Episode 103: Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace with Jennifer Brown

Jennifer Brown is a leading diversity and inclusion expert, dynamic keynote speaker, best-selling author, award-winning entrepreneur and host of The Will To Change podcast, which uncovers true stories of diversity and inclusion. As the founder, president and CEO of Jennifer Brown Consulting, Jennifer’s workplace strategies have been employed by some of the world’s top Fortune 500 companies and nonprofits—including Walmart, Microsoft, Starbucks and many others— to help employees bring their full selves to work and feel Welcomed, Valued, Respected and Heard℠.

On this episode, you will hear Jennifer talk about:

• How her background in nonprofit work, opera singing and off-Broadway theater performance led to her career in training & development
• How a corporate layoff led her to reposition herself in her career and start her own diversity & inclusion consulting firm
• What to do if you feel like your career or your workplace might not be a match for you
• The damaging impact of bias and stereotypes on individuals and businesses, and what leaders can do about it
• Her own experience with “bringing her full self to work” as an LGBTQ+ woman
• Her belief that everyone has a diversity story, and how this realization can lead to more inclusive conversations

If you want to know more about Jennifer and her work, here are other links you can check out!

• JenniferBrownConsulting.com (Business website)
• JenniferBrownSpeaks.com (Personal website)
• Book Website: How To Be an Inclusive Leader (or purchase the book on Amazon)
• The Will to Change Podcast (on Apple Podcasts)
• Facebook
• Instagram: @jenniferbrownspeaks
• Twitter: @jenniferbrown
• LinkedIn

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A full episode transcript is available below.

Today on Beyond 6 Seconds:

But in the end if you don’t feel that you can show up in your professional life and be proud of who you are, and really own your story, and know that your story is actually an asset to you, you’ve got to take a hard look at where you work and say, is this place ever going to support me?

Welcome to Beyond 6 Seconds, the podcast that goes beyond the six second first impression to share the extraordinary stories and achievements of everyday people. I’m your host, Carolyn Kiel. On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Jennifer Brown. Jennifer is a leading diversity and inclusion expert, dynamic keynote speaker, best selling author, award winning entrepreneur and host of The Will To Change podcast which uncovers true stories of diversity and inclusion. As the founder, President and CEO of Jennifer Brown Consulting, Jennifer’s workplace strategies have been employed by some of the world’s top Fortune 500 companies and nonprofits including Walmart, Microsoft, Starbucks and many others to help employees bring their full selves to work and feel welcomed, valued, respected and heard. Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Carolyn, it’s great to talk to you today.

I’m really excited to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here. You have had an amazing career. And I would love to just learn more about your own career story and how you found your place in the diversity and inclusion world. I understand when you first started out, you were in very different line of work. You told me before you started out in the nonprofit world as an activist?

