Monthly Mentoring with Cynthia Fortlage

Hey, we are live. I always like feel a bit scared at the initial part of going live for some reason, but yes, I'm just reminding everyone who is joining us that we do this as a broadcast and not as a kind of general Zoom call because we just know how many Zoom calls people have to get on every day. And so we wanted to give you the opportunity not to have to show your face and not to need to participate unless you would like to, um, in which case you can absolutely ask questions in the chat. Um, we will make some time at the end for questions, but if you have a burning question, I'm going to keep my eye on the chat as well, and we can also ask them throughout. Um, and I want to first of all say thank you, Cynthia Fortlage, for joining us today. We're very— I'm very excited personally.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Great.

Yeah.

Um, and I kind of wanted us to start because we were having a little chat just before we came live about the safety of asking questions. And I thought it would be a nice way to start it off because you, you articulated it really beautifully in just making it feel really safe to ask any question that we might want. So maybe you could just let us know that.

It's my pleasure. Hi everyone. So my rule is that, you know, the only question that is wrong to ask is the one that you, you don't ask. In other words, if you don't know the answer, you should be asking the question. And secondly, the context in which you do that is don't worry about the language, don't worry about how you say it, just ask your question. And if it requires us to talk a little bit about the language, you allow me to do that in the answer. But otherwise, it is okay to ask any question, including the ones your mother might tell you inappropriate to ask, I'm the girl that you can ask.

I really do love that. I really do. I'm gonna, I'm gonna steal it and adapt it somehow when I'm starting off a group because yeah, it's really great to have that, that safety. Um, but I always start as well by, by asking how you are today. How are you, Cynthia?

Well, you know, life is complex as it is for everybody. I think in terms of the nature of the work that we're going to talk about, you know, there's obviously aspects that are personal that connect with me personally. But, you know, we have global context of wars in many parts of the world that are going on. There's economic crises in the term, you know, we have like, you know, tariff regimes and everything else going on around the world. There's human rights backlash everywhere we go. We continue to have a cost of living crisis that everyone has their experience going through. We're seeing that marginalized communities are used in political games these days. We see the rise of the Trump effect around the world, including here in the UK. Obviously, within my own personal identity, we have the more recent Supreme Court decision that has unintended consequences, something that happens in every communication. There's unintended consequences. And so it's all of that. We're seeing a global rollback on LGBT and women's rights, both of those intersecting with my own identity. So yeah, the world's a little tough right now, but that just fuels why I need to lean in and do the work.

Yeah, it's— it is so complex and so multi-layered at the moment, and it also seems so loud. Like, it's really difficult to find the right balance between wanting to know what's going on in the world and being able to understand where you might want to push something. But most— mostly it just feels so out of control, out of our own control. And so knowing what's going on in the world, but then also protecting yourself because it is so much, and it is, it is, um, it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming. And, and yeah, it feels like very, um, very much uphill at the moment in every aspect of life. Um, how do you shut out the noise actually? Like, how do you stay informed with what's going on and also protect your energy and protect your sense of overwhelm?

Oh, well, you know, I think it ties into a couple of things. First of all, I mean, when I think of, you know, the personal context, I love what you said. Like, it feels like, you know, it's this kind of downward roll. But you see, for me, it's hit a place where for me, as part of my, you know, daily affirmations, I go, the only direction from here is up. So, already setting the mindset that I've shifted from worrying about how bad it's going to get to knowing that it's so bad right now, it can only get better. And so, that's part of the focus. And then, the work itself really sets it up to think about when you have those conversations with, in my case, with leaders that get it. And they're challenging themselves in the thinking. It doesn't mean they're engaging me and hiring me to work with them. But you can see that they're starting to do the work either on themselves or on their approach. That is hope at work. When we hear the stories or that I see, for instance, of allyship and bravery in the workplace. I worked with BT in the past year. And I was talking with them like, you're checking in like, how did it go? It just seemed that the doc that they gave me of the work they wanted delivered— we delivered the work— didn't quite hit the mark because the mark wasn't actually accurate in terms of helping a particular individual within the company. But it actually created something they weren't expecting, which was 3 other staff members felt I had made a safe space for them to come out and declare. And it's like, oh my gosh, like really? Like, you know, I mean, while I had worked with them pre, I mean, I was with the audience maybe 90 minutes and that was enough to convince 3 people to let go of the weight of holding them back and become much more authentic in the workplace. However that manifested for them, you know, that's just amazing. Hearing stories. I don't want to preempt some of the other conversation but hearing stories of corporates that may have taken a very public stance because of the socio-political news and then actually find out there's a whole other story going on behind the scenes. And seeing the positive impact when I bring my mentoring service to work with individuals. And most of my mentoring I actually offer free through my partners. I offer a slightly elevated service dealing direct with me, which is why it's a subscriber service. But hearing all of those kinds of impacts, that's amazing.

