Leah Elzinga: Advice for women leaders

leahelzinga@gmail.com

Product Owner at ATB

Leah has an outgoing and charismatic personality with a natural ability to lead. She feels strongly about women in leadership, and spends a lot of time promoting women in tech. From a small town in rural Alberta, her initial attempts of getting started professionally were put on hold as she became a mother of two preventing her from finishing school. Years later, on her journey to set her children up for success, she went searching for coding classes for her daughter and came across Ladies Learning Code, but it was for adults only. Leah decided to go herself to Startup Edmonton’s event and got a taste of the mentorship and guidance she lacked earlier in life.

"The women that volunteered there, were so lovely, and provided me with such good insight and feedback.” Full of questions and ambition she would ask “Where should I go to school, what would I even take? How do I do this? And they just patiently walked me through everything and answered all the questions I had.” Leah remembers being so inspired by the exchange that the next day she applied to NAIT.

Graduating in 2016, Leah is heavily involved in workshops and events in the community. During her time in school she was the president of the IT business Analyst club, as well as the student technology representative for Women in Technology and Trades at NAIT. She continues to be involved in panel discussions, Canada Learning Code, as well currently helping new Canadians that have been in the industry prior to coming to Canada find jobs.

Diversity and inclusion

Often there is little understanding for women when it comes to outside commitments. When putting on events Leah has told women to bring their kids, and she makes sure to let everyone know that this is okay. Leah believes that It is important to open this space to families. “If we open the space to families, we also improve the experience for dads too. When you improve the experience for women everyone gets to benefit. But we kind of have to start with women."

As for how diversity and inclusion can affect products Leah discussed the issue of not having enough diversity. “When your talking about homogenous thought, people who all think the same way. You only ever come up with one solution to a problem. You only ever see the problem from one perspective. You cannot develop empathy for other perspectives, and when you can’t develop empathy, you don't solve problems as elegantly, as intelligently as you can. You don't develop good products, because you only develop products for a tiny segment of the market because that's all you understand… In order to understand people, the people understanding and solving the problem must reflect their user base. Otherwise its not going to work. You will never build as good of a product, you will never define as good of process, or as good of a service because you don't understand the user.”

Advice

Leah suggests that women reach out and find role models and mentors in the community citing LinkedIn and networking events to be a great place to do that. But if there was only one thing she could suggest, it would be to volunteer. Leah points out that it is an opportunity for you to network, it makes starting that conversation easy and allows you to prove skills passively while gaining experience. Leah also points out that it can often feel difficult and uncomfortable when your surrounded by a homogenous group in the classroom, or in your industry. While reflecting on her own experience in which she would often be the only woman in addition to having a fine motor disability, she had this to say.

"It can be really intimidating to be the only of anything, the only one. So it can be really intimidating to be the only woman. you could be the only person of colour… You could be the only person with a visible disability... one of the things too, is that you’re not there for them. You are there for you. And you should not allow anybody to take away your education and you should not allow your own discomfort to shortchange you either, because that's never going to change. You just are, and sometimes it can be lonely. But I think the best thing you can do is accept those temporary moments of loneliness, but you buffer them with finding community elsewhere… So, it's finding other professional women that are going through the same thing.”