Challenges of the C-Suite with Alaina Love, Episode 1w

Hi, Elena.

Hey.

Hi, Elena, how are you? I'm great.

It's so great to see you again.

Great. You know, I ran in to make sure that I got it— got here on time. I had to drop off my puppy at daycare.

My puppy's out in the hallway, so if he enters the conversation, you know why.

That's perfectly okay. So first, let me greet our audience. Hi everyone, this is CB Bowman Live. Today on Thursdays we talk about social justice, and so I'm so grateful for you joining us. And today we have a very special friend, colleague, a terrific person, and her name is Elena Love. And just for, you know, just for transparency, Elena is part of the faculty for my new company, Workplace Racial Equality, and we can talk a little bit about that, but I want to spend some time talking about— talking to Elena, and this is the result of my rushing back and forth today, talking to Elena about what she's seeing out there in terms of social justice any suggestions and thoughts that she might have for change. And one of the things that we're committed to do on this series is to not make anyone feel bad. This is really about information to make wise and personal decisions. So this is our first show, and I'm so excited to have Elena. Elena, welcome.

Thank you. I'm honored to be the first guest on your show, CB. It'll be a lot of fun.

Great. So Elena said to me, what do you want to talk about? And I said, well, we're just gonna, you know, take it light and engage people. And so if you're listening in, please write in the chat. I can see that and ask Elena questions. So first, Elena, I would love for you to tell the audience about what you do and just about you and your journey.

Well, I run an organization called Purpose Linked Consulting, and the entire focus of our business is helping people discover and utilize their passions. And it's a wonderful job to have when you think about it, because I get to watch people transform before my eyes every single day as they discover the very best about themselves. And so what we do is try to help people also figure out, now that I know what these passions are, how do I apply them to the work that I'm doing and the way in which I'm serving in the world? And I work with leaders and teams in all kinds of companies all over the world and have them apply their passions to really transforming their businesses. So it's great fun.

And don't you have an assessment? Like, I don't know this. I do.

I do. Some years ago, I put together a research team from the University of Michigan and developed an online assessment called the Passion Profiler. And what we were able to do is take this what is a seemingly esoteric concept called passion and purpose and translate it into 10 distinct passion archetypes where we understood the strengths of those archetypes. We understand the vulnerabilities people with a particular archetype might struggle with, and we understand the environments in which someone with that particular passion would thrive. And so with this instrument, we can identify how an individual resonates against all 10, and then we spend a whole lot of time digging into your top 3. Because when we understand that, we have a ton of information that's really very empowering for the person. And we also understand whether or not they're using any of those 3 in their work setting so that they're able to go and make changes that they need to make within the ways in which they're working so that they're bringing more of who they are to the work that they do.

So they get to fire their company that they're working for.

Well, I'll tell you what, in all the years I've been doing this, people have always asked me that question. Well, what if my team discovers that there's a passion that they have and it's not for this company? Am I going to lose everybody? And I always tell leaders, you're more likely to lose people when you don't ask that question than you are when you actually explore the question, because it tells people that you care deeply about keeping them connected and engaged with their work. And we also find that for the most part, when people are armed with this information about themselves, they're empowered with the tools that they need to actually structure the path to making that connection. So they are more likely to stay where they are given the opportunity to apply those passions at their current level.

I want to— sorry, Elena, because you just struck a bell or two with me. Passion, engagement. And I want to talk to you about that in relationship to social justice. First, I want to go back and ask you, you used the term that coaches know about, MBTIers know about, but maybe not everybody— archetype. What does that mean?

Oh, you know, think about, um, think about the archetype in every story that you've ever read. There's a hero, there's a heroine, you know, there's somebody who's fighting the good fight, there's somebody who maybe plays the villain. Well, we all have those sort of archetypes within us, but what the way we use that word is to describe the energy that an individual exhibits. And that energy is very much aligned to certain behaviors associated with that particular person. And that particular person's what we call archetype or way of style of behaving. And so in our language, the archetypes are— the 10 are Creator, Conceiver, Processor, Discoverer, Teacher, Connector, Altruist and Healer, and Transformer and Builder. And so—

Hmm.

Working with people or interfacing with people, you're going to find each of those archetypes somewhere along the line is going to show up. Either you're going to have one of them or the person that you're interfacing is going to have one of those particular archetypes. And understanding how those archetypes offer themselves to the business and how they offer cognitive diversity to a team is extremely powerful information to have, especially when you're trying to solve tough challenges where having greater input than you would ordinarily get just through rounding up the usual suspects and getting people who supposedly have subject matter expertise in whatever the topic is. Those are, those are great people to have at the table. But when you can start bringing people who have passions that cause them to think differently than you do, then you've got something to play with. That really sets you off on a different edge in terms of your ability to compete.

Let me ask you, when you go to a party, do you stand there and figure out which—

It's terrible. When I do this work with teams, I always use, as part of my work, I use movie clips towards the end of the sessions that I do with them to prove to them that just with this one session we've done, They can actually begin to recognize these archetypal behaviors in others. And then I get hate mail from them because they say, I can't go to the movies anymore. I never look at the same thing the same way. I'm archetyping the characters in the movie.

