult; it took a long time for the author to organize their thinking to make it clear and approachable and to produce something authoritative and easy to read as a whole. Noel asked Dave about the pragmatic value of automated testing. Dave says that when he gets too comfortable doing something, he tries to stop using it so that he doesn’t get stuck in a rut and so that he doesn’t start to believe something religiously simply because he has been doing it a long time. He had been telling people for years that it is good to test and he had never done the experiment of not testing. He decided not to test for a period and was surprised by the result. He kept an eye on bug rates and it was just as buggy as ever, his productivity went up a little bit, and his designs were just as flexible as before. His explanation is that, having done the requisite ten thousand hours, it is now so ingrained that he doesn’t have to test to get the benefits of testing. He still feels that tests are useful when working with others and as a regression barrier. He sees his experiment with not testing as another example that nothing is sacred: if you’re truly being pragmatic, you should always be experimenting. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-68-pragmatic-programmer-at-20-dave-thomas-andy/id1195695341?i=1000446898661 Website link: https://www.techdoneright.io/68 LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

OneDrive is designed to connect you to all of your files in work and in life. Microsoft's Ankita Kirti and Jason Moore go behind the scenes talking with internal and external experts to reveal how OneDrive can work best for you. In this episode we talk with principal design manager Carlos Perez about the future of coherent files experiences across Microsoft 365.  Show Intro [00:00:00:00] Topic of the Month – Coherent Files Experience across Microsoft 365 [01:05] Guest Perspective – Carlos Perez [07:40] News and Announcements [24:00] Special Topic of the Month – Diversity, Inclusion and Allyship [32:45] Show Wrap [36:00] Social and Info Links: OneDrive Facebook | Twitter Ankita Kirti |@Ankita_Kirti21 Jason Moore |@JasMo Carlos Perez Resources: Better Allies | Twitter |Instagram | Everyday actions to create inclusive, engaging workplaces by Karen Catlin (book) OneDrive Tech Community Blog Microsoft Docs - The home for Microsoft documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals. Microsoft Tech Community Home Stay on top of Office 365 changes Favorite travel destinations of 2019: Ankita Kirti - Munich, Germany Jason Moore - Myanmar Carlos Perez - Isabela, Puerto Rico Recommended Podcasts: Ankita Kirti - The Intrazone, a show about the SharePoint intelligent intranet Jason Moore - No Such Thing as a Fish Carlos Perez - 99% Invisible Subscribe to Sync Up: Show Page: http://aka.ms/syncup Apple Podcasts Google Play Music Spotify Stitcher TuneIn RSS

Karen Catlin is a leadership coach, keynote speaker, author, and passionate advocate for inclusion in the workplace. After spending twenty-five years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, she witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies. Her client roster includes Airbnb, DoorDash, eBay, and Intuit, as well as entrepreneurs and individuals. Karen's coaching offerings include tactics for increasing visibility, being more strategic, managing stakeholders, negotiation, and cultivating ally skills. Her writing on these and related topics has appeared in Inc., theDaily Beast, Fast Company, and the Muse, and she's consulted on articles for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the New York Times. To help more people cultivate ally skills, she wrote Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces. A self-professed public speaking geek, Karen is a highly sought-after and engaging presenter who has delivered talks at more than a hundred conferences and corporate events. She speaks on a variety of topics, including inclusive workplaces and women in leadership. Her TEDx talk, Women in Tech: The Missing Force, explores the decline in gender diversity in tech, why it's a problem, and what can be done about it. Website: https://www.karencatlin.com ATTEND THE PITTSBURGH BUSINESS DIVERSITY CONFERENCE | SEPTEMBER 12, 2019 | Get Tickets Here To comment or connect, visit www.belongingfactor.com or email ibelong@belongingfactor.com About the host: (www.devinhalliday.com, www.rudimentsolutions.com) Devin Halliday is a Northern California native, living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He's explored the people, places and cultures across this beautiful planet. He's been amazed. He's been humbled. He's been outraged. But mostly, he's been inspired. After nearly twenty years leading people and delivering award-winning results in a Fortune 15 technology company, he started a new and fulfilling chapter. As Founder and Chief Belonging Architect of Rudiment Solutions - A People Empowerment Company, he is able to bring a lifetime's worth of inspiration and influence to those looking to achieve more. As the author of the book "BE/LONG/ING FACTOR" and host of the Belonging Factor Podcast, Devin gets to share his personal mission with the world. Check out Serendipity Labs at www.serendipitylabs.com if you want to experience the most amazing office and co-working space I've ever seen! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/belongingfactor/message

In this inaugural podcast episode, Jossie and Jordanna speak with Karen Catlin, leadership coach and diversity advocate, about her start in the tech industry, the challenges of staying in the tech, and how to be better allies to women and other underrepresented groups. Other topics include: * Issues around diversity in hiring * The struggles of being the only woman in the room * Bias in the tech industry Check out the episode webpage for the full show transcript. Here are some additional resources Karen mentions in the episode: * karencatlin.com (https://karencatlin.com) * betterallies.com (https://betterallies.com) * "Better Allies" on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MPYX96Y) * Social media: @betterallies on Twitter (https://twitter.com/betterallies), Medium (https://medium.com/@betterallies), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/betterallies/), Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/bettermaleallies/everyday-actions-for-allies/) * Better Allies newsletter (http://bit.ly/5AllyActions) * "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking" on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Present-Techies-Guide-Public-Speaking-ebook/dp/B01BCXHULK) Special Guest: Karen Catlin.

On today's episode of The F Word, Sheryl Brown is speaking with Karen Catlin of Better Allies. Karen Catlin is a leadership coach, keynote speaker, author, and passionate advocate for inclusion in the workplace. After spending twenty-five years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, she witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Today, Karen coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies. Her writing on these and related topics has appeared in Inc., The Daily Beast, and Fast Company, and she's consulted on articles for The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The New York Times. To help more people cultivate ally skills, she wrote Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces. In today's chat we will discuss: Recruiting Women: What does championing women in the workforce look like today? Why avoiding women today is a bad idea: #MeToo cannot be ignored Male Allies: How do men join the movement to support women? Be sure to connect with Karen Catlin: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kecatlin/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kecatlin Website: https://karencatlin.com/ Email: karen@karencatlin.com

In this week's episode, we unpack the discomfort about privilege, and share Pete Buttigieg's (white gay man running for President) story on privilege.  We also share our take on what it means to lead like an ally and talk openly about the "P" word. I share my own discomfort talking about this topic and what I have done to lean into this tough conversation.  The privilege walk is an excellent way to talk about diversity and inclusion at work. We also share some tools to keep this dialogue flowing in your organization with our "Unpacking Privilege" free online workshop with my ally Ericka Young and my ally Karen Catlin's "5 Ally Actions" newsletter. Learn how to lead like an ally and talk about the "P" word at work!   Get the "5 Ally Actions" weekly newsletter: https://betterallies.com/ Sign up for the "Unpacking Privilege" workshop: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/unpacking-privilege-how-are-you-using-yours-to-lift-us-all-up-tickets-61233861127 Pete Buttigieg video on white male privilege in the 2020 presidential race: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xSSB5R3rL8  