I mean, it was the easiest thing for me to get into when I was in my 20s. And I knew I wanted to make a difference. So it really kind of didn’t matter what kind of nonprofit, I just knew that that was the right job for me. So I ended up at City Year and I don’t know if any of your listeners know what City Year is, but it’s a really neat organization that started in Boston, and now it’s all over the world, and it helps young people between the ages of 17 to 23 do a year of community service. And so I was everything under the sun in that org. I was a grant writer and an event manager, program person, uniform manager, and program management. And I had to outfit 300 core members one year. And so it was great grounding. but at the same time, I was singing all the time because I grew up in a musical family. I’ve always been very pulled towards music. And I always had this sort of itch. I was like, Hmm, I wonder if this could be what I could do in the world. And so I applied to grad school and got in and moved to New York to be an opera singer. And I just was so thrilled and it was wonderful for a couple of years. I graduated with a Master’s, I got my equity card, I was a Off Broadway performer, singer, dancer, so I was classically trained that I pivoted to music theatre, which I think was a better fit because I was also a dancer. A singer who dances, rather, not a professional dancer is what we say, in the performing world. But sadly, and I tell this story on stage actually in every keynote I give, I lost my voice. I kept injuring it, and I had to get a couple series of surgeries. So literally, my instrument just would be forever kind of damaged. I think. I mean, I had a successful result from surgery, but your stamina is impacted. And you also just see the writing on the wall. You realize, you know, eight shows a week, for weeks at a time, months at a time, which is what the performer life is like, yeah, my instrument’s just not going to support it. And so no matter how much I want it, I have to kind of walk away. So I walked away, and I sort of networked with other performers, luckily, who reinvented themselves, which is so important, because you’ve got to kind of, we call it lily padding, and you’ve got to see the next lily pad or the other lily pads around you, and be like, Okay, so what would that feel like, you know, how could I do what that person’s doing? And so, I picked a bunch of people’s brains. And I ended up at Fordham in a new master’s degree, my second Master’s, which is in organizational development and leadership, because a lot of performers make really good trainers, and it’s not surprising, but I just didn’t know what training was. I didn’t understand there was a field that existed where you could get up and work with groups like that, and get paid to do so. So it then turned out that I really found my place in this new field of HR, but specific to training and development. I mean, I do believe I was wired to be a facilitator. You know, I’m not a comp and benefits person. I’m not ER, I’m not a recruiter. I am a facilitator, because it’s the stage, but it’s also, it’s also just the love of group process and the conversations that happen about leadership and the ability to guide something, but not necessarily teach in it, but just hold the space for it. And so that piece was a big discovery. And I ended up getting laid off from a Director of Training and Development role, and that would be 15 years ago, that was my last corporate job and the layoff was a gift. Because I said to myself, where do I really want to be in this field? And I think what occurred to me is, I want to be facilitating full time, and I want to probably hang up my own shingle and be what I call that sort of, like outside voice, that third party, that change advocate. And I wanted to have the freedom to advocate for my ideas, which were sort of shaping up to a pretty strong point of view about what was broken in the workplace. After having facilitated hundreds of days of training in a variety of different companies. I thought, wow, I think I have a strong point of view about what’s broken, and what needs to be fixed, and how I maybe I’m the one to or I’m a piece of changing all of that. So I would then subsequently form Jennifer Brown Consulting, I would start hiring people, I started to get clients. We were in the team and leadership space. I was doing a lot of coaching team offsites, which I loved, but I’m also LGBTQ. So I’ve been out since I was 22 but had been sort of closeted for years as a performer. And even as an entrepreneur, it felt really dicey to be out. And this was, you know, 13 years ago when I hung my shingle out So, I think what happened in the last 10 years was I pivoted my leadership development, the grounding in OD and org change. I started to see it through this lens of having been LGBTQ, and being in that community in conversation, where we talk a lot about workplace equality. And we talk about workplace cultures, and why we don’t bring our full selves to work, which actually is so much bigger than just LGBTQ. I mean, there’s so many of us that don’t bring our full selves to work for a variety of diversity reasons, and also inclusion reasons. So I just like dovetail these two things, and I think that’s when it just really became as aligned as I’ve ever been professionally, because it’s like all of these things I’ve described kind of coming together, working together, enhancing my credibility, my energy, you know, my joy that I can find in doing the work because, I was that an closeted employee and now I get to work across the fortune 500 building more inclusive workplaces, where all kinds of talent can feel welcomed, valued, respected and heard. And it’s, it’s really profound. It’s like, I’m, you know, late 40s. So it took many years and like, nothing is wasted. So if you’re listening to this, and you think, why am I here in this job? Like, what am I getting from it? Where is this all leading? How am I going to use this? You know, trust me your goal, I think, if you’re feeling a mismatch of where you are, as to just not to stay too long is probably probably my first advice. And then, but also to know that you’re getting some kind of valuable skill that you will figure out how to use at some point and just may not be in your sweet spot yet. And that’s something that comes over time.

Yeah, it’s amazing how all the experiences that we have throughout our lives, I think, even you know, in the first decade of our work in our 20s, when we may be trying out different things, and maybe we only do something for a year or a couple months, and we like it, but then we shift to something else. And sometimes as you were saying, once you get into the middle of your career, sometimes you can look back and understand how all of those different experiences kind of put the pieces together into the career that you’re currently in. So it’s interesting how looking back, it all makes sense. But sometimes when you’re in the middle of it, it’s like, why am I all over the place?

It’s excruciating. And I feel for everyone on here who is probably in that moment, which is actually, I feel like most people I mean, with the world of work is just so it’s such a mismatch, I think, for a lot of us on our skills, because, I mean, this is a diversity point we make a lot which is, as a woman, just as an example, the workplace wasn’t built by and for me, right now, for women, for anyone that’s not of a certain demographic, which was historically the dominant demographic and no knocking on white straight men, but like, that’s who built the industrial world. And so, we were here and there as women, but, you know, it’s just it’s a relatively recent phenomenon that we’re in these systems in large numbers and I mean, that’s what we obviously fight for, but If it makes anybody feel better to realize that the struggle we might feel in this sort of unfamiliar terrain, or things not making sense, is that it truly wasn’t built for a lot of us. And so that’s what we just need to change. We just make to work need to restructure workplaces, and workplace cultures to the point with policies and trainings, expectations, accountability and requirements. I mean, all kinds of ways that we create it to look more like us and to be, a more conducive place for us to bring our gifts. And, that’s sort of my deep, deep passion that we all find work that we can be passionate about, but that also feels comfortable for us to do every day.

It’s interesting when I have conversations with people who work in the diversity and inclusion space, there’s always these two sides of the movement where one is, how do we change those workplaces that were only built for a certain demographic? How do we change them so that they are ones that all people can perform in and bring their true selves and all of their talents to work with them, versus how do the people in those demographics, like women get called out a lot: Well, how do women change? Women need to be more confident, women need to act like this or that. So it’s the two sides. And I think they’re probably both legit. But sometimes, I’ll sit down and hear about all the things that women need to be doing. This is great advice, I guess. But there’s only so much that you can do from pushing from one side. So I feel like two sides have to meet together.

