In this thought-provoking podcast episode, we dive into the insightful perspectives of Sharon Gadonniex, Executive Vice President at Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT). She discusses the role of leadership in fostering such an environment and encourages leaders to actively seek out and amplify diverse voices within their teams. Sharon sheds light on the importance of diversity in stopping 'group think' and the value of healthy work conflict.
This podcast episode is a valuable resource for leaders, managers, and individuals seeking to create inclusive work environments that foster innovation and drive meaningful change.
Topics covered include:
- Sharon’s career journey
- Women in Engineering
- Building trusting work cultures
- Healthy Conflict Resolution
- Diverse thinking
About Sharon Gadonniex
Sharon is the Executive Vice President of Engineering Development at Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a telematics and analytics provider for insurers, rideshares and fleets. Sharon is an MIT grad in Electrical Engineering, and she has progressed through her career, from individual contributor to leadership in a large global engineering organization.
Sharon has worked for a number of household name technology companies, such as HP, Bose Corporation, and Knowles Intelligent Audio.
About Engtal
HerSuccess is brought to you by Engtal. Engtal is a US-based staffing agency specializing in engineering and technology, with a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Part of our mission is to balance the diversity scales in our industry.
We are so tied to this mission that we donate a thousand dollars from every underrepresented placement made to our nonprofit, Diversify the Future. We then use that money to fund scholarships for underrepresented groups to help them obtain a STEM degree. If you're an engineer or a tech professional looking for a new position, or you're hiring for talent in this space and want a recruitment partner, please get in touch.
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Episode 4 Transcript
Chris: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the HerSuccess podcast, the podcast that interviews highly successful and highly influential females within the engineering and tech world with the hope of inspiring the next generation of leaders in this space. This podcast is brought to you by Engtal. Engtal is a US based engineering and tech recruitment company that truly cares about diversity, equity and inclusion.
If you are an engineer looking for your next move, or you're a company looking to hire engineers, please get in touch. This week we are interviewing Sharon Gadonniex. Sharon is the executive Vice President of Engineering at a company called CMT. They are a Boston based tech firm. Sharon has an amazing background.
She's an MIT grad in electrical engineering, and she has moved up the ladder through various different roles starting as an individual contributor and now overseeing a very large global engineering organization. In [00:01:00] this episode, we talk about a variety of different topics, including conflict resolution, the importance of diverse teams and diverse schools of thought, as well as how to encourage that within your team.
Sharon also candidly shares some of the challenges she's faced as a female engineering leader and gives advice to anyone facing similar challenges. So great episode, I hope you enjoy. Let's get to the show.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's episode of HerSuccess. I am absolutely delighted to be joined by Sharon Gadonniex. Sharon has an amazing background. I'm really excited to talk with her today. She has an electrical engineering degree from MIT and she spent a number of years working in a variety of senior leadership roles within the engineering world.
So, she's worked with a number of household names, such as HP, Bose, Knowles, and she's currently the Executive Vice President of Engineering Development at Cambridge [00:02:00] Mobile Telematics. They're a telematics and analytics provider for insurers, rideshares and fleets , so really, really impressive background.
I can't wait to get into this episode. So Sharon, thank you so much for joining us.
Sharon: Thank you, Chris. I'm really excited to be here. It's a great podcast. And, you've spoken to a lot of women, so I'm glad to, be amongst that, that group. It's a great group.
Chris: Yeah, no, it certainly is. We've had some great guests and many more to come as well.
First things first, I would love to just get an overview of your background.
Sharon: Well, thanks. I, as you said, Got my electrical engineering and computer degree at MIT. And then after that, I joined Hewlett Packard Medical as an individual contributor. I worked on things like patient monitoring and medical imaging.
And I learned the craft of software engineering very deeply. And algorithm development very deeply and how do you actually roll things out into the world and go from, you know, in the classroom,[00:03:00] out into make that transition from the classroom to the the business world. And from there, I'm a musician, I love to play the guitar. And so when there was a, an opening at, at Bose Corporation, I leapt, I leapt at the chance. And Bose actually has a really great, leadership development course and framework for people to learn. And it was there that I went from, viewing my success being around how I contributed what I did personally to what the group was doing and how a leader might be able to challenge to channel the energy of a team in order to achieve bigger and bigger things.
