Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Hello, everyone. Today I want to talk about diversity, well being and culture in the Trump era, because we are going to go through a four year period of Trump in the United States. And it seems to me every couple of years I have to do a podcast on this whenever something big happens in the social environment. And the reason I'm going to talk about this is because we just had an hour and a half of in depth conversations with about 50 companies in the big reset. And there is a lot of stress in these organizations around the election, a lot. I'm not saying it's going to continue this way, but that's where we are at this particular point in time. Now, if you live in the United States, you know what's going on. If you don't, you probably can imagine. Roughly half the country voted based on the election for Trump. About roughly half the country or less voted for Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris is an African American or really Indian heritage woman. Trump is a Anglo Saxon white man. So you could look at this as a political battle between the existing administration and the new administration, although in fact, the Trump administration has been around before too. You can look at it as a battle between the left and the right. You can look at it as a battle between old and young. You can look at it as a battle between male centric thinking and female centric thinking. You know, there's a million ways to slice this, but there's. It's impossible not to see the ramifications of diversity because apparently a lot of Hispanics voted for Trump. A fairly high percentage of African American men voted for Trump. Not a majority, but a fairly high percentage. Not African American women. By the way, African American women did not vote for Trump. A lot of white women voted for Trump. And so the people that are concerned about DEI issues are upset because the Trump administration project 2025 documentation has a lot of articles about banishing DEI, doing away with LGBT activities and programs. There's actually a congressional act in Congress called the Dismantle DEI act of 2024 sitting in Congress, which probably will be passed, which dismantles all the DEI investments in the federal government in various ways. So obviously nobody knows where this is going to go, but the reaction by employees is very difficult. And one of the people on the call this morning is the head of DEI for a healthcare provider with more than 100,000 employees. And she said a significant number of our workers came to work crying, they were so upset. And so we had this whole big discussion about these topics with a lot of HR People. And I, I would say what comes out of this, and let me give you some things to think about. I'm not going to try to pick sides one way or the other, but the DEI topic, whether you call it diversity and inclusion and take out the equity, as Shurim did, which I thought was silly, or you call it something else, is existential to the way human beings operate. Every human being, whether they be white or black or Asian or African American or Hispanic or whatever your background is, is a human being. And we all feel that we want to be valued and respected and appreciated just like everybody else. And the United States does have a racial history of slavery. And so in that particular case of the African American community, there's income disparities, wealth disparities, and a lot of historic inequities that are very clear. So that particular group of people feels disinfected for that reason. I'm Jewish, so I've got my own sensitivities about that. Asians could be sensitive to the way they were treated during World War II. On and on and on. Every group in the United States, including the white Anglo Saxon Americans, have their own reasons for grievances about how they're not being treated fairly based on others. Granted that we're never going to make everything equal anywhere. What we do have to respect on the fact that human beings want to be respected and appreciated and heard, regardless of whatever groups they affiliate themselves with. And many people affiliate themselves with many groups, by the way, there's no one group. And so from the standpoint of running a company or a business or an organization effectively, when certain groups feel left out or are deliberately discounted or discarded for some reason based on bias, your organization underperforms. And that was the finding of the elevating equity research we did more than two years ago was that this is not a social issue. This is not a political or religious issue in companies. It is a business performance issue. And in a healthcare organization where the nurses and the clinical professionals tend to be very diverse because it's hard to hire those jobs and you have to be very inclusive in your hiring just to fill the positions, if you don't have a diverse and inclusive culture, you can't perform. And of course, they have this other problem that outcomes of health care are also not fair. And there's a lot of statistics that show that minorities are not treated as well in many institutions as other people simply because of bias, where African Americans will come into a hospital and they'll be treated differently and have different expectations of their health requirements than say, white people. And I don't have the data in front of me, but I've read many, many studies like this. So what comes out in these conversations with HR is this sense of pain that they experience when they see this going on in their organization and they reflect on the emotional reaction that people have in the workplace, not in the political environment. That's