Talent Karma: Lakeisha Poole on Building a Community to Eliminate Workplace Toxicity
By Jared Karol
Every Sunday evening, Lakeisha Poole was filled with dread at the thought of having to go to her job the next morning. Working as an employment lawyer with a very high strung partner she felt like her potential was not appreciated, but she had no outlet to articulate her feelings. There were countless experiences where she felt very isolated in the culture, but it wasn’t until her partner threw a stapler at her that she recognized the true nature of the toxicity in her work environment.
Lakeisha’s experiences have led her to help people in similar situations emerge out of those feelings of hopelessness and gloom and find active ways to get out of toxic work environments. “I want people to have an empowered choice,” she says. “This is a bad company but you’re amazing and you can go somewhere else; somewhere where you’re appreciated; somewhere where you don’t have to fight to show your worth because they already appreciate who you are.”
The solution? Talent Karma, a two-sided marketplace that allows job seekers — the talent — to get workplace insights about a company culture before they jump into a new role, while also giving companies the opportunity to get access to those insights so they can elevate their employee brand. It’s a win-win situation: talent has access to a community of people who are trying to learn about companies’ work environments, and companies will gain a competitive advantage by improving their workplace environment.
Talent Karma is an early stage startup; Lakeisha just came up with the idea last summer, and already they’ve had tremendous success. Talent Karma competed in, and won, a pitch competition at the Kapor Center in October, and have since built an MVP and are currently in closed-beta. The plan is to launch the site by the end of April.
Drawing from her background as an employment lawyer both with employers and employees, Lakeisha made a few main observations that led her to create Talent Karma. First, she says, “Employer-centric compliance oriented actions don’t innovate or inspire people to actually change. There needs to be a component that’s external to the employer to be really authentic.” Second, there are a lot of hurdles to preventing discriminating and harassing practices — and anything that involves bullying and toxic workplace cultures. “There’s a lot of individual risk in suing employers,” she says. “Most individual cases will settle, but that person is still out of a job and the workplace will remain the same.”
To be clear, then, Talent Karma is not about compliance. It’s about changing mindsets and systems — with an emphasis on leveraging community and building social capital. “I don’t want Talent Karma to be an anonymous thing,” Lakeisha says. “I want to reward the sharing of information between communities where you somehow get acknowledgement for your contributions.” Similarly, employers who are looking to elevate their brands can engage the community to do positive things. “They can enlist their employees as brand and PR agents to elevate their brand and attract people who are saying, ‘Oh, that sounds exactly what I want.’”
“I want to reward the sharing of information between communities where you somehow get acknowledgement for your contributions.” Lakeisha Poole.
Talent Karma is inclusive by design. Lakeisha is tapping her extensive networks of color, women, and people with disabilities as she starts to build the talent in Talent Karma community. And to get more insights from companies, she is beginning by onboarding value-aligned companies as catalyst partners who are already talking about culture. Next is to onboard their employees, and amplify the message of their workplace environment as a competitive advantage. “We want to empower the people who really believe in that message. Then, we’ll build this as a strategy to onboard more companies.”
Lakeisha is really bringing intentionality to the process. And it will continue to snowball: companies that aren’t recognized yet as exciting places to work can showcase their insights about their amazing workplace environment, which will then earn them greater recognition from potential talent. “We want to leverage the market effects of this information to make the top talent act according to non-toxic ways of being in the workplace,” Lakeisha says. “A lot of toxic work environments are going to go away.”
And a lot fewer staplers will be thrown.
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The Change Catalyst Team
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