8

STEP 6: LEAD THE CHANGE

We have a legacy of inequitable and marginalizing systems, processes, and cultures in our companies, across our industries, and throughout our society—passed down through the generations before us. And it takes all of us working together to correct them, so that we all have the opportunity to work, lead, and thrive in stronger, happier workplaces and communities.

In our research, we found many allies are motivated to do this work to become better leaders—whether leading the change for ourselves, our businesses, our colleagues, our friends and family, or the next generation. We become better leaders by becoming inclusive leaders: growing our empathy and courage, refining our individual work to be more inclusive, building team norms around DEI, and collaborating to create more equitable and inclusive systems, processes, and cultures.

You can lead the change from wherever you are in your career—this chapter is for us all, whether we’re managers, directors, executives, or just beginning our careers. The following pages include individual actions for becoming better leaders, actions for team leaders, actions teams can take together (consider working together as a team to address these), and actions that can be taken by anyone on a team. It’s not meant to be a checklist so much as a lifetime menu. Work to build your capacity for change: one or two steps now, then a few more when you’re ready, and continue to take additional steps over time.

Lead with Empathy and Allyship

Empathy is a crucial leadership skill—people with empathetic colleagues and leaders report more effective collaboration and creativity, higher team morale, and better performance. Demonstrating empathy for each other also increases employee engagement, job satisfaction, retention, customer satisfaction and loyalty, business growth, and profitability.3 Yet we are often missing empathy in our workplaces—72 percent of CEOs say the current state of empathy in the workplace needs to change.4 That same study found 96 percent of people in the tech industry feel their colleagues have difficulty demonstrating empathy.5 Considering the impact tech products have on the world, this lack of empathy could have a negative impact on many of our lives.

If showing empathy doesn’t come easy for you, it’s OK—it can be learned.6 As a young girl, I grew up in a family that didn’t really discuss or show feelings for each other. That made it really difficult for me to have or show empathy for other people. I approached people intellectually rather than emotionally, and often missed opportunities to be present emotionally for friends and family when it really mattered. In my late teens and early twenties, I actively worked to cultivate my empathy through reading, learning how facial expressions and body language convey emotion, getting to know myself through writing and later meditation, asking questions of myself and others, and deeply listening. Over time, the awkwardness of sharing emotions gave way to a genuine passion for understanding my own emotions and those of others—and it turned into a career of empathy-building through filmmaking, social marketing, behavior change, change management, and DEI. I now train and coach leaders to build empathy in themselves and across their teams.

Meet yourself where you are and work to grow and show your empathy. And keep in mind that when we have conflict or are interacting with people different from us (people we may view as our out-group), our empathy tends to reduce—which means we may have to remind ourselves to expand our in-group and step into our empathy in these situations. We also have to work harder to tap into our empathy when we’re stressed or on a deadline.7 Building your empathy muscle will not only help you become a more effective ally, but it will also help you become a more effective leader.

In “Step 2: Do No Harm,” we looked at how to show empathy. The following are some ways to continue your journey to lead with empathy and allyship:

Grow your self-understanding, build new relationships with people not like you, and demonstrate empathy toward them. Good allies know themselves well, which helps them listen, learn, and act with empathy. You can grow your self-understanding through coaching, therapy, journaling, meditating, or other practices that generate self-awareness and mindfulness. Spend time with people from different backgrounds and identities and really get to know them and understand their experiences—through travel, social media, working on community projects, attending events, scheduling informal meetings, or some other way. And the best way to show your empathy is to take action as an ally: listen with empathy, communicate your understanding verbally and nonverbally, and then use your empathic learning to take action on someone’s behalf.

Build your emotional and cultural intelligence. Emotional intelligence (shortened EI or EQ for emotional quotient) is a term that dates back to the 1960s from psychologist Michael Beldoch.8 The idea was made popular by Daniel Goleman, who describes it as a combination of personal competence: self-awareness and self-management or regulation of your own emotions, plus social competence: awareness of other people’s emotions and the ability to manage and build relationships. Goleman found that EQ accounts for 58 percent of performance in most jobs, and 67 percent of the abilities necessary for leadership performance.9 I’ve worked with several leadership teams that have focused on EQ growth as a team, and they tend to be more self-aware, open to new ideas, collaborative, and solution-focused when it comes to DEI and allyship. They lead with empathy.

