Leading with Heart and Purpose: An Interview with VICE Media’s CPO Daisy Auger-Dominguez
By: Female Founders Fund
Tags: Female Founders, Venture Capital, Diversity And Inclusion, Startup, Diversity In Tech

Daisy Auger-Dominguez

This Summer, we were fortunate to host Daisy Auger-Dominguez, VICE Media Group’s Chief People Officer, to speak with FFF Founders about ways we can support the movement to bring more diversity and equity to the investing and tech world.

Over the past two decades, Daisy has made it her mission to make workplaces more inclusive. Prior to leading the global human resources organization at VICE, she designed and executed diversity, equity and inclusion strategies for companies like The Walt Disney Company and Google. Daisy’s work has helped to reimagine and redefine what real equity can and should look like in workplaces today.

We’re excited to share some of Daisy’s personal experiences building DEI programs below, including advice around best practices for early and mid-stage startup leadership; best recruitment, hiring, and retention strategies; what inclusivity and belonging looks like while working from home; her favorite DEI tools, platforms, and resources; and more.

Daisy, we’d love you to share a bit about your personal and professional background, and how you’ve made it your mission throughout your career to make “all workplaces work for everyone”.

My commitment to building workplace cultures where everyone can thrive comes from a very personal place. I know first-hand that when women are given access and opportunity to thrive, communities, companies and economies are better for it.

And for me, it begins with my grandmother. As a child, Elena Fernandez survived a brutal dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. She was married at fifteen with a baby on the way, twenty-three when she and my grandfather, her second husband, were exiled to New York City with three young children, forcing her to learn a new language and eventually navigate inhospitable workplaces as a secretary. And she was thirty-seven when now back in the Dominican Republic she took on the responsibility of raising me, her teenage son’s two-year old daughter.

As a child, I watched the toll it took on my grandmother to suffer daily indignities at the hands of abusive bosses who disregarded her intelligence and diminished her sense of worth. Yet late at night, often exhausted and nearly beaten down by a toxic workplace she had no choice but to endure, I would often find her in a corner of our house by candlelight filling out immigration forms, carefully applying white-out correction liquid to mistakes, and coaching countless Dominicans trying to secure a visa to the United States. When I would ask her why she helped these individuals and families, her response was, “M’ija, because if I didn’t, then who?” I have dedicated my career to advancing the countless women like my grandmother who fight everyday to build better lives for their families and communities. Because if not us, then who?

I was born in New York City to teenage parents of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, raised in the Dominican Republic by my paternal grandparents where I attended an international school and moved to New Jersey when I was 16 to finish high school. Those early experiences informed my curiosity, ability to navigate difference and made my frame of reference super wide. Most importantly, I became aware and curious and interested in identity — how it was shaped and how it shaped outcomes.

When I entered the workplace, I observed patterns where talented women and people of color were sidelined, marginalized and silenced, including myself. These experiences led me to spend the past two decades designing and executing DEI strategies across large scale, global companies, and in more recent years, startups and nonprofits.

The conversation around inclusive and equitable work cultures has been a key focus for startup leadership — particularly over recent months. From your experience, which companies are best set up for success in this area and why?

Sadly hard to answer that question fully until there’s richer transparency into organizational behaviors and practices. Right now, all we hear are the good “things”, the practices, policies, events and programs in place. But it’s the Black@ “every company” stories that are now shedding light on what many of us have known for far too long. That what leadership does is far more important than what they say or post. I tend to look at tech companies like Salesforce and services companies like Sodexo because I know their leadership has tried to get this right in progressive ways. But even they are not perfect. And frankly, I don’t think perfection is the goal.

Here’s the thing, everyone has a relationship to work.

In FFF’s July roundtable discussion for portfolio founders, you spoke about the importance of “leading with heart and purpose.” What does that mean to you?

It means constantly reminding ourselves of what our people need us to do, and to pause and think about what type of leader we need to ‘be’ for others. This means also reminding ourselves of what our communities and businesses need us to do, especially for the most marginalized and vulnerable, and to pause and think about how to care for ourselves and for others.This means embracing community.

Little steps matter. You don’t need to make a grand statement but rather ensure that in all of your messaging and business decisions, you consider and acknowledge the impact on all of your employee groups — especially the most marginalized and vulnerable. This also means enhancing connection and allyship, doing so with clarity of purpose and values, and an inclusive sense of community.

For young companies (1–20 employees), what are the very first things a founder can put into place to set their business up for a strong inclusive & equitable work culture as they begin to grow and scale?

Get the foundational pieces right: Startup company culture is a lot more than just beer and ping pong tables. The key to building and nurturing a great culture is to treat it as any other business imperative, a “must have,” not a “nice to have”. Spend time to get your values right, hire for cultural alignment and values, and focus on making your business something that reflects your values.

Assess your structure.

Organizational structure, whether formal, informal or in between, partly defines your culture and is also a framework for your culture to be implemented. It determines how roles and responsibilities are allocated, monitored and the flow of communication.

Who has power and authority, and how is that distributed? How do we make decisions?

