Episode #655 - Creating Inclusive Workplaces with Joseph Santana, Chairman of CDO PowerCircle

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

And now, so what are some of. I would imagine, you know, it's a moving field. You have an association, different things at different times. But what are the main adjustments a company should think about making if they were to get involved in this rather than, you know, get in and get a year's education and this and that? What are some, some adjustments that leaders should think about right off the bat to get themselves starting to be more in line that will allow them to be inclusive and allow their people to be as productive as possible?

Well, one of the simplest things that people can do that organizations can do is start listening to what people in the organization are telling you. Start listening to these groups. A lot of these organizations right now about north of 90% of the organizations in the United States and an increasing number abroad have these different little communities within them. They have the group for the women, they have the group for the veterans. They have the group for the people with disabilities. What other people they have that they form a group for. They've got these different groups in the organization. And these groups can be a great source of information. Number one, they're usually more the group people. The group members are usually more reflective of the market on the outside than the current leadership of the organization. So they can provide tremendous insights into what it is that people are looking for who are buying that company's products and services. The other thing is that those groups also tend to be a wealth of information as to how people in the company are perceiving the company's benefits, how they're perceiving the way that they're being led and manage. There's a lot of great feedback, but a lot of times even companies that have these groups, they don't listen to them. Case in point, a book that I wrote last year. One of the examples that I used in it is this big pizza train that got sued by a man that was blind because he could not read their website using a reader. And so initially he basically contacted them and said, could you make these basic changes so that I can use my reader on my computer and order a pizza? They said no. And they basically said, there are other ways that you can order. You can pick up the phone and so forth. This guy didn't take no for an answer. He went and got an attorney. They sued the Pizza company, and it's a big, big organization. They sued them for. For violating the Americans with Disability Act. And this, this case went on for years, eventually made all the way up to the Supreme Court. The company lost, and then the company had to turn around and make all the changes to the website, in addition to all the losses that they already had in terms of legal fees. They could have been selling pizza to blind people with readers, but instead they paid all these legal fees and then they had to make the adjustment. Meanwhile, in that company, they had a disability group, one of these communities. Now, had anybody talked to one of those communities or had listened, they would have said, oh, this is a good idea. And by the way, we could sell millions more pizzas. And they would have just made the change, would probably cost maybe 250, maybe half a million dollars or whatever, and they would have avoided a tremendous lawsuit. So organizations today, what I say is the number one source of information that can help the organization to move into the 21st century are the voices of the communities that are right inside of them right now.

Yeah, well, we had two examples. We had one lady come down. This is back when we were the marketing arm for Citigroup. And she came down and she was in a senior role of some kind. And she talked about she'd always been successful, she was highly regarded. And she said, what I've always done, I go to a new company, I'd sit down with the key people one on one, in private, and I let them talk and let them tell me what is going right, what's going wrong.

What we need to do.

If they were me, what would they do? And she said, then, you know, that informs me on what, you know, changes I would make or, you know, what I would do is like, how can I. She said, the main question I would ask, how can I make your job better? How. What can I do to help you do your job better? And so that was one of the big things. So she said, everywhere she went, fabulous success. On the other hand, we went through a phase. We had many CEOs where this philosophy came down the exact opposite. We have all the senior leaders there. We know what's going on. We got with it the new CEO of the. This new CEO of the week came down and we told him, you know, here's the story. We did this in a group. And surprisingly, you know, we're all in agreement. And here's what he said.

And this is this arrogance.

And it comes out of. I've always seems like it came out of the elite, Elite Ivy League management. We're smarter than you, you idiot. And they would say, like you say, you know, you're telling me you think that's what needs to be. But we've done studies and we found out that that's not really what the problem is. Really. This over here. And you guys are missing the point. And we've done studies, and a lot of this is in the stupid military, by the way, too. We've done studies that found out, you know, when the soldiers come up or when the, you know, commanders, you know, you're fighting the war in the Ukraine and you're sending information back at Yakiev, you know, we need this. We need this. Like, oh, sure, yeah. Oh, sure, you need that. But what you really need, you know, we're set up here in our building. We figured out what you really need is this. And they would just blatantly, arrogantly, totally, if we gave them a suggestion that was definitely not going to get done. And because they were smarter than we were, and that's the most infuriating way to live. And I've lived through both of them.

Yeah, yeah.

And you know what?

