The Inclusive Networker
The Inclusive Networker is a podcast dedicated to helping small business owners, solopreneurs, and network marketers develop inclusive marketing and sales processes that help them authentically reach diverse audiences and subsequently grow large, diverse networks of customers, business partners, or team members.
The Inclusive Networker
Interview on TheInquisitor Podcast with Marcus Cauchi: Diversity, Profitability and Leadership
In this episode, we feature an interview on TheInquisitor Podcast with Dr. Raymona as the guest. Dr. Raymona, along with the host of TheInquisitor Podcast, Marcus Cauchi engage in a candid conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion. The discussion explores the challenges of navigating sensitive topics and addresses issues like physical access limitations, biases in recruitment, and the importance of self-awareness for managers.
Their conversation doesn't stop there, they tackle the tough task of having difficult conversations and the magic of cooperation and communication in building resilience. Join them on this journey of self-reflection, learning, and commitment towards creating a more inclusive business landscape.
In this episode, we talk about the following...
1. The importance of recruiting and onboarding processes that focus on inclusion rather than conformity.
2. Why the success of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts relies heavily on the self-awareness of managers.
3. The challenges associated with terminology in the diversity and inclusion space.
You can find Marcus on…
Podcast https://marcuscauchi.podbean.com/
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcuscauchi/
Want more from Dr. Raymona?
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/drraymonahlawrence/
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/drraymonahlawrence/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/drraymonahlawrence/
Thank you for listening!
~Dr. Raymona
Hey, hey, hey, welcome, welcome, welcome to this week's episode of the Inclusive Networker podcast, where we help network marketers, small business owners and solopreneurs become aware of gaps in knowledge or awareness that could be keeping their networks and businesses small. Tune in as we give tips and simple practical tools to make your business more inclusive, and we teach you how to build inclusive communities that support diverse customers, team members and business partners.
Speaker 2:So, if you want to authentically build, relationships with diverse communities of customers or business partners, you are in the right place. But be warned you will be challenged. But here's the thing you won't be judged.
Speaker 1:I'm your host, dr Ramona.
Speaker 2:I'm a speaker, coach, consultant public health professor, wife, mom and a fierce challenger of broken systems that keep people from reaching their highest potential.
Speaker 1:I'm so excited to be with you on your journey to becoming an inclusive networker, so let's jump right in. Hey, hey, hey and welcome, welcome. Welcome to this week's episode of the Inclusive Networker Podcast. I am so excited to introduce you to Marcus Couchy of the Inquisitor. All these times on the Inclusive Networker Podcast, I have told you about who I have been calling into conversation.
Speaker 2:but some amazing hosts have called me into conversation and I am going to introduce you to those episodes for the next few weeks. And so Marcus Couchy had me on the Inquisitor. Let me tell you, an inclusive culture is not something that is easy to talk about, but Marcus was ready to dig deep and we had such an amazing conversation. There was nothing fluffy about this, but you are going to realize that aligning DNI with business goals, like maximizing talent and customer connections, is really the key in your business. So the business case for diversity is a no-brainer, but we must not pay lip service only.
Speaker 1:And we talked about all these things in this episode of the Inquisitor with Marcus Couchy. So if you are ready to incorporate these things into your business, then jump right in the Inquisitor with Marcus Couchy.
Speaker 3:Today, my guest is Dr Ramona Lawrence. Ramona and I are going to be speaking about diversity, equity and inclusion. It's a sensitive subject. We're probably going to be trading on a few minefields I'm undoubtedly going to screw up along the way and we're just going to try and have a grown-up, adult conversation about the subject. We're going to look at blind spots, gaps and awareness Again thank you for picking that up in the green room the differences people have in access to resources. I mean little physical access. If you're disabled, if you can't get upstairs, if you're blind, if you're deaf, what are the limitations that you have to face every day? How does your background, how does your location, how does your where you grew up affect how other people judge you? How does their strengths affect their judgment of you and your weaknesses? Are they judging you for your identity and all your role?
Speaker 3:So we're going to dig into these subjects. It's going to be messy. If we offend anybody, it's not intentional. Please feel free to write in and complain. Tell me it's my fault, but the purpose is to talk about this like grown-up. At the moment, we are not seeing people reach across the aisle and one of the things that is constantly in the press and is being used as a weapon. It's become weaponized, and this is this whole concept of woke. So we're going to discuss that to what it really means, what it doesn't mean, and how language is weaponized. So these are all the topics that we're going to tap into, but before we go any further, ramona first of all welcome, and thank you so much for agreeing to do this.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I am so excited to be here and to just be able to be in this space and have this conversation, like you said, like two adults really looking at each other's experiences and how our experiences intersect to help other people. So this is exciting.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. And again, the conversation may well result in either one of us agreeing or disagreeing, and the audience may disagree, and we want that discourse. The objective here is to stoke conversation. It's not to hide in the shadows and it's not to run away. We're going to run to the sound of gunfire in this conversation. So buckle up. Ramona, over to you, what do you mind giving us a couple of minutes on your history, your background and why you ended up in this particular line of work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love to tell people about my lens. I always say in the beginning of any conversation, what is your lens if I'm talking to somebody else or if I'm introducing myself, and your lens is kind of your background and how you see the world. And so for me, my lens is that I was born as an African American female in the deep south of the United States. So I grew up in southeast Georgia, united States. I was the child of, or I am the child of, a person who was a police officer. So I always say that I also grew up on the at the intersection of black and blue, because for me I could walk up to the police station and say, hey, buzz me back, realizing even at that point that my access was very different than other people. Than that that was not everybody's experience, especially people who had the same skin that I do. So that is another part of my story. I also have a chronic genetic disorder that affects primarily African Americans, and so I have sickle cell disease. So with sickle cell disease I have experienced the healthcare system and the discrimination within the healthcare system that said you're not going to be able to graduate on time, you're not going to be able to access resources because you have this terrible genetic disorder Right. Then I have a doctorate in public health, so that's where the doctor Ramona comes from.
