Women at Work - How to Push for Policy Changes at Your Company

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

Want to modernize a program or enact a policy that would benefit women in your workplace, but don’t know where to begin? Learn how to build a grassroots initiative, no matter your job title. Two experts in systemic, organizational change explain the many different roles critical to sustaining a movement. They also share tried-and-true ways to keep everyone invested in the cause, aligned, and on track.

Over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. So many of the systems in our workplaces exclude or disadvantage women. Think about unequal pay or a lack of support and flexibility for those who are caregivers. We're not the problem. Systemic bias is, and it's leaders' responsibility to fix it at an organizational level. But what if you heard about a novel program or policy that you believe your company should adopt? What if leaders are ignoring problems that have tried and true solutions if they'd only try them? How can you instigate change yourself? Maybe you want child care subsidies,

or comprehensive health coverage, or paid parental leave. Perhaps you want an ombuds office, or have HR do a pay equity audit and then straighten out whatever inequities it reveals. Or to democratize a leadership development program so that it's genuinely open to everyone. That all sounds great, but how? Where does one begin? You're listening to Women at Work

from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Bernstein. And I'm Amy Gallo. Overhauling, building, or dismantling any corporate system in your work friends and make new ones as you all network across departments and hierarchies to gather information and support. There's a lot of thinking to do and groundwork to lay. Buy-in probably won't come quickly or easily. Conflicts are likely to arise. The effort might even stall at some point or shift its focus.

Success isn't guaranteed. But imagine if you achieve the goal you set for yourself, that you had a hand in your organization's paying women better, treating them better, advancing them better. Those are achievements you'll never forget. Feeling motivated yet? Well, we've brought in two experienced change makers to both inspire you and explain exactly how to get the work going. Lily Zhang is a strategist who advises leaders on how to create diversity, equity, and inclusion. They just released a new book called DEI Deconstructed. Lily's been on the show a couple of times before and we're delighted to have them back. Ashley Lewis has leadership roles

within the Coalition of Labor Union Women and the United Auto Workers Women's Department. She mobilizes women to campaign for what they collectively need and then advises them on how to bargain strategically with leadership. Lily, Ashley, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Yeah, thanks for having us.

Yes, thank you. It's truly an honor to be here. Lily, I want to start with you. Could you share an example of an organizational change that you've seen happen or were involved in, you know, that took a lot of effort, but actually succeeded? Yeah, well, there's a lot because this work happens quite frequently. I think one that comes to mind is an effort I was a part of just in a small capacity to completely change the onboarding experience of employees at a company. Basically, the company had recently

learned that their new employees didn't really feel particularly supported, they didn't feel integrated, and they weren't really learning the culture and the values of the company until much, much later in their careers there, like a year or two in. And so they undertook this pretty extensive effort to completely change the onboarding experience for these folks, which on its surface looked pretty simple. We all assumed it'd be like, design a program, implement the program, done in like one or two months. but it actually was a multi-month, almost half year, extremely political project involving a dozen stakeholders and, you know, really getting lucky with a few hires. And then ultimately after months and months of work, right, there was this new

program created, which I'm sharing because the behind the scenes was really, really interesting. And I'd be happy to talk about it further. But that's definitely one effort that I can think of. Yeah, we'd love to hear more about how it happened. But before we do, can you explain why onboarding, for example, would be a DEI issue, something that, you know, would help to make an organization a better place for women? Absolutely. Onboarding was the DEI issue in this company because we actually had data that it was a DEI issue. We saw gender disparities and also racial disparities and class disparities in these marginalized groups' feelings of belonging as they entered the company. And so,

you know, I can't say for a fact that every company has gender-related DEI issues with onboarding, but I know for a fact that this one did because we ran surveys and we disaggregated the survey data by demographics. Ashley, you have found surveys are very important in your work, right? Yes, they are, primarily because the reality of it is, is that we have to go to the people who are closest to the issues because they're closest to the resolution as well. And I find that surveys help us hone in on what the actual needs are, because I think, especially in leadership, you're conceptualizing what you think the need is but surveys communicate what the actual need is. For example we had a working while caregiving survey and honestly the quick fix is

that you find someone who can help you care for your family member but the reality of it is is that from an organizational standpoint how do you actually help them? And we found that our members weren't necessarily looking for us to identify a caregiver per se, but they were interested in, can you provide resources that will help me find a caregiver or resources that will help me address the medical needs, the medical bills, legal issues. And too often, I think if we don't do the surveys, you don't really find the solutions that really are viable for those who need them. How do you know, Lily and Ashley, when you identify a need, a new onboarding system, resources for caregivers, how do you know whether it's actually an issue worth fighting for? And

