Raising concerns

After I witnessed the problematic conduct by WMF management, I consulted the WMF Staff Handbook on how to report it. I learned that if I have a dispute with my manager and am not comfortable approaching my manager directly, I could report to HR instead, and if the situation cannot be resolved by reporting to HR, then I could report it to the CEO or their designee. So, in theory, I had options for reporting. I was planning to report to HR and not my manager. My reporting attempt didn’t go as planned.

But first, some notes on contextualizing my reflections on my experience with raising concerns at WMF.

Systemic, not individual

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

~ James Clear

I aim to describe potential systemic problems in WMF management, not specific individuals. Someone who is privy to WMF management’s systemic practices would be able to more accurately describe any problems with them at a high level, and it would not require anecdotal evidence involving specific individuals. But from the vantage point of an individual contributor, I can’t do that. I can only describe my own problematic experiences with WMF management that connect to or echo similar experiences of other individual contributors at WMF in order to paint a picture of systemic problems in WMF management. My testimony is anecdotal evidence, and it will mention specific individuals here in an anonymized way. The only reason the anonymized specific individuals are mentioned in my testimony is to facilitate the description of problematic behaviors and to attribute those behaviors to WMF management.

If I were to just name what I think are potential systemic problems in WMF management, without personal testimony or specific examples, it would sound like empty hand-waving. So I am relying on specific examples and personal testimony to show what I think are potential systemic problems in WMF management. My testimony cannot prove anything on its own (though it can add to the testimonies of others), but I hope it raises important questions (which, I hope, helps current and future WMF staff and the Wikimedia movement community) and validates the experiences of other former WMF staff who were fired or had to resign for similar reasons.

Having heard the stories of other former WMF employees, I think it was far more traumatic for some of them than it was for me. It’s easier for me to speak up than for many of them for many reasons, and I think it is a good use of my privilege. If I don’t speak up, then other people suffer in silence. If I do, I probably don’t sound very credible to many, or perhaps I sound foolish, or perhaps I am not saying things in the right way according to someone else’s standards or preferences, but it is a tiny tiny chance to make things better at WMF, for the workers, for the community. I think it’s worth taking.

So, I’ll be describing specific situations and problematic behaviors I observed (not all of them, just the ones that strongly resemble the experiences of other individual contributors at WMF), but I’d like to stress that who actually did them doesn’t matter as much and is not meant to be the focus of my reflections on this blog.

The way many humans process and communicate impactful events in their lives, good or bad, entails describing the people who acted in those events and having a perspective and opinions on those events and the people involved in them. To expect someone to share their experience in a way that is completely or nearly devoid of their personal perspective and opinions is a very high standard, especially if their experience was stressful or otherwise was very impactful to them. I don’t think I will meet that standard here. The experiences I describe in this blog were stressful and went against my ethics, and I felt negatively enough about them (the experiences and behaviors, not the people who acted in them) to try to do something about them (again, about the experiences and behaviors, not the people who acted in them). Just because I felt negatively about those experiences does not mean or prove that they didn’t happen. If I didn’t feel negatively about them (the experiences and behaviors, not the people who acted in them), then I would have no motivation to report them.

That being said, I also think that a person’s character does play a role in the responsibility for the systemic problems I am describing: not every manager would tell a dissenting employee to “practice curiosity”, even if they were given the authority to do so. I believe I’ve worked with quite a few managers in the United States who would not do that even if their own job was at stake for refusing.

The interaction between leadership character and organizational systems also matters. Good character in leadership upholds good systems, improves them, introduces new ones if needed, and addresses bad systems that don’t serve the organization or its mission. Bad character in leadership can hollow out good systems so that they only look good to the top leadership but in practice are bad for the staff and the organization. Good systems can empower good character in leadership and challenge bad character in leadership to improve. Bad systems can be a trying challenge for good character in leadership: either they will transform and grow as a leader by overcoming or improving the bad systems, or they’ll try their best to do that and not succeed, and perhaps leave. Hopefully, they don’t lower their character to the level of bad systems, but that too happens.

