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“Fighting Fatigue & Burnout as Employee Resource Group Leader”: Emily Garcia, Google; Janice Litvin, Banish Burnout Toolkit; Angie Chang, Girl Geek X (Video + Transcript)

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Angie Chang: Welcome today a fireside chat / panel of women in tech to talk to us about fighting fatigue and burnout as an ERG leader. I wanted to kind of talk really quickly about why we thought about this. We are at the tail end of a pandemic. We’ve seen a lot of women take on extra roles on top of work, and we’ve heard a lot about ERGs and how great they are at building inclusion and feelings of belonging at the workplace. And at the same time, we’ve also heard about women taking increasing roles and feeling burned out and really fatigued and wanting to do good and make an impact while also wanting to take care of themselves. This is an evergreen topic.

Angie Chang: We’ve invited some really relevant and excellent women who can speak to us about their experiences running ERGs and fighting fatigue and banishing burnout. I’m gonna first let them and ask them, introduce themselves since reading their bios will do no justice to them. Please welcome Emily, and if you can share with us about your background.

Emily Garcia: Thank you so much for having me, Angie and the Girl Geek team. My name is Emily Garcia. I run the supply and demand management team at Google for our Pixel products within the devices and services organization. As a planning team, what we do is we make sure that we have inventory and revenue for our Google phone product launches worldwide. I’ve been supporting our Pixel phones for now seven years in my time at Google.

Emily Garcia: On top of that, I also run an employee resource group (ERG) called Women in DSPA, being the Devices and Services organization. This is a global women’s group across all of our sites where the devices and services organization is formed. And I run the Senior Leadership council for that ERG. And what we do is we set up events across our strategic pillars. Every year, I make sure to onboard and hire new council members, set the strategy for the year, and make sure that we can land amazing events to serve our community.

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Emily Garcia: On top of that, I’ve been an industrial and operations engineer for over 12 years, uh, most of my work in tech and now residing in the Bay Area. Thanks for having me.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Emily. And that was a great introduction. Next we have Janice Litvin, who is an author and speaker. Why don’t you tell us about yourself?

Janice Litvin: Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Angie. I’m so happy to be here. My name is Janice Litvin. I’m on a mission to help leaders and teams banish burnout in their organizations. I came to this with a background tech. I started out as doing software development, then I did software consulting because I loved working with people.

Janice Litvin: I became a software trainer, and eventually I became a software recruiter for 20 years. During the recession of 2008, I needed something else to do because there was no hiring. Through a circuitous route, starting with Zumba Fitness, I am where I am today, which is speaking and sharing ideas about how to help people overcome and prevent burnout in their organizations. I love the Girl Geek community because I have a tech background and I love working with groups like this.

Angie Chang: That’s really awesome. Thank you, Janice. I was curious today, so I wanted to hear from Emily about how your work in employee resource groups or ERGs has moved or evolved over time.

Emily Garcia: I’ve been running this group for a little over three years now, and every year has been drastically different because when we first formed, you know, we’re at the beginning at the height of the pandemic. It was a very, very small team. We were really only serving Americas, more specifically just Mountain View where we’re headquartered. And everything was being done virtual. It was a very, very tiny team. I think when we did Women’s History Month, I was pretty much running it solo with some support from Yvette production. Um, and I was, I was dying <laugh>.

Emily Garcia: And then the next year, we became a lot more structured. We created a solid council. It was our first year that we also expanded into some countries in EMEA and APAC, and it was our first year doing summits. Summits is a really big moment because then we can come together, but they were all virtual. Now this year it’s our third year running. We have a very large structure council of around 15 people. We have executive sponsors in each region. We’ve developed a really key strategy, and we’ve expanded in each of the regions as well. This is our first year in India, and our first year really supporting Dublin and doing in-person as well as livestreaming summits as well.

Emily Garcia: Now in a full hybrid world, things get a lot more complex from an event execution perspective. And as we’ve gone bigger and bigger and we serve a bigger population, a bigger community, we’ve also been really, really focused on what is the strategy, how do we wanna serve the community? And then how do we create the right structures and systems in place, one, to avoid burnout, but also to make sure that the people that are doing all this work who is, which is completely extra. It’s not their day job, it’s not what they get hired for. They really do see the value and the recognition in doing that work. It’s been a massive year on your evolution, and I still feel like we have tons to go, but when I look at, when we started three years back, I was like, wow, okay. We’ve done a lot. So I’m really, really proud about that.