Speaker 2:I learned about social justice, equity, health disparities, those types of things and my formal training. So that came along. And then, when I went into my first business, I started doing network marketing and they told me that everybody with skin and hair can get to the top of this company. But when I looked at the top of the company I did not see people with skin and hair like mine. So I knew that it is not possible that not one black woman worked hard enough in the 40 years that this company has been around to be able to get to the top of this company. Like something is wrong with the system, not just those individuals.
Speaker 2:And so my mindset, even from a little girl, has been how do I connect the dots for people, how do I look at the big picture system and not just individual things, and how do I bring all my experience together to really disrupt systems? I always say I challenge and disrupt systems that keep people from reaching their highest potential, and so that's how I got into this diversity, equity and inclusion work I really became interested in it. I became a certified diversity executive. I became certified to our qualified administrator of the intercultural development inventory, where I see where people are on a continuum in their intercultural development and communication, and so all of those things again have intersected to bring me to this point, to where now I'm a speaker, I'm a coach, I'm a consultant and I work with businesses and organizations to look at how do we incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion as a lens on the processes and practices that you do every day. So that's me Lovely.
Speaker 3:Okay, thank you. So let's start with some definitions, so that we're clear what is diversity?
Speaker 2:So for me, diversity is a range of different factors. It's different people. There are different diversity categories. So often people think about race and ethnicity when we talk about diversity. But for me, diversity is race and ethnicity. It's also veteran status, it's different family structure, it's gender, it's socioeconomic status, it's different sexual orientation. All of these different categories are diversity dimensions or categories, and that's what I call diversity. And so it's not just race. But here's the caveat to my definition of diversity A lot of times people say it's not just race, so that they don't have to have that hard conversation, because often race is the hardest diversity category to talk about.
Speaker 2:And so when I say it's not just race, I don't want people to use that as an excuse to not talk about race and not to have the hard conversation. And there's also diversity within diversity. And so when you think about, all black women aren't the same, all white women aren't the same, all members of the LGBTQ community are not the same. So there's diversity within diversity. And I help people to understand that because, just like my two children, your children, they have the exact same genetics, they have the same two parents, but they are so very different. I have a 16-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy, who are? They could have been raised in different houses, it seems. Their personalities, everything about them, is different, even though they have very similar genetics, same parents, same race, all of that. So to understand that there's diversity within diversity is important too, so that we don't stereotype and say this is a black person, is all black people, or this is a veteran, as is all veterans Understood.
Speaker 3:Okay, so let's define equity and differentiate it from equality.
Speaker 2:So equity is giving people what they need to reach their highest potential. Equality is giving people the same think. So if I say, okay, I'm going to give everybody $5 and you're going to go out and purchase this gift or whatever, well, if you already had $100, then you could add $100 to your $5 and you're going to go away further to get the gift than somebody who had no money. Or we always use this picture of people standing on a box. So you may be. I might say, here's the goal reach the ceiling, reach that potential, and then I give everybody the same box. Well, if I stand, a person that's seven feet tall or six feet tall on that box versus my four foot, my five foot four frame on a box, not four foot five foot four, it just lost 11 inches.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, five foot four self on a box, then you're going to be able to reach it, even though I gave you the same thing. So we always say we're giving you the same thing, you have the same thing. But if you start out with more resources and more access and I give you the same thing, it's not fair. So equality is giving everybody the same thing. Equity is giving people what they actually need to reach the goal. So you would give me a taller box than you so that we both could reach the ceiling Right, Okay?
Speaker 3:And you would give me a little more All right and inclusion.
Speaker 2:And inclusion to me is bringing a group of people together and valuing now their perspectives and putting those things into action so that people feel like they belong in that environment, and so it's okay. Now I do understand that you are diverse. There's different experiences that you've had. Now how do I use that experience to incorporate it into the practices, the policies of my organization, to really be able to incorporate your experience in what we do in business or in whatever policy or practice there is?
Speaker 3:I think it was my pal, rod Jefferson, who said it. He said that diversity is being able to sit at the table, equity is being able to order from the menu and inclusion is being able to eat the food. I think far too often we give the impression of wanting diversity, but we hire for difference and then we fire for not fitting in, or people find it impossible to stay because of the way they feel treated, the way they feel undervalued, misunderstood and so on. So let's tackle that issue first of all. What are the common misconceptions that people have around the whole area of DE and I? Let's do that first. So what are the common misconceptions people have around DE and I? And then we'll talk about woke, because that's an entirely different rabbit hole.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. I think one thing is that I'm going to go with what you were just talking about, too, as a segue into this. People do culture fit versus culture add. Okay, so there's a big difference. Oh, that is it. Yeah, so when you think about what you just said that people get fired because they didn't fit in, and that's exactly right People are coming in and they say, oh, you don't act like me, you're not motivated the same way that I am, you don't like the same incentives, you don't seem to fit here, whereas in culture ad, we look at how is this individual different and how do they add experiences, how do they add perspectives to what we do? And then that brings about challenge, because when someone's different, they're going to challenge the system. When they challenge the system, if you are not a leader who is able to handle that, you're going to say they don't fit and you're going to fire them.
Speaker 3:Okay, sorry to interrupt, but I think this is really important. One of the areas that I specialize in is selling through third parties. So you have no control directly. You have influence and trust. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is they go to market not being a good partner and not being prepared to be a good partner, so they see the partner as a get-out of sales free card. It's aware of outsourcing their misery and dumping the problem onto someone else. Then, when it doesn't work out and they go dark and they disappear all of a sudden, they're complaining about the partners instead of looking in the mirror. What I see time and time again is people saying that they want to create this change, saying that they want to bring the diversity in, but they don't create the conditions, so that when they bring people in and they're doing culture add, they're not creating the conditions. So culture add is possible. So talk to me about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we always say I'm assuming that you will understand this reference, even though you don't live in the US, and if you don't, I'll explain it more. But this reference is you can bring in all 31 flavors, but don't get mad if they melt when you don't have a freezer.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I guess it's Baskin Robbins or somebody who has 31 flavors of ice cream. So you talk about all these different flavors, all this diversity, all these things that you have, and then you bring them in and it all melts. You're like what in the world just happened? I had these great flavors, I was able to recruit all these people, but I recruited them for diversity, but I onboarded them for conformity. So when you recruit for diversity and onboard for conformity instead of onboarding for inclusion, then everything is going to fall. It's going to fall. So you have to think about who is this individual Again, asking them questions and saying what motivates you.
