Inclusive Leadership Strategies

Hey there, nice to see everybody. Thanks for coming out at the end of the day. We really appreciate it. My name is Jen Brenneman. Thank you so much for the intro. I'm here with a lovely set of panelists. We're gonna talk a little bit about inclusive leadership, not just at MongoDB, but everywhere, all the time. I'm gonna give us a chance to introduce ourselves. I'll start, I'm Jen. I work on the HR business partnering team. I lead HR for engineering and product. And I want each of us to share one of our own personal core values. One of mine is humor. I don't know about you, but I spend more time with the people that I work with than I do with my family, so I'd better be enjoying myself. Otherwise, it's not worth it. So for me, being allowed to joke around at work and have fun with each other is an important part of how I get through the day. I'm wondering, can I pass it off to you, Garuti? Yeah, sure. Hello everyone, I'm Garuti, a lead product manager here at MongoDB on the core database side, and I am based out of New York. And my core value, at least for work, is all about intellectual honesty. It's about telling people that get paid way more than me the truth about how much certain things suck, even if it gets me fired. Awesome, thanks, Garuti. Hi everyone, my name is Steph. I am a software engineer on the Atlas migration team. I'm based in New York, and a core value I have is actually this Confucius saying that if there are three people walking, you can find a teacher among one of them. So I feel like there's something that I can learn from everyone that I meet, and I strive to do that and constantly grow. Hi everyone, I'm Will. I'm an associate product designer here at MongoDB on the internal tools team. I'm based in New York, and a core value of mine would probably be just generally inclusion, making sure everyone feels a part of the team that they're a part of or they're working on, as well as listening to people and just making sure that they feel heard. Excellent, I feel like I'm already learning things. We've only just gotten started, so thank you, Will. Before we dig into the questions, I wanted to take a minute and sort of show you how we think about inclusion at MongoDB, just in case it's useful to you. So we just introduced something called the MongoDB Leadership Commitment. The idea here is that everybody has a role to play in being a leader. If you abdicate it to people with titles, let's be honest, it doesn't get you that far. We all have a role to play in making MongoDB or making every place we interact with others a nice place to be. And so we capture that both in what we deliver, why we deliver it, and how we deliver it. That leads us to this definition of inclusion, which I really like because it's about how we feel and operate every day. So we want everybody to be highly engaged. We want people to live our values, and most importantly, to feel equipped to deliver great results. A very smart man in a previous role once told me, nobody comes to work to suck. You just don't. Like, why would you get out of bed and go to work to do a bad job? You wouldn't. And that's why we really want to create an inclusive environment at MongoDB, because we want you to feel equipped to do your best work. I think that's pretty powerful, and I like to believe. I like, I think I'm doing good work every day. So when we say every employee, I also want to point out, we don't believe in, I don't know, like, diversity as a, what's the word I want? Like, a buzzword, right? Because there's diversity that you can see, that's visible, like, above the line, but then there's a lot of things that differentiate us below the line. Like, for me, I'm a single mom. I need a lot of kinds of accommodations. No one knows that unless they talk to me about it and really have an open, honest conversation where they make me feel comfortable. And so we have that responsibility to do that with other people and make sure the people we're working with feel comfortable and able to bring their best selves in a way that we might not be able to see. So I'm gonna actually just move on to why this matters. If you didn't know these stats, I think they're pretty powerful and you should take a look at them. There's lots of business reasons why diversity is important. Companies that are inclusive and have a really diverse workforce have better results, the end. So, you know, if you doubt that fact, I can't help you with that, honestly, it's just true. So let's, the last thing I really wanna point out here is that inclusive language is embedded in every one of our values. And I wanna say, like, we didn't retrofit it. We thought to ourselves, like, what are our values and how would we define them? And then when we dug in, we thought, oh, gee, like, that is inclusion, right? Working hard to make sure our biases and personal beliefs don't get in the way of finding the best solution. Grudy pointed out intellectual honesty. That's the point, if we're honest with each other, then we can say, you're not looking at the data or do you think you're bringing a bias to the table and it frees us up to have those conversations. What's important about that, if I can get this, is that the outcomes of these values are qualities that have been validated by external sources. We got this actually from a company called