Jennifer Brown is an award-winning entrepreneur, dynamic speaker, diversity and inclusion expert. She is the Founder, President and CEO of Jennifer Brown Consulting (JBC), a strategic leadership and diversity consulting firm that coaches business leaders worldwide on critical issues of talent and workplace strategy. Brown is a passionate advocate for social equality who helps businesses foster healthier, more productive workplace cultures. Her book Inclusion: Diversity, the New Workplace & the Will to Change will inspire leadership to embrace the opportunity that diversity represents and empower advocates to drive change that resonates in today’s world.   Questions   Couldyou share with us a background of how did you end up in this arena of diversity and inclusion, what was your journey like? As it relates to diversity and inclusion, could you share with us some of the issues that have been may be barriers to preventing a fully diversified and inclusive workplace based on your experience? As it relates to diversity and inclusion, could you share with us maybe one or two strategies that you think small and medium-sized business owners could employ? Now in terms of how this impacts the customer experience, could you share with us some of the best practices that you've seen in organizations and how it has translated into retention and better customer experiences overall? Could you share with us how you stay motivated every day? Could you share with us what’s one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in business? Could you share with us some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you? What’s one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about - either something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people? Where can our listeners find you online? What’s one quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge you revert to that quote to help you to become refocus?    Highlights   Jennifer shared, as we like to say in this field not a lot of standard paths towards a career in diversity and inclusion. In fact, if you try to find academic programs that address or degrees that address this topic you probably will come up empty-handed. We all come from different places, for her,she was an activist in nonprofits in her 20s, but she was also always a musician and it was sort of an amateur pursuit in those early days in her life, but it was a huge passion. So, she decided to make it her profession and give it a shot, she moved to New York to become an opera singer and study at a conservatory and get her Masters in voice which was really exciting and heady times for her.But unfortunately, through the course of training she injured her voice and ended up having to get several surgeries on her voice to repair it but ultimately, she realized it wasn't going to work, her voice just would not be an instrument that she could count on for a career where she could make her living.   It was heartbreaking but it's led her towards where a lot of theater people go because they love the stage and they're so good in front of people, a lot of them become trainers and educators. In fact, we find a home in leadership in the whole kind of field of leadership whether that's as consultant or a learning and development person. So, she ended up getting a second Masters in Organizational Development/ Organizational Change, it goes by a lot of different names but it's basically the HR education realm and she was a corporate learning and development, training and development leader for a while as an employee and then she got laid off and she said, “I think I can have more impact from the outside if I became kind of that third party, that expert.”That really appealed to her, it still appeals to her to this day, it's the best role for her to play which is that agitator, but not the employee which helps give her some authority, gives her some distance, gives her some credibility earned or unearned or deserved but it is what it is. People tend to want to listen to people who've written books on things and people who are external when they don't do a very good job of listening to their employees, which is another maybe we'll talk about that. So she ended up hanging her shingle out about 12 years ago and doing leadership and team development and morphing into DNI because she felt pulled in that direction to specialize because she’s a member of the LGBTQ community and she has been out since she was 22, and yet she had really struggled with being out throughout her life and even in the nonprofit world certainly in the opera music world and then as an entrepreneur where she felt very exposed to bias if she were to be honest and authentic about who she actually is and it's a huge part of our lives to deny and to walk around and do business without talking about it, without kind of leaving that hole and not feeling it's going to be accepted and it's also going to hurt your ability to make a living which is really problematic.   So, now they do specialize in Diversity and Inclusion, and she’s fully out all the time, you could Google her and it's very plain.It is actually, she considers part of her secret sauce, it's part of where she has cut her teeth on developing her own voice, her bravery, her courage, her resilience has a lot of that has come from that identity and the pain of some of the painful lessons of exclusion that that has allowed her and enabled her to feel, to think about, to empathize with and hopefully made her a more inclusive leader, not just because she’s LGBTQ, but for all communities that needs her voice as an ally. So, it's a very cool place to find herself where she gets to write books and speak about all this stuff and it's particularly timely because the topic is, she would say, there's never been more attention on the topic than there is now.   Jennifer stated that it has a lot of reasons and a lot of factors, it's rather complex and yet it's kind of simple at the same time because the mandate is simple, the need to reflect your customer base which is diversifying quickly who has the spending power for example that non-white communities are the fastest growing consumer communities with the largest spending power.She thinks the gay community now has a trillion dollars of spending power. So, consumers are getting smarter, they're getting organized, they're finding their voice, they're using it to hold brands accountable which is exciting and make spending choices that reflect their values. And yet companies in terms of their employee mix particularly in the top half or third of organizations really don't reflect that diverse world and companies structures are old school, there is no better way to say it, they have been unchallenged and they haven't challenged themselves in terms of the makeup of their senior leadership in particular and many companies not all but many companies have kind of gone about their merry way trying to make money and really not focused on anything larger than that, whether it's how employees feel, who's succeeding and feels they can thrive in the organization, who may be reaching senior leadership roles and who's not and why they're feeling thwarted in that process up the pipeline. And so, she thinks there's this business as usual, we're here to make money, we’re here to generate shareholder results and there's not been a lot of attention paid to values, the importance of the workforce and what they want and need in order to stay and thrive and there is honestly a lot of bias around, “Well, I worked hard and all you need to do is work hard too and you'll achieve what I've achieved.”So, this belief and meritocracy and it's really easy to believe in meritocracy when people that look like you have benefited from that, it hasn't been a challenge, there haven't been stereotypes that have affected you, you have been pulled forward by others that look like you without even knowing it sometimes, and so there's this willful blindness to the difficulties that are faced by anyone that is not of a certain demographic in workforces, it’s sort of, “I write it off. I don’t take it seriously. I don't listen to it. I don't even know it honestly.”So, there's a lot of education that's needed around micro inequities, unconscious bias, HR processes that are so critical like recruitment, retention, promotion and advancement, all those moments in the employee life cycle where bias occurs, it's in a large part still allowed to kind of continue and so what their job is to interrupt those things and come in as a company and build strategies that help companies wake up, get educated, care about it, honestly have empathy for other people which you shouldn't even need to say but it feels that it's hard, it feels that if I explain something to you and you don't care and then you don't take action, that hurts, there's a ton of research on this it's not even like this is a mystery. It's right there and so the best leaders and the best companies are really forward, they're asking all these great questions, they’re humbling themselves to their own learning, to their own mistakes, they're publishing their data and saying, “Hey, here's our data and I know it sucks and we're working to change it.”That's what courage looks like, that's what leadership looks like these days and she wish she saw more of it.   Yanique shared, I like the fact that you mentioned that it's not something that people are accustomed to and change is hard. Unfortunately, human beings don't adapt to change very readily, and I don't think it's based on the geography in terms of where you're from in the world, I think it's just general human nature. So, it would mean that you have to put yourself in a place of being uncomfortable in order to move from one stage to the next.   Jennifer agreed and stated that nobody wants to be uncomfortable, but the flip side is it makes you so much better of a leader and a better team member, better colleague and by the way better parent, better community leader, all of these. There's a reason that you open a paper today and diversities in every headline, it's everywhere because institutions are really struggling with it of all kinds for profit, nonprofit,community organizations, church leadership, so there is probably, no area of your life where you can afford to not understand and embrace this conversation and do your work, your kid could come home tomorrow and say, “Mom, I think I'm transgender.”You would be completely ill-equipped to deal with that and to be fair most parents are, it's something that is life and does not prepare you for that but at the same time don't you want to be ready? Even if you're interviewing for jobs, even if you're leading teams at a company that values diversity and you don't or you haven't paid attention to it, you've assumed it's somebody else's job to care about it, none of that is going to work for you in the long run, it's a little bit of a scare tactic but she has to use every tool she has to convince people that this is important which is really tiring and honestly kind of depressing sometimes because you're wondering how they don't get it, “Please have empathy for people that haven’t had as easy of a road as you.” It's just that and then she doesn't know why we have to ask and convince and scare, how many different techniques do we need to basically talk about something that's such a human right and is all about the dignity of everyone in this world to do their best work and to feel their sense of purpose every day.   Yanique agreed and stated, and to feel appreciated, a lot of people work in organizations and they just don't feel appreciated and I think they've lost the purpose if there was even a purpose from day one, they've definitely lost it. It comes out in the interactions that they have with customers, it comes out in how they relate to their team members sometimes unconscious of the fact that the customer is observing you in every interaction once they're standing in front of you or you’re on the phone and you ask them to hold but you didn't actually put the phone on hold, so they're hearing everything that's happening in the background.   Jennifer shared that small companies have a great opportunity, it's actually much easier to shift things than for large organizations, and certainly remembering that if you build it right from the beginning, you will have a much easier time down the road. So, it's very important to think about how you are recruiting and retaining all kinds of talent, how comfortable they feel once they are in your organization and really being open to feedback about when that inclusiveness, the desire for inclusiveness is actually though being interpreted and the impact of an intention is one of exclusion. She thinks that sometimes we don't want to know the answer to that question so we don't ask and so it's very critical, particularly, if you're not a person of a marginalized or underrepresented background yourself, you're going to have some blind spots, your network is going to look a lot like you so you will tend to recruit from that network. You will have blind spots around how people perceive your brand and by even blind spots probably about your desired customers so that to the extent that you can ensure your team that you build reflects the world that you're doing business in, it will allow you to resonate and to see around that corner and to anticipate that audience and that customer and gear your communications accordingly and have kind have a check in balance on how are we coming across in the marketplace and like you said, we're being observed all the time, so your future talent is looking at your current organization and looking at your website and thinking about, “Would I be comfortable there? I don't see anyone that looks like me there.”That's something that's hard to fix in some cases because when you're an entrepreneur you're grabbing warm bodies, you're trying to get work done, it's very fast, you are going to pull from your own network because it's most expedient and that network is going to tend to look like you and so you've got to actively counterbalance that in your outreach, in the talent pools that you're seeking, in the way you talk proactively and very overtly about your commitment to inclusion.Shewould really recommend you have that in all of your marketing materials, it doesn’t matter what business you're in, there's always a way to talk about what inclusion means as a value to you and to what you're trying to build and to the customers you're trying to serve, there are ways to do that and she would recommend you do it because it's a beacon, not only for talent you hope to recruit and to say, “Hey, this is a safe place for you.This is a place that you are wanted and needed not just tolerated or accepted. We need all of you to bring your full self to work, this is a place in which you can do that.”Then we want to best serve the customer and their needs and wants, and companies are at real risk of missing some key….There's just a lot of mistakes that are made because diverse talent is not at the table when creative decisions are made or marketing collateral is designed, we've seen very high level mistakes made by brands like PepsiCo with the ad that they had where there was like a mock black lives matter march and one of the Kardashians was handing a Pepsi across the police line, it’s a nightmare and they pulled it immediately. And it became a kind of a case study that a lot of us talking about where we wonder who was at the table making those decisions, and if they were at the table, were they listened to, were they really considered, was that feedback taken into account?So, she doesn’t know where the error happened in their process because she doesn't have the inside look into them but at a smaller scale this stuff can happen all the time and she thinks you've got to make sure your mentored and coached and you run things by people, you think about the nuances of the diversity conversation because it is really nuanced, languages changing all the time and she gets a lot of complaints about are trans and gender non-conforming friends will say, “Yeah, I identify as they, them.So that's my preferred pronoun.”People will literally say, “Well, I don't feel comfortable referring to you as that, it's grammatically incorrect and I feel uncomfortable.”It's just amazing to her, to the point earlier, it’s a small action on your part that allows somebody to feel seen and heard is that so much work, she thinks it's such a red herring, it's just an excuse to not grow and she doesn't understand it. Jennifer thinks if you're in business, you should want more language, you should want more ways to talk to people in and resonate with them, that's what you should want.   Jennifer shared that she thinks that companies that are designing products for example for different communities, some of the larger organizations she worked with literally have something called Employee Resource Groups or they're called Business Resource Groups, but they are diversity networks, maybe they're a multicultural talent network, maybe they're a black employee network, maybe there are an LGBTQ network and most companies are trying to reach those diverse demographic so they can sell more to them, but they realize that they don't have the intelligence on the inside to really do this well and effectively, the smart ones realize that so they have these groups or these networks for a lot of reasons, these networks serve a lot of purposes in organizations and these can exist in small companies to by the way. She has worked with 200-person companies that have a full diversity committee, they have several Employee Resource Groups that are literally playing kind of this market intelligence role for the company so you don't have to be big to access this idea and they are at the table informing product design, informing marketing strategies, informing sales, educating the sales team and anyone that's external facing around cultural nuances and behaviors and language.In banks and financial services, a lot of the financial advisors are tend to be white and to be male and yet the biggest growth and wealth is in diverse wealth holders, female heads of households, people of color and yet you have a financial advisor community in all the big banks and insurance companies that doesn't really look like that and they're struggling to diversify those ranks on the inside.So, literally there are certifications you can get for example as a financial advisor, you can get certified in selling to the LGBTQ community, selling financial products to that community and you go somewhere, and you get a designation that you can put after your name and yes, you're an ally, you're a straight ally, you're not in that community but you know and you're investing in how to be culturally competent when you are selling to that community. So, you're listenership probably selling a lot of different kinds of things, we're all in sales all the time, we all have customers and it's all about resonating with them and making sure you're staying up to speed on what their care abouts are and how they talk about themselves and how they kind of getting inside their lives and anticipating what they want and need.It's just that awareness and there's just a lot of examples of brands that have done this really well. Heineken had a great ad that aired a Super Bowl ago that she would encourage everybody to go look at where they introduce people to each other without providing a lot of demographic information about the person and they give them some questions to talk about and they pair somebody who might have very conservative views with somebody who's in the military and who identifies as transgender.But they don't tell them any of these things and then they encourage some conversation and then they kind of reveal later on, “Well, actually this person that you've bonded with, this is who they actually are and how they identify and are you surprised and do you feel your bias is being challenged?”It's really, really neat and there's a lot of interesting ads, Gillette just came out with an incredible ad, she would encourage everyone to go and watch it on masculinity, it was so good and there was a lot of threatened boycotts and she watched it with her partner and they literally cried and it was so moving and to think that something that could move us and touch your soul could make so many people angry is really indicative of the polarized times we live in but by the way, Gillette's sales went up after that ad, by a considerable amount.So, threatened, boycott or not, anger or not and social media, they correctly diagnosed the bump that they would get through putting their values out there and saying, “Here's what we want to be about and we know that as a brand we haven't always been all that hip to the issue, so, we're trying to be.”She thinks it really worked.It definitely burnished the brand for her and a countless other potential customers.   Yanique stated, so this is definitely something that's new and of course it's definitely going to continue into another couple of years as you said people are trying to flesh out what does that mean for them based on their organization, based on where they operate in the world, based on who they are trying to target and as you said, how much sales they're trying to increase in what community and if they can connect with these people because as you stated at the beginning of our conversation, people are now buying from brands that represent the values that they hold near and dear to them and sometimes that's very hard to find and it's amazing that consumers are taking this stance because it just goes to show that the power is really in the hands of the consumer and it's going to be continuing even more, social media has given themso much power in terms of the things that they do, the comments and the feedback that they give and so it's not so much about what the brand says about themselves, but what the consumer has to say based on their experiences with the product or the service.   Jennifer agreed and stated that it goes beyond the four walls of the company, there is no such thing anymore, there's total transparency as you said, there's a lot of accountability and a lot of communities are diverse communities who are questioning - Do we want to work at a place like that? Do we want to patronize a place like that? What do they stand for? People really now want to hear what do you mean and are you walking the talk?And she’s really excited to see this accountability and the visibility that they have, they can peer into how companies do business and employees are finding their voice and really being public about it like the Google walk out of a couple months ago had 20,000 employees all over the world walking out and protesting their whole process that they handle sexual harassment claims and pay equity.They had his whole list of demands and it was really inspiring to seeing Google had to pay attention. They just had to and they've been kind of on a journey of addressing some, not all of the requests/demands that the employees had, so, we're going to see this is not going away, this accountability and it's exciting because brands have gotten away with a lot in the past, they've gotten away with unfair workplace practices, they've protected their data, they haven't been forced to admit where they're board is entirely white and male but it's never been talked about in the news before, those days are over and if you're in a company where you haven't been called out publicly, it will happen.And so, a lot of their work is actually these days about helping brands and companies make sure they're doing their work internally, and so hopefully that day never comes, hopefully they never mess up but that accountability is fierce and swift and she almost feel like we need to start teaching the art of the apology to our customers because they're going to make mistakes, they are absolutely going to and so the question is, how do you come back from a mistake? How do you apologize, own what happened, say you're learning, talk about what you're going to be recommitting to, what are you going to do differently in the future, even that as something you're prepared for, that's a new idea but she thinks it would behoove all business owners and even all managers to think about when I say the wrong word, do people trust me enough and they know that they can come to me and tell me, that's what you really want, you want to ask for that, you want to earn people's trust because by the way, you can't just one day and once only say, “Hey, can you let me know if I ever make you feel uncomfortable?”It's not a one and done. So, you've got to earn that trust that somebody then will trust you enough to be honest with you and say, “Hey, that joke you say or that saying you say or you know that you stole that person's idea in the room or assigned it to, you took it and you attributed it to somebody else or did you realize that men did 90% of the talking in that meeting?”We've got to be sensitive to these things and we just haven't been in the past and we need help to learn and so it's not just something you do need to do a lot on your own, you need to educate yourself, you need to read a lot of books about bias and team dynamics and being an inclusive leader, her book is helpful she has been told by a lot of people, she hopes it's helpful, so read these books, but they commit to making behavior change in yourself and inviting feedback and then act on that feedback, adjust, be humble be resilient, have that growth mindset which is failing forward.You know you're going to fail, it happens to all of us, we're all bias and it's hard to keep up with this, but you just have to try, that's huge points for trying.   Yanique stated, I like the fact that you made a point to the fact that the change starts with you because I find in a lot of organizations, the managers or the leaders are quick to say well they need to do so and so and they're not including themselves in the process because it all starts with them as well and as a leader or a manager, if I'm in an organization, I'm looking to see what you are doing because I'm taking lead from the behaviors that you've demonstrated, the attitudes that you've demonstrated and yes, I may have my own values but in an organization people kind of watch what's happening and they kind of conform to the culture that exists and if they do anything out of the norm, it means that they're going to stand out and because most people don't want to stand out, there kind of just going to go along with whatever is happening there, whether it's good or bad sometimes.   Jennifer agreed and stated that the best example of what Yanique is talking about is watching how many men take paternity leave or parental leave. We don't get a lot in this country, some companies are really trying to become much more generous around leave and actually going as far as requiring some employees to take leave because there's such a stigma around taking leave and particularly for men and male parents in any family configuration, it is particularlyshamed to take. Even the leave that's provided, take all of that leave, it's not viewed as a positive, you get pressure, it's spoken and unspoken pressure and men follow other men and follow what they do and they decide what the norms are based on what they see particularly senior people doing so you're right that we take our cues from everyone we watch above us in a way and we say, “Well, that's acceptable, that's not acceptable, that's a boundary I can cross or that's a boundary that I shouldn't cross.”This is why it particularly would leave and also vacation interestingly, there are some companies that are starting to require vacation because we don't take all the vacation we haveand that’s not because we don't want to take the vacation, it’s because we don’t think it's going to be okay to do. So, the norms that are communicated through behavior of others particularly senior people, we are watching, and we are then deciding, “What should I do that's not going to hurt my career in this particular culture?”So, she wouldn't encourage people to think about, it almost needs to be mandated because until such time as we can change this dynamic of pressure and peer pressure and watching these role modeling behavior happen and kind of employees not taking care of themselves and not really doing what they need to do to have a balanced life, we may need to mandate some things. She just interviewed this woman, Erica Keswin, and she really recommend her book called Bring Your Human to Work  and she has so many examples of what companies are doing in this vein to encourage leave, to encourage parenting and to encourage balance and flex and literally power to the employee to really have that balance that is the theme, the theme of women's month is how do we achieve this?But remember men need balance too, we single parents need balance, people without children need balance who are caregiving, we may be doing none of those things, but we may need just balance for our time off. So, let's not be biased in terms of how we set systems up as well and assume that only one group of people needs to manage their work-life balance, but traditionally was spoken of as a sort of women's challengeand that's really changing, and she hopes it's changing. She hopes men are thinking about what they need and they're advocating for themselves, younger men, she has a lot of hopes for millennial generation to say, this is what I need and want whether that's a sabbatical, whether it's flexible work assignments and arrangements, whether it's different career opportunities and moving around a lot more often and she just hopes that employees are in the driver's seat, it's time to assume our more powerful position as you mentioned earlier.   When asked about how she stays motivated every day, Jennifer shared that she calls it self-care and when you do diversity work, it has to be radical self-care because it can get kind of depressing to have to have these conversations over and over about why empathy matters. We have not succeeded in building healthy workplace cultures and that is wearing us down, it's tiring us, it's actually making us physically ill from stress-related issues when you can't be yourself, it’s harmful. So, talking about this all the time as is equally inspiring and also kind of depressing and makes her angry and frustrated and she has days when she wants to give up but that's also entrepreneurship. You have this passion, you're trying to raise money, you're trying to hire your team, you're trying to get contracts signed. So, how she fills her cup is gathering with people that care about what she cares about and just being able to let her guard down and be real about the frustrations and how it feels every day and for her, that might be in a room of women entrepreneurs as it fills her up to think about how are you growing your business?Just to see herself in them is a way of finding that space where you can say, “I'm not alone.” As she thinks isolation is really dangerous for us. So, who your community, where can you be real and let your hair down and let your guard down, be honest. Where can you go to feel re-inspired to realize the size of the community that's trying to do similar things or that shares your values.There's a lot of conferences on conscious capitalism and so, it's not just diversity conferences, it's conferences about values at work and culture conference, which is about why workplace cultures matter, there's a lot of great HR conferences that are talking more and more about what she does. So, it's this incredible convergence that she’s seeing in her conversation to many other sort of parallel worlds, which is a really cool thing to see. So, she would just recommend find your community, gather with them, put yourself around people that are having the highs and lows and everything in between, find folks you can be really real and honest with where it's off line and so nobody's watching and people who will hold your confidence. But ultimately, to her that has really sustained her. She has an amazing team as well, she doesn't try to do this alone, she has always wanted to build this beyond herself because she knew she wouldn't be able to touch all the lives that she wanted to without a team of people that could be going out and being in those classrooms and building those strategies for the companies and bringing those practices back to their group, so that they could do more of it. So, she has an incredible consulting team that does client work but also has a great marketing team that feels like they are all very aligned in terms of how much they believe in what they're doing every day and they're all sharing articles all the time, they're sending inspirational stuff to each other, they're sending discouraging new data to each other which just fuels the fight. So, she’d say if you're the kind of person that for maybe a team would feel that it would help you do the work and get up every day for a reason, then you might want to build a different kind of organization.There's a lot of us that just want to do it alone and that takes a certain kind of personality, it was never really her so, it's important to know what kind of leader are you? What do you need around you? Who do you need around you to be able to do your work and really find your sweet spot and your voice in that work and then who needs to surround you to enable that so that you can focus on what you do best.   When asked about an online resource, tool, website or app, Jennifer stated that it's such a hard choice, there is so many, she has her favorite podcasts, she has her favorite research institutions.She really relies on research by McKenzie and Deloitte are probably her favorite things, her go-to resources for data on the way the workforce is changing. So, there are these amazing think tanks, they very well resourced, they are very cutting edge and a lot of that information fuels their consulting work, they just take that to clients and they hadn't seen it, it's compelling data about the future and they can help kind of flush it out because of their expertise, so it really works well. And then on the personal side, she really loves this woman who runs a daily Facebook live called, Resistance Liveand that's more of a sort of for her personal fuel.It talks about what's happening in our political system, the new generation of democratic leaders and candidates and the whole developing conversation around progressive values is exciting to her and again, kind of feeds her the certainty that she’s going in the right direction and that there is a big community that is asking the same questions that she’s asking so, but there's so many women's podcasts that she listens to, so many where she also gets her education around difference.She listens to code switch which is an NPR Podcastabout race and ethnicity and code-switching which is a critical foundational principle in terms of what we talk about diversity and all of us are code-switching all the time around a variety of aspects. So, that's one of her go to podcasts to learn about how other people experience code-switching and how she can be an ally to lessen some of what people feel that need to code switch every single day, how she can lessen that need and support people to bring their full selves to wherever and not have to put all that energy into hiding and minimizing and shifting and speaking a different language to different people, it's exhausting stuff and we shouldn't have to do it.   When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Jennifer shared that she has many favorite authors that are difficult to narrow it down as usual, but there's a new book called Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplacesby her friend Karen Catlin and literally she's a woman in Tech.She was a VP in a technology company in a technical role and today she's an author and keynoter and she has a million ideas for how to be a better ally. She's got a hashtag and a handle on Twitter called #betterallies, which she really recommends everybody follows but she has a new book that literally pulls all that together in one place which is so helpful.So, that's one book that she would encourage reading. She doesn’t think there's a lot written on Allyship, so, this is an emerging area. Her new book coming out in August does talk about this a lot as well and sort of the allied journey, how you can get on board, how you can put one foot in front of the other and whether it's adopting one new word and trying to understand what it means and using it all the way to kind of advanced Allyship, which is she’s an advocate in her organization, she’s a big-time voice, she’s challenging the system and everything in between so, Better Allies is great. David Smith wrote a book called Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Womenabout why men should mentor women and she really pays a lot of attention to men and there are not many men who are writing about inclusion and men who speak on it because it's so important in so many ways. The (a) that they're involved but (b) other men are going to listen to them and read them in a different way and she thinks maybe many people are used to people who look like me and you speaking about all these things but for a man to speak about it is powerful.So, those are two amazing books she would point people towards that are great reads and full of practical advice.   Jennifer shared that they are embarking on a big shift in their business strategy at her company, they've been highly like white glove bespoke consulting has been their bailiwick and then she gave a lot of key notes, which is great, and she loves, and she just plan to do a lot more of them. She thinks it's really her sweet spot honestly, but she thinks they're moving into the online product arena and they've launched their first online program in the last couple of months and have their first cohort of students and thinks their programs could be so many things. They're going to launch a new assessment behind the second book that's coming out in August around how inclusive of a leader are you and actually give people a score and then kind of break down their score within 6 different domains. And so, it’s the first assessment they've ever really had like that as a company. She thinks it has a lot of potential because people want to know where they are and then they want resources and tools whether it's a quickie online program that's really affordable or whether it's much longer, six months multi-course program where they can really do a deep dive. They're starting to build all those things on the back end, to get access to their knowledge, you don't need to hire them to come into your company basically, there's going to be a whole way to access what they do online. So, she’s just really excited to investigate that, it's a great revenue generator for them, a different kind of workstream business unit and who knows what's in store for them with the economy, but it's been a long time since they've had a correction and corrections and recessions are really difficult for consulting companies, a lot of us don't make it through and she thinks they're recession-proof now but it's very important and every entrepreneur that listens to you will know this, that we must diversify your revenue, spread out the ways that you make money in as many ways as you can to protect yourself against downturns particularly if you are a service company, and you're attached to corporate budgets.And diversity has been viewed as a nice to have traditionally and so, she thinks a lot of us, it really would behoove all of us to think about how are you going to weather storms? Because we know storms are going to happen and so that's another aspect that she’s really excited about having these online offerings.They're more affordable, they are something that people can do even with in a recession environment to invest in themselves, continue to learn and grow and prepare for the upswing, not to be morbid but it is something that has crossed her mind and she’s sure has crossed everyone's minds that are listening to you if they run a business.   Jennifershared listeners can find her at – info@jenniferbrownconsulting.com Stitcher Radio – The Will to Change: Uncovering True Stories of Diversity & Inclusion Twitter - @jenniferbrown Instagram - @jenniferbrownspeaks Facebook – Jennifer Brown Consulting LinkedIn – Jennifer Brown Consulting   ****Special Note: the book is available for pre-order on Amazon in order to get into the flow that way   Jennifer shared that she likes to think about the quote that was on President Obama's rug in the Oval Office. It says, “The Arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”You talked about like an idea that keeps you working and getting up in the morning and thinking that what you're doing is making a difference, there's no better quote than that. I think Martin Luther King originated it, but she thinks about it a lot because it is a struggle, because progress can feel slow, sometimes it's a real galvanizing idea for her and many others who do the work that she does.     Links   Inclusion: Diversity, The New Workplace & The Will To Change by Jennifer Brown Bring Your Human to Work: 10 Surefire Ways to Design a Workplace That Is Good for People, Great for Business, and Just Might Change the World by Erica Keswin Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces by Karen Catlin Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women by David Smith  