Speaker 2:I learned in people mapping, I studied people mapping. In people mapping they talked about selling the cruise. When you sell the cruise, it's the same exact cruise. But if you're selling it to a task oriented person, you're going to say here's all the things that we have lined up for you. There is an itinerary, you can do something every minute of the day. We have this activity, this activity, this activity. If you're selling it to a free-spirited person, you're going to say we have this cruise, you don't have to do anything. You can lay out on the lead-o deck or all day long and do nothing. So it's the same exact cruise, but you talk to them and you based it on their experience and the way that they're wired. So that's what's not happening when we bring people on is we're not thinking about how do we really tap in to who this individual is and then adjust our systems to that, while we're still having them to follow the policies?
Speaker 3:So many of the people who've been listening to the podcast for a while will be familiar. Buyers buy for their reasons and their reasons only, not yours. It will come to work for their reasons, not yours, absolutely. What you've pinpointed here, to my mind, is a significant deficiency in the education and competence of middle management in particular, because they define the culture of the team that the person has to deal with on a day-to-day basis, and in all probability, they were promoted for being good technicians, not for being good people, managers. The net result of that is that you end up getting a double whammy, so you lose a good producer and you gain a terrible manager, who then is responsible for somewhere between seven or eight direct reports. So I think it's probably worthwhile digging into a little bit what you would suggest. Actually, if you were to put onto a blank sheet of paper the fundamental, the vital elements of a good manager's role, what would those three or four lines look like in your book?
Speaker 2:I think the first thing is that they have to be truly self-aware. If you're not self-aware and you don't even understand your own lens, then you're constantly going to be biased in the way that you are interacting with other people, because you're going to say they don't do things the way that I do and so that's why doing these, that's why they're not working it out right. I think that you have to be able to relay the metric. So I say that. What I mean by that is that often we say this individual is not engaged. They're not doing the things that they need to do, like all of these other people are. And the word engagement is this great term. It's super sexy, but who knows what it means. My definition of engagement and what I see what I think I see when engagement happens is going to be different than your definition of engagement and when you think you're doing what I'm asking, right.
Speaker 3:Let's go into that a little bit, because to me, engagement means that you enlist people and they give massive discretionary effort. If people are willing to throw their hat in the ring and to participate and contribute without any direct reward, that suggests to me that you're creating the conditions where people want to come to work.
Speaker 2:So tell me what it looks like. So when we say mass effort, okay, they're putting in their mass effort. To me, mass effort is going to look like something different than you. So we need to really define what is it going to look like when I feel like you're engaged, and what do you need to do to actually be meeting that metric? Because we talk about this with students all the time at my university. They're not engaged. Well, what they think of as engagement is not the same as I think of as a type A professor. Right, I'm going to stay up, I'm going to make sure I work, I'm going to read a million things to make sure that I have the information that I need to put in this document. Another student is not. That's not engagement to them. So if we are saying to the student you're not engaged, but we didn't tell them what the metric was for engagement, that's an issue.
Speaker 3:And this points back down to ambiguity, as the mother of all FUBARS. Absolutely. Ambiguity leads to politics at the bottom, it leads to confusion and it leads to misunderstanding, and typically what happens is we then punish the people who didn't do what we didn't explain was expected of them. We see this happen a lot in sales, where salespeople have not contracted for what the boundaries look like and, as a result, when a customer oversteps that boundary, they feel aggrieved and they blame the customer when they only have themselves to blame. This comes back to that self-awareness piece around the managers. So we've talked about the bias filters there. Let's talk about how managers have a tendency to recruit in their own image, only weaker, because that's certainly been an observation I've seen. Have you also seen that?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I talk to people all the time about this idea of ideal client versus thriving community. If you are recruiting your ideal client, that person is very much likely going to be someone who's like you, and so when you close your eyes, if I said, imagine the thriving community, tell me, would you imagine only white men? I'm asking you.
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 2:No, right, okay, so I would not imagine only black women. If somebody said, imagine the thriving community, I would think of all different types of people walking around, and so when we are preparing to recruit people or bring people onto our team that are part of a thriving community, that's going to be a very different mindset that we go into versus this very because people are saying print out a picture of her, put it on the wall. This is how we're trained about the ideal client, and it's like this is a certain person, put a picture, name her, and it's like yep, that's cool, you got to talk to somebody, because if you talk to everybody, you talk to nobody. Yes, we get that marketing stuff, but as you're going through the process of bringing people on to your team or working with people, you've got to think about how does this particular process that we have in our business work for people that are different ages, different races, different genders, all of those types of things? You have to be willing to think through that.
Speaker 3:Again, I think one of the biggest frustrations I see in businesses is the inability to recruit well, because there's a tendency to recruit on the basis of a cut and paste of a previous job description based on features and functions in terms of skills, historical experience and results. I teach people predictive hiring because I think hiring well is a manager's number one responsibility. If you hire well, 95% of your management problems never occur. Then you've got to create the conditions for those people to do their best work every day. That takes real skill. You can't be a player manager and do a proper job of looking after the conditions so that your people can thrive and that they can work well together, even if they are and they should be very different.
Speaker 3:Like you, I love the whole idea of lenses. In fact, I've been working together with my ecosystem partners and we go into companies and six to 10 of us look at a company through our different lenses all around a very specific problem. It's the most sublime experience we've ever had in business because it's seven or eight of us focused exclusively on the customer's problem in partnership and alliance against the problem.
Speaker 2:Here's the thing. Here's the thing. I love that, because there's no way for me to be able to see through all those lenses you can't. One person can't see. I don't care how many diversity, certifications or whatever I have, I see through the lens of an African American female. That's it.
Speaker 3:With your history.
Speaker 2:With my history. There's diversity within diversity. That's so important. That's what I tell people Partnership in this space, when you say, what does a manager need, you need to partner with your people, even because they are going to give you those different perspectives, even if you don't have a lot of people that are at your same level. Partner with the people. They're going to tell you what doesn't work in their community versus another person.
