Thought Leader: Suzanne Penavić, Director of Employee Engagement, SunGard

Suzanne PenavićSuzanne Penavić, Director of Employee Engagement, SunGard encourages women to recognize the generosity of the network around them, and to actively reach out and make themselves available to it. “Networking played a big part in making my shift into diversity, inclusion, and engagement successful,” said Penavić. “That is one thing I wish I had realized earlier in my career.”

Penavić graduated from Cornell University in 1987 with a degree in Developmental Psychology. “From a career path perspective I think I followed a pretty nontraditional path,” said Penavić. This is because instead of choosing a career related to her college major, Penavić accepted a job at JP Morgan on Wall St. She said, “I caught the tail end of the Wall Street Eighties boom and I joined JP Morgan the summer before the crash.”

Career Path in Finance and Tech

Although Penavić’s time as a banker was short-lived, she was first introduced to technology, as it relates to financial services, when the entire FX back office at JP Morgan was being replaced.

“I was in charge of the Payment Investigations portion of the project,” explained Penavić, “and after that I ended up running the middle and back offices of the derivatives operations. It was the early nineties, and it was definitely the Wild West when it came to swaps and options, but it was booming. I found myself having to put these very complex synthetic instruments into an infrastructure that wasn’t designed for it.”

It was at this juncture that Penavić decided that banking wasn’t the best professional fit for her and made a swift career change when she accepted a job with a privately held software company called Microbank. Penavić recalled, “There was forty five people at the company, software was a fairly new concept at the time, and my parents thought I was crazy for leaving my job on Wall St.” She continued, “It was an opportunity I did not foresee, but it had a huge influence on my career path.”

“I essentially grew up with Microbank,” said Penavić, “As the company matured, we started a client services organization separate from development, built out proper professional services delivery capabilities, and then took it to the next level by implementing a product management and strategy function, which I was in charge of.”

Microbank was eventually acquired by Sungard, where Penavić now serves as the Director of Employee Engagement after working in several senior level product management roles in the Financial Services division. Currently, Penavić is really excited about the work she is doing to build out SunGard’s corporate social responsibility, community investment, and employee volunteerism policies and programs. “It is such a huge lever for engagement,” explained Penavić.

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Women in Technology are Pivotal to Business Growth and Innovation

NatashaLalaContributed by Natasha Lala, Vice President of Engineering and Operations, OANDA Corporation

Arguably, women working in the technology industry may still face an uphill climb on the mountain of gender equality, but knowledge, confidence, and strong self-esteem can be powerful attributes to counter this challenge.

Although I have read about some women’s negative workplace experiences, I’m fortunate in that I have mostly had positive experiences throughout my career in tech. The few negative experiences barely register, in large part due to the role models who guided me at an early age.

I have found that it’s good to be different, and that as a woman working in a male-dominated industry, it’s okay to stand out in a crowd. Technology will likely continue to be male-dominated for years to come, so women will have to look for advantages as they present themselves.

For instance, I’ve found in both social and professional situations people will often recognize and remember you. If you find yourself in that situation, embrace it. That difference can be your fast track to visibility with your superiors.

Look at Where the Jobs Are

Technology offers excellent career opportunities in almost every business or industry. Companies need tech-savvy people and leaders, even if those businesses are not a pure technology play. Tech is also a constantly evolving and challenging career. Where you start is not where you’ll end up.

And there are more opportunities available today for women to build a rewarding career in tech at a time when statistics show organizations can’t fill science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) positions fast enough.

According to KPCB general partner Mary Meeker’s annual “Internet Trends” report for 2013, “America has a shortage of high skilled STEM workers”. The same report highlights five high tech companies that can’t seem to hire enough engineers: “IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, and Qualcomm have a combined 10,000 current job openings in the U.S.”

And though it’s not all wine and roses, a separate global survey conducted in April 2013 by online staffing platform Elance finds 80 percent of female respondents from more than 7,000 participants are “optimistic about the future of women in technology”. When asked what technical skills they wished they had or intend to possess in the next 12 months, website design, programming, and mobile applications development were among those at the top of the list. This is an encouraging trend.

