Welcome to the show where we expose new perspectives on our ever evolving world through the lenses of various industries, cultures and backgrounds.
Our guests are disruptors, united by a common goal to bring their purpose to life.
Whether they’re from the commercial world or third sector, from the global North or the Global S, expect an inspirational journey that will transform your perspective on just what is possible.
My name is Philippa White, and welcome to Thai on Earth.
What happens when the language we use to bring people together starts pulling them apart?
When a piece of work designed to create more humanity in organizations becomes politicized, misunderstood, and then reduced to slogans, and in a world growing more divided, fearful, and reactive, what does inclusive leadership actually look like now?
Welcome to episode 116 of Thai Unearthed.
My guest today is Joe Gerstand, a speaker, advisor, and actually one of the clearest thinkers I’ve come across in the world of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
For more than 20 years, Joe has worked with organizations across industries from Fortune 100 companies to government, healthcare, technology, and nonprofits, helping leaders move beyond performative DEI conversations and towards something far more meaningful.
Cultures where people can act, actually think, contribute, challenge, adapt, and belong.
This conversation isn’t about corporate buzzwords, it’s about what happens when humanity gets stripped out of leadership.
Joe speaks candidly about the current backlash against DEI in corporate America, why so many organizations quietly retreated from the work, and how fear, politics and short term thinking have distorted conversations that were always meant to be about people.
We talked about the corporate tick box exercises, why organizations that stop listening eventually stop adapting, and what leaders risk losing when they create cultures where truth can no longer be spoken safely.
We also talked about the growing need for more human centered leadership.
Because at the end of the day, I mean, let’s be honest, what kind of workplaces and what kind of world are we actually building and want to be a part of?
So if any of this resonates, then this conversation is for you, Joe Welcome to Thai Unearthed.
Thank you so much for joining me.
I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation since our initial chat and I think I’m excited to see where it takes us, so thank you for being here.
Thanks for having me, I’m excited as well.
So I often ask people who I speak to where they are, just because I feel very fortunate that the people I speak to literally are just dotted around the world.
And so before we go any further, just where are you right now?
Where can our listeners picture you?
I’m calling from Omaha, NE, and if you’re not familiar with the US, it’s about in the very middle.
I actually refer to Omaha sometimes as the middle of everywhere.
There’s probably some people that refer to it as as the middle of of nowhere, but it’s a, it’s a nice sunny weekday here in Omaha.
It’s a nice spring day here.
So that’s where I’m calling in from.
Nice.
So I grew up in Winnipeg, MB, Canada and I’m, I’m can’t actually picture, but I think you must be pretty much straight below where I grew up.
Obviously we were on the border of the US cause the middle of Canada would be absolutely freezing, but it was still pretty freezing but it was literally it was the same thing.
4:03
It’s sort of in the middle of well, we did say in the middle of nowhere, ’cause it really was just like, or is just sort of like a splat when you fly in, it’s just kind of like A and there’s nothing and there’s.
I’m up to an area called the Boundary Waters this weekend, which is right on the border with Canada and really is kind of the middle of nowhere, but it’s a beautiful, beautiful area.
Beautiful.
Yeah, I know.
The lake regions.
I grew up canoeing and camping and portaging.
I mean, I have not done that in it’s like another lifetime ago.
I do.
I do miss it.
But yeah, very different here in Brazil, so.
If you could just.
Tell us a little bit about the work you’ve spent the last 25 years doing in the space that you work in.
Just to provide a little bit of context for our listeners.
For almost the last 25 years, I’ve been doing work that’s generally referred to as DEI.
Now, when I first got into the work, I think we generally referred to it as DNI, which was diversity and inclusion.
And there wasn’t even a lot of discussion about inclusion when I first got involved in the work.
And then equity became kind of a featured focus a little bit more recently.
Started out doing it from the inside in the nonprofit community and then did it in a corporate setting.
And for the past almost 19 years, I’ve been doing it as an external consultant.
And I’ve never focused on a particular industry or profession or geography.
