Ignite – The Podcast – Season 1 Episode 2

Transcript
February 29, 2024, 5:06PM

Dr. Andrea Hendricks Ignite, a new podcast series of launched by Authentico. Authentico is a full-service multicultural marketing and diversity, equity and inclusion agency. Authentico creates meaningful connections to help brands broaden their horizons and reach their business goals. We partner with our clients to reach diverse audiences, creating work that resonates and gets results. And, we help organizations develop successful multicultural workforce strategies and inclusive learning initiatives. Authentico is a joint venture of a Kansas City based agencies, Walz Tetrick Advertising and Tico Productions. It grew out of the shared values and goals of CEO’s, Charlie Tetrick and CiCi Rojas. Our goal and our promise is to deliver success to brands by tapping into the vibrancy of multicultural markets and to broaden and advance DE&I initiatives.
Ignite Podcast series is about creating meaningful dialogue to innovate and culturally inspire. If you look up the word in Ignite, it shares focusing your energy and attention to creating and attracting positive outcomes for your life or your business.
So today we are honored to launch episode 2. This episode will focus on perspectives from the top. What can organizations do to enable progressive strategies around diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Joining me for episode 2 is Dr. Shirley Davis. She is the president and CEO of SDS, Global Enterprises. SDS Global Enterprises, is a woman and minority owned corporation that provides strategic development solutions that enables organizational leaders to build high performing and inclusive cultures. And it also focuses on helping them thrive in a competitive and ever-changing environment. She is the former global head of diversity, inclusion and workplace strategies for the Society of Human Resource Management.

Dr. Shirley Davis Hello. Hello I am so honored and thrilled to be with you. Thank you so much, Dr. Hendricks for the invitation and for all the phenomenal work that you’re doing with Authentico.

Dr. Andrea Hendricks As you know, the workforce, workplace and marketplace and community are ever changing, and they are changing in the ways that we focus on management and leadership approaches.

Can you share with the audience what diversity and inclusion mean to you as a thought leader? And why do you think it’s still essential for organizations and communities to focus on it?

Dr. Shirley Davis You know, for me it’s personal, but it’s also my life’s work. It’s my career purpose.
I believe that diversity, equity and inclusion is about all of us. It’s not just limited to race and gender, or to one particular identity. It really is about our humanity.
It’s about the fact that we’re all unique and different and we bring various traits and characteristics and attributes and things that are part of who we are. Our part are part of our own identity, but I also see it as a business strategy.
I focus on it as a leadership competency and I think we all have to think about it as business leaders, as a part of our global focus because we are working in a global society. For me, when I talk about diversity specifically, diversity just is it’s about all of us. It’s about you. It’s about me. It’s about men. Women. it’s about different age groups, different cultures, backgrounds, ethnicities as well as educational backgrounds and experiences. I mean, we can go on, the communication style, age groups, everything. And so, I want us to understand that when we think about diversity, that’s nothing we can necessarily change. It’s something we value, embrace and appreciate when we talk about inclusion.
Inclusion is a strategy. Inclusion is the work environment, the workplace culture where all of us have to work in with our unique differences and diversity, and the question is, is how inclusive our organizational culture is.
Do they allow us to truly thrive, to bring our unique perspectives and ideas and ways of working and thinking and believing and loving and liking and ways of all the things that we do, ways of being who we are. Do we have the opportunities to truly do that in a way that the company can thrive and leverage our uniqueness?

Dr. Andrea Hendricks There were two things that resonated well with me on what it means to you, because oftentimes as we go through this journey of this work, people are trying to measure the effectiveness of what great diversity, equity and inclusion looks like.

Dr. Andrea Hendricks And you shared a couple of those in your conversation about connected to the vision and strategy, maybe continue to share how you know you think about the benchmark or the maturity model and the growth from adopting to complying to transformational as you work in this space, what do you think great DE&I looks like because you mentioned what it means to you, but to others who are trying to practice this, how do they know it’s great and that it’s connected and seamlessly embedded?