Lily, we can maybe start with you. Yeah, I actually want to first circle a little bit back to something Ashley mentioned, which I'm hearing as you go into the survey process without assuming you know the solution. I think that's so important. I see a lot of employers deploying surveys that are, let's not say rigged, but when you see survey questions like, how do you feel about solution X? That tells me that they've already decided on solution X, and they're just looking for a confirmation of their bias. I really think it's important to use surveys that are extremely agnostic about what it is you're trying to look for, so that when those themes come out in the data, it's not because you're feeding it to that survey, right? It's not because you're trying to set up

your workforce to tell you one thing. And I'm sharing this because I think this relates to your question, Amy, right? You're asking me how you know that issues that come up in surveys are worth fighting for. And I think it's because ideally in a well-designed survey that comes out loud and clear in the data. A good survey doesn't just reveal what might be happening or what people need, but ideally why people need that thing. What are the impacts of them not having the thing? When I deliver qualitative surveys, some of the feedback that comes back from them are things like using this example of the onboarding system. colleagues immediately found camaraderie, I wish there was a system that supported me and other folks like me to make connection. Because without that, I felt adrift, I didn't feel like I could get started, I felt overwhelmed with the amount of work I had to do. And you know, not saying every

comment is going to be that enlightening. But I love comments like that. It outlines the challenge. It outlines a clear need for something. It outlines the impact of folks not having that something. And to me and the other decision makers who were looking at the survey data, it was a very clear call to action. If we can do this, we'll solve this problem and alleviate this impact. And that, I think, makes its own case for why something is worth fighting for, because we know exactly what we're trying to achieve and what might be possible if we can fix this inequity we've identified.

Yeah. But are surveys the only way to identify whether an issue is worth fighting for or are there other ways? Absolutely not. There's so many different methods you can use, right? Like focus groups, interviews, one-on-ones, pouring through exit interview data. That's all extremely valuable qualitative data that collectively gives me insights into not just what's going on, but why something's going on. I'd actually add that stories, I believe, are more powerful sometimes than even the data. Like I will take data and then amplify it with a story to create a greater impact when presenting, especially to leadership in terms of wanting to center resources around an initiative or a goal.

So yes, the qualitative data matters, but I will tell you that my vice president says it all the time. She says outside power moves inside power. And I've always been able to realize results when someone who doesn't have a position of power, because they're not bound by the position or the title, they are able to speak more freely and candidly. And often I try to remind members that they actually have power in their voice and communicating their issues and advocating for their issues, that they really drive the organization. So can I go back to something you just said, Ashley? You talked about how it can sometimes be easier for people without formal power to kick off something like this. Implied

in all that is this idea that you're risking something if you have formal power, right? You're risking your status, your stature, possibly your job, possibly your reputation. How do you go about assessing the risks? For me, I live by a mantra of ethics and the idea that I want everyone to treat me as I want to be treated. And if I am in a space where I am being disrespected or disregarded, I would want someone to speak up for me. And that is usually my gauge for whether I risk saying something or not. Because if we don't get to the basicness of the fact that if there is a human in need or a human being harmed and that we should care, then we've lost really all viable efforts to be an ethical entity. Ethics really matter. And my risk is solely associated with putting myself in someone else's position and saying, this is worth fighting for.

What about you, Lily? How do you think about that? Yeah, so first of all, I love everything you've said, Ashley. It really resonates with me. I think taking that position of ethics over everything, right, is extremely powerful. When I talk to folks in my own work, I admittedly use a slightly different angle. I talk about power as being something that's multifaceted and power existing in many different forms I think most often in the workplace people think about formal power as the only kind of power the power that comes from being a manager or being an executive I firmly believe that there are so many different kinds of power we can activate, both as individuals and more importantly, as communities and collectives. Things like unions, obviously, right? But then

also DEI councils, employee resource groups, advisory boards, committees, even book clubs, right? Like these informal gatherings of employees who come together to share stories, to build a shared understanding of what's wrong and how we can fix it. And then importantly, recognizing that even if you don't have formal power, you might have access. You might be friends with someone with formal power. You might have connections, networks, relationships. You might run a meeting every month that you're in charge of. And even if you can't shift the overall balance of power or the overall resource distribution, hell, you can run a meeting. And if you run that one meeting really well, and you decide, right, like what happens there, you can genuinely start changing things around. One maybe funny example that I share oftentimes is when I was

a student, and students don't have much in the way of formal power, but I sat next to a friend of mine in this big meeting for one of the labs I was working on on campus. And my friend and I talked to each other and we said, you know what would be really funny? This is back before pronouns were popular to use. I said, you know what would be really funny? This is back before pronouns were popular to use. I said, you know what would be really funny? If you and I both introduced ourselves with our pronouns, just because, right? And we're sitting on the corner of the table that we always start from to give introductions. So my friend introduced themselves with their pronouns. I introduced myself with my pronouns. And then the third person in line,

like all the blood drained from their face. They were like, oh my God, like, is this okay? And then they sort of very tentatively tried to introduce themselves with their pronouns. And then the fourth person did the same thing. Then the fifth person did the same thing. And we created this hilarious, you know, domino effect where everyone just sort of did it because it seemed like the right thing to do. Did my friend and I have any formal power? Not at all. Were we even the ones who ran the meeting? Not at all.

