Episode 135: Career success for women of color — with Minda Harts

Just a few years ago, Minda Harts was told that there was no market for a career book for women of color. Undeterred, she went on to write her best-selling book “The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table.” Since then, she’s been featured on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Fast Company, The NY Times, and Time Magazine, and was named the #1 Top Voice for Equity in the Workplace by Linkedin in 2020. Minda also speaks on topics like managing diverse teams, courageous leadership, and advancing women of color in the workplace.

During this episode, Minda shares:

• How her own experience with job-related trauma and racism inspired her to write The Memo
• Some of the less-examined causes of “imposter syndrome” at work
• How to build your network in a hybrid workplace or fully remote workplace
• Why Minda uses the term “success partner” instead of ally — and how managers and coworkers can be success partners for women of color at work
• What inspired the topics for her next two books: “Right Within: How to Heal from Racial Trauma in the Workplace” and “You Are More Than Magic: The Black and Brown Girls’ Guide to Finding Your Voice”

You can learn more about Minda on her official website mindaharts.com and follow her on LinkedIn.

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The episode transcript is below.

Carolyn Kiel: Hello, and welcome to the Beyond 6 Seconds podcast. I’m your host, Carolyn Kiel. And on today’s episode, I’m really thrilled to be here with Minda Harts, CEO of The Memo LLC, and the award-winning and best-selling author of The Memo: what women of color need to know to secure a seat at the table. Minda is a professor at NYU Wagner and hosts a live weekly online show called Secure The Seat.

In 2020 Minda was named the number one top voice for equity in the workplace by LinkedIn. She’s been featured on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Fast Company, the New York Times and Time Magazine to name a few. Minda also speaks on topics like managing diverse teams, courageous leadership, and advancing women of color in the workplace.

Minda, welcome to the podcast.

Minda Harts: Thank you Carolyn for having me, happy to be here.

Carolyn Kiel: Thank you. You know, I read The Memo probably about a year ago now and really enjoyed it, found it so valuable as a career book and to help me learn more about issues that Black women and women of color are facing in the workplace and how to be a support and a success partner as well.

I’d love to go back to the genesis of The Memo. So how did you get the inspiration to write The Memo?

Minda Harts: Yeah. Thank you for reading it. Many who may not have read it yet, I did write it with women of color, Black and brown women in mind, but my hope was that other people would read it too that identified in different ways — our colleagues, our managers.

So it’s exciting that you read it. It really was one of those moments in time where you realize that, okay, the workplace isn’t working for everybody. I see it working for some people, but I don’t see it working for people who look like me in all cases. And a lot of the career content that I was reading and books I was consuming were talking about women in the workplace, but they weren’t necessarily talking about the intersectional lens, what it’s like to be a woman who isn’t white in the workplace. And I felt very, I already felt isolated in the workplace. And then I felt that way in content as well. And I just started to think about, okay, if I’m feeling this way, then maybe there’s somebody, there’s other people who feel this way, too, right? That they want to be seen in the career narrative.

And the late writer Toni Morrison said, write the book you want to read. And it really was the impetus. I just started to think about, even as women, we don’t experience the workplace the same. So what would it be like to expand the conversation? Okay. If you’re not in a room, if you don’t have the sponsors, if you don’t have the network, then what are you supposed to do? And that was really the impetus. I saw a pain point in my life and I thought, well, maybe this is a pain point for others as well.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you also mentioned in The Memo that one of the times that you were thinking about writing the book or that the idea was coming together was when the book Lean In came out, by Sheryl Sandberg, and you had actually gotten feedback that there was no market for a career book for Black women. because Lean In was like, “that’s the women’s book and that’s for everybody.” So what kept you moving forward with the idea in the face of this skepticism?

Minda Harts: Yeah, it’s so funny. When I think about that now, because that was before the book came out. I have a company called The Memo LLC, and when I even put the company out there, I used to have a lot of people tell me, “oh, this will never work because you’re focusing on women of color. You’re half the problem. You’re siloing each other.” And I’m like, “well, okay, that’s your perspective.” And so I was already hearing that there’s no room for any Memos.

And then when I was reading Sheryl Sandberg’s book, I realized that that was one perspective, but if you’re not in the room, then what about us who haven’t got inside the room yet? Not because we’re not working hard enough, but because we just don’t have the access. And so when my agent was shopping the book around, we heard no, Lean In, that covered it. That was the women’s manifesto.

