Marwa Farouq: Teach for All - How to Focus on Diversity and Think Sustainability in Business.

Maureen: Ok, so we are starting back and we have another fabulous speaker for you Marwa. Marwa is the Global Head of Operations at Teach For All, and they are working towards a world where all children can fulfil their potential. Marwa will be exploring how a self-managing organisation can work across many cultures with a real focus on diversity and inclusion. Over to you Marwa.

Marwa: Thank you Maureen. Hi everyone! I've been here since the morning and it's been exciting to hear all the different experiences. I've learnt a lot already and I'm excited to share our experience at Teach For All.

Just to give some quick context to what I'm going to be talking about and our organisation a little bit: we have been going through a deep reflection over the last few years on our ways of working, how we are developing our culture, how we are creating the impact that we want to have on our network and in our organisation. To give you a sense of the scale of our network: we have 60 partners across the world, we are in every region, our staff are in at least 25 locations around the world, our staff have different nationalities at least 30 + nationalities around the world. We have a lot of diversity in our organisation and we have been really occupied with this learning question of ‘how are we setting ourselves up as an organisation, and subsequently as a network, to navigate an ever-changing ecosystem in a way that is sustainable for us as an organisation but also is sustainable for our people?’ And we've been in a really good place. I'm going to share my slides quickly. 

We've been in a really good place for the last couple of years. In the midst of the pandemic our engagement result for our organisation was 85%. We just published our new engagement results for this year, in April actually, and it's a whopping 88% which I'm really really proud of. To give context to this we are an organisation that is 80% diverse. That is 80% of our staff meet at least one measure of diversity that we measure. So we've been asking ourselves what is contributing to this? How are we sustaining this experience and this kind of impact within our organisation? And we are learning a few things. I'm going to share two key ideas today and hopefully you'll find some nickable ideas that you can take back to your organisations too. But before I start, to really give light to these two ideas I want to tell two stories.

My first story is about a colleague that I'm going to call, for the sake of this, Zach. This is a true story Zach joined our organisation towards the end of last year, early December, Zach is based in Kenya. And I was with Zach in a situation similar to this, we were in a breakout session and we were reflecting on Teach For All’s culture and ways of working, and how it impacts our people. And here is what Zach said, Zach was like I found my voice in Teach For All, all of my life I was that student, that professional who comes into the room sits at the back of the room and just sits silently. I don't contribute, I don't share, I leave the meetings exactly the same as I was when I came in. He said I came to Teach For All and I realised there is no back of the room. There is no back of the room in Teach For All; first of all we are virtual, there's physically no back of the room, but it's always a circle and I'm always invited to speak. And at the beginning I was very hesitant to speak up but then I started sharing my ideas and I realised that the conversation became richer; I learnt a lot, the people that I was engaging with learnt a lot, and over time I've changed. Now I can't wait to go into these meetings because I feel that I become a better person engaging in these conversations. 

Imagine being the Head of People, of Operations and hearing this. I just want this to sink in with everyone for a minute, it was such a fantastic experience to have.

My other story is the story of another colleague who I'm going to call Katrina, and Katrina is based in the UK. Katrina reached out a few years back and she was like ‘I really care about the environment, I think we're not doing enough as an organisation and as a network and we need to do more’ and so I asked Katrina ‘what do you want to do about it?’ and she said ‘I don't know. Let's bring people together and just talk about it and take action’ and she did. She went and asked who else was interested and created a group that came from across the organisation, and later that group expanded and came from across the network. They talked about what they cared about, about what they could do and they proposed policies and practices and habits that we could do internally and externally. Awareness that we could raise and they have done so much work since then. Fast forward to 2022 and we just hired as an organisation, in February, our first Head of Global Climate Leadership and Education in Teach For All; which is fascinating, I think about how this started and how people came together and really exerted their leadership in a way that created this impact. Of course we're still at the beginning of that journey, this is very early, but I think this story speaks a lot to what I want to talk about today.

Today I'm going to talk about these two key ideas: so how do you build leadership across every level in your organisation? And how do you ensure that everyone's voice is included as you create the impact that you want to create within the organisation? These are our biggest learning points on how to build resilient organisations.

I'm going to shed some light on that first idea first of all and then move us, after the breakouts, on to that second point. 

