Getting Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable [Nima George]

Hi, I'm Susan Drum and welcome to the Enlightened Executive where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help you get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness. This episode is brought to you by Meritage Leadership. At Meritage, we help strengthen leaders and empower teams to achieve high performance. Go to meritageleadership.com to learn more. Today we're focusing on creating inclusion and belonging in the workforce and I'm thrilled to introduce my guest, Nima George. Nima is the Director of Resources at Google where she oversees strategic infrastructure planning for computer and network resources, as well as efficiency management for Google Ads, commerce, payments and engineering. She's focused on three key areas as a leader. People providing an inclusive, safe and engaging work environment to help advance individuals and teams. Partnership to build strategic and trusting partnerships with client teams and partner teams across Google and technology where she asks, are they building the right long term infrastructure within the company to support their engineering teams? So welcome Nima.

Thank you very much, Susan. So glad to be here.

Well, I appreciate you taking the time out of the work that you're doing and I'd love to hear this really important topic about inclusion and belonging and creating a workforce and a culture and an environment that allows people to thrive. So I'd love for you to share a little bit about your background before we get into that. So what helped you the most in becoming the journey to a more conscious leader? And what twists and turns has your career taken?

Yeah, I'm happy to share, Susan. So I started out, so I was born and raised in Kuwait and then I went to India for four years of high school and then I came here for university and in college I realized that I was one of the few women in tech. My background is management information systems. So it's a combination of computer science and business management management. So I loved geeking out on, you know, coding and math. But I'm also a very people person and so I love the business side of things and which is why I went into business management as well.

Yeah, beautiful combination.

And in addition to that, I come from a family where we're always talking about personal development, being a better person. And we read a lot around these topics about how to contribute back to the world, how to grow yourself. And so I felt like along the way that helped me, that foundation that I gathered in my family helped me in tech in my first internship, along the way into growing into a manager and now a director at Google.

And so in your work in engaging your teams how do you create this environment for inclusion and belonging and have all the different types that you think is great? And I like to call it cognitive diversity. Right. You want to have different ways people think. But I think where people struggle or leaders struggle is how do I manage with those different personalities.

Yeah, absolutely. So Google, like a lot of large companies are taking this whole concept of diversity, inclusion and belonging very seriously. I'm actually one of the DEI leads for ads with inclusion being my main focus. And one would think that you need these huge, huge programs in place to make things work. And they're very much needed, don't get me wrong. But it's how you incorporate that in your day to day. A lot of times you see the CEO or the VP talk about diversity and inclusion and belonging, but how do you pass on those high level company values down to mid level management so that mid level management can embrace those values in their day to day? Let me give you an example. So in a meeting when you have 100 people dialed into video conference and there are few people who are extremely vocal, they have a lot of questions, they interrupt the speaker and then there are a few people who do have opinions, they do have questions, but they're very shy, they don't know how to speak up or they belong to a minority group, whether it's a woman or person of color. And they're not really used to actually they're not comfortable raising their voice or raising their hand and asking a question. And how does a leader play an important role there? This is where the values around inclusion and belonging comes into the picture where we encourage, encourage mid level managers to take a pause and ask people who are in the meeting, person X, do you have something to say? Person Y, I see you're nodding your head. Do you have a question? Right. And something as simple as that can go such a long way. Because here you are as a leader now trying to incorporate basic tools to make people feel included, like they matter, their opinion matters. And then once you start doing that, you realize people then start feeling comfortable raising their hands and it is not going to be easy. It's something, it's a very iterative process.

Yeah, because I wonder, maybe some leaders feel shy, not shy, but hesitant to do that because they don't want people to feel put on the spot and they feel like maybe that's worse. Tell me how you've navigated that.