Yeah.

And at the end of the day, we do the work because it's about people and seeing people grow. And I'm at the point of my career that I'm no longer growing to, you know, fill out, embellish my CV or anything else. I take great satisfaction in seeing others being able to update and fill out their CV.

Yeah, I love that. And you're trying— you're also explaining a way in which there is hope and joy to be found, and there is— yeah, there are movements happening that are really positive, but it is sometimes just you know, searching for them. I mean, you're finding it in the work that you're doing, which we're going to talk about a lot more. But, but yeah, going— being more intentional about the things that are happening that are positively impacting humans and workplaces and, you know, communities is definitely a way to protect our, our mental health at this point. Um, and, and there are those things. So maybe you can tell us about a couple of other ways in which you're your kind of— what are the things that are filling you up at the moment that do give you that sense of, I guess, yeah, resilience?

Resilience. Oh, well, I mean, in terms of resilience, um, it's a practice. Um, you know, a lot of people think it kind of comes, and honestly, I keep surprising myself with my level of resilience. Um, I am not the person I was 5 years or 10 years ago. Definitely not the person I was 50 years before that. So that's kind of amazing to be able to take a moment and realize your growth. My growth as a leader of how much it's fundamentally changed and the power that gives me in helping others, typically through organizations, actually be able to evaluate what they're doing And to see the power of the work they're doing that could create inclusion or by default is creating exclusion, right? And that's kind of through a bit of my superpower that I always market as one leader with two genders worth of experience. So, it kind of comes into play from that. You know, community but community and my friends. And so forth. Like, um, you know, people stepping forward and going like, Cynthia, I want to work with you. So creating more partnerships where people are being drawn to work with me when they stop and don't judge, right? What I call acceptance without understanding, that they suspend judgment for that moment and they kind of go, um, I, I use the analogy of you don't judge a book by its cover, but You know, the reason is all the good, all the important stuff is in the chapters and the pages in the book. And so, if my personal identity is what people perceive as my cover, well, I can tell you that the work I do with corporates has very little to do. In fact, my personal identity is incidental to the work I actually do. But my experiential depth and breadth that I bring is what actually makes me credible in the space.

Yeah, and so maybe you could tell us then a little bit more about the Fortlage Collective and the work that you've been doing and how you kind of design for inclusion within workplaces.

Yeah, I think it's important to, you know, kind of position this as where maybe where I came from so the audience will have a perspective. On that. So, when I was a C-suite executive, I was in a mid-sized organization. I had 6 direct reports, 13 contractors reporting to me. I had the organization handled about $5 billion in gross sales. And I oversaw a $3 million operating budget within that organization. And what I have learned about it was that There's many things. So one is I started talking about the work I do under kind of a brand of services because I honestly had no idea what I was doing. And that has progressed and evolved to today, you know, where I'm a collective. And the reason the collective is I've had 13 other organizations. One isn't even on my website yet that I have to update. Who have come to me and said, Cynthia, we want to partner with you for some aspect that either I'm providing something to them or they're providing something to me so that when I work with organizations, it is not just what I'm capable of delivering, but what my entire collective is capable of delivering. And that's why I'm always happy to be part of others' collectives in bringing our collective wisdom and ability together in order to help organizations. So, that covers the very traditional kind of diversity, equity, inclusion. Although I'm very focused on inclusion. And just for the audience's understanding, if I look at my background in terms of leadership, part of my leadership journey was I was actually the national leader for the feminist organization Women's March in Canada, speaking on behalf of all women across Canada. Obviously, I'm not going to have every lived experience, but I learned to speak to so many of those lived experiences. So, I always center, you know, that work in what I'm doing. And what's intriguing is that has given me a unique lens to look at the work because I didn't actually start even at the international level working in advocacy work in the LGBTQ+ space, which even happens at the United Nations level with the groups that I was working with. Until after I started advocating for women. But when we look at that from that perspective, women are 50% of the population. And based upon current stats, they're about 50% of the workforce. So if all of this is a checkbox exercise, check diversity, we're done. Women are in the workforce. But when we get to inclusion, the numbers don't hold up. And the numbers start— and don't even get me started on equity because we're not even close. No. So at the end of the day, inclusion is where the efforts need to be of ensuring that we are making sure that everyone, not just marginalized folk, but everyone. And certainly I, like most of the community space, definitely in our early days, we were very guilty of focusing on the marginalized identities with education and support at the expense of worrying about everyone. And so what I've been doing over the last 2 years is pivoting the Fortlage Collective, which launched officially this year, to focus on everyone in that work.

