How to Conquer Imposter Syndrome, and Become a Tech CEO

Kara Miller:

Welcome to Instigators of Change, a Khosla Ventures podcast where we take a look at innovative ideas, the people who come up with them and those who invest in them. I'm Kara Miller, and today, sometimes you make a plan and you really stick with it, no matter what people say.

Shellye Archambeau:

No one thought I should do it. Ben Horowitz, who is CEO of Loudcloud, is telling me, "Shellye, don't take this one."

Kara Miller:

But Shellye Archambeau had known what she wanted since she was a teenager, to be a CEO, and she was driven in a way you might think is pretty unusual, but she's not so sure.

Shellye Archambeau:

I believe there are a lot of people out there with a lot of ambition. The challenge is a lot of people suppress it. They don't share their ambition, they don't believe maybe they deserve to be ambitious.

Kara Miller:

Shellye Archambeau, the former CEO of MetricStream, a board member at Verizon and Nordstrom among other companies, and the author of Unapologetically Ambitious, talked with us about success, building a great network and making tough choices to get what you want. That's just ahead on Instigators of Change.

A lot of people, even very talented, accomplished people, have sat in an intimidating meeting and asked themselves, "Do I belong here?"

Shellye Archambeau:

I've suffered from imposter syndrome my entire life. You talk about that doubt, Kara. That whole doubt to me is that little voice, that little voice that creeps up in your head anytime you face something new, a new job, new opportunity, speaking in front of a group, invited into a new organization, whatever it might be, it's just new.

Kara Miller:

Yeah.

Shellye Archambeau:

And this little voice starts yelling in your brain, telling you, "What makes you think you're good enough? Wait till they figure out you don't know as much as they think you know." Right? It's that voice that is just tearing down your confidence.

Kara Miller:

Shellye Archambeau may have accomplished what few others have, becoming not just a tech CEO, which is rare enough, but a black female tech CEO, and like so many of us, she has doubted herself in all sorts of situations. Archambeau's superpower though, is a determination that seems almost superhuman. The ability to say at 16, for example, that she would rise to the top in the business world and yeah, she was going to make it happen, which she did in the middle of a tech crash.

So if you've ever jousted it with imposter syndrome, don't worry. Archambeau's got a plan for you.

Shellye Archambeau:

Just about everybody suffers from imposter syndrome at some point or another. Women more so than men, but women of color the most. So if everybody suffers from it, it means it's actually not me. It's not you. This voice, everybody hears the voice. So it's not real. It's kind of in the air. That's what I try to tell myself. It's not real. It's just in the air and therefore, just like television coming across the airwaves, if it gets scary or uncomfortable, you turn the thing off. So you turn that little voice off and if that doesn't work, then I remind myself that, "Listen, the only reason I'm feeling this is because I'm facing something new. And if I'm facing something new, it's because someone has given me the opportunity, which means they believe in me. So if they believe in me, then let me believe them." Right?

Kara Miller:

Right. Right.

Shellye Archambeau:

Forget this voice. Let me believe them. And if that doesn't work, then I fake the confidence. Right? I fake it. I act like I know what I'm doing until I do.

Kara Miller:

Now, Shellye Archambeau may have harbored doubts all along, but her life is a tale of being willing to work incredibly hard and plan incredibly rigorously. In high school in the 1970s, her guidance counselor told her something that would alter her path forever. "Leading school clubs," the counselor said, "Was a lot like being in business."

Shellye Archambeau:

You pull people together, you get things done. And I said, "Oh. Well, I enjoy doing that. And more than that, I like running and leading these clubs. I'm vice president, American Field Service. I'm President French Club," et cetera.

Kara Miller:

Right, right.

Shellye Archambeau:

"So I'll just go into business," and when I looked around, the people who ran them were called CEOs. So I said, "Oh, okay, I'll go be a CEO. And honestly, it was that naive and that audacious. Really, I had no clue really, about what it really meant to run a company.

Kara Miller:

But even if you had no clue, you were very committed to the idea. Through many years and many moves and many sacrifices, how did that level of commitment come to somebody who for a lot of the time when you were giving things up was pretty young?

