Southeast Dreaming' Keynote
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The Value of Personal Connections in an Online World Keynote for Southeast Dreamin' (http://southeastdreamin.com/), a Salesforce community conference.
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Southeast Dreaming' Keynote
- 2. The Value of Personal Connections in an Online World Mary Scotton Inclusion in Tech Developer Evangelist, Salesforce @rockchick322004 www.maryscotton.com
- 6. The Value of Personal Connections in an Online World Mary Scotton Inclusion in Tech Developer Evangelist, Salesforce @rockchick322004 www.maryscotton.com
- 8. 4.7
- 9. Photo credit: #WOCinTech Chat
- 11. Go to Coffee? But I’m WORKING!
- 20. Ayori Selassie President of BOLDforce, Sr. Solutions Engineer, Salesforce
- 22. Dreamforce 2015 BOLDforce Meetup
- 23. Women are 47% of the overall workforce Tech 18% Overall 47%
- 24. Hispanics in Tech 2% Blacks in Tech 1% 18% is starting to look pretty good…
- 25. 2%1%
- 27. Be Uncomfortable
- 28. Mary’s Tip: Join a Group! 1. User Group / Developer Group 2. Why Salesforce Admins Drink 3. Women in Tech Diversity
- 34. Go to Coffee! 1. Meet new people bit.ly/DiversityBingo 2. Interrupt unconscious bias bit.ly/EqualityTrail 3. Take baby steps success.salesforce.com
Editor's Notes
- Kristi: teeing up Keynote Karaoke: “Thanks to Apex and the Limits for keeping the party going. Before we bring up our keynote speaker, Mary Scotton, we have something special. Dreamforce 2015 was amazing, and one of Mary’s favorite moments was when we had Karaoke in the Admin Zone. So she requested that we kickoff today with KEYNOTE KARAOKE! Please sing along!”
- Thank you to all of the organizers - this is my first super user group and I'm so excited to be here! Huge Thanks to Apex and the Limits! Thank you all for singing along and making my wild dream of Keynote Karaoke come true. That song is really special to me, it was my mothers favorite song, and this keynote is based around traits I inherited from her. she loved to dance - we've got that part covered. She loved to teach – the goal is to do some teaching this morning. and she was an change agent, working within the system to get things done, and that's what I aspire to do. As you may know, I'm as passionate about inclusion and equality as I am about the Salesforce Plaform …
- …and Salesforce’s Forward Looking Statements message…please do not base any purchasing decisions on any forward looking statements I may make…
- …and, most importantly, I’m passion about our amazing community of users, admins, and developers. How many Salesforce users do we have in the house? Sales? Service? Marketing? How many Admins? Developers? My charter as an Evangelist at Salesforce is to help all of YOU to be successful. It's my dream job, for sure! The Salesforce community is the most engaged, passionate, and inclusive community I've ever seen in the technology space.
- This event is a prime example - passion, sweat and probably tears is what put this together. Thanks again to the organizers and to all of you for coming and bringing your energy and curiosity.
- Now that you are awake, let's talk about what I mean by the Importance of Personal Connections in an Online World. Take notes, because at the end, I'm going to ask YOU to be change agents, accomplices, along with me, to make our community more inclusive. The first step is the hardest. But I know you can do it - you're a great audience - you got here on time, you sang before 9am, now I need to ask you to do one more thing...
- I need everybody to put down your phones. (except for Kristi, who is periscoping) PAUSE You over there, can you please put that down, just for a second. BUILD TENSION. Because I want to share a number that I find scary…
- …This is the # of hours we spend every day, looking at our phones. Not at each other. At our phones. Considering we sleep a chunk of the day, that means we spend more than a quarter of our waking time STARING AT OUR PHONES. I’ll have to say that when I first saw this number, I was scared, but not surprised. I can easily spend an hour getting sucked into my twitter and facebook feeds. But it made me stop and think: What if we spent a tenth of that time in face-to-face interactions? Just 30 minutes a day? It would deepen our relationships, improve our careers, and make our community even MOAR inclusive.