I think that's so, so important. And it has been, you know, this work which has, um, been amplified for many different reasons over the last few years greatly, and it's needed, amplified. Um, but with a lot of people that kind of, or businesses that wanted to quickly put something in place, tick box reason, or, or for good reason actually, but often with, without necessarily, um, teams that were equipped to do that.

Yeah.

So how, because most of our community is, is, you know, senior HR professionals or HR professionals across the board actually, what could they think about working with you? Because I know you do keynote work. I know you, you know, you've got people that you bring in, you, you consult. Where would— like, give us some examples of some of the work, you know, without necessarily needing to name, but that you've done in businesses that— so we can imagine working.

Well, you know, I mean, one of the things, and certainly I, I know that your experience with, is, you know, being an entrepreneur and, and in this space time zone's really irrelevant. So, I do work on a global footprint. I've worked with 500 corporates in over 30 countries. I mean, just last week, I delivered a presentation in the Asia Pacific region at 2 AM UK time because that's when the audience was there. And then, I was working with another part of the company at 4 PM UK time for the Americas, Europe, and UK. Specifically. So, very much. Not every company is a global entity with that kind of footprint. But that is also a footprint that I can support and we adapt and work with. You know, there's work about doing— what I'm finding today is there's a lot of bespoke offerings. Like I have 14 prepared or canned educational sessions covering everything from you know, privilege, gender identity, intersectionality, allyship. And so a lot of very typical but a lot of very specialized kind of sessions, including, you know, parts of my own story, which I teach in One Leader, Two Genders. That's what it's called. And so there's that kind of work. There is these partnerships that I talked about. 3 of them, of the more recent ones, are all about developing leadership. I have 30 years of experience across, again, that corporate feminist and LGBTQ+ spaces. I have a very diverse educational background leading in very diverse spaces globally. That gives me an amazing toolkit. But not every tool that I was ever taught over those years were functionally or practically relevant. And so the idea is to take all the course material, because I'm a pack rat and I saved it all, and actually put together the bespoke offering that an organization wants of only the tools that address a specific pain point that actually worked in context that they worked because every tool is not universal. And so, I've got 3 partners that I'm working with that kind of development work right now to bring it together. Some want modules, i.e., you know, pre-canned, you know, published kind of work. Others are much more bespoke, on-demand. You know, I write extensively. According to Grammarly, I've written 13.5 million words on leadership, inclusion, diversity, and gender since 2017. As I wrote on LinkedIn recently, I think that makes me a writer. You know, I've written 2 books not yet published, still looking for an agent or a publisher. I've got 3 books I'm currently writing. I hope to finish one of them, the manuscript, this summer. That's my goal for the summer is to finish writing another one, as well as all the regular writings that I do. And I have 3 series I'm kicking off, either they're current or I'm kicking them off in the fall based upon things that I'm working on. And behind the scenes, you know, I'm also trying to learn what I need to know to create a global foundation to fulfill the audacious promise to— for me, a very spiritual promise of teaching 1 billion people, 1 billion, an eighth of the planet, about acceptance without understanding, the philosophy by which I live by and is the basis for a lot of the work I do by the year 2050. So that's a little bit of what I got going on and how I'm kind of interacting with people today. But you know what? As I tell everybody, look, if you're interested, you think there might be something there, give me a call. I'll let you know if we get to the point where the clock starts ticking. But Other than that, it's just a conversation, and it doesn't hurt to have a conversation.

Yeah, 100%. I think that, I mean, so much has happened in the last few years, and you, you know, at the beginning you, you stated out some of the context that we're dealing with. But in, in the landscape that you've described, what do you think are some of the most pressing and urgent inclusion challenges? Because I think maybe you mentioned one there earlier about the fact that we weren't really talking about inclusion for everybody at the beginning.

Mm-hmm.

Beginning for the last few years, and now we need to pivot and we need to make sure that we're doing that because any group or community that feels disenfranchised, um, you know, even if it seems like a majority community, um, there's going to be backlash or some— something's going to happen because of that if we don't include everybody. So, but what other challenges do you see at the moment that are pressing?