We just created this norm because we wanted to see if we could take that into our control. And we did. And it all worked out. So I'm not saying that everyone should Tro you know, Trojan horse hijack their meetings to spread agendas, but I'm saying informal power is powerful. It's something that we all have access to. And the more people we get on board

to utilize it together, the more effective our movements can be. And the more effective we can be at creating the change we want to see, even if we're not a manager or a manager or a supervisor or an executive. You know, Lily, what you're referring to some people call creating a microculture. Yes, the larger culture may not yet be on board with the change. But you're creating

a microculture and where that happens, where it's two people, a small team, just a meeting, right? And then that can affect the larger group. You know, Amy B., I want to ask you because you have a fair bit of formal power in our organization, and I'm curious how you think about the risks of whether to push forward something that you think is important. You know, I think about it similarly to the way Ashley does, which is, could I live with myself if I didn't do this? And then what do I stand for? It helps you pick your battles. You can't fight every single battle, but you can fight many battles if they all point back to the same values. You know, I think implicit in what all of you are saying is that we focus

on the risks of taking action, right? What if I take action? But what you're all saying is also you're assessing against the risk of not taking action. Right. Can I live with myself? What will happen? Will I feel like I've lived according to my ethics or values? But I also want to be very practical here because someone might come to you and say, our parental leave policy is abysmal. We need to fix it. And you may ethically believe that's true, but then you also have to assess that against the priorities for the company, the reality of whether there could be a change. The risks of failing, I think, is the other thing I'm thinking about. I think it's always doing a cost-benefit analysis. So for example, let's say that you have a dominance of young women of reproductive age. So you equally have to calculate what happens if I don't provide this leave. What am I losing out

on in terms of an employee? There is a cost to not retaining your employees, right? Every time that you have to hire someone new or retrain, there's an obvious cost associated with that. And there's a cost to the economy. I mean, whether we talk about child care or elder care, it's like thirty nine point three billion dollars a year that we lose out on because we aren't retaining women and men also in the workplace now because the COVID pandemic wiped out everyone, but it exacerbated the need for childcare, the need for elder care. And so now these needs become more prevalent. And I think the cost benefit analysis of if we don't implement this, what kind of impact will it have on our workplaces and will it affect the retention of the employees and the talent that we have? Actually, I love that. It's very similar to the work that I do in the DEI space.

It's funny, leaders often make this false assumption that taking action is risky and thus you need to justify it, but there's no risk at all from doing nothing, which is just completely false, right? Like this is, this is the origin behind like the business case for diversity stuff, right? Like leaders are always like, can you make a financial argument for hiring these people of color? And I'm like, well, first, can you make a financial argument for not doing so?

And they've never, they've never prepared themselves for that because this perception is always that doing nothing is safe. But doing nothing, like in an organization, doing nothing, especially when you know that there are inequities happening, doing nothing is not a neutral stance. Right. And so it's always weighing this sort of false argument between can you prove that taking action on this thing that you care about is going to help us more than doing nothing? When the argument should be, what do we stand to lose by doing nothing? And then let's weigh that against what we stand to gain by doing something. And the math is very different. Yeah. So on that point, do you think leaders tend to think of themselves as having a finite amount

of social capital to put against these kinds of causes? Like if I do this here, I can't do that there? Absolutely. I hear that perspective from leaders a lot. And what's your view on that? I think to some extent it's correct. The reality is when you're trying to make organizational change, you can't do it every day of every week, especially if you're treating your change efforts as discrete. And a lot of companies are seeing this problem with trying to tackle DEI as a set of different siloed initiatives. Let's help women. Let's help people of color.

Let's help disabled people. Let's help women let's help people of color let's help disabled people let's help lgbtq plus people suddenly we're tired because we've tried to run six different movements one after another the reality is that yes if you try to run six movements one after another you are going to fatigue folks i think the way you get around it is not by trying to space out your movements like you shouldn't say okay we going to just help women this year and wait two years before we talk about any other DEI issue. The answer is to take a radically different approach

to organizational change that solves the root cause problem affecting all of these marginalized groups at once. Use your social capital to fix the underlying problem rather than running all of these extremely expensive, both monetarily and socially, initiatives that keep burning out your workforce, right? Shallow stuff, paradoxically, burns out your workforce a lot more than an extremely targeted, well-thought-out initiative to solve the root cause of inequity.

