Monday's Opening Thought: April 11, 2022

This week’s opening thought: organizational culture change takes years. Not two or three years, mind you. Organizational culture shifts take five-plus years to implement, adjust, maintain and sustain. In a 2021 survey of workplace culture consultants, the folx who are hired to provide advice on changing an organization's culture shared that they generally estimate that the chances of success are low. How low? Typically one in three or four attempts takes root. Studies have shown that the single most crucial element in determining success in changing an organization’s culture is its leader's interest, support, and even passion. Not just the CEO or Executive Director but the interest, support, and passion for change of the senior leadership team or C-suite. But the leader? That person is the core driver of organizational change. And because organizational culture change takes such a long time, it is often longer than the tenure of a leader and much longer than the attention span of the organization or the organization’s willingness to sit with and process the discomfort of its oppressive states and processes.

So why do organizations think they can hire one person, often a person from an underserved community and a person of color fighting against the oppressions of intersectionality, to change an organization’s culture single-handedly with an unrealistic timeline for completion? And with little to no support or backing from leadership or the primary leader of the organization?

Whether intentional or unconscious, this is a recipe for failure and harm.

Leaders: hiring one person and placing the enormous weight of changing your entire organization for you on their shoulders while you passively "participate" in said change is not leadership. That’s setting someone up for failure – and giving yourself a scapegoat and excuse for why your organizational culture doesn’t have the opportunity to change.

If you’re a CEO, President, or Executive Director, it is your job to stand up and call in your senior leadership team and company leaders to help you center organizational change as something that matters.  And you can’t be ready to bail when it gets uncomfortable, or the realities of the negative impacts of your workplace culture on your staff come to light. You have to be willing to take responsibility for the current culture and atone for the harm your workplace has caused and may still be causing. You also have to be responsible for standing with the folx (plural, not one person) you’ve hired to help move your organization forward, not standing next to them long enough to throw them under the bus when things get complicated or uncomfortable.

Step up and quit hiring one person and expecting them to somehow make rainbows and unicorns happen for your organization with minimal involvement or support from you and your leadership team.

Monday's Opening Thought: April 4, 2022

This week's opening thought: I've been hearing the words "psychological safety" lately in my work with organizations. Like, a lot. And by "a lot," I mean multiple times a week. I'm sure you can guess the race and power and positionality of those who keep saying these two words to me. I'm also sure you can ascertain why they're saying it too. The more I dive into walking white people with power through how necessary it is to sit with and process discomfort around whiteness and its need to consciously and unconsciously uphold white supremacist ideology, the more white people bring up "psychological safety."

"Shouldn't our [white people's] psychological safety matter?"

"But what about the psychological safety of [white] people who want to have these conversations but are uncomfortable?"

"They're [white people in the workplace] scared of you because you aren't prioritizing their psychological safety."

Guess what, white people? Your white supremacist needs are showing. You might want to tuck ‘em in. Tan France from Queer Eye can help you with that front tuck.

No one owes you "psychological safety" around dismantling your views and being a better person and community member, white people. Especially not people of color. Especially not Black people. And especially not when you enthusiastically hire people of color, Black people, Black women for your company's equity and inclusion jobs and then turn around and treat them as if they are oppressing you by pushing you to unpack your hot messes.

Something y'all need to understand: you're not oppressed in these situations where you push for your "psychological safety." You are the oppressor. Your workplace culture is a tool of the oppressor, and you're wielding it with aplomb. Every time you open your mouth and ask for "psychological safety," you hammer home how necessary your white supremacist workplace culture ideology is for you to be present at work, to have peace of mind. You want "psychological safety," but you don't want it for everyone because you only mention these words when it centers on you and yours. No one is coming to me saying that the people of color they work with or report to them are asking for "psychological safety." This is a whiteness-centered request.

Unless we're discussing building, fortifying, and maintaining a safer and braver space for all employees, especially marginalized employees and employees of color, we're not talking about anything helpful. You're building, fortifying, and maintaining an electrified barbed wire fence for white people to keep discomfort out – and you're asking people of color to help you build it.

I suppose that's par for the course, though, seeing how whiteness has been enslaving and trying to force people of color to build things for white people's comfort for generations now.

Maybe white people at work should focus on breaking the cycles of abuse at play in the workplace created by their forefathers and less on how they don't want to deal with unpacking their perceived right to comfort. Maybe you wouldn't have to bring up your "psychological safety" all the time, and we could get some actual meaningful work done at work.

Maybe.

