Compilation: The Best of Season 7

Jackie: You’re listening to the Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox podcast.

I’m your host, Jackie Ferguson, author, speaker, human rights advocate. On this show, I’m talking to trailblazers, game changers and glass-ceiling breakers who share their inspiring stories and insights on business, inclusion and personal development.

Season 7 was incredible And, while we are preparing for season eight, I wanted to share with you some moments with my inspiring guests from the last season.

Leigh Steinberg

Jackie: Lee, what is your take on the inequities that exist in sports leadership? Why aren't there more Black head coaches in the NFL when 70% of the league is Black and what are some of the invisible roadblocks that hold underrepresented candidates back from hiring, mentoring, promoting? 

Leigh: I look at this the same way I look at the Black quarterback issue. Back when I represented Warren Moon, there was a certain feeling, not expressed openly, but that Black athletes were not really qualified to play the so-called thinking positions, which were quarterback then, and it was middle linebacker and the rest of it. And there just weren't many Black quarterbacks at all. 

Jackie: Absolutely. 

Leigh: And, and so I had Warren Moon and, and we had to deal with that issue because people wanted him to switch his positions. You need to create a pool in that case of enough younger Black quarterbacks playing college football in pro set, so you were getting the six foot four, big, strong prototypical quarterback, and here it's the same thing. You need to create a pool, very consciously, so that there's so many qualified candidates that, that you can pick them. And what, what happened with the quarterback position is not only are two thirds of the greatest quarterbacks in pro football Black, you now have Black backup quarterbacks.

So it's, it's not a situation where only an elite few make it, and then that's what we have to do in sports.

Sara Bowen

Sara: In the eighties and nineties, when I was growing up and, uh, you know, starting my career, it was all about revenue, generation and profit seeking today corporations have signed onto a different charter where, where they are corporate citizens. Um, and, and that changes the angle. We take, you look at young people today, right? I mean, um, there's been so much, so much more. We, we are more of a melting pot today than we were 20 years ago or 10 years ago, even. People identify, um, you know, people who have of multiple races, people of different gender identities and orientations. There's so much more in the mix today. And I think also quite a bit more awareness today than there was even 10 years ago, um, that it changes the conversation. It changes the landscape and, and then lastly, I'd. The expectations are different. That's right. Our people hold us accountable and they are choosing where to go based on the company's values and how they live those values. And they will make choices based on a company's commitment to diversity and inclusion. It's it's it's that simple.  and I'm glad they do.

Jackie: Absolutely. Yeah. And Sarah that's that's so spot on and you know, that's one of the, the things that in, in my work. I share with organizations who, you know, are kind of slow rolling into their DEI practice is, you know, you don't have the option because whether you're a, you know, candidate for a job or a consumer.

Those folks are really digging in on what kind of brands they want to support, what kind of companies they wanna work for. And that values alignment is so important. So important.

Kimberly Wiefling

Jackie: Now, Kimberly, let's talk about the benefits, right, of being scrappy in a world where leaders often feel they need to be buttoned up and have all the answers.

What is the benefit of being scrappy? 

Kimberly: Well, I wanna say the downside first. If you're not careful, people will use you like a hired assassin, and they will send you in to do really tough jobs, but they won't wanna be seen dining with you. But, the benefit is you look at something and say, "Yep, seems impossible. That just means I don't know how yet. Hey, I wonder if I could do some experiments. Maybe I'll just dive off the cliff and while I'm falling and screaming, grow wings and learn to fly," and being willing to proceed in the presence of fear, anxiety, stress, and saying, "Of course," that means you care, and you keep going, and you keep growing.

You don't give up. 

Jackie: Wow. I, I love that. You know, and as a person who is naturally risk averse - 

Kimberly: Oh, tell me more about that. 

Jackie: Yeah. You know, I, I like to be sure, I like to have a plan. I like to not deviate from a plan, unless I have a good backup plan that's not working, and I find, personally, I find comfort in order and process, right? 

But, I also find, as I grow as a leader, that that can be limiting. So, how does it risk averse person become a little bit more scrappy like Kimberly? 

Kimberly: Well, you know, you might wanna start by not labeling yourself as risk averse. 

Jackie: Okay. 

Kimberly: You might be more thoughtfully risk taking. 

Jackie: Okay. 

Kimberly: And if I was on a project that really mattered, I'd sure when a partner with someone like you, not someone else like me.

Jackie: Got it. Got it. Okay. 

