Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in Project Teams

Transcript

STEVE HENDERSHOT

A vast majority of companies aspire to build a diverse team where all workers thrive and different perspectives are honored and valued. But it can be challenging to find the right strategies to actually make that happen. Today we’ll talk about what project leaders can do to ensure all team members feel they are welcome to share their full selves and experiences at work. 

In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.

This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.

If there’s one thing project leaders understand and appreciate, it’s the sometimes-vast gap between identifying a goal and achieving it. Today we’re talking about diversity efforts on project teams. So much energy over the last few years has focused on making diversity, equity and inclusion—or DE&I—a priority, and now the reality is setting in that achieving the goal of a diverse and inclusive workforce is a lot harder than acknowledging its importance.

“Diversity fatigue” is setting in, according to the World Economic Forum, and while 85% of organizations have identified DE&I as a priority, only 5% of companies have fully mature DE&I programs, according to PwC. 

So let’s discuss what project leaders can do to overcome the fatigue and create diverse and inclusive teams. We’ll start with Victoria Toney-Robinson, a senior program manager at Google in Hamburg, Germany. Victoria is also the co-founder of the Germany chapter of the Black Googler Network, an employee resource group, and she’s now the co-chair of the global Black Googler Network. 

MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT

Let’s start with a foundational question: Why does diversity matter to the work product and cohesion and culture of project teams?

VICTORIA TONEY-ROBINSON 

Diversity and inclusion is critically important because our consumer base, customer base, stakeholder groups are diverse. And without making sure that these diverse perspectives are included in projects and processes from the get-go, and in the leadership, you run the risk of just disregarding needs, of missing out on business opportunities, but also really creating danger and risks out in the world. Those might be legal, those might be physical. There were cases where self-driving cars, for example, didn’t recognize a Black person on the street as a person or as an obstacle. So the repercussions of not including diverse perspectives—and that’s diversity in all its different dimensions—can be really dire.

To me personally, this is a values-based issue, but I love that it also aligns with business needs, with innovation that targets and is able to reach a large consumer base so that you can make the business case. Diversity and inclusion is the only way to really be innovative. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

How have you seen this play out in your work? Has there been a time when a lack of diversity hindered a project, or did someone come forward and request to make a team more inclusive? 

VICTORIA TONEY-ROBINSON

Well, I think it starts with things that are as simple as creating your slides for a presentation, right? I’ve had a lot of these situations where I had to learn by getting feedback, that what I think works for everyone—because it works for the groups that I have on my mind—does not actually work for everyone. So I think that’s another thing that we often don’t talk about and think about, that diversity and inclusion, there is no perfect state. There is no way to just get it done and be done forever and ever. It’s a messy and hard process that often causes a lot of upset, a lot of upheaval. But again, that is what opens the door to innovation.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Let’s dig more into the upheaval and change aspects. How can project leaders better manage that when that comes to DE&I in their teams and projects?

VICTORIA TONEY-ROBINSON

Often, we just want to go the easy route, and we want to make sure things get approved and things move quickly, and that’s often expected from us. But in order to deliver at the highest possible quality, for the highest number of stakeholders, we really have to embrace this conflict. It’s not pretty. It’s not always fun, but the outcome is worth it.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Now let’s talk about the practical side. How do you go about promoting a diverse and inclusive team environment? What strategies or practices do you think are the most effective? 

VICTORIA TONEY-ROBINSON

I want to reinforce that there is no perfect state for diversity inclusion. I think this is [an] ongoing process. There are always additional groups that we might not be aware of.

In terms of strategies, nobody has found the perfect strategy, right? It all starts with ground rules that are set for the company, for the project team, right? When you talk about creating an inclusive environment, you want to make sure that everybody who’s at the table gets to speak up, and there are different low-level strategies to get people to speak at the beginning of a meeting, to make sure when you ask for opinions, you ask for opinions of those who are in the company or project hierarchy, maybe, at the lower level. 

I think these ground rules, at larger companies especially, should be written and stated clearly. It’s important to have this commitment written down so that whenever there are situations, people can actually reference them and ground themselves in that. Because, in business, when you have to make quick decisions, and when you want to reach your goals, it is easy to disregard these ground rules to make sure you’re being inclusive. To make sure you’re involving all the important stakeholders. You make sure you do a risk assessment with various groups. For a culture of a company, also a project team, there are practices like doing blameless postmortems. This is not about individuals, this is not about people, as you state what might have gone better and what the failures were that the team can learn from.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

How does the Black Googler Network affect that dynamic? What role does the group play in creating a more diverse and inclusive environment, and how did it come to be? 

