Tag: leadership

In this episode of Le Podcast, I had the pleasure to welcome Jeremy Brown, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Traveldoo (Expedia Group). We talked about leadership and teamwork in a conversation that quickly became emotional, because the travel industry has been hit brutally hard by the pandemic.

Jeremy describes the last year as a shock to the system: a sharp drop in activity, painful downsizing, and a heavy human cost for the people who left and for the people who stayed.

Leadership when the context is not yours to control

Jeremy shares a powerful reflection: it’s easy to be a leader when everything is going well. It’s much harder when things are not going well, and even harder when you don’t control what makes it hard.

And yet, he sees growth in himself and in his leadership team. Not the kind of growth you would choose, but the kind you can’t avoid.

What leadership means to Jeremy

Jeremy makes a clear distinction between leaders and managers.

For him, leadership has two parts:

1) Direction, and explaining why
He uses a simple image: when you navigate a forest, the leader is the person who climbs a tree, looks out, and points the direction.

2) Being human
Leadership is not about performing perfection. It is about staying connected to people, admitting the struggles, and creating space for the complexity everyone is carrying, especially when work and home blur.

He also links leadership to self-awareness: the more he gets to know himself, the better he becomes as a leader.

From office-first to remote, then to asynchronous

Traveldoo moved from an office-first culture to fully remote work. Jeremy explains that the first phase was about replicating office habits with video calls and Slack. Then, over time, the team used retrospectives to learn and adjust.

A key shift: moving status reporting and coordination toward asynchronous collaboration.

One example Jeremy shares: a release meeting that started as an in-person ritual became a video call, and later turned into a Slack workflow. The direction is clear: fewer meetings, more written collaboration, more focus time.

Inclusion and participation in remote settings

Jeremy notes something interesting: remote work can be more inclusive when you intentionally change behaviors.

They introduced simple mechanics like hand signals in video calls, explicitly inviting quieter voices, and asking the question that often brings the best insight:
“I notice you didn’t comment, is there something you want to add?”

It’s not perfect, but it’s a real move toward better collaboration.

Recognition, energy, and the long game

Jeremy shares something many leaders can relate to. As a developer, he loved moments of flow: losing track of time while creating something.

As a leader, the reward changes. It becomes more long-term:

• seeing the payoff of investing in people
• watching language and behaviors spread across the organization
• noticing progress in the metrics over time

He’s also very clear on recognition: he prefers continuous call-outs and small wins over big award ceremonies. Recognition close to the moment has more impact and is more fair.

What drains energy

Jeremy mentions two drains:

• toxic or immovable behaviors that resist change no matter the investment
• the frustration of caring deeply and feeling others don’t understand why it matters

He connects this to his CliftonStrengthsFinder profile: his top strength is Belief, which makes him go all-in when he commits to something. When the “why” doesn’t land with others, it can be draining.

Advice for leaders who want to grow

Jeremy’s guidance is straightforward and practical:

• know yourself (tools can help: CliftonStrengthsFinder, Kolbe, others)
• choose your environment (the people around you shape your growth)
• seek challenge (you grow when others challenge your behaviors)
• deliver results without burning people
• invest in relationships across the organization

And if you’re not in an environment that helps you grow, change it.

†

If you think about trying to navigate through a forest, they’re the person that climbs up the tree and looks out over the forest, and points you in the direction where you need to go. I think that, typically, I would expect leaders to have a clear vision of where we are going, and perhaps more importantly, explaining why we’re going in that direction.

Jeremy Brown

Here is the transcript of the episode:

Alexis:

Hey Jeremy, thank you for joining Le Podcast. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

Jeremy:

Hey, Alexis. It’s great To be here. So yeah, a little bit about me. I’m Jeremy. I’m Irish. I’m actually half Irish, half Finnish. I live in Paris, where I’ve been here for about five years. Currently, I guess my background, I’m an engineer. That’s been my history, but I think I have also probably one of the most, I think, fairly diverse backgrounds for someone in my position, because while I’ve worked as an engineer on low-level things like the operating system of mobile phones, I’ve worked as a consultant doing very large scale Java implementations. I worked in pre-sales. I’ve worked in sales as an actual sales person. I, with a friend, started a startup incubator in Cameroon of all places and helped local entrepreneurs start tech businesses in Cameron 10 years ago. So it was pretty crazy. Yeah. So really lots of different things. And I would say my background and my passion is about building products and the teams and the systems that build those products. I think that’s really my passion and what everything has led me to today.

Alexis:

Today you are chief product and technology officer at Traveldoo, right?

Jeremy:

Yes. Yes.

Alexis:

So it directly connects to your passion of building products.

Jeremy:

Exactly. Yeah. And building products, and we’ve been, Traveldoo is a subsidiary of Expedia. We’ve been changing how we work as well. And I think that the majority of my work has been a little bit less on the product and actually more on how we build the product and how can we change how we do that that has a material impact on our customers and our users.

Alexis:

So of course, as soon as we said travel in the current context, I need to ask you a question about all that current situation that pandemic is affecting your business and the way you work.

Jeremy:

Alexis, this past year has been, I think, one of the hardest that I’ve personally experienced on multiple levels. Obviously, like everybody else just in a personal level of trying, the pandemic clearly had an effect on our personal lives. And we have a small child at home. He’s less than two. And we were, in March, we were all at home, and there was no crash. And we were busy juggling him and trying to get on with work.

Jeremy:

But of course, more than that our business is a travel and expense SAS business. And we went from people booking travel, where we were doing millions of transactions in a year to 80%, 90% down on the previous year. So from a business perspective, we’ve had, I would say, an extreme shock to the system.

Jeremy:

There’ve been a lot of implications to us as a company and the product team. We’ve had to let go of our contractors that we had. We’ve had to half of our team are contractors based in India, and we had to significantly downsize that team as well. And the people cost for us has been really high, not only for the people that we had to let go, and contractors, I really saw them as our own staff, but then for the people who are still here with us, they’ve had to, not only like everybody else, had to make a transition from being co-located in two different offices, one office in Paris and one office in India. But they’ve also had the personal challenges. And then, I think when you’re in one of the companies that’s heavily affected by the pandemic, it adds an extra stress and a worry for the staff compared to one of the companies where they’re benefiting from the current situation, because there are winners and losers right now. We’re definitely a loser. So it’s been hard. Yeah. That’s how I’ll summarize it. It’s been a tough year. Yeah.

Alexis:

I can hear that. It’s, of course, always difficult to imagine what people feel about it. I understand that you’re focused on, of course, the business is impacted, but that’s the big people cost. And I’m sure that if you see people around you let go,, it’s always affecting you. You cannot just be satisfied of being lucky and still having a job. That’s not the way it works. Of course, it’s very hard. So, yeah. It’s difficult to go to the next question.

Jeremy:

Well, all I would say is that that this has been, I think, a test for all of us, for myself. While it’s really tough. I would say that the growth in yourself, I guess like in hard times, you grow more like, just like you prune plants to help them grow in the next growing season. I think, I feel like the one thing that this has done for me is it’s helped me grow as a leader. It’s very easy being a leader when everything’s great. It’s much harder being a leader when things are not great, and it’s even harder when you don’t control a lot of the things that make it not great. I don’t just speak personally for myself. I speak for my leadership team and what they’ve had to handle.

Jeremy:

And I would also add that, we have dealing with customers who are also many of them struggling, because I would say that a large part of our business is with travel agencies. They’ve been even more heavily impacted than ourselves. We’ve been fairly fortunate. We’ve kept most of our staff from being furloughed so that we can continue to build a product. A lot of our partners that we do business with, they’re not in the same situation. So it’s been an interesting learning and growing experience, not one that you would choose to ever go through. But I’ll take it because, first of all, you don’t have a choice. But secondly, I do see the positive growth in myself and the others around me as well through all of this.