Angie Chang: Yeah, it sounds like ERGs do great work and you do great work at your ERG. How do you create the incentives for people to work in an ERG? Um, I personally heard from different companies, ERGs, where some people are pushing to get paid. Is that like the frontier for their work? So how do you look at creating incentives?

Emily Garcia: Our current structure at Google is that you may have dedicated HR or people ops people that support DEI but they’re not necessarily running ERGs that are more serving as consultants. You may also have full-time employees that are helping on production and execution. But the ERGs are fully volunteer positions where people are taking extra time out of their work to be doing this. And that this happens across all of the different employee resource groups as well as all of the different sites globally.

Emily Garcia: One of the things that we’re doing this year that is different than previous years is we really, really push to solve for three things – visibility, recognition, and accountability. The first one is, visibility. Oftentimes, managers don’t know what their employees are doing within the ERG work because they’re not directly involved, and so they have no idea what their employee is doing, how many hours they’re consuming.

Emily Garcia: We asked to involve the ERG work in as part of the expectations that the employee set at the beginning of the year and as part of the quarterly checkpoints with their manager. You are creating a conversation and making sure that the manager is acknowledging and supporting and really understanding that a chunk of that time is being dedicated to that.

Emily Garcia: The other part is accountability, because you are asking the employee to have that handshake with the manager. And because you’re asking them to involve it as part of their expectations or quarterly checkpoints, it puts the accountability on that employee so that if they’re signing up to be on a council, they know that they have to deliver and they know that they need to be there for their council to be able to support these initiatives.

Emily Garcia: In the past, we’ve had people that join with all the great intentions and then they drop off, they can’t do it, they burn out, they disappear, and the rest of the council just still needs to do all the events and just creates an even bigger potential for burnout for everyone else. And so making sure that everyone’s really being held accountable for their roles in the ERG.

Emily Garcia: And lastly, but definitely not least, this recognition, right? Making sure that that work is very heavily recognized. When we have a big moment like a summit, we will do a round of recognition, whether it be just email blasts or it be monetary small gifts, end of the year, for all of the employee resource groups. We also do some sort of recognition, monetary, small bonuses, whatever it can be, and making sure that not just the manager, but the senior manager and the leadership chain, gets information what their employee did in the ERG and is helping celebrate the work.

Emily Garcia: These three things are really key, and structural, to making sure that, one, you avoid the burnout; two, you have a really strong counsel, and three, that people see that their organization and their company values the work that they’re doing, especially knowing that it’s volunteer work on the side. Oh, I see a comment, visibility, accountability and, uh, recognition.

Angie Chang: I had to highlight them. I was like, I love this. I’m gonna put this on a poster on my wall or a post-it <laugh>. Those are really great pillars. I’m gonna just make a note of that. Now pivoting to Janice to speak about burnout, which is what we wanna avoid as we work on so many initiatives. Actually, sorry, back to Emily, I forgot.

Angie Chang: How have you avoided burnout or learned from it since you have been doing so much?

Emily Garcia: Yeah, I went from solo running every single event to not individually running any event and just kind of program managing the council itself. I think creating the structures and making sure that I went to my executive leadership and said, we need at least x amount of people on the council.

Emily Garcia: We need to divide and conquer. For example, in our strategies for this year, one of our pillars is leadership and development. I have two people there so there’s a buddy system and they’re only focused on that pillar. They’re not focused on anything else. Making sure that people have digestible chunks of ownership where it’s manageable as well as either a buddy or a support system in place. That’s helped me a lot.

Emily Garcia: It’s establishing boundaries as well. Like there’s a million things that we would wanna do as a community, but there’s a limit as to what I can do and what my council can do. And setting those boundaries and saying, we know women’s history month is really important and we’re really gonna do three amazing events. I’m sure we would love to do 47, but we do not have the time and space and money and <laugh> the the support system to be able to do that much and really, really figuring out, let’s do less and let’s make those moments way, way, way more impactful and let’s really pick our battles and really figure out where we make a difference.

