41. Leading Inclusion: Drive Change Your Employees Can See and Feel with Dr. Gena Cox and Prina Shah

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello, and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change the WordPress with myself Trina Sha. I love what I do. I'm a global leadership co-teacher, a consultant, a trainer, a keynote speaker, a podcaster. I help you to develop your leaders, your teams, and I help you to optimize your organizational cultures. I'm here to help you find ways to change your workplace. Why? Because we spend more time in our waking days at work than we do with our loved ones. It has to be a good place to be. So in this podcast, you can expect a mix of interviews with amazing thought leaders and then some solo episodes from myself as well. Get ready. Hello and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change Your Workplace. I'm really excited to be introducing my friend, Dr. Gina Cox, to you. Gina, welcome. I have lots to say about you. So allow me to introduce you, Gina. Dr. Gina Cox is an organizational psychologist and an executive coach. She is the author of Leading Inclusion, a groundbreaking guidebook for corporate leaders who want to build inclusive organizations from the top down. And Leading Inclusion is going to be launched on the 11th of October in 2022. So I can't wait for the book to be born. In her other work, she shows executives how to stop using 2019 behavior to address 2022 or current workplace challenges. So Gina is really bringing leaders to today's contemporary styles. A little bit of personal stuff about Gina. Gina was born in England and raised in Barbados. She now lives in Florida, where she can hear and smell the ocean as she rides her bicycle. Hello, Ocean Girl Gina. Welcome.

SPEAKER_02 2:13

Oh, it is so good to be here with you, Prina. And for those who are listening in, yeah, this is my second time having the honor to speak with Prina. I feel as if I'm at home and comfortable with someone who is such a gracious hostess and a caretaker. At least that's what I remember from our last conversation. So I'm really looking forward to this one.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Thank you so much, Gina. Can you tell us a little bit about you? Why you do what you do?

SPEAKER_02 2:39

Well, you mentioned a little bit about my history. You know, I was born in England and grew up in the Caribbean, and now I live in the United States, but I've lived here for like 40 years. I've lived here for a long time. And I have to say, though, that for most of my professional career, I have been a fake, a fraud, and a phony. Those three words are very famous words that were used by a US politician. And I always thought, oh, I love those three words. And unfortunately, they represent Gina with regard to this whole thing. Because for most of my professional life, I had not really been enjoying the experience that I was having in the workplace, even at the same time that I was coaching other leaders and telling them what they could do better. I was just a master of the poker face, you know, a little bit fake. So in March of 2020, when Breonna Taylor was killed, my whole life changed. Of course, I never saw that coming. At that point, we were all just beginning to think about the pandemic, and that was going to be the biggest thing that we would worry about. We didn't even know what that would entail. But when Brianna Taylor was killed, what happened is that I immediately realized that she could have been my daughter. And it had such a profound effect on me, I couldn't really explain it. And then two months later, George Floyd was killed. What does any of this have to do with why I do the work I do and why I wrote the book and all that, everything? Because in that moment in March of 2020, I just realized I could no longer be the fake, the fraud, or the phony. I had to actually be more honest in saying what my experiences were so that I could maybe help other people. So it was evident to me that there was such a disconnect between the day-to-day experiences of many employees, you know, employees with a variety of variations. There was such a variation, a gap between the employee experience and what the leaders of the organization thought was the employee experience. And how had I known that? I had known that because I had spent a decade doing employee opinion survey design and measurement. So I already knew that as a fact. I didn't just speculate that based on my own experience. And so I said, enough already, Gina. It's time to be you. And here we are.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Oh my gosh. And I'll link our previous chat in the show notes, Gina. I will add all of your details in the show notes as well. And for people who don't know Gina, Gina has a beautiful way of turning the intangible into tangible and using your own experience as well. You come from a lived experience. And I love the fact that you talked about, you know, the fake, phony, and fraud. The you know, alliteration is just wonderful first off. But then, Gina, I feel like a lot of us live in that kind of manner, and then what that creates in us is this internal conflict. And I imagine that internal conflict in you has just bubbled up to create this beautiful book that you are now, you know, going to be sharing with the world. And I want to learn lessons from you in relation to that. So the book is called Leading Inclusion, just behind you for people who are watching the YouTube episode of this chat. And what is inclusive leadership, first off?

