E44: Stop Waiting for Empowerment: Own Your Power NOW!

Hi everyone, welcome to Inclusion Unscripted. My name is Margaret Spence and I'm the host of the weekly live cast here on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube. Today's topic is the facade of empowering women and the facade of empowering women of color. For some reason, organization leaders, managers, and in general people in the HR community feel that what they need to be doing is empowering women. And it sounds good on paper, and I've used the terminology empowering women But the reality is no woman needs to be empowered by an organization. I'm going to say that again. No woman needs to be empowered by an organization. No woman of color needs to be empowered by her organization. No leader, no manager, No one in the power structure needs to empower me as a woman. When you start to talk about empowering a woman, what you are actually saying is that I am powerless and I am dependent upon you to give me the validation I need to walk in and embrace my own power. And for too long, we have built our systems of development and our systems of moving women through the continuum based on your need to feel that without you I cannot exist, your need to feel that without your validation, your stamp of approval, I am not eligible or worthy of my own power. And so that is the discussion today, and we're going to talk through why your job is not to empower women, and your job is absolutely not to empower women of color. We don't need your empowerment. We have to self-empower ourselves. What your job is, is to create a level playing field for us to have navigate the pathway. Your job is not to empower me. It's not to empower me to lead. It's not to empower me to become a leader. It's not to empower me to operate in your broken structures and systems. So I know for all of you who've never joined Inclusion Unscripted, that's a bridge that you're gonna have to cross, but I'd like to take you on the journey today of crossing the bridge of understanding the real and true meaning of empowerment, how it started, why we keep using it, why we use it as a weapon against women, against people of color, and against women of color. So we're going to unpack that. So if this is your first time joining Inclusion Unscripted. My name again is Margaret Spence. I am the host of Inclusion Unscripted. We are live most Fridays at 2 PM Eastern. We are also on all of the podcast apps, and you can download the show on our podcast app. The show is sponsored by the Inclusion Learning Lab, inclusionlearninglab.com. And we are here to say one thing to all of you, one thing. This is unscripted. I'd never write a script for the work that we do on Fridays at 2 PM. I speak from the heart. I speak directly to you. I speak based on things that are going on normally in my own world that I bring to this. But here's what I know and what I want you to understand.

Is as a diverse woman, I'm not building diversity and inclusion.

I'm living it every single day. And the motto of the Inclusion Unscripted podcast, livecast, is simply this: we don't build diversity and inclusion programs, we live them. Because if you're building them, you can't live them. You just can't. Because while you're busy building the bricks of diversity and inclusion, it's not alive and well in your organization. Diversity is a living being. Diversity is not something off to be built. It is a living being. The living beings in your organization are diverse. Every single person that works for you is diverse. The question is, how do you manage diversity itself and how do you create inclusion, equity, equality, belonging, thriving inside of the walls of your organization? So thank you for joining me.

This will be a spirited discussion.

I will be going against the grain today because as we've done this 5-part series, for Women's History Month, and today is the last day of Women's History Month, March 31st, last day of the month. I have to now walk this walk around how we develop women, how do we engage women, how do we, um, create opportunities for women, not how do we empower women. Because if we sit in the, um, the structure of empowerment, we really sit in the structure of systemic male domination of women. So let me say that again: when we sit in the structure of empowering women, we sit in a structure of male-dominated hierarchies that say you're not eligible to be here unless I validate you being here. And when you build diversity and inclusion programs that are built solely on empowering women, you're not really creating opportunities for women. What you're doing is saying, I want to make you clean enough so that we can move you if you follow the rules that we've set forward and the rules that we've laid out. You know, I was watching a Facebook post, and in that post, the teacher was at the front of the board, and he said, um, how many of you understand the word assimilate? And the student said, it's to take something on over and over and over again. And to take it on fully. And then he said, what do you understand about ubiquitous? And another person said, always, always absorbing everything. And then he put them together and he called it ubiquitous assimilation. I think when we talk about women's leadership development And when we talk about giving women the opportunity in our workforce and giving them a space to grow and thrive in our workforce, if we build that based on I must empower you, then what you're really saying is I have to be validated by you.

There has to be a manager or a leader who has the power and is the power dynamic who gives me the validation to find my own power. So there has to be normally a woman or a man who doesn't look like me who's going to tell me that it's okay for me to find my own power. That's what you're saying when you use and utilize the framework of empowerment at the core of creating opportunity. Because when you build the framework of empowerment for women and women of color, you basically say, I dominate you, I dominate you, and I'm going to give you the permission now that I've dominated you, I'm going to give you the permission to feel that you can find your own power within the walls of our building.

