lunch edition w/jossie haines on dei

full transcript

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me, old fashioned email, social media at t s and t d e s s e y n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Josie, let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. Awesome. And it's great being on the show. Thank you for having me. So I'm Josie Haynes.

I'm an executive coach for engineering leaders. I actually just left my role at tile as a VP of engineering about a month ago because, you know, my story goes in early 2018, I left Apple and I thought I was going to leave the tech industry. I was burnt out, going through imposter syndrome. I thought it was a bad manager even. And realized though, if I walked away, I was gonna walk away from having the ability to impact the future. Technology is impacting all aspects of our daily lives and it is not addressing the needs of women and underrepresented minorities. And so I decided I was like, no, I have to come back and to tek under my roles.

And so when I joined Tyle in late 2018, I spoke to the CEO and said, hey, I wanna make sure inclusion isn't lip service. And I wanna start a mentoring program and run our DEI efforts. And so he said, you know what? I have two daughters, two sisters, no brothers, no sons, and I married. I promised my wife I wanna make Tyle the best place for women to work in the Valley. And so I joined, started our mentoring program, which was awesome that we had seven folks be able to switch roles within Tile within three years thanks to the mentoring program. And I also open sourced all the content so other companies can build their own mentoring program.

I love that. And actually Mozilla and a number of other companies based their mentoring programs off of this which is pretty awesome. And I started our DEI efforts. We had already started building an inclusive culture but you know continue that and I was so proud of the culture I was able to build at Tyle. And I realized, though, one thing, which is while I could join these companies and move the needle and truly build an inclusive culture, I was doing it at one company at a time. And my mission is around retaining women in tech. And so I decided the best way to do that is actually working with the engineering leaders, because we have the largest teams in the tech industry, and yet we're the least inclusive and diverse.

And so I figure if I can get in with the engineering leaders and really help us build these inclusive, high performing workplaces, then we can finally stop having 56% of women leave tech after 10 to 20 years. 100%. 100%. I love that. And so let's dive in, right? So if my Josie and I were chatting off there and I was like, hey, I came up with a new conference talk. Here it is. And I was like, you know, talking about, you know, inclusive hiring, not exclusive hiring systems. This is great. I've already done this. Let's talk about it. Okay, great. So, so what's so how do companies get started?

Right? They're like DEI inclusivity. I get it. Vada, Vada. But Josie, how how do we go from zero to one? All right. So first, do not think the diversity is it. I think that's the biggest challenge we've had in the tech industry so far is we focus on the D in DEI because it's easy to measure. It is easier to measure diversity, right? However, that is why we have a revolving door in the tech industry today. You know, 37% of folks are leaving the tech industry due to unfairness and 57% of those would have stayed if their companies had addressed their concerns. And so I say, yes, let's get some inclusive hiring practices.

and so you can start getting more women and underrepresented minorities in your company. But if you don't focus on the inclusion piece and building effective and fair management practices and principles for your leaders, you're not going to retain your talent and you're going to keep having the revolving door you do in the tech industry. And so I say, hey, it is important to focus on diversity and that hiring pipeline. But what I'm telling companies right now is a lot of companies right now aren't hiring, right? Because of the economic conditions. And so I say, you know what you should be doing right now? Building the inclusion in your team, making your company culture more inclusive, leveling up your leaders so they're effective and fair managers.

When you get folks from underrepresented backgrounds and women in the door, right? So prepare yourself for success. All right. So I had, I forgot who I had on the show and I'm so sorry if you if this this individual's launching, I do apologize. I had a great conversation on this, and we talked about inclusivity. And I think what that looks like for people. So can you dive in and give some specific examples? Because when I talked about someone's show, I was like, man, really opened up my eyes, right? And again, one of the reasons why I have the show, as a manager myself, I want to learn from the best and brightest of the engineering side of things.

And so I can always learn more. And so what does inclusivity look like within an organization? Yeah, I think inclusivity looks like having an environment where each and every individual can thrive and really feels like their opinions are valued and heard and are contributing to the bigger picture. And, you know, we can create this through a combination of many little things. And that's the kind of the thing that's hard about inclusion, right? There's, I don't have a magic bullet for you. Right? I can't give you a magic inclusion pill and make this all better. And it's hard work, right? And so what does inclusion mean?

