Walk the talk: The behaviors of inclusive leadership | with Joe Gerstandt

We have a tendency as human beings known as ontological arrogance. And that is our simple tendency to assume that everyone here is having the same experience that I my experience is the experience. But that's never the case.

You're very welcome to the last show in March. It's the 30th of March and we're joining you're joining us for show number 93 here on the shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm the host of this show for the last, gosh, 92 episodes, or most of them anyway, and I'm the CEO and co founder of Social Talent. If it's your first time to join the show, you're very welcome. We're going to hang out for about 40, 45 minutes. Have a great chat. If you're joining us live, we'd love you to contribute with your comments and questions live on LinkedIn or YouTube. Live. You say there's a live version. You must be listening to the podcast or recording. And you're very welcome as well. We're available as a podcast most Wednesday evenings. We drop on Apple and Spotify and wherever you find your good podcasts. And of course, you want to know more about the show, our previous guests and future guests. You should check out socialtalent.com the shortlist. But let's get back to today's show. I'm really excited today about our guest. He's somebody I met, gosh, eight, nine years ago at a South by Southwest for the first time. Always been an admirer of his work and his presentations, the writing he's done. And he's one of the leaders in the space that we're going to be discussing today, which is around inclusivity. We're going to be talking, walk the talk, the behaviors of inclusive leadership. And many organizations and companies out there are quick to label themselves as inclusive. Of course we're inclusive. But often they really struggle to explain what it really means in simple language and often they just default to an explanation around diversity that doesn't quite cut it. They build programs, they wax lyrical about, pardon me, the importance of inclusivity, but overlook some of the behavioral components that are so crucial when it comes to comes to driving and maintaining an inclusive culture. And if companies really want to deliver a more inclusive employee experience, they really have to examine and change the behaviors of the people around them. That's especially true for leadership. Joining us on this week's show to dig into this topic is Joe Gersten. Joe is a renowned inclusion strategist in the US and around the world, the keynote speaker, contributor to the Social Plan Platform. He's an author. And together today for the next 40 minutes or so, we'll be chatting with the need to set behavioral expectations for leaders, the importance of accountability, and what inclusive leadership actually looks like. Joe, you're very welcome to the show. I was wondering if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself to our audience and maybe explaining how you got into this line of work. Why did you make this your passion?

Thanks, Johnny. It's good to see you. It's always good to chat. Thanks for the invitation. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Yeah.

My name is Joe Gersten. I partner with organizations on their efforts around diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging. And I tend to focus on the cultural and the behavioral components of that work. I've been doing this work as an external consultant for 15 years now, and before that I did it internally. So altogether, I've been doing this work in one way or another for close to 20 years. And the story of how I got into this work is a long, convoluted story. I won't drop that on everyone, but I will say that this has very much been a journey. I wasn't born a diversity advocate. I had to go out in the world and have some experiences. I had to unlearn some things. I had to be educated on some things. A lot of things had to change in my head and in my heart before I was able to find this work and get actively involved in it. I think for people and organizations, this work is a journey. It's an ongoing process of change. And regardless of where you're at today, I think the important thing to be thinking about is where am I going next? What are the next steps forward for me? And one of the things I like about this conversation is this conversation is actionable. It's about things that we're actually going to do in the name of this work. So I'm happy to have this conversation.

Jonny, I remember listening to the first course you made for the socialtown platform on inclusivity. I was on an airplane and we just introduced the functionality on our app to download courses and listen to them. And I said, how will I test this app this out? I said, I'll download Gio's content. And again, it was one of these moments where I felt my experience and knowledge really take a leap forward. As to that point in practicality, you just discuss practical things that folks could do in a meeting in terms of how they interact with their teams and colleagues that actually drive more inclusive behaviors, and I had never heard that before. And I was probably one of those people who would nod their head at inclusivity. And then I kind of go, what's the difference between diversity and inclusivity? I'm not sure. And, you know, I felt I was an advocate for D and I at the time, but I really didn't quite understand it. It really only came to life when I saw the actions, and I realized my lack of action in those areas would drive a less inclusive environment and how I could change it. So I'm loving that. I'm dying to get into it. But let's start with some, some of the articles out there. There's so much in the press and in the academic literature around inclusivity. I want to jump in first with a recent Harvard Business Review article by Deborah Grunfeld, Melissa Jones Briggs and Larry Nishra McKenzie, and we'll send a link out to anyone listening out there as well to check it out. This I thought, was interesting. I haven't heard of this idea before. Using a mantra to be a more inclusive leader. There's loads of different ways that you can be an inclusive leader. This I thought was really interesting as it's a very specific tactic. Makes sense. And the research, the art, the, the authors go into the research that, you know, they, they undertook in their profession to kind of come to this methodology that they teach. I want to ask you straight up first, Joe, have you come across this what are your thoughts on this concept of using a mantra? And then maybe you might explain it to our listeners?

