How Managers Can Practice Daily DEI and Create Equitable Work Cultures
Episode 478 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Alida Miranda-Wolff
How can managers navigate the ever-changing landscape of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging?
Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging or DEIB has been a focus in workforce development for a number of years. While most people grasp the overall intention of these organizational frameworks—fair and equitable treatment for all workers—the specifics are nuanced and easily misunderstood, and they can be difficult to implement, especially in the face of recent pushback from vocal opponents.
Alida Miranda-Wolff started her DEIB practitioner journey in venture capital. In 2019, the influx of clients requesting her help in developing their own programs prompted her to start Ethos Talent, a full-service DEIB and employee advocacy firm that serves companies all around the world. She is the author of two Amazon bestsellers: Cultures of Belonging: Building Inclusive Organizations That Last, and this year’s The First-Time Manager: DEI, and the host of the podcast Care Work with Alida Miranda-Wolff.
In this episode, Alida shares her passion for and intricate knowledge of this field as we look at how support has fluctuated over the years and what leaders—and first-time managers in particular—can do to facilitate the day-to-day integration of practices deeply intertwined with basic human rights.
The difference between equity, equality, and inclusion
A clear understanding of each DEIB component is essential for true integration into the workplace. Alida simplifies the difference between equity and inclusion in this way: equity is a process, and inclusion is an outcome.
Managers striving to incorporate DEIB initiatives into their teams are responsible for establishing both equity and equality. Equality is achieved when everyone has the same access to the information. However, to achieve equity, the manager is also responsible for ensuring that the people with access have all the available resources to use or understand that information. For example, making the company financials available to all employees is equality. But it’s only equitable if you then make sure all the employees have the training and tools necessary to parse dense, perplexing graphs and charts intended for accountants.
Inclusivity, then, is achieved when those practices result in all employees feeling like they are meaningfully included in the group. This is more subjective than equity, since each employee will have different comfort levels and backgrounds affecting their participation.
Four years of a changing DEIB landscape
Alida launched Ethos Talent before 2020, prior to the murder of George Floyd and the surge of Black Lives Matter movements that spurred an unprecedented amount of DEIB action in their wake. Her team was well-positioned to play a part in the rise of the discipline—across the country, employees demanded that their companies establish DEIB programs, and 55% of new jobs and roles fell under this umbrella.
In 2021, the pandemic-related layoffs of the previous year pivoted to a job boom and employee shortage. Suddenly workers had the upper hand, and their continuing demands saw a lot of best practices for DEIB develop, as even companies with deeply ingrained anti-DEIB structures struggled to step up.
Unfortunately, by 2022, 33% of those early DEIB jobs had been eliminated. Since then, DEIB has continued to fall off in terms of corporate interest—most of the 7.5 billion dollars earmarked for initiatives back in 2020 has been clawed back, and many politicians in conservative states are passing legislation to make it harder for organizations to develop diversity-oriented programs. While the percentage of American workers who believe in the importance of DEIB (56%) hasn’t changed since 2020, perspectives among those who hold the decision-making power lean heavily toward the employer’s, not the worker’s, rights.
DEIB and performance reviews
In her most recent book, Alida discusses a very practical application of her field: how to approach performance reviews from a DEIB lens. I asked her how a manager might navigate a situation where an underperformer happens to also be minoritized in some way. It’s common for the manager to feel hesitation to give critical feedback for fear it will be misconstrued, but Alida stresses that this hesitation is anti-DEIB in practice.
What Alida calls “sloppy sentimentalism”—and Radical Candor author Kim Scott calls “ruinous empathy”—is a big reason people with these identities are more likely to “middle out” in their jobs. Managers, fearful of their actions being boiled down to bias, are less willing to give the employee the feedback that would enable them to advance their skills. Ironically, this results in minority workers’ growth still being limited because of their identity, in just a more subtle, passive-aggressive way.
One thing Alida stresses managers should keep in mind is that performance reviews are about more than just how they are received by that one employee. The review tells every direct report how that manager is likely to manage them. If you’re collaborative and set clear expectations for what success and failure look like for every employee, regardless of identity, you are fostering equity and belonging across the board.
