110: Maureen Berkner Boyt Discusses Diversity in the Workplace

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Diversity or you groan at the idea of diversity is something that you have to address. What you probably don't realize is that diversity actually can make you money. Today's show is all about how to impact diversity in a way that improves the quality of your business, your decisions and your business results. I think you'll love it. Listen in foreign.

Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast.

I'm your show host and growth coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Maureen Berkner Boyt, who was referred by another great coach. And Maureen's here to talk to us about the real opportunity, the value of unleashing full potential by promoting diversity. What do you actually get? What are the real business value of promoting diversity and what does that look like? What do you actually need to do? So she'll share some stories and all that kind of thing. Maureen joins us from her office or home office in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Yeah, it's true.

Bill, welcome to the show.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, it's great. And it's a beautiful sunny day here in California. And how's everything where you are?

It is fantastic actually. Just got back from California yesterday.

Oh, nice. I just got back from Arizona and I'm on my way to New York later this week.

Right. Such is the life of this work that we do.

Onward and offward. So I'm excited actually to have you on the topic. I think our workforce on the show, our workforces are changing significantly now. Some people are griping and complaining. I heard Tom Peters talking at our Scaling Up Summit recently about he's like, people are complaining about how millennials like to be treated special and all that. He's like, for crap's sake. And he swore he used a bunch More swear words. Yeah. It's Tom, right? He's like, you should have been treating all your workers like that forever. It's not just millennials, right?

They're just demanding it.

I think it's funny because I'm like, what? Your people want to know the purpose. They want to work for a company. Values we've been talking about.

That's everybody.

That's not millennials.

Right, Exactly.

They want their work to matter, to make a dent in the universe. The other thing I think that's interesting is creating a different kind of workforce, but also the challenges. I worked mostly in male dominated industries for years, and then there was a shift in our family and the world and that kind of thing. And I stepped up to be the CEO of a predominantly woman owned woman. Women targeted companies. So our clients, customers, vendors, like everybody was mostly women driven. And it was a big eye opening thing for me to move into that. And I didn't do it perfectly or well much of the time and I still make mistakes in that, but it schooled me in a lot of different ways. So I'm excited to have you on. One of the things that I've noticed is that with my teams, if it's all women or all men or all white or all whatever, if it's too much the same, the conversation gets weird.

It's not as rich or as powerful.

As when we make it more diverse. So I think fundamentally, like, our ideas are better when they come from diverse perspectives and are informed by different backgrounds and things like that. So I love the general thing.

So, yeah, there's an incredible body of research and data saying that when you're diverse, your teams are stronger, they're smarter. Everything from collective team IQ to innovation, the number of patents, market share, profitability. This is not a warm and fuzzy thing that business owners should be thinking about. This is actually when you have diversity, it's about winning. And I'm all about warm and fuzzy, but it doesn't pay the bills. And I'm a capitalist. I like making money. So it's both smart to do this and it's the right thing to do.

Well, before we get into that, you.

Don'T have much to lose before we.

Make the case for that and give people the practical steps to do it and the pitfalls, that kind of thing. Let's back up for a second. And how does this become a focus or an interest for you? Where does this begin with you?