Alexis:

That’s really bringing me to the next question about what does being a leader mean to you?

Jeremy:

Yeah. I was actually thinking about this question when you sent me some of the questions you might ask beforehand. And I was wondering actually, what leader means change because of this experience as well. And I would say, first of all, I don’t know if it has. For me being a leader, there’s a couple of parts of this. I believe that there’s a big difference between leaders and managers. And I believe that a leader is definitely someone who’s kind of, if you think about trying to navigate through a forest, they’re the person that climbs up the tree and looks out over the forest and points you in the direction where you need to go. They have, I think they typically, I would expect leaders to have a clear vision of where we are going, and perhaps more importantly, explaining why we’re going in that direction.

Jeremy:

And really then I think the second part of leadership for me is really about being a human being. I’ve always believe this very strongly, and I think it’s become more important through the pandemic and managing things. But yeah, I really believe that not being disconnected from people, but really showing you’re not perfect and not painting a perfect picture of yourself, being human and looking into seeing how are your people doing and coming alongside them, if you can, and encouraging them to not… We’ve had people that have overworked, a lot of people, I guess. They’re out home, and there’s no, the lines blur between work and home. And you can really start to see the stress build.

Jeremy:

And I think the two parts to all of this is kind of showing that you yourself are having the same struggles as everybody else. Because I think that that’s important. Certainly I’m not the kind of person who would want to hide that.

Jeremy:

And secondly, providing space for people to manage the extra complexity that everybody’s currently managing. So I guess, yeah, for me, that leadership is about direction, and more importantly, explaining why that direction is important. And secondly, being human. The one thing I’ve learned in my journey, and I can say I’m far from perfect, but the one thing where I’ve had breakthroughs as a leader is where I’ve gotten to know myself more. The more self-aware I become and the journey I progress on that journey, the better leader I become as well. So yeah, that’s leadership for me.

Alexis:

It’s very inspiring. Being self-aware, being human. That’s not the first thing all times. And I think it’s really important. And I feel that the people around me are more and more aware of that and are more and more ready to be themselves and to be a real person in their work environment. And I see that as really a positive evolution of the world.

Jeremy:

I agree. It’s a world I want to be part of. I don’t know, Alexis, but just a quick comment on this. But I do think as work changes, creativity and collaboration are actually the things that we want to encourage in the workplace in order to really bring value to the businesses that we work in. I think that this is the kind of leadership that people respond best to to help people be inspired to bring their best and do their best. And so for me, it kind of goes together with the nature of work changing. I think the nature of leadership has to change a little bit too.

Alexis:

I think the kind of leader that was more kind of manager, that was showing the artifact of success could be a big car, a big watch, the nice clothes and inspiring respect or things like that, that’s already gone. That’s not the kind of feet our people are ready to follow now and wants to work with now. It’s interesting that shift that is happening.

Jeremy:

Yeah. And you know that because we’re not all in the office anymore, it’s harder to flex like that. It’s just you with, in your, home with a camera. You can’t flex in that same way that… I don’t know. Yeah. It’s different. When you’re in the office, there’s all sorts of power that happens that kind of, it changes clearly, but like the bad micromanagers come out still. But yeah, I think this new way of distributed work doesn’t really facilitate people to do that either.

Alexis:

Speaking of offices, I remember a passionate conversation with you about gathering, about how to assemble the team in a space and all to design the space to make the collaboration happen. We did discuss a lot of that. I assume that your way of working change, of course, from colocated you said that to fully remote. How you change those things? How you change your way of working to still be able to foster that creativity and that collaboration you were mentioning?

Jeremy:

Yeah. So I’m fortunate enough at least to have when I worked at Red hat before, Red Hat is kind of, I would say, pretty good with remote work. And a lot of, I would say, a large percentage of people who work there were kind of remote workers. And certainly, I was, though I saw my team face-to-face a lot, and we did have a lot of face time. We just definitely haven’t got that now. But here in Traveldoo, we had basically a team co-located in the office in Paris with a kind of a really office first culture. And the same thing in Cocci and in South India and Carola. And it was a pretty sharp change to not be in the office anymore.

Jeremy:

And I would say that the first phase of our transition was kind of just replicating the way that we worked in the office, but with video instead of face-to-face, and we heavily used, we were using Slack already, but I think we went a bit even more into Slack. And I think that was the first sort of transition out.

Jeremy:

And then we used the retrospective in the team, probably not as… Everyone says they use retros. We do use retros. I would say, it’d be nice if we used them more at the same time. But we tried to learn. And what we realized was, first of all, I started to hear my skip level conversations, especially with the tech leads, that they were in a lot of meetings and actually not able to code that much. And we still have that problem today, but I think we’re a little bit better than when we first left the office.

Jeremy:

We started to change the way we communicated. We started intentionally moving more and more things to asynchronous. I think I would say that if you looked at my calendar a few weeks after we had moved out of the office, and then you look at my calendar now almost a year later, it’s very different. We’ve definitely moved basically all of our status reporting to asynchronous. We’ve reduced the amount of time we spend in meetings. We’ve intentionally cut repeated lead meetings and asked why we’re doing that. And we’re moving more and more of what we do to even shorter form meetings. So that’s, I think, meetings is like one area where we’ve actually also, we had a release meeting, and we had people getting around at lunchtime and spending 15 minutes talking about the next release. And then that release meeting moved to a video call. And now today, it’s moved to a Slack workflow. So it’s fully asynchronous. And yeah, I think it’s incremental changes that we’re moving. And we’re moving in this continuum towards more and more written and asynchronous.

Jeremy:

We’re not there yet. I wouldn’t say, you look at companies like Automattic, the company that makes WordPress and so on. They’re very well known for how they work. We’re not there yet, but we’re definitely nudged towards them in how we do things, which is a very positive thing.

Jeremy:

Certainly we’ve seen while our team size has reduced, productivity overall has actually increased for all of us. I think that we’ve surveyed our staff, and we have a healthy percentage, like 20%, 30% staff who would like to stay remote and actually would like to even leave Paris. And we have another percentage of people who, the majority, the rest, would say, I’d like to go to the office, but I don’t want to be there five days a week, which is what we had before, where we had one or two people that worked two days a week remote, and they were the exception. So we’re really moving in a different way.

Alexis:

Have you noticed, of course, when we speak about companies like Automattic or Basecamp that are really working with people fully remote and putting a lot of attention to written communication and asynchronous communication, they are a thing that enables people that are usually more shy or more introverted to contribute better, and that enabled the better thinking. Have you noticed a change in the contribution of people? Have you noticed that some people were able to contribute more? Or what do you think?

Jeremy:

Yeah, I will say the extroverts still are the most chatty people on Slack. Their personality still comes through. Yeah, I think we’ve seen that nudging. I don’t think we’re at that stage of where Automattic are, but I do think that the one thing I will say is video calls or chat and email and all are more inclusive if you operate using them differently. Certainly, we’ve intentionally adopted a number of different behaviors, just to give you some examples, in video calls, we’ve introduced hand signals to say, I agree, or I disagree. We’ve introduced a hand signal to say, I’d like to talk. We do try to intentionally ask people who are not talking to say, hey, I see you didn’t really comment here. Have you got something to say? And I’ve always found that that question generates the most powerful insight in the meeting. So we’ve definitely, through the retros and stuff, introduced more behaviors like that.

Jeremy:

And I don’t think it’s as easy to do that in real life because definitely the extroverts dominate that much more. And you kind of… But you do sense the body language in a room, but it’s not… Yeah. I still think that this is still pretty inclusive, and it’s definitely, even through this, we’ve become more inclusive. Maybe if we would go back to the office, we’ll also have learned from that and still be like that. But it seems a bit weird to hold your hand up in a room and to stick your thumbs up in a room, whereas on a video call that feels now natural. So I don’t know.