Listen in for even more
In our conversation, Alida goes even deeper into the difficulties faced by practitioners in today’s fraught DEIB landscape. She shares her educated opinion on decentralized versus segmented DEIB and offers an insightful take on my question: is DEIB anything more than just good management?
Where are you seeing the benefits of DEIB in your workplace? If you’re a manager, how are you integrating these concepts? Share your thoughts about today’s episode on our Courage Community on Facebook or join us in our group on LinkedIn.
Related links from today’s episode:
The First-Time Manager: DEI by Alida Miranda-Wolff
“Care Work with Alida Miranda-Wolff” podcast
Connect with Alida on LinkedIn
Learn more about Alida and her work
Bias in Feedback Decision Tree
Episode 388, How To Leverage Your Power and Push For More Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
Episode 423, Being White and Latina
Intercept diversity and social justice article, “the Evolution of Union Busting”
Philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s work “Black Skin, White Masks”
Frantz Fanon’s other work “the Wretched of the Earth”
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 478. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up, and I am so excited for today's conversation with Alida Miranda-Wolff.
[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
We are talking all about, and frankly, geeking out about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging for first time managers.
Alida is a diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging practitioner committed to teaching, love and cultivating belonging. She's an Amazon bestselling author of two books with HarperCollins Leadership Cultures Of Belonging: Building Inclusive Organizations That Last and The First Time Manager: Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion, which just came out this past May. She's the Founder and CEO of Ethos, a full service DEIB and employee advocacy firm which serves hundreds of clients across the world. She also hosts Care Work with Alida Miranda-Wolff, a podcast about what it means to offer care for a living.
Alida lives in Chicago with her partner, toddler, rabbits and cats, who make some cameo audio appearances in the background in today's episode. Pretty passionate about this subject, as is Alida. And when she's not working, reading, writing, or parenting, Alida is wild gardening, interior designing, and falling down research rabbit holes.
Her wealth of knowledge, her absolute treasure trove of insights is on full display in this interview, which spans everything from politics, to economics, to workers rights in the workplace, to identities and the complexities of our many different ways that we show up in the world. I am so excited for you to hear from her, and I have to just put this caveat at the top.
I recognize this episode is coming out shortly after election day 2024. Let me be clear. I am currently on maternity leave, and this episode was recorded back in June. So whatever the h*** has transpired since then, we know nothing about it in today's conversation. With that, let me introduce you to Alida Miranda-Wolff. Alida, welcome to the Bossed Up podcast.
ALIDA: Thank you for having me.
EMILIE: So, first, give us a little background. How did you get into this work and how did you come to publish this exciting new book?
ALIDA: Well, I have been a diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging practitioner for over a decade, and in that time, I have really focused on belonging in particular. This comes from a place of just never having belonged anywhere. I am somebody who's very in between in my identities, in a variety of ways. So I am Cuban American, and in the US, when people look at me and they see my skin color and my hair, they do not accept me as hispanic, even though that's my cultural identity. It's tied to my spiritual identity, and it's very tied to the way I navigate the world. Being part of a diaspora means that this sense of belonging is already tenuous for me.
But I also pass in a lot of my identity. So I'm a cisgender woman, so I'm in between in that way. I also have a number of disabilities, only one of which is visible, and I'm neurodivergent, I have post-traumatic stress disorder. And so with all of those identities, I sort of traffic between spaces, but I never really have been fully welcomed into one. And I've been very curious my whole life about what it takes to do that. And especially as I was coming into non-profit social impact work, I wanted to be an immigration attorney. That's what I was studying to do. I made a hard pivot into venture capital. And when I was there, as I was looking for purpose, I was also realizing that having these identities was putting me in a very difficult place in the space that I was in.
And so I learned to become a practitioner, really for two reasons. The first was, I took my job very seriously, and my job was portfolio company growth, and I wanted to help our founders grow their businesses successfully. But the other part of it was, that I wanted to make my experience better. I was the only woman on the team, I was the only Hispanic person working in venture capital in the city of Chicago, one of 27 in the country. And when I took on my directorship, I was the youngest director nationally.
