Staying open and saying yes are crucial to professional development, says Angela Bates, Senior Manager of Technical Communities and Advocacy at Discover Financial Services. She discusses how curiosity and challenge has shaped and driven her career and why it’s so important for women to embrace lifelong learning and community…
What does a growth mindset mean to you?
Growth mindset is about getting out of your comfort zone. There are times when you’re comfortable in what you’re doing and that’s great. However, to really grow, you have to expose yourself to something new. I’ve done a lot of work with women in tech communities over the years and noticed that we often have voices in our heads that don’t always serve us. I’ve certainly had those voices telling me, ‘I’m not sure I can do that’ or ‘Why should I give up this job and do something new now?’ However, I’m a really curious person – and curiosity is very important in a growth mindset.
How has a growth mindset guided your own career?
My first job in tech was at Hewlett Packard and looking back, the manager that hired me was exhibiting a growth mindset, although I didn’t know what it was at the time. I was the only arts graduate – with a sprinkling of self-taught technical skills – that they hired that year, amongst 30 other Computer Science and Business Studies students. I met with him and asked, ‘Why am I here?’ and he told me that he felt someone from an alternative background would ask different questions and challenge his teams to be more innovative. All my career milestones have been dominated by times, just like that – when I’ve not really known everything that’s required of a job or a challenge, but I’ve done it anyway. I’ve just said yes – because why not?
When I moved to IBM, I started in marketing, before moving to run its global entrepreneur program, helping tech entrepreneurs be successful with IBM Cloud technology – a gift for me careerwise, as my family is full of small business owners, and I’ve co-founded two myself. And from there I moved internally into engineering where I, again, had a manager that believed in my abilities and hired me to be the leader of a team of developers and architects experimenting with technology and building MVPs for clients.
As a senior female leader in tech, what has been your biggest challenge and how did you use a growth mindset to overcome it?
Moving to a new company (Discover) after 27 years at IBM was daunting, and I agonised over it. I had to battle that fixed mindset that tells you that you can’t. I was doing something I loved, and I was well known at IBM. Why would I give that up? At Discover though there were quite a few people from IBM who’d moved there as well and could empathise with me around making that decision, which helped. When I left IBM, it surprised me that I had a real mix of emotions. When you’ve had that consistency in your life for so long, it’s like a grief process, letting go of what you had to embrace something new. It’s important to take time to process those transitions – but to also get on and do the work, because then you make new energy and blow those feelings away.
How does your work help to create an inclusive culture that fosters diverse talent at Discover?
Discover Financial Services is a digital banking and payment services company and one of the most recognised brands in U.S. financial services with 4 international offices located in the UK, Shanghai and Singapore. I’m part of Discover’s Technology Academy working cross-functionally across all our technical teams to cultivate a culture sharing technical knowledge and employee engagement. The culture and engagement working group I also lead looks at how we can support EMEA-based employees to feel engaged and to embrace the culture we have. As part of that, we work to help our people to take control of their own personal development and embrace a lifelong learning mindset, so they feel a sense of belonging in this dynamic, high-performing organization. My focus on this committee is on engaging employees through internal technical communities, opening the doors to innovation by providing everyone with the opportunity to support and motivate others not in their immediate reporting line. We’ve found this a great way to break down barriers to success and learning.
How important is a growth mindset in building a career, particularly for female leaders?
Back in 2014, I started running meetups at a co-working space in Shoreditch to provide free education to women and girls on Cloud technology. It was great fun, but it also gave me the opportunity to meet women who worked in other tech companies and who had not had the same largely positive experiences as I had. We worry as women about a lot of things that men wouldn’t even think to and even now, I see it when I work in ERGs at Discover – when men think all is good now for women and they can move on to other things. However, there is still so much work we need to do, and a growth mindset is a good frame for thinking about these challenges as something to be tackled with optimism and energy.
How important are internal and external communities in terms of lifelong learning, training and education for women in tech?
Official training courses are obviously important but really, they only provide you with a small percentage of actual knowledge in your career. A lot of your education comes from learning from others and learning on the job and that’s the role that technical communities provide – internally it is a big factor in providing an environment for people to rise at Discover. Communities outside companies also provide important opportunities to connect and grow. For example, I recently partnered with the London Java community and the Aspiring Women Speakers community to run a pilot course helping some of our female technologists at Discover to master the art of public speaking. More women are speaking at technical conferences now across the industry in general, but there’s still a gender imbalance and it’s so important to give those opportunities to women and enable them to feel confident taking them. Using partnerships and the resources of external communities, such as everywoman, is an important way to show that diversity leads to good things for everyone.
How do you use your leadership style to bring teams together and foster a growth mindset in them?
Every team is different, so it’s not so much about taking a single approach in terms of a leadership style that is best or most effective. One constant though for me is that it is important to be authentic about who you are, what you can and can’t do, and to take the time to get to know the people that you work with and be their career partner. That kind of influence is probably the most powerful way to inspire a team and motivate them to come together, rather than ‘command and control’.
Over-communication is another good focus – and I’ve honed my use of digital collaboration platforms to help people feel a sense of what they are contributing and engage their ideas. I’m lucky at Discover though, because everyone wants to learn and to know what everyone else is doing to be successful – and with people like that your job is easy.
What advice would you give to women moving into leadership in tech on how to optimise their role and impact with a growth mindset?
Be open to new things because there’s no better way to progress. That doesn’t just mean trying a new job, it can mean learning something new. Start thinking about where you could take a training course on something that is a bit of a tangent. My degree was in English and Sociology, but I took a course in computing in my own time and an MBA at weekends when I started working.
I’ve also found it great to help other people, whether as a volunteer or mentor, and immerse yourself with a community of like-minded people. There’s no better way to learn than to teach someone else, it also helps build your network and confidence. And finally, be humble and don’t hide your failures, because everybody fails. Sometimes it’s easier to avoid risk and not try something new. But, failing is not the end, it just means you haven’t achieved what you want to achieve yet.
