Category: Design

Suggestions for creating a needs assessment prior to facilitation

Q:  I want to do a pre-questionnaire to prepare for facilitation to get at how I can make facilitation more useful for participants. What are the goals and needs, any suggestions? What kind of questions?

A:  On my website you can review the Knowledge Base, a free resource of video clips of my thoughts on design & facilitation questions from my Q&A calls: https://programs.drkathyobear.com/knowledge-base.

There are several additional live call answers about needs assessment. A couple of things to consider. I would talk with the leaders/whoever brought you in and ask things like:

• • What are your intended outcomes?
  • What do you want people to be able to do? How do you want them to feel differently? What do you want them to know when they leave?
  • What are some of the current dynamics going on that have you wanting Inclusion workshops? What’s the current context whether it’s national, local, or international?
  • What DEI terms are used at your organization?
  • How comfortable are people talking about how everybody has a responsibility to learn and grow?
  • How would you assess the current level of competence of the participants?  A way to do this is using a 0-10 scale:  0 not at all, 10 completely. And then use a list of some of the following:

• • • Understanding the full breadth of differences,
    • Understanding how privilege and marginalization contribute to exclusionary dynamics and common microaggressions?
    • Understand the skills to respond, i.e. how much do they have the courage and capacity to speak up and intervene during microaggressions?
    • Know how to analyze policies, programs, practices, and services with an Inclusion Lens as they’re writing or revising them? With a Race Lens?

Now, I added Race Lens specifically because we need so much more racial justice in organizations and in society: dismantling racism, dismantling whiteness/white supremacy everywhere. So, the more we know the more we can do.  *See below for a recent report from American Council on Education about current issues in higher education.

You might also use a 0 to 10 scale to ask, “How inclusive is the organizational culture and climate in general?” And consider breaking out for individual categories of folks in different marginalized identities, e.g.: folks who are gender queer/transgender, who are immigrants, who do not have documented immigration status, who are queer, who are cisgender, who are folks of color. And I would break that into all racially minoritized groups:

• • Native American
  • Indigenous
  • Middle Eastern
  • multiracial
  • biracial
  • African-American
  • BlackLatino/a/x
  • Asian-American
  • Pacific Islander
  • White 

NOTE: The data from the ACE Report clearly shows that if you desegregate the data, climate and culture has a differential impact for people who are Asian-American descendants from twelve to fifteen generations. E.G. the Asian-Americans that were allowed in for one immigration policy around the 1960’s were clearly only people with significant capacity by class and maybe even English proficiency – so, it was not a full representation of different cultures and nations. That historical lens helps us understand why today there’s so much differential life experiences because we’ve had lots of different immigration dynamics.

To survey the workshop participants, these questions may be useful:

• • What are three ways you already infuse equity and inclusion?
  • What are 2-3 situations that you think you handle pretty well? (That will give you an idea of some of the microaggressions.)
  • What are one or two situations that you or your colleagues need or want some skills to better respond to?

These work for the foundational workshop that most people need before going into depth either into a single identity and/or looking at privilege and systemic change. But you could adapt these if you’re doing a 201 around whiteness and white supremacy:

• • What are five examples of how whiteness and white supremacy show up in the organization.
  • Talk about a time (if applicable) you were in a white caucus or a POC caucus and what worked, what was useful, and was there anything that was not useful.

You can take the 0-10 scale and ask people to anonymously rate themselves on tools/skills/knowledge. For instance, is you are teaching about sexism, history of sexism, and how sexual harassment and sexism are still prevalent today?   If it’s more of a knowledge workshop that will help you determine if it’s new information and/or reinforcing what people already know.

*Recent Resource: American Council on Education (ACE) Webinar and report by Drs. Millie Garcia, Shaun Harper, and Julie Park –  https://www.equityinhighered.org 

The value of self care when burned out

Question: If high stress levels and burnout are issues in an organization, what are some ideas to start bringing these discussions & activities to team meetings when people are feeling unsure of the value of self-care?

