[MUSIC PLAYING]
GAYATHRI RAJAN: Wow, thank you.
I'm truly excited to be here at the end of, I think,
a remarkable day.
I see such energy in the room.
I can't believe you guys have gone through a whole day.
And clearly it must have been something that got
you inspired and invigorated.
So the theme of sharing personal stories--
I'd like to share some of my personal learnings
as I've made my way through a pretty long career in tech.
And hopefully, some of it will be good learning for you, too.
So now, like many of you in the audience, I'm living my dream.
I mean, aren't we all?
Look at where we are.
Look at what we're doing.
This is what I always wanted to do when I was young.
But I didn't account for two things.
One, I didn't realize how hard it
can be to be a woman in tech, particularly
as you become more senior.
So it's going to get worse.
[LAUGHTER]
But it's all good.
And two, and because it's going to get worse, or harder,
it's really important.
I've got to stop--
I realized I had to stop keeping a score and grading myself.
You know what we do, right?
We are always up there grading ourselves, giving ourselves
little pluses and minus points.
The reality is there will be A-plus days and there will be
F-minus days--
you know, B-plus years and lucky breaks.
This is continuous learning.
We're going to go through the ups and downs.
It's not a series of exams that we
need to get perfect grades on.
And I wish I knew this at the start.
So I'm going to recount two episodes in my life
and my career that are pretty personal.
These were days-- these were two days,
and they were closer to the F days than A-plus.
But they taught me some really powerful lessons.
The first was several years ago at Google.
I was the product lead of a very successful project.
We'd had a ton of impact, and I'd
been doing this for several years.
And you know, things were going great.
In a turn of events that I didn't quite foresee,
a new business leader was hired into the org.
And this person then proceeded to hire
a product leader, so essentially someone who would be my boss.
So on that day, with very little warning,
I was asked to introduce this new product leader to my team.
And as I was doing so, I caught the eye
of two women on my team, and the look of devastation,
because they could see how shaken I was.
And that, just catching their eyes
and seeing what they were saying through their eyes
made it so much worse.
And I wanted to go home and cry.
But that night, I had agreed to meet a group of women friends
after work, so I soldiered on, and I
went to have dinner with them.
And one of them took me aside and said,
Gayathri, someday you'll thank him.
You'll thank Mr.--
I'm going to call him Mr. B--
for showing you that it's time to leave.
And I did.
I left that team.
I survived.
And the two women in the audience on my team--
but I'm looking at two women in the audience as I say this--
they survived, and they thrived.
In fact, they're both on their way
to becoming very senior and accomplished leaders
in technology.
So I thank the wisdom of my friend,
the one who gave me the advice that it was time to go,
and the sadness in those women's eyes, because they inspired
me to make the change, to move forward,
and to continue to develop myself as a leader.
The second episode happened just last year.
And in this case, it was just about a year ago.
I was working at a new effort at Google,
and it had been two years, and we saw great promise.
This was a new market.
We didn't really know quite how to crack it,
but we knew when we did, it would be kind of awesome.
But we hadn't launched a significant product
or had impact.
And at that time, at Google we run these annual surveys.
It's a 360-degree survey where people on the team
give feedback to each other, but also to their manager.
And my manager feedback scores were terrible.
I mean, they were the worst--
I'll still never forget opening them up and seeing
just how awful they were--
the worst I had ever experienced in the almost decade
that I've been at Google.
And so when I got this feedback, it hit me really hard,
because I'd spent--
I think like many of you, as women, we
do spend a lot of our time thinking about other people,
and we really sort of strive to do the right thing
by our family, by our spouses, by our children, by our team.
And so this felt very personal.
So later that evening, I met up with my 21-year-old daughter,
and in a strange role reversal, she asked me how my day was.
I mean, women, please ask your mother how their day is.
We don't do that enough.
And of course, that was not the best day for her
to ask that question, because I just went on and on.
