Month: February 2019

• Diversity Hiring in Football and Libraries

  Last week I tweeted about an HBS story unpacking leadership lessons from the recent NFL coach firing spree. In short, the NFL season concludes each year with a host of personnel changes, known by fans as “Black Monday”. The article focused on takeaways from managers on personal development and skill acquisition as strategies to protect your position within an organization. This year’s Black Monday held an irony that may have fallen on the authors of the article, given that 5 of the 8 coaches fired were Black. This prompted a conversation within the Black community about the role race and equity play in the recruitment, development, and retention of its staffers.

  

  This week, a colleague shared a podcast from sports commentator Bomani Jones on the NFL firings that touched on some key themes library directors deal with when trying to develop diverse talent pipelines. Check out the podcast first, then come back and see my highlights for libraries.

  1. Peeling Back The Layers Discouraging Diverse Talent Pipelines
  

  

  Bomani Jones and his guest Domonique Foxworth joked about some of the rules night clubs establish to maintain a certain type of clientele. This typically includes restricting the type of wardrobe patrons wear in order to require assimilation to a pre-defined culture to gain admission. Now, once the initial rules were adhered to by an unintended group, more rules are added. But once the additional rules were adhered to by the unintended group, the intended group no longer wants to patronize the club, creating a dilemma for the club owner: Do we keep our night club exclusive to the intended group and risk losing the business of the unintended groups? Or do we allow the unintended groups in and run the risk of losing our core business.

  The co-hosts discussed that night club owners have a decision to make on whether to “lean in” to or embrace interest from Black patrons or to create layers discouraging them. In the US, most night club owners create obstacles prohibiting Blacks from patronizing their establishments. Historically, the same has been the case in libraries, posing the same question to library administrators: are we making it easier for diverse candidates to learn about, apply for, and thrive in openings in our organization, or are we making it more difficult?

  Deans and directors can analyze the following areas when it comes to building or tearing down these 5 layers in between diverse candidates and our organization:

  1. Advertising: Does our advertising encourage Whites to apply to our jobs and discourage Blacks? 
  2. Opportunities: Are the pathways into our organization designed to attract Whites and discourage Blacks? (More on this later.)
  3. Culture: Do our norms and expectations in the workplace encourage Blacks to assimilate to White culture in order to thrive?
  4. Policies: Do our policies discourage Blacks from investing years of their career there, encouraging them to leave as soon as they find a better opportunity?
  5. Benefits: Do our benefits and perks respond to the unique needs of the community we are seeking to attract?

  2. “We Steady Tryna’ Come Up”: Developing a Right View of Black Entitlement

  Talent pipelines don’t include Black people not due to lack of interest, but due to racist infrastructure explained above. In fact, to the contrary, it is a cultural trait among Black people to desire all of the opportunities that our white counterparts have for two primary reasons: 1) We feel entitled to it due to the centuries of unpaid labor from our ancestors. 2) As Domonique Foxworth states in the podcast, it’s one of the most American traits one can have to want everything that’s possible to be had and to want more of it. This runs counter to the prevailing racist stereotype suggesting that Blacks are entitled and lazy, and highlights the fact that since our ancestors were brought over, we’ve only ever known how to work for everything we have. 

  Rare footage from an NBC interview of Dr. Martin Luther King 11 months before his assassination addresses this issue of Black entitlement, which was a myth propagated by European peasant classes after receiving various forms of aid from the government.

  And he offered more details here in this speech to NATRA 9 months later.

  As Dr. King illustrates, conflating the native Black American experience with immigrants (even African immigrants) and other minority groups is an age-old tactic to extend slavery from its now illegal origins into various legal means that continue to make the American dream unachievable. The only difference now is that what used to be out in the open is now more subtle and more difficult to detect.

  As leaders of organizations who are serious about achieving equity within our workforces, do not succumb to the lazy man’s analysis of affirmative action, the Rooney Rule, and other programs. These programs were designed to give native Black Americans boots once and for all in order to one day be able to pull the bootstraps.

  The simplest way to understand the right view of black entitlement is that when a Black person is entitled, we aren’t interested in anyone manufacturing the outcomes for us so that we are successful, creating unfairness towards anyone else, but solely interested in leveling the playing field with equal opportunities so that we have as fair of a shot at success as our white and immigrant counterparts.
  

