The Invisible Mentor

Mentor Yourself: Interview With Maggie Berry, Women in Technology

January 26th, 2012 |

Author: Avil Beckford

Invisible Mentor: Maggie Berry

Company Name: Women in Technology

Website: http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Maggie Berry: I run an organization called Women in Technology based inLondon and our strategic aim is to increase the number of women who are working and achieving in theUK’s technology profession.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Maggie Berry: I don’t really have a typical day per se as my role involves a range of different aspects from the overall strategy for the business, to getting hands on with the networking events and training courses that we run as well as spending time with our sponsors and making sure that we’re helping them to position themselves as an employer of choice for women working in IT. I’m also responsible for finding new companies that would like to work with us and I get involved with a lot of women’s business networking groups inLondon. So my days quite often involve speaking at an event – for example, I might talk to a student group to make them aware of the importance of networking from the start of their careers.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Maggie Berry: I have been involved with Women in Technology from the very beginning and I’m fully responsible for it. I’m really proud of what’s been built up over the years and of what we deliver to our members. So what keeps me motivated me is the services we provide and, especially, the networking events that we run for our members. We put a lot of effort into doing everything and making our activities good and it’s all worth it when you get positive emails coming back or calls saying, “This is brilliant, I loved it. It made me think differently about X, Y or Z.” That’s a big driver for me – the impact that we have on the women in our network.

I think my main other motivator is for myself as I want to achieve and I want the business that I run to do well and to be well-received in the market and so I put a lot of effort into that and that keeps me going.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Maggie Berry: I’m fromScotland and went to university inEngland quite far away from home and if I could talk to my 17 year old self, I’d encourage her to study inScotland and build a life closer to my family. That’s one of the things I wish was different as I’m not as geographically close as I’d like to be them. I’m close to my family and I’m obviously in touch with them regularly but I wish I were closer to home. However, you don’t think the same about things at 17 as you would tweny years later!

And if I was looking at Women in Technology, I wish we’d employed people sooner. I did a lot of the ground work on my own and we’ve only really expanded the team in the last couple of years. For five years it was just myself and one other and I think we could have achieved so much more if we had invested in some extra staff a bit earlier.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Maggie Berry: One of the things that has become a bit more apparent to me in the last year or so is the importance of having a personal business network – a personal network of people who you can call upon. I’ve always had a big network of people but I didn’t ever reach out to them for help. I’d always try to solve problems on my own but when I have reached out when I really needed advice, the people in my network were willing to come forward and help to provide me with some brilliant advice. It is a two way street, I help people and they are happy to try and help me back in return.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Maggie Berry:

Part of our revenue is from helping companies to hire more technical women and in the downturn, that we’re going through at the moment, lots of firms are making redundancies, they’re not hiring. So we’re looking at different ways to work with those firms and support them in their gender diversity journey, even if that doesn’t involve jobs and recruitment.
I see other networks running women in IT ‘stuff’ and what I really like to do is to reach out and collaborate with them instead of there being lots of stand alone groups hosting smaller activities. I think it’s better if we all work together towards the same kind of goals because there isn’t lots of money in the space. We all want the same thing, which is seeing more women achieving and working together and collaborating is the way forward. Some groups are interested in that, and that’s great as working together is very important for me.
And as we look at how we grow and further develop the business grows, it’s important to make sure that we invest in having a bigger team giving us a further reach. We’re quite a small team which has delivered an awful lot without masses of resources and I know that people would like us to do more things, such as hosting more events in different cities. So we need to keep an eye on the team and make sure we’re working smart to make the most of all of our capabilities.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Maggie Berry: I think in theUK market our online job board, which is used by companies who would like to attract more job applications from women working in IT, is unique. Certainly there are lots of organizations out there running many styles of networking events but we specifically work with firms to help them raise their profile as an employer of choice. We’re looking at providing our network with the additional skills they need to be a well rounded technology professional who is going to achieve success in their career, whatever that success looks like for them. There are lots of fabulous networks out there for women but I think, if you are a technical woman in theUK, our network has a lot to offer you.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Maggie Berry: I have been running Women in Technology since early 2005 and, before that, I wasn’t really in any roles that gave me any particular business challenges. The ongoing challenge for Women in Technology is that companies are interested in our services but they don’t necessarily always have the budget to invest the resources that are required. We are asked to do things for free and that’s quite difficult as we’ve invested a lot to put all our services together. I think in theUS firms are more accustomed to paying for diversity related activities and that needs to become more acceptable in theUK.

