INTRODUCTION

How I Hit the Glass Ceiling and Bounced Back

In 2013, I hit the glass ceiling hard, and still to this day I have shards from it embedded deep beneath my skin.

The glass ceiling exists for many people rising to the top of their fields and companies, where we hit the limit of what opportunities are open to us because of our identity (gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and/or other historically marginalized identities). It’s glass, so we might not see it right away, and the people around us usually can’t see it either.

All my life I’ve worked to make the world a better place. I began my career as a documentary filmmaker. After several years, my work evolved to creating movements of change by combining storytelling with behavioral science. I partnered with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), governments, and Fortune 500 companies to build social change using social marketing, branding, behavior change strategies, and storytelling. I also advised social entrepreneurs, became a popular sustainability blogger, and volunteered and served on the boards of multiple nonprofits and advocacy organizations.

While leading several global branding, marketing, and social impact campaigns with my clients, I was offered a job in-house as an executive at an international engineering firm in San Francisco. Like many companies, this organization was working to stay strong in an industry dominated by ever-enlarging global conglomerates. This company wanted to be the go-to firm for women in engineering and wanted me to help them get there. That sounded fantastic.

They told me my branding, storytelling, and marketing experience was exactly what they needed to shake up their brand positioning, storytelling, and marketing strategy. My experience in organizational and cultural change was exactly what they needed to build a healthier and more scalable culture, put human resources operations in place, and manage process and culture integration in a few upcoming mergers and acquisitions. And my social impact and behavioral science expertise was perfect for leading a new business service for our healthcare clients to help them improve sustainability metrics through behavior change initiatives.

The CEO had courted me for about a year before I finally said yes. Three times he asked me to work for him. I said no each time, because my business as a brand consultant was growing quickly and I liked working with multiple clients to make a positive impact in the world. Finally, I decided to take a leap. So I closed down my successful business and moved across the country to start changing the world in a new way.

I was Chief Experience Officer, leading marketing and culture, and also responsible for building a new service line for clients on sustainability behavior change in the healthcare industry. I worked with some of the nation’s largest healthcare systems, using technology and culture change to radically reduce their waste, energy, and water use and improve their social impact. It was my dream job in many ways. I was creating real change in the world and making a significant positive impact on the company’s sales, marketing, and engagement.

But that job became the worst professional experience of my life. While I was doing meaningful work in the field, I was miserable as soon as I got back to the office. I was the only woman on the executive team. And while I was used to being the “only” in my life, I was not ready for the deep assault on my expertise, the lack of respect, and being undermined and belittled throughout my time there. While there were bigger issues, most of what happened involved behavioral patterns and personal slights that slowly chipped away at my ability to do my work well. Here’s an example:

I’d spent the first few weeks in my role hitting the ground running on client delivery and listening, learning, and developing a plan to meet the marketing and culture goals I’d been hired to achieve. My first major presentation at the company was to share the strategy I developed with my 19 colleagues on the leadership team.

After being introduced by the CEO, I looked around the room at my fellow executives, eager to share and discuss my plan. And I watched . . . as they immediately picked up their phones and looked down at their computers. They’re not paying attention. As I start to speak, I’m thinking they will begin to pay attention out of respect and hopefully interest. But they don’t. Instead they quickly jump in and interrupt me before they’ve even heard what I have to say. People talk over me, again and again. Some of my ideas are flat out dismissed, and then a few minutes later brought up by someone else and championed.

It was deflating, and as it turned out, it was not an isolated experience. I soon began to realize that only a few leaders in the company truly believed in the CEO’s vision of becoming the go-to firm for women. Many of my colleagues didn’t care to be led by a woman and—they told me directly—they felt that to actively hire more women would be “lowering the bar.” In my case, not only was I a woman executive, but I was also an outsider not directly from their industry. It was clear I didn’t belong.

Data shows, and my CEO believed, that diversity was exactly what they needed to stay strong in the market: someone to bring new perspectives from many different industries, with a different set of innovative skills, and who would challenge leaders to make their work better. As a consultant I became good at quickly learning culture, language, and processes of new industries. I had already consulted with them for about a year so I knew their business, and I brought with me a lot of ideas and successes from other industries. But to many leaders at this firm, my being an outsider was another reason not to pay attention to my ideas. They absolutely were not going to give me an opportunity to succeed. From the start, they had made up their minds that as a woman and an outsider, I would fail.

Once on board, I learned the company did not have good experiences with the couple women executives they had hired in the past. Somehow, each of them turned out to be “not the right fit.” Yet I was an idealist. I believed the CEO when he told me about flaws these women had and that by contrast, I was the perfect person for their company. I know the CEO believed this too. Sadly, we both had a lot to learn about the company’s culture.

