140. Women Leading Together: The dynamics of women working together explored with Iliana Montauk — Women Emerging Podcast

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Women Emerging Podcast. I'm Julian Middleton, founder of Women Emerging and your podcast host. Every Wednesday I explore how women lead differently. Over time, all of us who are part of Women Emerging are determined to redefine leading so that more of us can say, "If that's leading, I'm in." Do women work well together? Of course we do! I don't know where this rubbish comes that we don't. Ah, of course we do! This series, this new series in the podcast starts with Ileana telling us how she and Laila have become a winning founder team at Monara. It's a very inspiring story. The secrets, they think, of two women achieving such extraordinary things together are: one, recognizing that there are lots of different ways to lead and allowing each other to be very different; two, meeting regularly to reinvent their complementary roles, to rethink the distribution of tasks and roles between the two of them for the benefit of Manara, and 3, allow space for feelings. They are great pieces of advice. Listen to this podcast, it's beautiful. Ileana, get going.

Ileana, there's this crazy theory that women don't work together, and we all know it is a crazy theory and it's not true, but Let's play with it. You and Laila have worked together for a long time and done some pretty amazing things through some pretty tough times. So tell us the secrets. What are the secrets to women working successfully together?

I don't know how much your audience knows about the tough time we've been through together. It's been really inordinate. Laila and I met you know, 10 years ago when I was living in Gaza and she was a new grad. And we started working more closely together a few years after that when she had moved to Silicon Valley. Now, you know, we're co-founders of Manara. We've been working on Manara since 2018, first as a passion project, and then we founded it and started working on it together in 2020. And there have been 2 wars in Gaza or 3 since we started. And Laila's family has been impacted by all of that. So it's been incredibly, incredibly intense. I think the most important thing that we've learned about working together is that we have very different leadership styles in some ways. We're aligned in some ways, we're very different in other ways, and that's okay. And there isn't a better way or a worse way. You know, I think I had some kind of bias towards wanting to lead more in my way, and I used to think my way was maybe more feminine or more, you know, considerate or something like that. And I found Laila's way to be incredibly valuable for Manara, for me. And so I think the key thing that has made us work through our differences and be really good leaders together is just that respect that we have for each other, how much we admire each other, and our willingness to work through each of those differences and create a team and a company that benefits from those differences.

I want the specific examples, and then I got loads of questions, but let's start with the specific examples.

Yeah, so I am a— on the Enneagram, if you've done the Enneagram, it's one of these personality tests. One of my main Enneagram components is a 2, which is that I care so much about feelings of people. And if I'm in a meeting, A big part of what I'm doing is looking at the facial cues of everyone in the meeting and how is each person feeling. Laila hasn't done the Enneagram yet. That's another one of our differences. You know, has a little bit maybe more skepticism towards these kinds of tests, but I'm confident that she's an 8, so she's not conflict averse, very direct, really believes in moving quickly. And the fact that we already have high trust and so we can just speak directly. And get shit done. And what this has led to is sometimes, for instance, in meetings with each other or with the team, Laila speaking in a tone that's very kind of commanding or confident and for me at times used to be intimidating occasionally, or for some of our team members, or just, you know, getting straight to the point and worrying less about feelings, whereas I'll be very careful with my language, etc. And Laila will be like, what are you even saying? I don't understand. I don't know if I can trust you. Are you actually saying what you think? Right? And, and I have found that I've needed to lean a lot more in her direction at times in the company leadership, that at times what I was saying was not clear to people because it was, you know, too couched in language and worries about feelings. And I also was really inspired to find out this year at a conference that the CEO of NVIDIA, which is currently being celebrated as one of the most successful companies, has a policy of giving feedback publicly constantly, that he's not going to take you away one-on-one to share feedback, that, you know, everyone needs to be able to have open conversations about what's going well and what's not. And so that was also very validating for me to realize that Laila's approach and style and values can very much lead to a very successful company, that there isn't a better or a wrong way.

Does Laila recognize that sometimes she's too direct and she needs Yes, yes, it's gone both ways.

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, she's also learned to speak in a way, in a different tone, or, you know, be a little more careful of her language in certain situations. So she's built that muscle. I've built the other muscle. We've both come a little bit closer to the middle or just developed a wider range, which I think is important as a leader, you know, having a wide range and knowing when to be in which range.

