What Is Justice? Former FBI Agent Reveals What Leaders Get Wrong | M. Quentin Williams Ep. Part 1

Welcome to the Legacy All-Stars Podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others. Here is your host, Alan Pavlosky.

All right, welcome, welcome, welcome. This is the Legacy All-Stars Podcast, where we shine a light on people who use their success to lift up others. I'm your host, Alan Pavlosky, and today's guest has spent his career turning hard-won experience into service. M. Quentin Williams, or Q to his friends, and how I'll refer to him moving forward on the rest of this episode, is an attorney, author, educator, and international speaker. Raised in New York City and Yonkers, Q earned a football scholarship to Boston College, then went on to serve as an FBI agent and federal prosecutor and to hold senior roles with the NFL, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and the NBA. In 2012, Q founded Dedication to Community, a national nonprofit that builds understanding and trust through skills-building workshops, leadership education, and community forums. He serves as a guest instructor at the FBI National Academy, and this year he co-founded the D2C Justice Institute at the University of Mount Saint Vincent, a hub for learning and action in social, economic, criminal, procedural, and restorative justice. He was also appointed to the North Carolina Post-Conviction Review Commission. His commitment to others has been recognized with the ACC's Unite Award, a place on Worth Media's Worthy 100, and Hometown Hero honors from both the Miami Heat and Yonkers Public Schools. Today, Q and I are taking on a deceptively simple question: What is justice? And exploring the internal shifts that visionary leaders entrepreneurs and athletes must make to turn their success into lasting impact. Q, welcome to Legacy All-Stars. Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks so much for having me, Alan. I appreciate you.

I appreciate you. Let's jump right in. You've talked about moving from deficits to discipline to dedication. Walk our listeners through that progression and what it means and where you first saw it working in your own life.

Well, thanks for the question. So I'm a man who has for my entire life been in search of ways to overcome my deficits. And we all have deficits, obviously. Yeah. And we have great talents. Each individual has great talent. My deficits were secrets, though, that I kept from everybody else For most of my life, especially as a child. And one of those deficits is the way I read. I read differently. So I have to focus, hyperfocus on what I'm reading in order to understand it. I can read phonetically really well. So for my whole childhood, I was able to fool everybody. They thought I was a great reader because with intonation and everything, I could stand up and recite really well. but I never knew what I was reading. Over the years, I've learned how to counter my deficit. I understand I have to concentrate at a high level in order to understand whether it's one word or a page. And so overcoming that deficit was a big deal for me. Mm-hmm. Along with that, overcoming the poverty of my childhood was a big deal. And it really— if I look at one thing that gave me direction as a child, it was to escape that poverty. And I didn't want to live the way we were living when I was a child. So as a result, because I have these deficits, I knew the one thing I could do was outwork everybody. I could just effort. I say on a scale of 1 to 10, I'm a 7,000 when it comes to effort. And it's because that's what it is. I always had to outwork work other people in order to stay up with them, let alone surpass them. So those deficits led to the discipline, the discipline of effort, and that ultimately led to my destiny, really, destiny of doing what I'm able to do now, having the life I've had over the last 60 years.

That's amazing. You know, we all have those deficits. I have plenty of them myself, and I think we all compensate or adjust to those deficits. But Some people have it more difficult than others. I always have a ton of admiration for people that have had things they've had to overcome because I think resiliency is the most misunderstood and the least celebrated quality in a person.

Yeah. Yeah. Having that resilience and persistence is really important. We're living in a very challenged society right now. So persistence is vitally important. And having accumulated the tools for that persistence as a young child, now as an adult, when I'm faced with challenges, I know it's going to be okay because I know what I've overcome. Right. It's like the practice was done as a child to get me to the game right now. And in this game, there are so many challenges. And I always know it's going to be okay because of what I've been able to overcome. And I must say, it's not me who's overcome these things. I've overcome these things with a village, a village of people. Relationships has really been the determinant of my destiny. And so, that's what I concentrate on a lot nowadays is how do I— teach relationship building and how do I form relationships in my own life and my children's lives and the people around me?

