 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of Women in Technology's Global Event, Celebrating International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We have Rachel Thornton here, VP of AWS Marketing, CMO of AWS. Rachel, great to see you. Thank you for spending the time to come on and share your stories about mentorship, being a mentor, being a mentee. You've had a great career. Thanks for coming on. No, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. You know, I'm super impressed with your super inspiration to a lot of people, your career, Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Amazon, you worked in amazing companies that had great growth, great transformations and business success. And all the employees that have all grown since then, you've been part of these great success stories. And you've had a great career. And the theme here is mentorship, which is a super important topic. You've been a mentee, you've been a mentor. Everyone needs a mentor. Most people don't know how to do it and how to be involved. It's almost like a secret dark art of success that needs to be opened up. What's your thought about mentorship? Hopefully people don't see it as a secret dark art. I actually am a huge proponent of mentorship, both mentoring folks and actually encouraging people to seek out a mentor for themselves. Early on, you know, when I started working, I really thought about how can I navigate a particular situation or what do I wanna learn more about? And even though I may have been nervous or a little shy at first to ask, I always thought just ask, because really being able to have a mentor, someone who you can ask questions of, someone who can help you with questions or help you with situations you're navigating or give advice I think is critical. As a mentor, I would just say as a woman in tech over the years, I've realized the criticality of sort of finding your voice and using your voice. And so I look at mentorship as a great way to help individuals, every individual that I mentor sort of find their voice and use it. And then ultimately advocate on behalf of others, advocate on yourself, on behalf of yourself as well. And I think it's just really, I think it's a great thing to mentor and I encourage everyone to do it by the way. And it's also ask yourself, hey, who would I wanna be my mentor? What do I think I wanna get out of it? And then go forward. Well, let's start with the mentee side. When you were coming into your career as you grew through with mentorship, a mentor, how did you find a mentor? How should people think about asking and finding? What's your thoughts on that? Because asking is great. People might be nervous. I mean, I know I'm nervous whenever asking people, am I interrupting them or confidence? It's a hard thing. How do you find a mentor? What I did and what I encourage other folks to do when they think about it is kind of write down what you're looking for in a mentor, what are the things you would like to ask or get help with or get advice with? Is it career progression? Is it learning how to navigate maybe collaboration with different teams? Is it, hey, you have a couple of great ideas and you'd like to figure out a way to get them surfaced in the organization? But kind of write down what you're looking to get. And then what I did and what I encourage other folks to do is really look around not only just kind of your immediate team, but what are some of the other teams you're engaging with? I would even ask people in your organization, I did this early on, like, hey, I'd like to get some more info on this or some help with this. Who do I think would be or who do you think would be a good person? We have a leadership principle at Amazon, learn and be curious. And I think it dovetails so nicely into the whole mentor mentorship, mentee relationship because if you're looking for a mentor, it's good to sort of think, okay, what do I want to get out of it? Who would I ask? If I don't know, start asking people that you do know and I think that's going to lead you to the right person. But on the mentor side, I think as you're working with the person, keep asking questions. What do you really learn about them, learn about what they're trying to do and help them learn about themselves, their opportunities, where they can grow more. So I just think that's a great leadership principle for the whole construct of mentoring. It's a relationship too. The mentee mentor relationship is one that's a give and take but also there's gains from both sides. How have you gained from your relationships with your mentors in the past? And how should people think about that? Because it's just human, it's a human thing, but it's also kind of a, it's a cool thing and it helps everyone both sides. Can you share that relationship, give and take and what people can gain from a good relationship? I think the biggest thing for me has been just the different perspective. I find that so valuable. I love the chance to get a completely different take on something, a completely different perspective, one that I maybe wouldn't have considered because I think if you are, and we're all like this, we all come to a decision or a situation with our own set of understandings, our own biases, if you will, our own frame of reference. And I think it is a powerful thing to work with someone else and have them give you a completely different lens on a situation because it opens up, not only how you think about something or how you react to something, but just how you would learn or maybe think about information or that situation going forward, right? And maybe probably do an even better job with handling it or processing it or considering it. Support is a huge thing in life, right? Having someone to support you and your career, same thing. Now that I've seen your leader at AWS, you're a mentor to many. I'm sure you get a lot of requests to be mentored. I mean, I'd love to have you mentoring. Hey, can you mentor me on this? So I'm sure you have your share of requests, but you're also mentoring. Now you're the mentor. How do you view your assignment? What's new? What are your tricks? Is there some secret trade? Is there a way that you handle it? How should people think about being a good mentor? Is there a common vibe or practice that you see successful for you? I think on both sides, mentor