So for better or worse, I’ve worked with a bunch of different organizations, really big organizations, Unilevers, John Deere’s, Walmart’s, Marriott’s, really small organizations, nonprofits, government entities.
Most of my clients have been medium to large corporations, but kind of all over the place.
And so one of the things that I would say, I think this work is horribly misunderstood today.
And one of the things that I would say is that regardless of whether I have any competence or qualification for the work at all, there’s not a lot of people in the world that have had direct access to more workplace DEI efforts than I have.
And none of those people are the people that have been talking the most and the loudest about this work over the past two years.
Those people don’t know what workplace DEI efforts are.
They know what they’ve been told, they know what they’ve heard, but they’ve never actually seen it.
They’ve never been there.
And so I believe as someone who has been directly involved with a whole bunch of workplace diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, that most of at least America, what they believe to be DEI is almost the opposite of what is actually true about DEI.
The narrative has been so disingenuous.
There’s always been a certain amount of confusion and there’s been a certain amount of inconsistency in language and things like that.
And it’s a young profession.
Some of that is just normal, but there’s also been a tremendous amount of misinformation and disinformation.
And I think the shared understanding of it is so upside down that I think the acronym DEI is, is almost just a meaningless at this point in time.
And at least in this country, I hear people on both sides of the culture war flinging that word at each other as an insult.
So that that’s kind of that’s kind of the state of where things are.
So even they have a just a logical meaningful conversation about the same thing is difficult today.
It’s always been difficult.
We’ve always been a little bit sloppy with how we use some of those words, but it’s, it’s at a different place, truth, meaning, language, those things.
We have a different relationship with those things today than we did a few years ago.
But I feel that I’m lucky and I unfortunately, I feel like that work is, is kind of over.
I feel like that’s not really what I am anymore.
I’m trying to figure out what is next.
But I consider myself very fortunate to have found a body of work that I believed in.
I was kind of professionally miserable a fair amount of my time before finding this body of work.
I believed in it.
I felt like I had a little bit of ability, like I can’t say enough about the people that I’ve met in this work.
Not only have I worked with a lot of DEI efforts, but I now have this large network of people that are involved in this work and they’re just some of the most fantastic people that I’ve come across and they’ve been so supportive.
I’m a person that’s had so much to learn coming into this profession.
They’ve been so supportive and so encouraging and so honest and so careful with me that, you know, I feel badly about the state of this work and the state of those folks.
I do think this work will come out better on the other side, whatever we call it and whoever does it, because this is testing it and some of it needs to be tested.
I do believe we’re going to come out better on the other side.
I just don’t know if that’s six weeks from now or six months or six decades.
So that makes it hard to plan for the future, but there’s not a lot of things going on center stage right now.
But I am encouraged by some of the things that are going on in quiet places and thoughtful places.
I do think there’s a lot of important things going on.
I’m sorry, that’s a really.
No.
And, you know, and it’s great because it really provides an overall context which you’d have to be living under a rock to not know what are these ripples that are happening, particularly in the US living in Interesting.
Very interesting times.
You might have said it already, but I don’t want to skip over this just because you might not have said it in quite the way that you might want to.
But because of this front row seat of these changes and in many ways, as you alluded to the retreat of DI in corporate America, from where you sit, what is actually happening right now?
I think I have little bits and pieces to answer that question.
I don’t know that I really feel like I have a strong sense just because three or four years ago I think I had a strong sense because I had a strong sense of the state of the work and the people doing the work because I felt like we were more well connected.
That group of folks has really, there’s been a lot of heat and pressure and stress.
There’s a lot of those folks that have lost their jobs.
Some of them have lost their business.
Some of them are in bankruptcy.
Some of them have come under public attack.
Some of them have been put on public hit lists.
They’ve gone through some bizarre things and the folks that are still in those CDO roles in corporate America, they spend most of their time talking to lawyers.
Everything that is said, that is written, that is considered related to this stuff has to be vetted and proved and run through a lot of stuff.
