246: Navigating Leadership and Inclusivity with Alida Miranda-Wolf

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:02]:

Alida, you’re so welcome to the Happier at Work podcast. I’m really thrilled to be having this conversation with you today. Do you want to introduce yourself to listeners? Let them know a little bit about your background and how you got into doing what you’re doing today.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:00:15]:

Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I’m really looking forward to our conversation, and this idea of happiness at work is one that’s really shaped my career and my sense of purpose at work. I started out my career in non profits and higher education, and then I ended up making a hard pivot into venture capital, and in that space I came to a few different realizations that have led me to where I am in my career today. The first is that I understood the importance of company culture, and being part of a culture that really shared the same values, but I also was coming into that space having been one the first woman ever hired on that team even though it was the most established firm in the Midwest, to being one of 32 Latino women working in venture capital in the entire country, and the only one in Chicago, and then when I became a director there I was 24, which meant that I was one of the youngest VC leaders in the country, and all of those identities put me in this strange position of feeling like an only, and also constantly being reminded of how lucky I was, and I came to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging work because I both wanted to make that environment better for myself, but I was also charged with growing our portfolio, and it was very clear that the companies we were investing in were led by the same kinds of people, and those people did not have the identities that I did, and I wanted to create more opportunities for them especially because we only invested in the Midwest, and contrary to popular belief this is an extremely diverse region of the U. S, and to have so little racial diversity and to have no gender diversity in our portfolio to me seemed like a missed opportunity in a variety of different ways. Ultimately, I fell in love with that work, and so after a time I started my firm Ethos, which is a full service diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging transformation firm. I’ve been running it for the last 7 years, and in that time I’ve focused on trying to make what we do here, which we think of as worker solidarity work, open source, so that’s how I wrote my first book, Cultures of Building Inclusive Organizations That Last, and then as the politicization of DAIB has really become an issue in this industry in the last two and a half years, I was asking myself if all of these investments that organizations are making in DEIB are clawed back, what remains? And that is how I ended up writing my second book, The First Time Manager at DEI, because at the very least we can provide tools and practices for the folks who are responsible for the day to day experiences of their employees to lead from the lens of equity, and so that book came out in May and has really been part of this larger project for me of ultimately saying whatever you want to call the work that I do advocating for underrepresented workers and workers from historically resilient groups is work that we need to be doing, and the last historically resilient groups is work that we need to be doing, and the last thing I’ll say on that is it’s why I started my podcast 2 years ago which is called the CareWork podcast, which is what it means to be in the business of providing care for a living, how do you take care of others, and what does that social contract look like, but also how do we take care of ourselves. I name that also knowing that I’m on hiatus because I’m currently in the process of trying to offer myself care as I grapple with a very difficult period in my own life.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:04:03]:

So that’s a little bit more about me.

Aoife O’Brien [00:04:06]:

There’s so much there that I want to uncover and unpack. Can I first of all ask about this idea of being lucky and, oh, you’re lucky to be where you are? You’re so young. You’re a woman. You’re the only woman. Like, was it other people who were saying that to you?

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:04:21]:

Absolutely. I remember being on a panel, and the panel was about entrepreneurship, and I had made it a main goal of mine to educate our community on how venture capital worked, because every entrepreneur thought they were going to raise money, and it was going to be the solution to all of their problems, and actually it’s a very complicated mechanism, it only works for certain types of organizations, it isn’t actually a good deal for many people, and so I really wanted to go out in the community and say this is what it looks like, and these are what the other options are. So I was on panels all the time doing this sort of education and community advocacy, and I really knew what I was talking about because we had such a large portfolio, I was involved in that process, and I practiced sharing this information. The reason that I say this is because I was waiting to get up on stage and sit in one of the stools, and there was a woman in the audience who was an entrepreneur herself, and she said how did you get on this panel? Are you somebody’s daughter?