That in organizations, that happens quite a lot also. Even in organizations that go out and let's say, for example, they survey everyone. This is another one that I found really interesting. So organizations will go out and send a survey and let's say the organization has. Oh, let's say that in this particular role, there are 10 women working in this role and there are 90 men. And so they send this survey out and they say, do you find the organization supports you effectively in being able to do the best job that you can do? And the 90 guys say, yes, it does. Now, 10 women look at it and let's say they don't completely agree. Maybe one woman is in a position where she can't agree, so she agrees. And then you have the other nine. And then of those other nine, five of them say, you know, if I say that I don't, they're going to know it's me, even though it says it's anonymous. And so they're going to zero in on me. So I'm going to say, everything is good. So then you lose those five. And then you've got the four who turn around and say, you know, I don't care what the consequences are. I'm going to speak my mind. So they have to be brave and they have to be direct. So those four come out and say, no, it could be better, and it is hurting my Profitability and my ability to make you profitable. Unfortunately, what happens is when they look at the survey, they go, we've got a 96% positive rating. And that completely silences the other four voices. Right?

We've got four assholes that we need to fire.

That's right.

Yeah.

We found the four that we have.

To, you know, put them on the.

Rift list, you know, for the next.

Right.

But that's one of the things. So one of the things that I think is important in listening to these groups is beyond surveys, is actually listening to the ones that are brave enough to tell stories, because those smaller voices probably represent a larger opinion set that is suppressed because of fear of authority. So when someone says something, you know, that sounds pretty like, you know what, this doesn't work for me, and I'm not really getting the support that I need to be successful. It's important to prod for that and to look for that and to make it safe for more people to tell you that if you don't, then you lose the benefit of hearing, of hearing those voices. I once saw something. I have to share this with you. I was once advising a CEO who felt that he wasn't getting. He wasn't getting the kind of direct openness that he was looking for when he was doing town halls. So these town halls were done in the cafeteria. There were a bunch of people sitting there, and he. You know, after he finished, he would take any questions, and if he got a question, it was almost. It was almost like a fawning question, like, could you explain to us how wonderfully successful we're going to be because of your gracious leadership? You know, something along those lines, like, let me kiss your ring again and show you my loyalty. Right. But he wasn't. But he felt like, I'm not getting, like, you know what I need to really understand. So we worked on putting together this presentation and the way that he just presented and did everything to create that openness. And it worked. And one person bravely raised their hand and said, well, in the beginning, you said you were going to do this, but then you said that we were going to do this other thing. I don't think those two things can be done simultaneously. Unless I'm missing something here. How would you do that? Brave question. He turned around, he said to the guy, well, you clearly do not understand yet the mechanics of our senior strategy. So I can't answer that question for you because it's just. I can't in, like, half an hour explain to you something that complex and so forth.

Yeah.

And I looked at him and the rest of the room just went, brrr. Right. Buzz kill.

Right.

We sat down later on and he even realized that. He said, he said, I fell into my old ways and I did it again. I shot myself in the foot. And I said, you did? You know, I mean, that's, that's the whole thing. If you want to hear the truth, you have to create safety and you have to put your ego behind you a little bit and you have to be willing to hear maybe something that's not that flattering.

Yeah.

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Now talk about go back to starting this association again. Joseph gets the idea and it's like you now you have a membership of zero, but you have an idea. So how did you ramp up building this association into the powerhouse that it is?

Well, I started out by going to people that I knew would make good members and who I had a relationship with that I had developed over the years, people that I had spoken with before when this idea was going through its phases of maturing. Right. Where I, you know, I felt like, you know, we're having the same conversations again and again and talking about the same practices again and again. This is not moving us forward and it's not going to move people forward. I had been, I had led a couple of other groups before and when I tried to pitch the idea of let's move away from what I call HR kabuki theater of doing stuff that just looks good but isn't necessarily going to produce a result, move into doing things that have more impact, I got a little bit of pushback. And when I say little, I'm trying to be cute because it was a lot of pushback. The other thing was that I.

What kind of pushback did you get?