How is information shared?

What behaviors, responses, and priorities do our systems reinforce?

2. Assess management practices.

Management practices are the things managers do day in and day out to make sure employees get the job done. Managers are important in both individual and team outcomes: what they say and do can either support or block a desired culture and the behaviors the culture supports, as well as the mechanisms in place to measure success.

What specific behaviors do managers engage in that promote or inhibit the behaviors and values we want to see in our employees and culture?

What are managers communicating explicitly?

What are managers communicating implicitly — even without being aware of it — through modeling and the choices they make?

3. Assess talent and capabilities.

Talent is one of any organization’s scarcest resources and the most direct route to achieving organizational goals. The best-performing companies know talent is critical to their success, and are twice as likely to invest significant time and resources ensuring they put the right people in the right roles and create environments where they can thrive.

What talent is needed for growth, and how do we best use our talent?

How do we source, recruit, select, develop, and promote talent?

What training might managers and leaders need to more skillfully select and leverage their people in support of your culture strategy?

And because recruitment practices are, I know, top of mind, I’ll say that the most important thing you can do to begin with is assessing the barriers to hiring a diverse workforce. A best practice is to not bifurcate your sourcing… focus on gender AND race, at the same time, and make sure you’re building welcoming workplaces for everyone, including technical and non-technical talent.

For later stage companies (50+ employees), how can and should senior leadership rethink and rebuild their organizational culture to keep DEI at the heart of decision making and growth strategy, if it hasn’t been a focus already?

Better understand what your teams are experiencing through more robust employee survey analysis and engagement with your teams.

Hold listening lunches with your teams to better understand the factors that both help and hinder their success. Share back with your org what you have heard, what you are committing to, and how you will measure and report back on your success as a leader.

Ensure one of the high potential talent you mentor or sponsor comes from an underrepresented background.

Send periodic reminders to discuss D&I issues — sharing an interesting article, hosting a discussion following an event, or sharing a learning around product creation/marketing.

Make culture, diversity & inclusion communication a priority among your teams:

Include team-specific, and relevant D&I messaging into your comms.

Make it actionable — encourage team members to do something, like take a course, and be specific. It helps to use examples of other teammates, e.g. highlighting employees on your team who play leadership roles in ERGs, if you have them, or participate in this committee.

Include at least one explicit reference to and recognition of how D&I, including employees on your team, positively impact success in sales and solutions

Address bias in your people, processes, and systems:

Utilize language about the outcomes you’re trying to achieve, e.g., raise awareness and disrupt bias during the recruitment and performance processes to enable more objective decisions and better diversity outcomes.

Encourage your hiring managers to drive transparent and inclusive hiring practices, including assessing biases in outreach, assessment and selection.

Encourage your managers and all employees to attend UB and bystander training, sexual harassment, so they can better understand how these impact decision making, talent decisions and business outcomes. As they build awareness, they will develop inclusive leadership skills to mitigate biases in themselves and others.

Encourage your team members to attend management training before being promoted to a people manager.

Make data the centerpiece of your people practices. Treat organizational processes and psychological safety as key business metrics, as important as revenue, cost of sales or uptime. This will feed into your team’s effectiveness, productivity and staff retention and any other business metric you value.

To prevent a harmful imbalance, establish systems to track raises and promotions and create guidelines that remove the subjectivity from the process. It’s also a good idea to communicate the criteria that employees will be judged on. That way, everyone knows who’s being rewarded and why, and when they should expect to receive recognition for their contributions.

For founders looking to diversify their leadership team, what have you seen work best in terms of recruitment, onboarding, and retention strategy?

In terms of recruitment, beyond what I stated above, it’s about deepening networks, setting bold golds and holding everyone accountable, and being mindful of bias and barriers that limit access from the get — like the famous venture capital expectation that you will only meet someone who has been introduced to you by someone credible, to you. Well, then you’re certainly never going to meet the broad swaths of talent who have had very little access to the likes of the white and privileged in your network.

In your experience, what have been the best ways to amplify and support the experiences of underrepresented employees in the workplace?

Storytelling is key here — understanding the stories of those around you, including yours, and the constructs that people take for granted about access and opportunity, about difference, about white standards of professionalism, privilege.

As is supporting employee resource groups or, if you’re too small, encouraging everyone in your organization to speak to moments of being interrupted, mansplained, omitted from a conversation or dismissed because of gender, gender identity, race, religion, etc.

Do you believe in setting diverse hiring goals, in that there should be quotas or targets to hit? If so — any best practices or rules of thumb and ways to measure success?

I believe in targets and goals — what gets measured gets done. Choosing benchmarks such as the available “skilled labor” market often ignores the historical inequality and institutional roadblocks that have left marginalized individuals out of educational opportunities and the labor market to begin with. Instead, set benchmarks that reflect where you should be in the geographic location of your work and given the increasingly remote ways we work now, where the country and your industry are headed.