And so I've given you this job, but I didn't really give you the power to find your own voice when you came into this role.

And that's what empowerment means to women. That's what it means to women of color. And it's the reason why we're not making advances when it comes to developing women, because the first checkbox that a woman has to go through, the first layer that a woman has to go through, is to be empowered by you, empowered by your organization. You become the god of my life and my power. And somehow HR, talent leaders, managers, men and women who lead other people, feel that it is their God-given right to give me my power. That is like dominance on people. And we as women, we as women of color We sit back waiting for these empowerment opportunities without recognizing that our power is in here. It's our power. And we gave that power to these organizations who don't value us, who take a dunk on us every day. We gave them our power and we're waiting for them to empower us. And validate us as women, and then validate us as women of color. We want to be in the empowerment zone. The reality is there's two sides to empowerment. There's to empower and there's to be empowered, right? If you're building your process on to empower women, to empower women of color, to empower us, what you're basically saying is, you poor Black woman, brown woman, Hispanic woman, Asian woman, Native woman, you have no power. And so I, on high, white man, white woman, get to give you back your power. And we're gonna serve it up on a sauce, sir, and we're going to give you the utensils to take your own power back from us. And so we sit in organizations where they have disempowered us, disempowered us. They've chopped out every part of our dreams, every part of our growth. Every part of what we thought we wanted to be, they have chopped it down to zero. And we sit there now after they have disempowered us. They've taken away our voice. They've told us we're not good enough for promotions. They've used us to build their brand and business, and then they said to us, well, you're not quite ready for that next level yet. So they're still holding on to the power dynamics around us, and we sit in the disempowerment waiting for them to empower us.

And then they get to build these women's leadership development program to empower women to take on the next level of leadership.

So we're still standing in the line the food line, the bread line, waiting with our plate in our hands, waiting for someone to put the food in there and then give us the permission to stick the fork into the food and then give us the permission again to take the food and put it into our mouth, and then we have to wait for the permission to chew and we have to wait for the permission to swallow. That's what we're doing. That is what we're doing. We are basically giving our power to, to others to empower us. So I want to make today a lesson.

I did a program on Tuesday on equity for women of color in C-suite leadership, and that program struck a nerve with a lot of people that attended it.

And so I'm bringing that today to this program to take the cord a little bit further, to take it a little bit step further.

So this part of the program is for HR leaders, you folks who are talent leaders, who are hiring people, who are promoting them, who are giving them the space in your organization. Let me talk to you about empowerment because this all starts with all of you. So let's have this discussion about empowerment.

When you think about empowerment, I want you to understand one thing. Your job in HR and talent is not to empower women of color. If you are watching this on the podcast app, I would suggest that you go to YouTube and look at the video that I shared about this process.

There is a construct around empowerment, there's a construct, right, there's a construct and I've gone out, there's a great research paper called The Construct on implementing what is called a Model A case study and I'm using that concept and that construct around empowerment, right.

The construct of empowerment says If Margaret wants to get a new job in our organization, we're going to empower her by giving her some courses.

We're going to give her some training. We're going to give her some stuff, right?

But when you focus on the construct of empowerment, what you're really not dealing with as an HR leader is the systemic issues within your organization.

You choose instead of dealing with the bad systems in your organization to deal with me as the individual woman.

See, the problem with empowerment is it says, it says to me, give me your power and then I will give it back to you. And so organizations are built to take my power away and then decide how you want to slice it up and give it back to me. But while you are busy slicing up the pie and giving me back the construct of empowerment, you're not dealing with your reward systems, you're not dealing with your job designs, you're not dealing with your job performance, and you're not dealing with your rule structures. So let's unpack this today because we are going to class.

This is not just Inclusion Unscripted this week.

This week is class. If you're busy empowering me, you don't get to look at your reward system, and your reward system says you have a low, a low incentive value of reward. There are incentives built around rewarding me, right? But in order for you to validate and justify your low incentive to empower me, you try to empower me. You try to work on me instead of working on your reward system and how it's built and the fact that you have low incentive and low values to move me forward. You try to empower me. Because your managers have no incentive to value me as a person. There is no reward in it for them to value me.

So instead of dealing with your managers who need to learn how to value me, you then say, let's empower Margaret because that poor woman of color doesn't know her power, and we're going to give it back to her, we're going to serve it back up to her.

Right?