The pushback was these organizations were more interested in just focusing on things that benefited the HR organization. So so they did not see the idea of bringing in a different class of speaker or different ideas that were going to be more outside of that silo as being beneficial. And in many cases they were selling their own services and their own reports. So they wanted to have sort of that captured audience only for their products and services. Even though in order to be successful, these people needed much more than anything that they offered. The other thing was that I also said, you know, I don't think it's a good idea to take members in willy nilly just based on the fact that their company is willing to write a check. And so now you end up with a group of people where you have some that are very senior and who are looking for solutions to really tough strategic problems, sitting right next to someone who just learned how to spell the word diversity a week ago. And what is it that you need to do when you have a situation like that? You have to reduce your instruction and you have to reduce what you're focusing on to the lowest common denominator. So that's why senior people stop coming to the meeting, because after a while it's like we're repeating the basics again and again and again. But they didn't want to do that either because they were interested in just amassing as much membership as possible because that was revenue for the company, it was their revenue model. So I just basically at one point said, hey, you know what? I'm not going to get someone else to do this. I'll do it myself. I'll just, I'll put this thing together. So I went to a couple of people, a couple of organizations that I had relationships with and that I knew already, we talked about this before and they agreed to become my initial members. And initially I had about four members in this association. And then the other thing we talked about is, hey, you know what? You as the chief Diversity officer, no matter how educated you are in various strategies and no matter how connected you become to understanding the business connections between all this, and no matter how good you already are at all this, you cannot make it all happen by yourself. You need a team to do this. You need other people that are engaged. You've got these communities that are out there, but in many cases they're off doing their own thing and celebrating holidays and so forth, but they're not helping you to move the needle. And that's because they haven't been trained properly, they haven't had investments made in them. So I extended, as part of what we were doing, the training and education of the people in those communities. And I do that by bringing in thought leaders. So a lot of my friends and contacts from over the years are thought leaders who have written a number of books. Howard Ross, who's written all types of books on bias and so forth, I brought them in. And of course, these are people who also benefit by connecting with the members of my association who are potential clients for them. And I am able then to take what they do and package it in such a way that. That it becomes something that is available to just about every one of these member. It's available to all the member organizations, and through the podcast, it becomes democratically available to anybody who just wants to plug into the podcast is the podcast.

So the podcast is a outgrowth or it's a. It's integrated fully into your association? Is that what it is?

Yeah, the podcast is part of what the association members are supporting. So the way the podcast works is this way. It's really very simple. When I do my podcast, all the members of the associations, the company members who have community group leaders, people who are leading the women's group, the veterans group, they're invited to come in as an audience, and they sit in the background in the podcast while I conduct the interview with the thought leader. The interview takes me about half an hour, 35 minutes. And then after I conduct that interview and I stop recording, I open the floor for the members so they get to interact with famous writers and various thought leaders on different topics like emotional intelligence, how to build their memberships, how to package things correctly, to send them up the pipeline to senior management, and so forth. So they're learning a lot of really great skills from some great teachers. And then I just take the recording recorded part and I add some of my own commentary to it in terms of creating sort of the bookends of what is this about? And what did I learn from it? What are some of the lessons that you can take away? And that becomes then the podcast that I put out there that then becomes available to the public.

And how often are you doing these podcasts?

I do 12 episodes a season because they take a lot of time, as I'm sure you know. They take a lot of time. And I do 12 of them a season. I am going to start season. I just wrapped up season five, and I'm going to start season six, which then will air in 2024. But I actually start recording sometime in September, so I have a couple of episodes already in the pocket before the year begins.

So you do like one a Month. You roll them out. One a month?

Yeah. Well, what I do is I record them. When I'm recording them, I set up an agenda and I give it to the membership and say, these are the topics and these are the people that are going to be at that particular podcast. Here are the links so that you can jump in. It's a zoom link just like this. Here are the links so you can jump in. You'll be muted automatically in the background. Then after it's over, you can unmute yourself. And then when I'm recording, I tend to record on Thursdays or Fridays. Six weeks in the fall and then six weeks in the spring. But in the spring is when, like in March. On March, the third week of March is when the first episode comes out, which was recorded the previous year. And then it all plays out until around the June time frame. And then after June, it goes into sort of a rerun where episodes come out again. Now the other thing is I have little clips.

You. You repeat the same.

I will repeat them. And I also have little clips that are taken out of each one. So let's say we have a. We have one on how to negotiate or how to leverage being the community leader into developing yourself into a better leader so you can take on the larger scope job later on. So they might be like a little two minute clip or a three minute clip on that. I also share those out primarily, some of them with the audiences in general, but most of them with the. And they can use those as conversation starters. So let's say they're going to have a conversation about budgeting. They can have an expert and they can listen to a little two minute clip as part of the presentation. They can just slap it in there and they can listen to that and say, all right, how do we do that here? And so it becomes a tool that they can then use to be able to bring in thought leaders into their discussions in little increments as they need them to set them off on certain types of discussions.

Yeah. And congratulations on 600 five star ratings. And so you've been doing this about six years, right? I have, yeah, I have.

I've been doing it for six years. The first time. So I'm a jogger, you know, and the first time I thought of this, I was in a beach somewhere. Yeah, I literally was listening to a podcast because I, I listen to a lot of podcasts when I'm either exercising or running. And as I'm running along, I'm thinking like, this is a great medium for conveying information to people that are busy or on the run. And I'm doing it all the time right now. This is a lot easier than trying to collect a lot of people into one meeting and do one set of instructions. And so I floated it over again by some of the members and I said, what do you think about this? And they were all for it. So that was the podcast.

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