Behind the Scenes on our Anti-Racism Journey (Part II)

Thanks for tuning back in. In this post, we’ll be diving into inclusion — what we’re doing well, the challenges we’ve encountered, and what we’re learning.

Unlike some other aspects of our journey to become more antiracist, which are brand new and profoundly challenging, inclusion is an area we feel slightly more comfortable with, though we still have plenty of room for growth and numerous experiences we can point to where we could have and must do better.

Definitions and goals

We’re a people-first organization, which you’ll see reflected in our values, programs, and culture. This is inclusion: the sense of community we cultivate that invites people in, appreciates each person for who they are, and values the unique experiences and perspectives they bring to the table. In upcoming posts, we will dig into the specifics of how we’ve built out our policies like 4-day workweeks, dependent care reimbursement, and mental health resources to foster inclusion. This week, we want to focus on the outcomes we’ve seen around inclusion and the places we are still growing.

As an accelerator, we bring distinct people and groups — total strangers — together for an intense week of programming (when there’s not a global pandemic raging, of course), so it’s an essential skill to be able to cultivate a shared sense of community and belonging over a short period of time.

We try to bring the same thinking around community and inclusion to our internal operations and culture as well, and we generally do a pretty good job. But we’ve found that where we leave nothing to chance in our programs, we have room to be more proactive in deliberately creating an inclusive environment internally. Rather than build on the strength we have in creating community, we’ve been guilty of using it as a crutch: avoiding or missing opportunities to learn, grow, and conscientiously adapt as our organization matures and the staff composition grows and changes.

We mentioned in our first post that we see our DEI work as essential for our growth as individuals and foundational to our organization’s ability to achieve its mission. To get there, we are moving from being an organization that assumes inclusivity to one that brings intentional thought and action to building an inclusive culture.

Where we currently stand

One of our longstanding values is bringing our whole selves into everything we do. The intended outcome is that when we bring our whole selves, we find belonging and inclusion through the acceptance of the team in who we truly are.

Creating an atmosphere where this can happen doesn’t just happen, though. It takes intentionality and modeling from leadership and consistent vulnerability from the entire team. This looks like leaders facilitating meetings in which they share from their personal life, their failures, and their struggles. We try to remember the specific details of each other’s lives and ask questions about them. We create long-term jokes and pranks around the specific quirks and idiosyncrasies of those on the team.

Our Spectra Diversity Inclusion Assessment results reported that 85 percent of the team felt that the leadership of the organization sets a positive example for our organization in terms of inclusion and have created a culture of diversity and inclusion at our organization (for these are more results from the Spectra assessment related to inclusion, check out the bottom of this post for full transparency).

What’s going well

Uncharted is lucky to have this foundation of inclusion built into our organizational culture. Many of our most cherished traditions have withstood the ebbs and flows of our team’s growth and changes in staff make-up.

We start every work week with a 30-minute team coffee and catch-up meeting that’s held as sacred time on everyone’s calendars, and we have monthly (or intermittently during COVID) team-building activities called MEOWs (which stands for “Monthly Employee Outing, Wow!” — yes, really), with rotating planning/execution by different members of the team and a budget to enable everyone’s participation. These traditions have adapted as our team has grown and changed — sometimes gradually and organically, and sometimes following an oops moment.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve welcomed people onto the team who are parents and watched as other members of the team who joined as carefree, childless twenty-somethings decided to start their own families. For Adrienne (one of the co-authors of this post), there was a tension at the beginning of her stint at Uncharted between her familial responsibilities and a sense of obligation to integrate into the Uncharted team by participating in after work MEOWs.

These days, five members (nearly 40%) of our team are parents, and MEOWs have changed. Some MEOWs happen during the workday so people don’t have to decide between team-building and family, and we’ve held MEOWs that are family-friendly, like an afternoon at a trampoline park so people can share their full selves and include the other important people in their lives.

During our team coffee meetings we ask two questions that invite people to share a little bit of themselves: an icebreaker question, and your reason to dance from the weekend (our way of asking people about something good or fun or notable from their life outside of work). This dedicated time on our calendars is not just a way for us to ease into the workweek, but helps build inclusion by giving us consistent time to get to know each other in ways that might not organically arise during our day-to-day work.