I don't think I'd come across the idea of using a mantra before. I like it. I think, you know, the, the thing that I am familiar with in this article is they talked about, I think they tried to make the point that unless you're deliberately inclusive, you're probably going to be unintentionally exclusive. Being inclusive leader isn't having the right intentions or saying the right things. It's about what you do proactively, intentionally, deliberately, to be more inclusive. That that's that behavioral component that we've kind of alluded to. I like the mantra idea. I think there's some good research that supports it, but I think it's a reminder to me that these are my intentions, which helps me try to make sure that my behaviors and my actions are aligned with those intentions. So I like it. I think it's a fairly simple thing that you could integrate into how you approach your work and how you interact with others. And it's Just a good reminder of those intentions.

Yeah, I kind of.

I.

The analogy they use is this character called Rob, who's the manager, to your point, who feels he supports diversity and inclusion. But the data shows that he's not delivering the outcomes that he probably wants and the business would expect from. And he's struggling to understand what he's not doing right or what he's doing wrong in particular. And I think the essence of it, they gave some examples, was that for Rob, or anyone like Rob, going into a meeting who wants to have good intentions is to repeat a simple mantra like I'm glad you're here, or I love this team, or we're all in this together, or everyone should speak, you know, whatever that mantra should be. And the idea being that, again, as long as it's a true and pure thing that the person believes, they're not, like, trying to fake it. They're not just telling themselves something they don't believe. And also, it's not about them, it's about others, which I thought was interesting, that it kind of keeps them honest and enables the person to focus on these things and not let it get distracted by their bias or their behaviors. It's back to that behavioral thing. And I know you're a big advocate about this, that it's, you know, intention is not good enough. I think I probably misquote you, Joe, to a lot of people in an analogy that you used, I think you used in a piece of training around fitness, which I think you said, everyone agrees that being fit is good. Everyone agrees that being healthy is good, but agreeing with it and believing in it doesn't make you fit. You have to actually get out there and get off your ass and do stuff to be fit. And, you know, inclusivity is the same. It's like, who wouldn't agree with being inclusive? But that doesn't. That doesn't cut it. You have to go out and do things, do things like this as a technique or other things. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on, you know, other effective techniques, like the person that Rob here, in this example, who genuinely believes that they are trying to be inclusive, they want to be more inclusive. What are perhaps some of the things that people do that lead them to be exclusive? And then what are some of the great techniques you've come across in your work that folks find effective and relatively simple to put in place that can make them more inclusive in their behaviors?

Yeah, I think it's really important for leaders to understand that inclusive leadership is active. It's not just about your intentions. There's things that you have to do. And I think some of the things that folks have to do, some of the foundational stuff, isn't actually behavioral. It's having some awareness and understanding of human behavior and social dynamics. I think it's important for leaders to understand the impact of things like bias and privilege, which both continue to be kind of poorly understood, oftentimes misunderstood. I think it's important for leaders to know that not everyone is having the same experience in the workplace. Not everybody's being seen and heard and valued the way that they are. They have to learn about those experiences from other people. I think it's important for leaders to know that there's still some consequences associated with being different in the workplace. But beyond that, I think you get into behaviors pretty easily. It's one thing to understand bias. It's another thing to be doing something to mitigate the impact of bias. So what are leaders doing to reduce the impact of bias in their own interactions, in their own decision making? What are they doing to take a look at their practices and processes and reduce bias there? Are they doing things to increase the psychological safety of their team? I think that's at the very center of this idea of inclusion. Can this group of human beings, all of whom are different from each other, actually tell the truth to each other? Can they fully engage? We can hold leaders accountable for that. Are they doing things to bring more diversity into their network of relationships? Are they doing things to learn about the experiences of others? Have they proven the ability to. To be just as good at hiring, engaging, retaining, developing, and promoting people that are different from them as they have proven to be doing those things to people that are like them? Those are some of the, I think, competencies or behaviors that we need to expect from inclusive leaders. And that's also a big part of how we get a hold of the accountability piece. And that's kind of a missing thing in this work right now. I have a lot of organizations say we don't know how to hold people accountable, especially leaders. Well, if you set some behavioral expectations, it becomes pretty easy to hold people accountable. Can start writing those things into job descriptions, considering them in performance evaluations and promotion decisions. Once you put those behavioral expectations out there, you've got some really good stuff to work with.