Cultural intelligence (CI or CQ) adds an additional dimension of understanding cultural contexts, and working effectively across different cultures in the workplace. While much of CI work focuses on global cross-cultural teams, it’s equally important to do this whether you have a local, regional, or global workforce that is diverse across gender, race, ethnicity, disability, age, religion, sexual orientation, and other identities, as well as geography. You can work on EI or CI by reading or individually working with an executive coach, and/or through group training and coaching.

Develop a growth mindset. Psychologist Carol Dweck has shown in her research that our mindset about learning and intelligence can shape our creativity, empathy, achievement, and career success. Someone with a growth mindset believes that anyone can develop intelligence and skills through hard work, dedication, and opportunities to learn. With a growth mindset, leaders embrace challenges, learn from criticism, persist in the face of setbacks, put in effort as a path to mastery, and find inspiration in the success of others.

Leaders with a fixed mindset, in contrast, believe intelligence is static and inherent—they tend to avoid challenges, ignore feedback, give up easily, see effort as worthless, and feel threatened by others. They also view other people as fixed, which can reinforce anchoring and confirmation bias, stereotypes, and other biases about them.10 Do you have a fixed mindset about yourself, or someone on your team? Work to have a growth mindset about yourself, as well as others—be open to challenges and opportunities, and open the door to opportunities for other people to learn and grow.

Develop inclusive leadership skills. There are several models of inclusive leadership you might explore—one that has had a lot of traction with several of my clients is Deloitte’s “six signature traits of an inclusive leader”:11

1.   Commitment. Develop personal values that include DEI, and stay true to those values by committing to action. These values might relate to fairness, respect, kindness, justice, and a belief in the value of diversity for your team and business.

2.   Courage. Show vulnerability and humility, acknowledge your personal strengths and weaknesses and work on them, and admit mistakes. Also, be brave as an agent of change, take responsibility for challenging the status quo, do the work to create needed change, and hold yourself and others accountable.

3.   Cognizance. Become self-aware of your biases, and mindful of situations where you’re most likely to be biased (e.g., when you’re fatigued or stressed). Self-regulate to ensure biases don’t influence your decisions and processes. Be mindful of fairness across your individual and company policies, processes, and structures. Assess fairness in outcomes (like compensation, promotion, attribution, and recognition equity), processes (ensuring transparency, consistency, accuracy, and inclusion), and communication (using respectful, authentic, transparent, and inclusive explanations).

4.   Curiosity. Be open to different perspectives, and tolerate ambiguity. Have a thirst for learning and understanding: fill the gaps in your knowledge, open yourself up to new ideas and experiences, and engage in respectful listening and conversation without judgment. Accept that uncertainty is inevitable in the search for personal growth—don’t get caught up in the fear of uncertainty, instead use your courage to remain open to change.

5.   Cultural intelligence. Seek to empathize and gain knowledge about people with identities and cultures different from your own, embrace unique working styles without judgment, and adapt your behaviors to work well across cultures. In my studies in sociocultural anthropology, I learned the power of cultural relativism: that no one culture is superior to another; each is equally valid with its own systems, language, and beliefs. Remember not to center on your own cultural experience as the norm, but rather develop the mindset that many different cultures are the norm.

6.   Collaboration. Give people autonomy, trust them, and empower them to fully contribute. Ensure teams are deeply diverse and inclusive, and create safe environments where every person on your team has a voice and is comfortable speaking up. Leverage the power of diversity to make better decisions, and make sure you remove any process biases that can become barriers to innovation.

In their research on management strategies that predict inclusion, Catalyst found that inclusive leaders lead outward—through accountability, ownership, and allyship—and lead inward—through curiosity, humility, and courage. These inclusive leadership skills lead to greater innovation, higher employee engagement and retention, and increased problem-solving abilities.12 Similar themes emerge across the growing body of research on inclusive leadership.

