3 Key Principles for Leading Through Change
With the recent celebration of International Women’s Day, and the lesser-known International Day of Women and Girls in Science (observed February 11), Girl Geek invited Opendoor’s incredible technical leaders to speak in a keynote session at their 2024 ELEVATE Conference. Raji Subramanian, Chief Technology Officer, and Merav Bloch, Vice President and General Manager of Opendoor Exclusives, spoke about “Navigating Change & Uncertainty.”
Career paths aren’t always linear, and having mentors, role models, and support can make a big difference in how you navigate challenges and learn along the way. I have been fortunate to have a handful of female mentors and role models who have helped me navigate career transitions — Raji and Merav being two of them.
As a Staff Decision Scientist in Raji’s organization, her leadership has helped me carve my, admittedly atypical, path to my first management role. I started my STEM journey as a civil engineer, but quickly shifted into engineering litigation consulting. While in consulting, I found my true passion for drawing out insights from data. I later realized that I could merge my interests in the built environment and data at Opendoor, and soon after, I joined the formerly known business analytics team.
Constantly inspired by our executive leadership team at Opendoor, of which the majority is female, I was excited to attend Girl Geek to learn more from our leaders. Below are a few gems I wanted to share from Raji and Merav’s conversation.
Focus, innovation, optionality, and adaptability are key to navigating through difficult situations.
In September 2022, Raji took over as Opendoor’s CTO, right in the midst of the once-in-forty-year interest rate shock, and at the tail end of a global pandemic, where there was a lot of uncertainty. Under adversity, Raji outlined the four key tactics she adopted and used to lead her team:
- Focus — narrow the vision to the circle of control. You need to have complete clarity on the fundamentals of the business to ensure the levers we can control are tuned and our value proposition continues to remain strong.
- Innovation — continue building differentiated customer experiences. It is no longer a nice to have, it’s a necessity, to ensure you can appeal to customers who may no longer benefit from your product because of the difficult environment.
- Optionality — by examining your strengths and opportunities, you can build in optionality ahead of time. This will allow you to change quickly and be recession proof in different regimes.
- Adaptability — things change quickly and often in times like this, you need to be able to react just as quickly.
As Raji expanded on her principles, I couldn’t help but think that these tactics also apply quite well to women navigating a career in STEM. Technologies and the skills required for them change frequently. The rapid acceleration of AI is the most recent revolution, but there have been too many to count over the last 40 or so years in tech. The women who have come out successful have utilized most of these tactics to navigate these industry-shifting changes.
Success and failure are two sides of the same coin.
When navigating difficult transformations, like the task we are facing in the housing industry, the thought of failure is inescapable. Raji urged listeners not to crumble and let the fear of failure paralyze them or their team. Imposter syndrome tends to make us believe that failure signifies the end, but Raji encouraged us to shift our mindset. It’s really hard to succeed, truly succeed, without failure along the way. The trick is to use a growth mindset to help you turn your failures into opportunities. Fail often and fail fast — don’t get too attached to a failed idea, move on quickly, and don’t be too hard on yourselves or take it too personally, these things happen. On the other hand, as women in leadership positions, sometimes we need to have conviction and push through failures to pull an idea to fruition. Conviction will allow us to vet some of those false negatives and get to that true positive. Walking that line between failing fast and having conviction will require judgment.
Leading through adversity requires empathy.
In response to an audience question on best practices for leading a team after layoffs, Raji’s primary piece of advice was empathy. You have to care deeply about your people. Lay-offs bring uncertainty, so it’s imperative to embrace clarity and eliminate confusion for your teams to earn their trust. Articulating the “why” matters the most and from there the next step is to start earning back your team’s trust. Raji stressed that leaders should be vocally self-critical, and openly reflect on what should have been done differently. In the event of adversity, these practices build trust and also allow you to make hard decisions and foster hard discussions within your team moving forward. Finally, leaders need to set the right vision and align the team on the plan to come out stronger. The team must have a shared understanding of the upcoming journey to enable high-velocity decisions along the way.
As a freshly promoted, one-month-tenured manager, this conversation made me reconsider how I think about people, products, and processes in my managerial framework. Raji emphasizes people first as well, but she brought in a new perspective on how to care for and foster the growth of your people. Most notably, I will look for more opportunities to reframe our mindset on navigating through failure instead of trying to avoid it. This lesson alone has been most impactful in reassessing how I check in with the imposter syndrome that kicks in, every once in a while, as I navigate my career as a woman in tech.
Check out Raji and Merav’s keynote at the Girl Geek 2024 Elevate Conference for yourself, here.
Interested in working with Raj, Merav and myself? Check out our open roles.
Aleshia Ayers is a Staff Decision Scientist at Opendoor.
