Cox’s Toni Stubbs Embodies Leading While Giving
The annual Women in Technology Award, presented jointly by The WICT Network, SCTE and Cablefax, is given to a woman whose professional achievements have extended beyond her company to impact and advance the cable telecommunications industry as a whole. This year’s recipient, Toni Stubbs of Cox Communications, has been fluent in the language of machines since her youth.
As VP, Technology, Engineering and Operations for Cox Virginia, she leads all network planning, engineering and Master Telecommunications Center operations for the Hampton Roads, Northern Virginia and Roanoke footprints. Under her leadership, Cox employees in the region support the customer experience for more than one million customers. She started her career at Cox down south in Tyler, Texas, leading technical efforts in what was formerly known as the Middle America system.
She’s also an active member of The WICT Network, sitting on the board of the Virginia Chapter, and the Information Technology Senior Management Forum.
In her personal life, Stubbs does everything she can to give back and lift up young people in need. She’s a previous board member for the Urban League of South Hampton Roads and currently serves on the board of Envision Lead Grow, a non-profit dedicated to breaking cycles of poverty by sharing the power of entrepreneurship with young women and girls. We spoke with Stubbs on her career path, misconceptions about women in STEM and what’s coming next for Cox. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow.
What does this award mean to you, and what was the first reaction when you found out? I was really humbled. I come to work and just do what I do because I love doing what I do and don’t necessarily look for the accolades. And so when I got the meeting invite from my boss [Cox VP, Engineering & Operations] Bill Hulsey, I pulled over and he said someone else is going to be joining us. I thought ‘What’s happening right now?’ [Cox SVP, Integration Management Office] Patricia Martin joined and she shared the news with me. It was really exciting. We were talking about the phenomenal women that have received this award ahead of me. I almost felt like I should say I’m not worthy. Bill said, ‘You absolutely are.’
Was there a moment when you realized you wanted to study science and technology? It really started in high school. I wanted to be a lawyer. My history teacher told me I didn’t retain my history well enough, so I went to the library to try to just memorize. I would take books and read and read and read, and try to memorize what it was. It was so incredibly boring to me, to be honest. And I saw this old IBM computer that someone had donated to our school library and it had a box with all these manuals. I asked the librarian what it was, and she said she had no idea how to make it work. I said, ‘do you mind if I read the books because I’m trying to get better at memorizing for history’ and she said sure. I read the books and figured it out. I knew what to do with those floppy disks. When I got back to the library, I started putting the floppy disks in and actually got the computer up and running. That was the start of me really learning technology and teaching myself. I shared with the librarian that I actually had gotten it up and running and she said to me you are really smart with those things. You should go into computers. That’s how I ended up going to Mercy College of Detroit studying computer science.
How did you move into cable? I started as an intern at an old Bell company, Michigan Bell. I worked with computers and worked for a company, National Cash Register, right out of college. We went through some mergers and acquisitions and steps where they became AT&T. Then I moved into the cable industry and I worked for Continental Cablevision and did that for seven years through all of the buyouts and mergers of that time. Eventually Comcast bought the market that I was in and I left them. I went to GM’s Onstar, started working there and I got a call from a recruiter. The recruiter said there’s this telco company that’s looking for someone to lead their technology unit in Texas. I was exhausted with all of the mergers and acquisition that were going on. I said, ‘I don’t know that I could get back into telco.’ He said, ‘I think you really want to talk to this company,’ and revealed it was Cox. I knew a couple of people who through all the M&A had ended up from Continental over at Cox and they had nothing but great things to say about the company. So, I talked to them.
You moved from Texas to Cox Virginia. What makes your current region unique? When I first got here to Hampton Roads, it was all still three very separate systems. It’s the Northern Virginia system, the Hampton Roads system and the Roanoke system, and we were just looking at doing system consolidations and bringing everything together. That was an initial challenge—how do you bring three unique autonomous systems together into one operating model and get people all rowing in the same direction. I had really been in a situation like that before in Tyler because the Middle America Cox systems were just like that. It was Texas, East Texas, West Texas, part of Arkansas, part of Louisiana. We were spread out across multiple states and had people that had to report into one general manager at that time. I was able to come in and share some of that experience and skill set to be able to make the Virginia region what it is today.