Because you have a lack of competency-based rewards, meaning incompetent people are running roles in your organizations, people who were never competent to take on those roles, but because they fit the bill, because they are the ideal person for the role in your eye, their competence doesn't matter. But my competence matters. So the empowerment construct is Margaret must be totally competent. But the reality in your organization, people can be incompetent doing these jobs you've given them to do.

And the only people who are being held to a high standard of competence are the Black and brown people in your organization, especially when it comes to moving us forward and moving us into additional roles.

So rather than deal with your reward system and the incompetence of your leaders, you want to empower me.

You want to give me some power that I already have, that's innate inside of me, but you've spent months and years and weeks disempowering me to try to serve me back my own power, when the reality is the problem is your reward system.

The fact that you have a lack of innovation-based rewards, meaning you're not rewarding people for the innovation they're bringing to the table— you also get to look at empowering me. Right, so your reward system is broken. So rather than deal with your reward system, you want to now say we're going to empower Margaret to find her voice and ask for what she wants. But I already knew what I wanted. You told me I didn't want it. You showed me that I didn't deserve it. You told me every time I applied for a new job that I wasn't ready for the role. You eliminated positions rather than promote me into them, right? So this is the reality, but you get to couch your inadequacies on empowering me. So the empowerment construct is pretty broken, but here's how it gets even worse. It comes down to your job design. See, you don't have role clarity and you have unrealistic goals, not only for your managers, your leaders, your organization, and your structure. So rather than dealing with your lack of clarity and your unrealistic goals, you wanna say, well, Margaret needs to be more empowered to do her job. And so we're gonna send her to some empowerment zone courses, classes, and things, but your job design is bad. And the empowerment construct says your leaders are crappy and you don't want to deal with that. So rather than deal with that, you want to empower me. See where this is going? See, you have a lack of training and technical support in your organization. You don't train people effectively. You don't train them to succeed the people who are currently there. Your technical support that you offer to people in the roles that they're in right now is inadequate.

So your job design is bad, but somebody in talent development gets up that morning and decides that they want to do empowerment for women and empowerment for women of color.

But you want to look at me and tell me what I'm lacking before you look at your organization and figure out what it's lacking. Because if you fix what your organization is lacking, you don't to fix me because I never needed to be fixed at the front door. The challenge is, especially for us as women of color, as people of color, is that we fall into this nest of crap and they serve it to us over and over and over again. Because when I go into organizations and they say to me, I want to build a diversity and inclusion program, I say, okay, let's talk about that. Let's talk about your reward system. What are we building diversity inclusion on? What's your reward system? Are your leaders even competent to manage diversity and inclusion?

Is there any innovation going on in your organization? What is the incentive for if I bring 20 Black people into this building or 20 Hispanic people into the building or 20 Asian people or 20 Native Americans into the into the building, Native people into the building.

Are any of your managers going to be competent enough to lead them?

Well, no.

Okay, so we need some competency because we can't build diversity and inclusion on your negative, right? And then there's a whole subset in your organization who feel that diversity is not important.

There's a whole subset who said this is not important, this is not essential. But when you say that, what you're really saying is we don't want to fix anything that's broken in our system already.

So the reality is, rather than fixing your reward system, fixing your job design, you want to fix me as a woman, or a woman of color, or a woman who is LGBTQ+, or a woman who is non-binary. You want to fix me because I need to fit into the box that you've given me.

And if I don't fit into the box, then you say to me, well, Margaret, you're not quite ready for the role that you've applied for. You need some more empowerment, and we're going to give you a mentor, sponsor, champion who's going to empower you so that you could be better at this. The challenge is, even if I get the mentor and the sponsor and the champion, you ain't going to give me the role anyway. You're not giving me the role. I'm gonna jump through all the hoops, and you're gonna find a new way to move the empowerment bar. You're gonna find a new place to move it to, and then I get to decide if I want to move with you. The challenge is, women of color— I'm talking to you— we keep moving with the bar that they keep moving, and we don't stop to ask ourselves, do I need this bar to keep moving? Or do I need to go move my own bar?

Or do I need to go to a place where the bar doesn't keep moving?

See, that's the question. So when we focus on empowerment, we don't address the fact that we have a lack of appropriate and necessary resources for women to grow and thrive in our organization, and we haven't really created the opportunity for them to grow. When we focus on my empowerment as a woman of color or a woman in general, then you don't get to focus on the fact that you have the lack of networking and opportunities within your organization. So you don't get to focus on your poor job performance, your poor job performance issues as a company, as an organization. Your leadership structure is broken. The ladder fell off the building a long time ago. And your leaders landed and crash-landed on the concrete below, and most of them didn't survive the fall. But the skeletons of them keep showing up every day in your organization, and you validate that skeleton while you try to empower me. See, this is the truth. This is what's going on. And then you have these high-bar rules and rule structures that says, um, here's the route that you must take to leadership, and the route starts with being empowered.