Okay, so here's the $64,000 question.

I know where you're going before you even ask it. Go ahead.

What's my archetype?

Well, CB, you definitely have builder, like written all over you. I'm going to guess there's some transformer in there and a heavy dose of altruist I think you have in you. So, hey, I mean, we can see, we can, we can have you take the assessment and we'll see. But I don't think I'm too far off. I got at least one of them right.

I might be afraid to know. It might hold me back from building.

No, it won't, because you can't help yourself when you've got it. Like, there's no way you're not going to do it. What I'm trying to figure out is how to get a hold of Match.com and eHarmony, because I have one heck of a great dating tool here.

Oh, I think so. I wish I had known that. Well, I met my husband on eHarmony, so—

Okay, so you need to have him take the assessment so you can figure out, you know, where the friction points are.

I can tell you that.

Yeah, be really careful because he'll be using it as an excuse. Well, I'm a Transformer. What am I going to do? That's why I do that stuff.

I think he would too. Totally. So let's, let's go to the difficult conversations for today.

Okay.

Which are, what, what, if any, do you see that we can do as a society, particularly in the United States, to move through this journey that we seem to have roadblocks towards for full social justice? And of course, you know, I'm particularly interested in the workplace and racial equality.

That's a huge question. And the answers to it are—

Break it down into 3 parts.

It's huge. And the answers to it are complicated. But I would say that Most important as I think about this are the large institutional structures that form our world. For the leaders of those structures to recognize, number one, they have responsibility for contributing to solving this issue because they are leading large organizations with many, many people. It really is often the work environment where you have an opportunity to test and hone and understand the aspects of yourself that you think you're presenting to the world. Because we go to work and sometimes we find out we have strengths we didn't realize or weaknesses we weren't aware of. We might even learn we have prejudices or biases we were totally unaware of until we got exposed to someone or something that would reveal that to us. That whole work milieu is an excellent learning ground for who we are. I would say first and foremost, leaders of organizations understanding that they have the responsibility for shaping the culture that others are experiencing, and they are contributors to solving these tough challenges or making them worse. I'd say that's first. Second, I would say that developing the deep capacity to listen is extremely critical in all of this. There are so many people who feel like they don't understand the issue, or if they engage in the issue, especially if they're not a person of color, they're going to get talked at, put down, criticized, made to feel guilty. I don't know anybody who signs up for a conversation where they're going to be made guilty throughout the conversation. They pretty much don't want to be part of it. We avoid that at all costs, and as a consequence, learning doesn't happen. This capacity for listening and understanding every single side of the issue from the perspective of the person that's experiencing that, I think it's particularly critical to being a path to understanding on a broader scale. So I've been doing with some of my clients some compassionate listening sessions where I'm actually pulling whole teams together. They've all watched what's gone on in the world here and nobody has had their head in the sand. We've had this perfect storm of a pandemic and social unrest sort of all bubbling together at the same time. And one of the most important experiences that leaders that I'm working with are giving their teams is the opportunity to have the ability to have a conversation in a safe way and in a place where each person, regardless of the perspective that they have, is being honored for sharing what they believe to be true or what their experiences have been. It's amazing to see when you do that and you do that well, you see light bulbs going on and you see people starting to understand differently that— and saying things to each other like, I had no idea that those were the hurdles you had to get over just to come to work today. And I vow to you now to be a better colleague and to check on you because it never occurred to me I had to. But I get what you're experiencing. And people are saying that not coming from a place of guilt of I should have, but coming from a place of compassion. Now I understand, therefore I am armed with the knowledge I need to be a more supportive person in your life. and in the workplace. More of that, I think, is pretty critical. Then deciding from that, that not only are we going to listen, but we're going to engage our workforce in helping us solve this because these are the folks experiencing this on one side of the issue or the other. We're all experiencing this. Nobody escapes this reality. How can we work together to figure out what we need to do in our own organization or on our own team to create an environment where we truly are embracing people completely. We are actually not just embracing them in word, but we're actually embracing them indeed in the way we act and in the way we include people. Because inclusion really happens at the team level. You can talk about inclusion way at the top of the organization and have all kinds of great C-suite policies around it, but inclusion happens at the team level. You need to start changing behaviors at that level if you want to change them Across the broader organization.

Let's go to— since this is our first show, I'm going to come back to each thing that you identified.

Okay.

But there is a misunderstanding, I believe, in not knowing the difference between diversity and inclusion. They're linked together as one. We even say DEI. I now. Can you share with the audience your belief in the difference between the two?

Well, I think when people talk about diversity, they're talking about very typical dimensions of diversity that we think of when that term was first coined, which was back in the '70s, believe it or not. So it's been around a while. But we think about race and gender and ethnicity, maybe cultural background, religious background, sexual orientation, that sort of thing. Those are the things we think about. Some of those dimensions of diversity are outward, like you can see that I'm a woman of color and you're a woman of color. And some of those are not outward signs that you would ordinarily know of. For example, someone's sexual orientation is not necessarily written across the— they're not wearing a t-shirt purporting that to the rest of the world.

