The LeaderShifter Show

Part 2 of my interview with Femily, Silicon Valley’s Gender and Inclusion Consultant, focuses on what “the good guys” can do to support women in the #metoo era. Sadly, some men who would never harass have become reluctant to mentor women, and this will only hurt business results all around. So it’s more important than ever for men and women alike to take action advocating for high potential women, redirecting conversations that have potential to be uncomfortable, and treating colleagues of any gender equally. Tune in to get the answers to all the questions you’ve been thinking but have been afraid to ask – Hugs? Complements? Drinks? Business travel? Dating colleagues? Femily weighs in on these topics and more!

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 38: Tips for The Good Guys in the #MeToo Era with Femily

Shani Magosky: Welcome leader shifters to another episode of the LeaderShift Show with Shani. I am welcoming back for a second time Femily, also known as Silicon Valley’s Gender and Inclusion Strategist. Our first interview we could have talked for days, and so I decided let’s cut and we’re going to come back again.

Today is Femily part two. Specifically we’re going to ask Femily to share her wisdom about if you’re a good guy in this MeToo era, what are the new rules of the road for you. Like what should you do, what shouldn’t you do, and we’re going to go through a litany of things from mentoring and just what to do if you see something that it’s like walking the line or inappropriate, then just we’ll answer all those questions that you have in your mind, but maybe haven’t known who to ask. Femily welcome back.

Femily: Thank you so much, Shani. I’m so glad to be here. This was the remaining nugget of that juicy conversation that we had last time. I’m so glad we get to dedicate time specifically for the male leaders out there who are the good guys in the office. The good male leaders. They aren’t the creeps and they want to make sure that they maintain that good image and are able to help their female colleagues just like they help their male colleagues.

Shani: Absolutely. I think this is such an important conversation because most guys are good guys. What I was starting to see in this MeToo era, obviously great that women now have a platform and more safety to come forward with these things. That’s all great. The dark side of what I think you and I both saw happening with clients was men were like, well, I just want to– better safe than sorry.

Even if I don’t intend something, I don’t want to mentor women anymore or whatever and it’s like no, this is not an excuse guys to back away from professional relationships with women. Even more important now than ever you just got to be mindful and so we’re going to let Femily give us some tips today about what that looks like so that you can go back and feel comfortable doing what you’ve always done with high talent, high potential women, right?

Femily: Absolutely, yes. You’re right with the research. One in six male managers is now saying that they do hesitate to mentor junior females on their team, which is not only awful for those junior females, of course, but it’s also awful for business. Any business that is saying, well, we can’t really mentor this certain proportion of our employees, that’s not going to be the best business out there.

Shani: Absolutely, all right, let’s get right into it. I know you were telling me that when this was coming up you did a survey. A bunch of women and so just tell us a little bit about the survey and what the main takeaways were.

Femily: Absolutely. In early 2019 after I saw the research that said that some men were hesitating to mentor their junior colleagues, I pulled my San Francisco community and Silicon Valley community of ambitious and accomplished women, executive and junior women in the biggest international corporations, the fastest movie startups, the most interesting non-profits, entrepreneurship, education, healthcare rights. A wide spectrum of places.

The number one thing that I heard repeatedly from nearly all sectors is that it’s not just enough for men to not harass women. That’s certainly a great place to start obviously, but we’re talking to the guys here so they know this. They’re not going to be harassing women.

I kept hearing– I wish more of the good guys understood that it’s not enough to just think of yourself as a good guy because you know you definitely wouldn’t harass women. Now in this modern era we need the good guys in our offices to take action.

The kinds of actions that we’re talking about are simpler than you’d think, and they’re less of putting your neck out there than you’d think, but it still counts as a leadership. Some of those things are advocating for female colleagues who are doing great things in the office and saying, can Cherry co-lead this project with me. I’m really busy. She’s really awesome in this area. Can we both tackle this together?

Sponsoring junior women, suggesting women’s names when there are top talent who happen to be female, suggesting their step up projects that you see projects that lead to promotion. Something that can be trickier is bringing conversation back when people are interrupted. That shows that women get interrupted in meetings more than men. Guess what, women and men are the interrupters. It’s just that all of us are interrupting women more than we’re interrupting each.

When you hear someone get interrupted as a man in the office you can say, “Frank I loved your point, but can we also hear Miranda? I don’t think you were finished.” The more graceful you can be, the more light-hearted, the less it has to be an issue.

A couple more things that the women in the office said were, if you hear uncomfortable conversation starting about women’s bodies or sex or other topics that are not G-rated or aren’t necessarily going to make every man for that matter feel comfortable and feel like it’s a G-rated work conversation, just redirect the conversation back or add another topic to the conversation. If you’re in a group of six at dinner, maybe you don’t want to take the whole conversation into a new zone that would feel too much for you. Then just start talking to the person next to you about something totally else like weather, travel, books, sports, art, a theater or anything that’s a little bit more G-rated. Conversations people can take part in.

Shani: Which is a great strategy for inclusion in general?

Femily: Yes. If you hear a conversation and you don’t feel brave enough/safe enough to say, I’m not sure that’s what I’d agree with in terms of that group of people or something. If you can’t do that because it’s your boss, it’s your main funder, it’s your client, then starting a different conversation where you’re then not a part of that it’s like a notch down, but it can be very helpful.

Shani: Great. Advocating for women whether it’s for stretch assignments or promotions, making sure that if someone is interrupted that they respectfully bring it back and let that person finish the point. Redirecting or starting new conversations if it feels like the content is very shifted to one side or not G-rated. What else should the good guys be doing?

Femily: Another thing that happens to women in the workplace that men can really step up for, women often get assigned the office housekeeping stuff like party plan. Even can you circulate this card for Bill’s birthday and get everyone to sign it and add $12 or whatever. In an office corporate environment, people have to do those tasks that aren’t really going to lead to promotion, but that they’re like part of what makes the company warm and friendly and culturally. It more often falls on the shoulders of women. Can you setup for the party et cetera.

One thing that men can do is step up and make sure that they’re doing as much of that kind of note-taking calendaring social end of things because when they step in and do it, then it allows a woman to have 30 minutes more at her desk or with the client or pounding away at those deliverables that will lead to promotion.

Shani: There’s no harm in asking people to volunteer, but don’t just ask women. Ask a broad range of people, can you come half an hour early and help us set up.

Femily: Exactly. If you notice that it was just mainly women or mainly women, even just the same people and maybe it’s just your junior staff or whatever, they’re coming to do the set up, then you can always say, well I noticed Marsha, Tim, and Llewellyn set up. How about you Gary, Paul, and Phil can you cleanup? Also a great tip for family thanksgivings.

Shani: Exactly. If I do the cooking, you do the cleaning. Okay, fair enough. Share the responsibility, spread the responsibility among everybody for things that once upon a time were almost always directed to the females in the office. I love that.

Femily: Then there are some specific tips about listening, group dynamics, touch and what’s metaphor. Do you want me to mention a couple of those?

Shani: Yes. Let’s just have them all.

Femily: Let’s do it. Okay, great. I’m listening. Sometimes in the boardroom or in the meeting room, a woman will say an idea and then it won’t be really heard by her peers, and that’ll be made clear because two ideas later, someone will basically reframe her idea. Then someone a lot of times it’s a man or someone more senior will say, “That person’s just given a genius idea.” So kind of into the interrupting once a nice ally, male ally or a senior woman can often say “That’s genius, Larry. I see what you were picking up and building on what Maria said. It’s awesome. It sounds like there’s a lot of agreement in the room because Maria said it”, you said it, making sure the credit is there. 

It may sound a little egocentric that sometimes women fear that it’s a little egocentric, but here’s the thing. If you walk away from those meetings having delivered a brilliant idea that someone else essentially gets credits for. When it comes to promotion time or bonus time or any of those other critical career advancement times and you’re not remembered for someone who contributes those big ideas that get taken and snowballed, then you’re not going to get those juicy career advancements.

Shani: Yes, absolutely. Frankly, a lot of my female clients on the executive coaching side, and even side conversations that I’m having with professional women, businesspeople, and so forth, we talk about that. I always recommend that you don’t just share your idea. Share your idea with intentionality, with energy, with the kind of energy that other people will hear it with. Don’t lower your voice. Don’t use filler words. Don’t qualify your idea. Be bold, be strong, be passionate, and you’re much more likely to be heard.

Femily: Yes. Exactly. Absolutely. Don’t say things like, “I’m just spitballing here, or I’m thinking our loud, or this just came to me I’m not really sure about it.” It’s fine. We’re in a business–

Shani: “Perhaps, maybe this could be…” No, get rid of the qualifying language.

Femily: Yes, absolutely. Good. I’m with you. Yes, go ahead.

Shani: All right, no go ahead. I think there are a couple more things you want to note and then I want to talk specifically about mentoring because I think that’s a super important thing.

Femily: Okay, good. On giving advice. We all hear the phrase mansplaining. It’s an office workplace. We need to be able to give each other feedback and tell each other new things so that we can all learn and grow and become better and smarter, faster and more innovative. In order to make it not sound patronizing, just check first if the person knows that kind of thing. You could say, “Do you want me to tell you the background on this or do you know it already?” A lot of times the mansplaining stuff happens on things that are not necessarily work-related, so like someone starts explaining the whole history of Korea and the person’s like, “I’m literary from there bro.” [laughs] I would ask do you want my perspective on X or are you good? Ask that because you can offend a colleague, but you can also offend a client by mansplaining.

It can have real business ramifications if you don’t just check first and say like, “Have you read this book? Do you know the author I’m talking about? Do you know the scientists I’m referring to, blah, blah, blah.”

Shani: 100%. I love that. Good tip. All right, so let’s get into this whole topic on what do men need to make sure they are doing and not doing when they mentor? What’s changed since MeToo?

Femily: Sure. I keep hearing this from well-meaning men who are in my audiences when I go to speak to all-male leadership at tech companies. They say things like, “You do know that the MeToo movement is dividing people in the workplace and that men no longer want to be alone with a woman for fear of getting in trouble.” I’m just putting that out there so we know we’re directly talking about that. They believe this too.

They believe that figuring out how to mentor junior women is critical. It’s critical for business reasons like you have to mentor all of your rising stars or you’re going to leave some of them in the dust which is not for your business. Also, in terms of women when they’re mentored by men, they make more money. They receive more promotions and they report greater satisfaction with their career trajectories. That’s a Harvard Business stat.

Because there’s now that world of fear, there are some new recommendations. Your listeners should take what resonates and leave the rest. We have very unique core cultures out there, very unique humans out there. Take what resonates and leave the rest. You’re dealing with a spectrum of risk here and so you definitely want to take what feels right to you. The main thing underlying all these questions are what if I unintentionally caused sexual harassment or what if I get falsely accused. Let’s just deal with that right up front and then go into the subtler like how should you mentor women, right?

Shani: Great.

Femily: The fact is you’re not going to unintentionally cause sexual harassment. If you think about any of the Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, any of the people you’ve read about in the paper over the past couple of years, those are not subtle things you wouldn’t know you’re doing. Those are horrib–

Shani: Those are not misinterpretations.

Femily: No, those are not gray area. Those are very clear. You know they are explicit. They are extreme. They are repeated. They are well beyond the gray area. You would definitely know. Also, those folks were not worried about if they were going to be misinterpreted. If you’re already worried, it’s not going to be you. You’re already one of the good guys, but also [sound cut] what if someone accuses me falsely. I get it that it’s terrifying. That would have ramifications for your reputation, your career, your income, your spouse et cetera, right?

Shani: Yes.

Femily: Lucky news is it’s incredibly unlikely. The incidence of fraudulent reporting of sexual harassment and sexual assault are .05 in that range of time. What we do know is that men are much likely to be the victim of sexual assault and sexual harassment than to be falsely accused of it.