Emily Garcia: I think the third piece in myself of avoiding the burnout is understanding when to say no. ERGs do a lot for the company and do a lot for the community. It’s very easy to be like, oh, can you guys do this? Can you guys do that? And really just saying, no, this is the extent of what we can support and it, it sounds amazing, and we will add that for our strategies for next year ,and like really trying to scale responsibly and not feeling bad for not being able to do everything that you wanna do on day one because you wanna serve the community and knowing that the more responsibly you scale year over year, the better services you provide for that. Protecting yourself from burnout is also doing a better service for the community overall.

Angie Chang: That’s a great reminder. Boundaries are very, very important. So back to Janice. Why are burnout rates so high right now?

Janice Litvin: There’s so many. Thank you for that question, Angie. And Emily, that was brilliant – all of the things you’ve said about burnout, and I will reiterate those as I go through. First of all, I don’t know if you knew that burnout was already on the rise before the pandemic to the tune of 66% of American workers approaching burnout then. That was in 2018. Then as we all know, two years later, all hell broke loose and the pandemic hit and having to manage children, especially those of you who have school aged children, whether they’re in high school or whatever age, they were making sure that they’re getting outside because I remember a young friend, teenager locked up in her room like she was in a cave with the curtains drawn so she could see her screen for hours and hours and hours and days at a time not getting outside, not seeing friends.

Janice Litvin: We forget that we could go outside, six feet apart. She forgot that sadly, but I was there one day working when my internet was down and reminded her to get outside. The pandemic made us all crazy. Women also took, as I think you alluded to earlier, Angie, women took on the brunt of the responsibility for children, and so after dinner they would go back to work till midnight and just got so overworked.

Angie Chang: How can you coach someone to push back when they’re feeling overwhelmed?

Janice Litvin: I was listening to Emily and thinking back to my own work as well as what Emily was sharing. Everyone, first of all, when you begin to feel overwhelmed, the key is to stay in touch with yourself. How are you feeling physically, emotionally? What’s happening to your body? Like, are you starting to have eye twitches? Are you starting to breathe heavier? Are you sweating more?

Janice Litvin: Are you angry? And are you clutching your desk cuz you’re just so angry at things that are happening? Are you taking things too personally? Are you snapping at your beloved family members when really they don’t deserve it? Pay attention to what’s going on with you and then what’s going on with your team. Ask your boss, how can I best be of service when I am working 45 hours a day or, or whatever it is, 15 hours a day and show your boss a a business case.

Janice Litvin: Research shows that after 50 hours of work per week, you are less productive. Our bosses don’t want us to burn out deep down. They want us to be productive. When they come with you, come to you with a new project like, oh, I want you to run the ERG and you had nothing to do with it before. Say, “wow, that sounds really exciting. I love the idea of a women’s ERG. I’d love to be involved. Which of my other projects would you like me to offload to someone else so I can join you on this new project? I already work 50 hours a week. That really is my limit. I love the idea of what you’re offering me. And yes, I would be happy to be involved.” That’s a way to say no without saying no.

Angie Chang: That is excellent advice. I love that. So one more question for you is like, what is your advice for reducing burnout for ERG leaders or affinity group professional association leaders?

Janice Litvin: What is my advice for ERG leaders? Is that what you’re saying

Angie Chang: For reducing burnout for ERG leaders?

Janice Litvin: I wanna reiterate a little bit about what Emily said – making sure leaders know what employees need, so whether it’s the leaders themselves or your team of ERG participants, making sure that recognition is a normal part of life for your culture. Making sure employees are seen and heard, making sure they have a voice, giving them as much control as possible over their work and their ERG work. Making sure they have time for themselves and their families throughout the day. Sometimes I need several breaks throughout the day cuz I’m a workaholic. I love my work, self-employed, so I choose my own schedule.

