Building Antiracist Organizations

Welcome to Crescendo Chats: Scaling Diversity & Inclusion. In this series, Crescendo co-founder Stefan Kollenberg hosts conversations with HR and diversity & inclusion practitioners, sharing valuable insights from their work. 

This week’s conversation is with Marcus Cooper, the Global Head of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity at PagerDuty.

Listen to the podcast or read below for the edited transcript. 

Stefan: Can you share a bit about yourselves to get us started?

Marcus: I’m a native New Yorker and have spent my whole life and career in New York City, which is a place that’s right for the kind of social justice work that I do. I’m pretty passionate about the city and the potential that it has to really change lives, particularly through local government and some of the social programs we have. 

As it pertains to my work, I’m the head of inclusion, diversity, and equity at PagerDuty. Our collective mission is to enable all of our people, which we affectionately call Newtonians, to be champion facilitators. If I had to break down my role, it would be into three main buckets: systems of equity and compliance (like EEO and affirmative action planning), talent development (like executive development and coaching), and community (like volunteerism and our foundation).

Stefan: Why did you get into this work?

Marcus: It’s the typical tale of a person of color being marginalized and feeling frustrated with the status quo. I started out my career in recruiting, working for a San Francisco-based recruiting agency, and I could not believe the homogeneity in the candidates that we’d engage. We would service these incredibly aspirational, famous, well-publicized tech companies. They were looking for carbon copies of talent and they would come back to us when a certain hire wouldn’t work out, and I would say the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over again and expect different results. 

I was sneaky about it, to be honest. I just started sending over full panels of Black and Brown candidates. The first time that I did that, I’ll never forget the hiring manager sending me a direct email and asking if I was new on the account. I said oh I’m still learning, can I send candidates that are different from the main profile. She said I could send them, but they probably wouldn’t end up engaging them. It was such a bias thing. Then they started to get interviewed and started to get hired. It was truly the most gratifying feeling to see them break down barriers and change their professional and economic landscape for their entire future, just by landing their first job in tech. 

At that time I was already volunteering and pursuing some more of my social justice oriented passions. I thought to myself that this might be an opportunity to merge those worlds and really do some good. 

It took a more substantial form when I joined Oscar Health in New York a few years ago, which is where I was before I joined PagerDuty. 

Stefan: What challenges have you faced or mistakes did you make in your journey?

Marcus: The biggest lesson I’ve learned is probably around the meaning and value of service leadership. Early in my career, there was some ego involved. It was all about I understood there was a need, but I had done my diligence, talked to professionals… I thought I had all the answers and I wanted my ideas to win more so than I wanted specific communities to win and more so than I wanted my team to win. 

It’s a mistake a lot of young people make, but the truth is sometimes my ideas aren’t what certain communities need nor are they always the right decisions for the organization. I had to reorient myself on our people and our community and take my ego out of the equation. I’m reminded that this is not about me - people are depending on my resilience. I have to keep going. 

Stefan: What are some things you’ve shared with employees to keep them engaged in Juneteenth antiracist work?

Marcus: The content we posted on LinkedIn around the murders of George Floyd and Breona Taylor and many others - and the role we play as an organization in one of the wealthiest countries in the world - it’s a clear responsibility on our part to not just say the things that sound right but to do something ongoing. So we came together as a leadership team and decided what we are going to do. 

We introduced an initiative, called A Date for Change, and this is essentially a company sponsored holiday for all of our people to take action in service of the Black community. From education to volunteerism to protest and lobbying, we saw hundreds of employees step up to practice real, tangible allyship. It was an incredible moment for us to not only leverage our platform but also our resources to educate our staff but also support a critical population within our community. 

Stefan: How do you decide on which resources to share?

Marcus: We tried to make this structured as a program in terms of setting the right expectations for our staff and giving them opportunities, but also wanting them to have their own identity and voice. When it came specifically to lobbying, that was offered across a suite of other opportunities. It was for people who felt passionately enough for change that they were willing to go above and beyond and use their voice for good. All we did was put the resources out there. To be honest with you, I didn’t expect that particular opportunity to be as popular as it was. 

Stefan: How do you make sure momentum continues?

Marcus: It’s at the heart of everything we do. We did a video interview with the Wall Street Journal and they asked me how we are differentiating ourselves from other public statements we’ve seen from other companies. And number one, the best thing about A Date for Change is that it’s annual. Meaning we’ll be closing our business to support our Black community every single year. Consistency is what creates change. 

It’s also worth mentioning that a deeper change isn’t an isolated effort. It’s part of a suite of commitments we made as part of our corporate platform in response to many of the things we’re seeing in the world. We’re committing over half a million dollars to creating justice and equitable communities. We’ll use our foundation, PagerDuty.org, for the bulk of that work. We’ve totally refreshed our volunteer time off policy, which is the hourly allocation to all of our employees to participate in volunteer activities throughout the year. We allocate 20 hours per year, but we’ve augmented it to allow employees to participate in human rights protests as a form of volunteerism. We’ve also changed it so it supports voter engagement work with a focus on voter turnout in underrepresented communities. 