Shani: Interesting. Let’s actually say that again, I think that’s going to be news to a lot of people.

Femily: Men are more likely to be the victim of sexual harassment, so to be sexually harassed themselves in the workplace by someone else, by a male boss or by a female boss or to be the victim of sexual assault than to be falsely accused of it.

Shani: Interesting. It makes me think of the silly movie Bad Bosses where Jennifer Aniston played- I think she was a dentist or something and she was harassing her male employee. Which also happens, and so listen if whoever’s listening to this, I think these tips are going to transcend direction, right?

Femily: Yes. The other thing to be aware of if you’re still thinking about what if I’m falsely accused of a crime or something. Men are 14 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than of sexual assault. If you want to get a wrongful conviction, just start focusing on murder because you’re 14 times more likely. It’s basically unlikely. It’s causing one out of six men to be scared to mentor women, but it barely ever happens. It’s time to mentor women.

They deserve it and you deserve not to be scared of it anymore. The other number thing that I will drop here is, it’s somewhere in the range of three-quarters to 81% of women experience sexual harassment in some form throughout their career. Well, you as the good men out there are far more likely to need the answer to how can I help a female colleague who’s been sexually harassed or a colleague of any gender who’s been sexually harassed than the question of what do I do if I’m falsely accused.

Speaking of that, what do you do? This is an environment where many women are experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace. They are turning to a lot of these good guys in the workplace to say, “This happened to me. What do I do?” It’s important to be a good guy in an office. You have to get this part right. It can be a heavy topic and it’s always disturbing to hear that someone has been through something like sexual harassment or actually someone close to you.

First of all, know that it takes a lot of courage for someone in the workplace to bring this up at all, especially to another colleague. You as one of the good guys is to thank her for telling you and for being so open. Don’t press for details, just let her tell you what she wants to. Don’t question her truthfulness or her perspective unless you’re her HR manager or the in-house counsel or the manager, in which case your company has rules about what you’re supposed to do when someone tells you about sexual harassment.

If it’s your pal at work that’s telling you about this, your only job is to support her. It’s not to get to the bottom of it. It’s not a problem to solve it for her. It’s to reassure her that it’s not her fault if that comes up. She may not think it’s her fault, so you don’t need to bring the fault thing up unless she’s asking if you think it’s her fault. Good phrases for this type of thing are like, “That’s really awful. I’m so sorry. That should have never happened. How can I help you, how gross. Thank you for telling me. Whatever you decide to do, I have your back.” Those kinds of supportive statements are the ones that someone’s looking for when they have or there’s a workplace situation.

Shani: If the woman’s afraid to go to HR if you’re the man in that situation and someone’s confided in you, do you encourage them, push them to go to HR, should you go to HR on their behalf?

Femily: No, definitely not going on their behalf because that’s again like another consent issue, right. She’s already had a violation in some form related to consent and just related to her power in the workplace. Let her determine her path. She’s obviously going to be wondering, should I go should I not go, and if you want to be a thought partner in that, but I don’t recommend that men who were just being come to be a thought partner and shoulder that they start advocating for what should happen. Only she knows how much of a risk she wants to take with her career, her personal finance, situation at home, her job stability situation. How quickly she can get another job, how badly she needs this one. Like how much stress she’s willing to incur at a certain point in her life based on the rest of the stuff that’s going on in her life, et cetera.

Shani: Sure. Right, gosh you just rattled off a litany of considerations that not everybody would know to think about as they’re being empathetic.

Femily: No, sure, yes.

Shani: Because I think people’s knee jerk reaction is, “Oh you have to report that.” Certainly in an ideal world, in either work environment when there’s psychological safety, and there’s a history of HR being supportive and all that sort of stuff, you probably are much more inclined to do that. But unfortunately not all companies are woke that way.

Femily: I think you’re asking, should I go to HR, it could be a sign that your company is not that ready right that you said about your culture because otherwise you’d be like, “That person’s a nightmare. I’m going to HR where it’s safe and welcoming and I will not be retaliated against.” It seems more like an easy path if you have that safe environment like you’re describing.

Shani: Right, good. Going back to the mentoring thing, you gave us the statistics which are super compelling, so man you’re 14 times more likely to be falsely accused of murder than sexual harassment. I called bullshit if you’re saying you don’t feel comfortable mentoring more junior women anymore.

Femily: There’s a few tips that can make it a little more easy, so how do I make sure it doesn’t veer into something more, right? That she doesn’t get the wrong idea, et cetera. There’s a lot of reasons people get into mentoring, so you might want to mentor all of your rising stars because as a leader that’s your job and you get it, right? So they could be that. A lot of workplaces now do you have a women’s mentoring initiative or rising junior women are assigned to senior mentors of any gender. Or maybe a junior woman who’s on your team has specifically asked you to be their mentor or has started asking you questions that are mentor-like, you’re clearly entering into a mentor relationship.

To keep it professional, basically the human brain works in a way where there’s a give-and-take expected when you have a relationship with someone, a professional relationship, someone who is doing work for you or in a friendship or anything. People seek out this mutually beneficial equilibrium, so the junior woman is going to get business mentoring from you, right? Then the question is like what are you getting from her? If it fulfills you business-wise to be mentoring your team then that’s something, but to make sure that you’re not accidentally slipping into looking for flirtation or like validation that can get into a slippery slope. You’re going to work concretely like what’s something that this young person, this rising star can bring to you that’s going to feel as professional as the businesses that she’s looking for and as needy, right.

Some of these kinds of things can be a lot of my– I’m thinking of my senior executive males in tech. Some of them are learning a lot about an audience that they’re making an app for. They’re running a tech company and it’s for a younger consumer audience maybe Gen Zs or millennials. They are learning about a certain culture more just by being in the presence of this younger person. Sometimes, it could be more of a hobby thing. Someone is from a different part of the world and the senior mentor likes to travel and learns a lot about this person who has an international background, and that’s deeply interesting to them. It can be that they have their finger on the hottest spots to eat in your town and that’s invigorating to you. Just pick out a thing so that you know what the give-and-take is and it’s more clear to you.

Shani: Right, think of it in terms of reverse mentoring.

Femily: Yes, exactly. Right, in fact I know one senior executive who is calling it that also, and maybe they listen to the LeaderShift podcast. [laughs] They’re getting millennial mentored. They are in their late sixties and they’re getting millennial mentored. They asked their technology like their outside of work technology questions, like how do I find this thing on Twitter, and what’s the difference between using Twitter for this, and LinkedIn for this?

Shani: My kid’s on this thing called TikTok now, how do I get on it, right?

Femily: Is it good? What should I be afraid of? What should know, yes, those kinds of things can be very helpful and can balance it out a little bit.

Shani: Okay. Terrific so make sure that when trying to achieve that equilibrium of a give-and-take relationship, that there’s nothing to be misconstrued.

Femily: Absolutely and to further help that misconstruing don’t do it over drinks, don’t do your mentoring over drinks. Keep your mentoring this works differently for different cultures obviously like I know that you’ve come from finance and that’s pretty big on meeting over drinks and so are certain forms of consulting and different business ones. But meeting– yes go ahead.

Shani: I was just going to say I’m going to Korea next week to do a workshop and in advance of that I asked some of my local contacts over there what do I need to be sensitive to in the Korean business environment and the way people negotiate and develop relationships and so forth. I got some really great tips around that, and they said that one of the ways that they bond over there even professionally is by going to do karaoke together. [laughs]

Femily: Right so yes, you bring up a very interesting point which is like there are some company cultures and national cultures where there’s a very specific way of bonding with business and so what’s happening in this new MeToo era is a lot of women are being left out of those opportunities where you’re with the high-profile clients, you’re doing the easy trust-building bonding at karaoke, for example, or at the chosen Steakhouse at 9:00 PM. right, or whatever, and so that is leaving out women. There are a few shifts that are happening in the American workforce for sure which a lot of male bosses are switching to either power lunches because that has– lunch has less of a romantic feeling, and same linking feeling for many industries and then also breakfast, power breakfasts.

Things that are taking– they’re taking a lot of business by storm and they’re really picking up pace. The important part there is that you do the same mentoring for your junior male employees as your junior female employees. If you feel uncomfortable doing one-on-one drinks with female employees at 10:00 PM, don’t do it with male employees either, because then you’re creating an inequity. That’s one of the tips. Make sure that all of your meetings have a very specific purpose. If a junior employee throws a meeting on your calendar that says like, Thursday drinks or something. I can say, what are the agenda items for this meeting, and then change the name and the calendar to like a mentoring session with Tea Smith as opposed to drinks.

Keep it like that and then also when you go– if you do have to go to a restaurant, even the lunch restaurant or the power breakfast restaurant. Like restaurants are created to be romantic and to bring that out like that’s who they assume is going there. That’s their like client number one so waiters it’s very awkward to be out at a business meeting with someone of the opposite sex and then have a waiter think that it’s a date. Bring a notepad, bring your computer, and put it on the table. Like bring something that is not date-ish that’s a busy thing and have it on the table to say nothing of obviously where your business outfit but like sometimes people still think that it’s a date for sure.

Shani: Right, good and what about, let’s take it even further. Men and women have to take business trips together. I think about– I can’t even count the number of times when I was a junior and when I was an analyst and associate at Goldman when my VP or partner were almost all men and so I’d be the only woman traveling with either a group of men or one man. Of course we don’t want women to not be staffed on out of town clients because men want to avoid that.

Femily: No. I agree. Keeping as many business things around while you’re doing that is really important because anytime someone else assumes that you’re on a date, it creates a weird vibe that then you’re battling uphill against that vibe. Perhaps at the other person they might get the wrong impression. Perhaps within yourself, you might get the wrong impression. There’s a lot of ways this could kind of go wrong.

With traveling, it’s really just if you break it down into micro bits of what the steps are, you’re sharing an Uber together. Make sure you’re talking business talk, quickly curb any conversation that seems like it’s going to be any of those not G-rated conversations that we had before. Sometimes I’ll slip into that when they’re traveling because they want to blow off steam and not have– it’s a natural impulse they want to have not to work on the brain 24/7. Choose work topics, the outside of work topics like sports, like travel that are more of a G-rated topic.

Once you open the door of talking about sexy, romantic dating topics with someone of the opposite sex who’s in a different power differential, it can snowball.

Shani: Absolutely.

Femily: There are always those creeps that are going to snowball it anyway. I’m just talking about trying to just– two good people trying not to get into a creepy situation or try not to have a dating spark fly in the midst of a business situation.

Shani: Absolutely. Okay. Terrific. I’ve got a couple of other social situations to throw out there and just get your best advice. Hugs.

Femily: Oh, I love it.

Shani: Okay. Listen, hugs, it’s not like we have people come into the office and hug all the time, but let’s say, it’s a holiday party. It’s a work holiday party and is it appropriate to hug and kiss on the cheek or if you’re European, the kiss on both cheeks when– and your female, either employees or even your counterparts are coming in that sort of thing.

Femily: I would say– so for the good guys out there, it’s again a spectrum of risk so manage your spectrum of risk, how you feel most comfortable. The best advice I ever give is to stay out of that gray area game, right? We all know those colleagues who are well-loved and they don’t get meshed in that gray area, like a kiss at the holiday party, blah, blah, blah. The most important thing here is really about the genders.