Right.

And so when people talk about diversity, normally they're talking about how many different types of people in those dimensions of diversity that I just mentioned do you have as part of your organization? If you're not careful, it becomes a numbers game. How many have I brought in? Therefore, I'm doing well because I have X number of people who are diverse in my organization. Well, that's great. But if they don't have a seat at the table and they don't have a voice in the conversation, You have numbers, but you don't have inclusion. And that's really where the inclusion piece comes in. And if we are not able to marry those 2 things, where we're both bringing diverse talent into an organization, but also being sure that we're including people in the conversations and in the decisions and in the growth opportunities within the organization, then pretty much you find that people come in one door and eventually, if they have an opportunity to, they go out the other door and you as the organization loses. So it's really understanding how to manage both pieces of that equation that's important.

I was just going to ask you that. Is one, in your opinion, is one more important than the other one?

Boy, that's a tough call. I would say if you never had any diverse people in your organization, you would never have any opportunity to include them. But if you don't include them, it doesn't matter how many you bring in.

Yeah.

Maybe the answer is inclusion is, of the two, the more critical. A lot of organizations, I'm seeing those letters switched. People are actually saying inclusion and diversity now because they're starting to recognize that it's really inclusion piece that makes the biggest difference in whether or not the changes that they're expecting to see happen because they have people with diverse backgrounds and experiences and ways of looking at the world. are actually part of the conversation. The inclusion piece is really— people are starting to realize— most critical. Otherwise, you're doing stuff, but you're not getting the results from it that you thought you would.

Why are leaders afraid of discussing and tackling diversity and inclusion? I mean, I know personally of a great leader in the field. And like religion, like politics, diversity and inclusion discussions seem to have been mixed into that do not discuss label. Why is that? Why is it mixed in?

Well, I think it's because people fear it. They feel like there's a high risk that they'll say something wrong or that they'll be chastised for asking a question that people think they should already know the answer to. And it just feels like an issue where people don't have solutions. We keep talking about it and we keep trying to do things and we keep checking the box that says, yes, we're doing all these things around diversity or all these things around inclusion. inclusion, but there's, I think, a high degree of frustration that the ball is not really moving down the field very much. So I think there's resistance to having those deeper conversations because of it. But any, you know, any big issue that any organization is up against always rises to the level of the CEO. And if conversations aren't happening about this issue at that level, then I would say that consciously or not, you're burying the issue in the organization. You're putting it under some layers that put a sort of a little bit of a protective barrier between you and it, right? But if you're a CEO, you probably are very closely involved with whoever's heading your marketing team. You're probably very closely involved with sales. If you're in research and development, research and development guy is like right next to you, joined at the hip, right? You know what your finance— figures look like. You're on top of how the company is performing and all the indices that are important for you to be successful. This is one of those things. Shifting the focus of this to the top level of the organization is the only way I believe we're going to see real movement around this.

It's something like— it goes in, of course, the category of tough conversations. But by not having the conversations, you're already labeled as anti.

I think there's a very high risk of that happening. And you are worse than that. You're perceived as talking about wanting to solve something, but not really doing the work associated with it. Because everybody's watching everything else you do around any other business issue, right? I mean, it's no surprise if there is some major marketing issue of a product that the CEO and his or her team is all over that issue. So if—

you know what? You know what? It just occurs to me, and I don't know why it just occurs to me, that it can create an incredible layer of lack of trust.

Absolutely. You're saying one thing. Yeah. What you believe, but your actions don't back that up. And we saw a lot of that post some of the big social issues that we saw back in early in the summer. where organizations were putting out very grandiose statements about what they believe and all that sort of thing and feeling like, okay, we're done now. We put this statement out saying what we believe in. But my question is always, what are you doing to activate that in the way in which the organization operates? That's the bigger question. It's great to say you believe in social justice and equality and diversity and inclusion, but what are you doing to make it a reality in your organization in a measurable, substantial and consistent way.

And you know what, I think where I'm going with this is if you create lack of trust in handling one— let's call this a pandemic, because if we look at pandemics, it's situations that happen that we need to pay attention to that are either in our control or not in our control.

Correct.

So we look at economics right now as being a pandemic. We look at social injustice. We look at COVID-19. We look at the environment, the wildfires.

Mm-hmm.

We look at mental health, you know, as being the 5 big pandemics that the United States is facing. Now, here's what it occurs to me when I talk about lack of trust or trust disappearing. If in any one of those sectors you go out and say you're supporting it and your actual behavior doesn't support what you're saying verbally, the trust not only diminishes for that particular pandemic, but it also spreads over to other issues that you might be dealing with, with other pandemics.

You're absolutely correct, not just with other pandemics, but with other things in general in the business.

Yeah.

Where you need people to trust you, right? You need people to believe what you're saying is what your true intention is and that you're going to put the oomph behind it to make those things happen. So making a statement and pretending to believe something and saying that you're going to take real action around it and then not doing it just erodes trust, I think, for leaders in all areas. So it's really not something to fool around with. You know, it's almost— if you're not going to do anything, frankly, it's better not to even say anything.