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Voice of Experience: Susan Lawson, Vice President, American Express Digital Technologies

susan_lawson_amexBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

For Susan Lawson, Vice President, American Express Digital Technologies, her career path in technology wasn’t exactly linear, in that she did not major in technology nor pursue a career in tech directly after school. However, when she decided that technology was the industry in which she wanted to establish her career, she returned to school to complete her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science. Susan explained, “I went into the aerospace industry to build flight simulation artificial intelligence systems.”

Susan leveraged the power of networking when she made her move to American Express. “I was based in Houston at the time, and established a great professional relationship with a person in my company working on artificial intelligence in Phoenix,” she said.

She continued, “He moved to American Express where they were building a new team to develop expert systems. He thought of me, recommended me and recruited me to work for American Express.”

Career at American Express

Susan came to American Express to work on expert systems and eventually transitioned into the Advanced Technology Group within the company. “We were focused on exploring new technologies being developed at the time that American Express could really benefit from. This was at the time that the World Wide Web was just getting started, so there were a lot of opportunities in that space,” said Susan.

Since the technology was so dynamic and critical for American Express’ business, the company created a separate group, as an extension of the Advanced Technology Group which became the Internet Development Group. Susan joined the web group and began developing secure internet capabilities globally for American Express.

“I have spent the majority of my career in the interactive and digital domain, which of course has expanded into mobile technologies and other interesting areas,” said Susan.

She is especially proud of the work she did early in her career supporting the international businesses of American Express. “Getting these markets established with secure websites for cardmembers was a breakthrough for American Express, and I love it when the work I do makes a big difference for the company. It’s exciting and very rewarding,” said Susan.

According to Susan, another highlight in her career was co-leading the complete re-architecture of American Express’ website, which supports millions of cardmembers every day. “This was a huge team, leadership, and technical endeavor that was extremely successful,” explained Susan.

Currently, in addition to research and development of new interactive and payment capabilities, Susan is spending a lot of time advancing collaborative development methodologies at American Express.

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The Glass Hammer’s 4th Annual Women in Technology Event: How to Be a Leader!

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female leaderDo you need to be collaborative, innovative and decisive, above all else, to become a leader? These are the traits attributed to current leaders according to almost 300 women surveyed by us in a recent research report [PDF].

This is what over 200 women in technology wanted to know at The Glass Hammer’s 4th Annual Women in Technology career event sponsored by Goldman Sachs, Thomson Reuters, American Express and SunGard last Wednesday.

Do successful women in technology have all of these qualities to ensure a path to the top?

The keynote, delivered by Nicki Gilmour, CEO of The Glass Hammer, set the stage for the evening’s intriguing conversation by revealing highlights from our research stating that women in technology have above average ambition levels. Also, women who want senior management jobs tend to have role models, sponsors, be in a network and actively attend leadership or career development sessions.

Determine Your Leadership Style

“You can learn traits,” said Jane Moran, CIO of Thomson Reuters, “You can do little things to challenge yourself.”

In response to the finding that women in technology identify more strongly with being honest and goal-orientated, rather than decisive, according to the survey, our panelists provided the audience with their insights and interpretations of the results.

Mary Byron, Head of Technology for the Federation at Goldman Sachs, commented, “I think women value honesty in the workplace and want to see integrity in their workplace.”

Debra Danielson, SVP of M&A Strategy and Distinguished Engineer at CA Technologies, added, “I have taken many psychometric tests in my career and being trustworthy has always been a prevalent trait for me. People want to trust their leaders.”

When discussing different leadership traits that garner success, all of the panelists agreed that each leader can effectively portray their unique skills in their own fashion. “You may never have all the leadership traits you admire,” said Susan Lawson, Vice President at American Express Digital Technologies, “but you can build your own team with people who have complementary traits, you don’t have to do it all.”