That's great. Sports has been a thread through your entire career, from Boston College football to the NFL, the NBA. What did the team environment teach you about fairness, accountability, and lifting others that you still use today?

Yeah, being on a team, that whole team concept gave me the ability to work with others and build relationships, build trust. Trust is critically important. It offers us that foundation for greatness. If we have trust between individuals, now you're a pair. And what you can do as a pair is much more than you could do individually. So the collaborative instinct that comes with the building of trust has been very important in my life personally, even more so than professionally. But now with what I'm doing now, that trust is really important because we have people who are entrusting with us their education. Oh, wow. That's a big deal for us. And I'm very thankful to be in that position.

Yeah, I'm fascinated by the arc of your career and how athletics, FBI, justice— I mean, everything that's gone into it. And you've stated that you'd love to explore one question, and that is, what is justice? How do you answer that for someone who has never set foot in a courtroom?

Well, it's interesting. A lot of people, when they think of justice, they think of criminal. Justice. They think of the legal system. When I speak of justice, I'm speaking about life. I'm speaking about, are human beings treating human beings like human beings? And that— the simplicity of that, that's justice when the answer is yes. When the answer is no, now we're moving into another area, and usually that area is accountability. So justice for me is a proactive word. It's preventative. It's preemptive. And when we speak about what happens after the fact, when there is an injustice, now we're seeking accountability. So you see a lot of times when folks are picketing or protesting and saying, we want justice for somebody, maybe somebody who was killed or somebody who lost their job or whatever. Mm-hmm. Well, they're really seeking accountability because the act has already happened.

Right.

And once the act happens, it's— we're seeking accountability. The lead-up to the act, that's justice. When human beings are treating human beings like human beings, now we have justice. So you don't need accountability when you have justice.

Fascinating. Let's dive into dedication to community and the D2C Justice Institute. You know, these 2 organizations that you've been founding and been a part of, they work across social, economic, criminal, procedural, and restorative justice. Which of these aspects is least understood, and how do they connect to one another?

We hear people talking about social justice a lot, criminal justice a lot as well. We hear them talking about economic justice, which is how do we get people to thrive? How do we get people to reach their talents? The misunderstood areas of justice, I think, are procedural justice, restorative justice, and maybe even academic justice. So procedural justice is, do you trust the system? Is the system worthy of trust? And so what does it take to gain that trust? And restorative justice is How do we get to healing when something wrong has been done? How do we get the parties together so that they can have reconciliation and healing? I think those are 2 of the most misunderstood. I do believe that academic justice is misunderstood too, though, because it's a strange time in academia because of technology and because of some of the social issues. We see changes on college campuses in higher education. We see changes in K through 12. And so what does it mean to have academic justice? What does it mean to have that access for all? And I think about it in terms of justice is when there is systemic opportunity. Mm-hmm. I don't use the word fairness because fairness to you, Alan, might be something different than it is for me. It's a pretty subjective word. But when you have systemic opportunity, that means the system is offering opportunity to all. And that's all anybody really wants is the opportunity to be whatever they are meant to be. Yeah. So I would say of the 6 pillars of justice that we teach, that we focus on, procedural, again, that's about the trust in the system, and restorative, that has to do with the reconciliation in the system, the healing in the system, and academic justice are the 3 that are probably most misunderstood. Okay.

Yeah. You've seen justice from the seat of a federal prosecutor, an executive, an educator, and a nonprofit founder. That's a big, broad vision there. How has your definition of justice evolved as a result of the activities you've been involved with?

It's evolved quite a bit, Alan. When I started to do this, we at D2C, we began as an organization that focused on economic justice. And it was really about entrepreneurship and how do we get people to create create stuff. We've gotten away from that in this country. So we wanted to encourage young folks, especially college-age folks, we want to encourage them to create stuff, take that risk, empower yourself. And so we started with economic justice. And as we got along, after— this is 20 years ago— after we started to do this work, We added pillars. So my evolution went from thinking about justice in terms of economic justice to then expanding on it with social and criminal and procedural and restorative and then academic. It's been quite an interesting spectrum for me when I think about how I've evolved in my thinking. And then when things started to really come together about, I'd say, 10 years ago, it became about the simplicity of it. Like, what is it? What is justice? In a simple way, what is it? And that's when I thought to myself, it's just about human beings treating human beings like human beings. And that became the mantra for the way I think about it. I just want human beings to treat each other well. That's it.