  3. Early Exposure is Key to Building Diverse Pipelines

  In his most recent press conference, the NFL commissioner addressed the issue on many fans’ minds of increasing the number of black coaching and managerial staff to become more representative of the population of the players. 

  NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says the league will keep focusing on opportunities to create a deeper pool of minority coaching candidates. https://t.co/KyxrDVFr4e

  — Sun-Times Sports (@suntimes_sports) January 30, 2019

  Foxworth discussed why the pipeline in the NFL is so dry, and the reasoning resonated with the way the libraries run their organizations today. Jones described a similar comfort level he had on college campus since one of his parents who was a professor exposed him to the academic environment at a young age, leading to his success in college. Like libraries, most starting jobs in the NFL are unpaid positions, giving the children of coaches a leg up over other candidates. It may be the case that the coach’s son knows more about the game than a current player. But it’s no excuse to delay rethinking the talent development practices of the league. Since Black librarians cannot afford to take unpaid positions at the same rate many our white and immigrant counterparts can, and are not exposed to the information profession at as early of ages, the pipelines must be built much earlier.

  4.  Other Non-Diversity Related Takeaways

  As mentioned, the podcast is worth listening to all the way through, especially as a manager or leader in your organization. But here are some of the other takeaways not related to diversity.

  1. “What’s your coaching tree?” Try to uncover who candidates can bring with them when they come, and who’s tutelage they were you under  in order to gain insight into their leadership style and professional biases.
  2. “What gives you the edge?” Currently high performers have to always be thinking about the future, because your competitors are constantly looking at what you’re doing and adjusting, reducing your value proposition.
  3. “Help everyone improve, not just low-performers.” Compliment your talent to make them better, not to make what’s already easy for them easier.
  4. “Leaders invest in who people are, not just what they can do.” Important to build a relationship with people in order to develop culture. Can’t just stay focused on the tactics

  2019.02.28

• Accessibility @Skilltype Part 1: Good A11Y is Good UX

  

  At the heart of Skilltype is a spirit of inclusion. We know that information professionals – those who work in libraries, who conduct scholarly research, who manage knowledge systems in our institutions – are vital to the survival and dissemination of truth. We make tools to help these professionals do their job well, and it’s important that our tools invite, include, and serve all those who might benefit from their use. That’s why we are committed to making our software accessible to users of all levels of ability.

  The following posts describe the considerations and challenges we faced when developing with accessibility in mind, describes some architectural strategies for building accessible components in React, and then walks through accessibility implementations in two of our components, MenuBar and TagListPicker.

  We’re not Accessibility experts. We’ve read a lot of blog posts about Accessibility and looked through various standards documents, but we don’t claim to have the depth of experience of, say, an Accessibility professional. However, we weren’t going to let that be an excuse to “leave accessibility for later,” which is a tempting path [1]. Instead, we decided to approach accessibility (A11Y) the way we approach user experience (UX). None of us have degrees in UX or call ourselves UX professionals, but like most teams building apps for web and mobile, UX is a top priority in our software design and we spend a lot of time discussing and testing it.

  Thinking about A11Y as UX is not trivial but it can be intuitive. The first step in our UX design is always mining our own sensibilities as web users. We ask ourselves questions like “does this make sense?”, “what would I expect to happen here”, “is this too much information on one screen”, etc. We use those sensibilities to make some best guesses that inform our interface design and behavior. We can do the same thing with A11Y with a little extra effort – first, we have to build some sensibility around using A11Y features by using the web the way someone with disabilities would.

  We began by familiarizing ourselves with the types of disabilities some of our users may have. The A11Y Project identifies four broad categories of accessibility: Visual, Auditory, Motor and Cognitive [2]. Each has its own specific set of guidelines and considerations, but there is also a lot of overlap. For example, if keyboard interaction is well-designed on your site, it will assist users with visual impairments using standard keyboard navigation as well as motor-impaired users using special control apparati. So, for the purposes of this post, we’ll focus on a blind or visually impaired user, but many of the analyses and strategies here can inform design and development for other accessibility needs.

