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Many of us are “digital citizens”; we are used to living in a technical world. Some of us were born into it, others migrated to it and became “naturalized,” and a few are still around who helped create that world in the first place.

To us, living online is an everyday thing, and has been for a long time. Video conferences, “drop boxes,” live chats, and many other forms of digital communication are everyday, normal things for us. Even before the crisis, we shopped online, got our entertainment online, connected online — and we are therefore very much at home with the digital aspects of the current environment.

While we “citizens” certainly miss our daily contact with actual fellow humans, alternate means of connecting are second nature to us. While not as satisfying, perhaps, they are also not in themselves a major challenge for us to use and cope with.

This is not the case for a large number of people, some of them our own loved ones. Some people are being forced by the COVID-19 crisis to connect in ways they never have before. For them, this is its own source of stress. These are the “digital refugees” who find themselves driven to our native or adopted “digital country” as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.

I have several of these “refugees” in my own family, and I bet you do too. Like many Silicon Valley couples, I am a “techy” married to a “non-techy." My wife is, in fact, a clinical psychologist who—while certainly not tech-averse—is also not a digital citizen. She has found herself having to meet clients and staff using—to her—unfamiliar video conferencing tools. While she has been pleasantly surprised to find that therapy can still be very effective in this way, the tools themselves drive her crazy. As a fellow shut-in due to shelter-in-place orders, I’ve found myself in the tech support role at very frequent intervals. I’ll bet that most of us “citizens” also find ourselves giving aid to the “refugees” in our circle.

My 89-year-old father is also a very surprising refugee in our digital world. My siblings and I have been trying for years to get him connected to the internet, but he has been resistant. This is despite the fact that when you google my name (“James F Walsh,” same as his) my father’s memoirs about the Korean War in the Library of Congress are page-ranked much higher than anything I’ve ever written.

As another couple sheltering in place (he and my Mom still live independently), my Dad was cut off from his sole connection to the Internet—the public library. Persuaded by my daughter, his granddaughter, he finally agreed to try. I sent my Dad my last-generation iPad and—to my surprise and delight—he loves it. He has been FaceTiming the whole family, accessing the internet, responding to email—and generally taking to the digital age like a duck to water. I was thrilled to see this refugee to our land—at 89 years old—look like he wants to stay.

I in no way want to minimize the plight of physical refugees who are fleeing from oppression, warfare or starvation and trying to find a better life. In fact a member of my own family experienced this early in the 20th Century. However I am struck by the parallels of the current situation to the physical one.

Forced to retreat by this disease from many forms of engagement with the “physical” world, we have fled to a digital one. While many of us are at home there, others most definitely are not. We who are at home find ourselves in a position where we must help these refugees live in our world. Some of those refugees will like this new land and want to stay; others will “go home” as soon as they can. And all of us, refugee and citizen alike, will be very much altered by this event—let’s hope, in some ways at least, for the better.

In celebration of International Women's Day 2020, we're proud to highlight one of our own premier women in tech, Sunny Azadeh. As GlobalLogic's Chief Information Officer, Sunny has over 20 years of IT and business experience—as well as a strong reputation for building innovation and driving change.

What does it mean to be a CIO?

A CIO's mission is to be a trusted and transparent partner as we help build out business processes and platforms for growth, compliance, and employee delight. My goal is to connect people and processes through technology, identify future opportunities to evolve GlobalLogic's enterprise architecture, and mentor and develop leaders within my team.

Have you always wanted to work in tech?

I fell in love with computer programming during my very first class at San Jose State University. I enjoyed the challenge of working through logical processes to solve different problems. I saw technology as an art form, so I immediately changed my major to computer science engineering. In fact, I was one of the few females to attend the computer science department at SJSU when it was first established.

What has your journey to CIO been like?

I am what you call an "accidental CIO." I started my journey as employee #1 in a startup as a software engineer. I then transitioned to a larger company as a software engineer, and during the economic downturn I transferred to IT at the same company—not even knowing what IT meant! During the many years of my career progression, I found that what made me the happiest in my career was the opportunity to innovate and transform, and to see the impact and value it delivered to the business. I exited my second company as CIO (one of the few female CIOs in the Valley at the time), and since then I have had several roles as sitting CIO. I also started up my own software company and two consulting companies.

What has been the most fulfilling part of your career?

The people who mentored and sponsored me in my own career were amazing, which is why building up the next generation of IT leaders is so important to me. I'm proud to say that three of my "mentees" have successful consulting companies, and another three are sitting CIOs themselves. I also helped develop a Directors Group as part of my membership with the Consortium of Information System Executives. This group has successfully helped members navigate the path to CIO for nearly 20 years now. Mentorship and community engagement are most fulfilling for me.

What motivates you to work in tech, and what do you think is the “next big thing?”

I love to build and learn, and I get to do both in my role—from developing people, to developing myself, all the way to developing applications and infrastructure. I believe the next big thing is the intersection of many technologies coming together, powered by connectivity over the 5G network. Connected anything via Artificial Intelligence is also on the horizon. However, I am worried that we lack the privacy, security, and rules of engagement for this next phase in technology.

What do you think needs to change to bring more women into the tech industry?

There is a lot of focus on gender, but I believe the focus should be on diversity, which includes many other aspects. That said, we need to create an opportunity early on in our education system for all students to explore computer sciences, and to empower our youth with choices. I am delighted to see so many efforts in this space today, from Girls who Code to AnnieCannons, a not-for-profit focused on transforming survivors of human trafficking and gender-based violence into software engineers and entrepreneurs.

