From the course: Inclusive Tech: The Case for Inclusive Leadership

Building and leading a new team from inclusive foundations

From the course: Inclusive Tech: The Case for Inclusive Leadership

Building and leading a new team from inclusive foundations

- [Instructor] Starting work with a newly formed team can feel like a fresh start, and it can be a great opportunity to begin building inclusive practices from your first day. You want to make sure that your team members from all backgrounds and your potential new hires all get the equitable treatment they deserve in the workplace. Let's look together at some of the factors you'll want to consider in building and in leading your newly formed team. Before starting with your new team, start thinking about the challenges and the goals that you want to address with them. What do you want to learn more about as you prepare to lead? You may want to grab a pen and a scrap of paper to brainstorm along. What kind of information about inclusion best practices do you need before you begin a hiring process? What kinds of biases will you need to work to mitigate in interviews and in hiring? You may want to do some research into the most common hiring barriers for underrepresented applicants. This is also a good time to think about the accessibility of your applicant facing tools and processes. You may want to check into how accessible your online application system is. Just as an example, when your team is ready to start, how will you communicate with them? And how will you track their output? Perhaps you'll use Slack, and you'll have daily standup calls, and maybe you'll use Jira to track issues. Are there going to be barriers to accessibility or inclusion linked to these choices? How would a hard of hearing team member be able to participate in your standup calls? Are the ticketing systems we're using going to be compatible with screen readers? And how do we make sure that the people doing glue work on your team, get that work tracked and credited? When thinking about the rules and guidelines for your team look critically at how you want to enforce and track these issues at work. Some of the most common and most insidious forms of bias in the workplace, stem from uneven application of rules that disproportionately punish marginalized team members. Questions around how will we communicate acceptable behavior? How will we work to fairly apply rules and expectations in the workplace? How will assessments work practically? And how will you work to mitigate your own and institutional biases in reviews and pay? Each time you ask yourself a question about how you'll approach an aspect of your team, also think about and research how people from different backgrounds might interact with your approaches. You want opinions beyond your own lived experience. So working with, reading from, and talking to other voices in the diversity inclusion space can help highlight both new concerns and new ideas.

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