I've been getting some terrific input and comments on the survey form. One of the first to give some feedback is Amy in New York. I thought I'd share some of her thoughts -- and worries -- as a great, well!, starting point!
The initial approach is always hardest for me. I would appreciate a starting point, i.e. an introductory letter that I could give to those that I would like to be part of my Mastermind group. I know no one likes a form letter, and everyone knows when they've gotten one, but perhaps an outline or basic points to hit when creating such a letter.I am new in my field (IT), and also a woman, so I am a bit of an anomaly. My perfect outcome would be a group of people who are successful in various sectors of IT who are willing to share their knowledge and experience with a newbie and to help me network and form connections with others in my field.
I am my own greatest impediment. I worry that I will be turned down (even though I know this to most likely be false), and as such, I have hesitated about approaching certain people for far too long.
I've been a subscriber to your lists for years. I applaud all you do and have done, and I think this Mastermind course is fantastic. I would pay to take this course, yet you offer it for free. You are amazing, Mr. Cassingham. Thank you.
Thank you, Amy, for your candid comments -- especially the fears.
You are the perfect candidate to be helped by a Mastermind group! You have clarity, are in a professional field, and have something unusual about you: a female in a male-dominated job sector.
The specific focus for the group you would want to join -- or form yourself -- is "Female IT Pros".
The term "pro" is fairly nebulous, right? Perfect! Executives? Hardware Techs? Help Desk folks (at least Level 2!)? You want a fairly tight focus, but wide enough that it includes people you want to learn from. You expressed that as "people [I would say: women!] who are successful in various sectors of IT who are willing to share their knowledge and experience with a newbie". The thing you'd all have in common is being girl geeks (if you don't mind either term). That gives you a sense of camaraderie, even if you have different specialties -- like Unix admins, networking gurus, helpdesk managers, etc.
I don't know your specialty, but let's say Unix admin. It'd be great to have other admins to bounce questions off of, but it would also be great to have network specialists in there to help you get up to speed on the unique problems they encounter. Knowing some manager types would help everyone else with advancement questions, personal networking to find new jobs (or new hires!), etc.
As you'll see in the article series, you want the group to have something in common. Girl geeks does that nicely. But you also want diversity, as you intuitively realized: you want to be able to cross-pollinate with allied experts in your field so your vision is wider, so you can see other possibilities, so you can get synergy by combining other ideas with yours to widen the possibilities for your career success -- whether you run this as your own business, or work for someone else. It will work for you either way.
You know your field; you know the types of people you like, or can learn from. So you create a group charter that includes what you want, and excludes what you don't (like maybe the level 1 help desk folks who only know how to read scripts). Even though you're new in the field, I'll bet -- if you consider that you can have group members anywhere in the world -- you know at least a dozen such women. And each one of them knows 11 (plus you!) That's a potential pool of over 100 women right there. See?
I cover this in more detail in article #6 in the e-mail series.
As far as a "form letter" to invite people to join you, article #7 is the one I used to start my current group. You'll have to adapt it, of course, but you'll get the idea when you see it.
"I am my own greatest impediment." Yep, we all are. One of the recurring themes I'm seeing in the survey responses is that people are afraid that others they recruit into a group will be pompous self-important jerks. I usually find the opposite: members look around at other members and are wowed by the talent they see, and think "I'm not worthy!" That, frankly, is a good attitude, because it means they recognize they don't know everything, and can learn from others. That's exactly what a good Mastermind group is about.
I've been working in IT since 1976. Early in my career, there were two unusual aspects about me:
First, I didn't have a university degree; I was self-taught. Because of this, I was able to start in professional jobs at an early age, so the second unusual thing was that I was much younger than my peers - people often assumed that I didn't have any knowledge yet, even after they had seen my resume.