VICTORIA TONEY-ROBINSON

I think employee resource groups are generally started by employees who feel the need for a safer space and network to support each other when they are in the minority.

I joined Google in Germany and quickly noticed that there wasn’t a local chapter. So I did what I do and have done at all stops in my career—I built this community. So I basically just gathered folks in a chat space, and eventually, we made that decision to found our own local chapter. This was entirely from the employee side. At Google though, this is supported by the company. There is support in terms of a team of community advisors and DE&I managers—diversity, equity and inclusion team. We have a budget that we get from the company to foster inclusion and belonging. We have executive sponsors, which is vitally important. So we have access to leadership and can basically voice our concerns as a group, making sure the community feels seen and heard. And the individuals within this community get to have this space where they can share their experiences and understand that they’re not alone with that.

The Black Googler Network also serves as an advisor to project teams. Often, we are the people that are being reached out to when it comes to reviewing something where people don’t have the representation at the table in the team. We have a huge team of product equity and inclusion, but for all kinds of efforts, we are often the first point of contact, where people are, like, is this campaign okay? Is it not okay? Are there concerns with this? And often from the engagement with this employee resource group comes an actual corporate change where there is headcount dedicated to something. This is voluntary work that we do. At Google, we do have the opportunity to work on things like ERGs (employee resource groups) 20% of our time. So, that’s included in our work time, but that’s not the case in most companies. We’re advising, we’re giving our opinion, but this is not our responsibility, so this is also where we hold companies accountable for actually creating those roles of people who are accountable for certain things.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Thinking about teams, even if you have a bunch of team members who bring varied perspectives and experiences, they might only feel like they’re welcome to share ideas that align with the consensus. What can project leaders do to make sure that everyone feels that their different experiences and opinions are valued?

VICTORIA TONEY-ROBINSON 

Well, I think this has to be said, right? This has to be said over and over again. And then there needs to be a break in time for people to listen, giving opportunities to submit feedback, maybe also not in large meetings, but finding other channels that people can actually voice their concerns. Also making sure that not one person is a representative of an entire community. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Let’s continue on the day-to-day teams front. What are some other good practices project leaders can use to build diversity and inclusion into the team’s culture? 

VICTORIA TONEY-ROBINSON 

The general goal is to increase the representation on the project team, but as a project leader, you might not have the power to put your team together that way. As a project leader, you might want to become an advocate for hiring, and you might flag that to your leadership, that your homogenous project team might not be the best approach. I think we are also powerful in that we can advocate and influence. If you don’t have the representation on your team, you just absolutely have to go out into the world and figure out who the stakeholders are and who can help you assess your risks and understand the needs from various communities.

Talking about testing before you roll things out, and testing in diverse communities, I think that’s also a pitfall that many project teams fall into. Because when you involve your diverse stakeholders at the end, it might just be too late to make meaningful change, and that’s a missed opportunity. In the inception phase of your project, you want to make sure you include all these different perspectives and understand who you might need to serve and whose perspective you might need to incorporate.

With your project team, you want to make sure that communication is clear, that decisions are captured in a way that everybody can understand and access. This is something that I see go wrong a lot in project teams that are not co-located, where there [are] so many in-person conversations, and those who are not with the group around the project manager are missing out and don’t understand what’s being decided. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

As we close out our discussion, some organizations are encountering DE&I fatigue. What advice do you have for project leaders on how to address this? 

VICTORIA TONEY-ROBINSON 

I think that’s just a challenge of this work. There’s not a one-time fix. There’s not a one-time goal that you can reach. It is hard. It is messy, and you have to be ready for that if you want to embark on that journey. I think, from a business perspective and also from a project perspective, long term, you’re going to lose out if you’re not making sure you are inclusive and include diverse perspectives in all you do.

