Keynotes that we have for you. The very first of which is Mary Williamson and Mary is the corporate vice president at Microsoft. So we are starting strong here and very excited to have her.She's gonna be presenting right away to you on the power of sponsorship and representation in technology. Now, on a normal day, Mary is responsible for the company's global commercial sales strategy and execution for the core multibillion dollar. Yeah, with A B Azure business that they have.

So Mary designs, organizations and systems that are grounded in learning cultures with a foundation of diverse talent. And I know we have an amazing diverse representation here today. So without further ado Mary, welcome to the stage, the virtual stage. Hello, and I'm gonna hand it right over here to you.

Well, thank you Margo and thanks for having me and I'm excited to be part of this moment. And I understand on the other side of the screen, there may be 1, 200 thousands of women in tech and whether it's 12 or 1000 I'm excited because there needs to be more of us and more of us having conversations for. Thanks. So Thank you for having me today. I um like I said, uh Margo introduced me and Anna. Um I'm Mary Williamson. I'm the corporate vice president of two of the commercial solution areas for Microsoft Microsoft has six commercial solution areas where we really look at how to build the business of Microsoft in the enterprise environment versus the consumer environment. So I don't talk xbox if you think that's really a cool area, it's I'm not, I'm not that cool. So um I deal with more enterprises that are looking at all of the technology that powers their businesses so they can meet their mission in the world. Um uh And my background is technology. I'll talk about that in a bit. Um But I'm really inspired to be here. I'm honored to be a finalist in the Women Tech Network Awards.

Um And, and being a speaker across so many inspiring women today, some of which I know personally and it's great to see their names. Um Beside mine, uh I feel honored. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about myself to kind of open up the conversation a little more. Um I am an executive but I'm also a mom. I'm a thriving black woman. I'm an executive leader. I'm a huge sci fi fan TV, books. Um I'm an athlete. I love playing soccer and I'm watching a lot of World Cup right now and I'm an emerging plant lover. My plant is still alive. Through COVID. I'm very proud of that. Um But, you know, I wanted to connect today and, and I was asked to share some thoughts and sponsorship and I wanted to ground it in my experience because I think the biggest gift you can give other people is learning from your own experiences and mistakes. Um Looking back and let me maybe leave you with because I'm sure you're getting inundated with lots of amazing and inspiring things today and try to get usually I get to three, but today, maybe I'll give you four lessons. I've learned over the years that illustrates um my learnings around authenticity and sponsorship and representation that are pretty personal and hopefully you can take something away from that. So let's think of useful nuggets. Um Lesson one.

I'm gonna be talking about a concept of camouflaging and the uh my lesson camouflaging doesn't work and I'll tell you a little bit about my story um because inclusion as we all aspire to be in an inclusive environment and to be part of the inclusive story, it shows up with starts with you authenticate authentically, right?

Um But I have to tell you that Camouflaging was one of my hard learned lessons in my early career. So I entered the workforce. I understand many of you are tech, many of you probably engineers. So you might identify this. This was 20 something years ago now. So I'm dating myself. Um But uh many of you might be in this situation today that as I entered the workforce, all my meetings were with men, all the buildings, all the everything outside of the lunchroom. I was in only or very, very few women. Um I ran across in my day that were also engineers. There were no people of color, no black engineers for miles. I knew about them, but they tended to be in groups very far away from me. Um So my strategy and, and I can't say it was a strategy at the time, but looking back, it was what I did to that I used as my toolbox to survive and I don't think thrive was I was hoping no one would notice that I was a woman of color and, and, and in a group of mostly men and I adjusted and I use a lot of energy, making sure people were comfortable with the way I spoke, were really understanding what I had to say were um I was spending a lot of time double thinking emails.

I was networking very carefully, not just to progress my career, but making sure everyone felt good about me as a engineer only. Um I smiled at uncomfortable things. I just did what I needed to do that I felt like to, to just survive. And I really put a lot of my energy into being the best and most um capable engineer around so no one could take that away from me and I put all of my energy there. I even, you know, looking back and I don't talk about this with a lot of people I like dressed down and so I'd have baggy clothes that were two sizes too big and very casual because the men I work with really casual, which wasn't me, but I felt like I had to do that. And it turns out even with all that energy camouflaging doesn't actually work like they still know you're a woman news flash, they still know you're a person of color news flash. So, you know, one of the lessons I learned is if you're spending time there, that energy is not worthwhile and it's actually causing you to, to, to fall behind and not on the energy you need on yourself. Um taking care of yourself first learning your job, helping others. And so I think that's something that we as women still deal with and, and hopefully you all are in places where it's less tax, but there's still a tax out there and I could probably stop there and say, oh that was an early in career learning.