Paradigm. They vetted this through, like, external studies and things to show that innovation, opportunity for everyone, culture of belonging, et cetera, those outcomes are what generate a feeling of inclusion for people. And that's what happens when we live our values. So I wanna take a minute to talk about the MongoDB values with this illustrious group. Grudy, can I start with you? Can you tell me a little bit, why do you think inclusion is so important for you as a leader of a team? Yeah, so I think, like you sort of mentioned, no one comes to work to suck, sometimes I wonder. But I think, yeah, no one, everyone comes and tries to do their best. At the end day, whether your work is your identity or you're there to exchange time for labor, at the end day, the more, the better you do that, the more money you get for the exchange of your time. So you still wanna do well in that. And so to me, with all that said, inclusive leadership is all about giving you the opportunity to shine, right? So understanding someone, understanding their background, understanding what they're about and making sure they're heard means that the odds of them doing their best work and feeling like they belong here goes up, if that makes sense. And so to me, and also the other part is that, like we talk about biases, there are a lot of places where you don't go look for talent and sometimes those kinds of folks come out with a new paradigm shift of thinking and so on that the rest of the team can jump around. So what you wanna do is essentially broaden your base up in terms of how you look at information and look for innovation so that when it comes together, you get something great. If everyone's thinking the same, sooner or later, that will bite you in the back, right? And so in the beginning, that might be fine. You know, it gets you somewhere, but really, if you wanna go to the next level, you're not sure where that kind of next level insight might come from, right? Or when you're innovating, you know, you might miss an important group of customers that may make or break your stuff, right? So for example, I saw a movie poster where, you know, the way they broke the line of the movie, it just looked like a racial slur in the second line, even though it was one word. And like, if they didn't have, you know, the person that was offended by that there, they couldn't, you know, notice that something like that happened. And so what happened then, it goes viral, of course. And now, you know, obviously, you know, bad publicity is not something you want for a movie. And I'm sure a lot of folks are not gonna go watch it, whereas if they had someone there to sort of speak up, you know, that might've helped. So to me, it's all about, you gotta cover your edge cases and, you know, make sure that innovation can come from a lot of angles. So to me, doing all of that is what inclusion's all about, to make sure that at the end of the day, we put out something good that covers everyone, if that makes sense. Well, I love that it sort of has both sides of it, right? It's the innovation and putting out good ideas, but also the vetting and making sure that we're thinking about things from multiple angles. I think that's a really good example. I'm wondering, Steph, can you talk a little bit about a time maybe you've encountered someone making, like, missing that, right? Where they had the opportunity to be inclusive, or they had the opportunity to make it comfortable for everybody, and they missed that chance. Yeah, for sure. I wanted to talk about kind of an interview experience that we had on the team. Our team is relatively new. We were formed around, like, more than a year ago, and we were hiring recently for another engineer. And at the time, most of the people on the team were new to the company, and so the interview process involved having a technical interview that serves as a screening before we go on to the final onsite. And we got to a point where we were interviewing so many candidates that, you know, we put everyone on the team on the technical screening stage, and I was just unsure, or I wanted to make sure that we, because that's such a crucial point in the interview funnel where, you know, if someone says no to a technical screen, then that candidate just gets passed over. And that is a lot to put on one person to make that judgment. And so I just wanted to make sure that because we were a new team, we were not introducing our own implicit biases into the interview process and discounting a candidate because of an impression that we had during a one-hour interview with them. And so I had talked to my lead about it, and we came up with a system where we would shadow a technical screen with her first to understand the qualities that we're looking for to make sure that we're all calibrated before we went on to do our own technical screening. And we ended up with a really, really good candidate for the role that I was super happy with, so yeah. Love a happy ending. Thank you, Steph. Will, do you want to add anything to that? Yeah, I think taking it from a different perspective, I'm a product designer, and so I love telling stories. So a quick story on accessibility and the interfaces that I design with. I'm on the internal tools team, so I'm working kind of meta, working with the engineers who are creating products for engineers who