It means taking a step back and realizing we all have biases, right? And they're not a bad thing, you know? It's what kept us back in our hunter-gatherer days from being killed by a lion. And even today, it's what helps us drive a car without having to like think, oh, how do I drive this? Do I need to put this in reverse? Right? Like, we don't have to do that. Like, we know how to drive, right? So it's not that these things are bad, but in the workplace sometimes, and we're trying to make decisions where biases can creep in and negatively impact things, we need to slow down our thinking, right?

And so, So I tell folks, it's one of two things. We either need to slow down our decision making because we know a bias can potentially be in there. Or how can we be evolving our processes to reduce bias? And so that's when people talk about, how do we build inclusive hiring practices and think about that, I say, look, we all have biases, right? And so to build an inclusive hiring process, It's about how do we reduce bias in every step of the process because you can't eliminate it. So it's either reducing it or slowing down your thinking when you know it's still present. A hundred percent.

And I think, you know, one of the inclusivity examples I had with this guest, and it's driving me nuts. I can't think of who it was. But basically, it's like, hey, listen, maybe not every activity needs to be drinking. Boom. Right. Like that's a very simple one. It's like, listen, there are people who maybe are trying to, maybe they've been sober. Maybe that's their goal. Maybe somebody's getting, maybe somebody doesn't want to like be a part of that. So it's like, how, what else are you offering to make everybody feel like they belong and comfortable? And I think that's a, that's a really hard thing.

You have to be really intentional. Yeah, yeah. And even things that you think might be inclusive might not be, right? So for example, a lot of companies do, you know, ice breakers, which is a great way to build trust, right? You know, I tell folks, like, the best way to build trust is not talking about work, because about being vulnerable with each other and really getting to know people. And sometimes ice breakers are a great way to get to know people. But a very common one is, hey, everybody send us your baby pictures and we'll guess whose baby picture is who? Well, if you're the only black person on a team, you're gonna feel kind of outed as like, yeah, that's obviously my baby picture.

I wouldn't even thought of that. Yep. And so that's where the slowing down the thinking comes in, right? And one of the biggest places I think we can work on inclusion is our meetings. And yeah, and so many times, how many times have you been in a meeting? And there's the loud voices. And they're the ones who everyone's hearing, but there's like five or six people sitting in that room. And you know, they're intelligent engineers with brilliant opinions of their own, but maybe they're introverts. Maybe they don't wanna argue with the really loud person in the room, right? And so one of the things I talk about is, hey, are you ensuring that everybody has a voice and is being heard?

And if you're brainstorming, One of the best things to do for brainstorming is literally take the time to let everybody spend five minutes and write down their ideas first and then go around the room, have everybody share their ideas with nobody judging whether it's good or bad. And then you have the discussion about, hey, what might be the best idea, right? And that's much more inclusive and is potentially adding in a lot more valuable ideas that folks might have not felt comfortable speaking up. I totally agree. Kristina, former guest on the show, I'm seeing her next week just returned from KCDC and we intentionally did non-drinky things which I know I've seen a lot more people on Twitter talk about having events that are obviously non-drinking things.

I don't know why we focus around drinking things. I think we should eat more, right? I think I love to eat. Yeah, and playing games is fun. That's That's what I did with my team every month. I actually did a monthly game happy hour with my team. And we all get on Zoom because my team was virtual. And, you know, we'd play, we did a virtual escape room one time. And we played along with it. I love it. I love it. I love it. And I usually hate it. And it was awesome. Yeah, they're great. So let's talk job descriptions. So I've been an absolute, I'm starting to get really, really loud about job descriptions.

I think, you know, I've gone out of saying, I think you need to hire a copywriter, a content writer to write job descriptions. Your job descriptions are the first thing that job seekers see about your company. What does it reflect about you? And so talk about how companies can write job descriptions and be more inclusive and not exclusive. Oh my gosh, if I could get companies to change how they're doing job descriptions, I, I, this would be amazing. So first, um, let, we need to look at our requirements and the type of language we're using in our job description. So let's start with language. Um, we, we need to make sure we're reviewing our job descriptions for gender language, uh, words like aggressive and rock star and superstar can actually turn off women.

