Lead Like an Ally

A Journey Through Corporate America with Proven Strategies to Facilitate Inclusion

Julie Kratz

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781642797176
• eBook ISBN: 9781642797183
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Lead Like an Ally facilitates positive change by including six leadership strategies, such as clean up the culture, stretch talent equally, establish ally networks, manage meeting behavior, promote belonging, and measure success.

Leaders, now more than ever, are wrestling with how to attract and retain diverse talent and be inclusive leaders. Despite the best of intentions, very few organizations are reaching their equality goals, even those deeply committed to diversity and inclusion. Leaders have the biggest impact on culture, yet they need tools to do this. Lead Like an Ally provides proven strategies, teaching leaders how to be inclusive with its companion manager tool kit to facilitate sustained success. Within its pages, Lead Like an Ally:

Teaches leaders how to be inclusive through an entertaining fable

Provides a window into the woman's journey through Corporate America and the unique challenges women face

Facilitates inclusive cultures with proven strategies for positive change

Includes a manager tool kit and checklist to take action right away

Chapter 6

MEASURE SUCCESS

I felt as though I had been chewed up and spit out by corporate America, where I no longer belonged. What is next? I had no job but wanted to be a part of the solution.

These thoughts spun in my mind like a tornado, circling and circling.

I hired a career coach to help me map out my next steps. Brenda had done her time in corporate America, and her career path closely resembled mine. She had made her exit a bit earlier than I and started her own coaching practice. I admired her courage to go out on her own, something I lacked at the moment.

I knew I needed to be brave. I had taken a big leap leaving BioSphere with no known prospects on the horizon. Brad was supportive, and we were able to spend more time together as a family, which was therapeutic. How could I look at Lucy’s and Cole’s little faces and not feel a sense of purpose? I was lucky to have my family. I became determined to ensure my work aligned with genuine purpose: to support them.

In our first coaching session, Brenda walked me through my 360 leadership assessment results. It was eye-opening to see my strengths, challenges, and opportunities all in one document. I had scored highly in inclusiveness and pioneering as a leader. My strengths were clear: confidence and being more decisive as a leader.

My confidence had been strong earlier in my career, but it had disappeared. Where had it gone? I posed this question to Brenda. She stated it was a commonality in many of the women she coached. The bravery and courage we once had is often tempered by non-inclusive work environments, which teach us to hold back. Women are often judged differently from their male counterparts when exhibiting the very same behaviors. She said it was called unconscious bias.

She then asked me about my experiences in the workplace. What kind of feedback I had received on performance reviews? How did people react to my ideas in meetings? As I reflected, I recalled times when people questioned my authority to make decisions or said that I was too outspoken. In response to this, I had conditioned myself over time to temper my confidence to fit in. When I had been decisive, people questioned my authority, saying, “Are you sure? Whose decision is this to make?” as though I were not a real leader.

Brenda decided we should focus on my confidence and courage as our two strategies to work on in our time together. I built positive affirmations and wrote a story of my future self. It was so helpful to not feel like I was alone. Each week, we met via video call. Changing behavior is hard. The strategies that I worked on did not come easily at first. I had a lot of self-doubt and a lot of fears to unpack. Yet, over time, I did improve. I was stepping back into who I was meant to be, and it helped a great deal to be out of a toxic work environment.

Once I had my confidence back, we worked on my career path options. Brenda asked me to reflect on my very best days at work: What was I doing? How did I feel? Who was I with? Then, she asked me to think about the skills that came easily to me. What did people ask for my help with frequently? What did I do efficiently and with high quality? What was I doing when time seemed to fly by?

I brainstormed two categories: my skills and my wills. At the top of my skills list was creative problem solving, crafting a vision, building business plans, facilitating collaboration, and ideation. I was strong at these skills, and when doing these activities I felt the most energized and connected with myself. I preferred workplace cultures that were inclusive, where I could work with people who were different than me and whom I could learn from, and being a leader who drives positive change. I needed a mission that I connected with on a deep level. I had to have a purpose in my work. These were nonnegotiable values I craved from the workplace.

Self-reflection is powerful. It aided me in efficiently executing my wills list. I could easily comb through job roles and responsibilities to weed out what was a fit and what did not, and then research the prospective company to see if they were aligned with my values. I began conducting interviews to learn more about specific job areas. The top three roles that matched my skills and wills were nonprofit leader, corporate social responsibility leader, and diversity and inclusion leader. As I shared these options with those I met, they offered insights into open roles and organizations that were looking for this type of talent.