These two facts meant that I usually didn't even get an interview at large companies - and when I did, they tended to ignore everything I would say. As a result, I ended up working in some very unusual shops. In my first job, the owner of the company was an accountant who had spent time evaluating the computer software available at the time, rejected them all as useless, and decided to create his own instead. He had no computer knowledge, though, so he hired people - most of us were straight out of high school. With 6 months experience I became the Data Processing Manager, which isn't as impressive as it sounds because the whole I.T. department was 3 people.
Amy, for the first 10 years of my career, I wondered aloud: "where are all the women in I.T.?" In my high school, almost 1/3 of the class had been female, but in my first two jobs I only ever met one female programmer.
After 10 years, I finally got hired by Security Pacific Bank. Whoa! Suddenly I knew where all of the female I.T. workers were. I didn't count, but I'm pretty sure that women were a slight majority - my boss, and her boss, and two of the five people in my unit were all female.
Since then, almost all of my jobs have been either in large corporations or in county government jobs. Women haven't always been the majority, but they definitely have a presence. In the health agency that I currently work for, the telephone list has 54 names, and 15 of them are probably female.
For what it's worth: Even the brightest minds graduating from the very best schools, have a LOT to learn when they enter the work force. School gives you the basic concepts about what happens in I.T., but when you start working on a real job you have to quickly learn a LOT of things that they simply don't (maybe can't) cover in school. If I had to choose between hiring someone with experience and no degree, and someone with a degree and no experience - I would take the experience every time.
But I'm in the minority. Two of my friends, who both had degrees LONG before I did, kept telling me that the degree didn't make any difference at all - they never used any knowledge that they got from school, and they never even mentioned the degrees in their interviews. But I had the experience of trying to GET the interviews without a degree, and it was TOUGH. Then I went back to school and earned a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree. Now, my friends are right - the degrees are never mentioned. But they ARE used to screen you out before you even get the degree!
Anyway, the point of all this rambling is: The difficulty you're facing is probably more due to your lack of experience than your gender. There are plenty of women in the I.T. workforce. As you gain experience you will also gain confidence.
Good luck, Amy.
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I agree completely, but want to make it clear that Amy would still get awesome support from a Girl Geeks group. -rc
I completely agree that a "Girl Geeks" group would provide awesome support. Starting out in any field right now is challenging, and it's tough going it alone.
What surprises me is that anybody sees IT as "male dominated".
I'm probably exactly the kind of person Amy's looking for, having spent the last 26 years in IT. And I've gotten mentoring from a series of wonderful female role models, not through Mastermind groups, but the support has still been priceless. It's been my experience that women in IT have a lot to offer, and aren't stingy with it, on the job or off.
This leads me to wonder, though, can a person effectively participate in multiple groups? I can see myself in more of a mentor role in a group like Amy's "Girl Geeks" group, but looking to get support in other areas where maybe the "Girl Geeks" might not be the best choice.
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I do think you can be in more than one group, depending on your goals and the groups' charters. Ideally, they would not be similar groups (e.g., one for IT types, one for your scrapbooking hobby). -rc
How would the Girl Geeks group you propose differ from existing groups like the SYSTERS? I'm still trying to wrap my head around what distinguishes a Mastermind group from other kinds of groups.
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I'm not familiar with Systers, even though I have heard of the late Anita Borg, but it would be no surprise to me that there are several "Girl Geek" groups -- classic Mastermind groups, job networking groups, etc. I looked at the link you gave, and see "Systers is the world’s largest email community of technical women in computing." -- "over 3,000" members on their mailing list!
The difference between that sort of group and a true Mastermind group is the depth and focus. I'm guessing Systers is pretty wide-ranging. I doubt members would reveal true "secrets" of their business models to a group that large, where they can't get a handle on who's listening. Clearly, you can't really get into much depth in a group like that: if only half the group posted just once a week, the crush of mail would be so overwhelming, no one would get any actual work done. I'll definitely talk about ideal group size later; it's an article I haven't written yet, but I have definite opinions about it! -rc
I completed my MS in Computer Science in 1984 and have been in the software industry my whole career, including in IT.