And if I can jump in, I'm thinking a few things. So one thing that I will say is, and I laugh because to me, DE&I and unions do a lot of the same work in the sense that in spaces that don't have unions, you don't have an organization that's working towards an initiative that addresses the need of one group, but really uplifts everyone. And I'll even cite certain examples. So for example, within our collective bargaining agreement, and I'll use General Motors because that's what I'm familiar with, but there we have legal services programs. Those programs are pivotal for women. Typically, if they go through a divorce or have some other life event, if you

don't have to pay those lawyer fees, that's life-changing. But it doesn't say that it's for women. It's a benefit for everyone. So whether you're disabled, whether you're a veteran, whether you're trans, it doesn't matter. Everyone benefits from addressing the need. And so what you're talking about, Lily, is I felt like was affirmational for the work that we do in unions through the collective bargaining process, because it alleviates a lot of the inequities that you see. Yeah, and I'll maybe push it a little further. I'll say if DEI work doesn't include

that kind of foundational work, if DEI work is allergic to the idea of collective bargaining and unions, it fundamentally can't work. And there's a lot of DEI stuff that, for better or worse, is positioned as do this instead of a union, which is terrible, right? Capital T, terrible. Like this work has to happen in unison. DEI work is fundamentally about resolving inequities through collective power. If that

isn't directly overlapping with unions, then I don't know what is. And I think more DEI efforts need to recognize that and directly support efforts to unionize. all? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. Hey listeners, if you want to hear from more leaders to help you answer questions like, should I talk about my anxiety at work? Or how do I claim my leadership power? Then you should listen to TED Business, hosted by Columbia Business School professor, Madhupe Akinnola. The show features TED Talks about everything from setting smart goals to the latest on DEI

in business, followed up with a mini lesson from Mudupe on how to apply these lessons in your own life. Listen to TED Business wherever you get your podcasts. So let's get into the actual work of running this, you know, the well-thought-out, targeted initiative, and thinking about the listener who's not in a leadership position, but wants to make this change in their organization. Lily, what you talked in your new book, DEI Deconstructed about, I think it's seven roles that people can play in a change initiative. Did I get that right? It's seven? Yeah. Can you talk about how someone might figure out which role

they're best suited for and how they can get involved? Yeah. So I'll sort of talk through, I guess, that chapter just because I think some context is useful. The setup for that chapter of the book is a lot of people pursue organizational change as this heroic effort that one person can take on their own. That's sort of how it appears in the zeitgeist. If you want to change your organization, you need to be the hero advocate, shouldering everything on yourself and fighting the man and like tearing down the system. But that's actually not how change efforts happen, right? I talked about the story in the very beginning with the onboarding program, right? There was no one hero. There were like maybe 50 people at the end of the day with a

core dozen that were all driving this effort forward in different ways. And they were doing different things. One of the folks that really drove those efforts forward, sure, they were an advocate, which is one of the roles that I talk about. They were someone that was an activist type. They were really pushing for change, super vocal. But there were also folks involved who were educators, who maybe were operating a little less visibly, but spending time to do the work of educating their colleagues, of sharing information, of making sure everyone was on the same page with why this challenge was a challenge. And there were others, there were folks who were backers of the project who were like, I don't know, middle managers high up in the organization who couldn't give a damn about onboarding. They didn't care. But at the

end of the day, they had access to resources and power and the rubber stamp of saying yes to a certain initiative. And they played a really powerful role as well. Funny thing is, if you ask them, they would say that they did nothing. But they did a large number of things because, you know, the movement succeeded in part because it identified that these are the folks who have access to the resources. And so at the very least, we need to make sure they're amenable to this effort. And then at the end of the day, the folks who were the ones building the new onboarding program, they also had an enormous amount of power as well, right? Like how terrible it would have been if we had created this huge movement and then at the end of the day, pass it off to people who didn't know how to build an onboarding

program. I actually see some movements die that way, right? They think the work is done when the policy has been announced and they don't stick around to see the implementation of it. No, like they're part of a movement too. So, you know, people need to understand that there are so many roles to play in a movement beyond just being that hyper vocal voice, which a lot of people don't want to be, right? Like you find that when you approach this idea of organizational change to people, they shy away. They say, I'm not the type to take the spotlight.

Therefore, I can't play a role in the movement. And I think that's missing a lot of opportunity. You can educate people. You can share information. You can organize people, right? Someone has to buy the pizza. Someone has to get people together. Someone has to make the calendar

invite, right? Like there is a role for everybody in these kinds of movements, but people just need to realize that and realize that these are powerful roles as well. Even if you're not at the front leading the charge, if you're in the back taking care of logistics, doing relationship building, talking to sponsors and, you know and advocates, the movement would not succeed without you, right? Those roles are so important. Yeah. I have to say, Lily, when I read that chapter, I kept saying, who's the one who makes the Google spreadsheet? Because that's the role I want to fill. And I found it. The builder could be that role. But I think what you're describing is that you have to understand what you are interested in, what motivates you, and what unique skills you have.