or mentee, when I take on, when I work with someone in a mentor capacity, I spend sort of the first time getting to know them and also what it is they want, it's kind of what they want out of it. Ask a lot of questions in the upfront, find out kind of what they're hoping to achieve. Like I think I said a few minutes ago, there could be folks that are like, hey, I want help with sort of career progression over the long term. I've also mentored folks who are like, I have a great idea that I just want some help with sort of packaging up and maybe positioning and then helping me navigate who would be the best team to take it to. So I think that's good to know kind of upfront, is it ongoing or maybe it's just in certain cases, it can be a very time-bound thing. But I think ask questions, on the mentee side, I always sort of come at it when I have a mentor, like here's what I want to get out of it, here's what I'm looking for, here are the three things I want to make sure I engage with you on. And then it's really clear on both sides. If I do have someone who comes to me with a mentorship, with a discussion around being a mentor, I will always ask, hey, have there other people that you've talked to because it could be that they're looking for, input on a project, for example, and there could be a better person I think, that hey, this person could be even better than me on helping you with this. You're navigating too, you're providing a little path and direction and the key is really to help someone in mentoring, it sounds like. Now let's have a look at the Amazon and AWS culture, you mentioned leadership principles. Is there programs within AWS, is this part of the culture, I know being a good manager is mentoring too as well, but is there formal mentor programs within AWS? Yes, there's actually several different ones. Women at Amazon, which is an amazing group that we have, they have Amazon Circles, which is a great mentor program. We have programs that are by country even, so as you can imagine, Amazon's a global company. One of the programs that I was really excited about because I worked with the team that started it, but in the UK, we started a Get IT program and it was interesting because we basically wanted to make sure that we were encouraging and aspiring girls between the ages of 12 and 15 actually to be interested in careers in tech. And we sort of thought, how do we do a good job with that? How do we get those girls excited? How do we get the mentors? How do we get them sponsors? That was the other thing we thought about a lot of. So what we did was we aligned teams and individuals inside at AWS to schools and then within the schools to grades and then to individuals in the grades, girls in the U.S. grades and over the course of a year, they would meet with their mentor, a team would have a specific school they would sponsor and then members on that team would be mentors to the girls in that school. And then at the end of it, there would be sort of a project and an assessment and it was really exciting to see girls who were sort of, they were thinking about it, but maybe they weren't sure. And then by the end they were like, I'm really excited about it. And I actually know kind of the next steps if I wanted to continue on with university with kind of a tech job in my sites for my future career. That's a great segue into the breaking the bias, which is the theme this year of International Women's Day is getting that as bias broke, getting people in early and also creating a culture of inclusiveness where there's no bias and we see it. And then this is a good way to call it out this year, specifically, and it's been a theme I know in this area, but this year they're calling it out. How do you know when bias exists and how do you know when it's gone, when we're not talking about it anymore? I mean, that's the scene would be to me, but this is a big deal, share your thoughts on this bias piece and what we can do together to help aware and solve it and break it. I think we all have bias. I think that you really do have to, I always in my head, I think, whenever I'm meeting with teams or just meeting with people one-on-one or meeting with customers, I think I sort of ask myself, what's my take on the situation? If I weren't me, if I was someone else, what would their perception be? What am I bringing to this situation that's sort of based on my context is sort of who I am or my background and how is that different if I were to sit with someone that has a completely different background, a completely different set of context or a frame of reference? I think that's so important across not only the teams I have here, I have a global marketing team. So always asking myself, I know I'm going to look at this one way. It's not the only way. So how do I make sure I have a great cross-section of leaders, a great cross-section of team members to bring to bear on a situation? Because the more I can do that, the more diverse I can make those conversations, the better off we're going to be with whatever solution we come up with for our customer or solution to an internal problem is just not just looking at it through one lens or two lenses, but how do I get a group of people, a group of different frames of reference, if you will, to come to think about it and then say, okay, I've seen it this way. How are you seeing it? And that just opens up so much more, I think great ideas, great conversations and ultimately great innovation. The more diverse those conversations are and the more diverse the audience is with the group is I'm having them with. That's a great take on how you feel and how you looked at that. And I think that's to me a great call out because you get to be self-aware and that's hard to do. You just basically walk through the mindset of stepping back and looking at perspectives other than your own. And I think to me that is hard for some people I've seen. And so that's one self-awareness, right? How do you do that? And then how do you maintain it? I mean, can you give some examples of how you've seen that in your career where it was just people weren't thinking before they were speaking or maybe driving too hard through conversations. And then the ideal scenario that you just pointed out, which is, okay, zoom out and understand and think and then align with at least, and you can do that in a