Inclusion Edges | One Startup Profile, Potential Resolutions

Edge.Brick.Build

I recently drafted a solutions proposal for an early-stage startup responding to requests for observations concerning their inclusion and diversity growth challenges.

I’m sharing these observations publicly – with names and company identity cloaked – for two reasons.

1.) Prevention of learning insights being lost, due to the team choosing to delay building in this area.

2.) Realizing this offering might spark others with fresh ideas to progress their own difference, inclusion, and equitable culture elevation goals.

The intention is to help committed teams, founders and leadership to deeply self-reflect on their diversity and inclusion motivations with engaged humility, paired with basic tools to build conscious action from.

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A. SUMMARY OF CHALLENGES

Initiating the building and sustaining of a fully diverse and inclusive team. No committed progress toward instilling equitable relationships within and between departments, backed by:

  1. expressed & documented (owned), foundational values
  2. operational practices
  3. (openly expressed) executive & structural support

Difficulty in communicating [your company’s] unique inclusion and diversity values from a place of integrity and authentic, industry leadership – free of external pressures to retrofit within generic D&I frameworks.

Expressed Challenges

fully aware | physical | vocalized by teammates themselves

[Your company or team’s] desire to publicize “diversity messaging” as part of Dev-Engineering (or another team's) hiring initiatives, which is currently focused on [specify your team’s identity group of focus].

One teammate has taken on the goal to craft and distribute diversity messaging. They have numerous ideas flowing, yet are challenged with launching an initiatory piece for community witnessing. Team-wide support is needed.

Hidden Challenges

perceived | emotional | subconscious | unspoken publicly by teammates

No clear definition from leadership and teammates on what “diversity”, “inclusion”, “equity”, or “belonging” uniquely means for [your company’s]:

  1. internal culture
  2. customer base
  3. external / global presence
  4. service to fellow companies

Concern over “stepping on eggshells” to initiate the discussion – and crucial follow-up actions. Fear of offending each other’s identity-frameworks, or habitually deferring inner authority to speak up, share, listen to, and productively resolve challenges when in disagreement.

Observed Challenges

witnessed by external parties | mental + emotional | mildly conscious | often unspoken

One-sided view of what diversity is in relation to hiring and retaining members of various identities. Very little-to-no discussion about inclusion and equity as a practice.

The need to “prove” publicly how much you “value” or “promote” diversity, without having engaged committed, inner work team-wide to unearth a personal relationship and resonance concerning the importance (or, frank support) of it.

Women and men teammates (so far: of European and Asian descent) have not been invited to openly and collectively share personal views on the intention to build a more racial/cultural/ethnic, multiple dis/abilities, economic class, gender, sexual expression, and neurodiverse team (as a committed next step).

Nor have concerns, fears, edges about building and upholding an inclusive team – as a progressive [specify your product-service company tag-line descriptor] – been aired out.

These are obstacles to resolve.

B. RESOLUTION PROCESS

  1. Facilitate leadership & team buy-in.
  2. Encourage collective ideation activities to spark full ownership of the process.
  3. Seek out, invite & host emotionally intelligent, adept facilitators experienced in holding space for teams to air out concerns in building & sustaining an inclusive culture.
  4. Ground action-based discoveries with (multiple) teammates who volunteer / willingly choose to become inclusion leaders. Publicly acknowledge, celebrate, support their altruism & courage to spearhead the completion of next steps.

Stage 1:

Define (in group format) exactly what “diversity”, “inclusion”, “equity”, and “belonging” uniquely means for each teammate.

Include: Founders, CEO’s, CTO’s, COO’s, VP of People, Recruiters, Hiring Managers.

Think: Town Hall, All-Hands, Team Stand-Ups. This should take some time, depending on the size of your team.

Under 10 members | roughly 60-75 minutes Under 20 members | roughly 90 minutes Over 20 teammates | divide up session into 2+ parts, for ample feedback

Crucial: Make this a strict, VOLUNTARY action.