And again, when we talk about women in the workplace, oftentimes the first person that pops in your head is probably not a Black woman. And so I think a lot of people, because they don’t have relationships with us, or maybe haven’t worked with us, they often don’t think about us. And I’m saying, well, hey, we have a whole other group of women that are not in the career narrative.

So the book did go on to become a bestselling book. But it’s funny, when you are not thinking about everybody at the table, then you speak for others who aren’t there. And there were people speaking for a group of people that weren’t represented in the career content that was out there on the bookshelves.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, absolutely. Now with the benefit of hindsight and, and many years past, I’ve read both books and it’s very clear how different they are and completely different perspectives.

So in The Memo, you are very open and you share a lot about your own career stories and the struggles that you faced. And, you know, I think we can all agree that bad job trauma or trauma from the bad jobs we have, that’s, that’s real. And you faced that on top of racial microaggressions, other race related trauma that really started early in your career and maybe even earlier in your life.

It was heart wrenching to read about the details of those challenges and those experiences, and also really thrilling to hear the stories of when you stood up for yourself, which you also include in the book as well. So I’m just curious, there’s so much of yourself in this book, did writing The Memo kind of help you process some of that trauma or those difficult experiences, or even find new power from those past experiences?

Minda Harts: Yeah, absolutely. I joke around sometimes and say that writing The Memo was part of my therapy, you know, because I hadn’t really realized how much trauma I had endured. You know, I was in my former life for 15 years.

There wasn’t a day that I didn’t experience that wasn’t traumatic in some way. Right? If you go to the doctor, they often ask, you know, where’s your pain, a 10 or a one? You know, 10 being excruciating, one being okay I can get through the day, no big deal. But if you have enough threes, they add up to a 10, right? You have enough fives, enough twos. And I would have those types of days. And I was like, wow, this is really toxic.

And I think all of us can point to a time where we’ve been in a toxic experience in the workplace or a bad situation. And think if you had to go through that every day. Right? And it started, I started to reflect on the pieces of myself that I lost along the way, because those experience started to chip away at me, and writing The Memo was a way of saying, wait a second. I could bring these pieces back, new pieces of myself. Right? And I can also make sure that those who have to experience it, these micro or macro aggressions, or any inequality in the workplace, that our story doesn’t just stop with the tears. Right? There’s more, there’s the dot dot dot after our stories, and we get to create that for ourselves.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, you talk about that a lot in your book. And I think towards one of the later chapters, you talk about the concept of imposter syndrome. And I know that’s sort of a buzz word. I feel like I hear that everywhere. And everyone’s talking about that, or everybody has that. But you raise a really important point that, at least for women of color, is imposter syndrome, is it really that? Or is it actually anxiety and self doubt based on, you know, microaggressions and other racism and other related traumas in the workplace, which I thought was really interesting.

Minda Harts: You know, I used to think that maybe after a while, I didn’t belong in these spaces, right? That I wasn’t good enough because I was never getting the same opportunities as some of my counterparts were, but I was working just as hard on the paper. I was doing 10 times better than them. But because there were these other factors, office politics, you know, those sorts of things at play. It had really nothing to do with me and everything to do with the environment.

And then once I realized, wait a second, I belong in every space I’m in, but maybe this isn’t the right space for me. Right? We can take that power back and I think, you know, imposter syndrome is a social construct to try to make us question ourselves when we know we’ve done the work and all those things. But I think we really have to, and I have to do it daily, to remind myself, no, you worked hard for this. Right? You know, own that piece of the puzzle. And a lot of what I talk about in The Memo and that I share with other women and just people in general is, we get to shift our mindset, right? To remind ourselves, you know, we are amazing. We do have these skills. And that’s on them if they’re not seeing those, that’s not on us.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, in addition to your own story that you share in The Memo, you share a lot of really important and critical advice for women of color to build their careers.

You spend a lot of time talking about the broad concept of networking. It goes into like, building rapport, going to the happy hours or the after work events and even stopping by to see influential people. You tell a story of where you would try to spend a little bit of time and just sort of pop into the office of one of the executives, even just for a couple of minutes so that they knew who you were. And the importance of building that whole network.

Networking is again another buzz word, but I feel like a lot of times it’s not really defined. So people kind of have their own concepts of what that means, or they just don’t really see the connection between building a network and socializing outside of work or “interrupting people.” Like I always feel like I’m interrupting people if I’m walking around, but it’s critical. Everyone I know who’s been successful does that, where they make those connections and talk with people. So I think it’s important to call out.

