Turning coworkers into allies
by Matt May
A long time ago, my partner, an ordained minister, introduced me to her peer group. To break the ice, she told them my job title was “accessibility evangelist.” Dear reader, if you ever want to hear a group like this laugh uproariously, then pepper you with followup questions, I can strongly recommend this as your way in. (Caution: I have only done this with socially-liberal ministers, so your mileage may vary. Widely.)
“Evangelist” comes to us from the Greek words for “good news.” Guy Kawasaki first applied this to a technical role during his time at Apple, and since then it’s more or less become a sexy term for a product marketing manager. (One critical difference is that no faith is required.) I adopted the term since I was doing so much writing, speaking and advocacy work that “accessibility engineer” wasn’t very accurate, and also, wasn’t helping me connect with other role players.
I field questions constantly about how to evangelize for product inclusion. These usually come from people who’ve grown tired of doing all the work themselves, and are looking for ways to spread it around and make it stick.
I’m terrible at sales, which I feel involves elements of manipulation that I don’t want to employ. But I’m a systems thinker, which means I’m actually pretty good at figuring out what motivates people to do certain things. If you think advocacy is mostly about telling people that DEI is important and them just going out and doing it, you won’t get far. Not only will they stumble at the first hurdle—a tough conversation with a peer or manager, usually—they’ll stop short of even making an attempt if they even think it will affect their standing at work negatively.
The workplace is a system. Employees, from their perspective, contribute effort in exchange for… what? Money, sure. But it’s more than that. A job contains a constellation of inputs and outputs which approximate stability. When people feel they are putting their necks out to do something, even something they care about, they’ll be reluctant to do it, because they are thinking about how it could destabilize their jobs, and by extension, their lives.
Your role as an evangelist for inclusion and equity is to rework a fundamentally unjust system to reward the behavior you are seeking, instead of punishing it. And it’s not like the playing field is even. Salespeople are rewarded for closing deals, not pressuring product teams to spend more on inclusive research. Product managers are rewarded for trimming down requirements and shipping on time, not thoughtful additions and measured progress. At my peak, the money I had access to as an evangelist was a rounding error to a single product’s marketing budget.
So, what can you do? Here's a starting point.
Choose something achievable
Systemic change is a long, long game, and the first step is recognizing that fact. If you’re a week from shipping a product, and everyone’s hair is on fire, the only thing you can succeed at doing by demanding everyone do things your way now now now is to annoy and alienate.
The best next step may not be the most obvious. The highest-impact, lowest-effort work I did was getting involved with the design system team from the beginning. It can take years for design systems to take hold, and that gave us time to lay the groundwork for functionality that would end up making hundreds of products better. I could have spent that time haranguing the management team on a flagship product to add a tiny feature, but I'd have had a fraction of the overall impact the design system work did in the long run.
Find your friends
If you want to get to work on bigger problems, you usually first need to show you can solve smaller ones. But in any case, you need to find a partner, not someone who’s going to lie down in the road to stop you. Finding someone who understands and supports at least the basics of the work you want to do can be invaluable. An executive sponsor—preferably one who has gotten into some scraps of their own—can make your case in the rooms you’re not invited into.
Make their work visible
If job stability is even a remote concern for your colleagues, one of the most important things you can do is to make the people supporting you stand out among their peers. When someone gets recognized for solving an accessibility bug, or doing research on underinvested customer communities, that’s a signal to others that your organization recognizes this work is valuable.
Your evangelism needs to extend to your advocates, as they work toward getting on new teams, and especially in support of bonuses and promotions. Your loyalty to the people who support your work goes a long way.
Cash helps
It doesn’t take a lot, but having a budget for outreach does pay off. As little as a hundred dollars can cover snacks for a team event while you talk about the work you’re doing. (I strongly advise against "lunch and learn" events: they send the message that what you have to say isn't worth spending work time on.)
With a little more money, you could sponsor awards and/or spot bonuses for the people who helped you this quarter. (Just make sure their peers hear about it!) I launched a quarterly inclusive design speaker series, which later became bimonthly, specifically to keep a cadence of new voices for our designers to learn from. Events like this show that the company is not just allowing this work to happen, but funding it, which is another subconscious sign that investing in this work can benefit one’s own job prospects.
If you’re trying to get your organization on the right track, I happen to own a company that can help you with that very thing. I’m booking clients starting in the April-May timeframe. Contact me for details on working with Practical.
Office hours
…are free, again. I have a new client that’ll be taking up a lot of my time (which is also why this arrived a day late), so I’ve pressed pause on paid sessions. The free ones will be limited as well, so don’t wait to grab one if it’s available. They are usually swallowed up within 12-24 hours.
Book a free session this Thursday
Have a great week.