Don’t touch the ladies at work or treat them physically in a way that you wouldn’t treat the men. If you are giving hugs and kisses to the ladies at work, you better give hugs and kisses to the men at work. If you wouldn’t hug a male colleague for 10 seconds at the holiday party or if you wouldn’t touch his lower back as you scoot by him in the coffee area, then don’t do that to a woman if you wouldn’t–

The number of women who’ve told me that they’ve had their thighs pinched under the table because the man next to them thought he was showing enthusiasm for a project or calling her attention to like a weird thing to other teams said on the other side of the table. If you wouldn’t do that to a male colleague– grab a male colleague’s thigh under the table, then don’t do it on a female colleague.

Here are some best safe bets for to still be a great comrade, to have that comradery, to have that holiday spirit or whatever. I mean a handshake can be fun and enthusiastic, right? You can do smiles, cheers, right? A fist bump, a high five like telling someone they’re great, like giving a compliment as your handshaking. There’s a million ways to have a festive happy, a friendly PG or G-related interaction with a worker, but keep that gender balance because once you treat women differently, it’s going off into that gray area.

Shani: Absolutely. Okay. The hugs and any touching really make sure you’re doing it equally across gender. If you’re just a touchy person, people aren’t going to misconstrue it nearly as frequently if you’re grabbing men by the shoulder and women by the shoulder, just as part of like you’re excited for example. If you’re a person who isn’t self-aware about personal boundaries, that’s another podcast. [laughs]

Femily: Yes. As we all know, we’re not in an Even Stevens society yet where it’s actually perceived as the same to do the shoulder rub to the men and shoulder up to the women because we’re in this world where 80% of women do have sexual harassment in the workplace history. You’re coming into that shoulder rub having had maybe one of those before that meant, “I need you to accept the shoulder rub or I’m going to fire you, et cetera.” All of those different things so it doesn’t feel the same to women.

I would say back off and just treat women great, but not physical.

Shani: Yes. Got it. How about just like run-of-the-mill compliments? I’m guessing that women probably get them more than men like, “Oh, that’s a lovely dress or beautiful shoes or your hair looks great today.” I know I give those kinds of compliments to men and women.

Femily: Yes. Which is where you’re going right because the quality of it all puts you in this other category of you’re just a complimenter.

Shani: Yes, I consider myself a stylish person and I notice when someone is well put together regardless of their gender or other orientations and I guess I’m sort of asking is for me and my listeners, should we just stop complimenting anything that isn’t a business achievement or– is it okay to still say, “I like your shirt or I like your tie.”

Femily: Yes. It definitely depends again on how much risk you want to acquire. If you want to be bulletproof, then obviously only talk about business, right? If you want to have-

Shani: Then you’re just boring AF.

Femily: If you want to have a culturally warm environment where people feel good. The point here is for you to feel good and for people to feel good. I’m trying to help you not say weird things to make people feel bad, right? Here’s the thing. Yes, of course, to say to someone, “Great report, good presentation,” that’s awesome. If you want to veer off more into compliments beyond work, definitely stick to those again that are not gendered.

If you wouldn’t tell a man– here’s two things that a man has said to me in the past year that I doubt he’s saying to men. He said, “You look a lot of fun outside the office.” It definitely isn’t anyone I’m not that excited about it’s– and someone said your spouse is one lucky person and that it’s just like a little– it gave me the creeps because it clearly was about romance and he was not going to be saying that to the men in his office. 

Shani: Then how about– let’s just go there because I have so many friends, men and women who have met their partners at work. We couldn’t finish this podcast without at least touching upon like, “Hey, what if you’re interested in someone you work with, someone you work for, someone who works for you,” what are all the dynamics there?

Femily: Let’s see. What’s true is a lot of people do meet their sweetheart in the office and so there’s a huge percentage of married people and that’s where they work. It’s true that that’s the case. It’s definitely not without loads of risk and awkwardness if it doesn’t work out. Here’s the truth. Make sure that if you are going to ask someone out in the office, it’s more on the life partner potential.

Like really run them through some rubrics in your mind of like, “Is this a life potential partner?” Because if they’re just a cutie, you want to like go on some dates but you’d never marry a person like that or whatever, then just go find a lovely person in yoga or on Tinder or wherever. Don’t go into the office looking, don’t get someone in the office for that but if you’re like, “This person might be my actual partner,” while you really like them. First of all, if they’re your peer in the company, way better than if they’re not. If either of you is the boss of each other or whatever.

Shani: Yes, the power dynamic often creates challenges.

Femily: Situations. Yes, like a power dynamic. Obviously to ask them out soon before either of you gets promoted into each other’s boss. You have took in the company guide that says either you’re not allowed to date your colleagues. In higher ed, there’s a lot of that, professors can’t date each other, can’t take grades. Definitely understand what your company says about that. 

Here’s the important part, ask her out or ask them out, ask the person out at work very clearly and only– because you only get one time to ask the person out. If you ask more than once you’re going into this sort of repetitive creep factor harassment blah, blah, blah. Instead of saying something like, “Hey, do you want to get drinks and talk about spreadsheets,” or something where it’s murky, is that work, is that a date? Ask specifically something like “I don’t want this to be awkward and if you say no I’ll never mention it again but I’m starting to feel like we might have a potential good dating vibe here do you want to, can I take you to dinner? If you say no it’s totally fine and I’ll never mention it again. I might blush with embarrassment for a couple of weeks but after that, I’ll be fine.” That’s a very clear ask. If the answer is no, very much move on. If the answer is yes, look at your company guide to see what that says.

Shani: A lot of companies, I mean some companies forbid it outright but I think a lot of companies just have rules about you can’t work in the same business unit and like I even have a really good friend I used to work with who started dating a guy who, you know, joined our group not long after that and they went to HR and one of them had to move to a different group just so they weren’t working directly together because that is conflict of interest and wouldn’t you know, they ended up getting married, they have two kids and happily ever after.

Femily: I love it. Yeah.

Shani: Yeah. I guess it’s true. You don’t want to like not go there if you really do think like this could be my soul mate.

Femily: Right if you think it’s that serious don’t stop yourself but don’t marinate on it either because you’re being creepy even if you don’t know it. Like just the minute you think this I might need to go on a date with this person. They might be my soul mate, just ask them like it’s not gonna get better the longer you lurk around their desk, and on the other hand the one thing I also will say about chivalry in the office. 

If you think you want to date someone, date someone who’d be a chivalrous, feels like the chivalry of your heart outside of the office. Don’t bring chivalry into the office for other people basically because bringing up chivalry that’s really like a way of men treating women in a certain way that distinguishes them from other men and in the like pulling out women’s chairs in a boardroom, letting women exit the elevator first in a business context, walking on the out– men walking on the outside of the sidewalk for a female colleague or opening doors for women. 

If you’re opening doors for men and women great or if you’re opening doors for people who have their hands full obviously that’s great but if you’re just doing it for women, it comes from the world of them being the weaker sex when we work in the workplace alongside you in the boardroom, and it introduces a genderly way of interacting that most often flows into genderly notions of who should be promoted, genderly notions of who should get the stretch projects, genderly notions of who should give the tricky speech to the high acting client.

Shani: Yes. Funny I interviewed a woman on this podcast, gosh, last year at some point and she’s a restaurant consultant in New York City. She has managed the back of the house for lots of big restaurants and lots of famous chefs in New York City and now she’s got her own consulting business. We were talking about one of the ways that restaurants are training their wait staff now is to not always presume that the woman’s going to order first like because that’s another piece of chivalry and I hadn’t thought about it but I was like oh yes that’s really interesting and so newly trained wait staffs at top restaurants now are not defaulting to asking the woman first what she wants.

Femily: That’s great. I never even realized that. That’s interesting therefore here’s a new tip hot off the press is if you’re out on a business outing with a man who is your peer, just a man in your workplace and the waiter comes and asks you the woman to order first, be like I’m still looking. He can order and it’s like it upsets the gender applecart a little that it’s not that “datey” atmosphere. You can do that. It is definitely much more helpful.

Shani: Good. Well, super. Thank you for sharing all of these valuable tips around what to do if you’re a good guy in this era of MeToo. Folks, just a couple of summary points here take action if you’re a man that you know even if you’re not so it might not be a sin of commission, there still could be sins of omission if you’re not standing up for what you see as inequality in the workplace. If you’re not redirecting folks who have been interrupted of any gender, if you’re not redirecting conversations from places that might seem to be more R-rated or beyond back to G or PG focuses. Give people the benefit of the doubt that they know things instead of going right into mansplaining. All of these things, continuing to advocate for all of your talented people including your high potential women. Don’t not do those things now, please. It’s more important than ever now to advocate for anybody who’s talented regardless of what the walk of life is.

Please don’t stop mentoring, right? It’s a business imperative to continue to mentor women and just use your common sense. Keep it professional and I love it’s a good best practice that if you wouldn’t say or do that with a man then don’t do or say that with a woman whom you’re mentoring. Another thing that I’ve said to people is you know what, if you wouldn’t want your daughter or your wife or your sister spoken to or treated that way then don’t do it to a woman in the workplace. To me, that’s another way to conceptualize what may be right and what may be inappropriate. Support women who come to you if they’ve been harassed. Don’t push them but be supportive. Have their back and of course keep it confidential, and last but not least with hugs and touching and restaurants and all that stuff again just use your common sense if you’re going to do things, do things equally and don’t just single out women because you think that that’s the way it’s always been done.

Femily: Right. As I tell my clients just take the of these that we’ve talked about today that fit your personality and your organizational culture and then maybe challenge yourself to do some of the ones that felt a little trickier and just try them on for size because that’s part of the growth, that’s where the learning happens, right. In my experience the women who I surveyed in my survey about the good guys they all said we’re not expecting the good guys to be perfect or immediately flawless; we’re just expecting them to help us create that inclusive and fair atmosphere to get in the trenches with us and to work at it with us as we figure it out together.

Shani: Absolutely because three-quarters to 80% of women having been harassed in the workplace is not okay, right? Do you happen to know off the top of your head what this like statistic is for men being harassed in the workplace just out of curiosity?

Femily: It’s in the below 10%. Yes.

Shani: Yes, not okay and I would love to 20 years from now be having this conversation and hear that there’s more parody that you– because there’s always going to be the inappropriate idiots– but 20 years from now or sooner I’d love to be able to get on a podcast with you and say, gosh, look at all the progress we’ve made but since 2019, now only some single-digit number of women are being harassed in the workplace. God wouldn’t that be wonderful.

Femily: Right. Like the same number of women and men who get their wallets stolen by a colleague in the workplace. Just a small like someone’s going to do a bad thing in the office like, but I want it to be that kind of weird low not expected number, not a universal experience.

Shani: Yes, absolutely. Okay. If people have other questions or want to bring you in to help them with gender and inclusion in the workplace, how can they reach you?

Femily: You can find me at my website which is femilyonthego.com. 

Shani: Love the creativity behind that. Thank you for joining us again today. This is so valuable and so critically important, and Leadershifters, you know how to reach me [email protected] and all the various social media platforms and let’s hear from you like if you have a question shoot it to me and if I don’t think I know the answer that Femily would give you, I’ll troubleshoot it with her on your behalf.

Femily: Perfect. Happy to help.

Shani: Until next time, have a good one and mwah, and that kiss is directed to everyone equally.

Femily: I love it!

The post 38: Tips for “The Good Guys” in the #MeToo Era with Femily appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.

Today, I’m joined by a forward-thinking CMO for an interesting discussion of Culture = Brand and vice versa. After a successful career at Motorola and other B2C telecos, Brian Mehta joined Trading Technologies to help SHIFT the brand and strategic direction of this B2B company in need of reinvention. Our discussion ranges from formulating a new vision and set of operating principles and growing from a one-trick-pony trading platform to a full stack operating system across capital markets to the important role that great culture plays in preserving the brand in compliance-heavy industries like financial services. Always a sucker for a memorable mnemonic, I’m a huge fan of their 3 C’s for winning brands: Craft (your product), Communication, and Culture – which tells us that most businesses are actually B2P: Business 2 People.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 37: The 3 C’s for Winning Brands with Trading Technologies CMO, Brian Mehta

Shani: Brian’s joining us from Chicago. You guys can see a little bit the sun setting over. I think that’s the Sears Tower, now known as the Willis Tower, where I worked briefly for a couple of years. Brian, to start us off, tell our listeners and watchers a little bit about your background and what brought you to Trading Technologies.