Probably all the way back to second grade, Bill. I was second grade. There was. We ran for class President and I looked up at the front of the room and the only people running were boys. And that just didn't seem right to me. So I threw my name in the hat and I ran under the slogan, vote for Maureen and you've got your queen. We were learning rhyming and I won. And that was my step into leadership. And it was that first time, really, that I can remember saying, gosh, it doesn't seem right that it's just the boys. I was really, really. And I really continued that journey. My first job out of college was with one of the fastest growth companies in the world at the time, Quad Graphics. Harry Quadracci, the founder, was my boss, I got to see. And by the time he was my boss, he was already on Forbes, Richest People in America list. The guy was the real deal. I was getting an MBA on the job and was just really fascinated both by the industry, but really about how the company was growing. So I ran off and got myself a master's degree in organizational development and did that work for large companies for a fairly short period of time. And I'm just far too entrepreneurial to work for anybody else. This is my fifth business and so went out on my own and I actually ran CEO mastermind groups, much like you do, Bill. And loved, loved, loved that work and actually thought I was going to do it forever. Because I always say that when you're working with CEOs of fast growth companies, you are working with the few that impact the many. So if, yeah, preach into the choir. So I was actually serving on a board at that same time for a company that was in real trouble if they didn't make some changes, they actually weren't going to be around. So spent a week in a room with some fantastic people. Some of them are actually one of them is a gazelle's coach and mentors and friends. And I left that meeting and as I always do, I was debriefing, what did I learn? What am I supposed to do? And I realized I was exhausted and I was trying to figure out why. And it wasn't just the fact that we had to just kind of rip this company apart and build it back up from a strategy standpoint. It was because I was the only woman in the room all week long and I had to hold up the estrogen. And I left that and said, you know, something's got to change that it shouldn't. We should never have an only in the room because that just doesn't make business sense. So I said, you know, If I was the only one in the room, what can I do to help more women get into leadership? And that's when Moxie was founded. And it was an interesting, you know, we were peer advisory and then some books and online workshops, and now we have micro learning programs. And women were all kinds of qualitative and quantitative data saying, I'm raising my hand. I'm doing all these things. I feel more confident, and I'm leaning into a broken system. And women can lean into a broken system until they fall over, but until we change that system, we're not going to get different numbers. That's when I started looking at what systemically is wrong. Why are businesses not able to promote women? People of color, go diversity across the board. And really started digging into unconscious bias and understanding that nobody is doing this on purpose. I have yet to work with a leadership team that says, no, no, no, really, we want all straight white dudes on our leadership team. More often, it's them scratching their heads and feeling frustrated and saying, we're doing everything we can and we keep losing these great people. I've mentored this woman or I've mentored this person, and they were on the leadership track and they were engaged and they quit. And that is when it's about systems. So now we have. We actually say we hit the problem from both sides. So we have tools and resources and microlearning for women so they can step into their full potential. And then we have tools and resources and programs for leadership teams and actually for individuals to understand and interrupt unconscious bias so they can build inclusive teams and workplaces where everybody can thrive. So that's my story, Bill.

There you go. All right, folks, it's been a great show. When you say unconscious bias, right? I think so. I'm a straight white male from North America.

Right.

I'm clear that I'm like, in the Lucky DNA Club. I've also visited 61 countries, spoken four languages, so I have also a little bit of perspective. But I'm clear. I'm a straight white male from the United States.

Yeah, I think the thing that we want to get on the table really early in this conversation is that every single one of us is biased. It's actually the way our brain functions, and it makes a ton of sense when you start to think about it. Back in the day, we had to decide very quickly, is this situation safe or not safe? So think about our unconscious biases as mental shortcuts. And all of us are doing it all of the time. And there are Both positive bias and negative bias. So, for example, you did hit the genetic jackpot if you are a straight white male, particularly if you're over 6ft tall. There's crazy amounts of research about this. Now, that's not to say. And this is where I think the conversation gets really interesting. Right now you've got the guy at Google that wrote the thing saying women actually genetically are not predisposed to be engineers. All this crazy stuff. Think about the systems that we've created around positive and negative bias, and everybody doing it all the time have created a series of headwinds for people that are not white straight males. Right. So it's these everyday little hurdles that need to be overcome. And for white males, there's a tailwind just gently pushing you along. We do not want to take that tailwind away. That's a beautiful, wonderful thing. Instead, when we talk about interrupting unconscious bias, it's about creating the tailwind for everybody so that we see everybody as capable, we see everybody as having leadership potential. We see everybody's performance the same way. So I think people start to get freaked out about this when they think it's about taking something away versus creating something new, creating that tailwind across the board.

Another trainer I saw do a very moving, powerful exercise once years ago, but asked, put a group of, I don't know, 15 people on the stage and then ask them to organize themselves, to put themselves in order without any further instruction. And what they did is organize themselves by racial, gender and insertive income.

Yep.

Unconsciously, without further prop. That's what they did. And. And of course, they couldn't see it, but the audience could see. And people began to cry.

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. No, and really, we have to sort and categorize really quickly. The problem is when we trust what we're thinking.

Right.

I mean, if you want the greatest bias interrupter, it's simply to be asking yourself anytime that you have a thought about a person, about their performance, about hiring, about promotion, is to ask yourself, what else could be true? This was my initial thought, but what's the bias here? And what else could be true? Not, is there a bias here? What's the bias? Is it positive? Is it negative? What else could be true?

Well, I think we notice this in.

A variety of settings. One of the ones that I notice again and again is in interviewing. So I'm interviewing someone for a job. Right. That's a very clear thing. And I'm like. And I'm thinking to myself, oh, I get this person. Oh, I can understand this. Person. Oh, I notice where they're coming from. So it very often and very easily comes when our sort of.

Like me bias overall.

