and foremost, there were as many business bestsellers by men named John as all women combined in 2020. You might be thinking, how is that possible?There's literally no way that this is true. Actually, 50% of the entry level workforce is female. So you're right to be surprised that there is many business bestsellers by a man named John in 2020 is all women combined. But the truth is as the role ascends, women start disappearing in the workforce. As people become more powerful, women start disappearing. 50% of the entry level workforce is female. Yet, by the time that it comes to woman, it's only 29% in the c suite. And guess what? If you're a minority or a woman of color, you have even less of a chance of making it to the c suite.

For every 100 men, you see that there might be 87 women who are promoted to managers or according to McKinsey, but only 54 are black women, for example. So there's a real issue. And this might be a good time to introduce myself. Who am I? I'm Leila Sheikley. I'm an Iraqi American Muslim woman in technology. And I learned about this discrepancy in the pipeline when it comes to women in leadership by not only being a minority and by being a woman, but by starting my own tech company. I went to MIT to study architecture and actually started a company out of school. And on day one, became part of the 7% of minority woman in the c suite because it was my own company, so I could call myself c whatever o. Right? We raised $72,000,000 at Y Systems, and we do route optimization for some of the world's largest companies that you know and have heard of and probably use.

We've been doing this for about a decade. And as I spent more time in the workforce, it became abundantly clear that people really become powerful in two ways. The way people become powerful is they either they ride somebody's coattails. This happens with mentorship. This happens with sponsorship. This relies heavily on relatability. Usually, research shows that similar background mentors are the ones that are most likely to take you on and to boost your success, and it improves promotion rates by up to 40%. So it's very successful. But it's also very unlikely because if you recall, there's a pipeline problem. Right? 50% of the workforce is female by the time you get to the c suite, 7% is minority women. There were as many business bestsellers by men named John as all women combined in 2020. There simply aren't enough mentors to go around.

So path two, which is the much more likely path, is making such a splash that you have to be noticed. People can't help but notice you. And this is the route that I've taken and this is the route that I recommend. And the goal of today's conversation is to help everybody here leave with some really good strategies and tactics to make a splash where they cannot be ignored. Because the truth is, if you're a woman, if you're a minority, you cannot afford to really stay quiet or wait to ride somebody's coattails because you are being stereotyped. And I'm not saying this because it's a hunch. I'm looking at hard research. So there's a really interesting research paper that says that we're all being stereotyped in two ways. One, based on competence, and two, based on warmth.

So what this research shows is that people who are seen as low warmth, low competence are treated with contempt. Immigrants are often put in this category per the research, people on welfare, people who are of a lower socioeconomic status, and people treat them like they're competitive and like they're low status. And that means they don't enable them to do things. Then there's people who are seen with high warmth and low competence. Who's put in this category? The elderly, housewives according to the research. People say, oh, they're really sweet, but they're not very smart. So, again, they won't be enabled. And then there's the envious stereotype. When people think you may be low warmth and low competence or low warmth and high competence. Pardon me. And so they put certain communities in this in this category according to the research.

For example, Asian communities are put here where people will stereotype them and say, sure, they work really hard, but they're not friendly. This is very, very, very bad because people will not enable you to to really succeed because they'll see you as competitive and high status. Where you really wanna be is high warmth, high competence. That's the quadrant you wanna be in. Right? And how do you accomplish that if really the odds are working against you as a woman or as a minority? And that's my goal today. I have about 15 left to teach you how to show your competence through six things. And the six things I'm gonna show you are the six differences that I've seen as a leader, as somebody who has run a startup for ten years, and they're primarily six differences between junior and senior employees.

I want you all to pull out a pen, a notepad, whatever it might be, and I want you to really mark where you are in each of these categories so you can confidently assess yourself. of all, one of the huge differences is that junior employees bring problems, whereas senior employees bring problems and solutions. Remember, our goal is to increase your perception of competence. So what happens is a junior employee will say, oh, there's an issue. Maybe I'll bring it up to my boss, or maybe I won't, and I'll just wait for the boss to tell me the issue, the goal, and the deadline. The ultimate career accelerator is to adopt a senior mindset before you have a senior title. So to say, hey, boss. I noticed x y z. I recommend we do x y z because the company goal is x y z.