You may (and will) have teammates not ready to share or openly discuss their views. Honor their wishes. Immediately nix any shaming or “policy” pressures to conform.

If you only end up with one or two folks attending as committed participants, continue with the session.

The quality of participation, self-awareness and willingness to change is key – not quantity, at this stage.

Commit to this process as first-stage inner work, and a practice of trust-building. Have a neutral facilitator present, ensuring all voices are heard and accounted for.

I. Share a personal life story reflecting why a diverse and inclusive team is relevant to individual well-being, and matters to [your company or team’s] success.

Reminder: these are viewpoints and opinions, hold the space of subjective respect.

This exercise will also reveal the foundational inspiration of your company and team values, if you have not yet defined them.

II. Share professional, emotional, social or “internal politicking” concerns in moving forward with inclusion and diversity work.

What do people feel they will need to “risk” / give up – and would be uncomfortable doing so?

Your facilitator should be mature, seasoned enough to stop and swiftly engage these concerns. Direct and compassionate addressing of these “edges” must entail holding space for the team to productively explore and unmask concerns. The intentions should be explicit:

  1. Help those present to begin acquiring tools to shift behavior, thought, & speech as an initial, resolutions-oriented practice.
  2. Help them acclimate to the reality that transformating internal obstacles will dissolve individual & collective sabotage of building, owning & embodying inclusive, difference-agile states of being.

III. Share what’s personally exciting about the process.

What are they ready to “risk” / give up / let go of in the work of building an empowered, inclusive culture?

Stage 2:

Document a set of collective inclusion values, for internal use.

  1. Obtain collective agreement on adhering to them.
  2. Test, play with, put them into practice, from day one!
  3. These should be taken from the discoveries unearthed in the Stage 1 session.

Get feedback on what’s working and what’s not through anonymous surveys (or, in team-approved and supervisor-driven 1:1’s) every month. Share findings in Town Halls, etc.

Create action-items – in small steps, for issues to resolve, or for successes to celebrate, promote and iterate on as new company policy (practice habits).

Immediately use this continuous data to support your volunteer inclusion leaders in the work of crafting and sharing publicly how your company operates, and is thinking about:

from a diverse / difference-agile, equitable and inclusive view.

Your team’s first steps in sharing publicly “diversity messaging” (once clarified) must be birthed organically, from the inside-out, via real-time internal engagement and measured practice. Not manufactured under the pretense (or pressure) of what’s currently “hot” to talk about in the D&I realm.

D. INITIAL OUTCOMES / DELIVERABLES

  1. Reveal sentiments and ideas, share personal life stories, resolve concerns, ground support, & nurture greater team bonding.

  2. Create & document values the team collectively agrees upon, for private, daily practice & public sharing.

Next: Facilitate a 30 minute, follow-up session to check in on progress, get feedback on the experience. Ideally, two weeks later, to give time for the team to test and play with the value-ideas revealed in the first session.

Optional: Schedule extended facilitation sessions (team-wide or individually), if desired. Should be done once initial group sessions and check-ins are wrapped up.

Other options could just involve specific teams:

Ideally, spend ample time on the above before active hiring sprints begin. New outcomes and goals can be determined for each team/person based on the needs specific to that working collective.

E. AGREEMENTS

What the chosen facilitator and voluntary team member participants agree to uphold during Stage 1 and 2 sessions described above.

These are suggested themes to build upon or recreate, specific to your team’s personality and needs.

1. Confidentiality

All sessions (group and 1:1’s) are held in strict confidence. From facilitator-to-team and team-to-facilitator.

What’s encountered, whether in-person (phone/video), online (social media/email) – even with other teammates, family, or loved ones – is not to be publicly shared.

Unless: Those relations also participate in [your company or team’s] inclusion growth work.

Sharing exceptions are made with: Explicit communication and open permission from all parties potentially affected by the publicized sharing of info. Firm boundaries as to what is and is not shareable must be stated in advance, with witnesses.