Answer: I read an article by Yashna Padamsee where they talked about community care. I had always thought of self-care as an individual focus. Their article expanded my understanding of how we need community-care, team-care, organizational care to provide the framework for individual self-care as well.

It is useful to position self-care and community care within the types of priorities of the leader and the organization. I’m a practical person, as much as I want leaders to invest in people because all humans deserve a quality life at work and at home, I am not naive enough to believe all or many leaders are motivated by these values.

Find out what they care about, such as: organizational reputation; their personal reputation; being liked & admired; financial viability; retaining top employees; innovative products and services; staying ahead of the competition, etc. Then frame talking about the need for self-care within their priorities.

You can meet with leaders and talk about what you are noticing and give the benefit of the doubt as you start: “I know you are noticing this as well. More and more people are coming to me or talking in meetings about how exhausted they are feeling. I’m afraid too many people are burning out and we may lose some of our top people to our competitors…. I’m wondering how we can get ahead of this and be more proactive before we start to see a more significant drop in creativity, teamwork and customer service…. I was listening to a webinar and got some useful handouts we might consider using in staff meetings. I’d be willing to share them with you as well as lead a couple activities to test out my hunch that we need to put more attention on self-care and community care.”

You may want to talk to the people who do training and development in HR or other areas and see if they’ll sponsor or co-sponsor these trainings or co-facilitate with you. My third book, In It for the Long Haul, might be a good pre-reading for a series of sessions or a book club.

Some initial activities might be to ask people their early warning signs they need more self-care. The have them use a zero to ten scale to talk about how much they need self-care right now. Have them choose a number and then talk with a partner about why they chose it. Then have them talk about 2-3 things they are already doing to get more rest, rejuvenation, centeredness, and clarity in the work environment.

I have a handout of 38 indicators we may need more self-care. After these warm-up activities, I have people complete that worksheet and you can feel the energy in the room shift as they come face-to-face with the reality of how they are living their lives.  Have them share in airs of 3’s and relate in as others share.

The question I’ll ask you is, “How far do you want to go talking about self-care in a work environment?” As an external consultant, I can usually go a little further than a supervisor of a team since people usually choose to attend my workshops. If you are working with an in-tact team, be thoughtful how much vulnerability you ask of people. You may not want them to share much more about areas in their life they’re satisfied & not satisfied with or ways they over-use substances and activities to numb out and distract ourselves from our lives. O discuss this last point, I ask people to talk IN GENERAL about the ways other people was over-use things like alcohol, drugs, food, shopping, exercise, relationships, working, etc. I don’t ask them individually to share about themselves, thought I do invite them to reflect for a moment how about how they are feeling about these different areas of their life.

If you lead self-care discussions, make sure you find out some local resources to share with people, including if the organization has an EAP Employee Assistance Program or employee resource group that’s about self-care, work-life balance, family care.

I hear complaints sometimes when people in their fifties and sixties saying, “These young people, all they care about is work-life balance and how much time they get off!” I respond by asking, “Do you want people at their best at work? Do you want them being innovative, doing cutting edge work? Do you want them passionate and energized? Then this will require you intentionally do more to support work-life balance if you want to retain top talent.”

Teaching about racial justice

Question:  As a white person, how do you reconcile teaching about racial justice?

I was just at the White Privilege Symposium in Denver this weekend and I had those same wonders except mine were fears. I was asked to be the opening keynote of the full day conference. They’ve had an evening event the night before that was very powerful, but a lot of folk were just coming to the one day.

So, I was like, “What do I have to say? How come they asked me?” And then, I got grounded as I realized I had been attending the national White Privilege Conference for about 12-15 years where I do work with whites to help us recognize the daily racist dynamics that we perpetuate fueled by our racist attitudes that we still carry consciously and unconsciously ~ some call this  racist implicit bias or internalized dominance.

