Kelli King-Jackson, ACC

Coaching for Black women leading in white spaces.

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Black at Work: Quarterly Review

So I recently did my quarterly review for the second quarter.  I always dread the thought of doing quarterly reviews but feel really great at the end.  My experience wasn’t great because my quarter was perfect.  In fact, I had a really challenging quarter personally.  #life was life-ing in all the ways.  My experience with my review was great because it allowed me to step outside of myself and my self-critique and look at data.  I found the data in my calendar, emails, and reports.  The review was a way to put all the disparate pieces together to create a cohesive picture of all the time and energy I put into the quarter. 

I shared my review on LinkedIn and several folks thanked me for reminding them to do theirs.  Y’all, it’s not too late. Any day is a good day to look back to bring forward lessons and reflections.  Before you talk yourself out of trying, here is a list of things you can do to start your review today.  I’ve even created a handout for folks who prefer a template to guide them through the process. 

Top 10

  1. Revisit your annual work plan, vision board, or quarterly goals.  No matter how you structured your goals, annual or quarterly, you can still pause every 90 days to see how things are going. 
  2. Leaders have areas they shine in and areas in which they struggle.  It’s important to spend time reflecting on both.  You don’t want to self-congratulate yourself out of growing.  Nor do you want to criticize yourself so much that you overlook important contributions you’re making.
  3. Those who have gone before us (living and ancestors) have left footprints for us to follow.  Pausing to pay homage each quarter grounds us in our collective leadership journey.  As Black women/femmes and women-identifying folx, we don’t walk alone.  Our culture values a shared experience as inspiration to keep going during tough times.
  4. Just because you set a goal doesn’t mean the goal can’t change.  Life, organization’s, the freakin world, are changing constantly.  We have to be flexible in how we adapt our goals to our lived reality.  Rigidity doesn’t serve leaders in the 21st century. 
  5. A leader’s success isn’t only in work.  It is also in joy and pleasure.  Don’t diminish the importance of prioritizing and experiencing both.  Often.
  6. Leaders have to cultivate the soil where they’ve planted seeds otherwise they will not reap a full harvest. Leaders who don’t tend to the not-fun part of leadership will never fully see the fruit of their labor.
  7. Self-Leadership.  Surround yourself with images, words, and sounds that inspire you to keep working toward what you really want.
  8. Reach back.  As a leader, make sure you create time to invest in others.  Whether it is a direct report or a promising intern.  Prioritize regular time supporting other leaders in their growth.
  9. Tell someone.  Y’all know I believe strongly in accountability.  Let someone know about your quarterly review and find ways to support each other over the next 90 days.
  10. Need a guide? Grab my ‘Not Your Mama’s Quarterly Review‘ to guide you through the process.

Black at Work: Better Together

This month I thought I would do a short list of ways Black leaders can be better together by showing Pride year-round.  I’ve written before about my journey to unpack the biases I grew up with coming from a deeply religious Black family.  In that post, I wrote about some things I learned on my journey to be a more inclusive leader. As my world expanded, through education and travel, I began to understand the importance of difference.  Being in community with people who are different deepened my leadership.  And, I’m grateful to be in spaces that allow me to continue to learn and unlearn. 

5 Ways to be Better Together

These top tips helped me on my journey and I hope you find them useful as well.

  1. Everything doesn’t have to be a lesson.  LBGTQ folks don’t always feel safe being ‘out at work’ so drawing unnecessary attention to team members can cause harm.  Being kind is being inclusive. 
  2. Model inclusion in your leadership.  Don’t just recruit Black folks who act, think, and have the same background as you. Be intentional about recruiting diverse talent. That means your job description needs to state explicitly how you value diversity. You can clearly state things like how your benefits packages offer coverage for all types of families or highlight certain benefits that LGBTQ candidates might find attractive (i.e. access to IVF for all genders, gender-affirming hormone therapy, etc.)
  3. The best way to keep people safe is to not tokenize them.   If your team has ONE person of a different lived experience, that can be isolating and harmful.  See bullet 2 on how to start to address this.
  4. Stop checking boxes.  I know this can get tricky.  Working toward becoming an inclusive space cannot be a box-checking activity.  It has to be a mindful process that includes recruiting, retaining, and promoting staff LGBTQ staff.  Provide opportunities (many and often) for staff to give input on what would make your team/organization an inclusive place for them.  
  5. Be approachable. One way to do this is by redefining what professionalism means.  As a leader, you can take some of the pressure to perform off of your staff.  In valuing your staff’s lived experiences, you create the psychological safety needed for LGBTQ folks and those of other identities to bring their best energy and ideas to work.

I hope these are helpful to you. I love to see Black leaders grow in their understanding of Black folks who may have a different identity or life experience. We cannot get into positions of power and then perpetuate the same bias and harm. If we can remember that we are better together, we can invest in doing the work necessary to make inclusion a leadership strength.

Black LGBTQ History

Since it is Pride Month I’ll let you with a few resources for those who want to go further in their learning journey.

Marsha P. Johnson, a Black Trans Woman who was living in New York City helped spark a movement at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969.  Marsh may not have been considered a leader but that’s exactly what she was! Pride Month is an opportunity to remember what happened at Stonewall, honor leaders like Marsha and others, and continue the work left to achieve equity for LGBTQ folx.