Well, I think there's a number of things, right? So, we've already talked about the external backlash, the politicization of DEI, right? That's the one. The other one, and I don't know if you've seen it in your experience, but organizations, and I think it's really showing itself right now, certainly to the practitioner community, those that were checkboxing, Right? It's like, okay, well, we have employee resource groups. Well, because our competitors and everybody else did. So, we had to do that too. They didn't have a strategic reason or plan in which to order. And I've written about that a number of times. There is a huge opportunity that organizations are missing by not making the development and investment in their ERGs strategic. So, I think we're missing that. And by not looking at it that way, that means we've been check boxing DEI. You ask people, "Oh, what are you doing?" "We ran these events. We had this education. We did that." "Okay, well, what changed?" "Well, we ran these events. We celebrated this event," right? That's check boxing. And we see that very much today when people kind of have backed off because of the socio-political environment. We're seen a lot of people. And what I love is the stories of what's happening behind the scenes that we don't see to do that. The other is, as it's been since really the 1960s, the personal is very political. I can't look at any aspect of my identity other than my whiteness is probably about the only part of me that's not politicized right now. Right. And so that very much is an issue that is affecting more than half this planet because we have to remember that women are the largest group of marginalized people on this planet. The other one, which I'm really excited about because it's a good news story, and that is this past quarter, I— so people don't know, I track as a part of some work I do with the LGBT ERG group Nexus. And that's the network of organizational ERG, LGBTQ ERGs within it. And I do a quarterly news briefing. And so, I've been tracking since last September organizations that have publicly come out and said, "Yeah, we're dropping DEI. We're backing away," the whole bit. And for a while, that list was long and it was like your Global 100. It was a bad news story. Well, I'm happy to report that this quarter because of A, the companies that did affirm their support for DEI like Apple, Costco, and many others who were there from the beginning and said, "Yeah, we're not abandoning this because it's a good business decision." Yeah.. But also the companies that have now actually had shareholders vote and go, yeah, well, we don't care what you said. You need to keep investing because it's good for business. And one of those stories is McDonald's, the restaurant chain. They publicly came out last November upon the— I think it was post-election, within 2 weeks. Like, oh yeah, we're abandoning all this, the whole bit. And their employees as I have it secondhand, were absolutely furious that the organization did that because internally, they were doubling down on doing the work. Like, it was just amazing. So, they have been doubling down. You're going, "Yeah, but now we've got this really negative slant to what we're doing." Well, shareholders have said, "You keep doubling down. You keep focused on this." So, that's a good news story. That list is twice the size of those who are in that positive space than those who are against it now. Twice. So, if organizations who are not leaders— and trust me, I worked for an organization we would have been called a fast follower. Being a fast follower, you now have twice as many leading global organizations who are doing the work. They're not going to be out flying flags. They're not going to rebrand their logo. During, you know, Pride Month as an example, that's okay. But they're doing the work, they're making the investments behind the scene, and that is where real change happens. And to me, that's exciting.

That, that is really exciting. And at the same time, when I speak to my peers and, you know, some of the community members in the US— and I know it's not just US, like as you said, Trump effect everywhere. There are a lot of HR teams that do feel a bit bereft. Yeah. A bit bereft is a real understatement, just because of, yeah, the amount of work. I mean, not just HR teams. When I'm saying HR teams, I mean all teams that support people within organizations, be the talent team, the DEI team, you know, It's, it's, it's complex again. But how do you think that we— like, you've just given a good news story there, which is great, but there is still so much work to do and so many leaders to win over. One of the things that I've really enjoyed about speaking with you and meeting you is the language around, you know, the commercials and just being able to to speak to those leaders in the room to get them on board. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you can advise HR as a community to get the buy-in?

Absolutely. And, you know, HR is in a hard place. We can get to that. But in terms of the language, you know, the way that I got to this place was I looked at it. I've always had three lenses by which I look at issues. It's not just quote, my gender perspective. The first one is I have over two decades solidly as a C-suite practicing executive sitting at boardroom making decisions. They were never made at the extreme of any point of view. They were always made in what I term now the messy middle where there's trade-off and We have to find a balance and it's not the same balance as it was. But that also means leaders need to be ready to come to the table. So, one of the things that's been missing from the conversation is through that executive lens is the business outcomes of doing it. There to me has been so much conversation around, "Well, we need to do this work because it's the right thing to do. And everybody else was doing it so, we'll just follow and do it because it's the right thing to do." And while that looks really good if you're doing ESG reporting and so forth because it's a positive outcome story, the reality is in all those tough times that I talked about economically, business pressures, globalization, it needs to be a business case.

Yeah.

