Rachel Parrott: Less talk more action
Rachel Parrott, Diversity and Inclusion Manager at New Relic shares actionable programs any organization can take to create a more inclusive and equitable workplace. Join us in learning the difference between an ally and an accomplice, finding career growth through employee resource groups, the neuroscience of why we should treat each other well, and many other tips.
Transcript
Introduction: Welcome to Breaking The Glass Ceiling, a PDXWIT podcast. I'm Megan Bigelow, the founder of PDXWIT. We interview people to dig below the surface of their achievements and challenges, showcasing the story behind the story. We believe that focusing on the person and humanizing their lived experiences will help us shape the future of tech.
Dawn: Hey again listeners, Dawn here! We wanted to take this moment to thank you for tuning in to the PDXWIT podcast. We are so grateful for all of the amazing guests who share their time and real life journeys with us this past season. Thanks as well for the guests who we had to delay due to the pandemic. We are taking a break here for the next few months over the summer and we look forward to returning to the studio in the fall to bring you more inspiring stories. We’ll continue to check our email, podcast@pdxwit.org so please reach out with feedback or topic and guest suggestions for next season. For myself, Kimberly, Max, and the rest of the team, be safe, stay well, and we look forward to catching you again.
Kimberly: Well hello and welcome back everybody! This is Kimberly Embry here.
Dawn: Dawn Mott here, she/her
Kimberly: She/her as well for me. We have got Rachel Parrot here in the studio today.
Dawn: Woo!
Kimberly: Yeah, we were super excited to talk to her and she had a lot of good messaging that I think is going to resonate with a lot of folks as individuals, but also actual items that companies can take.
Dawn: In terms of DE&I and other initiatives as well.
Kimberly: Yeah, so take a listen in.
Dawn: So do you want to tell us where you work?
Rachel: Yes [laughs] I would love to! I’m a Program Manager of diversity, equity and inclusion at New Relic.
Dawn: Woot woot!
Rachel: It’s a pretty cool place.
Kimberly: Yeah.
Rachel: I just hit four years,
Dawn and Kimberly: Congratulations!
Kimberly: Happy Ani!
Rachel: Happy Ani, I know!
Kimberly: [laughs] So you’re at New Relic, you’ve been there for four years.
Rachel: Mhm.
Kimberly: So you’re at New Relic, you’ve been there for four years so how did you get into your role or how did you get into tech in general?
Rachel: Yeah I got into tech in kind of a strange way and I actually used to be a huge Timbers fan and...
Kimberly and Dawn: Timbers!!
Rachel: Yeah, I guess I am still a huge timbers fan, but I had season tickets for a long time which is Portland soccer in case you don’t know which you should know who the timbers are.
Kimberly: [laughs] now you know.
Rachel: yeah now you know! Yeah, so I had season tickets and I used to sit by someone who was a VP at a startup..a VP of marketing at a startup in Portland and he and I became pretty good friends from sitting around each other every week so anyway I asked my friend you know I have a legal background you work at a legal startup what can we do here? [laughs] and they were hiring for their first Customer Success Manager which I will tell you in 2014 did not sound like anything real. I was like, that is a fake thing [laughs].
Kimberly: Customers successful? [laughs]
Rachel: That is a buzzword and buzzword..manager.
All: [laugh]
Rachel: But I said okay, I'll do it. I got hired there and just kind of did everything. It was really small when I started. Really fun, but it was definitely a different world, like it’s a whole new world of fruit snacks and show up whenever you want, you can work from home. And this whole new world, but I kind of did everything there. I helped with technical support so I was the person if you called this company, I would answer the phone..”thanks for calling, how can I help you?” I went on clients sites, I went to visit customers all over the country. I trained customers on the software. Getting into tech, moving into New Relic was my first introduction into the power of networking and not in the standard way that people say, you must go to meetups and eat awkward pizza and shake hands with recruiters that may or may not remember you. So I’m kind of an introvert.
Dawn: But like through real connections.
Rachel: Real connections is what I prefer over - and I have no problem with meetups - it’s just not a way that I’m comfortable meeting people. I’m very comfortable getting to know people and weaseling my way into their heart. And then making them hire me [laughs]
Dawn and Kimberly: [laugh]
Rachel: But no it’s about those conversations and it’s a lot about the relationships you make, not at work. The relationships you make with people you don’t work with everyday. That’s been kind of a core thing for me is you never know how you can help someone or how they can help you. And It’s not self serving, that sounds a little self serving. You never know what you can offer to someone. Be that advice, be that a job, be that mentorship. And you’ll never know unless you have those conversations. I always try to make sure that I'm the best version of myself; be compassionate, eager to learn version to people.