Minda Harts: I agree. A lot of people don’t know this unless they know me personally, but I am very much an introvert. So I really had to push myself to even do those pop-ins or happy hours, or, you know, some companies have virtual Hangouts and things, and I realized it’s not that I need to make friends with every single person that’s there, but who needs to know that I’m here? Right? And realizing this networking actually works to my benefit too. When you find your organic or natural way to engage with people. And you know, success is not a solo sport. So as much as we’d like to say, I’m going to work really hard. Keep my head down. I don’t want to be bothered. I don’t want to make new friends at work. We need those people, right? Because many of those people are in the rooms that we’re not in.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, The Memo was written before the pandemic. So I always wonder with some of the networking things, now that we’re moving into like a lot of hybrid workplaces or fully remote or partially remote, I feel like networking is still critically important, but I feel like the techniques may have changed. Now as we’re coming into this new structure of work where we’re not, many people will not be physically located near each other, what advice would you have for networking as a career builder in this environment?

Minda Harts: Yeah. You know, so I think of, but now in two ways, If you are a manager or you’re a leader, create those opportunities for your staff to connect. You know, so if it’s an open Zoom room on office hours where people can just, they don’t have to stay the whole time, but they know that they can drop in just to have people have that connection, because I think we still need that human connectivity.

And so creating those virtual water cooler moment so people can connect I think is really important — because when we do go back to the office, for some who end up returning back, some people got hired and they don’t even know where the bathroom is. Right? They don’t even know, they’ve never met their manager in person, you know?

So if we can start to create these networks now, at least build a little camaraderie. I think that goes a long way. And then individually, get on Zoom or Google Hangout or whatever your company uses, get there a little early, right? Because sometimes the movers and the shakers of the workplace, they’re on those calls a little bit early, so people could at least see your face.

The other thing I encourage people to do is if you’re able, turn your camera on so people can see your face. Use the chat, if you’re not able to say something where everybody hears it, but engage in the tools, use the emojis. We have a lot of resources and we still have to have that connectivity.

People still need to know that we’re here, that we still want people to say, oh, you know, that Minda woman, she made a really great point in the last meeting, and they’ll think of you the next time. And so don’t discount that you can’t still make those connections in the return to different phase of life.

Carolyn Kiel: Absolutely. The going to the Zoom room early is a good trick. I mean, I used to use it. I’m also an introvert myself. So in physical locations, I’ve heard it helps to get to the location a little early cause there’s fewer people. So it’s less intimidating without walking into a huge group of people and it’s easier to make conversations. So yeah, that translates virtually too. Very, very good.

So The Memo’s been out for a couple years at this point and I’m curious about the kind of feedback that you’ve received from your readers about it. I’m sure you’ve received a ton because it’s been such an amazing success. But in terms of what you’re hearing from your readers, do you feel like it’s having the impact that you were expecting or hoping for it when you first wrote the book?

Minda Harts: Yeah. I was really scared the first, putting it out there because it is a taboo topic. You know, the book first came out in 2019 and then a revised version in 2020. And when the pandemic happened, we were experiencing syndemics: multiple pandemics at once. And one was a racial pandemic, right, in our country here in the U.S. So a lot of the concepts that I was talking about prior to when the book first came out, a lot of companies and organizations were kind of afraid to touch that topic and didn’t want to touch it.

And then then a shift happened in 2020. And I mean, emails were coming through, calls, like, “come talk about this,” couldn’t happen fast enough. So it was really interesting to see the juxtaposition with just eight months prior to 2020 to see where now people were ready to talk about it. So before it was like, oh no, we don’t have a race issue. Maybe we do, right?

But the main thing is how do we get to a solution? How do we get to a resolution? Right? And so for women of color who read the book, it was for many, the first time they had felt seen in a career book. So imagine reading something for the first time, it’s a privilege to be able to read about your experiences or see yourself.