It has always needed to be a business case. So talking about it in business language, which is why I have curated 24 corporate KPIs to deal with it. And that fits within my discussion of what I call inclusive economics for an organization. Fundamentally, you have at the beginning, you have inclusive leaders. You want to develop leaders that create inclusive cultures in your organization. They need a skill set to do that. I call that inclusive intelligence. Much as we have emotional intelligence, and cultural intelligence. This is inclusive intelligence. So, you have inclusive intelligence is the skill that inclusive leaders develop. And inclusive leaders need an ecosystem in which they thrive. And that is an organization that is looking at not only the traditional economics of what makes the businesses a success, but they also incorporate those KPIs. Not all 24 because you need to address it as pain points. And just as an organization might review its financial performance and adjust either shareholder expectations, or margin, or revenue per employee, or any of those other traditional measures, turnover rates, etc., we also need to look at measures that are in that matrix for inclusion. Again, you probably only want 2, 3 max. One would be good to start. And that's inclusive economics. And when a business starts looking at that, now we're actually measuring the business outcome of being inclusive. And there are many reasons that that becomes relevant. So that's part of it. The other one is that when we look at it for that reason, it gives us a buffer to make the organization resilient during the tough times like now. Because we're not doing the things we're doing because of one aspect or another. I mean, a very simple one that every business understands is reduce your risk. Right now today, based upon all the cases for employment discrimination in the UK that have gone to tribunal, have an average payout of about £27,607. That does not include the legal fees which are almost £10,000 on their own. Yeah, the rate of getting a claim against you is 1 in 1,000. So if you're a 1,000-person organization, you're probably going to get one. If you're a 100-person company, you have a 10% chance of getting one of those claims against you. And if you're, you know, depending upon the size of your organization, when I deal with 4 or 5, you know, 10,000-person companies you're almost getting to a very significant number of managing risk. Even the most senior leaders, the board, the CEO, the CFO, they have a corporate responsibility to manage risk. That's a business conversation and we're not having it. And so, we got to move out of nice to have or 'it's the right thing to do' to 'it makes business sense.' I want to make better decisions. I want to outperform my competitors. I want bottom line revenue. Besides, I may want to reduce my turnover rate, my cost of acquisition, and so on and so forth. But I really want to impact the performance of the company because that is what we really look to, to know that we're actually making business sense. And we just haven't been having those conversations. So, when I talk about that, people go, 'Yeah.' And yeah, it took me 10 years to go from doing it to talking about it. But again, I think it's just part of the evolution of the conversation has taken us there. And hopefully, I'm telling people something they didn't know.

I think it's really helpful because I get asked It's really helpful to hear you articulate it in that way because I think, I think HR desperately does need to transform and there is the desire to transform. And this is one of the ways in which we can be truly a strategic partner is by talking in this language and using this metric as a business case. You know, I think for a very long time we have wanted to go with a business case of it is the right thing to do and to— but, but from the perspective of redressing imbalance and redressing— addressing the inequity. But yeah, it's much stronger to speak the language that the COO, the CFO, the commercial director is going to get behind. And, you know, our role is also to help the business manage risk. So yeah, I think it's super helpful to hear us say that. And I think it's one of the ways that we can help to transform HR as well. Absolutely. As that strategic partner. What do you think? Because obviously, you're probably working with quite a lot, I mean, in your corporate life, when you were in-house, you know, you're working with one kind of HR team. But what do you see as some of the other challenges for for HR teams now that you're working with a cross-section of businesses? And I'm sure you're in contact a lot with the people teams there. What do you see as some of our challenges and how we could maybe transform further and address things?

No, I mean, I think it's a relevant, very relevant question. So I think one of the challenges is that someone that's just starting out in a corporate space, not necessarily with a company, but their career, there's this perception that HR is there for the employees. And there could well be employees in HR that think that's why they're there.

Yeah.

But the reality is, as an executive looking at it around the table, we had the head of HR, whatever that role for us. It was a Vice President of HR. She was at the table. She was an executive making business decisions with us and taking the implications. She's working for the company, not the employees. And then, you have like the DEI group and so forth, which were to take and help amplify across the organization, work within ERGs or communities, compliance with various regulations in some cases. Where are the employee advocates? Because right now, that gets dumped on HR. Although that's not a core responsibility, that they were created in the structures that traditional structures have been designed for. Yeah. So that's a burden on those people in HR that quite honestly isn't there. The idea is, well, oh, HR is going to deal with that, right? Okay, excuse me. Your development of your people and your culture that everybody works in is a company-wide challenge. As I talk about it, and I mean, I've been through this as an executive developing an intentional culture. And so, it was our very first challenge we ever addressed in that experientially was the old, "It's not my job." It had become so pervasive. We felt that was the biggest challenge in our culture we had to deal with. And it took us 2 years to design, train, implement, and make it an integral part of the DNA of the company to deal with that one issue. The second issue we dealt with, we went through that cycle in 2 months because we had done all the hard work and created a culture of organizational-wide ownership. And everybody felt good because nobody was going, 'Well, that's not my job.' anymore. Everybody realizes we're all in this together. The work has to get done. We have to figure this out. And with that means, the equity conversations have to come in at times because you can't be expecting everybody to tap it in. And to organizations, I talk about today, every employee that walks in your door, every employee, they hold back on you. They hold back according to studies 15% of discretionary effort. If you get this right and you do this work, you create the opportunity to unlock that 15% of discretionary effort. What would 15% of discretionary effort that your employees give in creating success for the organization mean for your company, for your hiring challenges, right? Yeah, it's huge. But it's not HR's problem. It's everyone's problem. HR is a part of it. But it needs to be there. And the idea is that HR today is being asked to gatekeep. And nobody wants because the gatekeep always is seen as a negative. And the fact is, is they're so capable. They're so well trained. We need to unlock them to enable real inclusion instead, because I think that's why they do the work they do, but they aren't given a chance to do it.