So some leaders, I would say, and I'm trying to see if I was ever shy or hesitant to do that, I don't Think I ever was. I don't have that problem. But I do want to say, though, you bring up a great point. I wasn't always like this in my career. I used to be that person that was hesitant due to imposter syndrome. You know, you're in a meeting and you're thinking whether you're new to the team, you're new to the company, you're new to the organization, you're new to the program. You're always going to find yourself in situations where there is this voice in your head that says, I don't know anything about this topic. Should I actually raise my hand and ask a question? So, yes, I've been there in situations like that. And I, as a leader, I ask myself the. There were people who helped me out when I was going through that journey, and what helped me when I was going through that journey and climb up the ladder. Right. I had champions and I had mentors that supported me, that asked me and called me out. In these meetings when I was silent, there were a lot of people who were very vocal. And it was looking back, when I look at those situations, I realize those were the circumstances that actually made me exercise that muscle to feel like it's okay to be a tad bit uncomfortable. There are no stupid questions, so it's okay to ask this question. And I think along the way, that made me feel more confident in terms of, no, I don't understand this. I'm going to ask the question. So now I've tried to replicate that as well. And for leaders, I would say always try, try and go back to what helped you along your journey. All of us have had mentors, guides, coaches that have helped us in our careers, and so be that for someone else. Pass that on, you know, move it forward, right?

Yes. Yes. Do you have a mentor in your life that has been instrumental for you? And if so, how did they help you?

Yes, I have several mentors. And at work, I can say I have. I can name one Shiv. He used to be the VP of Engineering and ads, and he just left ADS recently, about a few weeks ago. And he's been a great mentor. And some of my other mentors at work, actually, the examples that I was giving you earlier about how. How when I was silent in a meeting, so he would actually ask me if I had any questions, did I have an opinion about the topic. So he did a great job in doing that, or he would delegate things to me in terms of talk to Nima, let her make the decision she needs to Review this. She needs to review the paper. Ask her what her opinion. And this was at a time when I wasn't even directory. I was a senior program manager. And, and there were a lot of times when I questioned, do I have the authority or the ability to assess this and have a 360 degree view and able to comment. And, you know, mentors and coaches and your guides in your professional career, especially at work, play a very important role in pushing you into that uncomfortable zone because they see something that you don't see yourself while being in that role. Right. And so which is why I definitely encourage all leaders and even my managers and my fellow managers, my peers at work, that it's very important to identify the strengths that your workforce brings to the table and then push them a tad bit in the direction of, you know, let's actually exercise that muscle of being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Yes, yes. You know what I think a great exercise to do with that is to sit down and say, well, what feels in your comfort zone with a particular employee? Employee. What feels like a danger zone? Like really out over your skis? And what can we get that. That's that middle ground, which is a performance zone, where it's, it's a. It's pushing the envelope. Right. It's not the comfort zone, but it's not so far out in the danger zone that the person's going to freeze, fight or freeze. But we need to keep pushing you in that arena and the more you as a leader can. It sounds like that's what people did for you.

I know that's what mentors had done.

For me. There were times where I was scared. I remember terrified to facilitate a very senior audience. And I was much younger and I had somebody who believed in me and pushed me out there and was it perfect? No. But that's how I learned. And now I have this amazing skill for. From everything that he is pushing, what are other strategies or even mindsets that someone needs to think about to create a more inclusive workforce.

Yeah. So great question. We are all biased whether we like it or not. It's just the nature of how the human mind works. And this is something that started during the caveman and woman era where, you know, anybody was after food, we considered them as a threat. And so it is just so natural for us to basically put people into boxes. And it is so important, important centuries later. Right. Even if no matter how much we read on this and think that we are not biased, there are a lot of times where our mind automatically goes into that mode. And so it's very important to catch ourselves. So what that means, how does that translate into the workforce, into your day to day? As a leader, it can be as simple as sifting resumes for a role. It can be as simple as interviewing somebody. And if they're not vocal enough or if they're not answering your question in a way that is pleasing to you, whatever that definition is, if they're not like you in terms of thinking abilities or approaching a problem, automatically, we end up concluding to a certain decision, right? Whether it's a yes or a no for that specific position. And so this is where I believe it's so important that, yes, when we incorporate inclusion and belonging in the workforce, it is so important. And this takes time. Don't get me wrong at all. This is where it takes effort and it takes time. This is not an easy problem to solve. But as a leader, it's so important to understand that when you're building your team, it is important to bring diverse minds together, because that's how you build a product with optimal quality. You don't want people to approach, approach the problem in a similar manner. You don't want people who think the same way on the same team. And I'm actually very mindful of that. When either I'm sifting through resumes or I'm interviewing or even within the team, my current team, I know that there are a few folks who are extremely analytical, they're very data driven. I give them a problem. Their first way of approaching that is let me just dump all the data and like, do some graphs and show you where the problems are. And then there are some folks who actually end up talking to partner teams and they're doing more research and they're trying and figuring out like, what are other people doing out there and should we be adopting similar methodologies? Right. And what I end up doing is, you know, I'm very cognizant of the fact that whether it's my current team or if I'm from interviewing somebody new, that I'm building a workforce where I have a good mix of folks.