Brian: I had always been working for technology in telecom companies most of my whole career, primarily in the consumer space, did some dents at SBC Ameritech/AT&T, Motorola, US cellular, and really did a lot of consumer marketing, big TV commercials, big budgets, all that kind of stuff. Quite honestly, after doing it for quite some time, got a little stuck, not my career but just stuck in terms of doing the same thing over and over again. I think that happens to a lot of people, but instead of just grinding it out, I knew I had to make a change. I was fortunate enough to always have good networking skills, as well as just a great network.

It so happened that befriended a CTO at a company called Trading Technologies. That CTO eventually became CEO. Our friendly conversations and our social interactions eventually became more business type questions, and all of a sudden, it’s like, “Hey, I’m trying to change this company, trying to transform this company, I really could use your help,” did not have much of the capital markets finance experience, obviously had a load of marketing experience and great transferable skills and Ricks reclaim the CEO, he also knew that there was enough domain expertise in the company, but really needed some strong market and communication skills to bring and reinvigorate the company.

Shani: So great. I love that you made the shift. You’re bored in your career. A lot of people would just stay bored, or make a move that is only slightly less boring. Instead, you made a shift to a different kind of challenge. I love that.

Brian: I think a fundamental shift sometimes is really important because, as I said, you could get stuck, and then you could almost your skills and your enthusiasm, and your drive can start to wear down and diminish. When you have made your shift, that forces you to sharpen up again, and that’s what I was doing. When I joined the company, every time I came home, I was so tired because I was absorbing so much new things, learning so much new things. It was great.

Shani: Before I ask you some more questions about my typical culture and how you’ve integrated that in, let’s just give listeners a bit of a sense of what Trading Technologies does. If you don’t mind, even just a little quick one on one on what futures are, because a lot of my followers are finance people like I used to be, but a lot of them are not.

Brian: Trading Technologies, we’re 25 years old. Actually, the company was really the pioneer in terms of bringing electronic trading to be what we are now.

Shani: You guys are responsible for lower margins on Wall Street. [laughs]

Brian: I think folks would say responsible for faster, more efficient markets and trading, but–

Shani: Totally. I was just joking, wearing my former buys or such sell-side trading floor hat. Sorry. [laughs]

Brian: One of the nice things is, a lot of individuals from the floor came to join the company because there’s a lot of experience, not just really knowing the markets, knowing how traders think, and what are the tools that will help traders translate the bit trading into efficient electronic trading. That was what we were doing for 20 years, is really delivering the market leading execution platforms, how to trade the best, how to develop spread training, how to trade different markets across globally, across the different product sets. We were doing that for about 20 years.

I should say, about six years ago, we thought, “How are we going to survive the next 20 years? We can no longer just be an execution trading platform that was installed at the customer premise.” We made the shift to develop a new platform that had software as a service as the delivery mechanism, lengthened our global network. Now we have not only a trade execution platform that is flexible to trade futures, as well as fixed income options and cryptocurrency where the platform is flexible to add new products, and eventually future products that we could integrate into the platform. Like, and we’ll probably talk more about this, surveillance, machine learning tools to help with compliance and surveillance traits.

Shani: Absolutely. Park that one, because I definitely want to come back to it. Walk us back to what you walked into at trading technologies, because you were brought on to reinvigorate the company, transform the company. What was the challenge? What did you do, and what were the results? [laughs]

Brian: Almost like an analogy to my career, the company had been successful for a long, long time, but the company was a little stuck. Me and the leadership team wanted to do some transformational change. The transformational change was at all levels. We’d like to call it three C’s, our craft, our communication, and our culture. The craft is our product, and we need it to make influential change. I articulated that we went from an old platform to a software as a service platform, as well as offer new products. We had it not only change the product, but people that were developing that product.

When you change out what people do, how they do it skill sets, as well as the direction of the company, you have to be so vigilant in communicating, communicating internally, as well as externally. That was another key in terms of transforming the company. Instead of saying, “Hey, we’re doing everything that we’ve always done, and a lot of things were, I would say, not secretive, but just people were not aware. Bringing that out to the forefront, I think empowered people as we were making these changes. What you have, as a result of greater communication and transparency, is a strengthening of a culture.

TT has always had a strong culture in its DNA, and that was employees working hard for each other, as well as the client. That didn’t go away. That’s still a great piece of the culture, but what we had to do was take it into the next stage of this transformational thinking. Pushing it away from, hey, we do what we’ve always done, to say, “No, we’re going to be doing things different, faster, quicker, thinking more like a fintech startup versus a software company.

Shani: I love your three Cs. I want to pause on that for a second and just make sure those who are listening wrote that down. You guys know me, I love shortcuts to remember things. Of course, in marketing, there’s the four Ps; product, price, place promotion. Now we’ve got the three Cs of really a success for any business. I like the simplification of; craft, what’s your product? Communication, which is so often one of the key missing pieces, the communication is incomplete, inefficient or not transparent. Those two things help form the culture, as well as some intentionality. As you’ve started to hear from me, as you’ve gotten to know me, one of my missions is to get everyone at the executive level to take culture and move it up to the same level as strategy. They have to meet, because if culture is somewhere else buried in HR, then the company will never create the environment in which people want to deliver on the brand promise. That’s something you and I were starting to talk about before we went live here. Let me just tee that up for you in terms of culture is brand, brand promise, et cetera. What’s your take on that, your philosophy?

Brian: Absolutely. When I joined, it was an intentional thing to do this transformation for the brand, and combining that with culture. My comment is, the brand is your promise. The promises, everything that you say and do and believe, that’s culture. When I joined, it was an intentional thing to make sure marketing communications was a part of the strategy, part of the development of where we are going. I mentioned to you before coming on, the first year, the CEO, CTO and I met every day for at least an hour. We were developing strategy. One of the first things was, how do we codify our principals and our vision? Developing those things is a foundation for the brand, in the foundation that we are sharing with our employees so that they could then bring that to our clients.

Those were things that had to be accomplished at the first year of joining the company. That set the foundation for how we transform our craft, how we do better jobs of communicating internally, as well as externally, and then also reinvigorating the culture. Reinvigorating the culture was everything from, more transparent meetings, more communication, and not only doing that at headquarters, but getting out to our remote locations. FaceTime globally, we would have what we called, what’s on tap. It’s these all hand company meetings. We really didn’t have those before I joined, maybe once a year. We ramp those up because as we were doing all these changes, we felt like we had to inform people on what was going on. We started to infuse some fun in these meetings. We also said, “Let’s take these meetings on the road.” We went to London, we went to Singapore, we went to Sydney to get those employees involved in the messaging, and believing in the direction of where we were going. All these things happening were overwhelmingly welcomed.

Shani: [coughs] I’m so sorry about this cough. My allergies are really bad right now. Suddenly right in the middle of this, they came on really strong. I’m sorry for everyone who’s listening, and sorry for coughing while you’re talking, but I’m listening intently.

Brian: I think it was key to not just get people at the headquarters onboard, but it was to get everyone globally onboard. There is great things like Zoom and Google Hangouts, but nothing is better than face-to-face interactions. We were able to, as a management team, reach out to our employees around the globe, as well as clients, and just get them aligned with where we were going. That has really helped in terms of our business and not setting the groundwork for not just the vision, but for actually implementing the things that we wanted to do.

Shani: What you’ve just described to me sounds like a roadshow. People think, “Oh, companies go on roadshows if they’re doing an IPO or a secondary offering. I love the idea of a company just going on a roadshow to communicate to internal and external audiences about what’s happening at the company.

Brian: As important, you could do the initial roadshow, but you can’t just stop there, you have to be consistent. I still travel around the globe meeting with our employees, as well as customers, just to reinforce what we’re doing, just to keep the engagement going, because it’s great that you do this kick off and everyone gets excited, but then if you hear crickets for the next several quarters, then it could be maybe just false promises. It could be, “Oh, we did this thing and let’s move on to the next thing.” I think the consistency is really important, and by doing that, it reinforces it and keeps everyone engaged.

Shani: What is the vision and principles that you guys landed on, if you don’t mind sharing?

Brian: The vision is, to be the operating system of capital markets. That’s a pretty heady goal, right?

Shani: Yeah.

Brian: It’s basically saying we want to be everywhere, every touch point, where the capital markets flow through happens. Starting as just a trade execution platform, it is pretty ambitious, but we are definitely making steps toward that. As I was mentioning to you earlier, our clients are really seeking that out. With vendor consolidation, cost consolidation, they are looking for partners that can do more than just one thing. Being in the operating system of capital markets, I think that’s a great goal to have. We may never ever fully get there. We are definitely taking steps toward that, as I mentioned with offering more trade execution products, doing it within our culture as a service, and then data as a product set. Those three, as we call them, pillars of our business, lines of business, that’s getting us towards being more of a fully stacked tech company for capital markets.

Shani: Absolutely. I love that. Listen, go big or go home. The vision should be something that’s a stretch, right?

Brian: Yes. What does Google say about the moonshots. I think that is very applicable to a lot of businesses, is go for that moonshot.

Shani: Google wants a vision that essentially translates to, let’s be mediocre, let’s aim for, okay.

Brian: I think sometimes we have to remind ourselves, the moonshot is out there, and everyday is little steps. You can’t just hit moonshots every day. Don’t be disappointed that you’re just making incremental steps, because those are so critical to building eventual–

Shane: Exactly, that’s what keeps people motivated day in and day out to do somethings that might seem repetitive or not very gratifying in the moment, but when they’re putting it in the context of that big moonshot kind of vision, it becomes a lot more palatable.

Brian: Yes, for sure.

Shane: Let’s talk about some of the things that you guys have done to reach this full-stack capacity, among which, and this is going to take us on two tangents, was an acquisition to get you into the surveillance business. First, tell us about the acquisition, and before we talk about sort of the compliance piece and what that brings you, let’s talk about how you went about bringing the acquired employees and leadership into the TT culture.

Brian: A couple of years ago, we acquired a startup company called Neurensic, and they had some really great technology. It was machine learning, artificial intelligence-driven surveillance tools, and compliance tools. They had a really good technology that could get to almost a scoring system of how trade activities are within the right zone of compliance, and using machine learning to really be an iterative process, because there’s always new rulings and new information from the CFTC. It’s an ever-changing environment. That we thought was having a dynamic tool would really serve our client base for both traders, as well as risk administrators.

When we acquired them, although it was a small company, I think the key is whether it’s a huge acquisition or small acquisition, and when I say big or large in terms of personnel, it’s really important that, obviously you’re welcoming, it’s really important to make sure that the individuals feel like they’re quickly integrated. I think as we had already gone through our transformational journey, all these things, whether it’s the mission or the principles or the culture or the fun aspect of things or the global aspect of things, those were already in place, so all we had to do was, we had these various, I would call them brand books, and say, “Hey, here’s a brand book. Let’s sit down and talk about it.” I think the other aspect where maybe we were lucky is, the individuals that came on board really gravitated to that. It was a good fit from the culture. Immediately they were, I think seeking out that part of an organization that had things already moving in the right direction, but also really dynamic in terms of the workplace, the client base, as well as the employee base. Things were buzzing.