Yeah. Tell me about your involvement in the North Carolina Post-Conviction Review Commission. What does that work teach a leader about humanity, accuracy, and the responsibility that comes with power?

I'm honored to be a commissioner on the Post-Conviction Review Commission, and it was previously called the Innocence Inquiry Commission. It's the only one of its kind, by the way, in America. Mm-hmm. Only one of 5 of them in the whole world, where you have a state-funded— and it's a state agency that seeks the truth. It's not an innocence project, although it has similarities, but it also— it just seeks the truth. It's not just seeking to get people out of prison. It's also seeking to find the truth about somebody who's in prison, And maybe they really did it. So I have to say, it's one of the greatest honors of my professional career to have been selected by the Chief Justice in North Carolina to be on this commission because I want justice. I want people to— who should be free, I want them to be free. It brings, you know, it's like a full circle moment because I know A lot of people who've been locked up who shouldn't have been locked up. And as part of our restorative justice pillar and our social and criminal justice pillars, I seek to have the truth be told. And that's what D2C does. We want to be known as truth tellers.

Got it. Let's shift gears a little bit. For a founder or athlete who has achieved success and now wants significance, What's the most important internal shift they need to make?

There has to be a desire to move on from the chase in life. And the chase is usually for money, fame, glory, those things that as children, many of us are taught to chase after. So we are nurtured to chase for much of our lives. But then there comes a time, at least with me, there came a time when the chase was no longer desirable. And it became about, how can I just make sure that whatever I have inside me, I use it to help somebody? Yeah. And so purpose, ultimately, it's the only thing that counts because you're not able to take the money with you. As many have said, you'll never see a U-Haul truck behind a hearse. And so what we leave behind is what we've done for people. Who have we helped? What have we done for the next generation? And so I think that You have to be willing to give up that chase. Some people aren't willing to do it until their last breath. And then maybe they start thinking about it. But I want to have enough time left to do good, not just to have done good for myself and my family, but to do good for society.

Dedication to community, I really want to dive more deeply into that. The tagline is listen, Learn, understand. Why is listening so often the hardest leadership skill, and how do you train it in others?

So I have to take you back to who I, I became after being raised by such a wonderful mother. Mother who has her deficits. Again, we speak about deficits. My mother has deficits that really challenged her life terribly. But the one thing that she did for my brother and me that changed everything for us was she always treated human beings like human beings. And it didn't matter who you were, what your status in life was, your socioeconomic status, what you look like. She treated you like a human being. And my brother and I saw this growing up, and that is something that impacted us greatly without her even teaching us, telling us. She taught us through action, not through words.

Yeah.

So we learned that listening When forming relationships is the first step in forming meaningful relationships. In order to form those relationships, you have to listen. And we say listening beautifully. You have to listen to somebody's soul and their spirit, because if you do that, you learn about that person. And then once you learn about that person, you start to understand that person. So listening, learning, and understanding are the first 3 ingredients in what we call the recipe for reconciliation, which is how do you form meaningful relationships in life? I can tell you, in my life, relationships have definitely determined my destiny because of the deficits. And so if it weren't for my relationships, every job I got was because of a relationship. If it wasn't weren't for those relationships, I don't know where I would be. I might be okay, but those relationships changed the trajectory of my life, and the reason why I had those relationships was because I learned to listen. I listened, I learned, and then I understood about those people with whom I had relationships and still do. And that changed everything for me.

This is the end of part 1 of this special 2-part episode with M. Quentin Williams. Tune in next week for part 2. I'm sure you'll enjoy the completion of this amazing discussion with Q.