On working for a diverse led team (part 1)

Despite the ample research that shows diverse teams are more successful, all teams and organizations for which I’ve worked thus far have been led and dominated by white folks. In these situations, I found myself deploying all sorts of creative methods and additional time and energy to even be acknowledged for the work I did — time and energy that my white peers did not have to put in on top of their daily work to be heard, promoted, or recognized.

Though I had read about the benefits of diverse teams in terms of performance, I still had yet to experience the positivity, creativity, and humanity in working for a person of color myself, until I joined Illumen Capital. In my role as our Product Manager leading our bias reduction and coaching work, I work for our Black founder and Managing Director, Daryn Dodson, and alongside two thoughtful colleagues, all of whom cultivate and preserve an inclusive culture. Over the next three posts, I wanted to share some brief reflections from my first six months working for a non-white manager or executive team.

(1) The default is never “no” — but rather, “yes and”.

In my first months working at Illumen Capital, I have not once heard an outright “no”. When I’ve brought a new idea for discussion, such as using an icebreaker to build relationships before just jumping into ‘doing’ the work, I’ve always been met with a “tell me more”, “why”, or similar inquiry that builds upon my suggestion, when I’ve expected a “no” to end the conversation before it started.

Having worked only in white dominant workplaces, coupled with growing up in a hierarchical culture core to my Chinese immigrant parents’ upbringings, my subconscious has been primed to expect “no”. The pre-emptive expectation of a “no” had affected me, so much so that my creativity, drive, and energy to innovate had slowly waned, along with the fearlessness to take risks in suggesting new ideas. I was so accustomed to my ideas being rejected without much room for discussion or suspension of norms like masculine defaults, being told that my ideas were “off scope and slowed us down” or were “not how we do things here”, pillars of white dominant culture that value urgency over creativity and the right way over the most culturally competent way.

In the same way that justice systems historically differ in their default assumptions (“innocent until proven guilty” versus “guilty until proven innocent”), I was so accustomed to my managers starting at “no” and spending more of my time convincing them to be on board, than actually using that energy to implement or operationalize new ideas. The emotional burden of going from “no to yes” rather than “yes and how can we make this even better” was exhausting, demoralizing, and ultimately unproductive.

Now, taking the lens of “yes and how can we make this even better” alongside my manager has allowed us to pilot a number of new ideas in a way that makes me feel supported and motivated to continue experimenting and suggesting new tools or products or paths to reduce bias with our fund managers.

Note: all views expressed are my own and are not representative of any organization of which I am a part, nor providing advice for anyone else.