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Inspirational Women in STEM and Tech: Chazona Baum of MAXX Potential On The 5 Leadership Lessons She Learned From Her Experience

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm. This is probably one of the easiest traps to fall into as a leader because you want to do whatever you can to ensure your team’s success. But just as airlines advise parents to put on oxygen masks before helping their children with theirs, you can’t bring the energy your team needs if you’ve drained yours.

As a part of my series about “Lessons From Inspirational Women in STEM and Tech”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chazona Baum.

Chazona is a Principal Technologist in Norfolk, VA, where she grows teams of technologists and prepares them for fulfilling careers in IT. She has worked on engagements ranging from onshoring work from India that built transparency and capabilities at home to helping enterprises present themselves to their customers in a new light. Before changing careers through MAXX Potential’s transformational Apprenticeship program, she spent a decade serving customers across the hospitality and insurance industries. She enjoys sewing, writing, and spending time with her young children.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Likewise, thank you!

I started like many in my generation, building Geocities pages and MySpace profiles, but at the time, many of us didn’t take our tech seriously as a career. So instead, I got a series of “real jobs,” mainly in customer service and support types of roles.

It can be frustrating in those roles because you are often the depository for people’s complaints and problems with a product or service, but you rarely have any real agency to correct them. In each company I worked for, I started to look at how I could get involved in the technical or product side of the business. That kind of transition wasn’t feasible because either their technical roles were handled onsite in some other region, or they required a four-year degree I didn’t have in addition to the proven skills. At one point, I was raising an infant, working full time, and considering enrolling back in school full time, but I knew if I did this, my work or my parenting would suffer.

So, I took opportunities to at least build up technical skills, figuring that someone had to give me a chance if I got good enough. I stayed up late when my children went to bed and logged into freeCodeCamp to brush up on web development. I had competing priorities for my time, so I focused on practical projects that would help myself and my family, like creating a website for people to RSVP to my sister’s baby shower or a web application to share kids’ photos by invitation-only.

I was perhaps optimistic about the industry’s willingness to take a chance on a plucky upstart. After a hundred applications and about a dozen interviews with no success, I considered going back to service work just to put food on the table. Ultimately securing an apprenticeship at MAXX Potential provided the opportunity and mentorship needed for me to change the course of my life.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

Norfolk is a city that routinely battles tidal flooding, and we established our local office inside of one of its’ flood zones. Most of the time, this only had a minor impact — as long as you tracked the tides, you would know when it would be good to get lunch or travel the streets.

Once, a nor’easter came through, and flooding was much worse than usual. We had a line of cars and trucks stalling right outside our office because their drivers had misread the water level. I will never forget the humanity shown by our team as several of our technologists rushed out to help push the vehicles and their owners to safety.

In that same nor’easter, a young woman steadfastly motored along on a Lime scooter as if it were any other day. Her resolve to power through knee-high waters became an example of grit we still talk about today.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Many of us have seen the stories about the engineer who dropped a database or broke DNS. It wasn’t funny at the time, but my most memorable mistake when first starting was inadvertently taking down a server.

I had made some decisions when building a piece of software that assumed additional changes would happen sooner than they did, which led to a runaway train situation with memory consumption. As someone who had mainly worked with high-level programming languages, how I worked with system memory wasn’t something I considered strongly at the time.

I learned many lessons from that incident, from engineering lessons around database configuration and system monitoring to more human ones like running a postmortem and not counting your chickens before they hatch. As you can imagine, it was a mistake I made precisely once.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

I think the nature of our model makes our company stand out. There are many firms out there trying to solve the problem of the tech talent gap, but all are approaching it differently.

Schools and bootcamps can be beneficial, but because their students are their customers, they risk overpromising how practical their education is when they are too eager to give students what they want.

Staffing firms can fill gaps, but there can be dangers when treating humans too much like commodities to be traded and bought.

Apprenticeships strike a good balance, with businesses extracting value from the work and the aspiring technologists being the workers who produce it. We stand out from other apprenticeship programs as most that I’ve seen require a contract with a payback clause or extensive flexibility to relocate; at MAXX Potential, we demand neither.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Because we help businesses get their work done better, it’s hard to find an example of a project that doesn’t help people.

