Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Building Diverse Leadership

Primary metrics:

If you haven’t already read the Practitioner Guide: Introduction - Things to Think about When Interpreting Metrics, please pause now and read that guide.

Open source communities and projects thrive with diverse leadership. However, they often struggle with a lack of diversity in leadership, which can result in less innovative, inclusive, and sustainable projects (McKinsey & Company. 2020). Without diverse leadership, underrepresented groups may face challenges in participating in and contributing to projects, losing valuable talent and ideas. Diverse leadership is needed to solve this issue.

A community or project with diverse leadership offers significant advantages because diverse leadership leverages diverse perspectives to build an innovative community, create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and empower individuals from all backgrounds to contribute their unique talents. New and existing contributors feel more included when they can see other people in leadership positions who are like them (Linux Foundation, 2021).

When diverse leaders collaborate, their intersection sparks innovation and creates a more harmonious global leadership system. It represents a global and diverse user base, which improves the usability of the project because more users' voices are represented in decision-making about the project's design and functionality. It enhances decision-making processes by incorporating various viewpoints and experiences, leading to better problem-solving and more effective strategies. It promotes a culture of inclusion and respect, improving morale and engagement among community members and ultimately contributing to projects' long-term success and sustainability.

Step 1: Identify Trends

You can determine whether your project’s roles are designed with inclusive leadership in mind, in addition to assessing the level of diversity of the people in the top leadership positions, by looking at Board/Council Diversity. You should also look at how people in leadership use their position to advocate for and bring up the next generation of leaders through personalized sponsorship opportunities.

Board/Council Diversity:

Board/council diversity looks at the composition of inclusive leaders in a community or project over time. Analyzing the racial diversity, geographical reach, and other diverse factors to understand the breadth of diversity that will help a community understand and address any barriers to diversity and inclusion. The board's composition demonstrates the diversity achieved in the community's top leadership. It helps people from underrepresented groups see that they could become leaders within the community when there are people like them already in leadership roles. Additionally, a more diverse team of decision-makers that represent a wide variety of voices from a global user base will make more suitable long-term decisions for the project.

Sponsorship:

In this case, sponsorship does not refer to financial contributions. The sponsorship here considers the community members who receive support, where a sponsor within or outside the community uses their reputation to create opportunities for sponsored people to advance.

Sponsorship is the active process by which those in leadership advocate for and bring up the next row of leaders, providing them with personalized growth opportunities. This action by current leaders to actively support and promote the next generation of leaders should be visible and measured over time to track the impact on a community. In any community with active sponsorship, members feel valued, and the rate of contributor retention is high. It also brings about growth and sustainability.

Sponsorship ensures newer or less active members gain visibility and opportunities, strengthens community bonds, and reduces turnover. Sponsored people are 90 percent less likely to perceive bias in a community (Donnelly, 2017). Sponsorship also promotes diverse voices, creating a more inclusive and equitable community culture.

Inclusive Leadership:

Inclusive leadership establishes the necessary governance and procedures to promote an environment where diverse individuals can thrive, take on leadership roles, and be able to hand these roles to someone else after a certain period. It's about creating the pathway for leadership opportunities in a community or project. For example, when a board member leaves a leadership position in a working group or a project and hands that responsibility to another contributor, this opportunity will empower this individual to take charge of the role, lead, and learn to handle a higher position in the future. Also, you can identify any barriers that may prevent underrepresented groups from advancing.

Step 2: Diagnosis

When considering diverse leadership, it can be difficult to track and gather specific data due to privacy concerns and the difficulty in storing personally identifiable data. Rather than trying to gather data directly from the people in your community to determine leadership diversity, this might be better diagnosed via a community perception survey to ask the broader community how they feel about the diversity of leadership within the project.

Here are a few sample questions that you might use in a community perception survey:

Board/council diversity:

  • Likert scale [1-x] item: I feel represented by the board or council.
  • Likert scale [1-x] item: The board or council represents the diversity of the project community.
  • Likert scale [1-x] item: The board or council considers diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Sponsorship:

  • Likert scale [1-x] item: I am sponsoring other members.
  • Likert scale [1-x] item: I have a sponsor within the community who puts their reputation on the line to advocate for me.
  • Likert scale [1-x] item: The outcome of my sponsorship is immensely rewarding.

Inclusive Leadership:

  • Likert scale [1-x] item: I understand the process for moving into a leadership role.
  • Likert scale [1-x] item: The project values and recognizes different types of experts equally (e.g., technical and non-technical)
  • Likert scale [1-x] item: Do the project’s leaders agree to a standard by which they can be held accountable?

The web pages linked above for each of these metrics contain additional survey questions and will likely give you ideas for other questions that would be appropriate to better understand these topics within your community.

You should also ask some open-ended questions where people can provide suggestions for how to improve your leadership diversity. This practitioner guide is intended to get you started; feel free to implement the practices described in your context.

Step 3: Gather Additional Data if Needed

CHAOSS has other metrics related to diversity that can help diagnose specific problems within your community.