Speaker 3:To give a great commercial example. I think it was Morgan Stanley. If I remember rightly, when I interviewed for the podcast and I'm so sorry I can't remember his name, it was Kevin something. Rather, I think. He was an African-American working for Morgan Stanley who was a VP, and they were running marketing campaigns all the time. They were doing it by postcode, by zip code. There were all these African-American areas that were not being targeted. They were unbanked. He started going into those communities and talking to the people about banking. What's really interesting is, in many of those households there were three or four or even five generations living in them. The owner of the house was normally Grant, who was 85, on $18,000 a year. That was the household income, but they're young professionals and they might be on 75 to 150,000 each. The household could easily be earning 500,000 and they're unbanked. It's insane.
Speaker 3:The lack of perspective means that we are missing out on vast opportunities. If we're meant to be representing shareholders and their best interests, why would we do that? Why would we limit the people we recruit from? Why would we limit who we listen to? The way I look at this is it's like when they first started treating cancer using gamma rays, they'd have one gamma gun and it would burn through the healthy tissue. Then they worked out. Well, let's have eight or 12 of them, all focused on the cancer. It gets the full blast, but none of the healthy tissue gets damaged. Well, that's how I see diversity in teams. We should be all lined up against the problem as allies, towards that one job to be done and committed to the customer's outcome, or committed to the company's job to be done. Because of all of this division and fractionalism, we end up competing with ourselves. It does seem insane, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, because the issue is that we're stuck on terms. We're stuck on terminology versus the actual work that needs to be done. We all know what the work is and we agree most of the time that we want people to be treated fairly, we want people to have access to opportunities and different types of things. We're so stuck on the fact that we don't want to be associated with the word woke or social justice or something like that, instead of being really committed to the work that needs to be done in our communities. Some people are very much happy with the power that they have and they're not trying to do things, but for many of us, it's not so far over to one side or the other that we don't want to see people thrive. We get into this thing where the terminology keeps us from acting because we're afraid that we're going to offend somebody in our friend group or our political party or something like that. That's a really big issue. It's so small but so big.
Speaker 3:Last week, howard Stern managed to offend the far right by saying that he was woke. Let's talk about what the definition of woke actually is and then how it's been commented. Then what I'd like to do is look at the other side, which is social justice and critical race theory, and how the far left has then taken over the other extreme, because it's left those of us moderates and wishy washy, tree hugging liberals stuck in the middle feeling like we are utterly unrepresented, looking forward terrified that one or other of these lunatic fringes is going to take over.
Speaker 2:For me, woke is just literally being we're not sleeping anymore. We're not sleeping on these policies. We're not sleeping on the systems that have been created that keep people from really thriving. In an essay in this country I'm in the US but those things that keep people from being able to thrive and to reach higher positions in the world, to be able to access resources. People aren't no longer being okay with saying, oh, we just don't get access to that just because of the color of our skin or because of where we live or who we are, because of these social determinants of health, where we live, we work, we play, we worship.
Speaker 2:That's my definition of woke, and what I understand woke to be is that we're not sleeping on this anymore. We're speaking up. They're not okay with these disparities and equities and these types of things that are happening in the world. That's what I say is woke. For me, to understand the issue with woke, it blows my mind. I think that people have just associated it with being extremely liberal with the LGBTQ community, with different communities, and I think that that is the issue.
Speaker 3:I'm going to challenge you because I don't think that people have associated it. I think it's been deliberately hijacked, in the same way that social justice has been deliberately hijacked and it's been turned into something that's politicized. Social justice means equity, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're moving barriers for people to reach.
Speaker 3:Instead it's been turned into. It's been portrayed as a Marxist ideology. You see it in academia, where people are being locked down. I can't remember which university was it where they'd had a day where black students and teachers would not come in by way of a protest and then the far left administration decided that that was the day that only black students and lecturers would come in and white students and lecturers shouldn't. And lecturer wrote, complained and he and his wife, after 20 years at the university, were drummed out.
Speaker 3:That kind of extreme behavior plays into the hands of the far right and then destroys the core message because, at the end of the day, if we can create the conditions where people can do their best work, where they want to come to work, where customers want to do business with you, there are no losers. The problem is if you are part of the small minority who benefits from extracting massively from the system. I look at things like tax reform. I look at things like lobbying. Those two areas would address so many social injustices and level the playing field by taking away the unfair advantage and the unfair disadvantage that they put the rest in. I'm sure there's a question somewhere.
Speaker 2:No, that's good. It's power, right? So the small minority that has all of that power is doing everything that they can to fight against other people who are coming into, who want to try to come into power. When you think about the fact that there are things that can be done, but over all of this time in the country, in my country, in your country, nothing has been done really to really move the needle in all of these structural factors that are happening. It's because the people that actually have the power won't do what they need to do because they enjoy the power.
Speaker 3:Well, mlk is famous. I have a Dream speech. Everyone knows the bit about the. I have a Dream, but what they don't really understand was it was a warning that it was a watershed in American history. It was a turning point and you had a decision to make. The decision was are we going to create that better future where freedom rings in Georgia, mississippi, alabama, hatton, new York, pennsylvania, colorado, tennessee, california and New North, south, east and West, or do we go into the quicksand of racial injustice?
Speaker 3:That was a tipping point. I think we're at one of those tipping points now and Martin Luther King was talking about. There was a promissory note of a great nation, the Constitution, and I think we as businesses, we as leaders, need to start establishing ground rules, constitutions and refocus on ethics and values. Because those things? I did a search yesterday on LinkedIn on sales ethics I think it was 12 articles, four of which were written either by me or my wife and business ethics it was less than 30. On a platform with 400 million business units, what does that tell us about the state of where we are as a society?
Speaker 2:It tells us that that's not a priority in any way and we always think about. I tell my son this all the time. He's very athletic and I tell him that as you're rising to the top in athletics, it's not your skill set, it's how your soul set, and I mean your mind, your will, your emotions. Those types of things are all about your character and how you're going to interact with people, how you're going to navigate the world.