Monday's Opening Thought: March 28, 2022

This week’s opening thought: I had my first meeting of the day at 10:00 am this morning. It was with a white cis female consultant. The meeting started with her trying to “school” me and “teach” me after I shared that the way I do my work isn’t a fit for many companies. She told me if I were more respectable and worked harder to make relationships with white people who found me scary, uncomfortable, or labeled me as dangerous, more comfortable, and safe for white people, my work would be easier.

Needless to say, that meeting ended early.

I couldn’t even make it to 11:00 am, y’all, without having fun with micro-aggressions live via satellite from my TV room. It made that Law and Order marathon I had playing in the background on mute hit different.

When white professionals disrespect us, say they’re scared of us, or label us as dangerous or uncooperative when we aren’t the palatable person of color they think we should be? The response isn’t for us to homogenize ourselves for whiteness. We need white professionals to quit pushing for Black folx, Black women, people of color to “be respectful” as a solution to the racism we face. Your “advice” isn’t helpful. Your “advice” doesn’t stop our jobs from being on the line if we don’t take your “advice” and implement it “just right” (note: there is no such thing as “just right” – that’s just the way y’all act when giving “advice”). We need less “advice” and more stepping up, speaking up, and speaking out when your white colleagues come at us with their micro-aggressions. We need white professionals to call in or call out their white colleagues instead of co-signing or being silent when the fear-mongering and characterizations begin.

We need y’all not to take your own advice.

I’ll leave y’all to sit with that, the way the white cis female consultant I met with this morning left me sitting in the Zoom meeting when she got livid about me calling her out for her actions and abruptly exited stage left.

Monday's Opening Thought: March 21, 2022

This week's opening thought: The U.S. House of Representatives passed the CROWN Act on Friday. The CROWN Act is a bill that provides federal protection against hair discrimination with a primary focus of combating racial discrimination against Black citizens for hairstyles like braids, cornrows, and locs in federally assisted programs, housing programs, public accommodations, and employment.

The bill was passed along mostly Democratic Party lines 235-189.

Mostly Democratic. Mostly. House Republicans were practically unanimous in their nay vote. House Democrats, part of the party that swears it cares about Black lives while doing performative things like wearing kente cloth and saying horrible things like thanking George Floyd for "sacrificing himself for justice," were not all on board with getting this passed.

Another version of the CROWN Act was previously introduced in Congress and subsequently passed in the U.S. House but has failed to be passed in the U.S. Senate. This one may likely face the same hurdles.

While hair discrimination affects the majority of Black and Brown folx in the United States, Black women and femmes are the most affected when it comes to employment, social service access, and federal assistance.

What does this all mean?

Even when this country doesn't say it out loud, it says "Black women don't matter" loud and clear.

You don't even have to listen that hard to hear it.

Monday's Opening Thought: March 7, 2022

Image description: Three images of women at protests across the United States, holding protest signs. From left to right: a white woman holding a sign that says "Our lives are on the line"; a Black woman holding a sign that says "We are stronger together"; an illustrated protest sign with a Black woman, her daughter on her shoulders holding a sign that says "Our feminist future." The mother and her daughter are flanked by a Brown woman and a white woman holding up signs that say "Power to the Polls" and "Tax the Rich."

This week's opening thought: This month is Women's History Month in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Tomorrow, March 8, is International Women's Day. We should all celebrate the impacts, achievements, and the drive and determination of the women in our lives and the women throughout western and world history. They have made our world the rich and lush tapestry of art, ingenuity, passion, empathy, resiliency, and strength that shape our lives.

But then we should all take the words resiliency and strength out back and put them out of their misery so that they never pose harm to another woman ever again.

And when I say "another woman," I mean ALL WOMEN. Don't @ me.

Women have to be resilient and strong because societal cultures are built on patriarchal hate and oppression.

Women have to be resilient and strong because we live in a society that thinks the Weinsteins, Cosbys, R. Kellys, Kanyes, Epsteins, and Trumps of our world should be given the benefit of the doubt when they harm women.

Women have to be resilient and strong because we live in a patriarchal culture that pushes the narrative that it's somehow a woman's fault if they are sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, fetishized, or objectified.

Women have to be resilient and strong because we live in a world that views women as secondary and tertiary citizens undeserving of rights and autonomy over their lives, choices, and bodies.

Women have to be resilient and strong to live, to survive. There is no choice for most women to be anything other than strong or resilient because the patriarchy only offers two options: assimilate and be docile or be harmed until you assimilate and become docile.

Resilient and strong are what women have to be to make their own choices in a world that offers them none.

We need to collectively work toward a world where resilience and strength can be viewed as positive acknowledgments of women's achievements and power and not definitions that box women in from being their whole selves. And the only way to work toward that is to dismantle the patriarchy and build something better.

And that work is not just "women’s work.”