I once eagerly joined a work-extra-curricular group that used data analysis to support greater diversity and inclusion. I thought this would be a great opportunity to make something more constructive than cupcakes for International Womens’ Day and make the workplace more inclusive for lots of people. I did not anticipate this would lead to me incite a small riot in the team chat only a week later.
There were concerns about coaching assignments, I learned, in my first meeting with this work-extra-curricular group. Apparently there was a growing perception that junior women were intentionally assigned to mid-career women coaches, simply because they were women – not because the match otherwise made sense.
I spoke up: surely this was the lesser of two evils? Of course, there was the chance this was not a good match for junior women, but mid-career women certainly had much higher coaching loads. The talent pipeline for women strongly resembled a squished triangle – how could that ratio of mid-career to junior women possibly be fair in this coaching context? At this point in the conversation, it was still perception and conjecture, so I volunteered to analyse the data.
The data showed that I was right and had also missed the bigger problem. Mid-career women indeed had relatively more women coachees; but also relatively more male coachees. Overall, they were doing roughly double the coaching workload of their male counterparts. I dutifully copied this analysis into the internal comms channel which I’d been told was the relevant forum for feedback and discussion.
Coaching itself is not bad, I argued back in the early eruption of indignation from my colleagues as messages began to pour in. It can be beneficial for all involved, and for many women who feel this greatly supported their career paths it makes sense to give back. My colleagues were clearly divided into two groups: those arguing I didn’t know what I was talking about and those furiously copying in links to articles about office housework.
Office housework became better understood through a 2017 paper in the American Economic Review. The paper found that women, more often than men, receive and accept requests for tasks with ‘low promotability’.
This highly unequal coaching workload seemed like a pretty clear example of this problem. Coaching, in this instance, was necessary but no one got rewarded or recognised for this work, much like unloading the dishwasher. But this was partly because of how coaching was often done in this organisation.
There are some instances of coaching that are highly valuable to the coach (even if it’s unpaid). Coaches can learn new things from their younger counterparts, including those who may have different strengths or experiences. There is also significant value in building a strong network of great people you can promote and hire in the future. The extra office housework is problematic, but while evening the load, women can also be more strategic about what tasks we accept.
There are select tasks at work that superficially meet the definition of ‘office housework’ (no one wants to do it, but they absolutely need to get done and appear to have low promotability), but are secretly strategic opportunities. IT is a good example.
In very large organisations, this is already looked after by IT departments, CTOs and CISOs. But sometimes there can be opportunities to join employee representative groups or ad hoc projects, like figuring out how AI is useful for your area. These aren’t quite a goldmine of strategic opportunity, but they’re a pretty solid silver.
IIn all other organisations, IT is a goldmine of strategic opportunity. If you leverage this well, you can:
- Use it as an opportunity to write a strategy that actually gets implemented – this doesn’t have to be long or complicated, it just needs some ROI (including positive feedback) you can use in your next job interview.
- Use it as an opener for a listening tour – by leveraging your strategy as an opening to have coffee and learn from more senior people in your field who have also been accidental IT leaders (as long as your current boss is fine with any organisational information shared as part of this tour).
- Use it as training for managing people with skillsets that are different to yours (like your external IT vendor) – this is one of the hardest things to learn at work, and it’s also rare (but highly valuable) to get experience in this before becoming super senior.
I’m learning that IT is frequently managed by accidental IT leaders, many of whom see it as office housework. We also know that tech is grossly underutilised in lots of small and medium organisations. Instead of telling these time-strapped small teams to get ‘smarter’ about tech, let’s empower accidental IT leaders with the right training and tools to be more strategic about managing tech for their organisation and themselves.
At Lumenas, we’re working on making better tools for accidental IT leaders. If you’re an accidental IT leader, or you’d just like to learn more about this problem, let us know at hello@lumenas.com
This post was originally published on Linkedin here.