So I imagine in thinking through how do you create that diversity of thought, one of the tools is really diving into how people solve problems. Tell me about a time that you had a particular issue at work and how did you approach that? Or give them some similar situations that you've had to solve in your teams and see how they might go about that. I'm just wondering, are there other ways to test? Because we're so biased. How do we make sure that we're staying open to the different ways of thinking and not judging it as lack of competence?

Yeah, and this is a very hard problem to solve. But one of the things that what I end up doing, because I'm not just managing my team, I also indirectly manage some of my partner teams. So there are folks who don't report, but I'm definitely coaching them in terms of how should they be running their projects or how do they work on a specific feature. So somebody might be great technically and they're a technical guru when it comes to solving a problem. And it's almost like I just have to give three sentences and they're already coming up with a solution. But what their area of development is the communication piece of it, how to package the problem statement and the solution and solicit feedback from everybody, their stakeholder group, and then surface it up to leadership. And this is where, you know, as a leader, sometimes in a situation like that, you get frustrated because, you know, the immediate response is, wait, you came up with a solution? And this is easy. All you have to do is put this in an email, solicit this feedback or a document, solicit feedback. And this is where you have to check in with yourself. Because something that has become so naturally to you doesn't necessarily mean it comes very naturally somebody else. And I'm at a point where, you know, this is what I've been doing for the past few years now. So now this comes very naturally to me, like this bias checking. But I know there are managers out there who struggle with this. Right. Because it's so easy to just go with the solution and then ask this person working on the solution. Yeah, put together the comms and then send it. And when it's not up to par with what your requirements or expectations are, you end up getting frustrated and then you end up having that conversation with your direct report or the person that they could have done better.

The work that you need to do around, I imagine you were facing a lot of that situation where people are very good technically but need to work on the developmental skills of communication and how they package their work. And do you mostly do that by you coaching or. Or are there other ways to help the more technically inclined and less relationally inclined individuals?

So at Google, we do have a lot of resources, so we highly encourage the teams to sign up for these classes. And so there is a lot of resources available. But as a lead myself, I do take a personal interest in my team and making sure that they're all developing as far as, you know, their goals are concerned. Right. So I'm always having conversations as far as where do you want to go technically and where do you want to go non technically. And because I am director of program management, Program management is actually very much a combination of both. You have to know the technical space and the domain that you're supposed to, but you also need to have the communication skills and the stakeholder management skills that are very important.

Let's focus on women in tech because that was another topic that we had touched on. Tell me a little bit about your perspective there.

Yeah, so when I started in college, I was one of the few women in my class that, you know, ended up taking a computer science course. And I remember taking first day of college in my CS class and thinking, is this a mistake? And it's hard. It was hard back then because I was new to this country and very new experience and my first class, I am the only person. So when you look around and you're not seeing people who you can identify with immediately, you know, as a human, you, you tend to become very isolated, I think is the right word there. And I would seek out people who looked like me and who, you know, it was just this natural tendency that, oh, I see a woman and oh my God, and she's in computer science. Great. And of course this has evolved, you know, along the years and great, I'm so happy to see that. But that being said, there are still a lot of industries out there, including tech, where women don't really dominate the workforce. It's very uneven. And along my journey, I've definitely sense that and experience that. Where I've been in meetings where I was the only woman in the room and I'm still in some meetings where I'm the only woman sometimes that has changed, of course, since I first started my journey, my career journey in tech. But nonetheless, like, this is definitely still, still prevalent situation that happens today. And as a lead, this is something, you know, going back to the example I gave you, right? Like some of my coaches and mentors did a great job in promoting me and pushing me into that uncomfortable zone of, you know, Nima, do you have something to say? Hey, do you, do you want to say something? And especially in a room full of male engineers. And this is we back when I first joined Google and everybody had an opinion. And here I was thinking, oh, I don't think I know this, I don't think I can say this. I'm going to look stupid Maybe I should just keep this to myself. My mentors back then definitely pushed me to be okay with asking even if they're stupid questions, who cares? Just speak up in the meeting. And I want to give you an example, Susan. Actually I think I joined Google in 2006. Now my LDAP because my last name is George. For the longest time actually people thought I was a male because in the system, right? Yeah, in the system all they saw was George. And so here I was updating all these bugs and updating it. And so one day when we finally had like an in person and this is during a time when I was working with some global teams. So one day when we finally had an off site where everybody had to fly into Mountain View and we were all in one room finally, this is months later, I was in a meeting and there were, you know, very strongly opinionated people there and we were discussing some document and, and people were talking and I had something to say and I said, well if you do this then you're missing out on ABC and then you have to do that XYZ and to have you considered, blah, blah. And then this person, and I was the only female in this room and this one of the very opinion based person in the room goes and who are you? And I looked at this person and I said, well I'm Nima George. I've been working on this for the past six to seven months. And then who is Nima George? And he goes, Nima George. And here I am thinking, oh gosh, nobody knows me. What's going on here? And then all of a sudden somebody else said something like oh my gosh, you are the George we see on those bugs because we thought that person is a meal.

