Leverage Your Workplace Skills for Equity Work
By: Kris Macomber, PhD, Lead Equity Consultant
Work 4 Change is often hired to consult with workplace employee groups that have formed to address equity in their organization or company. Examples of these groups include employee resource groups, race-based caucuses, and, more recently, DEI sub-committees. And although the employees in these groups are often experienced workers who are very good at their jobs, addressing equity is new to many of them. They often don’t know how to leverage their skills for equity work.
Here are six workplace skills that can be leveraged for addressing equity:
Continue to Learn: All good employees continue to learn, grow, evolve, and adapt. Equity work is an ongoing process that takes time and willingness to keep learning and growing.
Self-Reflection: Self-assessments and performance reviews keep you in-tune with your strengths, limitations, and blind spots. This is also essential for reflecting on important equity topics, such as identity and implicit bias.
Problem Solving: Knowing how to solve problems is a hallmark of most jobs. Carefully thinking through complex problems–and where/how they originated– is also essential for equity work.
Strategic Planning: Developing short and long-term goals for work projects helps you stay organized and focused. This is also what you need to do to develop concrete and effective equity strategies.
Assessment: You know you’re doing good work, or where to make improvements, because you have a range of assessments and measures. Assessment is also helpful for documenting and measuring sustainable equity outcomes.
Accountability: The work you do is accountable to someone, to a group, or to a workplace policy. Equity work also requires a clear emphasis on accountability.
As workers you bring a range of skills to your job. It’s why you were hired. Yet, as we often see with our Work 4 Change clients, employees struggle to leverage their skills for equity work. It’s almost as if there’s an assumption–or even fear– that what makes you excel as an employee does not translate over into equity work. This is not the case. But, it is a matter of knowing what skills to leverage and how to leverage them.
Kris@work4changellc.com