Then you're also guilty by not saying something.

So you absolutely are. But then you live with that part of it. You know, and what I'm also finding as I've thought about this, CB, and I know you and I had this conversation a little bit recently, is that when I look at what organizations have done over the years, and I've been in and around this space for a long time, even starting from when I was an HR manager overseeing EEOC-related things. One of the conclusions that I've come to is that our big challenge is that while we can train people on unconscious bias and we can give them other kinds of training and understanding of the level of competency that they're demonstrating around leading a diverse workforce. What we really haven't provided up until this point are a set of tools to practice it. And the set of tools to practice it needs to feel like a safe set of tools to use. You don't start out with a power saw. You start out with a hammer if you're just starting to learn how to use tools. And We collectively, I think, as those of us who work with leaders and go into organizations and try to influence the learning and the thought processes of these individuals who are leading these large organizations, need to think in terms of what are some simple tools that I can give them to help them to begin to practice this. What I've actually done around the passion work is exactly that. I've helped teams get comfortable with the notion of diversity of thought and seeking out people who have passions different from their own when they're trying to solve a strategic issue. And what happens when they do that is that they're not only opening themselves up to a type of diversity that is different from the particular thought processes and mindset that they have, but it's also asking them, in essence, to practice inclusion. Because if you don't have it in yourself or on your team, you have to go out and source it from someone else. So it begins to teach them that that's a good thing. And they see the immediate results of that. And when you do that enough times, the people that you end up going to increasingly become diverse in other ways as well. They're not all men. They're not all white men. They're not all women. They're not all white women. Sometimes they're women of color. Sometimes they're people who were born in Asia and had a set of experiences there that could lend input to what you're trying to solve. And they're coming at your particular problem with their builder archetype, or they're coming at it as a conceiver, or they're coming at it as a discoverer. And you're getting a whole new way of looking at that issue that, in my experience, when I've seen teams do this, 100% of the time improves the decisions that they're making and the direction that they take. So more of that kind of thing has to happen. So people—

I have to interrupt you because what you're saying is so exciting. And I am actually going to put out a challenge to the listeners.

Okay.

That one day a month for one year, you walk in somebody else's shoes. That means visiting and doing this without any filters. Just say, I'm going to be here to learn. I'm not going to say whether I like it or whether I don't like it.

Mm-hmm.

I'm just going to go and experience. So it could be something like, if you're Christian, go to a synagogue. If you are of the Jewish faith, go to a church, go to a mosque. Political, go to a— if you're Republican, go to a Democratic— I was gonna say event, but given COVID, listen to something.

Right.

Switch channels. No previous expectations. And then 2 weeks after the experience, Say to yourself, what did I learn? Not what did I not like, but what did I learn? And just store that information away. And I promise people who take this on that there is a nugget someplace in that experience that they could use to build their own experience on.

Absolutely. You know, there There's a fun little thing that I do, and it just kind of— I don't know how it happened. It just kind of happened. But I started doing this periodic, at least once or twice a month, Zoom call with a group of friends that became friends after we graduated from high school. Like, we all went to the same high school together. We kind of knew each other, but we didn't really hang together, except I did with one girl, one other woman who's included in the call. And I've gotten to the point now where I have labeled the call. The title of the call is Politics and Pandemics. Because that seems to be the direction of our conversations.

Okay.

Right? Like, can you believe what happened this week is kind of the way the conversations go. And interestingly enough, 4 of the women that are on the call are Jewish. 2 of us are African American and Christian. And we all grew up in the same town. And none of us were— maybe one had a little bit of a higher socioeconomic level that she enjoyed growing up. But most of us were sort of, you you know, middle class, you know, parents trying to make it, you know, thinking about whether we take a vacation or the baby gets new shoes kinds of questions, you know, and am I getting the food on the table at the end of the day. So the 4 of the Jewish girls were saying to the other 2 of us, you know, well, we all grew up in the same way. We all had the same experiences. You know, we just came from this little town, and they're going on and on. So my friend Amy and I are on the call going, no, it was not the same experience. And like, well, what was different? And she and I began to describe what our experience was like growing up as African American girls in this town. And the town was primarily comprised of people who were Italian, Jewish, and Polish. That was— I mean, if you looked, throw a stone anywhere and somebody that you hit was one of those 3, right? And then there— Then there were the group of African American folks who, for the most part, lived on one side of town. And so we began to describe some of the experiences that we'd had growing up, some of which were not so good. And for many of them, shocking. Like, they could not believe that this was going on to somebody who was sitting in the desk next to them in the 6th grade. That was a completely different experience from their own. And so they started asking more and more questions. And then with this, with this, with a follow-up call, another friend joined, also Jewish, and she said, I heard about that conversation you guys had the last time. You know, Elena, can you tell me some more? Like, what was that experience you had? Because I'm shocked. I mean, I didn't know that was going on. And so it was really interesting because we each got a chance to understand how we viewed the world and what our experience was like. I mean, we got to peer through the windows of each other's homes. at that particular time in our lives, and from— and now from adulthood, really understand this in a very different and deep way. So those kinds of conversations, we need to have a platform to have. And if you're— what you just suggested to your viewers, you know, to go out and do something different, I'd say hold a politics and pandemic Zoom call once a month.