Style diversity, right? You know, we do not need everybody to be like this. We need one person going, "Come on you guys, let's dive off the cliff," and some people saying, Kimberly, perhaps we could have a parachute."

Dr. Audrea Caesar

Jackie: So, can we talk a little bit about what the inequities are that exist in healthcare and then, what are some of the ways that, that we as individuals can advocate for ourselves? 

Audrea: Wow. So, that's a spring loaded question. I mean, if you really wanna know all of the inequities, I could probably take the rest of this podcast to run down each chronic disease and show you where the disparities lie.

I would say, across the board, if you are African American and you were born and raised in the United States, there's a high probability that some disparity is coming your way. Whether we're talking about cancer, any of the forms of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, you know, I've spoke about infant mortality and maternal and child health.

All of those areas are disparities, but I think it's really more important to talk about why those disparities exist, and one of the things that I'm really passionate about is educating medical students on some of the myths out there. So, you know, I, I'll start with this. It's important to debunk these myths about who people of color and persons who have different abilities, who they are, and the stigma attached to them because there's this internal bias that people experience.

And one of, one of my favorite scholars on the subjects is Dr. Bryant T Marks, and he says, "If you live in America and you have a brain, you, you have bias." 

Jackie: That's right. 

Audrea: So, what we don't look at as frequently are the doctors who are doing the educating, so the faculty, and they pass down some of these thoughts and beliefs that they've had for years and years and years down to their students and your students execute it.

Nils Vinje

Nils: When you become a leader, you're not in control anymore. The individuals on your team are in control of their output, but you are responsible for ensuring that they perform at a certain level and your team delivers X, Y, Z, right? So you lose that element of control, you lose that element of focus on yourself, and now all of a sudden your whole job is to make somebody else look good.

And that is the fundamental biggest challenge that people, regardless of if you're a manager, director, VP-I've seen it all through the stack-have trouble getting over, and sometimes they never do. So it's is, you know, there's so much wrapped up in that, Jackie. 

Jackie: Wow. You know, such good points you're making. It's, it's a tough transition and you're right, we earn our opportunity to lead because we're great individual contributors, but there isn't that, that pull aside, right, where we're being instructed is to how to move from individual contributor to leader. So, that brings us to the B2B Leaders Academy. So I, I wanna talk about that. What is it, what kind of people become members?

What are some of the benefit of membership? 

Nils: Absolutely. Thank you. So, it is a membership and it is - provides a structured approach to growing and developing your leadership skills. The people who join and who get the most value out of this are managers and directors inside of B2B companies who want to grow and develop in their role.

And they are either, you know, it can be first time managers, can be experienced managers, directors been doing this and running teams for 5, 10 years. There's no one right, perfect amount of experience because what I do is take all of the incredible experiences I've had from my MBA, being a leadership coach for over 10 years, working over a thousand hours with leaders one on one to help them work through the biggest leadership challenges and break all that down into a structured process to follow step by step.

And if I can impart and empower leaders with tools that they can integrate into their life, then results happen every single week, and that's part of the fun, right?

Dr. Deborah Gilboa

Dr. Deborah: Remember I said resilience is the ability to navigate change with intention and purpose. So keeping in mind that our intention and purpose is to be more inclusive. 

Right. 

So what choices do we have in this situation towards the goal of being more inclusive? And not in a snarky, "There's only one possible answer here, Jackie.

Say that I'm right." 

Jackie: Right, right, right. 

Dr. Deborah: But actually, can we talk about our choices? Maybe it is to have me do it just, just me for the first couple of meetings and see how it goes, or just the leader do it and see how it goes, or make it optional and see how it goes, or float it in an email and ask for responses and say, "We have choices."

And as soon as we remember that those reactions are reflex, just our brains trying to keep us alive, not only people trying to continue to be oppressors or unwilling to be at all uncomfortable and then say, "But we have this goal, this agreed upon mission, what choices do we have?" We then pick some of those choices.

We engage with them and we get to reunify. That's the top of the cycle. That's, That's the goal. And that reunification is not necessarily with best DEI practices yet. That goal is not necessarily with everybody being super comfortable. That goal, that reunification, is with us knowing that we are genuinely working towards our purpose.

Jackie: Hmm. I love that. 

Dr. Deborah: It's in this case, in this example, that, that reunification is about authenticity. 

Jackie: That is so interesting. Dr. G, thank you for sharing that. You know, it's, it's tough to navigate change personally, and it's tough to help others navigate change in the case of DEI practitioners or leaders. And so, just having that understanding, it feels like it takes some of the pressure off, right?

