Transformational vs. performative DEI leadership | with Jessica Havens

Foreign. You're welcome. It's episode 99 of this shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm your host for the next, I don't know, 40, 45 minutes or so. If you've never been on this show before, this podcast and today we're going to be talking about dei diversity, equity, inclusion, but from the lens of transformational DEI versus performative DEI leadership. What are the differences? What is performative apart from a difficult world to actually pronounce? Well, for me it is. We want to take you through that journey here today. This is the shortlist. We're a live broadcast that goes out every week on LinkedIn and YouTube. This is episode 99. There's been 98 great shows have come before us. Next week is a hundred. But you can find us on YouTube or LinkedIn every Wednesday afternoon in Europe morning in the US or you could be listening to the podcast on Spotify, Apple or wherever you find your podcasts. We kind of drop our podcast every Wednesday evening pretty much every week, and we have a great guest on talking about a topic in and around the talent and people space you can find about. Find out more about the show and our back backlog of shows and upcoming shows by going to socialtalent.com forward/the shortlist, but to today's show. Diversity, equity, inclusion in the workplace, of course, is an ongoing discussion. We cover, I guess one in four episodes on DEI these days. We're passionate about it here at Social Talent and every company is trying to find their path to create diverse and inclusive cultures. But I think we'll all agree, it's true to say that some are more successful than others. Performative acts of DEI are omnipresent. Think rainbow flags at Pride Woke washing box ticking exercises. We've all read about this and places like Twitter are great at uncovering our outing companies for doing these things. But these do little to create actual transformative change. So what can leaders and organizations do to counter this? Well, our guest today is Jessica Havens. She's joining us from Chicago in the US and she's a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant and and strategist on the show. This week she's going to be helping us to identify the difference between your kind of surface DEI change and your actionable DEI change. And we're going to examine the issues companies are currently grappling with in this sphere, discuss the importance of budget and structures and the tricky element of privilege. Yes, that P word when it comes to leadership and dei. Jessica, it's so great to have you on the show. You're very welcome. I was hoping you might share with our audience little bit about yourself and why this became your passion.

Sure. Thank you so much for having me to Johnny Campbell and Social Talent. So I've been in the field of education, I don't know, sometimes it seems like forever, so let's say maybe about 15 years. But in diversity equity inclusion, about the last eight years really led me into that work was as a social justice educator. And so working with high school, working with young adult learners at the university level, and then eventually working with administration and adults in the workplace. And my commitment to diversity equity inclusion has been a lifelong commitment. And with this desire really to bring inclusive and loving. I know we don't talk about the word loving in the institutional setting, but really creating spaces and communities where a deeper sense of belonging and equity exists. And I think my contribution to that work, because I come out of education as an educator, has really been facilitating that consciousness rising. Right? Whether that's working with a board of directors, whether that's working with employees at a microaggressions training is really wanting to help people not get necessary from A to Z, but to get from A to B. And so I think that's maybe part of what I bring to this, to this work is being able to sort of support people and handhold folks and really understanding grappling with some of these issues. So I'm so excited to be here. This is a lifelong commitment and this topic is one of my favorite topics to talk about.

So, Jessica, I want to get stuck into our first article. I want to reference to frame the conversation as a Forbes article that was published recently called 4 Ways Companies Tokenize Underrepresented Employees by Janice Ghassam Asar. And I find this very interesting because I've seen this myself, right. And you know, you mentioned that you do consulting on this and sometimes consultants are brought in as a token to kind of make the people happy, to make it look like we're doing something right. And I read this article, you know, certainly the examples that the author gave, and I'll quickly summarize, she talks about company marketing and branding. You know, like you wheel out your token diverse person on all your branding that doesn't really represent you. And the kind of symbolic diversity, you know, that happens, the kind of tick box kind of stuff in the organization, there's just lack of support to folks who are given responsibility for fixing things. So hey, we nominated somebody, but then we don't actually resource them or support them. And Then the lack of, you know, representation in communities where these businesses work. And not really digging into those communities. Again, just keeping that surface stuff, I was wondering maybe if you could share your thoughts on maybe the examples this article mentions and this, the general topic of that, you know, performative response to diversity, what you've seen, how prevalent it is, what examples are right there, and why do you think people do this?

