In a new series in commemoration of Women’s History Month, Comparably will recognize female executives from our most recent Best CEOs of 2019 list. The first person we are highlighting is Elizabeth Cholawsky of Santa Barbara, California-based tech software company HG Insights. Following is an excerpt from a recent Q&A we conducted where she shares her insights on what women can do to be strong leaders in the workplace, what companies can do to increase females in leadership roles, and her advice for those experiencing workplace bias. After learning more about Elizabeth, one can easily see why her employees rated her as the best of the best among other top CEOs in the nation.
What Top 3 qualities are essential to be an effective or good leader?
- Ability to make decisions
- Asking insightful questions and then really listening to the answers
- Empathy – If you understand the motivations of another person, you can work with anyone.
What hero, book, or piece of advice has helped you most in your career?
I have a few pieces of advice that I have carried around with me since the early days of my career. Things like “everyone gets managed differently,” “write it down,” “half of being competent is just showing up,” and “don’t piss off the bean counters!” (and we all count the beans at one time or another). There’s not a single piece of advice that outweighs the others – I find it very useful to have a list, continually add to it and be able to use what’s applicable in a certain circumstance.
I also continually seek out new thinking from books. A couple of my all-time favorites are “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz and “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen.
How can women emerge as strong leaders in the workplace?
Don’t give up, don’t drop out, and don’t take the easy road. In my experience building a career as a woman takes longer than if you were a man. Compared to men, women need to be more tenacious when seeking leadership positions. This means asking twice, or three times or ten times for the opportunity and continually looking for the hardest problems to solve.
A small percentage of women are CEOs and an even smaller percentage in the Fortune 500. What can companies do to increase females in leadership roles?
The 2019 LearnIn/McKinsey survey shows that women have made some progress in leadership positions, but overall women continue to be underrepresented in all organizational roles. The same survey cites that one of the biggest obstacles women face on the road to senior leadership is the first step up to manager. For example, for every 100 men promoted and hired to manager, only 72 women are promoted and hired.
One of the best ways to help women advance their career into leadership roles is to provide mentorship to them in early stages so they can advance their careers sooner, or at least at the same rate as their male counterparts. And the mentors need to be both female AND male. Companies can encourage this kind of help and train their current leaders on how to keep helping talented team members, including women, advance.
How do you balance the happiness of employees while also meeting the demands of investors and/or customers?
I don’t see creating satisfied employees, customers and shareholders as a tradeoff between the three groups. Happiness of employees, customers and shareholders is a virtuous circle. Satisfaction of one group breeds satisfaction in another. For example, if you take care of your customers and then communicate to employees how their work has impacted customer loyalty it will help to increase employee happiness. And, of course, happy customers result in a financially sound company and satisfied shareholders.
What was the biggest challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?
The biggest challenge of my career came when I moved into my first General Manager role at Citrix. GMs at Citrix were very much like CEOs for their lines of business, so you could make all the decisions. Finally, I thought, I can get things going quickly by circumventing endless meetings and discussions. However, if you do all the deciding yourself, you lose the buy-in of everyone who needs to execute. And you lose their great ideas. Learning how to be decisive, while still listening to and balancing the opinions of staff and stakeholders took a lot of effort and practice, but it has paid off and led to much better decisions and follow through from the entire team. I often describe this as the time period I transitioned from a “command and control” leadership style to a more effective “convince and cajole” style.
How do you motivate yourself?
Goals. Some days I don’t get out of bed without deciding what the goal of the day is going to be. I use goals, small and large, in both work and my personal life to make sure that I’m achieving the most I possibly can. At work, this translates to strategy, such as always knowing the company’s strategic initiatives, to tactics such as quarterly MBOs. In my personal life, I love to compete in triathlons, but need the goal of a next event to keep my training at a high level.
How do you balance your personal and professional life?
I’m probably not a great person to ask that question of. I get a huge amount of satisfaction from my professional life. If I get a free hour or two, I’m more likely to be catching up on email or reading a research paper than doing what others might consider relaxing like getting a massage.
How do you define and set the tone for your workplace culture?
I have a set of core beliefs about what makes a great company that have guided my leadership style for years. These beliefs include such things as adapting well to change, asking for and offering help, and focusing on rational outcomes. But culture is also a reflection of the organization itself and must be derived from the best behaviors, defined by the employees themselves and then adapted to where you would like to see the company grow. It’s a combination of knowing what you want the workplace culture to be, highlighting the great things that are already embedded in the culture and continually aspiring to even better behaviors.
Do you think women need to lead differently than their male counterparts?
No. We’re all people and each person leads with their own style. The style is not defined by gender. The sooner we understand that the better off we will all be.
What’s your advice to those experiencing workplace bias or pay inequality?
I have seen unequal treatment between males and females. The only way to deal with it is to give a firm and unambiguous correction to the teams and individuals involved and to showcase the behavior for others to learn from it. For example, I had a female customer success manager critiqued in writing for aggressive interactions in a meeting. When I investigated,it turned out that she had firm opinions and would not back down from a disagreement with a male colleague. On evaluation,the language she used would have been completely expected coming from a man, but the team she was working with labelled it as “aggressive” and she was coached by her manager to use “softer” language. It was a clear example of bias and we used the example as a teaching moment to the teams involved. We removed any written criticism and educated the teams about techniques to not allow subconscious bias to color their evaluation of each other. I believe highlighting this incident helped the organization grow.
What does earning a spot on Comparably’s Best CEOs list mean to you?
I’m grateful and flattered to be on the Best CEOs list. It helps me in recruiting the best candidates in a competitive market. And it gives me another forum to tell the world about HG Insights!