You also need to make sure you don't go to the opposite extreme too. and are way too collaborative and nice, and then you might actually turn off Matt, right? So it's really about finding good non-gender language. A great tool for this is the leverage textio. There's also the free gender decoder, which you can look up online. And it's useful too, is a good way to just get started, in case you can't afford textio, but definitely. And one of the things we did was we just had a committee that would review our job descriptions for gender and language. So before a job description got posted, it, our DEI committee would review the job description for gender and language and things like, hey, are you, and then going back to requirements, right?

Are you putting a needing a four year college degree as a requirement? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guess what? That's actually cutting out a huge percentage of people of color by just putting that in as a requirement. And last I checked, you don't need a four year undergrad to do most of what we're doing if you've gotten training in other ways, right? And so there's lots of ways you can get these skills, not just a four year university. And I think to I think putting the emphasis on the hiring manager to actually take a look at the job description, that's what I'm passionate about. I think, I think, you know, writing actual requirements that you're actually going to need to have an a job, right?

Like it's got to be that thoughtful. Like do you really need 10 years of experience for this job? So, and I take it to an even bigger level. So first requirements are great, right? And it's about the requirements that are necessary. Because again, women are only going to apply to jobs when they meet 100% of the requirements. First is for men, I think it's around 50 to 60%. And so you might be turning people off by having requirements they don't meet. But this is the one where if I could get every company to switch to impact based job descriptions, and I'll talk about what I mean by that, I think we'd be game changing, right?

And I really truly believe we should be using impact based job descriptions. And so what are impact based job descriptions? Instead of listing out your requirements and the experience that you're looking for, you're actually listing out the 30, 60 and 90 day goals for that individual. who can much more picture yourself in that role if you see that in there. And then here's the kicker, right? Having that 30, 60 and 90 day goals is actually beneficial through the rest of the hiring process as well. Because you can use that to find your competencies that you need for structured interviewing and we can talk about that and why that's important too.

And then you can also use it during onboarding because you can actually leverage those goals and hey, have the hiring manager literally hand those to the employee on their first day and say, those goals you saw on the job description, we weren't lying to you. Those are literally your goals. Here, literally, yeah. Now, the hiring manager has those goals in the back of their head from day one, which also helps because women and people of color get less concrete technical feedback on their deliverables. and get more feedback on how they behave. And so at review time, when that manager is sitting down to review their new hire, hopefully some of that bias can be reduced by the fact that, hey, I've had these goals from day one, hey, the person told me, like, hey, the reason I have these goals is to help reduce this bias.

And so you slow down your thinking and give effective feedback to everybody. Trae just goes, she is preaching. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right, that was great. I have so many thoughts. Talk about, let's talk about interview feedback. Because I know that is playing our industry, the tech industry right now. I know I hear a lot of it's HR and I'm like, well, if you don't say stupid things, you can literally keep it technical and literally give like three or four bullet points. What are your thoughts on feedback? how should companies approach feedback if you could set the tone for the entire industry? How would you approach feedback?

Okay, so first, it's not HR. So this is the thing, every hiring manager who's listening in, this is a partnership. You are just as responsible for this as HR is, right? And so please do not just put all of this on your HR counterpart or vice versa, right? Like it is a partnership. So interview feedback, actually I'm going to tie it back to what I mentioned earlier around structured interviewing. And so I think so many times we get these feedback forms in the tech industry that go something like this. What is your one to four rating of this person? What is it that you liked about this conversation or what did you not like about this person?

Right? That is so full of bias in so many ways. You're not evaluating somebody on competencies. not actually figuring out is this really the person you want to hire and one of our biggest biases we have as humans is like ability bias. We want to be with people we like who happen to be like us. However, that's not always the best person to be hiring. That's a great way to find friends but that's not how to figure out how to figure out how to hire a friend. You know, you're not hiring your best friend to come work with you. You know, that usually doesn't work out.

Well, and so what do I mean by that? So going back to that impact based job description, you can use that to figure out what are the competencies? What exactly is it that you are trying to evaluate some neon, both the technical competencies as well as the soft scale competencies, right? Or maybe it's tied to your values and you wanna evaluate those, right? like all of these are important. And so figure out what those are. What are the questions you're asking for each competency? What does good look like for each question? What does bad look like? And what that range looks like could be different for different levels too.

