 Thanks for coming. I am Tara King. This is how to be a good boss. Project maintainer, tech lead, all the things. And it's about specifically inclusive leadership. So I'm Tara. I am the developer outreach manager at Pantheon, which means I'm responsible for Pantheon's community of developers and nurturing that and listening to those folks and doing all the good community things. You can find me at Sparkling Robots everywhere on the internet. I'd love to hear from you about this talk, so don't hesitate to reach out. I also have my email here, Tara.kingatpantheon.io. I love books and board games and tabletop RPGs, so I'm always game to talk about those things. I'm also the leader of Drupal Diversity and Inclusion, and that's another kind of element that comes into this talk. I live in the U.S. in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I use the pronoun she or they. And you can use the Drupal community hashtag also to talk about this on Twitter. I'd love to hear anything. So first, I want to talk about perspective, specifically my perspective and what I imagine yours to be, so we can be on the same page, right? I'm coming to this as someone who is a woman, so underrepresented in that way, a queer person and non-binary person. So slightly underrepresented there, but also I'm a white person. I speak English, which is the dominant language of the Drupal Project. I have a college education, all kinds of things, right? I have both some very obvious privileges and some obvious disadvantages. So it's possible, of course, that I'm missing something, that someone else might not have the same list of suggestions. And I would say that especially on this talk, which is really about you and the people that you work with, whether that's at work or in the community, make sure that these things actually work for those people. I would feel very bad if you said, well, Tara said in her talk that I have to do this, and they're like, I don't need that. Please don't do that. So just want to be clear about the kinds of biases and blind spots I have. I'm assuming that all of you here, it's a great crowd, by the way, for last day of DrupalCon. Thank you all for coming. I'm assuming that maybe you're a manager at work or a tech lead or even an informal lead. So you don't technically have managerial power, but you are more senior than the others, that kind of thing. Or maybe you're in the community, you're a maintainer of a module or a project of some kind. Essentially, anybody who has the power to make their colleagues' lives a little bit better is who I'm looking at right now. So that can be anyone. I think these tips can apply to any employee, any community member. So we're going to get started. Now that we've got some perspective clearing in the way. I also want to say that sometimes this topic can be uncomfortable. So I'm using cue animal pictures in the whole slides. They're all, I think they're cute. So if you're stressed out, you can just take a deep breath, look at whatever's up there, and we'll get through this together and then it will be almost the end of DrupalCon. Except for tomorrow. Okay. So the first thing I'm going to talk about is what it's like to be underrepresented at work. I'm looking at underrepresented as very broad here. Could be your gender or your race. It could be mental health. It could be your religion or something that people don't even know about you. Anything that makes you feel isolated. This is coming from studies. It's coming from attic data, if you will. Stories that I've heard from other people. And also my own lived experience. Because I am not a very good boss. Surprise. I just became a manager a few weeks ago. So this is all coming from the employee-managed person perspective. So that's what we're going to go through right now. You don't fit in. It seems like kind of obvious and probably didn't need to be a slide, right? But when you don't fit in at a company, especially in tech where there's such a focus on culture fit, there can actually be a cascading set of negative effects. Some of which are you're maybe not equipped to do your job properly. Maybe you don't get as many resources as other people because you don't want to ask, you don't want to stand out. And you often do more emotional labor. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what that means. Emotional labor is used on the internet a lot to talk about like managing domestic tasks in like a married couple. That's a totally valid question for a different time. What I'm talking about is performing feelings that you don't actually feel. This is something we all do in all kinds of contexts. It's super common in customer-facing work. So if you work with clients, I'm sure you have all kinds of times that you're smiling and you're not thinking, smiling thoughts. So that's one way. But when it's with your actual peers, emotional labor can feel a lot different. You're supposed to be on the same team, but you're faking it. You're pretending not to be hurt by something or not to be left out in a certain way. So that's kind of a bummer. But there's actually studies that have been done that show that emotional labor leads to burnout quite regularly, quite reliably. So you don't want your team to be feeling this kind of way where they can't be honest about how they're feeling with their teammates. So that's one way it is, how it feels to be unrepresented. Another way is you experience microaggressions. So a microaggression is basically just like the everyday little indignities or slights that you might hear as a person of color, a gay person, a trans person, a woman in the world. These are things that the person