Based on that, there's a role to play in the movement. Yep, absolutely. But how does it all come together, Lily? You've got these seven roles, and the way you describe them, you know, I had a similar response to Amy. I could see where I would fit in. But how does it all come together to produce an effective movement? Yeah. I mean, gosh, movement building, right?

Like that's a whole conversation. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, Ashley. But yeah, you know, organically most of the time and messily most of the time to be very honest right like like i wish you could just put a pin on it and be like all right everyone movement starting tomorrow right like everybody get involved the spreadsheet maker in me lily really hates that like i want to hold the clipboard and just make it all like go in sequential steps but that's important too yeah right like that's really important too and and you you can't discount the importance of trying to start a movement on its own. What I usually find happen is that, yes, a lot of people try to start movements on their own.

They get some success and then people will coalesce around one or two really high profile events. That's almost always what I see, right? A very young movement or a very immature movement, something happens. The company releases a new policy, there's something, you know, in the breaking news, a big life event happens. And then suddenly, right, like people flock, they say like, oh my gosh, my eyes have become opened to the fact that this issue is an issue, right? Talk about like racial justice movements in 2020. No one could have prepared for that at all. But like, that did ignite a movement. And I think what we need to understand as people who want to create and build movements is that those windows of opportunity are both things that we can't control,

but also, you know, things that we can make use of to continue growing our movements. So we need to do both. We need to go around with clipboards, right? Like that sort of foundational movement building is absolutely how many movements start. But we can't be so inflexible as to not realize these huge moments when they happen and to use them as ways to dramatically raise the visibility of our movement, to bring new people in. We just have to be ready for that, right? And most racial justice movements in 2020 were not prepared for the enormous influx of new people who wanted to participate to great detriment, right? And I don't blame movement builders. I don't blame organizations

to some extent. But it's really difficult to recognize when these movements have suddenly reached critical mass overnight, and now we need to steer them to action. I wish in 2020, we could have seen all these movements that sprung up direct their companies towards taking more effective action. I wish we could have gotten more pay equity across the board, more leadership representation across the board, more DEI councils, ERGs. We did see some of this stuff, but it didn't happen nearly as quickly or with as much direction as it could have. I think largely because the movements weren't ready. I agree. And I think that it's not only seizing the moment, but it's also having leaders who have the vision of strategy. You have to have someone who can really center a movement and then have

everyone move towards that same moment. Because otherwise, if you don't stay on message, if you divert the attention or the direction or the end game, whatever your end goal is, because too often people start with an issue, but they don't start with what they want the end game to be. What is your end game? What is it that you really want to realize? And if you ask someone and they don't know, and they're within that movement, that means you need more strategy. You need to really implement the educational components, like you said, Lily, and really have those people who specialize in that do it, right? Like the advocate doesn't need to necessarily do the educational training at all, right?

But it's all those things I think that really create and cultivate a movement. But you have to have both of those. Yeah. I want to put ourselves in the shoes of a listener who has an idea for a way to change something in their organization that will not just benefit women but benefit everyone else. You know, all of this sounds, even the word movement sounds so overwhelming. What do we give them in terms of advice to get started? Like, how do they actually move from this idea to actually beginning to do exactly the things you all are talking about? Yeah, so there's this concept I

want to share called a theory of change. And a theory of change refers specifically to a set of steps to get from a point A, that's where you are, to a point B of where you want to be. And to Ashley's point earlier, you need to have that point B before you get started. You need to have the blueprints of a plane before you start building it. Otherwise, you're going to build a tractor, you're not going to get off the ground, right? But you need to be able before you start a movement to say, our organization needs to be more like this. It doesn't have to be in perfect fidelity, but you have to have some vision. You have to say, this is what we're trying to build. And then you need to, and this doesn't happen overnight, you need to reverse engineer why it isn't like that already. Why is it your organization

hasn't gotten to that point yet? What's in the way? What's stopping you? What are the obstacles? What are the roadblocks? And then once you have that understanding of where you are now, where you need to be and all the things in your way, you can make a plan. You can make a strategy. You can say, first, we're going to tackle this. Then we're going to address that. We're going to work together with these groups. We're going to try to achieve this change. And is that intimidating? Absolutely. But now it's chunkable. Like now it's a plan that can be broken up. If you have no plan, how are you supposed to break anything up into anything that looks reasonable and bite-sized. Like that's the