You were a female. Right.

And the reason why I wanted to highlight that example is, you know, something is like subtle as that. You know, you take that with you like as a junior person on a team and you just feel like, like wait, do I even matter? Like did people even know that, you know, I existed And I worked on this project. Right. And this was really long, long time ago. Right. But these are the things where you know, like this is why inclusion and belonging is so important. And the latest buzzwords today in terms of how to be an effective leader because you don't want to create moments like that and you've experienced them. Right.

I mean so no wonder this is such an important cause for you given what you've had to face in your career.

Yeah, yep. Definitely. Yeah. And, and, and that's the Thing is, as a leader, you need to be so mindful of these situations. And of course, you know, since then, the tooling and everything has changed where now you, you know, hover over and then there's a picture on the, you know, who is this Nima George person and all of that. Things have changed a lot since, you know, like 2010. Right? Yeah, but, but regardless, this is how a lead can pay attention, you know, to these kind of circumstances. Because you don't want your workforce walking away from a meeting, from a project where someone feels like, do I matter? Do I belong here? Nobody even knew I worked on this project. Does it all boil down to how my login name shows up on this tool? Right. And this is why, you know, this is a very important topic for me. Whether it's women in tech or whether it is anyone in tech, it's the, the concept of, you know, how can you bring your true self to work where you don't have to hide, you don't have to worry about, am I even accepted here for being who I am?

Yes. Yes. In fact, there's incredible data right now that shows that particularly Gen Z is having trouble even getting a word in edgewise into a meeting. And you think about that, what are we doing as leaders to promote greater, Create the platform to create greater diversity of thought, opinions and like you said, calling people out, what would you say is one thing that people could do tomorrow, leaders could do tomorrow to foster a greater inclusive culture and team environment?

Yeah, great question, Susan. So I'm going to actually leave you with something that's very simple. This is a talk, and this comes from a talk that I gave at Google on topic of diversity and inclusion. Something as simple as in your one on ones with your direct reports or team meetings. Starting the meeting with, how is everyone doing today? There's a lot of things going on in the world today. Just wanted to do a quick check in to see how folks are doing. It is quite overwhelming. And then also reminding your team in terms of, please come talk to me if anybody would like to talk about anything that's bothering them. And when I gave this talk at Google, I remember there were managers who ended up saying, I have never done this before. Like, I start my team meetings with production emergency issues because we have easier things that need to be fixed. So we go into a meeting and we pull up meeting notes and we're talking about, okay, we have these fixes and those fixes and these things. And wouldn't it be awkward if I now started doing this all of a sudden. Right. And so, and I would say to all the leads out there, no, you. All you. And this is for the leads to push yourselves into that uncomfortable zone a little bit. So what if you're going to feel a tad bit awkward for the first, first two to three minutes of the meeting?

It is about how you lead. So when you talk about retention of workforce, you got to look in the mirror and saying, how am I leading? And how am I. What kind of environment am I creating for people? So this is great. Well, thank you for spending some time with us today. Can you tell me where, if people want to reach out to you to hear a bit more, how can they connect with you?

They can find me on LinkedIn, Nima George. That's where they'll find me.

Great. Well, thanks again for being part of the Enlightened Executive.

Thank you.

If you loved this episode, you are not going to want to miss my interview with David Rendell, who discusses a unique strategy on how to be a better leader by balancing your strengths while amplifying your flaws. Let's lead the way. Hope you enjoyed today's episode and I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of the Enlightened Executive.