Asking for help is a strength, not a weakness. Great leaders know when to seek guidance, collaborate, and learn from others to drive better results.

In this edition of our Women in Leadership series, Areen Bahour, a Principal Solutions Architect at CMT,  discusses how embracing support has shaped her career and leadership style.

CMT: Hi Areen. To start off, can you share how you got to where you are in your career? 

Areen: My educational background is actually in chemical engineering, but I have never worked a day in the field outside of some research I did during my undergrad. 

Throughout that experience and the engineering curriculum, I realized that most of the work that I loved was either the project work that I did with my chemE team, or things that I did outside of the chemical engineering curriculum.

I did a leadership program. I tried to do a lot of community organizing. It was just very clear to me that I love being with people. I love chatting with people all the time. I need a job that’s a lot more social and I love solving problems and thinking big vision. Like what do we need to get done, how are we going to get it done? But sometimes the nitty gritty of it, I kind of lost interest.

I started thinking about what possible jobs can lead me in that direction. And I started looking at things like consulting, project management, and things like that. I wasn’t aware that solution architecture was even a title or a role at the time. 

But throughout my career and different projects that I’ve taken, met a lot of people, I just started noticing when people do a job, I’m like, that’s who I want to be when I grow up. I took note of what kind of companies or what kind of roles they were at and landed here. 

CMT: As a Principal Solutions Architect, what does your day-to-day look like? 

Areen: One of our main roles and priorities is understanding our clients’ needs really well so we can translate them into solutions and products that we put out in the market. A lot of the time is either actively chatting with customers or communicating with them over email or writing documentation to capture what I’ve learned from my conversations with them. That is really the majority of my time, I would say and then the second big chunk is cross-functional work with different teams. 

In order to make kind of our projects a reality, we need to work with product, with development, with QA, with sales, all the wonderful teams. There’s a lot of just cross-functional meetings to learn from each other and also to make sure that we’re all on the same page on what we’re trying to deliver. 

Then if there is time left in the day or the week, I try to allocate time to continue learning, whether that’s learning more about the industry, more about other clients that I may not be engaging with directly, just because part of the role is to be very familiar with our product and our industry. 

CMT: Seems like there’s a lot of collaboration in your role and that’s one of our key values at CMT. How do you collaborate with others and what are your key goals?

Areen: Key goals on a high level, it’s kind of the famous budget scope and time, right? We’re always trying to make sure that we’re delivering our projects or products in the market with the highest quality on time and within the allocated budget. And so that is really on a high level what teams do altogether, but it’s not one single person that can make sure that all of that is flowing as expected. That’s where a lot of the collaboration comes in. 

We work very closely. There’s internal and external collaboration. As I mentioned earlier, we’re always collaborating with the customer teams. A lot of times I joke, I say, I feel like I’m actually like a part of the customer’s team as well, because we’re interfacing a lot and talking transparently and honestly about what they’re trying to accomplish and what’s working, what’s not. And then there’s the internal collaboration, which is all the meetings within CMT and within the teams. It’s one of the things I love about this job, honestly, and about CMT in general, having that openness.

I’ve never felt like I couldn’t go up to somebody who’s many levels higher or somebody I never met at the company to ask a question. There’s so many brilliant individuals and everybody has kind of a niche that they know really, really well. And I just love the ability to have a one-on-one or stop somebody in the office and be able to work with them.

CMT: How do you balance being a full-time employee and your personal life?

Areen: I’m pursuing a master’s at the same time as this role. So that has been a whole new learning curve and experience in the art of prioritization and time management.  In terms of prioritization, I just try to think on a periodic level, like every week or maybe sometimes every few months, I’ll just sit and make sure I have my priorities in the right order, whether that’s work, whether that’s school, whether that’s like personal relationships, whether that’s other volunteer work that I do on the side.

I try to always make sure that I am very intentional and cognizant of how I’m prioritizing my time, because at the end of the day, something’s gotta give, and you’re gonna have to say no.

Then, the time management piece. I really time block everything, it gets ridiculous, but my calendar has all kinds of colors and I try to really, not very strictly schedule my time, but I just know where I’m allocating it generally day to day. And if things don’t get done, I just kind of try to move it so it doesn’t get lost. I do aim to try to finish everything I’m trying to accomplish by the end of the week.

CMT: What are some of the challenges you face? 

Areen: Honestly, juggling all the different things, I think that in and of itself is a challenge, but we already touched upon how to handle that or how I try to handle that. I think the other big challenge that I’d highlight is being always reminded of what’s the greater mission and vision, whether that’s on a company level, like thinking about CMT’s mission of making the roads and the drivers safer, right, or a personal mission or vision of what I’m trying to accomplish in 5, 10, 15 years. Sometimes I get lost in the day-to-day that I really have to stop and be like, hold on, why am I doing all of this? Like, what’s the point? Where are we trying to go?

Sometimes I get hung up or put a lot of pressure on things working out today, and I just really try to tell myself to look at the bigger picture and how much this impacts that bigger picture. And if it’s not a lot, then I can just let it go and move on. 

CMT: What is a piece of advice you have for women in the industry? 

Areen: Ask for help when you need it. I struggled with that a lot. I always tried to figure out things on my own. I just felt like it won’t be good enough if I don’t figure it out on my own or don’t ask, but you lose a lot of valuable time. I have a rule where I’ll decide before, like I’m going to spend X amount of time trying to figure this out. And if I cannot, I will seek help from somebody who knows more, can connect me with someone who knows more.

There’s a lot of opportunities to learn and display leadership outside of the traditional path. You don’t need to be a manager or to have a big team to be a good leader. I think try to find ways that there are things you enjoy, like I think community volunteering is a great example, to hone those skills and become more comfortable with them outside the professional realm and then you can bring them to your job and I think that’s kind of a good recipe to be comfortable and be good leaders.