March 8 is International Women's Day, this year falling on a Sunday. When you read this, it will probably be Monday (or later). Normally I don't post on Sundays, but this time I'm making an exception to get the date right.

You might assume that International Women's Day is a recent thing. Maybe some woke women instituted it last year. Or perhaps it was the first wave of feminism in the 1970s. Or maybe the suffragists in the early 20th century. That last one is correct, in terms of timing, but it actually started as more of a socialist thing. The first IWD was in 1911. Here's what the website says:

International Women's Day (March 8) is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women's equality.

International Women's Day (IWD) has occurred for well over a century, with the first IWD gathering in 1911 supported by over a million people. Today, IWD belongs to all groups collectively everywhere. IWD is not country, group, or organization specific.

International Women's Day has been a public holiday in Russia since 1917. In its early decades, it was mostly focused on socialist countries until it was adopted in the U.S. by the feminist movement in the late 1960s. The United Nations made it official in 1975. It is a public holiday in many countries. The one I like the best is that it is a public holiday in China—but only for women.

Mentoring Women at Cadence

As it happens, I am supporting an international woman. Cadence has a mentoring scheme for women that took place in the last four months of last year. I was a mentor to a woman in Cadence's offices in Noida, India. (I'm not allowed to say who she is.) At Cadence, like most tech companies, women are underrepresented. By the time you get up to the executive management team, it is one woman out of nine. The next level up is zero women, which is a roundabout way of saying that Lip-Bu Tan, our CEO, is male.

Obviously, one goal of the mentoring women program at the corporate level is to prepare more women on the bench ready for promotion to more senior roles. It is a long game—nobody goes from director to VP in a year just because they got a good mentor.

There were 600 women who signed up for the program (you had to be an appropriate level of seniority, not too junior but not too senior either), and 1400 mentors. Then we did a sort of online dating where we mentors had to put our biographies online and then the women (mentees) picked who they would like to be their mentors. I forget exactly how it worked after that. Obviously, the software is trying to match people so that they got mentored by the people they wanted, but also that no mentor had more than two mentees. I signed up for the smaller pilot version of the program last year, but nobody "swiped right" on me, so I didn't get to be a mentor. But this year I did.

Mentoring

One reason my mentee picked me, she told me, is that I have had a lot of experience in different roles. One of my mentors earlier in my career was a guy called Ernie Hirt who ran VLSI Technology's HR organization (later he would run HR for one of Cadence's competitors). Importantly, before he made the switch to HR, he'd been in operational management. Whenever I had a problem with an employee, or a management challenge, he could give me good advice since he'd already seen something almost the same before. I've worked in engineering, marketing, run a sales organization, had a P&L, been CEO, now a writer. So I've seen a lot before, too.

It was a good experience for both of us. Having been a manager for many years in all sorts of environments, I've obviously mentored lots of people in a general sense. But this was the first time I'd ever participated in a formal mentor-mentee program like this. When we were discussing the program at the end, she admitted that at first she was a little shy. The software driving the program wanted us to create formal goals, and then measure how we did against them at the end, but we largely ignored that. I don't think you can be that structured about something like this.

My mentee was an individual contributor, about 30 years old, on the cusp of being promoted into management. So I just took the challenge preparing her for that, a mixture of tools to do the job and a mindset that she wanted to do it. In my experience, the most difficult stage of anyone's career is the first management job. You have been promoted since you are the best at your technical (or whatever) job. It is your comfort zone. The people you are now managing are not as good as you at doing the technical job (or they would be the ones promoted, not you). In Andy Grove's High Output Management, he points out that the key thing to realize is that you are now measured by the output of the group reporting to you, not by what you personally accomplish. In fact, it is almost a negative if you do too much yourself, since you are not developing the people that work for you. I made my mentee read this book during our four months together. It was published in 1983, around the time I first became a manager, so maybe I'm biased, but I still think that it is one of the best books on management even today.

I'd like to think she got it from me, but my daughter is brilliant at this. She has opened three or four cocktail bars. "I'm a training machine," she told me. "I only hire bar-backs. They have no bad habits. And once you have trained them they are totally loyal." She even took the barista at the restaurant where she worked and turned him into a cocktail bartender since he was bored. A full-time cocktail bartender in a high-traffic city like San Francisco or New York makes about $80-90K. Baristas, not so much.

Results

One the very last day of the mentoring program my mentee was promoted. It was nothing to do with me in any direct sense, it was part of the reason that she wanted a mentor in the first place. But hey, I'll take the reflected glory. But more important was that she told me "I was shy at first but now you seem more like a friend."

Of course, all the "meetings" we had were by phone, normally at 7:00am my time, 7:30pm her time. She was planning to be in the US this year, so I would get to finally meet her. But with the coronavirus situation, who knows? Fingers crossed.

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