Shellye Archambeau:

Well, a really good question. I don't know that I'm so much committed to everything. What's set aside I'm going to do. I will absolutely try to do it, but I'm really more goal oriented. I learned early in life, Kara, that the odds were just in my favor. I'm a black woman in America. I'm a black woman in tech. When you look around and now roll the clock back 30 years, when you look around, there just weren't any of us that were doing that kind of thing.

So it was really clear that huh, if I just do what everybody else does, I'm probably not going to get what it is that I want. So I have to be intentional. And I learned that as a kid, again, growing up as a little black girl and the '60s and early '70s when there was so much racial challenge going on in America, and for as many people that thought there should be civil rights to it, just as many that didn't.

And so it was just clear that if I wasn't intentional and didn't make really strategic decisions and plans, et cetera, that I probably wasn't going to get much out of life. So it was really the intentionality that was just ingrained and almost beat into me, if you will. So here I am in high school and I've got to figure out a career. So okay, I'll go run a company. And for me, it then just became the goal. So now fine. How do I actually make that happen?

So it wasn't so much that it was the only thing I ever considered, but it was something that made a whole lot of sense to me. So fine, this is what I'm going to go do, and now let's work towards making it happen.

Kara Miller:

You come from a very intentional and focused family, and you talked a little bit about racism. You write about, particularly living in suburban Los Angeles, classmates are almost uniformly white. And you experienced a lot of racism there but you have this quote, which is, "In my family, we did not complain about unfairness, and particularly we were not allowed to believe that being African American was holding us back."

Was that ever a difficult, I don't know, thought to kind of keep in your mind that this was not holding you back?

Shellye Archambeau:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. In my family, you'd come home, something would happen. You didn't get something you thought you deserved. You got treated badly, right? Tripped on the playground and people didn't pick you, whatever it might be. And you come home and you can play and you're a kid. You say, "Oh mom, mom, it's not fair. This happened. It's not fair." And my mom's answer was always the same. It was, "You're right. It's not fair. Life's not fair. So what are you going to go do about it?" And it's like, "What?" As a kid, I get a lollipop. You get a lollipop, right? I mean, we're supposed to be fair.

Kara Miller:

Right.

Shellye Archambeau:

And that was just never something we were allowed to believe that hey, we should get something just because it's fair. It's like, no, life's not fair. So what are you going to do about it to actually get what you want? And that's what really drove being intentional.

And when you say, Was it hard? The answer is yes. Terrible things would happen and my mom would always say, "Oh, it just builds character. Right? People don't treat you right. Oh, it builds character." And I can remember saying, "Mom, I have enough character. I don't need more character." So was it hard? The answer is yes, it was hard, but I do believe that the experiences you have, positive and negative, actually contribute to building resilience, building character and building strength. And sometimes it actually helps you build skill sets and experiences that you can leverage later on that can actually turn into a strength.

This whole notion of planning and being intentional and goal oriented, I did that for survival and it actually became a strength that helped me succeed in my career and my life.

Kara Miller:

You have right about this very important relationship you had with the company IBM or this connection you had to IBM for a long time. When was it that you thought... You made this decision pretty early on that you were going to be the CEO of IBM. How did that come about and how did your connection to the company come about?

Shellye Archambeau:

Sure. So I decided I wanted to be a CEO in tech.

Kara Miller:

Okay.

Shellye Archambeau:

And the reason I picked tech is I'd heard along the way, and I really try hard to listen to people, and someone along the way made a statement that if you pick an industry that's growing, companies in growing industries are also growing and therefore they never have enough resources. So if you're good at what you do, you can move farther faster. And I was like, "Oh." So this is the early '80s.

Looked around and tech is booming. And I thought, "Huh, okay." And who was the top company back then? Well, it was IBM. So I thought, "Okay, I might as well pick a good company if I'm going to go pick a company in tech." So I decided kind of that serendipitously, "All right, IBM." And I'd been exposed to IBM. I got my first, "Professional," kind of job the summer between my high school and senior year in college.