  The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) site provides some useful personas for users with disabilities [3]. Here’s an excerpt from their persona for Ilya, a senior staff member (of a fictitious organization) who is blind:

  • Ilya is blind. She is the chief accountant at an insurance company that uses web-based documents and forms over a corporate intranet and like many other blind computer users, she does not read Braille.

  • Ilya uses a screen reader and mobile phone to access the web. Both her screen reader and her mobile phone accessibility features provide her with information regarding the device’s operating system, applications, and text content in a speech output form.

  We know that responsible UX/UI design must address site or app functionality in the various browsers and platforms where users will encounter our work “in the wild” (Chrome, Firefox, iOS, Android, etc), so our next step was to identify the screen readers that our visually impaired users would use on our web app. For this, we looked to WebAIM, a non-profit organization out of Utah State University that compiles data every year on screen reader usage and demographics. We learned that the vast majority (> 80%) of users with disabilities used 3 screen readers: JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver [4]. As JAWS is a commercial product with a non-trivial pricetag ($90/year), we opted to start with the free applications.

  

  To educate ourselves, we watched some videos of users with disabilities actually using screen readers to interact with applications like email on their computers and phones, as well as navigate and use web sites like reddit (and even playing Mortal Kombat).

  We then installed and/or activated these applications on our own computers and spent some time using our computers and phones to browse the web. At first, it’s incredibly awkward and slow to do anything, especially on the phone, where the gestural metaphors are nearly all repurposed. One vlogger on Youtube who is blind and demoing screen readers on her phone even warns, “don’t activate VoiceOver on your iPhone until you know how to use it, or you won’t be able to turn it off” [5]. But after a few hours of experimentation and Googling, you should be able to proficiently navigate a website with only your ears and the keyboard. It’s very important to reach this level of proficiency with screen readers – you must begin to build a design intuition for alternative forms of interaction; over time, as you design, build, and test accessible interfaces, this intuition will mature and, ideally, be on par with your sense for visual design and usability.

  In Part 2, we’ll look at how React is particularly well suited for architecting accessible apps.

  Paul Hine is a senior developer at Skilltype.

  2019.02.16

• Skilltype @ ALA Midwinter 2019: Taking the Road Less Travelled

  In typical Skilltype fashion, our presence at ALA Midwinter 2019 in Seattle was non-traditional. Mainly because as a startup, exhibit hall real estate isn’t the most fiscally responsible investment. But also because brands that launch at ALA in the sea of vendors simply to fade into oblivion. Why spend all of that money to cross your fingers in hope that the right people stop by your “little booth that could”, when in actuality the people who stop by just want to know if you’re raffling off an Apple Watch.

  So instead, I saved money, called up some friends, and connected the Skilltype way.

  Thursday: Gonzaga Skilltype Kickoff

  

  Over the course of the day, we had about 40-50 people from the library and various departments across campus such as Organizational Development and HR, Office of Diversity, and the office of research attend sessions to learn about the future of work, and how Skilltype can help prepare their organizations for 2030.

  After the session, I flew back across the Cascades to Seattle, and started preparing for the weekend’s festivities.

  Friday: Skilltype Happy Hour @ Amazon HQ

  

  Being in Seattle, I tapped Skilltype advisory board member Julian to see what ideas he had about showing our development partners a special experience while in town. He got us passes to the Amazon Spheres – an alternative workspace for Amazon employees who need a creative boost during the week. The 5-story indoor rainforest was an inspiration of what the future of work could feel like.

  

  After the tour ended, we met up with our beta testers and some new friends to kickback. This was one of the first times our development partners connected in this context. The energy around the Skilltype movement was tangible.

  

  

  Saturday: Skilltype + BCALA

  

  Spent the afternoon with the BCALA delegation sharing my personal story in libraries and the road to Skilltype. Was very interesting to have my personal and professional identities converge since they usually don’t. I believe this is another tenet of the future of work – being able to bring your full self to the workplace. To model it was refreshing and nerve-wracking at the same time.