saying them generally doesn't actually intend to hurt your feelings. They're just implicit biases that they don't realize might hurt someone. So things like, oh, you're so technical. As a woman, I hear that. I just think, oh, you thought I was doing something that you didn't think was a developer. Or you speak great English. I know. I think many of us have heard these in different ways. They often get kind of written off as like, you're just being sensitive. But again, it goes back to that emotional labor piece of having to, every time it happens, decide, I'm not going to escalate this. Am I just going to ignore it? Am I going to pretend it didn't happen? There is a study done by the Lean-In Institute, which we can talk about Charles Anberg all day, but I'll leave that to the side, where they basically polled a quarter of a million women in the workplace and asked them a bunch of questions about what their experiences were like. And they designated a category of people who are the only. So they're either the only woman on the team, the only person of their race on the team, the only person of their sexuality, whatever kind of category. They're the only one. And 80% of them experience microaggressions. So almost everyone. This is happening constantly. It's not as cute as that. You feel the burden of representation. So if you're the only woman on the team, people expect you to like represent all women. It can be a very lonely experience. This quote is from an article in Fast Company. The woman who wrote it says, you carry the responsibility of representing not only yourself, but the entire experience of working with that semi-mythical creature, the female techie. It can be exhausting. You don't get to put as much time into the work you came to do. And every mistake feels amplified. So yet another kind of feeling that is common. You make less money. You've probably heard of the gender pay gap. It's different in different countries. It's different for different races. But like in the US, the common number is that white women are paid less than white men by 76 cents on the dollar. So that also goes to benefits. That goes to all kinds of things. You don't know if you'll have backup. I think a lot of underrepresented people at work don't necessarily know if they can talk to their manager about it. And so they don't. So they just hide it. They just pretend that it didn't happen. You know, whatever it is, whether it's harassment, microaggressions, all kinds of things. There is a lot of women that I spend time around who say, like, I had a conversation that day with someone who said, I think I want to get promoted. I think I'm ready to be promoted, but I think there's sexism that's blocking me for these various reasons. Should I bring it up to my manager? And the universal response was absolutely not, you will be fired. And whether or not that's true, right? Like that's anecdata, but it's part of the cultural experience, if you will, of being a woman in tech. I think Susan Fowler with Uber experienced a lot of this where she tried to go through the appropriate channels and was shut down and all kinds of terrible things happened. So this is a very constant feeling of isolation. And then the last point is you think about leaving. So women in that same study who are the only are one and a half times more likely to think about leaving. So if you're involved in hiring, you're probably also concerned about retention. And this is a huge one. I hear women all the time thinking, not only when am I going to leave this job, but when am I going to leave tech? Of the women who leave tech, only 20% of them actually leave the workforce. They're not like retiring or going to have children. They're just going somewhere else. They're going to a different field where they feel like they're going to have more success. I think this is, for me, this is again, anecdata here. Emotional labor leads to burnout, leads to wanting to leave the industry. So everything that we can do, I'm so excited there's so many people here, everything that all of us can do to help prevent these feelings is going to retain those people who are already in the industry and make it safer for people to come in. That's the very simplified experience of what it's like to be underrepresented at work. What can all of us do? I feel like a lot of times the answer is, like, follow the golden rule or be nice. But it turns out that when you're dealing with someone with a different experience than you, it can be hard to know exactly how they want to be treated, does the golden rule actually work, or is it, you know, do you want to give a vegetarian a steak? I do not, that is not the thing to do. So I'm going to try to break it down a little bit more into some more specific tips and strategies. This part, if anybody here has questions, well, I guess this microphone's going to be kind of a pain. Save them for the end, and there will be time for that. So I'm going to just kind of run through them, try to make sure we got time for as many questions as people want. This one, obviously, is a big one. So just as I try to bring into the stock my own frame of reference the kinds of things that both privilege and disadvantage me and the perspective I have, I invite all of you to spend time over the next week or two just thinking about your own, say, your education, your technical background, your race, gender, sexuality. How does that affect you at work? Just like you're sitting in a meeting, you're a little bit bored. Just thinking about how that affects you. And if the answer is it doesn't affect you, then you're living the dream, keep going, and bring the rest of us with