Janet Jones

I attribute my success to my personality and positive energy. I am a super positive energy person, and my goal is to always walk into a room and leave a positive footprint. When I meet people, even when I start a meeting, I'm starting it with positive energy, and I think that carries over. It's my aura, I should say. It shines and emanates, and people want to be in that circle, and I believe positive energy attracts positive energy. So I try to bring that so that it comes my way, so it's kind of like a yin and yang kind of thing. I am not a pretentious person. What you see is what you get. I am straight, no chaser. People pretty much appreciate that. My personality has carried me forward and made it very easy for me to work with clients, work with very high-up people, you know, VPs and owners, because I'm very much treating everyone the same. Everyone's gonna get the same level of respect from me, because that's what you should get as a human being before anything.

One of my managers told me, don't compromise your integrity for the job. That seems very simple, but you find yourself in a situation sometimes where to go with what the manager or what the higher-ups want you to do, it almost changes your personality, and those are environments that I don't do well in, and that I can't stay. I don't think like the average manager, I think like a worker before I think like a manager, because I have to look someone in their face. My goal is to always treat people right, do how I would want someone to treat me. When someone told me that early on, just don't compromise who you are just for what management wants you to do, and sometimes that means that you need to move to a different place in order to uphold that, I never forgot that comment. And I was very young when someone told me that, too.

I would tell them to not only study the material, but the best thing you can do is have the material in your house. Be hands-on with anything. What helped me is bringing hardware into my home, and tinkering and playing around with it, so by the time I had to do it for real, in a real spot, I already had some hands-on experience. You have to stretch yourself, play around with things to learn what you're going to be supporting, and use the resources around you. When you find someone that has a little bit more knowledge than you, pick their brain, become friends with different people, get in different technical groups so that you can bounce ideas and thoughts to people that are already doing the work, because you'll find that they actually appreciate you recognizing that they have more skill than you, and they'll be more open to giving you some direction. So use your resources around you as best you can, and definitely practice, practice, practice, because having a certification or having a degree doesn't mean anything if you can't apply the work.

The biggest challenges I've faced are being a female and being a black female in a technical field where it's all men. At the same time, being a female sometimes gives me an opportunity because they may have treated me differently, maybe even sometimes more harshly. If I was a man, they may have treated me more harshly, but as a female, they need to be a little more careful sometimes, and sometimes that does work in my advantage. The fact that I am a female means I can convey to them the same thing a different way. If you're dealing with a male in the IT field that is not an egomaniac, and there's a lot of those, you can do very well with that. The ones that are like that, you can't do well with. Sometimes it's bad, and sometimes it's good, because depending on who you're dealing with, they may listen to you differently because they don't want to be labeled as a certain type of person because you're a female. So I've used it to my advantage when it does help.

The values most important to me are honesty, loyalty, and just decency - treating people with kindness and respect, and it doesn't matter who they are. It doesn't cost anything to be nice to someone. It's easier to smile than to frown. I like to see that, and I try to bring that when I walk into an environment, even if I'm having a bad day. I'm never going to treat somebody bad simply because they're not at my level. I see that in my business quite a bit, and that's something that's important to me - treating people right, treating them as you would want to be treated. My mother left me with this comment: she always said, you be right, even if they're wrong. You be right, because you have to hold your head up, and at some point, you're gonna meet your maker at some point, and you wanna say that you've always done the right thing, even when someone else wasn't.