But maybe— You knew you would. physically walk in now. I, I need to, um, put in a, um, what do you call it, uh, a disclosure that says, okay, CB said to walk in. No, I said experience it, right?

Exactly.

Make sure that you're following the rules of COVID-19.

Keep yourself healthy while you're doing all this.

But I remember back in the day when you could walk in One of my greatest fun things was going to— and I think it was because I was very young, so my mind then, uh, trying to remember the specific holiday, but I think it was Shabbat, going to synagogue and experiencing the kosher chicken. It was the best ever.

A little bit different than your fried chicken and macaroni and cheese. Exactly!

And I was like, where can I get this? How can I make it?

You know?

And everybody was laughing at me and with me, and we just had the best time. Uh, and, and it's so important to have that. I remember when I was in Istanbul, and, you know, God, There's not very many people of color walking the streets of Istanbul, and so the children would run. They'd see me, and they'd run and hide behind the buildings and peek out and look at me like, "Is she an alien or what?" And I just had a blast, and sometimes I would go, "Oh my gosh!" But it's so important. I remember when I was in Asia and I went on the subway and how people were crammed in and how they have pushers. And it started to— I started thinking about why space is so important to this culture, you know?

Yeah.

And it's so, it's so incredible. if you just allow yourself to experience and learn from different cultures. So that's my challenge.

It is. It's very interesting. You know, my son was born in Singapore.

Wow.

I, I was— I lived there for a few years, um, and, uh, was running my business there, which was actually a great experience, really getting to see, um, Asia truly embrace Western ideas about management and leadership at a time where they were just, you know, the money was coming in so quickly. They're just trying to figure out how do you get the desks in the place and the lights turned on so we can, you know, start depositing some of this, right?

Mm-hmm.

But what's really interesting is I spent also a lot of time in Thailand. And I would, if I was carrying my son with me when he was little, his father is blonde. And so when he was young, he had blonde hair. And in that culture, touching a child with blonde hair is good luck. So you'd walk—

Wow.

They'd all be trying to touch, you know, the head of blonde hair. And at first I was like, what is— what's the deal here? And then I started to recognize what was going on. But it's little things like that that you just pick up because you expose yourself to a culture that's different than your own. And otherwise you just— you would never know those things. And so for me, being in that part of the world, living there and working there, was just a huge education and a beautiful experience to just understand what leads people to think the way they do and what's important to them, as you just described. And also just to be able to share the perspectives that I have, having grown up here, and understand their perspectives of having grown up there. And, and in some cases, maybe putting a pin or two in the balloon of the idealization of America.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

And then, more importantly, maybe even than being there, was actually coming back here and looking at this country from the eyes of somebody who had lived outside of it.

Yes. What did you experience? What did you experience?

It was like, I called it reentry, right? So when I came back here, at this point I have maybe an 8-month-old baby. And I've come from this very family-oriented part of Asia where it's very easy as an American to kind of integrate into the culture because English is the language there in Singapore. So it was easy and it was super family-oriented. So I come back here and it's maybe the day after we arrived, one of those flights where you get in at 0 dark 30 at night, everybody's tired, you go to bed, you get up the next morning. So I get up the next morning and I turn on the television in the kitchen and I see this show. And all of a sudden, as I'm watching this show and it appears to be a talk show, There are, there's something, somebody talking about a paternity test that turned out to be not the husband and a fight breaks out and they're beating each other up on stage. And I find out, I discover that this is Jerry Springer. Jerry Springer, yes! I was like, oh my God. I said, people come to America, they go into their nice hotel in New York City, they turn on the television and this is what they see.

This is awful. What are we gonna do?

And at the same time, it was that they were doing the whole nanny cam thing where there was all this talk about nannies, you know, potentially abusing or neglecting kids, and then their nanny cams up. And by the end of that day, I was ready, like, sign me up, I'm buying a ticket, I'm going back.

It's so odd. Uh, and I remember having a different experience You know, traveling all the time. And I thought, oh, I'm so happy to be outside of the United States. But then it got to the point where it was draining. And when I touched American soil and walked through customs, I was like, oh, okay, I could relax.

Now you bring up a really good point. You know, we were talking about how— why is it that CEOs might avoid having this conversation or are doing more around this issue. Think about it for a second, because I think about it in terms of languages. So if you are someone who goes to a country and you don't speak that language, or you speak very little of that language, the amount of energy that you have to spend really, really concentrating on every word that's being uttered and maybe trying to pick up a few here and there and get the gist of what's being said to you is enormous, right? And you're on all all the time trying to do that, trying to tune in in some way and sort of understand. The same is true if someone comes to this country and this is not their language. They know a few words of English and they're trying to figure out, how do I, how do I navigate around here with this rudimentary level of English language that I hold within me? And the same thing is true when you're traveling to a different country and whether or not it's a language thing, it's just that you're immersed in a different environment. There's so much new stuff coming in at you that you're trying to manage and make sense of. And the same thing happens when we're talking about inclusion and diversity. For many people, there's a lot of issues around this that they've not been exposed to before. I mean, I went to school with those girls for all those years, and they thought their experience was my experience.