So basically what you're saying is, I have domain and control over you, and I'm going to lay my domain and control fully over you, and if you don't like it, too bad. Sí.

So you have these highly established work routines, which is why 80% of you right now are trying to drag people kicking and screaming back into your offices and dysfunctional organizations. And your employees went home, they were less stressed, they didn't have to deal with your inadequate, lacking leaders. And they want to stay home. But because you have these work routines that are well established, you're now dragging us back into your work structure. See, that's how this works. But you couch this on empowerment. You roll it up into empowerment. And because you have low advancement opportunities for women Period. Doesn't have to be woman of color. You have low opportunities for women. There's no advancement for women, but you pretend there's advancement for women by creating empowerment programs to empower me to think that I'm gonna get somewhere in your building and I'm gonna get somewhere in your hierarchy and I'm gonna be able to build and move my career here when the reality is there's low advancement opportunities because there's a high rule structure around how work is divided and delineated and handed out. And so there will never become a time when I am fully trained and quote unquote empowered to take on any of these roles that you're trying to tell me is in the pipeline for me. See, that's how this works. See, but rather than dealing with that, we try to empower women and we build programs for us because, oh my God, these so heartfelt, broken-hearted women need us to validate them. And so that male-dominated process comes back into play. And women, and specifically white women, fall into this empowerment zone. See, white women think that it is their job to empower women of color. But here's my thing to you: your job, especially in HR as a white woman, is not to empower a woman of color. We don't need your empowerment. Save it. What we need is opportunity zones. We need you to understand that your Hyrule structure has no goals, it has no steps, it has no process. So rather than deal with that at your competency incompetency level You would rather try to deal with me as a woman of color to try to make me more empowered because you as a white woman have sucked out my own power. You've created a structure so that I have no power, and then when I, I challenge you around my power, what you do is you cry. That's the truth. Today is a hard conversation around empowering women and empowering women of color. And so we as women, broad category women, actually annihilate each other. My worst bosses were women. My worst bosses were women because it was never clear whether I was on first base or on base 20. Right? So we create these weird dichotomies around empowerment of women, empowerment of women of color, and then we expect women and women of color to ubiquitously assimilate to our empowerment constructs. That's what we expect.

We want us to take on the empowerment constructs, take it on fully, right?

Absorb it and assimilate into your rules, because you don't want to know what I want. You're not interested in giving me back my power.

You're interested in maintaining my power and doling out the power to me as you see fit. And that's the challenge. That is the challenge. That is the challenge, right? And that is where we sit when it comes to empowering women of color and empowering women in general. We sit in this weird reward system where we build entire programs around empowering women when we don't deal with the underlying issues in our organization that prevent women from shining. We don't deal with them because we don't want to deal with them. We would rather say, I'm going to empower a woman, a woman.

See, and then when we do that, we create rules of empowerment. When we build this construct of empowerment, we then build rules around that construct of empowerment, and the rules around that construct of empowerment still says you have the power and I must come to you to get my power back. So the challenge as we end Women's History Month is to say to you, you don't need to empower me, that is not your job. Your job is not empowering women of color or women, Period. Your job is fixing your low incentive-value reward process, your lack of competency-based rewards, your lack of innovation-based rewards, your lack of role clarity and unrealistic goals, your lack of training and technical support, your lack of task variety, your lack of appropriate and necessary resources, your lack of network-forming opportunities, your lack of highly established work routines, your lack of, of, um, opportunities and your low advancement opportunities, and your lack of meaningful goals and tasks. Rather than spending your time trying to empower me, I want you to say, here is the yellow brick road that can come from this position you're in.

Here's a list of skills and competencies you need. And we are going to go work on our managers and leaders and help them understand how to move women through the continuum.

And we're going to disrupt the construct that we have around empowerment, where we have the power and we have the domination and control on who I can become. And for all of you women of color, And for all of you women out there, right, let me talk to you for a second.

We do not need anyone to empower us as women of color.