They spend the vast majority of their time trying to avoid violating some very confusing and political policies and expectations from the government.
A lot of the folks that are in external roles, some of them have left the work completely.
Some of them probably needed to leave.
A lot of them have been on one level or another, rebranding, refreshing, repackaging, using different language or focusing on specific issues.
If that stuff keeps parts of the work alive, I think those are good things.
I think at some point in time we can’t avoid the issues that if language is going to be taking away from us, it doesn’t matter ultimately what we call it.
So if we’re going to allow language to be taken from us, these new names that we come up with, we shouldn’t get too attached to them because we’ve proven that it’s OK for people to take language away from us.
So I don’t think that’s a long term solution and I’m pretty committed to that.
Longer term, figuring some of that stuff out, how do we take that language back?
How do we take better care of it?
We were using good words, we didn’t take very good care of them, and some other people took them and they’ve now defined them.
And that’s how you get to a place where people believe a profession is almost exactly the opposite of what it’s actually about.
You lose control of the language, you lose control of truth.
So that’s a tricky thing to figure out.
I get lost in that.
That’s, I don’t know that I have the brainpower to figure that out.
I try to find smart people to talk through it with, but I think that’s significant.
And I think that’s an issue that that’s a humanity thing and that’s a society thing.
That’s a civilization thing.
That’s a survival sustainability thing.
So it is big and it’s complex.
I don’t know how to find my way through that.
I think more of us need to be working there, but it’s strange work at the same time.
I mean, it’s so nuanced, so much of this as well, because I think we talked about it the last time we spoke, there were different levels to the buy in I think of anything related to DI and ESG and these initiatives within work.
And there’s a question of is it just box ticking?
Is it something that people claim to be doing for the wrong reasons?
And then, you know, it’s more in Portuguese, you say for the English to see Brian Glaze Bay and it’s sort of, it’s sort of we’re just doing it for show.
But you know, we don’t actually buy into it.
And I just wonder, what is your thought on when you look at this backlash?
What could it actually reveal about how deeply organizations ever truly believed in this work?
Yeah, I, I don’t think any of that’s positive.
I think one of the things that I struggle with is that this is completely recalibrated my understanding of corporate America.
It’s it’s not what I thought it was.
And and that’s not just specific to DEI.
We can take DEI completely out of the conversation.
We can take a look at the very real challenge of climate change.
We can take a look at our current sane relationship with technology.
These people, these organizations, some of the most powerful, wealthy entities on the planet aren’t doing anything that they aren’t forced to do there.
There’s a few exceptions.
I’m, I’m making some, some generalizations here, but not a lot.
There’s organizations that say things, but that’s a huge difference from what organizations actually do.
It’s much bigger than I realized.
I always knew there was a gap there.
I had no concept of the gap.
The gap is huge.
And I’m not trying to say that corporate America is filled with more dishonest people than I thought it was.
I don’t think the problem is dishonest people.
I think the problem is the context that we put people in.
I think corporate America is a system that incentivizes really, really bad things.
And I think people in in those systems find ways to justify doing that.
I think human beings are really good at that.
I’m not blaming the individuals.
The individuals involved are of all shapes and sizes and all different character in all different values.
I’m talking about the systems that we’ve built, the technology that we use.
Corporations are a form of technology.
There’s something we invented and we’re kind of suffering from them.
And we act like there’s nothing that we can do about it.
Like corporations are just this thing that exists and we have to deal with it.
And that’s not reality.
We created corporations and we can change a relationship with them and, and I don’t see any interest or energy for that fight.
I don’t see anybody even really talking about it.
I know this isn’t a private conversation.
This isn’t a place for me to be super transparent, but I’m starting to get concerned about even having these conversations with people because I feel like I’m going a little bit crazy because these things seem like they’re really big issues.
I don’t feel like we’re freaking out about some of them as much as we have to be.
I don’t think corporate America as a system cares at all about human beings.