Janice Litvin: But one day recently I noticed my eyes were twitching and I thought, wait a minute, I need to live my own preaching. And I went outside for 30 minutes and just sat out in the sun. The minute the sun hits your skin, vitamin D is released and you begin to experience dopamine and other happiness chemicals. Don’t forget to take care of yourself and communicate to the company leadership that our culture is one of caring for employees. If you love your employees, like you love your children, they will give back and they will be more productive for you. They want to feel a purpose and they wanna feel appreciated.

Angie Chang: I’m curious, Emily, have you been coaching people who have been working on your ERG about how to avoid burnout, how to tune into their bodies? Or what is your approach to this helping your team avoid burnout?

Emily Garcia: Yeah, I think the important part here is when you are working in, in an ERG space, it’s a very unique experience compared to maybe your technical job. And so finding other people that are in that same space. For me, and maybe people in my own council, but we also have other ERGs for example, we have a Latin ERG, we have a Pride ERG, uh, we have Black employee ERG, and they also have their own leadership. And so connecting with those people, not just from a coordination perspective on like, how are you doing? How are you feeling? How are you managing this? You know, sharing best practices. Like we meet monthly and I’ll share what I’m doing and they may say like, oh great, I’m gonna do that in my ERG.

Emily Garcia: Connecting with other people to see how they’re feeling and making sure that people understand that no one is in a vacuum and feeling that way is really critical. Being able to share those best practices with other people and then supporting each other wherever you can. You’re most likely not gonna be the only person in that whole company that’s doing any kind of ERG work. Finding that support system, even if it’s just an emotional support system of people that can relate to you and can support each other and, and really share different tips and tricks that have worked with one another. That’s been really helpful for me.

Angie Chang: Okay. And I’m also curious, so how do you, when you like, meet these touch points? Are they like messages in a slack or are they small coffee chats? Are they small? How, how does this tactically happen?

Emily Garcia: From a structural perspective in my organization, all the ERG leads will meet monthly. And then I also meet with my council at least monthly. On top of that, there’s a lot of, yeah, like Slack, we use Google chat coordination. Then there’s a lot of like meeting in person, having a coffee. Like not just talking about like how we’re gonna do event A, B, C, and D more like, well how are you feeling? How’s this going on? Sometimes it’s just a straight up bend session and you like breathe and you get over it and you move on. All of the above, like any way to connect is gonna be a good way to connect and definitely leverage them.

Angie Chang: Thank you so much. These are all really excellent tips for our people looking to avoid burnout. Since we hear about it, we know it happens, it sneaks up on you. Please take care of yourselves, push back, have boundaries. Thank you so much ladies for joining us and we’re gonna be moving to our next session. And yes, Janice has written a toolkit in case you’re interested. There’s a website. Please check it out. Thank you.

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“Launch Your Career Learning Circle with Girl Geek X this Summer”: Margarita Akterskaia, Senior Software Engineer at Roblox (Video + Transcript)

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Angie Chang: Hi! Welcome everyone to ELEVATE. Please enter in the chat if you can share with us where you are dialing in from today. We’re really excited to see everyone again. Thank you for joining us for our second ever Girl Geek X ELEVATE Virtual Conference and Career Fair. My name is Angie Chang and I’m the founder of Girl Geek X and we have hosted over a decade of Girl Geek dinners in the San Francisco Bay Area. And in the last five years or so, we started doing elevate virtual conferences so that we can bring together women from all over the world to learn and level up our careers with tech and career talks, lots of networking. What we’re trying to do this summer is launch some career learning circles, so we’ll be hearing from our keynote speaker later today about that. But first I wanna talk a little about Girl Geek X and what we’ve been doing this last few years.

Angie Chang: Recently we started partnering with the Oakland Public Education Fund and volunteering in partnership with them at a local school in Oakland. We helped organize a field trip to a tech company for the underserved students. And that’s something that we’ve been doing more in the pandemic as a way to bring together other people as we return to more Girl Geek Dinners in the fall and next year.