Alexis:

Yeah. I remember the first time I had a workshop using sociocracy or using the core protocols. And you are asked to make hand signals in the meeting room and not talk to talk to signal your agreement to a proposal that is made. And it’s really odd. It sounds counterintuitive, but at the third round of the table, going around the table, it’s starts to become more interesting, because you are already focused on what people are saying. And you look around, you see the hand signal, you see that suddenly you catch the opinion of people that you would have probably not even noticed before. It creates something different. So I think it’s odd to put in place in a room in the physical environment. Interestingly, I’m curious about what will happen when we are coming back once we learned those things remotely.

Jeremy:

Yeah, me too. I’ll tell you the one thing that I’m looking forward to when we can like see each other is to see each other. We do have like little coffee conversations, and we realized at times that some of the middle management were getting more and more disconnected in different departments., And they have like regular coffee hours together, which has really worked out well. But yeah, I think, for me, that the hybrid approach where you charge up your face to face time, and you get that small talk and stuff, I think is super important. And I think even where teams are fully remote in the future, certainly on my side, I intend to have regular face to face time for those teams because I think it’s important.

Alexis:

Yeah, absolutely. In the company like Automattic and Basecamp, they have face time events when they gather all together. So there’s a need for that definitely.

Alexis:

We spoke about leadership and what it means. Who do you look up to as a leader? Where are you inspired from?

Jeremy:

There’s been a couple different books I’ve read from different leaders that have inspired me. And maybe even more than, like nudge is maybe too weak a word, like really kicked me in the direction. And I would say David Marquet and Turn the Ship Around! has definitely altered the course of how I try to be a leader. I would say that Simon Sinek has really transformed how I go into work, start with why and a lot of the thinking that he puts into work. And I would say that he’s certainly inspired what I feel is my personal purpose for what I want to achieve and how I turn up and work. So there’s probably a few others like that, but yeah, I think those are the two that instantly come to my mind when you asked that question.

Alexis:

Yeah, good. And what gives your energy?

Jeremy:

When I was a developer, you had these periods where you entered flow, and you could lose track of time, and you were achieving something and making something, and you just felt so happy, and you don’t think about it. But afterwards you realize that those are those moments. I think as a leader, as a manager, you don’t have that kind of creator schedule and a maker schedule. And it took me a long time to feel reward and energized by some of that. Today I think it’s long-term for me. It’s the investment that you make in people and the pay off that you see. And it kind of three months later, a year later, and this, you made this change for the person, or you coach them towards a certain way of turning up into work. And then you see that paying off, or you have a one-on-one with someone, and they say, I did that thing that you said, and it just worked so well. That’s the big energizing moment for me now.

Jeremy:

And I accept that they’re not every day, but yeah, I think that that’s very rewarding for me. And also, I think in nudging an organization over a period of time where, as a kind of a leader, you’re you feel you’re repeating yourself over and over again, saying the same things. And I think there’s two rewards. One is that the language that you insert into the situation to try and nudge things starts to be repeated by others without, the same terminology that you introduced. And the second is you see the metrics that you use to track how we’re doing actually making it significantly changing. And those are also super rewarding and energizing.

Alexis:

This is really good that made me think of things in a different way. Right now, this is really good.

Alexis:

I have a question about, of course, what drains your energy, the opposite side of that coin?

Jeremy:

The opposite side, so one is, I think toxic people, and maybe also just people that no matter how much you invest, you can’t seem to get them to see the world differently or to change. And I think it’s also frustrating for me because I feel like there’s probably a way to nudge everybody forwards and into different way of behaving. And there’s a level of maybe frustration in me. So that’s one.

Jeremy:

And I would say that we’re all different. I’m a big fan of the Clifton StrengthsFinder and the idea of each of us having unique strengths that are in different orders. And my number one strength is belief. And what that means is that it’s a kind of an actually an execution strength. And if I believe in something, I’m going to go after it with all my energy and passion and everything else. And I think one of the things that kills that and drains it and creates bad behaviors in me is where I feel like people don’t get why I’m so passionate about that thing and why they should also be passionate about it. And so that can be really, for me, at least, that really is, it drains me a lot. That’s at least the things that I think about.

Alexis:

I think if you form a club about on that, I would join happily. I think you are not alone with that kind of frustration and a belief that, yes, we could all and get to somewhere different ways to change our mindset. And sometimes you don’t find the way, and it’s frustrating. That’s true.

Jeremy:

I would just say that when you’re energized like that, you want everyone to move fast, and you can’t… The fact that it’s not moving as fast as you want is also part of that kind of frustration. But then you get these payoffs, and boom, you’re back in the game, and you’re, yeah, we did actually make progress. It wasn’t as bad.

Alexis:

Yeah. Sometimes you need the feedback from others saying, no, you don’t remember how it was six months ago. It seems you don’t realize the progress we made. You say, oh, okay. Oh, yeah. That was nice. Well, that’s good. You need to do that every six months, a small paragraph like this will really help me if you can continue, maybe add it to your calendar 🙂

Jeremy:

But I’ve tried very hard to build a culture where we speak out those things more. And it definitely energizes people, not just me. But yeah, to call out and say, thank you and to call out those little wins, repeatedly. We now introduce weekly updates. We actually have that built into it. And we have a biweekly kind of all hands just within the product and tech team. And we spend probably 15 minutes of that meeting just thanking people for the last different call outs for the last week, last two weeks. So, yeah, I think as you build that, and we’ve only been really introducing more and more of that in the last six months, you do start to see it popping up more and more, and then you get a few compliments yourself, and it’s rewarding.

Alexis:

Yeah. It’s incredible, the impact that it has. And it’s difficult at the beginning, but I like that way of celebrating. I feel that the regular celebration close to when the event happens is really more efficient than the big awards ceremony.

Jeremy:

Exactly. Yeah. Actually I just personally hate big awards ceremonies because you always have to give awards to some people, and you can’t give it to all the people who really deserved it. I’m actually really kind of an anti those. I prefer the continuous kind of call outs and encouragement than plaques and awards and things like that. Yeah. At least that’s my personal, relatively strong belief. If I was leading an organization, I definitely wouldn’t have something like that there.

Alexis:

Yeah. The question a little bit other is, is there something you’ve always dreamed of doing but never dared to?

Jeremy:

Yeah. Difficult question. I think I’m quite, I’ve taken quite a few risks in my career, but I think, and I did start a company already. But yeah, I’d like to start another company. I’d like to build a real business from scratch or acquire one or do something like that, and really built a different kind of business, one that stands for different things in society. I’m very energized to turn up to work to do that. But I think that when you run a company, you can really shape it in a different way. And ideally, more in the sense of like Basecamp or folks like that, where they’re really, they don’t have to do something specific for their VC, the funders and things like that. They can really grow the company at the pace that they believe that it should grow at. And yeah, I think that would be the thing.

Alexis:

This is nice. I love it. I hope you will.

Jeremy:

Oh, me too. Me too.

Alexis:

Apart from work, is there something that you’re passionate about that you want to share today?

Jeremy:

I’m a geek. I’m passionate about lots of things, and probably like maybe a lot of men, I’m also, my passion is like, I would say obsessions change from time to time, but I do like to get out on my bicycle and go cycling. I really enjoy cycling. And my partner and I are very fortunate also to have a son, and he’s just about to turn two in a couple months. There’s definitely my passion has shifted being a father. That’s definitely like where a lot of my energy also goes, and probably why I’m doing a little bit less cycling these days as well, apart from just the pandemic. And certainly, in the lockdown, in Paris, we had a one kilometer radius that you could leave your home. So cycling wasn’t really a thing you could do so easily.