And all of those things were said to make me a kind of a unicorn. But they actually made my job much harder and made me notice how we were not investing in people who had those identities too. So that's how I came to the work. I started doing it in VC, and as I did it in VC, our startups asked me, will you do it for us? And that took up more and more of my time. And then finally I decided, I just want to do this. This is what I want to focus on and I want to focus specifically on investing in worker solidarity as a means of achieving belonging.
EMILIE: I love that. Amazing. And so you founded Ethos Talent. Yes, to do DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging in terms of your consulting and training programs, is that right?
ALIDA: Yes. I founded the company six years ago. And in that time, we've been through so many changes and transitions, which of course you might expect because we founded before 2020, when there was this big emergence in diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging as a discipline. We were in it before that time, and then we grew through that time. And now we're navigating the enormous backlash that's really being fueled by our current U.S. election, but also elections all over the world.
EMILIE: Yeah, let's talk about that, because I feel like I've been venting very publicly about DEI under attack for over a year. You and I had a call about a year ago. I was in the trenches of, you know, downsizing at Bossed Up for the first time, and we felt it big time. I know everyone in DEI that I talked to has felt that backlash.
What do you see happening when it comes to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as it relates to corporate budgets or as it relates to pressure feeling being felt by businesses to actually take these issues seriously?
ALIDA: It's very interesting because we can see the ways in which, small group of elites can control whole systems on a massive scale. The reality of the situation is this. In 2020, after George Floyd was murdered and employees really asked their organizations to step up, 55% was the percentage of new jobs and roles in diversity, equity, and inclusion, which was a huge number. By the end of 2022, 33% of those jobs had been eliminated.
So the backlash was pretty quick. It's been worse since 2022. And we can see that right after the protests for Black Lives Matter across the world happened, corporations collectively committed about $7.5 billion to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives. Almost all of those commitments have been clawed back. So, it's billions of dollars that were committed that will not be spent. And yet, this is something that I think is really interesting. Public sentiment about DEIB has not changed.
So in 2020, 56% of American workers said that they thought this was essential in organizations. At the end of 2023, 56% of American workers who said this was essential in organizations. It does cleave along political lines. So 78% of Democrat leaning workers support DEI, 30% of Republican leaning workers support it. So it's not like it's all Democrats and no Republicans, but there is a political divide here, and yet the numbers are still the same. What is different is that worker power is way down.
Since layouts started in 2022 and have never stopped, what we have are organizational leaders saying, we don't have the money for it, we don't have the budget for it, and if you quit, fine, because we would probably lay you off anyway. So, the sentiment around it has not changed. But who holds power around it has changed, because, if you remember, in 2020, yes, we had a reduction in workers and we had layoffs, but it was temporary. And then in 2021, we had a major jobs boom, and we had more jobs than we had people to do them.
Now, something that always gets my goat related to that is people are always like, yeah, why were people not willing to work? That's why we had this shortage. No, a million people died. We literally lost a huge percentage of our workforce. It was not because people were holding onto their stimulus checks and refusing to work. We literally did not have people who would be working because they were dead, or they had long COVID, or they were taking care of people with long COVID.
So we had this shortage, which meant that organizations really had to listen to their workers. And that was a problem for organizations that weren't used to it, and they had to navigate a lot of change related to it. And we saw all of these best practices come out. And then there has been a fear for two straight years that we're in a recession, heading to a recession. The inflation rate, the interest rates, all of these conversations, economically, have fueled these kind of, clawbacks or rollbacks of initiatives.
And then we do have the political element and angle, and we've seen that in pronounced ways, especially in higher education, not only with the rollback of affirmative action, but also the forced resignations of university presidents because of activist, trustees, or board members. And that is percolating across the sector.
So the last thing I'll say on this, because, as you've said before, I'm very passionate about this topic, the Supreme Court decision around admissions did not say anything about corporate interests. But what happened as a result of it was that state attorneys general from conservative states, red leaning states, started subpoenaing and suing corporations for leading any kind of diversity oriented programs, mentorship, sponsorship, any kind of workforce development in these areas. And so that made these organizations extremely skittish.
And I know this first hand because I have 170 clients. And in this period of time, I have had a call at least once a week between a diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging leader, or a people leader, and a compliance and legal officer just trying to mediate conflict between them because they feel that their interests are fundamentally opposed now.