SPEAKER_02 5:45

First of all, it's not as complicated as people seem to think. Just a very quick clarification for anyone who for whom this is new information. Although I imagine that with your audience, it might not be that new. But the truth is that often the words diversity and inclusion are misused, they're confounded, they're conflated, people can't distinguish. So when I use the word diversity, I'm primarily talking about sort of the counting of the presence or absence of a group of people by virtue of some characteristic, you know, whether we're talking about race, gender, ethnicity, LGBTQ plus status, neurodiversity, or what are we talking about. That's really about the numbers. Yeah. And by the way, unfortunately, it is where leaders of organizations have disproportionately focused after they had this sort of epiphany in 2020 that they needed to do something different. They focused on diversity. Inclusion, on the other hand, is really about the experience that those people in those groups that we were just talking about are having on a day-to-day basis. It's not just the interpersonal experience, meaning Gina and Preena, what is Gina's experience with Preena? It's not just that. It is really what is the experience that Gina has when she shows up in this organization with all these cultural norms and characteristics and patterns and ways of doing things? And do those norms and patterns and characteristics of the organization make it possible for Gina to get selected into the job that she's capable of performing, to get paid equitably, to get promotions and opportunities that she deserves by virtue of her contributions and capabilities, and of course, to have the visibility that she could have the influence to then become whatever she wants to become in this organization. So inclusion is really a much more sophisticated aspect of this whole so-called diversity and inclusion conversation. And by the way, you might want to ask me later why I call it a so-called diversity and inclusion conversation. But what I say is that inclusion tops diversity. Because I don't care how much you focus on, oh, we got to hire more people from this group, or yes, you should, and you should have done that, then you should. But what I really want to know is once you hire them, then do people look them in the eye or do they ignore them? Are they part of the fabric of this organization?

SPEAKER_00 8:07

You are talking to my ears. Oh my gosh. So let's be honest here. I'll talk to the Australian perspective, Gina. And this is my experience. So what I've seen thus far is yes, diversity and inclusion being banded into one. So far, there's a lot of tokenistic measures. Let's just call it that. And there's a lot of targets. We have to hit this target, we have to hit that target to recruit these diversity groups within this demographic or that demographic. Yes. Okay. Sure. It is quite a tick-in-the-box exercise at the moment. But now what you're talking about is expanding it. So when we look at inclusion, what on earth does that mean? So inclusion from that employee lifecycle perspective, organizations haven't even considered. Okay, Gina and Prina, both of us being people of color, have entered the workforce. Your experience and my experience and our needs are completely different. Have they been considered? Have they been even thought about in the sense of the kind of internal barriers that I have, the societal barriers that I have, other crap that affects us as well? What do we need from that workplace perspective? Gina, talk to me more about that because this is a really big missing piece in the workplace of taking the so-called diversity and inclusion measures to the next step. And let's just take off, you know, the lipstick, the lip gloss. Let's get real with it now.

SPEAKER_02 9:33

Yes, absolutely. I'll answer that question and I'll preface it by saying this. First of all, I do not expect these changes to happen overnight. And I don't think any person of color or any other person who has been traditionally disadvantaged expects things to happen overnight.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 9:50

