Get Your Squad Together
A startup team looking at a series of post it notes and a presentation together.
D&I is a high empathy, high care factor position. You have to go from a strategy meeting to basically holding a therapy session with an employee, and you only have about five minutes in between.
The empathic load that the CDO job puts on everyone just burns people out; especially when you add to that the fact that most companies are not actually interested in creating the structural change required to resolve the total volume of issues. That means you're dealing with a high volume of necessary care that you need to give and also a considerable amount of gaslighting that you're getting from your organization...
We know that we all exist on a compassion spectrum, and that it’s often discussed for nurses, social workers, and people in other caring roles, but we need to understand that people in D&I are experiencing many of the same sorts of demand for their care. If you don't practice self and community care for yourself, you can literally run out of empathy. The fact is, we all take on secondary traumatic stress in this role.
Even in organizations that are doing well, even in organizations where leadership is aligned to the goals of D&I, compassion fatigue and burnout is still exceptionally high.
We have to find external ways to deal with our own needs, because on top of high demand for our care, most of us in this career come from marginalized backgrounds. If we don't, we end up way too crispy.
Self-care is a part of this. I'm setting strict boundaries on how much time I allow myself for sleep and refusing to sacrifice that rest time for "productivity". I try to eat higher vibrational foods when I can or practice intuitive eating, and I try to understand the different cravings are reflective of the different traumas and stresses I’m facing. But self-care isn't enough. Working in D&I, we need significant levels of community care as well.
I think of my personal, family, and community as a braid or concentric circles that are all necessary for me to function optimally. In order to be well I’ve got a:
Therapist: While a huge privilege, I couldn’t do life or this job without weekly support.
Psychiatrist: I’m on the bipolar spectrum, which adds another layer of complexity to all this.
Family: My parents and I are close, and they are openly supportive of what I do.
Squad: A group of fellow CDOs and DEI pros who understand this work and jointly celebrate, commiserate, and support.
I invest as much of my time as I can in those relationships. I have worked to build the same supportive circles at work, having people I can turn to for that human connection and squad for me inside the team. I've negotiated a relationship with my boss to take mental health days, and I'm very open both with him and the company that I do that.
Even professional athletes have an offseason. Expecting ourselves to perform at the highest level all the time isn't realistic.
This idea from Anthony Ware is something that’s sat with me deeply.
I think it's helpful if, as a CDO, you are serious and honest about your own marginality and your needs to help normalize that honesty for the people you care for. You also have to know how to use what I call strategic vulnerability; in those moments when you're vulnerable, you're not there to therapize yourself; you're sharing because it's essential to build a culture where that is encouraged and where space has been made for raw humanity.
That idea of making space is essentia, especially for yourself. You have to look after yourself and spend time tending to your own needs. Until we're making space for ourselves, our squads and our teams, we’re all just still here on the road to burnout.
