{Self-eSTEM} The Human Behind the Leader - Limited Series - Featuring Rashida Hodge - Segment 1 of 3

Rashida, thank you so much for being here today. I'm so excited to have you join us.

Rashida Hodge is a global executive. She grew up in IBM for about 20 years and left IBM as a global executive. She now is at Microsoft. She oversees all customer success for data and artificial intelligence. She is also the recipient of Fortune 40 Under 40 in 2020. She is a rock star and she's so full of energy and so full of the human that I want to see in a leader. I'm excited to have Rashida join us today.

Rashida, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's indeed a pleasure and an honor.

Absolutely. So Rashida, tell us, what is your story?

Wow, that's a mouthful. Well, I like to probably describe my story as one of perseverance, but also one of courage and curiosity. I say that because I'm a product of teen parents. My mom was a teenager when she got pregnant with me, so it was no easy task, especially growing up in a small community. I was raised in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Most maps don't even show it; if they do, it's an amplified dot. And so of course there's always small community whispers and the shame and embarrassment of that particular experience. But my mom taught me that you should never be defined by someone else, so always have the perseverance to continue to fight. My life has really been driven by my mom, who allowed me to just be curious in everything that I do across the board. So for me, that's how I describe it. I describe it as my mom and I together we persevered to be where I am today.

That's wonderful to hear. So Rashida, you are fairly young and highly accomplished and successful. So tell me about what got you here, to that tiny dot of an island that you were born in, and what challenges did you have to face?

I don't feel young, by the way. You are very... my young crack in the morning. But look, I think, like I said before, growing up on an island you always have this perspective that there's more out there. One of the things my mom taught me is reading. You can be anything through a book. I actually found out about engineering through reading a book. Everyone always says, 'Tell me the name of the book,' and I cannot remember. I have to go look at my archives. But I think I was probably about 10 or 11 years old where I read a book that an engineer solved a problem. I remember going to my mom and saying, 'I want to be an engineer. They solve problems. That's what I want to do.' And my mom said, 'Well, what is an engineer?' And I said, 'I don't know, but they solve problems. That's what they do.' So that's what I wanted to do. My mom was like, 'Okay, well let's go figure this out.' I remember going to the library, doing research on engineering, and figuring out there are so many different forms of engineering. Talking to my teacher about it, my teacher said, 'Actually, you should be a computer engineer.' At the time, computer engineering was the thing. I came home to my mom and said, 'Okay, I'm going to be a computer engineer.' She said, 'Why?' I said, 'Dr. Walters told me that I should be a computer engineer. That's what's hot right now.' She said, 'No, that's not how you make decisions.' So she said, 'Let's learn more about it.' I actually did a program at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where you could go and learn about the different disciplines of engineering. That's where I found industrial engineering and fell in love with it because I love the fact that I can solve problems, I can take the human perspective into account in solving the problem, and it goes across basically anything. It could be a computer problem, a mechanical problem, electrical engineering problem, which landed me to be an industrial engineer. It really kind of started out my career. I landed at North Carolina State University, finished up at North Carolina State, started my career at IBM, continued to further my education at Duke University, and now 20 plus years later I'm at Microsoft doing amazing things from a data and AI perspective. For me, it's all about that ability to persevere, that ability to be curious, and also that ability to imagine. One of the things I say is, 'You're not a product of your environment; you're a product of your imagination.' For me, if I was a product of my environment, I probably wouldn't have been an engineer because I didn't know engineers, I didn't grow up around engineers. It wasn't something that I saw. But my mom helped me to be curious by me reading, and the knowledge of that saying, 'Ah, this is something we should go look at a little bit more. Let's go figure out what this actually is.' And then the excitement that I got from that to just continue that journey, and here we are today.

That's awesome to hear. So what challenges do you face now? I know when we were talking earlier, we were talking about how you had to practice the way you say certain things, or how you had to project yourself in meetings, and how you showed up every day had to be intentionally practiced.