I get messages still from women of all ages saying, wow, thank you. And then from managers and those allies, success partners, champions, advocates, they also reach out and say, thank you so much for writing this because now I know how to show up for my team better. Now I need to show up for my colleagues better. Now I know how to be more empathetic and you know, not get so defensive when someone does bring something to me. Right? So I think I’m just really happy with the work, the internal work, that it’s like modifying hearts and minds on all sides of the workplace coin. So I’m very pleased with how it’s helping individuals and teams just be better.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And you know, even though you wrote it as a career book for women of color, it really is also a great resource for white people and especially white women. It really helps them see the experiences of people of color in the workplace, which they may not see, or may be contributing to in a negative way, or just have opportunities to contribute and be more supportive and really bring towards the success of of women of color in the workplace.

And I know you use the term “success partners” versus “allies,” which I guess ally is sort of the term du jour that we see for white people and how we can support people of color. I think that’s a really interesting distinction. What’s the difference between being an ally versus being a success partner?

Minda Harts: Yeah. You know, I thank you for asking, because for me, I think a lot of people, we see ourselves as good people. Right? Many of us. And I think we want to be allies to people. We see ourselves as not aggressing, maybe like another colleague is, right? We want to be helpful. I get it. But allyship I feel has just become very much another buzz word. Like we say it, but there’s nothing. There’s no, like, “there” there. You know, you can call yourself an ally and never have demonstrated it ever in life. Right? And that’s for all of us, we can say we’re an ally, but ask yourself, what’s the last time I’ve actually demonstrated allyship to the group that I’m claiming to be an ally for? And so for me, I shifted it into a success partner. What does it look like when we partner with each other? When we support each other in a real way, when we get to know each other?

I always say success is not a solo sport, and that’s why we all have the capacity to be a success partner for somebody else. When it’s in a meeting, when it’s hiring, whatever the case may be. Thinking through what it’s like to be someone else and how you can use your privilege, because we all have it in some way, to support somebody in a real way when they really need it. Right? If you’re not in the room, then we can be a success partner.

I think ally is like, oh, only when a microaggression happens or only when someone’s being like, really crazy on a Zoom call, but allyship where my, or my interpretation of it can happen at any point. Right? I don’t even have to be in a room for you to be a supporter of me, a champion of me. And so I want to move into like more of a verb type of feel that there’s actually demonstration of the success that the allyship, you know, I am a direct beneficiary because you activated your allyship, right?

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. I definitely feel like success partner is more like an operational term. Like it has that action, that action verb in it and, and you’re right. It’s something that I think combined with more of an awareness as a success partner. So you have to be able to recognize those situations and be like, oh, here’s a situation where I can bring up my colleague’s name because we’re having this conversation about a new project, and I think that she would be great for this. Or you know, I’m in a meeting and my colleague’s getting talked over, so I can help reinforce their points and bring them back into the conversation. So I think having success partners start with that awareness and open their eyes to like those, these are some of the things that might go on in the workplace and here are just very simple and straightforward ways that you can help support. And it doesn’t have to be a big over the top thing. It’s a combination of all those little things that help support each other.

Minda Harts: Yeah. It’s the every day, it’s the everyday actions. I think oftentimes, to your point, we think we have to climb on top of Mount Everest and do the grand act. Sometimes it may require that, but it’s really, it’s the blocks right before, it’s walking the walk before we get to the mountain. So we all have the capacity to do that.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, absolutely. Wow. So The Memo is still going strong and there’s so much interest, so much conversation about it. On top of it though, but you’ve got two new books that are coming out really soon. I think one is October and one early next year. So The Memo was your first book and I’m curious about how you decided on the topics to cover for your next two books that are coming out.

Minda Harts: Yeah, Carolyn, I will be honest with you. After The Memo, I didn’t think that I would write any more books. Like I really thought that because I had given so much of myself in The Memo, that I wasn’t sure I was able to. That introvert in me was like, I don’t know if I could do this again, or I could talk about these sort of things. And and then I realized after the book being out for a couple of years, I still get so many messages from women saying, wow, I didn’t realize that. I forgot about that happening. I didn’t realize how toxic that’s really been to me. And I realized that even when I was on book tour, that we would be laughing and there’d be like this kind of sad crying, right?

It’d be almost like this, like therapeutic kind of conversations happening. I realized, you know what? We need to talk about that the trauma that these experiences have left us with, because it’s hard to bring your authentic self to work if you don’t know who that is anymore, because these experiences have kind of chopped some of your competence down or whatever have you.

