Top Tips: DEI's Value in Sales, Negotiation, and Leadership - Highlight Reel

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute, and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian, and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Here at AI, we believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And we are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership. And lastly, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. You understand you have that sales background and you also do dei, but people are probably wondering, what is the connection?

You know, it's really interesting on the connection points of diversity, equity, and inclusion in sales. And as we move on in the conversation, just because it's a mouthful, I'll say dei just to reference diversity, equity and inclusion for those that aren't familiar with it and even for those that are. So, you know, what I think about is starting with the customer, right? So just think about, for example, you, Kwame, in this world of a growing podcast that's grown leaps and bounds, you know, what does your customer base look like? Who listens to Kwame every single day, who listens to every episode and is inspired by you? When you think about that from a business perspective, you're touching people all over the United States, all over the world. And for that reason, because, like, from a diversity, equity and inclusion perspective, because you're able to open up to such a large crowd like that, what does that do for your business? It helps it elevate. Versus if you said, look, I'm going to focus on salespeople just in the United States, would that be as powerful? So, like, really expanding what your audience looks like and how you can bring them in and add value to them on a daily basis.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It seems like if you're able to speak to multiple audiences, it puts you in a position, from a business perspective, to expand exponentially.

Yes. And not only. So, yes, you're expanding. But think about the perspective that you get. And let me, let me tap into that just a little bit. Think about the comments that you get on your Apple, like when people play it back on Apple, when people play it back on Spotify. There's a diverse range of comments that talk about, like, what these conversations do for individuals. And if you didn't diversify your guests, your audience would probably be pretty narrow. However, you've been very intentional about diversifying your not only your guests, which in turn diversifies your audience. And again, it goes back to what we said at ground zero. That's how you grow your market share.

Yeah, 100%. 100%. And it actually reminds me of a story, Damien. And I think for most leaders and most humans, a lot of the best lessons come from pain. So I'll share a story, speaking about the stars and the comments and the reviews. And some people might be listening and saying, oh, what reviews? I haven't left a review. Well, this is a reminder to leave a five star review. Please say something, because I do read every single one of them. But I remember one time, I remember every single one. And it was in, I believe, the fall of 2019, I received a review from a woman who said, this feels like a boys club. The episodes that I talked, I listened to, it was all men and it seemed like a boys club. And that one hurts because I realized that I didn't do a good job of having much gender diversity on the podcast. And that made me reflect and say, well, what other kind of diversity was lacking? And then another friend who is black, and for the listeners who might not know, I am black too, he said that there wasn't enough racial diversity diversity on the podcast. And then I looked at it and I said, wow, it's, it's true. I live in Columbus, Ohio. A lot of my friends are white males. And, and so it was a really interesting eye opening type of experience, recognizing that I was limiting myself by not paying attention to the diversity of thought on the show. And so there was racial, there was gender. But then also when it came to the different occupations of folks who were on the podcast too, it made me really open my eyes. So I can 100% agree with and see that too. You limit your audience by not being able to speak different languages and show that you respect them by allowing them to see themselves in the guests.

Yes. And my question to you is, like, when you were intentional about making that change, what did that do for your podcast?

Oh, it grew significantly. Now we're the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Listeners in 180 different countries, over 5 million downloads and a deal with LinkedIn. And I don't think any of those things would have happened if I didn't take that, that feedback to heart. And again, I think people would look at me and just assume, hey, Kwame is a black male. And so diversity box checked. There's so many different layers to it. And I think one of the most interesting things for me, Damian, is the fact that this show and learning from different people in different countries with different backgrounds and all those types of things helped me to realize that I can continue to improve as a conversationalist. And it's helped me to communicate with and connect with people who are really different from me.

Yeah. And so what I would like to unpack what you just said. We're talking about a podcast. You know, I'm not in your pockets to, you know, ask you about how much money you generate. But just think if there's a multi billion dollar industry that has a CEO that is able to articulate exactly what you just said and approach their business as diversity, equity and inclusion is a business problem versus this entity that sits in human resources that gets a little bit of funding. So if you look at it like the first way I was talking about, just think how your people will, in essence, run through a wall for you because they believe that they're heard, they see themselves, they. They understand the value that they bring to the organization because you, as the leader of the organization, value their perspective, if that makes sense.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And so let the listeners know about what Jedi is for those who don't know.

Good question and good call out. So Jedi is a new term. There's a lot of terms for diversity, equity and inclusion, justice, equity, diversity and inclusion that makes up the term Jedi. So, as everybody knows, with the onset of, like George Floyd last summer, there was this big awakening internally across across the United States and also across my industry, multiple industries, but particularly in the architectural space as well. There's a lot of internal look at being much more intentional around DEI as it relates to our realm of influence and to be honest, looking inside of ourselves. So there's a series of steps. There's a series, there's a lot of work and research done looking at diversity, equity, inclusion within our firm, within our industry, within the work that we're doing. One of the recommendations out of that is making sure that internally we also had somebody dedicated, me and several others, to move this forward and move the initiative forward and to gain some ground on that. So as the JEDI program leader, I am one of many on point to make sure that our firm is moving all of these things forward in the right way.