I had the pleasure of speaking a few weeks ago to Facebook's head of gaming. And it's an American guy living in Ireland. And he was introduced to me from a friend who knew I was passionate about this topic and he been highlighted internally as for the work he'd done to try and drive particularly gender diversity in his team. Gaming doesn't typically have a whole lot of women in it has a lot more men. And as a leader, he globally managed to bring across the board a gaming division, up to 50, 51% female talent across the business. And I talked to him about this accountability piece because I've heard different opinions. You know, I know a bunch of folks in the acquisition world who are typically, you know, targeted around numbers and leaders who are targeted around having diversity in their teams. And the feedback that that this particular leader gave me was that his experience in terms of how they enacted it in Facebook was that they did KPI people on this, but they KPI them on the behaviors, not the outcome. They said that, you know, they measure people on are you displaying the behaviors, Are you taking the actions? And it's predefined list that they encourage people to focus on that they can measure. And if the person doesn't quite achieve the outcome, but they're displaying the behaviors, that's up. You're getting there. Because at the end of the day, let's say around promotions or hires, it just might not be the person of color, the female talent, who gets the promotion because the best person should win out. But if you have ensured that you have actually taken all the steps and you've displayed the behaviors that we have defined should drive more inclusivity, then you shouldn't be penalized because the outcome wasn't quite good enough for our numbers, but it actually brings the right way. And that was really interesting. And I've had mixed opinions and I've shared that with others around accountability models on scale across an enterprise. What is your opinion on that? What have you seen as different models that work at the kind of macro level across an organization?

Yeah, I would agree with that. I think you can, you can still have some amount of accountability on the outcomes, but I think the behavioral piece in this work is generally missing. You alluded to this in the introduction. It's not difficult to find organizations that will quickly tell you how inclusive they are. And they can oftentimes point to a bunch of activities. They've built programs and they have ergs and they have diversity councils. The problem is most of those things change what it feels like to be an employee. They don't change the culture. You can spend two or three years building stuff and have a lot of activity to point to, but after those two or three years, the employees don't necessarily feel any different. They don't feel any more or less included. If you really want to change that, you have to change the behaviors of the people around that employee, especially their leader. This, this work is much more about leadership than I think it is about anything else. Not that diversity councils and ERGs and other things can't have value. They can, but they don't. They don't have a real direct impact on what it feel. Feels like to be an employee. That's largely behavioral. So I think you can hold teams and organizations and leaders accountable to some of those outcomes. But I think the behavioral piece is the most important thing and it's missing in most organizations. Just like organizations, there's a lot of leaders that will quickly tell you that they're inclusive, but they can't point to what they specifically deliberately, proactively do to be more inclusive. They're thinking about their intentions, and their intentions may be fantastic, but intentions are not enough in this work.

I want to jump into our second article. It's from Forbes. It's entitled Here are five Actions Leaders Can Take to Build a Racially Inclusive Culture. So it's taking a particular angle on this, and it's by Dana Brownlee as one of the senior contributors in Forbes. And I kind of have mixed opinions. Some of this, some of this, I was like, yes, that's fantastic. Like, particularly the one that she kicks off with around surveying. Right. And getting. Getting information, constantly getting information back from the organization. But personally, I felt some of the other ones drifted into vagueness. What are your thoughts on. On these five actions? And perhaps to bring it back to that first piece around surveying and getting the feedback and that measure of. Is it working? Is that how people actually feel? Has it changed?

Yeah, I would agree. I think a lot of. A lot of these kinds of articles do tend to be a little bit general, a little bit vague. And I think, I think there's a lot of leaders out there that need a little bit more specificity. They need a little bit more direction. They have the right intentions, but they're not sure what this looks like in action. So I'd agree with that. I do think anonymous feedback is pretty important for a lot of organizations. It kind of depends on where you're at in your journey. Ideally, I think what we really want is we want to be much better at having honest, candid conversations with each other. But in a lot of organizations, that's risky. There's a lot of real or perceived risk to doing that. And so I think anonymous feedback is part of the journey there. But in general, I think these are good things. I would agree. A little bit general, a little bit vague.

I'll quickly call out some of them just to check if our listeners are familiar with some of these. Maybe not. One is listening anonymous feedback, as you've mentioned. Two is increasing transparency and they do dig into some initiatives such as, you know, pay gaps, for example.

Right.