Shane: I love that you guys acquired a company that you already knew was going to be a good fit for your culture, because I think that a lot of times people when they’re looking at targets, they don’t even think about that, and then it can become a big cluster.

Brian: I don’t want to oversell it. I think we did our due diligence. We met people that we thought would be good fit, but when the day is done, once the ink is signed, you still don’t really know what you get until you have it. I think we were a bit lucky too and I think that goes into it with any acquisition, you do need a little luck from a culture standpoint, and yes, you are taking some risks, but again, it goes back to well, sometimes you have to take risks.

Shane: Yes. Well, luck along with your intentionality of what you would already been doing with your existing people, bringing that to the new folks. Really great words of advice for anyone who is looking at acquiring or merging with another company to, like in your due diligence, at least get a sense of what the other culture is like, and how people think and how they perform and what they do when times are tough, right? When things are good and people are performing, that’s one thing, but what’s the fabric of the culture when things get tough, is a really important thing to try and understand in the due diligence process.

Brian: As the acquiring company, if you’re in that position, you have to take culture into account. If there are individuals that are not the right fit culturally, even if we may be excel on the technical aspects, you have to weigh those and determine if that’s what you want. There were some technical folks that were more consultants versus, “Hey, we want to bring them on fully into the company.” because goals were different, right?

Shane: Yes, absolutely.

Brian: Those have to play in a factor of your due diligence, as well as making some tough decisions when acquiring not just the company, but when you think about resourcing.

Shane: Yes. As we’re talking about this, what came up for me was, WeWork, their IPO fell apart recently because of some cultural missteps which created some mistrust among their largest venture capital investors, and they were like, “We can’t really go to market with this right now.” Is that important? People have been chomping at the bit to get a piece of WeWork, and now they’re saying that the valuation of it is a third of what they thought it would be. A mess.

Brian: As a marketer, I go back to, that is your brand, your promise, your reputation. All those things flowed into the value of your brand, and if you betray that, then what we’re seeing is you’re going to pay for it, and pay for it in a bad way. You need to be true to your brand promise, because if you align with your brand promise and play with integrity, you’re going to be successful.

Shane: Yup. Well, that’s a good segue to the next piece of this acquisition around surveillance. As you said, it allows people to monitor the trades, I’m assuming internally and maybe even externally. Compliance obviously hugely important in the financial markets. Ever since Enron and the various ebbs and flows really since then, and the conversations that I’m hearing a lot of my clients have around compliance, is compliance isn’t enough like just to have the rules that people have to do that. The compliance has to be married with a culture where people are committed to doing the right thing, not just an order that this is the right thing. The difference between have to and want to, the difference between rules and values that include integrity. I’m curious how you see that evolving for you guys and your customers.

Brian: Sure. Our approach is, we want to make sure our clients and their clients or the end-user, the traders, are successful. Now, what does success mean? In the world of trade surveillance and compliance, it’s to provide the traders and risk administrators with the tools that they need so that they know how they’re trading, what they’re doing, and making sure that their strategies are in line with what is acceptable behavior.

The way that we have it is, there’s a scoring system, and so you know the range of where your activity falls in line with the different rulings, as well as the different regulations out there that oversee the future straits By giving these tools, we feel like we’re actually empowering the trader, we’re empowering the risk administrator to, as you say, develop that culture of doing not just the right things, but being most successful within the rules of the road, if you will. If traders embrace these tools, they could actually optimize their activity and not have to worry about someone looking over their shoulder, but focus on what they’re supposed to be doing, is training, right?

From the risk administrators’ standpoint, it’s giving them the tools to make sure that they’re protecting their firm. That’s sort of our mentality with regard to this product set.

Shani: It only takes one rogue trader to bring down a firm’s reputation for a long time, if not permanently.

Brian: Yes. We don’t want to sell the fear. We actually want to sell and let potential clients know, this is to make sure that you have the power in your hands, right? That you are proactive in this versus selling the fear.

Shani: Yes. Exactly. That, again, goes to selling the fears compliance, selling the vision of success, is culture, and give it a vision. Here we are, right back yet vision to the operating system for the capital markets. In order to get there, the operating system is going to have to be in compliance with all the regulatory issues.

Brian: That has to be an element of it.

Shani: Yes. Super. Well, this has been so interesting. I hope that those of you who are listening and watching haven’t been distracted by some of the finance jargon, text speak and so forth. Because I think the messages that have really come through loud and clear from this conversation that you and I have been having, Brian, are the importance of your three Cs, right? The craft, the communication and the culture, and the intersection of all three, is where magic happens.

In terms of the importance of communication, thinking about if you’re needing a company or even a division of a company or a product, whatever it is, take your show on the road to communicate with your employees in other areas besides headquarters. Take your show on the road to meet with clients for no good reason other than just to connect, and make sure people are current on what’s happening at your business, and no mysteries are created. The whole thing around acquisitions, right. With a million startups out there, acquisitions are happening quickly, and we have to pay attention to culture both in the acquisition target, and then in the intentionality with which we on-board a new company and integrate. Culture is a key piece of the integration fabric.

Then lastly, whether it’s because there’s a trading product for a monitoring compliance or not, getting our folks to a place where they’re not feeling forced to abide by a bunch of rules. Because some regulator in Washington said, “This is what we have to do.” No, getting them to be part of a vision and a culture that values integrity, doing the right things and has ethics because that’s how businesses thrive, right? The difference to me is palpable, and obviously because I am so passion about it. Thank you for sharing your experience with all of these issues with our audience.

Brian: Thank you. I had a great time, and hopefully it was helpful to your audience. Appreciate it.

Shani: Sure. Any last words of wisdom before we sign off?

Brian: Well, one last thing we talked about is, I came from a consumer environment into more of a B to B environment. When it comes down to it, it’s B to People. You are marketing, communicating, connecting with people, and it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. I think that’s the important thing for your business to thrive.

Shani: B to P. You should go register that right now.

Brian: Okay, right.

Shani: As your trademark. Because [laughs] it’s your last name is pronounced Mehta, and doing B to P as a concept is very meta.

Brian: I like it. Maybe we could collaborate on something here.

Shani: I love it. Well, thanks for joining us today. Leadershifters, thank you for joining us, and we will see you next time. Until then, if you have any questions for Brian, you can reach him through me. Email me at [email protected], or on any of our various social media platforms. Until next time, mwaah.

The post 37: The 3 C’s for Winning Brands with Trading Technologies CMO, Brian Mehta appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.

How can your company move from a ‘2inthepool’ Band-Aid approach (minimum of 2 non-traditional candidates in the interview pool for every open position) to a more holistic culture of overall inclusion to win the competitive talent war and drive better results? In a timely discussion following the recent release of McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace report, our guest today is Femily – known widely as Silicon Valley’s gender and inclusion strategist. Tune in to hear the latest stats, understand the first broken rung on the ladder for women, and learn concrete ways your org can be more helpful to LGBTQ+ employees. Is “leaning in” enough? Curious when to use they and them pronouns? Don’t miss this one!

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 36: Gender and Inclusion LeaderShift Strategy with Femily

Shani Magosky: Hey LeaderShifters, welcome to another episode of the LeaderShift Show with yours truly, Shani Magosky. Today is a treat of all treats. I would say it’s like inclusion squared or I don’t know like quintupled. Our guest today is Femily who is Silicon Valley’s gender and inclusion strategist. I’ll let her tell you a little bit more about her background in just a second. Please stay with us today because we’ve got two really important topics to discuss. One is LGBTQ in the workplace, and the second which is not unrelated, is women in the workplace, including a study that’s just come out that McKinsey and Lean In have done, and we’ve got some statistics hot off the press. Femily, welcome to the LeaderShift Show.

Femily: Yes. Thank you so much, Shani. It’s so nice to finally join you. I am a super fan of the podcast and I love what you’ve been doing with it. I’m really honored to be joining.

Shani: Thank you so much. I try to tackle LeaderShift subjects that are all over the map because I have been in leadership myself. I have a lot of clients who I coach individually as well as corporate teams and organizations that I coach. They’re all struggling with the same continuum of challenges. My personal favorite just because of my personality is to name the elephants of the room and talk about the hot subjects that maybe in some boardrooms might still be a little bit taboo. Let me go there. [laughs]

Femily: Let’s do that. That’s the only way that my particular work gets done. As a way of introduction, my name is Femily and I help mostly tech companies but all kinds of male majority companies with gender stuff. I do that in a variety of ways. I do public speaking. I come in and give inspirational talks both on how to make your workplace more inclusive for women and for LGBT folks. I do diversity consulting more generally. One of my favorite things that I do right now is I help events and large events and huge conferences get more diverse, so get more friendly for women, for people of color and also for career people. I also host feminist retreats.

On the other side of this, I take boss ladies who are in companies, who are stressed out working hard, and I help them do self-care. I host feminist healthcare retreats. I also do a little bit of one-on-one coaching. It’s so highly involved and so high energy that I only take one or two people at once. I don’t talk about that much, but I do coach executive women who are in male majority cultures who want to see what does the research say about their situation. Is it a real thing they’re going through? What should they do? Et cetera.

Shani: Absolutely. Well, as someone who comes from a very male-dominated industry of Wall Street, investment banking by history, I appreciate what you’re doing. Clearly, in the tech space, the “bro culture” is legendary. I would love one day for there to be a lot more parity in every industry.

Femily: Yes, absolutely. There’s one more thing I will tell you. I started doing this work. I’m sure we’ll get into this a little bit more, but I started doing this work and so many people approached me and said I’m a boss who happens to be female in one of these industries, and what you’re doing is awesome. It’s totally necessary. I might want to help you when I retire. That’s my passion project is being a woman in this field and understanding it and trying to help other companies move forward since I’ve seen it from the inside. I got such a tidal wave of people who are interested in that.

I started a professional organization for people who are curious about becoming gender consultants. There’s enough work for all of us. As you mentioned, bro culture doesn’t escape very many fields. There’s exactly at this point and so much work out there. Anyone who’s interested, I’m helping them figure out the roadmap for jumping into this field and making a difference also.

Shani: That’s genius. I love the abundance mentality. You know what, honestly, that’s part of the cultural shift that is necessary because in a lot of organizations, they’re still this concept of the zero-sum game that if you win, that means I lose and vice versa, which is not necessarily the case.

Femily: Especially not just organizations, the planet, the world. [laughs] In terms of just the world of business and abundance and ideas, there’s enough work out there for all of us. There’s enough fun out there. There’s enough romance out there. There’s enough all the things out there.

Shani: Absolutely. All right. Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of LGBTQ. First of all, I think a lot of people don’t even fully understand– this isn’t because they’re bad people. People just don’t know what they don’t know, but the spectrum of sexuality. Can you just do a little bit of 411 for those who falls in that camp?

Femily: Sure. Absolutely. When I go into a company, I usually meet with the senior leadership crew, and they want to do better on LGBT. Maybe the pride group internally has said, “Hey, you need to do a little better,” and they’re like, “We don’t know what to do,” and they’re like, “Here, just have Femily come talk to you and she’ll lay out the land. What I usually start with is, as you said the definition of LBGTQ. There are a lot of different letters that are on there. We’re figuring that out as a community. L is for Lesbian. B is for Bi. G is for Gay. T is for Transgender, and Q can be either questioning or queer. Sometimes there’s an I on there for intersex.

Sometimes there’s an A on there for Allies, or sometimes the A also means Asexual. It basically just means anyone who’s outside of the majority of straight heterosexual person, and then also on the gender side, so transgender is in this LGBTQ.

Shani: It’s an alphabet soup at this point of diversity. Essentially, we can say anyone but a straight White male.

Femily: Yes. [laughs]

Shani: In some ways.