Of course. And if I may just preface, everything that I'm going to say in this interview and any sort of interview on dei is that there is no secret magic toolbook to how to create a perfect inclusive company that does not exist. And part of that is just because all of our companies and institutions are functioning within a larger society that is full of inequities and unfairness. Right. And so it's in the water, right? We drink, it's in the air we breathe. And so to humbly just share that I'm giving a perspective based on my wisdom and expertise, but that there is no secret guidebook and that much of this work is done through trial and error and. And we're doing our best. And so I just offer that to your viewers as we continue to talk on this topic. Yeah, I think part of why I love this topic right now, just to speak to the article and just give a brief intro into it, is that I think as we saw Black Lives Matter take off a few years ago, sort of the same time that the pandemic started, what we saw was on an institutional level, responding to sort of on the ground activism was this sort of urgent need for companies and institutions to respond to what was happening in society. Right. Like to not be tone deaf to what was happening on the streets and to say, okay, I mean, many of us have been working on DEI for years, but all of a sudden it became. I mean, I just couldn't. I've never in my life seen so many positions for DEI directors. Right. On LinkedIn or. And so that's the larger context for this conversation. And so I think I always say it's a blessing and a curse. People say, you must be just having so much work in the last two years, you know, But I think why this conversation feels relevant is that it's wonderful that so many companies are now having this conversation. But what that means is we have an inundation of people who are brand new to the conversation, board of directors, brand new to the conversation, you know, so scrambling to sort of catch up to some, maybe other institutions who are at this for a longer period of time. And so what that means is sometimes without placing any blame, everybody's at where they're at. We are attempting to do what is easiest and what is most accessible, given that we're new to the work, for example. And so what that happens, whether that's intentional or not, is that we can get these pieces that feel performative. Exactly like you said, you know, like a big company starts putting rainbow flags on everything. Okay, that's awesome. In terms of culture shifts, right, in terms of the vibe of how we feel about that company. But does that mean, for example, that there is a commitment in the strategic plan to support LGBTQ employees and things like that? And so without, I mean, you know, I could talk. I could just lecture on this forever, but I'll pause myself. There is just to say that I. Part of this performative piece is I know is not intentional. It's an attempt to respond very quickly with very little information and sort of wisdom on how to do the work in a more holistic way.

So let's take that one example, because I think it's an easy one for folks to get their head around. They see it quite visibly, which is the rainbow flag of you change your Twitter handle or logo for a day or a week or whatever it might be, and you put the rainbow flag in there. Is it more damaging to do that when you haven't done the hard work of talking to your people, doing the research? Or is it not great, but it's not damaging and it's better than doing nothing? What do you think?

Oh, that's a wonderful question. I think I go back and forth on this. You know, I say I love this and what does it represent? Right? It's the same. It would be similar to thinking about the politics of representation is I love when boards decide that they need to racially or gender wise, diversify their board, for example, or diversify leadership or what, whatever that looks like in terms of the leadership structure. That is wonderful. And then the question is, is that the only step? And I think sometimes, especially in spaces where we really care about this, we can be really critical of. Of places, right? We are like, so quick to figure out what they're doing wrong or what is not sort of up to par. Like, is it actually transformational, meaningful? And, you know, I think, I'm sure some of your listeners have heard of this conversation of calling someone out versus calling someone into the conversation. And I think some of these companies need to be called into the conversation. I don't think there's an easy answer to that. I go back and I literally have two minds about whether or not I think it's good to show solidarity. Because in some ways you do the rainbow flag, right? You are making a political statement, Right? So if someone really is homophobic, they know for a fact that your company, right, is actively advertising or recruiting or supporting the LGBTQ community. So in some ways, I don't want to like poo poo the political statement, but I also don't want to over, you know, put it on a pedestal, look at what this company is doing when in fact it's just a symbol.

Does it perhaps just open the door to the conversation rather than the absence of this kind of performative action means you're doing nothing, you're leaving it as it is, and nobody has a clue if you're having this conversation in your business. Whereas you put the, again, to use the example, the rainbow flag as a logo, it gives people the right to say, ah, brilliant, what else are we doing? Or that's great, but, you know, we have this problem where we've identified three leaders who were homophobic towards their team in the last month and nothing happened to them. So what's happening there?

Right.

You know, maybe the business isn't prepared for, but at least it gives license to the employees of that organization to say, well, I'm going to start this conversation now because you've introduced the rainbow flag, which means I now can talk about this and put you under pressure, you know, because I, I hear you about the, you know, the argument. Is it better not to do anything? Is it better just to do, you know, to do the serious work, so to speak. But, you know, I think it, you know, if you have the right kind of team in place, they can use these types of statements. Whether they're performative or not doesn't really matter. You have the right to start the conversation and go deeper and see is there is. Is this backed up? You know, have they done the thinking behind this? And if they haven't, you're at least exposing it and hopefully starting that conversation? No.

