holding the space

Kira Levy, Head of Healthcare, UK Public Sector, Amazon Web Services

The Women in Science group has been established as a safe space for women in leadership positions within a science/technical related role in the UK. This group provides an opportunity for its like-minded participants to share common challenges, offer support and guidance for one another and encourages the use of open communication channels to enable responsive and accessible contact. Externally, the group represents credible and successful role models who are keen to be the figureheads in challenging the status quo, promote professionalism, share their experience and learnings and advocate the need to have women in positions of leadership and seniority across the board.

My name is Kira Levy and I am the Head of Healthcare for Amazon Web Services UK Public Sector.

Being part of groups like Women in Science provide an important inflection point for me; 25 years into my career, I still marvel sometimes at how I got here. I have spent most of my career working in large corporate organisations, all of which were male dominated and most of which valued individual contribution over team collaboration. From the onset, I was struck by the absence of strong female role models. As a young wife and mother, and an ex-patriate, no one looked like me. In the absence of female mentorship, figuring out how to build my career whilst preserving what mattered most to me was daunting; it was also incredibly lonely.

Fast forward 25 years and while the workplace is less male dominated, stereotypical male leadership behaviours still pervade. By accident as much as design, I have figured out my way to navigate through it but still have days where my imposter syndrome is paralysing. With the wisdom of hindsight, I also spend a lot of time watching young women  – my daughters and their friends who are at the very beginning of launching themselves into an adult world, and my younger colleagues learning to navigate a workplace that can still be pretty unforgiving. And it got me thinking: what are the things that I know now  that I wish someone had told me then?

Here’s my list (slightly sanitised for readership, and some of which are pretty basic – but in my experience, getting the basics right can sometimes be more challenging than the hard stuff).

1/ Be yourself. I debated whether to put this first or last but actually, learning how to be comfortable being you dictates the ability to act on so many of the other things on my list. At the risk of stating the obvious, being yourself helps make other people comfortable. And when people are comfortable, they are better collaborators. It may sound contradictory, but authenticity is also a self-preservation mechanism. Pretending to be someone you’re not is exhausting and unsustainable. You might as well put it out there before you’re discovered. People will like you more for it.

2/ It’s okay to say ‘I don’t know.’ I think it is a truism to say men are better blaggers than women; I think it comes with being more outwardly confident. It also means they are worse at saying ‘I don’t know’. But the thing is, more often than not, you get found out. So own it; admitting gaps in your knowledge and/or experience earns more trust than getting it wrong erodes. But then, invest the time to go find the answer.

3/ And when you know the answer, be proud of being right. I’m right a lot. However, the number of times I have been sure but deliver my answer or opinion deferentially, or with a tone of doubt so not to undermine my colleagues, makes me wince. I still catch myself doing it, and see other women do it all the time. We need to stop apologising for being smart.

4/ Know your facts and figures. Building on point 3 (and I feel like I may get in trouble for saying this), I still believe women have to work a little bit harder, be a little bit more ‘right’ and be a little better to be given the same opportunities as male colleagues. Is this fair? Of course not, but I kind of wish someone had told me that from the onset so that I could have at least prepared for it, rather than being resentful when it happened. This starts with knowing your data. What gets you even further? Turning that data into a compelling narrative that only you can tell.

5/ Change your mind. I can be pretty stubborn and sometimes equate changing my mind with admitting failure. This is a bad characteristic. I see the amount of pressure young women (and men) put themselves under to have their career path chartered out before they understand all the options available to them. My least favourite career development question is ‘where do you see yourself in five years?’ I’m almost three decades into mine, and I still can’t answer the question. I also know for certain that if I had over-indexed on answering this question, I would have closed myself off to the some of the career opportunities I’ve had. Changing your mind is empowering and brave.

6/ Look for the thing behind the thing. People can be perplexing and I spend a lot of time scratching my head trying to understand why they do the things they do sometimes. I use this as much in my personal life as I do in my professional one. It helps me be more empathetic; it helps me identify root causes; and it helps me be more patient. It also helps me be successful because if you don’t diagnosis the right problem, you’re not going to find the right solution.

7/ Support other women.  This one appears on a lot of lists. It angers me that so many of us point out something that should be so obvious, but it is also categorically true that in a male-dominated workplace, some women still see other women as a threat. But guess what? It’s a lot damn harder to start a movement on your own. Embrace your female network. Lean into it, ask for help and support when you need it, and find the time to do the same for others. It really matters.

8/ Be kind. This is another one that should be seemingly obvious but in a male dominated workplace, is often seen as weakness. This has been a recurrent theme on my performance appraisals for years. Showing emotion at work demonstrates you care. Equally, being kind is not synonymous with being ineffective; it does not make you a pushover and it doesn’t mean you shy away from making decisions that people won’t like. What it does mean is that when you deliver hard messages, you do this with sensitivity and that people around you will know that it is considered, deliberate and necessary.

9/ Call it out. This one is hard – its something I have gotten more wrong than right, and its still something I struggle with on a regular basis. Calling out bad behaviour is scary and potentially isolating and requires courage. But if you don’t call it out, it won’t change; worst case, you become complicit; best case, you become an inadvertent enabler. Every single one of us would have something to say here if we had the courage to speak up. And every time we do, it makes it easier for others to do the same.

10/ It’s only work. There was a time when I used work as a get-out-of-jail-free clause for the rest of my life; that, and for a long time, I was better at working long and hard than I was at working smart. It’s taken a whole lot of personal misses for me to realise that part of what makes me a good leader, and a good employee and a good teammate is the fact that I am also a good mother, and partner, and daughter and sister and friend (or at least try to be). And guess what? More often than not, no one notices the difference between working 60 hours and 40 hours a week.

And in the context of all that – what’s my recommendation? I think its probably to remember that there isn’t a single right way, just the one that works for you. It also takes practice. So practice. Find your community or a mentor, and ask for help. You are not an imposter.