The second stage of getting more women into technology is ensuring equality in pay and career opportunities. There has been some progress made over the past 10 years, and there is a lot more good work to be done in this space. I encourage all leaders to step up and help; it requires a shift in mindset to purposefully build diverse teams.

What advice would you give to women who want to pursue a career in tech?

One word: grit. Be passionate and persistent in following your dreams.  Ask for help, find mentors and sponsors, ask for what you need, and build the path for both yourself and the next generation to follow. If tech is what you love, then tech is what you can do. Drive a career that is aligned with your passion, map out what you want to do, and be flexible to pivot as needed.

Early in my career, I had an administrative assistant who did not work out, and I had to let her go. She did not have the organizational skills I was looking for, and she seemed bored with the day-to-day work of expense reports, travel planning, etc. While she was serving her two-week notice period, I happened to walk by her desk one day at lunchtime, where she was sketching an absolutely beautiful portrait. I asked if she was an artist and she said yes, that was her passion and she worked on it every spare minute. She showed me her work, and it was absolutely incredible.

While I didn’t say anything then, I felt ashamed because I realized that mentally I had been questioning her competency—and maybe even her worth as a human being—because of how well or poorly she did at the job I assigned her. I realized that she was in fact enormously skilled and hardworking—just not at the work I had assigned her to do. I now understood that she was indeed an amazing individual; she was simply in the wrong job. She showed me that everyone is exceptional at something.

I’ve tried to keep this principle in mind ever since. I've found that if I can discover a person's passion and align it with their work objectives, they will deliver extraordinary results. They will also take huge enjoyment in their work and regularly go above and beyond. In fact, the major challenge once you find someone’s “sweet spot” is to keep them from burning themselves out.

Discovering an Employee's Passion

Shortly after I joined a different company, it underwent a major re-organization. Unknown to me at the time, my hiring was part of the new organization plan. Part of my job was to build a new engineering group within the company, and my boss told me to focus my recruiting efforts on a specific division within the same company. When I was given a list of high-performers to go after, I asked my boss, “What if they’re not interested?” He responded, “Don’t worry, they will be.”

As he predicted, I was successful in recruiting my top candidates—in part because I made the work sound interesting, and in part because rumors were flying that the division was being shut down (which turned out to be true). One of my top recruits was an immigrant to the US who would be eligible for permanent residency provided he stayed employed by my new company for another 9 months. I was aware when he accepted my offer that he was almost certainly just grabbing a lifeline to insure his immigration status, and that he probably planned to leave as soon as he got it. He was an extremely talented engineer / architect, so I decided to take the gamble that I would be able to find work that he loved and keep him on-board.

In addition to giving this new recruit a broad and challenging role, my approach was to dangle special projects in front of him and see which ones he latched onto. In each case, I’d try to “sell” the project’s interesting aspects and benefits, but at the same time I made no effort to force him to take any of them on. After two or three attempts, I found one that he got really excited about. I could tell he was sold because he started talking about the project as his own idea, even though I had talked him into doing it in the first place.

I knew he was not trying to take credit for “my idea”—on the contrary, he had started thinking of it as his because he’d made the idea his own. In fact, he not only delivered on the original idea, but took it way past the point I had ever envisioned. He grew it until it turned into a completely new and very successful line of business for the company. All I can claim is that, as his boss, I was smart enough to ride the tornado and keep problems out of his way. It was a win for him, for me, and for our company. And, of course, he ended up staying way past the point where he got his green card.

Mapping Passion to Purpose

As a manager, it’s a bit of an art to figure out what people are exceptional at. I’ve learned that the secret is to keep trying until you find an area where they start driving you instead of vice-versa. It’s also a challenge to figure out what people will be exceptional at before you bring them onto your team—though I’ve gotten better and better at that over the years. The key is to not just listen to what a candidate says during an interview, but to observe what they really get excited about. Excitement can of course be faked, but by looking for congruence between their apparent emotions and past behavior, you can at least start to form a picture.

It’s also an art to stretch the lines of a job description so that the job fits the person, but the work still gets done. There’s an age-old dilemma in business as to whether you fit the job to the person, or the person to the job. My own view is that, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, people are simply the “shape” they are. If you gather the right puzzle pieces together on your team, you can fit them together to cover your objectives. Your puzzle may not be a bunch of neat little rectangles within an organizational box, but your team will perform in a way that outstrips everyone’s expectations, including their own.

Planning Your Own Path

Perhaps the final frontier is to figure out what you yourself are exceptional at. This comes totally naturally to some people, but it took me years to figure this out for myself. I realized over the years that—regardless of my official job role­—I’ve always ended up playing a key role in launching new products to market. I think people could just tell that I was excited about it and good at it, and my bosses either got out of the way or actively pushed me forward.

Unfortunately for me, most product companies spend the vast majority of their time in routine day-to-day implementation. Launching new products—or even bailing out problem ones—is relatively rare, even in large and very innovative companies. That’s why it was good fortune that I landed at a product development services company. Given that we work with a huge number of initial or major product releases, I found that I can now focus on the areas of software development I enjoy the most—the architecture, design, planning, and launch aspects.

It certainly does happen that some people are great at jobs they hate, while others are terrible doing things they love (singing on YouTube comes to mind). But I have found that people will naturally perform better when they do things that bring them energy and excitement—and as managers, it serves us best to help our teams find that sweet spot.

I sometimes wonder whether that admin I had to let go found a place where her artistic talent could flourish and make her a living. I truly hope so. I owe her a debt for teaching me that we all are exceptional at something. We just need to keep looking until we find it—or it finds us.