I went in, and she listened to me, which was, again, also
a surprising change.
And then she asked me, what are you going to do about it?
And I launched into a slew of excuses, and she stopped me,
and she said, you're feeling betrayed, aren't you?
I said yes.
And she said, but are you going to ask your team
why they feel this way?
And I realized then that I was making this about myself.
It was my own baggage.
I was feeling sorry for myself.
I felt like, how could this happen to me, when I'm so good,
instead of really considering the feedback
and considering what I needed to do to fix the situation.
So why am I sharing all this?
I mean, these were two of the--
I've had some pretty awesome days, but these were hard days.
Well, firstly to show you that it never ends.
It doesn't-- the hard knocks, the questioning, the mistakes,
and the learning.
In the first episode, I realized that even though I
was doing my work, I really hadn't understood
the context of the organization, which is very, very important.
And sometimes women in particular, we
get our little heads down and we're just
doing the right thing, and we forget
that there is a context around us that
really needs to be considered.
And the second--
I had not invested in really understanding
how my team was being impacted as I
was striving to get us to a goal post that
kept getting pushed out.
I wasn't really looking around and actually understanding,
trying to make sense of what was happening to the people who
were with me on that journey.
So there was definitely some personal learning for me
in both these cases.
But at those key moments, I also found incredible support
and strength in the women around me--
my friends, my team, and now even my daughter.
They showed me with clear eyes--
they saw me with clear eyes.
They felt my pain, and they also showed me
that there was a way out of it.
Now, I know we all have things we need to do
as we learn on our journey.
But I feel at the same time it's really important for us
to take the time and make a special effort to help
women around us through their journeys.
There's real power in this, as I found.
And I have seen three simple things that I try to do.
They're really small.
They don't really take much time.
But I find them--
I find that these are really important.
When I see women going through a rough patch,
I make the time to listen to them.
I make the time to sort of understand
what they're going through and be
a sounding block or an advisor.
The second is, it's sort of--
I think every one of you has experienced this, very likely,
in some fashion or the other.
In large meetings, when women talk,
sometimes they don't often feel heard.
I find it really simple, but really powerful,
to reinforce what another woman said.
Oh, Amy, that was a great idea, following up on what she said.
And just having someone reinforce
that can be really powerful.
It's so simple to do.
And finally, when women question themselves,
as we all do, as I did, if they're good enough
or whether they're an admissions mistake,
I tell them to get over it and own it.
Own the work.
Own where you are.
Own your mistakes, and own the path forward.
And it's really important for us to get that counsel,
particularly when we're starting to feel like we are--
we're not doing what, you know--
when things aren't working.
We're actually in a really good place for a reason.
All of you are here for a very good reason.
It wasn't a glitch in Google's selection process.
But there's a fourth.
I get myself back up from whatever pit I've fallen into.
I mean, those two experiences that I recounted,
they ended up in making me make some changes that
were pretty significant.
But they also sort of made me realize
that this was not just something that I needed to do for myself.
Particularly as I've sort of, over the years,
as I've become older and more senior,
I found that there are several younger, more junior women who
look up to me to see what I'm doing.
When I bounce back, they know that it's just as hard for me
as it is for them, and that they can do it too.
So really, what we do for ourselves is a gift
we give other women.
That's the biggest learning I've had in my life in tech.
But now there's so much more we can do.
All of you in this room, think about the power
you have-- the networking, the connections you can build,
that we can do for each other.
We'll never stop having those bad days.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to have quite a few more
as I continue on my journey.
But let's aim to be that leader at whatever level, at whatever
stage, who's there to wipe the tears
and offer a glimpse of the road ahead,
and who can show that it can be done,
that really anything is possible.
So with that, I want to thank you.
I hope you take something out of it.
But really, more importantly, I hope
you take that the real power that comes out of all this
is the power within you, and every one of you,
and the power we have in really bringing the best out
of each other forward.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
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