Here are the resources, the time, the people on it, and really what ought to happen. Running it by you, what do you think? Right? You're not doing the heavy mental lifting. You're doing the heavy mental lifting for your boss and you're not relying on them to figure it all out. And remember, when you approach your boss, there's really one of four things happening with any issue. You're saying I have information, I need information, help me decide, or I'm not sure what to do with this. The sooner you figure out that category, the more you could speak senior. Tactic two is to understand the power of your communication. Junior employees tend to see themselves as communication burdens. They don't take up space. Senior employees tend to realize their communication is power, and they take up space really quickly.

They aren't hesitant to reach out. They never think they're a bother. So they'll say something like, I'm you know, junior employees might say, I might leave because I have a better offer. Do they really need me here anyways? Senior employees say, let me take the all hands presentation off your hands. I'll send you a draft so you can edit it. I did the board slides for you. Go ahead and take it from here. Or they'll enable the team. Good work, team. We did it. Right? They see their communication as power, and that's really something to step into. The next thing that's the biggest difference between junior and senior employees is junior employees tend to get stuck in the weeds and communicate tactics.

Senior employees always know they should start an outcome before tactic and decide if discussing the tactics make sense. Let me know in the chat, is this landing? Is this resonating? Should I keep going? Ultimately, what junior employees do is they might say, okay. You know, something that I recommend everybody does is, at the beginning of the week, tell your boss your top three to five outcomes for the week. What did junior employees say? Oh, I have a marketing weekly meeting, and I have to submit my designs on time, and I have to join a webinar. Those are not outcomes. Too much detail makes you sound junior. Take a moment and chew on that. Too much detail without outcome and too much detail in general makes you sound junior.

Senior employees know they always wanna start at the end of the accomplished outcome and decide if discussing the tactics make sense. So they might say something like, we have a a customer acquisition cost that's high. I'm gonna execute two trials to see if I can lower it, rather than what a junior employee might say, which is how they're executing the trials alone. Right? Or a senior employee might say, we have an initiative to reduce the cost of goods sold. So I'm gonna review our review how much you're spending on each software so I can help reduce that cost. What happens to the junior employee, they might be given a task of tell us how much all the cost software costs, and they're not able to really connect the dots.

Right? Why does connecting the dots happen? This matters for not only how you describe yourself or your organization today, but it also matters for how you put your resume together for tomorrow and how you talk about your accomplishments. The next big difference I see between junior and senior employees is junior employees do not see power in their networks. Senior employees know their networks are currency, especially when it comes to talent because finding talent is hard and it's very expensive. So a junior employee might say, oh, there's an opening, but I don't wanna recommend my sister because it's nepotism. Right? Or I don't wanna post this thing to LinkedIn because it's kinda cringey. What does senior employees say? Let me tell you.

The most powerful VPs we've ever hired walk in and say, oh, there's an open customer success spot. Hold on. Let me call my friend John. I'll have you connected by end of day. And you're thinking, oh my gosh. People are willing to run through walls and leave their organization to work with this person. This person's incredible. Now remember, I started this talk off by talking about how everybody here, just by being a woman alone and especially if you're a woman minority, are most likely being stereotyped. So this will feel uncomfortable, and that's okay. If you're not feeling uncomfortable, you're not growing. You have to always embrace feeling discomfort and realize you're doing the right thing. The next one is that junior employees tend to be asked to fill gaps, whereas senior employees will jump into any opportunity to give themselves responsibility, exposure, and power.

So what is filling gaps look like? I gave the example earlier of reducing the cost of goods sold. That might be a CEO level initiative. Right? We've certainly had to do something like that in the past where we've said we wanna prove that our software is really valuable, so we wanna ensure that selling our software and creating it is cheaper. So how do we do that? Well, let's look at the software that we're using within the organization and cut what we don't need to cut use so that we can make it cheaper. So senior employee will say, okay. I'm reducing the cost of goods sold. And a junior employee might say or think, oh, I'm just assembling a software list with the amount of cost that's being, spent on each of these softwares.

Again, you have to think strategically. You need to do the tasks ultimately and show that you can execute, but understand why you're doing it and why it matters. Another big difference between junior and senior employees is that junior employees, this is probably one of the biggest ones, junior employees seek positive feedback to reinforce that they're doing the right thing. They go to reviews to hear that they're meeting expectations. They ask for count they they might ask for counsel. They might avoid asking for counsel to show weakness and they may fear being wrong. They may assume that being wrong will limit their ability to grow or being wrong might show that they're stupid and they're imposters. And the reality is, especially for a woman, your chances of having impostor syndrome are much higher than a man. Right?