Dr. Shirley Davis It’s really an experience, right? I always say to have an inclusive, high performing workplace culture and a wonderful employee experience a lot of times I say it’s like the win. You can feel it, but you don’t necessarily touch it.
You just know it’s an experience.
And so for me, when I think about what it looks like and what great companies do to really do this in a really effective way, inclusive and high performing cultures really are ones that have these kinds of things in common. It’s like high trust and high standards, high performance, high commitment.
You have high inclusion and integrity as well as you know, people want to stay.
People want to work, you get top talent. That really cares about the work that you do, but the kind of company you are and the kind of leaders and teams that they’ll get to work with as well. And not only that, but then you get high engagement, and you get to build out the kinds of solutions and innovative strategies and you get to really be creative in a way that you wouldn’t if you didn’t have inclusive cultures and didn’t value and embrace diversity. So, that to me is where I start to see it happen.

Dr. Andrea Hendricks Some of your work you’ve shared you know diversity, equity and inclusion leadership couldn’t be more important today as organizations are grappling with attracting, developing and retaining top talent. They’re trying to drive innovation and creativity. You talked a little bit about that a positive brand and reputation and the ultimate goal being employer of choice. So, when we talk about what progressive strategies should organizations focus on first? Should they focus on workforce, workplace, community or marketplace first and why? Why did you choose that one? What would you say to that leader if you could only pick one and why?

Dr. Shirley Davis Yeah, I know that’s really tough and hard, but you’re right, all of those are important. But I would encourage them to focus on what they have right now in front of them. You spent the money, time, effort and energy to go and get great talent. Then focus on what you already have. That would be the workplace itself, right? And creating the kind of experience where employees feel valued and you can develop them and grow them, give them the training and the experience and the support, the tools, the resources that they need. It’s also about then looking for the leaders who can step into those roles as vacancies come, but also who you can develop and build a kind of skills for where you’re trying to take the company.
So that’s really key and critical. If you focus on the internal workforce and the talent there, the workplace itself, then they could also help you build the kind of brand that you need that can help you service the marketplace, your customers and your clients.
And they can also help to then build your employer brand in a very positive way.
So I would say start with what you have first and that is right there internally in the workplace itself. Make it a place where nobody wants to leave. They want to do their best work, bring their best thinking and they also want to tell others how great your organization is.

Dr. Andrea Hendricks I love that workplace culture part.
You know, we talked about what can organizations do to enable this to happen.
Your workplace is so critical to do that. When we talk about enablement and you have a lot of resources that you’re connected with in your work enabling leaders to really do this.

Dr. Andrea Hendricks So once they’ve selected workplace as where they’re going to start, there’s some benchmarks maturity models for success. What do you think, and you can even expound upon the progressive strategies, those are enabling them to set the right stage to elevate, to get to the expert in advanced stages of this work.

Dr. Shirley Davis Yeah, I absolutely believe that we have to, as I said, not only start internally build bench strength, right, make sure that you are enhancing your pipeline with talent that has all different types of experiences and backgrounds and skill sets and mindsets. All of those are important, and so be careful not to overlook your hidden figures in your organization. Training, development and education is going to be key and critical, but I’ve also seen where companies really thrive when they integrated inculcate, you know, DEI into their values, into their strategy, into everything that drives your organization. So, it should show up in performance expectations and your key performance indicators and certainly it should show up in all of your processes and all of your procedures and practices. Should be celebrated, recognized, and rewarded, and also when it’s not being lived every day,
it also should have a level of accountability. There should be some consequences when leaders aren’t living and walking the values of inclusivity. And so, those are some key and critical ones for me. And I think the other piece of it too is as you are even bringing in new talent another you know forward thinking strategy is to make sure that you have the right kind of questions that you’re asking the right kind of criteria in place that helps you bring in more people who value and who will celebrate the diversity of thought and perspectives and backgrounds as well too.

