Whether you’re a manager or a CTO, here are the five ideas you need to read on building safe spaces in your engineering org.
1. Juan Cabrera, Creating a safe space for your team
How can you make sure your company is a place where people feel empowered, safe, and like they belong? And if the leadership team is lacking diversity themselves, how can you improve something that you aren’t really able to see? In this article, Juan shares his guide to creating a safe space for your team, from unlearning your assumptions and building trust with your team to listening to them and making tangible changes that improve their working lives.
2. Jossie Haines, Finding a company with an inclusive engineering culture
Jossie Haines explains why she made the conscious decision to remain in the tech industry to help shape a more diverse future for the industry. When interviewing for her next role, she ensured that diversity was a priority for the company so she’d be able to champion inclusivity internally and ringfence some of her time to focus on DEI projects. Now she’s sharing how you can do the same. This article is a must-read for anyone looking for a company that’s genuinely focused on inclusion, as well as the red flags to look out for in the interview process.
3. Stephanie Stimac, How to create an inclusive space for different personalities
The best engineering teams bring together a broad range of personality types and perspectives. But creating a safe, inclusive space for everyone on the team isn’t always easy. In this article, Stephanie Stimac shares her experience of feeling pushed into a mold that doesn’t fit her way of learning, before outlining practical steps for supporting different working styles (tip: allow the introverts in your team time to prepare and recharge).
4. Ivana Ng, Shaping inclusive cultures for remote engineering teams
How can you design a more inclusive work culture that accounts for and includes everyone on the team? This article is a great read for anyone navigating leading distributed teams, with a focus on creating and sustaining an inclusive work culture. By breaking down exactly what work culture is, Ivana shares a useful model for understanding what’s most important to people at work, and what you should be thinking about when you’re working on improving your company’s work culture.
5. Karan Mehra, Growing your own grassroots allyship
Allyship is the essential work of understanding and eliminating the barriers faced by underrepresented groups. In this article, Karan shares how he and his colleague Stephanie Stattel kicked off a grassroots allyship initiative for Bloomberg’s Women in Tech (BWIT) community. Walking you through the three phases (preparation, planting the seeds, and growing), he shares how you can create a similar program for different underrepresented groups in your company.
If you have an idea for a LeadDev article or conference talk, we want to hear from you. We especially welcome submissions from folks in underrepresented groups. Find out more and submit your proposal here!