Aoife O’Brien [00:05:22]:

Oh, wow.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:05:23]:

And that was a pretty common experience, and, you know, just in terms of the reality of the situation, yes, I am someone’s daughter. I have parents. They are not in venture capital. They had no idea what it was. My mom is a Cuban refugee, my dad is a doctor, and when I got into this space they had no knowledge of it whatsoever. I didn’t get into the space through my family connections, I got into it honestly by happenstance, and by having a very, very helpful college advisor who opened this pathway up to me, but that was happening all the time. I was referred to as a unicorn, and that was meant to be a compliment, but it was also meant to say that someone like me should not be in my role, that I was the only exception, that I must be so exceptional to have this position, which one, creates a lot of pressure, because I don’t want to make mistakes, I don’t want people to see me as less than, but 2, it assumes that people like me can’t do these kinds of roles, which meant that I remained isolated because they were not getting into these positions. I had a leader tell me when I was advocating for having more women investors in our investor base, he looked at me and he said, Alita, you’re saying just having a woman in the room is worth it even if that woman is a dingbat? That was the way that he said it to me.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:06:53]:

Yeah and my response in the moment, which I actually stand by is well, you wouldn’t say that if she was there so then yes. Yeah. Because go for it, Ava.

Aoife O’Brien [00:07:10]:

But it’s it’s interesting that you say that. I often speak about imposter syndrome, and being the only person is a huge trigger for that for exactly the reason that you described, Alida. It’s this like, it’s the pressure that you feel. Like, I’m representing everyone who comes after me. There’s a huge amount of pressure to perform. If I’m the only person, I am the representative, essentially. So it causes a huge amount of pressure, and it causes us to doubt ourselves and our abilities. And do I deserve to be here? Or did I just get lucky? Am I the unicorn? And I made some sort of exception, and that’s the reason that I’m here.

Aoife O’Brien [00:07:53]:

I want to come back to this idea of investment and investment specifically in DEI and b because you were saying that there’s there’s has been a shift over the last two and a half years. Now I’ve seen this from the outside. And I don’t know. Do you have perspective kinda globally or Europe? But I know certainly from an American perspective, there’s been almost, like, a pushback. Like, we don’t need this. Why do we need it? Do you want to expand a little bit more about, like, what’s actually going on? What’s driving this, and what has been the impact of it?

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:08:28]:

So just in terms of the numbers, since 2020, $7,400,000,000 has been pulled away from diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging efforts globally. And the majority of places that invested in DEIB during that time were the US and Europe. So that’s really what we’re talking about when we’re saying that there’s been divestment in DEIB. Why is this happening? That is a question that a lot of folks in our industry are talking about, but I go back to a really simple organizational change principle, which is when you introduce change into a system too quickly, the system will reject that change.

Aoife O’Brien [00:09:05]:

Yeah.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:09:05]:

And I think that that is what’s happening. So in 2020, I’d already been a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging practitioner for about 4 years and was feeling new in the space even then. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and the international Black Lives Matter protests that followed, the industry exploded. So the number of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging roles increased by 33%. We had people starting their own businesses. We had folks who didn’t really have experience in the space, didn’t have training in the space, hadn’t cultivated a strong set of principles or values, but who felt moved to take action, moved to have an impact, and they thought this was going to be the solution. And especially in the US, we tend to think our social problems are going to be solved through corporate mechanisms. So the work was happening, yes, in terms of community organizing, but where the focus was placed was on what businesses were going to do, and that’s how you ended up seeing the proliferation of diversity statements and organizations making pledges in support of different identity groups.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:10:19]:

But ultimately, there were some problems with that. For 1, there became backlash within the space itself for the DEI Industrial Complex, the idea that this industry evolved to make itself money, but it wasn’t actually fixing problems. And in many cases it was window dressing, and it was allowing bad actors and big companies to continue doing the same bad things they had been doing before. You had controversies like what we’ve seen with organizations like REI or Patagonia, where GEI has been used to bust union efforts and so pitted against unionization, which was growing in popularity during that time. But then what we had was the political situation globally being very fraught and tense. So when I think about the rise of the far right, which has been happening in the U. S. Really since the 1980s, but exploding in the 2010s.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:11:22]:

That’s happening all over Europe at the same time, you know. One of my team members is French and based in France, and her anxiety levels were spiking over whether Marine Le Pen was going to win the election, and we saw this concern with our clients who are in Spain, in the UK. We’re really seeing this push on what social justice and impact are being framed as, and it’s being caught in this political crossfire, and CEIB is being pulled into that because it’s being viewed as, like, the original solution that was presented. But where I see it really hitting in the US is when we had all of these local elections following the election of President Biden that were the backlash against him winning that election, First, the campaign was around trans youth, which it continues to be, but trans youth, and then Critical Race Theory, which automatically got linked to DEI. Now there are a lot of problems with those arguments. They’re mostly bad faith arguments, and they aren’t tied to what diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is meant to be. But as critical race theory lost some of its luster as a kind of boogeyman, the term that politicians replaced it with was diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging. And Ron DeSantis in Florida, my previous home state, ends up being one of the leaders there because he wants to use it against organizations that are challenging his far right agenda, especially as it relates to trans rights and trans youth.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:13:10]:

And so he weaponized DEI against the Walt Disney Company, and when that happened it really sparked a trend across the country where you’re looking at states and state attorneys general suing companies for doing this kind of work, and once that happened, and there were bills being presented in Congress to defund GI initiatives, then it becomes part of the news cycle, then it’s all over social media, then companies themselves are getting skittish. I’ve seen this with my own companies that I work with, programs that they invested in, that they were proud of, that predated the murder of George Floyd, and those Black Lives Matter protests are getting pulled, and then of course the big nail in the coffin was the affirmative action decision in the Supreme Court because once that happened, it opened up the floodgates for a broader argument about the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission laws that protect certain classes of people within the workplace. Even though that decision is about higher education and college admissions, the idea that quotas have to be eliminated starts getting spread, and now we’re just pitting groups of people in the US against each other as the labor market is becoming tighter and tighter, and we’re moving away from where things were in 2021, where we had fewer workers than we had positions, and so there was more leverage and bargaining power on labor side. Now with the proliferation of layoffs and all of the challenges that are happening economically, the increased interest rates, how much more expensive life has become, workers have less power, and there are all of these different legal ways of taking more of those rights away to support a broader and different agenda.

Speaker C [00:15:03]:

Wow. So if I can reflect back what I’m hearing from that, and this this has been something that has come up on a previous podcast episode as well, is that DEIAB has almost become politicized. So you’re you take a a specific political affiliation, and then it’s, like, one side of and especially in America where it’s it’s quite divisive. There’s kind of 2 sides, essentially, where, you know, it’s I don’t think it’s as extreme as that in in other parts of the world as an outsider looking into America. But it’s kind of like if we’re going to rally against this, then it’s it it becomes part of that agenda as well, which I I find really fascinating. And it sounds like you’ve given a really great insight into how that has evolved as well and and how scary it is that it has become this kind of political motivation. If we’re experiencing all of these challenges, what is the solution? How can we how can we start to focus on this more?

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:16:09]:

The first thing that I will say is most people don’t even understand what diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is, and rather than being very attached to aesthetics and not saying the wrong thing or getting terms right, what I encourage people to do is look at the changes that they want to make, and then we can change the language around it. So an example that I give in higher education because of these issues around affirmative action, many programs that support low income students are being threatened or challenged, and simply renaming them takes them out of the line of fire. So one of the universities that we work with has a program that supports primarily rural students, so people who live in rural communities that don’t have access to larger universities and are mostly coming from agrarian or agricultural backgrounds. That program ends up supporting a lot of students of color because that is who is working in these rural communities. The program has been defunded by the state because it is supporting minority groups, but minority racial groups. Rebranding the program to say that it supports rural students versus students of color restored its funding. Now cynically speaking I mean, what does that look like? Yeah. What what does that look like? That that looks like the state is actively supporting racism and saying that if it’s if it’s gonna help people of color, then we should get rid of it.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:17:46]:

But if it’s gonna help poor rural people who in this country, the stereotype is that those people are white, then it’s fine. But what I’ve said to the folks who were running that program is, how much good have you done with the program? Who benefits from that program? How do we frame the program so that we can continue to provide the same resources? So a lot of the last 2 years for me has been looking for loopholes and then trying to build coalitions among workers, and generally speaking, encourage them to work together. The Starbucks unionization efforts are one small example of positive change in this regard. When we think about how DEIB has been weaponized against unions, this is a way in which that hasn’t been the case. So the leaders of the unionization effort at Starbucks are queer, people of color with disabilities who are very active in not only naming those identities, but advocating for employees with those identities too, and saying that, for example, when they’re many have argued is the problem with unions, which is that their many have argued is the problem with unions, which is that they’re historically since the 1970s racist and sexist and misogynistic and ableist, and even that I will say was a strategy of union busters was turning members of unions against each other. The thing that I’ll say to folks who are interested in this, there’s a great book by Eric Loomis called A History of the U. S. In 10 Strikes, and it’s basically about how our modern country has been shaped by unions, and union busting, and the strikes that came with them, and yes, there have been lots of challenges within that space, but ultimately I see a lot of what is being taken away from groups in terms of their rights and organizations as being part of a larger divide and conquer strategy.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:19:49]:

The more that we separate workers from each other, the more that we create arbitrary divisions between people, the more that elites can capture that power and exercise their own agenda, which doesn’t necessarily benefit the whole.

Aoife O’Brien [00:20:03]:

Mhmm. Interesting. You mentioned, Alita, about, not, you know, people don’t necessarily know what DEI and b really is. How do you define it?

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:20:16]:

So first of all, it is a fundamentally corporate strategy. People conflate it with social justice, or if they’re being pejorative, they’ll say that it’s related to social justice warriors. It’s not. It is something that exists within the private market within the market, and like human resources or people operations, What it is meant to do is improve the lives of workers within an enclosed organization, so when we think about, like, the invisible hand of DEIB that’s shaping every aspect of our lives, it just isn’t true. The scope is much more limited, and what I tell folks on my team is we’re not community organizers. We’re consultants. We’re consultants. We’re facilitators.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:21:04]:

We’re trainers, and we’re going into an employee population and trying to advocate for employees who are coming from vulnerable communities, and not vulnerable communities because they’re inherently or essentially weaker, but because they’ve been made vulnerable, because they’ve been minoritized in some way. That is what it is. It is all of the programs that support creating an equal playing field within a workplace and supporting individual needs. So an example that I like to give here is lots of organizations will say that they follow diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging practices by sharing their financial information with all employees instead of keeping it behind closed doors, because unless you’re a publicly traded company in the U. S. You don’t have to share any of that information with anyone except for your board or investors. In this case, organizations will put all of that information out, which they will say, you know, it’s part of equality, and I’m all for that, except that assumes that every employee has the resources to be able to understand that information, that they have the background, the education, the tools they need to be able to read, let’s say, a profit and loss statement. What it looks like from our perspective is DIB is looking at that and saying, what training, what education, what tools and resources do we need to provide to, let’s say, first generation white collar workers who haven’t seen these types of information in the past so that they can interact with them and protect their own interests within the organization? Yes.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:22:36]:

A lot of people associate DEIB with unconscious bias training or sensitivity training or microaggressions training, and that can be a component. But ultimately, the way it should work, at least in my opinion, is you’re looking at the employee life cycle. So from the point that they enter an organization to point that they leave, and everything in between, how they interact with their colleagues, how they complete their work, how they grow within the organization, how corrections are administered, how promotions happen, all of that keeping in mind that identity effects that flow through the organization and providing corrections and support to allow for success and opportunity to be possible across different groups. That’s what it’s meant to do and meant to be. So, for example, when I’m listening to a school board meeting for a second grade issue where they’re talking about how DEIB has infiltrated the classroom, no

Aoife O’Brien [00:23:34]:

one In infiltrators.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:23:36]:

DEIB. They’re not teach I mean, honestly, the the DEIB that would be happening would be training for teachers on how to be culturally sensitive to an influx of primarily Spanish speaking students. That’s what it would look like. It wouldn’t look like indoctrination, and the reason I say this is I was sitting in a school board meeting where parents were saying they’re teaching our kids that white people are inherently evil colonizers, and that we’re racist just for being white. And I just have to be honest with you here. I have been in a lot of 2nd grade classrooms. I’m a teacher myself. It’s really not happening.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:24:14]:

It’s just not happening, but there’s so much fear and there’s so much anxiety, and we also have this other problem that’s happening internationally, but especially in the US, the data is incontrovertible. Loneliness is at its highest peak rate. So in 2023, the surgeon general issued a health notice basically saying that loneliness is killing people in the US. Cigna reported that 90,000,000 American workers are lonely. And what loneliness does, we know from the psychological divisiveness that’s happening in our country today, a lot of it has to do with the fact that 3 out of 5 Americans are lonely, and therefore they’re more attached to ideologies or to ideas that are being floated to them than to the people that they’re ideas that are being floated to them than to the people that they’re sitting right next to in their own communities.