Yeah. Are they like me? Do we speak the same language? Do we have the same interests? Things like that. And I found myself responding well to people who have similar interests who seem to come from similar background. Like, I get them, they get me. Like they'll understand me. Oh, we can work together because we can communicate. However, when I trusted that and stayed there, I've ended up with some really bad hires because they didn't have the right skills, they didn't suit, whatever. I was essentially interviewing a friend, not a person, for a particular role.

Yeah. And that's actually dangerous. One of our strongest biases is like me bias. We know like and give trust to people that remind us of, of ourselves and then we'll ignore all kinds of data that tells us otherwise. And this plays out in so many ways. When we're talking about talent, it's about the little. When I talk about a tailwind, you know what, I'm just going to invite him to play golf with that client or I'm going to give him that stretch assignment that's going to give him exposure to P and L that he didn't have before. And it's these little series of things that happen when you've got somebody that's not like you. They have to prove it and prove it again and prove it again before they get those same micro sponsorship moments.

Well, for me it's like, when are they going to disappoint me? Or when are they going to surprise me with something that's, you know, that I didn't want to be? Not a good surprise.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it is really thinking about. And the other thing I want to make sure people understand about unconscious bias is that knowing is not enough. In fact, it's very dangerous when people think, oh, okay, now I know about unconscious bias. So I don't have it anymore. It's the way our brain, literally the way our brain functions. It's everything from our left frontal lobe to our amygdala. They're doing all kinds of really fascinating neuro research around it. But what we need to understand is, for example, if I were a diabetic, I could do a whole bunch of research on why my pancreas wasn't secreting insulin properly, but I couldn't then turn around and say, all right, pancreas, do it right now. It's an organ. Our brain is an organ. Unconscious bias is the way it functions. Knowing isn't enough. We actually have to hack our biased brain. We have to build in systemic and individual bias interrupters to stop that unconscious bias from happening. If people take nothing else away, it's like, what else could be true? And hey, knowing about this stuff isn't enough. I actually have to put bias interrupters in place.

Well, I think three things come to mind when you say that that seem really, really clear. So we can talk about this. You can get the ideas here, but it would be a little bit like explaining bike riding. You could talk about needing to balance and put your hands on this and maybe get fancy, explain to you how and when to shift and to move your feet in circular motions to keep them resting on the pedals during the whole thing. Like, I could explain all of that stuff. And if you had never done it, you would not know how to ride a bike. You might even be able to picture it in your mind. Had you heard of or seen it before and hear all those parts of it, you still wouldn't know how to ride a bike until you went out and you stumbled through the experience of riding the bike.

Bike.

And then you would know how to ride a bike. And yet you would not yet have the benefits of being a bike rider unless you rode on a regular basis.

Yeah. And even then, I think what's interesting about this is we always have to check our bias. Because even if we think, okay, I got this now you got to have the checklist, you have to have the process. You have to really make sure that you're following and interrupting. Just like, okay, now I know that I can get faster on the bike, but I can't go to sleep riding that bike. I still have to pay attention.

So if we become aware of and actively manage noticing our biases, then there's some other stuff to do before we get into that. Why don't we actually go back and you've got some great, great stories about some of the environments. So you talked about one where they shifted. What happened there? What did they do? Tell us a little bit more about that. Make that as real for us as you can.

Yeah, well. And I think it's really important, particularly for fast growth companies to understand that there is a talent war on. If you're not feeling it already, you're living under a rock.

I think every single one of my clients is frustrated and dealing with finding good people right now.

Yeah, absolutely. And the way that we were able to find people in the past simply is not going to work anymore. We've got 20%, actually 26% of the workforce aging out as the boomers retire. Most of the companies that we work with on their leadership ranks, it's 45 to 55%. So we've got a drain at the top and simply not enough talent to fill in. So if you're fishing where you've always fished for talent, you're going to end up with B and C players. There's a company, they are a product company. And I guarantee at least 75% of the people listening to the show are using their product. I know the CEO, I know quite a few on the leadership team. And what's really interesting about that is they were red hot and growing so fast. Actually globally, one of the fastest growth companies around. They became known as a fantastic company to work for. If you were a 20 something guy. The place was a frat and that story got out on the street.

I think I tried to coach their.