Leadership coach, speaker, author, and passionate advocate for inclusion and diversity Karen Catlin talks about how to be a better ally, ways to improve inclusion in meetings, meeting more people at conferences, how her career grew in this direction, her reluctance to being on video and more Karen's latest book is Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces (https://amzn.to/2Y2I5fu) and get the tweets which built the book at her @betterallies twitter account: https://twitter.com/betterallies You can see more about Karen at her site: https://karencatlin.com/ Intro music is "I'm Going for a Coffee" (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/Music_For_Podcasts_3/02_Im_Going_for_a_Coffee) by Lee Rosevere, which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Special Guest: Karen Catlin.

Leadership coach, speaker, and author Karen Catlin joins the program to discuss her experience as a woman working in the tech sector and how those experiences and observations led to her to her current work helping people to create more inclusive workplaces. She reveals the urgent need for change, and what leaders need to do to attract and retain diverse talent. Discover the future of allyship and how people of all backgrounds can become better allies.

Our next guest left a successful career in Silicon Valley at Adobe and Macromedia when she realized that a major shift had been happening—the women who had been working in the cubes and offices around her were gone. Karen Catlin turned her attention to writing, speaking, and coaching on creating more inclusive workplaces and adding diversity to speaker line-ups, particularly in tech.   Author of Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces, Karen Catlin shares several practical tips for creating an atmosphere of inclusion. "At every level of an organization, we can be a better ally." SHOW NOTES/LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE PRESENT! A Techie’s Guide To Public Speaking Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces Grace Hopper Celebration:  World’s largest gathering of women technologists Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, by Sheryl Sandberg Why Most Performance Evaluations Are Biased and How to Fix Them report by Clayman Institute for Gender Research Amplification: Washington Post article “How a White House women’s office strategy went viral” How women can say no to ‘office housework’ Ladders article MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY: "Brand New Day" by Sting   ABOUT THIS PODCAST Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm, based in San Francisco. We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.  

Career transitions are tough for all of us. Leveling-up or transitioning into a new role or field is challenging because we have to prove that we can do the job, especially when our resume doesn’t reflect relevant or exact experience recruiters or hiring managers are looking for.   The countless rejections may cause us to want to stay in our current role and hope that someone will acknowledge our skills, talents, and efforts.   However, we cannot build a career on hope alone!   In today’s episode of Build, we’re going to share what holds people back from advocating for themselves successfully, and in the next episode, we’ll dig into ways you can make the transition happen.   To help us out, I’ve invited Amy Sun who is a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm. In case you’re curious, Amy’s firm Sequoia Capital has been investing in companies since 1972. They have invested in 250+ companies, and some notable ones are Apple, Google, Oracle, PayPal, Stripe, YouTube, Instagram, Yahoo! and WhatsApp.   Last year at Grace Hopper, Sequoia Capital was the sponsor for a workshop I was co-teaching with Karen Catlin, which gave me the opportunity to meet Amy. After the workshop, Amy and I had the chance to chat, and I learned about her exciting background and thought it would be wonderful to share it with you.   What surprised me was that Amy didn’t start her career with the intention of becoming a venture capitalist; her first real job was as a snowboarding instructor!   After graduating from college, she began her career in tech as a product marketer, then eventually became a growth marketer and product manager.   As you tune into today’s episode, here’s what you’ll learn from Amy:   How to deal with the inner critic inside each of us who worries about: “What people are going to think” and get your foot in the door in spite of it How to suss out if you are missing experience How to handle roles that are and aren’t clearly defined or vary between companies The value of shadowing people and doing your homework How happenstance and luck play into transitions   “If you think about your career as the sum of all the knowledge you have—it’s not like you’re throwing away all the experience you’ve had in the past to start from scratch. Having a diverse set makes you more uniquely qualified for certain roles. So rather than holding yourself back by thinking: ‘Oh I don’t want to start from the ground (zero), and all my experience before is useless,’ think about it as compounding upon each other.” — Amy Sun, Partner at Sequoia Capital -- Build is produced by Femgineer (http://femgineer.com/).

From The Will To Change Podcast: Leadership coach, speaker, and author Karen Catlin joins the program to discuss her experience as a woman working in the tech sector and how those experiences and observations led to her to her current work helping people to create more inclusive workplaces. She reveals the urgent need for change, and what leaders need to do to attract and retain diverse talent. Discover the future of allyship and how people of all backgrounds can become better allies.

After spending 25 years building software products, Karen Catlin is now an advocate for women in the tech industry. She's a leadership coach, speaker, and co-author of Present! A Techies Guide to Public Speaking.   CONNECT with Karen HERE LISTEN to Karen's TEDx talk HERE   BeTheTalk is a podcast where Nathan Eckel chats with talkers from TEDx & branded events. Tips tools and techniques that can help you give the talk to change the world at BeTheTalk.com !

After spending 25 years building software products, Karen Catlin is now an advocate for women in the tech industry. She's a leadership coach, speaker, and co-author of Present! A Techies Guide to Public Speaking.   CONNECT with Karen HERE LISTEN to Karen's TEDx talk HERE   BeTheTalk is a podcast where Nathan Eckel chats with talkers from TEDx & branded events. Tips tools and techniques that can help you give the talk to change the world at BeTheTalk.com !