I work a lot on that. Actually. I’m a big part of a lot of men as inclusive leader conversations. So I’m trying to address the whole thing. But it’s very rare actually. Sadly, to your point. I think we’ve focused a lot on what we need to do to change to fit in or to play the game or to know the rules and therefore hopefully play them or break them or do a little bit of both. But if you lean in as Sheryl Sandberg encouraged us to do, is there going to be a table for you or is somebody going to pull it out from under you, or is nobody going to be on the other side of that table that you’re leaning in on, like, who’s actually supporting a behavior change? When women show up differently, what happens? And that’s where unconscious bias or conscious bias comes in, because there is still so many active stereotypes and double standards around women leaning in, and what that looks like, and how that’s responded to. And it’s not just women, it’s people of color will tell you, when I try to lean in, and I’m being assertive, or I’m being directive about my career or my needs, for feedback, for whatever, I’m judged as being aggressive, for example, it’s just one of those tropes that is very, very familiar to certain diverse groups. And so we’ve got to change the environment simultaneously as we kind of learn how to play the game, challenge the game, create our own rules. We can’t just show up changed in a world of work that is, frankly, really still very old school, and very traditional and is very loathe to change. Honestly, I think there’s such change aversion. People protect what’s comfortable. People protect power, their own, you know, and there’s, I guess human reasons for that it’s, it strikes me as pretty small minded and sort of short sighted to do that. However, you know. So I think that there’s a fear of change, and there’s a protection and there’s also the need to like look at yourself and your behaviors and your organization’s, the culture of your organization, when you don’t get like positive feedback about that, that can be really hard and really challenging to people’s sense of ego. It’s like if you’re a leader, and you’re just finding out that you have a pay gap, you know, or that women don’t feel comfortable in the workplace environment that you’re in charge of, this is really challenging to hear. It’s confusing. It can lead to shame, frustration, denial, all kinds of behaviors, which I talked about in my second book, and yet I work with those leaders to move through that and say, Okay, so what’s on the other side? All of your feelings, great, I’m so sorry that you’re having a crisis of the soul, about the fact that this is true, and you didn’t know it. But like, let’s move through that. And what’s on the other side of courageous leadership with this? You know, that’s where I hope leaders can kind of get to, and start to take ownership for the everyday reality of so many often diverse people. But it’s not just people, you know, women and people of color and LGBTQ people. I might argue that even for many men, a male dominated workplace isn’t a healthy one. A workplace dominated by anyone is not a healthy one. It’s not diverse. You’re gonna have blind spots in any kind of homogeneity. So we’ve got to be really on the lookout for that and the workplace, and particularly people in power are still very homogeneous and that’s a big risk to business. Big risk.

I’ve read this finding several times that companies that have diverse boards of directors or diverse leadership teams, actually have a higher financial return on the stock market. So you’d think that public companies that, a lot of them live and die by their short term earnings, would see that and say, Oh, this is truly like the business reason to have diversity and inclusion. But it’s still difficult because it’s still a big change.

And the thing you’ve got to remember is you can have diversity without inclusion, and that can really backfire. So you’ve got quotas in place, like say you’ve got goals, you know, you’re actively sourcing and placing diverse talent at all levels of the organization. If you don’t have an inclusive environment, you’re going to lose those people just as soon as you bring them in. And so that’s where the rubber really hits the road too that actually makes recruiting the diverse talent, the easy part in a way. But keeping that talent and enabling them to thrive in this old school system is the place where I focus. The measure of success, I think, is the sustainability of that talent in the organization and the engagement of that talent. Like, how do they feel every day? How are they treated? What do they hear? What do they overhear? Where do they feel outside of the system of support? Where are they not being pulled up or fostered? You know, or sort of told the unwritten rules or, you know, where are the unofficial opportunities for growth being presented to them, you know, and provided. It’s subtle acts of exclusion that accumulate over time, and eventually cause someone to say, you know, I don’t know if this organization has my back and I don’t know if any individual leader in this organization is really dedicated to sponsoring me up the chain or supporting my voice in the room, and that’s I think what breaks the relationship eventually, and people leave and that’s very costly. Really bad for reputation, really bad for brand, really bad for morale. Everybody that’s at lower levels is always watching particularly senior hires, diverse hires, to say Gee, I wonder how long she’s going to last? Or, gee, I see that person denying that they’re a woman or a person of color, or not joining the Diversity Committee because clearly it’s hard enough just to be them everyday in this organization and they don’t want to really like raise their hand for more, or they know they have a target on their back if they do, so to have somebody leave can be read in certain ways by people who feel and are underrepresented, right? If you have one out gay executive, and you’re a LGBTQ emerging leader, and that person leaves under sort of, you know, murky circumstances you know, it can sow fear in an organization because you just, you’re so used to not being included. The narrative is so familiar to you of somebody not getting a fair shake. I mean, it’s sadly a very familiar story and you almost expect it, you know, even though you don’t know the circumstances, and often the circumstances anyway are protected by lawyers and you don’t really know. Oh, they’re leaving to spend more time with their family, but meantime, you have no idea if like they were dealing with intense homophobia or sexism or racism at the executive level and the board level and that nothing was done about it. And they just somebody told them, oh, you’re just not a fit here, like this isn’t working out. Anyway. So it’s just sadly, it’s like so familiar to so many of us like this happens over and over again, to the point where that’s the first thing that you assume when somebody walks away. So my bigger point is, don’t just recruit them in that you’ve got to do the harder work, which is the internal company culture experience work. And that’s, that is much harder to analyze, to shift, to address, to know what success looks like. And that’s kind of some of the stuff my consulting team focuses on is like so how are we going to build a process that enables us to get an accurate picture of what the culture feels like on a day to day basis? Like how are we going to know that that’s occurring? And then what should we shoot for in terms of goals and objectives and accountability so that we make sure we can’t just achieve progress this year, but every year after that.