Aoife O’Brien [00:25:08]:

Yeah. So it’s kind of a way to I’m trying to find the word, but it’s like not to have empathy for someone else. If you’re supporting ideologies and you’re buying into this, you’re finding a sense of community with other people who share that ideology. But, actually, you’re forgetting on a human level about the people who live down the road or who live next door or who live maybe even in the same house as you or the same building or or whatever it might be. It’s really, really interesting, that that insight. I suppose I’d love to move on to, like, what are some of the strategies that we can employ to create a more inclusive environment at work? And and can I just reiterate? I love how you’ve said it’s boundaries. This idea of DEI and b is boundaried within work. And, again, that has come up in a conversation on the podcast before that it’s not just it it’s not social justice, and it’s not it’s not the entire community.

Aoife O’Brien [00:26:09]:

It’s within this organizational context.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:26:14]:

One of the main things that I’ve tasked myself with is what do we need to do from a structural level and from a day to day level? So how do we continue implementing these initiatives and supporting employees? Here’s the first thing that I’ll say. I have interviewed thousands of employees. We have a 170 clients at Ethos, actually I think 190 as of this year, and one of the things we do is we complete equity audits. So we interview 100, if not thousands of employees. The most important thing to employees, apart from being paid a fair wage, is feeling respected and valued on a day to day basis. And so when I look at organizations where folks report higher levels of belonging, they always have healthy relationships with their peer groups and with their immediate managers. We have seen some of the most dysfunctional teams that you can imagine. I mean, the stories that I could tell, I have had organizations where I have been involved in removing the CEO because he used their development budget to hire escorts.

Aoife O’Brien [00:27:18]:

Wow.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:27:19]:

I mean, the stuff that I have seen is wild.

Aoife O’Brien [00:27:23]:

I’m like, we could do a whole other podcast episode about all of the things that you’ve seen.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:27:27]:

Yes. My my mom is always like, that should be your 3rd book. Should just be all of the the Yeah. Todrick skills.

Aoife O’Brien [00:27:33]:

Who’s not gonna buy that? Everyone’s gonna be so nosy. They were like, okay. I’m getting my hands on that book.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:27:39]:

I’ve been in a school where the teachers put the kids in blackface. Like, it is messy. We have dealt with some very messy situations. That being said, employees who are still there and are not having breakdowns usually have a manager who is engaging in a few core practices. The first is that they’re showing care. They’re going out of their way to understand what mechanisms exist to take care of their employees. So not necessarily acting as a therapist for their employees, but saying here’s how we can do an accommodation. Here’s how you can have a more flexible schedule.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:28:15]:

Here are the leave policies we have available. Let’s actually partner and work together to think about how we share responsibilities among the team. These are also managers who understand that providing clarity and being open with information is a core equity practice, something that’s really easy to forget. The more leadership or the more power we have in an organization, the more information we have access to. And we think that other people know the same things we do, but they don’t because they’re not in the same meetings, they’re not talking to the same people, they’re not reading the same documents. Being able to disseminate that information and allow employees to make their own decisions based on that information is also part of creating a more equitable environment, one in which they can protect themselves and advocate for themselves. And then also, managers who are practicing what I call the 7 Habits of Highly Inclusive Leaders in my second book, they’re going out of their way to proactively engage in hard conversation. This is one of the greatest disconnects that I see inside of organizations.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:29:23]:

In the US culturally, we have a problem with conflict aversion, and as a result, we see things that really hold people back from underrepresented or historically resilient groups. Renee Myers, who leads DEI at Netflix and before that was probably the most famous person in the DEI space for many years has termed this sloppy sentimentalism. Essentially, because we are managing people from disadvantaged groups, we don’t give them critical or negative feedback, but we hold them back. We say, you know, this person is coming from harder circumstances or has greater challenges. So we’re not gonna give them harsh feedback, but we’re also not gonna give them an opportunity to improve. We end up making decisions for them. So an example of this was I had an employee in one of our client organizations who was a single black mother, and her manager repeatedly passed her over for a promotion assuming that she had too much on her plate to

Aoife O’Brien [00:30:28]:

take on

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:30:28]:

additional responsibility.

