Barbara is a friend and proven tech sales leader who’s turned her top individual performance into top team performance through a keen mixture of data and emotional intelligence.  Past employees praise her using words like supporter, teacher, balance and learning.  She’s a veteran of SEVEN non-profit boards, and she’s a member of CHIEF – a private network designed to strengthen women in leadership, magnify their influence, and pave the way to bring others with them.  Barbara joined us to share some stories from her career leading people and some techniques she uses with her own teams.  In the episode, you’ll hear her talk about how she coaches managers who work for her to find success within their own approach, and she’ll walk us through some proven mechanisms you can implement to improve diversity among leadership roles within your organization.

I’ve invited Barbara to the ManagerMirror because our paths crossed at Amazon and I started following her social media messaging. I had heard she was an excellent leader first-hand from colleagues and noticed some themes in her post surrounded employee engagement and caring in leadership.  Barbara started her career as a lobbyist before taking her first sales roles at Bloomberg in 2010.  She delivered results and quickly ascended into people-leadership in the media and telecom vertical before moving to Amazon in 2017.  At Amazon, Barbara grew both enterprise and mid-market sales teams on her way to becoming the US Head ofB2B Sales for Tech, Media and Telecom.  If you ask her what she’s passionate about, she’ll tell you its people development.  Focusing on promoting, coaching, and motivation has enabled her to scale teams into top producing segments while inspiring collaboration and innovation. Today, Barbara is the Vice President of Sales at Avanade – a Microsoft & Accenture organization providing customers innovative digital, cloud and advisory services, sustainable industry solutions and design-led experiences across the Microsoft ecosystem. Connect with Barbara on LinkedIn to continue to learn from her leadership and content!