Angie Chang: We love our sponsors. Their support keeps us going and hosting Girl Geek X events and Girl Geek Dinners. We wanna say thank you to Vannevar Labs, UCLA IT, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee – and you’ll be meeting and hearing from them later today. I believe it’s at 11:00 AM Pacific Time, and you’ll want to meet the recruiters and staff and ask some questions and they are all hiring for fully remote jobs, so I encourage you to check that out! I know that it’s a kind of shaky macroeconomic climate, so please tell a girl geek [about the job] and help a girl geek get her next job in tech. All the roles are listed at GIRLGEEK.IO/JOBS and now I’ll hand it over to Sukrutha.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thanks Angie. Hi everyone, my name is Sukrutha Bhadouria. I’m Angie’s partner in crime. For today, we’re gonna be hearing from a diverse set of women working in tech from executives to individual contributors. We love hearing from women about their unique experience, expertise and their inspiring stories. We’ll also learn about cool new job titles that may we may or may not have known of before. Each of these amazing people have incredible passions and values.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hopefully our speakers will inspire you to do that hard thing you always, always wanted to do or help you think differently. We will be learning so much today. We encourage you all to help us amplify and elevate the incredible takeaways our speakers will be sharing with us today. The best way to do that is to share on social media using the hashtag ElevateWomen. Some housekeeping notes. Not to worry all talks are recorded. They will be put on our YouTube channel under Girl Geek X later. You can also immediately hit replay in this platform itself after the session ends (this afternoon, evening, later this week, next, next week, you can rewatch the session and that’s just amazing). I know I do that all the time.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: There’s also closed captioning available in Airmeet. You can look down your Airmeet window and find the CC button and turn it on for yourself as the AI=generated closed captions do their magic. They’re absolutely excellent. Without further ado, I’m gonna hand it back to you, Angie, so we can kick off our amazing keynote, keynote talk with our awesome keynote speaker.

Angie Chang: Thank you Sukrutha. I wanted to kind of boast for her. Her day job is Salesforce Senior Director of Engineering, so she is definitely one of the reasons why we keep doing this because we are such great partners over the years helping each other with our careers. We used to carpool to Girl Geek Dinners and in that valuable hour of, you know, traffic, we would reconnect and maybe make plans to have a second dinner somewhere like Ramen Dojo in San Mateo.

Angie Chang: We definitely have over the years found opportunities to get together – and I think Girl Geek Dinners and events like this really helped with the networking and bringing together women to retain us hopefully through our careers. Is that what they call it? Retain, retain women, is the the line I hear all about. So hopefully people can make plans together, whether it’s a Girl Geek Dinner, a volunteering event, tuning into ELEVATE while you’re at work.

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Angie Chang: Thank you so much for being here and today our keynote speaker is Margarita, a senior software engineer at Roblox. She’s a highly skilled mechanical and software engineer with a background in computer science, machine learning and algorithms development and organization optimization. During her PhD, she developed a novel simulation approach for significantly reducing computational time. And we’re excited to welcome our keynote speaker today, Margarita.

Margarita Akterskaia: Thank you very much for the great introduction. And hello everyone. Happy Wednesday. And first let me thank our organizers for this wonderful opportunity for all of us to connect today. Please use this chance, reach out to people, engage with each other, and with panelists, ask questions and have fun. My name is Margarita Akterskaia and I’m super excited to be here today. I have a background in mechanical space engineering and yeah, I am a software developer at Roblox. I also created a girls career bootcamp during pandemic to help women find their jobs in tech. And I’m a strong advocate for accessible education and the power of communities to grow together.

Margarita Akterskaia: These are the ingredients of who I am today and it took a while to find my way. I still have the desire to learn more, grow further, and be part of a supportive community. If you’re also interested to how advance your career and how to build up your company, let’s begin. I’m here today to talk about the importance of learning and building up learning circles. I will draw from my experience of participating in such circles and organizing them. I will also mention some research. Please participate actively use chat to ask questions. Think about what you would like to learn and share your experience.

Margarita Akterskaia: Let’s start with taking a journey back in time. Hundreds of thousands years ago, people used to gather around the fire pit to discuss their days and make plans for the future. These gatherings were not only crucial for survival, but also a way to bond, share knowledge and learn from one another. As time passed and civilization evolved, the concept of gathering and learning together remained an integral part of human existence. Fast forward to the present day and we find ourselves in a rapidly changing world where careers are constantly evolving, industries are being disrupted, and new skills are in demand.