And compensation being a big issue. I'm referencing the New York City Council law that comes into effect in a couple of days that requiring compensation to be advertised on jobs. Three, increasing objectivity and selection process. Again, generally that's a good statement, but there's really no detail on how to do it in this. Four, finding problem areas and conducting root cause analysis to fix them. Again, it's a good general comment, but not really digging into it. And then five, bring everyone into the discussion. Right, so. And then she puts a subline, literally. I'll go back to number four though. Find problem areas and conduct root cause analysis to fix them. This kind of leans a little bit more towards diversity. I work with companies who would share the diversity stats and they share them at the highest macro level, Joe. They'll give you a kind of breakdown of race, of gender, of a whole different bunch of things. And it may look good, but the reality is there's pockets where it's not good. And you know, for example, you'd find in finance it's easier on gender to be a lot more skewed towards female than male. It's actually I see a lot of 55%, 60% female versus male in, let's say, finance and commercial roles. Sometimes times. And much more difficult in tech engineering where you see it in the 20s. And often times, you know, what companies do is they, they just bring it all together and say we're doing 46%, we're all good on whatever metric. Whereas the truth is you're, you're over dimension fine in one area, you're seriously poor in another. So I'm not number four, the finding problem areas and conducting a root cause analysis. I, I definitely, I'm an advocate for. That's dig into the sub numbers and the sub numbers again because that's where you might really find. Actually there's a challenge over here. You know, for example, a lot of international multinational companies would find on the diversity side, they would have, you know, little issues with gender balance in Asia, particularly China, where you, you know, it seems to be even in stem generally easier to hire a female talent, but then it's blended in with other numbers in the world, do you find that happens? On the inclusivity side, are there metrics that, what are the metrics perhaps that organizations can dig into to get this root cause analysis? And then is there a danger that you can kind of have high level metrics that make it look good? Don't dig into the actual real problems?

Absolutely. I think overall demographics are important, but I think they oftentimes don't tell the whole truth. And so I think there needs to be a local perspective that takes a closer look at things. I also think it's important to look at, in addition to overall demographics, to look at employee outcomes, things like retention rates, engagement rates, if you measure engagement, promotion rates, and to sort that stuff demographically as well. And I think this is part of how you, this is part of how you pursue the equity issue. If you have employee outcomes that are noticeably different across social groups, that's an indicator to me that you might have some practices or processes that are not, that are not fair and equitable in nature. If retention rates vary noticeably by race or age or gender, I would want to dig into that. I would want to dig into that, maybe do some focus groups, maybe collect some more data. But I think there's also data that you can collect that's more specific to the employee experience and the idea of inclusion. You can, for example, ask employees, do you feel fully included. That's a good question to ask, I think, especially if you've got a clear and concise definition for what that means for your organization. So they're all responding to the same thing, but asking people about their experiences. Do they feel safe contributing in meetings? Do they, do they feel consistently seen and heard and valued? Do they have a sense of belonging? Do they feel like an insider? I think all of those are good questions to ask. And again, sort demographically and if you've got some differences, then dig into that, dig into that with some focus groups or some interviews and start to figure out what those behavioral things are. We know the research is pretty clear and consistent that women are much more likely to be interrupted at work than men are. And they're interrupted in more negative and disruptive ways. If that's not happening to you, it's kind of an easy thing to overlook. But it's something that impacts what it feels like to be an employee and it's something that impacts those employees participation. And it has behavioral solutions. We can fix that pretty easily if we're aware of it and talking about it and focusing on it. But I think if you're collecting the right kinds of metrics. It helps you identify what some of those behaviors are that you need to expect of employees and probably especially leaders.

Speaking of specifics, we mentioned it a few minutes ago in terms of giving people actionable things they can use. I know in the world of employee engagement, nearly everybody uses a Gallup framework that they published years ago on. These are the questions to ask to try and measure employee engagement. Right. Everyone kind of copies and paste them, standardize them. Can you recommend a group of questions that are good to measure psychological safety? Is there a. I generally don't know this, so if you do, I'd love to share it. Is there a kind of. There's the gold standard of questions you should ask to understand if you have a psychologically safe environment or team.