I think it’s very comfortable to extract human beings and to use human beings, and human beings are pretty good at justifying their behavior inside those systems, and they’re rewarded for doing that.
I mean, Meta is a corporation that is extracting massive amounts of value from this country, maybe globally.
But the impact on our civic connection, on our mental well-being, they are printing money as they extract it, and they only want to do it faster.
That’s just not sustainable.
And I just wonder back to specifically DI because I’ve got some strong feelings about it as well.
Because, you know, if we’re talking thinking about what DEI is, basically it’s just saying that a group of people who come from different places and think differently are better than a homogeneous group of people to solve a problem, right?
OK, I’m simplifying it a lot, but it’s sort of if we just hire a whole lot of people who look the same and come from a similar background, that is one option.
And then another option is let’s have a, a group of people that come together and in an organization and on purpose ensuring that those people are coming from a variety of different backgrounds.
And of course, you know, there’s, there’s more to it than that.
But I just wonder, where do you think DI went off track?
How is that considered a bad thing?
Almost like illegal.
Illegal in some places.
Which is bonkers.
It is bonkers.
That’s not even a big enough word.
But but I don’t know what the right word is.
It’s it’s a hard thing to even name.
It’s so it’s absurd.
It’s an absurdity.
We’re living in an absurd time, at least in this country.
I don’t know exactly how it happened.
I know part of it was we didn’t take real good care of that language.
But the way that you asked the question was where did you think DI went off track?
I don’t.
I don’t think that DI ever went off track.
I don’t think that DI ever got the track laid down.
I think that’s the work that it was doing.
I think this idea that DI was this all powerful behemoth that had been around forever, that’s ludicrous.
This body of work is in its infancy.
It’s a baby and it’s not even a cohesive body of work.
I mean, there’s so many different things under the ban of DI.
There’s people that have done compliance work and call it DI.
There’s people that do assimilation work and call it DI.
There’s bias, there’s performance stuff.
There’s a lot of different stuff lumped together under this band of DI and hadn’t been around very long.
I would say DI, the way that I was doing it, in the way that a lot of the folks I know are doing it, is it’s a profession that’s been around a couple of decades and it was never very big and it was never fully funded.
If you ask me what the state of this work was three or four years ago, I would have said DI practitioners and leaders are exhausted.
They’re stressed out.
They’re isolated in an organization.
They’re misunderstood.
There’s some of their organization that’s angry their job exists that doesn’t even know them.
They don’t have access to their boss.
They have a complicated relationship with HR.
They don’t have access to data that they need to use a job.
That was three or four years ago when DI was supposedly peaking.
And in its heyday, it was never all powerful.
Did it have a little bit of swagger for a couple of months?
Did it have a little bit of extra money?
Yeah, but it was chronically underfunded and under supported.
This thing of DEI that people talk about, it’s this big compared to HR that is this big in management that is this big and they’ve been around for a century.
There’s entire schools of business and there’s entire programs out there.
These are established, much larger professions, and they happen to be the two professions that didn’t take very good care of DEI, which is ironic because DEI is kind of a corrective to two professions that claim to be about human beings but don’t know anything about human beings.
Monkers on a few different levels, but I don’t think DEI ever went off track.
Were there some silly things done instead in the name of DEII?
Have no doubt.
That’s also true of education and social work and law enforcement and government.
Silly things happen in all of those places, and I don’t think that DEI had it all figured out for sure.
I think a lot of the stuff that we were doing didn’t have a big impact.
I think some of it was counterproductive, but that’s where a body of work starts.
You start somewhere and you experiment.
You try some things.
I think there wasn’t enough experimentation.
But we also had these people in a weird situation where they really couldn’t afford to make any mistakes because they barely had any support or resources to work with anyway.
Everybody was just trying to run Ergs and everybody was trying to have a council and everybody was trying to do this as these kind of accepted best practices.
There’s never been any DEI best practices.
It hasn’t been around long enough to do.
That no, totally you’ve been living in this.