Goals or targets that take into account race, gender, and other protected traits are legal, acceptable tools for combatting underrepresentation. These efforts may be lawful if they (1) are designed to eliminate imbalances in traditionally segregated jobs, (2) do not unduly harm non-minority workers, and (3) serve as a temporary measure to eliminate imbalance and not intended to maintain a new balance. I have never met an in-house legal team who didn’t fret at the idea of establishing such goals. It’s all in the expectations you set and the operating mechanisms you put in place to ensure there is no adverse impact from these actions.

What’s illegal is making a decision based on a protected class. The challenge is that when you put those practices in place, managers can sometimes game the process by only selecting Black candidates for a specific role, for example. Beyond being illegal and creating legal risk for the company, it also doesn’t set up the candidate for success when they’re hired and worse can reinforce negative stereotypes. The perception of being the “Black hire” becomes their burden to carry, unfairly. Setting diversity-focused hiring goals is always perceived as tricky legally but I believe in sharing transparent goals based on representation gaps in distinct areas, say content creation, senior leadership, software development, and then applying specific and measurable interventions to address those gaps.

Feeling connected can be extra challenging while working remotely. How do you think about inclusivity & belonging while working from home? Can you share any best practices around how leadership can connect with, listen to, and support employees via Slack, Zoom, email, etc. during this time?

I’ve written about this! Although so much has changed. Many of us are feeling stuck and in this constant state of exhaustion. But I think the basics still apply.

Cultivate trust and safety. Leading inclusively anytime, especially in an unprecedented and longstanding pandemic coupled w/ political, economic and social unrest, requires increasing levels of perspective, empathy and compassion. It also calls for heightened sensitivity to the further marginalization of underrepresented groups.

Engage in purposeful storytelling, including how this is personally, emotionally and cognitively affecting you, e.g., how you are coping through confusion and uncertainty, and how you are thinking about business continuity while doing the right thing by your teams.

Model caring as a community by enabling complex conversations about exclusionary behaviors, bias and discrimination. Ensure team members can share difficult things with each other without fear of disrespect or risk to their personal safety and careers.

Find your voice by reflecting on your own assumptions and behaviors, sitting with uncomfortable feelings, being mindful of when to speak and when to listen, and trying different platforms and approaches.

Clearly define ground rules and expectations of how decision-making is conducted and how diverse points of view are considered.

Do not sanitize remote convenings. Platforms like Slack, Trello, CiscoWebEx, Blue Jeans, Zoom, and Skype have been designed to enable you to create an environment where you can do your best work. As you lean on these platforms to facilitate remote information-sharing, collaboration and connection, focus on establishing and monitoring inclusive and caring principles. Communicate plainly and widely — this is not a time to optimize for politically correct language. Set and practice clear behavioral norms, especially for when tensions arise about how decision-making will be conducted and how diverse points of view will be considered. While more cognitively demanding and time-intensive, this process will enable you to consider all ideas and lived experiences thoroughly. Offer multiple ways of communicating to meet different styles. For example, SquaredAway uses Loom, a video sharing platform, to send videos with screen recordings so that you can show not tell. You can use this tool to have your team members give lightning talks about project updates, new products, or creative solutions to current working conditions.

Create meaningful connections while apart. Instead of asking “Are you OK?”, try “How is your day going?” or “What worries you most right now?” Build new team rituals like virtual volunteering, “All Hands” to boost energy, daily standups to share gratitude moments or “Ask Anything” sessions to enhance transparency.

Companies are being held to a higher standard of social justice than ever before, by both employees and customers. When founders and brands make mistakes — as they will continue to do — what is the best course of action? Can you provide examples of brands who have done a good job of this, and why?

Focus on being responsive versus reactive. Be willing to look inward and figure out how to radically transform from the inside out. I think it’s too soon to really tell. I think the ones that jumped in to make claims of “by 2024 we will be XXX” and the ones who recommitted to racial equity jumped the gun. I think the ones who centered on their employees and got to work internally, the ones we hear far less about, are the ones on their way to getting this right.

From your standpoint, what does this moment in time mean for leadership and change?

The world is paying attention in a way that I haven’t seen before. And communities — the young, BIPOC, LGBTQ, religious minorities, etc. — are demanding change in a way and with a skillset and with communications channels we have not seen before. That makes me aggressively optimistic about the future.

That said, the future of work is here. And it needs to include a strong focus on diversity, inclusion, equitable benefits, and fair policies. Those organizations who do not advance diversity, equity and inclusion risk their bottom line, brand and chance for success. The question is not whether we will achieve gender, racial and ethnic equity someday, but whether we are courageous enough today to reimagine and rebuild the organizational culture of the future.

Thank you so much for your time, Daisy. To close, which are your favorite tools, platforms, and/or resources that founders and startup leadership in the FFF community can check out?

HereWe for D&I consulting, culture & engagement

CultureAmp, a people & culture platform

Humu, a nudge engine

tEquitable, a complaint hotline

Seed and Spark, an inclusive workplace culture program built around film

The RaceAhead Fortune newsletter

Did you find this interesting? Learn more about Daisy’s work on her website here.