Voltage Control is proud to partner with Capital Factory in welcoming you to a distinguished panel of experts discussing Inclusion and Diversity. The panel covers a range of perspectives including companies with established programs, companies just getting started, thought leaders, and services organizations helping others design and execute internal programs.

Join us at Capital Factory 1st Floor on March 10, 2017 12:30 PM — 2:30 PM. The panel will consistent of a moderated discussion followed by audience Q&A. There will also be facilitated audience interaction as well as printed resources to help you implement inclusion and diversity at your company.

Food and beverages are complimentary.

WHO IS THE EVENT FOR?

Inclusion and Diversity leaders in tech, entrepreneurs, engineers, and the men and women who support and invest in inclusion diversity.

Confirmed Panelist

Aubrey Blanche — Global Head of D&I @ Atlassian

Aubrey Blanche is the Global Head of Diversity & Inclusion at Atlassian. There, she works with teams across the business to provide greater opportunities for everyone to join Atlassian and do the best work of their lives there. Her work spans the talent lifecycle from increasing access to technical education for underrepresented minorities through recruiting, retention, and advancement of all Atlassians. She relies heavily on empirical social science in her work, and has developed a new team-level paradigm for external diversity reporting. She believes that leading with empathy is the key to driving meaningful, sustainable change and creating highly effective teams.

In all areas of her work, she seeks to design effective interventions, programs, and talent practices that create equal opportunities for all Atlassians, and for the global tech industry. She is heavily involved in multiple industry groups seeking to define new standards for company transparency, reporting, and investment in diversity & inclusion. She is an advisor to SheStarts, a Sydney-based accelerator focused exclusively on supporting female founders, BeVisible, and Joonko. She is the co-founder of Sycamore, a community aiming to fix the VC funding gap for underrepresented founders.

Bernard C. Coleman III, Global Head of D&I @ Uber

Bernard is the Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) and he drives the D&I programs through meaningful relationships, both internally and externally, as well as promotes Uber as a leader in ride sharing, and as a forerunner in D&I engagement. Prior to Uber, Bernard led Hillary for America’s D&I and HR initiatives, as the first ever Chief Diversity and Human Resources Officer in U.S. history for any presidential campaign and political party. Bernard’s written for Forbes, Catalyst, SHRM and his insights have appeared in the Nasdaq Government Clearinghouse and the Huffington Post. Bernard holds an M.B.A. from Trinity University, a B.A. in psychology from Hampton University, a Strategic Diversity and Inclusion Management certification from Georgetown University, and is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership.

FREE DOWNLOAD

Get Our Build & Lead Your A-Team

Assemble your team and lead them through the different phases to keep building toward the big idea.

Get It Now

Christina Sass — Cofounder and President @ Andela

Christina Sass is the Co-Founder and President of Andela or, as CNN has called it, “The startup that’s harder to get into than Harvard”.

Founded on the idea that brilliance is evenly distributed but opportunity is not, Andela aims to train 100,000 world-class software developers in Africa over the next 10 years. To do so, Andela has created a new model of education that funds itself through the work we do: training brilliant young software developers and placing them with top international companies. With a .6% acceptance rate, Andela is the most selective tech training program in Africa and has been featured by Wired, CNN, The Today Show, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and many others.

Prior to Andela, Christina built education and employment programs in China, Gaza and the West Bank, Kenya, and her home state of Georgia (Go Dawgs). Christina serves on the Advisory Council of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and on the board of the non-profit, the Global Give Back Circle. She also serves as education topic expert for the Clinton Global Initiative University annual meeting. She was named as a 2014 New York Business Journal “Women of Influence”, a 2015 Business Insider “23 most innovative and inspiring women in New York City Tech” and a 2015 University of Georgia “40 Under 40” Alumni.

Kimberly Strong — Founder and CEO @ Strong Connexion

Kimberly Strong is the Founder and CEO of Strong Connexion, LLC., a human resources consulting boutique firm that specializes in advising start up tech and venture capital firms on building workplaces with high levels of employee engagement and positive corporate cultures. She also recently joined Pipeline Angels as an Angel Investor where she invests and advises women-led and non-binary femme for-profit social ventures.

Throughout her 20+ year career in human resources across consumer focused industries, Kimberly has promoted corporate objectives and organizational growth through creating and implementing talent acquisition strategies, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and education programs. As an innovative leader, Kimberly understands the importance of aligning all stakeholders and customizing managerial principles to create efficiencies, offer seamless customer service and drive improvements in the workplace experience.

Prior to her current role, Kimberly served as the Vice President of Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) at Target Corporation. In this role, she facilitated communications, education and training plans that increased awareness and understanding of D&I and maximized employee engagement, impacting over 366K employees across 1,795 stores and 38 distribution centers. She also collaborated with the Chief Human Resources Officer and the diversity analytics team on ways to identify, track and measure success.

Kimberly’s dedication to education, mentorship and advocacy are also evident through her community involvement. She has taken on leadership and committee roles with The All in Together Campaign, where she supports the empowerment of women to drive change, and the Executive Leadership Council, an organization that helps develop global black leaders. Furthermore, she is proud to have received the Howard Business School Alumni Exemplar Award recognizing her work as a mentor to students.

