January 24-26th I participated in the WEST Leadership Summit. The leadership summit was a virtual conference unlike any other I have attended. It was a small, focused set of talks that encouraged engaged participation. I had at least a few useful take aways from each talk. But for me a lot of the value was in seeing the representation of strong women leaders in technology.

This post in no way does justice to the individual talks, but here are my quick take aways:

Day 1

Embracing Resilience in Your Professional Journey

Key Take Aways:

  • Resilience is a skill; you grow it
  • Your current set back may feel like a big deal in the moment but careers are long, it’ll probably feel minor in retrospect.

How to Define a Personal Brand that Sets You Apart

Key Take Aways:

  • “Personal Brand” does’t have to feel phoney
  • Be yourself, but carefully
  • Build a foundation of self knowledge
  • Networking: live your life - just push at the edges a bit. We often think of networking when we need it, but it’s a muscle to keep using throughout your career.

Courageous Negotiations

Key Take Aways:

  • Good negotiation is creative negotiation.
  • Prepare > Relate > Offer > Seal
  • Tip for opening offer: if it feels uncomfortable, hedge it a bit “this is my first offer but I’m willing to negotiate”
  • Dragon audit: What scares me about this? What scares me about not doing this?
  • How not to suck at small talk? Get specific. Notice the environment. Use 3 question technique.

Choose Your Own Adventure as a Software Engineer

This was one of my least favorite. It was a pannel of women engineers, but 4 of the 5 were manager so it didn’t really give much insight into the non-people manager track. It was nice to hear all of their stories, they had some really interesting paths.

Day 2

Beyond the Career Ladder: Defining Success on Your Own Terms

Key Take Aways:

  • After early career we are selling ourselves as products rather than commodities.
  • Hard work pays dividens early in your career but as you advance you need to learn to work smart.
  • Even if you “lose” when taking a risk, you are going to learn, which is a win.
  • If you aren’t feeling uncomfortable, are you growing?

Navigating Transitions In Career, Family, & Life

Key Take Aways:

  • Transition = opportunity
  • It’s impossible to ensure balance in the micro (day/week) you’ll drive yourself crazy. But it’s achievable at the macro level (month/year/career)

Building and Developing Resilient Teams

Key Take Aways:

  • Framework for thinkig about resiliency:
    • P - problem solving - effective, efficient and adaptable problem solving skills, while bringing other along through the process
    • A - aptitude - ability and willingness to learn new skills, expand knowledge and leverage capabilities as needed
    • S - self-awareness - give and take feedback, understand strengths and weaknesses, manage and adapt expectations
    • T - trust

Mindful Leadership: Finding Balance on the Path to VP

Key Take Aways:

  • Strategies for having peace of mind with your work:
    • Familiarize yourself with what is expected of you
    • Only overperform conciously for short periods
    • Consistently communicate successes
    • Figure out what works for you - focus on energy
  • Make prioritization a consistent practice both at a micro and macro level.

Small Group Mentoring Session: Career Navigation in Data and Engineering

Key Take Aways:

  • How to stay deep enough in the weeds:
    • Ocassionsally (once very few weeks) review PRs
    • Have people on the team present what they have been working on, especially what was hard
    • Understanding the balance between leading and staying in the code
    • Focus on how you are a best a multiplier for the team; when will you be mroe valuable to have the conversations
    • Delegation - the people you are manageming what these opportunities. By delegating you are being even more of a force multiplier
  • How to get back into coding after being out of code?
    • small daily katas
    • don’t over index on having the green block on github; hiring mangers care more about how you can tell the story
  • How do you keep up with industry trends with limited time?
    • learning club at work - make the continued learning part of your role
    • newsletters

Day 3

Overcoming Failure to Make Way for Success

Key Take Aways:

  • When you have a failure it’s important to keep a growth mindset. It’s not a failure, it’s just a bump in the road, how do you turn it into a learning.
  • Opportunities are give and take, there will be more later.
  • If I don’t have confidence in myself, who will?
  • Individual failures are not indicative of your overall worth.
  • Resiliance is a muscle you build, you aren’t born with it.
  • Burnout can be a signal. There’s likely one or two things that are really bothering you. Burnout can be caused by not having the autonomy or support you need to be effective.
  • Accept reality sooner; take action sooner. It might be hard, there might be hard conversations. But people appreciate people who try to make it better

Neurodivergence as a Superpower in the Workplace

Key Take Aways:

  • Neurodivergency is a wide variety of different characteristics
  • It can be hard for people to ask for what they need, but proactive in offering accomidations.

You Get to Say No: How Saying No Will Lead You to Time and Emotional Freedom

Leading in a World Of Overload

Key Take Aways:

  • How we feel profoundly impacts how we perform; and impacts others.
  • We take capacity for granted. Time is finite, but energy is flexible. More energy = more capacity
  • It’s not just the number of hours we invest that determines the value we create, it’s the energy we bring to them.
  • Four dimensions of energy:
    • physical
    • emotional
    • mental
    • spiritual
  • The more intense the performance demand, the greater the need to regularly renew ourselves.
  • How could you renew your energy in: 1 minute? 5 minutes? 10-30 minutes? Make a list and post it somewhere!
  • Everything in our body pulses. Where in the day can you build in a pit stop; that’s how we are designed.
  • Emotional engergy quadrants: Y-axis: High/low energy X-axis: Negative/positive energy
    • “Pulse” between “Performance Zone” (high positive energy) and “Renewal Zone” (low positive engergy)
    • Avoid Surivial Zone (high negative) & Burnout Zone (low negative)