Yes.

And here they are, adults, saying, wait a minute, break it down for me, Elena. What happened? And How is that happening across the street from me and I didn't know it? You know, they were just shocked. So there's a lot, you know, when you're trying to actually navigate this issue of diversity and inclusion, it's almost like going to a foreign country where you don't speak the language, but there's so much going on that's important for you to understand. And so it becomes a process. You don't build a language overnight. You don't become fluent overnight. You become fluent because you practice. And you care enough to understand and continue to try to learn and ask people who speak your language and that one too, to translate for you what's really going on. So these, these conversations are critical.

I think it's so important. You know, earlier this week I interviewed Tricia Nadoff, who's CEO of Management Research Group.

I saw that one. That was a great session.

Amazing.

Too much fun.

She's a riot and so brilliant too. One of the things we talked about is, as you remember, the concept of having a personal board of directors, both within an organization and outside of an organization. As I'm listening to you, I think it's even more critical now because imagine if there is a white leader, at the top of the organization, his having a trusted group of 5 people or 4 people or even 2 people that have different viewpoints that happen to be Black also, the amount of learning he or she can experience is enormous. Oh, it's building that trust with those few people that can help guide you.

I think you're right. And I think also having an opportunity for shared experiences is also where a lot of learning comes in. I was talking to a friend, I think it was last week, and we got into a conversation about social justice issues. And this particular friend is a white male, and he was talking about a leadership program that he's involved in through his company. And it started off being a program where he thought he was electing someone on his staff to attend this program. And they specifically were interested in a person of color being part of this leadership development program. So he chose a woman that he thought, this will be great for her. You know, she's phenomenal. This will, you know, help to round out her experiences in her career. She'll get a lot of exposure. You know, this will sort of be a nice trajectory for her career. So he gives her name as a recommendation. And then he gets a call and says, congratulations, you know, your person has been selected for the program. That's— it's really wonderful. We'll see both of you in class on XYZ date. And he's like, what? Wait a minute, I thought this was for her. And they go, oh, no, no, no. The way this program works is you're coming with her through this experience. And the stories he told me about the things he learned, it was kind of like that Politics and Pandemic phone call where my girlfriends are saying, was that really hap— like, what happened to you? I thought you had the same experience I had because we grew up in the same town. And he was like, no, no, no. He said, there's so much I had no clue about that I actually learned from her. And it let me really have a deep understanding of what her journey is like in this organization and what now I can do a better job of to help smooth that path for her and help remove some of the obstacles that nobody else but her has to jump over.

I'm speechless because how lucky were both people?

He says that, and that's exactly his reaction was like, I mean, I just can't believe what I'm taking in from this experience. I mean, I'm thrilled that I sent her through it, but I'm learning too. And I said to him, I don't know of a better way for you to get this deep appreciation because they were going someplace in this program. I mean, they weren't talking about light issues. They were very prepared to dig in. They created a safe way of doing that.

Right.

But a lot of very challenging difficult conversations were had, but a safe space was created and a nonjudgmental space, which I think is super critical, was created for those conversations to be had, which allowed people to learn things about others and their experiences that they never would have known.

And I think something critical that you said is it allows for both parties to find out critical information about both Parties.

Yeah, because I think there's a tendency for all of us to judge other people based on how we would do things or how we think. So we could falsely assume that because this person doesn't appear to be doing things that we think they should, that that's intentional, that they know better, that, you know, they're making a choice not to engage in a way that we think they should. And it may be that they're completely clueless about the fact that they even needed to.

Absolutely. You know, I want to go back to something that you said. How much time do we have? Oh, God, not enough. Let's talk about— you mentioned unconscious bias, which is the same as implicit bias. But I want to be sure that our audience knows what that is. So can you tell us what it is?

Well, I mean, I'll try to use the sort of a Cliff Notes version of the answer to that question. But in essence, It's a bias that you're carrying that you're not even aware of. And usually it's based in the fact that you don't have an experience or an understanding of that other person who's different from you. And so you behave in certain ways that are usually less positive than they could be. You know, it's the equivalent of deciding that as I'm walking down the street, if I see a group of young African American men, walking the same way that I'm walking, and I happen to be a white male or a white female, I decide somehow I'm not safe. I'm going to walk across the street and go on the other side. You just demonstrated an unconscious bias towards a couple of people that you don't even know, but you're making that judgment based on the color of their skin and assuming, well, they might be, you know, bad people. They might want to attack me, etc. Now, I'm not saying go walk down a dark alley where you see a bunch of folks who look like they're a little sketchy and don't turn around, keep walking towards them. But I'm saying we do that sort of thing all the time. We make decisions about people based on some past experience that we've had that we don't— we're not even conscious of the fact that that has influenced us. And we take an action of some sort that is not inclusive when it comes to that particular person. We see it, you know, we've seen a million of those examples in the news over the last year. You know, a lot of decisions that are being made by people in authority that are— and the way they react to people who are people of color being very different from the way they react to somebody perhaps doing the same or worse in terms of crime who happens to not be a person of color. So there's a lot—

Yeah, I'm sorry. Again, I'm so excited about this discussion. And I also want to break it down to a more granular level. If for some reason, for example, you don't like broccoli, broccoli may be very healthy for you. But if you've been told all your life that broccoli tastes terrible, and so you grow up thinking, I really don't like broccoli, and you just don't even try it, is already—

Exactly.