Yeah, there actually is, from my perspective, a gold standard. There's 10 questions that I use to assess psychological safety. I've failed to have those 10 questions in front of me, so I won't nail all of them. But some of the questions that I really like around psychological safety, whether you're doing a formal assessment or you're just having a discussion about it, is it safe on this team to be unpopular? Because if. If we want people showing up, making their unique contribution, there's probably going to be a day for every single one of us where we are the weirdo, the oddball, the heretic, the voice of dissent. That only happens if it's safe. Is it safe to be at least temporarily unpopular on your team? Do we disagree enough? Do we disagree? Well, is it. Is it safe to share bad news here? Those are some of the things to really pay attention to. Is it safe to disagree? Is it safe to disagree with your boss? Is it safe to admit failures? It's safe to ask for help? I think those are some of the questions that really help us get at. Do we have psychological safety on this team? And for those that are maybe not familiar with psychological safety, basically what we're talking about is trust on the team level. When you're together with your team, do you feel safe taking some risks and being vulnerable? Asking the uncomfortable question, sharing your big crazy idea? Because if it's not safe in reality or perception, people aren't going to do those things and that team becomes deprived of some of the resources that they should actually have access to.

I love that we might one day get you to maybe publish that or if you have it on your site, share that list out. I think a lot of folks would benefit from being able to copy and paste that and use as the gold standard. Joe, I want to talk about equity. Again. Diversity is spoken a lot about and people can lean on it because they don't have a whole lot of understanding around inclusivity. And then the one that really don't seem comfortable talking about is equity. Right. Call it the latest in the, in the die, depending on what else you want to put in there. And people kind of just get really uncomfortable. They kind of use the E word, try and avoid talking about it because they really don't kind of understand it or want to get into it. A great example, Lars Schmidt, I think you might know Lars, he's lives in the D.C. area. He was over in my hometown last week. We, we shared a, a, a 30 minute conversation with an audience here in Dublin in a HR summit. And he gave me a great example of the company momentum, which many people might not know momentum, but you might know Survey Monkey, which is their previous name. And when you speak of equity, they went to their employees saying, what can we do more for you? You know, do you want pay rises? Everything else. And they were stunned with what the employees came back with as their biggest concern. And they said there was a whole bunch of people who, they worked alongside in facilities, in their canteen, cleaning staff in their businesses who were colleagues but not employed by Momentive. And they felt that they had great benefits, they had good support for health and pension, everything else. And they felt these colleagues in their mind did not and they wanted to not take more benefits themselves. They wanted those other people to have similar benefits and opportunities that they did. And so momentum lift, they said, okay, this was not what they expected, but they worked with the provider that supplied those, those individuals to bring them up to the same level of benefits as the direct hiring staff. I thought this was an amazing example of employee led equity. And what one way that equity can play at an organization do you find, first of all, that teams kind of struggle with equity even more so than they struggle with the concept of inclusion. And for you, what role does equity play in the bigger mix?

Yeah, I think equity is the, is the tricky one for a lot of folks and it's a little bit newer into the conversation. We've been talking about diversity inclusion longer than we've been talking about equity. That's the one that I get some resistance around. And just to give folks kind of a framework for how I use these words, I keep my definitions pretty simple. Diversity means difference. There's a lot of ways in which human beings are different. Inclusion is an ongoing process of change. And I think if we're good at being engaged in that ongoing process of change, we produce two outcomes. One is a sense of belonging on the individual level, and the other is equitable outcomes on the group level. Sometimes when people are resistant to the idea of equity, in my experience, they're resistant to the idea. They think what we're talking about is guaranteeing the same outcomes for everyone. And that's not what we're talking about. We're all different people. We've got different gifts and different talents, and we apply different levels of effort. We're always going to have different outcomes on the individual level, but again, we should have similar outcomes on the group level. But I do think organizations are struggling to figure out what equity means and how to deliver on it. A lot of it's about accommodations, acknowledging the fact that different people need different kinds of accommodations. And when it comes to physical disabilities, we're pretty good at understanding that. We understand that if someone uses a wheelchair, they need some different accommodations at work than we do. But we have a hard time seeing the needs for equity sometimes. Beyond that, I mentioned the fact earlier that the research is pretty clear and consistent that women get interrupted more often at work than men do. If we want to provide a more equitable outcome, we need to do something to keep that in check. The research is also pretty clear that women, especially women of color, are much less likely to get candid, valuable development feedback. If we want a more equitable experience for them, we have to do some things to change that. There's some things that we have to do to push back on that. But I do think there's a lot of folks and leaders that are a little bit confused around equity. But I would go so far as to say there's still a lot of confusion around all of this work. As you said in the beginning, organizations are quick to tell you that they're inclusive. Most of them can't tell you in simple language what that means. Most organizations don't have a common language. They don't have a definition for this is what diversity means here, or this is what equity means here. Belonging, excuse me. And I think that's problematic until you can tell me what those things mean. I don't know what to do with your statement of commitments, and I don't know how you pick your strategies and your tactics and your metrics. And so I think, you know, I mentioned earlier that the behavioral piece is kind of missing in a lot of organizations. So is a common language. Put some clear and concise definitions in place so that you can make sure that you're all actually talking about the same thing. I think that's a big challenge for a lot of organizations as well.