Speaker 2:We are so focused, even on LinkedIn, on your skill set, but we're not focused on all of those other types of things that are the ethics, that are the character, that are the things that really make a difference, that really set you apart, not only in business but in life. And so that's what is quick, that's what's up to the surface, that people want to see, they want to see skills, they want to see all of that. But these things that we're talking about take that deep reflection, that deep work. That is not easy for people to do so and it's not the thing that's going to get you a thousand or your hundred thousand likes. It's not going to get you the followers, because that piece it makes people look at themselves, and people don't like to look at themselves deeply and say, hmm, I need to rethink some things, I need to question some things that I've been thinking of my whole life.
Speaker 3:Okay. So I couldn't agree more. Something often comes up and is a trope that's very easy for people to say you know, this is all gone out of hand. Let's talk about pronouns, for example. When someone misuses a pronoun unintentionally, someone reacting to that in a hostile way is bound to create some defensiveness. How does one educate, for example, when someone has overstepped by accident, unintentionally, but in a way that doesn't then make you the enemy and being uppity or whatever term they're going to throw at you, there will undoubtedly be a pushback and saying you know, it's like women who are successful and just refuse to sit down when they're being spoken over, and then all of a sudden they're being accused of being pushy or too masculine. It's horses for courses. I think we've got to find a way of creating a balance here. So let's start with the pronouns thing, because that's something that seems to be a minefield for people of my age that we seem to tread on quite clearly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I try to have people to think about two things before they even start conversations is to assume good intent and then to worry or to work on calling people in instead of calling them out. Right, so we have a real call out culture right now. So how do we call people into conversation versus calling them out? And so when we assume good intent, most of the time if somebody doesn't use the right pronoun for you, even if you've stated it, it's just because we're so used to saying the pronoun that we physically we think that we physically perceive for a person, and so when that does happen, there's going to be somebody we talk about the subtle acts of exclusion is. The thing that I was saying is that a lot of times there are Tiffany, janna and Michael Barron called the microaggressions the subtle acts of exclusion, right, and so we have a term, different way of saying it, because most of the time people don't have bad intent. They're doing a subtle act of exclusion instead of a microaggression. Well, as we assume there's aggression and there's mean or negative intent there, not using a pronoun correctly, I think, would be a subtle act of exclusion. When we are thinking about that, they talk about this idea of being the subject, the initiator or the observer. What are you going to do as the subject? The subject is the person that assumes good intent and then makes the correction.
Speaker 2:Or we say pause and then say, if I ask you to pause and say, okay, just a reminder, my pronoun is they, or something like that or just to remind you, then you, as the what you would be in that case, the initiator of the subtle act of exclusion you should say, okay, you know and accept that, and then act with curiosity and say, okay, in my mind, what do I need to think about so that I can do better? How do I need to remind myself of this? Because it's just courtesy. It's just courtesy to say I'm going to call this person the pronoun that they asked me to call them. If I didn't know you and I didn't know anything about you, and somebody said you're, a new manager is starting, your new manager is coming in soon, and I would say, okay, when are they going to be here, I would automatically call them they.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't say he or she, I would say they. And so if it doesn't match a person's beliefs or anything like that, it's just common courtesy to say If you want to be called they or he or she, then what is it hurting me? So trying to remember to be courteous and inclusive, I think is important, go ahead.
Speaker 3:Okay, let's deal with the other elephant in the ring, which is how we get ourselves in trouble by treading on eggshells instead of just having direct conversations. How to tee the conversation up so that you can have a grown-up conversation and not cause a fight. If you mess up, then it's an adult to adult discussion about what to do differently. How do we go about doing that?
Speaker 2:Because I mean these are simple things. So if we're on Zoom having everybody to put their pronouns, if everybody put their pronoun and your pronoun is he, then your pronoun is still going to be he and everybody can see the pronouns and it's going to be up on Zoom. If they want to put something different, they put their pronoun and everybody can see that. Or we have a conversation, just like you said. Anytime I work for the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, on the first call I say my pronouns are she and her and you tell me yours and I will respect them. So whatever those are, and so I remember those things, I write it down and when I'm writing a note, if I'm talking about somebody, I honestly find it hard to write they in the sentence because I'm trying to think. I have to really think to put they instead of he or she.
Speaker 2:It's okay, but I respect that individual and I say okay, either. We've had a direct conversation, you put it on your Zoom, you put it in your signature some way. You've let me know and it's now my responsibility to use the pronoun that you have given me.
Speaker 3:Okay, slightly conflicted here, because there's a little voice inside of me that's saying this can't be that important. Now, I'm sure that's because of my perspective and it's my view on the world. But this then speaks to the whole question of identity and how far should we go in order to accommodate diversity. I mean, you can go to a point and that's reasonable, but trying to get down to accommodating every little nuance or every little peccadillo or quirk or aspiration or whatever, makes it then impossible to function. So how do we draw lines and prioritize to what actually matters and what is really about? Maybe attachment or a distraction?
Speaker 3:To my mind, while I respect if someone wants to be called something, I will do my best to do that, but the job to be done seems to be so much bigger than worrying about that. There are things like values, for example, and to my mind the most important thing is to recruit for diversity in everything except for values and unite around a common purpose. So a clear job to be done and everybody knows how they're contributing to that job to be done, because then we're working towards common purpose. And do you overcome those little quirks?
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I want to challenge you because I think that, again, your answer is coming through your lens and your lens has a little bit of privilege, right. And so when you think about this, that would be like if I said you told me your name is Marcus and I'm like no, I want to call you Marcia. Like that would get on your last nerve, right. I mean you would be like, ok, so much the weekend.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's almost the weekend.
Speaker 2:So it would be like OK, why are you calling me something different when I've clearly said it and I want to flip it and say why is it so hard? Why is it so important for you to not?