So there's the long tail of history, which first of all, leaders need to understand. And there is a lot of resistance to people honestly dealing with the facts of history. There's all of that. But when it comes to the actual change taking place in organizations, I start the clock in May of 2020, which is to say it's been two years, in my opinion, since organizations across the globe, and I'm not just talking about in the United States, have really done a little bit of soul searching to say, what are we doing? What's going on? So in that two-year period, it is probably not a surprise to me to see that organizations are starting with actions that haven't been very effective, primarily focusing solely on diversity, or and then an overuse of the emphasis on implicit bias training. Those two things, which I'm not sure that I understand why implicit bias training became the mantra, the focus, the thing that people talked about that they didn't even understand what it meant, but they wanted to do it. I don't know exactly how that happened so fast. But to more specifically answer your question, then I already know that the changes that are necessary will not be quick, but they have to start. It has to be a foundation. So I give leaders a big pass in the sense of saying, I don't expect you to have solved this problem in two years. I don't. I do expect you, however, to understand what you should focus on so that you might be able to solve it in the next few years. And I also see that leaders are getting a lot of ineffective recommendations and suggestions and feedback. So the reason there hasn't been a lot of progress is number one, I said overemphasis on diversity, overemphasis on implicit bias training, and just generally bad guidance about what organizations should do in general about this stuff. But the inclusion piece, which is really what you asked me about, is really the key. I see all the news about people don't want to return to the office, about great resignation, about things where there's a greater activity taking place with regard to what we would call like labor relations, more organizing, more unionization, and that sort of thing. Those three things are directly related to one another, in my opinion. Because the reason that inclusion and the focus of inclusion really matters, not just for people of color, is the reality that the workplace has been for hundreds of years not a very pleasant place to be. So once we start with that assumption, which is where I begin, I always know that if the workplace is such a difficult place in the first place, it's usually people who are from traditionally disadvantaged groups that are at the bottom of the ladder when it comes to the experience. Which is to say, then, a lot of people are not having a great experience. Not just people from disadvantaged groups, but the people from the disadvantaged groups tend to be at the bottom. So my call is really for leaders to be more focused on a humanistic perspective to leadership and not treat it as a secondary thing. So I say that inclusion is really a subset of effective leadership. You cannot be an effective leader if you have never focused on understanding how to effectively lead your entire workforce. You've only been leading a portion of it.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Yeah, absolutely. Gina, you talk to understanding our history, especially from that workplace perspective. And I don't know if this is going to be a controversial question, but what institutionalized old ways do we need to undo?

SPEAKER_02 13:25

Yeah. Well, I don't know if it's controversial or taboo to talk about these things in the sense that I'm being disingenuous. I know that it is controversial and taboo. However, the other thing I also know is we have got to be realistic. We got to stop living being the fake frauds and the phonies. So I'll paint that picture within the lens of my own experiences. My parents were born in a colony, Barbados. In the 1950s, after the German Blitz, the English government decided to go out to the colonies and bring people to London. You know that people from the Caribbean, people from India, people from Africa, from the colonies. Help us rebuild our city because we've lost a significant portion of the male workforce and we need to do things faster. So these people came. Great nurse, registered nurse. I have relatives and friends who made their contributions to the transportation system, to the healthcare system, to all of these systems and processes that were necessary to rebuild that city, that great city that is still great today. However, the fundamental problem was that those immigrants didn't know that they thought when they would arrive, they would be equal, but they had no idea that they would be treated as second-class citizens. But then they figured it out. They learned how to survive, how to smile behind the newspaper and get through. They learned how to do that. But here we have a situation in the year 2022 where there could be talk about taking immigrants out of the country and sending them to Rwanda so that they could be this idea that we don't need these people in our country. Let's take them to Rwanda. Or two years ago, when the British Home Office decided that they would repatriate people who were part of this wind rush generation, they would repatriate them to Jamaica. My parents were from that generation. This is a long sort of preamble to my answer, but here's the answer that many of these dynamics that have to do with power differences and first class and second class, people who speak one way and who speak in all the distinctions, the social distinctions, have their origin in colonial history. And in the United States, where we pride ourselves on being an independent country, and we are, obviously, but we came from the same historical origin, some of those same patterns of people who speak a certain way or go to a certain school are special. People who speak a certain way and go to a certain school get certain jobs. People who are in a particular situation, the male might be dominant. As these are sort of supposedly expected behaviors, right? They've been in place for such a long time. I guess the bottom line is that this is just a long-standing pattern of how we relate to one another that we almost don't know any different. So along comes women who said we want equal rights. And here we are, this is 2022, and not a whole lot has changed. Why hasn't it changed? Because those power patterns, certainly, they have been patterns in which you know males have dominated. And I'm not here to pick on males, I'm not here to pick on people who were the power sources that had the colonies. I'm merely stating a fact. So the only way you change that is you got to find an alternative way. So for women, women will fight for what women want. And yet here we have the overturning of Roe versus Wade in 2022. For people of color, people who have disabilities, people who are LGBTQ, they will say, we want to be treated as equals. What is so hard about that? And they must fight, fight, fight. Because here we have in 2022 recognize two steps forward and three steps back sometimes. So the bottom line is that I cannot separate my understanding of history from the conversations I have in 2022 about inclusion in the workplace. They're directly related. And until we talk about all of these things with that level of specificity, people do not understand what really happened here.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 17:34

In my opinion.