debate. That's your philosophy at Amazon debate and align, but can you share some experiences where you've seen people just drive through too hard or didn't do that and scenarios where it did work? I definitely think that it's true. You can get folks in a meeting or in a conversation who are like, oh, I think I'm right on this. I know I'm right on this. Let me explain to you who I'm right on this. And sometimes it's just, it's important that you take a moment and say, okay, but if we had someone in the room that wasn't you or didn't have the background, would there be different? Would it be a different answer? And I always try to frame it. I think when you get sort of locked into there's a right answer, that's not always the way it is. I think that there's, depending on the situation, there's definitely answers that, yes, if we're trying to solve this problem, we've looked at it a couple of ways. We think there's a couple of different answers or a couple of different scenarios in which we can get the best outcome. But the more you can kind of move away from, at least I think move away from, hey, there's a right here or there's only one way here, the better you're gonna be ultimately on, hey, actually, there turned out to be a couple of different ways that we could have addressed this issue or that we could have built this program. And so I do think that's important is not to come lock yourself into one way, but think, all right, let's take a beat and say, hey, could there be another way we could have thought about this? I mean, especially with a room full of engineers too, you can imagine, I'm right, this is the right answer. I think both different perspectives. What's come out of a lot of these interviews is that diversity, inclusion, and equity brings more power functions. It's a step function in value, right? It's a competitive advantage too. I mean, if the data is becoming clearer and clearer that more diversity, more inclusion, more equity brings more power to the conversations, more, and products. And this is proven. How do we get there? As you're a senior leader now, you've got the helm at AWS on marketing. You got a lot of influence as you go through your career. How are you going through that progression of keep driving that positive mindset, that change? Mm-hmm. I'm really, I love my team. When we sit down and talk about conversations, what I always try to think about it is, let everyone else speak first. Like, I don't wanna be the first person to comment on something, right? I always say, hey, let's hear from everyone else first. Because then I think people feel free to kind of share what they think. And I always do kind of look around and in my head just think, okay, have we got the teams here that we wanna make sure we're including in the discussion, right? So kind of just saying, oh, we're gonna roll out. Hey, we have a new idea for our marketing program. Who's gonna, for all of our customers, great. It's a global program, great. Do we have global representation? Great, if we don't, hold on. We need to pause for a second. We're thinking about new messaging positioning. Okay, great, for our customers. Who's here to talk about it? And we have marketing representation. How about PR? How about the engineers to your point? But just again, I think the more diverse we can make that conversation. If I'm in a room and I'm like, oh, there's only a few of us and we all are going to have the same frame of reference for this conversation. Let's make sure we get some other folks in the room. So it's not just us with one set of context. Well, you're a customer. You guys have been so successful at AWS and Amazon. AWS in particular, its results. You look at, just go back to our first Cube event there in 2013, just enormous success. And you've got such a diverse customer base. It is global. It is, you know, 51% women. That's the statistic in the customer base in general. So super important. And this is really a big deal. So I have to ask you, as you're the leader out there of AWS, you're an inspiration to many out watching. For the young folks out there, the young girls and young women out there who are going into their careers and thinking about tech, whether they're in early school or getting into the career path, what advice would you give them around how to be successful, how to find mentors, how to be a good citizen in the community and how to contribute and how to move forward in a very positive way? When we started the conversation a couple of minutes ago, I mentioned finding your voice. I think that's really critical. I think find your voice, use your voice. I know that sometimes, you know, early on, you know in my career, I was maybe nervous about asking questions but ask the questions. I think that the more questions you can ask, very oftentimes you'll ask a question and someone else, a bunch of other people in the room are like, oh yeah, I would have asked that question. I think that, wait, you know, I'm super proud of my leadership team. It's a 70, 30 split women, yay. But I definitely think look at who you're surrounding yourself with, think about your mentors, think about your team, think about your community and just kind of, you know, ask yourself, hey, how can I, you know, have this be an even broader community and even more diverse community? Because having that, I think, is just gonna help make whatever comes after it that much better. And so I think that would be my big advice is just, you know, learn and be curious. Like I said before, ask a lot of questions but definitely find your voice and share that voice with your community and make that community as sort of as broad as you can. Rachel, thanks, that's great insight. The word community resonates as all my interviews here on this International Women's Day all comes back to community and being part of something super important. Thank you so much for being part of our program and our community. We really appreciate it. Thank you for your time and insight and your mentorship and also your insights here on theCUBE, we really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you, John. This was really great. Thank you for having me. Okay, this is theCUBE's presentation of Women in Tech's global event, celebrating International Women's Day. More content coming. Stay with us for more. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.