CEO so recruiters weren't wanting to work with them. And here's what was happening. They'd bring somebody in outside of that box and they'd spit them out six months to a year. So they were hiring B and C players while at the same time trying to continue to grow so rapidly. Guess what happened? Strategic misses. They missed a huge market opportunity that I was watching from the sidelines saying, why aren't they going after this market? Yeah, quality issues. They were having profitability, I mean you across the board. Because they couldn't, they could not sustain their growth with the talent they were able to bring in. So this, it's so critical and it's, it's way, way easier to build diversity and inclusion when you're small and growing than it is to say, oh my God, now we're, we're 300 people, over 3,000 people.

It's hard to turn a big ship.

Versus okay, there's three of us. The fourth hire has got to be somebody wildly different.

Yeah.

And we can build from there. There's actually a tech company in Austin that they took a look and they said, okay, we know that we want to grow. We know that if we try and compete against Apple and Google and Facebook for talent, we're not going to win. So they said, we're going to be totally different. We don't care if you went to school and we certainly don't care where you went to school. We're going to get extraordinarily good at training. So they bring people in the door and rather than spending their money on the churn and Burn of talent recruiting and losing people or hiring B and C players. They say, okay, if you have. If your core values are the same as ours, and they don't say culture match. They say, core values. You know, if you're innovative, if you are a learner, and they've got them all listed, if your core values match, we'll train the heck out of you. So they've gotten incredible at it. Over 50% of their leadership team are women, and they have employees from 20 different companies. They're on Inc. 500 lists year after year for the last five years. They're winning because they totally flipped on its head where they were searching for talent, what they were looking for, what their process was, and say, we're going to get really good at bringing people in the door and keeping them and bringing them up to speed.

Let me see if I hear you correctly, because I think that a lot of people will say, well, why don't we just get the best person for the job? Forget all the rest of this stuff. I'll say, well, two things. One is, at the end of the day, if your team is diverse, styles, perspectives, backgrounds, things like that, the more diverse it is, the more fertile, the more interesting the conversations, the better decisions you'll make. The second thing is, and I think we open the show with this, is that your thought that one person is better for the job or another is, is often flawed and based on unconscious bias that you haven't stopped to examine.

Yeah. So if you're saying, we want the best person for the job, you better have bias interrupters in place, because right now you're hiring based on biases. This goes back to the 70s. It was really interesting. Orchestras started doing blind interviews where they would literally put up a curtain. Now, before those auditions were happening, orchestras were traditionally about 90% male, 10% female. They put up the curtain. Auditions happened, women. It's really interesting hearing some of the stories they would literally tiptoe in so that their heels wouldn't click on the stage. Within five years, most of those orchestras were 50, 50 men, women. Where when I knew it was a woman, I might think, gosh, you know, she plays yobo well. But the guy before her was better. When there was a screen where I couldn't see and all I could do was hear the music being played, it interrupted my bias and I actually got the best player. So that's one of the things that if you can absolutely do blind screening of your resumes, scrape any sort of data that tells you gender, ethnicity, again, it's been replicated again and again and again.

I don't think we are at all equipped to do that. The vast majority of us. I see a resume immediately. I can make pretty good guesses about ethnicity and gender and even from some of the locations and things like that. Perhaps even sort of socioeconomic level. Right. What's the sort of class level?

And that's where there's some great software out there where you can run resumes through if you don't have those resources, which I know a lot of small businesses don't. What you want to do is before you go in, remind yourself there's this really, really fascinating research that tells us if we remind ourselves about performance bias, if we remind ourselves about maternal bias, if we remind ourselves about all kinds of bias. I mean, there's switching names on a resume from Jane Doe to John Doe, John we think is ready, and Jane, we might not even bring her in for an interview. And if we do, she should make $15,000 less. There's just so much data around this bill. You have to, if you can't blind screen, right. And just look at the data or have, you know, have somebody go through the resumes before the hiring manager takes a look and try and scrape that kind of data out where you're just looking at experience. If you can't do that, at least remind yourself of bias. And then super fascinating research that says if we simply look at photos of people from diverse backgrounds, famous people who have been successful, it temporarily reduces our bias. So flip through pictures of whether it's Sheryl Sandberg or Tim Cook at Apple who's gay or whatever it might be to say, here are all these people that have been successful. Okay, now I'm going to take a look at these resumes and decide who gets the interview. And then be absolutely sure in the interview process itself that you are asking the same questions in the same setting. So you're not taking the guy to lunch and the woman's in the cold conference room.

Right.

It's either you're taking everybody to lunch, but really you should do everything you can. Conference room, same questions. And then you've got very clear cut criteria. This is the experience that we're looking for. Do they have it or not? Here are the questions that we're going to ask. Are core values match? Do we think it's a match or not? So that you're really doing as much as you can to compare apples to apples. I just threw about six bias interrupters at you.