Several years earlier, I’d worked in the film industry where sexual harassment was an everyday experience for me. I thought it would be better in corporate America, yet in some ways, it was worse. While I experienced sexual harassment, a lot of what I experienced was more subtle, and I didn’t understand it at first. I believe most of it was unintentional—my colleagues’ behaviors were rooted in the norms established by the company culture and in their individual biases, which were formed over their lifetimes and perhaps handed down over generations.

The little negative behaviors and patterns I experienced daily from my colleagues slowly chipped away at my confidence, undermined my leadership, and reduced my capacity to innovate. Former White House Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith calls what I experienced “death by a thousand paper cuts.” In this case, I think I was feeling shards of the glass ceiling along with these paper cuts!

When people experience acts of exclusion, there is a physiological as well as emotional consequence. Reflecting back to that room where I gave my first presentation: despite my years of experience and expertise, I was negatively judged before I’d said anything. Sure, I was a bit nervous for my first big presentation in front of this group, but I was prepared. I had done this many times before, my plan was a good one, and like a good corporate executive and coalition-builder, I had talked with many of my colleagues individually to get their input beforehand.

Yet I was knocked off my feet from a lack of people listening, the constant interruptions, and my ideas being taken as other people’s ideas. I lost energy and confidence because my expertise was being questioned. Then my fear and stress response kicked in, and I experienced what’s called the amygdala hijack.² My brain was stuck in fight, freeze, or flight mode. In social situations my brain often chooses flight—so my brain was focused on how to fly out of that room. I was no longer fully functioning as the innovative, confident, and challenging thinker that I am. I began to sound flustered and soon found I was saying a lot of ums and ahs in an attempt to keep people from talking over me. By the end, it had unraveled into a mediocre presentation at best.

When your voice and expertise are silenced, it’s nearly impossible to be an effective leader. If the people in that room had challenged my ideas, then we could have had a robust debate. But they never heard my ideas. Or perhaps worse, they heard my ideas in passing and suddenly claimed them as their own.

I was the only woman in that room, except for the CEO’s assistant. And I could have used an ally. An amygdala hijack can be interrupted at any time by someone who helps change the dynamics in the room. An ally could have recognized what was happening and helped stop the interruptions, could have asked people to put down their phones, and could have subtly pointed attention back to my ideas and strategy.

The disrespectful behaviors I experienced in that meeting room continued every single day I stayed at that company. Behaviors and patterns like this, when they happen over and over and over again, wear you down. Pretty quickly, my energy was tapped, my confidence was shot, and I was miserable.

Exclusion can break you. It can change how you show up, it can lower your self-confidence, change your work identity, make you less productive (because you’re working against many barriers, and because it’s exhausting), make you numb and distant, and lead you to build protective armor around yourself—which can cause all sorts of other issues. We will explore this more in the following chapters.

About a year into the job, I hit rock bottom and felt like a complete failure for the first time in my life. At a real low point, I read an article about toxic workplace culture and microaggressions. Microaggressions in the workplace are everyday slights, insults, and negative verbal and nonverbal messages—sometimes intentional, sometimes not—that impede someone’s ability to do their work well, show up, and thrive as their best self.

That sounded familiar! I slowly began to realize that I wasn’t failing, the culture around me was failing me. And data showed me, I was not the only one. Similar behaviors in the workplace affect people of all underrepresented identities.³ This has a real impact on our colleagues, our companies, and our collective capacity to innovate.

I began to see microaggressions everywhere, every day, particularly from a handful of my colleagues I interacted with daily. First, I observed them in wonder and shock, and then with anger and frustration. I tried to point them out, and that was a disaster. I tried asking people to close their laptops and put down their cell phones in meetings. Awful idea—they became angry and shut down completely.

I tried sharing the data I analyzed in our company: we were losing women to turnover at alarming rates. Like several companies in the industry, we had a revolving door. On one side we were working on recruiting diverse talent, on the other side we were not retaining them. Women were leaving and going to our competitors. Astoundingly, company leaders told me they didn’t care.

All this was devastating, and it took me some time to work out of a pit of despair and discouragement. What helped were long talks with my husband every night, finding ways to make a difference for people with underrepresented identities who worked for me, learning about how other companies improved their cultures, and reading stories of people who had experienced similar situations.

One day one of the principals in the company asked me to lunch and told me, awkwardly: “Um, I have been wanting to say something for a while and wasn’t sure how to say it . . . I think people are treating you differently because you’re a woman.”