So that's something to also think about. And then when you get to that, and so you create a little scorecard based off of each of the competencies and have people give feedback every few days. It's more concrete. Yes, on each competency, instead of just a vague, and I mean, you could still have like a one-to-four rating if you want to, but you really wanna look at like, hey, for each competency, like who truly did best for overall and the ones that are most important to us. Yeah. Well, so I also, I want you to plug Josie real quick. Sidebar, Annie comes up here with Josie.

I need you to be giving this talk to every company out there. So talk about, let's do a quick break, talk about your recent kind of, your recent gig. Oh yeah, so you know, I love doing public speaking actually. So if there are any companies out there who want me doing this talk, definitely let me know. And, you know, as I mentioned in the introduction, I recently left tile and it started my business as an executive coach for engineering leaders. and I truly believe that we need to be building inclusive, high-performing workspaces. And Taka, I see so many folks focus on the high-performing side on things like the Dora metrics and things like that, which is great, don't get me wrong, but they're fully focused on that.

And they don't think about the empathy side, the inclusion side. And to me, a high-performing team needs both. And that's why our jobs as engineering leaders are so hard in some ways, right? Because we need to nail the tech side and the soft side and bring it all together. And so that's what I'm coaching on. So if any of the engineering leaders want some executive coaching on how to up level your teams, feel free to reach out. There you go, I love it. All right, back to schedule programming. So all right, so we went over job descriptions, we went over feedback. Is there anything else that we really need to cover before we move on to job seekers before we wrap it up.

So I would say the last thing I'm gonna comment on is remember, as I keep mentioning, you need to be building that inclusive culture. So inclusive hiring just does not stop the second that person gets in the door, right? And that's why we have the revolving door we have today in the tech industry. And I call it death by a thousand paper cuts, right? Because a lot of times it's not one big thing that is happening to somebody. It is the combination of all of those little injustices that add up and frustrate folks. Prime example, when I worked at Apple, my project manager counterpart was a male and we were attached to the hit.

The two of us would go into meetings together all the time. Everyone always assumed he was the engineering manager and I was the project manager. To the point, I actually got an apology email at one point from somebody about this, which is when I actually ended up realizing just how often it had happened. And that's just one story, right? And so, you know, that's why this is so important. And then here's the other thing, right? This is important for your customers as well, right? I can talk about your company culture and it being good for everybody, but let's talk about the fact that we're not building inclusive products in this tech industry right now, right?

Oh, another conversation. And I can dive into that for a while, but it's not even just high tech, right? I talk about the fact, hey, voice assistants are less accurate for female voices and those with accents, but I wanna give an example of a story of a soap dispenser. I was at Tampa, fly and visiting my dad for the first time since COVID in April. I was at the airport bathroom washing my hands, put my hand under the soap dispenser. I got soap. What I noticed though, was a black woman down the way. She is trying to put her hand into the soap dispenser. No soap would come out.

And she turned to the woman next to her and said, this just doesn't work. Would you mind putting your hand under there? The other woman did. And soap came out. And I realized something. That woman has now had this happen so many times to her. She has realized that soap dispenser does not recognize her skin color. And so it's more easier for her to ask a white woman to put her hand under there to get the soap. This is a soap dispenser in an international airport in 2022. So I'm not just talking about high tech. I'm talking about day-to-day products that everybody uses and we need to be thinking about the inclusion piece.

And that is why this is so important. This isn't just a nice to have about, let's create more diverse workforces for the equity part of it. That's great. I wanna be equitable too. Don't get me wrong, but it's also like, you will create better products if you focus on that. Yeah, well, you're such a gem. I mean, I think being aware of that, I think is so incredibly important. I think, you know, I mean, listen, I say this all the time, like I'm a white male, right? Like I understand what I've, what I like, I understand basically that things are given to me and I'm allowed to do more things.