Femily: Basically, the truth is, if you make your org better for LGBTQ people, then it’s better for everyone because it has an emphasis that says like, “All kinds of partners that you might have and all kinds of family constellations that you might have been born from or be creating yourself or be marrying into, those are all welcome here. That certainly means if you have a straight white picket fence family, that you’re also welcome here.

Shani: Of course. Absolutely. I think some of the strides that have been made, we’ve seen more and more companies extend benefits to the non white picket fence family paradigm. What else can companies do on a cultural level that can bring more diversity and inclusion in that arena?

Femily: Sure. Absolutely. Take you one step back just to lay a little bit. Do you mind if I lay a little bit [crosstalk]

Shani: No, no. Please do. Please do.

Femily: Some of the facts that are compelling about LGBT people in the workplace are that, when employees are able to be out in the workplace, like out about their families or even like someone who has a gay brother who feels they have shouldn’t mention it in the workplace. There’s a variety of ways people can be out. Being out in the workplace makes people not only happier but more productive. Knowing that, it’s important to know that four out of ten LGBT employees are not able to be fully out at work. They fear that being fully out at work would put their career prospects in jeopardy or their current job in jeopardy.

As we see, there are three cases right now in front of the Supreme Court. They just heard the arguments last week. They’re going to be deciding later in 2020. If it is possible to fire someone because they’re gay or trans. People are legitimately fearful about losing their job because right now it’s an unknown. 62% of lesbian and gay people have heard anti lesbian or gay jokes at work in some fashion and similar numbers for bi and trans folks. The last fact I’ll give you is that, LGBT folks in tech, and that’s my main field, are more likely to leave their job than other colleagues because of bullying in the workplace.

Those are some of the things that people are experiencing in the workplace that definitely take their mind off the job first of all. Second of all, it’s harder to connect with the workplace and to feel like that’s a safe place for you to be as a worker and as a human.

Shani: I hate to interrupt you but reconcile that for me with the progressive California reputation. Not every Silicon Valley company is actually in Silicon Valley, but a good percentage of them are. How on one hand are the majority of, especially northern Californians, claiming to be progressive and liberal and open, yet those statistics are still prevalent?

Femily: For one thing, I’ll start with the jokes. One is, it’s so cavalier in a lot of these companies. People feel like they’re down enough that they can make a joke, but then maybe their colleagues who are queer or trans don’t understand that the person is in their heart they believe in equity, but they are just casually saying a bad word because they don’t get it fully about how that should be. We talked about the folks aren’t able to be out because they think they might lose their job, because they truly might lose their job.

If there’s no talk of sexuality in the workplace or sex orientation or any of those things, then they might think that they shouldn’t bring it up because people aren’t talking about it because people aren’t friendly to it. Most of the folks that I talked to when I survey the LGBT people at companies, and I say, I asked them, “Are you out?” And then if they are out, I say, “How did you know your manager was a safe person to come out to?” This is about someone who’s saying, “I’m going to be transitioning at work,” or someone who’s saying, “I’m a man and I have a husband. I’m gay,” but all of those roll up to having a manager who’s out about the fact that they’re inclusive.

It doesn’t even have to be about queer and trans or LGBT stuff. It’s just inclusion in general. If the person is saying like– managers who say like, I’m a Christian, but I want to make sure that we have Diwali and Hanukkah and Ramadan on all on the calendar, that kind of inclusive attitude makes people know that they can bring their other things to the table that are in the minority.

Shani: What you’re describing essentially is psychological safety, and not enough companies are creating it in any context, let alone for sexuality.

Femily: Absolutely. The last one is about the bullying one. Bullying can be microaggressions like always being interrupted in a meeting, for example, always assigned the menial tasks or not the juicy projects. It doesn’t necessarily mean like physical bullying or yelling of words, et cetera. It can be that we hear about people being pushed out of organizations. It can be that. LGBT folks, folks of color and women in tech, all three groups are having a hard time because there’s a very pervasive bro culture that affects all three kinds of groups. Of course, all of those three people are in all of each other’s groups all the time, too. It’s not so linear as in three groups.

Shani: God. It’s disconcerting. You expect it from the old school company whose C-Suite is still baby-boomer and not diverse, but it’s disappointing to hear that it’s still a problem in technology companies, which by and large are younger demographic, lot of the C-Suite are millennials even.

Femily: Right. Exactly. There’s a group we haven’t talked about yet that does fit under the umbrella, also which is non-binary folks. Folks who more identify with they and them pronouns who’s maybe it looks and/or identities and/or gender identity doesn’t fit neatly within male or female or always within one of the other or sometimes they fit within both. It’s much more fluid. A workplace where most colleagues don’t use the right pronouns for someone is definitely a workplace someone would want to leave. It’s a kind of bullying to misgender someone, to either refer to them as they’re the old gender or to a gender that’s not theirs.

That’s another thing I help companies with, because for a lot of people, even the most well-meaning people, that is a newer concept. There’s always been gender fluid people in every society around the globe, but the specific use of they in them in the workplace is newer for many people.

Shani: Can we actually pause on that and elaborate a little bit because I think it’s a good– not even a segue. It aligns well with the microaggression thing you were just talking about where some people aren’t even conscious of what they’re doing. Are they interrupted? That’s a common thing that you hear with women, that they get interrupted more, and a lot of times, the other folks aren’t even aware of it. Frankly, women are interrupting other women more than they’re interrupting men.

Femily: Exactly. Exactly.

Shani: It’s all over the place. Let’s talk about the microaggression of not recognizing the non-binary. What should leaders instruct their people to do with they and them? When should they be using it? How should they be using it?

Femily: That’s such a good point. For folks, there’s a couple things. You should just use the pronouns that someone gives you. Somebody uses they/them pronouns either has it in their email usually who’s a co-worker, or they’ll say, “Hi, I’m Femily, I go by they/them pronouns.” From then on, you need to try to use they/them pronouns with the person. Some people say, “Oh, those are plural words. How can I call one person they and them?” But we use it all the time. For example, if I was shipping you a book that I’d read, and I thought you’d really like. I’d be like, “I’m looking on the Amazon. The delivery person is going to be there at noon. They’ll probably leave it on your front porch.” When you don’t know someone’s gender, we already use it as a singular.

Shani: Oh yes. I didn’t even think about that. They’ll deliver it.

Femily: We know how to do it. That’s one thing we should do. Also for trans non-binary, non-gender conforming folks in the workplace, I’m helping a couple tech companies right now get ready.  There are just a lot more non-binary folks who are out and who are in the workplace with they/them pronouns and who are ready to contribute fully to the mission as long as the company is ready for them. Gender neutral bathrooms are, of course, that’s the one everyone’s getting. If people are getting something right, they’re getting that right. Health insurance plans need to include transgender inclusive care. That’s a given that a lot of companies are pretty hip to these days.

Formal nondiscrimination policy is the next one. All the companies have one that talk about the different protected classes, legally protected classes, but what companies can do to position themselves above and beyond other companies is have a specific policy that says, “When we say we’re not going to discriminate on gender, we mean we welcome non-binary folks and transgender folks,” and then some proof points, “by which we mean we have bathrooms that you can use based on what gender you identify with, and you will have health insurance policies that support the kind of care you need.” Even just those two lines are an incredible recruiting tool.

Shani: Interesting. Okay. That’s so good. It’s not even that hard to change the language.

Femily: No.

Shani: It might seem obvious. At the end of the day, who doesn’t just want the best people for the job no matter what is underneath the skin. We’re all the same underneath the skin.

Femily: I know. The funny part is, obviously, the world of tech out here is having a hard time hiring. They’re all fighting for the best talent. They’re always asking me like, “How can I beat the talent war?” Here’s the way that you can beat the talent war.

Transgender people are by and large over educated compared to the jobs they currently have because of discrimination. If you can get past your bias about transgender people, you as a company, as a recruiting force, as an HR team, as hiring managers, then you can hire the best of the best because you could literally scrape off the level, that whole level of people who are trans, who are underemployed, who would be thrilled just like anyone who’s underemployed to have a much better job.

Trans people are much more overpopulated in tech. Those are just two facts that can help people– It’s like if you just get bias out of the way, you can win the talent war, which is the biggest thing for business right now.

Shani: If we just get bias out of the way. What’s the secret formula for that? We could go down a rabbit hole here and I don’t mean to…

Femily: No, let’s.

Shani: It’s subconscious. It’s just based on how you were raised, and you can’t go back and change that. I feel like the best we can do on a day-to-day basis is pay attention to where our biases are showing up and continually ask ourselves the question, “What filter am I looking at this through? What’s another filter? What’s a better filter? What’s a more inclusive filter? What’s a less judgmental filter?” Whatever the case may be because it’s like we can’t get rid of bias just like I can take off my scarf. Scarf gone. You can’t excise a bias out of your–

Femily: The best thing that I’ve seen companies do is, if you give people information about how their biases are showing up in their managerial, in their hiring or in their promoting, then when someone’s aware of a bias, then they can do exactly what you said is. They then see that they do have those lenses on that are bias and while they can’t really remove them, because it’s part of their internal programming from every movie they’ve watched, every human that they’ve ever talked to at their Thanksgiving family table from upbringing.

Shani: Yes, their teachers, their friends, where they work, what heritage they are. There’s a million factors that go in to form those.

Femily: What I think is really powerful is the manager and I’ve told you this before is that when we show the managers in our companies, the ratios for how they’re promoting men versus how they’re promoting women, unfortunately, most companies data doesn’t splice also include non-binary people, I’ll just say that. When you look at men versus women and you share that data with managers, you’ll see that there are some managers and these are not hateful people, these are great people who really want to promote the best, they just have these glasses on.

They are over promoting men or you could say they’re under promoting women, like both, either way it’s the same way to describe the same thing. It means that they have top talent women who are not getting tracked up as quickly as their similarly talented male peers. When managers see this data, they are embarrassed and ashamed, not so much to be paralyzed, but so that they are certainly different next time so that they’re looking a little more closely at their female next in line for promotions next time they go around.

Shani: I like the idea of teaching people how to just question their own biases as a better practice in long term. You know what? I’m sure you see a lot of this too.

Femily: Yes.

Shani: I’m curious, your perspective on how effective it is. What I see in some of my client companies is, for every open requisition, you have to have at least two qualified female candidates and if you don’t, you got to keep recruiting until you do, like blah, blah, blah. It’s like, forcing it, which, I guess, is better than nothing, but it just doesn’t seem like of the right spirit.

Femily: Good. I love this topic. I agree, that clearly we shouldn’t have to say, you got to have a board that’s 50% women, like women are between 46% and 48% of the workforce, so maybe we’re saying that percent on boards or whatever. Some kind of quota, nobody likes a quota. But guess what? Quotas do work. They’re like this multivitamin. They’re like it’s not your favorite horse pill to swallow because it’s not in the right spirit but it does the trick. It does get more women on boards or gets women into the hiring world or wherever we’re trying to populate, we’re trying to diversify in terms of numbers.

The first cast of them, they are like on the border or whatever, everyone knows they got in from a quota, they feel weird because they got in from a quota. They’re talented, but they got in from a quota so that’s not good but what it does is, it inspires the next generation of women to look up and be like, “Lorraine is on the board, this is awesome like I see her, I know her, I can be her, I’ll follow a similar path like it’s inspiring.”

What happens is, the next generation of people of women, even just like five years later, the next cast of them that get into the board or get into the C-Suite or get into the VP ranks or whatever rank you’re trying to populate, they are legitimately there, but it was the quota that was the door opening mechanism.

Shani: They serve a purpose-

Femily: They do.

Shani: -at a point in the evolution of all on this.