I would never do that late in career, but I gotta say it's still something I struggle with that. Um Even as a senior leader and an executive, I reflected in linkedin, a couple of, I, I think a year ago that I started wearing my hair curly in part was like, because it's really cute. But more so it's, um COVID, I stopped getting it straightened and I was reflecting on why I was getting it straightened so much. It was hours of my time and money and, and it was so it would be camouflaged even as a leader. And I thought that was really interesting when I shared that with people and specifically women out there of how much they identified with that. So I, I think we all need to continue to look at, you know, how are we helping the world understand this and put energy into that versus the other way around? Um So less than one camouflaging doesn't work. The second one is building um networks and sponsorship and you all have probably heard this, I heard this like from like the beginning of my career, you need a network of sponsors and board of directors and leaders, but no one really tells you how to do this and I can tell you even in my life, um I was seeking structure for that and someone else to tell me how to do that.

Exactly. Um But I think what I realized is I was looking at it through the lines of work and how do I set this up like a project at work and put a list together, an Excel spreadsheet of amazing women or amazing leaders that I wanna go connect to and, and have them sponsor me. And I think that's a step you take at some point. But the first thing you need to do for yourself to make sure that you as a woman in tech or an ally in tech, that you understand who's in that core bull's eye of your life, your ride or die posse. These are the people that are gonna be there for you no matter where you are or no matter how you're feeling about your life outside the company or life inside the company. And those are the people who you need close to you to give you constructive advice about you and your growth and your growth as a person, your growth, as a working mom, your growth as a senior leader, your growth as an engineer.

Um Those are the people that are gonna be the, the closest to you to say, yeah, it's time to take a leap. You're miserable. I've heard you talking about this or hey, that person that's giving you that advice that you're, you know that this is not a strength of yours. I'm gonna tell you, I'm your friend like it's not a strength of yours and you got to lean into it like and, and, and you know, those are the people that help you sometimes when you want to make that leap of faith and maybe take this job. That sounds crazy. They, the sounding boards that are gonna really be there to help you make those choices. Um Those are also the people as you grow that circle out and say, you know, what does that look like in a professional realm? Can I create something like that with people who will give me that advice? And maybe they're not my write or die, but they're my professional circle. Their sponsors are those people who are gonna give you advice you don't wanna hear. Um Because I felt like as, as a woman in tech, a lot of my career was like, you're great with absolutely no specific feedback on how to grow. And I would get so frustrated that I would seek and get angry at that lack of feedback without clarity.

And so having someone to say something more um useful than just keep doing what you're doing. Next year, I had to have conversations about why am I not growing and, and finally find people to say the truth. And one, at one point in my career, one of my senior sponsors in the company said you're not growing because quite frankly, you've hit a, you've hit a cap, you need to move, you need to move your family to where this, you know, culturally, we need to make decisions. And if she wouldn't have said that to me, I would have been stuck frustrated for a really long time. But her courage to and, and, you know, trust in me really helped me reshape the way I thought about the world. Um So it was super important for me to have that next layer of bullseye. Um You know, it was hard to hear, but like how critical it is that we all have those types of people in our life. And sometimes you might need to find new people or new places to get that kind of feedback as you grow. So it's not fixed. So second lesson, hope that was an interesting one. The third one is, and this is really shaped a lot from many one on ones that I have with women who are seeking my mentorship. Um and not just women, but like people that they're seeking opportunities to have, you know, guidance in their journey.

How can I get to the next level? How can I utilize all of the tools in my toolbox better than I am today? And I think one of the things that I learned in my career was to be, you know, to, to take incrementally bigger leaps of faith and stretches of yourself. Um When I was an engineer at the very beginning of my career, I was like, I'm an engineer. I don't wanna be anything else. I just want to be the best engineer and you know, stand out in that camouflage way. But I learned through experiences that I actually had an affinity for talking to customers. And over 1015 years, my technology got job kept stretching and stretching, bigger and bigger where I was better at talking to customers better at at uh synthesizing information better at bringing it back to the product teams and engineering teams that I led. And then eventually I got a knock on the door that said, hey, you should come out and be a fields leader, a sales leader. And I was like, no way that is such a big leap and it kind of seems one scary, two high risk and three I might have to manage less people and, and, and, and do something I might not be really good at.

But that leap of faith really, like, really accelerated my, my own success, which is great, but it actually was, it, it inspired me to learn about new people, really rethink the way I looked at the business rethink of the way I looked at sellers who I thought were, you know, golf players and, and almost um used car salesman type personas and they're not, they're amazing.

You should meet all of them. Um And I'm so glad I took that leap of faith and, and I would encourage you all when you're spending time seeking mentors and seeking sponsors, come with that leap of faith idea and, and, and get some educated leap of faith um insights. Um They're out there and they feel scary and if they feel like you're kind of hitting 50% of what you think you're going to be good at and 50% you need to grow, that's, that's the type of thing that should, should excite you. And I, I said three was usually it, but I'll give you one more and fourth lesson and I'm gonna open up the Q and A and the fourth lesson is, you know, it's never too late or too early to be bold and be part of the representation of all of us. That it goes back to that kind of first lesson. I think that the world is so different now than I joined early in my career, mid career, even two years ago, that you all have a platform for lifting up others. And whether you feel like you have the energy to do that or the official responsibility to do that, I would challenge you to say you're gonna get so much energy from it.