- Photo credit: #WOCinTech Chat, wocintechchat.com I'm not dissing online communities - I love the Success Community and the Developer Forums and Twitter. But, I am worried that the more time we spend online, the less connected we are in real life. [click] We need to spend more time face-to-face – that’s how we build authentic personal connections. So I need you to put down your phones…and Go To Coffee. Yes. Really. This is the action I want you to take: Go to Coffee. OK, well, not right now...because we still have a lot to talk about. And, no, it doesn't HAVE to be coffee, that's a simplification, for marketing purposes. The drink doesn't matter, what matters is you spend time, in person, with someone NEW or with someone in your circle that you want to know BETTER, and you spend time getting to know that person, finding a common bond, sharing your common values.
- Because that’s how you build authentic personal connections, and building authentic personal connections is just as important – and possibly more important - as learning about the newest technology or business strategy. Full disclosure - I did not become an expert coffee-go-er until maybe 7 or 8 years ago - pretty far along in my 25 yr career. So this is something that can be learned, and that is not often taught in school, so we’re going to teach it here today. And it's a journey, so what's important is taking it one step at a time.
- Right now, you might be thinking, “what? I don't have TIME to go to coffee! I’m too busy working!” The thing is, going to coffee IS working - it's how you learn about what's happening with people on your team, and in other teams in your organization, and what's happening in your community. It's also how you grow your network which can grow your career.
- I could talk about this a lot, but I recently saw Carla Harris talk about it, at the MAKERS conference. I was watching from my office at home, and started jumping up and down going "wait - that's it - she's saying what I've been saying - go to coffee!" So, I knew in that moment that I had to share it with you. Carla talks about 3 of her "hard earned pearls of wisdom” after being a woman on Wall St. for 28 years. This is Pearl #2… 3 min [video - 9:39 to 12:23] http://www.makers.com/blog/2016-makers-conference-carla-harris Pretty powerful, right? I recommend watching the whole talk - and the other talks from the MAKERS conference, they are all online. You must invest in the relationships. Going to coffee is one way to make that investment. And it's low-cost…but the payoff is big.
- Now I’d like to introduce someone who has successfully invested in relationships over the past few years and it has definitely paid off! Toya Gatewood [woohoo, clapping, Toya walks up] Hi Toya, thank you so much for joining us in Atlanta today! [Interview] Iik love Toya's story because it illustrates how career success is a combination of doing the hard work to be awesome at your job, and also taking the time to make connections and to get comfortable reaching out to people you don't know. But I’ve learned that it’s not enough to make connections with the people who are already in your circle…
- …you need to “diversify your feed.” This is something a Salesforce Master Instructor you may know, Leah McGowen-Hare, taught me. And I’m here to teach it to you. I’d spent probably 4 years going to coffee, but still my circle was still pretty homogeneous.
- An by that I mean, pretty white. And cisgender. It's a natural tendency we have - we are drawn to people we feel we already have something in common with. So I started to intentionally follow people on Twitter who were different from me, in some way. It opened up my world – new ideas, new events, interesting discussions. I also started to go to coffee with people who challenged my assumptions and made me think differently. It was a little uncomfortable at first, but in the end, I found we had more in common than I thought.
- Yesterday I blogged about a fun game you can play with your friends or coworker. Diversify Your Feed. Check it out on my website–you can also follow my journey on my website – looking back at my blog posts, they are about the new people I met and new ideas and ways I was learning about inclusion in tech over the past year or so. I’ve learned so much!
- Think about what would happen if all of us in this room intentionally diversified our feeds? What if every day, for just 30 minutes, rather than looking at our phones, we went to coffee with someone. Really got to know them.
- It would make our community even MOAR inclusive (and awesome)! But I know that there are barriers..
