2023-April-17

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Home, Sweet Home. Again.

BY MONA HUDAK · BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER · UNITED STATES

WITH HELEN GALL

4 MINUTE READ · 7 MINUTE LISTEN

I like to joke that my Cisco badge is purple. After five separate employment terms here, moving between red and blue badges, I’ve earned that unique, colorful distinction.

Mona at Cisco’s Hillsboro, Oregon office. She is back for good.

I compare my Cisco journey to that of a grown child who moves away from home to gain experience or independence. A move that is not to escape but to grow.

The connection to family, while perhaps physically separated, remains tethered. That’s my story.

I love Cisco. Cisco is and has always been my family. I’m home again and here to stay.

I first joined Cisco in 1998 as a technical writer.

It was an unlikely landing spot for me. Growing up in a small town, while I gravitated toward STEM classes, my high school counselor told me that I would never be an engineer, because… “engineering is a man’s job.”

As a teenager, her words filled me with so much anger and self-doubt — doubt that would linger with me for many years. Yet, those words motivated me to prove her wrong.

With my family’s support, I left my hometown after high school and moved to the San Jose area. I worked entry-level jobs to pay the rent, before stumbling upon and succeeding at technical writing and networking technology classes at a local college.

It was the spark that ignited my career. I knew that I had found my calling.

After several years as a technical writer and other various roles at Cisco, I was promoted to Senior Program Manager, the gatekeeper for every software release at Cisco.

It was a daunting role, yet one that I executed with growing confidence. When you’re a gatekeeper, standing in front of a literal revenue train, and you deem that train unready, it can be unsettling.

Senior leaders may tell you to get out of the way. But I maintained my conviction, understanding that to release a product before it was ready could threaten our brand.

Leading the way

While I enjoyed professional success, the sting from my high school counselor still resonated. The male-dominated landscape she described proved accurate. At the time, it was common to be spoken over by male colleagues, who lacked respect for our talent and insights.

Mona during a WAN meeting almost 20 years ago where she was co-leader of the network.

As a result, in 2002, I cofounded the Women’s Action Network (WAN, now called Women of Cisco). It was the first of its kind and eventually inspired and helped launch Cisco’s successive Inclusive Communities.

It’s one of my proudest professional moments.

WAN began very small and quietly. We couldn’t share the news with our managers out of fear we would be judged for taking time off our day jobs for an extracurricular activity. But our movement quickly gained stealth popularity, and we attracted more than 800 members within a year.

We even gained the attention of Cisco’s former CEO John Chambers, who embraced our efforts and fostered our growth. This led to our landing an executive sponsor, modest funding, and allies in human resources.

HR eventually launched a diversity and inclusion department to handle the many communities that were spun out from early WAN effort.

I had found my people. And my purpose.

Growth spurt

We worked with HR to expand our messaging and formalize our business case. I recruited high-profile speakers to donate their time to speak to us, offering them no compensation but a chance to align themselves with Cisco and our group.

A group photo of Mona and other attendees with John Chambers.

Mona with former Cisco CEO John Chambers at the 2006 Women's Leadership Summit in Monterey, CA.

Our numbers grew. We filled conference rooms with monthly sessions that addressed work-life balance, which was unheard of in 2003. We had a community of people who desperately needed resources to support their personal and professional growth.

That energy spread and through our efforts, people felt better connected at work.

Today, WAN has become a model for other Inclusive Communities and fully embraced by Cisco, which is the right thing to do, sure, but also adds business value.

When you have happy employees, they’re more productive and it grows your brand.

So why leave Cisco four times?

It’s tightly connected to my commitment to WAN. Early on at Cisco, I developed a close relationship with a mentor who played a significant role in my professional growth. She trusted me to take calculated risks and lead high-stakes programs, even those shrouded in secrecy.

My mentor had my back, and that can hard to come by as a woman in tech.

So each time my mentor left for a new job, she invited me to join her. After each stint, I returned to Cisco, eager to pick up where I left off — or begin a new adventure.

As a Cisco Business Development Manager today, I’m sunsetting my career where it all began.

I’m really back for good now and proud to see that Women of Cisco has grown to 8,000 members globally, recognizing that my work — and my colleagues’ work — makes a difference in many people’s lives and to the Cisco brand.

Fifth time’s a charm!