Yeah, in many organizations, HR is completely disempowered.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, I love the— I love, you know, we need, we need more voices around saying that culture is everybody's responsibility. Like, every action that is taken, actually, every decision that is taken, that's what is creating culture. Yeah, no, I feel like in HR there's a lot of HR bashing at the moment happening out there, and I understand it. I do understand it, um, because HR does work for the company, but we can also impact individuals' lives, and we do, and that's where the reward comes, right? And, you know, in the work that you're doing, you know, and the work that HR teams and people teams generally are doing, it does impact not just one person, often sometimes the family that, that person, community that, that. So, you know, the work is wide, wide-reaching. But yeah, there is a, there is a, a disconnect, um, especially since the term people and culture team has come, you know, making it seem like culture is the responsibility of a department, which how can it possibly be, right?

Yep. Yeah, yeah, the buzzword nowadays is inclusion and innovation. That's what I'm encountering.

That's, that's good. That, that feels powerful, right?

But how many organizations have a chief innovation officer?

Yeah, not too many yet.

No, no.

Um, I want to come on to trans rights and activism and just— okay, it's a Supreme Court ruling It feels like no one knows what to do in businesses right now, and I wanted your view on, on businesses that, that do, in your opinion, a good job of specifically trans inclusion, and what, what does that look like within an organization?

Well, I have to proceed this with, I'm not a lawyer, Nor do I play one on TV. Fact is, nobody's doing it perfectly. No one. I think part of the problem— I mean, and this happens in every aspect, right? Because I mean, as we just talked about, HR teams are not just faced with a Supreme Court ruling. That's not the only issue on their plate. We have entire legislative changes coming in. There's the development. Even the chancellor today was reinforcing this idea of workers' rights. Enhancements. That's going to be hectic, to say it politely, for HR people. Yes. So, I think we need to do that. The second is I think organizations that are doing it right, you can't sit on the fence anymore. Okay? I don't care whether you're talking trans rights or women's rights or rights based upon race or religion or ethnic background or ability or disability. You can't sit on the fence anymore. And that doesn't mean that every organization is going to get out and run placards. But it does mean your employees at least need to know where you stand. Again, you don't need to go publish it in the press or anything else. But you need to tell your employees what's going on. And if they're not, that becomes the burden of HR who people are going, "Well, okay. Well, HR, you're supposed to know what's going on. What's happening, right?" So, good organizations are doing that. The second is that there's a lot of people, and trust me, I went there because that ruling personally affects me. And while there's things I've had to do and do differently since that ruling, there was nothing in the ruling that talked about which bathroom or change room that I'm supposed to use. But everybody seems to think there is because everybody has been throwing about opinions and supposing what they think it means. Like, oh well, this is a logical— is it? Because the Supreme Court said these words. So now all of a sudden you get this dichotomy, and that's why we're already seeing a number of cases that are launched against the was it EC— EHRC, um, here in the UK, um, you know, moving up to the European Court, you know, and challenging that based upon the original Goodwin case, um, based upon, uh, you know, a number of treaties that the UK has signed. You know, I look at it and I go, well, hang on, the Prime Minister just announced this amazing I'm not going away from— trust me, I'm connecting the dots.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This, you know, this brand new trade deal with Europe, and one of the things that stood out that people asked, and then they've kind of moved on, was the fact that they're recognizing the supremacy of the European courts. Well, hang on, the European courts are much more advanced than the UK courts, and in fact, the UK courts have only done— including for the LGBT community in the military, where only happened of the work that's been done because of what happened in the European Court. It took them 25 years to get here, but it was all caused by the European courts. Well, guess what? We're going down the same path. And I, if I'm the government, I'm going, okay, well, I can stay out of this political fray, this social dissidence that's trying to be created, you know, this, this woke war, because we'll just defer and let the European Court rule on this and tell us, oh, well, we got to comply with that. And then everybody can't say anything. Well, if that's where it's going, we're already going there. So people are interpreting something that wasn't said on the assumption that that's what it meant. And I don't think we can do that. Obviously, there are lots of legal specialists, of which I'm not one, and I follow many of them. And so organizations definitely need some really good legal advice these days. Because there is a belief that denial of trans women— because let's face it, it wasn't about trans men, this ruling was about trans women having access to a bathroom that's appropriate, um, would violate, based upon the Gender Recognition Act, the rights that were imbued to trans women on that. And let's face it, According to the numbers that have been released, we're only talking of less than 3,500 trans women that have ever been given that right. Yeah, so that's not really a huge group that should be worrying, but we sure get a lot of attention.