And so I learned, a lot of great management techniques there, like modifying your leadership style based on the person that you're interacting with and their skill level. And we can go into more of that later. But I really kind of, cut my teeth on, learned, developed in various roles at, Bose.
And, after about, it was [00:04:00] about 14 or 15 years that I was there, I was recruited to, Knowles Corporation, which at the time, Knowles is a manufacturer of MEMS microphones, primarily, so a semiconductor company, and they were trying to, get up the value chain, and so the idea was to develop, voice cognition and noise suppression and kinds of algorithms that could be bundled with their product and, so I was recruited to lead teams there and that was at the director level and so I got this amazing experience talking to customers and demonstrating technology and interacting with the C level.
I was giving presentations to the CEO suddenly and wow, that was, you know, really a little bit of a trial by fire and I learned a lot. And from there I, that was in California. And so I wanted to come back to Boston and had a position with [00:05:00] Shark Ninja and then CMT here. So you can see the evolution of my career through individual contributing, learning the skill set that you need to become a senior leader.
And then finally, you know, being in that, that fire of actually doing it on a day to day, has been a great ride and I'm thankful for all the opportunities I've had and the mentors and the people that I've met along the way.
Chris: Yeah, no, it certainly sounds like it. Tell us a little bit about the role at CMT, yeah, what does that sort of structure and organization look like?
Sharon: Sure. So as you said, CMT is a telematics company. And what does that mean? That means that we gather sensor data from connected cars or from IOT devices that we create from phones from many various places. And then we do artificial intelligence and machine learning on that sensor data. And that provides some insights around how well you're driving.
How risky are you? Were you in a crash? You need [00:06:00] emergency services. So that real, center of mobility and and risk. My group covers the, the mobile development. So Android, iOS, the cloud development, everything is on AWS. So a lot of back end and front end engineers. We have data engineering as well and the data science.
And so it's really everything from the ingestion of data to creating those insights and presenting them to our customers. That is in my group. And so I have a great team, fabulous team of amazing leaders as well as engineers.
Chris: I noticed on your LinkedIn, you mentioned that you've scaled that team quickly and you know the numbers and it said you have a team across obviously US, India, and Budapest as well in Hungary.
Well one of the questions that I had to almost sort of kick things off. How do you keep the culture [00:07:00] and the connections healthy well, when you have, you know, a team that essentially spans three different continents?
Sharon: Yeah, that's not an easy thing to do. And one of the most important things that you have to do is, face to face meetings from time to time.
So travel, is important. I would say that the basis of all good healthy engineering culture is trust the trust building. And that means more than if I have a, a conflict with you that I'll say it's your face that I won't, you know, disparage you behind your back. I don't mean just that.
I mean, things like, meeting your commitments. Or telling me, giving me feedback if you have feedback for me, so that, we can trust one another to do our jobs to work well together and to bring up issues when they, they come up. So setting by example, and by talking openly about that, and we'll talk about conflict management, I think a little bit later,[00:08:00] you can build, a culture where if somebody is in India or in Budapest, they can feel free that there's an open door for them to bring concerns.
We have to have standards. So development standards and documentation standards and software development lifecycle standards. It's also really, really important to have each geographical group have enough of a critical mass so that they can make progress together. And then finally, I would say when you have, meetings for the entire department, be mindful of the time differences.
So communication, build trust building, making sure standards are, constant across all geographies. Everybody knows how to do their work and can do it well together. And, having an open door and demonstrating that by my own actions. Excellent.
Chris: Yeah, that's interesting. I've interviewed a few people that have managed quite [00:09:00] matrixed and large organizations and one of the things that was quite loud and clear that I've heard is that there can be obviously nuances in culture between geographies and ages and the backgrounds of the people, but a really good culture has that golden thread right the way throughout. And, you know, regardless of whether you're in Chennai in India or you're in Boston in the US, things like transparency, trust, open door policy standards.