Additional Metrics:

Step 4: Make Improvements

Enhancing diverse leadership within a community or project involves taking concrete actions, monitoring progress, and making adjustments as needed to ensure continuous improvement. Metrics about diversity and inclusion also provide accountability for both leaders and the broader community. Accountability helps leaders prioritize inclusivity, which might lead to increased interest in leadership roles in a community or project.

You can start by creating and communicating clear pathways for contributors to grow into leadership roles, which may include creating sponsorship opportunities and transparent criteria for leadership positions. Also, establish mechanisms to hold leaders accountable for promoting inclusive leadership by asking questions like, “Are they actively promoting diverse perspectives and equal values?” Then, identify any gaps in accountability and areas where leaders can improve their inclusivity practices using regular evaluations, feedback from community members, etc. Next, encourage leaders to actively promote diverse perspectives and equal values by hosting diversity and inclusion workshops, creating safe spaces for open discussions, or celebrating diverse contributions. You can also implement programs that encourage diverse representation in leadership training and promote diverse perspectives.

For all leadership positions, from leading various groups to top leadership (e.g., boards, councils, steering committees), focus on actively selecting diverse candidates and creating clear pathways for underrepresented members to reach leadership roles. Additionally, if the candidate pool is not diverse, then maybe a community needs to put in additional effort to invite candidates that represent demographics not already present. Inviting people is important! But also, so is the nuance in the invitation. When communicating, the best way to prevent a contributor from feeling tokenized is to ensure the invitation is based solely on a person’s work or skill set and not on their demographic characteristics. Regularly monitor and evaluate the diversity of all leadership roles by collecting and analyzing survey data and reporting progress to the community.

Increase the availability and visibility of sponsorships within the community to identify potential sponsors, create formal sponsorship initiatives, and promote the benefits of sponsorship to community members. You can develop sponsorship programs that pair experienced members with newer contributors from diverse backgrounds. Create opportunities for sponsored individuals to showcase their strengths, contribute to project development, and grow into leadership roles over time. Acknowledge and reward sponsors for their contributions to the community in public recognition or through awards and incentives for those actively supporting diverse voices. Work to reduce perceptions of bias within the community via regular surveys to assess community members' experiences, addressing any reported issues, and promoting a culture of fairness and inclusion.

Implementing these improvements above will help the community or project create a more diverse leadership structure. It will not only enhance innovation and decision-making but also create a more welcoming and supportive environment for all contributors. Like with many aspects of open source projects and communities, there is no one way to improve the diversity and inclusivity of your leadership, so you should implement these suggestions in ways that work best for your project and community.

Step 5: Monitor Results

In this step, we focus on tracking the progress and effectiveness of the improvements implemented in Step 4. Monitoring results helps us understand the impact of our actions and identify areas for further enhancement. These are a few ways you could access and monitor your results.

  • You can conduct regular assessments to evaluate the effectiveness of pathways to leadership. To do this, you can use surveys, feedback sessions, and performance reviews to gather insights from contributors and leaders.
  • Monitor diversity metrics related to leadership roles and analyze the trends over time.
  • Establish feedback mechanisms to gather input from community members about the inclusivity of leadership practices. You could use anonymous surveys or open forums for discussion.
  • Continuously tracking and analysing demographic data of leadership, including boards and council members, will help you identify any changes in diversity and assess the effectiveness of selection and retention strategies.
  • Provide regular reports to the community on the progress of diversity and inclusion efforts to promote transparency and accountability and encourage ongoing engagement from community members.
  • Again, track sponsorships and their outcomes by monitoring the number of sponsored individuals, their progress, and the impact of sponsorship on their advancement.

Monitoring results can ensure that your efforts to enhance diverse leadership are effective and sustainable. You can also decide on other ways to monitor your results.

Cautions and Considerations

As you monitor the results of your efforts to enhance diverse leadership, it's important to consider key aspects to ensure your approach is effective, respectful, and sustainable. The data you collect will provide valuable insight, but interpreting and acting upon it requires careful thought.

  1. While making improvements and monitoring results, remember that open source communities are often global and encompass diverse people and backgrounds, so avoid imposing a one-size-fits-all approach and be open to adapting strategies to fit the unique needs and values of different groups within your community. Ensure your practices are inclusive, making all members feel heard and valued, regardless of their background or identity.
  2. Evaluate the impact of sponsorship on the health and sustainability of your project and community.
  3. Be open to feedback from community members regarding your diversity and inclusion efforts.
  4. Cultivate a culture of trust and collaboration where all members feel safe and supported in expressing their perspectives.
  5. Finally, when working with data about people, especially those from underrepresented groups, prioritize privacy and ethical considerations. When using data about people, especially those from underrepresented groups, it is important to be mindful of how the data is collected, stored, used, and shared (Casari et al. 2023). Privacy and ethical concerns should be carefully considered. The CHAOSS project has a Data Use Awareness Recommendations: Privacy and Ethics document that can serve as an example of these concerns.

Additional Reading

Contributors

The following people contributed to this guide:

  • Peculiar C. Umeh
  • Dawn Foster
  • Georg Link

References