Note: Exygy has recently undertaken a major effort to become a more diverse and inclusive organization. This is a copy of an internal note sent out a few weeks ago. 

We strongly encourage women and people of color to apply for our open positions: 

• Front End Engineer
• Business Development Lead
• Lead Designer

Hey Team,

In the spirit of the diversity conversation we started at Team Lunch two Thursdays ago, I wanted to share some thoughts around this issue.

• Firstly, lots of companies don’t think about, or deeply understand, diversity issues. Of those that do, I perceive relatively few actually do a good job aligning ideas and action – particularly in the tech space.
• Secondly, I think we can, and should, be one of the companies that does a great job with the issue.

This note focuses on why, and how, we do that.

Being a Learning Organization**

I’ve spoken with some of you about why being a “learning organization” is a critical part of our long term success: it’s only through regular, honest self-reflection on our errors, both large and small, that we can actually understand how to become better. In the last year, we have begun to truly dig into areas of weakness, and make focused changes based on what we’ve learned. This is leading to very clear changes in the business, e.g., our failings around scoping and managing projects led us to hunt for an incredible project manager – which is yielding some amazing candidates.

As a learning organization, we have the right skills and mindset to to overcome any type of challenge.

Problem Types

I also want to recognize that, organizationally, we face a spectrum of problems. Some, like the project management issues, are clearly defined: “oh man, we are way over budget!” or “we are way over timeline!” These are clear problems, and may or may not have clear solutions. On the other side are unclear problems, problems whose impact on the business is less easily defined. Diversity falls into this type – we don’t understand the full implications of not being diverse, nor do we know all the right solutions, but we must focus on it.

Three big questions need to be answered:

1. Why should we care about diversity and inclusiveness?
2. What does being successful at diversity and inclusiveness look like?
3. What do we do next?

Why should we care about diversity?

Our Business is Our Team
Being the best agency in the social enterprise space means not only attracting, recruiting, and retaining the best people in the industry, but having the highest *performing* team. If we care about having the highest performing team, we should care about diversity: Research has proven over and over again that more diverse teams produce better results. For example, it’s been proven that more women makes your team smarter.

Another study demonstrated that companies whose leaders had both “inherent” (race, gender, etc.) and “acquired” (different experiences) were 70% likelier to report that the firm captured a new market.

Being Diverse Means Starting Now
As Carlin astutely mentioned, we are at a tipping point in our organizational growth. We are actively hiring five people, and their identity will go a long ways towards establishing the identity of our team. Eg., it they are all white men, we will be an organization of mainly white men, and it will become increasingly hard to change course. This will make it harder to bring on talented people with other backgrounds, and also to retain them.

It’s Who We Are
Thirdly, the same set of values that compelled us to become a green business and a B Corp are the same set of values that compel us to become more diverse and inclusive. We choose to pursue a different way of doing business, even when doing so means doing so is challenging or difficult for us. That’s what it means to be values driven. Being a leader in the business for social impact movement means setting an example by cultivating a team that truly represents a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints.

What does success look like?

Candidates, staff, clients, advisors, and other stakeholders in Exygy feel represented and included.
I mean, I made that up, but I think that’s what we’re shooting for – a place where people know they can come and feel safe, valued, and respected – no matter who they are.

What do we do about it?

In order to achieve this vision, we must do a lot of things – but for right now, let’s focus on changing our recruiting practices. I think there are two main ways this needs to happen:

Build a Diverse Pipeline
Given that women and minorities are disproportionately underrepresented in the technology space, we must make additional effort to recruit for candidates from these backgrounds. This doesn’t mean basing selection around a candidate’s identity – to be clear, we can never, ever compromise on our requirements for staff or contractors, lest we risk a ‘bozo explosion.’ Rather, it means acknowledging that, for example, because women are less likely to apply for an engineering job, that we will likely need to spend additional effort to get a representative number of qualified women to apply.

This could mean doing things like establishing partnerships with Women Who Code, Black Girls Code, or Hackbright. It could also mean reaching out deliberately to qualified candidates who we’d really like to apply for a job.

Be Reflective in our Selection Process
We must take extra care when evaluating women and minority candidates. This involves being very careful about recognizing our own biases and world views as we go through the interview process. Our identity shapes our worldview in subtle ways that we may not be conscious of, or spend time thinking about. A few examples of thinking about our own biases:

• How might the fact that an engineer was female have affected her prior employment opportunities?
• How might my interview style – e.g., direct, firm, lots of eye contact – be an outcome of my gender norms?
• How might experiences of ideas from other parts of my life be shaping how I think about this candidate?

This type of identity-based meta cognition is critical, and probably worthy of its own essay. The point is that without this sort of thinking, we risk selecting for talent in a way that propagates the majority’s worldview.

Note that I stated diversity and inclusivity in the vision statement and the title, which is deliberate, since these are not the same thing. While an organization may be inclusive, it may not be diverse. Conversely it may be diverse, but not inclusive (like maybe your high school). I’d say Exygy falls into the former, but not because we’ve made a deliberate choice: It’s easy for the majority population – white men – to feel a sense of belonging because most of the people in the company are like them. This shared racial and gender identity provides credibility and authority in an unspoken but important way. We’ve never had to create a deliberately inclusive community with a diverse staff.

Being inclusive means creating a welcoming space that fosters the exchange of different viewpoints and ideas. As we grow, and seek to become a truly representative space, we must recognize that simply having a more diverse team – race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, etc., – isn’t enough. We have to work hard, consistently, to make different voices heard. Inclusion is critical in realizing the value of diversity. This is a critical part of becoming the enduring company we aspire to be.

So, what next?

Take a minute and check in with yourself after reading this far. How do you feel? What are you thinking? You may have a sense of unease – “I don’t really understand why this is a big deal;” a sense of powerlessness “what can I do;” or opportunity “I have so many ideas about how to move this conversation forward.” All those perspectives would make sense. Our “growth mindset”** is critical here, and compels us to ask questions like:

• Are we all aligned on diversity as a value? Why or why not?
• What kinds of questions do we have?
• How do we continue this conversation?

We can become the diverse, inclusive community we aspire to be through deliberate action and reflection. We will all have to work hard to address this – both on a personal and organizational level – but we will become a stronger, more effective team because of it.

Best,

Phil

**If you’d like to learn more about this, I highly, highly recommend work by Carol Dweck, who’s written extensively about “growth mindset.” You can read a good overview of the idea here.