That said, even these moments can be opportunities for learning. One time, our icebreaker question was, ‘what was your favorite Halloween costume?’ We had two people on our team at the time who aren’t from the United States, and who, as it turned out, didn’t celebrate Halloween. It was a moment that didn’t go as we expected it to, but it created an opportunity for everyone to learn more about the different cultures represented on the team and gave everyone some pause for thought around how even small things like silly icebreaker questions can become moments of inclusivity or exclusivity.

Inclusion during COVID

During COVID, we welcomed our first fully-remote team member (we’re headquartered in Denver and she lives in New York). We gave a lot of thought to how we could welcome her to the team and create opportunities for her to be included even from a distance. We had tools in our pocket that we already use: within 30 days of starting at Uncharted, every team member writes a user guide to themselves — this covers how each person likes to communicate, how they make decisions, how to build trust, their pace, energy, and working style, and information about their personality and quirks. As part of our final interview process, we send out the user guide of the person the applicant will be reporting to in order to level the playing field and give our applicants as much power to get to know and opt into us as we get to know and opt into them.

Nicole, our Director of People and Partnerships (and co-author of this post), put together an activity to accelerate the inclusion and integration of Xaira, our new VP of Growth and Development onto our newly-formed director-level team. Directors’ Storytime, which admittedly sounds a little hokey (help us think of something more marketable?), is a deeply personal and meaningful activity. Once a week for six weeks, each of the directors got a day to share the stories and formative moments that led them to today with the other five people who make up this group. We each got a small budget to buy something that we could share that was personal or meaningful to help bridge the physical distance we missed out on having to do this activity over Zoom.

Not only did we get to know Xaira better and give her the opportunity to get to know us, all the directors got to know each other on a deeper level too, even though many of us have worked with each other for multiple years at this point.

“Joining a new team that you have never met beyond Zoom is intimidating. Having the opportunity to join fellow directors in a small space to share our stories allowed me to quickly connect with them and feel trusted and included. As we take on new programming, having had the opportunity to learn how my colleagues grew up and why they chose to work for social impact has made it easier to for me to understand their perspectives and navigate differences.” — Xaira Ferrara

Mistakes and challenges

By all accounts from the directors, Directors’ Storytime was a huge success, but we unwittingly sowed seeds of division and exclusion among the rest of the team. The seven other members of our team saw these regular meetings on our calendars and didn’t hear a lot of details and were left to draw their own conclusions. It wasn’t catastrophic by any means, but following a number of questions, and tongue-in-cheek comments, we understood the inadvertent harm we caused by making overt efforts to include one team member potentially at the expense of others.

“Directors’ Storytime was interesting as a non-director …When prompted, the Directors were coy, probably due to the fact that there was budget involved and that it was fun in nature. We didn’t get a straight answer and that didn’t help. [Although] feelings of division or exclusion were half-hearted among myself and other non-directors, it was the first instance in my three years at Uncharted where there was a hierarchical approach to bonding with a teammate. If the goal was to build trust with a fully-remote teammate…why couldn’t we all witness? If our exclusion was essential to the goal, it should have been explained.” — Joe Santini

Though we’ve doubled in size and become more diverse over the past two years, we’re still a pretty small and a homogenous group by many standards. This isn’t to erase the diversity that exists on our team or flatten us all to cookie-cutter versions of ourselves, but rather acknowledge that when you have a small group of people who by and large fit a particular mold, being inclusive is an easier task. It also means that as the group changes in composition, we’ll either rise to the occasion and rewrite practices that need facelifts, or retreat into what we know at the expense of people who bring different perspectives.

The realization we’ve come to is that for all the strong organizational traditions we have and deliberate efforts to include individual members of our team, we’re still falling short when it comes to building a truly inclusive culture. When we look back at the issues that have arisen and exit interviews of former staff, it’s easy to see that we’ve been fostering a culture that’s inclusive for staff that fall within a standard deviation, and pushes staff that fall outside the mean even more to the margins.