You know, it reminds me of women that I've worked with closely over the years, and sometimes it makes you laugh, doesn't it? Because there's some outsider who thinks they can divide you up by sort of playing you off against each other, and you know each other so well, you just laugh, and you both laugh at watching this person thinking that they can divide you because you're different. But actually, in a funny way, it's because you're different that you can't be divided.

That's right. I think that that's one thing that we saw from the beginning is we didn't want to be the same. There were parts of the differences that we immediately valued. You know, she's the technical leader and her technical brain and capacity is something I will never understand, right? It's just amazing what she's able to very quickly figure out on the technical side. And we're a company that teaches people software engineering, so that also impacts the core business of what are we teaching, how are we teaching it. She has an amazing capacity around that. And so many other amazing capacities. She gets so much done so quickly. She can zoom out and be so strategic, right? And for me, I think what was interesting is seeing how committed we were to each other and to our success together. And that still there can be bumps and you can work through those bumps. But yeah, there have been moments where people have come and tried to divide us and we're like a fierce lioness when that happens. We are each other's biggest defenders. We see how hard the other one cares, how hard the other one's working, and how much the other one brings to the table. And we know you have to have room for people as entire human beings. Nobody's going to be the perfect in everything. One of my coaches once told me that I was dreaming of being a unicorn and an elephant and a giraffe and a zebra all combined. You can't just choose that you want the horn and the long neck and the, you know, stripes and everything. You have to accept that you're not going to be able to go to a restaurant and select, I want these parts of the leadership style and be perfect at everything. You're not. And I think that's a key part of working well together is just how much we accept each other. Let me actually give the most recent example of this. I tend to be a perfectionist. And at one point, Laila came to me and said, I can't put up with this. This is not serving the company. It's not good for the company. It's not good for me. You need to change. And I said, I can't change this. I am a perfectionist. We need to figure out how to manage around my perfection. There are certain things where maybe you just don't show them to me because, you know, if I look at it, I'm gonna see all the little details, right? And now she's teaching the team how to operate with me. So people who haven't worked with me before, you know, they'll come and then they'll go back to her and say, Ileana had all this feedback on this thing, and she says, let me help you parse it. You know, she's our best QA tester when we need it, but we don't need the CEO being our QA tester all the time. So bring these kinds of things to Ileana, and when she starts giving you this kind of feedback, thank her for it and add it to your backlog for later.

But she also knows that she needs a perfectionist around her.

That's exactly right. That's like, that's why she says in certain situations we need her. She's going to be our best asset, right? So bring those things to her where we need that. And she'll keep the quality high at the company overall. Right. But yeah, in other situations, we have to know how to manage around this and accept it.

Now, you've, you've occasionally used a coach to sort of figure all this out. Tell us about that.

Yeah, I'm a huge believer in coaching, by the way. I have a coaching degree myself. I used to have a coaching business. But the— but there's so many different types of coaches, and you really don't know what a coach does when they call themselves a coach unless you're familiar with a school that they went to. The coach that has helped us the most, she's actually also a hero of ours. She's a founder of Andela, which is a talent platform for African talent, and she's an angel investor in Monara and a mentor. And she started a coaching business while we were running Monara and ended up being willing to take us on, which was amazing. And she offers coaching that uses a method from Talentism. It's a company that works a lot with talent and has done a lot of research, but specifically she works with co-founders. And so she'll work with each founder individually, and then she can also do joint coaching if needed. But mostly it's all about how do you design around yourself, accept yourself, except yourselves, and figure out how to design around yourselves to have the most success for the company.

So what does that mean? What does that mean?

