Creating a Safe Space at Work for People who Stutter

Transcript

Mike Meany:

Alexa sometimes does not know what I'm asking for her, and is not always that patient, right? Um And you know the automated voice machines that are like, tell us who you want to talk to. And it's like, well, if their last name starts with R, M, L or N, like there's no way the answering machine is gonna know what I'm saying.

Maya Chupkov: 

I’m Maya Chupkov, and I'm a woman.

Cynthia Chin:

And I'm Cynthia Chin Maya’s longtime friend, and I know nothing about stuttering.

Maya: 

And this is proud stutter, the podcast about stuttering and embracing verbal diversity and an effort to change how we talk about it. one conversation at a time.

Welcome back to Proud Stutter. I'm so excited to have our guest for this episode. His name is Mike Meany, and he works at Facebook, now known as Meta, and he has a really fascinating story about how he started a stuttering group within his organization. And I just think it's so inspiring and I'm really excited to speak with him. Welcome, Mike.

Mike:

Yeah, excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Maya: 

So you started this stuttering support group at Facebook. And I'm really curious how you started it. And maybe we can go even further back and you can talk about your stuttering journey and what led you to starting this stuttering support group at Facebook slash Meta?

 Mike:

Yeah. Thanks for the question. We started the stuttering/stammering at Meta Employee Resource Group about a year and a half ago i i i co-founded this group with my colleague, Gary Goldsmith, who's in the New York office. And how it started was I'm a user experience researcher um so both in my prior life in academia when I was doing my PhD, uh as well as the work I do at Facebook, I do a lot of qualitative interviewing. Um and so we record all of those interviews and one of the ways that I share the insights um as a researcher is to like post those interviews in our internal employee forums. Um and so as someone who has a stutter, I was incredibly anxious the first time that um I did these interviews and I had a p-post it because when I listen to myself talk in a recording or on a video or a podcast, for example, um I can note every single slight like inflection of my voice and every subtle pause and every strategy I deploy at any single second um and it drives me crazy.

Long story short, I just wanted to address this. So I wrote this post called Stuttering in UX interviews and just to introduce my team to just the fact that I'm a stutter. I just I did that to just kind of establish my disfluency that they would likely hear and like note, and, and I was not sure how how how how many people like knew that I had a stutter. I mean, and perhaps other stutters can empathize, but it just kind of like I don't know what to do here because I don't want to like, draw unnecessary attention to it, but I don't want people to think that I was nervous or unprepared. Um so I wrote this note and I posted it in a different employee resource group called Disability at Meta, and that's where Gary saw it um and he reached out to me and we had a one on one. And this is like amazing moment where uh I was finally working with someone who talked very similar to how I did and seeing him on like video and using some of the same strategies that I use to like get through uh disfluencies. And so that's how we started it. And so that was about a year and a half ago.

Maya:

And since you started about a year and a half ago, how has the working group in going?

 Mike:

Yeah, so we try to meet every quarter and the first few quarters we just like met up with the group of members and introduced ourselves and what we did and talked about um how stuttering was just a part of our everyday working experiences. Um and we also shared like common strategies for how to like deal with it and how to um communicate effectively with our teams and our managers um that we have these challenges. Um and so that was that haaaas been really powerful and some other highlights that kind of emerged from that. So first, we were able to identify that stuttering and stammering was not covered as an individual d-diagnosis under our health care insurance policy for speech thththerapy. And so like working with our benefits group at Meta, we were able to present some data and information around stuttering and stammering um and how effective speech therapy can be as an intervention. Um uh and they were able to like work with our our benefits program and have speech therapy covered so that is a new benefit that directly resulted from from our group, which w-w-w-we're really quite excited about.

Maya:

That's really awesome. Oh my gosh, I wish I could have had a mentor when I was a kid. And um so that's that's really great that you guys have set th-that up. So I want to go back to what you said earlier. And you wanted to send a note to the disability group at Facebook saying that you had a stutter. I c-can imagine it was a very emotional experience. And so I'm just wondering if you can just walk us through that moment and what led you to hitting send and really taking that leap?

 Mike:

So it was I just I knew that I had to address it because yeah, um I guess it's a good question. I think I just as someone with a stutter, I'm just very self-conscious of how my speech is perceived. And my stutter can be quite mild now, but it can also flare up um and I just wanted people who were listening to know what was going on um and so that it like most importantly that they wouldn't think it was like a lack of preparation or like nervousness and so that they could also just like, like, know this about me. And, you know, I have to say at this point, just because of some of the other experiences I've had in my life, I was I was not that nervous to post it, because in some ways I just I try to just like own my stutter a lot and just have like sort of like a radical ownership and I have to say just like you know, Meta has a lot of really smart, hardworking and ambitious people and it's an incredibly fast paced environment, uh which can at times be a little anxiety inducing, especially like when I started, but but my experience there has been like, I mean, uh I'm biased like I work there, but it's like they it's a place where people are really encouraged. to like, be tthhhhe maximum versions of themselves, and that's, like, embraced and celebrated and so I felt when I pushed sand like that, that I um that it would that like people would find it, you know, probably interesting and useful. And, and that was my hope. Uh what was unexpected was that I just didn't know that there were so many people that had a stutter. I mean, there's like 50 people in in this employee resource group now.