EMILIE: Yeah, I mean, we lost clients in higher ed for the same reason with the Supreme Court decision a few years ago now. And I should also acknowledge, first of all, everything you just walked us through, very concisely, I might add, is like highly complex socioeconomic analysis. That is debatable. It's. I think a lot of people see our economy right now in different lenses.
I just want to acknowledge that one person who is doing some amazing coverage on this is Ezra Klein, on his podcast, the Ezra Klein Show. I don't know, if you listen to that podcast, but he's talked a lot about America's relationship with our perception of the economy. And do workers have less power now or more power now? There's still worker shortages, but it's like you're right in that you're seeing a lot of corporations no longer feel the pressure to actually listen to and act on these DEI demands coming from the majority of workers. So there's certainly some weird power shifts at play.
I should also acknowledge that you and I are sitting here in the blissful naivete of June 2024, recording this conversation. Future you and I are gonna know what the h*** happens in this election by the time this episode comes out. And honestly, right now, I just wanna kind of plug my eyes and ears, and bury my head in the sand, out of paralysis. But, you know, I think that this can change really quickly, right, in terms of perceptions and power dynamics.
So one of the biggest trends I wanted to ask you about that I'm seeing reported on in the Harvard Business Review and Gallup is, what needs to change about DEI is its segmentation to one department with one person working on this issue, or maybe three, uh, at the most, down to one after layoffs. Right? As opposed to a more decentralized, integrated approach to DEI, which feels very true to how you're approaching this topic in your new book, The First Time Manager: Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion. So help me understand what you make of that trend. And are you seeing that decentralization as a good thing or a bad thing?
ALIDA: I think it's a good thing, fundamentally that we're seeing a decentralization in DEI. And I say that with a caveat, because decentralization does not mean defanging it’s ability to enact change. It means that we need to share in the responsibility collectively in organizations. I wrote my second book for two reasons.
The first was, I saw the writing on the wall, because we moved into DEIB as a strategy and organizations way too quickly. And my general view of this space is if a system adopts a change too quickly, it will reject that change. I was looking at this and saying, if we're going to take all of these things away, how do we make sure that the employees themselves are not fundamentally impacted in really negative ways?
And a big part of my practice, my consulting practice, is talking to employees. We interview hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds, of employees to understand their experiences. And ultimately, their day to day experience is impacted most by whether they're earning a living wage and who their manager is. And so my question to myself is, what do I think will be a bulwark or a protection for employees when these larger initiatives get defunded or taken away or stopped?
And the answer was managers, and first time managers in particular, in my experience, are much more willing to adopt these practices. They're more willing to say, I don't know things, I need to adopt tools, I need to practice. It is not first time managers that we have problems with at Ethos when we're trying to do this work. It is usually folks who are tenured, who have gone through a lot of things, have not had a lot of counseling or coaching, and who now feel like they're a point in their career where they really don't need to learn anymore. And those are the folks who often do the most damage, but also are the least likely to listen. So what's the path of least resistance? Talking to folks coming into these positions for the first time who want to do right by their employees.
So that was one. The other reason I wrote the book is because ultimately, I don't believe in the DEI industrial complex as it came to be. It's evil in a lot of ways.
EMILIE: Which I should say. I had Lily Zheng on this very podcast to talk about that topic just a few years ago, so I'll link to that in the show notes. But at a high level, what's the sort of synopsis of the whole complex there?
ALIDA: The whole idea behind the complex is that we had an explosion in a sector that is broadly unregulated, without clear standards, and that is existing to fuel its own growth. So you have practitioners at all levels of skills, at all levels of values, at all levels of goals, who are serving the people who pay them. And the people who pay them are not the folks, usually, that DEIB was designed to support. So that complex is, a lot of consultants and trainers and strategists in this space who are trying to fund their payroll. Truly, I understand that as a business owner, and will do that by serving the needs of the elites who hired them.
EMILIE: Right, checking a box, basically, with their services.
