Monday's Opening Thought: April 25, 2022

This week’s opening thought: If you’re a recruiter, HR “professional” in charge of recruiting efforts for an organization, hiring manager, or hiring committee member in 2022, and you’re still asking the following questions (or some version of these questions):

“Tell me about yourself.”

“What would you say are your strengths?”

“What would you say is your biggest weakness?”

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

“Have you ever been fired?”

“What was the worst trait of your previous manager?”

“What did you like least about your last job?”

“Why do you want this job?”

“How does your experience relate to this job?”

‍“I’m interviewing other candidates for this role. Why should I hire you?"

“Where do you live?”

“What year did you graduate?”

“Describe yourself in three words.”

“Describe yourself in one sentence.”

“What country are you from?”

“What is your race?”

“What is your current salary?”

“Have you been convicted of a crime?”

“Have you ever been arrested?”

“Do you have a disability?”

“Are you married?”

“Do you have kids you have to drop off and pick up from school every day?”

“Are you a religious person?”

“Are there any religious holidays you observe?”

“Are you pregnant?”

“Are you planning on starting a family anytime soon?”

“Do you have kids? How many?”

“What are your child care arrangements?”

You shouldn’t feel the need to question why you’re losing awesome candidates to other companies. You shouldn’t feel the need to wonder why candidates keep removing themselves from the running halfway through your recruiting process. You shouldn’t feel the need to wonder why Global Majority folx, people of color, and folx from marginalized communities are leaving your company.

All of the answers you seek are in the questions you ask.

P.S.: Before you ask, yes, people are still asking these questions in interviews. I had an interview last week, and the recruiter asked me three of these questions - and he only asked me five questions. I'll let y'all guess which three. People regularly tell me about the questions they get asked in interviews, and this list only scratches the surface.

Monday's Opening Thought: April 18, 2022

This week’s opening thought, for Global Majority folx, people of color, and people of culture: know your worth and hold to it, not just your financial worth but your worth as a human being.

Don’t let these white supremacist and colonizer-based systems and organizations we must grapple with to survive decide what they think your worth is because they will always offer you pennies instead of diamonds. Don’t accept anyone underpaying you or undervaluing what you bring to their company. You are much more than a diversity hire. Your lived experience and work experience are more valuable than they want to admit. They need you more than you need them or the added stress of their urgency to position you as the magic solution to their issues.

Yesterday’s price is not today’s price.

And today’s price might go up this afternoon if people keep trippin’.

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.