Fantastic. Yeah. And so we connected last year when NBBJ started working with us, the American Negotiation Institute. And so for those of you who don't know who are listening, of course, yes, we do negotiation, conflict resolution trainings. That is our bread and butter. But last year we started doing diversity, equity and inclusion trainings, focusing on how to have difficult conversations about race. So it's all about communication and connection. So it's still within the purview of what we like to do with A and I, helping people to communicate more effectively and build relationships, but in the realm of diversity, equity and inclusion within companies. And so in this episode, what we're going to do is we're going to kind of highlight some of the key learnings that came from some of those trainings in the diversity, equity and inclusion space and the negotiation and conflict resolution space. I think this is great because you are one of the clients who. One of our clients who have done both of those types of trainings. And so what Greg's going to do is highlight some of the impact of the trainings and how he's been able to use the skills practically in his role. And then we're going to transition, and Greg is essentially going to interview me to a certain extent with some lingering questions. Now that you've had several trainings and we've been working together for over a year, there are still some things that even though we've touched on a lot, we can't touch on any. On everything. So then we can address some of those lingering questions, too. So let's go ahead and start off kind of handing the ball to you, Greg. When you think about the key learnings that you've. You've encountered over the past year, what kind of sticks out to you?

Man, there's a couple. I think the first thing is just educating yourself. I think one of the bigger benefits to having you come in there is just. And you talked about these things in tandem. There's the diversity, equity, inclusion, as well as conflict, getting educated on. On these things, on bias, on. On how to have a conversation, on the things that you need to do before you have a conversation. The educational aspect of it can't be understated because essentially it's awareness. It's like, it's education, but it's also a lot of awareness. One of the things that, I think, one of the reasons why I think people appreciate having that kind of dialogue and the way, the way you Facilitate is pretty cool too, is you're learning and becoming aware all at once because there's things you didn't know that you necessarily bring to a conversation or ways you think about something. The amount of awareness that comes out of getting yourself educated and getting a large group of people educated has been extremely beneficial. So I use education and awareness synonymously because that's a lot of what I observed happening in the firm. My perception outside of that awareness, specifically with regards to. I mean, with regards to the DEI and conflict management, I think we already knew this from the George Floyd experience. The importance of trying to generate a sustainable and meaningful plan for moving DEI efforts forward in our firm. A lot of that. There's a lot of work into just generating the, the. The actions and the things that we wanted to consider that we would consider for a plan. Right. I think that amount of rigor also got pivoted into thinking about how to have a lot of these conversations around race bias, all of these types of things. So, I mean, there's a few things that we've been. I've noticed that we've done a lot more. I think even as subgroups, we've been able to prep for conversations. So we'll pick a date, we'll circle up as a group, we'll talk about what is it that we hope to have out of this conversation. Key question going into this. What do you want? What do you want? What do we want? Are we clear with what we want from them outside of this discussion? And it's funny because you think that's a. That's a very simple. A simple question that it's. I think it takes a lot of rigor to get clear about that. So that's another thing that we've been implementing. We've educated ourselves and then just putting it into practice, building a plan, building strategy, thinking about the discussion, rehearsing it to a certain degree, maybe not every. Every point, but rehearsing it and just making sure that we are clear with what we're trying to say. The other thing that we've been doing, and I've got my little list next to me. So if I look down, it's like, I got like a whole list. I probably need to, like, put it, like, right, right on my lap. So it's like that, that, like that hesitant look down, like the other day, to be honest, just having the conversation, I think after you do all that.

Work, the biggest impact concept for them. And so when you think about the intersection of leadership and diversity, why is that something that is worth exploring.

Great question. And I've been doing this work for over 20 years, starting in a time when it was a very surprising intersection to look at. I would say today, people really care a lot more about this topic. And there's always gender differences. The same behavior that predicts success for male leaders predicts failure for female leaders. Right. So you can't ignore those differences if you're a serious scientist. You can't just pretend they don't exist. And so I had to study that. That topic, and then over time, it really became the most interesting thing that I study. I think it's the most important thing that I study. And after, maybe after tenure, I don't care as much if people question whether I'm the most serious scientist or not. I think what I'm doing is the most important topic out there.

This is great. And so I want to highlight a couple of things, because the persuasion and negotiation nerd in me cannot help but do this, but you in particular are a very compelling person to have this message because you were reluctant to carry the message. That in itself is really persuasive because as you're having these conversations with other people and they are skeptical, you can truly empathize with them and say, listen, I get it. I didn't want to do this, but after being confronted with the data, I had to do it. And I think it's really telling the fact that you found those discrepancies between men and women in your data and you didn't see those same discrepancies as it relates to race, mainly because there wasn't enough of a significant sample size to come to a conclusion, which is an important data point in itself. So I just commend you for leaning into that and having and kind of leading this because it's really important.

Oh, thank you.

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