Microsoft's Kathleen Hebert Talks to WIM
Jamie Earle
Issue date: 10/29/01 Section: Technology
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What's it like to be a woman and among the top ranks at Microsoft Corporation? "Great," says Kathleen Hebert, MBA ‘90, Microsoft's Vice President of Business Solutions. Young, driven and five months pregnant, Hebert describes her career as "something that feels natural, that I really enjoy."
At a Microsoft-sponsored dinner last week, Hebert spoke to a small group of Women in Management members about what it's like to work at Microsoft and to be a woman executive in the high technology field, as well as gave her perspectives on leadership.
Hebert grew up in a midwestern family of nine, where she says she learned to be competitive. A math major and nationally ranked miler at Dartmouth, and accepted to Stanford MBA after graduation, she obviously carried that competitiveness through to adulthood. She deferred Stanford and worked at BCG Chicago, where she learned hard line industry and sharpened her analytical skills.
At Stanford, Hebert worked for Microsoft during her summer internship, when the company had only a small product line. She worked on the company's first server-based email system, Microsoft Mail. "Remember, those were the days before email," she explains, "People thought we were working on a new way to do mail merge."
On deciding to join Microsoft. Coming out of Stanford, Hebert had offers from consulting and venture capital firms. She reports having turned down a consulting offer of $110,000 starting salary to take a $38,000 starting salary position at Microsoft. She explained that, in those days, high technology was not the money making machine that it is today (or maybe that it was a year ago), so the decision was less obvious. However, she reasons, the fit was great and she believed in what the company was doing.
Hebert went on to manage the Office Group, growing it from one that sold 5,000 units per month to a billion dollar business, then the Project Group and Small Business Solutions Group. Today, she is responsible for the Business Solutions Group, which comprises some three thousand people and incorporates at least two acquisitions.
On being a woman in high technology. Hebert says that, while she enjoys her job a great deal, there's "not a lot of social comfort" at the top. Indeed, of Microsoft's VPs, Senior VPs and Group VPs, less than ten percent are women. Hebert says Microsoft is a meritocracy, but cites a high attrition rate of women managers in the high technology field in general. She likens it to the dotcom craze, when employees were getting frequent calls from headhunters. "That's what it's like being a woman, except the call isn't a headhunter…it's family, biology, the desire to work in the nonprofit world…it's like a daily call from a headhunter."
On leadership. Hebert highlights the characteristics she believes make people succeed in leadership. "These characteristics also just happen to be what women are inherently good at," she explains. The characteristics include empathy, self-awareness, communication and the ability to learn and grow from feedback. Narrowing in on communication, Hebert says one area where women sometimes fail is that the language and communication style they use is often less precise, more exploratory and more willing to share credit than the language and style men use. A good leader needs to be able to communicate clearly and convey a goal, vision or point with fewer words rather than more. "We call it a signal-to-noise ratio," says Hebert, "and the higher you get in an organization, the more important that ratio becomes."
At a Microsoft-sponsored dinner last week, Hebert spoke to a small group of Women in Management members about what it's like to work at Microsoft and to be a woman executive in the high technology field, as well as gave her perspectives on leadership.
Hebert grew up in a midwestern family of nine, where she says she learned to be competitive. A math major and nationally ranked miler at Dartmouth, and accepted to Stanford MBA after graduation, she obviously carried that competitiveness through to adulthood. She deferred Stanford and worked at BCG Chicago, where she learned hard line industry and sharpened her analytical skills.
At Stanford, Hebert worked for Microsoft during her summer internship, when the company had only a small product line. She worked on the company's first server-based email system, Microsoft Mail. "Remember, those were the days before email," she explains, "People thought we were working on a new way to do mail merge."
On deciding to join Microsoft. Coming out of Stanford, Hebert had offers from consulting and venture capital firms. She reports having turned down a consulting offer of $110,000 starting salary to take a $38,000 starting salary position at Microsoft. She explained that, in those days, high technology was not the money making machine that it is today (or maybe that it was a year ago), so the decision was less obvious. However, she reasons, the fit was great and she believed in what the company was doing.
Hebert went on to manage the Office Group, growing it from one that sold 5,000 units per month to a billion dollar business, then the Project Group and Small Business Solutions Group. Today, she is responsible for the Business Solutions Group, which comprises some three thousand people and incorporates at least two acquisitions.
On being a woman in high technology. Hebert says that, while she enjoys her job a great deal, there's "not a lot of social comfort" at the top. Indeed, of Microsoft's VPs, Senior VPs and Group VPs, less than ten percent are women. Hebert says Microsoft is a meritocracy, but cites a high attrition rate of women managers in the high technology field in general. She likens it to the dotcom craze, when employees were getting frequent calls from headhunters. "That's what it's like being a woman, except the call isn't a headhunter…it's family, biology, the desire to work in the nonprofit world…it's like a daily call from a headhunter."
On leadership. Hebert highlights the characteristics she believes make people succeed in leadership. "These characteristics also just happen to be what women are inherently good at," she explains. The characteristics include empathy, self-awareness, communication and the ability to learn and grow from feedback. Narrowing in on communication, Hebert says one area where women sometimes fail is that the language and communication style they use is often less precise, more exploratory and more willing to share credit than the language and style men use. A good leader needs to be able to communicate clearly and convey a goal, vision or point with fewer words rather than more. "We call it a signal-to-noise ratio," says Hebert, "and the higher you get in an organization, the more important that ratio becomes."