IT is actually just one part of an overall industry. IT's focus is on the software that runs or supports a business, and I think there is a larger percentage of women in IT than other areas of the software industry.
Software that would not be considered IT includes packaged software of all kinds, games (an industry to itself!), scientific programming, safety critical applications of all kinds, military, robotics, and so on. In those areas, where I have done a lot of work, women are generally quite rare. I am often the only woman on the team, or maybe one of two women in a team of 20 or more people.
I think Girl Geeks is a great idea for a Mastermind. I would encourage more thought be given to whether the Mastermind should focus on IT and the special needs there, or if it should be a broader group with women from other software specialties as well. I think both kinds of groups could be useful and interesting.
Online communities like Systers are great, but do not have the focus of a Mastermind. They each have their place.
So is this a mastermind group of mastermind newbies with a mentor? Perhaps one could think of it as a mastermind meta group led by an experienced guru, or possibly a teacher in training.
Would you consider answering your four questions with respect to this course or series of essays or whatever you think it is? Postponing publishing it till later in the series would avoid overly influencing our initial answers to the questions.
Even after you answer your own questions, if you ever do, note that the questions are more important than the answers. The fellow who returned to attend a class by his long previous PolySci professor was surprised to see that the quiz of the day had exactly the same questions as two decades before. When he mentioned it to the professor, the response was, "Of course, but now the answers are all different."
"That's a great question" is such a common and correct initial response that I'm considering publishing a book by that title after building and honing its content in a mastermind group with that focus. It could also lead to an interesting focus on argumentation systems, especially those which only allow claims/ideas/answers in response to explicit questions. The clarification that provides is astonishing.
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I'm unclear what your reference is for "this". I'm definitely not trying to create a Mastermind group with thousands of members with varied interests; I am trying to help people see the power in creating small groups with a central focus that will help the members in each group succeed, according to their own definition of success. -rc
For Amy:
If it helps you to write down your invitation to potential group members, I hope you will do so.
Once you've formed your initial concept in writing, you might consider trying the verbal one-to-one or small group approach.
Test out your Mastermind group concept (no need to call it that if it sounds a bit scary) over coffee, drinks, while watching an event, doing something fun together with one or more folks; even talking about a recent tech conference or issue first might open the door.
I'm thinking about doing this with the handful of folks I'd want to be in our Mastermind group. Yes, I'll be the leader, but these are all strong folks who are not afraid to challenge and/or push each other in real life, already. I'm a good bit older than the others, and I think they'd be relieved not to have to deal w/the administrivia and oversight so they could dig in to achieving self-defined success. I don't like the administrivia, but I'm good at it, and I can delegate!
:)
This describes me as well. "I don't like the administrivia, but I'm good at it, and I can delegate!"
Glad to have this insight as to what tasks/skills required and that things can of course be outsourced!
Would be very helpful to have a list of what other skills - and tasks - are required in the job of mastermind leader. Helps me, and probably others, know if being a mastermind leader is the right fit for them. You in turn, get folks who ARE the right fit to buy your products about masterminding.
OK, the "this" I meant above was not 2000 subscribers to the course, but twenty five or fifty who actually respond in public. And indeed the new intentionally small focused group you've just started up on the side is even a better "this".
To work well, it's got to have some trust and confidence which is impossible with even a hundred people, I suspect. If half the people sent email once a week, it's another message every other waking hour.
And maintaining focus would seem to get more difficult, though perhaps a good leader could increase the maximum size of a group that really works, if she is willing to be a benevolent dictator. Participants could batch their reading and responding into two or three times per day and still provide feedback within less than a day, when called for.
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I'll write this up as a report sometime, since it takes some explaining, but I think a tightly focused group cannot have more than 50 members, especially when it's e-mail based. There is room in the model for larger groups, but it would almost necessarily have to be web-based, and not depending on "secret" strategies, since as you've expressed above, you can't get adequate "trust and confidence" (as you put it, quite accurately!) for members to spill their guts. -rc