Let's go back to that behavioral topic. I want to talk about inclusive leadership, specifically. What does it look like? How do you identify inclusive leadership? What kind of behaviors. To use that word again, Joe, do inclusive leaders typically display.

Yeah, so I actually have a competency model that I use. It's got five different levels of competency with some specific awarenesses and behaviors in each group. And it's just kind of a boilerplate model. It's probably a little bit too much for most organizations, but it's just to give folks an idea of what some of this stuff looks like in behavior. The first level is kind of what I call the learning level. And I alluded to this earlier. It's not super behavioral or actionable. It's a little bit more about understanding and awareness. Does this leader use respectful and inclusive language? Do they understand the business case? Have they kind of figured out their personal case for why they care about this, which is important? Do they. Do they understand the impacts of things like bias and privilege? So that first level is, I think, some kind of foundational awareness. But then beyond that, are they comfortable speaking publicly and privately about this set of issues? Are they doing things to learn about the experiences of others in the workplace, people that are different from them? Are they doing things to reduce the impact of bias? Are they willing to make clear and public and specific commitments? This is what I'm going to do to be a more inclusive leader. Are they doing things to increase the psychological safety on their team? Have they proven the ability to confront and hold other people accountable? Are they setting expectations and accountabilities for their direct reports? I think, again, proving that they're just as good at hiring, developing and promoting people that are different from them as they are at other folks. I think that's a pretty important competency as well. Are they getting involved in organizational efforts? Are they becoming a champion for this work? Those are all things that I think are some of the behaviors and competencies of inclusive leaders.

A lot of leaders take their guidance from business schools and leadership programs are sent on. Right. How much focus do you think the modern leadership program, or course, whether it's done through a Stanford or it's done in house in a company, puts on inclusive leadership?

This might have changed in the past year or two, but I don't think nearly enough. And I would go beyond that and say they don't put nearly enough focus on the human aspects of work in general. I think we still have a lot of leaders that are kind of clueless on human nature and human behavior and social behavior. And that's a huge part of leadership. They get the numbers, they're solid on that side, but they're a little bit clueless on the human parts. Again, maybe some of that is changing because of the last two years, but I think there's a huge opportunity for improvement there.

Well, my guess is probably it's not changing fast enough. I know. Pardon me. Curricula in academia takes a long time to change. Right. So even if there's a will to go introduce new curricula, it can take years to actually get approved by universities, put into curriculum, taught to new folks who go on year two year long programs. Right. So this can be a slow thing. But you mentioned the human piece. Right? Empathy is a word that I think it's probably, if you look at searches for it on Google, I'm sure it spiked in mid-2020 and hasn't been so high in 20 years. Right. We talk about empathetic leadership and the need for empathy and the pandemic really highlighted that. Talk to me about the role of empathy in being inclusive and particularly just generally in leadership the last two years from your perspective.

Yeah, I think empathy is incredibly important and kind of the heart of empathy is understanding the experiences of others. We have a tendency as human beings known as ontological arrogance. And that is our simple tendency to assume that everyone here is having the same experience, that I am, my experience is the experience. But that's never the case. Even in this conversation right now, every single participant is having a little bit of a different experience. We're different people, we came here with different expectations, we interpret things differently. So I think it's really important to make sure that leaders understand that and that they're doing things to come to understand the experiences of others in the workplace. Because if it's not happening to me, it's kind of easy for me to assume that it's not happening. The reality is there's things that happen in the workplace that leaders don't know about because it doesn't happen to them. They have to know people that are different from them and have safe, trusting relationships where people feel safe sharing those stories, then they can be a part of the solution. But until they understand what's happening and what its impact is on a human being, they're really, they're really not equipped to be part of the Solution. A long, long time ago, I was in the United States Marine Corps and I served in the infantry and we talked a lot about the difference between headquarters truth and ground truth. You've got generals up here making decisions for Marines on the ground. But unfortunately what happens over and over again is these two groups of people, people are operating on completely different realities. There's a whole bunch of information from down here that never makes it up here. Some of the information that gets filtered out fastest, bad news. Why do people stop sharing bad news? Because of the way in which they think it's going to be received. So you end up with generals up here and they may be the most competent people in the world. They're not likely to make the right decision for the Marines down here because they don't understand the reality. They've lost access to some really important information. And this goes back to psychological safety. Is it safe to tell the truth? Is it safe for me to share bad news? Is it safe for me to tell you about a bad experience? That's pretty important if we're going to actually fix and address those things. Bad news is never fun, it's never convenient, it's never super popular, but it's incredibly valuable. Have you proven as a leader to be a safe person to share those stories with? You're not going to dismiss them, you're not going to explain them away, you're not going to blame it on the person who told you. You're going to understand that experience even though it's different than yours, and try to be a solution for it. I think it's, I think it's one of the essential competencies with this idea of inclusive leadership.