Choose Courage

The work of allyship can be challenging at times. Yet we have all come across challenging new ideas and concepts many times in our lives. Like driving a car, riding a motorcycle or bicycle, or learning a new skill in our field, it takes some time to grow this new strength. It takes courageously trying new things, being vulnerable when we don’t always know the answers, learning when something doesn’t work or we make a mistake, listening to feedback and people’s unique experiences, and holding true to our values as we continuously move forward.

Leadership requires courage, and what Brené Brown calls removing our armor: that defensiveness and inauthentic posturing we think protects us, but really holds us back. Beneath our defensiveness and posturing is sometimes shame, guilt, or discomfort. With allyship, sometimes this shame and guilt arises when we realize we have benefited from unfair privilege, we have been using language that has created harm, and perhaps we have not done enough to correct systemic barriers that exclude and oppress people. We might find ourselves resisting to protect ourselves from the uncertainty, vulnerability, or discomfort that comes from questioning what we thought we knew. Our armor might be to say we don’t have time for allyship, it’s too difficult, we don’t know enough, or that our colleagues are “fine” without us.14

Do you have any unresolved feelings relating to this work? If so, I highly encourage you to work through them so they don’t hold you back.

Along my own journey to lead the change, I resisted—and perhaps resented—the idea that I had unfair privilege. I have worked hard while facing many systemic barriers, I told myself. And yet when I really investigated, I realized that while this is true, I still have a great deal of privilege. I resisted Black and Indigenous women saying that their intersectional experience as women was different than my own as a White woman. Early in my life, I resisted the existence of racism, firmly believing we lived in a post-racial world. I have also resisted the notion of “White feminism,” “ableism,” “White supremacy,” and other inequities that surface even within DEI work. Now instead of resisting I recognize it and work to make power and privilege equitable.

Leading the change begins with our own self-awareness and internal work. If you find yourself resisting someone’s experiences, doubting a new concept you learn about allyship or inclusion, denying privilege or inequity—challenge yourself. Be curious: look inside yourself and find out why you’re resisting. This internal work is a big piece of allyship and will give you tools (both skills and stories) to help create change in other people too.

Above all, allies take action. We can get stuck in learning because we’re afraid to take action or action makes us feel uncomfortable. Be courageous and move beyond learning alone; make sure you have a bias toward action. You may not always get it right, and that’s OK. Use your courage to step out of your comfort zone, take risks, lend your power, and give your time, resources, and expertise to correcting generations of inequity and marginalization. Change happens when we catalyze a series of individual behavior changes, new cultural norms, and deliberate system and process improvements.

Rethink Your Individual Work to Be More Inclusive, Equitable, and Accessible

You have the power to lead the change in your own work, whatever your work entails. Each of us can spend some time and thought to improve our individual work to be more inclusive, equitable, and accessible—whether we work in marketing, communications, product, service, creative, customer satisfaction, procurement, administration, data, legal, engineering, research, sales, finance, strategy, innovation, HR, DEI, or something else. Model allyship in the work you do and how you go about doing it:

Share your allyship process with colleagues, with friends, and even publicly. Let people know what you’re working on as an ally, whether it’s ungendering your language, learning a new skill, deepening your knowledge of a culture, minding your microaggressions, or another practice you’ve learned. You can also ask people to give you feedback or hold you accountable to your commitment. When you do this, you model courage and growth, and normalize allyship.

Make a plan to incorporate more inclusive, equitable, and accessible processes into your daily work. Use the following exercise to think through how you might improve the daily individual work you do to embody allyship.