“There are different types of leaders,” added Danielson. She continued, “It has to be in your style for it to be effective. The women surveyed for the study did not say that they believed the identified leadership traits to be optimal.”

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Voice of Experience: Debra Danielson, SVP M&A Strategy and CA Distinguished Engineer, CA Technologies

deb_danielsonBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

Debra Danielson, SVP M&A Strategy and CA Distinguished Engineer, CA Technologies is committed to making sure that future generations of women in technology have access to the opportunities that will help them advance their career.

This is why she is actively involved in a number of programs at CA Technologies to promote the advancement of women. Danielson said, “I was tasked, along with three other women, to develop a Women in Technology organization within CA to create a forum for networking within the community. This group also provides a foundation for mentoring.” She continued, “It started out as a grass roots organization that has become formalized over the last year.”

Career Path

Danielson started her career in technology as a software developer for Applied Data Research. “The first fifteen years of my career were pretty straightforward,” said Danielson, “I had increasing responsibilities in engineering and then entered management for ADR and Computer Associates, which acquired ADR around 1988.”

During that fifteen year period of her career, Danielson spent a lot of time focusing in integrated development environments creating technologies that would improve the developer experience. “We did a lot of interesting work in introducing multimedia into the developer experience, which was new and exciting technology at the time in the mid-eighties,” recalled Danielson.

After fifteen years of concentrating on the developer experience, Danielson switched gears when she began to think more about the quality of the end user experience. “We needed to rethink our end user experience,” explained Danielson, “So I ended up bringing user centric design and usability into the organization. It was critical to implement a sense of continuity across all of our products since our end users were becoming more generalized and less specialized.”

This focus on improving the end user experience associated with CA’s products led Danielson into a series of roles overseeing the coming together of technology designed to create a broader solution applicable across all of the unique products offered by CA. “For a couple of years, I helped transform CA from a company that delivered point products to a company that delivers integrated solutions that are consistent with one another,” explained Danielson.

CA’s executive management team then introduced the idea of building an organization within the company that would create a stronger and more dynamic technical community, according to Danielson. “I was appointed as one of the charter members of this think tank whose purpose was to push the boundaries within CA and leveraging the scope of the technical talent we had within the organization,” said Danielson.

She continued, “After a couple of months, we formally structured the think tank and I was elected the first president of the Council for Technical Excellence, which was responsible for developing a creative and innovative technical community, and bring our innovation and organic exploration to a next level.”

According to Danielson, the Council for Technical Excellence set the tone for the strategic transformation that has taken place at CA Technologies over the last five to eight years. She added, “One of the key roles I have been able to play within the organization is to take a look at the forces within the ecosystem, identify factors placing stress on that system, and develop a strategy for where the organization needs to be going.”

For the last couple of years, Danielson has been working on mergers and acquisitions and corporate strategy at CA, mostly focusing on bringing inorganic innovation into CA. “I look at technology from startup organizations and other companies and make an assessment about the value of that technology. This is hugely rewarding because it allows us to accelerate the impact that we have on the business.”

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Look on the Bright Side: Optimism Can Boost Your Performance

iStock_000021795969XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

By now, you’ve probably heard about how women are more risk averse than men, and this could be one reason why firms with more women decision makers do better in turbulent business environments. In fact, the idea that the overconfidence bubbling up from a culture of testosterone-drenched male traders was the root-cause of the 2009 economic meltdown was popularized by the New York Magazine article “What If Women Ran Wall Street.”

Women tend to be more conservative than men in how they approach risk, writes author Sheelah Kolhatkar. This can result in more stable, rational decision making. Rather than making ego-based trades driven by showy overconfidence, women traders tend to operate on a more even keel. This rationality is a generalized characteristic of women that is viewed as an asset in any industry.

Nevertheless, women still receive mixed messages about confidence. We praise women for taking a conservative approach to business risk, while at the same time, we encourage women to take more career risks, by talking up their achievements, asking for stretch assignments, and taking on more of the P&L roles that test their mettle.