My father worked for IBM. He started his career... He didn't have a college degree, but he started his career fixing typewriters. And it got to the point where he actually managed the people that repaired equipment and things for IBM. And so at that location, that headquarters location, I got a summer job basically filling in for secretaries, and they were called secretaries back then, for secretaries that were going on vacation. And I'd sit and basically take care of the desk for a week or two and then move to the next desk for a week or two. And this really was my first professional experience of being in a company and I got so lucky because I had a manager for that summer who, when she asked me what I wanted to do and I said, "Oh, I wanted to go to business, I'd love to run a business one day." And she said, "Well, while you're here, you should talk to people about what they do." And I was like, "Really? Will people talk to me?" And she was like, "Sure, if you ask them nicely."

Well, I don't think she expects me to do what I did, Kara, because I literally, sitting at the desk, you have the corporate directory. I looked at titles that were interesting and literally just cold called. I'd dial a number, "Hi, this is Shellye Archambeau. I'm here for the summer. I want to be a CEO one day. At this day, I'm sure it sounded like too cute for this young teenager who's calling these people, but you'd be amazed how many people actually took a few minutes to talk to me on the phone or actually had lunch or bought me coffee or whatever and told me what they did.

And so that gave me this whole view of business and roles that was really very helpful and people were so nice. I was like, "You know what? IBM's a great company. I'll go be CEO of IBM."

Kara Miller:

And it's funny that you say you got lucky because in some ways you did, but also, how many summer interns or people filling in over the summer cold called people and asked to know about the job it is they do? And I feel like that's very characteristic. You move to Japan for IBM for a little while and you do all these slides in Japanese. I feel like when you have an opportunity, you really get out there if you possibly can.

Shellye Archambeau:

Absolutely. I've always believed it doesn't matter why the door opened for you. A lot of people feel guilty for some reason that they got the opportunity because they knew somebody or because there's a diversity focus and they're a woman or they're black or whatever it might be, and then they kind of feel guilty that they're in the role. And I'm like, "Listen, it doesn't matter why the door opened for you because a door opens for everyone for some reason or another, and it's been happening forever. All that matters is what you do when you get on the other side of the threshold. That's all that matters. So don't spend any time worrying about why you got there or why you got the opportunity because it doesn't turn into an opportunity unless you actually capitalize on it."

Kara Miller:

You write about a couple moments at IBM when you are thinking of quitting. The first time, you actually don't end up quitting, but you're planning to. And then the second time you do. Can you talk about both of those moments and why you were thinking of leaving?

Shellye Archambeau:

Yeah, so the first time I was still fairly early in my career. I think I'd been with IBM now about five, six years.

Kara Miller:

Okay.

Shellye Archambeau:

And I had this plan. My plan was I want to be CEO. I was like, "Okay, so I want to be a CEO. Well, then at some point I actually have to manage a full P&L, a real business entity." And at IBM at the time, those jobs were called branch managers. So I said, "All right," looked around the branch managers and usually people became branch managers in their 30s. So great. I targeted I want to be a branch manager by the time I'm 30 and I'm moving up my little steps, but then I get to this job and I've done well, I'm getting good ratings and rankings and everybody tells me I'm ready for the next thing, but opportunities just aren't there.

IBM is struggling a little bit, they're shrinking things, whatever. And so at this point, tick tock, I'm like, "I'm going to miss my goal of getting to be branch manager by the time I'm 30 if IBM doesn't have opportunities for me." And so I figured, "Well, I'll have to make the hard decision and go find basically the same opportunity someplace else so I can get on track to become CEO, and if it's not at IBM, of some other tech company."

So I literally went out, found another opportunity, came back and tried to resign. And they were like, "What? What do you mean you're leaving?" I said, "Well, you told me there aren't opportunities for me to take this next role and therefore I have to go someplace where there are opportunities." They're like, "Wait, wait, wait." So bottom line is I did get the promotion I needed and I did become branch manager by the time I was 30.

Kara Miller:

And would you say that's the power of the threat of leaving or having an offer in hand?

Shellye Archambeau:

It's two things. Yes, it's the power of having an offer of hand but let me tell you the biggest power. It's not the threat, because if you threat every time, you make a threat every time you want a job promotion, they're going to let you go. They're like, "Okay, you really don't want to be here," right? So it's not something to do idly, but the reason I was so determined about it was because I had a timeline on my plan.