Yeah, you know, that's interesting. As a woman of Caribbean descent, sometimes people would say, 'You're not from the Caribbean. I don't hear an accent.' And I'm like, 'Okay, I do have one. It's within me.' But I actually had a pretty bad experience when I was interviewing for an internship one year. I had an interviewer that mocked me throughout the interview and said, 'I can't understand what you're saying. Did you swim here from the Virgin Islands? How did you swim with the sharks?' I'm looking at this person, I was like, 'Are we on the same planet? Because it sure doesn't sound that way.' I left that interview. I was 18 years old at the time. I left that interview and I was just horrified. I was embarrassed. I felt so much shame and I just felt absolutely humiliated from that particular experience. But what I did is I went to my dorm room and I literally got on YouTube and I just practiced how to camouflage my accent, like we're talking right now. I wrote the recruiter's name down. I went back that next semester in the spring and I signed up for that exact same interviewer because in those days the same interviewers would come back to university from the companies. In that interview, he was like, 'Oh, you're so impressive. We've got to have you at our company.' I was just amazed. I said to myself, 'But I'm the same person. Nothing has changed about me. I just sound like you versus not sounding like you.' I went through the entire way. I said, 'Great, let's interview. Let's do the on-site interview.' When we did the on-site interview at the end of the day, when the company offered me the role, I said, 'I think I want to move forward, but can you call Mr. Show?' I love to just thank him for this opportunity. When he came into the room, I said, 'Thank you for the opportunity, but no thanks. And here's why. You may not have remembered, but I remember that fall day when you humiliated me because I didn't sound like you. But today, now that I do sound like you, I'm closer to what you think is normal and acceptable. I'm good enough. But actually, you're not good enough for me.' I say that with such confidence right now. Like, 'Whoa, Rashida.' But I was so scared. Remember, I was 18 years old. I went for this on-site interview. I didn't know if I was even gonna make it back to Raleigh, North Carolina or not. But there was something within me that said I had to stand up for myself. This was a critical moment for me to do just that. In this particular instance, I wasn't looked at for my skill sets or my capability. I was just judged based on the way that I sounded. That was a big learning lesson for me on multiple fronts across the board that has really shaped me in terms of how I go about my leadership style across the board. Unfortunately, it was a lesson that I had to learn at a very young age, but one that has been defining for me as well. So for me as an executive, thinking about that experience, quite frankly early on I've always had this feeling like I had to be somebody else. I had to sound a certain way, I had to dress a certain way. I tell people that I deal with what I call the trifecta: that I'm Black, I'm a woman, and to most people I look young. I'm probably gonna always look young, thanks to my parents giving me some amazing melanin. But for some people, youth doesn't equal skill set. I remember being in meetings where certain clients would not take the meeting or would demand that other people were in the room. I remember going to a client one time and we were all gathering. The client walked in and they said, 'Let me set the team.' They'd never met me before. They said, 'Let me know when your VP shows up.' Everyone just kind of froze. They didn't know what to say. I said, 'I'm here. Let's get started. Do you want me to get you a cup of coffee?' Everyone was just stunned in that moment. In that moment, I wasn't seen as an executive because of that trifecta.

I hear you. It happens every day in every part of the world where the women in the room are naturally seen as the one that's here for taking notes or helping with the schedules or whatever it is. It's not fair, but it's the reality of what we see in many places still. We've come a long, long way, but we still have a long, long way to go. But to what you did to that recruiter, to stand up for yourself, not a lot of young women or not a lot of women in general are comfortable standing up for themselves like that. Whether it is an incident like yours, or whether it is asking for a raise, or whether it is negotiating a job offer, whatever it is, we undervalue ourselves, to stand up for ourselves, to get what we want and get what we deserve. What advice do you have for young women that are up and coming, or already have made it to a certain level but they're continuing to evolve and grow and push their boundaries? What would you tell them?

Yeah, look, I always tell them, 'Don't be a shrinking violet,' which was advice that was given to me. I remember one time being in a meeting. It was a very important meeting. I was with my boss. I was the chief of staff to one of our senior vice presidents at IBM. It was an important meeting. In this meeting, the client treated me like I was not there, that I was essentially to help in the meeting. They spilled their coffee, I cleaned it up. I was invisible essentially. As we entered the tail end of the meeting, my boss said, 'We've made some great progress. This is amazing. I knew you didn't get an opportunity to get to know Rashida, but she's actually going to take it from here. She's gonna really be my lead and she's gonna work with you on getting us to closure.' You could see on the person's face that they felt that they saw a ghost. They couldn't believe that me, like I was the one that was going to help progress the conversation even further. When we left that meeting, my boss turned to me and said, 'You're always going to be a woman. You are always going to be Black. But you're always going to be great. But you first need to make sure that you acknowledge that and that is known. Don't let someone else define who and what you are.' That was a great learning lesson for me on multiple fronts. One, my boss in his own way advocated for me in a way that was very meaningful and impactful. But I also saw how I didn't make myself a priority in that moment. That was a point of education that I needed to reflect on. I put everything else, the business interest, before me even existing as a human being. None should be neglected. It should never be binary. All and both are important: the business interests as well as my existence as a human being.

Absolutely. That's such a great lesson. You're always going to be who you are, and you've got to own up and be comfortable with it. Absolutely. That's fantastic.