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Debbie Madden is the founder & CEO of Stride Consulting, author of Hire Women, and two time Inc 500 CEO. She is a mother, wife, and breast cancer survivor. Debbie has built 5 companies from the ground up and has been CEO of three of them. She is passionate about building teams that individuals truly enjoy being part of. Due to her reputation as a passionate woman executive in technology, Debbie is a sought after speaker and writer, having appeared in Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, Huffington Post, Varney&Co TV and more.
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your book?
A: Hire Women is a book about increasing diversity and inclusion in the workplace. The book is short and tactical, and only takes 40 minutes to read. It’s meant to be a conversation starter, to get us all aligned with an actionable, iterative framework that any team can use to take steps towards hiring and building more diverse teams.
Q: Debbie, tell us something more about your background, and why you decided to write Hire Women?
A: I’ve been a female tech entrepreneur for over 20 years. I wrote the book to change the conversation about women in tech from “Why me?” to “So what?” Meaning, women and men both have to change the way we look at diversity and inclusion. It’s a known fact that unconscious gender bias exists in the workplace. Instead of throwing in the towel and saying “Why me?”, or using this as an excuse to not be as aggressive as possible about excelling in our careers, women can say “Life isn’t fair. Yes, it’s harder for a woman to succeed in business than a man. So what?” It just means that women have to work a little bit harder than our male peers to get ahead. And that’s ok. Look around, figure out what you need to do, and go do it.
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Q: What advice would you give to any woman wanting to pursue a career in tech?
A: Don’t worry about tomorrow, focus on today. Too often, I’ve spoken to women who are making career decisions today about the life they think they want to have 10 years from now. Maybe you want children, maybe you don’t. Maybe you want to get married, maybe you don’t. The truth is – you can make plans, but until the day comes, you don’t know what the future holds. Women opt out of career opportunities today because they think they might not be working tomorrow. That’s ridiculous. Go get the job you want today. And then tomorrow, when your life requires you make a change for whatever reason, go ahead and make that change when and if needed.
Q: How do you think society as a whole can move the needle to get more women into leadership positions?
A: The biggest thing we can all do is mentor others. Research from Harvard Business Review shows that when people mentor others, they form the highest level of empathy towards that other person. So, men should mentor women. Women should mentor men. We should each seek to both mentor and be mentored by someone not like us in terms of every qualification we can think of – gender, age, race, religion, industry. The more we each spend real time learning from and teaching others that are nothing like us, the more we really understand different point of views. And this will lead to more leadership opportunities for many different types of people.
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Q: What are your plans moving forward?
A: My focus today is on my business, Stride Consulting. The future is going to be made up of today’s best teams. It’s going to be the best teams that excel in the years to come, not the best ideas, and not the highest funded companies. And building the best team is hard, and takes constant attention day by day.
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