EXERCISE

Build Team Norms That Cultivate Allyship, Equity, and Inclusion

You already have what my friend and colleague Jennifer Brown calls the “spark” to become an inclusive leader, and most of the tools to make it happen are within you. There are a number of ways you can work to build new culture and team norms that facilitate change in your workplace. If you are a manager or working to become one, what you do and how you do it can make a big difference: Catalyst found that 45 percent of employees’ experiences of inclusion are explained by their manager’s inclusive leadership behaviors.18

Develop an Inclusive Team Culture

Think back to “The Role of Allyship in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” where we discussed the Stages of Inclusion. Work to ensure you are cultivating a culture where diverse identities and perspectives are welcome, where people feel safe to be who they are and fully contribute, engaged because they are contributing to the team and company’s success, committed because leadership cares about their professional growth and well-being, and feel they belong because they are valued, connected, and supported.

In a study called “Project Aristotle,” Google researchers conducted an in-depth analysis of what makes an effective team. They found that effective teams are interdependent and collaborative, and work together to plan, solve problems, make decisions, and review progress. In order for this interdependency and collaboration to thrive, the most important quality of a successful team is psychological safety: where team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other.19 Psychological safety is the foundation for engagement, commitment, and belonging.20

Create Psychological Safety on Your Team

Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as “a climate in which people are comfortable expressing and being themselves.”21 Help create an environment where people on your team feel psychologically safe to do the following:

Express and be themselves. People who feel safe don’t feel the need to cover, code switch, or otherwise hide a portion of their identity; they are comfortable expressing and being themselves. Eliminate out-groups so that everyone on the team feels they are an equal member of the team. Consider introducing shared values to broaden the group’s feeling of belonging together. Make sure you follow through on commitments to reduce biases and microaggressions. And prioritize DEI on your team, develop shared goals around DEI, and enroll everyone in working to achieve these goals.22

Take risks, make mistakes, and share concerns without fear of retribution. On teams that work well, people are not intimidated, reticent, or consistently stressed. For this to happen, leaders and colleagues need to be open to new ideas, provide thoughtful feedback, and be available for support and collaboration with all team members. Approach people with a growth mindset, and view mistakes as growth opportunities. If you’re a leader, take responsibility for team risk and share credit for team successes.23

Feel confident to speak up. When people are fearful that they will be humiliated, ignored, or blamed if they speak their minds, they shut down. Too many leaders don’t tolerate disagreement or even the raising of uncomfortable issues. Become the kind of leader where people around you are confident about speaking up. Work to have equal distribution of speaking time across all team members in your meetings, where each idea is heard and respected.24

Know their unique skills and talents are valued and utilized. People thrive on teams where their expertise is valued rather than questioned or disrespected, their unique skills and talents are utilized, and their contributions are aligned with team goals. If you are a manager, empower and trust team members to make decisions, help team members understand how their work relates to the larger goal of the team, and always provide formal and informal recognition for accomplishments as well as feedback. Create a team norm for recognizing contributions and major milestones. Often cultures overvalue the leadership style of the CEO or the dominant culture, and undervalue other equally important styles of leadership. Instead, recognize and value different leadership styles.

Trust and respect colleagues. Teams thrive where people feel they are not judged, everyone respects the expertise of their colleagues and can rely on them to meet goals and timelines, and all team members are encouraged to take reasonable risks. Create time and space for team members to get to know each other, build empathy for one another, and develop a collective intelligence together. Consider holding team get-togethers like lunches or afternoon meet and greets, offsites, volunteer outings, or other activities that build informal connections.

Foster Engagement, Commitment, and Belonging

There are a many ways to cultivate a more inclusive team culture that fosters engagement, commitment, and belonging. Secondary to psychological safety, Google found that effective teams develop dependability (“I can rely on team members to complete quality work on time”), structure and clarity (“I understand my role, plan, goals, and processes”), meaning (“I find a sense of purpose in my work”), and impact (“My work is making a difference for the team or organization”).25 The following are a few actions you can implement:

Develop shared vision and goals. Create clarity, structure, and meaning by developing a shared vision for the team’s collective work and connecting it to a larger impact. How does your team’s work contribute to a better world, or a key company priority? And what are your collective goals in achieving this vision together?

Establish mutual accountability and process clarity. From your team’s collective goals, individuals should create their own goals, timelines, and plans of action. Strive to make the goals transparent and measurable, discuss processes and review progress together, overcommunicate any changes, and take responsibility for achieving your own plan as a model for your team.