I agree with you. We've spent some time in the last couple of years building out what we call our inclusion, Inclusion stories on the social platform. To your point about level one is like, let's introduce you to people you don't often see or meet day to day and they'll tell the story about their lived experience, which is probably different to yours, whoever you is. And you, you kind of take a step back and go, I never know. I never knew people would have that challenge. You know, I remember listening to Joanna Abayi first a couple of years ago when I first met her and she told the story of coming from a, a, a, a poor background in London and she was given an internship and this was a brilliant opportunity in an ad agency from her own background. She didn't have the normal academic background and she said her challenge was that to get to the internship every day, which was unpaid. She had a choice. Did she basically use the minimal money she had to pay for her bus fare or pay for her lunch? Because she couldn't do both. And her perspective was, nobody in the ad agency understood that perspective of poverty. They just assumed every, you know, it's an internship, it's a fantastic opportunity. No one considered that somebody like her who'd be offered that job would have to make that decision. I remember hearing her, it was the last time I ever allowed somebody to work for free in social talent for any opportunity, even if it's a work placement from school. It's like you just don't know again until you have heard the lived experience. You don't have empathy with somebody else. And the storytelling can be powerful to make you think about others. Another just example you made me think of, and it's, I coincidentally have a book on my desk I'm holding up called the Mom Test. And this is a book about building products and customers and so on, so forth. And the basic idea is that your mom lies to you. Your mom is trying to be nice. And when you tell your mom about a good idea, an idea what you're doing, she's going to go, that's brilliant, that's fantastic, Joe. That's a great idea. And that we need truth if we're going to develop great projects, ideas, solutions, businesses, whatever it might be. Sometimes what happens is people just tell you nice things all the time and how do you go about trying to get the truth out of people? So that book is a framework to actually get the truth out of customers.

Fantastic.

But you know, it just reminds me the importance of having that truth in the business. You can, your analogy from, from, from the military is just very apt there because you have folks on the top who aren't told stuff from the bottom because, you know, there's a perception that they don't want to hear that and they just go along and make the wrong decisions. Right. You could argue that that is possibly happening in Ukraine to the Ukrainians. Benefits. Right. There's, I imagine, a complete absence of psychological safety in the Russian army and in Russia in general. Right. This is a country, you know, for those trying to understand psychological safety. You know, it occurred to me, it's like if you walk the streets of Russia, your, your phone apparently can be taken off you and it's checked to see if you're checking foreign news sources. And if it is, you're jailed for what you check on your phone. That is the complete opposite end of the spectrum from psych, psychological safety. Right. So take that to the workplace. One of I'm, you know, searching for a job. If I'm on a job site, if I'm saying something negative, I have a criticism of project that we're running. And how do you create an environment where you can. Where you can actually speak the truth to your point as being such a fundamental thing? I'm going to move on to one of the our last questions, if you don't mind, Joe. You know, when you ingrain a culture of inclusivity at the top, we kind of maybe should have started with this point. What are the benefits? Like, you know, what is the business case, should we need it for? Ingraining a culture of inclusivity at the top?

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this. I've engaged in, I think, far too many conversations about the business case in the last 20 years. And I realize that's how we open the door for some folks, but we're talking about such fundamental human needs here. I think we almost do ourselves a disservice when we frame it as a business case conversation. I think the business case is pretty clear and compelling and overwhelming at this point. But I also don't think that business cases really motivate people's behavior. I think even more important than the business cases for you to figure out why you care about this work. And I think there's a lot of different ways that people find that connection. They find it through their faith or because it aligns with their core values or because of some personal experience that they've had. But we're talking about such fundamental human needs here that need to be seen and heard and valued, the need to be treated like you belong there. And I just find myself more and more frustrated that we have to use dollars and cents to convince people that that's important, and probably both are important. But I feel like we've almost had an overreliance on the business case, and we've turned it. We've commodified something that's much bigger and more beautiful and more powerful than that, and it's much more human. And it's stuff that we have in common, some of those basic human needs. I'm trying to bring a little bit more of that to the conversation to at least complement the business case. Sorry, that's probably not maybe the kind of answer you were looking for, But I think it's a bigger conversation than just a business case.