Alexis:

Yeah, of course, of course. What would be the really your advice to people who want to develop themselves as leaders?

Jeremy:

I think a lot of people who aspire to leadership, there’s getting to being a manager of people is something that they can all achieve and be entrusted with managing a team. And I think that there’s clearly certain skills that are needed for that. And they can learn and grow that. But to really push through, to break through kind of up another couple of levels, I think that there’s a bit more that needs to be developed. And it goes back to what I said earlier, but I do think knowing yourself, going deeper in yourself, I highly recommend people to take some kind of tests, like the Clifton StrengthsFinder, and there’s others, like I think Kolbe and a few others. Often people’s work will pay for those, or even people have done a bunch of those. I think if one doesn’t really work for you, try a few, but use some of those tools.

Jeremy:

I think being in the right environment of having the right people around you is super important. And if you’re not getting that in the environment that you’re in, change it. Find people that are going in the same direction as you and passionate about that, because I think we take each other on the journey together. And you’re not going to really be tested in going deeper in yourself without other people willing to challenge you. And then, I would say that my current team, there are people in there who have challenged me on my behavior, and that’s helped me grow. So yeah, I think going deeper in yourself.

Jeremy:

And then clearly in the kind of executive world, I think there’s a couple of things here. One is that you definitely have to be able to deliver results. Ideally, the good kind of execs do that without people paying a price, like taking people with you. Second is just managing the relationships with execs of other departments that are not directly related to yours, managing the politics and the… Just it’s relationship thing. And those are critical skills, but you can test, you can, every level of your career, you can definitely develop them. But I think it gets a bit harder the more senior you go. And often people get a bit stuck at a certain level. Yeah. And for me, the breakthroughs come when you either, and I think you also, you need to be willing to move a little bit to change jobs, to get those experiences and get the right people around you, or even to fail and then move again and try again. So yeah, that would be my advice.

Alexis:

I love the advice.

Jeremy:

Thank you.

Alexis:

Very tempting advice. I hope that people will be appealed to that, knowing yourself and looking at your environment and look at if the people around you are helping you to grow. I think it’s a really, really good one. Love it.

Jeremy:

My parents taught me that, Alexis. I just hear their voice at the back of my head when I’m thinking that, because that’s from my parents. I definitely learned that from them.

Alexis:

Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, we learn all the time, and sometimes you remember the things we learned are coming from a long time ago. It’s really good.

Jeremy:

Exactly.

Alexis:

Thank you very much, Jeremy, for having joined the podcast today. I really appreciate your time and your insights. It was really beautiful. I’m really glad that we had that conversation. Thank you.

Jeremy:

Thank you, Alexis. It’s been a pleasure.

Jeremy:

Yeah. I’ve been a long time listener of your podcast. So it’s great to be here, and yeah, please keep going with the podcast. It’s great.

Alexis:

Thank you.

Alexis:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to alexis.Monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode. And to find more help to increase your impact and satisfaction at work, drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello. And until next time, to find better ways of changing your team.

Photo by Annie Spratt 

Le Podcast – Season Two

• 
  Playful Leadership: Helping Others Be Their Best
• 
  Blessed, Grateful, and Human
• 
  Build the Right Product, with Gojko Adzic
• 
  Hiring and Diversity Without Dropping the Bar
• 
  Leadership and Teamwork in a Crisis
• 
  Chief of Staff: The Role, the Craft, the Community
• 
  Belonging, Identity, and Better Hiring,
• 
  What Software Teams Can Learn from Sporting Teams
• 
  Agile and Open Innovation: Building the Bridge Between Tech and Business
• 
  Radical Focus: OKRs, Cadence, and the “Seduction of the Task”
• 
  Human-Centric Agility Coaching: The Expert Paradox and the Ideology Paradox
• 
  The Job of an Open Leader: Context, Trust, and Growing Others

Le Podcast – Season One

• 
  Growing as a Software Engineer: Learning, Sharing, and Impact
• 
  Thirteen Rules for Building Strong Teams
• 
  OKRs in Practice: Learning, Focus, and Common Pitfalls
• 
  The Myth of 10x Engineers: Growing Beyond Technical Skills
• 
  The Anatomy of Peace: Leadership Starts With Who You Are
• 
  Psychological Safety: Creating Teams Where People Can Speak Up
• 
  Leading Distributed Teams: Collaboration Across Time Zones
• 
  Changing Your Team from the Inside: A Practitioner’s View on Leadership
• 
  Why Shared Language Matters: How Terms Shape Collaboration
• 
  How (Not) to Give Feedback: Responsibility, Ego, and Relationships
• 
  Rock Stars and Superstars: Supporting Growth Without Losing Stability
• 
  Do Cultural Differences Really Block Agile Adoption?
• 
  How to Create Great Goals: Using OKRs to Focus on Impact
• 
  Making Change from the Inside: Leadership Beyond Management Roles
• 
  How to Form a Cross-Functional Team That Actually Works

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure to welcome Ally Kouao, Developer Advocate and Solution Architect at Red Hat. We talked about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), not as an abstract concept, but as something that shows up in daily conversations, hiring decisions, and the small moments that shape belonging.

Allyship is not a label

One of the strongest points Ally makes early is simple: saying you are an ally is not enough. What matters is what you do.

Ally shares a definition that captures the intent and the posture of allyship:

Allyship means acknowledging, accepting, and embracing our similarities and differences. It means being open to listening, avoiding complacency, making an effort to understand, and being proactive where helpful, while continuously educating ourselves and others with empathy, respect, and kindness.

The part that stayed with me is the humanity of it: you will not do everything perfectly, and still you can show up with sincerity and effort.

Education gives power, especially when history is incomplete

We also talk about how much recent history is missing from many school curricula, and how this shapes our understanding of today.

Ally’s suggestion is direct: educate yourself beyond what school offered, seek perspectives that are not centered on a single narrative, and do it continuously. The internet is free, but the intention to learn must be real.

Belonging can be fragile for immigrants and their children

We discuss a painful pattern: people who are second or third generation immigrants can feel they do not belong in the country where they live, while also being seen as outsiders in the country of their parents or grandparents.

The result is a kind of “nowhere to go” feeling that can last for years. Ally’s response is not to offer a quick fix, but to name what helps: surrounding yourself with people who are open to learning and listening. You cannot force someone to change, but you can choose environments where curiosity becomes respect, not interrogation.

The question “Where are you from?” and what it can signal

This episode includes a moment of discomfort that is worth sitting with.

I share how I used to love the question “Where are you from?” because it can open many doors. Ally explains why the same question can land very differently depending on context, intent, and what happens next.

If someone answers “I’m from London” and the next question is “No, where are you really from?” the question stops being small talk. It becomes a signal: you do not fully belong here.

Ally offers a line that should make all of us pause:

When you ask that question, you may be prioritizing your curiosity over their feelings.

The intent may be innocent. The impact may not be.

Bias in hiring is real, even when we believe we are fair

We then move into hiring, and the discomfort that comes with it.

Most people believe they are objective. And still, patterns appear: leadership teams that are overwhelmingly similar, interview processes that favor familiar backgrounds, and subtle filters that exclude people before the conversation even begins.

We discuss a concrete practice that reduces bias in resume screening: stripping out signals that invite stereotyping (name, address, school prestige, formatting differences) so that reviewers focus on relevant criteria.

Ally also addresses a common argument:

“Are we compromising on quality to increase representation?”

Her answer is clear: we do not have to compromise. Talent exists everywhere. What changes is the effort and the system used to find it, evaluate it, and give it a fair chance.

A simple test for hiring managers

One story Ally shares is both funny and brutal: a recruiter gave interviewers their own early-career resumes and asked them to evaluate them. Many rejected themselves.

It highlights a blind spot: we often forget that everyone has a starting point. We judge potential through a narrow lens, and then call it “quality.”

