You may be familiar with the Keenan Anderson situation in Los Angeles (although he himself was a teacher in DC). If you’re unfamiliar, here’s the video.
If you are the type of person that analyzes police videos despite never having done police work yourself, you can analyze this any number of ways. He isn’t following instructions (“comply!”) and that’s where the shit goes off the rails. (That’s the conservative angle to it.) What liberals will respond to is, near the end of the video, he screams “They’re trying to George Floyd me!” OK, so enough of politics.
Whenever we have one of these cultural flashpoints, be it Floyd or COVID protests or any number of things, I wonder: should we be discussing this stuff at work? My usual answer is “no,” because if we tried to have a group discussion about a societal topic in an organization, probably the executives would ask HR to plan it, and it would be useless and meandering.
You can’t actually “ban” employees from discussing anything, but as society has become more polarized and tedious, obviously we spend a lot of time at work and we spend a lot of time interacting with co-workers, so some of this stuff can flare up. Probably the best advice I’ve seen is from Jason Fried, who founded Basecamp and 37 Signals. It’s in here.
Here’s the quote:
6. No forgetting what we do here. We make project management, team communication, and email software. We are not a social impact company. Our impact is contained to what we do and how we do it. We write business books, blog a ton, speak regularly, we open source software, we give back an inordinate amount to our industry given our size. And we’re damn proud of it. Our work, plus that kind of giving, should occupy our full attention. We don’t have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure. These are all important topics, but they’re not our topics at work — they’re not what we collectively do here. Employees are free to take up whatever cause they want, support whatever movements they’d like, and speak out on whatever horrible injustices are being perpetrated on this group or that (and, unfortunately, there are far too many to choose from). But that’s their business, not ours. We’re in the business of making software, and a few tangential things that touch that edge. We’re responsible for ourselves. That’s more than enough for us.
I used to work for this dude Marshall. I ultimately got piped out of that job, but Marshall was a nice guy. He used to tell me the following:
A company has two responsibilities around social justice.
The first is to pay people enough so that they can go and contribute to causes they want, do what they want, and not be rubbing nickels together.
The second is to hire in a diverse way — and that means cognitive diversity, skin diversity, gender diversity, age diversity — so that people are exposed to different perspectives they wouldn’t get in their day-to-day, week-to-week personal circles (which can be homogenous).
I generally agree with this. The worst element of corporate social justice initiatives is the sepia-toned Instagram post about “standing together” and “uplifting voices” which is then tied to zero action items. That’s one reason why most people think corporate diversity initiatives are little more than a performative joke.
The sad fact is, many executives don’t really care about diversity and social justice. They might in their day-to-day life. They want their daughter to be a good person who takes in different viewpoints. But when the “professional” hat is on, they want to make money, prove growth, and showcase success of both themselves and their company. They view all this social justice stuff as a “nice to have.” It’s not a need-to-have, like a go-to-market strategy would be. So a GTM strategy meeting will always replace a meeting about social justice.
The shallow and superficial treatment of these issues is what infuriates a subset of people. So, avoid that. And if you tried to mandate discussions about issues among people who mostly put on headphones, avoid colleagues, and look good doing their tasks, well, that would also be performative. So, we shouldn’t discuss this stuff unless it happens in a natural, organic way between colleagues. And if that organic discussion blows up and people start screaming, anger-logging out out of Zoom, or throwing staplers, then we need some conflict resolution strategies.
Remember: virtually anything a company has “mandated” will be handled by a department that will fuck it up, because anything that’s a true mandate, the execs will hand-pick who runs it — and it will be someone they trust to crack heads until everyone complies with the mandate. We can’t force corporate drones or “extrapreneurs” to discuss police brutality. It can only happen organically. And in reality, the workplace should have very little to do with social justice causes unless people want to discuss it with those they slay deliverables with.