Kara, so many people have goals and they kind of set little milestones for themselves, but they don't actually put a timeline and then they wake up and they're 35, 42, 51, and they're like, "I'm just not where I thought I would be right now." And it's because we get comfortable, we're comfortable. You're doing the job, you're getting paid, you're getting good feedback. So what's another six months, another year, another two years? You're comfortable and next thing you know, tick tock, you slip and slide and you get off the path that you played for yourself.

So the real key in setting goals and putting plans in place is actually putting timelines for yourself that are reasonable, make sure they're reasonable, aggressive, but reasonable. But it's that timeline that was really the power versus just the walking in and quitting.

Kara Miller:

And then the second time, you do quit. Talk about that?

Shellye Archambeau:

Yes, I do. And this again, another hard point because I had been with IBM at this point almost 14 years, 14, 15 years. And if you cut me, I bled IBM blue. I moved around so much with the company that all my friends were IBMers. My husband started out in IBM. I met him at IBM. So it was IBM. And here I am at the point where my boss reports to the CEO, Lou Gerstner. There's no one higher than me that looks like me in the company. And even though I'm getting good feedback, two things were happening.

One, I wasn't getting paid what I thought I was worth competitive, just even with an IBM, and two, I just kept getting little signs that, "You know what? I don't think I'm actually on the path to compete for CEO." And that was what I was working towards. So if those things were the case, then I needed to go find someplace to get on the path to become CEO because that was the goal. IBM was the option, but the goal was I was CEO and that's why I ultimately ended up leaving the company.

Kara Miller:

And looking back, why do you think you were not being paid what you should have been paid or being paid attention to in the way that you felt would've been appropriate?

Shellye Archambeau:

I believe it was a couple of things and I actually had a conversation when I left IBM in terms of exit interview. And one of the things I told them is, "Listen, if you have people that you believe are truly your high potential top people, how many people are there like that? Not that many. You should be able to break the molds." They have these salary molds which say, "Okay, we'll pay from a low end of this range, high end of this range." And because I was getting promoted really quickly, I was always at the bottom of the range, but I got, "a nice," percentage increase, 8%, 9%. I got a nice little percent, but it was always at the bottom of the band, but I'm performing at the top of the band, so why does it make sense to pay 90% of the people more than me? So that kind of thing.

So I had that conversation. One was a comp issue, and oh, by the way, when I left IBM, I doubled my cash compensation. So I was not being paid-

Kara Miller:

Wow.

Shellye Archambeau:

What I was worth. And then two, they need to make sure that if they really wanted me, they need to make sure they were actually treating me like they wanted me. I'll give you an example. The CEO of IBM came to IBM International Asia Pacific, and he met with a whole bunch of my peers, people who are running different divisions across Asia, didn't meet with me. And I'm like, "Okay, if I'm really in the top tier percentage of people that you think are high potential, why didn't that happen?" So to me, that was just another sign.

So anyway, if you want to keep and retain your best talent, you want to make sure they know that you believe they're your best talent and that you show that you care. And then you want to make sure that you're paying them. I wasn't mercenary. I don't need to be paid the top, but I want to be paid competitively.

Kara Miller:

Right. So after IBM, you were the President of blockbuster.com and you've got this great story where the co-founder of a relatively small company, Netflix, this guy Reed Hastings, sort of knocks at Blockbuster's door. What did he want? Why was he there to have a conversation?

Shellye Archambeau:

Yeah. Reed and I had met each other. Here I am building blockbuster.com. I had got a great brand and we're building the technology. He's got a startup called Netflix. They're building technology, but they don't have any kind of a brand or reach. And so Reed comes with a set of people. We talked several times. I arranged a meeting to happen. He came out, presented, "Let's take basically blockbuster.com the brand, Netflix the technology. Why don't you put them together and go conquer the world?"

And my boss, who was the CEO of Blockbuster was like, "No, if that ever turns into anything, we'll just buy it."

Kara Miller:

Right.

Shellye Archambeau:

And you're like, "Wow, really?" Now, two points to that. One, this is a story that happens over and over and over again in business. And for everyone listening who's building companies, you will make this mistake at some point too because you get to the point where you are the big brand, you are generating a lot of cash, you have profits, you have customers, and this new little pip squeak competitor or a little [inaudible 00:20:12] is going to come along and you'll think, "Oh, I don't need to invest or spend money or share equity with that kind of company. I'll just wait." It doesn't work that way.