Femily: The other thing I will say about those, there’s that policy that you were talking about for recruiting where it’s #2inthepool, you remember it? The interesting thing about that is, if you don’t have two women in the pool, there is statistically no chance you’ll hire a woman if the rest of the candidates are men. If there was no bias out there, we wouldn’t need to say two in the pool, but since there is that hiring bias, clearly, we still do have to say it. There’s a good Harvard Business Review on two in the pool, if you’re a listener, you want to get the data for this because it’s fascinating.

Shani: That’s hysterical, Jesus. I feel like we’ve started to make the shift into talking about women in the workplace, and because, ultimately, and you and I were discussing this before. We even pressed record on the podcast that underlying, whether it’s sexuality or gender or any other otherness, it’s the same philosophy and process to be more inclusive, it’s just fill in the blank. Let’s talk about some of these statistics and what you’re seeing change. I alluded to in the opening this McKinsey and Lean In study that is hot off the press; so what is the latest and greatest there?

Femily: The most interesting thing that we’re seeing five years out on the study that came out recently is that the movements and the efforts and all of the hard work and the women’s initiatives that we’re doing in corporate workspaces, it is working for a certain set of women. It’s the set that we like to refer to, we, all the people doing this gender work with me, as the Lean In contingent. It’s women at the top and its white women, and it’s women in VP and higher rank, so that’s what I mean by the top.

The good news is that all of this work is working somewhere. The other news is, the majority of women are not in the top ranks, and they’re not white women in the top ranks. The rest of women in the workplace, in the corporate workspace, are women of color up and down the entire leadership spine, and they are white women who are below the VP level, and so that’s where companies need to look next.

The other thing that I’m seeing in my work is that companies want to bring me in and they want to bring other people in to help work on gender, which is a good impulse for sure, but they look at the wrong place. They want to bring women into a leadership group and help women lean in more and meaning negotiating, they have negotiation workshops, and women’s confidence workshops and imposter syndrome workshops, which I lead an imposter syndrome workshop. Basically, those are not good if those are the only things that are happening.

Shani: Because it puts the onus just on the women to change that. Fuck that, like, the whole mindset needs to change. I’m so glad we’re going here because I love Sheryl Sandberg, I spend a lot of my year in South Florida, and she’s a North Miami Beach girl and so I root for her. I read Lean In and listen, I’m a woman who was always leaned in; I think that’s why I was successful at Goldman.

I had thick skin; I wasn’t afraid to speak up. I sort of do what she recommends naturally, and that has served me well. I get that a lot of other women have to be more conscientious or intentional about it, but my first thought was, this isn’t enough, just like the same way companies have all these women’s groups and whatever. It’s just like, well, you’re just creating more separation by calling it a women’s group, it’s like why not have a human being group?

Femily: I have seen that women when they get together in the workplace, to sort of lament about the problems that are unique to the kinds of oppression and disrespect they’re getting as women in the workplace and then harnessing that to make policy change within the company, that can work but you’re right. Women’s groups that just get together within the company to have inspiring lunches or–

That’s not enough, because it’s going to make people like people who are running the company and maybe women who are in the group think, we’re doing something, we’re getting together, we’re having an inspiring lunch, but that’s not going to change the landscape for women who are coming behind them. It’s not going to change [crosstalk].

Shani: No, it is just optics.

Femily: Yes, it is just optics. Absolutely.

Shani: I think that’s what people like you and to a similar extent, me, I come at everything from strategy and culture, boom, and to me, part of culture is we have to address all these issues, because, to me, companies are more competitive or better – similar to what you said that folks who are trans or non-binary or whatever, when they’re not out in the workplace, they’re not happy, they’re not as productive. I think that’s true of companies. When companies aren’t honoring the diversity and inviting everyone to bring their best selves to work, then their strategy could fall on its face.

It’s like that on a larger scale. I think the work we’re doing, it’s like we need to help companies lift it up from the bottom as opposed to just– I feel most companies are like, Oh, good, a senior woman is talented, let’s shine a light on her and develop her and then get her into the C-Suite, and then we can say we’ve got more women at the top and again, good, not good enough.

Femily: No, not good enough. Definitely not good enough because what we saw in the largest report on Women in the Workplace that just came out is that there’s, in fact, this thing that they’re calling a broken rung on the career ladder for women. We use this thing when we would look at these all-male C-Suites, or even all-male VP ranks are mostly male, that the rung was broken there.

What we’re seeing is a little more disturbing is that, from the first entry-level job that women have in a corporation, the rung is actually broken in the first step up to manager. The data there is that for every 72 women who make manager, a hundred men do, at the very first rung. This is well before most corporate women in the white-collar world would have children, it’s well before aging parent concerns would come into the place.

It’s well before they’re even married if they’re married to an opposite-sex person where his career would come first, it’s well before any of those kinds of things would be coming in. Women and men are equally represented in the workforce in terms of numbers, at that stage of the game, they both report equal levels of ambition and interest in rising to the top at that point. The only thing that’s holding them back – only thing, I say only jokingly, is that these middle managers or managers who are supposed to promote someone from entry-level to supervisor or to first step into management, they are over promoting men and under promoting women.

The trouble the McKinsey study was showing is that a lot of the work on diversity in companies and the emphasis has been at the C-Suite. For example, I know this firsthand, I’m called in to go talk to the C-Suite. I talk to them, I get them rallied up about LBGT in the workplace or about gender in tech, et cetera and then the idea is they’re going to go back and trickle it down to their forces. That doesn’t work like, trickle-down nothing. Nothing’s been trickling down in any way, shape or form whatsoever, certainly not culture in the workplace and certainly not strategy.

You wouldn’t go to all of your C-Suite people and be like, no, this is the strategy, and have them go tell everyone like you need a full-on change management like organizational awareness getting around it. That’s what they’re realizing now. The data is showing that these lower-level managers need to have both unconscious bias training, for sure and they also need to be enrolled in the diversity enterprise by their senior manager. Their senior managers know that they’re responsible for the diversity of their whole team but these middle managers or these lower managers don’t feel responsible for it. That was the biggest finding this week is that companies need to shift their focus to the middle managers.

Shani: Interesting. I want to take a timeout and just ask LeaderShifters who are listening or watching, do you have a broken rung in your organization? What is your statistic of first-line leaders that you’re promoting from individual contributor? Are you imbalanced at the 72 versus a 100 level or worse? Actually, I’m pleasantly surprised to hear 72, to be honest with you.

Femily: What that ends up meaning though, is by the time you’re up a couple of levels in managers, that it’s like 32% are women and 60 something else percent are men, so it’s like they’re doubled out by then.

Shani: For sure. Then when you get to C-Suite, it’s like, in the teens, and on boards, it’s even less. Then people like Indra Noori retire and you go, “No!!”

Femily: Oh my God. I know. I couldn’t agree more. Oh my gosh.

Shani: She was such a pioneer-

Femily: I know.

Shani: -and a woman of color no less.

Femily: Absolutely. That’s the thing that we’re also seeing in the research. Women of color, they’re much more susceptible to sexual harassment, under promotion and underpayment than their white peers for example. The McKinsey study last year, their major finding was that anyone who’s first only or different kind of person on their team, so that includes lesbian women, other women who are out, trans people, et cetera, we all know at first only different are, but those folks, they’re more sort of out on the limb so there’s just more bullying targeted at them, there’s more jokes targeted at their group of people. Even in the most well-meaning workplaces, it’s just a more raw place to be in the inclusion vernacular.

Shani: Sure. Let me ask you, what’s the line or maybe, is there a line between just good humor and well-meaning like, if it’s not coming from a real biased place, it’s just what someone might think is a funny pop-culture joke, for example, versus what we see at this point, especially after the #MeToo movement is like an overcorrection overly PC, like now you can’t say anything, and men don’t want to mentor women because of the risks and– How do you open your mouth at work without risking offending someone anymore?

Femily: I’m glad you’re asking that because I think I kept that in 90% of the sessions that I teach. Definitely, a lot of people are wondering that and it’s a spectrum too. If you want to be 100% sure you’re not going to offend someone, like if you haven’t known anyone who’s non-binary or gender non-conforming before, and they’re the only one on your team, or it’s your boss or you just want to make real sure you’re not offending them, then focus on things like hobbies, the work, what they have for lunch, how’s the weather, and build a relationship of trust with this individual, and then take their lead and then you can be more cavalier once they’re leading you there.

I have executives ask me if they should be using the word queer because as you have heard, I use it in my presentations, and when I talk on podcasts and when I speak. What I say is, if you have to ask if you’re allowed to use queer, you probably shouldn’t because here’s the thing, I’m in the queer community, the LGBTQAI community, so I can use it. If you have so many queer friends and family members that it just rolls off your tongue, you’re not going to be the one that’s asking, but if you are asking that just means you’re not located in that social nexus where queer is your community, so just don’t use it. Also, I want to loop over to what you were mentioning about #MeToo.

Shani: I know we could talk all day.

Femily: Oh my God, we’ll talk all day. I actually have made three documents specifically for men, good men, like in the workplace who are trying to figure out how to navigate #MeToo, we should do a whole other episode.

Shani: Let’s do that.

Femily: It’s called for the good guys who want to make sure that the women in their office don’t think they’re creeps. This is not for the awful person who doesn’t know how to keep his hands to himself. I honestly have no idea how to help that person. My work is towards the good guy who is a total ally of women and queer people who just doesn’t want to make mistake but also wants to tell someone, you have a great dress or you did great in the presentation, like they don’t know where to draw the line.

Shani: We will do another episode just on for the good guys who aren’t creeps and how to thrive in the #MeToo world because I think it’s really important. Some of my best mentors were men and I would hate to think that if I were coming up in the workplace today that they would be afraid to mentor me or travel with me or whatever.

Femily: It’s also extremely disadvantageous to women. Here’s the thing, since we talked about like there’s barely any women in the C-Suite and even if there are three at the best companies right now, the average is three. Those three women are so tapped out by the entire org structure of every other woman who is an ambitious rising star, I don’t have time to mentor.

Shani: Oh, will you be my mentor?

Femily: You have to find a man. If you want anyone with free time, you have to find a man. Also, women have to prove themselves twice or thrice if they’re women of color in the workplace. They don’t have time to mentor you like go find a man. It has to work out. For women in the workplace, it has to work out.

Also, men who want to mentor all the rising stars and some of those rising stars are women and they don’t want to have a weird situation, so there’s a million tips, including, if the only time you can meet even if it’s at lunch like it is at a restaurant or if the only time you can meet or if your industry does drinks with people, you could bring another person or bring a notepad and put that notepad right on the desk, this is for both of you, either of you or both of you.

Put it right on the table and have a pen out and so when the waiter comes over, you’re making a business face and you’re like writing some notes so then they don’t assume it’s a date because it’s really awkward when the waiter thinks it’s a date. He’s like, can I get you some champagne? They add to this weird atmosphere like, they’re going to be in a weird atmosphere when a man and woman are out and people think they’re on a date but you can curb a lot of that surprisingly, by just putting a notebook on the table. It really makes the waiter and the other person who may have a questionable idea, think that it is just a business meeting. There’s a million tips like that that can help.

Shani: I love that. That’s genius, so simple and easy to do. That’s a habit that someone can change because sometimes changing habits is a tall order for people but that’s easy enough. You bring a notepad, scribble some stuff down.

Femily: Or your laptop, whatever you have, like just bring a business thing– a stapler, if you only have a stapler, like bring the business then you have, yes.

[laughter]

Shani: I love it. Okay, let’s call this one and we will definitely get on another podcast to do the #MeToo, how non-creepy men can contribute there another time and whatever else comes up that we think is important for leadership to know because I feel like this has already been incredibly juicy. I’m just going to recap a few of the different things that we talked about today as highlights.