It's the answer. I agree with being honest with you, Joe. We had a great conversation. We got together with six again this conference last week and I was put in a group to have a discussion with eight other HR leaders. They were all senior HR leaders from different organizations in the US and Ireland. And we talked about social capital and how we interpret as a group was more the kind of societal social capital capital. And. And how organizations have changed their approach this over the last two years. I mean two brilliant examples in the group. One was a lady for a big US multinational spoke about how her organization had invested 10 million. It could have been as high as 100 million but as minimum 10 million in initiatives to try and help disadvantaged employees progress further in the organization. And they'd done a whole lot of work about publicizing this and how they basically were giving opportunities to their people. And it felt completely flat. We had an example of another guy in the group who worked for an insurer. And he spoke about how early in his career there was a case where there was an individual overseas who was insured. It was in Asia during the SARS epidemic and he needed to be repatriated. And long story short, it emerged that, you know, his illness was nothing to do with sars and therefore his insurance cover didn't cover him and he was terminal and the insurer was within their rights to just refuse to repatriate him. And somebody made a decision to ignore the policy and repatriate him and just make it all work. And that story had lived for decades in the company as an example of the behaviors of the company. Whereas the 10 to $100 million spent by the US multinational publicizing a program went no nowhere. And it hit me about just kind of the genuineness of the insurance company had a culture of just do the right thing. The other organization were trying to promote themselves as being inclusive and helpful. And they almost. Because they put so much money into the promotion of it, it didn't work. And to me it was kind of a. I think it's to your point. It's like if you're focused on the business case and why then promoting it and selling it back to people, it probably won't work. If you just do the right thing, people will eventually hear about it and it's unbelievably more powerful than the. The curated and crafted version of that. I don't know if that resonates with you, Joe.

100 it does. 100 I think a lot of the things that are done in the name of diversity and inclusion and equity and sustainability and community, they're outward facing. And I'm not, I'm not saying they're completely insincere, but the, the value is mostly in the public perception of the organization. Let us broadcast our intentions and there's not nearly as much effort and resource on the internal aspect of it. Doing the right thing, having inclusive behaviors, making sure that you're living values. I mean, how many organizations have great core values? But then you walk around that organization, you can see a whole bunch of behaviors that are not anchored to those core values. If this stuff matters, it should matter and it should show up in our decisions and our behaviors and how we function as a team. Yeah, I think there's a, I think there's still a pretty big disconnect in that way.

Joe, you've given us tons of advice and tips over the last 44 minutes. I'm gonna ask you to give one more. We ask every guest on the show. 92 people have gone before you and given their tip to add to our short list of advice for our listeners out there today. And those will come back and find the podcast and video at a later date. From your experience in your career, or perhaps from others experience has been handed down to you, what's the one tip you'd like to leave our audience with here today?

Well, I'll keep it kind of relevant to the topic of inclusive leadership. I think that one of the most valuable things that you can do is to ensure and prove that it's safe for your people to tell the truth to you. Disagreement is a great proxy for diversity, if you value diversity. If you value differences, you should have a healthy, intentional relationship with disagreement. Start there.

Love it. Joe, thanks so much for joining us here today. Really, really appreciate your time. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Let's have you on the show soon. I'm looking forward to your new content on psychological safety, which is coming soon. The Silvertown platform. Thanks, Joe.

Thanks for having me.

And thanks everyone for listening this week. We'll be back next week for show number 94. Please join us again. You can find links@socialtalent.com the shortlist. I'll be joined by Yasmin Shaikh. Yasmin's a fantastic person I met in the UK a couple of years ago. She's a TEDx speaker, so she's delivered to bigger stages than this. The founder of the organization Diverse Matters and a former lawyer based out of the uk. And she's gonna be telling her story and talking about attracting enabling employees with disabilities. Again, back to that piece around empathy and understanding and walking in someone else's shoes. I'm really excited with the right conversation with Yasmin. It's been a couple of years since we've had a chance to share a stage or virtual stage due to the pandemic and she's a fantastic and powerful speaker. Come join me. Listen to Yasmin speak on Wednesday 6th of April. That's at 4pm UK Ireland time which is back to 11am eastern 8am on the west coast of the US and you'll find it on my LinkedIn profile, our Social Talents YouTube channel which is just Social Talents on YouTube. Or you can find it next Wednesday evening as a podcast on Apple or Spotify. Until then, please do take Joe's advice. We need you to walk in other shoes. See it from their perspective and again, remember that doing the service of good diversity, equity inclusion is about doing the right thing, not about publicizing the benefits for the gain of your company. We'll see you soon.