Aoife O’Brien [00:30:30]:

What a way to make a decision for someone else. That’s unbelievable.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:30:34]:

Exactly. And when we looked into that situation I mean, the story is a happy ending because that individual now leads that department. That that woman who was being passed over now leads the department. But it was 4 years of being caught in limbo because of assumptions made about her and not thinking through, well, she’s a great employee. She might have some limitations around hours and when she can be in and whether she can be on call, but why don’t we have a conversation and see if there are things we can do to collaborate? Mhmm. And so that’s a piece of having that hard conversation and being willing to introduce a a subject, like, hey. You’re not doing well here. Let’s talk about why, or there are opportunities I wanna offer to you, but I don’t know if you want them, Or, I mean, I’ve had to have some of these conversations proactively too.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:31:26]:

I’ve had folks on my team who have had major personal situations arise where I wanna walk that fine line between not violating confidentiality, but also I’m noticing that they’re not showing up at work the way that they did before, and it’s gonna affect them. Instead of ignoring that, I’m saying, hey. What’s going on here? Yeah. Then thinking through what we can do in order to solve for that problem. The other thing that I’ll say is there are parts of diversity, equity, inclusion, and blogging that haven’t been challenged yet that we can leverage to support more groups of people. So one area is accessibility. Now I’m gonna be biased on this topic because I’ve been part of the disability justice movement for many years. I’m a person with multiple disabilities.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:32:15]:

I’m also neurodivergent, and so I do have a special interest and emphasis on accessibility. That being said, a lot of the accommodations that we offer to people with disabilities or a lot of the strategies we can use to support neurodivergent employees, support people in many different identity groups, so when we think of our most inclusive health care plan, and we eliminate clauses that would restrict employees with disabilities, we’re also often having to eliminate ones that there are things called transgender exclusion clauses in the U. S, which basically say, for example, if I am receiving hormone therapy, it can only be for IVF. It can’t be for gender affirmation. Simply changing our policy changes the experience of that employee fundamentally. Right? And these are things that we can do under the guise of just making things more fair and equal for all types of people within an organization that make a change. The other thing that I’ll say about accessibility is I have this massive working document of all of the different types of accommodations we can make for a variety of different conditions, and when I look at those, so many of them would make life easier for people from other identity groups. The one that comes up the most, caregivers.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:33:39]:

Caregivers need flexible schedules, caregivers need flexible officing solutions, they need clear expectations around boundaries and time, and this is a really common strategy for what we use for folks who self disclose ADHD or mental health issues, but this is what I mean. I think we as practitioners have to work within the constraints that we’re in while our collaborators or maybe us in our our other lives are protesting some of the legislative actions that are taking place more broadly socially and saying, okay, this is the hand we’ve been dealt. Instead of retracting, we’re going back to some of the window addressing actions, like let’s just do inclusion training all day. Yeah. Figuring out how do we do a salary survey and audit such that we can correct compensation across the board. I have been doing compensation analysis and pay equity work my entire career as a DEIB professional and I will still say to this day it’s the work I’m most proud of doing even though it’s the thorniest and most difficult because that’s what has the greatest material impact on employee lives. When we think about why people work, no matter how much we talk about purpose and happiness and a sense of responsibility and community, ultimately people work in companies to earn a paycheck. Yeah.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:34:59]:

Making sure that paycheck meets their living requirement, that they’re making a living wage, I can’t think of anything more important from an equity standpoint.

Aoife O’Brien [00:35:10]:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That we’re actually able to pay our bills at the end of the day. I’d love to come back to this idea of the hard conversations. And what do you think blocks people from having those difficult conversations with their employees? Is it something to do with training? Is it I’m gonna feel really awkward? I I, you know, I can’t maybe hold myself in that emotion or that empathy while I’m having this difficult conversation with someone else. What are the kinds of things that you see are being used as reasons not to have those conversations?