SPEAKER_00 17:35

Yes, yes, yes. I've got lots to ask you in relation to that. But firstly, I will share my story as well. I too am a product of British colonization. I was born in Kenya, second generation. My grandparents actually were asked to move from India from the Gujarat to Kenya to help with the train lines, to help build the economy of Kenya. And my gosh, they contributed really well. And my parents were first generation born in Kenya, British colony. And then we moved to the UK when I was probably around eight years old. And my mum was a housewife, traditional role, looked after us, did a wonderful job. Thank you, mom. And my dad, my dad, was a traditional breadwinner. And in Kenya, absolutely so. You know, he was at the apex of his career in a managerial role, all of that. Moved to the UK. And they expect all of this. Yes, I'm gonna be at the same level that I am. Uh-uh. Reality check, Gina, the systems, the institutions. Oh no, no, you're not qualified in this. Oh no, no, you don't have UK experience. Like, yep, but there's equivalent experience. So the barriers that my dad faced was something else, and he ended up working as a shift worker in a factory from a managerial role back in the day in Kenya to such a different shift within the UK when we migrated. Now, Gina, while we're talking about the workplace, all of the institutional wrongs uh within the workplace, which affected my dad. But then, you know, when you talk about this also, it brings it home to the family and people, the family members are affected by all of these institutional old ways that really need to change. So the kind of old ways that need to change from the perspective of my parents, for example, was the transferable skills, the basics of forms. There were so many forms as well, you know, little things like that that people don't even consider. So when we're looking at the workplace, I think there's a massive missing gap, and this is really me on my high horse, to look at the workplace from a humanistic perspective and empathy mapping women who are, let's say, if we break them down to demographics, let's say it's a single mom. What are her needs? What are her pain points? What influences her? What systems are gonna be really effective for her as well? How can we help her excel within the workplace? Let's say that I think is a real missing piece when we look at, you know, yes, we've got all of these institutionalized structures. And Gina, having worked within government organizations in the past, oh my gosh, trying to get change to happen is gonna take time. So I'm glad we're having the conversation. And you know, often workplaces, Gina, I don't know if this is the same case with you. It's too hard. We have to ask this person and that person, and then people just get lost in the hierarchy of to-dos. We can take action ourselves, though, surely. There's practical steps that we can take as leaders. Can you tell us more about that from a leadership perspective? And I know there's loads of people who want to do the right thing. What can people do at an individual level, let's say?

unknown 20:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:53

Let me also say that even though some of the conversation we're having and some aspects of this conversation will always be hard for other people to hear. Yes. We can't shy away from understanding some of the factual origins of some of these problems. We don't have to fixate on that and spend all our time on it, but it is important.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:13