Speaker 3:I'm just thinking in terms of the grand scheme of things that appear. Yes, it feels like there are so many more important things to focus on, and if we then get bogged down into a battle over pronouns, we're missing a wider issue, which is well, why is it that our board is made up of 11 white men over 45, who are all university educated and have incomes in excess of $200,000, whereas the people who work for us are significantly different to that? Our customers are massively different. I mean, this is the stuff I think that we need to be dealing with when we get distracted by the little things and I get it at a sort of micro level.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think identity is important regardless, right? So when you're thinking about identity and you're thinking about who you are as an individual, how do I include you if I don't know who you are and if I'm not willing to acknowledge who you actually are or who you perceive yourself to be right? That is important, and so if we're not willing to do that, then how could we be inclusive? There's different things with our beliefs and faith and all of that. I consider myself to be a very Christian person. Right, I am a very Christian person, but I would not ever tell somebody that I will not call you by your pronouns, because I don't think that I can be really inclusive if I don't acknowledge who that person says that they are. Now, do I think we should spend hours and hours and hours on it? No, but we should have the environment where a person can express that.
Speaker 3:OK, I'm willing to concede, but what I would like to express is that I think that we need to pick our fights and I think, at an individual level, it's absolutely right that we should respect what people want, how they want to be identified. So let's dig into that whole subject of identity, because, again, that seems to be massively misunderstood. How would you define identity? And then I'll define it my way.
Speaker 2:Oh, let's see, I think it would be the. I always like to think of things on a comprehensive land. So it's not, it's your, your individual, your physical characteristics, but it's also your emotional intelligence, it's your beliefs, it's your way of interacting with the world. I really think of identity that way. We also think about. You know the genetics of identity. That would go within the physical characteristics, but I also think that it encompasses all these other things that have to do with your culture, your background, your lens as well, and so your self concept. That part too, yeah, absolutely. I think that it has to do with the comprehensive self, not just how you identify physically or genetically.
Speaker 3:Right, ok, so the way I tend to define identity is identity is who you are and role is what you do. And I think often much of identity is tied into your role. And that role bleed is where a lot of the confusion comes from, because it's about being a man or a woman, gay or lesbian or whatever, and those are role functions, they're not about identity. And I think, because the definition of identity has moved into role, then people are judging on the basis of whether people are fit for purpose competence, whether your philosophy or approach to solving those problems or tackling those issues aligns with your political beliefs or your ideological beliefs. And in business we see this a lot, where people hang on to old processes.
Speaker 3:One of my favorite ones was the British Army in 1972, or something did a time in motion study on artillery fire and the captain who was responsible was there for about two weeks and he kept seeing these gunners carrying the shells to the back of the gun, opening the breach. They shove it in the back, slam it shut. One of them would stand with his back to the gun and face backwards. The other one would march eight paces, turn around, stand to attention and hold up his left arm and then nod and the other guy would then pull the cord and fire the gun. Basically turns out that they were holding imaginary horses. The holding up the left hand was holding the reins, so the horse didn't jump and they hadn't used horses for the artillery for about 40, 50 years.
Speaker 3:Now how often are we holding onto those predictions and we're just never questioning them? Why is it we recruit in this way? Why do we recruit from these demographics? Why do we interview the way we do? Why are we not asking questions like what are the questions this person is going to have to address in their job? And can I recruit someone like that? Because that's better than experience of the same industry.
Speaker 2:And what we're doing is. I always talk about this concept of screening out versus screening in. We screen people out because we have these rigid things that we've used all these years that are not really conducive to how we want our teams and our businesses to look now. So let's say, for an example, screening someone out is just going to say we want this many years of experience and we want them to have this education from this school right, Versus screening them in says that this person doesn't have this many years of experience, but we see the potential for growth. So we're now looking at growth concept versus just this screening out process. And so tell me, why is your face?
Speaker 3:There was a study done in 2019 or 2020 that said that 94% of sales managers were not fit for purpose, and I really don't blame them because they're. Typically their runway is they're tapped on the shoulder and told Ramona, we need a word and you think you're getting fired. Say bad news your boss, your idiot boss, has just been fired. Good news You're now the idiot boss. Off you go. And that's their runway. So they don't know how to manage, and the role of an individual contributor is to be quite selfish and get the job done. The role of a manager is to get everyone on the team over the same time Very, very different skillset, and I believe that the middle management layer is potentially the greatest catalyst for economic recovery and growth and for creating great culture. But they are the most under trained, under developed and unloved and under pressure people in the business. I can agree with that too. What do we have to do with the middle management layer in order to create the conditions where they don't fear diversity?
Speaker 2:I think that they're going to have to interact with people before they get there. Oftentimes they fear diversity because they haven't ever interacted truly with people who are diverse. They haven't had hard conversations. We've got to teach people to be able to look at different perspectives, understand their own lens and to make them have that hard conversation with themselves, because I really I had people ask me. You know, they ask me all the time how do I start this process? And I'm like you got to do the work yourself, and so I think that that's part of the issue is that I'm asking people to speak up for other people, but they don't even know how to speak up for themselves yet.
Speaker 3:A really good starting point, I think, is the implicit association test from Harvard. Yes, from Harvard, absolutely. It's a fantastic eye opener and impressingly sobering, absolutely. And it will look at race, gender, age, fatism and all those different areas of bias. But one of the most interesting aspects of their initial research I haven't followed it up for a few years now was the way that Black men associated other Black men and the level of bias that they held, and that then speaks to something in terms of conditioning and I'm really interested in looking at how we can break those patterns, because a lot of this is down to conditioning.
Speaker 3:On TV, for example, up until about 18 months ago, if you were Black or Asian, chances are most of the advertising didn't resonate with you Absolutely. They now swung the entirely the other way. So I would say seven out of eight, maybe about half, of adverts contain someone of color and there's a diversity message being pushed by these companies. It doesn't really feel congruent and it feels like everyone's going into overkill because they're reacting and we're treading on eggshells. So let's come back to that. How do we get past this where we're ashamed to talk about difficult stuff, we're afraid to have these difficult conversations? How can we just get this stuff out in the open and shine a spotlight on the stuff, and we can be grown up about it, because it just seems to be a tinderbox and it doesn't need to be. I mean, we've had a perfectly reasonable conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course, and I think that that's the key is actually having the conversation. But here's how you do it. A lot of people try to start to have these conversations in high risk environments. You've got to have the conversation on a lower scale and then you're able to have it in a bigger place, like at work or wherever else. But if you can't even have a conversation with people in your home, where nobody else is listening to it, how can you get on a podcast? We've talked about these things a lot of times before now. This is not our first rodeo talking about this, and so that's the thing is that we've had these micro conversations and we built the muscle to talk about it, and that's all we talk about.