Margarita Akterskaia: In this dynamic world, having access to information and the ability to generate new ideas is vital, but it can also bring you exciting possibilities, fun, and more satisfaction in your life. Growing together gives us the opportunity to generate new ideas, get information, support others’ perspectives, develop new skills, and get feedback. Share your knowledge and through sharing this knowledge, you could learn. Instead, show that people learn better through explaining the concepts to others. But how to build up community?

Margarita Akterskaia: If you think that relationships should form spontaneously, you may end up surrounded by people who are like you. You might share hobbies, views on life and get along very well. But here it comes, the affinity bias, which is a tendency to favor people who share similar interests, back backgrounds and experiences.

Margarita Akterskaia: We tend to feel more comfortable around people who are like us. There is another bias involved here called confirmation bias, which is a tendency to seek out and focus only on information that concerns our views and expectations. This might impact our ability to think critically and objectively. It’s important to consider the value of ideas that come from the people who are different from you, who are different, who have different the grounds and different perspectives.

Margarita Akterskaia: What is interesting is that studies show that we often secure job opportunities through our reconnections, reaching out to individuals whom we don’t know well,. Why is that? Well, our circle typically have access to the same information as we do (they know the same people, which isn’t particularly helpful during the job search).

Margarita Akterskaia: Expanding our connections would bring new people into our lives. They could become connectors to new opportunities, and social circles that we wouldn’t have access to otherwise. But community is a two-way road. Learning as much as you can is great, but learning to consciously create value for others is a big mind shift. Opening your network and looking around for opportunities for others, advocating and supporting that is about building meaningful relationships and fostering a sense of community.

Margarita Akterskaia: It’s about recognizing that by actively contributing to the growth and success of others, you not only enrich your lives, but you also expand your own horizons. When I was doing my PhD in Germany, I was tremendously lucky to join a team mentoring program. It was designed for six women – to help them navigate the complexities of doing a PhD and planning for the future. We were guided by the instructor to define our goals and formulate requests to each other and learned how to provide a feedback. This is what peer mentoring is all about. After several sessions with the instructor, we continue to meet regularly to discuss our struggles and celebrate achievements.

Margarita Akterskaia: Even after so many years, we still use our WhatsApp chats as a means of staying connected. I still remember one of our first sessions, I think we were asked to illustrate our day-to-day activities. Out of the six of us, four or five of us ending up drawing and octopus to represent feeling overwhelmed with tasks competing for our attention. Do you recognize yourself? Your goals and commitments may often be in conflict as you try to balance personal and work life, but it goes beyond that. When preparing for an interview, you need to have a ready resume, prepare for both technical and behavioral interviews, which usually happen on the same day. You can take a pause, pass the interview, the technical interview and then focus on the behavioral part. On top of that, you also need to research the company and be prepared to answer questions about the value you can bring to the table .

Margarita Akterskaia: At work, when considering promotional guideline guidelines, I have not come across any that require just one skill or qualification – it’s usually a complex set of requirements that demand different skill sets, all competing for your time and attention. Let’s learn how to navigate these challenges and build our careers with the power of community. But first, let’s take a closer look at the common career growth paths and the potential struggles they may bring.

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Margarita Akterskaia: The career growth path is commonly represented by the S-Curve with an initial period of slow progress (resembling a plateau,) followed by a acceleration. And finally, another plateau (associated with the mastering). However, different career levels represent similar struggles, imposter syndrome, burnout, etc. What we see here is the beginning of your journey into the field. In most cases, your career starts even before your first job and it involves a lot of learning.

Margarita Akterskaia: However, it’s not just about practical technical interview skills. When I started the bootcamp, I initially thought that all I needed to do was go through technical problems, solve as many as possible, survive, and solve more. It was useful, but it turned out much more was needed, and I was asked so many questions in other directions.

Margarita Akterskaia: It was about dealing with imposter syndrome, trying not to lose direction in all the multiple learning resources, meetups, opportunities. It’s about lots of decision-making, setting up boundaries, and learning to say no to another course or book that you discover. It’s about building up confidence, and finding a moment when you’re ready for the interview. It’s about persistence and not giving up.