I am excited to have the opportunity to help a well-known healthcare group better inform and serve its community, a financial services firm providing the chance to regain access to credit, and a digital firm giving small businesses the ability to reach their customers. As a company, some of the most exciting new projects we see involve an area of tech most aspiring technologists have never heard of: Robotic Process Automation. By automating routine processes that are necessary but typically not engaging, we’re able to clear employees’ plates for more meaningful work while reducing errors.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Are you currently satisfied with the status quo regarding women in STEM? What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?

I think few would be truly satisfied with where things currently are for women in STEM. While lack of a pipeline of qualified candidates can be an issue, as someone who struggled to grasp that first rung on the IT ladder myself, I don’t think we can assume it all boils down to lack of interest.

In many ways, necessary changes likely differ between recruitment of women in STEM and retention of those same women. And both efforts depend on each other.

On the recruitment side, reluctance to take risks on entry-level talent hurts women and underrepresented people especially hard. This risk gap is a large part of why I am such a proponent of apprenticeship-based programs like MAXX Potential where, regardless of your background, if you have the grit and aptitude for the work, you will have an opportunity to prove yourself. Additionally, I think how we talk about IT and math concepts can make a huge difference. I’ve heard so many women describe themselves as unfit for these roles because they equated IT with math, and math with abstract concepts to memorize. While some areas like data science are more math-heavy, strength in this field depends on more human skills like communication and resourcefulness. Likewise, while it feels like quoting a Disney movie to say that math is involved in every “rock and tree and creature,” it truly is how we make sense of the hidden rules of the world and life around us — we just don’t typically present it that way.

On the retention side, we need to look at factors like advancement and balance once women are here, which may sometimes seem at odds with one another. If women aren’t rising to roles that give them a tangible impact on the values and direction of their organizations, we’re likely to continue to see the same gaps. Businesses operating from 1950s mindsets of working long hours while someone else manages home and family harm everyone, including fathers who want to be more active in their children’s lives.

I think the pandemic has made it even starker for everyone that if we can’t make modern employment work for working parents, we will lose their talent and perspectives when they drop out of the workforce. When women underearn men, is it any wonder that they are usually the ones to sacrifice their career for their family if someone needs to stay home?

For more on the balance side and new perspectives for leaders, I recommend reading Indra Nooyi’s new book, My Life in Full, as she has created a masterful accounting of her life and career, including the tradeoffs that have come with it.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women in STEM or Tech that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts? What would you suggest to address this?

Honestly, most of the significant challenges I see women facing today are also experienced by men, like the parenthood penalty. The most urgent challenge I’ve seen only women face in this field is a lack of opportunity for the critical feedback they need to grow. The risk when attempting to recruit women into this industry is that we make getting to that first rung on the ladder so celebratory that it’s like you’ve won just by showing up. If we are so afraid of turning women off that we fail to give them the same feedback we’d give men, how can those same women build the competencies they need to rise to the C-suite if they so choose? As leaders, we need to consider whether we perpetuate the “delicate, virtuous maidens” myth.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a woman in STEM or Tech. Can you explain what you mean?

I haven’t experienced many “myths” of being a woman in Tech. Contrary to my experience in hospitality, those I’ve met have always presumed competence and reliability. I recognize that every woman’s lived experience varies, and this certainly doesn’t reflect every industry. As I understand it, there are also considerable differences between experiences in Tech on the East Coast as opposed to the West.

What are your “5 Leadership Lessons I Learned From My Experience as a Woman in STEM or Tech” and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)

  1. Try to learn early on which balls you’re juggling are glass and which ones are rubber. More likely than not, something is going to drop at some point, and you want to ensure that it’s something safe to bounce when that happens.
  2. Don’t default to the rescue service for your team. As a leader, you probably don’t want your team to fail. The challenge if you rush in too soon to solve problems and save your team members is that you can stifle their initiative and creativity. Pretty soon, they stop trying to solve problems because they know you’ll handle it.
  3. Good leadership depends on understanding what’s important to each member of your team. Keep in mind that they are the hero of their own stories! If you get too busy to connect with your team, that should be a warning sign that you need to change something about what you’re doing.
  4. Don’t stop seeking mentorship and coaching once you get into leadership. It’s hard to see your blind spots, and as a leader, your strengths and weaknesses can have a multiplying or diminishing effect on your team. Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers can help with recognizing these effects.
  5. Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm. This is probably one of the easiest traps to fall into as a leader because you want to do whatever you can to ensure your team’s success. But just as airlines advise parents to put on oxygen masks before helping their children with theirs, you can’t bring the energy your team needs if you’ve drained yours.