Yeah, it's interesting. It Was interesting to run into, to walk into the world of all women years ago and find that my ways of operating were off putting and uncomfortable and things like that. And I wouldn't say that I became masterful, but I definitely got trained and developed in that role.

Well, I think what we want is diversity, Right? Right. If you have all women, that's not great. If you have, you know, all African American, that's not great. If you have all white men, that's not great. You really want a mix.

The mix, yeah, the mix makes it a fertile, rich kind of.

Absolutely. Yep, yep. That's where. That's actually where you see the business drivers, the real business results.

Yeah, yeah. Because you're going to get not a bunch of people who agree with you, but you're going to get competing ideas. You're going to get more of an idea meritocracy, right?

Oh, absolutely. And there's going to be a little bit of tension to it as well. A positive tension where people really feel like they have to bring their A game, which is a very positive thing, versus like the frat, Right. Where I feel like, you know, I can burp and scratch and drink beer and put my feet on the couch. Right, bro, something like that.

Oh, I get it. All right, so big takeaways, right. It's a lot easier to get this done early out. So the earlier you tackle and work to build diversity of perspective, opinion, background, that kind of thing, the better. Better. You know, when you're 3,000 people in, it's going to be a lot harder to do.

Absolutely.

Or even 30 people in. And you think about harder to shift that boat. But think about people coming in, who's going to compete and try to get on your team. When the team all looks like one kind of person, if they're all mirrors of you, I often say people will say to me, early stage companies, God, I just need to clone myself.

No, I disagree.

You need to structure and design your business so that you have a range of different types of people doing pieces of things, not just more and more of you. More and more of you gets you a particular kind of business. It's not the way we scale a business. And if we had all of you think about crop diversity, right. If you were to go in and have one strain of crop, one thing out there, and then a disease comes in or some environmental condition comes in and wipes out that strain, that strain's vulnerable to it, then that's game over for that crop. And if you're dependent on it for you in your community. But the more diverse, we can handle a greater range of things, we can respond to things because we've got more ways of thinking represented, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And I would say this talent has a choice right now. Great talent has a choice. So if they're looking at your company, you know, there was a woman who she went into interview, she's like, mo, I'm not going to take the job. The panel was three middle aged white guys and they were all named Dave. Right. She said I didn't have to forget about anybody's, you know, anybody's name. But I knew in that moment I wasn't taking it because they didn't recognize it, they didn't make a joke about it. And I'm asking myself, is this where I'm going to thrive? Not at all.

Right. I don't look like Dave.

Yeah. And even if, you know, for a lot of companies, they're like, well, okay, we're not there. We are all a bunch of Daves. Say something in the process. Say something on your website, in your material is like, hey, we're not there yet, but we want you to be a part of our story. Then I might as great talent still give you the chance to interview me.

Yeah. You might say we looked in the mirror and we realized we have an issue.

Oh, absolutely. That was a CEO that I worked with. It was interesting. His daughter graduated with chemical engineering degree, came home and said, dad, I'm the only woman in the plant. And he was like, oh, that's terrible, blah, blah, blah. And then he went back and he looked at his team and he went, oh my God, I'm doing this at my company. Something's got to change because I know the experience that my daughter is having. So I would say if, if nothing else, think about the kids in your life and think about the legacy that you're leaving for them. That we really want to leave a world and a workplace that's inclusive, where everybody's got that tailwind.

Well, for sure it'll make you stronger and it'll make your life easier. If you want to follow more, read up on and and learn more about Maureen's work, go to moxieexchange.com you'll find lots of stuff about becoming more diverse, about unleashing the full potential of your team and your business getting easier and building a better business. Moxieexchange.com and of course, every week we bring you an author, a guru, a thought leader, a CEO, a fellow coach or somebody talking about all things scaling up. So find us here every week and get all these podcasts and free tools and tips and things like that@scalingupbusiness.com go there and subscribe and get all that good stuff. Scaling upbusiness.com moxieexchange.com thanks again Maureen for being on the show with us today and for helping us to think a little.

Yeah, absolutely. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

I want to give some special thanks to our original growth guru Verne Harnish. Our show is produced by NY Obeid Audio production by Podfly Productions. Audio editing by Albert Burge show notes are compiled by Ein Codena with proofreading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of the show today, please share it with somebody else and let us know the parts that you loved so we can bring you more of that. Thanks for listening and keep scaling up.

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