Career Rocket Episode #7: Kenya Davis
To future minority women leaders:
“You being a woman is not a weakness but indeed a strength. So the more comfortable you are around everyone else, the more comfortable they will have to be with who you are.” - Kenya Davis
The goal for my Career Rocket series is to make an impact on people’s careers by sharing wisdom from successful folks with high integrity. You can also listen to the podcast of this post hosted in collaboration between DURMC and Empathetic Machines which dives deeper into the topics covered here.
Target audience for this episode: aspiring professionals in digital analytics and a/b testing. If you are a minority and/or a woman, I highly recommend
Today’s guest: I am really excited to have our guest Kenya Davis. I met Kenya several years ago at a conference we were hosting. I love her energy, postive outlook, wealth of experience in A/B testing, and am grateful to have stayed connected.
Beyond our standard career questions, we discuss racial and gender diversity issues.
I was inspired and so impressed with Kenya’s perspectives and leadership. Please listen to the podcast after zipping through this post.
Professional background and highlights
B.S. Applied Physics and concentration Astrophysics from The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Built first iteration of the experimentation team at Lowe’s
Currently works at Evolytics for Intuit-TurboTax, Mint Live, Sephora, and True Value
She is a passionate costume designer and visual artist for her company Artist Universe. She enjoys merging science and art to create abnormally large pieces of artwork.
How many people have you managed over your career? Overall, around 50 - 60 people. Managed 26 people directly at one time
For each career stage, please share the most important characteristics to have in the field of digital analytics.
Entry level: 1-3 years
Learner mentality: absorb everything. To hone this posture of being a learner, be humble. Listening to as many ideas and perspectives as possible will help you to sharpen your communication.
Mid career: 3-6 years
Relationship building: Do not be afraid to be vulnerable and open about yourself. Inspire diversity across races, backgrounds and ages, it will ensure full coverage of perspectives. Cultivate market variety in your field of expertise. Tip: find an extroverted mentor who will make your circle bigger.
Thought leadership means belief in your team, their abilities, and their potential. Invest in education for your team and yourself. You and your team cannot deliver results until you are all equipped with proper tools.
Mgr/Directors:
Stop and Listen: You are never too busy or too senior to stop and have a conversation with any member of your team. It is okay to miss a meeting for the sanity of your team and it is equally important to show up to a meeting to support your team. Practice humility, strength, support, and curiosity.
Looking back, please share what you feel have been your biggest drivers to a successful career?
Throughout my career one of the strongest drivers to my success have been my mentors. It wasn’t about finding one and sticking with them but actually finding many and moving on as I learned what I needed. This is not as cut-throat as it sounds. For example, with a goal of someday becoming a CEO I must understand the path/journey to getting there, so I sought out highly respected leaders within my companies and outside of my companies for every step. A manager, a VP, a C suite seat holder. They all have stories and nuggets of powerful information that guided me through very difficult situations and also exciting times.
Building relationships with my peers would follow the mentorship driver. It’s not as exciting to be at the top surrounded by individuals that do not respect you and that do not wish to lead with you. Take the time to learn about them and how your visions come together.
If there was one thing you would like to tell someone earlier on in their career that you wish someone had told you, what would it be?
If you do not know when to move on from a company, look around and ensure that you are not the only one in the room that knows everything. That is a sign that there is no one you desire to learn from, and therefore it is time to move on. There’s an endless supply of challenges out there if you are willing and open.
For people in college looking to get into digital analytics, what are your top recommendations for them to start doing?
Start joining networking groups outside of college organized groups. (like D.A.A. Digital Analytics Association) and actively engage with other members
Purpose: secure mentors, keep up with ever changing technology trends and how that impacts the data analytics industry, and to graduate with advocates in your pocket for real jobs
Expand this to all of the positions involved with analytics: Marketing, software engineering, Statistician/mathematician
Complete multiple internships, and don’t be afraid to take the ones without the shiny perks and names. The purpose is to get comfortable dealing with real, unpredictable, messy data. If you do not secure an internship, look up contests or search for free data you can access to build/rebuild concepts. Also consider reaching out to a local business and offer your insights for free in exchange for experience. Ask for a recommendation and endorsements on your linkedin! Companies want to know you can handle imperfect data with real businesses.
Take applicable classes to real life problems within business, economics, statistics, mathematics, science. If you don’t have time for that, then attend webinars and conferences for digital analytics.
