{"id":782,"date":"2015-09-03T09:00:10","date_gmt":"2015-09-03T13:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/annelitwin.com\/?p=782"},"modified":"2015-09-03T09:00:10","modified_gmt":"2015-09-03T13:00:10","slug":"joint-projects-between-affinity-groups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/blog-posts\/joint-projects-between-affinity-groups\/","title":{"rendered":"Joint Projects between Affinity Groups"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<![CDATA[One\u00a0way to move toward understanding our differences as women\u00a0is to engage in joint projects between affinity groups in the organization.\n&nbsp;\nSometimes affinity groups formally exist in organizations, such as one for\u00a0women managers, one for African Americans, one for Asian Americans,\u00a0one for Latinos, one for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender)\u00a0employees, and others. However, these groups may not see the other\u00a0groups as having the same interests or goals. It can be helpful if affinity\u00a0groups can define joint projects, even if their scopes are small, to open\u00a0the possibility of building trust and taking on larger projects later.\nIn one of my client groups, a group of senior-level women decided\u00a0to try to get the women in the organization together by organizing a\u00a0women\u2019s leadership forum as a one-day annual event where fun and\u00a0leadership development opportunities would be shared and trust could\u00a0be built. Not unusually, most of the women of color in this organization\u00a0worked in support roles, and many women in technical positions worked\u00a0in the field as the only woman on their teams. Not surprisingly, the first\u00a0year of the forum, only a small number of women, predominantly white\u00a0professionals, accepted the invitation to the event. The support women\u00a0didn\u2019t feel the event was for them, even though everyone was invited.\u00a0Some technical women reported that they would not attend because\u00a0they felt they would be disloyal to their male colleagues if they attended.\u00a0Others felt their male managers would penalize them if they attended\u00a0and decided not to go. But the original organizers kept their focus on\u00a0getting the women of the company more connected, and each year the\u00a0attendance grew.\nThe women of color went from one table of women sitting in the\u00a0corner and not participating in the experiential activities at the first\u00a0annual event to a much larger group of women mixing and mingling\u00a0with others by the fourth year. By the fourth year, about two-thirds of\u00a0the women in the company attended the forum. It may seem that a one-day\u00a0event held once a year would be too insignificant to have an impact,\u00a0but the environment did begin to change as a mentoring program was\u00a0spontaneously and informally launched by some of the more senior\u00a0women for junior women and some of the isolated technical women\u00a0in the field began to meet periodically and offer each other support.\u00a0Within four years, more women of color began showing up in the ranks\u00a0of the technical and professional women. To be sure, pressure on the\u00a0organizational culture to change came from sources other than this\u00a0one-day event. Small groups of more senior technical and professional\u00a0women were involved in an intensive one-year women\u2019s leadership\u00a0training program during this same period, which greatly enhanced their\u00a0ability to support other women.\n&nbsp;\nAn excerpt from my book,\u00a0<em>New Rules for Women<\/em>, available at Amazon (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0982056982\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0982056982\/<\/a>).]]>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<![CDATA[]]>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[14,116,131,188,207,221,225,286,344,418,471,480,529,567,611,634],"class_list":["post-782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts","category-excerpt","tag-affinity-groups","tag-competition","tag-culture","tag-ethnicity","tag-feminine-values","tag-friendship","tag-gender","tag-identity","tag-lgbt","tag-new-rules","tag-projects","tag-race","tag-sexuality","tag-teamwork","tag-woman-of-color","tag-workplace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}