We’ve also committed to driving more transparency around our inclusion, diversity, and equity work and we’ll be launching pagerduty.com/diversity in July 2020. It will be its own unique format, but similar to the reports you might see in the industry. 

Lastly, we’ve renewed our commitment to doing business with partners who demonstrate and prioritize IDE. That means looking at our current contracts and thinking through what the plan is to get them to a space where we feel like they’re demonstrating the values that are consistent with ours. And how do we make sure that any new business we engage going forward has an awareness and understanding of what we mean when we say you have to prioritize IDE. 

Stefan: What ways have you seen systematic racism exist within companies and how can we adjust processes to address that?

Marcus: I try to pay respect to the fact that it might be a triggering question for a lot of folks. For a long time, racism was considered in such binary terms.It was either you're overtly racist or you're just not at all racist. Of course we know that's not the case.There's a number of microaggressions to speak to that. But more broadly, people are just kind of starting to wake up to it. 

Consider first that the systems we have today are relics of hundreds, of years of government regulated business, right? These are the same governing bodies that made discrimination, slavery, et cetera, all legally permissible. It's almost like a game of telephone. The message might dramatically change by the time it reaches the destination, but it still has elements of that original note, our HR and people systems, even the way we buy, sell, or just generally do business, all STEM from those original racist governing bodies, regardless of how much we've innovated. We have to actively seek out and audit our systems that have the capacity to adversely harm underrepresented populations. This is what it means to be actively anti-racist.

We see this pop up in all areas from benefits compensation to our corporate policy, to promotion and performance management, hiring the entire end to end talent experience, to be quite honest.My advice would be to map out your talent process from brand exposure, which is more along the lines of talent branding all the way through to post hire and even exit, and then ask yourself, what are the critical moments or milestones within each step? What structures exist within those? How are we mitigating bias within those structures? Are you even aware of how bias might impact these structures?

To be totally clear, this is going to be a lot of work.It's a tremendous amount of work to deconstruct every element of your people experience.

I'll tell you that you won't see the benefits of this overnight, but the key is just to get started and you'll see those changes happen. You have to pay respect to the fact that it took a hundred plus years for our particular industry to get to this place. We won't be able to solve it right away.

Stefan: What are your opinions on unconscious bias trainings?

Marcus: They're flawed in the way that humans are flawed. They don’t quite get to the root of the matter. Many times they've become these check the box type of learning engagements for the operations.I do think they have some utility, but the challenge is most unconscious bias trainings, focus on bias awareness and not necessarily bias mitigation.

Now I see these trainings being really successful when you can ground an audience in bias awareness first and then deliver a bias mitigation module that is specific and measurable enough, for example, Michelle Kim’s company Awaken. It's great because they absolutely cover the basics of bias awareness, but they help drive action and behavioral change by rooting the mitigation element in our feedback culture.

Stefan: What actions can recruiters take to have more balanced groups of candidates and hires?

Marcus: Yeah, they have a tough job, because I think a lot of organizations don't spend enough time enabling and coaching these teams.

So, in my mind, I see this in three critical buckets. 

Tools and systems. This is more focused on the resources available to recruiters to both hire efficiently and inclusively. My recommendation is to invest in tools that support a candidate centric hiring process. That's typically activated by your ATS and supportive tools like, travel and relocation, et cetera.

Recruiters should always be expert relationship builders. So they should want to see talent win and be successful, but that means setting the right expectations and over communicating, coaching for the interview, and advocating for them behind closed doors. I’ve seen a few companies do this really well, an example that’s top of mind right now is the way Google recruits. They’re great at coaching candidates through the process. 

The third bucket is more around domain expertise and consultation. This is the concentrated nature of the recruiter and the hiring manager. Recruiters should educate hiring managers on things like market trends and availability, role expectations, search criteria, and everything in between. This is an opportunity for recruiters to create a pathway into the organization for underrepresented talent by setting a fair and equitable hiring bar.

Stefan: Lightning round - favorite quote?

Marcus: From a colleague back at Oscar. I don’t know who originally said it: “Service unto others is the price we pay for our time here on earth.”

Stefan: What motivates you in life?

Marcus: Family is a key driver for me. My grandfather is a personal hero. He was the original director of the NAACP and was one of the first Black engineers at IBM. 

Stefan: What book or movie changed the way you think about the world?

Marcus: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. 

Stefan: Favorite podcast?

Marcus: I don’t know that I have a favorite podcast. 

Stefan: What’s the coolest tech product you’ve ever come across?

Marcus: I saw a Kickstarter campaign for a mobile dog washing station. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I was watching the videos and thought it was so cool. 

Stefan: How can people connect with you?

Marcus: Check out my LinkedIn or Twitter and get in touch.

Stefan: Thank you!