Senior employees are hungry for critical feedback because they realize companies like McKinsey, other consulting companies charge hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to expose issues and to find solutions for issues. Understanding what you are bad at is really, really valuable and really hard for you to see generally. And most people don't like giving you critical feedback because it makes you uncomfortable. I recently was talking to somebody, nicest guy, but he takes an inch of feedback and turns it into six miles. And I said, your biggest risk is that because you're so nice and nobody wants to hurt your feelings, they don't realize how good you are at taking feedback. So you need to beg for feedback because I promise you nobody will give it to you. You're just so kind. You shouldn't drop that.

That's a beautiful trait, but you have to ask for feedback five times more than you think you should. Nobody will give it to you. Right? So how do you do this? Well, after every meeting and before reviews, welcome feedback. Say, hey. What are three ways that I could have done that thing that I just did better? That demo, give me three pieces of feedback even before the demo. By the end, I want three pieces of feedback on how I could have performed better. Get to answers quickly. Get to senior employees realize that feedback gets them to the correct answers quickly. They realize that seeking and taking advice from advisors allows them to have pattern recognition, which is a huge strategic weapon and something that I personally do all the time.

And in fact, I'm gonna do after this presentation, is anytime I have a talk, I take the transcript, I put it into chat GPT, and I say, tell me five reasons I will never do a TED talk. Tell me five reasons that I'm not as good as the best solutions engineer presenter, whatever the the goal or the outcome of the talk is, and GPT usually gives me extremely good and critical feedback. Now good and critical feedback through a machine is often easier to digest than a human. So that's a good gateway to feedback, but I recommend you you honestly do it pretty often. I will say I also have a substack. If you look up, label the the name on the bottom, kind of on the bottom right of the slide, substack. I I have a Substack that I put together on leadership learnings every week. And before I post any article to Substack, I put it into Claude for this one.

But really any any generative AI tool works, and I say, tell me 10 reasons I'll never be a New York Times bestseller. Again, aggressive prompt, but I notice I've been doing this for three months. Look at my writing from January versus today. Look at my writing from a year ago versus today. It's night and day because I have this constant coach reminding me how to give feedback. Another interesting thing, I talked about how people who are really nice don't get feedback. When you're extremely senior, people also do not give you feedback. Because I'm the cofounder of the company, because I have power, people assume that feedback will compromise my view of them. Feedback might need to lead lead to me holding opportunities back if I feel hurt. None of this is true, but these are assumptions. People fear power. Right?

They're more keen and eager to use their time to impress you rather than criticize you. So another position if you are of in a position of leadership, again, you have to constantly peers at your level will give it to you gladly if you ask for it, but you have to constantly solicit feedback. Here's a little cheat sheet for you. Screenshot it. Fill it in. Figure out what you need to work on in order for you to really elevate yourself and ensure that you're being seen as somebody who's competent. Because, again, the stereotypes are not working in your favor. And here are some prompts for you. Screenshot it. Once you've identified what you do not thrive at, what you are not good at, create a plan for yourself to become better at these things. I'm an operator.

I do do talks like this every so often. I welcome you guys to invite me to your organizations to talk and kinda share my feedback and insights because I realized by learning these things and in COVID going online and posting these learnings across Instagram and TikTok and Substack that there's something called vicarious mastery.

There's something else called social proof. Really, there's a bunch of theories. And all of these theories say the same thing. If you don't see somebody who looks like you doing something, you are less likely to believe that you could do it. Sounds basic, but it's extremely true. In fact, there's actually research that kids of any socioeconomic status who see somebody who runs a business, this could be a tech company or a bodega on the corner of your street, is more likely to start their own business and have better outcomes because they now believe that they have control over their outcomes and the trajectory of their life.

They don't have to wait for things to happen or opportunities to be given to them. So I'm keen and I'm eager when I have time to share and scale my learnings, especially the populations, as I noted in the beginning of the presentation, who are less likely to receive mentorship, which is most likely anybody in this room, including myself. I welcome you to add me on LinkedIn. I'm very grateful for your time.