Speaker 2:The continuum when I think about the intercultural development inventory, I think about people on a scale from denial up to adaptation, where they can really adapt their behaviors to other cultures and not just understand that different cultures exist. And most people are slapped that in the middle of that continuum, where they're at minimization, where they just say we're all the same, why can't we all just get along? Everybody's just the same, and that's a problem. That's where colorblindness lies and all of that. So when we're moving people up this continuum, we're really starting to be able to have these bigger conversations and we always say why don't you feed steak to babies? Because they can't digest it. So if you haven't given them the smaller chance to digestible conversations, then you can't feed steak, because when we're trying to feed steak to people who aren't ready to have the conversation, we have complete eruptions because they're fighting, they're angry, they're doing all these things that are not conducive to change.
Speaker 3:You know what we're actually trapped into this. It's about creating uncertainty. When people are uncertain, the brain's default setting is the worst case scenario, so we have to take them along a journey, and if you are already at what you consider to be the end point of enlightenment around DE&I, the other people have to go through that journey. It might be 12 or 100 steps, and you don't need an elephant in one mouthful. You've got to take it by slice.
Speaker 2:So here's what I tell people. I tell people to determine your disruption. So what do I mean by that? That means that you might not be the person that's getting out on the street with a sign and marching. You might be the person that's just saying I'm going to read a book, I'm going to talk to somebody who doesn't look like me, I'm going to follow a creator on Instagram who's not like me. That might be your disruption in the way that you are starting. You might not be Martin Luther King or anybody that really, really has this passion and this power or this powerful purpose for change, and so if you determine your disruption and start there, then maybe you've moved to a bigger level of disruption. I don't know, but everybody has some place that they fit into this process. Whether it be looking at your own lens and seeing how you see things, or going out and making big policy change, or being Katanji Jackson on the Supreme Court, I don't know, but it's important to think about your level of disruption.
Speaker 3:What I'm taking from this conversation is actually what we're dealing with here. It's the same challenge that we face in sales, in management. We have to enlist other people, we have to recruit them to the cause and we have to create the conditions where they can thrive and contribute to their greatest level. And we need to create the conditions where people can lead when it's their turn to lead and step back when it's not. So they don't have to put their ego in the way, because that seems to be the determining factor here. It's attachment and entitlement. It's attachment to doing things in a particular way or a particular outcome that is selfish, without paying attention to the other people who may be affected and organizations. One thing that I spend my life doing is looking at the ripple effect of a bad decision going down the organization. One of my clients, the guy called Jay Allen, did his master's degree and his thesis was on about 120 different major business failures. The single biggest determining factor was three bad decisions in a row, one comparing another comparing another. And I think very often when we're dealing with topics as difficult as this, we forget the fundamentals. Human beings are wired pretty much the same. We haven't evolved that much in the last quarter of a million years. The odds of us evolving in the next 10 are pretty limited, so most of this stuff can be planned for.
Speaker 3:We can look at how people are going to behave as we go into this particularly difficult period. We need to be clubbing together. I can't remember who it was. Was it Washington? Who said we either fight together or hang alone? And I think we're at that point. I don't know if anyone else feels that way. You may be slightly more optimistic than me, but I think we're going into a big unraveling. At the moment, society seems to be coming to a head. There's a lot of turmoil. We seem to be mirroring the 1920s and 1930s. That didn't end well. I think we need to be really focused on creating resilience by building community, by tapping into the natural resources that put humanity to the top of the food chain, which is our ability to cooperate and communicate.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and there's an African term that I use for my business, and it's Ubuntu, which means that I can't succeed if you don't succeed. It's talking about bringing our resources together and the humanity of us all, and how do we bring all of that together to make change? And so I think that's it. We've got to come together, we've got to bring our different perspectives together. I love what you said, that you have eight people that go in and look at one thing across their different lenses, because that is the way that we really get rid of those gaps in awareness, because we use their blind spots before the gaps in awareness that we have, and that's the way we're going to make change as we move forward.
Speaker 3:And I think we've got to start asking ourselves the questions what am I missing? What am I not seeing? What am I not hearing? What biases am I bringing to the table? That it means that I'm misinterpreting what's being said.
Speaker 3:This is what I believe true, and there's not enough time spent in reflection. And for those of you listening now, please, the best habit you can develop is one hour a week. You take the most difficult, pressing, awkward, uncomfortable, perennial question that you cannot break the back of and you spend an hour longhand with paper and pen and no interruptions, no phones, no email, no, nothing, and you write to that question. So pick one question and write to it for 45 minutes. The first 15 minutes will be drivel. The next 15 minutes will be derivative drivel from the drivel. The last 15 minutes is where all the good stuff typically comes, because now you've got past all the boring stuff, and then the next 15 minutes is working out how you're going to implement the juicy stuff that you created. And every week, if you're in sales, if you're in management or if you're in leadership, take an hour and start with the question what am I not saying?
Speaker 2:And can I add to that Please? Here's a question that I want them to add to what you just said. The question to yourself is who is telling the story and in what part of the story did they begin? Because the person telling the story has the power to shape the narrative. If they start the story in a different place, where people are disruptive and they're fighting back, and don't talk about how people have come in and stole their land or stole the resources before that part happened, you're going to think of these people as ruthless and just this negative connotation of them. Who's telling the story and in what part of the story did they begin? That's important for us to think about as we're listening to narratives of a group of people.
Speaker 3:Look through the different lenses of the witness triangle and the drama triangle. For those of you not familiar, the drama triangle drama thrives on ego and the drama triangle is made up of three voices. The victim why me so unfair? This always happens. Save me, help. Then the persecutor you piece of you, always, you, never. You're all the same, and it comes with a jabby index finger in the pronoun you, stabbing you in the face or chest, diminishing who you are. And then the most divisive of all, is the rescuer.
