I'm cleaning my inbox and found an email to a board of an org which I had to eventually withdraw from.

This is a story that I hope to share as a cautionary tale about diversity & inclusion efforts. How you can have smart, diverse people in the room & still be shitty.

[thread]

In 2017 I was invited onto a board for a social innovation org who provided employment training programs for ex prisoners. These folks were often sent to juvenile prison for minor felonies. I had an ex in a similar situation and knew how important reintegration was. I said yes.

The exec who created the board and invited me on onto team was a well-meaning friend. The other board members consisted of folks in law, public health, and mostly people of colour around the TO community. They all had interesting and insightful perspectives.

There is one other board member who came from a sales background who was also a friend of the exec who invited me.

In meetings he never asked questions and always proposed his own ideas in long speeches. The org's execs entertained his ideas because he spoke with authority.

The agendas he proposed were financially, logistically unfeasible. The partnership (with his own org) he tried to push had nothing to do with up-skilling ex-prisoners. The board was often derailed into debating him and making little progress in more important areas.

Lesson #1: D&I isn't about people on a team looking colourful.

It's about who is heard, who's perceived as an expert, who's given the benefit of the doubt and whose ideas are prioritized not because they have merit but because the person looked the part.

One day, that board member made a comment on my outfit in private after a mtg. I ignored him. Seeing no reaction, he turned to "help" a younger female board member find her pen and teased her that she wasn't able to find it herself b/c 'you're a girl'. He was about 2x her age.

The exec who recruited me was told (privately) of the dynamics on his board and he vowed to "do his best". His solution? Encourage women to speak up in meetings.

Give me a break! Nobody wished to adopt *his* communication style and turn meetings into unproductive monologues.

Our communication style? We took turns, didn't cut people off, asked q's and deferred to others with more relevant exp. We hoped that by modelling this very normal, respectful and collaborative behaviour, it will influence the two men.

But self-reflection is hard.

The exec and that sales guy happen to be the only white men in the room, go figure.

Eventually more people tuned out and stopped caring. Why bother to ask smart questions help move the org in the right direction when only to be cut off by another self-absorbed tangent?

Lesson #3: It's problematic to interpret empowerment to be 'encouraging people to behave more like me'. Instead reflecting on why there is a difference of behaviour in the first place. Maybe others know more, maybe you aren't a standard of excellence, maybe you are the problem.

We didn't completely give up though. After all, he admitted there's a problem and he's working on it. So we changed strategy to put pressure on this exec to grow as a leader. We drafted org metrics for him to be held accountable to instead of being side-tracked. He agreed.

TY @KarlTheMartian for talking me through this part. I wanted this guy to hit his goals. We all believed in the cause.

HOWEVER. His response whenever pressed for updates was to double down with a monologue about how tough it has been for him and asking us to help do his job.

I'm a big believer that trust in a leader, friend, is earned when people show up with integrity. And this. pisses. me. off. He lost my trust when he failed to take accountability and used his failure as an emotional bargaining chip to push responsibilities onto someone else.

Lesson #4: Admitting failure doesn't give you right to push the burden of responsibility to someone else, even if they are more capable. D&I isn't about recruiting willing, capable pawns to pick up the slack when the person in charge overpromises and under-delivers.

At this point, I was 7 or 8 months on the board. I grew to like most of my fellow board members but this was the last straw. These meetings were slowly becoming a platform for this exec to air his grievances and his buddy to talk sales and flirt with women. So one by one we quit.

I left disappointed and angry. This cause, this diverse board, it could have been something and look where it ended up. He managed to convince group of very capable minds and wore us all down with little results to show. I felt exploited for my expertise, my time, my energy.

You have no idea the private messages I've gotten from these two men to "pick my brain", even after I withdrew from the board. The audacity of it all.

Lesson #5: Learn to spot unaccountable people early. Save yourself from the drama and RUN.

/fin

AFTERWARD

I revisited this experience after some distance. Despite how shitty it was, it didn't help to blame everything on toxic people alone and see it as a trauma. I wanted to reflect on where I had agency and set myself up for the better.

Some of my learnings in hindsight:

1. Didn't do enough due diligence

The exec who invited me built a board of (mostly) high performers, but we on the other hand blindly trusted his ability as a leader. We were too eager to contribute the cause. In hindsight, I should have asked him to report org metrics sooner.

2. The board was too green

Despite the majority of the board having other leadership exp, for many of us it was the 1st time sitting on a board and we didn't have much guidance.

Thanks to @rosekue recognizing this from our conversation and showing me what expect next time.

3. There wasn't a dedicated facilitator

This would have been ok if everyone had more or less similar communication styles, but that wasn't the case. A skilled facilitator would help to diffuse tangents and call on others to speak.

Further reading: Facilitating Collaboration

Wanted to highlight these 3 takeaways because while it was important to recognise where D&I failed due to problematic behaviours, it was also necessary to acknowledge my own blindspots in order to grow. :)

Thanks for tuning in! Hope this was a helpful read.

/fin for reals.