A good question to sit with is:

Would you hire yourself today for the first job you took in your current company?

Where to start

Ally recommends a book that offers multiple perspectives across generations:

• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

More broadly, her advice is practical:

• use the internet intentionally, not passively
• learn from diverse perspectives
• have real conversations with people you do not yet know well
• be open to noticing what you did not notice before

Because improvement starts with awareness, and awareness starts with paying attention.

Below is the transcript of the podcast:

Ally Kouao:

In that moment when you’re asking that question, you’re really prioritizing your curiosity over their feelings.

Alexis Monville:

That’s Ally Kouao, developer advocate and solution architect at Red Hat.

Ally Kouao:

Honestly, allyship means something different to everyone, and I think just having that shared understanding and that shared motivation to listen and to be there for the people who want their voices heard.

Alexis Monville:

Ally Kouao explaining what allyship means. Diversity, equality and inclusion are what we explore in this new episode of Le Podcast. Le Podcast equips you to make a positive change in your organization. Each episode turns insight into actions that you can use straight away to build momentum and create lasting change from yourself to your team, from your team to other teams, and from other teams to the entire organization. I’m your host, Alexis Monville, and I believe in the ability of people and teams to find better ways to increase their impact and satisfaction.

Alexis Monville:

Let’s jump right into the conversation with Ally to learn more about what it means. Hey, Ally. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

Ally Kouao:

Yeah, so first of all, thank you for having me on this podcast. I joined Red Hat back in 2019. Prior to that, I was actually a software engineering student in a university in Wales. In terms of my personal background, I actually grew up in London. I’ve lived in London my whole life, and I moved to Wales for university when I was 19. The rest is history. I’ve been at Red Hat for just over a year now. I’m a solution architect on the Red Hat graduate program, and yeah, it’s been a really good experience so far.

Alexis Monville:

Excellent. I think I first heard about you because you ran a 14-day program, To a More Knowledgeable You. And it was fantastic. Each day resonated with me big time. Could you tell us the motivation behind the program?

Ally Kouao:

Yeah, sure. I feel like the main reason this program came about was aside from the fluctuating levels of COVID globally, it felt like there was definitely a bark to highlight the continued civil unrest that’s been magnified and brought back to the surface after the brutalities and documented injustice that has been going on in the US. What I thought was important to do alongside one of my colleagues was to make a point of the fact that not only is it possible for black people located outside of the US to be affected by what’s going on, but there are experiences shared by black people and some other minorities in their everyday lives that have been frequently glazed over, or not much attention’s been paid to it.

Ally Kouao:

Yeah, so as a result, some Red Hatters and I came together and created an initiative that we now know as 14 Days To a More Knowledgeable You, that provides the safe space to offer daily insight, be it through an article or podcast episode or a personal story, into the realities of their fellow black colleagues, friends and family in the UK and Ireland.

Alexis Monville:

What would you say are the main aspects of the program?

Ally Kouao:

That’s a really good question. I feel like what really brings the program to life I would say are people’s personal stories. I think we had a total of three personal stories from three different people who contributed to the initiative. I felt like it really brought things closer to home. I think it definitely helped make people realize that there definitely is another person behind the screen, or another person at Red Hat who can relate to this sort of thing. I think it makes it even more significant that it’s personal stories in the UK.

Ally Kouao:

Something that I’ve definitely heard throughout my life really, even until now, just the fact that … not the fact, but just people’s opinions that black people here don’t have it as hard as in the US, I would say it’s definitely true to an extent in regards to the brutalities, but I feel like in the UK, that there’s so much more that happens under the surface such as microaggressions, that I feel would be really beneficial for people to keep an eye out for and be conscious of.

Alexis Monville:

It made me think a lot. It’s really comfortable for me to say that at Red Hat, we are an open, inclusive meritocracy, and I can repeat that every day, and I’m really comfortable with that, and I think it’s really good and so on. There’s no question about that. But one thing that made me realize, and I will draw a parallel with, I have three kids. I have two daughters. The youngest one is 18, so they are not really young any more. I bought from a charity organization feminism T-shirts, that were really … I thought they were really fun, and I wore one, and I offered the others to the girls and to everybody in the family in reality. The message was fun, because I thought it was fun. That will not work with everybody. And it was written, “Girls just want to have fun.” Then under that, it said, “Fundamental rights.” So it’s a good joke from my perspective.

Alexis Monville:

Once, I remember one of the girls saying, “Oh, and you are doing that and you’re saying you are a feminist.” I was puzzled because I thought there was no necessary connection between what she was observing and the fact that I thought I would want to consider a woman as equal, and there was no question about that in my mind. But I realized that the connection was not obvious.

Alexis Monville:

During the program … That was a long intro to that. During the program, I realized that in my young age, I was actively involved in anti-racism organizations, and I was demonstrating about that. And after some time, it faded away. All that introduction to ask a question. I thought I was an ally, and I wonder if I am really an ally, and I wonder even if being an ally is enough. What do you think?

Ally Kouao:

That was such a lovely intro to that question. I would honestly say that well, at least from my personal experience and from my personal opinion, that to just say that you’re an ally probably isn’t enough. It’s more so what you do. So obviously going back to your personal examples, it’s really good that you were active in terms of being feminist, so wearing the T-shirt supporting them … I think it’s quite hard, because quite a lot of people compare what their standards of being an ally is to what other people’s standards of being an ally is. I would say overall there is no real checklist of what it takes to be an ally, because everyone has their own interpretation of the term, and there’s no one way to do it.

Ally Kouao:

But something that I would say is the gist of being an ally, personally, is listening and amplifying the voice of marginalized groups, so like you said when you did it before, people who did experience racism or advocating women’s rights. I do have an extract with me of my input of what allyship means to me in one of my colleagues’ blogs on the importance of allies. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just quickly go through it.

Ally Kouao:

On the blog, I said, “Personally, allyship to me means acknowledging, accepting and embracing our similarities and differences. Where are differences are present, this branches out to being open to listening, avoiding complacency, and making an effort to understand and be proactive where helpful, while continuously educating ourselves and others with empathy, respect and kindness in areas where we may fall short. Allyship means understanding that at the end of the day, we are all human, and even if you can’t do everything perfectly, you’re wholeheartedly making an effort to do what it is you do to the best of your ability.”

Ally Kouao:

That’s just a little sneak peek of my input. For anyone who is listening to this who also works at Red Hat, I would also recommend that you check out part two of the Diversity and Inclusion: the Importance of Allies series blog post, where you’ll see a bit more about what I have to say about allyship in more detail, and hear from all the other wonderful diversity and inclusion leaders at Red Hat.

Ally Kouao:

Just to sum up everything that I’ve said in just one sentence, I would say honestly, allyship means something different to everyone, and I think just having that shared understanding and that shared motivation to listen, and to be there for the people who want their voices heard.

Alexis Monville:

Yeah, it’s beautifully written. I need to copy/paste the extract in the blog post that will be a companion to this podcast. It’s really beautiful, and it really resonates with me. It really says, “Being human,” and being your whole self and being human is something really important. I wonder if it’s suddenly that I’m getting old, and I realize more things now, but I feel I’ve learned a lot during those past years, and I continue to learn. I feel the more I learn about that, the more I have to learn and to understand.

Alexis Monville:

I will give you another example. I spent 15 hours with Laurence Fishburne, the American actor, and he told me the story of Malcolm X. Of course, I did not really spend 15 hours with Laurence Fishburne. It’s an audio book, and it’s the autobiography of Malcolm X, and the narrator is Laurence Fishburne. But I had that feeling, and that’s always the feeling with audio book, that you have someone who is telling you a story.