And so I'm trying to bring people on to voice these, these issues that no one talks about, right? Like I would have never, because of my background, I would have never noticed that. Right? And so I think it's, I think it's so incredibly important to have people, this is why you need diversity inclusion in the workplace because there are times where my team holds me accountable for sometimes, I say something and it's like, hey, like that wasn't quite right. like let's reframe it. But I think for leaders and organizations, I think there's gotta be that openness, that empathy, that vulnerability, because there's no way you're gonna be able to grow unless you as a leader is willing to take those criticisms.

And that's- And we're all gonna mess up. Like, that's the thing, we're all gonna mess up. And you know, I've been talking about this for four years. And every once in a while, I'll say something. I'm like, oh shoot, I shouldn't have said that. Or I go back and watch something that I said before. And I'm like, oh, I did not really see that. Well, the back then, right? And you just, you have to realize allyship is a learning journey and you have to be vulnerable and willing to make mistakes and admit them and learn from that and then move on. Yep, so good. All right, so the last few minutes, job seekers.

Biggest, biggest advice for job seekers right now. All right, so I love giving this advice because I don't see a lot of people giving this. So a lot of times people ask me, hey, Dizzy, when can I ask and find out if somebody has an inclusive culture? Or, you know, I have this question, I wanna ask the hiring manager, but I don't feel comfortable asking it. There's a really key time to asking questions, which is between getting the offer and accepting the offer. At that point in time, you basically have free rein to ask whatever you want and ask to meet with whoever you want to on that team.

And so take advantage of that. You wanna know if they have an inclusive culture? Ask to meet with like an engineering IC on some other team and ask them if they think it's inclusive, right? Ask your new manager, hey, how do you think about building an inclusive and diverse team? How do you retain your talent? It is very telling what the responses to those questions are. If you have a question. I have a question. What's a good response from a manager perspective because it's something I'm trying to get better at. And I'm involved with Render ATL and a lot of other organizations to help promote diversity, obviously having these conversations as well.

But what's a good answer or should be a good answer? Yeah, I think it comes to a couple of the things that I referred to earlier, right? And so I would hope that, you know, I don't expect engineering leaders to be DEI experts, right? However, I do expect engineering leaders to have an intelligent answer about this. And, you know, the other day I was on, I popped into a panel that was on like the secrets of high-performing teams. And I asked, you know, during the Q&A, hey, how do you think about DEI and and high performing teams. And I got like, dear in a headlight, it's looks from the panelists, like how do you ask that question?

And like, that's the opposite of what we want, right? Like, you don't have to be perfect. Like, that's the thing. But you have to have an answer that's intelligent about this. And so what is good? Hey, this is something I think about. This is how I think about it, right? I know I am not perfect and we have ways to go. and here are the areas that I am working on, right? I think it's acknowledging the fact that, hey, I know no place is perfect when it comes to inclusion. But if you're working on it, and you can show me how you're working on it and what are the areas, and you can intelligently just answer the question, right?

Like I said, I think there's unfortunately a large number of engineering leaders that would give that to you in the headlight. Look, if they got asked this question. Okay, I love it. I love it. Anything else for job seekers? I think the other thing is right now in the market, I think so many people are being laid off and things like that. And people feel potentially a little desperate. But I say the more you can still focus on finding the jobs that really truly align with what you want to be doing. And really taking the time to focus your resume and LinkedIn on those roles, the more successful you'll be.

The spray and pray method does not. Thank you. And so one last tip for those job seekers is that it's a psychology trick. So go find top five, 10 job descriptions that you love on LinkedIn and copy down the requirements and experiences that are in there in a Google sheet. And then on the right hand column, put your experiences that match to each of those in the language that is in the job description. And there's a reason for that. And this is the psychology trick. unconsciously, the bias, resonate with the same words that we use. And so if you were talking to the hiring manager and you're describing your experience using the same type of language that they already are using because they're using it in their job description, you're more likely to resonate with them.

There you go. That was awesome. Well, Josie, thank you. I appreciate it. Y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us today. Our guidance counselor 2.0. We appreciate it. I appreciate it. Please go connect with Josie. She's incredible. Josie, stay on real quick as we wrap up. Because I want to say bye to you, off air. You all have a great Friday. Have a great weekend. And I'll see y'all next week. Peace. Bye. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode. And I am very grateful. Because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes. And I myself rarely finished an entire episode.

So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, tailor at vaco.com or at Tdaston on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.