What advice would you give to other women leaders to help their team to thrive?

I find the more you achieve, the more intimidating you can come across and the harder it may be for reports to feel confident in reaching out. I follow Colin Powell’s maxim that “the day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.” To that end, it is more crucial than ever to find opportunities to connect with your reports and to share little moments of vulnerability that humanize you. While you want to maintain healthy boundaries in your relationship, they still need to recognize that you’re not fundamentally different from them so they can aspire to keep growing themselves.

What advice would you give to other women leaders about the best way to manage a large team?

The larger your team gets, the more crucial it is that you are not their only resource. Every member of your team should understand that they have a network of potential resources that may include yourself, their coworkers, others on different teams or in other areas of leadership, or even people outside your company. You cannot be everything for everyone, and attempting to do so will only harm yourself and your team.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I can’t stress this point enough: we all had help getting where we are.

The two people who have had the most substantial impact on my career have done so differently.

Early on, when I was trying to find my way in tech and see if this could even be viable for me, Jesse Tolj, Senior Software Engineer at COLAB, provided instrumental mentorship and stressed that, like him, I had the aptitude for tech work. He was the one who reached out to let me know that MAXX Potential, the apprenticeship company I would get my start at, was broadening to my area. He encouraged me to pursue it and was confident that it would be a fit.

At MAXX Potential, founder Kim Mahan has had a decisive influence on my career, primarily through sponsorship for opportunities I may not have considered myself ready for and by challenging my assumptions. I likely would not have leaped into technical management if not for her ability to see that potential.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

I’m a big proponent of holding the door open for others as I know what a transformational opportunity it was for someone to take that chance on me. Just under thirty people with careers in Tech have one of my projects at MAXX Potential as a catalyst in their origin stories, and hearing about their continued success, promotions, and new opportunities is always a highlight for me.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

Personally, it’s saddening to see how little we trust each other as people or sometimes even see the humanity in others. As a society, we benefit most when we have an optimistic outlook on the nature of humans. If I was to try to start a movement, I think it might be as simple as taking a moment to apply Hanlon’s razor to situations that upset us. If this situation could be adequately explained by ignorance or negligence, we probably shouldn’t presume malice in that person.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“In life, there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, is a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

This paradigm shift has been the most beneficial for me as it made a night-and-day difference in my communication style and strategies. We all benefit most when we work within diverse groups, which means that, at least in theory, we’re not going to agree with everyone all the time. No one benefits from echo chambers or lack of accountability.

But often, when someone disagrees with us on critical things we value, it tends to impact our perspective on the entire person. We see this all the time in the public sphere. And when you think someone’s the villain in your story, you’re unlikely to have a productive conversation with them or to have a chance at changing their mind. I’ve found that approaching situations from the viewpoint that people are doing what they genuinely believe is best with their circumstances leads to better outcomes more often than not.

It’s also a game-changer for things like public speaking that can be terrifying for people. Have I gotten on stage somewhere and said something the wrong way, like a verbal typo? Probably. But I’ve also found that with most people more concerned about their problems, these minor mistakes rarely get in the way of the larger message. Most people don’t analyze my words and actions to the same degree that I do and recognizing that can be liberating.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂

I would personally love to have a meal with Chetna Gala Sinha, a woman I feel is truly inspirational and has already paved roads for others where there were none by establishing the first bank in India for rural women. Her work has directly impacted the lives of roughly half a million women, many of them mothers like herself.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.


Inspirational Women in STEM and Tech: Chazona Baum of MAXX Potential On The 5 Leadership Lessons… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.