S3 E58: Being on the planning committee to prevent burnout
with author and inclusion expert Ruchika Tulshyan
Key Takeways
At that time I was like, am I going a little crazy? Is there something wrong with me? Why am I struggling so much? It's just me not leaning in enough. So I quit my job. This was before I had a child, I wanted to take my journalism skills and write a book about what it really takes to create a workplace that is gender balanced that is very accommodating to women and really allows women's skills and everything we bring to the table and especially all those parts of our identities. Whether you're a caregiver, whether you're a mother, whether you are certainly, for myself as a woman of color, a woman of very different ethnicities and identities. And what does it look like to create an inclusive workplace? And again, this was at a time where we weren't really talking about inclusive workplaces.
I think what was very surprising to me is the narrative continued to be women aren't leaning in enough. I think, we have, unfortunately really made it very challenging for women to even name the issues that they're facing. So much of the solutions we see in the workplace today are still, and in society are geared towards women as individuals changing themselves. You need to lean in, you need to negotiate. You need to advocate for yourself. And the research was very clear that actually even when women do that, they face pushback because of the gender norms that exists in our society.
Inclusion on Purpose is really me saying, and me recognizing and being very explicit and saying that actually, no, you need to take personal responsibility. Like you can have all the data . You can have a nice press release about how wonderful your organization is, but unless you can actually name what you are doing almost on a daily basis to create a more inclusive environment for women, specifically women of color, you're not gonna be able to make the type of change you want to.
We're a household where my partner and I both work and work outside the home. Both of us did not see that model growing up. We both grew up in Asia and both our mothers were, and in his case still are, stay at home parents essentially. And that was very difficult for me sometimes. And I would feel that real guilt and any sense of burnout that I felt over the pandemic and really in my life as a working mom, I would say, has been exacerbated by trying to figure out and navigate, what does it look like to create almost a model of working motherhood that I have never seen in my life for me up close. I hadn't interacted with someone who looked like me and had certain cultural expectations of how I wanna raise my child and what I want the norms in my household to look like. Who also was a woman who worked outside the home, who did paid work outside the home.
It's better to take care of your mental health and show up fully because I learned the hard way. I learned the hard way of how I was showing up when I had four or five speaking agents, media, podcasts, things like that to promote the book in a day, how I'd show up by the time I was on to number three or four, versus now where I really feel very much more in control of doing one a day, maximum two a day. And I feel like I can be so much more myself. And this is the version that I want people to become acquainted with. Not the version that's giving canned responses, exhausted, lack of sleep, burnt out.
There was a lot of what matters most. And especially when we were looking at compensation models, a lot of it was like what matters most is how many views your article gets. And it was hard because, I realized that before some of my colleagues who were writing about Kim Kardashians, latest wig were getting, millions of views. I kid you not. And here I was writing about what happens when women of color in another part of the world are struggling with certain issues, social issues, and that would get a hundred views. So I realized that it's easy to value ourselves based on those.
I read your article and that really changed the way I see myself and how I'm gonna approach the workplace. Or I used your article to have a conversation with my manager. And those were the moments that felt really profound. It wasn't the numbers as much and we're marketed to all the time to be told that, oh, what matters is, these numbers. And can you share these things and how grandiose is your approach and how you touch people's lives when an actual fact it's those individual notes that make the biggest difference.
Diversity as being invited to the party, inclusion as being asked to dance, which I think are very important and necessary outcomes for us to measure. Equity being part of the planning committee, being part of the decision maker, process, being part of do you get to choose the music that you like, do you get to wear what you like to the party? Are people allowed to bring their full, authentic selves to the party?
When I wrote Inclusion on purpose, my hope was that we would recognize how much work we have to do as individuals to try to drive that systemic change. Ff we say this is the way things have always been done here, if you want a seat at the table, you need to contort yourself to be able to get that seat on the table. For a lot of us, even when we get the seat at the table, we recognize the chair is broken or actually, there was never a chair to begin with. It was all just, window dressing. So I think that we need leaders to take more responsibility in action.
