Career Journey 5: Bringing Diversity to Tech Leadership | Bhavini Soneji

0:00And you know, Dan, it starts also with starting with some change. So you don't have to wait for the full sponsorship and support from leadership to start this from the ground level. I was part of Microsoft and a lot of those at initial times, the women just started coming together as a community, as a network, as a support forum to support each other and then starting to bring about and influencing change. So my thing is that, yes, start with the top, bring about that change, but don't wait. You can do it in multiple directions and in parallel. The most iconic duos in tech, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and Google's Dora team in Linear B.

0:47You heard that right. Linear B and Google Cloud are collaborating to explore the results from this year's 2023 Accelerate State of DevOps report. Gathered from over 33 ,000 global professionals, this annual report is your go-to for an independent view in the groundbreaking software team practices. Join Dora's Steve McGee, LinearBee CTO Yashai Berry, and me, Dev Interrupted co-host Connor Braajan, for a workshop on November 8th as we guide you through the key findings from this year's report. Learn why teams with faster coder views have an incredible 50 % higher software delivery performance. gain insight into the latest trends across industries and company size, and see the impact AI is having on team performance.

1:27Mark your calendars for November 8th and prepare to elevate your DevOps game. Register now at linearb.io slash events or follow the link in the show notes. If the ape doesn't work for you, no sweat. Register and we'll still send you the full recording after the fact. Hey everyone, welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host Dan Lyons, Linear B co-founder and COO. And today, we're continuing our series on the career journey of an engineering leader with Bhavini Sonigi, former VP of Product Engineering at Cruise. Bhavini, great to have you back on for a second episode. Thank you so much, Dan, for having me.

2:08And as I said before, I smell right. I love what Lean and B is doing, both for driving more evidence-based and data-based transformations. which is so, so necessary as we kind of, you know, make the whole software production and assembly line, as well as, you know, what this group is doing for the community outreach and helping leaders like me to learn from each other. So thank you for doing that. Absolutely. And thank you right back at you with the kind words about Linear B and all the community stuff. And I want to say to everyone, if you haven't listened to Bavini's first episode on building customer-obsessed teams, product-led companies, go and check that out.

2:54I think it's a really good episode. We had a ton of fun recording it. And so, yeah, of course, it's amazing having you on here for another episode. This time, the topic is a little different. we're going to step back from a little bit on the nitty-gritty details about how to build a product and you know the focus of that and it's i would say this topic is a little closer to the heart you wrote a blog titled diversity strategy built to scale and in it you discuss how to drive diversity, inclusion, improve the number of women represented in tech, all of these really, really important things and some amazing, I guess, stories there.

3:44I'm really looking forward to hear your insights about all of these topics. And I think we can kind of just maybe start out simple here for a second. Our first topic is driving diversity in tech. and in your own words, when you just think about it for yourself without being like academic, maybe like, why is that important or why does it matter to you? Yeah, I think for the couple of things, why it matters to me, because one is I have been on the receiving side of it. And when I see the next generation, I want to bring that change. And I would say the last but not the least is I have seen it firsthand of how it impacts driving better outcomes for the company, for the team.

4:38So I'm a firm believer of it. And I'll tell you one story around that. Allyship. Like people talk about, you know, what is and why is allyship important? And that is where when the majority starts, you know, supporting advancement of minority initiatives and advances, that's how a transformation comes about. And that's why to drive this, you need both the parties to come together. And that's where I want to bring that awareness on, you know, how this would help the leaders and the companies. And one of the stories, kind of touching back to why it's important to me, one of the stories that came to my mind was during the George Floyd Black Lives Matter movement.

5:34I have twins who were, I think, probably young at that age, and we had taken them for one of the support rallies. and then when we came back my kid is asking oh there were so many non-black people and that's when it was an aha moment for them to learn from these examples that for a change to happen everyone needs to chip in yeah it's a it's a fairly complicated subject i think because there's a lot of emotion behind it. And there's kind of like, I could even go back to like a human rights type thing and, you know, seeing people that might not look like you or maybe look different than you, all of that kind of stuff.