Those are important regardless. You know mm-hmm. Sort of where, where you're at. Yeah, no, that, that's very interesting. One of the things I was interested to talk through with you Sharon, is obviously the gender balance within the engineering and tech world, at entry level that's really relatively imbalanced.
I mean, obviously it's very, very male dominated. As you become more and more senior, that is even more the case. Like, when you look at the management and C level, you know, female people within the engineering and tech world, it almost gets smaller and smaller as, as you go up the ladder.
In your opinion, where do you think [00:10:00] gender bias is, , and biases for non binary people, where do you see that most in the engineering and tech world?
Sharon: What I notice most is that people will see someone who's not a cis male as othered first, and then the engineering second. So there's that, you don't match their mental model of what an engineer looks like.
And the way that manifests is that I often get called by the wrong name. I'm the head of the department. Everybody knows who I am, but they often call me by another female senior leader's name, even though we couldn't look more different. And so that's something that's not unique to CMT that's happened in a lot of other other places and not everyone does that.
But I'm just saying that that's an indicator that you're seen as the other first and engineer second. And the way that the techniques that I usually use to try to combat that is to be [00:11:00] aware. That that is happening, that that's unconscious, that it's not, you know, somebody deliberately trying to, you know, belittle or whatever.
And that makes me, realize that I have to be careful about establishing my credibility as a technical leader and that the ways that I often do that are by asking questions, which shows that I know the subject matter. I get presentations or get feedback on architects. I just make take an extra step to make sure that my thoughts and ideas are heard.
And I don't need to do that so much in this particular position. But as I was going up through the ranks, that was something I paid a lot of attention on, to create technical credibility by being thoughtful about what I said when and what kind of feedback I gave.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, I can see them. My wife's actually, she's an attorney.
She's a partner in a big law firm here in Chicago. [00:12:00] And she says exactly the same thing. She'll sit down in court as the partner and the senior member of a team of two. And all the questions will be directed at her male colleague who's three or four levels below her. And to get the credibility of the judge, and often the judges are female as well, but to get that level of credibility from the opposing counsel or the judge, you almost have to go, beyond certainly what, a male counterpart, would do. If you were to give advice to someone in, finding their voice in the engineering world or, making sure that again, that, they almost mitigate that and that doesn't happen to them. Yeah, they're able to find their voice. But what would you, what would you say?
Sharon: The first thing that I would say is that you can have a lot of accomplishments, a lot of technical accomplishments. You can really know your stuff, but if you can't communicate that you've what you've done or how you've done it or what you know, it's much more invisible. And so what [00:13:00] you need to do is prepare for meetings, make sure you are clear about the points that you want to make follow up afterwards in writing. So just develop more channels of communication to make sure that you're being heard because there's a little bit of, you know, there's a headwind.
About around being heard. So, make sure that you speak loudly enough. Sometimes people don't want to speak up in, in meetings and maybe you're that person and you don't, you can't have a, you know, a, interesting reply just on the fly. We'll follow up written to develop your communication skills.
And consider about how what you're saying is conveying and get feedback from people to get feedback from your, your other counterparts and work on the impressions that they have. Now, the feedback may not reflect necessarily how you feel about yourself, but it's still a [00:14:00] perception. So it's a manage, manage the perception by improving your communication skills and being aware of the content, that's very important.
It's also really easy to get into imposter syndrome. If you're not being heard, you're like, Whoa, am I really that good? But you are. Keep a log of your achievements. Read them back. Ask your, your colleagues. What do they, you know, appreciate about you?
So care for yourself emotionally and care for your psyche and how you're, you're seeing yourself. And I would say imposter syndrome almost always often stems from not seeing things as objectively, but seeing them overly negatively. And so you can look at the facts, and try to recalibrate yourself by remembering all the great things you've accomplished and asking people for feedback.
Chris: Yeah, I think it's so, so critical. It's an interesting thing, you know, kind of imposter syndrome, because I think most of the [00:15:00] people that I know that suffer from it the most are perhaps the most accomplished people. You know, there are so many people that just have these off the chart accomplishments, but they're constantly plagued by imposter syndrome.