are creating products for engineers. And so when I think about them, I think about all of their needs, both technically as well as just like when interacting with the platform, just being able to see the platform and seeing different perspectives and just kind of interactions. And so one thing that I wanted to take in mind for my most recent project was actually accessibility. And so accessibility comes in a variety of different fashions whether that's just making sure a button is clickable by a user, or making sure they can see a button and see the different statuses between, say, a task that we ran. And so when redesigning our new interface within MongoDB, specifically an internal tool, I really wanted to make sure that I used all of the different tools available to us. Stakeholder management can sometimes be difficult because engineers love information density and making sure that all that information is available to them. However, making sure that that information is accessible to everyone across different teams, across different needs, across different perspectives. And so that was something that I highly advocated for as a product designer with my engineering team as well, across stakeholders, making sure that that information was extremely accessible and finding the tools that were necessary to make sure that happened. And so I went ahead and I found color accessibility tools to make sure that different people with different disabilities could see the different statuses as well as icons, making sure that there was enough contrast between colors and backgrounds. I know MongoDB and this is a very technical aspect, but we really wanna make sure that we're talking about the person behind all of these technologies and making sure that it's truly accessible to everyone. I love that example. One, if I may, I'd like to offer an example too. So I'm the executive sponsor of our config ERG, which is for neurodiverse individuals. A lot of our employees who are in this ERG have diagnoses like autism or ADHD. And what we did was we put together a group of people to audit our interview process and make sure that our interview process was inclusive to people with neurodiverse backgrounds so that they could participate fully in the interview process. And we highlighted some gaps in the process and we're able to fix those. And one of the things that I think is really important about the examples that we've just shared is that willingness to admit that maybe there's an opportunity to get better, right? If you get defensive, if we're like, no, our technical interviews are great. No, we really, we already love everybody. We don't want to admit that our colored buttons are wrong or whatever the thing might be. And we've all sort of worked in that environment before I expect. And so I really appreciate these examples all show like a willingness to be like, yeah, yeah. That was a mess. We could probably fix that. So thank you for that. Now, what I'd like to do is sort of put the positive spin on it and ask about a way that someone has helped you feel super engaged at work and like gone the extra mile to make sure you felt included. I'll open it up to anybody, obviously, though I think, Will, I like the idea of starting in the opposite direction and coming back. So maybe you want to kick us off? Yeah, absolutely. So I think I joined MongoDB just not fairly recently, but definitely a few months ago. And so the onboarding process was definitely quite daunting. And so something that I really appreciated specifically from my manager and not just my manager in my product design capacity, but my manager across the engineering team was making sure that they offered me continuous support in terms of connecting me with the right people and opening my eyes to see the different resources that were already existing within the company. Because oftentimes I could definitely search and find plenty of different wiki resources available and try to really network and narrow down all the opportunities available for me. However, having a kind of a source of knowledge, such as a lead across different teams is really helpful in terms of just kind of narrowing where I can find the best support for myself. As well as kind of giving the kudos where it's really necessary. It's starting on, sometimes it can be a little bit intimidating. And so I really appreciated my manager checking in and giving me that reinforcement across the entire timeline for all of my projects, making sure that we're checking in and that they acknowledge the work that I have done and acknowledge where we can improve, of course, but also just providing that extra level of support in terms of connecting me with people that can help me achieve that goal. Providing me with actionable steps in which I can go ahead and take and make sure that I get to that goal that we both align on. I love that. Steph or Gurudi, do either of you want to add anything to that? Pro tips, pro tips? Yeah, I can go. So I'll talk about, you know, I'm in product, but we have a lot of meetings, especially with engineering. And so I have a couple of engineering leaders that sometimes someone will say something that clearly makes no sense. They'll see me rolling my eyes and some of them will be like, hey, Gurudi, what do you think? And I'm like, well, to be honest, you know, I'm like, you know, I'm