When you think of leadership usually, in traditional organisations, it's mid-level and above. And we asked ourselves ‘what would it look like to have leadership at every level? To have people truly living in their leadership and truly having agency across the organisation at every level?’. So we have experimented over the years with a few things. Our first experiment was very similar to what Al (Castro) had said about getting out of the way. We realised that we have superhero expectations of our managers. We realised that we had very unrealistic expectations around our managers being the be all and end all for their staff members. They manage performance, make sure they set priorities and that the work is getting done, they also are coaches, they also take care of development, they also navigate conflict with you; they're just everything. And we realised this was so unfair to set as an expectation of every manager in an organisation as diverse as ours, and we asked ourselves a question ‘what happens if we free up managers from that responsibility of managing people and we let them focus on on managing the work, focus on building fantastic cultures within their teams, and let people manage themselves? Let people manage their time, their performance, their life and journey and development in Teach For All. Then fast forward we've been experimenting with this now for a few years and just to give you a sense of what that looks like in shifting our staff members experience: in this last survey, the engagement survey, 94% of our staff have said that they think their management are team leads and are fully leaning into our core values, 90% thought that their manager helps them to make decisions and grow and develop, 93% thought that their manager welcomes their voice, includes them and supports their voice within the organisation. This is astounding. It's a true shift in our staff members' experience.

So what then? What happens to our staff members? We have people from all different cultures, it's not like we left them in the lurch, so what happens when our staff members are owning their own journey in the organisation? We decided to not look at support within the organisation in a similar way to parents: you don't choose your manager and you don't choose the person who is going to coach you. We said what if we allowed our staff to make choices? To choose who they want to walk with them on the journey of development, navigating the organisation and seeing what happens. And I think this is my nickable idea by the way: the sponsorship programme. We experimented with the sponsorship programme for a few years and it's life-changing, to say the least, in our organisation. The idea was we asked people to volunteer to be sponsors for other people. And what we mean by sponsor is this: they will be your biggest cheerleader, this will be who you go to to advocate for you, to coach you, to guide you, to vent to; I go to my sponsor to vent and talk about my challenges in my week. This is your person. And we ask people to volunteer and then we ask people to choose. And it was fascinating what we saw. What we saw was that people were tapped into this amazing informal network of leadership within our organisation. We now, after a few years of doing this, have sponsors at every level, every region, every function. It's across cultures, levels, functions, it's just fascinating. And we realise that this was such an amazing way of choosing who you want to walk with you on that journey.

So that's my second idea. First idea is that we have managers not superheroes, the second idea is the sponsorship programme and then my third idea, the third learning point really, is bringing decisions closer to the work. I think a lot of my colleagues, the speakers before me, have talked about this: the idea of getting out of the way. This idea of truly bringing decisions closer. And I think the Katrina story is such an amazing story that highlights this. No one up there is making the decision, the person is making the decision because they're passionate about it. And they are leveraging collective wisdom and what that creates is that you build judgement. We always worry about staff members of the teams making the decisions because you worry: ‘Do they don't have good judgement?’. Judgement is a muscle you practise that muscle and you equip yourself with the collective wisdom of those around you and you make excellent decisions. And that's what our experience has been over the years.

Finally my last idea, my last learning point, is that we have our staff own their journey at Teach For All and, as part of that, their development. And what that meant was that they leverage their coaches, their sponsors and the support systems that we have but they own where they want to go. As an organisation our philosophy is that we want our staff to live up to their highest contribution but what that means is that they decide where they want to grow and develop. That enables a level of flexibility that traditional development, manager development, doesn't create.

I'll pause here and leave you with a quick question to take to your break out groups: listening to these ideas, what would leadership at all levels look like in your organisation? 

Marwa: Onto my second idea. So we talked about resilience, what would contribute to organisational resilience or us navigating these two learnings that we've had? Building leadership at every level and my second learning being bringing everyone's voice into the organisation or into the work; and that's one of the most difficult things to do if I'm being super honest. 

We have to think a lot about: how do we build an inclusive organisation? And actually what we also think about a lot is how do we build a diverse, equitable and inclusive organisation? 

And I will share three ideas, or three things, that we have been doing at Teach For All that helps us to do this. The first thing is if you want people’s voices to be at the table then you need to invite people to the table; so being super intentional around who we are bringing into our organisation. We are very big about people who have lived experience in our organisation, people who are coming from the, we call it the, global majority- which is basically non-western dissent. Fundamentally we want our organisation to reflect our network, the areas, the nations, the communities which we are working in and trying to serve. And where we are now, I'm always really proud to talk about this, we are 80% diverse as an organisation. 80% of our staff meet at least one measure of diversity and that takes intentional effort. 

I'm going to talk a little bit about, at least just, recruitment. When it comes to diversifying your staff if it's looking like it won’t be diverse… we have a rule that recruitment doesn't share the pipeline with the hiring manager unless the pipeline is 60% diverse. We set up our candidates to succeed. We talk to our candidates, our recruiter spends a lot of time with our candidates, especially those that will be going through the interviewing process; talking about who we are, what we value, what's the role, what are we going to be asking. Everything. We talk to them a lot, about the organisation, we share resources, show them videos so they are very well set up. We also partner with hiring managers, not only around training them about unconscious bias but also, to coach them. To try and bring to the surface and to pay attention to when unconscious bias is at play. For example when someone is saying ‘Oh but I don't understand what they're saying, like their pronunciation isn't right’ or ‘their written English isn't right’, we're surfacing all of these things. 