The talent management and retention is the harder part versus building the pipeline. Definitely. So you began working in diversity and inclusion before it became a strategic priority for a lot of the big fortune 500, or even just like all companies. Now, it’s kind of a popular buzzword that we hear about all the time. So when you were first starting out in this field, how did you convince the companies that you were working with that diversity and inclusion were important?

You’re very right. It’s just recently that people are and companies are waking up to this, but I feel like I’ve been waiting in the wings for this moment for a really long time. I got it many years ago, and I was like, Okay, I’m going to set up my shop, and I’m going to be ready to consult and then it was like, waah waah. I mean, I was still busy, and we grew our company. And so I’m thrilled with what we’ve been able to achieve in the face of that fact, because that’s me being resourceful and scrappy and hustling every single day of my life, which is what entrepreneurs have to do. We made lemonade out of lemons, but it was very difficult to get a seat at that table. And I think I started at the bottom honestly, with employee resource groups and affinity groups. So when I started my consulting, as an LGBTQ person that didn’t know a lot about diversity and inclusion, as a practitioner, I made sure I was around the people I wanted to learn from and the people in the companies that I wanted to hire me. So I was very big in the ERG space, meaning that I would go to the conferences where women leaders and leaders of color and LGBT leaders in the corporate world would gather and talk about how are we influencing, we call it kind of bottoms up, you could say it’s middle off as well, but it’s not the top down, that’s for sure. So it’s, it’s sort of employee, not activism, but employee advocacy, meaning company have traditionally relied a lot, probably too much on their diverse employees to lead their strategies, right? They’d like turn to the senior woman and said, Well, you know, you’re going to lead the task force for, you know, gender parity or unconscious bias training initiative. And meanwhile, she has a full time job, right? Anyway, so so those are the folks that are my I think were my first audience that I spent a lot of time with. I donated a lot of my time I spoke at a lot of conferences for free, I moderated panels, I always offered to be helpful. I wrote white papers that people still use today, 10 years later, that articulated how I believed employees of diverse identities are a huge part of the sort of recipe for organizational change. You know if they can be heard if you can show up as a strategic partner to the business that you work in, and that you can make the business case for your identity and for your talent demographic and also for your market. So for LGBTQ people, this meant, how do we recruit more LGBTQ people, how do we build more comfortable workplaces where people feel supported once they’re here? And then how do we market responsibly, and ethically, and resonantly with cultural competency to the LGBTQ marketplace. And so my friends at that time all worked at companies like Merrill Lynch and Deloitte and IBM, companies who are very early to this conversation, and I was able to see how they set up their infrastructure. So I gained the trust of that community and I still have it. And then how I built my business from there is that I eventually learned a whole lot more about diversity and inclusion more broadly, of course, never losing my deep knowledge of LGBTQ issues because a lot of those issues are very emblematic of, of everyone who doesn’t feel that the workplace is a comfortable place for them. There’s so much that’s shared, sort of the identity, it’s like 80/20. 80% of this is the same conversation. 20% of it is custom to that community, and their particular challenges and nuances, but a lot of grooming diverse talent and supporting diverse talent is shared across a lot of identities. Sort of what’s good for one group is good for all groups kind of thing. And so it was just a wonderful proving ground and network. And I eventually met all of those people’s bosses, bosses, bosses, bosses. And we would work sort of work our way up in the ecosystem to Chief Diversity Officers, who are now mainly our clients. And these are the people that are leading the whole effort in their organizations. And many of them were my friends from the old days, who had day jobs, but were giving back to their companies in this way. So there’s also sort of an interesting career path that’s happened over and over again from, I’m this volunteer leader that is on the side, helping my company be more constructive for women of color. And now I’m the Chief Diversity Officer, and it’s my full time job. And so it’s really neat to see how people have leveraged all of this passion and experience into actual jobs where they get to do this every day. It’s pretty cool.

Yeah, that’s great. So you got to work with a lot of the early adopters.

