According to a CEB Global study, 60% of new managers fail within the first 24 months in their roles. This directly impacts company performance: teams under struggling managers perform 15% worse on average, while employees are 20% more likely to leave or become disengaged under ineffective managers (Gartner).
Couple these statistics with the oft-quoted fact that 70% of digital transformations fail (McKinsey), and it becomes clear that organisations must do more – particularly in the tech sector – to support new leaders to succeed.
Ahead of Women in Tech Fest 2025, Quest Events spoke with Tanya Trott (CTO Transurban), Dr Katherine King (CEO Yarris Technologies), and Emma Jones (CEO & Founder, Project F) to gain their advice for new leaders, understand common challenges in tech leadership, and explore how tech organisations can reduce barriers to advancing more women to executive leadership positions.
What are the first steps you would recommend for an ambitious individual seeking to step up into a leadership role in tech?
“Ask a lot of questions!” advises King. “Who, what, where, when, why, and how much? Let the organisation know you want to be a leader and ask what you need to do to become one. If they don't tell you, don't know, or won't help you learn the tools and skills you need, leave and find a place that will.”
King adds that new leaders must understand that reporting is everything. “Find out what your manager’s manager needs to know, and provide it to your manager on a regular, predictable schedule so they don’t have to keep asking you.”
New leaders should learn about project/product/customer management tools like Jira, Confluence, Salesforce, Monday, and the Microsoft suite so they can create and disseminate authoritative information quickly.
Don’t make the mistake of focusing only on internal stakeholders as you find your feet. “Understand that you’re working for a business with customers,” says King. “What do they want and need? Focus on them.”
This is no time to wait and see what will happen next. “Work fast and hard,” King urges. “It's a lot better than being bored. When you run out of things to do, ask for more.”
For Trott, the key for leadership success is to establish domain expertise in an area. “It might be a technical domain like networking, or it might be strong service management expertise. You need a baseline of expertise to build your credibility, and demonstrating domain mastery is useful for that.”
This might involve gaining certifications or could require tenure in a role for several years.
“From there,” continues Trott, “building out knowledge in other domains is key. This shows versatility and curiosity, which are traits needed for leadership roles. When I’m hiring for manager roles, I am looking for people who have held a variety of roles in a different functions or technical domain.”
How can new leaders get the most out of their tech teams from the outset?
New leaders, Trott believes, should spend the first 30 to 60 days understanding the team and what they deliver. “What are they doing well and where are improvements required?” she asks.
Next: KPIs. “Set measurable KPIs to meet business objectives and deliver any uplift required,” Trott says. “Actively communicate these objectives (or the priority subset) to the team so everyone is clear on the expectation – it helps to define a strategy in collaboration with the team, and to communicate changing priorities regularly so everyone is aligned. Review delivery against the objectives regularly, and celebrate successes!”
King lists eight steps new leaders can take to get the most out of their tech teams from day one:
- Create clear product roadmaps and processes informed by your leadership, customers, and competitors – not just by your imagination.
- Plan sprints in advance and get everyone on board with the long-term relevance and short-term goals of each sprint.
- Lead standups every day, making sure everyone is clear on what they are doing and removing any blockers.
- Plan work carefully, explaining why the work needs to be done, to what standard and the outcomes you're expecting.
- Test, test, test and ensure you have developers testing developers’ work – keep the standard high.
- Automate whatever you can and don't skimp on adding automated testing before the work is considered done.
- Encourage polite arguments and disagreements – everyone should speak in meetings, even your quietest, youngest team member. (Note: AI tools can now be used to flag if someone is dominating a meeting and ensure quieter voices are heard.)
- Provide the highest levels of flexibility and trust for your team. “Everyone wants to pick up their kids, go to the dentist or visit their mother. Just let them.”
What are some common challenges you have seen tech leaders face, and how can they be overcome?
Trott notes that getting everyone aligned to the strategy can be challenging, particularly if some teams are being asked to change what they have previously done. “Whilst there isn’t a magic bullet to solve this, it does help to communicate transparently with everyone on what is changing, and why. People can usually understand, and whilst they may not agree, at least they are clear on expectations,” she adds. “From there, continuing to regularly update on the change and reinforcing it is helpful to ensure teams don’t stray from the purpose.”