So your viewpoint and experience is obviously so much more nuanced as a complete outsider sort of looking in and the frustrations that I’ve felt again, with all of these things, CSRESGDI sort of becomes like a token kind of thing.
It becomes like I said it before, a tick boxing thing.
And you know, it’s doing it just for the sake of doing it or doing it because we want to just, you know, what we need to just it’s a lack of understanding the reason behind this.
Why are we doing this?
Is the education there within businesses and who is responsible for this?
Is it HR talent?
Who, who is it that is responsible for this?
But there is an element of it.
And coming back to my very simplified version of this, it’s this lack of understanding that this is not about box sticking.
This is about we need to have a variety of people within a business because if we don’t, we’re not as competitive.
And I think it’s like anything, if we are just doing something, it’s it’s the same thing with the climate change debate.
If people just think that they’re doing things because we have to do this because it’s like what we’re supposed to do.
Well, also, people are going to want to work for you if they think that you’re destroying the planet or if you don’t have a planet, you’re not going to have a business to be able to run.
It’s understanding that there’s a real business driver to this.
I guess my question and I and I’m perhaps I’m leading you, but kind of back to the DEI going off track.
Was that clear enough to the majority of people in business?
Is that something that needs to somehow be rebranded and then not called DEI, but something else?
But at least it starts getting into the right channels so that people actually understand why this is a really important thing.
I think the problem is that we look at DEI as the problem for that, or we look at ESG as the problem for that.
I think the problem for that is that we’ve created an entity that we have to convince to take seriously things that are serious to human beings.
I don’t want to support an entity that can amass power and wealth that I have to make a business case that it has to care about the planet, that it should be a good citizen on this planet, that it shouldn’t knowingly harm individuals or nature.
That doesn’t seem crazy to me, but it’s totally at odds.
You can run around in corporate America today and you can talk about inclusion and you can talk about ethics and you can talk about sustainability, but you’re going to have to convince people and you’re going to have to make a business case you have you have to justify talking about that.
You do not have to justify in corporate America talking about nothing, but how do we make more money?
You do not have to justify that.
You don’t have to make a business case.
You’re not going to get called out for that.
From my perspective, that’s where the problem lies.
I think we’re looking in the wrong places.
We created DI as some kind of fix and we played these little games that they let us play, and I think the structure is designed in a way that it is problematic for us as human beings.
OK, so really I want to hang on that now because this has a lot to do with the work that I, you know, this is what I wrote my book on and this is sort of the area that I work in as well.
And I’m really want to just understand this from you.
You’re talking about the need to return to fundamentals and to make this work more human centric, not even the work human centric, making businesses more human centric.
So it’s it’s sort of businesses have lost their way.
You know, it’s not focusing on the human, it’s literally just focusing on money and everything else is a is secondary, is an afterthought.
What does this then mean to you?
What does this look like then?
I don’t have a neat simple answer to that, but you use the language human centric.
I think that’s part of it.
I I think I’m interested in helping leaders create spaces, places, teams, organizations that are human centric and human informed.
I don’t think that most workplaces today are either of those things.
I don’t think that the professions of management or HR are human centric or human informed.
That doesn’t mean that some of the people doing those jobs aren’t human centric.
There’s some HR people and some leaders that I know that love human beings and some of them have some real expertise and insight into human nature, into human behavior.
But as professions, they, you don’t, you don’t have to know anything about human beings.
I, I’ll never forget this project.
I worked on a project for a very big company and I did a bunch of interviews in advance.
And the last person that I spoke of was the person that was the farthest up in the organization.
Incredibly smart person, incredibly smart.
And at the end of the conversation, and this person is in charge of like 300 other people.
And he says, I just wish I cared as much about people as I do about robots.
And I’m super glad that he told me that.
And I know he meant it.
And it might have been a moment of poor judgment.
He might have regretted telling me that.
But I’m glad that he told me that.
I’m glad that he knows that about himself.
But it’s also indicative to me that that’s not a person that should be in charge of 3000 human beings.
I think there’s another way to use that person’s intelligence and competence.