Dr. Andrea Hendricks So, what I’m hearing is and those of you in the audience hopefully are taking great notes, in order to enable this into action in workplace cultures to make sure you’re seamlessly getting this into everything you do and then you’re lift will come from the talent and from the community and others as you do that so they can help you enable progressive strategies.

There’s a research point.
I’ll share HR research into institute shares that companies are struggling to mature their DE&I initiatives and I think this one was 2022, when this report came out, only 22% indicated that they were at the expert and advanced stages.

They’re still struggling with how to become progressive and how to do that, right?

Dr. Andrea Hendricks So those of you who are listening today, you can take some notes on impactful ways to do that.
So a couple more questions before we end our conversation today.
Anything underway that you wanna share that you’re doing to enhance the understanding of knowledge with your team around the country?
You wanna share that?
And then how do you advocate for inclusivity?
To me, you know, having an inclusive culture and also a belonging culture gets us to the equitable efforts we want.
So maybe share some impactful work that you’re doing in this space and then how do you advocate for inclusivity?

Dr. Shirley Davis Yeah, I’m really proud of some of the clients that we work with who have been on this journey actually for a while.
But they realized that this is an ongoing journey and you don’t get off of it because you’ve now checked the box and had, you know, a great recruiting year of more women and more people of color. No, it’s not just that. We’ve gotta look at this as an ongoing forever strategy that we have to have.
And how do we continue to sustain a wonderful culture, to work for, a wonderful culture where we, you know, are doing business where impacting our communities and our customers and our clients want to continue their work with us as well.
And so I’m thrilled that in some of the work that we’re doing with them is that we’re going beyond just only a training program and only helping them build their recruitment strategy.
Yes, we do audits and we do organizational assessments and we do focus groups and we talk a lot about the you know how to build a long term DE&I strategy.
But one of the things we do is go beyond that.
What we’ve been doing I love is helping leaders to really get into a more immersive experience.
So we’ve been doing what we call the cultural competency learning program and it’s a path that goes over a year long, very, very similar to what we’re about to do.
I’m loving, loving, loving our opportunity and I know you’ll talk about that a little later, but we are actually partnering leaders two by twos and they are as diverse as they are, you know, got the different experiences, backgrounds, different ways of seeing the world.
They’ve been socialized differently and yes, visibly they are very diverse and throughout the year they have once a month meetings where they talk about a particular topic that we actually send to them as an assignment. They do the pre work and then they get together and they talk about it.
We break them up even by their level of cultural competence, and maybe somebody who’s in denial of differences, and someone who’s very advanced and adaptive to differences. Putting them together really has been one of the richest, most rewarding experiences that we’ve seen. That is really game changing, it’s game changing.

Dr. Andrea Hendricks We are embarking on a great journey as partners in a new DE&I certificate program in the Greater Kansas City area. Super excited about that. Those of you in the audience, if you want to learn more, go to our Authentico website, and send us a message and we we’ll have a second cohort coming up in 2025. Today as we close, I’d love for you to share one of your favorite best practice resources?

Dr. Shirley Davis So I actually this is it’s an old school one too, but there is a desk reference for DE&I that I’ve actually used for years. And I still think it’s relevant, but I’m going to be really partial because I had the pleasure of writing the first ever DE & I for dummies book that came out in 2022. And guess what? May the 7th, the newest one inclusive leadership is coming to Amazon as well. And so those are some of the ones I’ve taken all of my 20 plus years of great expertise and experiences and lessons learned and pinned it all into those books. So those are going to be great resources that then encapsule all the others that I’ve read.

Dr. Andrea Hendricks Well, thank you so much for that and we look forward to leveraging some of those resources as well.

Dr. Andrea Hendricks Thank you Shirley for your insightful perspective. I know everyone listening gained additional insights and best practice approaches to this very topic. As we leave Episode 2, I want to take the moment to thank you for listening and encourage you again to continue to climb in this space power forward.

We hope you enjoyed this new episode and we look forward to having you engaged in the future program. See you next time. Go out and Ignite your strategies.