Alexis Monville:

All that to say that at some point, Malcolm X described the fact that he is considering the people from New York, fighting for social rights, going into Alabama, and he’s saying they are totally wrong. They should not do that, and when I read that, I said, “No, no, no, no. That’s … What is wrong with that?” He said, “They should fight for civil rights in New York, because there’s a lot to do there.” I realized that yeah, I did in a way the same thing. I was demonstrating against apartheid in Strasbourg while apartheid was in South Africa, and I hope it had an impact, but I’m not really sure about that. But what was I doing in Strasbourg?

Alexis Monville:

I remember one of my friends at that time coming from Algeria. He was French, but he was born in Algeria. That’s the kind of thing that you will wear all your life on your face. And he was telling me, “I’m considered a stranger, a foreigner, by everybody in there.” And I have to admit that at that time, I hope it changed, foreigners were not necessarily welcome in small cities in the country. And he told me, “I tried to back to Algeria, to say, ‘Okay, I will end my study there, and I will continue my study in Algeria.’” And he told me, “It’s not possible, because over there, they are calling me the French guy, and so I have nowhere to go.”

Alexis Monville:

I was horrified by that, and I didn’t know what I could do for that person. How would you say we can deal with our past as a country, and we can have people that … I don’t really know how to formulate the question, but how to deal with that kind of situation for people?

Ally Kouao:

Yeah. Honestly, I would say that that’s probably not the first time I’ve heard a story where someone’s recounted their experiences of going to one place and feeling like they don’t belong, and then going to place that people say they belong, and then not belonging there either. I think that’s something that is experienced by quite a lot of people, but also I can’t put a number to it. But in terms of addressing that … Sorry, could you remind me of your question?

Alexis Monville:

In a way, it’s addressing our colonial past, or addressing the fact that we have people that are coming from probably the … They are the second- or third-generation immigrants from another country.

Ally Kouao:

Yeah. Okay, brilliant. That’s put me back on track. I was just going off on a tangent forgetting what the question was. So yeah, in terms of second- and third-generation immigrants or people who’ve moved to a country because their parents did or family did, I would say in order to educate people who are already in that country, or probably not even educate people, because everyone is accountable for their own learning, I think it’s definitely worth keeping in mind that it’s important to surround yourself with people who you know are open to learning. You can’t really force it down anyone’s throat. You have to be open to the fact that people probably don’t want to change the way they want to think, or be open to the fact that people are really interested in learning more, like learning about ways that they can become closer to you or learn more about an ethnicity or a culture in more detail.

Ally Kouao:

I think if I had to give advice to younger generations out there, I would honestly say it’s important to educate yourselves as well, even if some people say that they belong to generations of immigrants or anything. We don’t know everything, right? There’s always something more to learn, and especially in terms of the educational curriculum, it can’t cover completely everything. And that was definitely another topic that was touched on in the 14 Days to a More Knowledgeable You initiative. Something that we noted was that in the British education curriculum, they don’t really cover all aspects of slavery or all aspects of the things that happened in the past or things that happened that wasn’t quite so English or quite so European-centric.

Ally Kouao:

Obviously, it’s something … In terms of the world’s history, it’s quite hard to encapsulate that all into one history lesson and one history curriculum. So I would advise younger generations of immigrants and other people who would like to learn more, to just go out and educate yourselves. The internet is very much free. There’s probably a lot of sources, a lot of stories, a lot of recounts of things that have happened in the past, and there’s no such thing as knowing it all or knowing too much, because there’s always some sort of learning that you can do.

Ally Kouao:

My main point here is education, that where there is knowledge there is power, and as long as more people are … I feel like the younger generation’s definitely becoming … From what I’ve seen from the Black Lives Matter protests and not even protests, but the Black Lives Matter movement, people are taking a stance on what’s going on, and people are realizing that it’s wrong, people are taking this opportunity to educate themselves a lot more, or in greater depth. I think that’s definitely a step in the right direction, but there’s definitely a lot more education or self-education that needs to be taught and given to oneself, for there to be that good amount of change and to avoid more recounts of experiences, as you’ve previously mentioned with your Algerian friend.

Alexis Monville:

Yeah, I love the advice of learning more about history, and especially the recent history. That’s definitely something I did not learn in school, and I had to learn that by myself, and there was a really good series in France about … It was Behind the Maps, and that was fascinating, about our recent history and all the things that we don’t know, but in a way we think we know, and in reality, we absolutely don’t know. We don’t know why it happens and when it happens, really, and all the reasons behind. And when we know something, we know only one perspective of it, and that perspective is of course biased. It’s only one perspective. So that’s a very, very good advice.

Alexis Monville:

I think connected to that question, there’s that question that I love to ask to people, and I realize that it’s not a good question. I love to ask a question that is, “Where are you from?” I love to ask that question, because in some contexts, people answer, “Oh, I’m from the finance department,” or, “I’m from Alabama.” And I love that, because it was a question that could open so many doors, and so many different doors, because based on what the people are thinking at the moment, they answer something different. So I love that question.

Alexis Monville:

I realized that that question was not so good when we moved to the US with my family a few years back, and of course, my accent, people are able to catch that I’m not from Boston, even if I just say hello or thank you. The next question from people, “Where are you from?”, and I realized it was not a good question because my wife was a little bit offended by that question, and she was systematically answering, “We are from …”, and the town where we lived at that time. So I had that discussion with her, and she was saying, “Yeah, why are people asking me where I’m from like if I don’t belong? I live here. That’s where I live. That’s my home.” She was really sensitive with that. What do you think is happening in that situation?

Ally Kouao:

I don’t know. I think that sort of question is a matter of people not really saying what they want to say, but not wanting to be impolite. But either way, they come out … I guess the interpretation of the receiver of that question can vary so widely, so yes, there’d be some people who wouldn’t take offense, and there would be some people who … like you mentioned with your wife, would take offense because it’s just like, “What do you really want to know from that question?” It’s not … If I give you an answer would you be like, “Where am I really from?”, or would you keep pushing until you get the answer, like you want that validation, that confirmation, that you had in your mind?

Ally Kouao:

This is definitely something that we touched on in the 14 Days to a More Knowledgeable You initiative, where that’s a question that’s commonly asked, and it’s not just asked of people of color, but it’s also asked of people in places where people … I don’t know. I guess it’s sometimes seen as a conversation starter, and I can see why it is, but I think it’s the way in which the question’s asked. It also depends on what answer the person who’s asking the question is willing to settle for in front of the person they’re asking it to.

Ally Kouao:

In terms of the initiative, we really tackled the “Where are you really from?” question, because an experience that many other black associates have been able to relate to, and I’m sure many other people would be able to relate to, being at a party or something or just meeting someone in a formal professional context, and people asking where you’re from. So if I had to give a personal example, so for example if I went to someone and they asked me, “Where are you from?”, I would naturally say, “Oh, I’m from London.” A response that I do often get is, “Oh, okay,” and then there’d be that really awkward pause, and then they’d be like, “But where are you really from? I know you’re from London, but where are your parents from?” And it’s like, well, I could do … I think it’s quite important that people are very specific in their questions.

Ally Kouao:

I’ve had friends who have been even more vague about their answer to make a point out of it. So someone would be like, “Oh, where you from?”, and they’d be like, “Oh, I’m from a very specific area about where they’re living at the moment,” and they’d be like, “Oh, but where are you really from?”, and they’d be like, “Oh, I’m from Britain.” And they’d be like, “Oh, but where are you from?” They’d be like, “Oh, I’m from Europe.” Like, just making a point to show that it’s just a really silly question to ask if you just keep digging it at.

Ally Kouao:

Yeah, I just feel like in regards to the “Where are you really from?” question, it’s often the case that people want confirmation that the person isn’t British or isn’t from wherever the location is they are, or if their location sounds completely … their country of origin sounds completely different to where’d they’d typically think they’re from … I’m not quite sure if I formulated that correctly.