Well, right. And so I think probably what happened in the last two years around race in particular for many companies, but especially in the United States, so much of this is, it's like I keep trying to decenter the US but so much of our conversation around race inequity is, is. Has a lot of examples from the U.S. but the last two years, I think a lot of companies did that, right? The perception is we need a political statement and that's where they start. Even Though they think maybe that's it, that is the work. And often through messing up is how then the company realizes, you know, or they issued a statement on Black Lives Matter and then they get a whole bunch of pushback because they probably, they maybe didn't have a team, didn't think it through and maybe their black employees are like, what, they just issued this statement. But this is my experience with this company. These two are not aligning. And sort of through that messiness, the hope is that institutions have learned and are starting to move in a different direction. So I guess as I'm working through this in my mind, through the conversation. Yeah, I think it's okay for that to be the starting place. If that becomes a catalyst for. Oh, okay, what are we actually doing to, to back this up? It's a catalyst for future conversations.

Yeah, I know several businesses in the summer of 2020, big, high profile businesses that you know, would be considered good employers and they do the right thing and they went out, make these, made these what were seen to be performative statements or acts that summer and there was a big uproar in their, their, their teams and they lost a lot of folks who just walk because you know, were happy to stay there whilst the company kind of went silent on it. But if the company dared to actually say, oh, we're doing the right thing, they went, well, screw you, you're not. We, we work here. But again, you look at the end result. The end result is a probably drove change that was long overdue because the company panicked and went, oh, we did this poorly. And in fact not doing the performative stuff probably allows you to sit on, on the back seat of this for.

For even longer maybe, and I think even adding to that. So say the company does make this statement and you're referring to some of these big high profile companies doing this, people walking and feeling very upset about the process is that I often bring into this work trying to connect not just the concrete, what we might call traditional masculine ways of talking about these topics. Right. But what that might look like for a company to actually be vulnerable, vulnerable in a statement and admit to wrongdoing or admit to making mistakes or admit to being in the process, which is not a pro. Like if you are a money making large company, that's, you're not in the practice of doing that. Right. You, you present a particular face to, to society. And I think what we're seeing is companies who are able to be a bit more self reflective and probably humble about where they actually at Those are the places they're going to have the most traction. Not necessarily those who, you know, present a, a perfect space. Because this work is very imperfect.

It is. I'm going to bring in a question. I'm going to invite questions from our audience who are listening live. If you have a question, a comment, please do join us on YouTube or LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you. We've had a listener at the start actually make a comment about what they see on screen. If it listens to the podcast we do broadcast live every week. You can see myself and Jessica. And sitting behind me on my wall, as you see every week, are two of my favorite movies, posters for do the Right Thing in Boyz n the Hood. And this listener has asked the question, looking at the frames behind you and wondering if these movies have been part of your journey on being aware of different experiences and some lived experiences of African Americans and the lack of equity inclusion in corporate. I'm a white male from Ireland, so it's a really relevant question, I think, to my lived experiences. You know, those movies when I was a teenager did shape my view of the world. And you know, two amazing movies made by two fantastic black filmmakers, right. John Singleton and Spike Lee. And they're powerful movies actually released within six months of each other. Only Cop down when I had these posters printed recently and they are powerful stories of the experience and experience of, you know, a part of society that I didn't have exposure to growing up in small, very white Dublin, Ireland. Right. And I think this is, you know, we all are shaped by these experiences. I'm also shaped personally by a very strong matriarch in my, my, my own family that and, and I worked for women nearly all my life, women leaders in business and, and that shaped my experiences in these different things. And we're all influenced by those things. And you can influence people by exposing them to more scenarios and situations that are not their norm. Right. So some folks, I'm sure you, you've seen this in your work. Some folks have opinions on whatever it is merely because they only have had a certain level of exposure in their life, just as other folks are, you know, call them more liberal, more open, not because they're brilliant people, because they grew up with just more exposure. And you know, they, they couldn't help be non racist just as someone else, someone maybe couldn't help, couldn't help be racist by the background they grew up with or whatever it might be to a degree. Right. You get to adulthood and you have to Take responsibility. You know, did you have those kind of informative experiences, Jessica, that are. Our listener has referenced? You know, you know, you. You kind of had exposure to injustice. Was it yourself? Was it family? Was it just exposure through media that kind of opened your eyes to this is an unjust world. And, you know, from we mentioned we're going to talk about privilege, that from your position of privilege, there's parts that you're not seeing and that you need to extend that to others. Has that been your experience?