In a way, yeah. And I learned so much. And the LGBTQ community has been really strategic about our business case. I think what I learned in that community, which one marriage equality got domestic partner benefits instituted even before that, the conversations I’ve been in have been really strategic. It’s not, you know, the moral case, which we all know is so important, and obviously like should be enough. We’ve had to really complement the, don’t you just want to do the right thing, because it’s the right thing argument with the well, why is this important for business and we are a piece of your talent puzzle. You know, just like people with disabilities are, just like women are etc. We might be a smaller group. But we are also so closeted, that you don’t even know how small or how big our group is because so many of us are closeted at work. So how do we even get counted? Which is a fascinating question. And by the way, while we’re on this topic 50% of LGBTQ people are still closeted in the workplace in 2019. So that’s a lot of people who are still not comfortable in the very same workplace that you may feel fine about bringing your full self to work. And you’ve got people who literally are so afraid that they don’t even talk about their family who they love, what they did over the weekend, nothing. And that’s happening all around us. And so I really encourage leaders to think about the ramifications of that on the business. If that’s what makes sense to people, you have to explain it in those terms, let alone what’s happening to the individual who’s like traumatized every day by having to lie about their life at work. If that’s not enough, we have to talk about lost productivity, poor morale, team performance being impacted by a lack of trust, there’s so many knock on effects to having people not bringing their full selves to work. And I think LGBTQ is just one lens to look at it through. But it’s honestly shared across so many different demographics. And I know, and I have the data that supports that.

And you mentioned that for the first part of your career that you yourself were largely closeted when you were working, even as an entrepreneur and even as a performer where there are certainly other people from the LGBTQ community who are part of that as well. When you were working in corporate and discovering these initiatives, and even as an entrepreneur and starting up this diversity work, were you continuing to worry about bringing your full self into your own work? It’s kind of an interesting juxtaposition.

I know it’s such a strange question, isn’t it? In my world, some of us are out very selectively, is how I would answer that. I’d be out in my personal life or to my team or my manager. But my manager’s manager might not know or my clients might not know. Eventually I would need to and want to be fully out, and it actually helped to be certified not only as a woman owned business with Webank, but I’m certified as an LGBTQ owned company, with the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. In fact, there’s 1500 companies that are certified and probably even more by this point, we have giant conferences, I get corporate work and opportunities to bid on our fees because of it. It’s been really amazing. And I think that being out, what we say is coming out is a daily process, and it’s something you are constantly having to make decisions about, it doesn’t even matter. I still make those decisions today. Back then though, I was facing a sea of white male, probably straight faces in audiences, and making that calculation about I’m here to do a job. I’m already a non traditional person in this world. I don’t have 15 years in corporate. I can’t say I ran teams of hundreds of people, or giant P&Ls. I was an opera singer, so I was an artist and business people don’t know what to do with artists, even though we make great business people FYI. So I think I was very hesitant. It took a lot of courage to kind of over time with each successive job I had, to be more out. Like that I think is a goal that a lot of us share, which is, we say to ourselves, Okay, this next time, I’m gonna bring more of my full self, I’m going to be out from the beginning, or I’m going to have this conversation, whereas in my past life, I might have not brought it up. And then it just becomes this big lie that you’re working really hard to maintain, which is never good. Some of us do it all at once, and we say, nope, I’m going to be out period. If you have a problem with that, then I don’t want to work here. You see that attitude amongst a lot of younger generation folks, which is exciting. And I hope that continues. What I fear is that they go back into the closet, having been out in school, because schools are so comfortable with the lexicon of all of this and it’s just by definition, It’s just a comfortable conversation these days. And yet when you go into corporates who haven’t done their work, or who are sort of fumbling their way through diversity and inclusion, and you’re that young person who feels like a lot is on the line, you may indeed go back in the closet about a lot of things. I have a woman of color who just shared with me, we were talking about intersectionality, which is the overlapping impact of stigmatized identities. And she said I’m a woman. I’m a person of color already in tech and I struggle with being bipolar. And so I have sort of mental health needs that I need to attend to sometimes. And that is something I totally don’t talk about, because I’m already dealing with the headwinds of being a woman of color in this org where I’m the only one on multiple levels. So I think this is really a hard equation to navigate every day, and yet, it’s so important. She’s so brave.

I just want people to understand the bravery that it takes, and the courage, and the resilience that it takes for people to show up in these workplaces. To be navigating all these different pieces, and deciding what I’m going to share, and to whom and, what about all the other parts of me, and all the other stereotypes that I’m going to hear? And then I’m going to pile on to that with more details. It’s a lot and it’s incredibly distracting. What I hope people hear in this is, it is so much work. It’s like double work. I mean, there’s no other way to say it. I’m in a room and I need to be taken seriously. I need to be heard as a woman right, which is already hard enough. I don’t know if they know I’m LGBTQ. And now it’s going to be, my work by the way is holding people accountable for their own journey on diversity and inclusion. So you know, it’s difficult enough to talk about what I need to talk about with people because it elicits all sorts of deflections and resistance. And then you add to that, your different identities, and they feel threatened even by who you are, so not even just your message, right?

Right.