The attention is completely the wrong thing. That's my personal opinion on this, on the bullying, like the, the, the Yeah, the attention and how the, the, the kind of talk around it, and as you said, the different, you know, opinions, is again on the wrong thing. We should be focusing on the actual violence against women and misogyny. Yes, women from racist men. So yeah, I think it's, uh, it's, again, it's complex, but it is. Yeah, I feel like frozen. I feel frozen. As an HR person in knowing what to do, right, how to act. And as you said, there's great lawyers out there, and maybe that's, maybe that's a step, yeah, that we need to take. And it's not just about trans inclusion, it's about inclusion generally. There is, there is a sense that, you know, with everything that's been happening and stripping back of D&I budgets and cutting teams— yes, what, what, let's, where should we start? Is the feeling. And it's a bit of a frozen feeling.

Well, you know, I mean, and the burden goes beyond that, right? I mean, first of all, we've seen that when you get it wrong. I mean, Accenture knows that now firsthand with the advertising contract from TfL. I mean, it was worth tens and tens of millions of pounds. Yeah. And because they backed away out of the US, but they did it global across their organization, they lost that contract. I think it was £50 or £80 million. Right? It has business ramifications if you get it wrong. There's also the problem that ERG leaders and HR staff have been dumped on from tribunals and that because they went, 'Okay, well hang on. You can have trans-inclusive beliefs staff and you can have trans-exclusionary beliefs and you have to allow both of them.' Yeah. But if both of them are so fixated on their point of view, if they're both going, 'Me, me, me, me, me,' who's ready to come to the messy middle and talk about a real answer? Importantly, an organization needs to be sure about what their policy is. Obviously, from what I've seen, if you already have what they define as universal toilets in the UK, gender-neutral toilets but have both the wash basin and hand-drying facilities, in the stall, you're all set, right?

Yeah.

But if you have separate male and female facilities, right, then it becomes— because one of the answers is, well, then, you know, we're just going to dump it on the disabled toilet, which is typically a single stall, which wasn't already necessarily serving the community it was designed for. So we're just going to add more people to that. And, you know, it doesn't necessarily cater. So The answer is, we'll take away from the one group in order, you know, to give to another. And the fact is, as you said, the actual complaint has nothing to do with the perception of these 3,500-odd trans women. There are many others in that conversation. But see, that's the problem with the messy middle, right? There's no easy answer. But until we come to the table and have that conversation, We won't know. And I think when you come up with an answer, then you go get a legal review to make sure that you're covered. But at least you have your people bought in, which means you don't tell them what the problem is. You need to bring them to the table. And that's one of the things I love doing is I love facilitating difficult conversations in the messy middle. I've gotten really good at that.

That feels like such, like the most important work of today.

Yeah.

Is being able to do that because everything has become so polarized. People's views are so opposed to each other. And yeah, we've lost the art of trying to find a way forward in a way. Um, we're just sticking to our side. Um, I'm really conscious that I haven't even asked you half the things that I wanted to ask you today, but I also just wanted to see if there's any questions from our audience and from our community members. Please just feel free. I'm going to carry on asking Cynthia Fortlage questions, but please do feel free to type your questions in the chat if you want to. Um, I wanted to just come on to— well, is there anything else you think we should say in this, like, to tie up this part of the conversation that we haven't said yet?

No, I think we've talked about trans people enough.

Okay, fine. Um, I guess, I guess what I all— what, what I always want to talk about in monthly mentoring is, is where people find their resilience from, because I think for HR people that has been, you know, it's been missing for HR as a profession generally. We're all— we're often focused on other people's, you know, feelings and other— and supporting other people. And we have a lot of people pleasers in HR as well. Boundaries can be quite tricky.

Yeah.

Um, and so, yeah, I, I always want to hear from others where they get their resilience, how they look after themselves. So I just wanted to ask you that.

Okay, I'll get a little woo-woo.

Yes, please. We like woo-woo.