After spending 25 years working in tech and serving as a VP of engineering at Adobe, Karen Catlin is now a leadership coach, speaker, and author. Her latest book is "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces." You can learn more about Karen here: www.karencatlin.com This episode is brought to you by Authors Unite. Authors Unite provides you with all the resources you need to become a successful author. You can learn more about Authors Unite here: http://authorsunite.com/. Thank you for listening to The Business Blast Podcast! Tyler --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/authorsunite/support

Karen Catlin was a vice president of engineering at two public software companies, and served as the CEO of an early-stage startup. Today she's a leadership coach and author who is helping folks cultivate ally skills. Most recently she wrote "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces." http://betterallies.com

Last week on Build, we shared what allyship is and why it can help build inclusive workplaces. Anytime new approaches like these come out our defenses go up because it can be challenging to change mindsets and best practices. Plus there’s some fear around what the unintended consequences will be.   I hear ya!   Here’s the thing about allyship, you don’t need to get the green light from someone at the top or put in a ton of effort to make an impact. Turns out there are everyday actions that can benefit your team and workplace and make you a better ally.   In today’s episode, we’ll be sharing them with you to help you get started as an ally!   To help us out, I’ve invited Karen Catlin, co-author of Present! A Techie’s Guide To Public Speaking, a leadership coach, and an advocate for inclusive tech workplaces. You may recall seeing Karen in a few episodes from last year on mentorship.   I invited Karen back on to the show to talk about the work she has been doing coaching allies.   Given Karen’s rich career in tech spanning 25 years, she has a lot of experience to draw from, and it has inspired her to help other become better allies and create inclusive workplaces.   Here’s what you’ll learn as you watch today’s episode:   How You Can Get Started Being An Ally How Karen went about testing a number of simple everyday actions people can take to being an ally 3 simple everyday actions you can start to take immediately How Companies Have Benefited From Allies Taking Simple Everyday Actions A Best Practice For Being A Better Ally In Your Community   Want to get in touch and learn more from Karen? Reach out to Karen Catlin on her website Follow Karen on Twitter and follow Better Allies on Twitter to get more simple tips Sign up here to be notified when her new book is out, and receive 5 simple actions each week to create a more inclusive workplace -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.   --   ## 3 Simple Everyday Actions You Can Do To Be A Better Ally And Create An Inclusive Workplace Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     In the last episode, we talked about what allyship is, and why it's important for helping with diversity in the workplace today. If you missed that episode, I've included a link to it below this video. In today's episode, we're going to dive into some best practices on how you can become a better ally through simple, everyday actions. So stay tuned.                                                   Welcome to *Build* brought to you by PivotalTracker, I'm your host Poornima Vijayashanker, in each episode of *Build*, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Now two big misconceptions that a lot of folks have when it comes to being an ally for diversity is thinking that they need to have a green light from some high level executive in order to have their initiative come out, and thinking that the initiative has to make a big impact in order to even pursue it.                                                   Well it turns out that there are some everyday actions that you can do that will cause a ripple effect and improve diversity in your workplace, and we're going to share what those are in today's episode. And to help us out, Karen Catlin is back. Karen is my co author for our book Present, she's also a leadership coach and an advocate for diverse and inclusive workplaces. Thanks for coming back on the show.   Karen Catlin:                     Thanks so much for having me again.   What Allyship Is And Why It’s Important   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah, so let's do a quick recap for people who might be joining us. Tell us what allyship is, and again why it's important today.   Karen Catlin:                     Mm-hmm (affirmative), so allyship is simply using your position of privilege to make more inclusive workplace, and help other people be successful if they don't have quite as much privilege as you. And this is so important today, because we have a war on talent, it's hard to hire people so you want to cast a wide net and keep those people once you've hired them, keep them productive and working hard at your company, and stayed, staying there.                                                   And, there are all these studies showing the economic benefits, benefits of improved innovation, problem solving, and decision making. So that's why it's important.   How You Can Get Started Being An Ally   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah. So let's talk about how people can get started, because I'm sure there's people in our audience who would love to get started as an ally.   Karen Catlin:                     Yeah, so it's really not that hard. And I love the way you started out saying you don't have to have a huge initiative, you don't have to be the VP of people at your company, or head of diversity and inclusion to start being an ally. You simply I think need to just start paying attention to what's going on around your workplace, and raising awareness yourself, and if you're not really aware of like what are some of the things I could be doing, it's fine to ask someone who is an underrepresented gender, or minority, just ask them for some feedback of what are some of the challenges you're facing, and what's one thing I could be doing to help you out?   How Karen Catlin Went About Testing Simple Everyday Actions People Can Take To Being An Ally   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     So in your upcoming book, you provide a myriad of best practices, but before we dive into some of those, let's talk about how you went about testing these practices.   Karen Catlin:                     So I start testing these ideas actually on Twitter.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     OK.   Karen Catlin:                     About four years ago, I started a Twitter handle called @betterallies. And it was anonymous, it still is anonymous until this show actually.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah.   Karen Catlin:                     And I started tweeting simple, everyday actions that someone could take to create a more inclusive workplace. And my whole goal was that I didn't want it to be, you didn't have to feel like you were the head of people at your company, or head of diversity and inclusion to make a difference. It really was something that the normal person could do. So I started tweeting these ideas based on my experience working in tech, based on coaching clients I had, as well as the research that was being published at the time of the challenges that are happening in tech workplaces as well as other workplaces by people who are underrepresented.                                                   Based on the reaction, I kind of started realizing, OK that works, that's helpful, that's not so helpful, and where it was helpful it was really helpful, and I started getting again, positive reinforcement that these messages were making a difference to the people who were consuming them. And checking out my Twitter handle too it's like, there's some, you can use Twitter Analytics to find out a little bit about your demographics.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Mm-hmm.   Karen Catlin:                     And I have about 50% followers who are men, 50% women, so I know that there are a lot of men who are paying attention to this and appreciating the content.   How Companies Have Benefited From Allies Taking Simple Everyday Actions   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Nice. I know you've coached some men, so do you mind sharing maybe one or two examples of how these best practices have helped their team, or their company?   Karen Catlin:                     Sure. One that's just so memorable to me is I was coaching a man about, he wanted to hire more diverse talent for his team, and we started talking about just different aspects. I asked him just so how does the team socialize today, like you know, to go out to lunch or after hours? What's social life like for the team? And he looked at me, and he said, oh, you mean I probably should've told those guys going to the strip club for lunch last week that that's not cool? I'm like yeah maybe that wasn't exactly the most inclusive social event.                                                   He honestly like, bless him, he just hadn't realized how other people might feel that they couldn't go out to lunch that day with some of the team members, right. Another example is some of the language we use, and I know Pivotal Tracker I was reading a blog post that they now have something in their daily stand up, and in their bill process for the week called the Inclusion Thing of the Week.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Oh, cool.   Karen Catlin:                     And they just come up with the idea of something they can be doing to be more inclusive, and they talk about in their daily stand ups and everything, and one of them was simply don't use the word “guys.” Some people may be thinking, “Wait a second Karen, what do you mean? Guys is gender neutral, we use it all the time.” To them, I always like to say well if you were a woman, you need to use a public restroom, and there was a door marked guys, do you go in? Probably not.                                                   Or if someone were to ask you, a man, how many guys did you date in high school? They're not thinking women, right there, right? So “guys” is not gender neutral, so that's another thing that as Pivotal Tracker learned is a simple thing they could do. As I've started coaching other people too, examples come up such as, “Well what's your spirit animal?”                                                   Well maybe that's not very inclusive because spirit animal is actually an important part of some Native American cultures, and spiritual component of it. So it's really kind of appropriating their culture. So I can't believe this is such a beautiful example of an alternative. Why not use patronas instead from Harry Potter right? So just swap that out, and have everyone feel that they can be included in the conversation.   Best Practice #1 For Being A Better Ally And Creating An Inclusive Workplace: Reviewing How We Give Feedback To Women Versus Men   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Got it. OK so let's dive in now and have you share three best practices from your book.   Karen Catlin:                     Yeah. So the first one I'll share is all about performance feedback. People who do research into performance feedback have done things like study performance reviews, written performance reviews, thousands of them, and found that there is gendered difference in how we give feedback to women versus men. Some of that gender difference shows up in the form of the feedback that we give to women is more vague.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     OK.   Karen Catlin:                     And with men, it's more specific. We're telling men more often that this is how your work has impacted the business, here's how you can keep impacting the business, here's a skill you need to learn to have a bigger impact on the business. And with women less so, it's more vague. And at the same time there have been studies showing that we actually tend to hold back from giving constructive feedback, the hard feedback, to people who are different than us.                                                   So whether that's a different gender, different race, or so forth, we hold back from giving the constructive feedback probably because we don't want someone to think that oh he's only giving me that feedback because I'm a woman. So as a man we might think I don't want to give a woman feedback because she's going to think I'm sexist if I criticize her. I don't want to give a person of color feedback if I'm white, because they're going to think I'm racist, right.                                                   So we hold back, and we soften the feedback. But that doesn't do anyone any good, right.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah.   Karen Catlin:                     We really need that feedback, constructive as well as the positive feedback to keep growing our careers. So in the book there's a whole chapter on giving feedback with best practices of doing things like looking at the language you're using, and are you actually tying the feedback that you've giving someone to their performance? And to the impact they're having on a business?                                                   Are you providing skill based suggestions about how they can grow their career that way? And, at the end of the day, are you writing reviews of roughly the same length for men and women, for all of your staff? Because that's one indicator that you might be skimping on the feedback, real easy thing to check.   Best Practice # For Being A Better Ally And Creating An Inclusive Workplace: Give Credit To An Idea’s Owner Publicly   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Nice. Well that's a very comprehensive best practice, thank you for sharing. Do you have another one?   Karen Catlin:                     Sure, pay attention to what happens in meetings. So much of tech and frankly any workplace is driven through meetings. And, in meetings there are a number of dynamics at play that really prevent people who are in the minority from speaking up and fully participating. Perhaps it's that they are interrupted, we've talked about that already.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yep.   Karen Catlin:                     And number of reasons why that might happen, but if that is part of your culture, or perhaps there are some repeat offenders who interrupt frequently, that could be something you could be paying attention and stopping. It could be that the ideas are not being credited appropriately when women or people in minority positions are bringing them up.                                                   It may be that someone's asking a question, like in a client meeting of what they, they asked the question to the person who they think is in the power position of the meeting. Probably a man, when really it should go to a woman. So redirect that question to well, you say something like, that question would be best answered by Poornima, the founder of Femgineer, like throw that question to the right person. So look for ways that you can create more inclusive meetings by just paying attention to these social cues that are happening.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Got it. So this is great in meetings, but I think sometimes we're not sure if we're doing it the right way. So is there a way we can solicit feedback from our peers, from our boss?   Karen Catlin:                     Yeah, why not use the back channel?   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     OK, yeah.   Karen Catlin:                     The back channel that's in any meeting, I mean we all use them right. The DM's or the text messages, private chats to just like touch base with people, like what did you think of that point they just made? Or did I clarify everything I should've clarified? We're constantly using the back channels, why not just ask people in the meeting that you trust, have someone DM you when you could've been a better ally, when you could've stood up for someone who was interrupted or had trouble making a point in the meeting, or whatever it is right. Use the back channel.   Best Practice #3 For Being A Better Ally And Creating An Inclusive Workplace: Saying No To Office Housework That Isn’t Your Job   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     OK. Your third best practice that you'd like to share with us.   Karen Catlin:                     Yeah, so the third one is I think I'll choose office housework. So office housework is the stuff that needs to happen in any office and it's no ones job really to get it done, and it's important work, but not really leading to business growth, career growth, and so forth. The classic example is taking the minutes at a meeting. When that's not your job.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     OK.   Karen Catlin:                     That's your job, that's not office housework, that's your job. But if it's no ones job and you just have called a meeting and someone needs to take the minutes, it often falls on the shoulder of a woman sitting around the table. The problem with that is the person taking the minutes is usually a step behind, so they're not participating in the meeting at full force so to speak, so they're being left out, their voice is counted as much. They're also put in a subservient position to maybe their peers who are sitting around the table, and that's not fair, and that might have longer impact right, well beyond the meeting.                                                   So it's much better to set up a rotation.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah. Actually did that at my second startup, yeah.   Karen Catlin:                     Excellent, so you were a great ally there. But office housework isn't just meeting minutes, it's also things like maybe it is someone's got to clean up all the comments in the code before we ship it off to our partner, or to make it open source, right. That important work needs to happen, but it doesn't really lead to career growth, right. It could be oh we need someone to mentor the intern again this summer, Susie did it the last five summers and she's awesome at it, right.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Right. Maybe Susie doesn't want to do it again, she wants to do something else, yeah.   Karen Catlin:                     Exactly, because the first time yeah maybe there's some career growth area, you learn to mentor, you learn to have that leadership skill, but the fifth time you've probably mastered it and maybe it's time to spread the wealth.   A Best Practice For Being A Better Ally In Your Community   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah, that makes sense. So these three are great for inside your company, do you have maybe a couple best practices you would share for the community at large?   Karen Catlin:                     Sure, so I think we should think about our networks, the networks we build professionally. Our networks, and there's research on this too, that they become very homogenous, or just like me, because we meet people and hang out with people, and connect with people, and stay in touch with people who we share some common interest with, right. So it's not that that can't cross gender bounds, or racial bounds or anything like that, but we tend to have networks that are primarily just look like us.                                                   So the impact of that is that then we only have people who are like us that we connect with opportunities, whether that is to get a new job, or to speak at an event, or some other career growing opportunity, right. We recommend people in our network. So the call to action here is diversify your network. The next time you're out at any kind of professional event, go say hello and introduce yourself to someone who does not look like you.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah.   Karen Catlin:                     Whatever that means right. Start a conversation, see if you can't connect them with an opportunity, and reverse might happen to. So diversify our network I'd say is the first one. The second thing is, and this is such an important part of being an ally is, don't just be a bystander, or like I don't do these bad things, right. Be an upstander. When you see something bad happening, don't just like say that's not my problem, like say something, and see something, say something.                                                   There is a story that was shared on Twitter just I think a week or two ago of a woman saying that one of the worst things that ever happened to her as a public speaker was that there's a man who asked a question during the Q&A and kind of demanded to know was she single, because he wanted to pursue things with her. And at the time, I mean I wish there had been an upstander in the audience who would just stand up and say basically, hey dude, we don't do that here.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Right.   Karen Catlin:                     That's all it takes, defuse it and put the guy in his place, and show some support for the woman.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah. Well you remember when I was in Canada, I fortunately had a team that helped when I had a heckler in the audience, and just kindly took this gentleman outside, and I could kind of move on with my Q&A, so it helps to have those folks in your kind of corner.   Karen Catlin:                     Yes, absolutely.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     So be one of those people.   Karen Catlin:                     Be one of those people, yes.   Better Allies: Everyday Actions For Creating More Inclusive Engaging Workplaces   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     So I know we just scratched the surface. So tell us more about the upcoming book as well as how people in our audience can work with you.   Karen Catlin:                     Yeah, so the book is *Better Allies: Everyday Actions for Creating More Inclusive Engaging Workplaces*. And you can get in touch with me at KarenCatlin.com, but I really encourage you to follow @betterallies on Twitter, or other social channels, we're on Instagram, Pinterest, and Medium as well. And there's a newsletter also so if you go to betterallies.com you can get the subscription link to the newsletter.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Wonderful, thank you.   Karen Catlin:                     Yeah, thank you.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Well I can't wait to read Karen's book, and that's it for this episode of *Build*. Be sure to share this episode with your teammates, your friends, your boss, anyone who you think may be wanting to be an ally, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode. Ciao for now.                                                  