you. So just try to think about that and think about also your colleagues and how much they may or may not be able to bring themselves to work, right? How much they're having to perform a certain personality or experience for you. So slow down, right? So in tech, there's a lot of move fast and break things. And I think we could all argue all day about whether or not that's actually good for deployment. But with humans, I think we can probably agree that it's not great. I would argue that speed and spontaneity are never inclusive because it's just hard, right? So if you think about a happy hour, you have a crazy project at work, it's amazing, or it's terrible, and you want to celebrate when it finally launches. And so you go to a bar. Well, is there enough light that everyone can see at the bar? Is it too loud for people to be able to hear each other? You know, not that you need a quiet place. Some people like it louder, but some people are generally, they just genuinely cannot hear. Can people physically get to the location? Is it accessible? Is there food that everyone can agree, can eat? Like if everyone is having, if everyone is having like an amazing fancy dinner and one person is eating dry lettuce, I don't think you've succeeded. Alcohol versus non-alcohol, if you can have both or, you know, whatever. And does everyone feel safe getting home from the venue? A lot of us have like safe ways to get to and from work. But like, oh, surprise, we're going to a restaurant. I don't know how to get there. Am I going to be okay getting home? So I am going to say I am not anti-party. And if you can see my slide, it's a cute fluffy dog with a party hat on. It's really cute. I love parties, and I think parties are great. But I think a little bit of advanced planning, even if it's just like someday we're going to have a party, not this week, someday, finding a venue, knowing your people's needs so that you don't have to go, hey, I already booked a venue, but I think maybe you have an allergy. It can be really inclusive and make everyone able to celebrate equally. So consider as much as possible how you can either pre-plan or just slow down a little bit. Sometimes it's better to be a little slower and make sure that everyone gets brought along. I think Dries's quote that he put yesterday, together we go fast, or no. If you want to go far, go alone. If you want to go, no, getting it right, don't have notes. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. It's very relevant to this basic concept. We're talking about slowing down. Now we're just talking about asking. I think sometimes we can be so uncomfortable with these conversations or so worried that we're going to offend, but I think ask your people what they need. Make sure that when you're in your one-on-ones, leave a lot of open-ended questions, like how are things going, and is there anything else you need to tell me? A lot of times if you don't know what the other person is experiencing, you can't elicit it, right? You just don't know that it's happening. So if you just make sure you leave a lot of space for those kinds of awkward conversations to come up. Sorry, I'm going to get my notes back. Am I? Here we go. Those are all over here. Cool. And then a corollary to this is to practice. I think many of us have had the one awkward conversation and it's like, let's never do that again. I would argue that actually practicing awkward conversations is one of the best things you can do as a leader in general and specifically for people that you're maybe different from in any number of ways. So you have a co-worker who's transitioning and I want to use they pronouns and you find like, I keep messing it up and it makes me stressed out and I don't want to do it. Practice at home. Just use it for everyone you meet or for like your pet, right? It doesn't matter just so that you're actually like muscle memory does actually help in these things. So the more you can practice, it'll roll off the tongue. It'll be a lot easier. There's also a fantastic article on Medium. I am going to post my slides. So I'll have some of these links in there called the art of the awkward one-on-one. And it basically has two points. One is your one-on-one should not contain any boring information that you could say in the office or over Slack or whatever. It should be limited to stuff that you really can only say in this very intimate conversation you're having. And specifically telling your report that you have space for awkwardness and you're going to try to say one awkward thing for one-on-one and encourage them to say one awkward thing for one-on-one. And by awkward I don't mean offensive but just like, hey I've noticed that maybe you don't ask for as much time off and I don't know why and maybe you feel a little bit uncomfortable but that way you start to build a safe space between you and that feeling of you don't know if you have backup from your manager can start to shrink and you can start to feel more like a team. So highly recommend awkwardness. Sorry. Start talking at work about culture ad rather than culture fit. Culture fit's great. Like it's fun to fit in. But it's really awesome to have your leader say like this is what so and so is bringing to the team because often people will start to perform and start to kind of hide the parts themselves that are different. It's a dog in a camera case. I have a friend who is a mother and was on a marketing team and they did a photo shoot and when she saw the photos there was a baby in it and the diaper was like on sideways or something, it wasn't functional and she laughed and pointed out that the diaper was not going to