Dawn: And it’s worked.
Rachel: Yeah, surprisingly.
Kimberly: Heck yes it’s worked.
Rachel: Yeah and that’s like, so at some point I became a mentor. And I'll go back to my New Relic story, but at some point someone said, “You’re a really good mentor to me” and it occurred to me, I didn’t realize that I had enough experience that people actually cared what I had to say [laughs]. But again, you never know what situations socially or at a sporting event or a colleague you had a company or two companies ago might have seen something in you and or they think that person is somebody I want to re-touch base with and see if they're interested. So how you show up kind of matters in life.
Dawn: Mhm, for sure. Absolutely.
Rachel: But also it helps to give hope, I work with one of or company resource groups at New Relic is for mental health and neurodiversity and that’s always a big sticking point when I’m with that group and with that leadership team of that employee resource group is that there are some access paths to tech that don’t benefit people who have different brains that get intimidated in front of a lot of people who have anxiety around interviews like that can make or break your chances of getting in somewhere. And not everyone likes to go to meetups and do the shaking hands and being in like. I've been at meetups at Relic and just been like nope just like pop out the room like I gotta go! There are too many people in this room! And there is not enough free booze like it just yeah it's so not everyone is built for like those kinds of situations and that group we talked about actually like about ways to make meetups more accessible even like New Relic meetups because we recognize that were a large tech company in the area people want to work there but who are we missing when that's the way that you have to come in as either feel like a cold applying on what website or doing meet-ups like that. We started to think of different ways to network that were less intense like meetups that were capped at a certain amount, meetups that didn’t have alcohol. Anyway that was a tangent [laughs]
Dawn: No that’s very interesting.
Kimberly: Mhm...that’s super cool.
Rachel: I’ve talked about this with sourcers and recruiters at at my company too which is just that yeah there's a lot of ways that your access to tech can get cut off if you're not the typical person they're looking for
Kimberly: Yeah….And so in your role, you're already likes thinking about not, to me like I haven't heard people think about even just getting people involved or like having the conversation so I find that super interesting because I haven't heard that quite yet until so tell us more about like other things that you do like in your role
Rachel: A lot of my career - and this I hope helps people, a lot of my career has just been trying random things and seeing what works and New Relic has been a really great place for that. They leave a lot of space for you to just try things and so I said I’m going to create an allyship program. Cool. I don't know what this means but I’m gonna do it. I ended up doing a - just starting with just creating a slack channel, like okay we have an allyship slack channel cool. And just dumped all the people interested in allyship in there just funneled them in and then you know created a Jive space and we started to work on like what is this for, why do we have this channel, why do we have any allyship program. What does being an ally even mean? Which I think at the point I think even I was a little fuzzy on what it was that I would ask an ally to do?
Kimberly: Mhm.
Rachel: Would I ask an ally to... What is the purpose of an ally? I’m making this program, but what does this even mean? And I say this…
Dawn: what does it mean to you...yeah
Rachel: Yeah, and I say this because everyone is on their own journey. And so I do this for a living now, but four years ago probably couldn't have solidly given you an answer for what an ally was. Well, it takes a lot of work and learning. And so for me, I've moved a little bit away from the concept of allyship into like accomplice, because allies can – there's a lot of allies out there and it's complicated, it's complicated to be an ally. And anyone can be an ally to someone else, if you have the power there. So we all have lots of intersecting identities.
So like one way that I can be an ally even though I'm an underrepresented woman of color in tech – is I have a lot of political capital being at a company for that long, you accrue capital, you accrue political capital you have through relationships with people who are higher up so when I hear things like I utilize that privilege to go talk to people who are SVPs and GVPs and C-levels about these issues, and so on to me and ally really finds the space that they can slot in and help, and then they don't back out of helping. And so, we an ally skills 101 and 201 training at New Relic and the second one really talks about like, let's be less reactive because you can be an ally in the moment someone says something problematic you can say hey that's not cool or don't do that here or hey that's makes me really uncomfortable. Or you can start doing the things so that's reactive, or you can start doing the things that create really deep cultural structural changes. And that's, that's our ally skills 201 program. And that's really focused on “okay I as an underrepresented person can't decide tomorrow that I don't feel like being underrepresented today. I don't feel like being brown and a tiny woman. I think I'm gonna be a giant white man.”