I think if you’re going to be in charge of human beings or you’re going to support them in a profession called human resources, there should be some real education and development around what do we know about human beings, things and human behavior and human nature.
And what scares me is that most HR people and most leaders that I know don’t have any interest in that information.
They’re not aware of it.
They don’t have any interest.
They haven’t read the books, they’re not going to the conferences, they don’t know there’s journals and research going on.
It’s just a huge disconnect.
Maybe I’m the weirdo, but that just makes no sense to me.
I think that’s a big part of how we’ve built organizations that we’ve all just accepted this organization exists to provide profit to these people.
Like, you can’t have an entity that exists for that purpose.
Like that’s completely unsustainable.
There’s got to be more to it than that, and it’s got to be anchored in humanity and the world in which we exist.
I don’t think those are radical or even political things, but they seem to be at odds with where we’re at today.
So I think there’s an opportunity for some of us to start some new conversations and to start experimenting with some new practices.
Yeah.
And I feel so much of this is around positioning.
It’s around, you know, finding our allies.
It’s finding the people who get this and understand because anything that we’re going to do there has.
To be a value.
Connected to it and I agree with you that a business cannot just be focused on profit and that you’re constantly having to make a business case.
But even in the case of, you know, what I’m focusing on, which is the importance of people tapping into their human assets, understanding the importance of human competencies and more a team that understands these dynamics.
Well, the business in this case is I personally would not be at my best if I’m working in a place that I don’t feel psychologically safe, that I don’t feel that people give a shit about me.
But I don’t feel that, you know, I’m expected to basically kill myself over work and no one even cares about the fact that I have children or the fact that I have a life outside of work.
And that’s not sustainable and I won’t continue working for a place like that.
And at the end of the day, that’s going to cost the business money.
So there is, you know, I think there’s always a business case.
Yes, it would be great if people were actually thoughtful and and did this for other reasons.
And I would like to think that there are leaders out there who do that.
But I think if we’re talking about, you know, the positioning or if we’re talking about the business case, and I mentioned this the last time that we spoke, I love, and this is for all our listeners, anyone who’s listening, if you’re interested in this and you’re wanting to know like the real business case for this Matthew science book Rebel Ideas is amazing.
And it was recommended to me by a friend of mine, London.
I read it and Oh my God, I just, you know, I could not, I read it so quickly just because it was just, I was like, Oh my goodness, this is it.
This is explaining why this is so important in, in so many different contexts.
And I just my business tie.
We talk a lot about the fact that complexity demands diversity of thought.
And Matthew side talks a lot about that in his book.
What do organizations stand to lose if they abandon this inclusion work now, especially in a world that is growing more volatile and uncertain?
Yeah.
Well, and I think I think that book does a great job of answering that question.
He gives 25 different samples of the answer to that question.
I think what you compromise and it and it’s a long term thing, which I think business leaders aren’t good at caring about.
That’s part of our challenge.
What really what they’re doing is they’re compromising their capacity to respond to an ever changing world.
I think organizations that get good at something and are profitable think that they are an organization of consequence and that they’re going to be OK.
But being good at something is profoundly different thing than navigating disruption and learning something new.
Not a lot of organizations have the ability to do both of those things.
An example of that would be who is the old?
I’ve even forgotten the name.
Who’s the old camera company that went out of business?
Kodak.
Right right after they were super profitable and respectful and all of these things, they went out of business and they went out of business because they became irrelevant and they became irrelevant by technology that they helped create.
The future was right in front of them.
They couldn’t figure it out and they were anchored in what they were good at doing, which became much cheaper and less relevant, and they became irrelevant.
It looks like what happened to Blockbuster, who used to be innovative and exciting and profitable and respective, and then they became irrelevant.
What you do is you compromise your capacity to be a consequential organization to respond to, to adapt to an ever changing future.
You’ve got to have the ability to learn.
You’ve got to be open to new ideas and information to permeate your organization.
I don’t even like talking about the business case.