sort of, you know, cynical sometimes. Like, hey, not everything we do is great, right? I don't like drinking our own Kool-Aid. It's not perfect. Oh, you know, people will be like, yeah, we're talking about something that all the customer will figure it out. I was like, no, they won't. You have to assume it's not that these people are not smart, but they're busy. We're not the only database they're using. They're doing other things and so on. So you want to make it obvious. And so, you know, and those same leaders, they tend to ask, you know, other folks, especially new ones that have not been, you know, drinking the MongoDB Kool-Aid for years, like I have, you know, what they think. And I think to me, that's the kind of inclusion that I like because you try to, you know, you ask people that don't speak all the time or people that might have a different opinion, what they think, and that also gets the conversation going, right? Can you debunk it? If you can prove it wrong, then hey, we're good. But at least that discussion happened. And so I like to feel included that way or feel, you know, make other people feel included that way by asking folks that either don't speak a lot or folks that I know for sure might have a differing viewpoint, what they think, just so we can see if we can poke some holes in the arguments that we're making. I think asking questions is such an important thing. You know, I facilitated MongoDB's manager program for a lot of years, training people how to be new managers. And a couple of the questions we suggest that every manager ask their team, how do you like to receive feedback? And what motivates you? And like, check in on those things because getting feedback in a way you don't like, including like public praise, like the last thing I wanted someone to stand up in front of a crowd and tell me I did a good job, I'll die a million deaths. Like, don't do that to me. I won't feel included, right? But if my manager doesn't ask, and they just assume, then I won't, right? So we have a responsibility to sort of ask those questions, invite that conversation. And so I just wanted to give you like a couple of concrete questions you can ask your colleagues or your direct reports back when you get back to the office to hopefully make that environment a little bit more comfortable for the kind of exciting feedback conversation that Guru was describing. I really appreciated that. Steph, looks like you want to add something. Please chime in. There's just one thing I wanted to add. So we have a executive vice president at Mongo who also happens to be a woman, but one culture that I think she has really fostered within our greater engineering org is the ability to say, I don't understand. Like, can you tell me more? And that has really trickled down into so many levels of management. And it really encourages new people who have just joined to be okay with not knowing. And I think it really creates a culture of just like being willing to share, being willing to help, but also being willing to admit that we don't know everything and that's okay. I love that. And that's a great segue to my next question, which is like, what tips would you give? For those of us, I'd like to believe that all of us are aspiring to be more inclusive leaders every day. Hint, hint. I'm not very subtle. So if you have any tips for what you think, like a small step everybody could do tomorrow to be a more inclusive leader, what would you recommend? I can go first. I came prepared with three main things that I think are pretty helpful. The first one is to really get alignment with your manager on the work, the diversity work and inclusion work that you're doing. I feel like especially as a software engineer, as an individual contributor, it is a little bit hard sometimes to justify, you know, like spending an hour doing something for your affinity group versus spending an hour working on a ticket that you have on your like docket. And so I think it's really, really important to be able to identify what your company's values are and connect your work directly with one of those values and have manager alignment on, you know, reassuring you and being on the same page that yes, like what you are doing is still impactful even if it's not something that is on the GRF board for this week. The second piece of advice I have is to timebox the actual work that you have. It is so easy to get sucked in and to plan like 10 different social events for your affinity group or for your ERG and there is an endless list of things we can do to continue to be more inclusive and to foster that community, but to timebox it to say like an hour a week and there's so much that we can do even just with those incremental hours within a week. To make that also seem more manageable and not take away so much of your time from your engineering work. And the last piece of advice that I have here is to not do it alone. I think it's really, really hard to run an affinity group. I'm sure all of us here are all parts of affinity groups at MongoDB, but it is so hard to do this work alone and, you know, we're not technically getting paid to be leaders of our respective groups, but to pull in people who are also interested to get people to feel empowered to step up and to help plan these events and really scale your impact in that way. So I really recommend