The Origin Story of ManagerEQ (TM)

On the day we celebrate the legacy of Dr. King, we offer a dream of our own for the future of work. Here's why we chose to rebrand and how at its core, the work remains the same.

It was a cold February day, (a Friday to be exact) and we found ourselves sitting in familiar territory. We were in a board room at a large educational nonprofit that each of us had spent time previously working for early in our careers. You could argue that for most of us, we got our professional start here, so this was in many ways a full circle moment. Except, instead of a trip down memory lane back to the places where we each experienced our workplace highs and lows, we were gathered to reimagine the future of work. How did we get here?

We’d spent the past seven years working with companies, across sectors, big and small to operationalize equity efforts (we were doing this before it became trendy). Then, the bottom fell out of the DEI space and folks started losing their minds about what exactly we were trying to accomplish. We weren’t worried; we’ve seen this before. Historically whenever significant progress is made on behalf of mostly black folks, there’s a “blacklash” from the defenders of the status quo. Ultimately, those of us pushing to help our country live up to its original creed (you know, freedom and justice for all?) recalibrate and move forward with a new strategy that accounts for the changing dynamics.

Which brings us to that cold Friday in February. We were asking ourselves a central question…given what we know about workplace dynamics right now, what’s the opportunity for disruption? Written on the board was a bunch of research questions we wanted to test, leading back to a central one: what could we build that might address each of these questions? From there, we knew we needed to explore not only the depth of our own experiences, but also talk to tons of other leaders and in particular managers. We needed these stories to inform our working theory, that at the intersection of AI, data utilization, and training + coaching could be a tool to revolutionize the way we conceived of capacity building. What we knew from our years of organizational development work and our own managerial experiences, was that managers (in particular middle managers) were the key levers.

We got to work interviewing people and gathering the data to inform our approach. It helped that we had a rolodex of previous customers from our capacity building work and a point of view validated by thousands of managers. Over the course of the next six months, we learned that not only was our approach viable, but it was timely given the marketplace shift that was happening away from explicit DEI effort. Companies still cared about addressing gaps in employee experiences (and in fact, as they backed away from their commitments they were were starting to see gaps widen or reemerge). However, they needed a different approach, and we were becoming the answer for this moment in time.

Which brings us to now, our full launch as a spinoff company called ManagerEQ^TM focused on building the capacity of managers (primarily middle managers and new managers under 5 years) to ensure optimal conditions for all employees. Our work has taught us for years that this is where our greatest impact on organizational culture, efficacy, and retention lies. Our impact report that demonstrates the powerful gap closing experiences that occur for companies that engage with us. We’re excited about what the future holds as we continue to partner with organizations who want to create workplaces where we all flourish. True to our brand, that’s been our aim all along.