I don’t even like talking about things like psychological safety anymore because I think it’s too academic or consulting language.
I just try to talk about very simple logic.
Are human beings different?
They are all of us.
We’re all naturally different from each other.
Can those differences lead to good things and bad things?
Yeah, they’ve led to a lot of bad things and they’ve led to a lot of good things.
Seems like me, since we’re going to bring a bunch of people together, we should pay attention to that.
Logically, I don’t care what your politics are.
I don’t care what the kinds of people are.
That seems like a logical thing.
If we’re going to bring people together that are different, every single human being that we employ is different from every single other human being.
We should pay attention to that and try to get the benefits and as little of the bad stuff as possible.
Just logically, do we want people that are different from each other to tell each other the truth?
That seems like a good thing.
You know what?
Someone in your organization is afraid to tell someone the truth because of the way in which they think it’s going to be received, because of their identities and their titles.
That happens all the time.
I served in the Marine Corps infantry.
It happened there.
Marine Corps combat tested Marine Corps veterans unwilling to share bad news with their boss because of the way in which they thought it was going to be received.
That happens in every organization on the planet.
It’s happening in organizations right now.
That’s a diversity issue.
That happens because of differences in identity and power and perceptions and ideas about what the consequences are going to be.
If you want people to tell the truth to each other, that takes hard work.
And most organizations weren’t doing that work.
And so they have groups of really smart individuals that avoid serious disagreement at all costs because they don’t know how to do it, which means they don’t tell the full truth to each other.
And that’s how you have codecs and that’s how you have blockbusters and that’s how you have space shuttles blow up.
And that’s how you have.
I think Rebel Ideas is one of the books that does a fantastic job of explaining the back story of how the United States government was pretty well positioned to stop 9/11.
They had a lot of the information, but it was stuck over here and it was stuck over here and it was stuck over here.
Individual lines of difference prevented that stuff.
Trust and information from moving.
That stuff happens all the time.
It’s super easy to survive today, but in the long term it puts an expiration date on your organization.
You’re compromising your ability to learn and adapt and respond to an ever changing world.
If you care about the long term, there’s no business case that needs to be made.
It’s obvious, it’s logical.
But we’ve got some work to do.
And I think a lot of the work is in the language and the narratives and the metaphors that we use.
And that’s different than a lot of the work that we’ve been doing.
So it’s going to require some different folks.
Do you have a story that you can share?
Because I’m, I’m really curious to know, I mean, like you say, you’re in contact with so many different people from this area.
I, I can’t even imagine if you know what, when you’re drinking a beer or coffee or, or tea or whatever, you know, kombucha or whatever, and you’re sort of hanging out with your colleagues when the microphones are off, what those conversations.
I would love to be a family on the wall.
What are you hearing behind closed doors right now?
Do you have any that you can share with?
Us a little bit of everything.
I think of the people doing the work.
I think there’s some folks out there that they’ve got an ongoing business or enough clients or they’ve rebranded enough that they’re they’re financially decent and they’re doing the work.
And I think those folks are hopeful.
I think most of those folks have made some small changes to their work.
I think some of them will probably make some bigger changes down the road.
I think there’s a lot of folks that have left the work or thinking about leaving the work.
Like I have quite a few folks that were doing EI in corporate roles a year or two ago that are doing coaching now, or they’re moving towards coaching that are doing more speaking or writing around some related issues, some different issues.
Corporate folks aren’t really talking that much about it.
I think nobody wants to draw any attention to themselves on either side.
They don’t want people to think they’re doing it because they’re afraid of the attention.
They don’t want people to think they’re not doing it.
I think the whole conversation’s crazy making in in corporate spaces.
We have a government that could come out and say literally anything about DEI tomorrow, and we all know that.
And so it’s hard to even know what to tell clients because even if some of these things obviously are not going to stand up in court, but even if some of these things don’t stand up in court, it’s still a real thing for an owner of a business to get a letter from the White House or the FBI or the that’s a real thing that has real consequences.