As the year comes to a close, you’re probably getting ready to attend a holiday party, maybe your company’s. And maybe you’re concerned about what to talk about with your teammates and boss. Diversity and inclusion may be hot buttons to stay clear of, especially with people scrutinizing practices and scoffing at the benefits.   But you know it’s important…so what can you talk about? How can you set your team and company up to see a change next year?   Allyship.   Wondering what it is and how to be a better ally? Well in today’s episode, we’ll cover what allyship is and how it can help you build a more inclusive company.   To help us out, I’ve invited Karen Catlin, co-author of Present! A Techie’s Guide To Public Speaking, a leadership coach, and an advocate for inclusive tech workplaces. You may recall seeing Karen in a few episodes from last year on mentorship.   I invited Karen back on to the show to talk about the work she has been doing coaching allies.   Given Karen’s rich career in tech spanning 25 years, she has a lot of experience to draw from, and it has inspired her to help others become better allies and create inclusive workplaces.   As you watch today’s episode, you’ll learn the following:   What an ally is and what allyship is How people can develop an awareness for allyship Why you don’t need to be a leader to be an ally in your company Why men care about being an ally How to spot or approach an ally to work for Want to get in touch and learn more from Karen? Reach out to Karen Catlin on her website Follow Karen on Twitter and follow Better Allies on Twitter to get more simple tips Sign up here to be notified when her new book is out, and receive 5 simple actions each week to create a more inclusive workplace -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- ## How Being An Ally Can Help You Create An Inclusive Workplace Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:         You've probably read a number of headlines around discrimination in tech. Despite all of the diversity initiatives, it seems like change is pretty slow. So, what can we do to make change faster, both in our teams and our companies? Allyship. If you're not familiar with what allyship is, well, in today's *Build* episode we're gonna talk about it. So stay tuned.                                 Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode of *Build*, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. As you're well aware of, diversity is a hot topic today. There are a number of practices, but people are scoffing at their benefits and they're wondering if there can really be anything done in the near term.   Well, there is a new approach called allyship. In today's episode, we're gonna share how allyship can help you and your company. To help us out, I invited Karen Catlin. Karen is my co-author on our book, Present. Karen is also a leadership coach and an advocate for inclusive tech workplaces. In the episode today, we're gonna be talking about what allyship is, why it's important, and in the next episode, we'll be sharing some of the best practices that you can put in place every day.   Karen Catlin:                  Thanks so much for having me on the show again, Poornima.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah.   Karen Catlin:                  It's great to be here.   Why Diversity And Inclusion Have Been On A Decline In Tech For Two More Than Two Decades   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Thanks for coming on. You've had a rich career in tech. Why don't you share with us what you've done, as well as problems you've experienced over that time?   Karen Catlin:                  Yeah, so I spent about 25 years working in tech. I started out as a software engineer writing code for a living, and over time moved into management roles, and eventually into executive leadership. Most recently, I was a VP of Engineering at Adobe Systems. During that time, I definitely saw this interesting thing happening where there was a decline happening in the number of women coming into the field. There's a lot of research that backs this up, but there are just fewer women studying computer science. Not that that's the only way you get into tech, but it is definitely a key way, here in Silicon Valley, to get into tech.                                 So, there's a decline happening with the number of women who are into the field, and at the same time, women leave tech at twice the rate of men at that mid-career point. As a result, over the 25 years that I spent working in tech, I really saw the impact. I saw that there were a lot fewer women around and less diversity in general.   Beliefs That Have Held Leaders Back From Creating An Inclusive Workplace   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Were there specific problems that maybe you incurred or you saw happening within the companies?   Karen Catlin:                  Yes. And I worked for some really good companies, so I don't wanna throw my companies under the bus that I used to work for at all. But I will say that most of the men I worked with really, firmly believed that their company was a meritocracy, that you got ahead based on your merits, that if you worked hard and did good work you'd be recognized and promoted. But the numbers just really didn't back that up. In any company there are more women in the entry level, and as you get up to the C level, it just declines like a pyramid. So, definitely there was something going on.                                 Personally, some of the things I witnessed...and I think this will resonate with a lot of women who are watching this, is something called bro-propriation where you say something in a meeting, as a woman, and it's a pretty good idea but it kinda falls on deaf ears, doesn't really go anywhere. And then in the same meeting, a little bit further on, somebody says the same thing, usually a guy because there's mostly men in the meetings. A guy says the same thing in the meeting, and gets all the credit. We call that bro-propriation, because a bro has appropriated your idea, of course. That happened to me so many times.   Examples of Unconscious Acts That Contribute To A Lack Diversity And Inclusion In The Workplace                                 Then there's also this thing, and it still happens to this day, where people give me what is called an unconscious demotion. An unconscious demotion...I bet this has happened to you, too. You meet someone for the first time and you might say, "Oh yeah, I work in tech." And they say, "Do you work in HR or marketing?" That's an unconscious demotion. Nothing wrong with those fields at all, but if you're a woman who's already in a very male dominated field, like engineering, computer science, tech in general, it's like this yet another reinforcement that you don't belong there. That's just not cool.                                 It happened to me just a couple months ago. I was visiting my husband at his office and I met one of his new colleagues. Sure enough, he said, "What do you do?" I said, "Well, I used to work in tech, was VP at Adobe for a long time." And just told him something like that. And said, "Oh, well at Adobe, were you in marketing or HR?" I mean, literally, he said those words, and I just kind of...I wanted to punch him. But I ended up just sort of smiling and saying, "Actually, I was a VP of Engineering."                                 So those are just a couple examples of things I've seen. I could share some more, but I think you probably have some more questions you wanna get to.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah, of course. It's unfortunate that you're experiencing this and seeing this happen inside of your companies and other companies. Were there things that you were also seeing in the community at large over the years?   Karen Catlin:                  Yes. Definitely started seeing...First of all, in support of women as well as other kinds of diversity, there's a lot of activity going on, a lot of conferences, a lot of discussions, a lot of research. All of that's great. And I'm starting to see men wanting to also really get involved and help with diversity initiatives, help support women in their companies, and so forth. I saw that first hand. I also saw it at places like the Grace Hopper Celebration.   The Grace Hopper Celebration...I mean, you and I know. We've been there a number of times—   Poornima Vijayashanker:         It's the largest technical conference for women.   The Origin Story of Better Allies: The Bingo Card At Grace Hopper 2014   Karen Catlin:                  Yes, exactly. In 2014, there was something called the Male Allies Panel. It was a panel of men who were leaders at their company, and talking about what they did for women in terms of allyship, to support them, to champion them, and so forth at their workplaces. Unfortunately kinda fell flat. It fell flat because ahead of time, some women were upset that men were taking up valuable stage time at this conference, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Sure. Yep.   Karen Catlin:                  Some women also were concerned that these men really weren't the best allies.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         OK.   Karen Catlin:                  So they created a bingo card. They created a bingo card of phrases they expected those men to be saying that would show exactly how far they still had to go to become real allies. They handed the bingo card out, right? And of course, during that panel, the men were saying different things and falling short, and the women were checking off those bingo squares and started yelling bingo at different points during the panel.                                 Now, when I heard about this...I wasn't at that panel, I sort of was following it on social media. When I heard about this, I sided with these poor men. These were actually good men, their hearts are in the right place. They wanna do the right thing. They just don't know exactly what women need. They certainly don't know what people of color need, or you put those together, women of color, and so forth. So, I see people wanting to do the right thing but not quite knowing what to do.   Why Diversity And Inclusion Initiatives Are Important Now More Than Ever                                 Poornima Vijayashanker:         Got it. Why is this even important, right? There's so many of these diversity initiatives that come out and benefits just are slow-coming or maybe not existent at all in some people's eyes. Why do you think this is important?   Karen Catlin:                  Yeah. First of all, especially in the whole me too era right now, you kinda hope that people just wanna do the right thing, and it feels maybe like a moral imperative to support people of all types of backgrounds. So you kinda hope that. But at the same time, there's so much research that shows that diverse companies are more economically profitable and successful, that there's better decision making, there's more innovation, there's better problem solving. It's so many benefits that have been proven in social science and economic research studies coupled with it's the right thing to do. Then you layer on top of all of that, there's a big talent shortfall in tech as well as across the whole United States in terms of we've got the lowest unemployment numbers in...I don't know, in a generation. So, we have a problem finding the talent to fill a position, so why wouldn't you want to cast the widest net possible?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah.   Karen Catlin:                  One more thing. Women can lean in all they want and all they can, but until we start changing our workplaces so that things that have always been done a certain way change, the women aren't going to be successful. We really need to start looking at our workplaces and changing our workplaces.   Why Workplaces Are Slow Or Resistant To Change And Embrace Allyship   Poornima Vijayashanker:         OK. What do you think is hindering that change?   Karen Catlin:                  There are a couple of reasons. I would say one is this is the way we've always done it. Why would we bother changing? An example of that is, well, I've always hired the best people for my network. Why would I go outside of my network? Well, if you don't go outside your network, and your network is your best buds, people who are probably just like you, you're gonna continue hiring people who are just like you and you're gonna have homogenous hiring, right?                                 So, if we've always done it that way, maybe that's something that's holding us back. Another is that there might be concerns that we are taking away something from men who are in positions of privilege right now, right? If we hire more women or people of color or whatever underrepresented minority you wanna fill in the blank there, if we hire more of those people, there's gonna be less opportunity for me. That's not exactly a growth mindset. If you think about hiring the best people, assembling the best team, the pie and the opportunities are just going to expand and there's gonna be larger slices for everyone as a result. That's another thing that's holding people back.   The third, I'll say, is that there's just, at times, a lack of awareness. Unless you're living these situations of being interrupted or having your ideas appropriated and so on, and so on, you just might not be aware it's happened to other people. You might not be aware that...even walking around a trade show floor and seeing maybe a sexy pinup image on a T-shirt or a bumper sticker or something, or a laptop sticker even, you might just think oh, that's sort of funny, not thinking about how a woman might feel is she sees such a sexualized image on a conference swag giveaway. So I think that we need to raise awareness as well.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         What drew you into this?   Karen Catlin:                  What drew me into this is this desire, especially after hearing about the bingo card in, at the Grace Hopper panel of all the male allies, that, coupled with just hearing from man after man that I would just be talking to, maybe casually, or coaching, men really being curious of how can I help here, I really do care about diversity. I wanna create a diverse workforce. I wanna work with all kinds of people. I care. I'm a good person. But what am I supposed to do? There really seemed to be this desire without the information.   Why Karen Catlin Decided To Become Coach Others Into Becoming Better Allies   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Why did you decide to embark on this mission?   Karen Catlin:                  I decided to embark on the mission because I felt like I couldn't not get involved. I really felt like I had a unique perspective. I had been working in tech for 25 years. I understood this industry. I also had this desire to really help make the industry more diverse. I really wanted to have an impact.   I started tweeting. After that Grace Hopper conference, I started a Twitter handle called @BetterAllies. I started tweeting answers to this question of what am I supposed to do, and simply talking about here are some simple, everyday actions you can take as an ally to be better for people of all sorts of underrepresented groups in tech.                                 So I started the Twitter handle. Then I started a newsletter and started getting some really positive feedback from both of those channels. People say Twitter is just a cesspool and everything, but I actually have fan tweets that I get.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Nice.   Karen Catlin:                  People like my content. So I got positive reinforcement there. My newsletter is growing like gangbusters, so super happy about that. Again, positive reinforcement. I just decided recently that I had to write a book on the topic, too. I had to take the best of what I learned on Twitter, through what I've been tweeting as well as the reinforcement I was getting there, and the content from my newsletter, and create a book for people to be better allies.   What Is An Ally And What Is Allyship   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Let's dig into what allyship is. What is an ally, and then what's allyship after that?   Karen Catlin:                  Yeah. So, an ally is someone who uses their position of privilege to help someone who has less privilege. So, in tech, that typically is a white, straight, CIS man who has a lot of privilege. They can use that position of privilege to help others. They can do that by doing things like mentoring, sponsoring, championing, speaking out on behalf of them, looking for opportunities, connecting them to different opportunities, being just somebody who's an all around good person, but not just sitting still, not just not being a bad person, but actually taking action to help promote other people.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Got it. So taking initiative.   Karen Catlin:                  Taking initiative, yes.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         You already touched on this, but who can be an ally besides the straight, white male?   Why You Don’t Need To Be A Leader To Be An Ally In Your Company   Karen Catlin:                  Definitely. So, allyship is not limited at all. That's the beauty, it's anybody can be an ally. You can be a leader at your company. In fact, I'll share a quick story about a leader that was my manager, a senior vice president at one point in my career. I still remember this time. I had just started working for him. I was new to the company, and I was in a very senior meeting with him. I heard him say, "Well, what I learn from Karen is the following." And then he said something.                                 I thought at the time, first of all, I didn't say those exact words. So he took what I had shared with him in a one-on-one earlier and reframed it in the company speak. So he taught me how to speak the language as a result. But also, what a shout out he gave me. What he, the SVP, learned from me, was the following. So that's a great example of how a leader who has a lot of cred within the organization can be an ally.                                 But an individual contributor can be an ally, too. An individual contributor sitting in a meeting and noticing someone might keep interrupting another person, might just pull them aside later and say, "Hey, dude, do you know you interrupt a lot?" And just raise awareness. So it's really a job for everybody.   Why Men Do Care About Being An Ally   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. I know we're gonna go into more best practices. Thank you for sharing those. I also know that there may be some people in our audience or just wondering are men really interested in this and questioning if they really care. Maybe you can share from your experience.   Karen Catlin:                  I'm sure there's some men who don't care, and that's fine. But there are so many men who do care. I get emails from people, they don't even know who I am. They're just emailing to or DM'ing the Better Allies handle, and they're asking for advice. They're asking for advice about...well, with everything that just recently happened around Judge Kavanaugh and the hearings there, how do I actually support women at my workplace who might be feeling upset about the way that Dr. Ford was treated? I'm getting emails, and messages, and questions of things like well, I just got this great job and I'm thinking about taking it, but hiring me is like the opposite of improving diversity, 'cause I'm a white guy and I really care about working at a diverse company that values that, so help me...Should I take the job? And the answer was yes. If you want the job, take it and go in and be an ally and a champion for diversity from your position of privilege.                                 So, I hear about that. I get questions of just how can I...I want to respect women I work with. Is it cool to invite them out for coffee, for a one-on-one, just to get out of the office. Can I do that? So, there are so many men who are thinking about this very thoughtfully and really want to make sure that they are being supportive and doing the right thing.   How People Can Develop An Awareness For Allyship   Poornima Vijayashanker:         That brings up a good point, that you wanna be well-received should you choose to become an ally. How can people develop an awareness and make sure they're headed in the right direction?   Karen Catlin:                  Here's what not to do. What not to do is to assume you're the knight in shining armor riding in to save the underrepresented person from whatever-   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Princess, yeah.   Karen Catlin:                  The princess, whatever. Because there are a lot of women who don't need to be saved, frankly, and don't want to be saved and so forth. And so, instead, what I recommend you do to make sure that you're having the right kind of impact, is look for systemic changes as opposed to one off changes where you are maybe just saving the day. What I mean by that is, let's say you notice that someone on your staff is being substantially underpaid for her grade level. You could make just that fix, potentially, if you have the budget and assuming you have control over their salary. You could change the budget for that one person, her compensation.   But better is to look more holistically at your department or the company and request that a salary review be done by gender and perhaps by other minority kind of aspects, such as race, or sexual orientation, and so forth. But make a systemic change, not just a one off. So that's something that’s a best practice to follow.   How To Spot Or Approach An Ally To Work For   Poornima Vijayashanker:         For our audience out there who maybe want to work for an ally, how can they approach and spot one.   Karen Catlin:                  If you are thinking about in an interview setting, like let's say you're going to a company you wanna be working for, someone who is going to be a good ally for you, perhaps your manager, or perhaps coworkers, during that whole interview process, you can literally just ask them. It's like, so what have you done to support a diverse, inclusive workplace here? Just ask them to give you some examples. And then I think you'll be in a pretty good situation for seeing whether or not they're going to be the kind of allies you want them to be.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Well, thank you for coming on the show, Karen, and sharing what allyship is. I can't wait to read your upcoming book. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about it.   Karen Catlin:                  The title of the book is Better Allies: Everyday Actions for Creating Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces. It's coming out early 2019.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Now, Karen and I want to know if you've acted as an ally inside of your company, what did you do and what was the impact that you experienced. Share it with us in the comments below this video.   That's it for this week's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode where we're gonna be diving into more best practices for becoming an ally. Ciao for now.