You've got to make bets. Risk and opportunity are two sides of the same coin and unfortunately, once we get big, we tend to be more and more risk averse, which basically reduces our opportunities going forward, and especially for growth. And this was just classic.

Kara Miller:

Could you see the opportunity? Because it must have been hard. Here's Blockbuster, this sort of behemoth player, and I can see why the company might have been like, "Who are these Netflix people? What's that ever get..." Obviously it would've been impossible to see into the future that we live in now where Netflix is a huge player. What did you see at the time?

Shellye Archambeau:

What I saw at the time was I'm trying to build this blockbuster.com and I see how hard it is to build technology within a company that's not really a technology company. So I'm thinking speed to market, it's all about speed to market. So I saw Netflix, not that I saw what Netflix would become, but what I saw is if you actually put the things together, you can turbocharge what we're doing here and what could that mean?

I just didn't see how Blockbuster within its own walls was going to be able to move as quickly, as fast and bring the innovation that was required. It was hard for me to hire top people because I'm at Blockbuster, I'm not a high flying tech company. So that's what I saw. What I saw was really more speed to market and opening up future opportunities.

Kara Miller:

So I know you kind of made that transition into Silicon Valley before the dot-com crash in 2001, but then you saw the crash. I wonder, I guess you had decided, "Yes..." I think at that point you had moved to California, right?

Shellye Archambeau:

Not moved. I was commuting.

Kara Miller:

Okay.

Shellye Archambeau:

I left my family in Dallas. Exactly. I was commuting from Dallas to California.

Kara Miller:

The long commute.

Shellye Archambeau:

Long commute.

Kara Miller:

Right. How sort of worrisome or scary was it when the air came out of the tech bubble in 2001?

Shellye Archambeau:

Oh, it was very scary. I was at Loudcloud at the time, and one of the Loudcloud's claims to fame is they were one of the last IPOs to get out before the world ended as it related to the dot-com bubble burst. And here we are with the company that is an infrastructure company, but Loudcloud did was basically operate websites for startups. Most of their clients were startups. They could offer high secure, highly managed, scalable websites as companies were growing.

And so when the bubble burst, all of a sudden we're losing customers, not because they don't need the business, because they are going out of business. So you now are in a company that is quickly going out of business and you've got to find a new market, you've got to find some new models, the whole bit. And so we were scrambling and going through all of that.

And was it scary? The answer is yes, absolutely. But at the same time, there's ups and downs for every market. So there's tons to learn when you're actually going through a downturn.

Kara Miller:

Did you think this is a downturn or did you think Silicon Valley's not going to get back on its feet?

Shellye Archambeau:

I didn't believe that it wasn't going to get back on its feet.

Kara Miller:

Okay.

Shellye Archambeau:

And I can prove it. The way I can prove it is here I am in 2002, so that's just a year after the bubble's burst. So everything's crazy and people kept telling me, because I'm now ready, what I believe, I'm ready to go after my CEO job. I've now been at IBM, I've gotten the seat at the table jobs to understand what's so different. I'm interacting with boards, I've got the skills. People are saying, "Yep, you've got the skills, but there's no opportunities." And I was told and coached by many people, I should just go back to a big company, ride out this bad period at the Valley, and then go after my CEO job, but I didn't do it.

I was like, "Listen, if you believe I've got the skills and the experience to go after the CEO job, I believe I'm ready. The timeline says I'm ready. I'm going after the CEO job." And I went after it in Silicon Valley. So yes, I believed that the Valley was going to come back and I took a company that was really broken, really broken. So no, I was betting on the Valley.

Kara Miller:

What was the hardest part about becoming CEO of Zaplet in the midst of this really tumultuous time that not only you are living through, but everybody who's working for you is living through too?