Bad systems and bad character in leadership can usually get along quite well. This combination seems to be way less challenging in terms of leadership work and leaves plenty of time for performative virtue signaling, so on the surface and to top leadership it can appear to be very good and virtuous. In addition, the bad character in leadership + bad systems combo can have a self-reinforcing feedback effect: such leadership is likely to hire and promote like-minded individuals into leadership and drive out of it everyone else, and bad systems either reinforce this or do nothing to stop it.

I think that looking at the experiences and reflections I’m sharing in this blog through the lens of systems rather than individuals is much more constructive. It might be tempting to blame individuals, but blame rarely solves or builds anything. Looking at systems that allowed problematic behaviors by WMF management to happen and persist would make it possible to identify systems failings that could be fixed or improved on.

It would also be great to have character in leadership that models and genuinely strives for integrity, accountability, transparency and respect for both the community and staff. Leadership that shows up to own and repair damage in relationships, while recognizing the power differential in them. Leadership that gets actively involved when they see repeated dissent-suppressing behaviors become systemic patterns, like the frequent “practice curiosity” responses to dissenting or concerned employees. And by “actively involved in this”, I don’t mean joining in on those dissent-suppressing behaviors; I mean stopping those behaviors, researching them to understand their root causes and surveying their impact on staff, putting systems in place that prevent them, evaluating whether the preventions work, and doing this with integrity, accountability and transparency.

This wishing might be a bit too pie-in-the-sky to be practical. Instead, finding ways to incorporate these positive traits into organizational systems at WMF, rather than blaming individuals for not living up to them, could be a practical and constructive way to make things better at WMF. If the Wikimedia movement community truly has a say in WMF’s practices, then this might actually be feasible for the community to do, either through BoT, through other community input, or perhaps through communicating with WWU (I can’t speak for them, but I support them in their journey and this is just my hopeful thinking).
The first step in doing this would be to identify credible potential systems failings. I hope that my testimony helps with that, even if it is just a small grain of sand in terms of evidence, either by identifying new investigation avenues or providing supporting evidence for pre-existing concerns with WMF management’s leadership. And as a small grain of sand, my testimony can either be used with other grains of sand to build a sand castle, or it can be thrown in someone’s eye. My hope is that it is used to build a sand castle, and not to irritate anyone, powerful or not. Please choose the high road, especially when it’s hard to do.

Blaming people, or asking individuals to take accountability for entire systemic problems, can feel like accountability or justice in the moment. And there’s some truth to it, perhaps a lot or perhaps a little. But, either way, what it often does is make people feel bad and create or reinforce an us-vs-them mentality. Eventually, it just might fade from discourse with no real change.

Identifying systemic failures, coming up with actionable solutions for them and working on their implementation might not feel as significant in the short run. It might not feel like justice to some. But it will bring about a more long-term form of justice and accountability: fixing problematic systems will help good, rather than bad, leadership at WMF succeed and repair relationships with staff and community; it will help WMF staff to work more effectively, knowing that they can speak up safely; and it will help the Wikimedia movement community because a lot of the time the community is the reason WMF staff tries to speak up.

Having good, evidence-based organizational systems, support, protocols and training in place at WMF for both management and staff could have prevented or remedied much of what happened in what I describe below, as well as the stuff I described in the Unethical conduct post.

Reporting concerns to my manager

I felt like I had no choice but to disclose my concerns to my manager during a weekly 1-1 meeting, because she asked me, and it didn’t look like I had other options in that moment. I also was mistakenly hopeful that she genuinely made an error in acting complicitly to AL2’s behavior, and that perhaps talking to her frankly and honestly about what I observed would help her understand and correct it.

During that 1-1 meeting, I raised concerns about the following behaviors to my manager:

I had a few more concerns, listed in the Unethical conduct post, but raising the concerns above did not go well, so it seemed pointless to continue with the rest of them.

The “practice curiosity” practice

In response to my concern about AL2 saying that information should be withheld from the community for the sole reason of avoiding criticism, my manager repeatedly told me that I should have practiced curiosity. She told me that I should have a meeting with AL2 so that I could practice curiosity until I understood that no unethical conduct had happened. She repeatedly insisted on this throughout the conversation, despite my objections to it and my saying that I was exploring other reporting options.