quickest way to intimidate people. If you say, well, we want racial justice and we've got none of it. Time to get started, right? Like, oh, like that stresses me out just saying it. But instead, if you say, we want representation that looks like this, maybe it's not racial justice, but it's representation at the very least at this level. That hasn't happened because of these policies, these people, these processes, these broken things, these things inside the company, these things outside the company. To address these things, we need movements that change these processes, that help turn these people into allies, that help activate new ways of working, that help us create more consistent relationships with our recruitment teams and the folks outside of our

company who we're trying to hire, so on and so forth. Now we have five work streams. Let's chunk those. What does that look like? What's our two- plan, one month plan, right? Like all of these things. How many people do we need to get involved? It's really intimidating, but now it's intimidating in a tangible way, rather than just fear of this infinitely big unknown, which I think is what stops a lot of people from getting involved. Yeah. What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities.

Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. So you identify an issue. You've done a little bit of this analysis. Do you build a coalition? I'm just trying to imagine wading into this fight. If you don't have the experience of having done it before, what are your next steps? Do you get in touch with someone who may have more

formal power than you? What do you do? Actually, I'd love to hear your thoughts on coalition building. I'm sure you have a lot. I do. I think first, I would suggest to people, because I do it all the time, bring in those who aren't the same as you when you are creating the idea in and of itself. Because I think too often we're not bringing intersectionality into the ideation phase. For example, I want to say, yes, we need paid leave. We need... One of the other things that I would really love to see is a childcare stipend. But I have to go talk to someone who's at the bargaining table, who actually handles the bargaining. Because equally, I need to understand the process there, right? Then I have someone in research who might be able to give me insight on what is the economic cost of this? And how do we present it in a way that leadership will actually support and rally

around it? And so I think often, and it's not something that people really realize, but we have to get out of our own silos. Even if you're a person of color, even if you're a woman and it's a woman's issue, you have to get out of your silo and talk to those who really touch that issue in a variety of ways, because that helps you create a process to actually drive resolution. Because as you were stating, what do you do once you come up with this idea? The next thing is, well, who is the appropriate person to actually drive forth that change? And I know for me, it comes down from the leadership will identify and say, okay, you get in contact with this person in this department and this person and that person. And that helps drive forth the change. And too often, I always tell people this,

observe even before you get to ideation, observe how things are changed and realized within an organization. Because once you have that process, then you can not only push forward through maybe informal dialogue and having people reach out to leaders, but equally you work through the actual process to drive change. Man, we're on the same page today. That's wild. I literally give the same advice. So, Amy, one thing, just one short thing that I'll add is the question you asked is like, say you have the idea, what do you do next? Do you build a coalition? Here's the secret. You can't have come to the idea like the coalition will materialize. The point of a participatory collective process is the coalition building happens even in the very beginning when you're coming up with what idea to solve, what challenge to address, right? Like how to implement it. It's all happening in the collective. And so if you're really looking for a first step and you're truly an individual, my first recommendation would be find the collective.

Like find other people to organize with. You don't have to have an idea yet. But like we mentioned earlier, you know, find people who can share those stories with you. Build an understanding of what ideas you want to be putting forward, what challenges you want to be solving. And then to Ashley's point, you want to be explicitly bringing people who are as different from you as possible into your coalition, not only just for the sake of them being different, but because these people will have perspectives and ideas and access and power that you can't even dream of, right? Like you can only see one side of the elephant yeah you need to bring in someone who has another perspective to be able to say this is how it's shaped on the other end

because that will allow you to craft an initiative a movement whatever that actually works if you don't have that perspective in which i've seen by the way movements start without the people that they need in them and And they create this like very well thought out ask that completely is impossible because they fundamentally misunderstood how the organization works. It's tragic, right? Like it takes months and then they decide to ask for something which doesn't exist or which can't happen. And like, if there's something that demoralizes movements faster, it's that, right? And I've seen it happen a couple of times. Well, thinking about your example, Ashley, of the child care stipend, for example, like if that was

something in my organization I wanted to push forward, I would think, oh, let me get some other working moms who also want that, right? But what you're saying makes me think, well, it's not just the working moms, right? It's also the senior leader who maybe made a change to get a stipend for health care subsidies. And even to talk to like the 25 year old who doesn't yet have a kid or maybe never is interested in having a kid and saying, hey, I'm thinking we need child care subsidies. Do you have any thoughts on that? And who knows? Right. Who knows what information, what perspective?

Right. Like, oh, in my last organization, I saw people do that. Actually, this is how they did it. I'm sort of imagining it's this like, what do you call it? Like a road show where you go to like different people who have different perspectives and just say, this is what I'm thinking. What do you have to say? And don't forget the managers whose teams are hurt by the policies that hurt their team members, right? Yes, right, right, right, right. What about getting people aligned? You talked a moment ago, Lily, about movements dissolving or stalling out.