The diversity fatigue generally comes from a position of privilege. This comes from the people who have the choice to think about diversity and inclusion or not. Because they feel like they belong. They feel like they’re considered competent. They are being trusted to make decisions and lead. That’s not the situation for everyone. So, for those of us who are affected, in whatever dimensions, might be race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, disability, you name it, we often don’t have this choice. We see risk that it might affect our community, or a specific dimension of our intersectional being. Intersectionality refers to having multiple intersecting identities at the same time. Like, I am a Black woman, but I’m also a mother, I am a woman, and multiple things here. If you think only about one specific dimension, let’s say, gender, it doesn’t have a bigger impact on all these other dimensions and communities who are excluded.

As a project owner or project manager, or anyone on a project team, in order to promote DE&I, if you’re not too fatigued for it, I think it’s just important to understand and acknowledge that you will never have learned enough. That this is a process. There are going to be mistakes, and that you cannot do it on your own. This whole practice is one of community where, again, because we’re all limited in what we can experience, what we can relate to, it is vitally important that we connect across all these different dimensions and learn more, and more, and more about other communities, and how they might not experience the world in the same way that we do.

MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT 

DE&I success isn’t just about changing the demographics on your team—it also requires a paradigm where all of your people learn to value and lean into the things that are different about their co-workers. It requires bridge-building, and that’s something of a specialty for our next guest, 
Nikky Chen, a 2023 Future 50 leader. When we spoke with Nikky, she was a group manager working in the project management department at tech e-commerce giant Rakuten in Tokyo. She and Projectified’s Hannah LaBelle talked about building cohesive teams that include members spanning multiple cultures and continents. 

MUSICAL TRANSITION
HANNAH LABELLE

Nikky, today we’re talking all about building diversity on project teams, so let’s start by talking about diversity, equity and inclusion at a high level. DE&I has been a major topic across enterprises and sectors for several years now. Why is it imperative that project professionals are promoting diversity on their teams and in their workplaces overall?

NIKKY CHEN

As project managers, our main goal is to deliver projects, to bring all the resources together. So if we are always working with people, we are going to be always working with diversity. If we have diversity, we can have enhanced problem-solving. Diverse teams bring a wider range of perspectives [and] experiences to the table. Diverse teams are more adaptable in the rapid-changing environments which we have at the moment, and most importantly, if we want to promote diversity in the workplace, it means that everybody gets to be valued, and that’s how we can deliver successful projects.

HANNAH LABELLE

Let’s look at the flip side of those benefits—what are the risks to projects and organizations when their teams lack diversity?

NIKKY CHEN

When teams lack diversity, there’s a lot of pitfalls that can negatively impact projects. Especially with [a] globalized world, we have projects that have a lot of international components, and lack of diversity can hinder that, especially understanding the international market, cultural nuances, customer preferences, and that can impact the success of a lot of global projects. Having said that, there’s a lot of reduced creativity, limited perspective. If we bring in a diverse team, we can change that.

HANNAH LABELLE

Can you share a time when a diverse team or an inclusive environment benefitted one of your projects? 

NIKKY CHEN

I was working in South Africa for several years. I myself grew up in South Africa. We were working on a compliance project, and an external governmental body was going to come and assess us. We had a team where we had the local South Africans, we had expat staff coming from overseas, coming from the East, and we also had the external stakeholders coming from the U.S. It was a team of a lot of diversity, and this project was at a very high level, a very critical stage, and we had to plan the rollout of the project very carefully. We couldn’t afford to make any mistakes, and we also had to do a lot of careful risk assessment.

Because of the diverse background that we had, we had a group of team members who understood the cultural nuance of working with the U.S. team, and understanding how to react to that sort of communication. If we were sent something, if we were asked for something, we knew exactly how to respond. We were very good at responding to changes. We were very good at risk assessment. We were very good at planning, and the end result was that for that year, the South Africa office won the best global award for compliance, and that was a very big award for the team. And that was a very good project example in my project career that I saw how diverse project teams came together and made a huge success.

HANNAH LABELLE

Let’s talk about some ways project professionals can boost diversity and inclusion on their teams. What strategies or practices do you use to help promote a diverse and inclusive team environment, and how do you help team members know they can bring their true selves and varied perspectives to work?

NIKKY CHEN

First of all, we need to be able to have leadership commitment, project sponsors, company leaders. They should lead by example and agree on the strategies and practices that [we] as project managers are going to be using to promote diversity and inclusion within the project team.