How much confidence is too much confidence? When is the right time to feel good about your chances, and predict your own success? What is that illusive sweet spot?

A new INSEAD study purports to show that being optimistic about one’s work can actually boost performance. But in doing so, the authors also make an important distinction between optimism, confidence, and overconfidence that may help sort out some of the contradictions women face when it comes to taking risks.

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Women in Leadership: Where Do We Stand?

iStock_000010106683XSmallBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

In July, Sheryl Sandberg and PwC US Chairman and CEO, Bob Moritz, sat down for a special PwC webcast to have a conversation and revisit some of the most important themes discussed in Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work, & the Will to Lead. This inspired us to also take a closer look at the current state of women as leaders and assess where we stand, what actions we could consider, and how we are going to achieve these goals.

Moritz, who is an outspoken advocate for diversity and inclusiveness, said of Lean In, “The reality of the book and the discussions will be about gender, particularly from a female’s perspective. But the lessons within it are equally applicable from a minority perspective, a generational-millennial perspective, a sexual orientation perspective.”

We believe that by encouraging men to talk about the challenges of others, as well as their own, everyone can really benefit. The critical role of the diversity agenda should be a companywide initiative rather than a point that only a select few subscribe to. So, we ask the question: where do we stand?

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Voice of Experience: Jane Moran, Global CIO, Thomson Reuters

jane_moranBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

Jane Moran, Global CIO, Thomson Reuters has been working in Information Technology in the finance sector for the last 25 years, but it is not where she started out. “After college I became a business analyst for a venture capital firm where I learned that my skill set was better suited to networking our office. I became known as the go-to person who could fix any PC or server,” recalled Moran.

The president of the company, who Moran had the opportunity to work with directly, recognized her ability and sponsored her to take computer science classes. This set the foundation for Moran’s career in tech as she went on to earn her MBA with a focus on IT from Boston University. Moran then went on to work for a consulting firm, where she spent five years developing portfolio management and trading platforms for financial institutions.

“I consulted for about eleven years, but when I was pregnant with my second child, I couldn’t continue to travel for work as much. I ended on a consulting assignment for a small dotcom firm in Boston and they actually offered me a CIO position, which I accepted since it was based in Boston,” explained Moran.

The company was eventually acquired by Thomson Financial in 2004. “In 2005, I became the Global CIO of Thomson Financial, which was a two billion dollar company at the time,” said Moran.

In 2008, Moran’s career advancement continued when she became the Global CIO of the Markets division for the Thomson Corporation, which had recently acquired Reuters. Moran said, “In 2010 the company centralized all of IT, and that is when I became the Global CIO for Thomson Reuters.”

Moran added that she graduated from Brown University with a degree in History and full intentions of entering the legal field. “You don’t need a technical degree to be technical,” explained Moran. “You just need to enjoy what you do. That’s the most important thing.”

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Voice of Experience: Mary Byron, Global Head of Technology for the Federation, Goldman Sachs

Mary ByronRegarding her career path in technology, Mary Byron notes that it was more of a serendipitous accident as opposed to a calculated plan.

“I didn’t study technology in school, but I was very lucky to have a job in college doing general office work,” said Byron. “One of the tasks was backing up the Word Processing system. They needed someone who could manage pretty basic technology functions and I was fortunate enough to be exposed to this kind of work right around the time personal computing and networking was starting to be widely developed.”

She continued, “As it turns out, I loved technology and I was skilled at it. So I never looked back after starting down that path.”

Career Path in Technology

Throughout her career with Goldman Sachs, Byron has had the opportunity to lead the implementation of many new technologies for the company, including building out the IP network for the firm in the nineties. “I was fortunate that as the Internet really took off, so did all the technologies that supported it and the need for companies to adopt those technologies,” explained Byron.

Byron recalled, “We didn’t even have email when I started at the firm, and every division ran its own technology. In 1994, the company decided to streamline all of the individual IT departments into one centralized division. For seven years we worked on converging eleven different email systems into one uniform system.”

