Things look bad. The global pandemic continues to disproportionately impact communities of color. News cycles feature a steady stream of images of racial violence. Anti-Asian racism in public spaces proliferates. The Great Resignation has exacerbated the perpetual difficulty of building a pipeline of diverse leadership.
On a brighter note, human resources practitioners and everyone who shares the vision of a more equitable future are cognizant of the need to support the leadership and well-being of professionals of color at both the organizational and societal levels. Targeted actions focused on workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion and allyship have given rise to a plethora of programs that are embraced with the hope of nurturing the next generation of
diverse leaders.
From my vantage point, it is critical that employers keep three guiding principles in mind when seeking to create a supportive workplace for leaders of color.
Honor Identity in Mentorship
Mentorship is more than a powerful tool for career advancement. It is also a method for building a stronger workforce. When being mentored, younger and newer employees learn more about themselves and how to succeed by forming genuine connections. Those connections then contribute to making the work culture more robust and collaborative. Mentorship also encourages skill-sharing and leadership development on behalf of both the mentor and protégé.
A mentorship, whether formalized through workplace structures or generated through informal networking and relationship-building, plays a huge role in fostering career success and increasing access to professional opportunities. However, many professionals from underrepresented groups report difficulties in identifying mentors within their organizations. This is especially true for women of color in the nonprofit sector. According to data from the 2019 Race to Lead Survey, women of color are most likely to feel their race and gender have had negative impacts on their career advancement. Respondents to the survey conducted by the Building Momentum Project also cited the lack of professional mentorship and few role models at work as major barriers.
While there certainly can be merit to being mentored by someone with a different background, a shared lived experience often serves as the basis for a meaningful mentoring relationship for professionals of color. Consequently, hiring a more diverse workforce and bringing on more people of color in senior leadership roles to serve as collaborators, mentors and advisers must constitute the core of an organization’s efforts to develop a new generation of leaders from within.
Mentors with shared lived experiences can create a heightened sense of belonging and confidence for professionals of color by acknowledging and affirming their protégés’ identity. Sharing their own insights on how to navigate predominantly white spaces while remaining authentic to one’s self and values also allows mentors of color to alleviate their protégés’ imposter syndrome and to help protégés understand how to hone and own their power.
Furthermore, mentors and protégés with shared identities have an easier time building trust through intentional communication and connection. Establishing a strong foundation of trust facilitates the evolution of a mentorship into a sponsorship, which is a professional relationship in which the senior individual directly advocates for the younger or newer employee and works to raise their protégé’s visibility within an organization or industry.
The lesson for organizations seeking to build a more inclusive and supportive environment for leaders of color is that investing in affinity- or identity-based mentorship programs is a viable and mutually beneficial way to foster the growth of employees on an individual and collective level.
Cultivate Intrapreneurial Spirit
An intrapreneur is an internal entrepreneur—a professional who works within an organization and has access to the organizational resources they need to design and drive forward innovative ideas that strengthen the organization and further its work, mission and impact. Essential to cultivating intrepreneurial spirit is creating an environment that encourages curiosity, perceptiveness and outside-the-box thinking. Within such an environment, intrapreneurs can leverage their individual and collective strengths and knowledge to execute their vision.
For example, my own organization supports employee-led groups dedicated to key issues such as workplace culture and racial equity. Employees from across departments, at all levels and of different identities gather in these groups to create spaces where they engage in honest, transparent dialogue. They are given a platform, a voice and room to reflect on work challenges and to develop innovative ways to resolve those challenges with the support of senior leadership and while accessing organizational resources. The employee-led groups have taken the lead on everything from bringing in consultants to support an internal racial equity transformation to navigating team-building during hybrid and remote work.
Commit to Learning
Effectively and proactively creating a better workplace that works for all colleagues is an ongoing journey. It takes humility, continual learning and daily commitment to changing the policies, practices and mindsets that inhibit inclusivity. While on the journey, it is important to embrace discomfort and recognize that mistakes will be made along the way.
To truly foster collective learning and accountability in the workplace and be able to adapt and pivot in the face of unpredictability, each organization must commit to becoming a learning organization. Learning organizations create spaces for open discussion, encourage curiosity and risk-taking, and foster supportive environments for employees to learn alongside senior leaders and the organization.
Along with making targeted interventions in the organization’s culture and processes, senior leaders can model the behaviors they want employees to emulate, such as deep listening, open-minded questioning, thinking outside the box and putting an eye toward innovation.
In order to be a learning organization, it is also important to be in dialogue with other organizations. Joining professional groups is an excellent way to engage with peers and share resources, ask questions, observe trends and source insights from across organizations. For instance, I am part of a group of about a hundred COOs across the nonprofit sector. We are all leaders trying to do the best for our organizations. We meet once a month to think intentionally about strategy and implementation, as well as to share information on a level that is only available to folks in similar positions.
Moving Forward
Creating an environment where professionals of color feel heard and are encouraged to take risks will lead to a better sense of community, more knowledge sharing, and greater innovation and creativity. In reflecting on this, it is enlightening to consider one of the most famous mentoring relationships, the one between Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey. In Oprah’s view, “A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.”
Angelou, the activist and literary icon, commented, “In order to be a mentor, and an effective one, one must care. … [C]are about the person, care about what you know and care about the person you’re sharing with.”
Sometimes the simple truth is the most profound—even when navigating the complex task of preparing for a more equitable future of leadership.
01 May 2022
Category
HR News Article