Want Progress? Measure.
If you don’t measure your impact, you don’t really know if you are having one.
You may have a sense that your efforts are driving changes, but you only know you’re making progress if you have a baseline and quantitative measurement of your improvement.
Corey Flournoy, VP of Diversity at Aurora, advocates that June be Black Progress Month. It’s a great challenge to check ourselves:
Are we implementing a well-considered action plan to hire and retain diverse staff and measuring our progress?
To improve our talent pipeline, we built diversity OKRs comprised of Objectives (goals) and Key Results (quantitative measures of outcomes). One of the OKRs requires each leader in Product and Engineering to have a certain number of informal networking conversations with both external and internal diverse talents. Interviews don’t count; the goal is to take some of the load off our Talent Acquisition team by nurturing connections before job opportunities arise.
A peer asked:
“Christine, how do I reach out to people without being creepy or transactional?”
It’s a great question.
First – make it a habit to connect with people you used to work with every year or so. They may ‘boomerang” back to you, or at least give you perspective and potential connections outside of your organization. Every conversation needs to include the question “What can I do for you?” Perhaps they need the name of the Agile coach you used in the past, a recommendation for an Intellectual Property firm, or a phone number from an old contact. It’s only an email / virtual coffee / after work beer. The connection may be brief, but it’s important to find a way to be of service. A woman recently came back to work for me and is making a big impact for the company. We had coffee once a year, and I helped her with a few challenges in her other positions in the years between.
Second - pay attention to new hires in your org, and reach out. I heard a recent grad who had just started at our company mention she was new to Chicago. I reached out, and we chatted. She was isolated in an unfamiliar city, so I connected her with four folks on my team who live in her area, and suggested they share favorite food deliver sources or see if they could connect for walks. As we chatted that first time, she mentioned she led a diversity organization at her college. When we had new job openings, she was my first call and her network gave us two terrific, smart folks who start in a few weeks.
Third - mentor and volunteer. There are many organizations looking for volunteers to speak, coach, and support. Through these opportunities you can be of service while amassing insight about talent in your geographical area.
So, let’s talk about our measurement of our progress. In my team alone, the measured impact on diversity has been great (our last seven hires have come from connections like these), and ALSO we’ve lowered our talent acquisition costs, expect to see higher engagement because of connections we share, which ultimately leads to discretionary effort, high performance, and retention.
This is why we measure informal coffees in our diverse networks: they make a material impact on our talent pipeline.
When we reach out to people we know or are connected to, it’s not creepy.
When we ask, “What can I do for you?” and do it, it’s not transactional.
When we measure our outcomes, we stay accountable to our goals.
So yes, Corey. Let’s go for progress, and let’s measure and celebrate it.