Complete certifications while in school and be versatile in digital language and focus on perfecting one or two coding languages if possible.
Looking ahead, where do you think are the upcoming hot spots in careers around your discipline?
Data Science- Testing
Marketing - Data visualization
Marketing - forecasting
Data Science - anomaly forecasting
What are the interesting challenges you anticipate will be coming up in your discipline in the coming years?
The growing knowledge gap of marketers and data analytics
The education needed to be a part of the data world
The more I research and reflect, the more obvious it is that we have diversity issues among leadership in companies across the US. What are the challenges you have seen or faced to make this a reality in the near future?
There are many reasons why I’ve witnessed a lack of diversity in leadership. First, from MY experiences and MY observations across ALL of my previous companies: there are many men of a one/few colors at the top, very few women of very particular colors beneath them, and huge gaps in salary and opportunities for everyone else. The level of distrust between those layers grows larger the further down you go in job level. It often mimics the visual lack of diversity we see across our government. There seems to be 3 elements that have supported this poor experience and common observation:
Human Resources: They receive so many applications that by the time they narrow from the large pool, they are left with what they think is a perfect candidate type.
Years of experience requirements limit by age and not by quality. Hiring individuals who only have 8+ years experience in a field that has been around for maybe 15 years is not necessarily the best approach. Why? Because for a new field, it may not be supported by most colleges yet. This means the person is already at a disadvantage if they weren’t amongst the first pioneers, regardless if their experience was a much richer experience in two to five years than the person with eight years. I’ve seen this happen far too often, and prioritizing years of experience opens the door for unqualified friends to slip through the cracks or open positions because the company is unwilling to teach. Employers being open to teach talented candidates opens more opportunities for diversity.
Education: specific degrees do not create great leaders or people leaders. Soft skills are just as important as hard skills, and this is often overlooked, leaving out opportunities for great candidates to move up into leadership positions.
Overly detailed job descriptions for individual contributors: not enough qualifications for entry level and a perspective on the company as them not wanting to teach or allow for learning
Recommendations open the door for bias applications. These people may not be the best for the job on paper, but they are highly recommended by someone in the company. The problem is that someone with very poor/high performance at an individual contributor or lower level job recommending someone is not taken seriously, whereas a person in a leadership position no matter how poor of a leader they are immediately taken seriously.
Diversity and Inclusion: These Teams often support the company far too late in the process when addressing diversity. Celebrating diversity within the company is one thing, while realizing the lack thereof is another. In other words, they are tasked with making diversity work with what they have within the company already . At times, there is an inability to also focus on diversifying the candidate pool for hiring.This trickling effect for a sole minority in a team means that they are what makes up the “diversity”. The weight of going unnoticed for your color and noticed for your work becomes an impossible task to balance.
When I was managing a large team, it was hard to add new talent because there were prejudices in “types” of people HR would send me because of trigger resume words and names and lack of knowledge of the roles. Additionally, leadership tends to prefer paying for the full package rather than investing in potential. This behavior is reflected in the leadership feedback surveys all companies have. There should not be excuses for poor leadership or lack of diversity. The mentality of leaders begins to shift into believing any leader they choose must be worthy of the position and be born with the ability. If there were more opportunities to truly groom individuals into leadership positions there would most likely be an increase in diversity.
Do you have anything in particular you would like to tell future minority women leaders?
Be yourself. It will be hard. I wish I could say it’ll get better soon. The solution is not to be submissive or overly confident, or overly vocal, or wear underwhelming attire, or to change the way you speak around “the boys”. Find your attainable female leader and mentor and don’t be afraid to call out the mansplainers. Women can be intimidating since everyone can relate to a woman of power in their life, their mother, grandmother, sister, or friend, of whom they respect greatly. Being a woman is not a weakness but indeed a strength. So the more comfortable you are around everyone else, the more comfortable they will have to be with who you are.
Not only do you have a successful professional career, you seem to be genuinely grounded and happy. What does living abundantly mean to you and how have you carried it out?
I have found joy in building relationships I never knew I needed. My friendships now expand past my typical comfort zones and include others from different backgrounds that have resulted in the most fruitful conversations and experiences. Valuing these relationships are the reasons many of the decisions I've made in my career and life have been done with confidence. Lastly, making time for loved ones no matter the length of interaction time, is work life balance therapy for me.
If you want to hear the in-depth dialogue of this post, check out the full conversation on the podcast !
Check out our full list of Career Rocket guests here
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