Tech Works: Embrace Inclusive Leadership Now
When it was an employees’ market, we saw the tech industry embracing the messages of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. Because developers had made it clear that company culture influenced their career moves. And it’s just good business since it’s been long proven that diversity increases competitiveness.
But then in 2023, a deluge of tech layoffs came rushing in, and we began to realize how performative all those “inclusion plans” really were.
Black tech founders are actually receiving less VC funding than ever. Women in tech are disproportionately being laid off. Women, Black, Latinx and Native American professionals continue to be vastly underrepresented across the whole U.S. tech industry. Hispanic women and Black women earn the lowest. And while the one and only in-depth tech leavers study is now seven years old, there’s no reason to think that anything has changed — minoritized tech workers are still abandoning the industry due to unfair treatment.
So, if we know that diversity increases innovation — and the likelihood of building something a wider breadth of users actually want — how can engineering leadership curb this trend?
Be intentional. That’s the advice I heard from all three Black tech leaders I interviewed for this piece. Read on for engineering leadership practices to create an intentionally safe and productive environment for your employees most marginalized by the tech industry — and to set up your whole organization for success.
Are You About to Lose Talent?
“They come to us at that point and say, ‘I’ve had enough. I want to leave. What can I do?’” This is the circumstances at which Black women turn to Coding Black Females’ Return to Tech Bootcamp.
“It’s for people who are returning [to the tech industry]. But it’s a way of suddenly stopping people from leaving,” Charlene Hunter, CEO and founder of Coding Black Females, a network of over 20,000 globally, told The New Stack.
“People who are already experienced in the tech industry, but maybe their current company isn’t supporting them in a way that they could be, like through learning and development or recognizing their skills, and so on. This program is there to increase confidence and provide technical skills, and then we only run our Returners program in collaboration with companies offering roles, so then they’ll also get a role at the end.”
How do you recognize the signs that your management style is less than inclusive? That folks already have a foot out the door? Common leaver motivators Hunter hears include:
- No career progression.
- Skills and contributions aren’t being recognized.
- Learning and development aren’t offered.
“Or if it [L&D] is offered, it’s being seen as a weakness rather than a strength that someone’s developing their skills,” she observed. “We’ve had people who said, ‘Look, I want to learn this skill’, but they’re like, ‘You should know it already’.”
The most common reason her Returner recruits cite is that they feel a lack of recognition or opportunity to grow. Hunter offered the Skill Will Matrix as a powerful performance tool for managers to compare the willingness to perform a task with the degree of skill an employee has to perform that task well.
“I’ll notice that someone’s got so much will, but what can I do to support them on the skill side?” she reflects with her own team. It’s about “understanding leadership techniques to support your team, rather than just expecting your team to deliver. If my team was struggling, my first thought is: What can I do to make a difference?”
Collaborative and technical skills are much easier to support than motivation, which is often at its highest when you start a new gig, but can deplete over time. As Hunter said, “You can’t give somebody will, but you can support them to keep it.”
Intentional Onboarding
This intentionally inclusive effort should start with onboarding.
“There should be some structure in place and some check-in points discussed in the onboarding, to ensure that person has a clear line of communication and updates for the first three to six months,” Jasmin Thomas, angel investor and VC consultant, told The New Stack.
Line managers need a clear structure in place, especially regarding promotions and learning and development, she continued, “from the beginning, so that person sees how they’re going to get there which is based on actual achievements and work, rather than any kind of outward influence of preference or team.”
This could be implicit biases held by managers or teammates. It’s also important to know that Black employees are rated significantly lower than white employees by both customers and supervisors — even when the objective level of performance is controlled.
If you do not already have visible diversity on your team or within your organization, Thomas emphasized, you need to be extra intentional in this structure and communication, because those minoritized by the tech industry may not trust your promises of promotion.
Folks from minoritized communities often don’t have the existing in-tech networks to find tech jobs or to check in with peers to see what’s normal or off.
“There are so many different paths you can take,” Sabry Tozin, vice president of engineering at LinkedIn, reflected, “and one of the things about minority communities, in particular, is that we don’t have networks where people can guide you as easily as it may happen for other communities.”
How to Have the Career Conversation
People should never not know where they stand. A key part of a manager’s role is to recognize other people’s work and to make sure they have a clear path to skills acquisition and growth within your organization.
For Tozin, it’s not just about having a corporate hierarchical career path. Companies, even in these tighter times, need to make sure that employees always feel like they are able to learn more skills, he told The New Stack. “It starts to also give you more ownership into how you think about your own career and give confidence that you are really going to places to acquire a new set of skills.”