She received her B.A. from Howard University in Washington, DC.

Melinda Epler — CEO @ Change Catalyst

Melinda Briana Epler has more than 20 years of experience elevating brands and developing business innovation strategies for social entrepreneurs, mature social enterprises, Fortune 500 companies and global NGOs.

As Founder & CEO of Change Catalyst, Melinda empowers diverse, inclusive and sustainable tech innovation through events, education, mentorship and funding. Through Tech Inclusion, an initiative of Change Catalyst, she partners with the tech community to solve diversity and inclusion together. Her work spans the full tech ecosystem, from Education to Workplace, Entrepreneurship and Policy.

Melinda speaks, mentors and writes about diversity and inclusion in tech, social entrepreneurship, women entrepreneurs and investing. She is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker — her film and television work includes projects that exposed the AIDS crisis in South Africa, explored women’s rights in Turkey, and prepared communities for the effects of climate change. She has worked on several television shows, including NBC’s The West Wing.

Sandi Mays — CIO & EVP @ Zayo Group

Sandi Mays is a founder and EVP, CIO & Service at Zayo Group, a leader in global telecommunications providing bandwidth and connectivity over an exceptional network infrastructure. Sandi’s passion is providing an effortless customer experience for both internal and external customers.

Previously, Sandi served in various management positions at ICG Communications, Level 3 Communications, MFS Telecom, WorldCom, Focus Enterprises and Northern Trust.

Sandi is a champion for diversity in the tech community and serves on the Board of the Latino Leadership Institute, the Salesforce CIO Advisory Board and the Denver Metro Chamber Economic Development Executive Committee. She is also a patron/supporter of the Denver Art Museum, the Colorado Ballet, Denver Performing Arts Center and Greenhouse scholars and an active member of many minority and diverse charities. In 2016 Sandi was named the 2016 Most Inspirational Woman in Communications by Women in Communications (WIC). She earned a B.S. (magna cum laude) in Finance from DePaul University.

Follow @SandiMays

Trey Boynton — Director of D&I @ Duo Security

Trey Boynton has spent her professional career working to create inclusive environments. For nearly 20 years, she worked in university settings working with students, faculty and staff in diversity leadership roles. She joined Duo Security in August 2017 as their first head of diversity and inclusion to guide overall strategy and connectedness initiatives.

For Trey, inclusion work is deeply personal. She describes it as head and heart work centered on creating space so that employees are valued, celebrated, and able to define their own success. In short, her ultimate goal is to reduce barriers to brilliance.

Originally from her beloved northern California, she studied at Spelman College, Georgetown University and the University of Michigan. Her most important job is helping her two young feminist daughters continue to be awesome. In the two minutes of time she has left to spare, she fancies herself a furious colorer, a haphazard crochet-er and an expert on all things Jane Austen.

Sign Up Now!

Voltage Control facilitates innovation workshops and we specialize in Design Sprints. Please email Douglas at douglas@voltagecontrol.co if you are interested in having us facilitate your Sprint, coach your team on how to run an effective Sprint, or are curious to learn more about how to adapt Design Sprints or other workshop techniques to help your company or product.

If you are in or near Austin, come visit us at the Austin Design Sprint meetup. Each month we have a guest speaker share their experience participating in a Design Sprint . If you would like to be a future speaker please email me.

The post Inclusion & Diversity Panel appeared first on Voltage Control.

As a leader and entrepreneur responsible for building and growing teams, the importance of building diverse teams has become more and more evident to me. Diversity of thought and diversity of perspective are crucial to obtaining truly innovative solutions. A 2015 study by McKinsey found that gender-diverse companies are 15% more likely to outperform and ethnically diverse companies are 35% more likely to outperform. One of my favorite Patton quotes sums this up quite nicely.

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” — General George S. Patton Jr

Shortly after starting Voltage Control, Stephen Straus and Josh Kerr approached me about integrating my innovation workshops into Kung Fu AI’s sales and scoping process. As I started getting more involved with Kung Fu’s recruiting process, Stephen told me about his Diversity & Inclusion pledge, which challenges startups to apply the Rooney Rule. Applying this rule has already encouraged us to slow down, giving our process the slack it needed to identify individuals who were not only diverse but also a much better fit for the role.

This work couldn’t have been more timely, as I was scheduled to attend a Diversity and Inclusion workshop that Capital One organized and hosted at their offices in San Francisco. Melinda Epler and Wayne Sutton of Change Catalyst provided the content and facilitated the workshop. Change Catalyst empowers diverse, inclusive and sustainable tech innovation — through Tech Inclusion and Startup Ecosystem programs.

This workshop brought together startups from across the US ranging from 2–200 employees to participate. I personally found the stories and experiences from these startups as impactful as the expert content prepared by Change Catalyst. During the workshop, I learned new concepts, as well as new vocabulary for things I’ve struggled to articulate in the past.