We do many other things, like posting the roles in local channels. One of the things we are thinking about, or rather our new Head of Global and Talent Acquisition is thinking about, is posting roles in the native language of the people that we are seeking to bring into the organisation. So how intentional are you at who you are bringing into the organisation? And who is missing? Whose voice is missing? We've done an exercise over the last couple of years where we looked at: ‘what are the locations?’ Where do our staff come from and which locations are missing, and why? And we started expanding that.

So that's my first idea. The second idea, which I think is a very popular idea, is on the topic of DEI (Diversity, equity and inclusion). You think of DEI and instantly think of development and a lot of people think of development as training and that’s a big misconception. I think if you truly want to build an inclusive organisation these three things come hand in hand: self-awareness, skill building (which is training) and then coaching and open dialogue.

I think we need to ask ourselves the question: how can we identify where we want to grow and develop if we don't know where we are? We really encourage our staff to go on these learning journeys, to learn about their values, limiting beliefs, biases, ways of working, preferences, privilege, the power that they hold. And with that level of awareness they then can go on to build their skills and engage coaching and so on. They also learn that knowing something is very different from being and doing something; and that's where coaching and open dialogue come in: how do you use your sponsor, your coach and these different support mechanisms to talk about: how do we do it in the day today? I'm facing these different situations with my colleague, we have different communication approaches for example. How do we truly manage across lines of differences? And having open dialogues is important. We talk a lot about privilege, power and decentering white dominant ways of working in our organisation and we talk openly because that helps us to decenter some of the practises that we want to decenter in our organisation.

First idea: diversify. Invite people to your table.

Second idea: having a holistic approach to development. And my third idea… Oh, just going back a second: as a result of our approach at least 70% of our staff are engaging in learning opportunities and those are the ones that we actually count, the structural learning opportunities; teams do development, communities do development all of the time in our organisation and we have all types of this. I'm involved in a book club where a group of us have come together in a very organic way to learn about attachment theory and belonging. 

My third idea is: systems, processes and procedures. So we talked about bringing everyone, building the capacity, and building the knowledge of everyone but that's not enough. It comes hand in hand with how you are building your systems and processes and procedures, and using those to be the runway where you can take off from. Where that enables us to grow and develop, and not create systems that are static and create a ceiling for development and limit our potential. To create that we are very keen on our systems being staff centred and that enables us to be flexible and continuously evolving.

One of the examples that I like to give is this: in the past 6 years we have shifted our compensation system at least 3 times. What happens is our staff gives us feedback, we listen to that feedback, reflect on it, and learn from it; and then respond to it. What that creates is it enables us to evolve collectively and we can do that across our systems and policies and procedures. It enables us, basically, to evolve as our staff body evolves and grows.

I'm going to pause and send you out for another question before you come back: what would you personally do to support your organisation to become more inclusive?

Marwa: Hi Henry! So Claire was just asking me a question, so I'm just going to go ahead and answer it.

Henry: Go for it.

Marwa: So she was asking: ‘In the sponsorship program do the people choose their sponsors or do the sponsors choose their people?’ The answer is all staff members choose their sponsors. And the second part of that question was: ‘What if more than one person chose the same sponsor? If everyone chooses the same person?’ And we have actually had that here. When we first launched the program we had a hypothesis that everyone is going to choose senior people within the organisation or more experienced people but what we've learnt is that actually, with such a diverse organisation as ours, people chose all sorts of different people. It didn't end up in our experience that people chose only one person though. Of course there may be some more popular people than others but over time, as we were doing this, we encouraged people to think about changing their sponsor every year. Some do and some don't, but even that evolved over time. So they might initially think this is the person they want to be with but then they might change their mind over time. That has been our experience.

Henry: And do some people not get chosen and does that matter?

Marwa:  Yes! Some people don't get chosen and it doesn't matter at all; they continue being on the list, they engage still with all of the development that we do for sponsors and then they might be chosen another time whereas sometimes others don't. It's a very dynamic process And there's no judgement associated with it.

Henry: How often do you have to re-open your pipeline to meet that 60% threshold?

Marwa: That's actually to all of our roles we just don't share with our hiring managers who the people in the pipeline are except when they reach 60%.

Henry: Oh really?

Marwa: And we were very intentional about how we cultivate that pipeline that it’s changed over time and now it doesn't take a lot of time to cultivate a diverse pipeline because we're doing this with all of the different channels that we want to hire into.

Henry: So how does the pipeline work? Are people continually applying to be in it?