This week's episode shines the spotlight on the representation of women on our big screens, little screens, conference daises, and bookshelves. It's worth taking some time to consider the messages we receive from all forms of entertainment and education and whether we are getting a balanced view of the world. If you come to the realization that your bookshelf needs more female authors on it, never fear, we have a list of some favorite female authors and books. Check them out! Tweet your favorites to @UnravelingPink and we'll add them to the list.
 Resources in this episode:
 Molly Flatt, The Guardian, "Is The Future Female? Fixing Sci-Fi's Women Problem." Check out: Molly Flatt's "A Darker Wave," Kassandra Khaw’s "There are Wolves in These Woods," Madeline Ashby’s "The Cure For Jetlag," Liz Williams’ "In the God Fields." 
Jodi Picoult, "Small Great Things"
 Debby Irving, "Waking Up White" 
Karen Catlin, "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking"
 Ed Yong, 4/19/2018, "When Will the Gender Gap in Science Disappear?"
 Emma Pierson, 8/5/2014 "In Science, It Matters That Women Come Last" 
The Unraveling Pink's Brain Trust List of fav female authors and books:
 Arundhati Roy, "God of Small Things"
 Ntozage Shange, "for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf" 
Curtis Sittenfeld
 Doris Kearns Goodwin
 Loung Ung, "First They Killed My Father"
 Ayn Rand
 Kate Germano, "Fight Like A Girl"
 Julie Kratz, "ONE: How Male Allies Support Women for Gender Equality" 
Amy Waninger, "Network Beyond Bias: Making Diversity a Competitive Advantage for Your Career"
 Jennifer Brown, "Inclusion: Diversity, The New Workplace & the Will to Change"
 Iris Bohnet, "What Works: Gender Equality by Design"
 Another list of favorite female-authored business books
: Shona Brown and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, "Competing on the Edge:  Strategy as Structured Chaos"
 Andrea Kates, "Find Your Next: Using the Business Genome Approach to Find your Company's Next Competitive Edge" 
Angeles Arrien, "The Four-Fold Way: Walking the Paths of Warrior, Teacher, Healer and Visionary"
 Rayona Sharpnack, "Trade Up: Five Steps for Redesigning Your Leadership and Your Life from the Inside Out"
 Gail Larsen, "Transformational Speaking: If You Want to Change the World, Tell a Better Story"

Karen Catlin spent 25 years building software products. Karen is now an advocate for women in the tech industry. She’s a leadership coach, a TEDx speaker, and co-author of "Present! A Techie’s Guide to Public Speaking." Formerly, Karen was a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe. She holds a Computer Science degree from Brown University. Karen talks about seeing the decline of women computer science majors since the 1980's, the keys to reaching the Vice President level, and public speaking tips for techies. Reach out to Karen on LinkedIn. Stay up to date with Witty through our website, LinkedIn or email us at podcastwitty@gmail.com. Support the show (http://wittypod.com)

Karen Catlin shares a fantastic male ally moment involving the ultimate compliment.

All this month, Karen Catlin and I have been digging into the theme of mentoring. We started out by sharing the debut Build episode on why some people are reluctant to seek mentoring, and last week we talked about how to approach mentors, set expectations, and thank them. In today’s final episode, on mentoring for this month, we’re going to talk about what you can do to become an effective mentor yourself. We understand that you might be reluctant to be a mentor for a number of reasons: you don’t have the time, you don’t feel qualified, or you feel like your experiences may not relate. Don’t worry Karen and me have you covered! You’ll learn: How mentoring is a two-way street benefiting both the mentor and mentee Why you don’t need to have same experience or perspective as your mentee Who should be holding the mentee accountable What to do when you just don’t have time, but still want to help someone who approaches you What to do when someone brings you a deeply personal problem Transcript Poornima: In the previous two segments, I've been talking to Karen Catlin, who is an advocate for Women in Tech, a leadership coach, and my co-author of our book, *Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking*. Karen and I have been digging into the importance of mentorship. We started out by talking about why you might be reluctant to seeking a mentor. Then, we talked about how you can effectively establish the relationship. If you've missed either of those segments, I highly recommend you check out the links below this video. In this final segment, we're gonna talk about how you can become an effective mentor yourself.                                                   Welcome back to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Each *Build* episode consists of a series of conversations I have with innovators. Together, we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career. Now, I know at the beginning, Karen, you mentioned how you loved mentoring, because you get to learn a lot. I feel the same way. I think I actually learn more than maybe my mentees do and that's why I love doing it. Let's talk about some of the benefits that you're gonna experience should you choose to mentor.   Mentoring is a two-way street that benefits both the mentor and mentee   Karen Catlin: Sure, yes. It's definitely a two-way street. You may not know what you're gonna be learning from a mentee, but getting together, hearing about what's going on, the questions they ask, you are going to get insight into how you can benefit your career. You might just get a good, broad perspective of what's going on around your company or your industry. As I mentioned, maybe some great ideas for podcasts that I could listen to, or books I could read, or productivity apps I could use. I don't even know what's it gonna be, but I always pick up something when I talk to a mentee.   Poornima: Yeah. I feel like it's a great way to stay relevant. Especially if some of us are a little bit older and maybe we're not as in the know.   Karen Catlin: OK. OK. So one time I was talking to someone and they said, "TLDR." This was a few years ago to my credit, but I'm like, "TLDR, what's that mean?" So, I asked and they said, "Oh, just too long, didn't read." I'm like, "Oh, OK." Just now, I am able to just like, weave that into conversations and all of a sudden I seem really relevant.   Poornima: Totally. So you can speak the lingo.   Karen Catlin: Exactly.   Why a mentor doesn’t need to have the exact same experience or perspective as their mentee   Poornima: Now, when you were at Adobe, did you just mentor women or do you also mentor men as well?   Karen Catlin: Sure. As a senior woman at the company, I definitely was approached by a lot of woman for mentoring. Men approached me, too. I did definitely mentor both genders. I think it's important for a mentee to get advice from people who don't look like them, whether that is because of your gender, or your life experience, your...of other things that you're bringing to the company, bringing to the table. It's important for a mentee to get advice from people who aren't like them, because it's gonna broaden the set of advice that they're going to get, right?   Poornima: Sure.   Karen Catlin: Likewise, because mentoring is a two-way street, it's good for mentors to mentor people who don't look like them too, because, that is going to allow them to learn, get different perspectives, and all of that. I think everything is ups for grabs.   Poornima: Yeah.   Karen Catlin: Yeah.   Poornima: What about people who may worry that they don't have the same experience, or perspective, and so, they might not feel credible sharing their life experience with a mentee?   Karen Catlin: Oh my gosh. Don't overthink it. That's my advice for mentors here. The mentee has approached you because they respect you and they want to learn from you. You don't have to worry about, am I going to be able to provide just the right piece of experience or advice. Don't worry about it, just have a conversation, share stories, share your experience, it's gonna make a difference to the mentee.   What to do when you don’t have time to mentor someone   Poornima: I wanna talk about a couple of other issues that I see come up a lot when I recommend people mentor and they're resistant to. The first is time. “I'm just so busy, I have kids, I have a family, I have other obligations, I just don't have the time to be somebody's mentor.”   Karen Catlin: Yeah. Yeah. I get that. Because, we are all very busy. That said, if someone approaches you because they wanna get your advice, and they haven't time-boxed it following my advice from an earlier segment here. Ask them, what are you really asking for here? Can we get together and maybe, you know, if you're busy, you might say, "Can we get together for a 30-minute phone call?" for example. Ask yourself, "Do I have time maybe for a 30-minute phone call?"                                                   Chances are, you have some small segment of time that you could offer to a mentee and so, you can be responsible for saying, "Well, this is what I can give you and this is all I've got right now." If you're really too busy, you might just say, "The next two months I am just super busy on this project, can you ping me in three months’ time, and I'll bet I'll have some time for you then."   Poornima: Yeah. I think that's good. I think it's good to give people that kinda realistic picture. One thing I like to do—actually, two things I like to do—if somebody comes to me and I know they have that good directive question, like, I got this one recently, "How do you self-publish?" Well, I've already written two posts, like, pretty meaty ones. I tell them, "Read these posts and then, if you have any other questions, shoot me an email, I'm traveling a lot, I'll be sure to respond to you via email."                                                   Trying to find a 30-minute time spot across time zones, is just not gonna work for both of us. I think that's great. The other thing I say is, and you do this because you speak at a lot of events, I say, "I'm gonna be at this event, why don't we just meet there and when I'm in between sessions, would be great to come out and have a chat with you." I think finding those opportunities, you can get more flexible.   Karen Catlin: Yeah and,doing what you can to just help the person, whether that is with your actual mentoring or making a recommendation for another mentor.   Poornima: Yeah. That's a good one.   Karen Catlin: I had times, yeah, over my career, where really my mentoring dance card was just full. I really, really couldn't take on anymore mentees. When those things happen and someone approached me for mentoring, I would explain, my mentoring dance card is full. What are you really looking for from a mentor? And then I might recommend that they reach out to someone else at my company. Right?   Poornima: Yep.   Karen Catlin: Help them, move them forward in some way.   Poornima: Definitely. I know another hurdle is relevancy. Again, kind of, oh, you know, the mentee might say, "I'm looking for somebody in data science." I might say, "I don't know anything about data science, I'm just a front-end engineer or I'm a designer, why are you approaching me?" Right? It doesn't seem like my work is exactly relevant. I don't know if this is a good thing.   Karen Catlin: Yeah. It's so funny. Just a couple days ago, a mentor, excuse me, a mentee was reaching out to me and asking, "Hey Karen, I am thinking about putting on a women's only hackathon and I'd like to get your advice about how to do this." I had to tell her, "Well actually, I have very little experience with hackathons, even though I'm an advocate for Women in Tech. I think this is a great idea, but I don't have direct relevant experience to share with you. However, I do know about this one tech company who has run a women's only hackathon." I mention the name of the company, she said, "Oh, I know people who work there, I'll reach out to my network there to find out little bit more.” Again, this notion that I pushed her forward, I helped her out without really being able to answer her direct question, whether that was on data science or a hackathon.   Poornima: Yeah.   Karen Catlin: This notion, I’ve done with so many mentees, this notion of encouraging them to think about their network. Who else could they tap to get that specific experience or advice they're looking for?   Poornima: Yeah. Part of your mentorship is also helping them see what they already got, see the resources that they have at their disposal.   Karen Catlin: Exactly.   Poornima: It's not all about you having to do the work.   Karen Catlin: Exactly.   Who need to hold a mentee accountable   Poornima: Yeah. That's great. What about accountability? A lot of times people say, "How can I hold my mentee accountable? Make sure they're hitting milestones. Make sure that they are successful?"   Karen Catlin: Yeah. Gosh. Maybe I should be doing a better job at this. I really feel that as a mentor, my job is not to take any action items from the meeting, you know, it's to provide my experience, my advice, my thoughts. But, really, I'm expecting the mentee to be taking notes, to be figuring out what they're gonna do next, and to be making progress. I don't take any of that on me, but maybe I should be, I don't know how to help them. We all benefit from having accountability partners. It's just that, as a mentor, I'm already giving a lot of my time, I don't feel I need to be doing that as well.   Poornima: OK. Maybe that's something more a sponsor would do or even a coach, if you hire them?   Karen Catlin: Yeah. A coach would definitely do that for you. Otherwise, maybe it is a buddy, or a friend, or a colleague that you might reach out to, in addition to having the mentor, you have an accountability partner, who helps make sure you're making the progress you want to make.   What to do as a mentor when someone brings you a deeply personal problem   Poornima: I've had this happen a number of times, where somebody that I mentored, I see very quickly that it is not just about getting that promotion, or improving a particular thing about their career, there's some other stuff going on. It might be a personal issue, and so, how would you recommend answering that as the mentor?   Karen Catlin: Yeah. Mentors and coaches, frankly, we're not therapists. We're not trained in helping people through some deep personal issues. I remember a situation where someone had some things going on with, I think it was a teenage child, and, even though I'm a mom of teenagers, I still felt that this was something that I did not feel qualified or really feel right about providing guidance. Happy to share what I've done as a parent in different situations, but that's not getting to the point of providing therapy, so I've really had to sort of redirect the conversation and stay away from it, frankly.   Poornima: Yeah. Set some clear boundaries and make sure that they understand that.   Karen Catlin: I'm not a therapist.   What are male allies and how to become one   Poornima: Yeah. That's fair. I wanna go back to one of the earlier things that we had talked about around coaching people that may not look like you and I know as an advocate for Women Tech, one of things that you do is coach men to become better allies for women. Start by telling me, what exactly is a male ally?   Karen Catlin: Yeah. So, an ally is anyone who is in the majority and really has a point of privilege as a result. Maybe a little bit of power that other people don't have, because they're not in the majority. In tech, it's typically white men who have the position of power, they're the majority. So, it's an important thing for them to realize that they have this role to fill as an ally for women or anyone who's underrepresented in tech.                                                   They have a role to play to help those people be successful, to feel that they can be...that they're welcome somewhere, that they can be included, that they can grow their career and have an impact there. A male ally, that's what I look to them to do, is to make their environments, their teams, their company culture, more welcoming and inclusive to people who don't look like them.   Poornima: How do you help men to become male allies?   Karen Catlin: Yes. I believe there are everyday, simple actions that men can take to make their environments more welcoming and inclusive. For example, and this is something that I think that pretty much every woman who's professional, or maybe working—every woman working in tech, I'll go as far as to say that, has had this experience, where they have been talking in a meeting and some man with deeper vocal chords and a louder voice, just interrupts them and sort of steers the conversation in a different direction.                                                   There's a phrase for it, “manterrupting.” We've heard that before. What can a male ally do when they witness that behavior when they're sitting across the table and seeing it going on? They can say something with their deep, strong vocal chords, "Hey, I was actually interested to hear what Anna had to say, let's bring the conversation back to her." That's an example of an everyday action a man can take to be an ally for women in that meeting.   Poornima: Yes.   Karen Catlin: Another example, might be this whole idea-hijacking, I like to call it. Again, I think so many of us have had the experience where we have said something brilliant, awesome, in a meeting, and it kinda fell on deaf ears at the time, and then maybe a couple minutes later in the meeting, someone else says the same brilliant thing—often it's a man, only because there's gonna be so many men in these meetings.                                                   What's a male ally to do in that situation when they notice an idea has been hijacked by someone else? They can say something simple, like, "Yeah, I really like that idea, and when Jen said it a few minutes ago, she phrased it this way. I like the way you've built on it," or something like that. Another every day action a man can take to help the women and underrepresented minorities be successful.   Poornima: It's great that you are coaching men to have these everyday actions that are important and impactful. You have any others that you would like to share?   Karen Catlin: Oh, sure. Here's another space, I'll call it—forget about meetings, let's move on from meetings. We all need to have networks to be successful, to hear about opportunities, to hire from, right? When we're trying to fill roles at our company or to find jobs if we're looking for jobs. If we let our networks grow naturally and organically, chances are, we're gonna have networks of people who are just like us. “Just like me” networks. We enjoy the same hobbies, we went to the same school, we enjoy doing and talking about the same things, right? That's just human nature to reach out to people we enjoy spending time with, that's our network.                                                   I think we have a role to play, especially if we're a male ally, but we should really be looking to diversify our network, so that our networks aren't just like us and that they're filled with people who are of different backgrounds, different experiences, just went to different schools, worked at different companies and so forth. For men, specifically, I challenge them, if they go to some networking event, or a Friday afternoon beer bash or something, go introduce yourself to someone who doesn't look like you. You can define that however you want, but someone who doesn't look like you.   Poornima: Maybe shorter than you.   Karen Catlin: Maybe shorter, yes. Darker skin, gender, whatever it is. Say hello, get to know them a little bit and see if there isn't something that you can either learn from them or that you can do for them as a result. Just getting to know them a little bit. That challenge, I think, is important and I try to embrace it, too. When I go to a networking event, I tend to like to look for the women that I wanna meet and reach out to them. It's easier for me to have those conversations. It's a little bit more intimidating for me to go up to a young man in a hoodie and introduce myself and start a conversation. I try to do that myself, because I think it's important for me to diversify my network. It's good advice for not just male allies, but probably for all of us.   Poornima: Yep. Well, thank you so much Karen. This has been a lot of fun and I'm sure the audience is gonna get a lot out of this. Why don't you let us know how we can get in touch with you.   Karen Catlin: Sure. You can get in touch with me on my website, there's a contact page and that is karencatlin.com. If you want more everyday actions you can take to support diversity, inclusion, create a welcoming environment at your company, check out the Twitter handle @betterallies.   Poornima: Wonderful. Thank you. We'll be sure to share the links below the video. That's it for our episode on mentorship. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode. If you've enjoyed this segment, then please be sure to share it with your friends and your colleagues. And finally, a special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker. Ciao for now.   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).

