Likes & Launch

This post is the second in our “Lessons from the USV Diversity Summit” series. In December, USV hosted our first Diversity Summit. Below are some of the most helpful insights we gathered about how to take action. If you are just joining the conversation, you can read the first post here.

Start somewhere

Who starts the conversation around diversity? Who will be the first one to say something, out loud, to your team? How do you start that conversation?

Talking about diversity can feel awkward. Many of our attendees found themselves  leading the charge at their companies simply because they were the first person to speak up about it. Others had their leadership role bestowed upon them because they happened to be the first person on their team to represent diversity.

A lot of our attendees told stories about how their company first “discovered” they had a diversity problem. Sometimes the team’s lack of diversity was pointed out by an outsider: “So how does it feel to be the only female engineer in your company?” Other times it was something people realized for themselves: I noticed I was the only black person  at our all-hands meeting of 100 people.” Occasionally, diversity came up because employees realized there was a mismatch between the team and its customers: “As a team of  ten white male engineers, we don’t represent the market or our customers.”

Most of the time, it was up to the diverse member of a team— whether they were a minority with regard to gender, race, or background—to take up the diversity initiative themselves. This can create the impression that diversity is important to that person simply because they want more representation for people “like them.”

We asked our attendees to tell us about their fears and concerns. Here are some of the sentiments that emerged:

• “I’m a woman and I’ve never been discriminated against, but I know others have, so I’m making sure that behavior doesn’t continue for others.”
• “I’m Latino, and I know a number of talented engineers of all backgrounds. I don’t want them to feel like an outsider like I did when I joined.”
• “I’m the only male on my team, and I don’t want my opinion to be perceived as, ‘this is what all men think.’”
• “I was the first female engineer, and I wanted to show other female engineers that they would not feel alone here, the way I felt alone when I was the only one.”

Waiting for minority team members to start the conversation themselves is dangerous, because if there is no diversity in your team, how will you ever start? So don’t wait. Start the conversation now.

If your goal is to be the best place for top talent to work, it should be the best place for anyone—even if they don’t work there yet.

We’re all in this together

No matter who or “what” you are, diversity belongs to all of us. To frame the discussion about diversity at our summit, we discussed unconscious bias early in the day.

We are all different from the next person. We all have biases that we use in our decision making, biases that come from  our upbringing, our life experiences, and our interactions with the culture and the world.

Leaving it to the professionals, we played a portion of Google’s video on unconscious bias. The video explains the importance of bias awareness in how a tech company successfully makes decisions. The video is worth watching in its entirety.

The concept of unconscious bias gives us a shared language to frame our personal experiences. Instead of saying “we,’” “them,” or “us,”—or using general statements like “men like to…” or “as Hispanics, we…”—we instead each framed our own thoughts around bias, conscious and unconscious.

Here are some examples: “I’m biased in favor of  iPhone users, since I’ve always used an iPhone and never an Android.” “I’m biased in favor of  NYU grads, people who grew up in North Carolina, and middle children.” It’s okay to have these biases, but letting them go unnoticed is where we get into trouble. If I only want to interview candidates who come from NYU, I’m letting my personal bias affect decisions for my company. If I believe that people who have been entrepreneurs just “fit the culture better,” I may not realize that I’m biasing a hiring decision. The idea might sound logical, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

In your conversations, you may find it easier to talk to your peers about diversity if you have thelanguage to talk about differences, rather than generalizing. Instead of saying, “I only hire SVA grads,” you might try substituting, “In the past, I’ve had a bias toward hiring SVA grads.” Modifying the language you use in your mind can make the difference between weighing a decision and having your mind already made up.. It’s the difference between being open to discussion vs. being closed.

We found that establishing a shared vocabulary empowered us to speak up, be empathetic, and encourage without turning the conversation into an “us vs. them” type argument. Unconscious bias training is a great way to kick off diversity discussions, but it is only the foundation of a larger conversation. There are more unconscious bias resources listed here. 

