Three Tips for Leading an Affinity Group
Ultimately these groups are creating community in spaces where a lot of us have typically felt isolated, and that in itself is a huge deal.
When I joined Storyblocks in 2017, I was one of four women on a roughly 20 person engineering team. The engineering ladies and I would regularly go to lunch to chat and sometimes commiserate about being women engineers. We called ourselves the Digital Divas.
Fast forward a few years: there are over a dozen of us and we’ve rebranded ourselves to the Society of Underrepresented Genders of Engineering (SURGE) to be inclusive of more gender identities. We’re still doing lunches, but they’re virtual to support our distributed group during the pandemic. It’s 2021 and we decide to become an official affinity group, which I volunteer to lead. Here are three lessons I learned during my time leading SURGE, which can hopefully be helpful if you’re leading a group, a member of a group, or interested in starting or supporting a group.
Regularly evolve the group based on what its members want and need.
Over time in an affinity group, the members will change as people come and go, the overall company culture or mission will shift, and of course, macro world events will continue to play out. With all of those variables continuously evolving, it’s important to regularly pull up and make sure the way the group is operating is still serving its members within the organization they belong to.
With SURGE, we ran an end-of-year retrospective in December 2021, a la a typical engineering retrospective, to discuss what went well and what we’d like to change going forward. That generated helpful feedback for what the group wanted to keep doing, along with solid ideas for things to do in 2022.
From there we did a New Year New SURGE planning meeting at the beginning of 2022 to reorganize ourselves and set some goals for the year. We opted to structure ourselves into subcommittees to start doing more community engagement, professional development, and internal programming initiatives.
On paper, this all seemed great! We were branching out from just doing lunches and seeking ways to impact beyond our group. But after a few months, during a pulse check conversation at one of our monthly lunches, it was clear that most of the group felt pressured by the additional structure and expectations from this setup. Ultimately we were trying to do too much and it wasn’t feasible alongside everyone’s day-to-day work.
We dissolved the subcommittees then and there, and decided to refocus on our monthly lunches and create a social safe space for each other. This adjustment made SURGE more approachable and enjoyable for its members, and better suited to the capacity we had available.
TL;DR What sounds like a great idea one month may not be so great a month later. How the group operates and the goals of the group will change over time, and that’s good! Make an effort to embrace and discuss those changes via retrospectives, planning meetings, and informal pulse checks. The focus should be that the group is positively impacting its members, so continue being open to feedback and flexible to keep that goal at the forefront.
Create direct lines of communication with upper management.
At their core, affinity groups are a safe space for people who share a common identity characteristic. The primary positive impact of these groups' existence is creating a psychologically safe space for underrepresented and underserved groups.
Beyond that benefit to the group members, there’s the potential for a major impact in being able to advocate for and effect change to better support underrepresented and underserved groups within the company and wider community.
Some examples of this are:
- Making changes to performance review processes to make them more equitable
- Updating job description language to be more accessible and inclusive
- Spinning up an internship program to provide career opportunities to new graduates or individuals making career transitions
- Running resume workshops in the local community
Those types of changes require buy-in and bidirectional communication with upper management since upper management typically has access to the resources and authorization to make them happen.
If your group is interested and ready for initiatives like this, start by identifying key partners in upper management to check in with regularly. These check-ins can be as simple as casual quarterly chats over coffee; it doesn’t have to be super frequent or super formal depending on the situation. They will help you get updates on what’s happening at the company-wide/organizational level and find out where your group can hook into processes to improve them.
Establishing a partner at that level will also build rapport and make it easier to surface and elevate feedback from your group. It’s difficult to get meaningful feedback as a leader; it’s often intimidating for individuals to surface directly and there are not always venues to do so. Establishing a direct connection to give feedback not only validates the feelings of the group but can make positive changes in the organization and surface issues or sentiments that company leadership was not aware of.
TL;DR Identifying key partners in upper management to meet regularly and establish a rapport with can provide a venue for elevating meaningful feedback from your group and enable your group to make a long-lasting impact on processes at your company. It can be intimidating but remember we’re all just humans at the end of the day, and in a healthy culture, your leadership should be happy to connect with you and support your group.
Put psychological safety first.
As mentioned above, the core intention of an affinity group is to bring people with a common identity together in a safe space. It’s not the job of the group to solve world issues or create a perfect company culture. If you can move the needle, that’s wonderful and something to be proud of! But it’s certainly not something to feel pressured to do.
Ultimately these groups are creating community in spaces where a lot of us have typically felt isolated, and that in itself is a huge deal. So above everything else going on, make sure your group is an inclusive, positive, and psychologically safe space for its members.
That’s not always an easy task, especially depending on the culture of the company your group sits within. Fortunately, Storyblocks has an open, communicative, and friendly culture, but I’ve still tried to be intentional about cultivating a safe space within SURGE. A few things I’ve done with SURGE that have helped create a psychologically safe space are:
- Introduce yourself to new group members by meeting with them one-on-one. Establishing a personal connection off the bat can help them feel more welcomed and comfortable in the group.
- Create space for unstructured, organic, and nonjudgemental social time. Lunches have been great for SURGE to just talk, get to know each other, and organically share issues or opinions.
- Also, create intentional space to connect and talk when things aren’t going well. Whether it’s a macro world issue or a difficult time within the company, making space to be open when things are hard is important. For example, SURGE connected after Roe v. Wade was overturned and that was a helpful moment to grieve and be there for each other.
TL;DR The main intention of affinity groups is to create a safe and inclusive space for its members, to give them a community when they otherwise may not have one. Keep that purpose at the forefront of your group. Don’t feel pressured to always have action items, a roadmap, or a strategy, but continue to make space for the members of your group to openly be their authentic selves.
For me as a woman of color, my journey in tech and engineering leadership has not always been easy. I know I’m not alone, and many of us are trying to exist authentically in spaces that have not historically accepted us as we are. Affinity groups are an invaluable mechanism to give people who are underrepresented or underserved a safe space to be and a community of support. I’ve been so grateful to have this in SURGE ❤️
Interested in joining SURGE, or looking for a company that will welcome you as you are? We’re hiring!