Shellye Archambeau:

The hardest part about taking the job is no one thought I should do it except for my husband. No one thought I should do it. Ben Horowitz, who is CEO of Loudcloud is telling me, "Shellye, don't take this one." As I told you, people tell me, "Go back, get a big company because Zaplet's in trouble." And then I was also looking at Zaplet because it was a Kleiner Perkins company. And at the time, Vinod Khosla was the partner at Kleiner who was responsible for Zaplet. And Vinod had an amazing reputation as it relates to being able to build companies, midas touch, create value for shareholders, et cetera, but he also had a reputation of being very forceful and being sometimes tough to work for.

So I was like, "Okay, I'm going to take a company that's challenged and I'm working for someone who I believed could add tremendous value and I could learn a ton from," but I knew it wasn't going to be easy. So big job. And I will tell you, it was the best thing I did. It was the best thing I did. I learned so much from the experience of Zaplet, from working with Vinod, but I like to describe Vinod as one of those scary smart people, right? Only a few very scary, smart people that I've met in my life and he's one of them. So it was really just a tremendous learning experience.

Kara Miller:

We talked before about imposter syndrome, and it's interesting that you struggled with it because that obviously coexisted inside the same person who's like, "Yes, I can be CEO, I can totally do this." And that was true even before you graduated from college, before you had this big track record. So you have a deep belief in what you're capable of and also, you have these misgivings about what you're capable of.

Shellye Archambeau:

Yes. And let me tell you, one of the key reasons why I was able to work through it versus it just freezing me out is because I was fortunate to have a lot of cheerleaders in my life. And I tell people, surround yourself with cheerleaders. And to me, a cheerleader is a cheerleader. It's someone who's basically in your corner saying, "Shellye, you got this. Of course, you can do that. Go girl. Come on. Look at all the things that you've done," right?

It's just like sports teams have cheerleaders like, "Yes, go, go, rah, rah, get psyched up."

Kara Miller:

Right.

Shellye Archambeau:

Even teams in the huddle, a football team, they get together, they call the players, "One, two, three, break." Why do they do that? To psych each other up. It's like, "You can do this." We all need that reinforcement because there's so much in this world that wants to tear us down, to tell us that we're not good enough. We're not smart enough, capable enough, pretty enough, whatever it might be. We're just not enough. We need people around us who are countering that so that even though you're feeling, "Ooh, I'm just not sure." When you have somebody at your back who's saying, "Of course, you can do it. Of course, you can do it."

Kara Miller:

Right.

Shellye Archambeau:

"You've got this." So find cheerleaders. I've been really fortunate to have chaired cheerleaders throughout my life.

Kara Miller:

Let me talk about a couple more lessons that you've taken from your career. One is, I think maybe to some people counterintuitive, but it's give more than You take. Talk about why you believe that?

Shellye Archambeau:

I believe there is huge power in giving, and I learned it frankly over time. I tend to be a giver. I was raised in a household as the oldest where it was always help, right? Help your mother, help your father, help this, help your sister. So it's help, help, help. So it's kind of built into me, just to help, but what I saw happening when I helped and when I gave, was that it created an environment to actually create authentic relationships because when you're helping somebody, they're actually getting to learn about you and who you are in a positive environment. One.

Number two, when you help someone, and many times there's something that you actually learn from the activity itself. And then thirdly, when you help people, they're more likely to think positively of you. They're more likely to actually help you in some way in the future. So to me, it all starts with helping and with giving. First and foremost, it's because you get to create real authentic relationships.

Kara Miller:

And this is connected, which is, I think there's so much building of networks now online, but you really advocate trying to, I don't know, see people in person, have coffee, take a walk, that the ability to connect in person has a kind of unrivaled power.

Shellye Archambeau:

I do believe it has an unrivaled power. I also do believe you can create relationships where you haven't met. It's just harder and they may not end up being as deep, because there is something about seeing somebody, touching somebody in the whole three dimensional world that is just a little different. But the key, and you set it upfront, the key to networking and having a network is not how many contacts and names you have in your phone.

To me, a network, a true network is how many people would do something for you when it's not convenient. To me, that's a network. And to have that, it takes real relationships, authentic relationships.

Kara Miller:

You talked before about how you were kind of strategic in choosing tech. It was a growing area when you were first thinking, "Yes, I want to lead something, but in what area? What kind of company am I looking for?" If you were 22 today and you were asking yourself that same question, would tech still be your answer or would you have a different answer?