Maya:

So we didn't touch on your journey and how you ended up at Facebook. And before that t-time, you did mention that it was an isolating experience, and you didn't really meet anyone that stuttered. So I'm wondering if you can just expand about what was it like growing up and how did you come to be more proud of your stutter?

 Mike:

You know, when I like remember starting to stutter and and uh but it made me like realize that it's, I don't remember ever speaking any other way. Like from the time that I have conscious memories of speaking, I was stuttering. Um and, you know, some of the things that I shared in this note that I wrote at Meta were how I was able to just kind of deal with it and I just was incredibly lucky that I had parents and teachers that were just sort of like uh the right blend of gentle and supportive and kind and like also uh firm and like principled and convicted about not uh allowing it to sort of like block me. My dad's my dad's like from the time I was like, in second grade he was like, If anyone ever makes fun of you give them the middle finger, like he was just like, uncompromising, like, do not ever not let your voice be heard. And it was like you know, and then like my mom who was a bit more sort of gentle or like whatever the term would be, was always just like, it matters way more like what you say than how you say it. And so she was just like think about your words, like llllearn more than everybody else. Be more clever than everybody else, like have the best words because then it doesn't matter how long it takes you to say it. Um and like so that was like incredibly empowering. It was it was difficult though. I mean because I tried to do all of the normal things like like reading in mass was something that like my siblings did, and all my friends did. And then it was my turn one week and I tried and like I got up there as a second grader and was trying to read the Scripture and I started stuttering and people laughed at me and I started crying like why I was reading the scripture in Mass. Um and and I finished the reading like while I was crying and and it was just this like, horrible, horrible searing experience. And so even though I had supportive people in my life, I also had to deal with, you know, situations like that, and I'm not sure like and obviously, there are other privileges that I was afforded that that also probably like made me I just like there were other pppprivileges being a guy being white, like having educational opportunities, things like that. Like I always had a roof over my head. I I didn't ever have any kind of like deprivation growing up um where like, it wasn't the singular challenge in my life, but it was one of it was the most severe and it was one of only a handful of challenges that I had to focus on and sort of be tough about and like develop my grit around. But I do I mean, I c-c-credit my parents and my like my teachers a lot that that kind of have the best words don't worry about how you say them.

Maya: 

Having a strong support system. At home is so important and I I don't know the science behind it, but I do know that it it really does help because I had a strong support s-system at home too. And I think that allowed me to be m-more conf-f-fident in myself and not get so bogged down on my stutter.

Cynthia: 

Yeah, I think that the support system that you had growing up really makes you a great candidate for what you've been doing at at Mehta, with the Employee Resource Group, which by the way, I think is one of the best things about tech companies is that they have these groups for people to allow them to share their stories and to meet each other. So my last question for you is being a leader in your community of stutters and being in a very competitive environment as you are in Meta. What advice do you give to the people in your group as well as our listeners for managing the stress that might come from potentially stuttering on an interview or in in a call during a presentation? What advice do you have for them to mitigate that?

Mike:

Yeah, I guess there's kind of there is tactical advice. And there's like sort of broader, I guess, like strategic advice that I think of so strangely, and in my, I don't know what your experience is like this. But for me, I, I either have to have every word that I'm going to say written down exactly as I will say it including all of my pauses and disfluencies or I can only have bullet points, because then I have to take a bullet point of information and wrap words around that bullet point of information, so that I can say that bullet point of information, but I almost can't ever say it verbatim. Um and so like for me, I just like, but that's how I work. And there are some people that like work different ways, but then strategically, I mean, then, and this is just again, this is sssome of the mentors in my life uh just tried to like get me to think through my stutter as like a gift um as opposed to like this huge like, burden.

And it took me like a long long like I didn't I didn't have a healthy perspective on my stutter until I was probably in my early 20s. Like I used to say things like I hate my stutter like I would give anything to like have been born without this and just because it just was it's it can be it was such a pain in the ass quite frankly, for so long. It still is sometimes, um but thhthinking about it as a gift, I just I know a lot of words, because I have to like have an arsenal of words. At any moment to deploy if I encounter a word that I can't say. And so I realized that like that's an amazing thing. Like the thing that I'm most grateful for is like having a sense tivity to like differences and to like invisible differences. And most of my career has been focused on improving systems, either policy systems or technology systems so that they are more inclusive and they're not reinforcing existing structures of marginalization. Like that's what my whole career is has been about. And like I think it's in part because early on I just like had these experiences that were really searing and I thought were unfair and I just I it it it makes me still to this today I can't stop like, like when I see someone get bullied or excluded or some unfair thing happen, I have a visceral reaction to it, because it just it gives me I feel that pain.

Maya: 

Mike, thank you so much for being with us. And sharing your story and how you started such an amazing community at at Meta, I think this is gonna inspire a lot of others hopefully to do similar things at their own organizations and just building a community around stuttering in in general, so really big thanks and yeah, and I'm excited to see where this th---this group goes and keep up the good work.