So one example, for instance, I am the person at Monata in charge of partnerships and sales, developing new partnerships. Is that what I always dreamt of doing? Is it what I'm compulsive about? She asks us constantly to look at what are you compulsive about? Because if you can align your role with your compulsions, you're going to be the most successful. And at times your compulsions will get in the way because your role is designed to be working on something different, right? And so my compulsion is not in sales. I love relationships. I love that part of partnership building, of getting to know people. But I'm not like a person who just wants to go and close deals. I'm much more compulsive about things like the team and the environment we've set up for them and the process, like the HR kind of side of things, right? And so she helps us see that this is the role you have to wear for the company right now because you're a small company, you know, you have to wear multiple hats. But this is not ultimately of service to you or to the company to have you in this role, or maybe only this part of the role you're in service, this other part you are working like you're pushing a boulder uphill, right? And so she helps us accept that, not feel like we have to be good at areas which we're not necessarily compulsive about, and helps us develop a plan for how can we do that right now when we need to, and what might it look like in the future. And as a part of that, she has us sit down every 6 months and look at what's your role right now, what's my role right now, because even though your role is CTO and my role is CEO, at an organization of this size, you know, we were 10 people when we started working with her, 20 now, you, the title means almost nothing. You just have to do what it's gonna take, right? And so she helps us facilitate that conversation with each other of checking in, how are you feeling about your role right now? How is it playing to your strengths and your compulsions? And, you know, should we switch hats? Should she run sales for a while and partnerships, right? Everything is open for discussion. And it's never that you're failing because you're bad at sales. No, you're not compulsive about it. It's the wrong role for you. And so it makes you feel better about being in it for the short term and designing around how can we set you up for success while you're having to be in this role. Or if you're too compulsive about something, how do you become aware of that and make sure you're not spending all of your time on something which isn't driving the most value?

So inherent in that is, is, is the concept that you have to sort of reinvent your role on a regular basis, which, you know, I used to use maternity to do that.

I had—

I remember when I was going, uh, I had 4 children, I was deciding whether I was going to go for 5, and I said, well, if I don't go for 5, when am I going to have maternity and have chance to think again and reinvent myself. But the truth is, when you're running small businesses, you have to reinvent yourself because the business needs different things of you. And that means reinventing both of you and reinventing both of you to be compatible.

That's exactly right. That— you nailed it. That's— that's— you're— you're— it's like being in a relationship where one person's growing this way, this person's growing this way, And you— so you have to always stay in touch about that, right? And I love what you said about maternity. Laila had to step away from the business for a while this year because her family was in life-threatening danger in Gaza and she needed to focus full time on just getting them out. I admire her so much for this. When she came back, she was more strategic than ever. She got us out of the weeds. She went from having been an individual contributor to really backfilling herself on those IC roles and really wearing a strategy hat, in part because she was forced to by the circumstances. So a little bit like maternity leave might force you to step away and think differently, right? Unfortunately, not as wonderful circumstances as maternity leave, but still, I think— and you mentioned it's for small businesses. I do think that small business is important, but even at larger businesses, you know, you're right to innovate, right? Like company directions change, and you have to not get stale and rigid. So I think that journey is a journey we're always on, and having a common just set of language around how to speak about it, it's amazing. I don't feel like we need to have the coach as often as we used to, just because we have a few shared concepts that, yes, our roles change, and yes, we have to design around each other, and yes, we can grow, but we also have to accept each other the way we are. And then there's one more core concept that she taught us, which is to be viewing everything always as an experiment and always come at it as, hey, we have a hypothesis. So it could be something like, we have a hypothesis that if we co-work more often, we'll be more productive, the two of us. You know, it doesn't even have to be a big company goal, KPI experiment.

Yeah, yeah.

Anything. Or we have a hypothesis that our hiring process will improve if we add a hack week and we have people actually work with each other, with us for a week before we hire them. Right. All these kinds of things. We always phrase it as an experiment. Let's try it. Let's see how it happens. Let's track it. And, and so as a result, I think we're also just less attached to our very strong feelings. We, you know, our opinions or data, you know, sometimes we just don't have enough data. It makes it a lot easier to have conversations about things that we want to do. And, and so that kind of foundation baseline, I think, is incredible for being able to lead together.

The other thing you said to me is this expression space for feelings. What does that mean?

You know, um, the— there's no way to run a business and not have feelings. There's no way to be working with a leadership team and not have feelings. People are going to have strong opinions. They're going to have feelings along the way. People will get feelings hurt, or they'll feel discouraged by something that happened, not necessarily between you, the two of you, just the business was happening with a a team member or, um, or the way that the business is going. There may even be excitement, enthusiasm. Um, but I think the harder feelings, uh, you know, sadness, disappointment, anger, things like that, frustration. Exactly. Um, those people feel sometimes think when, at least I thought when I first got into leadership role, that maybe you're supposed to just let go of that. Because you're just now a leader, a business. I don't know. There's something that feels very official about it.

