Chapter 8: Hindsight is 20/20
…and sometimes looking back can be hard.
When I moved to NY, I had no idea what I was getting myself into both from a work perspective and, honestly, a life perspective. To say it would take me another 6 years to understand the value of my worth would be an understatement.
I mean, my roommate and I lived in a one-bedroom with a curtain between our beds. Does that sound like we had any idea what we were doing? I moved to NY thinking that snow meant you had a day off — it didn’t. The city stops for very little and snow is not one of those things.
My first “big city job” was with a…well, I never know how to describe it but in the simplest terms, it was a strategy firm essentially going around telling old corporations the way they worked was dead and they were doomed if they didn’t change. We’d walk into places like American Express with our Macbook computers, wearing athleisure for business casual, and usually carrying coffee from a random, trendy place in SOHO.
We were the coolest of cool talking to CEOs who still used Outlook and sent memos to their teams.
We also had to change our mission and service in order to not close in 60 days and our executive team was made up of individuals who were extremely smart but not so smart all at the same time. It sounds impossible, but it isn’t. When you sell what became a profitable entity to a company that is nearing bankruptcy and then act surprised when the new parent company goes under…I have to question your level of genius.
But this story isn’t about that, this story is about my first real experience with systemic racism in the workplace.
This company operated within a management system called holacracy. If you don’t know, holacracy is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, which claims to distribute authority and decision-making through a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy. Now, in practice, it makes sense, and for a large portion of my time there, it did make decision making seem distributed — slow but distributed but honestly, it was a system built on rules centered around rules-based in rules. It took more time to ensure you were doing the process right than making actual decisions.
One of the circles was built for the review and promotion process. This group focused on:
- Salary and salary band transparency throughout the organization
- The review process
- The promotion process
- Salary leveling
Now here’s where the red flags come in. I think the idea of salary transparency is great — it should be clear what level each makes and the requirements needed to get there. What doesn’t make sense is when only certain parts of the organization are transparent — the commission was never brought up, the salary bank for directors was so large that it almost seemed intentionally deceptive. The biggest red flag of them all was the process for promotion which was designed to appear transparent but was created to :
- Give those already in a high pay band an advantage — the design of the process essentially resembled that of a courtroom. You had to not only provide evidence but also had to argue your case for a promotion or raise. And for me, a junior-level employee, I had never had the experience nor was provided any training for a process that, looking back, should have never been in place. I don’t consider this transparent. Knowing the process isn’t the same as being set up for success equal to others going through the process.
- Establish a culture of being on the defense. The point of individuals arguing their reason for promotion was not to highlight what they had done well, the emphasis was put on highlighting why you think you deserve it.
This process was the first time I saw and experienced systemic racism in the workplace and I didn’t even realize it until many years later.
Let me paint you a picture:
- There were two maybe three black people that worked at this organization at the time, in total there were less than 10 people of color — we were all considered junior staff
- The room we made our argument in was a room of all white men because our leadership team was made of all white men besides one woman who was not only excluded from many things but contributed to the system as well in her own ways
- I learned, later, that the only people asked to discuss their ‘past experience’ were only the people of color.
Now, you tell me why that last point would matter? If this was a conversation based on performance, why did the past jobs have anything to do with the present?
Well, simple really, as the ‘transparency’ around salary bands rolled out, so did the clear discrepancy of salaries between the POC's and the white team members — and it was large. BUT instead of rectifying the situation, they, instead, had us argue our own case for why they should right their wrong. Prove that we’re worth it if you will.
And, spoiler alert, they didn’t change anything. While others around me consistently got raises (some 3 or 4 within their first year) I got one. Resulting in peers were making anywhere between $15K-$25K more than me for the same amount of work, the same expectations, and the same size accounts. I would never say they didn’t earn it — they worked hard — but I never understood why my hard work didn’t yield the same results. To be clear, these were not people doing anything more than me, you could even argue I was holding the biggest accounts we had and yet, for some reason, I got 1 raise to their 4 in the same time period.
If I could go back and give that Brandi advice, I would tell her to not be blinded by the free lunches, coffee trips, and exciting work; I would tell her to know her worth; I would tell her that if she feels something is wrong, it probably is. I would tell her to demand to be treated equally to her white peers and if the answer was no, to have enough confidence to find somewhere that would.
I’m a fan of transparency but if you implement transparency yet don’t utilize it to better not just your clients but your own organization, there is no point.