I realized that I didn’t need to create something brand new in my fear of doing it wrong or having to be perfect, all those white cultural ways. And I just trusted the folks that asked me to do the keynote and decided to talk about disrupting from the inside, dismantling racism and white supremacy in organizations and in us.

I believe as whites we have a critical role and an increasing role to work with other whites and show up meeting whites where they are, and helping them to recognize the common dynamics that are happening in the organization; how it’s hostile for people of color and our responsibility to notice the daily racist microaggressions, interrupt them, and then come together with other whites to do our work where our racist attitudes are fueling racist behaviors.

We can set-up white affinity groups. It can be cross-race groups, but I think most whites need maybe eight – twelve sessions with just other whites to do our own work before we are ready for cross-race work. We need to talk through all the denial, resistance, yeah but’s, but-they-do-it-too, the perfectly logical explanations, and other potholes we fall into.

Helping whites look at our socialization & examine how we got these racist messages, what happens when they come up in the room and then skills to intervene. But, I think we need to look at our own socialization because too many of us want to jump in and try to solve things before we’ve done our own work to dismantle the internalized racist attitudes we still carry.

We also need to work at the institutional level and identify how racist attitudes are embedded into policies, practices, and services. A quick activity to use as you are working with other whites is to identify five different policies, programs, practices, or norms in the organization and examine, by group membership, whose needs are getting met? Whose may not be? Are there any unintentional barriers or obstacles for members of certain groups? Are some group, in this case whites, getting unearned access or privilege? How are white cultural beliefs embedded as the only way or the right way?

It’s important to not do this work in isolation as whites. Can you negotiate a relationship with some people of color in the organization or the community to serve as advisers to give you feedback and direction? Not asking to be taught, but to work in collaboration an follow the leadership of people of color as we whites develop and implement activities and trainings to dismantle racist dynamics in our organizations.

Where do I start

Question: Where do I start? I feel overwhelmed, there’s so much to do.

A common trap is to feel you have to use a teaching or telling style since you only have a very short amount of time. And so, people lecture about the leadership case, why this is important to do, what are the problems we have, and what you need to do differently.

I think instead we need to remember that old saying: Give the student a fish they’ll eat for a day; teach them to fish and they’ll do it themselves throughout their lives.  Most people remember so little from a lecture, maybe 10% But if they are engaged in the learning, and especially if they are learning from their peers, they retain so much more.  So, start by getting clear about your approach and style as a facilitator.

If you look at how I scaffold and build a day-long foundational workshop, we start out sharing examples of times you felt included, that we belonged as well as times we felt marginalized. I use lots of storytelling in pairs and small groups to have participants learn through the life experiences of others.  and then large group. Because it’s not just the content you’re teaching, you are building a learning container where people have increasingly authentic conversations.

Another key first step is to think about what you want to accomplish in each of the three parts of the workshop. I think about a workshop like three acts of a play. The opening, act one which is creating the container for authentic conversation dialogue, gets people grounded in the room & understanding where we’re going. The middle, which is the body of the workshop, that’s where we can teach some skills, build some more capacity. And then, the conclusion is where they begin to transfer the learning and identify how to take this back to the work environment.

Where do you start? Let go of the idea that you’re going to fix and change people in two hours, four hours, even a day. But, if you can give them greater capacity to have authentic, real conversations with other people, and increase their ability to really listen to the stories and experiences of their colleagues; if you can increase their capacity to have confidence that they can recognize and speak up more effectively and interrupt microaggressions, then people may leave feeling the session was worthwhile.

Where do you start? You build the connections between why we are doing this session and their day-to-day work activities. Have a senior leader open the session and talk about their own insights from diversity trainings and how they have changed their practice.

In twelve-step work, when people speak from the podium, they talk about what they were like, what happened, and what they’re like now. Coach the senior leader to tell a story about a microaggression they did or one they overlooked and how they learned in a workshop how to speak up instead of staying quiet. Finally, coach them to talk about their expectations that all members use an Inclusion Lens in everything they do.