In the early 2000s Byron became the Co-head of Goldman’s technology infrastructure, which included all data centers, networks, computing platforms, operating systems, databases, and help desks.

In 2005, Byron was chosen to be the CIO for Goldman’s Asia business, where she spent six years. “It was exciting to be part of this growth market,” said Byron, “as we were establishing our business in China and India, which are both countries with very different levels of technical prowess and technology adoption.”

During this time, Byron worked on establishing good governance and best practices for the technology division. Organizing this aspect of the business and showing people how to think about technological investments in commercial terms is something that Byron is extremely proud of. She said, “Moving these ideas forward so that they became institutionally recognized as the way we address technology has been very rewarding.”

Byron stated, “I think of all technology as an evolution. In the past, one of the projects I worked on was our first implementation of grid computing, which was the precursor to the cloud. Now, we are working a lot on dynamic computing and the automation of infrastructure, which are things that we identified a need for ten years ago and now have the technology to implement.”

The grid computing project, which Byron referred to as the compute farm, is one project that stands out to her as being one of her most exciting professional achievements. She explained, “When we first started, we anticipated one or two thousand computing engines running on the grid. Now we have tens of thousands computers running on it.”

This dynamic nature of technology and applying technology to solve problems are two things that make Byron excited about the work she currently does in her role as Global Head of Technology for the Federation. “We are spending a lot of time right now working on big data and data governance,” said Byron.

She continued, “Sometimes our best technological ideas are not really about the technology at all, but how we can leverage the technology to make our business bigger and better.”

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Is There a Formula for Effective Leadership?

iStock_000010457824XSmallBy Hadley Catalano (Boston)

A recent Deloitte report [PDF] indicated that, “One size does not fit all” when it comes to corporate leadership. The fact that some businesses are facing an unstable and jagged economic future means they need a leader who can thrive across multiple complex environments. Requiring these top executives, both individually and collectively, to break out of a cookie cutter mold of one-dimensionality and embrace a multifaceted approach to leadership.

Qualities such as a high tolerance for risk and failure, a diverse skill set, a willingness to learn, adaptability, and a passion to engage fellow employees, are what corporations are seeking in a contemporary leader, according to the Deloitte report. But does this set of leadership qualities favor women leaders?

According to an in-house study conducted by Caliper, women leaders are, “more assertive and persuasive, have a stronger need to get things done and are more willing to take risks than male leaders.” The results of the Caliper study also emphasized that women leaders set a new standard of executive leadership by infusing qualities such as empathy, flexibility, and strong interpersonal skills. Is this blending of more traditional leadership qualities and new traits encouraging more women to seek leadership roles?

The answer would seem to be yes, according to Alice Eagly’s work at Northwestern university. She noted, “Cultural stereotypical leadership roles are changing to incorporate more culturally feminine aspects, without losing the culturally masculine aspects.” Professionally, Eagly explained, this is helpful to women, because social skills are being incorporated into the expectations of a leadership role.

“Women do well with an androgynous mix of culturally masculine and feminine behaviors,” Eagly said. “It’s often possible to do both—be assertive while maintaining consideration of others. I think that female leaders/managers often offer a mix of masculine and feminine behaviors, and can be accepted with an appropriate mix. So it’s not a matter of masculine or feminine behavior.”

However, finding the right balance between assertiveness and approachability is critical for female leaders.

Eagly continued, “At higher levels, women are in the minority as leaders everywhere, but there is gradual change overall toward more women in leader roles. We know that in more culturally feminine fields (education, social work, healthcare, community groups) women are relatively more successful and accepted as leaders. In more culturally masculine fields such as business and finance, and especially in highly male-dominated roles, women are less successful as leaders and encounter more prejudice,”

Why? It’s simple, she explained. It is because where expectations are for more masculine behavior and for the presence of men; women are distrusted more and accorded less respect and liking.

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