Dr. Deborah: I hope that it does. I hope that it allows you to feel less frustrated personally when it's other people who are struggling to navigate the change to feel less fraudulent personally, when you are the one struggling to navigate a change.

Avantha Arachchi

Avantha: I firmly believe that like representation matters regardless of what type of company you are, what type of thing you're building because this work, this world is different than it was before, and you're leaving so much on the table, you're leaving so many people out of the conversation.

So ethically, like it matters. It matters to be able to speak to people that that deserve to be spoken to. But also like, honestly, from a business standpoint, diverse teams do better. They have higher acquisition prices, they have higher stock prices, they have higher levels of collaboration and creativity, and they just genuinely do better.

And it behooves all of us to be able to make sure that our teams are as representative as possible because we will do better. 

Jackie: Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I think about, you know, I'm, I'm almost 50 and so, I think about when I was young, right? And, and what the, the Disney storybooks looked like, and what the, you know, the people that were in the magazines looked like, what I saw on TV, and none of them looked like me. And even now with the, you know, the, the controversy, for whatever reason, around the new Ariel. Right? 

Avantha: Right. 

Jackie: And the, these little adorable videos of these underrepresented babies that are just looking at this and saying, "She looks like me. She has my hair."

Right? And, and what that means for young children and that development, early development of self-esteem, because they can see themselves reflected. And even as adults, if I'm looking at clothing that's on a size two model that's 20, right, that, that's not how I'm gonna look in the clothes, right? 

Avantha: No. 

Jackie: I wanna see someone that looks like me.

Annie Lieb

Annie: I have some exercises I do when I'm coaching one on one, but I'll give you, I'll give you one, just like a little, a little exercise for you to think about.

If you're listening and you're thinking, "What does that even mean? Where do I start?" Close your eyes and just describe out loud to yourself, or even write it, but I like closing your eyes and saying it out loud. When the last time you felt fulfilled? When was that? How did it feel? How did it taste? How did it smell all the details of the last time you felt fulfilled?

Now, I'll tell you about 50% of people are like, "I don't even know what fulfilled means. What are you talking about?" And I'm like, "We have some work to do." The other 50% can describe something to me. 

Jackie: Yeah. 

Annie: And I can pull out from what they've described, what is most meaningful to them, and then we sort of start to work through the excavation process.

But think about what is meaningful to you. What makes you lit up? What makes, what drives you in the morning? What gets you outta bed? You know, is it that silent time with your coffee? Then you might really, really like, value, sort of solace, you know, like silence. Like, there's all these different things that people don't, you know, wasn't in - I had a client the other day that said "I was in the ocean with my husband, and I just looked up in the sky and I thought, 'God, this is just everything right now.'" And I thought, that's freedom. You value your freedom so much. The vast ocean is where you feel the most fulfilled. Think about that. So, these are the conversations that we have to sort of dig into that, but that's a good starting point.

Jackie: Thank you for that. I love that. You know, the way that we think about ourselves is a little more surface, you're really encouraging us to dig deeper into our motivations, and that's really interesting. You know, with, with all of the books, the, you know, the self-help books and being a better professional and, and finding your, you know, your personal fulfillment.

There's so often a, a superficial base to it.

Aiko Bethea

Jackie: There are ways to support your culturally diverse employees, even if your company is not as diverse as you'd like or aspire for it to be. And so, what a lot of leaders fall into the trap of, "Well, this is the way it is.

I don't know what to do." There are ways to support those employees if you're willing to put in the time and the energy to make sure that you're kind of shoring up around your employee base while you're creating levels of diversity within it. It's really about those, those external partnerships.

And I think that's such an important part of the conversation that can be used for mentorship, that can be used for recruiting, that can be used for marketing review. So, use those external resources to support your organization while you're - 'cause you're right, Aiko, it takes time to, to move your company to, you know, include more diversity.

You can't do it all at once. 

Aiko: Yes. 

Jackie: But there are ways that you can, you can create support for those employees while you're, you're doing that work. 

Aiko: Yes. And something else as you were talking and made me think of this is that, even if you do have a large percentage of - or percentage, let's just say, of people of color or women, it shouldn't be incumbent upon to mentor all the people who look like them anyway, because we often see that inequity perpetuated because once you hire a handful or a few people, now you want them to do all things DEI. You want them to run the employer resource groups. You want them oftentimes, sometimes without pay, but you expect them to do all of these things. They never asked for that.