And I imagine the lack of alignment, the lack of strategy that Ashley was referring to earlier is a problem. Do you have any exercises that you find are especially effective to get alignment on the issue? And I think, Ashley, you had some thoughts on that. Yeah, so I'll share some brief thoughts. And again, I'm really curious to hear Ashley's as well, given that I think you have slightly more experience with it. But when I work with movements, a few things. One, no movement is going to stay perfectly aligned forever, given how inherently messy they are.

And it's totally okay to have a movement that comes together for one victory and then falls apart slightly to come together again for the next big thing. Like movements are living, they're organic, they change, and they always take different shapes. So first of all, it's okay if your movement's not always aligned. The problem is if you fall apart before you're able to achieve your first goal, which is what I'm assuming you're asking about. So if you want to prevent that, I have people just really focus on what that goal is and to use that goal as a reminder of what it is we organized around. Let's say it's a child care subsidy, right? Let's say it's a child care subsidy, right? Let's say it's a parental leave policy. Then making sure at the end of the day that whatever our messaging is around that,

that we continue to push that forward, linking it to one clear ask, one clear demand, and keeping that message as consistent as possible. And there may be some objection from within the movement. There may be some people who say, we want 10 things more. There may be some people who say, we want 10 things less. But trying to stay fixated on that one message, our movement is going to achieve this first, is what I find gets people aligned, not perfectly, but enough to make that first effort succeed. And this is, I think, another challenge of movements. They try to achieve everything all at once when that's not necessarily how things work, right? Like making sure that you can go from victory to victory one at a time is infinitely more

sustainable than trying to get the kitchen sink all at once and falling apart because you can't align a movement of dozens or hundreds of people around 20 discrete asks. It's okay to start multiple movements. And what does that look like? So if you're trying to get people to coalesce around one victory or one ask, do you vote? How do you decide which is the one to focus on? Well, actually, yeah, go for it. And I'll use a tangible example. I've been going all across the United States. And one of the biggest things that we've been talking about is Roe v. Wade. And a lot of people don't see it as a labor issue, but it absolutely is primarily because women typically are discriminated in the workplace because of their ability to reproduce. And so once we start

marginalizing one community, then others start to get marginalized. And I know that by highlighting the fact that we all are dealing with something, some level of discrimination as a result of who we are, it creates a commonality in a community. And I will also say that it's not just about collective bargaining. It's also about community benefits. And one of the things that I think is a big misconception with unions is they think that we just work for our members, but we actually work towards a cohesive whole. So for example, a lot of the nursing rooms that women have in the workplace, those are pushed for by unions. It became a part of the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act.

And it may seem small, but it's really an example of the reality of it is, is that we're all are in need of a space. So we have to make sure that in addition to the fact of creating benefits for our members, we're also including the community because that's another coalition building. And if you don't include the community, then you are excluding those who really are more impacted even than the worker by the implications of a corporation coming into a community. There's a term for some of what you're talking about in the DEI space called the curb cut effect. And it refers specifically to the, you know, curb cuts at the end of curbs that were implemented for accessibility reasons after the ADA. But the thing about the curb cut effect is it describes how if you design for the most marginalized, you create these cascading benefits that can benefit people who you might not have even thought about.

Look at curbs. Who benefits from those? People, parents with strollers, joggers, delivery workers, bikers, all sorts of folks. And I can guarantee that like the ADA wasn't passed out of consideration for parents, bikers, joggers, and delivery people, right? But when you design for the most marginalized, you create these benefits that can help so many people. And I think this is one way in which you also build alignment within movements, right? You help people understand that this isn't just a niche issue you're helping out with out of the goodness of your heart. That's important too. But find ways, you know, think of ways in which this might help you. Find ways in which you can make your own relationship to this issue we're talking about and ways in which it's going to change the reality for you and your working situation, for your team members, for your

colleagues. Self-interest is not a terrible way to appeal to people, right? Like everyone wants to learn how something they participate in can help them. And we don't have to look far to find ways in which DEI efforts or equity efforts or unionizing efforts, you know, really benefit way more people than just a small population. So how does that conversation go? I mean, is it as simple as getting your group together and saying, how does this benefit we're seeking for this particular group over here affect other groups? So I think it's backwards. Instead of selecting a benefit and asking people how it helps them, remember what I said about assuming the solution, right? Go back to the

beginning, say what would help you and find commonalities between everyone's challenges that lets you create a solution that they're already bought into. And I can't tell you what that is at the end of the day, because I don't know what movement we're designing, but if you have a good coalition of lots of different people, you understand their needs by the time you've selected your solution. Ideally, it already is something that has some degree of buy-in from multiple people because they've already had a part in the process. You're not coming to them as an afterthought after you've decided your solution. That doesn't work as well. Well, you know, we've been giving examples of solutions, but what you're saying in a way is

that we should be forming our coalition around the problem. So I'm having trouble affording child care right now. I need a child care stipend, but I'm having trouble affording child care. Who else would be affected by this issue? Once we understand our needs, what are different ways we can meet that need? Then you coalesce around and ask to how to meet that problem that's affecting many people. Yeah. Jazz hands organizing.

