What is “Managing in the Margins”?
There’s something missing from our most highly recommended resources on leadership and management. It’s power. It’s about how to navigate power dynamics in order to prevent (and heal) harm to marginalized folks wherever they may be, among our colleagues or — a la survivorship bias plane — not represented.
The books and conferences for women in tech didn’t address many of my challenges, and their suggestions didn’t work for me. The rare writings on leadership that address marginalized groups are either superficial or inaccessible to laypeople. The resources for navigating stigma or systemic oppression are often esoteric, and weren’t specific or pragmatic.
I am developing a set of practical, accessible resources for leaders to support and advocate for people from groups that are marginalized or stigmatized — people who experience stigma, biases, or discrimination based on who they are (e.g., sexism and racism). Learn about navigating power dynamics, patterns of systemic oppression, and actions you can take as a leader, manager, mentor, or sponsor.
The primary audience is people managers in the tech industry. That being said: while often framed around management challenges, these ideas and practices are valuable for all people leaders, whether an individual contributor, a manager of managers, or an executive. Tech is not fundamentally relevant, but manager-report relationships and the degree of flexibility in expectations vary across industries.
For now, this is a growing series of lightly edited blog posts.
Topics
Topics I intend to cover include:
- Clarifying power dynamics in basic terms
- Common experiences of marginalization (e.g., stigma, minority stress)
- Common patterns in tech affecting people from marginalized groups (e.g., underleveling, Fundamental Attribution Error, “we don’t want to lower the bar”)
- Historic events — including the consequences, and how we might navigate similar future situations (e.g., Ellen Pao, Kelly Ellis, Timnit Gebru, James Damore, Thanksgiving Four)
- How to lead as a person who experiences marginalization, stigma, or mixed power dynamics with your peers or reports
- Relevant resources to learn more in depth and grow related skills
I’m stepping up to improve our existing resources. I’d love for these writings to be a stepping stone discarded in favor of future, superior resources.
Who should read this?
- People managers in tech who want to support their reports
- Leaders who want to learn practical methods for navigating power dynamics around marginalized people in the workplace
- Leaders who want to deepen their understanding of patterns that affect marginalized groups they aren’t part of
- People from marginalized groups who want practical recommendations to share with colleagues
- Anyone who wants a better understanding of how systemic oppression shows up in the tech industry and what we can do about it
Why?
I’m driven to improve the world.
I didn’t set out to become a writer — or to become a people leader, a manager, or teacher. I saw leadership problems that interfered with our technical and business goals, I recognized that I had the skills to solve it, I fixed it, and I liked it. Rinse and repeat.
Leadership means solving problems that no one can solve on their own. This is why I need your help: I want to equip you to build a culture of inclusive leadership, and to improve how we grow new leaders.
I experience the sharp end of enough varieties of power dynamics to know that I’m on the blunt end of others. I understand better than most that my challenges are not your challenges, and my success story will not look like your success story — but our challenges are shaped by the same fundamental operating modes of power dynamics, systemic oppression, and the many forms of authority. [I’m also in a position to listen when it comes to anti-Blackness, though as a White person speaking to a predominantly White audience in tech, we must center antiracism.]
My goal is to share knowledge, to expand your toolkit, and to kindle (or feed) a flame of justice. I invite you to join me in working to change our industry and our world — as a reader and a collaborator in inclusive leadership, or as a writer and another voice on the forces that influence leadership.
Caveats
This is not and should never be a standalone resource on management. If you read only one thing about management — stop that! No! Please read more than one thing. I am not the Lorax, I do not speak for the trees. Take every management book, blog, article, or talk with a handful of salt, including this one.
I am not an expert on everything. My goal is to contribute to and leverage existing expertise — from people management to racial justice — and shape that into bite-sized nuggets of knowledge and practical guidance.
I am not a perfect person. I strive to know my weaknesses, to know the limits of my knowledge, to reduce mistakes, and to repair mistakes (mine or otherwise). Fucking up has consequences that hurt people and damage careers. Fucking up at scale — an inevitability of leadership — has exponentially broader and long-lasting consequences that can reverberate through the years, poisoning the culture of organizations.
I hope for these writings to have the opposite effect: tikkun olam, “repair the world”.