It’s like I call it threading the needle, I call it dancing on the head of a pin. It is really delicate work. But in the end, if you don’t feel that you can show up in your professional life and be proud of who you are, and really own your story, and know that your story is actually an asset to you, you’ve got to take a hard look at where you work and say, is this place ever going to support me? Have I tried to be a change agent, and the process is just too slow for me, or I’m still dealing with micro aggressions every single day. It doesn’t appear that people are doing their work and I feel intimidated to be all of who I am. Then I think we all have to take a hard look at, there’s many employers out there. And I would really encourage you all to think about like, Where do you want to work? What kind of company would have values that align with yours, and if your values are ones of feeling seen and heard, and wanting to be a part of an organization that enables that. The organization doesn’t have to be perfect, but my benchmark is, are they doing the work? That’s very important. It’s going to be flawed, mistakes are going to be made. There’s still individual leaders and managers that aren’t on board. Where there may be a company that’s really, really trying, and there’s always kind of laggards. There’s leaders, learners and laggards, so my friend Chuck says, and it’s a mix of those, and so only you know how many of those in each bucket exist and how much you can tolerate basically.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s amazing how much mental bandwidth it eats up to not be comfortable with bringing your full self to work. And wouldn’t it be great if instead of having employees who were coming and spending all this energy just trying to navigate and do their job, if they could actually use that energy and put it into the business?

Right? I know, any leader would say, well, what do you mean people’s productivity is leaking out because they feel they can’t bring themselves to work? That’s not okay. And what I wish is the leader would say, I want to know more about that. I want to, I am not only curious, but I’m invested in changing that. That is not good for the person, it’s not good for their team, it’s not good for the productivity of the company. And it’s not good for our brand. And it’s really not good by the way, to continue to lose talent when you need that very talent to sell products and services effectively to a diverse world. This is the big problem. You know, you’ve got people leaving because they can’t stand your internal culture. And meanwhile you’re trying to build advertising and products and you’re selling into a world that is getting diverse whether you agree with that or not, the facts are there. So the demographics is shifting, the buyers are shifting, and when you think about women controlling more and more of the wealth of the family, you know that this is happening, it’s already a reality and yet most financial advisors are men. The fastest growing demographic and the wealthy of the future will not be straight white men head of households, just won’t be and already is not. And so if you have trouble recruiting, and particularly retaining all kinds of financial advisors, you’re not going to be able to capture that market, somebody else is going to come in and grab those customers. So there is a real business imperative here to doing what’s on the inside, making sure the inside of your organization mirrors the story that you’re trying to tell to the outside world to get clients and customers.

Yeah. And, I think it’s important to include everybody in that conversation, and sort of bring everybody on board and help everyone understand what their role is in bringing true diversity and inclusion. And I know in your latest book, “How to be an Inclusive Leader”, you say that everyone has a diversity story, even the middle aged white man. I really want to delve into that because I feel like sometimes whenever I hear backlash, or sort of questioning about the value of diversity and inclusion, I think a lot of it is people who feel like they’re not part of it, or feel like they’re just being blamed for everything. These are things that I hear and I worry that it erodes the progress that’s being made. So I was really interested to see your statement that everybody has a diversity story. Can you tell me more about what you mean by that? And how that all ties together?

Yeah. It’s a bit of a controversial thing to say. Because I think that right now, there’s so much frustration and anger that’s coming out, and books that are being written, and me too, and there’s sort of a catharsis happening of truth telling. And it’s so healthy and so important, and I am part of that and I’m angry as hell. I will say that. I can’t really show it that much. But I am. Because I have to, I’ve got to hold it together as a consultant. It’s a role that I play, but on a personal level, I am as activisty as they come and I am frustrated, super frustrated, and I’m terrified. I mean, the Supreme Court, right now is ruling on whether LGBTQ people have protections. And we’re thinking it’s not going to go in the positive direction. So that ruling comes down. We can already get fired in 35, 30 states for being gay. And there’s no protections. So literally, you talk about dancing on the head of a pen in terms of, well, if I bring my full self, am I going to lose my job, literally.

People are scared for a reason.