- How many people here have heard of unconscious bias? Learning about unconscious bias is incredibly important for all of us, and ONE of the steps you can take to do so is to check out our learning platform, trailhead, and the module on unconscious bias in the Cultivate Equality at Work trail. Its a great place to START learning more about how our brains work and how to recognize unconscious bias. We didn't have this trail 3 years ago when I started in this role as a Developer Evangelist and saw firsthand that many groups were underrepresented in our community. So like any of you who had to learn the Salesforce platform without Trailhead, I had to learn about unconscious bias on my own, through googling, through trying things out, and through talking to people…
- …One of those people was Ayori Selassie, the President of BOLDforce, an affinity group at Salesforce for employees of African descent. 4 years ago, she asked me to coffee. And as she says, the rest is history. Since then, we've collaborated on various projects around diversity & inclusion in tech, within Salesforce and in the broader tech community. How many folks have been to Dreamforce?
- I worked with Ayori, and Boldforce, and the other Salesforce employee groups, to raise awareness about diversity and inclusion within our developer community. In 2014 we curated 6 sessions and hosted 3 meetups. In 2015 it was 20 sessions and 6 meetups. And this year, who knows? But it all started with coffee – and it was virtual coffee, because I’d already moved from the Bay Area to NJ at that point. So even if you meet someone in the Success Community or on Twitter and they don’t live near you – set up a google hangout and invite them to virtual coffee.
- I love this photo from the BOLDforce meetup – you might see some familiar faces in here… I want to pause here for a sec - I am often asked why we NEED all these affinity groups - why is there a Women in Technology group when we don’t have a Men in Technology group? Why is there BOLDforce when we don’t have a Whiteforce? Why is there a Lesbians Who Tech Summit and not a Straight People Who Tech Summit? The person asking that question is almost always someone who hasn't needed an affinity group because they belong to the dominant group. I join an affinity group to have a safe space to refuel. Affinity groups are also where I go to meet other change agents. We talk about ways to make our workplaces or community more inclusive, so we'd have less refueling to do. One of the more common things people say at women's conferences is that they hope some day that we don't need women's conferences. That's to say that someday there won't be a dominant group, things will be equal, and so all conferences and workplaces will be 50/50.
- Well, more like 47/53, but I'm cool with that. My nirvana in the tech community is proportionate representation. 47% of the overall workforce is women, so I want to see women as 47% of the tech workforce, not 18%.
- Although, looking at the stats for Blacks and Hispanics in tech, 18% starts looking pretty good. 1 and 2% is clearly low, and again it is disproportionate. Overall, Blacks represent 12% of the workforce but only 1% of the Tech Workforce and Hispanics represent 16% of the overall workforce but only 2% of the tech workforce.
- I am focused this morning on changing the ratio in the tech industry, but I am well aware that there is a wider, systemic issue in this country when it comes to black and hispanic lives. Going to coffee is not going to stop police brutality. It’s not going to bring back the people we have lost. But it’s what I feel I can do. It’s the part I can play, and that I’m asking you to help. By interrupting unconscious bias and making our workplaces more inclusive, we can change the ratios in tech and achieve proportionate representation.
- Family is really important to me. You are all my family. I'm going to ask you to put your phones down again, and even Kristi this time, just for a few minutes. I want to share one of our internal videos about family, our Ohana. [Boldforce video – internal – removed] Having coffee with Ayori was the start of an authentic personal connection that has benefited us both in our careers, but more importantly as friends. I know this is true for a lot of folks in the Salesforce community. This isn't just where we come to work, it's where we make friends, friends who support us in our careers and in our personal lives. That's why it is so important to me that EVERYONE feels included. Everyone feels welcome. Everyone feels connected. It feels like a family.
- Sometimes being part of a family is uncomfortable. It was probably uncomfortable for Ayori to invite me to coffee. We didn't really know each other, we’d just kinda seen each other around. Asking people to coffee can be uncomfortable, but it is so important. That’s why I wanted to leave you this morning with some tips on how to get out of your comfort zone so that you can deepen your relationships, improve your career, and make our community MOAR inclusive.