identifying people that you know are interested, you know, can make great impact and to pull them in into all the initiatives that you're doing. Yeah, as a people manager, you know, that is a thing I have to, you know, think about, right? And so to me, inclusion, there's two fronts. On hiring front and then there's the, you know, the employees already here. On the hiring front, for example, I remember when I was recruiting, you know, some of the product managers on my team, it's like, hey, well, you know, you're talking to the recruiter. It's like, well, here's the kind of people we're looking at. It's like, look, it's okay to expand. I'm happy to take a couple extra screening interviews just to confirm that the type of people you think are not qualified are actually not qualified. And surprisingly, there are a couple of people that we wrote off on paper that, hey, when I talked to them, I was like, well, clearly, either, you know, they didn't present themselves well in the resume and so on until they actually were stellar viewers, right? And so we hired one of them actually that way, that someone that was not on that original pass list, but I'm willing to, you know, do that work to be more inclusive. You know, hey, if I have to let go of, you know, a couple of small projects just to do one or two more interviews as a hiring manager, it's on you to be inclusive. You got to do that work, right? It doesn't come for free. And by default, it's not even your standard thing, right? It feels like you're going above and beyond, but it will pay dividends. And I think, you know, you'll see it within a couple of months of them starting. That's the first part. The other part is same thing with folks that are there. There are people that you see are disengaged or you see are, you know, less likely to sort of stick around, right? You don't want to lose someone after six months and got to rehire again, or you also got to go out of your way to make them feel included, right? Ask them, you know, whatever it is, like how they're feeling, stuff about their background, how everything's going. Not everybody wants to be personal. You don't have to be super personal, but just treating them as human, letting them know that you understand that they may have something that is, you know, different about them engagement-wise, the team and trying to get to the root of that. I think those are things. And then connecting them to, you know, people that are like them maybe as, you know, sort of mentor or peer mentor. I think those are things you can do as a people leader that we don't think about as opposed to just, you know, going about our own ways. And the last thing we try to do is that, look, people work, they have different working styles. So for example, I don't care if you work midnight to 8 a.m., all right? Obviously we have meetings, but you know, that's some things you can't avoid. But like, look, I have a pretty objectionable, you know, things you got to do that are pretty objective. And if you do them, that's it. I don't care how you did it. Now don't piss, you know, the whole company off and so on, but you have leeway to accomplish the job, however I see fit. And I go, did you accomplish it? Great. You know, if that means it took you two hours and, you know, you had to go, you know, babysit in between the day, but you did it, who am I to tell you that you didn't do your job, right? So to me, that's the other part. It's about actually myself being inclusive and like looking at, hey, you have different working styles and allowing the measure to sort of be agnostic to how you work. That objectivity, that was one of the outcomes that leads to inclusion, right? If you're making data-driven decisions and you're setting data-driven outcomes for your team, then it helps you make better managerial decisions. Great point. Thank you. Will, I can tell you want to add something. What's that? Yeah, just real quick. One thing that I've been trying to practice more recently is just like gratitude. Gratitude for the variety of different communities that I've been a part of and that have like really helped me get to the point where I am in my career and just generally in life. And so that's something, whether that's a workplace worker who puts on an amazing event and you're just thankful that they set up a coffee station for the morning and you really need to get to the meeting or it's your manager really helping you network across a different organization. Just practicing gratitude to make sure that people are seen, are heard, and just listening to different perspectives. I think as we've mentioned across the board on all of our different answers, everyone's perspective is really valuable and can often lead you to a different outcome and can just open up new avenues of just kind of productivity and just kind of a new direction to take different things. So I highly recommend just being grateful and listening to people. I think those are two very simple things that we can just take a moment and reflect on and move forward with every day. I feel grateful you said that. Thank you. I'm gonna add, I'm gonna take the liberty of adding as the person who I'm pretty sure is the oldest person on this panel and therefore has had the most opportunity to screw up out of all of us. I think it's really important to ask for feedback. It will