Yeah, I think I love that question from the listener. So thank you for that. So part of my story, and sometimes I feel like I repeat it all the time, but I realize it's useful for listeners to give context to why in the world I even have expertise as a white woman on here about diversity, equity and inclusion work. So for those who are not familiar, I grew up on the south side of Chicago. So the south side of Chicago is an extremely diverse but very segregated place of Chicago. So what that means is you cross a street and you have a different racial or cultural group, and that rarely do you have people mixed within the same blocks. But the south side of Chicago is mostly black, Latino, Latinx and Polish. And those groups usually do not intersect on the same streets. And our family was pretty random. And we. There's a whole story to how we ended up on the south side. But so to give some background is. So I was raised as this sort of white nerd, growing up in black and brown communities and schools as a racial minority in those spaces. And so most of my school experiences, I don't know, maybe white kids made up 10% or something of the, you know, anywhere between 5 and 10%. And so that was really a formidable. Formidable? Is that the correct word? I don't think formidable is the word formative. Formative. Thank you. It was a really formative part of my life, and I think I struggled a lot with identity and trying to figure out who I was as I moved through the world with so much privilege. But I was also able to sort of culturally code switch through multiple spaces. And then in addition to that, was raised in a very strong social justice house and religious space. So I was sort of gifted. That desire to do good in the world. And so that I didn't come up with that on my own, I was very. That. That feels like a privilege to have been given that. That sense of justice and that sense of whatever you're able to do, you know, and so I have to thank my parents for that and for that and So I feel very much like I was raised by multiple communities. And part of my work here is that I am in debt to so many communities, right? I, like, the black community helped raise me, the brown community helped raise me, White community helped raise me. And so I think as I got older, I realized I was a bridge person across spaces, right? And I was able to sort of translate, you know, I felt like I could sometimes help folks of color understand white people and vice versa, and started working with majority white spaces because I felt like I really understood some of the ways that predominantly white institutions really needed to shift in order to make it not just that someone gets hired who, you know, is racially diverse or, you know, from various backgrounds, but just so someone wants to stay at the company, which is. Retention is part of the issue. So, anyways, much of my personal life experience, I know people sometimes label me as an academic because I have. I don't know, because I teach. But so much of what drives me in this work is my life, my personal life experience and the relationships that I've had, the relationships I've lost and. And really how I move through the world and trying to figure out what. What I can bring as a bridge person across communities, how I can help raise understanding and consciousness.

I want to take that point, Jessica, just before I do, a quick comment. Our listener was Gregory Luaba Deom. I probably mispronounced her name. So my apologies, Gregory, who actually made that comment, original comment, and he just wanted to make sure that it's known because it wasn't visible to us here on our screenshots. So thank you for that. And also from Joe Each, who said this makes sense. I was fortunate to grow up in very diverse environments. As someone who's biracial, this was helpful. I want to bring this on to our next article, which it comes from the Guardian in the uk. It talks about workplace inclusion. Drives have almost trebled since the BLM protests, a survey shows. And it goes further on to talk about actually some positive signs, such as an improvement. For example, 27% of those surveyed of minority ethnic workers said their employers had introduced new initiatives during the last 12 months, which was an increase from 10% two years previously. So it points to a lot of good positive change. And also saying 64% of minority ethnic people said they experienced discrimination, which was a reduction from 73% the year before. So the article generally is going on to point out some positive stats to say that actually the evidence may show, according to the survey of a couple of thousand people, that Actually there has been some change and it's good. But one of the things that I thought was interesting and you mentioned obviously that you work, you have worked with predominantly white institutions and worked with them. Is that often and was pointed out in this article, in the previous article, often the responsibility of, I'm going to say fixing it is given to folks who represent those minorities as in the organization feels they represent because they look like they represent them. And it was one of the challenges to say, okay, let's point, appoint that Latinx person to be the person to solve the Latinx, you know, inclusion challenges of our business. Let's point that African American person to be the person to solve that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that gender neutral person to be the person who works with the LGBTQ+ community, et cetera, et cetera. And they tell them to do this whilst doing their full time job with no money and no resources, whilst let's say the predominantly white people sit back and go, go fix this problem that we have. Is that what you see?