Marwa: We publish our roles in different channels and then we look at all of our candidates and we shortlist a set of candidates. So let's say 10 candidates where we think these are the strong ones that we want to take through the interviewing process and before we show these 10 candidates to the hiring manager we make sure that at least 6 of them meet at least one measure of diversity that we care about at Teach For All. 

Henry: Top question is: Where people are more introverted how do you enable them to speak up? So that was the Zach story.

Marwa: We actually spend a lot of time talking about bridging, so it's not even introverted; it's like some cultures and more hierarchical than others, some cultures are more harmonising than others. Even when we talk about raising tensions, how do we allow staff to raise tensions in a way that's to their preferences? So we basically installed different channels of communication, so take performance management, for example, people seek feedback- so they are responsible to ask for feedback- but they are free to ask for feedback in whichever way that they are comfortable with. I could choose a form,  I could choose that people share it on Whatsapp with me, or share with my sponsor and then my sponsor tells me. There are a myriad of options that people could choose that meet their own preferences and expectations, and bridges to their working style.

Henry: Ohhhh ok. And do you have sponsors in the senior team?

Marwa:  Yes, yes we do have sponsors in the senior team.

Henry: No, do you have sponsors for the senior team? 

Marwa: Yes, yes I have a sponsor. Everyone has a sponsor. I think It's 60 or 70% of our staff who have a sponsor so it’s everyone across all levels who has sponsors. It's something that's very successful right now in our organisation.

Henry: And so sponsors of the senior team are they other members of the senior team or could they come from elsewhere in the organisation?

Marwa: It could be anyone, it really could be anyone.

Henry: Wow, ok. Let's see, next question: What support or training do you give to the sponsors?

Marwa: We have multiple mechanisms. We have first of all what we call sponsor onboarding: so we talk about what's the role, what is the role of the sponsor, we talk about confidentiality, we talk about coaching, like how you coach your staff, we talk about the responsibilities that sponsors have. So that's the onboarding. We also have what we call sponsor circles where we have circles of sponsors that come together to share their experiences to get help from each other, to support each other with what's happening, look at trends. We also have a Slack channel which gathers all of our sponsor communities for questions like ‘I'm facing a situation and I need a quick answer on something’ or a quick support with something, that is where people go; so we have multiple things in place. And on top of that of course the People Team is always available to support sponsors with these things.

Henry: Now somebody's asked: we talked about white privilege now to becoming a fear and an obstacle if you are one, any idea on how to overcome bias thinking in a risk-free way? 

Marwa: Say that again Henry? Can you?

Henry: [holds chin] It’s quite a… Can I ask who raised this so they can unmute and say? ‘We talked about white privilege now to becoming a fear’  who said that?

Conference Participant: That was me, I probably didn't articulate it that well so I'll try to now with words: So we were talking about how we could be someone who was a white privileged person or we could be somebody in another bracket who, you know, has a particular story, but then there's a fear with that of ‘I don't want to say the wrong thing’ or ‘I don't want to do the wrong thing, I want to do the right thing’ and not be biassed. How do you overcome that thinking in a positive way so it doesn't actually become an obstacle? 

Marwa: That's such a great question, thank you for asking. I think the first thing is how we're approaching it. We're approaching this DEI journey as, just that, a journey as opposed to an action or a transaction. So it's a journey that we're all going on. The development that we do really equips a lot of other people on having awareness about how to use language in a way that is respectful of different cultures and so on; but we also have other mechanisms, we have coaching, for example, we have DEI coaching, so if someone is struggling or worried about having a meaningful conversation and doesn't want to offend you could get a coach to help with that. An internal coach  or we have a partnership with another benefit organisation that does coaching for NGOs so we use them a lot. And also the sponsor could help you to approach the conversations. There are multiple mechanisms to make sure we're tapping into the leadership and agency of everyone. Decentering white dominant ways of working means we are centring ALL of the ways of working, it doesn't mean that we're excluding one approach versus the other.

Henry: Tell us a little bit more about this white dominated way of being because you've identified, I think you've identified, 4 specific things haven’t you Marwa? 

Marwa: Yes, we’ve identified 4 things that we are on a journey to work around in our organisation: Perfectionism, a fake sense of urgency, Paternalism and the worship of the written word. It's like these 4 elements of how our ways of working are dominantly centred around some of these things. The idea that things need to be 90% or 99% before they go out there. The idea of ‘do we need to protect people from x?’. This idea of a fake sense of urgency, that everything needs to happen now, for example. And that kind of thing. And we've been engaging in that dialogue with each other; it's the thing that I said at the beginning, that open dialogue with each other about how we centre some of this. 

Henry: Excellent. That is fascinating, that is fascinating. Ok. Let me just see… I think we are coming to a close. Okay Marwa, that was brilliant. Everyone unmute and applaud. [Applause] That was absolutely fabulous. And great ideas, there are some great stories.

Marwa: Thank you everyone.