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Tokenism
Sometimes when we’re building out our teams and we want to include new voices, we do the absolute wrong thing as a manager. Let me give you an example. One of the stories I told in the book was about a young woman named Kimberly Bryant who early on in her career had gone to school at Vanderbilt, been an engineer, showed up at her second job at DuPont, and her manager did this. “With Kimberly, we got a twofer.” And introducing her to her fellow colleague engineers of people she was so excited to join, what he was actually pointing out was not how she was connected to that group by what she was passionate about, what she had come to build, all the reasons why they were excited about her engineering skills, what they pointed out was that she was a black woman in tech as if somehow it was some kind of diversity jackpot moment. And that, of course, made her separate. Any time any of us are less than 15 percent of a group, we’re less likely to actually understand the rules of the group, we’re less likely to be able to advocate for our ideas.
And the technical term behind it that Rosabeth Moss Kanter probably is the one who most popularized is this notion of tokenism. So anytime we’re seeing the silhouette of the person, not the soul of the person, and pointing out the ways in which someone doesn’t belong to the whole, we’re actually negating their ability to add value. So, yes we can notice that they’re a black women in tech, but the more interesting thing we can do as managers is to figure out where are the intersection points? where does Kimberly belong on this team? why are we excited about her belonging to this team? And focus on that intersection. And as we do, we’re actually going to develop a group, a set that actually says, this is the kind of problem we’re wanting to solve together, and then it’s not about one person separate, it’s about that inclusion model.
Act intentionally
A lot of men, business entrepreneurs, et cetera, say, well, I want to find those voices. How do you find them? And I often just say, you can open your eyes. Because they’ll often say, I’ve never seen them. And I go, “Well, what conferences do you go to?” And, “Maybe you can just go to a different set of conferences where that group of people is already assembling.” So I don’t think the fact that women and people of color are largely invisible to, let’s say, the tech industry or business in general is not because they’re not there; it’s that we’re not noticing them. So it’s a network problem. And I always tell VCs, if it was any other network that you wanted to crack you would sit there and figure out, how do you solve that network problem, and you’d build that group of people into your ecosystem. So how do you do that? You go to different conferences, you go to different networks, you set up different dinners. You basically intentionally figure out how to funnel in rather than opt out. And as soon as you get creative about that, of course you’ll solve it.
This is the part that every company has to get. Every time we’re not funding women or people of color, we’re actually missing out ourselves. It’s not, like, only those people are not getting dollars, it’s that the solution to major medical problems, to, I always use the teleportation pod as my answer to everything because I really want someone to solve that, and I’m, like, what is that woman or person of color who has the solution to that that is not getting money? and wouldn’t it be amazing if they were? And so what are all the things that we’re not getting to because we keep funding the same old voices? If we’re only funding a set of people who look the same as we do, we’re going to get the same kind of creative solutions. But there’s another set of solutions that is right now completely off the table. So how do you measure that? It’s hard to do, but we know it’s intuitively correct.
Support your “firsts” and onlys”
The hardest thing that firsts and onlys really struggle with is, they are trying to figure out how to navigate that space that doesn’t look and feel like them. And so the tendency, just based on all the social science, would be to figure out how to conform. Because in the hierarchy of needs of human beings, there is that base foundation of sort of shelter and food and at the very top of that pyramid, Maslow’s Pyramid, is the ability to express your ideas and advocate for ideas. But in the middle is this huge section of belonging. And so, if we have to choose between belonging and our ideas, belonging becomes that gateway. And so the key is, do we understand how to find our people? Do we know how to ask questions to find them and so on?
I was just working with a design thinking person who had joined a major organization, and she was there to be that first and only champion of design thinking, and yet she was really very different than the rest of the engineers, the way she thought about the world. And so she ultimately ended up failing and leaving the company, and she asked me, “What did I do wrong?” And I said, “Well, wouldn’t it have been interesting if you had hosted a lunch? And maybe once a week had a design thinking person come into the organization and come build a conversation with you, and invite anyone at the company to come participate about what is design thinking, how could it apply here? Have a series of conversations and create that kind of curiosity about what could it mean for us, what could be better?” What she was doing was trying to make it all about her selling the idea, instead of helping create the context into which a whole bunch of people could come around the idea. And that’s the difference, it’s not My Idea, it’s The Idea. And as you build something that is around The Idea, it’s like a watering hole, the animals come if you build it. And we need to build more understanding of how to build watering holes for our organization so people can come when they’re thirsty, when their curiosity is, how could this help solve our problem?