Margarita Akterskaia: There is a lot to worry about in practicing resilience, build up action plans, and having a support system is key for the successful journey. We had learning circles that had more of a free-form to create a support system. It worked well for many and some even decided to continue after the end of the bootcamp. But the beginning of your career is not much different as compared to the search of the job. You’re still learning a lot, but now you have more challenges. How to show your best self at work, how to build up strong relationships with your team? What is the team work and how to learn efficiently? And what about mentors?

Margarita Akterskaia: And here is a burnout everyone was cautioning you about how to take care of yourself. Next stage looks like you’ve already gained enough knowledge, built up relationships with your colleagues and must probably have some answers for previous questions, at least first iteration of them. Do you feel that you could relax? While you may have answers to previous questions, it’s crucial to recognize that the world is constantly evolving and your challenges and opportunities arise. So instead of relaxing, you might want to embrace a growth mindset and continue seeking ways to expand your skills and knowledge. Very often it could be associated with time to think more about your focus and reevaluate your values.

Margarita Akterskaia: And here is a burnout everyone was cautioning you about how to take care of yourself. Next stage looks challenging. You see it’s a plateau and it might feel good enough because you reach the mastery, but at the same time you might have become a leader of a larger department or a whole organization. And at that point you might feel the decision-making is taken a toll. How to build up clarity? What about longer vision? How to find the balance between your intuition and facts, and your imposter syndrome might be still here, but now it’s harder to talk about it with your peers. What about work-life balance, and how to become a role model for others?

Margarita Akterskaia: With all that, and here I want to emphasize something important. All of these questions that we’ve covered and even their answers can be found in numerous books, dedicated courses, countless articles, YouTube videos – nowadays, you could talk to ChatGPT about it, right? This all is one side of a coin. These are the instruments, but you also need an application of this knowledge – having a safe and supportive space to plan your actions, execute them, receive feedback, and be accountable. The practical implementation is another side of a coin and you need them both to grow. What do you need for practical implementation and growth?

Margarita Akterskaia: When I did my PhD, I was always wondering how to learn and grow efficiently with a very limited amount of time and very much information and knowledge I wanted to consume. Time is the most valuable resource. Please use it wisely. But what else is important? Since I was a researcher, I needed to collect, analyze, and summarize lots of information. The goal was to build upon existing knowledge and push the boundaries of science a bit forward. That means you don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

Margarita Akterskaia: On the contrary, you want to learn as much as you can about the latest inventions and build upon them. Building your career is similar. I strongly believe in the power of sharing knowledge and experience, which makes all of us stronger and more prepared to move forward. Knowledge sharing and streamlining this process is also important for growing. What else? Have you heard about the famous idea of 10,000 hours – put them in whatever you do and you will become an expert! But the extended version and more research coming up to the study says that, you need a clear goal and a deliberate practice, which is based on a feedback loop. Why is that important for efficient learning?

Margarita Akterskaia: Studies show that the feedback in learning facilitates learning in and also improves cognitive functions. Most studies claim that we need to fail and make errors while learning so we learn faster, there are adjustments to the core behavior (which is not very culturally accepted, right? I’m talking about failures). We need someone by our side, someone who would be ready to advocate for us and let us learn our way. In the bootcamp example, it was important to have a support system to build up confidence, so much needed before the first interview. Research shows that we perform better when we know someone believes in our abilities.

Margarita Akterskaia: Creating a bootcamp for women taught taught me a lot. When pandemic was at a full start, I created a post in the Facebook group suggesting to help women to prepare for technical interviews. The post got nearly 100 replies and I decided, okay, let’s go for it. It was a pandemic and everything would be online anyway, so no need to rent a physical space. But what is important here is that it was already nearly impossible to do it all by myself. The bootcamp that had three successful batches wouldn’t have happened in that format. If I want to get help, these are fantastic woman who jumped with me into this adventure and at different stages help teaching and planning for our women. It’s very rarely that anything is created by one single person. It’s almost always a result of tight collaboration and incredible support that allows beautiful things to happen.

Margarita Akterskaia: If we create products altogether, why not to consider our career and grow in that career to be a product? We need a team to work on. It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to build a career. Think about all people who are official and unofficial mentors to you, those who might not even know about you but served as role models. Those who believed in you. Why not to crowd this community to support you and invest into that community to grow together as a team?