And then the other part of that is our managers. I’m a firm believer that on a micro level, each manager has the opportunity to make the workplace safe for everybody. Right? You get to invest. We get to really, you may not be able to change the way the whole company organization works, but how about your team? Right? And as women of color are healing and finding their voices to address some of these things, we need courageous managers to say, wow, thank you for bringing that to my attention. Let’s find some solutions so that we’re not perpetuating this continued harm on the next generation. And so that’s where “Right Within” came, I’m like, oh, okay. Let’s talk about some of the frameworks for how we create that psychological safety for all the racialized trauma that happened and might even happen in currently today.

And then my next book after that, I was thinking, wow. And you, you alluded to it at the top of our call, is that I realized that there were tools that I needed as an adult, but if I went back in my younger Minda years, I realized ooh I needed these much sooner. So my young adult book is “You Are More Than Magic.” And I’m really excited about that book because it talks to young Black and brown girls about how to prepare, how to talk to their teachers, how to talk to their parents about difficult conversations, how to see themselves through the eyes of themselves and not these experiences. And then also speaking to the parents of white children that we go to school with. What are some of the things that you need to be talking to and demonstrating with your kids, showing them what success looks like? Because some of our classmates, when we were younger, they don’t get better, they bring those negative behaviors into the workplace. So let’s figure out how we can solve some of these things at a much earlier age.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh, wow. So yeah, that’s really all encompassing. If you think of the three books together is, the advice from The Memo for women of color who are navigating their own careers. Right Within, it sounds like there’s some focus on management, because it’s very true that any kind of corporate culture or culture change really that has to be driven top down. So something as critical as healing racial trauma, or just changing the way that we work with each other absolutely needs to come, you know, it can’t be grassroots necessarily, although there’s roles for that, but absolutely top management needs to be very engaged in mindfully putting that forward. And then, of course even before you get to the workplace, how do you find your voice and how do you come and prepare for that? So, yeah, well that’s remarkable the way that it looks at everything holistically.

Wow, so you’ve got all these books and you’ve also got The Memo, LLC, which is the company that you started before you wrote The Memo. There’s so many different fronts that you’re looking at it and supporting people with. What are some of your longer term goals for The Memo LLC, and/or your books in terms of areas that you want to address or help support or types of changes that you want to influence?

Minda Harts: Yeah, I’m just so humbled to be able to write about the content and share these stories, because I do think it’s helping change hearts and minds about how women of color see themselves, but then how our allies, success partners, managers can also make the workplace better. And so having this body of work I’m really excited about, but as far as The Memo, the company is concerned also one of the things that we’re working on is called the Women of Color Equity Initiative, which is to make sure that when there are open positions that we have a diverse slate of candidates. And so I can tell Black and brown women to do all the things to move ahead, but if we don’t have those partners on the other side saying, hey, we can’t move forward until we do have a diverse group of people being interviewed, at least for the opportunity, right? That access. And so when I think about the next layer of my career, it is really working with companies and making sure that when women of color are hired, they’re entering an environment that isn’t toxic, that they can thrive in and not just check a box.

Carolyn Kiel: Yup. It’s more than recruitment and hiring. It’s what you do when people are here and how you support them and grow in their careers. Absolutely. That’s wonderful. Minda, thank you so much for being on my show. I loved talking with you about The Memo and the process for creating that and all of the great work that you’re doing. How can people get in touch and learn more about your work, whether it’s your books or The Memo LLC?

Minda Harts: Well, thank you for being a success partner and letting me have this conversation with you. The best place is MindaHarts.com. You can find everything on my site and, or follow me on LinkedIn.

Carolyn Kiel: Awesome. And I’ll put links to your LinkedIn profile and your website in the show notes so that people can click on it really easily. Minda, as we close out, is there anything else that you’d like our listeners to know or anything else that they can do to help or support the work that you’re doing?

Minda Harts: Thank you for that. You know, I just want us all to just be introspective, right? What is it that we could be doing better? So ask yourself, is there something I need to start doing to be a better success partner for those who aren’t represented in the spaces that I’m in, and what do I need to stop doing that might be harming some of the folks that are in our spaces? If we all take a step and do our part, then we make the workplace better than we found it.

Carolyn Kiel: Fantastic. Well, thanks again Minda for being on my podcast.

Minda Harts: Thank you.

Carolyn Kiel: Thanks for listening to Beyond 6 Seconds. Please help us spread the word about this podcast. Share it with a friend. Give us a shoutout on your social media or write a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. You can find all of our episodes on our website and sign up for our free newsletter at www.beyond6seconds.com. Until next time.