Battling Brotopia: How to Be Part of the Solution
Listen to my full conversation with Emily Chang here.
I read “Brotopia” the week it hit the shelves. As CEO of a tech company, I was anxious to hear what Emily Chang’s investigative journalism had uncovered and what I could learn from it to help better lead our company. Emily had given me a heads-up on the content a few months prior to the book’s release when I was a guest on her show, Bloomberg Technology — of which Emily is host and executive producer. She was busting up the “boys’ club” in tech, she said. I was eager to learn more.
Parts of the book shocked and disgusted me: cuddle puddles (you can’t unlearn that), drugs shaped like prominent company logos (clearly not from the internal swag store), venture capital pitches in hot tubs (gross).
Other parts of the book angered and saddened me: the many accounts of men who abused power and influence, the imbalance of opportunity and influence among genders and underrepresented communities, the discouraging perception young women of all backgrounds have of a possible future in tech.
But the most important part of the book are the solutions, and that is still a work in progress. “Brotopia” is a record of what went wrong. While Emily provides a start to solutions in her closing remarks, figuring out how to battle brotopia is on all of us in the tech community.
I interviewed Emily at Zillow Group’s San Francisco office, at an all-hands in front of our employees, to discuss the next chapter of “Brotopia”: solutions. There are many things we can do as companies, managers and individuals, which Emily and I discussed in detail (listen to the full conversation here), but my biggest takeaway as a leader is the importance of improving employee engagement.
In our annual employee survey, we define engagement as 1) intent to stay for the next two years, and 2) willingness to recommend working at Zillow Group to a friend. Engagement is our most important business metric; it’s the strongest signal for belonging and excitement about the company’s mission and future. Since we launched this survey a few years ago, our engagement numbers have been really high, and we were really proud of them … until we looked at the numbers in a different way.
We knew that we were, sadly and like much of tech, underrepresented in some areas when it came to gender and ethnicity (we still are). And though increasing the number of underrepresented employees was important to us, we also wanted to look at how engaged existing employees were — if they were intending to stay, if they’d recommend working at Zillow Group. The results were eye-opening: Underrepresented people of color were less engaged in their work at Zillow Group and were leaving the company at higher rates.
We spend all this time and money trying to attract the best people to our business and equip them to do their best work with a great environment, supportive managers, interesting work, benefits, et cetera … and we were losing a subset of this top talent because of their decreased sense of engagement with the company compared to their peers. We were trying externally but failing internally, and this was a painful and sobering moment for me as a leader.
My team and I realized that if you don’t get to the root of the issue with existing employees — engagement — no recruiting program will solve your problem. You are bailing water out of a leaky ship. This applies to any underrepresented group, be it gender or ethnicity.
From that point on, we laser-focused on engagement with an equity and belonging focus, building entirely new functions to existing positions and adding new positions, establishing affinity networks, and starting company-wide, transparent and candid conversations to bring everyone into the fold on this important transformation. I’m happy to report in our most recent survey this spring that the engagement levels across all employees, regardless of color, have minimal discrepancies.
But you can’t just ask underrepresented communities to solve an engagement problem. What we continue to learn from our experience is that it takes the whole company to address equity and belonging. White males — and everyone else — need to know that gender and racial issues affect us all, and we need to be part of the solution even if we haven’t been part of the “bro culture” and bad behavior in the headlines. All leaders need to mentor people who don’t look like them, hire people who share company values and bring different perspectives, learn about these issues we’ve never had to deal with ourselves, and speak up about why all of this matters.
Admittedly, as a white male, all of this can get uncomfortable. It’s understandable for someone to think, “I didn’t cause this problem, so don’t blame me.” Keeping our heads down, waiting for others to act, excusing ourselves from the issue, saying nothing for fear of stepping in it — these are all acts of comfort and caution that keep us out of the line of fire. But they also keep us out of the fight. If we’re really going to change an industry, we need everyone — regardless of gender, race, socioeconomic background, title or tenure — to step up and do their part at busting up brotopia.
Listen to my full conversation with Emily Chang here.
Check out previous episodes with:
Senior ICT Officer – Full Stack Developer
6 年The article is nothing to do with filling quotas, and everything to do with inclusivity in the workplace. Wish everyone else had done their research before opening on their rants. Thank you for the read!
Not hiring people who are the best at what they do is simply bad business. Diversity also means diversity of thought, ideas, viewpoints. That is real actionable diversity. Quotas help no one.
Student at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
6 年Porn lady and fake news TV demanding lady
IT Infrastructure & Service Management Leader | ITIL Expert | Driving Operational Excellence & Team Development
6 年Great leaders know that diversity isn't achieved by meeting a quota based on gender or race. Ever person is their own individual. It's their ideas and actions that determine their diversity not the color of their skin or their gender. Create a workplace that promotes the honest exchange of ideas. Listen to your people to truly learn who they are. Promote equality of opportunity not outcome. Don't buy into the identity politics nonsense. Build a culture of trust. Encourage people to be open and honest without fear and diversity will work itself out.
Senior System Engineer at Tanium
6 年The biggest problem I see with diversity in tech is convincing the status quo that there's a problem. Every time this subject comes up, there's a litany of denial and outrage from the white male tech worker... they feel as though they are under attack, that the playing field used to be "even" but is now stacked against them, and that diverse employees cannot possibly be as qualified as they are - thus an injustice is occurring against them...which plays into the larger political narrative of a sort of shadow war against white people, men especially, and a self perpetuating victim complex which disallows reason and emotional divestiture from the real problem of active institutional bias against industry minorities. This demographic honestly feels that they are being targeted and presumed guilty of being white males, and until they no longer feel this way, meaningful change will be very difficult to achieve. What we need to do, rather than taking sides, assigning culpability, or attempting to challenge deeply held biases and belief structures which are being fed on a daily basis by various media sources, is to change approach. We should focus on the tangible, measurable advantages of a diverse workforce.