Run inclusive meetings. In many workplaces, team culture and collaboration center around meetings—whether you’re working in an office together or working remotely. Here are some things to consider in developing an inclusive environment in your meetings:

Images   Develop an agenda and ground rules. A great way to generate meeting norms around minding microaggressions and giving equal distribution of speaking time is to build this into some basic meeting ground rules. Also create an agenda and share it before the meeting, so people can prepare to contribute. Enforce the ground rules during the meeting to ensure all voices are heard and respected.

Images   Preplan for accessibility and accommodation. Ask ahead of time if anyone needs accommodation. If you know someone on your team has accessibility needs, don’t make them ask for it, just make it happen—whether it’s providing an accessible meeting place, a sign language interpreter, a PDF version of documents for their screen reader, or something else. Meetings should take into account different time zones and parenting needs, and if you are offering food and beverages, make them inclusive (vegetarian, vegan, kosher, halal, gluten free, dairy free, etc.).

Images   Communicate the meeting’s purpose. Help everyone in the room understand the main objectives of the meeting so the team has a collective goal and knows how best to contribute. Take a moment to let each person know why you’ve asked them to join the meeting.

Images   Capture notes during the meeting. Develop a meeting notes template and a location where all notes are stored so the notes can be referenced later. The note taker(s) should work to capture all ideas and attribute them, and document key decisions. It’s crucial to rotate this responsibility for notetaking, as office tasks like these tend to disproportionately fall on people with underrepresented identities.

Images   Make space for the quiet ones. Introverts and people with developmental or intellectual disabilities may need extra time to think through their ideas before speaking them. While brainstorming, you might ask people to write down their ideas before you discuss them. Make it a norm to allow for pauses in the conversation where new voices can enter. Invite people who have not contributed to share their thoughts—perhaps ask them if they have any thoughts to add, if we’ve missed anything, or if they agree with the group’s conclusions so far. If you know this is an area they are passionate about, you might say, “I know this is an area you’re passionate about and wanted to be sure you had an opportunity to share thoughts if you’d like.” Don’t force it; allow people to contribute after the meeting if they aren’t ready yet.

Images   Conclude the meeting with clear next steps and outcomes. Discuss and capture decisions made in the meetings, as well as next steps following the meeting. Clearly establish any responsibilities coming out of the meeting, and share the notes with all attendees.

Encourage career growth in individual team members. If you’re a manager, talk to your team members about their career aspirations and create transparent pathways to growth. Outline concrete pathways for promotion, leadership development opportunities, compensation raises, and bonuses. What are the metrics for achieving a promotion, and what milestones must be met along the way? What are the feedback loops a team member can rely on to determine if they are adequately reaching those milestones? What are their opportunities to shine and be recognized for their achievements, and how will this play a role in promotion, compensation, or bonuses? These processes are often very opaque in organizations, and can lead to unfair and biased decision making, as well as low morale and engagement.

Support physical and mental health. To foster a healthy team, it’s important to support individuals in all their dimensions, including their physical and mental health, as well as any individual needs. Hopefully, your organization offers inclusive benefits that address physical and mental well-being, such as gym, martial arts, yoga, or meditation benefits; coverage for conventional, traditional, and alternative medicine; coverage for women and LGBTQIA+ health; mental health resources; paid time for volunteering; flexible hours; ability to work from home; parental leave; sabbaticals; floating holidays so people can incorporate their own cultural holidays; and professional development and learning opportunities. Managers and people teams should help everyone understand and navigate these benefits. Develop team norms that encourage physical wellness, taking time off from work, and openly discussing mental health—especially during challenging times for individuals, groups, the company, or the world.

Enroll Your Team in Taking Action as Allies

In addition to modeling allyship in your own work, consider enrolling the team in modeling allyship together. This will engage team members around allyship and may also create an example for other teams in the organization to emulate. Here are some actions you can take:

Integrate empathy and allyship learning into your work culture. Group learning can take the form of weekly or monthly training, facilitated conversations, and events. Many companies have formal offsites dedicated to DEI and allyship. More informal learning activities could include volunteering together; informal or formal sharing of customs, holidays, and cultural milestones that people on the team experience; and having a learning portal that includes articles, books, podcasts, training, and other materials.