As women of color, we don't need anyone to empower us. We have to self-empower ourselves. If someone If you need someone to empower you, when they stop empowering you, what happens? What happens if you absolutely need someone to empower you and validate you? When they stop validating you, what happens to you? Do you fall by the wayside? Do you fall off the, the tree? Do you fall off the hill? We as women, and we as women of color, have to understand our power. We have the power to make the decisions about our own lives. We do not need corporations and companies and people who don't look like us to constantly give us back our power in the, in the rules that they create on how we navigate and move through the systems that they control. We do not need the validation of the organization to say to us, Margaret, you have your power and I'm going to give it back to you. We have the power to make decisions about our careers. We have the power to not sit in roles that we are unhappy in. We have the power to ask for what we want. We have the power to do the research about the jobs that we want. We have the power to go out and research the salary that we should be earning. We have the power to lift our heads up from the tactical skills and learn how to manage our careers. We have the power to say to our family structure This is what I'm going to do next, and all of you need to strap in for what I'm going to do next. Because oftentimes, as women of color, our empowerment is dependent on our family structure. If our family— mother, father, husband, significant other, children— don't give us the plus to validate our own power, we sit back waiting for the organization to empower us. The fact that these humans gave you a job doesn't mean that they get to take your power from you. These humans gave you a job. That's it. They don't get to take your power from you. And too many of you sit in organizations that take a massive dunk on you every day. And you sit there waiting to be empowered by that organization. And I'm saying to you, get your life together. They are not ever going to empower you. What they are going to say is, you're making money for us, and as long as you're bringing bottom line dollar to us, we don't give a shit about what you want. Period. Sit in that desk and make us the money. And so this is my podcast. If I get to say a word that y'all don't like, you don't have to listen. But the reality is, if you're in a department that's making money for the organization or servicing the money that the organization is making, there's no incentive in the structure to move you There's no incentive to move you, none. But we still think that if we go through these empowerment, uh, programs, that if we enter these development programs, that at the end of it there's going to be some structural reward that we get. The question we need to ask ourselves is, if I go through this empowerment program and I walk into it with both feet. What is this empowerment program preparing me for next? And then we have to be open to looking inside and outside of the organization for what comes next. We give people a timeline to empower us. We give them a timeline to empower us. We don't give them a long years and years to empower us. We give them a timeline and we take that timeline to heart. I'm gonna have discussions with you about my career for the next 12 months, and if at the end of the 12 months I am not where I need to be, then it's been great.

I bless you for the—

and I have total gratitude for what you have done for me.

But I am also going to take my gifts and my power somewhere else. So the parting word for today, what I say to all of you in HR, because I'm talking to you HR leaders, you do not have the right to empower me. That is my God-given right to empower myself. What you have the right to do is to create a foundation where I can thrive.

You do not have the right to empower me.

I don't need your validation, and I don't need you to give me back my power.

It's in here. And women of color, find your power. Your power comes with a voice.

Use it. Don't let people tell you who you should become when you know who you want to be.

Let me say that again.

Don't let people tell you who you should become when you know who you want to be. Go be that person. This life is short. This life is not long.

I did the program last week on regrets. If we don't take our own empowerment and self-empower ourselves, we will look back on the decisions to hand our power to other people with regrets. So I say that to all of you today, that nobody gets to take my power.

You don't get it, it's not yours. It's mine. It's my God-given right. My breath is my power. My life is my power. I don't need anyone if I have my own power. I choose now to be a part of your organization so that I can demonstrate my power in your four walls. So thank you for joining us for Inclusion Unscripted. We are here every Friday at 2 PM that I'm in town and available.

I want to ask you to go to our website inclusionlearninglab.com and sign up for our newsletter and join us, uh, for our weekly training programs.

We do them every Wednesday at 1 PM Eastern We're doing a program for new D&I leaders, and we are doing our Third Wednesday open forum for D&I leaders. The Inclusion Learning Lab is an amazing program that we've put together, a community to support all of you doing diversity and inclusion work. It's where you get to have a safe space to grow and learn. So I would challenge you to join the Inclusion Learning Lab and become a member of the community.

And last but not least, tell a friend about Inclusion Unscripted.

We are here every Friday at 2 PM, and I totally am appreciative for all of you that listen and tune in. Gina, thank you, thank you, thank you for listening today. Tuning in to our program live here on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook.

Take care, everyone.

We'll see you next week on Friday. It is Good Friday, and I'm going to do a Good Friday show. I may do it on Thursday for Holy Thursday, but it's all good. Um, thank you for joining us, and I appreciate all of you for being a part of the Inclusion Unscripted live program every week. Take care, have a wonderful week ahead, a great weekend, See you next week. Take care.

You're like a circle that floats around me, keeping me safe and sound. And when I fall, you tied a rope to me. You're blessing me every day. I was down with an illusion, like a sparrow with broken Take care everyone, see you next week.