So there is a lot of righteous anger. And the wage gap is infuriating, that has been allowed to continue, like it has with no courageous leadership on the part of people who actually have the power to change it, which is not the women, by the way. I don’t even go into that. There’s many, many books, there’s a lot of ranting going on. But interestingly, you’re right that it has had the impact of making people feel attacked on the other side. And I think that learning and leading from a place of feeling sort of deep in the shame and the attack place, learning and leading can’t happen from that place. So while it’s important to acknowledge that you might not be that kind of leader that would allow these kinds of things to occur, and by the way, you just might be complicit in terms of a lack of action. You know, we could argue all day about whether it’s sort of a moral failing of character. But once you’re shown what’s going on, what I do expect is that leadership means putting yourself in that uncomfortable place of saying, I didn’t say anything about this or I didn’t know anything about this. I knew but I didn’t care about this right? Those are all different things and that’s all interesting things to dive into and say well, why is it a not caring? Is it a not knowing? Is it a not doing? Is it an, oh, the diversity team is making us go through unconscious bias training, so I checked the box and I’m done for the year. That’s not leadership on this topic that is compliance. That is sort of doing as little as possible and kind of trying to skate by and not really taking this on board. So there’s all these degrees, I think of what’s going through people’s hearts and minds. But what I think is important is what I think the big unlock that I’ve discovered in my keynotes and work is this, everyone has a diversity story, because I really believe that, I know that it’s true. It’s not just believe, I know that it’s true. I have spoken to hundreds of audiences, thousands of people, sometimes mostly men in my audiences, and the way I speak about diversity is super inclusive, like I cannot exclude anyone because then I’m not walking the talk. But I also know that it’s inaccurate to exclude anyone. And so some examples I give of speaking to male leaders about these things, and when I give my presentation, they’ll share they don’t have a college degree. But they haven’t ever told their kids that they don’t, let alone talk about it as a leader. And talk about growing up in a really difficult circumstance, alcoholic abusive family history, experience with mental illness, addiction, losing a kid to suicide, which is happening more and more, having a kid who just came out to them as trans, and being now a parent of a kid who they’re terrified for their safety, but they don’t talk about it. Being in a mixed ethnicity marriage or partnership, having a kid of a different race or ethnicity, struggling with being sober. You know, being neurodiverse, struggling with mental health issues, like that example I mentioned earlier. So there’s a lot of diversity dynamics that are being experienced, and a lot of men that tell me, even in that sort of what I might call this sort of masculinity run amok kind of workplaces, that many men don’t feel they fit into that. And it’s something that’s very painful for them to have to compromise to not bring their full selves to work. Even men who say, I would like to be a stay at home dad. I would like a flex work arrangement because I love parenting and I want to be with my kids. And I feel like that’s derailing my career. First of all, welcome to our world! That being said, it’s so legitimate. This conversation about men and caregiving, and the diverse needs and wants of men too, is one that needs to be had. Because this needs to be normalized so that all of us can lift together. I am never ever going to diminish the importance of everything that I just talked about. So I think when I speak, and I present all these diversity dimensions, and I’m so inclusive in the way I do it, and the examples I give, men come up to me and say, thank you for including me in this keynote, I have never felt a part of this conversation before now. So that’s a big failure on our part, I hold us accountable for that, as advocates, change leaders, people who want to create better workplaces, we cannot make change if we only focus on one part of the equation, like we have to be inclusive. We have to walk the talk, as hard as It might be, as angry as we might be, rightfully so, as much kind of avoidant behavior we may experience, as much resistance, as much diminishment, as much sort of overt lack of prioritization and attention on this, which feels like a personal thing. I know for me, I get so tired of making the business case because I stand there and I say to myself, why am I having to justify 15 different ways why somebody like me is worth retaining, and enabling me to feel that I can thrive somewhere? Why am I having to sweat through all these rationales and all this data? They always want more data more and more data. No, you don’t need more data, you have to just, you have to decide to lead. Don’t ask for any more data. And by the way, there’s always Google. Don’t waste my time. My time is not best spent trying to bring you along when there’s literally so much research on how diversity is good for the bottom line. Do your homework, and then come to me and let’s have a conversation about how. And that’s kind of the attitude I’m in these days. And you know, I have to be careful how I say these things, but between us, it’s deeply fatiguing and diminishing to have to argue for your humanity in the workplace, that should not be happening. And it definitely should not be incumbent on those of us who are struggling to bring our full selves, to have to do this every single day. And that’s, I think, the other reason, I’m very much focused on getting men on board, because we are tired, we’re exhausted. Our confidence is diminished. I think on a sort of subliminal level, some of us, every time you hear microaggressions, every time you aren’t supported, it really does a number on you from a belief in what you can achieve. And that is sort of inestimable harm to those of us who are already struggling to hear our voice, to listen to our voice, to stand up, to use our power to play that game, to get up to fight another day, it just makes it way harder when you’re subliminal is kind of picking up on all these messages around us that we’re not enough or that we need to do all the changing, or we need to not be our authentic selves in order to win or in order to be promoted or be seen as having executive presence or all the sort of things that we’re coached around. And so I really feel that, that piece is my focus now. And I don’t think it’s been the focus for a lot of people. I honestly, the reason why is it’s a very frustrating world to try to tackle. Everything I’m describing doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, right?

It sounds exhausting. Yes.