  Sunday: Skilltype Product Update

  

  On Sunday morning, we connected with our beta testers and working group leaders to get stuff done. One of the biggest decisions that came our of this talk was to approach Teams differently on the platform. Eleanor Cook commented on the difficulty of organizing department nomenclature across institutions to the platform. Every institution calls teams something different. Unlike other pieces of organizational data that are controlled with vocabularies, Bohyun Kim from recommended that other systems on campus do a good job at structuring groups of people. Skilltype can be the place where we can create ad-hoc, dynamic groups simply used for internal purposes. We immediately agreed and brought the idea back to the team to update the roadmap.

  It was also interesting to have the current and previous heads of three separate professional associations in the room discussing Skilltype’s role in the professional association landscape. I’m really excited about where this conversation will go, as there seems to be a need for something more; something different.

  2019.02.11

• Collaboration and Team Building in Practice

  

  Guest blog post by beta tester Jennifer A. Ferretti.

  I started as a manager of a ready-made unit. Here are a couple things I thought about early on.
  
  I hear from a lot of folks throughout my different channels about imposter syndrome and lack of training for new managers. This isn’t surprising as most library and information science programs don’t offer managerial courses. Reviewing leadership styles, budgets, and managing personnel is rarely discussed, but incredibly helpful for not only those who are interested in becoming managers, but those who aren’t. Management at any experience level can be trying, but there are things you can do to feel more confident, or at least, understand you’re not alone!

  Here are some of the things I thought about and established with my team early on.

  Determine How Will We Work

  During my first meeting with my small, ready-made team we discussed digitization projects they’ve done in the past and what we might think about for the future. One team member had a really important question: “But why are we digitizing this?” I was blown away by this question. She wanted to know why we were doing something because in the past she felt like projects were taken on with no clear roadmap for how they’re shared, what they contribute, etc. There was no pre- or post-work being done, therefore leaving it feeling like digitization for digitization sake. It was a question I will forever be grateful for and refer back to it a lot. What I heard was “I want to be part of a team that has a defined purpose or purposes.”

  For large-scale digitization projects, I developed a Project Charter based on UCLA Library’s. This is part of the pre-work. Eventually we also developed a request for digitization of collections form so that staff could suggest collections be digitized.

  We’re a Google Campus, so after I arrived I created a shared folder system for the library. Project charters, team meeting notes, annual goal review, and more are organized in our Google Drive and accessible to the team at all times.

  Establish a Communication Strategy

  The average undergraduate student I see everyday doesn’t do email. Or, doesn’t use or check it often. I can’t blame them – my personal email inbox is pretty shameful. But not everything that comes in as an email has to be an email. I doubt I’ll be able to ever stop using email, but my use of it at work has definitely decreased with additional tools like Slack and Basecamp.

  So what’s your preferred method of communication? This is an important question to map out with a team. Working through available tools and methods (Slack, email, in-person pop-ins, phone, etc.) and discussing situations in which you would use each is a great place to start with your team. Then reviewing your decisions to make sure it’s still working for you is just as important, especially at the early stages. Take into account remote work too, if your workplace offers that.

  Shortly after I started my current job I implemented Slack for my team only. Eventually it was expanded to a library committee I was part of, then eventually I was onboarding all library staff. We’ve outlined when and how we use Slack, email (including tagging subject lines for things such as Response Needed), and project management tools.

  Schedule Team Meetings and Individual Check-Ins

  Monthly team meetings were a no-brainer for me. But I really wasn’t having one-on-one check-ins and during the annual goal review process, one of my team members brought it up. I currently manage three people so one-on-one meetings once a month with each of them is totally doable.

  You can add in engaging activities during team meetings such as resource shares. I had team members choose any resource they thought was interesting (it absolutely didn’t have to be related to our work) and asked them to just show us around. No notes or reports needed. I just wanted to be made aware of a) what’s cool and out there; b) what they think is cool.

  I also established our annual retreat, which takes place every summer. We take the entire work day (lunch is purchased by the library) to discuss what the year was like, we review our three year plan and throw in some more plans, talk about what works for our workflows and what doesn’t, and any big upcoming projects.

  I’ve been in my position now for almost four years and I’m consistently checking in not only with my team to make sure things feel right for us, but also with myself. The latter typically consists of much needed self-reflection. Recognizing what we don’t know and making an effort to learn more is not only crucial as a manager, but also as a colleague.

  2019.02.07