I tried to explain to my manager in earnest that telling someone to practice curiosity when they have a concern about unethical conduct by a person in power is not ok, it is a practice of dissent suppression. Doing this to workers who raise concerns about leadership’s behavior would mean that there’s no way to hold leadership accountable when potentially problematic behavior is observed, because claiming that someone “didn’t practice curiosity” is vague enough to use against dissent in many situations, if not all of them.

I said that this is not something that should be happening at WMF, and I asked my manager to please not do this, to please not use the phrase “practice curiosity” to suppress my concerns about AL2’s unethical conduct. Even if my concerns were wrong, they were in good faith, and should not be suppressed from reporting to HR or the CEO by pressuring me to “practice curiosity” with AL2.

I was not insisting that I personally had the final word on judging the problematic conduct I observed. I simply witnessed behaviors by a senior leader at WMF that I thought were problematic and not in line with the ethics that the Wikimedia movement community would expect from WMF. And I was raising concerns about them, in good faith. I was not expecting to be fully and unquestioningly believed, but I was expecting an investigation by a party who was not directly involved in the problematic conduct, and who would make at least some effort to be objective in the investigation process.

Language manipulation

Multiple times during this conversation, my manager would take my statements about the problematic practices I witnessed and rephrase them into personal accusations toward her or AL2. For example, my manager would say things like “So you are saying that AL2 and I are unethical”. It made it sound like I was verbally attacking AL2 and my manager as people, instead of raising concerns about their behaviors in the workplace. It framed them as victims and me as doing something bad by raising concerns. I did not make such statements about AL2 or my manager in this conversation. I only made statements about the behaviors I observed, and I specifically avoided making statements that would describe their persons instead of their actions. I explained this to my manager after each time she converted my statements into personal accusations toward her or AL2. And there were many such times in this conversation.

For context, I frequently heard at WMF the saying that went something like “be gentle on people, tough on ideas”. It was always said very nicely, but based on how I saw employees react to it, I got a very very faint impression that doing something that could be construed by management as going against that saying could get an employee in trouble at WMF, but I didn’t take that impression seriously until this meeting. When I noticed that my manager was rephrasing the concerns I was raising about the behaviors I observed as if I was verbally attacking or accusing her or AL2, I thought of that saying. To me, my manager’s repeated rephrasing of my concerns about behaviors into personal attacks sounded like my manager was trying to entrap me into stating my concerns in a way that went against that saying, which I thought would get me into more trouble and prevent me from being able to report to HR.

Telling on my reporting to the involved party

At the end of this meeting, my manager told me that she will tell all of this to AL2. AL2 had a conflict of interest in this, since she was directly involved in the concerns I raised, and my manager was aware of it.

Some issues with the above

This was not how I expected the reporting process to go at all. I think there’s definitely room for improvement in it. Here are some issues I see with the behaviors (and not persons) I described above.

I don’t think it is ok for a manager to pressure a subordinate to “practice curiosity” instead of making a report in good faith to HR. I think this behavior by my manager went against the dispute resolution process stated in the WMF Staff Handbook. But, according to my employment agreement, as I understood it, I was obligated to follow the WMF Staff Handbook, while WMF was not obligated to follow it. I think it would be better for WMF staff and the Wikimedia movement community if both WMF staff and WMF were subject to the WMF Staff Handbook, if not equally, then at least to some degree. And I think it would be great if the WMF Staff Handbook was public and available to the Wikimedia movement community.

I don’t think it was ok for my manager to repeatedly rephrase my statements about problematic behaviors in a way that made them sound like personal attacks and contradictory to the “be gentle on people, tough on ideas” saying. WMF has many international staff who are non-native English speakers, and, in my opinion, such language-manipulating conduct by managers would make it unreasonably and unnecessarily very difficult for non-native English speakers to raise concerns and advocate for themselves, compared to native English speakers. Perhaps it would also put many of WMF’s neurodiverse staff at an unfair disadvantage as well.