And so, I apply the same concept to allies like if I can't take off my identity and you want to be an ally, I'm going to be an ally all the time, like you can’t step back from that. And when I ask people to move into being accomplices. It's like okay now you're such an ally and you're willing to go down with me in this fight, and not step back when it gets too hard for you. And so, but this is all things and like this is what I tell people about this work, and when I teach ally skills 101 and 201 at New Relic is this stuff changes constantly and you have to stay on the ball, about what this stuff means and you also have to like continue to experience that personal growth.
So you can move through the phases of being like, you know, unconsciously incompetent of certain things to, okay I'm consciously incompetent and like working your way through becoming consciously competent, all the time. That's like, active learning, that's actively following leaders on LinkedIn and Twitter, and it's a lot of work, and that's the thing that I don't know that sometimes leadership at companies or people who are like I want to be an ally, like they don't realize that it takes a lot of work, you have to stay current.
Kimberly: Yeah..they don’t live the life.
Rachel: Yeah, you can't, you know you don't get your badge and a cookie. Yeah, you have to continue to do that work. Sort of at the end of last year so in December as we're heading into – so we have planning offsites for all of our employee resource groups where we gather in some city. Some, some office hub in the United States, and we fly everyone in the Leadership Committee there. And so, those started happening in January so I've gone to Relics of color and New Relics which is our neuro diversity and mental health ERG and women of New Relic next month. But I started to realize that everyone who had been a leader of our employee resource groups for longer than two years had seen exponential career growth.
Dawn and Kimberly: Huh!
Rachel: And so I started a talk to people and they're like yeah this gave me skills in talking to people from other like cross functionally so it wasn’t as scary as much to talk to someone in the product org because I could get an intro from someone who is in the ERG, or when I was thinking of moving for tech support to software engineering, I already knew software engineers because they were in the ERG. I talked to them or they could intro me to someone else. And it really became our mission really aligned a lot in the last couple months of 2018 of, ”oh shit, like I know what ERGs are supposed to do.” They're supposed to get more underrepresented people in leadership, and provide a network for those people to tackle while doing it. So developing different skills so they can get their jobs like exactly why I joined the ERG.
I wanted different skills if I wanted to learn different stuff and I was learning in my day to day job. It wasn't interfacing with anyone except for my direct team. And by joining an ERG all of a sudden I was interacting with people all over the world, from all over different teams and so when I needed something from sales I could just say, hey, so and so, in my ERG, can you help me figure out who owns this. And it, just made, like, it helped a lot with the imposter syndrome I was feeling and it helped a lot with feeling overwhelmed at a big company. And I realized, that's what I wanted employee resource groups to be as a place that really developed the leaders, gave them chances to talk with our C suite, gave them chances to present on their work.
Kimberly: Mm hmm.
Rachel: Gave them a lot of opportunities outside of their jobs, and so like some of the growth we've seen is we had someone move from a technical support engineer he's now a engineering manager and that’s one of the chairs of our rainbow relics. Chair of relics of color moved from an individual contributor software engineer to lead software engineer. And these are all - our talent acquisition coordinator moved to program manager of corporate social responsibility. So I'm watching how these people develop their careers and I’m like maybe there's something to this. And that's when it kind of just clicked for me, I actually had a one on one with my manager yesterday where I was like, “nevermind, I love running the ERGs never take them from me”. [laughs] Because all of a sudden, I started to see the ways we underutilized these communities in tech and in different companies, and if we really invest money, time, development on like some stuff it's like, it's getting people in to help them with their career development getting people into help with, How do I manage my finances, sending people to different conferences, we sent every black employee at New Relic to Afrotech.
Dawn: Oh that’s amazing.
Rachel: Because yeah because it's the access to leaders who look like them.
Kimberly: Yeah.
Rachel: Because if we can't provide that because we're, you know we're not free of the same burdens.
Dawn: That’s great advice!
Rachel: yeah give access to your employees and so we have 93% of black Relics stayed because and they named that as one of the reasons, like it really does increase retention so when we're looking at things like retaining underrepresented employees.
Dawn and Kimberly: Mhm.
Rachel: You can look at that at a macro level from like the company level or you can look at what are things that we can do that show underrepresented employees that that they deserve access to conferences that are for them to have access to keynotes and leaders who are like them so we sent a group of people to lesbians who tech, I spoke at lesbians who tech last year. We've sent people to Grace Hopper, we sent people to LatinX fest. To show, like you should have exposure to leaders who look like you. And if we can provide that right now because again, we're not free from the burdens that all tech companies have, which we have a very largely white C suite and leadership team that we should be investing in opportunities for you to see people who look like you prosper.