6:26And then there's like, I would call it like a business academic side to it as well, where you talk, if you're just looking at numbers, you can talk about performance. And I think, for example, in your blog, you cite a study from McKinsey and Company stating that companies with diverse exec teams are 33 % more likely to outperform competitors in terms of profitability. So it's kind of like you have these two, or at least for me, this emotional side and human side, and then there's a performance side. If we started with just the performance side. Why do more diverse teams perform better? Here's my perspective on that, Dan.

7:13One is when you have diverse teams, it's mimicking a better customer mix composition, which means you get better insights and evidence on problems, as well as better validity of hypothesis right there as part of your team. It posters creativity and bringing in different perspectives. What this leads to is debates, discussions, more knowledge sharing, and thus avoiding the confirmation bias, which in turn leads to continuous learning and pushing the comfort zone boundary and builds grit to persevere. It instills a sense of belonging, being heard, being valued, you know, taking risks. And if you reflect back on one of these, These are the tenets for a strong culture and innovation framework.

8:07And hence, diverse teams perform better. They give better outcomes. You know, I think like a lot of the things that we do, at least in like product engineering, engineering, we're solving complicated problems. And especially if you go into, I think, an executive room, the right answer or the right thing to do. It's not really like black and white. There's a range of outcomes or like a range of perspectives. And what I can say just from personal experience, I would say a more diverse room brings more perspectives and more solutions, I think, to problems where there's not only one solution. So that's one thing I've personally experienced.

9:00And I would also say the vibe of the room gets a little more collaborative, kind of like balanced out. Like if you just have, let's say all white men, all white males in an executive room, it's very stale. It's a very, very stale feeling. And the only other thing that I would say is, you know, I'm into sports and maybe some of the people listening are into sports. I don't think you would ever say, I want to build my football team or my soccer team with the same person over and over again for every single position. No one would ever do that. You're kind of saying, okay, if I'm playing basketball, my point guard, I want them to have certain traits.

9:46My center, that person is going to have a different set of traits. And if we get good people that are different in all of these positions, we'd be the best. And so I don't know, maybe that can help people like think about it that way. If you're into sports or performing, you never build a sports team with a clone of the same person over and over. So true. So true. You highlight another statistic. This one's from the National Science Board, that women make up only 24 % of the STEM workforce and less than 9 % hold engineering exec roles. So if we think of the STEM workforce, that's like engineering, right?

10:31Engineering, math, science. Yeah, that type of thing. So what are your thoughts on how we begin to normalize and be more diverse in tech leadership? Yeah, I think the first thing is it starts at the top, right? At the leadership level. And the second one is the company must have the intention. And we all know just the third step, just having strategy without execution is hallucination. So if you don't have the plan to convert the intention into action, it's futile. So how do you then rally it up? And in my mind, and I'm a firm believer on applying all of the lean product development principles and framework over to any process transformations that you want to drive.

11:31And so how do you bring that by setting goals, measuring, driving awareness, training, and, you know, fostering allyship and inclusive culture? And I have kind of, you know, those are some of the things I've outlined in the blog post on how to go about doing those. Right. So you're kind of saying it's like any other, like you can use the same principles that we all know in engineering. And like, yeah, I would agree with that. And you talked about the word intention. So we like the head of our people and culture, her name is Jess. She's awesome. She talks about intention a lot. And, you know, this is a subject that we work with intention on within Linear B, like our diversity percentage and all of that.

12:22And what I saw was kind of the first thing that needs to happen is the executive leadership team, not just the engineering, the executive leadership team needs to commit to that intention. Correct. Honestly, or it won't happen. Like it's you either you have to get everybody in on it and say this is just like you would run any project. And like we do it data driven like this is, you know, our current percentage of, you know, diverse hires. This is how many people we're giving an opportunity to. Here's our goals against it. Have you and I would say sometimes maybe convincing your executive leadership is tough to get.