King agrees that communication is absolutely critical. “Communicate, communicate, communicate – silence is death!” she says. “And pushing people too hard never works – they just break and burn out. Accept that you make mistakes and [when they happen], apologise to the team and to customers – at least you're admitting there's a problem.”
King’s other advice is around diversity: “Trying to create one type of worker is always a problem: embrace people's different ways of working because we're not all the same. Fitting square pegs into round holes is not a good management strategy. People from different non-white, non-male, non-mainstream cultures may need an extra hand to step up. Offer your hand. Offer both hands.”
What should organisations do to advance more women to executive leadership positions in tech?
“Analysing your people data is a great place to start,” notes Jones. “Understanding the internal story your data tells enables you to see where the barriers exist so you can create actions to address these.”
Examples might include examining exit interviews, engagement surveys and performance management feedback, alongside attrition, pay gaps, hiring practices and promotion rates.
“Then, set targets and report on metrics,” Jones continues. “Improving leadership capability in all areas, especially with regards to inclusive leadership skills, will always yield benefits in this regard and if appropriate, consider implementing a tailored sponsorship program. Lastly - adopt the T-EDI Standards! “
For King, the provision of training and mentorship for women by men and women in leadership positions is essential not just in term of skills, but for growing relationships and connections. Besides this, it’s all about providing special projects and creating opportunities to gain the necessary experience: “Enable your people to attend conferences, sit in on key meetings, undertake special interest independent study, participate in proof-of-concept experiments, take a secondment to another team to try out a new area of interest.”
“Ensure recruitment processes are as blind as possible so people are not swayed by the inevitable hiring 'because they look and sound like me', or 'they went to my school’”, King continues. “Ensure there are senior women on every recruitment panel. Don't hire and promote people who do not hire and promote women and people from diverse backgrounds. Look very carefully at managers' hiring records.”
Finally, King recommends providing flexible working arrangements to men so they can participate in their family, community and interests. “That way they see how important it is for everyone to be treated with respect and inclusion. The men flex for others when they are given flexibility. People begin to understand that you can have a job and still have a life.”
In Trott’s experience, having female participation targets can be helpful because a clear and measurable objective shows where participation is lagging and can be focused on for attraction and retention improvement initiatives. “At Transurban, we ensure women are part of the hiring panels so that female candidates can relate during the interview process; and we’re committed to including female candidates in the selection process for all roles. We have an organisation-wide focus on gender diversity, and report on female participation at our monthly Scorecard meetings which really focuses attention on the issue.”
What are the organisational hurdles to gaining more diversity in thinking in the tech sector, and how can they be overcome?
In her work as a tech gender diversity advocate, Jones often sees a lack of alignment at senior leadership levels as a significant hurdle, along with a lack of incentive to do the hard work of creating diversity. “There is an overreliance on representation as a core measure when in truth, it takes a long time to change,” she says. “This leads companies to look for quick solutions like employer branding (‘window dressing’) over the more complex strategic work of identifying and breaking down systemic, structural and cultural barriers, reporting with transparency and holding all leaders accountable (instead of HR).”
King believes the greatest hurdle to diversity is managers who are “poorly qualified, inexperienced, narrow-minded and scared; people who don't come with a development/opportunity mindset. They don't realise how much they hold the company back with their non-commercial narrow-mindedness.”
The reality is that people from all walks of life buy products, with most products in the world are actually purchased by women. At present, up to 10% of the population is neurodiverse.
“We need to have women, people from different racial and cultural backgrounds, and neurodiverse people in our teams so we can create products and services that appeal to people of different backgrounds,” says King. “Want to be commercial? Profitable? Then hire people from diverse backgrounds to help you grow and compete.”
Trott points again to the benefits of targets. “Having no target for female participation may indicate a low focus on improving it – adopting targets can apply focus on attracting and retaining women. Some basic tweaks to recruitment processes include always seeking both male and female candidates, and having women on the interview panel to help female candidates connect with the organisation they are interviewing with and to counter any bias that may exist.
Finally, Trott notes that the number of women graduating from technical degrees is a lot lower than men: “Organisations can consider providing technical training for women wanting to consider career changes.”
Connect with and hear from expert speakers including Dr Katherine King (Yarris Technologies), Tanya Trott (Transurban) and Emma Jones (Project F) at Women in Tech Fest 2025 from 18-20 February in Sydney. Learn more.
To access the detailed conference program, download the brochure here.