You're gonna get so much energy in the world and uh in helping others and seeing them navigate challenges that you've recently navigated or not. So recently navigated and look at the bigger picture of making the table bigger for other women, for other women of color, for other people who are other. I mean, it's just I think an amazing opportunity to take from from this time of reflection that you're spending today. And this women in tech network is how do you take all this positive energy during it today and even share it with one person? So I'm just gonna recap my lessons and maybe um go to Q and A if we have some time. But don't do the camouflaging, spend the energy on yourself, build your bull's eye circles. Think about if not now, why not? Now take that leap of faith and be bold and represent. So, hopefully we have a minute or two for some questions.

Yes, absolutely. And thanks so much Mary for your talk today. There's a lot of chatter going on in the comments section. Certainly resonating with you, especially around your early comments about kind of camouflaging. I think that that one really hit home for many people and, and even for me, Mary, because I did the same thing with my curly hair. I, we're here on stage together now. It took until the pandemic for me to feel comfortable wearing my hair this way. So there you go. And on that, we did have a question that came through. Angelina was wondering when you stopped camouflaging. How did your male colleagues react? And did they encourage you or were they surprised or did you see any shift that you could speak to?

I think it was a, it's a pro it was a progression for me because I think there was um the male colleagues I had at the time weren't too to understand what was going on that. I was not backing down and saying, OK, I'll take this offline. No, I'm not gonna take this offline. We're gonna have, I, I'd like to address this now and you could feel a pre like the pregnant pause in the room. And so I think it was challenging when you, when I wasn't in an environment that it added a lot of tension, it reset the way I almost had a personal boundary. It was almost less professional and personal. Like, no, I'm gonna stand up for myself and you could start feeling almost a group of male males even before we had the word allies to go. Ok. Yeah, that makes sense because she's a credible engineer, right? Or a credible person and some others were like, mm mm I don't like it. And I think that's the part where you have to use allies and others to say, I think I'm gonna have a, I'm not gonna change, but I think that person's gonna have some coaching required, right?

And, and, and there's language there today, you should be able to say, hey, I'm I need some coaching because I'm, I'm speaking with clarity, but this person seems to hear it differently. What's my coaching boss? How can you help me do that? Is that just my feedback on the person? So I think, you know, depending on your environment, when you have environments that don't have that language is more challenging. But when you're in an environment, hopefully many of you are now that are like allyship, um gender bias.

Um Being thoughtful about inclusive language, you have the construct, use it and test it, but that's what it's there for. If not now. Why not? You couldn't have this conversation five years ago. There was no need to like have it now. No more, no more waiting.

Yeah, thank you. Um And I think certainly that will resonate too because I think a lot of us do. Um, you know, we're finding we have this language, but we still need that intermediary sometimes and it's a little bit having that confidence to kind of put yourself, uh like you say, in that position, I think we have time for one more quick question. Um I wanted to ask you as well, Mary, you were talking a bit about sponsorship and about kind of your personal board. Um You know, and how we can do that. And is there a certain like key role or two that we should be looking for when we're starting that journey? So we know we have our kind of people in our own lives but like certain types of backgrounds or certain types of roles that we should be looking for when we're first kind of assessing that for

ourselves. Well, I I think for my iii, I never like to say this role is better than this role because um I'll give you an example, like some people think operational support roles are less impactful to careers. And that's not always true and it's rarely true. Like the chief operating officer of a company is usually the second to the CEO they're very operational. They became very operational somewhere in their career. Um I was in a room of less than 20 black CV PS. The other day, five of them had been chief of staff to CEO S very operational job. So I, I hesitate to say a product management role who is more strategic and technical or an engineering executive role or an engineering lead role is better or you know, is it depends, I think it depends on the opportunities in front of you. But I would say, rather than say, I'm only looking for a product role, I'm only looking for an engineer role. Have your ears open to like if you're trying to grow, what is the portfolio of roles you need and experiences? And if you're like, hey, I just want to be a product VP, guess what? You'd be a better product VP. If you do a marketing rotation, you'll be a better sales leader.

If you do a support uh role, you'd be a better finance person if you get in the out in the field and do field finance than engineering finance. So yeah, don't, don't I think people are always looking for like the next best role. It's the, it's the next best role for you and it's also the next best manager who's committed to growing it.

Mhm Well said, thank you, Mary. And that is the time that we have today. So big round of applause to you. Thank you for coming out today. Um I know that probably felt fast, but we are to our next speaker. Thank you, Mary. Thank you.