Bethany Foote is the Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Outschool and has had a hell of a journey as a software engineer. She joins us to talk about how diversity makes companies better, share the stories she's heard from women in tech over the years, and how they taught her how to be a better leader, mentor, and coach.
Here are a few of our favorite moments from the conversation
It's been proven over and over again, all the way up to the C-suite, that companies with diverse team members and people on their board are better and companies are more profitable. It's good business.
Remote work is empowering and allows people with caregiving responsibilities and other life responsibilities to stay in the workforce where they would be pushed out. That's powerful.
One of the more frustrating parts of our entire industry is that we suck at giving feedback. We reduce it down to something that you can't do anything with. And I think that happens to women and underrepresented folks a lot more.
It's very hard when you have your family, professors, and people at your job, perhaps, telling you, "You know what? This is hard. You should just quit." And I don't want to paint too broad of a brush, but I think it is more common to default to that answer with diverse employees.
You have a team of six engineers, all senior, all Kobe. They're not going to get the work done, and they're going to fight. Nobody's gonna wanna fix the typos, they're all gonna have a different opinion about architecture, and nothing's ever gonna get done. The fact is diverse teams are better teams. They work better, it flows, and they can allocate work differently.
💡 Topic Explainers
💡 Nice vs Kind Feedback
We love Bethany’s distinction between giving nice and kind feedback as a leader, and how it is often harder to be kind than to be nice - even though the impact is miles different.
Here’s what Bethany said:
I want to differentiate between nice and kind. To me, nice is more a performance of, "I'm gonna soften this down."
Kind is giving them the information they need to do better. That is kind.
And you need to be kind, you need to be fair and specific, and it needs to be actionable.
And that's where I think people in the industry really, really struggle. They find it so hard to be kind, which sometimes means going, "Your performance is not up to standard."
And that is an area where we fail continuously, and we fail everybody when we do that.
Bethany’s personal example of this perfectly illustrates why this distinction is so important:
Do you know that the best performance review I ever got was a bad one? I was miserable in my job, I was not performing well and I knew it.
But my engineering manager gave me a review and it was specific, it was actionable, it was fair. And do you want to know what my abiding thought from this was? Somebody cared enough to notice. I came away going, "Somebody noticed. Somebody actually cared enough to say something." And that changed my entire career trajectory.
🏀 Leadership Lessons from Steve Kerr
it’s fitting that Jason would mention Warriors coach Steve Kerr in an episode about Diversity. Besides being an incredible coach, Kerr is known for being outspoken about issues of Diversity in an industry that has often fallen short of it.
When it comes to believing in everyone’s value on the team, “He believes there’s something special about each one of these guys as humans and players. And he works very diligently about fostering that in each individual. And this isn’t some pie-in-the-sky thing. Sometimes we’ll say, ‘I don’t know if he can do this,’ and Steve is always the rah-rah guy. He sees something sometimes that we don’t see. He recognizes the small contributions.”
You’ve heard us say this on the podcast over and over again, but there’s much to be learned from great leaders in industries outside of tech.
👉 So, here’s a great compilation of some of Steve Kerr’s biggest lessons on Leadership.
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Diversity: The Secret Sauce of Engineering Success, with Bethany Foote