And I think the communication thing, you know, I really resonate with what you said there as well. I listen to a, it was a podcast or a TED talk or something about just being aware of how you best communicate. And there are some people that are the loudest voice at the table and they're great when there's a meeting of 10 people.
There's other people that are very effective at communicating, you know, one on one, other people that are far better at communicating via email. They're better at communicating when they take an hour to cognate what's been said and then think about it and then come up with a response. Other people are very good on the fly.
I think if you could, you know, get get that awareness of like where your strengths lie from a communication perspective, you know, definitely helps. You're obviously a leader of a large organization at the moment. How do you ensure that, within your group, people have their [00:16:00] voices heard, and there is that equity in your organization?
Sharon: Well, I think you hit the nail on the head in your comments just a moment ago, when you said that people have different strengths in communication, and you have to, as a leader, understand that. People think differently. People communicate differently. People process information differently. And, you need to create relationships with your, your direct report so you understand how best to make them comfortable enough to give their ideas or to have that information flow.
And so, in a meeting, you might want to, make sure there's space for everybody being heard, and, I might, if there's somebody who takes up all the air in the room during a meeting, I might have a conversation with that person afterwards and ask them to be more aware, or I might send them to active listening classes, so you, so you can make some tweaks and some, do some coaching in order to make sure that [00:17:00] there's space for everybody to be heard, and not everybody will talk up during the meeting, but ensure that there's space for that, and if someone didn't speak up I would, might go to them afterwards and have a one on one and say, hey, can we get some, coffee or tea?
What was your takeaway? And, you know, how did you see or have some prompting questions to, to encourage them.
And the open door policy is great. Everybody on my staff, no matter if they're an IC1 or an intern can, go to my office hours and get a half an hour with me and talk about what other, what other subjects they might like to do.
So, providing a number of different kinds of channels. And I always respond to Slack so people can write to me and often do in Slack. And I participate there to show that I'm available. So you just have to modify your style to allow for multiple communications channels. And you have to, when you do have a group [00:18:00] setting, ensure that nobody is taking up all the oxygen and that they get feedback themselves because it will help them in their career.
We interrupt this podcast for a quick 30 second introduction to Engtal the host of her success Engtal is a US-based staffing agency specializing in engineering and technology. We have an insatiable passion for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and part of our mission is to balance the diversity scales in our industry.
We are so tied to this mission that we donate a thousand dollars from every diverse placement made to our very own nonprofit Diversify the Future. We then use that money to fund scholarships for underrepresented groups of people to help them obtain a STEM degree. If you're an engineer or a tech professional looking for a new position, or maybe you're hiring for talent in this space and want a recruitment partner, please get in touch.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, as a manager, if you could do nothing else but really learn the way that your direct report would like to communicate and [00:19:00] most effectively communication. But one of the things that we do with all of our hires is before we hire anyone, we ask them to do the Gallup Strength Finder.
Not sure if you've ever come across that. But just it's a relatively basic, concept, but I find it so insightful. We have a grad class starting with us in about three weeks, and I've asked the managers before they start to analyze their Gallup results and report to the team look, these are the people that are going to be joining my team.
These are their biggest strengths. This probably means they're going to be good at this. They're going to be good at that. They're going to be good at that. These are some areas that they're going to struggle with. So I'm going to need to amplify their voice in this area. They're probably going to need a bit more structure in this area.
They're probably going to be someone that needs to analyze some data before actually making decisions. I think if you can, you know, once you really understand how different humans are, you know, you become a far more effective manager, I think.
Sharon: And the beauty of that is knowing that a team is much stronger if it has a diversity of thinkers and [00:20:00] communicators in the team, because then you don't get locked into groupthink.
And the products that you might develop and the ideas that you might develop reflect your customers more. When I was at, Bose Corporation a long time ago, most of the products were around DVD home theater system, and that was quite some time ago. And then there was somebody who joined the R&D team who had this idea about creating a survey around how do people use their music.