Speaker 3:Rescuers help without boundaries, without permission. They're micromanagers. They mollycoddle, they tolerate the intolerable, they're unclear and they finish this sentence with if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing yourself. Instead of worth doing well, they become bottlenecks. Now the problem with operating from there is that it's all about attachment, it's all about entitlement. You'll blame other people, you'll make excuses, you'll go into denial. Now there's a formula for how emotions work Prejudice, pre-judgment, negative expectation and negative preferences. Ie, you want to do them hard. Your intent is to score a point, take advantage, have them lose. So negative preference, negative expectation and prejudice, as compared with reality as perceived, equals an emotional reaction. Now there's a way out of this which gives you Teflon armor, which is called the Winner's Triangle.
Speaker 3:The Winner's Triangle is vulnerable, caring, nurturing, empathic and assertive, and, instead of being stuck in the past or worrying about the future, you're fully present, you're in the moment, you're paying attention, and we forget. This attention is a currency and it's part of respecting others. Listening, really hearing, empathy, being situationally aware these are the skills of life and what I'm hoping people have realized that what Ray Moema has been talking about actually is the same. In selling, we need to establish what the other person wants and needs, who they are, what they are trying to accomplish and enlist them. And I love the fact that you said recruit a customer, because that's what I teach my clients to do. If you are recruiting a customer, they're going to be on your payroll for the next 20 years. You'd pay a hell of a lot more attention than the way most people do when they're trying to transact and take money from people.
Speaker 3:And if we operate from the Winner's Triangle, we're vulnerable, we're nurturing, we're assertive. That's a very powerful position and also it means that you never get sucked into the psychological gains, and that's what this seems to lead to, because we get sucked into the psychological hook of our ego, being trapped and attached to our entitlement, our privilege being threatened, and the moment we have that uncertainty, we get into defensive mode. Braymona, thank you so much. This has been insightful, inspiring. I've learned a shed load. Would you come back so that we can upset the apple carph again?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, I'd love to hear your audience's thoughts and then we can answer some more of their questions and really dig deeper in some more of these issues.
Speaker 3:Excellent. How can people get hold of you?
Speaker 2:Just go to drramonahlaurancecom that's D-R-R-A-Y-M-O-N-A and then H and L-A-W-R-E-N-C-Ecom, and you can find out more information about me. Schedule calls with me, look at the different things that I do and that's it.
Speaker 3:And who's your ideal customer.
Speaker 2:It would be a team or a company who is looking to apply diversity, equity and inclusion principles to their recruitment, their onboarding, their activity or their retention systems. And so I have a framework called WAR and I work with network marketing companies. I work with pharmaceutical companies. I just came back from the Georgia Council of Court Administrators. I talked to them about diversity, equity and inclusion, and so individuals who are looking to update those systems and through a diversity, equity and inclusion lens, Lovely.
Speaker 3:Next time, what I'd like to do is to talk about DE&I as a profit center. If you're up for that, sure Okay, excellent, dr M Bernard Lawrence, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3:Oh, actually, I've got one last question. You've got a golden ticket and you can go back in time and whisper into the ear of the idiot right now, at age 23. What would you tell her that she would have undoubtedly ignored but would have benefited from?
Speaker 2:It would be very simple. I would say question everything and I'd say that I'm going to go further.
Speaker 3:Oh, go ahead, question everything, and if a question's worth asking, get the answer. Sorry to cut across you, but it was too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's good. And I'd say that because I was raised very strictly and would buy a teacher and a police officer in a Christian home, right. So everything was like this is how things happen, it's how it goes, and I still very much stick by those principles. I walk the straight and narrow very much in my life, but I also got to see that the world is so much bigger than me and it's so much bigger than these experiences that I've had. It's so much bigger than the support and the privilege that I have had. Not everybody else has that, and so when someone says I have reached the top of this, I wonder.
Speaker 2:The question is, I wonder, right, I wonder what it was like to not have these resources and still get to the top. I wonder what it's like to be a single mom. I don't know. I've been married for 21 years, since I was 23, 24 years old. I wonder what it's like to not have safety, I wonder, right. So question everything is what I would go back and tell myself so I could really really understand even earlier the perspectives of other people.
Speaker 3:Fantastic, romano. Thank you, thank you. So this is Marcus Kalki signing off once again from the Inquisitor podcast. If you found this insightful and if you haven't, you're probably brain dead Get in touch. Tell me why I'm wrong. Fight me, I'll get you. Come back and tell me why DE&I is a pile of shit. Tell me why it's vital. Tell me your experiences.
Speaker 3:I want this discussion to liven up and for us to really dig into it. How do we turn this into something that serves the common good? Because we are in trouble, the economy is tight, we're going into a period of massive upheaval and disruption. We need to get smarter, or else we're going to have our system ripped from under us and we're going into a period of massive upheaval. It's up to you. You have a choice.
Speaker 3:I was only following orders is a choice. You push the person into the oven, you pulled the trigger, you stabbed them. Whatever it was, you still made the choice. We have choices ahead of us and they're important, and we are now at a point where we can design the future of business society that will be coming down the pipe over the next 10 years. If we don't proactively choose a path, then we're going to become part of someone else's plan, and you know the kind of people that we have leading us at the moment. Don't know about you, but that isn't a future that I'm keen on. So, in the meantime, stay safe and happy selling. Bye-bye, bye.
Speaker 2:And that wraps up another episode of the Inclusive Networker Podcast I want to express my sincere gratitude to you, our listeners, for joining us on this journey of learning and growth. Your support and engagement are truly, truly appreciated. Creating a more inclusive network and beyond starts with us, individually and collectively. Let's continue these conversations beyond the Inclusive Networker Podcast. Engage with others, challenge your own assumptions, take action to make a difference in your own spheres of influence and your own influence, and share, share. Share this podcast with a friend. So here's what you can do next. Go to drremonahlaunchcom and keep up with me. Stay in touch. That's D-R-R-A-Y-M-O-N-A-H-L-A-W-R-E-N-C-Ecom.
Speaker 1:Don't forget my why in Dr Ramona and don't you dare forget your why, and I'll see you on the next episode of the Inclusive Networker.