I go into these rooms, like, so when I walk into other rooms where it’s full of, like minded people who give me a standing ovation. It’s like, it’s like rain in the desert. It’s awesome. It’s like, ah, my people. It’s like the people who understand and we’re all in this journey, and we’re struggling, and we’re in the trenches. And we just have to support each other. And this is another piece of advice I’d give you all, if you feel alone, and a lot of this resonates with you, you’re never alone. Please find virtual communities you can be a part of, go to conferences where you are represented, and you can relax and say, oh, there’s other people that are having my experience. And if you’re a man or a white leader, or a white male leader, white female leader, and you’re saying, you know, I have a lot of work to do, I need to learn a lot. You know, there are conferences like the better man conference, which ran three times last fall, last year. And that room is full of men who want to be inclusive leaders. So those communities are there if you want to find them, and certainly reach out to us on LinkedIn, and tell me your sob story, your tale of woe, and we will help you. It’s so funny, a white straight guy in the UK reached out to me on LinkedIn and said, I just love your podcast, and I have this presentation coming up where I’m talking about allyship for men in the tech industry, and I really want to leverage your stuff, is there anything I can offer the audience in terms of your resources? I literally got on the phone with him for half an hour. I said, “Let’s brainstorm, tell me what you’re going to say, tell me the points you’re going to make. Do you need research to back you up? I can give you some slides to present from that are my model from the book. That leader is to me the tip of the spear, that person is stepping up to say, you know, I may not say the right thing. I want to make sure I’m saying the right thing to these people. I want to share my own vulnerable journey of not always having the answers and not having done the right thing. But I want to do this and I want to do something. I love that, that I can work with, so we just need to generate more leaders like that, and really show them how to do this. There’s still people that are going to debate you and argue. The why is the business case, right? But I think the people you really want to support are those who are like, I get the why. I want to figure out like how can I use my voice as somebody of privilege in an authentic way that doesn’t offend people. I don’t want to make mistakes, but I know I will. I want to be humbled to that and learn. And I need to be coached and supported. I think that kind of person, if we could generate that across the leadership ranks in companies, then I think we’d be in business, because then we could move into, from the doing role into the coaching role into the supporting role. But the doers have changed. The doers are now the ones in the “majority,” in leadership. And they’re the ones with power. So if they say something once, thousands of people are going to follow them, I mean, that’s the beautiful thing about leadership. You know, and also, I would argue, it’s not that risky. It’s much more risky for me to come out in the leadership meeting. That takes a lot of, I’m putting a lot on the line when I do that. For a white straight male leader to stand up and say, I believe in inclusion. Here’s some things that I’ve learned or things that I’ve gotten wrong in the past. Everyone is going to applaud you. What a difference! So when people throw out the whole, oh, this is too risky for me. I’m going to sit on the sidelines. I don’t buy it. I’m like, No, you’re just not understanding, that you’re actually very safe. And you’re not gonna have a me too moment unless you need a me too moment. Unless you deserve a me too moment. That’s just BS. And yet, me too has had kind of a chilling effect according to some research out of lean in, it’s had a chilling effect on one on one relationships between women and men in the workplace, according to male leaders who took the survey. So while that’s very depressing, I prefer to think about, Okay, so how do we unchill that, how do we equip leaders with a path forward with concrete things to do, so that they aren’t pulling away from relationships with female mentees or people that they need to support? But how do we change the circumstances to make everybody feels safe in the workplace? There’s some things that really need to change that I think would benefit all of us.

Yeah. Absolutely, Jennifer, it sounds like you have so many great resources for people who have that energy, who are all in and want to make those changes, and want to be great advocates. So I will definitely put links in the show notes of our podcast here to your website, which I believe is JenniferBrownConsulting.com?

That’s right. So I have two websites, we kind of play with my personal brand, and my author and podcaster brand. And then, I have an amazing team of consultants at Jenniferbrownconsulting.com. So if there is work in your organization that you suspect you need the help of a consulting partner, we have an amazing team that comes in, and does all the work I’ve talked about today. And then for me, I’m at Jenniferbrownspeaks.com, and that’s where there’s a lot of video of me, of my talks, my podcast, my speaker details, hiring me as a keynoter. The podcast is called, The Will to Change. The book, two books, the first book is called, “Inclusion,” the second book, which just came out in August of 2019. is called, “How to be an Inclusive Leader”. They’re both on Amazon. There’s also an assessment. If you go to Jenniferbrownspeaks.com. There’s a self assessment you can take for free, which takes about 10 minutes. And I really recommend you take it, it dovetails with the book really nicely. And you’ll get a score along some of the competencies we’ve defined as inclusive leader competencies, and some helpful resources, whether they’re mine, or some of my favorite go to research that I use all the time. So you’ll get a little report, which can help you understand where you are in the journey. So that’s cool. And then I’m on social media everywhere. I’m @JenniferBrown on Twitter. I’m @jenniferbrownspeaks on Instagram, and then my LinkedIn community is big. And I’m very involved on LinkedIn. So I always get back to messages. And there’s actually a diversity and inclusion leadership group on LinkedIn that you can actually join. And we started that years ago, we have almost 10,000 people. I can’t believe it. So that’s a great community for everyone to access. We will certainly let you in. If you’d like to be in there and swimming around and sharing resources and getting mentoring, or giving mentoring, we’d love to have you. So just really get involved and just know that you’re not alone. There’s a huge community of advocates that I know keep me going every single day. And I love conversations like this with you, Carolyn, and thanks for having it with me, and asking me about the inner workings of this. And I hope it really helps people, and gives them some strategies and how tos to find their own voice and actually, hopefully, lead this conversation wherever they find themselves.

Absolutely. And I understand for people who are looking for even more resources from you that you have a free gift for our listeners, in terms of the first chapter of your new book. How do people get that?

Yes, I do. So if you go to Jenniferbrownspeaks.com, you’ll actually see that you can enter to receive that free chapter of the book, which is called, “How to be an Inclusive Leader.” And you’ll get it in a PDF form, and it’s very popular. We’ve had thousands of downloads, and I would just love to have you, have it, read it, maybe share it. I like to think of the book as a great pass along resource. And so, think about gifting this first chapter to a leader that you sense is ready to begin the journey, or is on the journey, but at the beginning stages, it’s a perfect thing to support that leader with. So absolutely visit us at Jenniferbrownspeaks.com and get your free chapter.

That’s wonderful. Thank you so much, and I really appreciate you being on the show.

Thank you for having me.

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