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:35:45]:

So I ask folks all the time, what are the different reasons? And they do come up with different reasons, but, ultimately, I think it breaks down into 3 categories. The first is it’s emotionally challenged. It stretches people to their emotional limits, and one of the most common and basic human fears is, fear of unknown states of mind. So if we can’t predict how someone else is going to react or how we’re gonna react, it triggers a basic core fundamental fear for us. Another reason is that there won’t be a solution or time to come to that solution, That it’s too big of a problem to be able to address, so I might as well just ignore it because if I have the hard conversation, I’m going to have to do something about it, and maybe I don’t have the time or the energy or the resources to do so. And then the last reason is I think tied to this idea of difficult emotional responses, but in a more fundamental way. So when we talk about sloppy sentimentalism, this has to do with unprocessed or metabolized feelings of shame or guilt. I feel guilty that I have privileges that my employee doesn’t, or I feel ashamed of the the group that I’m part of, or I am defensive and I don’t want to be made to feel guilty or ashamed.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:37:08]:

There’s a lot that is wrapped up into it, but ultimately when I’m working with our clients, we mostly work with nonprofits, although we used to work with organizations in the technology space, and so I’ve noticed a big difference in why people are conflict diverse in those places. So conflict diversion in my tech companies tended to be a fear of loss of productivity and

Aoife O’Brien [00:37:31]:

Yep.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:37:31]:

Like mess. In nonprofits, there’s this phenomenon of ruinous empathy, which Kim Scott defines in radical candor and talks about in the radical candor model, which is I’m so empathetic and I care about you so much that I’m terrified of hurting you.

Aoife O’Brien [00:37:47]:

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:37:48]:

And that is something that we’re dealing with day to day at Ethos. And this comes back to we need to strengthen your relationships such that they’re durable enough to withstand being honest with each other.

Aoife O’Brien [00:38:04]:

Yeah. Love that. I love that. Alida, we’ve covered so many different angles. I can’t believe how quickly the time has gone. But is there anything else that you feel you would love to get across to listeners today that we haven’t necessarily covered yet?

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:38:20]:

We’ve covered so much. I agree with you. I think the piece that I will say is happiness at work, one thing that I’ve come to realize. I used to call it employee happiness and say that people teams were responsible for employee happiness, and my perspective on that has changed because happiness itself is so subjective. It’s ultimately up to the individual employee. So what I say to professionals in this space is it’s not your job to make your employees happy, but to create the conditions where they could find their own happiness.

Aoife O’Brien [00:38:53]:

I love that.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:38:54]:

They choose to do so or not Mhmm. Is ultimately up to them them as agents of their own lives.

Aoife O’Brien [00:38:59]:

Yeah. And I totally agree. It’s about creating that environment where people can thrive, that you’re not creating an environment that is toxic, that where, you know, where people can feel free to have those conversations or where where they’re not getting paid enough or whatever it might be, whatever is getting in the way from their happiness that you’re creating that environment where they can really thrive. Brilliant. And kind of building on that question, what does being happier at work mean to you?

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:39:32]:

Well, for me right now, as I try to pursue that, being an exhausted parent of a 2 and a half year old who’s had medical challenges and who’s been running a business, a small business for 7 years, happiness at work for me has changed. I used to think that it meant pursuing bigger and broader challenges, like growing and being on a bigger platform, and those things were very true for me several years before. Right now though happiness at work means having strong boundaries around my time and having the ability to be flexible in the projects I take on and having space to be creative and try new things as opposed to being in this constant mode of scaling. So being able to focus on the things that are interesting to me and within a set container of that’s what happiness looks like to me right now.

Aoife O’Brien [00:40:30]:

I love that. And what’s the best way that people can reach out? And don’t be afraid to mention your books again. I know you have your own podcast as well, so give a shout out to those. What and what’s the best way for people to connect with you?

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:40:46]:

If you go to elitamirandawolf.com, you’ll find both of my books and my podcast as well as all of my social media handles. So that is a great repository for you. I would also encourage folks on this podcast, listening onto this podcast, to check out my first book, Cultures of Belonging, Building Inclusive Organizations That Last, which thinks about how to structurally create those environments that allow for employees to pursue a sense of happiness out.

Aoife O’Brien [00:41:14]:

Brilliant. I love that. Thank you so much for your time today. It was such an interesting and insightful discussion. So I really, really appreciate you sharing your insights.

Alida Miranda-Wolff [00:41:24]:

Thank you so much for having me.