Margarita Akterskaia: Being a part of a community is essential for career growth. But here’s a question. Is that a right thing for you? Please answer these three questions carefully. Do you have a pain point you are ready to talk about? Are you open for feedback? Are you ready to invest in others? And it’s totally fine if you say no to one of these questions or all of them. It takes time and lots of efforts to move into that state. It’s a journey.

Margarita Akterskaia: While circles are a very powerful tool, they’re also very fragile, especially at the beginning when connection is not yet strong. These are some common things that could kill this spirit of the community. Not showing up at meetings, having other priorities. Someone takes all the time and attention, so there is no facilitator or time moderator, but I think also there is a lack of respect in that case. Not having clear goals for yourself and for the circle, so you don’t know the direction where you want to go. Not participating actively through listening and sharing – this is social law. Often in social law law often we usually gather as a group of people, but then we expect that someone else will contribute and do the work, and we will just be here and listening.

Margarita Akterskaia: Obviously when not everyone is contributing, it would need to decrease productivity and efficiency of the whole group. Not having action points so there is no clarity how to learn and how to apply what you just discussed. Since we’ve covered main don’ts, here are the do’s. Schedule regular meetings, depending on the urgency of the goal and number of participants from once a week to once a month, very often is biweekly. For five to eight participants, submit to the meetings as your top priority. Remember the previous one and build trust and collaboration. Have a plan for the meeting and the moderator. Define clear goals, be actively engaged and participate and set up action steps after each meeting. Actually I have one more thing. It’s creating accountability. Usually in the circles, the meeting starts with discussing the action steps taken by each participant since the previous meeting.

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Margarita Akterskaia: And there is something more I’d like to share. The learning circle is a journey and through this journey, you’ll learn a toolkit of peer mentoring. You will learn how to provide the feedback, share your story, and formulate a request. You’ll learn how to come up with an action plan, express support, ask questions, and listen actively. Everyone is unique, so the problems we need to help, I help with. And I encourage you to make your own list, which should start from your goal.

Margarita Akterskaia: Here’s I share some common ideas of topics that could help you to start, such as power of frustration, work-life balance, and the economics of wellbeing, building a personal brand, effective workplace communication, what is inclusive leadership, and strategies for personal growth. But obviously there are much more. Now I want to ask you to do something and write in the chat one career goal you’d like to accomplish this year. And write down one action you need to take to achieve this goal. Please participate actively. There might be a small and large career goal. You might iterate over read eventually, so it’s not a final thing that you have to contribute, but at least some idea what the career goal you might want to have and which one you want to pursue. Okay, perfect. Obtain employment. Yeah, that’s a fantastic and important goal.

Margarita Akterskaia: You might also consider what might be an action plan, at least one action that you might do for that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Find my first role as a new grad. Need to keep applying and attend career fair. Perfect. Remote job in tech. Yes, yes. Explore employment. Yes. Awesome. I’ll talk to recruiters today at ELEVATE. Fantastic. Yeah, please learn from each other as well. You see there are some brilliant ideas about, especially about action plans. That’s great.

Margarita Akterskaia: Why is defining a goal is important? It helps you assess your current level of skills and experience and in identify where you want to go. It also helps to match you with the right circle of people who have a similar current level and share similar goals and aspirations en enabling you to grow together.

Margarita Akterskaia: The idea is to start with a goal you want to achieve. Join a circle that best fits your goal. Life brings us family, partners and friends. Some of these individuals are inherited while others are chosen along the way. However, not all of them may work in the same field, at a similar level, or share the same work-related concerns. So, what if you take a proactive approach and seek out a community that shares our challenges and desires to grow in the same direction?

Margarita Akterskaia: What if we view ourselves as the CEOs of our lives? Circle can then become our own board of directors as we navigate our careers. I hope this empowers you to create your own circles based on who you are and who you aspire to become. You’ll get more information about learning circles a bit later and here it is. I hope you’ve learned a bit about learning circles and I will finish with what I believe: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Please don’t hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn. Thank you for your attention.

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