We need to change our broken professional pipelines
When I was 15, I wanted to get a summer job. I walked around my neighborhood and asked stores if they were hiring. Every store manager asked me whether I had any retail experience. I did not. Manager after manager told me they wouldn’t hire me without experience.
How was I supposed to get that experience?
If we’re honest, there’s probably little any of us has been able to do without someone taking that first chance on our capacity to do something we’ve never done before. I’ve done many things I never imagined — some because I heard about a project and asked, but many times because someone else thought of me when a project came up.
There has been an increasing awareness in the social sector that our staff and boards often do not reflect the communities in which we work. There have been efforts to change recruiting practices, to create internship and training programs, to reach out to opportunity youth. They’re a good start, but they alone are not going to fix the broken pipeline.
Have you ever found out that a coworker landed a high-profile project you had no idea existed?
I can list writing successful grant proposals on my resume because I told my first manager that I was interested in grant writing. I could ask because I knew it was something our organization did.
How do you ask about what you don’t know? Whether you’re looking for a job or freelance work, chances are you are only applying for opportunities you saw listed somewhere you knew to look or that you found out about through your relationships with other people.
This is referred to as “the thin file,” wherein people are promoted based on high-profile projects and feedback that is given out informally and idiosyncratically rather than through a process that takes into account the ability and potential of all possible candidates. Basically it is the visible impact of the saying, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know who knows what you can do.” The thin file is a big reason why companies’ diversity efforts may change things at entry-level without changing anything at the senior level.
A report from the Building Movement Project found that less than 20% of executive director positions are held by people of color — in spite of similarities in education levels, current positions, and years in the field. We cannot assume that mission driven organizations are as intentional about internal business practices as they are about external programs.
Moreover, it is not enough to believe that we only need to get people in the door and that meritocracy will care of the rest.
In recent years, many programs aimed at helping first-generation college students attend college have shifted their focus to helping them graduate. Helping kids get into college is not enough. The environment is different. The challenges are different. The expectations are different. What makes you successful in high school is not always the recipe for success in college.
To act as though the foot in the door is enough is to ignore implicit biases and the ways in which we fail to structure our organizations to mitigate them.
It’s not necessarily because a manager is racist or sexist or ableist. It can also be as innocuous as assigning projects to the people who are top of mind because their desks are next to ours or we’ve worked with them before, even if the new employee might be a better pick. As humans, we all have mental shortcuts.
When you think of a leader, who does that look like? What indicates that they are a leader? Is it their title or degrees? Is it certain behaviors? Would your answers change if I put in front of you a woman of color or a person who is deaf or a teenager?
Maybe it is not currently feasible to offer paid internships, but we can make sure that candidates who needed to take summer jobs instead of unpaid internships don’t have that counted against them.
Does the new hire actually need a specific degree or do they need to be able to do p, d, and q?
Instead of recruiting board members from our social circles or the C-suite — the people who get asked by every other organization — we could ask them to help us find board members. We could reach out to professional associations. We could offer more inclusive ways for board members to contribute beyond raising or giving a certain dollar amount.
When hiring for top positions, do our eyes immediately go to resumes that list an MBA? There’s nothing wrong with MBAs, but someone can be a stellar graphic designer and also have the ability to create a vision, to build consensus out of discord, to keep her team moving forward through the dips. Are we evaluating all our people regularly? Greasing squeaky wheels is not leadership.
How many rising leaders are we overlooking? And, like those first-generation college students, are they getting the right support?
Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior, explains that women are often over-mentored and under-sponsored. Mentoring is has many benefits. But without the ability to practice leadership, one can only grow so far.
We have many people willing to tell us what they think we should do and not nearly enough who are asking what we think when we are not in the room.
If all of our efforts stop at getting people in the door, then that is where our results will stop. We can’t change anything at the top if we don’t do anything to change the ways that people get there.
Start small. If your favorite go-to person is deluged, they might actually be relieved if you ask them to recommend someone for a project rather than asking if they can do one more thing.
Wherever we sit, we can all benefit from asking,
“What am I missing? What do you see that I can’t from here?”
This post was written for Wethos and also appears on The Nonprofit Revolution.