ALIDA: And that can look like checking a box and ineffective solutions, but it can also look a little bit more nefarious than that in kind of a few ways. One core way is backing up or serving as cover for organizations that do bad things to their employees. Another is by calling themselves DEIB when that's not what they do. So I wrote a story for Truthout, specifically on the fact that a lot of what we would call union busting organizations, labor consultants, now call themselves DEIB firms and say, we're not doing unions because unions are racist and sexist. And wouldn't you rather a culture that is inclusive of everyone, but they also ingrain themselves and they disrupt folks who are trying to build union efforts out. And they do this specifically under the guise of saying, we want to put together DEIB initiatives in your organization. Talk to us about what's happening here. And they try to figure out ways that they can undermine union organizing efforts by giving some perks and benefits to these groups, and by essentially turning them against each other.
The intercept has done really in depth reporting about this. It's something that I've experienced firsthand as a practitioner. I've seen other firms do it. And that's what I mean, in terms of, I believe that this is a lens. DEIB is a lens. It should not be a department. It should be a discipline that gets applied in every department and for one express purpose, which is to advocate for workers who are coming from historically resilient or otherwise known as minoritized groups.
EMILIE: Yeah. Amazing. Wow. That's shocking. First of all, I need to see that reporting. And we have been trying to get more folks on this podcast to talk about unions in the modern age. So, I'll take any recs you have on that front for future guests. I wanted to ask specifically about the advice in your book around, like, what it means to be an equitable and inclusive manager. Like, maybe define some of those terms for how you're using equitable versus inclusive. And what is the lever, what are some of the levers available for use by managers to be more equitable and inclusive in their day to day practice?
ALIDA: Absolutely. So, first of all, the way that I see inclusion and equity, fundamentally different. Equity is a process. Inclusion is an outcome. Equity is both providing baseline access. So, making sure everyone gets the same tools or resources, that's the equality piece of equity. And then making sure that it is meeting individual need. Understanding that just providing a resource doesn't make people able to use it.
So, an example I like to give to distinguish equity and inclusion, because inclusion is an outcome, and it's how your employees feel. How do they feel when they're in your group? Equity is, how do they even get to the place where they can participate in your group. Right? So there's that distinction.
So I have a mentee. She calls herself a proud “res” kid. She grew up on a native reservation. Her family has been in agriculture forever. She's the first person in her family to go to college, and the first person to hold a white collar job. She works at an organization that says that they are equitable and that one of their equity practices is that they share their financials every quarter with everyone in the organization, whether you're an intern or you're one of their VP’s. I would call that an equality practice, not an equity practice.
And one of the very tangible reasons is how she feels the inclusion part of it when she sees those reports, which is that she does not belong here because she doesn't know how to read them. She doesn't have someone in her life who taught her how to read a profit and loss statement, who she could ask about a profit and loss statement. She doesn't have a traditional business or economics major. She hasn't worked in other corporations before where this is part of the lexicon. There's been no training on this. And the people around her all act as if they understand what they're seeing.
So what I would say an equity practice would be is, before you present the financials, you make sure everyone is trained on how to read and interpret them, and they also understand how their role relates to them. So it's an additional step to make sure that not only everyone gets the resource you're providing, but they're actually able to take advantage of it and use it.
Inclusion is all about. We've got people in a room who are coming from diverse backgrounds, ideas, and identities. Now that they're here, do they feel like they are wanted? Do we invite them in? Do they have that opportunity? It is not whether they accept the invitation. The onus of inclusion is always on the manager and never on the employee. The manager cannot force an employee to feel included or accept the invitation, but they can create the conditions for them to say, yes, I will accept your invitation. I think that's one of the hardest parts of management and one of the most misunderstood parts. I actually think as a manager, it's easier to be equitable than it is to be inclusive because of the subjectivity involved.
EMILIE: Yeah. And I think there's a lot of, like, well intentioned managers out there who get pretty dismayed and maybe even defensive early on in their journey for DEI maturation when they've done all the things that they think they need to do and the results of inclusion are not there.
And, you know, I wonder what you would say to someone who feels like they're trying to be as equitable as possible in their practice of management and they're not seeing that inclusive buy in or that response that they're hoping for. What advice do you have for them in that moment?
ALIDA: I will first of all remind them that they cannot change another person, and they are not responsible for an employee's happiness. You are responsible for whether you change yourself and how you feel. But the question is never about the individual, because now we're dealing with issues of interpersonal, and there's coaching we can do around that. It is, what kind of conditions have you created on the team, and what structures in place do you have for that team to be a self-sustaining ecosystem?
