GMH Senior Summit Breakout

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GMH Senior Summit Breakout Leadership Survival
Skills

• Group Leader Maria Klawe

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Charge

• Charge How to be more effective leaders
  individually and collectively as women in our
  field?
• Process
• Explored leadership challenges
• Discussed strategies and best practices

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Leadership Challenges 1

• Broadening perception of leadership beyond
  conventional styles
• How do we achieve in the current landscape?
• How do we evolve the landscape?
• Extra challenges and responsibilities of being
  women leaders in our field
• Managing enthusiasm to promote women/political
  correctness vs. readiness for new positions and
  responsibilities and development of the skills to
  succeed
• How to decide when to take/seek new opportunities

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Leadership Challenges 2

• How to feel like a leader and place oneself
  within the technical, political, social framework
• Entitlement issues
• Role of women leaders in computer science with
  respect to furthering the representation and
  agenda of women in computer science
• Energy management and burnout
• Where are the sugar mommies?
• How to encourage agencies to invest in
  maintenance of good outreach projects vs. seeding
  outreach projects
• How to weather transitions successfully (going
  from one culture/institution to another)

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Strategies and Best Practices

• What have you or others done to be an effective
  leader?

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Strategies and Best Practices 1

• Power of rhetoric If you want things to
  change, declare success about it
• Raise visibility by having things be part of the
  language
• Take time for reflection leadership by
  introspection
• Values learning to be adaptive, flexible, agent
  for change

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Strategies and Best Practices 2

• Be able to articulate your vision in an easily
  understood way
• Provides a focus for your leadership
• Get a core group of people working with you
• Buy-in is critical.
• Build on peoples strengths and passions
• Invest people in forwarding your/their agenda

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Strategies and Best Practices 3

• Be willing to lose openly and often
• Accepting loss speaks to integrity and leadership
• Use a group of key people in your life whose
  advice you trust
• Be willing to change your thinking
• To be a leader, you need to be able to get people
  to follow
• You need to get people working together and
  engaged with a mutual agenda

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Strategies and Best Practices 4

• People follow leaders with vision
• Vision must be simple, focused and compelling
• Leader must do their homework
• You must be able to sell your vision
• You need to master when to use influence and when
  to use power
• You need to know how to use both
• Actions are at least as important as words
• If you think something is important, you need to
  demonstrate it to your reports wrt your
  priorities, how you spend your time, etc.

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Strategies and Best Practices 5

• You need to be able to work in a number of
  different time scales
• You need to be able to plan far ahead
• You need to be able to manage both
  self-confidence and self-doubt
• Take enough input to question yourself
• You need to be able to create new leaders
• Good organizations have bench depth

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Strategies and Best Practices 6

• Stay at the table dont give up on people or
  what you believe in
• Leaders should listen
• Be obliging in the way you refuse
• You have to be respected even if you or your
  decisions are not liked
• Be a role model for your organization
• Interact with your staff consist in the way you
  want the culture to be

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Strategies and Best Practices 7

• Make your goals about your teams success rather
  than your success
• You need to get good at managing both up and down
  
• With direct reports, its useful to foster
  communication among parties
• Strategy Each person can explain the others
  point of view
• Value the idea and not just the status of the
  person who said it

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Action Items

• Maria and Robin and Fran B. will organize
  leadership short-course, sponsored by IWT and
  available to senior women
• Focus Development of skills applicable to our
  day-to-day leadership roles
• Summarize leadership challenges and strategies
  for senior women in computing
• Susan and Fran A. will organize a senior womens
  summit around the idea of women being catalysts
  for change in society
• Focus Strategies to use leadership to change
  society more broadly