Kimberly: Yeah. That’s amazing!
Dawn: Thank you so much. I think that is great advice, very actionable, that when I hear, there's a problem with the pipeline, or, you know, we can't really do anything about that right now it's like actually you can you can send people to places where they can see themselves reflected in leadership, that is a wonderful point.
Rachel: We also get to go talk to people and say like, “Hey, all of our black relics came to this like we're a place that at least, we might not be perfect in some ways, you will have just like a badass group of people who will have your back, no matter what”. And like that's the biggest thing like [laughs] we have a channel called ‘relics of color emergency room’, which is a play on our Slack channel for actual service interruptions, and it's for like if someone says something racist or we’re on the street and something happens, we have this room where like, people post in only if something terrible has happened and then everyone just floods them with support, and it's just all bad stuff, like, hey you know someone misgendered me today, or someone made a racist.. like an offhand racist comment in a meeting and I'm so upset right now. And like people will hop in the room and be like do a walk, do you need a coffee, do you need a talk. What do you need and you know it's like, that's what keeps me engaged at work. And I really like that, my husband who helps run an ERG, I will tell you that I probably just married him so that I could have an ERG leader. He helps run our neuro diverse and mental health ERG, and he also got pitched for a promotion this cycle and now he credits a lot of the work he's done with his ERG for having candid conversations with people on his team that he used to have issues connecting with, and that he's so much more passionate about early career engineers at work, and making sure that people who he also has really pronounced ADHD, I would not suggest to the audience if you have really bad ADHD, marrying someone else with also really bad ADHD. We make it work but, like, through the use of a shared calendar and obsessively used shared calendar we somehow saved our marriage.
Dawn: I thought if we asked you about your life hack, maybe you could say a shared calendar.
Kimberly: A shared calendar!
All: [laugh]
Rachel: We routinely forget to put things on there, but we try really hard. But no, I've watched him become more engaged at work, you know it's someone I live with so I can tell when someone's like going through some growth going through some stuff and, yeah, his just wanting to mentor people his wanting to show up for people his understanding of intersectionality. His big goal for New Relic, is that, hey if this is an accessible thing that it’s a little more accessible to talk about mental health. We can then get people to understand that, like, okay, when you feel like people don’t have your back, or you’re having challenges or people are not treating you fairly because you have something that makes you a neuro-divergent or you have a mental health thing. And let's try to apply this to other people, how do you think they feel when people don't take them seriously.
When people, you know, pass judgment on one part of their identity, and so it's been really cool to watch the different leaders grow and just become more engaged at work and also the members, Relics of Color this year is going to move towards what we call a Business Resource Group, so hopefully it'll have a different source of funding, and more of a group that leadership can consult when they have questions about policies, how does this impact our employees of color. Who does this benefit, who does this burden because we're working on moving them - leveling them up another level. And this is something that I just like made up. I was just like, okay, we should have enfinity groups, and when they get more funding they should be ERGs. And when they're ready to actually become a business unit and they have developed into like a solid leadership team, they should become a Business Resource Group, because words matter because what you call things matters, what you title things matters, I think people forget that. And so, putting business in there, having people instead of being chairs they'll be VPs of the Business Resource Group. It levels them up.
Dawn: Yeah.
Rachel: Title wise too.
Dawn: And it's like you've been able to actually fulfill diversity, equity and inclusion,
Rachel: Yes!
Dawn: By yes having the people there like in this company, including them and making sure that they have a community and feel supported has obviously benefited retention, has benefited their career growth, all those things I think that is very powerful and testament to how powerful it is for someone to, to feel included, and to feel heard and to feel seen and what that does for them. And now having Business Resource Groups. It's equitable.
Dawn: It's super impressive!
Rachel: We got there.
Dawn: It really really is!
Rachel: It's very hard for me to own my accomplishments, because I'm a woman in tech. I’m still struggling with imposter syndrome, but it's been in the last couple months I'm like I'm doing the real work, and impacting my communities of people I'm doing real work through TechTown. I sit on the steering committee of TechTown Portland, doing real work with the communities at work, and it just feels really cool, but it also feels like I made this happen with a lot of this was just self driven because it's just, I made it happen with the support of a very good manager who was like “yes please take the space to to try some of these strategies out”.
