Our Slash and Burn Approach of Talent Management Promotes Racism

Written by Audra Grassia, edited by Loryn Wilson Carter

This is the sixth post in a series about racism in the progressive political ecosystem. You can read my previous posts here.

My focus is how we — in the progressive and Democratic political ecosystem — reinforce racism by virtue of how we recruit people; how we promote (or fail to promote) people; and how we retain (or fail to retain) people.

In each part of this series, I’ll dive deep into a particular issue in a campaign career life cycle. I’ll offer ideas and solutions on how we can address and work towards creating more antiracist policies.

Slash and Burn: The Campaign Approach to Talent Management

In agriculture, “slash and burn” refers to essentially clearing land before planting new seeds. While this method initially produces very fertile soil, it ultimately deprives the land of nutrients, rendering it useless for long periods.

This is how we treat people in the progressive political space, and especially on candidate campaigns.

Campaigns and progressive organizations take in young, bright-eyed kids who believe they can do anything and make real change in the world. We get them involved in causes they are passionate about and then — in the name of the mission — we work them to the bone. We enforce a culture that glorifies some of the worst personal care habits you can imagine: missing doctor’s appointments in favor of work, working all hours and barely sleeping, eating like shit, drinking like sailors, smoking/vaping, and more.

Once a cycle is over, staff are usually laid off within two weeks of election day. We tell them to magically find the financial means to withstand 3–5 months of unemployment before the next cycle gears up and there are more jobs available.

Only those who can afford prolonged periods of unemployment stay in this business for very long at all. The people who it leaves behind are those who cannot afford the expense: on their bodies, their wallets, or their mental health.

We Require Personal Economic Sacrifices That Favor White People

White staff get hired faster after a cycle ends and into higher positions than their BIPOC colleagues. No organization tracks this data from year-over-year, but I have seen it happen over and over again.

First, we require people to have personal wealth to even be considered for a job. Campaigns commonly expect staff to have a laptop, a smartphone, and a car in order to accept a position.

A friend told me about a campaign he was on. There were two candidates for the Regional Organizing Director job. The first candidate, a person of color, was local to the state and to the community. But they didn’t have a car. The second candidate lived nearly 3000 miles away, but agreed to purchase a car when they arrived. The campaign flew the candidate (who was 3000 miles away) in and gave them the job. They did this rather than asking a donor to loan the organizer of color a car for 3 months. Or finding another way to accommodate the candidate without a car.

On top of that, there are racial pay disparities in progressive politics. In the 2018 Progressive Data Salary Survey we found that White people had a median salary ~$10,000 higher than non-White people. This gap persisted across years of experience.¹

The Deserted Talent Landscape

After a few cycles of getting the best work out of this young, ambitious group of people, many are forced to leave. This is what I mean by “slash and burn.” When we look out on the talent landscape, it’s been deserted. We scratch our heads and wonder:

Why don’t we have qualified people to fill x job?

Why is it so hard to find qualified talent who are also people of color?

Those who remain are more resilient. Or privileged. Or both. But we say it’s resilience and then reward them by continuing to promote them. At that point, it’s not because they were definitely the best. It’s because they were able to stick around cycle after cycle while others faded to the background to save themselves.

Detoxing

We also have a culture where we (especially those in my generation of politics) tend to wear our stories of dysfunctional campaigns, horrible bosses, and untenable situations like a badge of honor. We value “earning your stripes,” which is code for a willingness to accept a toxic working environment, a bad boss, a dysfunctional team, or worse. When junior staffers demand better, we respond with an air of “Well, I dealt with it — why can’t you?” Or worse — those same junior staffers don’t recover from the abuse they suffer and end up parroting the bad behavior on others, as they rise to the ranks of management.

This approach devalues people’s human experience. We ask them to come back to unsafe and unstable work environments and then do the emotional labor of “toughing it out” so they can advance in our industry.

Other types of addiction (drugs, alcohol, compulsive behaviors) often require a period of detoxification before an addict can truly start their recovery. For me, and politics, I took a nearly 6 year break after 2008, because I was burnt out.

It really wasn’t until then and after I started working in corporate and large-scale non-profit jobs that I could assess the damage that campaigns had done to me, personally, emotionally, and even professionally.

I felt ashamed of some of my bad behavior on campaigns — how I treated more junior staff. How I sometimes did things in the name of winning an election or just getting through the election that I really wouldn’t have done “in the real world.”

I might chalk this up to my own character failings. But the truth is, I wasn’t unique.

I sometimes joke that I still apologize to people who I worked with in one early-aught cycle, because if you knew me then, you probably didn’t think I was very nice. I was good at my job, according to my managers and as demonstrated by my work product.

But I wasn’t a very nice person. What I didn’t realize, then that I recognize now is that being good at my job was actually — in part — dependent on being nice to people around me and treating everyone with respect.

When I look back, I force myself to be at least a little forgiving. I was in my early twenties and I knew nothing about managing people. I was put in positions where I ostensibly had some power over other staff, who were similar in age to me. And I was being managed by an incredibly abusive boss. I don’t say this as an excuse. I say this as a warning. I treated others the way I was being treated and over a decade later — I seriously regret it.

Toxic work environments are born under bad leadership and they thrive under bad management.

I’ve already discussed the importance of elected leaders and candidates taking responsibility for the ecosystem that’s been built around them. They can do this especially by who they hire as managers.

When I first started, I was a bad manager. I had never been trained to be a manager. It was pretty clear that my boss, in this example, had never been trained to be a manager.

My goals were built around producing results and results were expected, regardless of the consequences to staff. People who were “emotional” or expressed any need for self-care were considered weak and problematic and were shunned by those in power. And those in power ignored pervasive abusiveness of the managers they’d entrusted, even when it was later brought to their attention in explicit detail.

There is Another Way

The ultimate consequence of our slash-and-burn approach to staff leaves us in the same place cycle after cycle. We are left rebuilding the bench over and over and over again. And those who survive to become party and consultant leadership are rarely as representative or diverse as those who started with them.

In my post on recommendations for fixing our broken system, I note that the lack of training, mentoring, and coaching for people management is a root cause of the toxic work environments that can have a disproportionately negative impact on BIPOC.

While there are some outside organizations (discussed in last week’s medium post) now leaning into building these support systems, they are not nearly expansive enough or accessible enough.

Ultimately, I am advocating for what organizational development professionals have known all along — the better people feel about coming to work and doing their job, the better they will do their job.

I believe our lack of attention to training people managers — not just project managers — has actually cost us elections. I’ve actually witnessed it. You can’t manage a $10+ million budget, a large team of consultants and staff particularly effectively if you are inept at managing other human beings. Sometimes, in spite of the manager themselves, it works. But I’ve seen where poor management practices have sunk campaigns that electoral math suggests we should have won.

Sometimes, even with particularly good management, we still lose elections. But just imagine if we could go into every election cycle confident that every manager on every campaign actually had the requisite people management skills to do their jobs in the most effective way possible.

I believe that talent who otherwise burn out of politics because of our toxic culture would remain in greater numbers. And I believe that this is a root cause to ensuring BIPOC operatives remain in our ecosystem.

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Footnotes:

[1] This is one small glimpse of salary disparities, but there hasn’t been an attempt to assess this across all campaign salaries.