Commit to learning more about Marsha and being inspired by her leadership.

Kelli and Martha’s Top Ten Coping Strategies

I am thrilled to share today’s post with a beloved colleague, Martha Ann Toll. Martha and I met while serving on the board of Funders Together to End Homelessness. At that time, I was Vice President of Programs & Community Engagement at the Simmons Foundation in Houston, and Martha was the Executive Director of the Butler Family Fund.

After 26 amazing years running the Butler Family Fund, a social justice philanthropy, Martha left to write full-time in 2020. I transitioned earlier this year to solely focus on my coaching and consulting. We’ve stayed in touch about our new lives. Martha has been a wonderful support to me, giving me entrepreneur tips and sending me client referrals, and I’ve been fangirling as she prepares for the launch of her first novel. I am deeply grateful for her friendship.

Last week we were chatting in our LinkedIn DMs about how to cope with the relentless onslaught of horrifying and hope-crushing news. We discussed our strategies and wanted to share our list, in case it’s helpful.

  1. KKJ: Start a text thread with BFFs and incorporate TikToks, memes, and animal videos and not just the bad news of the world.
  2. MAT: Go on a serious news diet.

  3. KKJ: Have outdoor wine meetups with my people (fellow introverts will understand the italics). 
    MAT: Eat lunch with your girlfriends as often as possible but not so often that you feel overscheduled.
  4. KKJ and MAT: Start with exercise time as a repeating calendar item vs. fitting it in each day. 
  5. KKJ: Take 30-minute random brain breaks and choose from a menu of things you like (nap, read, neurofeedback, a casual walk, etc.)
    -Exercise with what you love. [Kelli is a “Gen X Peloton nerd” and a walker; Martha swims and walks, and when she can stand it, does the elliptical.].
    -Save administrative work for outside your peak hours.
    -Try delegating.
    -Most emails and texts can wait.
  6. KKJ and MAT: Eat dessert.
  7. KKJ and MAT: Get rid of any toxic people in your life.
  8. KKJ: Be intentional about ‘dates’ to FT with grandchildren, call your mom, and have a virtual paint party with your adult daughter.
    MAT: Hug your loved ones.
  9. MAT:  Give a charitable donation, or, at the very least a compliment and some love, every time you get a rejection.
  10. KKJ: Move at the speed of grief.

(Special note: Martha wrote and published this post first on her blog, and it has been slightly edited for mine.)

CLICK TO share your top coping strategies with us!

Grounded

Are you grounded?

What does that even mean?

I visualize grounding as the moment when dirt and plants connect to create the environment needed for something to grow.

Survey Results

When I recently wrote about the distress I was seeing in my coaching clients, I didn’t know if my readers would relate. I was curious enough to send out a survey in my newsletter and LinkedIn asking folks to tell me how they were REALLY doing.

Here’s what y’all said:

two surveys that use emoji faces to vote

Only 14% of the folx who took my survey had a smiling emoji. Everyone else ranged from 😐 to 😩.

I mean, I wasn’t shocked but then again I was.

Let me speak in I statements. I can say that MY life has totally gone off the rails since then. My fatigue meter went waaaay up and my capacity to take action went way down. Add in my perimenopausal symptoms and it’s a wrap.

I’m stuck.

My clients too.

What about you?

At What Cost?

Recently I started asking ‘at what cost’ anytime a client starts talking about being over-committed/burned out/exhausted. I get curious about how they gauge their capacity as leaders.

How did you get to an eight-day work week?

What will happen if you don’t respond to emails during your vacation?

What are you willing to drop to say yes to that new committee role?

I hold the coaching space for clients to explore. No judgment. No shame. Just a lot of openness for folks to slow down their pace long enough to self-determine what they want for themselves and their leadership. I like to ask questions that are not about the client’s calendar and or strategic plan.

What do you want?

What are you willing to let go to have it?

If having it all is not an option, what will you choose to pursue?

These are not thinking only questions. They are feeling, touching, and listening to questions, too.

Right now many of us are in cerebral land. Thoughts swirling around. Replaying conversations. Retraumaziting ourselves as we think about all the things that can and have gone wrong.

Turning off the loop is possible.

Isn’t it?

What if we collectively commit to stop the spinning and get grounded again?

Ways to Get Started

Here are some things I’ll be doing over the next 30 days. (Maybe something on this list will call you to it. 🤔)

  • Daily walks on my Peloton.
  • Drink more water.
  • Realign my calendar to my goals.
  • Re-engage with tools in my toolkit (Therapy, Tapping, Music, etc.).
  • Time outdoors (alone and with humans).

Full disclosure: Nothing on this list is new to me. I know that doing the things on this list will help me. Unfortunately, when in distress, rooting down to be present with and for MYSELF is the last thing on my mind. Instead, I flail around fighting, fleeing, and forgetting that I already have the resources I need to realign. Our human nature is strange that way. That’s why collective actions work. They create the energy needed for transformation to occur.

We can do this together, y’all. We certainly can’t do it alone.

Join me.

Share 1 or 2 commitments you will make to help get yourself grounded again.