I was one of those.

Yeah.

Until I started playing around with herbs and spices and made garlic broccoli. Oh my God, you can't keep me away from that. It's, it's really— I had an unconscious bias against broccoli.

Mm-hmm.

But when I engaged in it in different ways than steamed broccoli or broccoli from a can or frozen broccoli, I thought, you know what, this is really good. And I'm eating healthy. Perhaps a little bit too healthy I eat, but—

Nothing wrong with that.

Next time you make it, call me up.

I'll be right over.

But, but I want to talk about how that can be reflected in the office. And so There's a meeting, and a white person decides that a Black person should not come to the meeting because they don't have all the information that's needed to be able to contribute to the meeting.

Or making that assumption.

Right. Or you have a special group of people that you meet with Because they're considered high-level, so you don't invite other people to participate. Unconscious bias at work, big time.

Absolutely.

What could be done about it? One, ask the question, what do you know about the subject matter? Let's not assume, let's not let unconscious bias happen. 2 is if you are making this assumption, go and find out if that assumption is correct, because that person may know even more than you do.

Exactly, exactly.

But has not had a chance to express that knowledge.

And the other big thing that those kinds of decisions do that makes me a little bit crazy is it makes the assumption that that person is not going to come prepared for the meeting.

Yes.

Because depending upon what the subject matter is, if you know something about it, but you know, you're going to this big meeting where there's going to be a deep discussion about it, your tendency is to look and make sure you've got all your facts straight. You have all the information that you can possibly contribute to the meeting. So not only is it excluding the person from the meeting, but it's also making the assumption that they are not professional enough to come prepared. It says so many things on so many levels.

And the other thing is it lacks kindness. Because if you feel a person is not going to contribute to a meeting, is not prepared to come to the meeting, and you've asked if they are and they aren't, Why not say, here's what you need to do to be prepared and to be able to contribute to the next meeting?

That's part of leading, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

To lead, you have to have followers. To have followers, you have to develop them.

Absolutely.

Support their growth and their learning.

What we see is so sad. Or somebody comes to the meeting and they are not prepared and they don't contribute. Why not have a meeting with them after and say, here's what you could do to become a stronger contributor?

Well, the other thing I see pretty frequently, and this happens in all forms of diversity, by the way, is that we tend to choose to associate with and invite to the table the people that look like us, the people that we're comfortable with. And I did a little test on this to see, does this extend beyond a white male inviting another white male to the table versus inviting a Black male to the table for a discussion? And I found that it actually translates across to the archetypes. I did a little study where we looked at team inclusion, and we were looking at it across 10 different networks of interaction. Who do you go to for formal information? Who do you go to for informal, who would you trust if there was a difficult situation that you could count on, etc. Part of what we were looking at is the number of people, where were the nodes of influence on the team, how many people were going to a certain person on the team, were they also reciprocating and going out to others, etc.

Yes.

We found some differences that had to do with gender. Among this group. It happened to be a group that didn't have a lot of ethnic diversity, but we did find some differences around gender. But interestingly enough, those differences disappeared around gender if that particular woman happened to be holding 2 of the archetypes that most of the men held.

Really?

And who didn't tended to be excluded. And interestingly enough, the leader of the organization spent the most time going to people who had his same archetypes, at least 3 same archetypes.

Of course.

So this is, I mean, we think of it as being associated with color, gender, et cetera, the outward forms of diversity that we all are aware of, but it also ends up going to diversity of thought based on the passions that somebody carries. And so part of our approach with this team was to help them understand when you this particular individual, here's what you lose. This is the way they think that could help you and could make a bigger difference in how you solve problems, but you just completely eradicated access to that because you didn't even invite them to the table. You're not interacting with them at all.

Yes.

Or very, very little. So it was a way of putting in front of people the consequences of their decisions. When we talk about diversity and inclusion, We were actually initially, when all of this started, we were trying to get to the point where we understood that when you invite people who look different, think differently, come from different backgrounds, they're going to offer you a perspective on things that you don't have right now.

Like the diamond in the sky.

Like, that's the whole point, right? That's the whole point of this. Well, when you flip that over to aspects of personality and how those, those particular archetypes think, it makes it very real very quickly. Someone could say, invite CB, she's an African-American woman, you really should have her at the table. At that particular meeting, you may or may not offer some insights on certain things, and you may or may not wow the other people who are at the table. But if I know that you have a particular archetype and there's something that I need your insight on through that archetype, I can be very specific about CB. I want you to take out your builder, put your builder hat on, and I want you to look at this issue that we're really struggling with. We can't figure out how to get to this goal. What are the 15 ways you see that we, we've overlooked to get to that goal successfully? So I think, again, I'm back to how do you translate this into some tools that people can use to start appreciating very, very quickly the value of this? Because I think once people do, it changes the game completely.

