PWiC Silicon Valley: Conversation Over Coffee with Sheeba Malik
On Oct 26th, the monthly mentoring series for the PWiC Silicon Valley Chapter continued with Sheeba Malik, Sr. Engineering Program Manager at Apple as the featured mentor. Being a female leader herself — the topic of Sheeba’s session was “Women Leaders: Navigating organizational challenges”. We met at Coffee Bar in Menlo Park and had a great turn out with many new faces.
For this session, we tried a different format. Sheeba had a lot of material to cover so a majority of the time was spent in an interactive discussion about the content instead of our regular round-table Q&As.
Here are some highlights from the event.
Mentor Introduction
We started the session off with an introduction to the mentor. Sheeba Malik has an impressive career history — with 19 years of project management experience and currently working as an engineering project manager (EPM) at Apple. She is also the communications/general secretary for the FAST Alumni Association of North America (FAANA). It was aspirational to hear her journey of working in different companies — both in Pakistan and in the US.
Sheeba shared some of her awkward moments from her roles in Pakistan — from assuming she won’t be able to do her job well because she is a female to people judging her for being cold if she was trying to be professional and refusing to discuss the details of her private life. She had hoped that coming to the US would change that and that the work culture would be different here. But what she found was that there were still challenges — the nature of the challenges was different but it was still a struggle.
Navigating Organizational Challenges
What Sheeba realized was that as women we are wired up differently and that is ok. The challenge is in figuring out how we go about it. What are some of the tools and strategies available for us to navigate these situations? Over the course of her career, she has been lucky to attend various pieces of training and mentoring sessions and she wanted to share some of those experiences with us.
Have Confidence in Yourself
Sheeba went over a study conducted by Harvard Business Review that went over the commonly shared statistic that men apply for jobs when they are 60% qualified and women only apply when they are 100%. Sheeba explained that it’s important to recognize the difference between accomplishments and potential. Men look at the remaining 40% as a growth opportunity and development in their next role. As women — we need to start doing the same.
Focus on ALL the Areas of Strength
For being a successful woman leader, it is important to develop yourself in all of the following 4 areas.
- Execution
- Relationships
- Influencing
- Strategizing
Just working hard and being a rockstar at execution will not necessarily help you climb the ladder or get the promotion that you are chasing. It is necessary to work in all four areas. The first step is recognizing these areas and knowing your strengths. If you are self-aware of your areas of strength, then work on highlighting them. Similarly, it is equally important to know your blind spots. Which areas are you not actively working on? Try to partner with people (allies, mentors, managers) and fill those missing areas.
Most often we as women, are good at relationships and execution. Where we struggle is the influencing and strategizing. One useful tip is to try to find mentors and connections, links outside your team. Think outside the box and grow your network, this helps in influencing in the future and leads ways for possible collaborations.
Avoid the Drama Triangle
Another useful reference that Sheeba shared was the concept of the drama triangle. Sometimes at work, we get caught into situations in which there is a persecutor, a victim, and a rescuer. The first step is to recognize the situation and role that you are being put in. And it is very important (and difficult) to remove yourself from the drama triangle.
Example: If someone at work comes and tells you they are being treated unfairly (a victim), your natural instinct is to try to help them (rescuer). This effort takes away from your other daily responsibilities and in turn, the persecutor comes down on you and starts to blame you (turning you into the victim as well). This whole cycle is vicious and best to avoid. As women, we are already struggling with balancing work with home, kids, growth, etc. We usually do not have bandwidth or headspace to deal with more. So it is very important to recognize when this is happening and try to acknowledge patterns in behaviors. Step back and reflect on the situation and choose wiser responses. This is very difficult to do and everyone struggles with this. Here is a good reference:
Use Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to recognize and understanding emotions in yourself as well as others. We can use this awareness to manage behaviors and relationships at work. It is proven that managers who have higher emotional intelligence, make better decisions and communicate effectively.
A difficult situation usually comprises a trigger, emotion, and response. Whenever there is a trigger — our immediate instinct is to react and reply. It is very important to understand the difference between react and respond. The best tools are time and data. If you have facts and data, these can be your tools in dealing with difficult situations. Try to avoid the urge to react immediately. Take time to reflect on the situation, and run analysis on all the data before you respond. And when you do decide to respond, be firm and clear and use data to back you up.
Summary
Overall, we had a very enlightening session with Sheeba. She coupled each advice with examples that she had faced in the workplace and we encouraged the attendees to share their experiences along the way as well. This way we could break down each situation into its components and find solutions as a group.
The monthly series is turning into a great way to attract more women to the community while also discussing issues that we all face in the workplace.
Future Events:
Watch out this space for future events: https://pwic.org/events
Thank you for reading!
About the Author
Novaira Masood is PWiC Chapter Lead for Silicon Valley and currently a Software Manager for an R&D group at Apple. She has 15 years of industry experience in computer graphics and computer vision. She worked on the first version of Hololens at Microsoft and prior to that she used to work in R&D for visual effects in movies. She has an MS in Computer Graphics and likes working on unsolved, creative and ambiguous problems.