I don’t think it was ok for my manager to unilaterally decide in this meeting that my concerns were invalid and were a result of me failing to “practice curiosity”, especially since she was directly involved in them. In my opinion, determining the validity of such concerns raised by employees in good faith should be left to an investigation by an appropriate party, like HR or someone who was not directly involved in the concerns raised. I would have strongly preferred it if my manager recused herself from this reporting once she heard that my concerns were about a situation that directly involved her and gave me the option to report it to someone else or HR instead, and not pressure me to continue this conversation with her or AL2.

I don’t think it was ok for my manager to tell on me to AL2, since AL2 was also directly involved in the concerns I raised, but I felt that there was nothing I could do about it.

To me, this reporting experience felt hostile and very discouraging. I doubt that someone who went through something like this would want to raise or report their workplace concerns again. In my opinion, this is bad for the organization and for the community it serves. Employees can be the first ones to see potentially problematic workplace issues arise. When they feel safe and welcome to raise concerns in good faith to management or HR, it helps the organization fix the issues before they grow into bigger problems.

Sometimes, employees might unintentionally report concerns in good faith that, after a proper investigation, turn out to be invalid, unfounded, or not possible to determine. How employees are treated by management and HR in such circumstances matters a lot for company culture and for employee well-being. In such cases, if employees are punished or treated badly for reporting, they will likely feel discouraged from reporting in the future, which is not good for the company.

The aftermath

After my failed attempt to report to my manager, my manager told on me to AL2, and then AL2 told me that she told on me to AL1 (another senior leadership person in the Advancement department; there were multiple during my time there, and the management/leadership relatively frequently switched around the teams or left, so neither AL2 nor AL1 uniquely identifies anyone specific; and again, my focus here is on behaviors and practices, not people), and my manager told me HR was informed of my situation. I was offered to meet with HR, but only with my manager or AL2 present. I also kept occasionally hearing from some colleagues that my manager might have a close friendship with HR, which was hearsay and I wasn’t sure if it was true, but it made me a bit wary of HR in this context. Given all of that, I became hesitant to reach out to HR. Despite being informed of my situation, at no point did HR ever reach out to me or offer to meet independently from my manager or AL2.

I was starting to doubt whether I could safely report my concerns to anyone at WMF. So, I asked several colleagues whether they had positive experiences with HR objectively intervening in similar situations (the WMF training course titled ‘Preventing Harassment and Discrimination’ showed doing exactly this: asking colleagues for advice about going to HR after a negative experience in the workplace, so I was following what that training showed by doing this). They all said no. The training course did not cover this possibility. Not a single colleague I asked thought that HR would help me, or would be even remotely objective. They said that, best case scenario, HR would do nothing, and worst case scenario, I’ll be reprimanded or fired. Bummer.

It’s not just me

Upon hearing my colleagues’ opinions about going to HR, I asked them why in the world they would think that. I really wished that they’d told me that HR was safe to report concerns to instead. In response, many of them shared stories of their own attempts to raise concerns or dissent at WMF and sometimes going to HR. In their stories, some of WMF management’s problematic behaviors kept coming up again and again, and echoed my own experiences that I described above, suggesting systemic issues.

The most frequent problematic behavior by WMF leadership/management seemed to be the “practice curiosity” practice. Many of my WMF colleagues said that they too were told to “practice curiosity” whenever they raised concerns about WMF management’s behavior or decisions. Listening to their stories and comparing them to my experience, it seemed that “practice curiosity” was used by management as a go-to phrase to stifle dissent at WMF, and it appeared to be a shared, systemic practice across multiple teams. It seemed to be a rather strange euphemism for “because I said so, and I outrank you”, which may be appropriate in other workplace environments, but it didn’t seem appropriate for WMF, at least to my knowledge. In my opinion, the “practice curiosity” practice is not a good thing for WMF employees and the Wikimedia movement community, nor is it a good thing for WMF in the long run.

Actual curiosity is, of course, awesome, but in my experience, the “practice curiosity” practice by WMF management had barely anything to do with it.

I have also heard from some of my WMF colleagues that they experienced similar language manipulation as I did, and at least one colleague was also told on to the involved party when they tried to raise concerns about the involved party. This was much less frequent than the “practice curiosity” practice, as far as I could tell.