13:05It's tough to get buy-in. Do you have any tips that you've used or anything that you've seen to start that conversation at the exact level if that is a new concept for your company? Yeah, I think just before I answer your question, building on what you were saying, right, is just running it as a project and measuring. It's, you know, what is important? You measure that and, you know, you bring that front and center. And so this should be sitting at the same level as your business outcomes and other people goals. And whenever you're, you know, visiting that, reviewing that at whichever frequency, you bring these across as well.

13:49So that's how you repeatedly use data and over communication to, you know, apply the strategies that's going to drive the change. Now, to your question, right, when a company doesn't have some of this, how to bring about that, how to introduce that concept or how to bring about that change? And some of the things that have worked is, A, you know, aligning on the problems with them, right? If they want to drive the company outcomes, telling them back to how some of these will tie it back to those outcomes. So connecting the dots and showing them that for their value add, for the goals they are reaching, how does this piece play a factor in there?

14:35The second tactic is different people get influenced through different means, which means learning what which other company do they see as or which other leaders do they see as something that, you know, they get inspired by. using that information as a way to bring it back and showing that evidence of how those companies are doing it or how those leaders are doing it. The third aspect is just, you know, right now, if you just see other companies, there's a whole website that I think quantitative.com resources slash articles, DEI dash goals. It outlines the goals from some of the companies like Amazon, like Mattel, all the different kinds of industries to showcase what are the diversity OKRs they are driving.

15:29So this can be another way to say what are the parallel industries in that same company, what are those companies doing, and influencing through those means. So I think there are different ways based on what you see as the perspective within the company to partner and bring about a change. And, you know, Dan, I'll tell the last thing is it starts also with starting with some change. So you don't have to wait for the full sponsorship and support from leadership to start this from the ground level. I was part of Microsoft and a lot of those at initial times, the women just started coming together as a community, as a network, as a support forum to support each other and then starting to bring about and influencing change.

16:21So my thing is that, yes, start with the top, bring about that change, but don't wait. You can do it in multiple directions and in parallel. A lot of good tips there. And I hope, you know, I think what we can do, I really like that reference for some of those larger, highly successful companies. Here's what other companies are doing. OKRs, goals against us, that type of thing. Yeah, I'd love to include that as a link for our listeners, because I do see that useful as a gateway to say like, hey, our company's not doing this yet. But look at some other successful companies that have goals against it.

17:02Here's how they do it. That kind of gives confidence. Totally. And it also gives a pretty good blueprint for starting, right? You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can just start with some of those things and adjust it to what works for you. Now, there's a flywheel concept that has to do with hiring and retaining diverse candidates. And we'll also get into unlocking diversity in hiring. But what is the flywheel concept around this? Yeah, it's kind of simple. How do you bring about this change, right? And the net outcome is you want to bring about the numbers shift to drive that culture and business and innovative framework.

17:52So what that means is, first, you have to have the strategy for hiring diverse candidates so that you can bring in more of the funnel, you can bring in more of the pipeline and you can convert more of those candidates. Now, if you've improved this, the second step would be how do you retain them? How do you foster a culture to drive that inclusive and engaging environment? And for that, the reason is because you don't want to have a leaky bucket. Otherwise, you're going to have a funnel coming through and a challenge with retention means you're not going to be able to retain them. So once you have that environment, it now helps to bring about risk-taking creativity and innovation such that you're going to be able to have better company growth, a better durable business, a better repeat patterns of driving your projects and problem solving and solution building.

19:03So this is now going to bring awareness and attract more candidates because they will hear from their network around the successful company culture and outcomes. So that's kind of, in my mind, it's a flywheel that will just continue building on and getting more and more successful. It makes sense. For me, what I've seen is usually hiring is the most difficult. It's like getting the momentum to hire more diverse candidates. I think I've seen that be the challenge with a lot of companies. Let's dive in there. What are some of these tactics that we can use to encourage diverse hiring? Yeah, I think there are a couple of them.