I think allowing open communication to team members. We have to have that empathy where we realize that there is a culture difference and that we can create different methods for people to have an open communication. Some people don’t prefer to speak up. Some people prefer to type, some people don’t feel very confident in a certain language, and it could be their second language. Can we have another way to allow them to bring their ideas, their perspectives, their problems onto the table? They should be encouraged to speak up.

As project managers, we have to keep emphasizing that we are one team and that we are all working towards the same goal. So I think those are very important when we shape and try to bring inclusiveness into projects.

HANNAH LABELLE

I also want to talk about psychological safety. What kind of a role does that play, and how do you try to build that environment within a team?

NIKKY CHEN 

Everybody wants to feel valued. I always listen to them actively, to my project teams. I not only just listen—I think listening is good, but taking action on it is something also very important. A lot of times, people just listen, but it gets brushed under the carpet and it’s forgotten. So I think building that trust with your teams, listening to them, actioning on it, and even if you cannot do anything with it, bring that back to the team. Tell them, “This is out of my hands, but I’m here, I’m listening. We’ll try and do our best to get this done.”

HANNAH LABELLE 

You’ve worked on projects where team members are located across the globe, and one of the strategies that you have leaned into is using a digital forum. How has that helped you create inclusivity within teams? 

NIKKY CHEN

It’s like a digital room where we can all participate in there. Yes, we have to be very professional when we’re working, but at the end of the day, we are working with people. A lot of projects we work on [for] a very long term where we work on it for a year, six months, nine months. We talk to each other every day together, so I think we don’t need to just share about work. We can share culture. “How did you celebrate Diwali?” “How did you celebrate Obon in Japan?” That creates that awareness and understanding of each other, and that brings that human element into the project.

I think being digitalized, we often only think of our project teams or colleagues as that little icon that you see. But in reality, we have families. We have a life out of this little chatbox that we have. So I think that is very important, that we bring that human element, and we play games. We have days where we just play a game for 15 minutes. For agile, it’s very easy; we play games using Kanban with the team and that works very well, where everybody has access to the board. Or we play what words [come] to your mind when you think of this project now, and we have applications online where [if] everybody writes the same word, that word becomes bigger on the screen. And you would see different people having different perspectives of this project. That’s something I really like to see. That’s how you elicit their feelings and how they actually feel about the project. I like how IT has created so many different ways we can work with teams.

HANNAH LABELLE

What is your top piece of advice to fellow project professionals who are looking to create diverse, equitable and inclusive team environments?

NIKKY CHEN

The first one is to always lead by example. If a project professional is telling the project team, “Let’s promote diversity. Let’s be inclusive,” but we’re not doing that, that is definitely not going to work. Demonstrate commitment to diversity and equity and inclusion in every aspect, and show that we value and respect the diverse perspectives of every single team member that we have. And I also feel that encouraging, motivating, acknowledging the team members. Tell them that they’re doing good. Everyone should have the same opportunity to speak up, to learn, to grow. And then last of all, I mentioned this previously, listen actively. Listen to them and take action. 

HANNAH LABELLE

Let’s end on a personal note. Why are you passionate about DE&I? How do you hope that the efforts you’re making have a positive impact on your teams and other project professionals?

NIKKY CHEN

I was born in Taiwan. I moved to Bolivia in South America, and then I moved to South Africa as a child, and now I’m residing in Japan. I was exposed to a vast amount of diversity in the world. I had a lot of privilege to work with professionals in companies around the world, APAC (Asia Pacific), Middle East, Americas, Europe. And most of all with myself in the tech industry, I’ve seen a lot of people lose out because of that opportunity not [being] available to all. I’ve seen how certain genders are excluded in some positions. I’ve seen how some people have not been given equitable education that they were supposed to be getting in a workplace. 

This is why I feel that diversity, inclusiveness, equity is very important to me. If I can impact my team members, that is how I hope my efforts as a project manager can make an impact in the work that I do, in the field that I work with, especially in tech. I can create this environment and that everybody will feel valued, respected, empowered to thrive, regardless of their background, identity or gender.

HANNAH LABELLE

That is a great way to wrap up our discussion. Nikky, thank you so much. This has been great.

NIKKY CHEN

Thank you so much. It has been a good time talking to you.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Thanks for listening to Projectified. If you like what you heard, you can listen to more episodes on your preferred podcast platform or visit PMI.org/podcast. And please subscribe to the show and leave a rating or review—it’s always great to hear from you. Hope you can join us next episode!