work that way and they would not be able to use these photos for the photo shoot and just no one else on the team had noticed it. So for her boss to say thank you. Like thank you for bringing this experience into the team and not feeling like you have to pretend to be the same as everyone else who doesn't have kids on the team was a really wonderful experience for her. So make sure you're able to really validate what people do. I've had bosses say like donate to charity said I'm raising money for. That feels great. It makes me realize that they see me in the matter. I've also had bosses say, ah, it sure is great to have female energy in the room. And I'm not like the most feminine person first of all. And second, I have no idea what that means. Like it just made me super uncomfortable because then everyone else in the room was like, yeah, yeah boss, sure. Like it has to be authentic but it really, a culture ad is like the whole point of diversity and the more you can talk about it and get people on board, the better everyone will feel. Educate yourself like this dog who read the book. One thing I like to do is follow new people on Twitter. So if I meet someone new, I met a blind developer. I was like, I actually don't know very much about your life. And so rather than grill you about it personally, which probably happens to you all the time, go to Twitter and find people with their shared experience. Watch movies that your reports recommend or read books, things that maybe are outside your cultural seer. And when you don't know how to accommodate your employee, it's actually one area that I would recommend first try and Google. Like we're developers with Google things all the time. I've known a woman who started a new job and her boss couldn't tell her the dress code. He said, oh well the men wear polos and khakis and I don't know what that means for you. So what she took from that was, there were no other women on the team probably and he doesn't have anyone he can ask or he doesn't think it's his responsibility. So she had to go to her first day feeling like, I hope this works, right? Like I hope I'm appropriately dressed and I would argue that that's her manager failing her on the first day of work which is a huge bummer. This is the last one, the biggest one, most important one in my opinion, increased pay equity and transparency. Not only are we getting paid less, we are generally speaking very aware that we're getting paid less. And that's real tough. So if you know already that you're paying everyone equally and everything's all kosher, like tell people, tell your employees, tell everyone in the world, you're doing a good job and I applaud you. Most people I think either don't know or they know that they're doing it badly. If you don't know you can do an audit, you can hire people and if you know you're doing it badly you can also hire people to help you solve that but it really makes a difference, it really, really, really builds trust because we all know that money is the bottom line and if I'm actually being rewarded equally for my effort, that's a huge sign that I matter and I should stay. And this also goes for benefits, right? So even if benefits are like, everyone at the company gets the same benefits, I would say that if you're looking at your, say, time off usage, start to look at who's using the most, who's using the least and see if you can encourage people who aren't taking as much time to take that for themselves because of that burden of representation, like often underrepresented people will work harder or work longer and not feel comfortable taking time off because they're worried they're going to get fired or get chastised. So really noticing when people aren't taking advantage of everything the company offers and trying to encourage them to do so. So the wrap up here, your actions as a leader matter. It's super exciting to have everybody here because I just think we can make so much change in our community and in our companies by starting to just do this much more effort. It's going to have to be a huge overhaul of the company. I think in open source, a lot of us end up as leaders accidentally. I know I did, it was like, I showed up, then I showed up again, then I showed up again, and then all of a sudden, hey, do you want to be the leader of the thing? And I think that goes for a lot of us. So we don't have a lot of training. I think a lot of companies under invest in training people for leadership. And the more that we can speak up and say that these things are important, the more that it's going to happen across the community. So it's super exciting. And the thing is, when you start doing it, everyone else will start doing it too. This is culture is how humans scale behavior, right? You don't learn from your parents to do this stuff, but you learn from your peers. And as a leader, you're going to have a lot more impact on people around you. If you interrupt something, like somebody is misgendering a colleague or miscrouncing their name or any number of things. And if you say, hey, actually, that's not cool. You don't have to be mean about it. But then people will understand that it's okay to interrupt those kinds of behaviors and start to follow you. Whereas if you see harassment and you just turn a blind eye, people will start to follow you. So, you know, make sure you take advantage of this position and spread your good, obviously your own good-hearted people spread that around the world. So that's it. Come tomorrow. I'm going to be in that far room, mentor contribution room, working on diversity and inclusion stuff. I think we were just talking about working on