Shellye Archambeau:

Tech would absolutely be my answer. If anything, tech is bigger than it ever was because it is foundational. I tell people all the time, every company is a tech company. They just don't all know it yet. Because tech is enabling so much of the power, so much of the value proposition that companies are able to offer, whether they are companies that are flying people from one place to another, companies that are providing toothpaste or companies that are doing dog rooming, it doesn't matter. Every company is trying to figure out more about their customer, more about the market, trying to figure out how to provide more value, how to anticipate needs, requirements. The best way to do that is to leverage technology. So tech, absolutely, still, I think the best industry.

Kara Miller:

Karim Lakhani at Harvard Business School has said that to me. He says that every company is an AI company. It's just like there's people who believe that. There's CEOs who are kind of in denial, and then there's people in the middle who are like, "Oh man, I see this, but I really don't want to."

Shellye Archambeau:

You know what? That's true with all kinds of change. We all believe that other people should change, but we don't want to change. Right? And that same thing is true with companies. Change is just painful.

Kara Miller:

Let me ask you for a moment about women. You write about women, even people who are executives, people who are making a lot of money, and that they tend to fault themselves for not being good enough cooks or not doing enough gardening or whatever it is. Do you think that that impairs people's abilities to succeed?

Shellye Archambeau:

What I think impairs people's ability to succeed is when they succumb to the judgment of the world. The world will judge us on everything, especially women. They will judge us on, yes, the quality of our jobs, where we live, what kind of car we drive, the family we have, what our kids look like, what we look like, how we dress, what vacations we took, all those things.

Somebody walks into the household and they'll say to the wife, "Oh, what a beautiful home you have." They never say that to the husband. So guess what? Who feels judged about everything looking nice and being...? The woman does. So if we accept all that judgment, then for us A types, we try to do everything perfectly, everything. That takes so much time, not just time physically, but mentally. You've got all the mind space. "I got to plan this and do this and do this and do this." No, no. Do not accept the world's judgment. You decide what you're willing to be judged on and let the rest go so that you can create space to do the things you want to do. And I know that sounds so easy like, "Okay. Sure, Shellye, just decide." No, no, it is not easy, but it's imperative.

When my little girl was growing up, she was born with thick, curly hair. Thick, thick, curly hair. So the best way to do her hair is you brushed, you combed, you braided. Okay, I've done that my whole life. Had my husband ever done that before? My six foot two, former football playing, big hands Husband? No, No. Did he need to learn? You bet. I couldn't do it all the time and I wasn't going to do it all the time. So what that meant is that she's getting ready to go to preschool. She's three, four years old, he has to do her hair.

Well, she left the house looking pretty jacked up for a while, for a while because he's learning. So the parts are crooked. One platte's uneven, a thick one, a thin one coming unraveled, you name it. Right? And I know for a fact when she got to school, people would look at her and say, "Where's her mother? How could they let her out of the house looking like that?" Right?

Kara Miller:

Right.

Shellye Archambeau:

Okay. Did I care? No, I refused to let myself care. Why? Because it didn't matter. She's three. She doesn't care what she looks like and he had to learn. And the good news is he did. And a month or two, he's got it down. She's looking great. So did it affect her at all? No.

Kara Miller:

Right. But you did care for a while though, right?

Shellye Archambeau:

When I say I cared, meaning I'd look and I'd cringe, right?

Kara Miller:

Yeah, right.

Shellye Archambeau:

But I didn't care. I didn't care enough to change it. What I didn't do was to go redo her hair, because that would've told him, "Hey, your efforts aren't worthwhile." And so he would've just stopped and never done it again and it would've been my job forever, right? I didn't pick on him, or I didn't take over the job. I didn't do any of that. So did I care? Did I cringe? The answer is yes. Did I change behavior? No. And that's what I meant by care. We had an objective in mind. The rest of the world didn't know what was important to us or our family, what we were trying to do.

Kara Miller:

Right.

Shellye Archambeau:

So when I say decide what you're willing to be judged on, I really mean it, and let go of the rest. You do not have to be perfect in everything, just in the things that you believe are important for you and for your family.