Ally Kouao:

But one of my colleagues, he was born in Zimbabwe, I believe. He was just saying that when he asked people where they’re from who have a Zimbabwean accent, it’s because he recognizes that accent, and that’s why he asks them where they’re from, just for confirmation of where they’re from. So like I said, it’s definitely the intent behind the question. I think it’s definitely worth clarifying with the person before asking, but I think when people do ask that question, something that they do do and should keep in mind is that it’s really important to approach the question towards the person you want to ask it to with sensitivity and clarity.

Ally Kouao:

If you approach the question “Where are you from?” or “Where are you really from?”, in that moment when you’re asking that question, you’re really prioritizing your curiosity over their feelings. You’re prioritizing your curiosity over how comfortable they feel or how much they belong in that moment in time, so you may receive a really guarded response. So someone giving a really vague answer like, “Oh, I’m from this really specific area,” because it’s a really silly question, honestly, I don’t really think you need to ask where people are from. Then again, I can also understand the conversation. It’s like, for example, we go to one of the Red Hat events. Well, from last year, we went to a Red Hat event called RHTE (Red Hat Tech Exchange), I met so many different people, and people are asking where you’re from because they’re curious to know which office you’re located in or where your accent is from. I can see how that can take a turn for the worst, depending on the motives of the person who is asking the question or the way in which they ask it.

Alexis Monville:

Yeah, I think it’s a very precious … I like the point about prioritizing curiosity over feelings. It’s a really important point. Whatever is your intent or the motivation behind the question, we need to realize that it’s not a good question, that adding “really” to it will not really help. That’s an horrible question in reality. If people want to share about where they are coming from and if they are from Scotland and their grandfather were coming from Ireland or whatever, that’s their problem. If they want to share that with you at some point, maybe they will, and that’s good. But why are you asking that? Yeah.

Ally Kouao:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. It’s such an odd question. There’s always that awkward pause after someone’s asked it, because when people ask me, in my mind I’m just like, “Are they trying to ask what I think they’re trying to ask, or are they genuinely curious on where I grew up and my accent?” Because I often get the question about where my accent’s from, because I’ve just moved from London to Wales, and somehow that’s just messed up my accent and people are just like, “Oh, where are you from?” So I think definitely it depends on the intent behind the question, but I would just say try and avoid it, like you said. You don’t have to know. If you did happen to know the person, and if you became a lot more close to the person or seemed to be chatting with them on a more regular basis, then you’d probably have that space or that comfort to be able to ask that question, or them be able to tell you themselves.

Ally Kouao:

I think it’s definitely an interesting question to ask upon first meeting someone. Some people just can’t really think on their feet off the bat, or it’s probably just to fill in the awkward silence when you first meet people.

Alexis Monville:

I did a training about hiring, improving your hiring practices. It reminds me something, because I was pushing some managers to say that maybe they have some biases in their hiring practices, and this is dangerous territory, and usually people are convinced they have absolutely no biases, and they are doing the right thing. What I was saying is that it’s not easy to do the right thing.

Alexis Monville:

There is a lot of biases that we have, and you need to admit that you are able to judge someone in the first 15 seconds you are seeing them. The problem is if you are not conscious of that, you will just use your intellect to confirm your first impression. This is exactly how the biases are working, so you need to be conscious of that. That’s why you need to write down all the questions you will ask in an interview beforehand. Then you are forced to go through those questions. You cannot escape that path and ask other questions that will confirm your first impression. So it’s really challenging.

Alexis Monville:

I told them I worked with a small system integrators in Paris a long time ago. It’s probably more than 10 years ago, and in the first gathering of the whole company in Paris, there was probably 150 people or something. There was something that was visibly different from other system integrators I worked with at that time. There was a lot more women, and a lot more people coming from various diversities that we have in France. France is at the crossroads of a lot of different countries, so of course there’s a lot of diversity present in the population, not necessarily in all the companies. But in that company, that was obvious that it was different from the others.

Alexis Monville:

I inquired about their hiring practices. That’s something our HR person is doing. She’s changing all the resumes, and stripping out all the information about the location where the people live, their first names, where they did their studies, and to keep only the things that we are supposed to make assumptions on. She’s rewriting all the resumes so they are all in the same format, so there’s no way to know things about that. And I said, “But you don’t judge people from where they live,” and they say, “Yeah, we also think that.” But the result is in our resume selection, we are selecting different people for the interview, and the result is when we see people, that we interview them and we hire them, people we would have probably never selected because they are coming from whatever, Saint Denis or whatever. Do you think that example is just an example, just a point in time? Do you think we have a problem in our hiring practices, and do you think there’s ways to fix that?

Ally Kouao:

That’s a really good question. I would just like to say off the bat that that hiring process or that process of hiring in regards to hiding people’s information, I think that sounds brilliant. It definitely strips back the identity that’s behind it, because there’s so much that people who’d probably be unconsciously biased on, such as the person’s name or where they studied or even their home address, like you said. So I think it’s really good that that recruiter definitely took time out of her day to put their main information into the resume, but present it in a similar format so there was no space for deviation. I think that’s definitely a good way to go about it.

Ally Kouao:

But in terms of general hiring processes, that’s definitely quite a tricky question, because different organizations can tackle hiring differently. It’s a double-edged sword. It depends on how you want to recruit different individuals. Overall, I think that’s important that there’s representation in a company, and a frequent argument that I tend to hear in response to that is, “Are you compromising on the quality of the candidates in favor of representation?” The answer to that can be, “We don’t have to compromise on anything.” I think there are very much skilled people of different ethnicities from different locations everywhere, and I think it’s just putting that extra effort into scouting them out and finding them.

Ally Kouao:

Something that I do tend to frequently see on LinkedIn is … I think I signed up to this girls’ page. I’m not quite sure where it is, but I think it’s a women’s empowerment page, and they tend to give empowering quotes or showing people who’ve started to rise into more senior positions, like women rising into more senior positions in companies, because you’re definitely seeing more of it today. You’re definitely seeing people in companies or industries where it used to be traditionally male-dominated. You’re seeing more women come through and excel in their fields and prove themselves.

Ally Kouao:

Something that I have seen quite a lot of, those pages highlighting women of color who are pushing those boundaries, reaching really cool careers or reaching a new level of success, and they thought it’s a really good idea to praise them, and I completely agree. Something that I did frequently see in the comments is people going, “Ah, we shouldn’t be pointing out their race at all. It should just be about their motivation. It should just be about their successes.”

Ally Kouao:

Something that I think is really important to note from these posts or posts that do celebrate women and women of color, is that sometimes this attention does need to be paid to them. For now, we do need to pay this attention so that it becomes something we do naturally. The reason why we are highlighting it is because it’s not something you see often, and when we do see it, we want to celebrate it because it’s something we should see more of, and I think we all want that shared goal of not having to think about race any more or think about the location that someone comes from or think about what their history was, in favor of getting that perfect candidate.

Ally Kouao:

But I feel like where we are at the moment, where people are still growing and learning and learning to overcome their unconscious bias, I think it’s really important we do make a point of celebrating those people who are reaching new levels that it’s not so common to see, and wasn’t so common to see before. Yeah, I think there are different ways to go about it.

Ally Kouao:

Going back to your question regarding the hiring process, I would honestly say … Just to link it to that little … I can’t even describe it. Just to link it back to what I said regarding highlighting women of color who are doing really well or people of color who are doing really well, I think it’s really important that we … Or I think it would be really beneficial if we did take that stance in hiring as well, so yeah, even though we are paying more attention to the fact that we are trying to have a more diverse or representative workforce, the end goal is that hopefully we won’t need think about this when we’re hiring. Hopefully it’s something that comes naturally to people and it’s something that … We hire them for what their talents are, and we don’t hire them because they don’t look like us or they don’t have qualifications that we’re also familiar with.