On some of my past teams, we rotated monthly sharing in our all-hands meetings: for 10 to 30 minutes, a person shared a bit about something that they felt passionate about related to their identity. This can go a long way to building empathy for each other. You can also share a new term or concept related to DEI each week in your team meeting. I also highly recommend having an informal place for team members to share resources—our company has a “DEI Articles to Read” Slack channel, where anyone can share an article or paper about a topic related to DEI.

In both formal and informal learning environments, make sure you are creating a psychologically safe space free from harassment, bullying, and microaggressions. Create and enforce a code of conduct or ground rules, and make sure there is someone monitoring discussions who is trained in how to take action if discussions become unsafe.

Make commitments as a team to reduce biases and microaggressions. A good way to develop team commitments is to experience a training together on allyship, biases, and/or microaggressions, and then follow up as a team to commit to taking individual and collective action. You can also read this book together. Afterward, debrief as a team and spend some time creating your own individual goals, plus collaborate to develop a few collective goals you’ll work on together.

As a team, give each other permission to normalize intervening when biases and microaggressions occur. If you’re leading a team, prime your team to be aware of biases and microaggressions when they are hiring, giving performance reviews, and other moments that can have a big impact on someone’s career. And forgive yourselves and each other when you make mistakes, make apologies and corrections, and commit to having a growth mindset.

Empower change agents. If you’re a manager, give your team time, resources, and recognition for work they do to create change in the organization. This may be participating in ERGs or affinity groups, mentoring, training, or working with the DEI team. This is important work. Often companies will allow team members to devote 10 to 20 percent of time to these efforts, or pay them overtime or bonuses for doing DEI work.

Build Accountability for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Allyship

Once you make a commitment to learning and growth, hold yourself accountable to consistent learning and action. How and when will you check in with yourself? You might consider having an accountability partner with whom you share your goals, and hold each other accountable. This can work really well if your partner is in a lot of the same meetings, and can point out to you—publicly or privately, your choice—when biases or microaggressions show up in your words and actions. You can also ask your team to help hold you accountable to your commitments.

If you’ve developed goals as a team, also ensure you build in checkpoints and hold each other accountable. If you are a manager, tie individual performance to company values and team goals around DEI. And of course, don’t wait until the performance review to check in on these, check-ins and incremental feedback should always happen between reviews as well. If someone is repeating microaggressions or consistently not hitting their goals, work with them, and hold them accountable for making improvements.

If your executive team has made a commitment to DEI and allyship, help hold them accountable as well. Often executives prioritize this work when they hear from their teams that it’s important. We have a number of clients and partners who originally reached out to us because their employees told them it was time to take the next step. When providing feedback to leaders, be kind, use specific examples, and ask to see action.

Adopt Inclusive Ideation and Decision-Making Processes

Work with your team members to reduce bias in approach through inclusive design and development processes. Decision-making and problem-solving are more innovative and inclusive when done with a diverse group of people, so put together a diverse team to develop solutions.26 Build inclusive team norms for projects using the methods shared earlier in this chapter, and adopt an inclusive process where solutions are created collaboratively. Here are some ideas that have proven to be effective:

First, align the group on the goal and outcome. Establish with everyone at the beginning of the work that your collective objective is to come up with a truly inclusive and equitable solution. Then share what all goals and desired outcomes are—if you can, co-create the goals and outcomes together.

Establish ground rules and prime your team to reduce biases. Ideally, create ground rules ahead of time, and ask the group if they have any to add. You can find several examples online. Ask everyone to keep inclusion in mind, go beyond their initial intuition, ask questions that help surface any biases, and remember to work together toward the bigger, inclusive goal.

Create a safe space for everyone to contribute, take risks, and know their voice is heard and respected. Allow time for open brainstorming, where everyone’s voice and ideas are heard. Make space for introverts by having people write their ideas on sticky notes or some other written format, and sharing them at the same time. Check in at the end to ensure everyone feels they have been heard and included in the decision-making process.