Allies and open conversations

The most cringeworthy stories we heard about at our summit came from people’s efforts to try to “get people talking about diversity.”

One company had held an all-hands meeting to discuss diversity. Anyone could weigh in, share ideas, and speak up about what they wanted changed. To ensure that employees were building off each other instead of battling, the facilitators required everyone to say “yes, and…” instead of “yes, but…” The conversation generated a lot of ideas but left everyone exhausted. At the end, everyone had to come up with one word to describe how they were feeling. Most people chose words like “uncomfortable,” “tense,” or “stressed.”

In hindsight, brainstorming sessions that have more than 50 people are rarely productive. Extroverts excel, introverts hang back. Leaders speak up while newer employees proceed with caution. It’s not the right forum for most topics, and it;s not a great forum for diversity discussions either. The meeting generated conversation, but nothing moved forward until a smaller group took the lead and started to make changes.

Starting with a small group proved to be a successful strategy for several other companies as well. Two different companies set up lunches to try to bring women in engineering together and ask: “What can we be doing better?” One company found that just creating a space to discuss the question already helped the attendees feel supported and heard. At the first meeting, only women were invited. Once the safe space had been established, the second lunch was open to anyone. Ultimately, the meetings led to several positive outcomes: (1) women in the company were encouraged to attend the Grace Hopper Conference, the leading conference for women in engineering (2) the company started requesting a Code of Conduct from conferences attended, and (3) the company pledged to have more diverse hiring panels.

Several companies advocated starting the process by assembling a small group of people to brainstorm about objectives, then bringing in more people only after the small group had a handle on what they wanted to accomplish. The small groups don’t need to be limited to one type of diversity. It’s enough to start with a small, diverse group of individuals who all share the same mission: to increase diversity on their teams.

Defining Diversity

Once you’ve gathered your small team of allies, the next step is to define what diversity means to your company.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has an extensive (and evolving) list of classes who are protected from discrimination. Since discriminating against members of these classes is against the law , it’s probably a good place to start. But you don’t have to stop there.

Here’s Stack Exchange’s philosophy on diversity in the workforce. This statement can be found on all of their job listings:

Diverse teams build better products

Legally, we need you to know this:
Stack Exchange, Inc. does not discriminate in employment matters on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or any other protected class. We support workplace diversity.

But we want to add this:
We strongly believe that diversity of experience contributes to a broader collective perspective that will consistently lead to a better company and better products. We are working hard to increase the diversity of our team wherever we can and we actively encourage everyone to consider becoming a part of it.

Another company defines it as “Diversity of Thought.” They built off the EEOC guidelines, but expanded it to include diversity of skillsets, education, and interests. They took what was required legally and added to it to make sure it felt authentic to their company culture and their existing team. Diversity belongs to everyone at the company, not just a subset of employees.

Start small, start today

One of the break-out sessions from our summit was “Talking about Diversity without Tension.” There were a few takeaways from that discussion. There will be always be tension, even in a small group. Trying to avoid tension may actually be counterproductive. It’s more important to have the conversation than to try to avoid it.

The best way forward is to start small. Assemble a small group of people to start the discussion in a safe space. Invite a professional trained in diversity or unconscious bias to join you. Or bootstrap early conversations with online resources. We’ve collected a few recommendations in the Diversity Hackpad here: Unconscious Bias Resources. Whatever the size your company, start your small group conversations today.

The next post in this series will explain how to take the small group conversations and extend them to the wider company culture.

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At USV, we often get our portfolio companies together to discuss topics of interest, as well as challenges and lessons learned. In 2014, we held 42 such portfolio get-togethers. In December, we hosted our first Diversity Summit. The focus of the discussion was to increase organizational diversity to gain competitive advantage.

At the event, we had 28 attendees from 13 different companies with a range of job functions: Engineering, People, Community, Sales, Business Development, Legal and Product. Everyone had the same goal: to increase diversity in their organization.

I wanted to share the insights we learned and what we found helpful to take action.  