Yes, I just could say yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I think, I think that's, you know, I'm going to keep, bring, I can give answers but I'm going to keep just raising up some of the difficult conversations that organizations are dealing with because I think the politics of representation does matter. To say it doesn't matter is crazy. Like if you look at how Black Panther did in the, in the movie theaters, right, to see what, like Afro futuristic version of the world superheroes, like what, what that might do, right, for young children of all races to even see that, right? So if you take that and you extrapolate that to the business sector, right, that representation has real, I don't, I don't want to say that it doesn't have real merit, but yeah, that's what you end up seeing. And so you end up seeing this emotional labor coupled with kind of lack of institutional support and all of that is ladled on one person who's either officially the director of diversity and inclusion or unofficially. And they're just adding exactly what you said. So I see that that is, that is constant, that is everywhere. And I think that is something that companies grapple with, right, because on one hand they could hire somebody like me to say, can you come work with our white people? People have literally called me up and said that I'm having, you know, but then what does that look like in terms of politics? Because they have a majority white board, right? And so there is this sense of do we have diversity of thought and of representation in our decision making. And I think it's a real, I think it's an honest concern that companies are grappling with. And I'm not sure that there's an easy answer to that. I have a few more things to say on that, but I'll pause in case you wanted to respond to anything.

I'm going to ask you to share more because I'm interested to know, regardless of whether our audience believe those stats or trust those stats, maybe they're true. Maybe things have improved. I hope they have. Right. But maybe they haven't. Right. They probably haven't improved consistently across every part of society. What works, Jessica. Right. You know, and I, I totally get your point and want to reinforce your point that you're not here to give us a magic out of the box solution that works for everybody. But, but what have you seen that has worked? Knowing that whatever answer you give me, I, I'm going to preface it by saying, I assume you don't mean it works for everybody all the time. What kind of things can work for organizations?

Oh, so much so I would say one of the pieces because, because so DEI is often in hr.

Right.

But it really spans the full institution. But one of the most basic pieces is really thinking about our hiring process. And I think that when we're focused on representation, so let's say it's for any position or we can say it's for a DEI position and you're hiring. Sometimes what we, we don't think to do, which is a really positive piece, is okay if we're wanting to diversify our board or our team. Right. And we're really wanting to have more women leaders. Right. What is it? What are the qualities that we actually think women leaders are bringing? What are some of those qualities or life experiences or, or, or mindset. Right. Many. There's always debates in this field like do you hire for mindset or skills. Right. I would always say you hire for mindset. And skills can be trained mindset as much different difficult to, to work around. And so one of the I, one of the suggestions I will give to organizations is, okay, you're wanting to make this commitment to dei. What are you requiring? What are you requiring as part of your qualifications for every single employee that you're hiring moving forward to have around equity around dei, even if you are hiring a white straight male from the United States. Right. So that it doesn't become this piece where the people of color or the women, we want them to have expertise on DEI or consciousness or a commitment. Right. But then everybody else is sort of left off the hook. And so if we embed equity in our hiring practice, what we're starting to do is build a team. We are building the ecosystem that will be supportive for LGBTQ folks, that will be supportive for white people. Not white people. That's funny. The ecosystem that will be supportive for folks of color. Right. And so because part of the thing is we don't want anybody to be working on a team on its own. So one of the points, again, that I always suggest is what are the qualities that will represent this newly found commitment to justice? And how do we make sure everyone has it so that even if our company doesn't look racially or gender diverse right now, we are literally from the ground up, we are doing a culture shift and we are starting to create a space where someone would want to work, someone would know that they would feel. And some of that is making sure that your white people, that you're men, that you're straight folks at your organization, that some of them are super committed to DEI and really want to do the work and are prepared to be the cheerleaders for that so that people don't feel like they're alone. That's one. That's one strategy that works. I have an. I have a whole list here, but.

I'm going to ask you to dig into some strategies. I think that's great on the hiring piece, but I have a question around that, because I. I've had many conversations with many senior HR leaders, and when we talk about making change, recruiting the right type of person and making more equitable is absolutely the right way to do it. But the reality I've seen for a lot of companies is, and it's. It's torn me, is that at a very senior level, many have said, you know what? The problem is so entrenched. So let's say white male, which is the typical problem not to pick on on that. But that's the typical problem that they've had to make very strategic hiring decisions around putting people in who aren't that. And this is from people who. Who in the same breath are genuinely saying, we want an equitable process everywhere else. But I just needed to get the leader in and not in a token role, like, I mean, roles with power roles with budget, serious roles on the board, at the C level, etc, and going. And maybe privately said there was a white male who was as good or better. But you know what? It will never change because we need to Speed this up.