Humanize. Whether you’re looking to hire someone or to create a new product line, humanization and empathy are key. Without this, we fill in the gaps with our preconceived ideas of who a person is and what they want—opening ourselves up to biased judgments. If you’re making a hiring decision, ensure you’re getting to know the human not just the résumé or test—think of how the person can add to your culture, and what new experience they can bring to help you better innovate.

When building a new product or strategic direction, as Steve Blank says, “get out of the building and talk to people.”27 To build with the human in mind, create a team that looks like the people you’re building for, and talk with potential customers or users. Diverse human problems require diverse human solutions.

Normalize the acknowledgment and countering of biases. Hold each other accountable for staying true to your shared goals and outcomes, and call each other in when you notice biases. (Review common biases in “Step 2: Do No Harm.”) Ensure you are mitigating against groupthink and confirmation bias by encouraging alternative perspectives, allowing space for healthy disagreement, and examining risks. As you come up with your solution, list the assumptions you are making, test those assumptions through data and interactions with real people, and ask pointed questions. Who wouldn’t this solution work for? You don’t have to design for everyone, but it’s important to know whom you’re leaving out. Check your assumptions against data as well. If you find your solution isn’t inclusive and equitable, rework and retest until it is.

Roll out the solution in an inclusive way. When you’ve created your solution, recognize the diverse team that worked together to achieve it. For new hiring and other team-focused decisions, show empathy for candidates, and value their time and unique experiences regardless of the outcome. As you roll out new products, ensure you’re meeting your target customers where they are through inclusive outreach strategies. For new strategies, ensure you are collaborating to implement the strategies as well. Build in feedback mechanisms with your team, candidates, and customers so you can improve your processes and solutions.

EXERCISE

Collaborate with Your Team to Improve DEI

Work together as a team to improve your team systems and processes to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Doing this work together can build empathy and psychological safety in addition to developing long-term systemic and culture improvements. Ensure you are dedicating adequate time and resources to doing this work effectively. The following paragraphs offer some ideas:

Enroll your team in hiring diverse team members. If you’re a manager, share why having a diverse team is valuable, and enroll your team in the collective vision for a more diverse and inclusive team. Then establish some team goals (for example, goals for hiring from different demographics, goals for considering diverse candidates, or goals for finding a pipeline of more diverse candidates). Support each other and hold yourselves accountable for achieving these goals. A pre-step to this may be to redesign your hiring process to be more diverse and inclusive (see “Step 7: Transform Your Organization, Industry, and Society).

Collaborate with your team to improve your team systems and processes together. Have a design meeting to develop your team’s DEI plan—there are several ideas to consider in this chapter and the next. Choose a few key areas where your team believes there is high need and impact. Develop an action plan together to address these goals, and work to achieve them. Make sure you build in checkpoints along the way, elicit help from professionals if needed (this could be HR or DEI folks in your company, or consultants), and hold yourselves accountable to build, test, and deploy new solutions.

Offer to pilot a new DEI program in the organization. Often DEI folks in organizations are under-resourced in terms of staff, and/or they spend a lot of their time convincing teams to do the DEI work. They might welcome an offer to pilot a new training program, process change, or system implementation with your team. Let them know your team is open and ready to take on something new and be a resource for them.

Volunteer together. A great way to reinforce DEI values and build team cohesion is to volunteer together. Discuss as a team a few local, national, or global organizations that work to improve DEI in your field. Hone in on one or two together, and commit to volunteering as a team—it could be a two-day, three-month, or yearlong engagement depending on your availability and the organization’s needs. You might mentor, teach, or use your collective skills to help an advocacy program improve their product, service, marketing, accounting, or other area where your expertise fits with their needs. Be someone they can rely on to get things done, and be open to doing whatever they need, including admin work. If an organization doesn’t share opportunities to volunteer on their website, don’t be afraid to connect with the organization via their contact@ email, or email the founder directly. Most advocacy organizations have needs for volunteers!

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