Alida Miranda-Wolff: “The biggest opportunity is to listen to employees.”

Expert Interview for Sharehold’s Redesigning Belonging Research

Published in

Sharehold

6 min readSep 17, 2020

This post is part of an ongoing series in which Sharehold is publicly sharing our in-progress research that seeks to explore and answer the question: What does it mean to belong at work in a time of uncertainty? Are you interested in receiving our research insights when they’re released? Sign up here.

Meet Alida Miranda-Wolff

Alida Miranda-Wolff is the CEO of Ethos Talent, a full-service diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) transformation company serving growth-stage companies across the U.S. From growing up in a divided, multi-heritage, Cuban-American family to a car accident that increased her awareness of the lack of accessibility on her college campus, Alida has always known how fragile a sense of community and belonging can be. After leading the DEI turnaround within a venture capital firm and its portfolio of investment companies, Alida struck out on her own to build Ethos and has since partnered with the likes of dscout, SpotHero, and the Pat Tillman Foundation.

As part of Sharehold’s research on redesigning belonging at work for uncertainty, we interviewed Alida as a leading DEI consultant. Her interview highlighted a few themes:

The practical structure required to support day-to-day behaviors of inclusion
How silence and fear holds executives back from gathering candid feedback from Black employees
Why everyone — not just DEI leaders — need to take responsibility for belonging

Read on for a few selections from our interview with Alida:

What does belonging mean to you?

“Belonging is feeling welcomed, valued, and leveraged for all of who you are in an environment that you believe in and that, in turn, believes in you. There is inherent reciprocity when there is belonging. There is an inherent understanding and mutuality.”

How have you seen day-to-day work practices shift since beginning at shelter-in-place orders? Have you found ways to foster connection and inclusion remotely?

“In some ways, bringing people together online has been even better than in person. [In Ethos’s training with client teams], we have gotten more questions, more activity in terms of chat, because people have different modalities that they can use to communicate. We’re using breakout rooms where people feel like they are really within a group of just those four people as opposed to a larger room. What we’re seeing is much more openness and vulnerability.”

“Additionally, we changed our team meeting structures. One, we scheduled [meetings] to be longer — 90 minutes — which means that people have time to settle into the meeting and to exit the meeting.

The second is that we always do a team development activity or an activity that gets people talking to each other about things unrelated to work and is at a deeper level.

Third, we set clear meaning agreements that prioritize people getting their voices in the room at equal levels and being able to share, work on specific situations together, and volunteer ideas together. We were intentional about what togetherness would look like.

It seems counterintuitive. People are saying, ‘Well, we want more natural conversation. I want this to feel more natural.’ But the reality is, every time I asked them to deconstruct something that worked, it’s much more structured. And I think that that’s the thing that distributed companies do very well.”

How has COVID-19, unrest, and this general time of uncertainty impacted the experience of belonging at work?

“It’s not just that you’re online. We’re at the intersection of a public health crisis, a public safety crisis, and an economic crisis. Every day has been another kind of unrest. The country is in a shambles. And for the first time, people who were not thinking about issues like racial inequity, social justice, and police brutality are [thinking about it], but that also creates issues in this virtual environment.”

“When George Floyd was murdered, I talked to 41 companies in six days. I said 41 different times, ‘Have you scheduled one-on-ones with Black people in your company?’ And the answer was no, no, no. It’s a conspiracy of silence that reinforces power structures in favor of white dominant groups…

There are some strategies that I’ve seen are effective. I have CEOs who make an appointment to meet one-on-one with three or four of their employees a week to just chat and have coffee.”

Many companies are now rushing to hire DEI leads. Will this have an impact?

“I see so much skepticism [in DEI] roles from employees. A lot of people are just posting pictures of the only Black person on a leadership team being the Chief Diversity Officer. There’s an element of, ‘You hired this person because you have a problem with this and you’re trying to make them solve it and you’re not taking it on your own’

The [DEI leaders] who are permitted to do their job successfully have strong relationships with other influencers, other managers, other department leaders, where they are supporting the strategy and development of initiatives that get carried out overall…

That’s the whole thing about belonging. One person can’t do it. The whole community has to create the conditions for it.”

What opportunities do you see for the future as we begin to reach a “new normal”?

“The biggest opportunity is to listen to employees. It seems cliche and simple, but companies don’t do it. A lot of the surveys that they construct are not geared towards truly listening to what their employees need, but reinforcing or confirming what they already want to do, or what they already think, or what another company is doing.

“The biggest opportunity is to listen to employees.”

The biggest challenge is the amount of uncertainty we’re facing. It feels like the target is always moving… Having clear roles and responsibilities assigned, knowing how you interact with those people, knowing that this is your point person to talk about these issues creates a sense of structure and stability.”