So one thing that I'll remind folks is, it's okay if you have an employee who says, I don't want to participate, or I don't want to show up this way, or this isn't what I want to do with the specific practice or behavior. What isn't okay is if there are expectations for how the team works together, that that person is unwilling to meet or match in terms of reciprocity, or give and take. So it's also about diagnosing what is happening and understanding what is in your responsibility to fix and what is a part of letting go. And I remind folks that your working relationships are not different, in many ways, from your relationships outside of work.
So I had a question come up for me at a talk that I was giving two weeks ago, and it was a manager, and he was a manager of color, and he was managing another person of color who identified as non-binary queer, and he is not. And he was just really trying with this employee, but he raised his hand to say, what do you do if you don't like the person? He doesn't have anything to do with their identities. I feel like I can't really voice how I experience them, though, because it's going to be construed as that. But I just don't like this person. What do I do about it? I feel like all I'm doing is these bids and these invitations for someone I actually don't want to spend time with.
To which I said, that is always going to happen. I'm sure that there are people in your life. First of all, I asked, is this person good at their job? And he said yes. And I was like, okay, so they're good at their job, they're performing, they're contributing to the team. So this is actually oftentimes the hardest thing. I have to work with someone I don't like who's really good at what they do. So I have no way out. What I asked him is, what do you do with, let's say your sister's partner, who you can't stand but have to go to family events with all the time. You put up boundaries, you set expectations, you moderate your communication, and you leverage other folks in the family to spend time with that person instead of you. You would do the same things on your team. But what you wouldn't do is try to make the personality differences that you have. The reason that you are saying they have poor performance or they don't have advancement opportunities.
So that's something that I highlight. And I would say this is another time when you lean into the equity practice. I have a lot of folks who are struggling with Gen Z employees, who are much more open about mental health challenges, who are much more open when it comes to what their work life balance should be. And they are feeling flummoxed, like, do I have to be a therapist? Do I have to be a therapist now? Because it feels like that.
And what I've said is the equity practice is to always remind them, these are the days that you have off. Here are the resources we provide for mental health services. Here is what leave at our organization looks like. Here are the ways that we would support you if you went on leave. And managers often don't know these things. I really do think every manager should be trained in basic HR in addition to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. But there's this feeling of, well, to include them, I have to listen to them talk about what it's like for them to switch anxiety medications. And the answer is no, you don't. That isn't inclusion.
EMILIE: Yeah. And they're not a therapist. Like what is within the scope of my role and my influence here. Yeah, absolutely. I know our time is limited, but I've got one other arena that I find really interesting that you cover in your book, which is about performance management with an equity lens.
What if the answer to that question is this person good at their job is no, they're currently struggling, but I'm afraid to coach this person because I think it's going to become an identity issue and I'm, let's say, a cisgender white male boss. And I've got someone on my team who's underperforming and who I know is dealing with a lot and is a minoritized person in our company. There's some trepidation there, isn't there? So how do we be equitable and inclusive while managing performance as leaders?
ALIDA: A few things. First of all, this is very common, and this is actually one of the reasons that we see people from minoritized identities, middle out. No one is willing to give them performance feedback that would allow for them to advance in an organization and develop skills because they're so afraid that if they say so, they're going to be perceived as racist or ableist or anti-gay, any number of things. There are various terms around it. I like to use sloppy sentimentalism because that's what I encounter the most.
EMILIE: Sloppy sentimentalism. Is that what you said?
ALIDA: That's great. Yes, the term is sloppy sentimentalism. And it is when we do not give performance feedback or performance coaching to people because we essentially feel guilty about the privileges we have had in our identities that they have not. So it's very common. We work with a lot of nonprofits. There are other ways that this shows up. But I would say that this is the sort of ruinous empathy kind of performance challenge that we see the most.
And so the first thing I'll say is these people aren't getting feedback, which is really limiting their growth in organizations. So I can share this resource with folks. I put together an equitable decision making tree around performance feedback. If you're really worried that you are showing up with bias and that this person is not actually underperforming, but it's something you're doing, you can go through it.
