For Nonprofit Staff of Color Struggling to Get Promoted

TL;DR: This article shares 3 ways I’ve built momentum for promotions (and raises) and helped others do the same. At the end, I also offer free access to a 45-minute training where I go even deeper on these topics (and others) to help you queue up your next career move.

You know the drill: you graduate college with a plan to change the world by devoting your life to a cause you care about. You find the perfect organization to work for — one really walking their talk on your issue, in the city you want to live, with team members that you’d love to work with. You get the job… and then you hear the salary and your heart drops.

That’s how I felt taking a $6,000 pay cut (at that time, about 15% of my salary) to move from a teaching job to my first program role at a nonprofit. What made matters worse is to take this job I needed to move from a moderately-priced city (Baltimore) to a more expensive one (DC). In my heart I knew it was the right move for so many reasons, but in my head, as I worked the math against my student loan payments, I couldn’t help feeling like I was making a mistake.

In my case, through mentors, great bosses, and honestly a lot of hustle, rapid learning and hard work, I was able to do really well: within 6 years, I’d doubled my initial salary. Within 8, I was on the Exec Team for one of the most exciting education nonprofits in the country. But I know that’s not the typical story in our sector, especially for women of color. In part, I started my company, Breaker28, to change that.

The Mine-Field: How Professionals of Color Get Stuck In Entry-Level Roles With Low Wages

What I’ve learned as a management coach and trainer is that unconscious bias at work isn’t usually deliberate and malicious — that’s what makes it even harder to spot. In fact, what the data says is that most disparate outcomes at work by race, gender, class, etc. have less to do with purposefully excluding people who are different, and more to do with doing small favors for people who are the same — or who we like — or who have been trained to speak up for themselves in ways that resonate with the norms of our dominant corporate culture. This means that folks who are different in a myriad of ways (race, class, gender, etc) miss out on the invisible advantages that help their peers get ahead.

What this might look like for a talented professional of color in a white-led nonprofit is not being considered for a growth opportunity because she’s not top of mind and her colleague is. Or unsuccessfully negotiating a raise because they didn’t have access to the coffee conversation with a peer that helped them with talking points to make their pitch a success. Or being hired “on potential” when you didn’t have every must-have for a role in order to diversify a team, only to flounder unsupported for 6 months before being shown the door. Or being consistently hired into the matrix-managed, problematic, associate role that plagues our sector and often requires managing up to and pushing back on powerful white executives in a way many of us have never been taught to do.

If that’s you, I have some sobering (but probably not surprising) news: doing good work is often not enough to escape the bias-traps that keep people of color in support roles in our sector. If you want to advance, it takes deliberate action beyond the obvious. I’m not saying that’s the way it should be, but that’s where we are. So let’s talk about what it takes to bust through some of the bias, and queue up the promotion or pay increase, or both, you’re hoping for.

Three Ideas to Build Momentum For Your Next Promotion

1. Being visible by sharing your most important wins. One of the sneakiest ways bias sometimes holds us back is that people with power don’t know just how good we are at our jobs. There are lots of reasons for this: sometimes our ideas or successes are ascribed to others, like our managers or project collaborators. Sometimes the work we do is “invisible” — e.g. when we’re doing our jobs, things run smoothly and we’re in the background. That’s why having a way to roll-up your most important wins and lessons learned at a regular cadence (once a month, once a quarter) is a critical step to ensuring people know just how successful you are at your job. This can look like a monthly email to your boss sharing your biggest wins and lessons learned. It can also be a more formal “business review” style check-in with your boss every quarter where you circle back on your key priorities and where you landed. The key is these conversations should be planned, have data, and tell the story you want told about the wins you got over the time period.
2. Make sure you’re getting the feedback you need. The data tells us women (and sometimes professionals of color of all genders) receive unclear praise or performance feedback as compared to white cis-gender men they work with. What this may look like is a lot of feedback like “you need to be more confident” or “watch your tone” and less feedback like “those slides are sloppy…I want clear visuals, no typos, and smoother transitions between slides.” So you can’t take for granted that no news is good news on the feedback front. You might be doing well, or your boss might not be giving you the full story. To combat this, aim to get peer feedback on your performance, ask your boss pointed questions about ways you think you can improve, and ask mentors in your office if you can count on them to tell you directly if they see anything that might be holding back your effectiveness. You don’t need to panic about this, but being proactive about building the feedback loop with your colleagues will make it much more likely you’ll receive it.
3. Enlist your boss as an ally, not an adversary, on the promotion/raise conversation. It’s easy to think that when we’re asking our boss for a raise or a promotion, it has to be a high-pressure conversation. Not so! Some of the best promotion and raise conversations I’ve had have happened when I enlisted my manager as my unofficial “promotion coach” — asking them to share the playbook on the data, accomplishments, and language they’d need to see/hear from me to advocate for a promotion or additional compensation. One low-stakes way to do this is, after a period of 2–3 important wins in a row, to ask if they’d be willing to coach you on how raise and promotion conversations happen in your organization. For example, you might ask, “If you were in my position, how would you think about your career growth at our organization?” or “Next week, I’d like to talk about a compensation adjustment to account for the additional responsibilities I’ve absorbed since Maggie and Tom left the organization three months ago. I know we’re both slammed, so I want to make sure we can use the time well: what information would be helpful to prepare to ensure we have a productive conversation?” In both these cases, you’re asking your manager to be your partner in thinking through your career — and opening the door for a candid conversation about what’s possible.

Need More Help? See Below for Free Webinar Link.

Clearly, there’s a myriad of other things I could share on this front, but in my experience, they’re more conducive to a conversation than a long-form article. So if you’re a nonprofit professional struggling to get promoted or get a raise, I want to invite you to a 45 minute zoom webinar next Thursday, May 30th at 8 pm EST where I’m going to go much deeper on strategies I’ve used (and helped others use) to build momentum for their first raise/promotion. Once you sign up, I’ll send you an email with the details (and a reminder an hour or so before). NOTE: I know this time is early for West Coast friends, so I’ll be sure to send the recording to those who sign up afterward.