And I think if you’re a business owner, regardless of your commitment to this work, when you’re thinking about protecting your business and protecting your people, that makes you step back and say, we can only do stuff that’s quiet and low profile or we can’t do anything right now.
I think, you know, I think there’s a lot of that going on too, which isn’t sustainable.
So I don’t know.
I think parts of the work have been stopped.
Parts of the work have been set back years and decades.
I think there’s parts of the work that are sneaking and finding ways forward and are going to blow up in the future.
I think there’s a lot of different things going on, on a lot of different levels.
I think there’s going to be a lot of probably technology and data coming into this work.
I think we were super slow to get to that anyway.
But I don’t know.
I don’t know what it’s going to look like.
What does resilient, courageous leadership look like right now?
Because, I mean, there’s a lot on the line and it’s hard to put your neck out, But at the same time, you know, what does that look like right now?
I think there’s a couple of things that I look at, you know, I look at the the people of Minneapolis who have endured some, some real hardship over the past couple of months.
And, and a lot of that leadership was, I don’t even know what to call it.
It was very, it was very close to home.
People got close, right?
People in the neighborhoods.
They stayed together.
They looked each other in the eye.
They walked with each other.
They talked to each other.
They knew each other.
I think that is maybe leadership’s not the right word, but I think we need a lot more of that.
I think we need that in corporate America.
I think people, I think leaders need to get close to their people.
They need to know their people.
They need to talk to their people, look each other in the eye, build those trusting and resilient relationships.
We’re far too easily divided and we’re way too divided already.
And, and we don’t have nearly as much power when we’re divided.
It’s going to get, I think, harder and harder to know what and who to trust.
So those eyeball to eyeball, I think that’s part of it.
I think we need a lot more of that.
And I don’t think we’ve done that in business in our neighborhoods.
I think we need more of that everywhere we can find it, more connectivity that’s naturally resilient.
And then I think we need the loud kind of leadership and it’s kind of missing.
You know, it comes down to humanity, You know, it’s the humanity.
It’s the I’m here for you.
It’s the, it is, it’s the connection.
It’s the belonging.
It’s the you can count on me, I’m here and I’m going to stand up and it’s the I.
Think we need some loud people too, to be reminding us of our shared humanity.
There’s no big differences.
The differences are all small, like the commonalities, the big thing.
We’re all human beings.
There’s tremendous similarity.
And I just, I don’t see a lot of leaders with big platforms reminding us of calling us back together.
It’s all about us, them, we, they different narratives.
It’s everything is divided and I don’t think we fix anything that way.
Can you leave our listeners with a belief or an idea or maybe a quote from someone else, or a truth that sums up what we’ve talked about?
Be good to yourself and and be good to each other.
We need to take better care of each other.
Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you’d like to tell our listeners?
Well, I don’t know.
You haven’t asked me my favorite color, my Zodiac sign, none of the regular ones.
No, I’m just kidding.
I’ve probably over overspoken anyone so.
You have not at all.
This has been really powerful and I appreciate your honesty and authenticity and courage at this moment in time to be so truthful, which many people are not able.
I’ve tried to have this conversation before and there’s people who just won’t have it.
So I really, really, really, really appreciate it.
I think we need to try to say some two things to each other, right?
Until the next time.
Thank you.
Hey everyone, it’s Philippa again.
I hope you enjoyed listening.
Now if you’d like to dive a little deeper, why don’t you check out my book Return on Humanity Leadership Lessons from all Corners of the world.
It reveals how putting people first is actually the smartest, most competitive business strategy of our time.
And if you’re ready to breakthrough disengagement, spark innovation, and build agile, purpose driven teams, let’s talk.
Whether it’s workshops off sites, keynotes, or full scale, leadership, programs will shift paradigms and create the change you’re looking for.
Visit philippajwhite.com to learn more or get in touch.
A huge thanks to Benna Vieira for the music and to Pete Morgan for his help with the editing.
Until next time, and I hope we’ll meet again soon.