While engineers should be able to take ownership over their own careers, Tozin observed that those marginalized by the tech industry may have been or are still in “a team where the manager doesn’t make them feel like they belong, and they feel intimidated and don’t even know how to have a career conversation.”
To diffuse the often principal-student vibe of one-to-ones — and the need for constant eye contact — he takes the meeting on a walk outside. Then, he said, “I never jump into the work right away. I just start asking them: How are you doing? Where are your mind and your heart? How are you feeling? How are things going at home?”
It’s all about fostering an environment where people can communicate in an open way, Hunter said. “It’s important people feel comfortable to ask: ‘What can you do to support me?’” Being ready to answer helps both with retention and upskilling your team.
Facilitate Mentorship
As the Returners get more senior, they also complain that they aren’t given enough opportunities to support others, Hunter said. “When we get to the point that we take away a lot of initiatives that support other people — potentially externally or internally because there’s less money in the business — people can feel disempowered to be able to give that support, so they’ll want to leave and maybe go somewhere else,” she said, “or they might lose interest in the industry because it’s not supporting people the way they want it to.”
On the other hand, Hunter went on to share a recent story of a manager whose whole team took a day off coding to run a data analysis workshop for 15- to 18-year-olds.
“Every single one of those people in the room got to talk about their careers. They felt really good about the fact that they were sharing their knowledge with younger people,” Hunter said, including the two women who still came to volunteer while on parental leave. “They felt empowered to know that they were going to be helping the next generation progress. And they know that the organization they work for is dedicated to making a change within the industry.”
Engineering leadership is in a position to advocate for time or budget for such motivating actions.
Do the Math
Engineering is a science, so we know that we can’t improve what we don’t measure. Yet a lot of companies are reticent to measure diversity metrics. Perhaps that’s because they continue to be dismal? But that’s where your DEI improvement journey begins.
Thomas consults with and scouts for venture capital firms, which means she more often than not finds herself the only Black woman in the room. This creates a huge pipeline problem: “If the people that are giving up the money are not diverse, then the founders won’t be diverse. If the founders are not diverse, the tech teams are not diverse,” she said of “the trickling stream of how we get non-diverse candidates in a lot of companies.”
She has once or twice seen a VC firm take into account the demographics of the local population, and then figure out, for example, how many Black people they are going to interview to aim for equal representation.
Like venture capitalists, STEM journalists are predominantly white male, which in turn means their sources trend that way. In order to counter that, journalist Ed Yong spent two years tracking the gender imbalance of his sources. To get a quote, he realized that he needed to contact 1.3 men and 1.6 women. By following this ratio, he was able to interview 50% of women sources within two years.
Every team and company will have different results. But measuring is the first step.
Sharing your metrics also makes you more likely to deliver on them, like how LinkedIn publishes its own annual Workforce Diversity Report, even sharing its commitment to doubling its senior U.S. Black and Latino employees by 2025.
How to Influence Culture at Scale
Be careful how you state your goals. When companies put in job ads that they are “hiring for cultural fit,” that can deter diverse applicants because, as Thomas said, “Our cultures are not the same. How am I ever going to be a fit?” People often misuse this term, she said, when they should be more descriptive about the culture that they are and what they are looking for.
“You need to think, what can I do, what can I put in place to make sure that this environment is going to be welcoming for Black women?” she said, which includes having other Black women on the team and in leadership. And you need to encompass and include diverse cultures in other ways. Thomas referred to a client who gave out wine and chocolates made by Black-owned businesses as a way to celebrate Black History Month.
“Recruiting and pipelines are one thing, but making people feel like they belong is far harder,” Tozin said, reflecting on a career where he’s often the only Black person in the room. “All my life, I’ve been sort of wired to believe that this system is going to work against me,” which in turn affected how he presented at the office.
This mindset had him keep his personal and work life very separate. But when he became an uncle and then a father, he realized that one day they would have to work in these same corporate settings.
“I realized I had to become more visible — as uncomfortable as it was for me — because I tend to be introverted. I tend to be more private in how I operate,” Tozin said. “When I didn’t make myself more visible, I was perpetuating this idea that working at these places is a journey that most people can’t undertake, especially people who look like me.”
So he started showing up at work in his distressed jeans and Air Jordans, and going to lunch with interns, and doing more work with enterprise resource groups, even co-founding Black@Netflix at his previous employer and co-sponsoring the Black inclusion ERG at LinkedIn.
He noted that this openness does not come naturally to him, but it does feel necessary, especially now that he is in charge of 1,700 LinkedIn engineers. “The fact there are very few Black VPs of engineering means that it’s just harder to find me,” so he has to show out more.
How can you as an engineering leader help people feel like they can bring their whole selves to work? Share this post on LinkedIn with your tips and the hashtag #TechWorks.