Opportunities poured in from both coasts, but not from Chicago, our home for nearly two decades. The Midwest is infamous for its “culture of nice,” which I believed held many organizations back from truly being progressive. As I traveled, I saw the same issues in New York and California; however, there organizations were leaning in hard to the candid conversation rather than glossing over diversity and inclusion.

Brenda helped me prepare for my interviews by acting as a sounding board as I vetted options with her. When the offers started coming in, my confidence grew. People wanted me, and I had a purpose. I could add value to an organization. I finally belonged.

In the end, I narrowed it down to the two best options: a chief equality officer role at a marketing agency in New York or a local nonprofit executive director role in Chicago. I mapped out the pros and cons with Brenda, and it became crystal clear that a move was necessary. I was going to uproot my family to New York to pursue my dream. I had always wanted to work on workplace culture from the front line, and as the very first equality leader at this organization, I had white space to play with to create an inclusive culture from the ground up.

Two months later, my family was on an airplane heading east. I was bursting with enthusiasm. We settled into our new home in the suburbs, and I took the train into the city each day, using that time to reflect on and build my ideas and plans.

The first day at Octiv was a whirlwind. I was introduced to what felt like a thousand people, and I was very much drinking from the proverbial fire hose. There were lots of suggestions about what my role should be focused on and lots of ideas to consider. I valued the energy for the role, yet knew balancing all the perspectives would be challenging. I was certainly up for that challenge.

The first week was strictly orientation. I got my computer, attended the mandatory trainings, and met my team. The following week, I mapped out my onboarding plan with input from the senior leadership team (which I was now on—wow!). It felt good to be with a team that had diversity. Of the eight senior leaders, there were three women and two people of color. Our chief operations officer was also disabled. I had never been on a team with that kind of diversity. Yet, there are always opportunities to be better.

I met one-on-one with each leader that week and asked similar questions of each: Why do diversity and inclusion matter? How are we measuring success on diversity? What have we done in the past to support inclusion? What worked? What didn’t work?

Their answers revealed a wide variety of challenges. It was disappointing that not one single leader had a good story about why diversity and inclusion mattered. Their business case was cited at times, knowing that diverse teams outperform those that are not diverse. Their human case was unclear, and there had to be more emotion around it for this to be taken seriously; otherwise, it just felt like a flavor-of-the-month program. In addition, there were no metrics for success. I could not believe that there were no means to set goals or measure progress, given the diversity of the senior leadership team. As I looked down through the organization, there was a glaring gap in middle management. Many of our recent promotions and front line hires were notably not diverse. The diverse talent pipeline was not there, and that would be a big problem in two years if we did nothing. As I dug deeper, the middle managers got defensive when asked about their hiring decisions and how they managed the performance of their team. They would respond with statements like “I am not going to hire diverse talent just to hire diverse talent. They have to be equally qualified. I am not going to lower my standards. We have a job to do.”

That was biased. Why did they assume diverse talent is somehow not as qualified?

The first 90 days were all about fact-finding. I identified the top five challenges and presented them to the leadership team:

1. 1.There was no “why” for diversity.
2. 2.We had no plan for it.
3. 3.Leadership was not being held accountable for inclusion.
4. 4.Leadership lacked the skills to be inclusive.
5. 5.There was a lack of transparency around diversity.

To address these challenges, I leveraged my creative problem-solving and strong facilitation skills to engage the team. I wanted the ideas to be their own and for them to feel like a part of it. It was important that we modeled inclusive behavior, as our very purpose was to increase inclusion and equality.

The first town hall discussion was healthy. Teams leaned in to the candid conversation. I engaged them in a discussion about why diversity matters to them personally, and we bubbled up the answers to craft a succinct statement that would be our rallying cry for equality: “We value diversity, equality, and inclusion because we care about all humans. We believe our culture is one where all people can be seen and heard equally. We want our team to reflect our clients and marketplace equally.”

After two hours of rich discussion, I was left to wordsmith the statement and market it externally. It was fun to see the team come to life as they personally connected with the message. It was not about me; it w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Clean Up the Culture
• Stretch Talent Equally
• Establish Ally Networks
• Manage Meeting Behavior
• Promote Belonging
• Measure Success
• Conclusion: What Now?
• Acknowledgments
• Lead Like an Ally: Hindsight Is 20/20, a 52-Week Guide to Being an Inclusive Leader
• Manager Checklist
• About the Author