19:56One is how do you just make sure that companies are not taking the easy route? By that, what I mean is making sure that people are able to go and reach out to candidates outside of those that have just applied. And that is super helpful because you're trying to get out candidates who might have thrown themselves out because they are not meeting all of the checklist. And so that's one way to get those things out. And even before that, just having the data again to track how many candidates that we reach out of what was the diverse representation there. How can we drive those numbers change through various other outreaches to seek out these diverse representations?

20:52and then making sure that, you know, during the interviewing as well, we are not having biases towards some of the ways of assessing the candidates and falling into the mindset of, you know, life-minded correlations. So those are the other ones. And I think just one more thing during the interviewing, it's very helpful to have that representation of some of the minority the interviewers on the panel to get some of the signals as well as for the candidate to be able to relate and ask more questions. If we kind of break down each step that you're saying, the first thing that we need to do is allow for the candidate pool to increase.

21:40The diverse candidate pool needs to get larger. So it's kind of like a funnel. And I have a note here about tackling the application dilemma, which I think you're calling out maybe some of the differences on this one between like a male and female approach to job applications. Is there anything you'd like want to like highlight there for the audience and how maybe to not have like a bias? Yeah, I think the research basically shows that, you know, when you have people, and this is just based on some of the analysis that was done, which I can totally relate and agree that's been my observation as well.

22:26When you have an application and all the requirements listed, female candidates will apply only if they check off all of them. And male candidates will apply even if they checklist one of them. So how do you make sure that your job description is conducive to getting a full, well-represented persona of the profiles? And so that's one of the things. And there is a software text IO that does some of the analysis to kind of make sure some of the ways that's coming up aligns to a diverse representation of a work post. That's really cool. Yeah. Again, I would just say from personal experience, I, it's not all the time and I don't want to speak like out of, out of line here, but I will say when I'm a little more conscious to give diverse candidates an opportunity at an interview, because you don't know them, I would say like opportunity to interview.

23:34You don't know them when you're looking at the resume or something like that. And I'm usually more often and not surprised, almost wanting to say, hey, you could bolster or be more confident in your resume. I came in with a lower expectation and I'm surprised. And I would say the other way around, sometimes with the other group, it's like, oh, you look better on paper than you really are. So maybe it's just like a little bit having a mindset there, like remembering that difference. And then, you know, you know, once you get a diverse candidate into the interview process, you have something here around the power of interview panel diversity.

24:19So what's up with that? What's up with the panel? People kind of sometimes ask me, what do you mean by the panel as well, based on the size of the company and the ways they've been doing? And for me, the panel is the people who are interviewing and you want to kind of interview on culture, you want to interview on system skills, you want to interview on coding skills, managerial leadership skills, etc. And so you just want to make sure that you have a well-represented panel so that there is some connection with the candidate as well. And the reason is twofold. One is in case of a minority candidate coming through, they can now relate to this individual and they can ask more pointed questions around the experience.

25:09And that helps them to know and understand what the company culture and what they're getting into. So it can help selling as well to the candidate. The second aspect is around, you know, how does this help with non-minority candidates? Because that's going to be the case as well. And for the non-minority candidates, it helps to assess the culture fit as well. And yes, it might not be effective in, you know, normal situations, but that it becomes effective in testing out some of the outliers. and one of the examples I've seen it firsthand as well is and then we had a mixed there was two interviewers because one was shadowing and the candidate when the minority person would ask the question would still look at the other individual and answer and that was kind of a complete you you know, no, no on kind of not even being acknowledging or, you know, being representative of the situation.

26:21And so we, of course, said based on this and some of the other signals, we were like no higher. But this is where having that representation in the panel helps to assess some of these, as well as during the interviewing discussion, debriefing, as you were mentioning, right? How some people are kind of great at storytelling. It helps to ask for facts. It helps to seek truth and understand that we are not just getting carried off in one direction based on one perspective. So this again helps to assess both minority and non-minority candidates to make sure they are a better fit for the company and the intentions the company wants to pursue.