So when you brought up belonging, the talk I gave at lesbians who tech and I've also given this at our product off-site is the neuroscience behind inclusion because there's a great deal of science behind why we should treat each other well. And so during the course of this talk, I kind of talked through amygdala hijacks I talked about the impact of like trauma and things that will throw you into fight or flight at work and effects on the brain that has, and so really what the point of saying when we include differing voices, we don't just invite people into the company but we make sure that they're comfortable here and we live up to the promise we're making to them. Everything works better. So, in the course of this talk, I kind of go through things that might cause an amygdala hijack at work: microaggressions, team changes, desk moves, all kinds of things. Cause amygdala hijacks and what an amygdala hijack is for folks who might not know is just when your brain works in a certain order you receive sensory input its processed through your prefrontal cortex, you have a reaction but when you have an amygdala hijack – your brain, the part of your brain that you know controls those balanced responses. It never activates.
Kimberly: Yeah
Rachel: So I did a lot of studies on MRIs and how to actually kind of bring that amygdala hijack down. But when I told the company and what I spoke about at lesbians who tech is when people are in amygdala hijacks, they lose 10 to 15, they lose the equivalent of 10 to 15 IQ points.
Dawn: Oh I believe that.
Rachel: Yeah, so it's like, oh I'm so mad I can't think straight. I actually think your brain is doing you literally can't think straight. And so what I was telling leaders what I was telling the company is if we allow these amygdala hijacks to happen, particularly to underrepresented people, particularly folks who are black and brown, who already have the trauma of racism. We're not doing ourselves any favors because we now have someone we hired who is not working at the highest level they could because they're fighting this amygdala hijack. And with that, you know, there's firmer studies that emotions are contagious so when you're working in this dynamic of I came to work hijacked. And now I'm on a team around other people and my mood is hijacking them. All of us are operating at less than ideal cognitively. And so if you can't believe in inclusion for the niceness factor or the fact that it's the right thing to do, like, believe in it because your teams will work better because you will produce better work. Yeah. And, and, really, in the end, that's what we're here to do like we're at work.
Kimberly: Oh yeah, absolutely. So yeah, like there's a big thing about, you know, the pipeline, the pipeline, and it's like your pipeline just has a big ol leak.[laughs] Like you did your diversity page, your diversity page online promises people a diverse workplace that you didn't live up to. And I feel like, you know that does end up happening a lot. And I appreciate you sharing all of the different processes that you've put in place or all the different ideas that you've been able to implement at New Relic because I feel like a lot of folks struggle with “well, we know what the issue is, but how do we, like fix it”. What can we do? I feel like this episode will give folks an idea or ideas that are actionable, that they can do in their own, you know, companies and really impact, not just the company itself and benefit them but like the individual lives of people, and that's super powerful. Thank you very, very much.
Dawn: Is there anything else that you would like to share with us. 2020 goals, we covered a lot. Yeah, we should give you the opportunity to close out.
Rachel: Oh yeah. What time...did we just talk the whole time?
Kimberly: Probably like 5 or 6 at night.
Rachel: There’s probably something. I’m going to use this time. What am I going to use it for?
Dawn: Time to find your soapbox
Rachel: Yeah we talked about this a little bit on the phone and it's been something that's really been on my mind because I like to try to think about things from different perspectives, and one that's been on my mind is just kind of what it's like to be a D&I professional, a lot of people hit me up on like LinkedIn hey can we talk, and if you're listening to this and you'd like to hit me up on LinkedIn, you should I love talking about this stuff, you just have to like give me a donut to come talk to you about whatever you want.
Kimberly: there'll be a link to your LinkedIn.
Rachel: I’ve talked with many many companies in the Portland area to start D&I programs and to roll out ERGs and it's really fun for me to. Especially companies that are really bought in at the beginning. And so that's kind of what I want to talk about a little bit is companies that aren't bought in, and like how hard it can be for D&I folks, and then just how hard it can be if your leaders don't believe in what you're doing or they believe in what you're doing in words but not in actions so I think if there are leaders of companies. Just giving people the space, giving people, you know, our employee resource groups got off the ground by just being able to use our public space to have talks to bring people in, things that were super cheap, or just give us 100 bucks to order some pizzas so people come to the first event, which is something New Relic did, and just like leaders have to make space for this stuff to happen, managers have to make space for this stuff to happen. And just for people to remember this work is really hard. It's really hard and really rewarding.
Kimberly: Yeah.