So instead of having, the same sort of product line that actually, frankly, was starting to, tail off a little bit in terms of sales there. Somebody with a completely different mindset started saying, well, we want people to listen to music. We want them to use these products. How might we do that?
And created this great survey, which, I Identified what people wanted in a completely different way. And so the product lineup really, really changed from something that was a little bit more narrow to something that had a lot of diversity in it, [00:21:00] because that the power of thinking a little differently about the problem was brought to bear and actually was, was very helpful for the company.
Chris: I imagine. Someone asked me just the most simple question was, you know, have you learned more from people that think the same as you or from people that think differently? Like, you know, it's just a very basic question. That really sums up, what we're talking about here. You talked with, Laura, who's our Head of Marketing, before this podcast.
And one of the topics you talked about was creating mechanisms to handle kind of conflict in, the workplace. And that's also very important to some of the topics that we, we've been discussing. Can and talk about some of the things that you've done to kind of handle that sort of conflict resolution?
Sharon: Yeah, well, the first thing to realize is that, there is good conflict and there's dysfunctional conflict and good, healthy conflict is actually something you want in the workplace. It actually, it builds trust. If I can bring up an uncomfortable [00:22:00] topic with you, I really do have to trust you first. So let's focus a little bit more on how to turn dysfunctional conflict into more functional, healthy conflict.
And dysfunctional things are like, you know, somebody dominates the conversation or people are angry or polarized or, you know, a leader has a flawed idea. And usually that boils down to communication is failing in some way. I'm not hearing your ideas. You're not hearing my ideas or things are not said because I'm afraid or I don't want to hurt your feelings or I had a bad experience last time we talked.
So the techniques that I bring to bear to get healthier conflicts really are focused on opening up those communication channels and helping people manage it, how they feel. And so the first thing is active listening. So a conflict might be because I'm talking too much and the other person doesn't feel heard.
I want to, [00:23:00] I want to feel heard more than I want to hear the other person. So practicing active listening where you don't respond right away where you summarize and, check understanding is great. If you're the person not being heard, some of the other things we talked about, like following up with, an email afterwards or using a different channel of communication, can be very, very important.
If you're conflict avoidant, and I see that most with women and non binary people and underrepresented minorities is, just avoiding it altogether. And that usually... You never avoid conflict completely. It'll always come out at the end. And so I recommend practicing in low stakes situations.
So having like a friend or partners, you say, Hey, you know, I'm uncomfortable with conflict. Can we practice a little bit? And I even do that with my partners. Like I need to practice a little bit. And you do something [00:24:00] like having a conversation about what movie you're going to see or what, Where you're going to go to dinner, but really expressing your opinion, in this, which should be a fairly low stakes situation for most people.
And so, those are, are some really important techniques and finally building strategic relationships, reaching out to somebody that you disagree with, like, maybe you're working in mobile and somebody else is working in cloud and you're having a conflict about a design or whatever it is, or it's sales. Reach out to them, have lunch with them, have a coffee with them. Start building that trustful relationship outside of the context of the specific thing you're disagreeing with. Learn to see them as a person and have them see you as a person. And interestingly, sharing and being vulnerable is extremely important.
So it boils down to channels of communication need to be open both [00:25:00] ways. You have to speak up. You have to hear them. You have to feel trust or confidence or be able to manage your emotions around that. So you can bring things up and you have to be open so that the other person feels the same way.
And so all of these techniques help to build that sort of foundational trust foundation that allows healthy conflicts to come in. And you know, if there's a hidden agenda that it can surface and things like that. So transparency, trust, and really listening to and trying to learn from the other person are, are key, really key.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. You know, we have a philosophy in our company and with our management team that you have to always go into a meeting with the option of having also be open to having your mind changed. And I think if you go into every meeting with that, you know, if I am wrong, I've changed my mind.
And if you're not [00:26:00] you just validate your own opinion. I mean, you know, but I think going in with that concept of like, you know, I may, I think I'm right, but I may be wrong. And if I am, I'm going to change my mind, but also create a safe space for No, no one feel that their mind is changed.