I know that the firms which engage with us get a lot of value from it but we also have a number of firms who just want to work with us for a short time and although we’re happy to work with them, it’s hard because gender diversity is big picture stuff and there needs to be a long term plan. It’s not something that can be sorted out in a few months. So we’ve learned to manage expectations and push back when firms make unrealistic demands about what we can deliver and how quickly they will see a change.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Maggie Berry: In terms of Women in Technology, the organization I worked for at the time is aLondon financial services recruitment firm called McGregor Boyall Associates and they always had a strong focus on diversity. Back in 2004 they undertook a piece of diversity research about IT recruitment in the City and one of the aspects that came out was the lack of women working in technology roles. My boss, Laurie Boyall, had bought the URL womenintechnology.co.uk and he gave me the project of building a website around it.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Maggie Berry: We’ve not had any major failures with Women in Technology but you take knocks all the way through in running a business. You then have to look at each incident, ideally later after the heat of the moment is passed, and think, “How could I do that better next time?” Also over the years, as you deal with different clients, host networking events and things like that, we constantly ask for feedback and so much of what we’ve done, and how we’ve developed the business, has been done by acting upon the feedback we’ve received. That has helped us to keep on a positive path because we’ve done things that have been asked for and we constantly try to improve upon what we’re doing.

It could be something really simple. For example, someone once said to me that you need to have nibbles available at the beginning of an evening event because people are hungry after work and after sitting down for an hour-and-a-half, they’re going to leave straightaway and not stay to network as they have to go to find something to eat. Or another piece of feedback somebody shared with us is that where a venue is flat, the speakers need to be on chairs that are higher than the audience’s otherwise they’re not visible from the back of the room. So sometimes it’s just a simple logistical thing that you can easily change and even more complex changes are quite manageable if you give yourself enough time.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Maggie Berry: After I graduated, I went back toScotland and worked at home for a few years. I lived in quite a small town and I knew it wasn’t going to give me the breadth of career and life experience that I wanted. The only other place where I had friends was London so I made the decision to move here in 2000.

I was torn because I liked being close to family so it was quite hard to make that move but it’s been such a positive experience and now, when I consider it I love London but I still wish I was closer to home in Scotland.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Maggie Berry:

The choice of where I went to university had an effect on my life as it meant that my friends were not from close to home. I went to a university that was in the south and as such a lot of my friends were fromLondonor the south east and so that’s where I gravitated to.
Taking the opportunity to work on Women in Technology when that project cropped up. At the time we had absolutely no idea what was going to happen and I know we would have been fairly gobsmacked if we could have glimpsed a few years into the future and seen what it had become as it wasn’t what we were setting out to do.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Maggie Berry: I have to say Women in Technology as I live and breathe it and I’m really proud of what it has developed into. I love the network and the positive impact we’ve had on people’s lives and that we can help women find jobs and share networking opportunities. It’s a small business, but I’ve been involved in all aspects of it and I’m proud of that.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Maggie Berry: I’ve had a couple of different mentors over the last few years but I’ve never been involved in a formal mentoring scheme. My mentors are people who I’ve met through work and who I’ve thought are really great. I’ve been in a very fortunate position that they have been happy to share some of their expertise with me. I have a couple of mentors who are very senior women in business who I have met through my networking and they are always happy to offer advice, whether it’s something really practical, advice that I need about the team at work or general advice about life, happiness, marriage, all sorts of things. It’s really important to have mentors to help you in life and you don’t have to have just one, of them to only be women – it’s great to be able to call upon the expertise of many different people.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Maggie Berry: I would break that down into two areas – one is hands-on practical business advice about breaking down business problems – what is it, how can you move forward – it’s tangible business knowledge they can share with me that can help me with the situation that I am in. The other area is about self-confidence and self-belief and to have somebody who is able to give you really relevant advice from a dispassionate perspective.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Maggie Berry: Network and get involved! I’d say that to everybody. It’s one of the reasons I go out and talk to student groups to explain to them that networking isn’t just for senior people. It’s something they need to from the start of their career. You need a network of people around you so in good and bad times you have people to call on. For me, it’s the most powerful thing I’ve done and I can’t recommend it enough. It takes time though and you’ve got to find the networks and the groups and the activities that work for you, whether it’s geographical or it’s within an industry, or a women’s network. Get out there and you’ll get to meet people you wouldn’t come across in your day-to-day work and that’s just so important.

Maggie Berry: I run an organization called Women in Technology based inLondon and our strategic aim is to increase the number of women who are working and achieving in theUK’s technology profession.

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