While the folks who are already reaping the benefits and privilege of not being either a person of color or the only, they get to go on with their happy life and skip along without taking accountability and ownership of making the workplace a better place.

Keith Daniel and Tom Droege

Jackie: The last research that I read said that Black entrepreneurs receive only about 1.2% of capital investment in the U.S., which is actually an increase since 2020, how does Resilient work to level that playing field?

Tom: Well, we wanna move the, the needle with just the funds that we can raise, but I would add that number is, I feel, pretty widely known. You know, it's between one and 2% as it's quoted. But what's less known, I think, is the underlying biases that are still prevalent, and that's the underside of that question that's, that I think we're also really working to change. You still have, like, there's a Morgan Stanley survey came out just in October, said 70% of white investment decision makers in large pension funds, endowments, etc., still believe that prioritizing diversity in their investment management meant sacrificing returns, right?

So that's one. There, there's still a belief that investing in, in diversity will sacrifice returns. And then the other study by the Harvard Business School found that minority owned firms either performed as well or outperformed their white owned peers. So, in terms of actually what we're doing I think that's clear not enough money is getting to founders, and we know that firsthand from fund one, where we invested in the series stage kind of companies, companies that had revenue, they'd done product market fit, they needed a small amount of money, like $250,000 to $500,000. It was still hard to raise that amount of money, but what we see, it's just gonna move up the ladder.

Jonita Wilson

Jackie: As we think about some of the systemic inequities that exist in finance and lending, how does Discover work to ensure fairness and provide education for underrepresented consumers? 

Jonita: You know, this is a topic I can tell you that really resonates with me. When you think about systemic issues and, and a lot of the gaps that happen amongst, you know, our, our diverse communities, I think first and foremost, banks must acknowledge that their practices created financial injustices and wealth gaps and it's time to make changes and act, actually act, to close those gaps, right? No more talking about it. Let's put some things, some real things, you know, to action. I think that, as far as DISCOVER goes, DISCOVER believes, brighter futures, financial futures, begin by providing our youth with the skills that they need to help them succeed long after they leave the classroom.

And more than one in six students in the US do not reach the baseline of proficiency in financial literacy. And so we created, DISCOVER created the Pathway to Financial Success, which is a curriculum that is bringing financial education to students across the country. This includes more than $14 million that have been invested in high school financial literacy programs across the country. We're, we're located, our, our corporate offices are located here in the Chicago land area. And with that, then more than 1 million in support of Chicago public schools for curriculum materials and, and teacher training.

 In addition on our website, right, we, we offer many more resources that anyone can access to help them build financial literacy. And also, you know, we focus internally too, right? So while we recognize that, you know, our employees could also be our consumers, right? I have a Discover card, so I'm also a consumer and we work to educate our employees as well.

Sadira Furlow

Jackie: When people think about lending or banking, it can be intimidating, and feeling like you have an advocate that's gonna kind of sift through all of the options, all of the, the things, right?

And in the checklist of, of lending that we often see or think about to really understand who you are as an individual. And, you know, what your abilities are based on your personal trajectory, rather than looking at this checklist, right, of, of items. I think is really refreshing and interesting and, and needed.

And when you talk about trust, right? It's so important, more so than it ever has been before because these younger generations, millennials and and Gen Z particularly, want to work with organizations or work at organizations that align with their values and see them as individuals. So, I love that Happy Money is doing that in, in a lane that's scary for most of us. Right? 

Sadira: A hundred percent. And I have to give a huge testament to that of like, who Happy Money attracts and our employee base, they are the heart of our mission. And I think that is what you feel in our care is it starts with each person around the table, on the front line, and their beliefs, their commitment to doing the right thing.

Their commitment. Commitment to wanting to be of service, their commitment to wanting people to have a very different positive experience in navigating something, historically, tends to be filled with a lot of different types of emotions and is scary and can be filled with a lot of shame or uncertainty or lack of information.

And to be able to have a place and say, "Hey, we're on your side. We wanna help you navigate this, and we also want you to work with Happy Money in a way that leaves you better than if you had not been here." And I think that's really important because when we talk about our, our mission of accessible and affordable financial products and services, the affordable piece comes back to you.

Jackie: Thanks for listening to some of my favorite moments from season seven of Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox. If you enjoy the show, please take a moment to share it with a friend,  leave a rating and review, and subscribe so you’ll be reminded when season eight kicks off.  And the season 8 lineup is exciting.

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This show was edited and produced by Earfluence. 

I’m Jackie Ferguson. Take care of yourself and each other.