The Antiracist Business Book by Trudi Lebron

Author:Trudi Lebron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Row House Publishing
Published: 2022-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

We all have the choice to be intentional about how we construct our environments so they facilitate how we want people to feel, to be, and to interact with each other. In equity-centered environments that are striving to be diverse, inclusive, equitable, and antiracist, we should want all members of the community to feel emotionally, psychologically, and physically safe; we want people to experience success; we want to be responsible stewards of power and privilege; and we want to equitably distribute resources.

Part of being intentional about space creation requires us to remember that despite all the intention and preparation we put into our space creation plan, people are not blank slates when they show up to work on the first day. People show up with years of prior learning, patterns, norms, and expectations that we’ve been taught elsewhere about what a work environment “should” be. It will take time to help people acclimate to this new environment, and one of the things that can help this process is to make sure that there is alignment between the three elements of your culture plan. For example, if you work in a warehouse with open floor plans and Ping-Pong tables, it might be difficult to get people to show up to work in formal suits and shoes. The space alone is enough to counter the messages of formal business practices. So, if you want to create a casual work environment, you need to create a casual physical space to support it, and vice versa. If you want a team to show up to a creative brainstorming session with a casual, fun energy, don’t hold your session in a formal boardroom. I know this might sound obvious, but trust me, it’s not. When I was facilitating community equity work in inner-city school districts, it was almost impossible to convince a superintendent to come to a community center in casual dress to meet with parents even when they’ve said they wanted parents to feel comfortable attending school meetings, giving feedback, and being engaged. People with power are used to communicating that power in nonverbal ways and it can be difficult to break that pattern.

There have been other instances where I’ve met with executives of multimillion-dollar companies who show up on Zoom with a stale background (usually either a blank white wall behind them, or a fake image for their backdrop), leaning back in a chair, hands behind their heads, and talking to me while they are looking off the screen half of the time. I will not even take clients who show up like that because they are creating a space in which they are already “leaning out” of the process and are taking a casual approach to a situation where they have caused a lot of harm to Brown and Black folks in their communities. Executives I do work with come to consult, literally leaning in with their bodies, engaged, focused, and demonstrating real concern and commitment to the work ahead of them.

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