You don't feel like a fool because you're like, Oh, I was wrong, there? Like, you know, actually, it's positive thing. So, yeah, completely agree. It's interesting what you said about, almost practicing on the conflict resolution with smaller stakes. And one of the, the other people that I had on this show a few weeks ago.
She's a DEI consultant and she coaches a lot of very senior sort of female execs and obviously one of the challenges that a lot of those people face is advocating for themselves you know, perhaps not as much as, a male counterpart. And she said exactly the same thing. She said, look, you know, am I going to tell you to go and tell your boss that they have to give you a hundred grand raise tomorrow?
No, right. But next time maybe, you know, your husband wants to do this and you want to go to the movies, [00:27:00] right? Advocate for yourself, small scales and, you know, just sort of push the arm over a little bit, get used to that small amount of, you know, tension. And if you do that, you know, five times over the course of the next two weeks, then like you, you will start to be comfortable in that area.
Sharon: Yeah, I 100% agree with that. And often our fear of the conflict is worse than the actual conflict itself. And there's obviously lots of scenarios where that's not the case, right? But I'm talking about reasonable business situations where you're afraid to bring something up and practicing, you know, smaller stakes, versions of that will help you to understand that it's probably going to be okay.
And in fact, it may be a really great outcome. Not always, but often.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I agree because typically, I think people want the same thing, whether it's, business or politics, or, if you were to describe the perfect [00:28:00] end state of the country, it would probably be very similar to mine, right, you know, but people may differ on how you get there, and I think when you take that away and you realize that we're not ethically misaligned here, we both probably have the same morals, the same ethics. We want the same thing. I think that the easier way to get there is this way, and you probably think the easier way to get there is that way.
So let's talk that out and decide. And I think when you almost reconcile that in your own mind. It makes that sort of conflict a bit less personal and it may be easier to deal with.
Sharon: Absolutely.
Chris: Awesome. So the topic that I wanted to talk about is, mentorship. That's kind of one of the reasons why we, launched this podcast. It's like remote mentor, I guess,, get some advice, to give to our community for people that are maybe in a position that they're aspiring to. Have you had any good mentors in your career? And how do you think they benefited you?
Sharon: I've had a lot of good mentors over my career [00:29:00] benefited me by helping me work through a specific kind of scenario, maybe where I was giving a presentation, didn't know how to express my points, helping me to understand, notably helping me to understand what were the qualities that a senior leader needed to have. And I realized that there was a bunch of things that I didn't either recognize or value that through the relationship with a mentor.
I started to understand the importance of executive presence or being able to give us a speech or be able to, you know, communicate or create inspiration. And so one thing I have noticed is that mentorship relationships aren't necessarily long term relationships.
They're often for maybe like a few months, six months, maybe a year or two, in a specific kind of situation or you want to learn a specific [00:30:00] thing to get to the next, the next level. So I would say that many people may provide mentorship to you and it tends to just last as long as, as the learning process for that lasts.
And so I'd say be open, be open to actually ask people if they would be your mentor. But when you do that, say, I'm trying to learn X. So it gives some kind of directionality to the mentorship, like come to the meeting, make sure to thank the person and just have it be a little bit of a two way street.
And I can say that having been a mentor many times, it's immensely gratifying, especially when the person actually takes the advice or takes some action and is growing with you. I would say that that is kind of a wonderful thing.
Chris: Yeah, no, 100% I'm saying, you know, I've been in, that scene as well.
It's interesting, yeah, but that, coming with [00:31:00] topic in an area that you want to develop it. Like I have been in that situation where I'm like, cool, right, where do you, where do you need help? No, I don't know, I just want to get better. But like, coming in and saying, this is where I'm at today, and this is where I want to be.
And when I think about probably the mentors that have been most impactful for me in my career, they haven't been these, you know, 15 year career mentors that's always been there. They have been people that over, you know, kind of a six month time period have got me from, from A to B.
So yeah, I can definitely, definitely see that.
What's something that you have faced or a challenge that you've faced, in your career, as a female within the engineering world, and what advice would you give to maybe yourself if you were to go back in time or, or somebody else that's facing a similar challenge today?