Okay, so I was born in Belfast, and I know the profile you had sent out, so people, they know that I was born in Belfast but raised in Canada, and it was the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland is what chased my family away. I call that my first transition in life because it happened in 30 days. From the point that 3 men in black masks appeared at my parents' door when I was 6 years old to living in Canada happened in 30 days. It was that severe. I went through a religious transition when I got married in Canada. I married this wonderful Catholic girl, French-Canadian background, It was wonderful. We have two amazing children. My son's 32, daughter's going to be 28 this month, and they're wonderful adults contributing. But I no longer believe in those religious structures, and I believe in what I call spirit, and it is the universality of the energy that connects everyone and everything. So that's kind of the woo-woo part. Um, in my conversations with Spirit, which have happened in many different ways, I have found my purpose. My purpose is to teach the world about acceptance without understanding, and I have promised Spirit to reach 1 billion people, to teach them— not just reach, but teach acceptance without understanding— by the year 2050, which is why my— I wrote my first book yet to be published, but it is in support of that philosophy. That is my purpose every day. And because of my lived experiences that took me to that place, my corporate goal is to help organizations create spaces where every employee feels they belong. Right? Maslow defined Level 3 of Maslow's hierarchy of psychological needs as love and belonging. We all have a psychological need to belong. And by the way, if you want to relabel that, call it thriving. And people look at where I'm at, I would say I'm in a surviving, I'm in level 1. That's the level of life I'm experiencing today. And if I'm doing everything I'm doing, can you imagine the capacity and ability I have when I get up to thriving again? I am just boggled at what I'm going to be able to do because people are blown away with what I accomplished and what I'm working on today. I already talked about, you know, drawing from community, friendships, um, allowing to rest. How often do we just stop, just sit in stillness? In the quiet. And in that, I listen, right? And so there's both meditative practices, but there's also mindful practices that I use in doing that. And I love to just have what I call thinking music, mostly classical, playing kind of in the background that allows me just to float into that space. Where I just let go and communicate with spirit and just the download. I mean, I only ever started with an idea to write one book, my biography, because I was just— Cynthia Fortlage, you got to write your story, we want to hear it. Well, I haven't even started that, but that's one of the 8 books that are on the list. All other 7 books, spirit has told me I need to write these books. And so I wrote my first one, took me 3 years. My second one took me 27 days.

Wow.

And so, I'm just open to that. And that allows me to process a lot of thoughts and feelings in my writing. Learning to be vulnerable as a leader has taught me to accept imperfections. And even as a leader, I no longer buy into and I'm very open that as a leader, I don't have all the answers. And so, like you were saying, I'm not a lawyer but I can give you a point of view. But if you want to accept that point of view, you probably should get it validated with a lawyer. And the other is learning to tell stories as a way to move forward to take very complex life things and talk about them in a way that others grasp. And as I shared that story of the work I did and 3 people "came out." I measure my success as a leader not by the size of my paycheck but by how much my heart and soul are filled every day with the work I get to do. That's a pretty fundamental switch from what used to be a 6-figure salary. Yeah, yeah, that has built resilience. But in saying all of that, I surprise myself how resilient I am. Even today, when I think I've gone to my lowest low, Spirit gives me something and goes, hey, You're at the bottom of your lowest low. You can't go any lower. The only direction from here is up. And a new affirmation is born and it has nothing but positivity and seeing the upside of everything that's in front of me. I trust me, the 10, 15-year-ago person I was would have been absolutely in a really bad place. Not anymore. I am shocked at how resilient I am, and I just lean into it, which is acceptance without understanding. I don't question why. I accept that it is. I suspend judgment to see how it goes.

Cynthia, thank you for sharing all of that and just sharing your story and the amazing work that you're doing. We haven't had any questions, but we've had a comment. Saying, not a question, but I just wanted to say thank you, Cynthia. It was really interesting to hear more about what you do and your views on these important topics. So that is cute. Um, how can people get in contact with you? What's the best way? Obviously we've got your website up behind you right here.

Yeah.

Is that the best way for people to connect with you if they wanted to chat and maybe bring you into their businesses or talk about what's going on in their organizations?

Absolutely. All the links are from there. All the social media links are on there. So, you'll find me on Instagram. You'll find me on Substack with my writing. You can subscribe for free. But yeah, to do that, the website. And of course, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Let me know that you are coming to me from our amazing conversation. And you know, again, it doesn't cost anything to have a conversation. I'll let you know if we get to the point of actually trying to solve something that'll cost.

Amazing. Cynthia, thank you again. I really, really appreciate you. I'm a big fan of yours and the work that you do and the way that you speak and just how much you share. Um, I think it's so helpful for the world, for individuals. So, so yeah, thank you for your time. And we're gonna put this, um, as we usually do on our platform and all the links there to connect with Cynthia as well directly. Thank you so much, um, thanks to everyone who joined or who will see this later, and we'll, we'll be together again soon. Thanks, Cynthia, have a great rest of your day.

Thank you. Bye. Happy Pride, everyone. Happy Pride.

Bye.