visas and helping the triple con teams manage visa deadlines for people. So if that's interesting to you, come on down. If you want to do other stuff, there will be other stuff to do. Please rate my session in the app because I want to hear how this goes. If you have, like, reached, had a difficult situation at work that you don't feel comfortable talking about and questions, feel free to reach out to me privately. Be happy to talk. If you think I missed something and want me to add it, let me know. And that's my cap. Time for questions. Do you mind coming up? I know it's crowded, or I don't know how much of this is going to be posted anyway. At least this way everybody can hear properly. Yes, thank you. In the beginning, you were talking about microaggressions and that 80% of the survey amongst women had experienced microaggressions in their workspace, right? I was just wondering if they also have a control group and what the percentage question in the control group. I could send you the report. I don't know the numbers. I'd like that, actually. Maybe you can post it in the diversity channel. I can do that. Yeah, they do it every year and the questions are modified and that kind of thing, but I'll happily send it. I think you kind of touched on this, but one thing that I found that a lot of managers don't do that would make things so much easier when managing people is talking to their employees and asking them what would help the manager manage the relationship and how they'd like to be managed. For example, I have chronic illnesses, so sometimes I have a lot of day-to-day management issues that can be like, I need to go to doctor's appointments and I have to be really flexible with my working and I've had managers instead of just talking to me and saying, hey, how do we make this work and laying it out in the beginning? It's sort of like, we sort of have to slog through it and I find that, you know, managers tend to be a little bit hesitant to just kind of ask questions of how things should be because they feel like they're the people who should be saying how things should be and things will be so much better if there was more communication in that room. Totally agree. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I think having just become a manager, I feel very keenly the pressure to like know what's going on and do things correctly, but I think, I love that. Thank you. Yeah, come on up. Thanks, Tara. That was fantastic. So I head a Drupal shop in India and apart from the senior management, which is about 17% tops, most of the guys are, for want of a better worth, they're millennials. I don't know if a lot of this, it's not micro segmentation because that's a totally different topic, right? Simon said like, he's spoken about it when you hear your views on the age. Oh, the age stuff? Look at a 25 year old and look at him differently from what you were when you were 25 and all that work. Oh man, that's a good question. I feel like in general, I like to take it out of the, in general, I like to take it out of the generality but to bring it into more specific. So I think a lot of times what can happen is like, those questions like, what are your specific concerns? But I think one thing that I've noticed is I am also millennial, but I'm like the top edge. They're kind of like, we're the ones that slightly knew what it was before the internet as opposed to always having it. And I certainly have had to manage my own bias around what it means to be younger. Like because like you said, I had a different experience and also like one trick that I've been using is to imagine them in 15 years, to imagine them as managers, right? It helps me to see what skills they're going to need to get there. And maybe they're not there yet, but I don't know if that helps, but that's something that I think about is to not be like, oh, you're so young, which I have done. But instead to say, cool, what do you need to get to your next level of career, right? Which maybe is a separate conversation. We can't back to communication. Any other questions? Yeah. I wanted to come back before when you say like your boss in a meeting or something like that, or you're like, oh, what, I, feminine, feminine. Oh, I like the feminine energy in the room. Yeah. I mean, I think that sometimes it's confused for the people. Like, okay, in somehow all of us, no, in somehow, no, all of us are different, but some of them are like, have something in common. For me, the point is that, I don't know, at work, I am a person, but not a specific woman. I don't know, I know diversity, that's cool, but I don't want to be betrayed like a special time for the woman. Totally. And I think that this can be applied for everything, for videos or whatever. It has nothing to do with the job. Just treat me like a special person, because all of us are special, but not especially for my gender or religion. Totally. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, sometimes I think where I get tripped up as people are like, I don't need to accommodate you. I don't need to have a dress code for you because, you know what I mean? Like, I think there can be, it's a very delicate line, which I think is where those awkward conversations come into, to be able to say, does this actually feel good to you? Or, you know what I mean? So that you can have that. And I think that applies to everyone. Everyone has some way that they're maybe feeling a little isolated, like everyone. For example, dress code. If you don't know, it because you never thought to open your mind to have this type of person. Then maybe don't say anything and say, okay, I'm going to check it. Yeah, I'll find out. Okay. I'm not using this part. Yeah. Better than say, okay, you're like a home star here. I've never seen you before. Yeah. And a lot of times have been, at least to me like, I call it like the good machisms. They try to open the door or try to, I don't know. Like, something that you feel weird because I don't know. You're like, I can open the door myself. Yeah, totally. I know that feeling. You can say something like, I'm polite for them. Right. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Have at it. Yeah. Hi. Great talk. Thank you. So one thing that I think is worth to mention is how you ensure that everybody can have a voice in meetings, for example. So one of the things that we found in our work setting is when we've had voice meetings, then a couple people own the meeting. And then we picked, and we also distributed themes. So what we figured out is we put up a spreadsheet of like, this is where you put your feedback. And everybody has time to put in their feedback. And then we went through the feedback. So then everybody had their input. And it was not like one person talking and they were not aware in their mind that there's like these 10 other people who have like maybe twice as much feedback as they have, but they were owning the time for the meeting. And I think the same works with the tax format meetings that we do in Drupal. It's equalizes the opportunity to say what you need. And it's even equalizes the opportunity across time zones, because you can join later. But what we did not succeed with, so I'm interested if you have tips on how to do this in a voice setting without these tools. Yeah. I've seen talks where like, this is a talk, which is not quite a meeting, which I think is what you're asking for, but maybe in a meeting it would work where actually people, instead of standing at a mic, will ask like raise hands and then the speaker or the person leading the meeting will pick who gets to speak in what order so that that way if somebody raises their hand who hasn't spoken, the orders may be slower. Some people are just slower, so raise your hands are shy. That can really help with a live presentation kind of thing. I've also seen people, I think visualizing it. So I don't know, we showed this in the Drupal Diversity Talk yesterday, I can't remember if you were there, sorry. You were not there, cool, no worries, no pressure. There's a man, just publicly shamed. No, what was I going to say? Oh, there's a slide that we had that had a visualization from a mayor who was at a city council meeting and she was knitting and she would knit red for women speaking and green for, sorry, yeah, red for men, green for women and it was like a red scarf. So I think sometimes if you can find ways of visualizing that can alone help to read, but it's not a solved problem. Also, one thing I will say that I've heard worked, they did this in the Obama White House, the women on the staff felt like they were getting talked over and so they got together and said we will promise to amplify each other's ideas. So if they were getting talked over, another woman would say, you just talked over her so that she didn't have to defend herself, kind of thing. So those are some strategies I've heard. Yeah, I think it's still a tough one. Anything else? Yeah, coming up. Hi. Thank you for the speech. If we talk about leadership, there is another coin of, another side of the coin of leadership is the responsibilities. Could you please describe a bit what kind of responsibilities you see like top three, for example? For any leader? If we talk about the leadership itself because it doesn't matter, it's a formal weight. Sure. I feel like I'm coming at this from my own leadership experience and there's a lot of styles, but for me, I like to think, to listen way more than I speak. The last hour and I was standing. But in those positions and then also to, I think sometimes hearing feedback or hearing criticism or conflict can elicit a lot of emotions in a leader. So-and-so said something sexist to me. Well, you like so-and-so. You also like the person who's complaining. You can get really panicked. You don't know what to do. Am I going to have to fire somebody? You can get really scary. And you can fall back on your own biases. Like, oh, you're just young and you don't understand how the way the world works or whatever, right? You're not responsible for your first thought but you're responsible for your next thought, right? Something happens in your brain, you can't stop that, but you can correct what comes out of your mouth and you can correct your actions. So for me, a lot of it has been about if somebody says something upsetting to me to just take it and say thank you and thank you so much for sharing that with me and then sometimes it takes like, especially with dribble community stuff which can get very emotional. Sometimes it takes time, but I'll take it away and sit with it until I can understand where they're coming from, even if I don't agree, even if I think that the behavior was not appropriate. So listening, taking your time to process the feedback and then treating everyone like an individual, like really knowing their name, what they like, how they like to work. I think sometimes it can be really difficult, especially in a community setting where somebody who comes by makes one commit and disappears. But as much as possible to try to make those connections really matter. I don't know, I wasn't really prepared with all the leadership on that. Anybody else? We have actually maybe no minutes. We have no minutes. Find me in the hallway. Thank you so much. Sorry for all the... Thank you.