And we have to get rid of that excuse of, well, if we invite CB, she may shut down the other contributors.

Hmm.

That's one we hear often. Yeah. I know a group that was put together of white women to address the, uh, what could they do to support their Black sisters, and there was no one Black in the group.

Wow.

And I questioned it in a user-friendly manner, and the response was, well, we kind of tried it, but then there was no honest dialogue from the white women. Well, the way they tried it is they invited an entertainer That was a different, different arena. No, um, and if you're un— if you are— I'm gonna sneeze, excuse me, audience. Yeah, um, if you are concerned that it's gonna shut down the audience, that's where we need to start the discussion.

That's— that tells you everything you need to know. That absolutely is the pain point.

Yeah.

How do you overcome that so that you open yourself up to even having a dialogue? That's why I was saying when you asked me the question in the beginning of what do I see going on and what are the solutions, I said to you, this is complex. It's multilayered. There's a lot of different reasons why things may be happening the way they are in any particular company or with any particular leader. Going in and doing this work in an organization really requires the fortitude to actually spend time understanding what are the very apparent and open issues, but what are the underlying obstacles that might prevent this organization from making the progress it says it wants to make, or this leader from making the progress he or she says they want to make around this particular—

I want to bring up before we jump off, at least one important story, which was a story of a Black man who went to a very high-level Ivy League white school. And at the school, his roommate was white.

Mm-hmm.

And every once in a while, the roommate would disappear, and he didn't know why. And they got along great. And he also had a Black friend on campus. And finally, he asked his roommate, where do you disappear? clear to. And he said, well, a group of us folks meet and review what's going on in classes, etc., etc., bonding.

Mm-hmm.

So he said to his Black friend, we should have the same thing, we should get invited to these. And his Black friend said, why do I need to have a relationship with these white people? I can do this. Myself. And so I'm sort of ending with that to say to everybody, everybody has a role in this. Blacks need to not become another culture. They need to experience another culture and from it the diamonds that will help them and their culture And whites need to do the same thing, take with them the diamonds that will help their culture. It's so important not to close out an opportunity to experience a different culture.

I completely agree with you, and I'll offer you a step further in this. People who are multicultural, multiethnic have a completely different set of experiences as well. that need to be understood. You know, my experiences growing up looking like I look with a mother with very fair skin and blue eyes and a blonde-haired, blue-eyed sister, it's a very different set of experiences than somebody who didn't have that. And, you know, I remember having the same conversation with my son who went to an Ivy League school and was struggling because my son is biracial. So he was saying, you know, there's an African American house There's a house for Jewish people. There's a house for Asian folks. There's no multicultural house here. Why don't we have that? Because there's a whole bunch of us who are here that are mixed with lots of different stuff, and we have a different set of experiences having grown up that way than someone who doesn't. So I said, well, you know, your other option is to go to all those houses.

Oh, yes, I like that option.

Yeah, you could start your own, but you can just go to all the other ones because you can check the box. Yup, I'm part that. I'm part that, I'm part that. Okay. I think that's what he ended up doing, actually.

I love it. I love doing it all, you know. Why are we letting anything stop us? Just go for it.

It's the only way we're going to learn about each other, and it's the only way we truly are going to recognize that we're all connected. Yeah. And the sooner we figure that out, and the sooner we start to appreciate the beauty that each person, from their experiences and their background and their culture and their way of life brings to our experience, the better life will be. Maybe we'll start solving some of these really tough problems that we're up against as a world.

For goodness sakes, allow people to ask you tough questions because then you can ask tough questions back.

Absolutely. It's not a scary thing, believe me. Recently, I've had some conversations with folks that are new friends, And they've asked some really tough questions. They usually preface it with, okay, safe space? I can answer this. And I'm like, bring it, bring it. You're good. I love it. And so I've been able to do the same thing. And we've discussed some really, really difficult issues, but from a very loving place. And so I learned from them, they learned from me. And I feel like we advanced overall our understanding and our knowledge. dispelled a lot of the myths and the rumors and the things that leave us feeling badly and feeling like there's no sense of hope. Those conversations give me hope.

Absolutely. They really do. And we're out of time. I wanted to go back to some of the points that you discussed. But so that just means you have to come back.

You got it. You got it. We'll do politics and pandemic on CB Bowman's show. One more time.

I love it. I love it. Everybody, I'm so glad you joined us. We, we, uh, got lots of comments. Um, people were saying, you know, right on, and yes, and, uh, let's do it. And thank you so much for, uh, these difficult challenges that we have and giving us a roadmap. So, Elena, I am so glad you were here today to kick off this program.

I am so delighted and honored to have been invited, and I'm so happy to be in your life, CB. Oh, you make the world a better place.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, everyone, tune in next Thursday. This is CB Bowman live on Challenges of the C-Suite. This particular series is on Workplace racial equality. Sending lots of love out to you and lots of success and lots of discussion. Bye now.

Bye.