Yeah.

You know that. Which again, I'm a massive believer in equity. It feels wrong because at a decision level you aren't being equitable. But I get it because in the service of the long run, maybe it works better. But again, I'm always torn on this. You know, have you seen this type of behavior? It's never publicly revealed because it's illegal to do in most countries. Right. And most companies will never reveal they've done it. But I know companies who do this regularly and they are often the companies who have the most progress in real terms on this issue.

Right.

So how do you, how do you reconcile those two opposing views?

Well, I don't know they're opposing because I don't necessarily think that's a bad strategy. I just think that can't be your only part of the strategy because the other thing we see is sometimes when that happens is. And the other piece of things at work is I was going to. This is a great segue into board development being like the focus of where we start our training as opposed to employee training. Sometimes we skip, skip over the fact that those people in decision making roles are way behind even where their employees are. And you hire someone in the DEI role, maybe they have a lot of power, but within that board structure they're met with all types of excuses or they can't get headway. Right. Because the other folks are think they're farther along than maybe they are. Maybe they think they did a great job because now they. We have more diversity on our board. So I don't think it's necessarily a bad strategy, I just think it's incomplete. And I think lucky are the organizations that are able to do that and have enough support within their leadership where that person feels empowered and wants to stay. I see tons of turnover like people who are hiring for positions a year or two ago because I'm always looking as a contractor full time work. And I've seen literally 90% of the companies who are hiring for a director of diversity a year and a half, two years ago, I've seen those positions reposted. So I don't know the internal dynamics, but just knowing that there's a high rate of turnover when people feel frustrated and disempowered.

So on that issue, right, of representation, we talked about board representation, et cetera. It is a challenging one because we talk about representation. It does drive things. And the behaviors of the most senior execration often are the ones that will most influence culture. It's hard to change Culture from the bottom up. It is easier to change it from the top down because people will look at those above them and see how they act and behave and they will follow in that example because that is the, you know, the, the, the, the, the learning. Right.

You right.

Same way we discussed it post pandemic going back to the office. If the leadership all go back to the office and they say don't worry, nobody else has to, everyone's going to go back because it's accepted that well, if my leader's going back, I need to follow her because she likes to be in the office. I better be the person who likes to be in the office because that's how you get a promotion around here. You know, the subtlety of culture. So when it comes to representation and you can imagine hiring, hiring is the way you will get that representation potentially. But what about kind of, what about some of the other efforts around just removing the obstacles for folks? Because again we know the talent pools don't exist at certain levels. They actually from. From the data that I'm given from our customers, the higher up you go in most professions the, the talent pools become smaller and smaller when it comes to diversity due to institutional stuff that's existed for years that have stopped people from different backgrounds getting to that level.

Right.

The talent pool is bloody hard the closer to get to the top. But that's where we want to probably have the first level of representation change. So how do you, how do you. What other ways can you use to try and fix that?

One of the ways that you can tell sort of organizations or companies who have a real in depth commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, usually it's embedded into a strategic plan. Part of that is also that there are opportunities internally for, for promotion. Right. And so some of the things we might look at is do are employees aware of how one moves up in the company. So some of this is like talk is talked about outside of DEI is just like good company culture. What is it, what's a company that where employees feel good to work at a lot of stuff that's equity is in line with any of those pieces. Right. Whether you use that language or not. And so just that people in term in the organization know that they are valued, that their professional development is valued. So having professional development funds is a huge piece thinking about equity and especially for particularly if you're looking at leadership. Right. We can just call it out is people of color and women. Right. And in tech, in the tech world gender equity is really like high up there Right. And so if you're not finding the talent pool outside how do you create that internal internally so that people know? Because that's, that's going to be one of the top comments you get from women and folks of color in large corporations. Right. Is that there's, that there's this bar and they're not going to make it to this upper echelon of leadership. Right. And so that's like, that's an easy go to one is creating these sort of grow your own when within the education world. That's one of the things of like the masses amounts in the United States of people applying to be teachers are white women who did not grow up in communities of col color. Right. And so they're like how do we get more black and brown folks or more people of all races who can relate with the children they're working with in the classroom and people being very desperate and part of that they've done is grow your own. Right. And so working with younger people of in from these communities to say, you know, to have scholarships, to have you know, all types of financial backing to encourage them into the field of education. The same thing exists in companies and corporations except there's way more money to play with. And so that, that should be a very, that's like that, that, that, that should be an easy shift for a company to make to think through how they can create such a program.