not surprise you that I work in HR and I'm a talker and I've had the opportunity to learn from some introverts on my team that maybe I'm running roughshod all over them and they need a little more space and a little different way to do things, right? But I needed to open up the floor to say what's the feedback you have for me and what can I do better and make sure I'm doing that with sincerity so that way when I'm not offering up the right time zones for my counterparts in other countries or not paying attention to their religious holidays or things that, I mean, basic stuff, I definitely shouldn't have messed up and don't have an excuse to do but if I wasn't open to the feedback, we wouldn't have fixed it. So I think that's another thing I would just offer up and we've done a really good job. We've left time for questions. Does anybody have any questions for our illustrious panelists? I don't know if I could define the word illustrious. I don't use it that often. Outstanding. Hang on. Very simple question to Steph. Anyone can answer as well. I'm an entry-level engineer so someone who's a software engineer always struggles with like actually saying their thought process out loud. So this is something that I always face struggle during the stand-up meetings in the morning. So I wanted to know like how you actually prepared yourself in MongoDB or outside everywhere else where you do like the meetings or like if you have to like talk about your project, feature that you worked on over the week. So how does it work for you and especially in MongoDB? Yeah, that's totally valid question. Thank you for that. I think a little preparation goes a long way. I remember in the beginning when I first joined the company or when I first started my career, I would have a note app with just like all the things I wanted to say during stand-up or like all the questions I wanted to ask. And in meetings that I led, I would prepare the agenda in advance just so I remember to like cover everything I wanted to do. So honestly, I think that's also a level of organization that has been appreciated throughout my career. It's just like a little bit of note-taking goes a really long way and there's nothing wrong with having to like read off your laptop sometimes just to remember what it is that you wanted to say. I think it shows that you really care and that it shows you want to do a good job. I'll just add one thing to keep in mind when you're newer in your career or at a company, you get a leeway to make a lot of mistakes. So the dumber you look in the beginning, the smarter you'll look a year out. And so never be afraid to be embarrassed in the kind of questions you ask because believe me, depending on what it is, most folks will understand and will try genuinely to help you. I remember when I first joined MongoDB, I thought I was a stellar PM, but I knew very little about databases, right? And so I was asking questions that clearly proved I knew very little about databases. And today I'd say, four and a half years later, I know a ---- ton about databases, right? But in the beginning, I think that, I was able to be vulnerable and ask those questions because I was new, no one could judge me. And now I know folks, for example, that have been around for a while that never asked those questions and you could tell, they never reached that next level because they were too afraid to look dumb in the beginning. So if you're new, you're junior, whether at the company or in your career, I think that is a perfect time to be vulnerable because folks, the senior folks, especially the experts, the staff engineers and so on, they will understand and they will help you. And later on, that will mean that you will need less help. And so they will also appreciate that in the coming months. Yeah, just want to add something really quickly, is your manager's there to help you. They're your biggest advocate and they really want to see you succeed. And so something that I've utilized, especially early on in my career, just asking those questions on those one-on-one or just asking for feedback and asking for just generally communicating my working style with my manager so that we are aligned as much as possible. That open communication and making sure that everyone is kind of on the same page. I was in a meeting last week with our CFO and he said, you know what we should do? We should just make sure that we always have the most junior person go first because this is what happened at his previous company. And he was like, of course, it was like a little cruel and terrifying. Like, you know, we're in a meeting and we're going to go in order from most junior to most senior. But the idea was that the senior people needed to learn to listen and the junior people needed to learn to talk. And it was the best way to ensure that everybody was growing in the meeting. And then if you introduced it as standard practice, nobody has to worry about like, is it okay for me to say the wrong thing? Because that's just the way it's done. And I thought, that's why you're in charge. It's a good rule. So thank you for the question. I like that. Annie, I think we have time for one more. Anything else? All right. Well, I don't want to stand between you and a drink. You should definitely go get one. Thank you so much for coming. We really appreciate it. Enjoy your evening.