So the bridge framework essentially is, the B stands for be comfortable with, being uncomfortable.So much of this does make you uncomfortable. And it's easy in those moments to get defensive, or it's easy to be so uncomfortable that you don't wanna engage. And I actually say no, push past that and get comfortable with being uncomfortable, right?
The R is reflecting on what you don't know. And the reality is research in this country, in the United States finds that three quarters of white people don't have a single friend of color. So often the perspectives that you're going to get in your life are very homogenous and reflect what you already have in your life. So I invite people to reflect on what they don't know.
And then the next is the I of the framework is invite feedback, right? And invite perspectives from people that you don't already have represented in your life. And that's gonna cause defensiveness.
So the D is defensiveness doesn't help and get okay with again, those feelings of discomfort of defensiveness of thinking. But I'm a good person, and pushing past that and saying, I may be a good person and I may have caused harm or been exclusionary or didn't stand up when I should have, so defensiveness doesn't help.
And then G is growth from mistakes cuz you know, you're gonna make mistakes. I've certainly made plenty. And then E is, expect change takes time. So nothing happens overnight. A lot of the fatigue and the exhaustion that I think that people who try and do this work sometimes face and talk about is you're just not gonna have overnight change happen.
I grew up in Singapore, a country, which in which homosexuality is still criminalized. And so I grew up not knowing anyone, literally nobody who was openly gay or openly part of the LGBTQ community. And of course I'm so thankful that I learned that actually there's a different way out there. So that is the extent to which like you truly did not know or recognize that actually there are different ways of being and living your life. Growing up for me, I didn't know anyone who was openly part of the LGBTQ community, but the point is you can learn, you can grow, you might feel defensive, you might feel uncomfortable. And you can still you can push past that. You can make change. That's really the message that I'd like to leave people with.
There's such a strong overlap between DEI overall culture work, social justice work, and then certainly mental health and burnout because indeed, even research done during the pandemic found that women of color working mothers during the pandemic experienced the highest level of mental health challenges and burnout compared to any other demographic during the pandemic. So we know those intersections of being a woman of color of being a mother. Of doing paid work during the pandemic really created that perfect storm of the most, the highest levels of burnout and mental health issues.
People think culture is, do you get free beer at your office? Or do you get ping pong days? When in fact what really is culture is, do you have reasonable work accommodations? Culture means, is it a norm in your organization to not have even a single moment unscheduled? Is it a norm in your organization to constantly work late? Is it a norm in your organization that you can't feel vulnerable or even feel like you can be honest and safe with your manager or with your team and say, actually I'm having a really hard day or someone in my life needs extra care today. I need to take time off and that's what culture is. It's not, those freebies and benefits.
The biggest barrier is, but I worked hard too. So why should I have to make a change? And what people don't understand or people really need to spend more time reflecting is both things can be true. You had a hard life, you could have grown up in poverty or you could had other issues in your life. Certainly life is hard for a lot of people. There's no silver bullet, but that doesn't mean that you don't have the responsibility based on the privileges and advantages you did have to make life better for those who did not have those privileges and advantages.
I don't see myself in data so much, but even if someone has a very different experience than me in the workplace because of their identities or in society in the world that is going to touch my heart. Cause there will be some level of recognition as human beings that you would have when you listen to that story, which certainly wouldn't, if you just saw it as a data point.
Bio
Ruchika Tulshyan is the best-selling author of Inclusion on Purpose: An Intersectional Approach to Creating a Culture of Belonging at Work (MIT Press). The book was described as “transformative” by Dr. Brené Brown.
Ruchika is also the founder of Candour, an inclusion strategy practice. A former international business journalist, Ruchika is a regular contributor to The New York Times and Harvard Business Review and a recognized media commentator on workplace culture.
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