I love that and that's. I'm glad you went there because that's where I go first which is the mobility piece. But I had a great example from one of our customers I was challenging recently and they were telling me about they, they again believed in that they wanted to focus on more mobility for their internal talents, particularly those who were marginalized. And one of the. There was a part of their business potentially was the sales org and having international experience was considered to be quite an important part of, you know, your, your, your promotability and readiness. And they were actively opening roles to women in the business. Of course they were. But they were finding that very few women had the experience, international experience are willing to take it on and they felt it was pushback was this is why we can't hire more women in more senior roles. But they kind of looked at it from a different angle and said okay, if we know that working internationally is important because it was for these roles and they wanted that and we know that less women seem to put themselves forward for this and therefore be eligible for the promotions, how can we fix this and what they did, was they. They went to a bunch of eligible candidates, female candidates for roles, and said, like, Jessica, we'd like you to. To take you do a year in Copenhagen. Right. We're sending to you. I'm rather saying, you know, do you want that job? They said, what would we need to do to make it work for you to be able to go and do a year in Copenhagen, come back to us? And this was a shift in policy. Now they would do the same for male candidates. Just to be clear, it wasn't just for female candidates, but male candidates statistically didn't have the same challenges. I guess maybe that's the traditional family unit. The man would travel and the woman wouldn't. And when they took this approach and let each individual candidate think about what they'd need to change schooling circumstances or home or whatever it might be, they found that they were able to start promoting women to those opportunities or give them those assignments at an equal rate as men. But it just took a different approach, which was, equity isn't just about. Some folks think it's about we will treat everyone equitably. But actually it's recognizing that some folks have more challenges to progress or go for a promotion. And you need to get to the root of that and try and remove that obstacle. And of course, you're going to do it for anybody who has that. But it requires that deeper understanding of your candidate Persona, you know, and, you know, again, it could be that somebody comes from a background where they don't have the opportunity to perhaps do a master's degree. You might say, well, we'll send anyone on a master's degree. You know, we'll give internal training to anybody. And someone, you know who's marginalized might go, well, I'm the only breadwinner in my family, and we've got four kids and they're young. I can't study at night, and I've got a really busy job and I can't take any extra time. So I appreciate you'll pay for me to go on courses to get me a promotion. I can't do that. And it might be the case of going, great. What if we took 10 hours of your workload back and gave it to education because we invest in you, and actually we'll do that for anybody. It's, again, having I've seen is taking those steps forward to be really equitable and really understand somebody is what will allow what you've mentioned to really happen.

Yeah, I love that. And I think when you have a holistic understanding of DEI work, as opposed to maybe some of the pieces we talked around being more performative. You get into so much of that hr, you know, how employees are supported and treated and things like work life balance to me, for me are an equity issue. You know, thinking about family leave policy, that is a work life issue, thinking about professional development funds, many of the things you said, those are all equity issues that sometimes we don't realize are part of that hindrance in terms of diversity of leadership and thought. And then the other thing just to remember, and maybe it feels basic, but for those listening, as a reminder, when we make these shifts, it's going to literally shift the culture of the company, right? And so if we have more women in leadership or if we have a racially diverse leadership board or nationality diverse board, it's going to literally shift how we do work. And if it's not shifting the how, then it means that this is maybe more performative and saying this is how this company works and you get to fit into this or not. And then we get this setup where the truth is anyone of any identity, I always say this, and I've said this in some of my lectures that I've given, but anyone of any identity can be a tool for liberation and inclusivity and dei or, or for a tool of oppression, doing things the same old way and the status quo, regardless of identity. And so we always need to be aware of that. And are we trying to get. This is where you get the tokenism, a few random people here to fit into the company culture, or are we really being open to company culture change? Which is why starting with a board is so important.