Let's not get emotional about this.

Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly. And the fact is feelings matter so much. And one of the things that Laila and I noticed is if we have things that are draining our energy, our energy is literally one of the top resources for this company. We're a Y Combinator startup, so we've had incredible advice from the YC community. And one of the best partners and advisors at YC, Michael Siebel, at one point told us, you want to manage your founder juice, like drinking juice.

Yeah.

How much juice do you have in you? It's a limited resource. It's not going to last forever if you're not making progress, right? If you make progress, it gives you energy. If you're not making, you know, if you're not reaching certain milestones, it might decrease your energy. So, um, emotions are a part of founder juice. If you're feeling angry at each other as founders, it's going to drain both of your energy a lot, right? If you're feeling frustrated at a team member or at a partner you're working with, or, you know, if you're feeling discouraged, etc. So the thing that was interesting, I think, is I always wanted to talk about feelings. And for Laila, at one point in our journey, she loved that too. And we actually used to call it our weekly founder therapy session. It would just kind of, it just happened organically. We would meet once a week to co-work. We'd always start with a walk. And during the walk we would just vent. Often it was actually feelings of like not being good enough, you know, imposter syndrome at the beginning of the founder journey, right? And I'd share mine with her and she would reassure me like, what are you talking about? This is in your head, you're fine, and vice versa, right? So we love that. But there was a phase where Laila pulled away from that, I think because of how much she was going through in her life. And also because we started to have a few disagreements, and it turns out that that was very stressful for her. And for me, I just want to jump in and like talk about the disagreements. For her, it was very draining to have to do that. And so if she did that, then she wouldn't be able to work for the rest of the day, right? She ended up investing this year in going to an incredible founder retreat. Where they really spend the time learning to talk about feelings primarily. And there's some other things there too, but that's a very big component of it. And so Laila came back with much more, I'd say, comfort with that being a part of what just has to happen as the business, you know, fluency around it, but also able to tell me how to support her with those kinds of conversations because they're so hard for her. So, you know, Once a week, we know it's going to be happening at this time. Don't bring it up at other times. And it wasn't even just things where we might be in conflict. It could be things like, I'm going through a hard thing in my life right now and I want to share it with Laila, but she cares so much about me that then she'll spend the rest of the afternoon worrying about me. Right. And it'll distract her from other things. So we learned that there has to be space for feelings. If you're not making space for them, they are there and they can get they could bloat out of proportions if you're not talking about them, but also that different people have different ways of dealing with feelings. And ultimately, it's the business goals that we're focused on. Ultimately, that's what unites us the most around what we're working. Yes, there's the respect, and we would be friends even if we weren't working on the business. But ultimately, that's why we are here, is to build this business. And so how do you make space for feelings You know, respecting each other's needs and in service of the business.

And not try to change the other person's feelings.

Yes, yes, exactly. Yes, yes.

Let people— yes. I think this is the most wonderful episode. I have loved every minute of it. I'm going to— I think this is the first. We're going to do some more. We'll go and talk to some more founders. And find out more and see if we can make a long list of all the things we all should do more. But thank you for starting this off, Ileana. It's fantastic.

It is a pleasure. I am, you know, it's such an incredibly deepening experience to work with somebody on this level. And I've grown so much thanks to Leila. And I know she would say the same about working with me. And we don't frequently get the chance to reflect on it and talk about how much we've grown together. So thanks for creating a space for that as well.

Ileana, that was, that was fantastic. Really, really, really practical advice. We got it. We got it. We got it. Women work brilliantly together. Especially you do. It was wonderful. Now we're going to do more of these episodes over the next few weeks. We're going to go and talk to women who work utterly brilliantly together, because we do, and let's capture how and why we do it. So, look forward to next week. Lots and lots of love, Julia. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to follow our podcast channel or follow us on Instagram, or join the Women Emerging community on LinkedIn or through our website, womenemerging.org. That's womenemerging.org. There you can find out about the expeditions that we're currently running and how we can help if you decide to start an expedition yourself.