What challenges did you face coming up as a woman in tech? Are there milestone moments of accomplishment that stand out from the rest? I was coming in as a female, and there had not been a female leader in technology at my level here before. I had to gain the trust of the employees and really prove that I deserve to be at the table here. Looking at all of my male predecessors, they had probably been given the benefit of the doubt that they deserved to have the seat that I was coming into. Part of what I did was just listen to the employees and share with them who I was. Over time, the employees had the opportunity to see that I really did know what I was talking about and also that they could trust me. Leadership really comes from not just being the doer. I think traditionally, within at least this space, the cable industry, people just got promoted up. That was the piece for my team where they said, ‘you didn’t get promoted up the ranks.’ But I won them over.
Is there an upcoming technology or initiative that’s keeping you excited to come into the office every day? I am excited about what our data services have to offer customers, more than just getting on the internet or e-mail or video streaming. We have the opportunity for customers to interact with their medical professionals. We’re seeing that some now, but I just see that growing even more. And though the pandemic caused us to have to readjust from a learning perspective, I see the opportunity to reach so many more children and teach them and give them that interactive experience. Kids that didn’t leave the city of Norfolk would be able to actually engage and see what it is like to be in another country and experience that almost as if they were there. That’s not to say that they shouldn’t strive to get there, but that gives them an opportunity that maybe they would otherwise never have had. When I think about that, I get so excited because we have the platform to be able to deliver that and to be able to give families that ability to see beyond their circumstances and to be better than what they ever imagined they could be.
What advice would you give to young girls considering a career in STEM? There is still, I think, the misperception that girls or women cannot be in engineering. I had an opportunity to go to an event with a male counterpart in front of a group of these young children. I asked the question ‘which one of us do you all think is the engineer?’ They all point to him. When I said, ‘nope, it is me,’ the girls and the boys said, ‘you can’t be an engineer.’ I said, ‘why not?’ There’s still the perception that women and girls cannot be engineers and that’s at a very young age. Getting in front of seven-, eight- and nine-year-olds and not only letting the girls see, but letting the boys see, that girls can be engineers, that they can go into areas of STEM and that it isn’t so nerdy. When I was coming up, you were considered to be a little bit nerdy if you were doing math and science. That has now gone out the window. There are so many opportunities. You don’t just have to be a programmer to get into the technology space. Some of the girls that we work with at Envision Lead Grow wanted to create their own makeup line. I told them, ‘do you realize this is STEM?’ That is the definition of science—experimenting and figuring out which things go together to make the best product that you want to make as an entrepreneur.
What myths about the cable industry need to be debunked? So many people still say, ‘oh, it’s just cable.’ We are so much more than cable. We are providing connections to the world and across the globe. We connect outside of our communities and are far reaching beyond what people ever would have thought.
Why is it important to give back? I am a product of a single mom whose family had to step in and really help to raise me. One of the things that my great-grandparents, who were very instrumental in my upbringing, reminded me is that to whom much is given, much is required. We didn’t have a lot, but I felt like I had a lot. As I got older, I really realized what that meant when they said that to me. I had been so incredibly blessed. I was the first to graduate college on my mother’s side. As I looked at being able to not only go get my undergraduate degree, but to go on to get my masters and now I’m working on my PhD, I want to be able to give opportunities to those who maybe don’t see that they have the opportunity. Giving back to the community, that is so personal to me. With WICT, we talk about giving to women who are starting their careers in this industry, and showing them that there are windows for them to be able to see through and go through to get to the next level. For children in foster care, the goal is always within foster care to give a safe environment for those children as parents are trying to get themselves back on their feet. I want to be able to provide what my great-grandparents provided for my mother in terms of a safe place, a loving environment in the event that the children are not able to be reunified with their families. In my case, I have four wonderful children who I have all adopted from the foster care system and they have made my family complete. They have a forever home with me.