not really their job. And what comes out when you talk to lots of senior DEI people, and we have talked to a lot of very senior DEI people, is that this is a very, very systemic thing. Diversity is no different from inclusion. Inclusion is no different from some sense of equity or fairness. And by the way, it touches well being and it touches culture and it touches productivity and it touches performance. Because all of these cascading emotional factors that enter our work environment and our home environment slow us down. They make it harder for us to focus. They reduce the level of collaboration and free thinking. I mean, we did this study long ago at Deloitte, which I loved, called Waiter and is that inclusion in your soup? And it was a statistical study of project consulting teams and looking at different elements of diversity, gender diversity, generational diversity, physical and rather racial diversity and so forth, and national diversity. And they found statistically that the project teams that had more diverse constituencies were higher performing client teams. They got better ratings from clients, they were more profitable, they were more innovative. In fact, different, different types of diversity had different outcomes. It was very, very interesting. So what's really going on inside of companies is we're no longer trying to push a social mission, by the way. I think that's one of the things that went wrong with DEI is we tried during the George Floyd period, I think a lot of companies turned DEI into a social agenda, which created a lot of the backlash from the right. I think we've all learned lessons on that, that this is about creating an organization that has a cohesive culture where people feel respected, where people feel appreciated, where they feel that they can do their best work. And maybe their hair looks different or maybe their body looks different or whatever it may be. And that that is not a factor in how the organization rewards people, pays people or decides who to hire. And I don't think anybody would disagree with that. And I don't think anybody would disagree with the fact that we all have biases. And they come from your family, they come from your experiences in life, and they come from your religion and all sorts of other things. But so DEI is not going away. And when people like Elon Musk Say these inflammatory things like, DEI is dead, or let's let DEI die. I don't think he's doing anybody a favor because the concept is not going away. It will not go away ever. Just today, I read that a bunch of Jews were attacked in Amsterdam. I mean, we thought that stuff went away in the 30s. It didn't go away. This is not going to go away ever. I think this is just one of the human wiring things we have as human animals that we sometimes are afraid or feel threatened by people that are different from us. And that's just something that's sort of inbred in our survival instinct, perhaps. But. So what we've got to think about relative to HR is using the DEI idea. Forget what you call it. You can call whatever you want to build this cohesive culture. Now, on the topic of culture, we've done tons of research on this, and I'll give you my opinion at a high level. Companies are societies, just like cities and states and countries. Every company has values. Every company has reward systems. Every company has its own history. It has leaders, it has founders, it has core customers, core beliefs. You may not have written all this stuff down, but if you're successful, I guarantee you have these things. Because these cultural attributes are usually why you're successful. They're usually the things that created the spark of entrepreneur growth, that created who you are.
[00:09:55] And usually what you can find in big companies is if you go back in time and think about and talk to people about the history of the company, you will find that the core values that created that business in the beginning are still there, and they're still driving the success of the company. And when they're lost, the company tends to falter. So if you think about your company as a society with a culture, one of the things we have to do in hr, working with leadership, of course, is to make sure we keep that culture healthy and that the culture is discussed and that there's transparency about the culture and that there's debate about the culture. And one element of this culture of a society is what I call citizenship. Now, in the political environment, citizen, or in the country we live in, citizenship means being a good citizen. It means participating, helping picking up litter, taking care of other people, helping somebody across the street, doing things for the rest of society that make the system work. You know, I remember. You know, there have been these funny Seinfeld episodes about it where people would do terrible things to each other. And I remember one time George made this comment, said, we live in a society why are you behaving like this? And I never forgot that. So, you know, and we all do this, and we all see this in our own communities. This is part of being sort of a community participant in every country around the world. And usually what you find is that the smaller the community, the more cohesive it is. The bigger the community, the more difficult it is to be a community, because people's differences get accentuated. And we don't really know the people who have different opinions from us as well as we do, the people that are close to us. Exactly the same thing goes on in companies. We have the sales organization's culture, the manufacturing organization's culture. The finance department has a culture, the HR department has a culture. I