Tiffany Stevenson on Creating a Thriving Workplace
Tiffany Stevenson is the Chief Talent & Inclusion Officer and Global Head of Communities at Box, a cloud content management company ranked in the 2019 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For. Ms. Stevenson sat down with the Women in Leadership class over Zoom to explore how her company achieves its commitment to workplace equity and inclusiveness, helping its employees thrive.
“If I had to explain what I do for a living in a tweet,” she said, “this would be it: Our team helps to build thriving communities inside and out. We create healthy Boxers, healthy organizations, and healthy communities.” She went on, “One of the values that I think really wraps everything that we do, is one that we call ‘Bring Your (blank) Self to Work.’” In Ms. Stevenson’s words, this tenet means “thinking about all the things that might make us feel different — how might we leverage those in a way that helps drive top performance and helps to create an incredible culture?”
To illustrate this idea, she called in an example from a different sphere entirely. In 2016, UCLA gymnast Sophina DeJesus created a viral sensation by incorporating hip-hop dance moves into her performance. To Ms. Stevenson, this is a powerful example of a gymnast bringing her (blank) self — her Black and Puerto Rican self, her dancer self — to the mat. In a workplace like Box, she said, “you have your technical performance and all of those skills, but you also get to bring who you are, your unique experiences, backgrounds, and you get to do it in a community where you’re actually supported.”
Ms. Stevenson acknowledged that bringing your whole self to the workplace isn’t always easy. Many of us, she said, engage in a practice that the sociologist Erwin Goffman termed ‘covering’: “We might downplay certain aspects of who we are,” Ms. Stevenson explained, “that might push us outside of the mainstream.” She emphasized that feeling this kind of pressure to conform can be a huge drain on employees’ wellbeing and success.
“When I think about identity and the unique things I bring to work every day, I would be remiss to not think about my grandmother.” Ms. Stevenson gave the group a sense of her grandmother’s life: the hard work she put into providing for her family and the clear vision she had for their success, despite the poverty of resources she had access to. “That is an important part of my identity that I bring to work every day,” Ms. Stevenson said. “I know that talent isn’t based on a ZIP code and I know that certain people have access to more things than others.” If she didn’t feel comfortable bringing that awareness into her work, she said, “I don’t think that Box would be getting the best of my skills and experience.”
So what can we do if our workplace lacks a welcoming and inclusive culture? The key is to get the discussion going and to recruit others who believe in pushing for inclusion. “And sometimes,” Ms. Stevenson said, “on an executive team, it might just be that one person, but that one person can be the spark that can open up a bigger conversation.” She acknowledged, too, that it may be necessary to “think about inches instead of yards.” She cautioned, “With inclusion, you know, we might see opportunity everywhere and want to fix it all. And I think even at Box, we have to be really intentional about moving an organization one step at a time.”
But if there’s anything we need right now, it’s adaptation and change. From the COVID-19 pandemic to the continuing racial injustice in the country and the world, Ms. Stevenson reflected, the rising generation will be facing challenges that nobody is prepared for.
“I want you to hear in this message,” she said, “that the world needs your voice and your unique perspectives, everything that you have to bring, to help us solve the problems in front of us.”
For more information on the program, please visit Women in Leadership Program, CBE.