“The most important thing I learned was the spectrum of ally behavior, and how important it is to pick the right techniques for diversity and inclusion that align with where your team/company are on that spectrum.”, Ellen Chisa, CEO at new startup

Inclusion

After attending the workshop, I have a much better working knowledge of inclusion and am now better equipped to create an inclusive culture. In order to better understand inclusion, it is helpful to compare it to the definition of diversity. Diversity is bringing people with different backgrounds to the table. Inclusion is inviting them to speak and encouraging them to lead.

5 stages of inclusion

1. I feel welcome
2. I am safe
3. I am engaged
4. I commit to being here
5. I belong here

“While I think we’ve worked really hard on creating a welcoming community, I’d now like to focus on creating a space where you don’t just feel welcomed, but you feel like you really belong. A sense of belonging creates roots, commitment, and in turn, stronger communities. I look forward to helping foster this sense within Capital Factory, and the tech community in Austin in general. I want all types of people to feel like they belong in this industry.” — Abba Binns, Capital Factory, Austin, TX

Microaggressions & Biases

A microaggression is a statement, action, or incident regarded as an instance of indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group such as a racial or ethnic minority. The workshop helped me realize that microaggressions discourage inclusion and must be dealt with decisively. I’ve set a personal goal to no longer quietly ignore microaggressions and instead confront them with an honest and direct conversation.

Despite our best intentions, unconscious biases can derail our attempts to create an inclusive culture. They can also creep into our recruiting and interviewing efforts. It is a good idea to learn about these biases and consider tools and techniques to counteract them. I’ve found these videos produced by Facebook helpful and there are many others like these.

Affinity Groups

In the past, I’ve advocated and created special interest groups and guilds to support individuals in their quests to learn new skills or follow their interests. However, affinity groups and employee resource groups (ERGs) were new to me. If these groups are created with purpose and allow the members to create an authentic community, I believe they would have a profound impact on fostering an inclusive culture.

The other attendees who had experience with these types of groups were happy with their results and even expressed interest in finding better software tools for group communications. One attendee warned us of the dangers of Slack for such a group, as anybody can add someone else, which has led to “outing” of someone still “in the closet”. Many things should be considered to ensure you are nurturing inclusion.

Diversity

Recruiting & Onboarding

Melinda & Wayne challenged the group to think through our purpose and goals and to consider the entire pipeline holistically. Once you’ve hired an employee they still have to be onboarded and they need to feel welcomed and supported through that process.

One tool we used, which was new to me, is an empathy map. I like that it forces you to consider how this individual will experience through their various senses and then you are invited to consider how that might manifest positively and negatively. This prepares you to have an inclusive mindset when designing all aspects of your recruiting pipeline from writing job descriptions to crafting your employee handbook.

Job Descriptions

A few years back, I remember reading some research from Google about how a candidate’s college was not a good indicator of success in the job. I also read their advice on removing superlatives and “bonus points” sections from job descriptions. In the workshop, we learned that while women on average will only apply to jobs where they believe they meet 100% of the requirements of the job description, men will apply to jobs where they only need 30%. Based on those stats, it is clear that you should keep your job descriptions clear and concise if you want to attract a diverse workforce.

The language you choose when writing your job description can provide cues into your culture. Take extra care with your use of pronouns and consider using a tool to check for bias in your copy. https://textio.com/

“I’ve already started making changes in my startup, around the hiring process. If you’d asked me a week ago, I would’ve thought that sourcing and inbound talent would be my main focus, but since the workshop I’ve been digging into the interviewing process itself, examining our questions, expectations, and care.”, Arsenio Santos, VP of Engineering at Grove

Sourcing

Once you have established and are continuing to foster inclusive workplace practices, it’s time to focus on sourcing. I often hear folks make the claim that lack of diversity is a pipeline problem. While I can understand how they arrive at that conclusion, it is simply an easy excuse to avoid the extra work of enhancing the top of the funnel.

It is also important to consider confirmation bias and selection bias, due to the fact that your company will more likely attract individuals that are similar to the individuals already employed there. If you are interested in diversifying your funnel, here are a few job boards that target candidates with underrepresented backgrounds:

• BeVisible — Career network for Latinx
• Women Who Code — Inspiring women to excel in technology careers.
• POCIT — Jobs for people of color in tech.
• hiretechladies.com
• eiversityworking.com
• employediversity.com
• include.io
• jopwell.com
• digitaldiversitynetwork.com

Stereotype Threat

Stereotype Threat is a situational predicament in which people are or feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group. The workshop taught me to consider if candidates may not bring their “A game” due to their own internal stereotype threat. Consider encouraging a candidate to become more active, take them on a walk, give them a high five, break them out of any negative priming they may have received prior to walking in the door.

Conclusion

Our cohort will stay connected using Slack Channel, so that we can share our progress, continue to compare approaches, and help each other become advocates for diversity and inclusion in our larger communities. I’m looking forward to this ongoing work.

Regardless, if you currently have no diversity and are just trying to figure out how to start, or if you are looking to improve your techniques, I suggest connecting with a group like Change Catalysts or finding some local startups that are also working on diversity. The more I learn, the more I realize that there is so much more for us to do. I welcome your thoughts and words of encouragement. Please share via the comments below.

The post Diversity & Inclusion appeared first on Voltage Control.