Do you feel awkward when it comes to promoting yourself? What about when you have to put together a professional bio? What are you telling yourself about what to say and not to say? If you are in a constant battle with sounding credible but not audacious, or experienced but not gloating, you will love this episode. Today's guest is Karen Catlin, an advocate for women in the tech industry. She’s a leadership coach, TEDx speaker, and co-author of Present! A Techie’s Guide to Public Speaking. Formerly, Karen was a VP at Adobe Systems. Today's show is all about how to own your background and use it to your advantage to grow your speaking business. There was a time when Karen felt uncomfortable touting her 25 years of experience in the tech industry, but now she has figured out how to use it to her advantage as an independent coach and professional speaker. Get tangible tips and a new outlook on how to talk about yourself on today's show and find more information about Karen at www.karencatlin.com or on Twitter: @kecatlin. 

Have you already tried mentoring and found that it’s not working for you? Is it because you’re just not getting what you want out of it, or other people have convinced you it’s just not worth your time? We get that something may go wrong, which is why in today’s episode we’re going to cover ALL the things that can go wrong with mentoring. But we won’t leave you hanging… Karen Catlin (https://karencatlin.com/) and I will provide concrete tips (including some exact script to use) for: - Why you might consider finding a mentor inside versus outside your current company - How you can go about setting clear expectations with your mentor - How mentoring and coaching are different - How to decide if it makes sense to pay for coaching - Why it’s important to thank your mentor and how to do it effectively In the next video, we’ll conclude our theme of mentoring by sharing how you can get started as a mentor! Transcript Poornima: In the last segment, we talked about the importance of mentorship and why some people may be reluctant to seeking out a mentor. If you've missed the segment, I've included a link to it below this video, so don't miss it and be sure to check it out. In today's segment, we're going to focus the conversation around how you can get the most out of mentoring. Welcome back to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Each *Build* episode consists of a series of conversations I have with innovators in tech, and together we debunk a number of myths around building products, companies, and your career in technology, because I know there's a lot of people out there who may not be aware that they are doing things that are actively acting against them from having a good mentoring relationship. Karen Catlin: Sure. What not to talk about during mentoring Poornima: Let's start by talking about what you should not expect to get out of that relationship. Karen Catlin: In a word, gossip. I used to have a mentee who would come to my office for our monthly meetings, and would sit down and just say, "So, tell me what you're hearing about. What's going around the company?" Oh my gosh, like I wasn't just going to share all of the, you know, news I had heard to this person, you know? Poornima: Right. Karen Catlin: He was just looking for gossip and it basically turned into this mentoring relationship that I hated. I really did not look forward to those meetings because like he was probing me for intelligence. It wasn't cool. Poornima: Yeah, yeah. It wasn't the purpose of the meeting. When mentoring goes wrong Karen Catlin: No. Can I tell you something else I've hated about mentoring? I had another mentee who we were working together, I think, for over a six-month period, once a month we had a meeting, and when we got together each time I would say to her, "So last time, you know, we talked about this. Did my advice help you?" Her response was various forms of, "Oh, you know, I've been too busy" or, "I didn't really think it was going to work so I didn't even try it out," but she was there to get more advice from me. Like, what was that all about, right? I was not fulfilled. I did not think my advice was helping her, and again, I hated those relationships. Poornima: Yeah, so it didn't sound like it was something that would keep you engaged as the person who was doing the mentoring. Karen Catlin: No, exactly. Poornima: Anything else that people want to be doing? Karen Catlin: I'm so glad you asked. Poornima: Yeah. Karen Catlin: The other pet peeve I have around this—and I bet most people in our audience here would be incredibly respectful of anyone's time that they were asking for mentorship—but I definitely have had people that have overstepped the bounds of that. You know, a meeting has been scheduled maybe for an hour and I can't get them to leave the office. It's like the hour is up and they keep talking, and they want me to keep providing advice. I'm just trying to get them out the door because I've got other things to do, so we really need to be respectful of the time and our time commitments there. How to set expectations for your mentoring relationship Poornima: OK, so now that we've talked about a number of things not to do, let's switch gears and talk about how to set expectations. Karen Catlin: Sure. A mentee should really be looking to the mentor for advice, but really in the context of, "Have you ever experienced this situation before?" Or, "Tell me about a time you might have had to do something like this." For example, let's say that you wanted to approach a mentor because you had to learn about a certain market vertical, right? The worst question is to go to that mentor and say, "Tell me everything I need to know about this market vertical." It puts so much burden on the mentor to be like this educator in everything. Poornima: We don't know where to start. Karen Catlin: Any way, and we don't even know where to start. It's too big a question. Much better would be to approach the mentor and say, "Hey, I need to come up to speed on this market vertical. Can you tell me how you came up to speed and learned everything you know?" Poornima: Nice. Karen Catlin: Something like that. They then can share their experiences and start talking about how they have come up to speed on the market. Poornima: Yeah. It's a lot more relatable and they have those experiences. They're not kind of fishing for things that may or may not be applicable. It's kind of your job as the mentee to figure out which piece of their experience relates back to you. Any other examples that you have? Karen Catlin: Sure. I remember mentoring someone who came to me because she wanted to explore a lateral job move and she actually asked a really good question. She didn't come saying, "Hey, I have this opportunity to do this lateral job move. Do you think I should do it?" No. She didn't say that. Instead she said, "Hey, I'm thinking about this lateral job move. Have you ever taken a lateral job move and how did you make the decision to do it?" Then we were able to have a great conversation about it. When does it make sense to pay for coaching? Poornima: It's natural to start and have maybe a coffee conversation. There are a lot of mentors, though, who are also coaches that expect to be paid, so how do you know when it's time to hire somebody? Karen Catlin: Mentors and coaches are similar and yet different as well. A mentor's job is to provide their experience, share their advice, those types of things. A coach probably has more of a discipline around helping a client in a certain way, whether that is a job transition that they're exploring and trying to put frameworks around that, or strengthening leadership skills, which is what I focus on, and every coach is different. I think a very simple way to think about this is, a coach will be—it's a business, and so there is a charge for that, and a mentor is a free thing.                                                   One thing I'll say though is every coach has a different style depending on their experiences and their approaches to things, and I am a blend. Chances are I've walked a mile in my client's shoes because I've had such a long history in tech already and all my clients are in tech, so I do provide some mentoring in terms of my coachees might ask me something, my clients will ask me something, and if I have relevant experience, I'll share that story because I think it might help them, but then I'll also be putting more of a framework around helping them achieve their goals overtime and that's why it will end up...you know, there's a payment involved, there's a cost involved. Poornima: Yeah. You're trying to get somebody to a milestone. Karen Catlin: Exactly. Poornima: You're trying to help them improve, and because there's a lot of structure around it, you then want to get paid for that versus like just general kind of coffee conversations. Karen Catlin: Right. Exactly, exactly. Poornima: For people who are evaluating when it makes sense to hire somebody, how would you recommend that they think about it? Karen Catlin: Yes. I would recommend it in terms of, first of all, if you don't have a good mentoring situation or mentoring program at your company or in a community of some sort, then that's a time to explore coaching. I would also say that if you have a situation where you're trying to grow some skills and you're very much, "Here are my goals and here's what I want to get to," and you feel that it would be something you want to do not out in public, like you don't want anyone at your company to know you're working on these skills, again, you want to do it on your own and sort of on the side, you might want to hire a coach. It also might be that you want some professional help in terms of, yeah, you respect a lot of people that you work with, but are they the right people to help you get to this point that you're trying to get to in your career? It might be time to get an external perspective and some professional help. Poornima: Yeah. I've also found that just having the accountability of meeting with somebody weekly, thinking of it as an investment, is really helpful. Karen Catlin: Yes. Poornima: Versus like, "Oh, can we grab coffee 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there?" A lot of times it's valuable, but you miss some of the context, and like you said, some of the framework that people you're paying for have done this over and over again. How mentoring differs from coaching Karen Catlin: Yeah. Here's an analogy. Let's say you think about your workouts, just to keep yourself healthy and so forth. You may have a workout buddy or a friend. You're going to go work out, go climbing, go for a walk, whatever. That's great, but if you really are serious about changing things up, you might hire a trainer at your gym to really get things moving in the right direction and get some professional help. That's similar to how you might approach coaching and mentoring. A mentor would be someone like, "Let's go for that walk together. Let's go climbing together." We're going to talk as we go, but it's going to be a little more casual. Then if you really want to get serious, you're going to hire the equivalent of the trainer at the gym. You're going to hire a coach for your career. How to thank your mentor Poornima: Last question for you in this segment. How about thanking your mentors, expressing your gratitude so that they know that their time was well spent, and they keep kind of looking out for you and want to work with you? Karen Catlin: Yeah. Mentors, even if it looks like we are professional and successful, we still enjoy being treated to a cup of coffee or a lunch. You know, it's a nice touch, and of course flowers, wine, gadgets, Teslas. I don't know. Just have some fun there. Poornima: Yeah. It'd be a toy Tesla. Karen Catlin: A toy Tesla. There you go, but seriously, gifts are always nice, but I'll tell you the most meaningful thank yous I've gotten from my mentees have been when they have come and thanked me and told me, "This is how your advice has helped me." I remember I mentored someone when I was back at Adobe just over lunch one day. It was just a one-time, casual mentoring kind of thing. A year later, she reached out to me and said, "Hey, Karen. I want to thank you for that lunch we had a year ago. You told me these things and this is what I did, and I just got the promotion I was trying to go for." I remember I went to lunch, but I didn't remember everything I told her. I shared some advice, shared some stories, whatever.                                                   For her to come back and say, "This helped me" was so important to me because that meant that I spent my time well, she really was paying attention and in sort of a circle kind of thing, it also helps me become a better mentor because now I know, "Oh, that story or that advice really resonated for her. I'll remember to use that again if someone is in a similar situation." So thank somebody by really telling them, "This is what you've shared with me. This is what you told me. This is what I did. Here's how it helped." That's the best thank you any mentor could ask for. Poornima: No, that sounds great. Well, thank you for sharing that with all of us. Karen Catlin: Sure. My pleasure. Poornima: Karen and I want to know, are there expectations that you're looking to set with your potential mentor and you're wondering how to frame them? Let us know what they are in the comments below and we'll be sure to respond to them shortly. That's it for this segment. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next and final segment on mentoring where Karen and I will be talking about how you can become an effective mentor. Ciao for now.   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).