Sharon: Going back to the theme of communication, a challenge that I've had and worked on a lot is being able to communicate succinctly and to simplify what I'm saying. So that, if the [00:32:00] audience is not, a fellow engineer that they can understand what I'm saying. So I've struggled with conveying, complex topics in a way that non technical audience might be able to absorb.
And so my advice and I think this is a common problem
that
Chris: we speak to engineers all day, every day. Not on that level. So yeah, I agree
Sharon: know your audience. Yeah, know your audience and maybe starting with a summary rather than here's all the evidence that I'm going to show you. And then when you observe all this evidence, you'll come to the conclusion. Like that that's a way that people think, but it's not a good way to, to convey, information unless you're talking to somebody who is very clearly a data oriented person. So, my advice is to practice, to get feedback, especially from somebody who's a skilled communicator, like, I have a friend who is a professor of English and writing, and, and she gives me a lot of feedback.
[00:33:00] She said, Sharon, you talk like Yoda. And so, that, meaning I invert my points a lot, and that helped me a lot, because that brought my attention to, writing more clearly or speaking more clearly. So I would say, work, understand your audience, be aware of the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge is where you assume, I as the speaker assume that you know a lot of the background that I assume.
And so when I say something to you, I might not give you the context and I'm terrible at that. That's like one of the things I really had to work on is making sure that my audience understands the full context for what I'm saying. And so understanding where your communication shortcomings are and practicing.
Chris: Yeah, 100%. I mean, we see that so much with our customers, obviously, we're an engineering and technology recruitment company. And I would probably say maybe the most sought after skill that we are asked to [00:34:00] find is that level of communication, right? Can this engineer explain what they do and why they do it to someone that is, has, you know, very limited engineering knowledge.
If you can have someone that has the technical chops and also has that ability to communicate, those are the, I think the most dynamic engineers and then technology professionals, I mean, in the market.
We're nearly running out of time here, which is crazy. I thought it's gone super quickly.
The last question that, I had for you, Sharon, this time of year, there's obviously a lot of people graduating, you know, a lot of people are finishing up their master's degree and probably about to start their, you know, career. If you were to speak to someone who maybe they did just graduate with their electrical engineering degree from MIT. They're due to start their first job in, in engineering next week.
What do you think an invaluable piece of information or an invaluable piece of advice is that you would, would give that person?
Sharon: I would say, dig in and learn all you can and look around you to see, who are the, the team [00:35:00] leads and who are the people whose ideas are heard. Try to understand what are they doing well.
So you've, you've gotten your degree from a great school and, you know, your theory, but you have to start learning to apply it to the business world. And part of that is, is understanding the dynamics and understanding how to get people to to listen to you.
I'd also say that it's important not to go into leadership too quickly too because you want to establish a track record of technical achievements and because I firmly believe in many others like me firmly believe that a technical leader really needs to be technical. You have to understand the stuff so you can have those conversations with with the non technical people and really be able to back it up.
So spend some time learning how, the software engineering world works, how the hardware engineering world works, how IoT or whatever the industry is and, learn how that all, [00:36:00] how it all fits together, because it's very different from academia. Once you start putting things out into production into the world.
Chris: 100%. I think the organizations are a lot flatter these days and you know. The idea of a hands off manager just doesn't exist anymore.
Like, you have to have that technical knowledge, whether you're, overseeing the entire engineering organization or whether you're, you're a software engineer, individual contributor. Anyway, yeah, that's all we have time for today, but I mean, Sharon, thank you so much.
I thought we covered some really great topics, really, really, enjoyed chatting to you. For anyone that's listening to this, Sharon's LinkedIn will be, on our communication, sent out. So if anyone has any questions, you know, I'm sure she would not mind at all reaching out.
And yeah, thanks everyone for listening.
Thanks so much, Chris.
Thank you so much for listening to today's HerSuccess podcast, brought to you by Engtal we hope you found this episode, instructive, educational and inspiring. Don't forget to tune in next week.
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