Daisy Auger-Dominguez: “To build belonging means that you’ve got to do the work.”

Expert Interview for Sharehold’s Redesigning Belonging Research

Published in

Sharehold

6 min readOct 22, 2020

This post is part of an ongoing series in which Sharehold is publicly sharing our research that answered the question: “How does uncertainty impact one’s sense of belonging at work?” Access the insights here.

Meet Daisy Auger-Dominguez

Daisy Auger-Dominguez’s mission is to make workplaces more equitable. As the Chief People Officer of VICE Media Group, she leads the global human resources organization. She is a recognized leader in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) by AdWeek and Harvard Business Review and was recently invited to deliver her TED talk, Inclusion Revolution. Her book by the same name will be released in early 2021.

As part of Sharehold’s research on redesigning belonging at work for uncertainty, we interviewed Daisy as a leader at the forefront of DEI. Her interview highlighted a few themes:

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is a requirement to foster belonging at work
Belonging is a core management skill
The work of belonging is a long haul, systemic effort

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

How do you define belonging?

“I can’t define belonging without defining diversity and equity and inclusion. These are terms that have been applied and misapplied for a long time.

Diversity is the mix of backgrounds, ethnicities, demographics.

Inclusion is around, how do you make that mix work? How do you create environments where folks feel that they are part of processes and part of being in an organization?

Equity… refers to the systemic and structural limitations. Part of the challenge with this work is recognizing that a lot of this is systemic and structural. It’s not one thing that has to be fixed. It’s really a whole set of things that need to be addressed.

Belonging is that higher-order state. It’s not enough to be included in a meeting, but it’s about feeling that you’re truly respected and valued and that you matter, that you’re essential.”

What does belonging look like in your work with VICE?

“In every organization that I’ve ever worked with, the underlying element of belonging is managerial skills. What excites me about being at VICE Media Group in this role now is that I get to look at the full employee lifecycle and address the manager experience from a holistic lens so they can be more inclusive, supportive, efficient, and productive. All of these pieces have to be put together. For far too long, we’ve siloed them. Workshops and trainings are just band-aids that we put on these pieces, and we don’t look at the whole ecosystem.

Fundamentally, employees don’t leave companies. They leave their managers…. It all fundamentally falls on the lack of managerial skills. We call those inclusive managerial skills. I just call it good managerial skills — to be able to look at your team, and to know them, understand them, value them, recognize their gaps, recognize what you have too much of or too little of in terms of the mix of your team.

It’s my job to model for [the team] what an inclusive manager should look like, how they should behave, and how to operate. Then, how do we do this for the broader organization?

It’s about building awareness and the muscle to address what you learn. We’re not going to be a one and done shop here of just throwing one training and checking the box and saying that we did that. This is lifelong work.

I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I still have an incredible amount of biases that lift up every single day in my decision making. We have to think about this holistically. We also have to think about training that’s bespoke, that addresses the root cause of symptoms not the symptoms themselves.”

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

“All of a sudden, we’re realizing that it was bad before COVID-19 and it got worse after COVID-19 for a lot of people. Those vulnerabilities and frailties that existed before in the system just became wide, huge gaps. Before [the murder of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd], you could look away and you could not take action. But the events of the last couple of weeks are putting it front and center for you.

For a lot of people who’ve never had to face this before, it feels exhausting. And for others, that is the compounded trauma, because this is how we’ve been living our entire lives.”

“I’ve been calling it sustained exhaustion. We’re tired of navigating 1,000,001 things in our homes and in our lives and of feeling like this is never going to end. It’s compounded trauma, particularly for people of color — the trauma from COVID-19, the mental and wellness trauma, the economic trauma, the financial trauma, the trauma of uncertainty. It’s the trauma of being a person of color in a country where you can die for simply walking in the street because of your skin color. That compounded trauma leads to sustained exhaustion.”

What opportunities and challenges do you see for the future of belonging at work?

“There’s going to be more collective recognition of what needs to be done to be truly inclusive… Part of the opportunity here is to build something that’s more sustainable, that’s more embedded in the system.

Finally, we’re realizing that [racism] is not just a random individual act — there’s something systemic here. [White people] have a role to play, and they need to move away from their frailty and do the work. Right now, that means listening and sitting in your discomfort.”

“They all know that it’s a lot of work [to create a culture of belonging and inclusion], but for the most part, they don’t recognize how much work is going to take from them personally… You can’t just put a person of color or a marginalized person in these roles. They need influencing skills and business skills.

What I wish they understood was that creating a place with a sense of belonging for all their employees means that they have to do the work, despite the discomfort that they’re going to feel. They don’t get what hard and challenging means [in this context] because they haven’t had to experience it on a daily basis.

To build belonging means that you’ve got to do the work. It requires you to ask questions and ask for feedback that you may not want to hear. It requires you to truly listen. And it requires you to act on what you learn.”