I was floored. I had no idea he was paying attention. He hadn’t been in any meetings where I’d brought this up, and yet he noticed on his own. He told me he’d seen his wife struggle with the awful treatment she received from her colleagues in her career as an attorney, and he saw me experiencing similar things. Wow. Just that acknowledgment—that someone who I don’t know well was seeing what I was seeing—that was enough to make me feel not quite so alone. It helped.

I found myself motivated to create societal change so that other people don’t experience what I did, so that people of all backgrounds can be happier and truly thrive and lead in their workplace. My wheels were turning. In the meantime, I used my power of storytelling and behavior change to begin improving our company culture. I did this work while skirting the real issues. I did not talk about women, LGBTQIA+, Black, Latinx, and people with other underrepresented identities—no one wanted to hear it. Instead, I focused my work on emotional intelligence, employee engagement, and wellness. I call this covert culture change—use it if you have to! The culture started to change a little bit, particularly on teams led by principals like the one who took me to lunch. Some of the leaders began to get it. Our engagement numbers improved significantly, especially for women, and our turnover decreased.

It takes years for company cultures to deeply change, however, and I didn’t want to stay where I wasn’t welcome. I also wanted to have a bigger impact on the world, something I’ve been preparing for my whole life. So I transferred the change-making work to other people in the company who could continue what we started. And I left my job as an executive, to change the tech industry as a whole.

I started my own company with Wayne Sutton, my cofounder and now husband. At Change Catalyst, we build inclusive innovation globally through consulting, training, speaking, coaching, online courses and toolkits, and events. To date, we’ve worked with nearly 500 companies, innovation hubs, startups, and venture capital firms in cities around the world. I work a lot with leaders: developing their own skills in empathy, inclusion, and allyship, and helping them build companies that are diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

People share stories about the impact of our work every day—messages that fuel me to continue doing this hard work of change! We began our work in the tech industry and have since expanded our work to several other industries. Change at the industry level takes people and organizations working across the industry ecosystem to create change. In tech that means education, investment and entrepreneurship, workplaces, policy, advocacy organizations, and media—all of us must work together to create a fundamental shift in the industry. While it has not been easy, we are making progress as an industry.⁴

In 2018, I gave a TED talk on what I’ve learned over the years about allyship. I chose that topic because I was seeing so many people wanting to create change but not knowing how. I wanted to provide a framework of understanding and some tangible, actionable steps people can take to be better allies for each other. To my surprise and excitement, that talk has resonated with millions of people.⁵ Since then, I continue to receive many requests for more information: how can someone like you, like me, step in and help someone else thrive? How can we be better leaders, better managers, better colleagues, better neighbors? How can any one of us interrupt the microaggressions, stereotypes, biases, and systemic inequities that keep people in our lives from thriving?

I wrote this book to answer these questions for all of us. This book is an evolution of that TED talk—it includes my experience from years of practicing allyship and training leaders and teams to be better allies. Carol Shields says that you should “write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.” I needed this book to help me be a better ally. In the following pages you’ll learn about how we got here as a society, what the benefits are of being an ally, and how you can take small, medium, and larger steps to be an ally.

This book is about how we can all be better allies for each other—with an emphasis on allyship for people from groups that face discrimination and unfair barriers to opportunity, with identities that are generally underrepresented in the workplace. The pages of these book are written by myself, a White, cisgender, bi (and straight presenting⁶) woman who grew up in a middle-class family in the United States. I am an introvert who has anxiety and depression, asthma and other immune system disorders, and debilitating migraines. I’m still recognizing and exploring all these pieces that form my own identity. The more I explore my own identity, the better an ally I can become.

I have spent my life learning from people who have identities different from mine—especially people with disabilities and people who are Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Arab, Asian, and LGBTQIA+—so that I could expand my own worldview and become a better ally and advocate. Over the past few years, I’ve learned from thousands of people about what allyship means for them, my team and I have conducted an international allyship study, and I’ve intimately interviewed about 50 people for my podcast as research for this book. I also conducted a literature review of more than 300 articles and books, and colleagues have read these pages and provided me with invaluable feedback.

While I have dedicated my life to this work, my knowledge is not perfect—I’m not a perfect human and I’m not a perfect ally. Nobody is a perfect ally! Allyship is a continuous journey for each of us. Language and understanding are constantly evolving. And while I have worked to include geographically diverse language and examples, I am still learning how allyship plays out in different countries around the world, and there are many gaps in my understanding. Please use this book as a framework from which you continue to grow your own knowledge and form your own worldview, continuously learning from people with diverse identities and experiences.

Some of the terms and vocabulary used in this book are not in common use yet and may not be completely familiar to all readers. A companion glossary can be found at https://changecatalyst.co/glossary.