Yes. So you have gathered this coalition. You've sort of agreed on goals. People commit. And how do you hold everyone accountable? How do you make sure they carry through on their commitments? Well, and especially because for many people, this won't be the core part of their job, right? This is voluntary. This is in addition to the work they do, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, talk about movement roles, right? Like that's an entire movement role,

making sure people follow up, right? Holding folks accountable. Organizers are great for that. I think the important thing is for the majority of movements, you're not going to have everyone in the movement doing the exact same thing or building up to the exact same decision point. And so it's not as easy as just saying, everybody get here, sign your name here, you're done. Instead, you need to help people design their role in the movement. You need to help people

build a sense of personal responsibility. For that, I refer to something called the Ikea effect, which is the idea that if you build your own Ikea furniture, you're suddenly really attached to it and you love it versus if someone builds it for you. It refers to this social psychological principle also called the Hawthorne effect, where if people develop an idea themselves, they get really attached to it. They have a sense of personal responsibility. So don't just tell people what to do in movements. Help them figure out what role is best for them. Help them come up with it themselves and then work with them to hold them accountable. If someone's really excited about saying like, hey, I figured out my role in the movement.

I'm gonna send out these emails to my colleagues, right? Like, I'm so excited. All you need to do to check in is like, hey, I remember you were really excited about this thing. You know, like, how's it going? Versus like, all right, Steveve your job's to send out emails to these five people and every friday i'll check in on you like who wants to do that like who would want to participate in a movement where it's just some weird hierarchical top-down thing like a

corporation like uh-uh like movements are collective organizing there's collective responsibility and if you can help people feel that responsibility individually, then, you know, not to say they're always self-sustaining, but it's not as hard as you might think. So tap into what inspired them into it in the first place, right? Yeah. So thinking about these movements, these groups who are pushing for change, in your experience, do people sort of stick it out too long once it's clear it's not going to work? Or do they give up too soon? So I've seen a lot of movements lie dormant, and then something happens and suddenly they're given new life. But when movements lose their leaders, when, you know, the moment passes,

the effort that the movement's pushing for isn't trendy anymore. Yeah, sometimes they die out. Sometimes folks try to stick on longer than necessary, you know, and it's clear that things won't work. But given our conversation on movements not being these linear things, just because a movement has gone dormant doesn't mean that it's never going to come back up once again later. And sticking it out and being able to realize that even if the movement isn't going to happen now or in the next few months, that doesn't mean that it can never happen again. You just have to wait for that right moment and have the infrastructure, have the support, have the logistics just lying on the back burner for when there's interest. So then suddenly you can restart things back up. Like that's,

I think one of the biggest strengths of having grassroots movements like these, the infrastructure you build never goes away if you remember to keep it alive. Right. Ashley, what do you think? Yeah, I don't really think that movements die per se I think that what happens is is that they transform and so it's not something that ever really dies and just like Lily is saying the infrastructure constantly has to remain and be the same but now you have to readjust and assess okay what is it that we need to address? And to me, movement is movement is movement. It's not necessarily issue, issue, issue.

It just transforms based upon the actual need. Ashley, Lily, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks for having us. Yes, thank you for this space and this conversation. That's our show. I'm Amy Gallo. And I'm Amy Bernstein. Making organizational change is a huge topic.

And even after the conversation with Lily and Ashley, I feel like we only scratched the surface. A good next resource is Lily's book, DEI Deconstructed, Your No-Nonsense Guide to doing the work and doing it right. Another resource we can recommend is Shared Sisterhood, How to Take Collective Action for Racial and Gender Equity at Work. It's by Tina Opie and Beth Livingston, both of whom we've had on the show before. Shared Sisterhood is their philosophy around collective action, where people from historically power-dominant and marginalized groups work together. HBR has more podcasts to help you manage yourself, your team, and your organization.

Find them at hbr.org slash podcasts, or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Women at Work's editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoke, Tina Tobey-Mack, Rob Eckhart, Erica Truxler, Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates. Robin Moore composed this theme music. We'll be back in your feed on December 5th with a special episode. It's a Women at Work host reunion with Sarah, Nicole, and Emily. They'll join us to reflect on the topics we've covered this past season. I can't wait for that. Thanks for listening. Our inbox is always open. Women at Work at HBR.org.