The “In Their Own Words” series is a collection of short columns from some of Chicago’s most influential tech leaders. After a tumultuous 2020—with a global pandemic, civil unrest and a turbulent economy—Inno wanted to give Chicago's tech community an opportunity to reflect on the highs and lows of the last 12 months, and share how they're working smarter and better in the next 12. Each columnist was asked to answer the question: How are you and your company preparing for 2021?
For more columns like this, scroll to the end of the story.
One of our collaborators at Ethos has taken to calling this year “The Great Pause of 2020.” For Ethos, this has not been the case. Our work is to navigate complex challenges around social identity, close the opportunity gap for marginalized groups, and balance healing-oriented work and structural change. In a year filled with public safety, public health and economic crises that have led to so much harm for the most vulnerable communities, we on the team have found ourselves racing in a way we never have before.
We are grateful that we are coming closer to achieving our version of scale—helping as many people as possible—and that our work has been recognized as a worthwhile investment by organizations in a way that it hasn’t in the past. But, we’re tired. Not just because of Covid-19, or violence against BIPOC and queer communities or a polarizing political climate, or so many other things, but because it’s our job to grapple with trauma.
And, if anything, I would call 2020 “The Year of Trauma.” For me, trauma is too much, too soon, too fast. And that’s what 2020 has been for us. So, in preparing for 2021, we are preparing to engage in recovery and restoration for ourselves, and to offer the same to the various folks who make up our communities.
On our team, this involves a few practices. All of us are taking off the last two weeks of December to close the office and find our own kinds of balance. When we return in January, we are starting the month by reviewing our goals, engaging in a StrengthFinder workshop geared towards helping us connect our responsibilities to the types of work that energizes us, and convening together in an offsite purely focused on exploring our dreams for ourselves and how these might tie into the organization’s growth. We are also confronting our own scarcity mindsets, meaning we are investing in expanding the team, fully maxing out our $8,000 a year education credit, and defining our team-wide curriculum plan around learnings we will want to pursue.
For our organizations, we are focusing on leading more healing sessions that help caucused groups vocalize past harm and identify opportunities for resolution, offering more stress management and coping strategies through skills-building workshops and team coaching, and encouraging our organizations to think critically about the structures that their employees navigate on a day-to-day basis. The latter consists of asking questions like: Is compensation not only fair, but designed to relieve financial stress, especially for marginalized groups? Are there places to go to process grief when violence impacts our communities? Are meetings captioned, recorded and tagged to ensure everyone can access information? I think most of all in 2021, both for ourselves and our clients, we are planning to ask: What is a good life? Our hope is that we can answer and live it.