Rachel: But I understand why there's such a high level of burnout in it too, so like there's a really low retention rate for D&I professionals I think right now it's three years is usually what people make it to. And it's not usually because of anything we did. And so sometimes you read those articles where it's like, kind of laughing at D&I people and laughing at companies for having D&I, and there's sort of like the failure point is almost never the D&I practitioner. It’s almost never a D&I professional. We get brought into companies, and I've seen this happen, I'm not specifically talking about New Relic, just I've seen this happen to so many of my peers, you get brought into companies or promoted within, you're typically a person of color. Typically a woman of color, and you have all these amazing ideas for equity, but you're never given the power to do it. Yeah, it's just it's you know it's just a PR move to have a head of D&I
Kimberly: Hey we have this.
Rachel: Yeah and so it's just for leaders to actually consider these people leaders, I think some
of the things I love about New Relic is that when I speak to leaders, they listen to me. Like when I when they consider me an expert in this, the same way they would consider a chief architect, an expert in software architecture. And that feels really good, because I think there's still a stigma in tech, I know there's still a stigma in tech, non traditional versus traditional, technical versus non technical and that really does become a leveling system, it becomes gosh I can’t think of the word. It becomes like a ranking system, well you're a software engineer, you're a technical program manager or you're a specialist, you're in people-ops like we do this, where we elevate folks with technical skills, and somehow have decided that that's more important, or impressive and worth more money. And that bothers me because you can't scale technology without scaling people. Who’s building your software? What's the most expensive cost you have? The most expensive cost is paying the salaries of the people you employ.
Kimberly: Yeah.
Rachel: Wouldn't you want to invest, the most money in keeping that. Wouldn’t you want to invest the most time and money, and effort in the thing that you're putting a great deal of, you know your yearly cost to and that's something I see a lot of companies not doing like it's really important. Like, technology and how we're going to get rid of technical debt and how we're going to leave the market, you hear a lot of the stuff in software and my answer is like how are we going to lead the market in people, how are we going to bring the best and the brightest here, so they want to work on their cool things. Like what sets us apart. What makes people not leave. And so, it's just really important to me is, just remember as leaders if there are leaders listening, or people who want to be leaders and so that you have to invest in both together.
Kimberly: Yeah.
Rachel: It’s not going to serve you super well to invest in engineering teams, if you're not investing in their team health which is something that New Relic does every year. Everyone has a software health and a team health meeting with their team. And, yeah, so my closing is just if you're gonna put people in these roles, let them have power and influence and let them do what you hired them to do. Let them report to a decision maker who has their back who supports them and that's that's one thing New Relic has done really really well it's just again for providing that space. I've had the best managers of my life at that company.
Dawn: Yeah. That’s great to hear. Thank you so much.
Kimberly: Thank you so much. Oh that was cute.
Rachel: That was adorable.
All: [laugh]
Rachel: Thank you for having me and letting me just wander through some of this. This is so fulfilling to see this work become regarded as real. because for a long time it was like D&I who does that. [laughs] Yeah. And so, thank you for letting me come and talk and be kinda nervous.
Kimberly: No, thank you for sharing. I think this episode is gonna be really valuable for a lot of folks.
Dawn: I mean, I feel like I can take some of it.
Kimberly: Oh gosh. Yeah, definitely.
Rachel: I do want to reiterate, like, please blow up my LinkedIn, if you're trying to start this stuff at your company if you're curious how to do it. It's something I've just been doing as a side hustle for free. Should probably figure out that part, but I really do like talking people through figuring out what works for their company. And what works for their culture because again like going online looking at what other companies do, try to model it off other people's never gonna work and you have to model it off of your people and your values and what you stand for. As a company so…
Kimberly: Absolutely.
Rachel: Hit me up.
Kimberly: Hit her up y’all.
Dawn: Thank you, Rachel you're, you're awesome.
Rachel: Thank you!
Dawn: Well thank you so much for listening today. We hope you got some great actionable advice from Rachel Parrott.
Kimberly: Yes, yes!
Dawn: Thank you, Max for being here with us.
Kimberly: Always and forever Max. you’re stuck with us.
Dawn: Thank you to the rest of the podcast team. We hope you listen again.
Kimberly: Thank you, we’ll catch you next time.
Megan Bigelow: PDXWIT is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, with the purpose of encouraging women, non binary, and underrepresented people to join tech and supporting and empowering them, so they stay in tech. Find out more about us at www.pdxwit.org.