Loree:

So you’ve been on the city council now for almost a year and a half, has it felt like longer? What’s been something that has surprised you about serving on the council?

Alison:

One thing that surprised me is how many things were not visible to me as a member of the public or a candidate. And I don’t mean that they weren’t public, I just mean that I wasn’t aware of them. So for example, the serving on the regional boards and things like that. I’m a director on the San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority. I’m also in the Bay Area water supply conservation agency as the director from Palo Alto. And those are significant amounts of time, not just the meetings, but the same thing with the council meetings, preparing for the meeting, meeting with the executive director to get up to speed, or answer questions serving on ad hoc committees; those things aren’t super visible to people. But for example, with the JPA, we’ve just hired a new executive director, and so a lot of closed sessions, which obviously are not visible to the public. Then working on the ad hoc to go through the resumes and go through the hiring process. So that’s one thing that surprised me. That’s probably the main thing because I had the benefit of spending a number of years observing council meetings, and I had gone to board and commission meetings. So I was familiar with that.

Loree:

Great. Do you feel like your time that you’ve worked as a leader in the civilian world helped you before you started serving in government on the city council?

Alison:

I love how you called civilian.

Loree:

Yeah, it’s so funny. Yeah, I definitely think of it that way still. How do you feel like your time working in the corporate world helped prepare you for working on city council?

Alison:

I actually think, and I was telling a member of our firefighting team this yesterday, I feel like all of my experiences come into play at different points in time. I’ll just be specific about Google because I did contemplate running before I went back to work, when I was a stay at home mom. But for a variety of reasons, that wasn’t the right time for me and my family. And I am confident I’m a better council member for having worked at Google.

So when my prior work experiences had been in more sort of the, I’m going to use your military terminology, commanding control a little bit right hierarchical, and information was was controlled, I guess, is the best way to phrase it. And that seemed appropriate. But at Google, it’s more about, and you’re familiar with this, you know, Google Docs, right? And Docs, lets people make comments, share it with everybody find that tested, find the problems and fix them beforehand. It doesn’t matter whether that’s a word document with words or a document with numbers. And I saw the benefit of that. And I learned it over those almost five years I was at Google. And I bring that to counsel. And that’s one thing that I know, I would have not have had otherwise. We do that and I am an advocate for sharing more information.

Loree:

Yeah.

Alison:

Yeah. It always struck me when we were working together at Google to open up a Google Doc, and you’d see all the people who are in it working at that moment. And it’s like, wow, it’s super cool. But at the same time, it’s like oh, my God, like all these different people, you know, the comments. That the comment function to me is the is the secret sauce of Google Docs. And maybe that’s because part of my time at Google, I was in communications and yes, I would see people working in it together. And sometimes you’d be on the phone with them or a video, and you’d be like, well, how does this look? But often it was a different time zone or whatever.

Loree:

Excellent. So I wanted to ask about your own experience growing up and your exposure to leaders… Who were some of your role models as leaders as you grew up?

Alison:

I did a lot of reading as a child, and I still do, and a lot of fiction. And so I think I absorbed through reading different ideas about what it means to be what I’ll call independent, you know, as opposed to sort of like traditional leadership; I’m not sure that that was obvious to me at the time. I certainly always loved my teachers in elementary school. I wanted to be a teacher. And then I think as I got a little older, I saw a different model of leadership. And one of the things that I saw in college was someone who has since become a friend of mine, who ran a conference called “you can make a difference.” I just hadn’t been particularly involved in public service, or community service.

When I was in high school, there are a few leadership examples there. But in college, I saw the ability to lead people in a community function again, as opposed to a vertical function. So that was sort of the beginning of seeing that. I guess, if I go back to high school, I was the president of a few clubs. This isn’t answering your question. But I think for me, my early leadership roles evolved from being organized. Right, coming into a group and seeing Oh, okay, Model UN. So, okay, where are we going? How are we going to get there? Who’s doing what, you know, does everyone have all the information they need before they get there? Right, you had to be dressed up and things like that. So I think that was just a natural evolution. I’ll say my mom was definitely, you know, the leader in the family, but it came from a place of organization and planning. And I’ll just say love, which I think and outside of the family, we would call it caring. Yeah. So those are probably two that I emulate just instinctively.

Loree:

Nice. It’s interesting that you bring up caring. You and I had talked before about this, this really interesting evolution in leadership, how when you and I grew up, and you know, became leaders after college, and in the workplace, there was, you know, it was still during a time where there weren’t as many women in business, there are more now. And I think women were really starting to do more in business and to hold higher leadership positions. And it was still under a very male model like this, the business role used to be all men. And so the environment is very much based on I think some of the attributes that are typically more thought of as being male. And so, you know, being a woman in a male business environment, having to be unemotional, you know, strong, very, you know, have that barrier. And now, recently, it feels like people are starting to recognize the power of caring and empathy and vulnerability. And I think, you know, we had this discussion about how it’s kind of, you know, all of us women who came up in that world where we were trying to fit into a man’s world. Now, a lot of those attributes that were that are just part of who we are, as women are now starting to be celebrated more and looked for more. So I’d love to get your thoughts about that evolution, and how you see that in the leaders that you work with today.