But if it really is a performance issue, you have to tell them. And what you're responsible for is telling them before it's such an issue that they're on a PIP, a performance improvement plan, that you are offering them guidance, tools and support, and that they understand that you are their partner in this, in actually solving the problem. You should not be doing this if you want the person to leave, because that's going to be not only manipulatively insincere, but it's going to further the rift that you have with other employees because they're watching you.
Everybody is always watching you when you're a manager. And so the other thing that I say to folks about these performance issues is, don't even do it for the person, do it for the whole team. Because how you manage them, when they're struggling or failing, is how everyone else thinks that you're going to respond to them or how they should be. And so in this case, if you have somebody who's underperforming, who's from these identities, you put a plan together with them, you're collaborative with them about how they can improve, and you set really clear expectations around what it looks like for them to fail or succeed in this plan. Otherwise, you're not doing anyone good.
EMILIE: Yeah. And I think that courage to walk that path equitably. Right? Which is how you would do that exact performance management for someone else. Right? Is the most important step of this, like, not treating them differently or tiptoeing around a performance management issue because you're afraid you're going to be labeled as racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or any of those things. And that, that can be hard, but that is what I hear you challenging managers to do. Yeah?
ALIDA: And you are, as a manager, always asking yourself, did I give this person the same opportunities as someone else on my team? Did I provide them with the resources that they would have needed? Is there a resource I could still provide them that I haven't? Like, you do have to do the self awareness work and look at your role. It takes two for a performance issue to arise, not one. You're both responsible in the situation.
The question is, have you done everything that you can? And for many folks, the answer is no, you haven't done everything you can, and you're also not telling the truth. And if we're going to honor the human dignity of our employees, we have to both provide them with the resources they need to succeed and let them know exactly why they aren't succeeding when it's happening.
EMILIE: Yeah, that takes courage, and it takes you as a manager, perhaps even a first time manager, perhaps especially as a first time manager, knowing that your management has your back, too, when handling performance management. So it's so funny. Like, [SIGH] at the end of the day, is DEI, just good management? Like, that's part of how I, that's what I keep coming back to. Because everything you just described about clarifying expectations, equipping people with the tools that they need to succeed, I think that's just good management,right? Like, have we overcomplicated all of this? Am I, am I crazy? Like, it drives me nuts.
ALIDA: The day to day? Absolutely. The structural. No, for the structural. We can talk about why everyone needs to be reading Fanon and I will talk to you about Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s vision of elite capture and how we are breaking apart coalitions that should be advancing justice and all of those things. At the structural level. No. DEI is something totally different. But we're treating organizations as if everyone in them is able to make these kinds of structural changes, and they can't. What you can do as an individual is at that day to day management level, what you can demand your leaders to do and hold them accountable for are these big things that do need to change to essentially rebuild a broken system.
EMILIE: Yeah, that's great. That's really, really helpful. I feel like you are a professor and I will take the syllabus that you are offering, like, give me the required reading and we will include it in our show notes because you are just a fount of information, as is this wonderful book of yours. Alida, where can our listeners learn more about you and your practice and get their hands on a copy of your new book?
ALIDA: Absolutely. So for all things me, go to alidamirandawolff.com. You can order my books there. You can listen to my podcast, which is called Care Work with Alida Miranda-Wolff and is on any podcast platform you can think of. You can also go to my company website, Ethostalent.com. And fun fact, I am the only person with my name. You can look up 26 pages of Google results and you will only find me, [LAUGHTER] which means add me on LinkedIn Alida Miranda-Wolff. I post every day.
EMILIE: I love it. I will add all of those links to our show notes. Alida, thank you again for joining me, this conversation was a delight.
ALIDA: Loved it. I would love to hear from your listeners.
EMILIE: For links to all the phenomenal resources Alida just shared with us, head to bossedup.org/episode478. That's bossedup.org/episode478. And that's where you'll also find a fully written out transcript and blog post highlighting Alida's key points.
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I want to hear from you. What do you make of today's conversation? Let's keep it going as always, in the Bossed Up Courage Community, on Facebook, or in the Bossed Up LinkedIn Group. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose, and together, let's lift as we climb.
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