Why is diversity important?

To prepare for our event, I connected with Lisa Lee, Pandora’s Head of Diversity. She shared the importance of setting context around the topic in a professional setting, especially since conversations can easily drift into discussions on social justice, privilege and entitlement. Those topics are worthy to inspect, but they detract from the organizational conversation of increasing diversity for business success.

To set context, she advised addressing two key questions early in our discussion:

1. Do you want your company to increase your company’s competitive advantage? Extensive research has proven that more diverse perspectives leads to more innovative ideas and better financial returns.
2. Do you want your company to one day serve millions of people? It helps if you know how different people in the population think. If companies want to last, they need to think about this early.

Grounding the discussion in these questions early on will help ensure a productive conversation about diversity in your organization, both in strategy and in practice. The topic is vast, but you don’t need to be an expert to start making changes. If you want to learn more, go find experts willing to help.

To help get up to speed quickly, here are the most cited research studies around the benefits of organizational Diversity. The research can be summarized into the following:

• If you want to create the most innovative ideas, you will benefit from diversity of perspectives within your workforce.
• If you want to increase the financial returns of your business, encourage gender diversity on your executive team and board.
• If you want to build a massive company that serves a global population, consider the diversity of your workforce in order to best serve those customers. 
• Having diversity of perspectives can create more innovative ideas, but will likely expand discussions and debate.

Because diversity is such an important topic, it must be prioritized early in a company’s life.  As Lisa put it, “I’m a believer that you have to start thinking about diversity early, otherwise it just becomes really, really difficult the bigger that you grow. What you want is to grow your company where diversity is one of your core principles and core values, because trying to inject it later on is inorganic and it’s off putting to people.” Start today.

Challenges of making change

One of the biggest challenges of successful diversity initiatives is simply opening the discussion.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Intel and HP shared their workforce diversity numbers publicly after Tracy Chou, a Pinterest engineer, called for more transparency about their diversity efforts. Even though these companies are making progress, the media and social media reactions are largely negative. There is media finger pointing at what isn’t achieved yet, not focus on what is being done.

Diversity challenges are across the tech sector, from startups to venture capital. At USV, we know we’re far from diverse. Fortunately, we have learned a lot and we want to continue to encourage progress internally, within our portfolio, and the broader tech community.

Diversity initiatives are currently happening behind closed doors. Best practices are siloed and we’re not learning from each other.

An open diversity conversation lifts all boats. It’s what the tech community embraces: transparency, failing out loud, sharing strategies, cheering on those who are making changes, and using post-mortems to learn from things that didn’t pan out.

Diversity at work

Even within the walls of a single organization, it can be difficult to raise the topic of diversity. When asked amongst our summit attendees, the challenges raised were: discussing and defining diversity, creating a plan, and prioritizing initiatives to move forward.

To address these challenges, our group came away with a number of different approaches that I’ll expand on in more detail in this blog series. These include:

• Getting Started: having the discussion, language, and online tools
• Company Culture: embracing diversity, inclusive mission vision values, and performance
• Recruiting: tactics, expectations, interviews, job postings, resources, and external organizations
• Constant Evolution: Feedback, measuring success, training, and materials

Diversity is an urgent and important issue; the best time to start is now. Let’s open the door on this topic.

Diversity is never done

To wrap up our day, we had Maximo Patiño, Associate Director of Admissions and Diversity Strategist, join us from CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, bringing 14+ years of diversity leadership and advocacy. He answered the questions left open from our discussions and affirmed we were heading in the right direction. His most profound advice, however, was this: “diversity is never done”.

Just as innovation is not something you “achieve” it’s something you constantly strive for and try to inspire, diversity is never done. Both a relief and an inspiration, diversity is an initiative that will constantly be part of your company. The goal then is not to “fix” or “solve” diversity, it’s to encourage it.

Something to share?

If you or your team have something to add, please share in the comments or on Twitter.

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For the full list of Diversity Resources, including the research mentioned above, you can view the list here. 

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