For Uncharted, this has shown up across lines of race, professional experience, family composition, class, and political views. It’s hard to look at those words and know that there are distinct examples we can point to in which we as an organization or we as the group of individuals that make it up have not been inclusive. These examples also carry consequences that range from missed opportunities for deeper connection and learning, to diminished contribution at work, to departure from the organization. If this is how our culture is shows up now, we have to course-correct on inclusionary practices as we continue to grow and diversify.

Analysis

We recognize that some of the things that made us feel inclusive and connected in the early years of our organization (and even now) could be the very things that make us feel exclusive later. Where our culture has been praised, there is truth to the fact that some of that came as a result of being more homogenous and having a lot of common group traits and interests.

We have some practices to foster inclusion now, but as we become a more diverse team, we will need to flex our muscles on inclusion and belonging to an even greater extent. We see many aspects of white supremacy culture baked into our organization, and know that those norms impact our ability to create the kind of inclusive culture we’re striving for. Our foundation will serve us well, but parts of it will need to adapt and other parts will need to be rewritten.

For us, inclusion will look like having hard conversations about our personal values and backgrounds, creating space for differing perspectives, opinions, and disagreement, and opportunities for lifelong learning about experiences and perspectives that go far beyond our own. We will continue to make mistakes. We will continue to engage in more conversations to seek understanding across lines of difference. And we will continue to create more opportunities for forgiveness and growth.

We may find ourselves on less common ground, but a more expansive horizon for impact. The places that we do find common value, purpose, and mission will become even deeper anchors as we commit the organization’s work.

What we’d offer as our biggest points of learning so far are:

1. That the same thoughtful, careful consideration we give to creating moments and opportunities for inclusion at major inflection points (like helping integrate our first fully remote teammate) or in controlled environments (like our program bootcamps) should be brought regularly to moments and practices that are more mundane or ingrained.
2. That a true culture of inclusivity must be created for everyone on the team, not just a simple majority. We must constantly ask ourselves who’s included and who’s excluded, and rewrite our actions and practices for those who don’t yet feel that sense of belonging.

Questions

This is ongoing work for us and we’re still grappling with a lot of questions. As we learned the hard way, inclusion in one subset of the organization can create out-group feelings elsewhere, especially for a team our size. How can we bring a level of consciousness and care to decision-making where we might inadvertently be creating moments of exclusion?

We’ve also noted our team is growing in size and across several measures of diversity. What are opportunities for inclusion we should be considering as our team grows more diverse? And how can we promote belonging across geography and time zones even as our core team remains in Denver?

Finally, we shared that we’ve relied on past inclusive practices to adapt organically to the present moment, and on the forgiveness of teammates to let moments of exclusivity slide. We know it takes consistent commitment to build new muscles so we’re wondering, what are some everyday actions we can take to make sure inclusion is a practice we all consistently employ to help build that muscle memory?

Appendix

Here are the results (our from our full-time team members) around inclusion:

Management

Management sets a positive example for our organization in terms of inclusion.

• Strongly Agree: 23%
• Agree: 62%
• Neutral: 15%

Management has created a culture of diversity and inclusion at our organization

• Strongly agree: 8%
• Agree: 38%
• Neutral: 38%
• Disagree: 15%

Culture

Employees of different backgrounds interact well in our organization.

• Strongly agree: 20%
• Agree: 69%
• Neutral: 8%

When diversity and inclusion issues arise in this organization, they are dealt with in a positive and constructive manner.

• Strongly agree: 15%
• Agree: 46%
• Neutral: 38%

Disrespectful and non-inclusive behavior is not tolerated at this organization.

• Strongly Agree: 62%
• Agree: 23%
• Neutral: 15%

Policies, Practices and Procedures

Effort is made to solicit ideas of all employees in this organization.

• Strongly agree: 69%
• Agree: 31%

The HR policies, practices and procedures in this organization support diversity and inclusion.

• Strongly Agree: 8%
• Agree: 69%
• Neutral: 15%
• Disagree: 8%

The size of our team when we took this assessment was 13 people, so a single answer in one direction or another can change the entire makeup by double digit percentages. And that’s why we want to provide a little color to these numbers.