Kara Miller:

To paraphrase some of what Cheryl Sandberg has said, women still aren't in charge of a whole lot, which you know as a woman who has run stuff. Do you think that that is some of the kind of social pressure we're talking about? Is that networks and women don't tend to be kind of as thickly connected in certain kinds of networks as men? What's your sort of diagnosis after seeing things for a while?

Shellye Archambeau:

Oh man, there's so many pieces that play into this. I think from a society standpoint, we just expect women to be the ones that organize things. And by definition of organizing things, therefore just doing the things, especially as it relates to things that have anything to do with social, and that could be in the workplace too. If you're going to have a fun event or an offsite or you're pulling a group or team together, look at who's actually doing the work. It's almost always dominated by women.

So there is this society expectation that we're all raised with. Remember that whole thing about helping? "Shellye, help your mother. Help your brother, help your sister."

Kara Miller:

Yeah.

Shellye Archambeau:

I think women are asked to help more growing up, and therefore it becomes part of who we are and part of what the world expects. So those kind of dynamics we need to change.

And then as it relates to in the workplace, unfortunately, there are still unconscious biases and beliefs about what women can do versus what men can do. So we still promote men based upon their potential, and we promote women based upon what they've demonstrated.

I looked at a study not too long ago that was asking people, men and women, why there weren't more women in senior levels in tech? And literally, they put the top five reasons for each column and I think only one was overlapped. The men thought the women just weren't ambitious enough, weren't technical enough. Whereas women felt they didn't get the sponsorship, they didn't get the opportunities. It was completely different.

Kara Miller:

Right. It's like they lived in two different universes.

Shellye Archambeau:

Exactly. Exactly. So we just have to do two things. One, leaders need to be doing a better job of back to being conscious, but making intentional conscious questions of people. Don't make assumptions. We don't even realize we're making assumptions. I once wasn't getting promoted because it was assumed that I wasn't willing to move.

And if I hadn't pushed, not my boss, but I had a conversation with my boss's boss and found out that was the issue. He said, "Oh, Shellye, there just aren't those kind of jobs around here." I said, "I'm willing to move." He said, "Yeah, but your husband works too. And we thought, we thought you weren't willing to move." I've already moved twice in my career. Okay? So people make assumptions that are just subconscious, they don't even know about.

So the key is we need to be just more explicit and intentional in our conversations and make sure we both ask the questions as individuals, but also as bosses, we need to make sure we're asking the questions.

Kara Miller:

Do you feel like you're an unusual person in terms of your level of ambition?

Shellye Archambeau:

Actually, I don't think I'm unusual in terms of my level of ambition.

Kara Miller:

Okay.

Shellye Archambeau:

I believe there are a lot of people out there with a lot of ambition. The challenge is a lot of people suppress it. They don't share their ambition, they don't believe maybe they deserve to be ambitious because a lot of people, especially women and people of color, get signals throughout their career and life that being ambitious is a bad thing. And that's frankly why I picked the title of the book because I've been told the same thing.

Somebody would say, "Oh, you're ambitious," and it's not meant as a compliment, which is ridiculous. Ridiculous. You would never raise a child, work hard, get good grades, be involved, show your leadership. But oh, don't be ambitious, right? We would never do that. And yet that's what we tell people all the time and that's ridiculous because all ambition is, all ambition means to me is that you have something in the future that you want to build, create, or impact and you're working toward it with intention. That is being ambitious and everyone deserves to be, and studies show people who are ambitious actually go further in their careers.

So be ambitious, own it. It's okay. It doesn't mean you have to be in your face. That's just being rude.

Kara Miller:

Shellye Archambeau is the former CEO of MetricStream. She's the author of the book, Unapologetically Ambitious: Take Risks, Break Barriers, and Create Success on Your Own Terms. Shellye, thank you so much.

Shellye Archambeau:

Thank you for having me, Kara. I really appreciate it.

Kara Miller:

And thanks to you for being here. I should say Unapologetically Ambitious is one of those rare books, this has not happened very often, that has been taken by my husband. It's now on his nightstand. And almost every day I would say, he reads me a couple lines from it and tells me why I have to incorporate this or that lesson from Shellye into my own life.

So if getting a book stolen by your husband is a positive recommendation for reading it, consider the recommendation made. Instigators of Change is produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Kara Miller.