So going back to our original opening sentences on this, Jessica, right, what I'm hearing is that transformational DI leadership recognizes the complexity. And it isn't a department, it isn't a function, it isn't an initiative. It is a layer that permeates everything and hence why it's more complicated. So perhaps it's more under it's understanding that some people will do the easy, well, what if we just set up a committee, hire a person, you know, put a rainbow flag on our Twitter image for a week that, you know, the E, you know, people think I can fix this by doing X. But to your point, there isn't a magic solution. It's just like, how do you make people happy? How do you get employees engaged? They're complicated things. There is no magic answer to. There are processes, there are structures you can follow that generally work. And if you Follow them and you make it part of your DNA. We want happy employees, we want engaged employees, we want diverse culture that these things can work. But they are top down there, everywhere. They're not a department, they're not one person, they're not one initiative, one budget, and they aren't one change of an image on social media. It's hard work.

Yeah. And I think we, I can give you very concrete suggestions for, you know, sort of what does this look like at an organizational level. And one of the pieces that's less comfortable for someone who might be in a very high leadership position is that self awareness and development of that board of directors. And sometimes that's very uncomfortable. Right. We tend to, in traditional company structures, we separate the personal. Right. And then we have the company. So the company works so that if your family life's over here, if your issues, your trauma, all these things are separate. And this is here we come to make products and to make money. And part of the, if you're doing DEI work, if you have a leader who understands transformational change, is that it's going to require some uncomfortable self reflection if you are in a leadership position regardless of your identity. And that often we skip over that piece. Right. And I think that in many settings that is a less comfortable space for many men. You know, I'm going to make big generalizations here for many men to take on that. Like there is some personal self reflection piece that is connected to their role in a very concrete leadership role at a company. And that is where the magic happens is when you have people who are in positions of power who have these aha, sort of come to God moments around this work and that then impacts everything they do relationship to DEI at the company.

I agree. As a father of four young boys, four young white boys, I have not just a responsibility in my job to, to drive inclusivity. I have a responsibility to a society in particularly in four white males who will grow up. I need to make them understand their role in the world and how they can use their privilege and they can make it more equitable. And you're right, it's not just about what you do in your company or your job. It's about self reflection on life and your bigger role. Jessica, it's been such a pleasure having you on the show. I can't believe we're at time already, but I was hoping you could. I know you said you could list lots more. Maybe I can ask you for one more thing which is to perhaps leave us with one last piece of advice for our short list of advice, the 99th piece of advice we'll get on this show. If you were to leave one piece of advice with our listeners, what would that be?

A lot of pressure. So one piece of advice is similar to what I was just saying is that particularly if you're in a position of leadership is to invest in yourself first around. Whether you know it's a DEI coach, whether it is reading a book on anti racism or whatever the area is, is really being open to the fact that many of us are have a lot more to learn than probably we're aware of. So my first piece of advice. Sorry, I have two Johnny My first piece of advice is to focus invest on yourself and the other people in your leadership circle before you go trying to help the rest of the organization. That that time commitment is more valuable than you realize than making sure that your 500 employees get a 45 minute training next month. Is that is, that's the, that's the bread and butter right there. And the second piece is investing money in a DEI consultant or someone to facilitate capacity building with your board and with your strategic plan. And really, you know, this is a long process. So I'm being patient.

If folks, Jessica, if folks want to contact you, find out more about your work, your thoughts engage you, how can they reach you?

You can Find me on LinkedIn. I also have a website, it's listed right here on the screen but for Those listening it's www.jessicahavens.com and you can find out about my work. There's a few videos of presentations I've given there and I'd love to hear from you.

Jessica, thanks so much for joining us today from Chicago. I wish you well in your good work and I'd love to be close to that sunshine and those tweeting birds in the background. It's been wonderful. Thank you Jessica. Thank you for listening. And those who joined us live with your comments, we always gratefully appreciate them. Those are joining on the podcast as well. Wait till you hear next week's show. Show Next week we have our 100th show and I'm going to be joined by the fantastic Amy Bateman. Amy Bateman is the founder and CEO of Career Cake. And Career Cake has been an organization producing amazing training content for career development for employees for the last number of years out of the uk. And Amy is somebody who may be known to many of you who have LinkedIn learning you may have gone through. Many of Amy's courses are engage directly with Career Cake Amy's going to be joining us with some fantastic news next week and talking to us a little bit more about how you develop your career. What is the best career tips in this crazy market as well, and what can she share with those of us who are hiring for great talent as well? So join us next week. That's at Live. You want to join us? YouTube and LinkedIn at 4pm UK Ireland time. That's 11am on the east coast of the US and 8am on the west coast of the US are the podcast drops on Apple, Spotify and all good locations of podcasts on Wednesday evening. Until then, thanks a million for listening to the show, for commenting on the show. We'll see you next week.