Ally Kouao:

So yeah, I think that’s my overall answer in terms of hiring. I think it’s important to pay extra attention, especially now, so that … If we pay attention now and don’t continuously stall, I feel like that will just help us to get to that end goal so much faster, and we won’t need to strip back the information like the woman you were talking about did. You could just present that person’s information, and they’d be treated just as equally as all the other candidates.

Ally Kouao:

I think that would definitely be the ultimate goal, definitely an approach that I think more organizations should take. I think Red Hat is definitely going in the right direction from even offering that sort of training to begin with in terms of right for Red Hat, and having unconscious biases, because it’s something that’s very real, and it’s something … Like the title says, it’s unconscious. People aren’t aware that they do have their biases until they realize that their whole team is not really representative, but there’s so much diversity and representation in the UK and Ireland, at least from my personal experience. Yeah, sorry for the long-winded answer, but that’s what I was getting at.

Alexis Monville:

Yeah, and I really appreciate all the details you shared. This is exactly the problem I think we have. I think it’s not easy to handle that problem, because we would like to do the right thing. We would like to think that we are doing the right thing, and it’s uncomfortable to realize sometimes that we are not. I had that conversation with the team, and at some point I stopped them and said, “Okay, so we are doing the right thing. That’s absolutely perfect, and we are all white, all male, in that leadership team. So that’s totally representative of the population of the world. You’re absolutely right, all of you. All of us are absolutely right.” And so even if we are not consciously doing something wrong, we are not helping. So there was a lot of things around that, the fact that the job description could push away categories of people directly because there was too many requirements or too many …

Alexis Monville:

That was fascinating to me, learning about those studies that are real studies. That’s not one idea of someone. It’s real studies that have been proven. It’s fascinating to me. I have a friend who is … His first name is Samir. He told me that when he was sending his resume, if he was stripping the “ir” at the end of his first name, he was called back for an appointment immediately.

Ally Kouao:

Oh. Interesting.

Alexis Monville:

But if he was leaving his first name like this, he had no appointment. He told me he tried that several times. Of course, he told me, “The problem is, when I’m going to the appointment, usually people who would have struck me from the selection in first place are not necessarily taking me there seriously.” But it’s fascinating.

Ally Kouao:

Yeah, I think it’s definitely more common than we think, that people are feeling the need to change their traditional names, because it doesn’t sound quite like what they think the recruiters would want. So for example, in Britain, some people would change their cultural or their traditional names to make it sound more European or more British, and I think that’s definitely a shame. I feel like unless someone really wants to do it because they really liked a name, I feel like the people who do do it because they feel like they’d have better chances of getting recruited, I think that’s definitely part of the problem. It’s just a shame that people would have their names changed, and it just makes it really awkward, because they get hired, they get recruited, and it’s like they don’t feel like they were able to put their original best self forward to begin with.

Ally Kouao:

Like I said before, it is very common where people do tend to alter their name or completely change it and strip back what they are originally just to appeal to recruiters. Yeah, like I said, that’s definitely a shame. I also saw a post … Just browsing the internet, I did see there was a post on … I think it was a recruiter talking about how there were some people in her company … Not her company, the company that she worked in, interviewing candidates, and she realized that they were being really tough on the candidates.

Ally Kouao:

She thought she’d play a little trick on them and give them their own resumes from when they first applied to their jobs, because obviously they’d been in their jobs for a long time. And they all rejected themselves, and it was so crazy, because I was just like … The fact that they said the people weren’t qualified enough, I thought this was just quite interesting, because I was like, “The fact that you’d … I understand that you were in a better position than where you were when you first began with, but everyone has that beginning of their journey. Everyone has a starting point.” And it was just so interesting to see that they wouldn’t even give themselves a chance if they were in that hiring seat.

Ally Kouao:

I feel that was definitely a good takeaway lesson, in regards to the fact that you might not see something that you see in yourself where you are now, but I think it’s definitely important to give everyone that chance, that starting point, where they’d be able to grow and excel, because that’s where they are now, and it definitely made me chuckle seeing that, because I was just like … It’s crazy, because if you can’t accept yourself from your starting point, how much harder it would be if you don’t see yourself in the person who you’re interviewing, or you don’t feel that they’re the right fit because they’re so different to what you have in mind? So I think that’s definitely something that hiring managers or people involved in the interview process should definitely keep in mind.

Alexis Monville:

It’s a very, very good one. I love that experiment. It’s really important to work on our biases and the way we handle our emotional system and our intellectual system, and we use it to confirm the other and so on. Ally, it was really great to have you on the show today.

Ally Kouao:

Thank you for having me.

Alexis Monville:

What would be the first thing you would recommend to people who want to improve?

Ally Kouao:

Ooh. Ooh. Ooh, that’s quite a good question. I’ve really enjoyed reading the book Girl, Woman, Other. That focuses on perspectives of different women of color, different ages, from different generations. I think it’s quite an interesting insight into how they grew up, how they lived life differently in Britain, in Europe. That definitely could not be the starting point for everyone, but if someone did want a source to have a little read of and become a little bit more of a knowledgeable version of themselves, then yeah, I think that’s definitely a good book to read.

Ally Kouao:

But at the end of the day, I can’t really tell you where to start. Everyone’s on their own journey, and everyone can consume material differently. But I’d say definitely just make use of the internet. It’s very much free, like I said before, and you can find so many good resources. Have conversations with your loved ones, have conversations with people who you might not speak to too often, and get to know them, because we’re all living different timelines, and it’s important to be aware of that, and be open to others. But yeah, that’s all from me.

Alexis Monville:

Excellent. Thank you very much, Ally. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show today.

Ally Kouao:

Thank you.

Alexis Monville:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-blog-alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode, and to find more to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello, and until next time, to find better ways of changing your team.

The music is Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0)

Le Podcast – Season Two

• 
  Playful Leadership: Helping Others Be Their Best
• 
  Blessed, Grateful, and Human
• 
  Build the Right Product, with Gojko Adzic
• 
  Hiring and Diversity Without Dropping the Bar
• 
  Leadership and Teamwork in a Crisis
• 
  Chief of Staff: The Role, the Craft, the Community
• 
  Belonging, Identity, and Better Hiring,
• 
  What Software Teams Can Learn from Sporting Teams
• 
  Agile and Open Innovation: Building the Bridge Between Tech and Business
• 
  Radical Focus: OKRs, Cadence, and the “Seduction of the Task”
• 
  Human-Centric Agility Coaching: The Expert Paradox and the Ideology Paradox
• 
  The Job of an Open Leader: Context, Trust, and Growing Others

Le Podcast – Season One

• 
  Growing as a Software Engineer: Learning, Sharing, and Impact
• 
  Thirteen Rules for Building Strong Teams
• 
  OKRs in Practice: Learning, Focus, and Common Pitfalls
• 
  The Myth of 10x Engineers: Growing Beyond Technical Skills
• 
  The Anatomy of Peace: Leadership Starts With Who You Are
• 
  Psychological Safety: Creating Teams Where People Can Speak Up
• 
  Leading Distributed Teams: Collaboration Across Time Zones
• 
  Changing Your Team from the Inside: A Practitioner’s View on Leadership
• 
  Why Shared Language Matters: How Terms Shape Collaboration
• 
  How (Not) to Give Feedback: Responsibility, Ego, and Relationships
• 
  Rock Stars and Superstars: Supporting Growth Without Losing Stability
• 
  Do Cultural Differences Really Block Agile Adoption?
• 
  How to Create Great Goals: Using OKRs to Focus on Impact
• 
  Making Change from the Inside: Leadership Beyond Management Roles
• 
  How to Form a Cross-Functional Team That Actually Works