2. MUST be Voluntary

Not forcing anyone to participate, or shaming them if they choose to opt-out of the inclusion culture exploration and culture-building process.

3. Emotional Balance, Responsibility, and Mental Courage

We choose to apply self-reflective actions that dissolve the urge to react versus respond to what may “trigger” us in a session. We seek understanding, speak up swiftly and ask questions when confused. We do not leave to chance that others will automatically know what we mean, as we share who we are in space.

We acknowledge that at a certain point, professional, psychological counseling over group facilitation sessions may be appropriate for some to transform inner obstacles toward developing an inclusive worldview, personal, and professional life practice.

We agree to do so, free of guilt or concern that we may be viewed as “mentally unstable.” If we feel called to dive deeper into self-exploration, outside of the realm of this work, we speak up and take effective action without hesitation – with the team’s full support.

(Conscious facilitators will never require, or determine this as a final step for anyone. They can only observe and suggest alternative options, based on a series of mentally/physically/emotionally unsafe behaviors that someone may repeatedly present during the scope of inclusion work suggested here.)

We give – and expect in return – our full attention, experiences and patience toward creating a safe container to explore what diversity and inclusion within equitable relations means to each other, and to [your company’s] success.

We take full responsibility for our own emotional content, thinking and mindset. We equally factor in that much of our emotional and mental processes have been conditioned by long-standing social imbalances, historical and real-time injustices, familial and ancestral socialization, tribal/cultural expectations, and all-around fear of transformative connection with others different (in any capacity) from ourselves.

We choose to participate in this inclusive exploration work from a place of self-love, authority over our own experience, and willingness to ask for help (confident that help will be given).

4. Compassion for each other. Loving-kindness for ourselves.

We agree to be kind to ourselves while engaged in this work, but never let ourselves “off the hook” for course-correcting as we catch our discriminatory thoughts, behavior and habits / biases / places for improvement and social healing.

We gently hold each other accountable for this action as a daily practice – in relationship with each other – beyond the facilitated sessions.

5. Professional Transparency and Ethics

What is internally designed and unique to [your company’s use], solely belongs to you.

Frameworks and your facilitator’s methodologies shared for inspiration are their intellectual property, open to company-specific crafting, as needed and permitted.

Request permission before sharing your facilitator’s inclusion practice methodologies outside of [your company’s] internal environment, processes and documentation. (E.g. blog posts, articles, books, conference presentations, podcasts, lightning talks, etc.)

Likewise, your facilitator should commit to giving full and open credit where due (based on expressed, sharing permission agreements above) regarding teammates and leadership who spark critically useful ideas. Facilitators should also commit to requesting permission to openly share [your team or company’s] unique inclusion and diversity revelations – strictly as allowed, and appropriate.

6 Open-Mindedness

This is a fundamental trait of all genuinely diverse, inclusive and equitable relationships. Being at ease with difference, and exercising our curiosity about one another, from a fresh, “first-mind” view.

We choose to leave our assumptions about each other behind – no matter if we have known some of our colleagues for one day, or a decade.

7 Trust

We consciously choose to connect from the stance of clear intention to express a protective energy of good character, refraining from harming each other in body, speech, or mind.

This stance is our starting, middle journey, and completion point.

If there are concerns, air them immediately in the inclusion working group, with the facilitator, a fellow ally-participant, or trusted leader connected to the work you’re doing who’ll help re-ignite confidence.

8 Presence

Show up fully, make room for being present on “good” and “bad” days. Avert the need to hide. Encourage each other to shine, as a default habit – not an exception.

9 Reality-Check Disclaimer

One leader’s insight: “The process is never going to be perfect”, “will take time”, is not a quick, one-time, done-for-you situation.

Encourage shameless, dedicated practice.

Acknowledge no one is inherently “bad” and that [your company’s] current state of difference-agility and inclusion practice is very workable – and capable of being even better!

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© 2018. Dara Songye.