27:07Yeah, that's really cool. I mean, I think if you're not using a diverse panel today in the interview process, like you said, there's a lot of benefits there. And that's something that you can, if you're listening, suggest to your company. I think it's like a really smart, easy suggestion that usually works. and what one thing that i've again this is not data for me but one thing that i've seen maybe there's like uh two types of biases one thing is do i look like the person that i'm interviewing so if it's like i i'm a male or i'm like i'm a white male and i'm interviewing a female or i'm a white male this is just for me personally and i'm interviewing a minority candidate there's almost like a bias training.

27:56I think we're going to talk about this to say, okay, can I recognize that this person I'm interviewing does not look like me and therefore I may have this natural bias against them. Let me cognitively turn that off or think about it. In smaller companies, you might not even have that minority representation in tech already if you're at the starting. And so how to be creative, right? You can bring in from different functions to just get a connection and do a lunch and learn or culture fit, et cetera. So just be open to creative ways to drive the outcomes. And the second thing you mentioned around some of the biases, right, on when you see that individual who is not like you, but also based on your past interactions, you might see that person related to some past interactions that you were not liking or not comfortable and you would just box this person in and think all of those negative things would apply here.

29:00So how do you kind of, you know, keep that open perspective that every situation and thing is different so you don't need to, you know, ding this candidate with the biases from your past unhappy experiences? So there's such thing as bias interview, training workshops or something like that? What's that all about? So I think this bias awareness of workshops, this applies to anything, right? Not just interviews or so. It applies to your culture, your work, gain, collaboration, et cetera. And people say, okay, everyone has biases. So how and what this will help? And even whether they'll be effective in remote teams.

29:43So my perspective is that these has been very, very helpful, both for me and for my teams as well. And what these are is these are the activities or workshops, and they can be very small. You don't have to think about it as a day-long workshops or anything. And there are various options to do these different workshops. But they help you kind of think of your self-development or self-personality check kind of things as well. Some of these just help you understand and know about your biases. Sometimes you knew about your biases, but you did not know additional ones that you had or in which aspect they are surfacing up.

30:28So these things help you to connect back to how you are coming across and how you want to, you know, change some of those mindsets. And the key in these things is doing breakout sessions. Because in these breakout sessions, now the team is bonding. They're discussing some of the things. They're discussing some of the ways to come across. Like what you outlined, right? What are some of the biases during hiring? What are some of the biases during project assignment for managers? What are some of the biases that apply during review system? and performance management. So having some of the things tied back to the company and to the day-to-days of the team helps to make it more concrete.

31:20And I'll give you one more kind of pattern, right? Because many times I feel people are like, okay, we've done it, all good. This has to be done repeatedly again every year over and here. And here is an analogy that comes to my mind, right? People management, right? Think of that and people leaders, people managers. They do trainings. It's not that the first time the person started, they did training and for 20 years of their leadership management career, they did not. So why? The reason is because as you are progressing, each stage, they discover something new about the situation or about themselves.

32:00And so when they do these trainings or so workshops, they are now better equipped with learnings from the trainings and how they can apply to their situations in light of these new things. And it's like just like peeling the onion. And that's why it's a continuous learning and a work in progress. Continuous nature of this, the reminder. Yeah, it's a tough thing to figure out. It's definitely not easy. And you have, you know, maybe a few tips or you have, like I saw on here in my show notes, tell me about the shadow diversity. Yeah, that one was actually very, very effective when I'd done it. And I hadn't realized, I did not project that it would be so impactful.

32:51So let me walk you through it. So it ties back to kind of, you know, what I was saying is I'm a big proponent on the product development principles. So this is kind of, you know, following that framework of Gemba Walk, which is shadowing your customers. And that gives you the firsthand visibility into the specific challenges and how to effectively, you know, transform them. So how do we as leaders understand the challenges of, you know, minority or the inclusivity environment culture? And how do we learn from it and bring about that change? And so what I had done was, and different people can apply kind of, you know, different ways based on this pattern.