- I talked about the importance of affinity groups. We have a number of affinity groups in the Salesforce community. How many of you are members of a local user group, women in tech group, or developer group? How many of you have joined an online group in the Success Community? My favorite Success Community group is Why Salesforce Admins Drink. Seriously. The best stuff gets posted there. And it's a way for Admins to share their stories, laugh, and refuel before they go back out into their company, where they are often the only. Who here is a solo admin? You know what I'm talking about. One of my favorite affinity groups is Women in Tech Diversity. It's a virtual group that meets the first Tuesday of every month, and it's a safe space for women of color and their allies to refuel and to discuss intersectionality and action plans for making change. That’s my one tip -
- I’ve asked Shonnah Hughes, the founder of the Women in Tech Diversity group, to join us today to share some more tips about getting out of your comfort zone. In addition to WIT Diversity, Shonnah leads the Minnesota Salesforce Study Group and co-leads the Minnesota Women In Tech Group. Thank you Shonnah for agreeing to share your tips for how you embraced being uncomfortable and became a "learned extrovert". SHONNAH Hello Change Agents, It is a pleasure to be able to share my experiences with you today. As Mary mentioned I have labeled myself a learned extrovert. What does that even mean, right? Well for me the majority of my life I displayed traits of introversion. I loved spending time alone, being able to get away from all the noise brought me much comfort and peace. I didn't want to meet new people, I didn't care what they had to say. However, I will say that a lot of my introversion was due to my environment and upbringing. I was taught that you mind your own business and you stay to yourself, this was taught as a protection. I do wish that I had learned sooner this mentality would stunt my growth personally and professionally. About four years ago I was fortunate enough to have a mentor that knew about my passion and who taught me that my introversion was causing me to miss out on some authentic and lucrative opportunities. It wasn't easy letting people in, this was and still is very difficult for me.
- However I started with baby steps, I actually smiled at people. No, Just kidding. My baby step was accepting invites to group happy hours or lunches.. I felt as though these environments would have less pressure and they did. The downside to this approach is that people aren't getting to know you in an authentic way. I truly wanted people to know who I was, my desire and passion for change. I knew for people to know that about me, the setting would need to be a bit more intimate. Again, this terrified me. How could I change such a fundamental part of me? Well it came down to the fact that I wanted to see and experience change. I thought awhile about my own introversion and how this was truly selfish behavior on my part. As I was experiencing and seeing inequality and injustice all around me I could do something but my fears were holding me back and paralyzing me. I never considered myself a selfish person so I was a bit irritated with myself so i said…Self what are you going to do about it.
- I decided then that I would start tearing down some of my walls, again baby steps. I was determined to start letting people in so that I could also let myself out. If I wanted to see change happen I would need to open up and let the world see me. This in turn would allow me to find my people, the people who wanted to see and experience the same change I did. I did not and will not allow their biases and even my own to stop me. When I started asking people to coffee and accepting coffee invitations my whole world opened and changed. I have met and made so many new friends.
- These new relationships has enriched me personally and professionally, these are not superficial relationships as I do not allow them to be. When you are 100 percent true to who you are and what you want you can spot the real from the fake. You will lose nothing by having coffee with someone, you will always gain. Even if the person isn't authentic you will have learned something from the interaction. So don't allow your own biases and fears to stop you from gaining knowledge and experiencing the joy that you will receive from just asking someone to have a coffee. … [Mary comes back out, Shonnah stays on stage] THANK YOU SO MUCH SHONNAH FOR ALL THAT YOU ARE DOING IN THE COMMUNITY, and for sharing these tips with us. I hope you have the chance to meet a lot of new people today, this is a pretty awesome crowd. Oh, and there was one other thing you wanted to do in this keynote, right? I think it was your favorite part about the Admin Keynote at Dreamforce…[Shonnah throws confetti]
- [Shonnah walks offstage] So this is where I turn to you. I want you to be change agents. I want you to be successful in your career. I want you to get out there and build authentic personal connections. I want you get past your unconscious biases, and meet new people – people who challenge your assumptions. I want you to take baby steps to bust out of your comfort zone and make magic happen!
- So, take 10% of that time you are spending looking at your phone, and look at someone else. Everyone in this room has something in common ... you can just start the conversation by saying "so, salesforce...". I challenge you to find someone you haven’t met yet and Go to Coffee with them! In fact, I want you to go to coffee so much, I'm financing it! I kicked off this keynote with my Ellen moment. This is my Oprah moment. Reach under your seats...$5 gift cards for each of you. Now, go to coffee!