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Ava DuVernay has been steadfast in creating opportunities for herself while simultaneously elevating other underrepresented voices around her—and that’s been the case since the beginning of her career.
With her 2010 feature directorial debut, I Will Follow, DuVernay also launched Array (previously known as AFFRM), an independent film distribution company that has blossomed into a multifaceted powerhouse in Hollywood.
“For me, it was really whatever I could do not to be lonely,” DuVernay said during Fast Company‘s Most Innovative Companies Summit. “I would get into these spaces as an artist and feel lonely. I wasn’t seeing any other people like me. Some people get in a room and they’re the only one and they like that. They feel special. They like that position. I don’t like that. I look around a room and I think, ‘Where’s everybody else?’”
In addition to the distribution arm Array Releasing, there’s also the production company Array Filmworks (which recently added podcasting to its purview), and the nonprofit division Array Alliance, which houses resources for grants, mentorship, and online education tools, and now Array Crew, an inclusive database of below-the-line workers, meaning camera operators, script supervisors, boom operators, and so forth.
“I recall two years ago saying, ‘We should get a really good list together. I’m thinking a spreadsheet that’s really detailed—might have a binder.’ And two years later, I’m hiring a chief technology officer,” DuVernay said. “This list-passing thing that we’ve been doing for all these years isn’t good enough to remedy a deeply systemic issue, which is people who hire crews saying, ‘I would hire people if I knew them, but I only know the same people, ’cause we hire the same people. So I can’t hire those people I don’t know.’ And our thing is saying, ‘You know what? Let us create IMDb meets LinkedIn.’”
Below are more highlights from DuVernay’s conversation, which have been edited for clarity and brevity.
On Hollywood’s (continued) reckoning with race
“The events of 2020, particularly around the conversations to do with race that happened in the summer, were so profound that they changed their course. We at Array [were] already on that course. So I can’t say it’s changed or even illuminated anything more. If anything, it gives us a benchmark, a signpost by which to hold people accountable. If you were interested in all of this last summer, are you still going to be interested in it this summer? If you posted the black square on your IG as a company, as a studio in July of 2020, what did you do in the months ’til July ’21? And so for someone like me who’s constantly thinking about those things, the benefit of that was the visibility into people declaring their solidarity with and their desire for equity. Now the question is, ‘Well, what did we do all year about it?’”
On recognizing her own blind spots to inclusivity
“I’m ahead of the curve, but the curve is a very low bar. I’m really trying to learn a lot about the deaf and hearing divide, and accessibility in terms of everything that we do at Array. We’re thinking about our captioning on every single thing we put out. Even when you come on our campus, we’re looking at the campus now that we’re closed and saying, ‘Can someone who can’t walk get through that door and up those steps?’
“We looked at our own team and said, ‘God, there’s a whole bunch of Black women here. Should we get some more other kinds of people?’ We were falling into some of the same traps that white male companies were doing when it’s all white men. We wanted brown women. We wanted white women. At one point we looked up and we had all kinds of women and we were like, ‘There are no men in this company.’ We need to understand all these perspectives.”
On widening her scope of inclusive stories to tell
“Selma took me around the world. I got to meet filmmakers from other parts of the world who had the same challenges as we did as Black filmmakers in terms of getting their material out to different kinds of folks. And that is when AFFRM became Array. And it is about films by filmmakers of color and women filmmakers of all kinds.
“We have Sovereign [on NBC], which will be the first Native American family drama. I direct the pilot for [DMZ] with Rosario Dawson and Benjamin Bratt and Freddy Miyares, putting brown folks in a DC comic on HBO Max. We executive produced White Tiger, which is Ramin Bahrani’s [adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 novel] that’s now heating up the Oscar hopeful circuit—no Black people in any of that. And yet it feels right for Array because we know that this is an echo chamber. We exist in a dome. When there’s a negative vibration, it’s negative for more than just the one.”
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Being in the right place at the right time can result in some serendipitous career moments. If you bump into your boss at the coffee machine, it could prompt them to put you on an important new project. Or, if your manager notices you’re always the first one in the office, it could play out well when they’re working on promotion recommendations.
When you’re working from home, however, these passive moments are gone. To make sure your work is noticed, you need to be proactive.
“Today, you need to think about the need to be visible,” says Kevin Eikenberry, a cofounder of Remote Leadership Institute, which is a company of virtual workplace consultants, and a coauthor of The Long-Distance Teammate: Stay Engaged and Connected While Working. “In the past, you were literally visible. Now you need to be much more intentional, but you want to do it in an ethical way.”
Change Your Mindset
If you think about your situation as “working from home,” you’re focusing on being insular and individual, says Eikenberry.
“What you really are is a remote teammate,” he says. “Ethical visibility is still being part of something bigger than ourselves. What we’re after is making sure your work is recognized in context of it being part of the team’s work and results. You want to share or contribute in a way that’s consistent with team culture.”
For example, we all know that person who is always speaking up during Zoom meetings, only talking about themselves.
“Don’t be that person,” says Eikenberry. “You may think you need to call attention to yourself and your accomplishments to be visible. But when you take up too much airtime in meetings, others will judge your behavior and not your intent. Make sure your behavior is in alignment with being part of the team.”
Have a Visibility Strategy
You don’t want to take the opposite approach, though. It can be easy for employees to slip into a pattern of limited communication and slowly fade into the background of a company while working remotely, says Kevin Harrington, CEO of Joblist, a job-matching platform.
“A visibility strategy is a way for employees to stay prominent within their teams and ensure that their efforts and contributions receive the proper recognition at work,” he says.
Joblist surveyed remote workers and managers and found that while only 36% of workers have a visibility strategy, the benefits of having one are notable.
“Employees who feel visible in their remote workplace are more likely to be satisfied with their productivity, levels of engagement, and job security,” says Harrington. “Long-term, an effective visibility strategy can also be critical to career advancement, as companies are more likely to give raises and promotions to employees who make an effort to remain visible while working from home.”
Eikenberry recommends that employees make sure they’re delivering what their boss needs most from them now. “Ask, ‘How can I best serve the team right now?’” he says. “It’s managing up. Know the goals of the leaders, and make sure you’re giving them the help they need. It doesn’t have to be brown-nosey. It’s understanding where priorities are and making sure you’re making an incremental effort in areas of priority and not just your own.”
According to the Joblist survey, the most effective ways for employees to remain visible are offering new ideas, helping colleagues with work, and volunteering for a task or opportunity. Forty-one percent of workers made sure their projects kept moving, 37.4% helped their colleagues by taking on additional work, and 36.5% made an effort to focus on small details.
“These actions are particularly effective because they send a strong message through an employee’s actions that they are engaged, motivated, and care about the success of their colleagues and the company as a whole,” says Harrington.
Being visible is really about being supportive of others, says Eikenberry. “Generally speaking, when you’re doing the right thing to support your team, you will be noticed and recognized,” he says.
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