So when you ask what an individual can do or can or should do, I think of it in terms of three things. I think of it in terms of mindset, boldness, and action. And when I say mindset, what I really mean very simply is that for each of us, all of us, including me, we have to be really careful that we don't have all these preconceived notions in our heads about what the realities are that then prevent us from reaching, learning, connecting with people who don't look like us, who don't behave like us, or whatever. So I think of this as a two way thing. It's not just certain people that have to do this. We all have to do this. But it does require that people have a mindset for inclusion. If you don't care about this, if you don't think this is important, if Think people who talk about it are just victims and who are positioning themselves as victims and always asking for something. If you have that mindset, you're not going to be an effective leader for inclusion. To have to be an effective leader for inclusion, you have to be willing to at least consider the possibility that you might not know everything you need to know, that there might be some new things you could learn, that if you talk to a different group of people or some additional people, you might learn something. You can't just rely on your inner circle to help you form your mindset for inclusion, for leader as a leader. So that's the first thing. But more specifically, the next thing that is really necessary for the an individual, a mindset, by the way, is supported through education and broadening your perspective. But the next thing is boldness. Because the truth is, even this conversation that you and I are having requires a degree of boldness because we already know that there's at least 50% of the people who might not want to hear it. So an individual manager in his or her company has got to be willing to say, you know what? I recognize that something needs to be different, and I'm willing to take the risk to do some things that others in my peer group might not want me to do, might not agree with doing, but that I know need to get done and are the right things. So boldness, for example, would be the situation that I have observed where a leader really wanted to make some changes in the organization to make it more inclusive, but had people reporting directly to him, half of whom were just like, yeah, right, yeah, right, we're gonna do this. So they would agree to do things in the boardroom, and then only half of the people would actually do them. The other half of them would either not do them at all, would slow down the pace at which they were done, or would delegate them to people that they knew would never really do them, and they would not check in to see if these things were done. Basically, they were sabotaging this effort to be more inclusive. So boldness actually as a manager requires that you kind of search your heart and say, what is it that needs to be done? Ask yourself, is it being done? And be certainly willing to hold people accountable for doing those things, even if they're not popular things. And then the third thing is action. So if you asked me earlier why isn't there more progress between May of 2020 and July of 22 on this broad diversity and inclusion thing?

SPEAKER_01 24:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:18

I told you already that I said too much focus on diversity, too much focus on implicit bias training, not enough and focus on the inclusion aspect. But there's another thing, which is the action piece. So with action, you could be doing absolutely nothing, taking no action, even though you might have the right mindset and you might think that you could be bold, you might not be taking any action. You might be taking the actions that are not the right actions, right? You could be taking action, but you might just be doing something that's basically spinning your wheels. It's not going to have a positive effect. Or of course, you could be doing exactly the right things at the right time. So an individual has to think about what actions they can take. And when it comes to action, I think about action as having sort of two pieces. They're the things that you do on the interpersonal level, like do I make eye contact with Gina in the elevator? Do I smile when Gina approaches my space? Do I make sure that Gina gets, you know, that Gina feels like this is her home as much as somebody else in the organization? But they really want to cut, you know, the systemic things. Am I making sure that there's equity in my decisions about who gets promoted? Am I making sure there's even equity about who am I taking to lunch? Or, I mean, nowadays with more remote work, maybe this is not as much of a problem. But the classic definition of what I used to see as an inequity was when there was always certain people in the inner circle for the manager, and everybody else was on the outside. And you knew there's no way you were ever going to get what you needed. So I'll stop there, but my point is that individuals have to do some soul searching. They have to then be willing to take unpopular positions sometimes, and they have to make sure that they're doing the things that will make a positive difference.

SPEAKER_00 25:59

Yes. And it's being okay with doing something different and leading it and taking charge. Absolutely, leading inclusion, as the book says. Gina, you have given so many practical tips for our listeners. I have one final question for you. You know, I'm all about finding good ways to change your workplace. So if I was to hand you a magic wand and ask you what is one way you would change the way of the workplace, Gina, what would it be?

SPEAKER_02 26:27

Yeah, my one thing is a big thing, but my one thing is I would want every CEO of every company that has humans working in it to recognize that human variation is normal, but that human variation is not dealt with in that way in the workplace, which is why we have these problems with exclusion. And only they at the top of the organization can make the changes that will drive inclusion from the top down. That's the one thing, and that's and that's my focus in my work.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

Yes, listen, CEOs. Brilliant, Gina. Thank you so much. You have given us so much valuable information to consider. And I think this is an episode that you need to tune into again. So listen again, and all of Gina's details are in the show notes. Gina, thank you so much for today. Oh, again, another wonderful conversation with you, Prina. Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure. If you want to meet great thinkers who stand against crappy workplace cultures, lousy leaders, and toxic teams, then you need to join the Ways to Change Your Workplace Facebook group, which is linked in today's show notes. I will see you in the next episode. Bye for now.