mean, very natural. Similar things happen there. So what we've got to do in hr, and this is what a lot of the HR leaders were talking about, is do, in a sense, a listening tour and figure out where the glitches or inconsistencies are that can be repaired. Now, in the case of this particular healthcare company, the woman who runs dei, very senior executive who's done this at other big companies, she said, well, you know, we have a lot of groups doing fantastic things in this company that don't know what anybody else is doing. They don't feel like they're a part of the bigger company because they don't know what the other groups are doing. They don't know what the words, the letters LGBT mean. They don't know if we should call somebody black or African American. They're not sure how, what the norms should be in the company. And so they're, you know, just sort of slowing down, unsure of how to behave in these different situations. That's not a political or social agenda. That's just a, you know, a business strategy issue. So, you know, you can criticize DEI as much as you want as a politician, but these are meaningful conversations that have to happen that make companies perform better. And that gets to another dimension of this, which is leadership. You all know that the leaders set the tone. The leaders decide what is valued in the political environment. We are going to be led by Donald Trump for all of his strengths and weaknesses, at least for a while. There will be all sorts of, you know, political things that will happen around him. But in the company, your leaders are right there. You can talk to them. You can get to know them. I'm not sure most of us are ever going to get to know Donald Trump. We'll probably read about him. But in the company, that's not so big of a problem. So DEI is also very much involved in bringing the leaders along on this journey and letting them be a part of it. And they will have their own opinions as to what inclusion and diversity and culture means. I will say one thing though, that is very, very consistent among every single company I talk to, and I talk to a lot of companies. Everyone agrees that teamwork, collaboration, innovation, customer centricity, quality, and you can frame that as diversity and inclusion if you want, is important. And so for those of you in the DEI domain, or those of you that maybe want to be in the DEI domain, or most of those of you that maybe are not sure what the DEI domain is about, this is what it's about. It's about bringing together these ideas and doing this work. And it's funny, a lot of the people in DEI describe DEI as work. They use the word work a lot because I think it's really hard. I think what DEI professionals have to do, it's not just set metrics for hiring or teach people about bias or do various training programs. It's much, much more complex than that. It's. They have to constantly find these inconsistencies and challenges in the organization and then find ways of communicating to leaders and individuals about how to rectify these problems. Now, you know, the thing that I also want to be sensitive to at this particular moment is that the United States election has just hyper accentuated this topic for many, many people. We don't know how much is true that's been written about the Trump administration. We don't know how much is true about Project 2025. And it doesn't really matter because until things actually happen, you know, all these are is discussion talking points. But I will say it is clear to me in my life and the conversations I've had with the people that I work with that this is a big stressful time. And many people are afraid. They are literally scared. African American women I've talked to are literally frightened about what's going to happen after what's just happened in this election. I thought both Biden and Kamala Harris did a really wonderful job of discussing what's next, but we haven't heard a lot from the other side yet. And so they're nervous. And so I would give your DEI counterparts some time and some effort and help them decide what your company's response may be and if any to the situation that we're in. I guess the way I would conclude this is my book Irresistible. And our research on human centered leadership which we really pioneered during the pandemic, pretty much clearly explains that effective leadership today is not just hard nosed execution, innovation oriented thinking. It's also thinking about the human issues that underlie the performance of the company. 78 to 80% whatever today you look at of the United States economy is now services. There isn't a company in the planet that is not dependent on its human capital for success. And every individual has his or her own emotional reaction to things in the workplace and in the outside environment. You can call that HR stuff, you can call that dei, you can call that leadership. I think it is, it is part of being a leader. So let's go back and think about human centered leadership again one more time. Let's just be sensitive to the situation we're in today and the sensitivity to this will blow over relatively soon. But right now I just want to highlight where we are and why. I have so much respect for people in the DEI domain. I think it's one of the most complex, interconnected, systemic, difficult to measure areas of business. But I don't think it's going away. And I want to tell you guys that do this stuff how much we respect you. We're going to do a lot more work in this area. Come join us at the conference, come join us at the big reset or just call us up if you'd like to talk about what you're doing. Okay, that's it for me this week. Talk to you guys later.
[00:18:11] Sa.