Welcome to Build brought to you by Pivotal Tracker! I’m your host, Poornima Vijayashanker.  Each Build episode consists of a series of conversations I have with innovators. Together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. One misconception I fell prey to early on in my career was staying heads down and waiting for someone to acknowledge my accomplishments. The thought of tooting my own horn seemed too self-promotional. I was worried about what my teammates and boss would think. It wasn’t until I came across people who helped me find my voice and style that I realized the disservice I had been doing to my career. Through their guidance and support, I realized how beneficial mentors can be to your career. While there’s been a lot of talk already about the need for mentors, in today’s segment we’re going to take a slightly different angle and explore: Why many resist seeking mentorship What is a mentor versus a sponsor When is mentoring appropriate What to expect from a mentor Why is it good to have a mentor  In future segments, we’ll tackle how to effectively get a mentor, and how you can get started as a mentor! To help us out I’ve invited Karen Catlin who is an Advocate for Women in Tech, a leadership coach, and my co-author on our book: Present! A Techie’s Guide to Public Speaking. Transcript Poornima: One misconception I fell prey to early on in my career was staying heads down and not talking about my accomplishments. I felt like it was too self-promotional to toot my own horn, and I worried about what my colleagues and my boss will think. It wasn't until I came across people who helped me find my voice, and told me that it was OK to share the work that I was doing, that I became more comfortable. And it was through their guidance that I realized how valuable that mentorship can be to catapulting your career.                                               While there's been a lot of talk already around mentorship, we're gonna dive a little bit deeper. In this segment, we'll dive into why you might be resistant to getting a mentor, and in future segments we'll talk about how to effectively approach a mentor, and if you wanna be a mentor, how to go about getting started.                                               Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode of *Build*, I'm going to be talking to innovators in tech, and together we're gonna be debunking myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. And to help us out, I've invited Karen Catlin, who is an advocate for women in tech, a leadership coach, and my co-author on our book, *Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking*. Thanks so much for joining me, Karen. Karen Catlin: Oh my gosh, it's my pleasure, Poornima, thanks for having me.  Poornima: Yeah. This is such an exciting episode for me, 'cause you and I have been working closely for a number of years. Now, for our audience out there, I wanna go back a little bit to your days as a VP at Adobe, and walk us through what you were working on there.  Karen Catlin: Sure, sure. So I joined Adobe through the acquisition of Macromedia, so I actually worked at those two companies for 17 years, so a big bulk of my career. And while I was the Vice President there, I ran the shared engineering services, which included things like product security, product globalization, our open source, our engineering productivity tools, accessibility work. All sorts of things that we hire deep experts in those areas, and then worked across the product teams to help them with their product releases.  Poornima: In addition to your role as VP at Adobe, you were also mentoring a lot of people. Walk us through why you decided to do this.  Karen Catlin: Sure. And I actually started mentoring people much earlier in my career. I remember at one point, at Macromedia, I was a program manager, and in fact I was the only program manager for the company at the time, and I worked on a very early version of Dreamweaver, which you may remember. And as other product teams started hiring program managers, I offered to help hire them and train them, and bring them up to speed. And because of that interaction, a lot of those program managers, by default, kind of started looking to me for ongoing mentorship about how to be successful in their role. So it started out really there. And then, certainly I just kept continuing to do that as I moved up with my career and into the VP level.  Poornima: That's great that you were doing a lot of corporate mentorship, but as I know it, you also had been mentoring outside of Adobe and other companies that you worked at. Talk to us about the kind of mentorship you did outside of the company.  Karen Catlin: Sure. So there are quite a few ways to get involved in, formal mentoring programs, I'll call it, and I do that through...for example, my alma mater, where I mentor a senior, an undergraduate, who's about to start her career, and I provide mentoring during her senior year, which is great. And I get matched with someone, and it's a nice way for me to give back to the university, as well as to learn about what a senior is going through right now in her life, and trying to figure out and navigate the career options and so forth.                                                 I also do more informal mentoring, which I like to call micro mentoring, and I do that through The Women's Club of Silicon Valley, where I've been a member of that for a number of years. I've been on their board, and I certainly love helping our members with anything that they might need some advice on, some help on. And I call it more informal because we're not matched, people just reach out to me if they have advice that they want to seek, they wanna get my experience that I've had on something. And they'll just reach out and say, "Can we get a cup of coffee, get together for lunch," something like that. So it's much more informal and kind of organic that way.  Why is it good to have a mentor  Poornima: So let's dive into kind of the bigger theme here, right? 'Cause I know a lot of people say that mentoring is important, but why is it even important? Like, why do we need to do this, why can't we just read books, or ask our boss, or ask our colleagues for help when we need it?  Karen Catlin: Yeah. So first of all, I think that I enjoy mentoring because I wanna pay it forward. I want to share my experience, and help other people who might be going through similar challenges, or similar choices that they need to make, to learn from my experience. And I hate reinventing the wheel, so if I can help other people not have to reinvent the wheel themselves, if they're going through the same type of situation that I'm going through, I'd love to—or, have gone through, excuse me—I would love to share my experience with them.                                                 And this whole notion of paying it forward is one reason I mentor, but it's really a two-way street. Every time I mentor someone, I learn something from them, too—it's just not me providing my advice, I learn from them. I might learn about, you know, good new books or podcasts I should be listening to. I might learn about new productivity tools that are just, you know, a new app to do something that I had never heard off. When I was a VP I also might hear about certain challenges that people are facing, that actually helped me be a better leader, because I got intel and insight into what was going on around the organization that I might not otherwise hear about.  When is mentoring appropriate  Poornima: Yup. And for the mentee side, what are the benefits for them?  Karen Catlin: Oh, sure. So the mentees, they get to have a sounding board. For example, if they are trying to decide something, get some advice, they get to hear someone else's perspective on that. They get to hear stories about a time that that mentor maybe went through something similar, and then they can learn from that. And they just might be able to take a step back from that day to day, I'm working, I'm getting stuff done, let me step back and think about what I should be doing with my career, these choices ahead of me, how I should think about a problem differently, or a situation differently. So, so many benefits to a mentee.  What is a mentor versus a sponsor  Poornima: I've also heard of this word, sponsor, and I'm sure some of our audience has as well, so walk us through what's the difference between a mentor versus a sponsor.  Karen Catlin: Sure. So they're very different, although they may sometimes be the same person. But let me break it down. A mentor is someone that you might meet with to get their advice, and they should share their stories, their life experiences, their perspective on things, so that you get that insight into what they, you know, how they think about things. By contrast, a sponsor is someone who is influential at your company, or in your industry segment, and they are going to be in situations, meetings, different situations where they will find out about opportunities that they might think of you as a good person to fill. So they will open doors for you that you might not even know exist, right? So that's what a sponsor does, they know you well enough to recommend you for opportunities, and to support you that way.  Poornima: Yeah, a little bit more directed, then.  Karen Catlin: Yes, exactly. But you might not even know you have a sponsor. They might just be doing this behind the scenes, and opportunities are coming your way and you're not even sure why they happen. So sometimes you don't even know you have a sponsor.  Why people are resistant to mentoring  Poornima: Nice. Now, not everyone wants a mentor, why do you think people are resistant to seeking one?  Karen Catlin: Yeah, so in my current role as an advocate for women who are working the tech industry, I have talked to hundreds of women about mentoring and the importance of mentors, and the two things I hear from many women—there's a theme. The first is, "Ooh, it's so awkward to go up to someone, or send a note, and say 'Hey, would you be my mentor?'" You know, that's awkward and a little intimidating, so they don't wanna do it for that reason. And then the second reason is that they think they're imposing on someone. Everyone's so busy in tech, right? Super busy, and so why would some important person wanna take any time out to help me, right? It's an imposition, and I don't wanna go there.  Poornima: Yeah. And what would you recommend to kind of getting over those hurdles, if that's what's holding you back?  Mentoring what to expect  Karen Catlin: Right, right. So I like to break it down with my coaching clients, as I encourage them to find mentors in their companies, I like to break it down in terms of, be very specific about your ask. For example, let's say your goal is to file your first patent. That's a really clear goal, and there are...then you can look at, who do I respect around the organization who's filed a patent, and send a simple note saying, "Hey, I'd love to file a patent and I would like to have lunch with you to find out about your experience with patent filing." You know, just really simple, concise, direct, this is what I would like to do.                                                  Sometimes it might be a longer term mentorship, so another example of an ask might be, "I'm very interested in growing my career to the director level. Would you mind meeting with me for three months, once a month, for half an hour or something. I'll bring the questions, you bring the advice." Right? Just be very specific about what you need. You don't even have to say mentoring, like, that feels awkward. Just say, this is my ask, can you help me?                                                  And you'll notice with both of those, whether it's a one-off or a longer term thing, I time boxed it, right? And I think this notion of time boxing is really critical when you reach out to a mentor. If I were to say to you, "Hey Poornima, would you mentor me?" You'd be like, "What's that mean?" Like, what does that even entail? What are they asking me to do? But if I can say, "Would you meet with me for half an hour, once a month for three months," you know exactly what you're getting into, and it's a whole lot easier for you to say "Yes," or maybe, "Not right now, I'm too busy," if that's the case, right?  How mentoring relationships evolve Poornima: Yeah. Or, let's do a couple meetings first, and then if it works out, there's chemistry, you like what I'm saying, then maybe we'll do a full three months, but let's not get—  Karen Catlin: Exactly. And by the way, at the end of that time box period, let's say that is a three-month, or a six-month engagement, if things are gelling and you still wanna be learning from that mentor, and the mentor wants to continue meeting with the mentee, you can continue it. You can renew it for another period of time, another six months, three months, whatever that is. Yeah.  Poornima: Thank you so much Karen, I think that's a great place to get started with mentoring. And for all of you out there, if there was a hurdle that Karen and I didn't cover in today's segment, let us know what that is in the comments below, and we'll be sure to answer it shortly.                                                  That's it for this segment. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the next segment, where we'll continue the conversation, and talk about how to get the most out of your mentorship. Ciao for now.                                                  This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).   

Karen Catlin spent 25 years building #software products. She started her career writing code, but moved into executive leadership to become the vice president at Adobe Systems. But today Karen has a new role. She's an advocate for #women in #tech. She coaches women to be stronger leaders and encourages men who want to be better allies. Today, she sits down with Lee to talk about #diversity in tech, networking and why it's important to become a better public speaker.

Karen Catlin is an advocate for women in the tech industry, a leadership coach, a TEDx speaker, and co-author of "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking." Formerly, Karen was a vice president at Adobe Systems. Karen started a blog in 2012 called "Use Your Inside Voice - Thoughts on the Intersection of Leadership and Parenting." She believes that many leadership skills can be applied to parenting, and vice versa. In her blog, she explores these overlapping skills with personal stories from her career in software and her journey as a parent of two teens. (Her children have since graduated high school and are attending college.) Karen also works with a number of non-profits. She's on the Board of Directors of The Women's CLUB of Silicon Valley, an incubator of women leaders (theclubsv.org). Through Brown University Women's Launch Pad, she mentors young women about to start their careers. She is also a member of the Diversity Advisory Board for Browns Computer Science Department. In 2015, the California State Assembly honored her with the Wonder Women Tech Innovator Award for outstanding achievements in business and technology and for being a role model for women. What you’ll learn about in this episode: Karen’s background Karen’s blog Why you have to give your kids the freedom to make mistakes Perfect parenting: why it doesn't’ exist Challenges facing teens today that previous generations didn’t experience (ex: cyberbullying) Benefits of limiting technology use The challenges of working with new college grads Parenting strategies to help your kids become successful future employees Why you have to be a lifelong learner -- and why you need to instill that in your kids Improving feedback -- both in your professional and home life The benefits of working on interpersonal skills inside the office Why being helpful to others can be such a boon for your career Why you need to stretch your kids’ responsibilities (don’t do their laundry forever!) Ways to contact Karen: Website: karencatlin.com Twitter @kecatlin Book: "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking" Resources: How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish: www.fabermazlish.com/about_us.php The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease: www.trelease-on-reading.com

Karen and Aleen discuss advocacy and mentorship in tech, leaving corporations for consultancies, and the intersection of parenting and leadership.

"The best teams are composed of individuals with complementary skill sets..." -Poornima Vijayashanker Poornima Vijayashanker - Entrepreneur Engineer, Author, and Speaker Poornima Vijayashanker is an entrepreneur, engineer, author, and speaker who has made her mark on the tech world. A graduate of Duke University, Poornima was the founding engineer at Mint where she helped build, launch, and scale the product until it was acquired by Intuit. Following the acquisition, Poornima went on to launch Femgineer, an education company for tech professionals and entrepreneurs who want to learn how to build software products and companies. Poornima speaks at industry events around the world and has authored the book, How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products, and Present! A Techie’s Guide to Public Speaking with Karen Catlin. Having served as the EIR at 500 Startups, Poornima has also lectured at her alma mater’s Pratt School of Engineering. Connect With Poornima: Website | @Femgineer | Facebook | Youtube  Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking How to Transform Your Ideas Into Software Products Subscribe to the Outlier Newsletter: Click Here If you enjoy Outlier On Air, please Subscribe & Review on iTunes or Stitcher Brought to you by: OUTLIER ENTREPRENEURS CLOSED FACEBOOK GROUP Request Invite

The last episode of TLDR was titled "Quiet, Wadhwa." It concerned a man named Vivek Wadhwa, but we did not ask him for comment. The episode was later removed. This week we look at the controversy we've become a part of and our role in it. To read Amelia Greenhall's original blog post, titled "Quiet, Ladies. @wadhwa is speaking," click here. To read Greenhall's post-podcast removal follow up, titled "I wrote about Vivek Wadhwa and you'll never guess what happened next!," click here. To read Vivek Wadhwa's rebuttal of episode #45 on Venture Beat, titled "My response to the podcast that unfairly attacked me," click here. To read Vivek Wadhwa's other response to the situation on South Asia Mail, titled "Perils of becoming a public figure," click here. To read Gawker and Gizmodo's coverage of the situation, click here and here. [Update: The Cate Huston article referenced was co-authored by Karen Catlin, and is notably titled "Tech’s Male ‘Feminists’ Aren’t Helping. To read, click here.]