Guys, and girls remember, everybody performs better when they can be themselves at work. They’re happier and more productive and that serves them, it serves the team, it serves the organization and honestly like I don’t know why we wouldn’t want more of that.

Watch the microaggressions and just notice and open up the door for feedback on that stuff to make it safe for someone to just say they noticed it and vice versa because if we don’t at least open the door to those conversations, it’s going to keep happening and let’s not be offended by it like let’s just I mean don’t be offended if someone gives you the feedback that you did it just use it as a learning opportunity and notice if you’re continuing to do it.

For folks who are theythe/m, use the pronouns if folks have introduced themselves to you that way and then it’s totally cool, right? It sounds like if someone is wanting the they or them that they will make that known so you don’t have to guess that right.

Femily: If you don’t know someone’s pronouns, you’re welcome to ask but that’s out of the comfort zone for a lot of people. If you don’t know someone’s pronouns, just refer to them as their name. Just say like, yes, Jamie is going to go get a soda and then I think Jamie also mentioned that they were going to write all of the notes on the board for us during this meeting, just use their name until you hear someone else use their pronouns who’s in their inner circle and you can trust that is the correct use of their pronouns.

Shani: Got it. Okay, perfect. Keep doing the things that you’re already doing because we were talking about this we assume the best right now that most of you, the vast majority of you want to be more inclusive and some of the stuff is just new and there’s no roadmap there, there’s no how to do this 101 because it is new in the workplace. Continue offering benefits in those health care plans, not just for alternative marriage situations, but for gender inclusive healthcare.

Make sure the bathrooms are gender neutral. Quite frankly, as a woman who’s still like, identifies as a she, I think it’s bullshit that there have never been enough bathrooms for women. I’m honest and again, like maybe TMI. I’ve been using men’s bathrooms for years.

Femily: Me too, there’s never a line.

Shani: When there’s a long fucking line at the women’s room. Are you kidding me? They’re a little messier, right? You just have to maybe squat a little higher, but come on. Like, that’s just common sense. Formal non-discrimination policies, just broaden what’s already there, okay? It’s easy enough to just broaden what you already have. Let’s see. If you have to start with some quotas and #2inthepot, better to start there than nowhere and eventually hopefully those things won’t be necessary.

I’ve already called you out to ask what’s your broken rung; is it at the first line leadership level and if we can fix it there, then it gets easier to fix it as we go up the leadership ladder. All of these things folks are not just like selective pick and choose. This is change management at its best and if you don’t know how to do that, call me, call Femily. This is the work that we do we help leaders change cultures. Last but not least, building a relationship of trust and psychological safety really is the key to success, regardless of the issue.

Google’s project Aristotle proved this research years ago-when I say years, I don’t mean decades, like five or six years ago-that the best performing teams have psychological safety as part of the culture of the team and that just means give a shit about people right? Be respectful. Don’t take things personally and make assumptions, have conversations. Be real, be authentic, be transparent, be honest and I know about those words may be easier said than done. Last words on this podcast because there will be a Femily part two.

Femily: Yes. I would just say, I really love your podcast. I love how you do the recap, it really helps me as one of your guests figure out some things. The one last thing I will say is that you can make your organization or podcast or whatever, more friendly to all the listeners, including those that aren’t totally attached to one gender or the other who are gender fluid etcetera. Instead of saying “Welcome ladies and gentlemen”, you can say something like, hello listeners or the team like hello Googlers, that’s what the managers at Google would say.

Therefore, without getting without saying the genders out loud, it’s a really much more inclusive way to welcome everyone of all the different genders in that’s really, that’s not diversity 101, that’s more like diversity 301. It’s pretty advanced, but it’s–

Shani: Well, because the word choice is really powerful and I open up my podcast by saying welcome LeaderShifters, and I also noticed that at some point in this podcast, I was like, okay guys and gals, like, I committed it too and because I’m still like everybody getting used to it.

Femily: Yes, we’re all getting used to it today. Just today someone, a collaborator, I have, she corrected this thing that I was saying, which I was like, “we just have to step it up” and she was telling me that step it up as a phrase is not very kind to those who are not able-bodied. People who have a disability and use a wheelchair, I’d never thought of it. It breaks my heart that I’ve been saying stepping up for 40 years, but now I’m not going to marinate: I’m going to move forward. Okay. No more step it up. Great.

Shani: Okay, I want to begin LeaderShifters, even those of us who do think about this on a daily basis, still make some mistakes and that’s okay because we’re learning, and our intent is good. Thank you for joining us today. Yes, hearts, hearts! Now that we notice like behind me in my new office is the Egyptian goddess of love, Isis.

Femily: I love that piece of art when I first saw you come on here. It’s great.

Shani: I got this in Egypt last year. It’s modern. It’s not an ancient papyrus scroll but the way the artist does this, it’s made to look more ancient and I just fell in love with Isis when I was over there so I had to have this.

Femily: It’s good, you’re cool, Shani.

Shani: So are you, Femily. Okay, next time I’m San Francisco, we’re going to get together because last time we got together it was on my coast on the east coast. Next time we get together it’ll be West Coast, baby.

Femily: Perfect. I love it.

Shani: Thank you and thank you to the LeaderShifters for watching.

The post 36: Gender and Inclusion LeaderShift Strategy with Femily appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.

It is my privilege to introduce you to today’s guest, and one of my favorite clients – Kurtis Jetsel of Lockheed Martin’s Missiles and Fire Control division. One of his self-professed hobbies is Leadership, and he’s had a tremendous impact on his organization as their unofficial leadership and culture guru. Today, Kurtis shares how he gets left-brained engineers and rocket scientists to embrace “soft stuff”, the fantastic cultural impacts of having a female CEO in Marillyn Hewson, and other innovative ideas that could spark a shift in your organization!

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 35: Leadershifting in a highly structured, left-brained culture with Kurtis Jetsel

Shani Magosky: Welcome Leadershifters to another episode of The Leadership Show with Shani and today you are going to hear from an impactful leader in one of the coolest divisions of the coolest companies in America. We have on the show today Kurtis Jetsel who is a director of program management at Lockheed Martin in the Missiles and Fire Control division. Yup, the people who make the rockets and all the cool stuff, the missiles and needless things that protect our country and keep us safe. Welcome to the show, Kurtis.

Kurtis Jetsel: Right it’s so great to be with you, Shani. Thanks for having me.

Shani: It’s my pleasure, you have always been one of my favorite clients to keep in touch with because I think your passion about leadership rivals mine. Kurtis is a leader in action and he’s a leader in voice too. He’s an average student of leadership, he voraciously reads anything about great leadership and I will ask him about the leadership newsletter that he started at Lockheed many years back as the question further into the show.

Kurtis: All right, fine.

Shani: You are joining us from Dallas today, right?

Kurtis: I am, yes.

Shani: Missiles and Fire Control, you two main offices are Dallas and Orlando and it’s been my privilege to come in and work with your teams mainly teaching some of you people leaders how to be more coach-like in their approach and I know that’s something you share and interested as well.

Kurtis: Absolutely.

Shani: When and why did you become so passionate about leadership?

Kurtis: Okay, I’ll share a story with you. The story goes back 20+ years ago. I have been with Lockheed Martin for 35 years.

Shani: Because you started when you were in like the seventh grade.

Kurtis: Right, that’s it, yes. It’s just been an incredible journey. I will tell you what happened, I was working actually in Grand Prairie at the Missile and Fire Control division on a product that was going to be tested and I had been working on it for almost two years and they said, “Hey, would you go to a remote location and share with the team how to put the product together, and then, by the way, you can stay there for the test.” As you can imagine and you’ve been part of a team before that is very high-performing and has a lot of stress and has a deadline and has to work long hours and the experience is a very bonding experience, right?

Shani: Right.

Kurtis: We did that for about a three-month period. We had a great test. I get a call from my leader the day of the testing he says, “Will you stay? The next product is on its way out there. They want you to stay for another three months and show them how to do it again, and by the way, you can stay for another test.” Okay, sure great and about halfway through that second series of tests that we were working there, we came to work on a Monday morning to find that the leader and the deputy of the team lost their job over the weekend. They’ve been fired over the weekend due to somethings that had happened and the response of the team was really wild the first day, so on Monday about half the team left. There was all kinds of emotions from anger to sadness, even people crying, things being thrown around and I’m thinking, “Wow, we’ve got this test we are preparing for, how am I going to get this done? Half the team just left.” That day was wasted.

Shani: It went from high to in the sewer.

Kurtis: It did. Absolutely. Over one weekend. The next day, the team shows up and extensionally we have a stand-up meeting and I don’t know if you can see but they are standing around with there arms crossed and they are look at me and say, “What do we do, Kurtis?” Lockheed Martin has a tagline that says “We never forget who we’re working for.” We were in a place were there were a lot of our customers around and so, me trying to think quick, “Let’s not forget who we’re working for guys, let’s go get with this product and get the test going.” Their response was, “Yes, who we were working for got fired over the weekend and we are not buying into your tootsie little tagline. Thank you very much.”

It was this moment, this epiphany that, “Wow, I am wholly unprepared. I don’t know what to do to guide or lead this team through this tragedy.” For them, it was seriously a tragedy and at that point, I did something that’s some people find a little bit bizarre, and that was I made leadership a hobby. If you think about hobbies, its something that we like to do, that we want to get better at, that we spend money on, that we practice and really what that has done for me since the late ’90s is just as you mentioned before, it just created this very intensely curious student of leadership and learning and I committed at that time and it was really because of the pain and the struggle that I saw in this peoples faces from this experience.

I committed at that time, I’m not ever going to be in a position where I don’t know what to do to help a team navigate and get through a situation like this. That second three months turned into six years. I was transferred to this location and ended up working for six years and so I had about six years to practice. if you will, to practice my new hobby of leadership. I would go every day into the library. The internet was around in the late ’90s and the location we were in, it wasn’t very fast so I actually found myself in the library.

Shani: It was still in the “You got mail” days where it was kind of up all.

Kurtis: Yes, exactly. I just started studying on what can I do to and what do these people need and how can I respond and serve them in a way that would allow them to get back to the high engagement and the excitement that they had before their leaders lost their jobs. It’s just been a huge experiment if you will. It’s fun to think about the last 20 plus years being as just this experiment where I have had some really great result and then I’ve had some really bad results, rather some really lousy results from my experiments that haven’t gone from a leadership perspective haven’t gone so well right. That’s really what has caused me to have the passion and excitement and then just seeing the influence that leaders can have on individual lives. People’s lives and be able to change them for the better is just so exciting for me. Then seeing people grow and develop has just been such as a passion for me.

Shani: Right. Well, you obviously have had more successes in your leadership experiment than failures because I know that Lockheed has continued to send you to different units, different projects, different locations to clean up some cultural messes. I don’t want to cross any boundaries but are there any sort of generic stories that you could speak through around that subject?

Kurtis: Sure, it was funny when I committed that I was never going to be in a position where I would allow this to happen again, right? Really, I read another quote by the way that I would share with you, and it was something by Jim Rohn and the quote was something like, “Success is not something we must pursue its something we attract by the person we become.”

Shani: Yes, nice.

Kurtis: I decided what kind of a leader do I want to become, right? Then just set out to become that leader. That allowed me, I think to attract, if you will, these opportunities then to practice at a different level at a different side, in different situation the hobby that I had and the skills that I had developed through my hobby. One of them I will tell you an interesting experience, I got a phone call that said, “We would like for you to apply for this job.” By the way, this has become a pattern over my career since then. We’d like for you to apply for a job, and when I ask about the conditions or situations then my typical response is, if you get the job we’ll share this with you, we’ll share these kinds of things with you. Right?

Shani: Which is the first sign of trouble.

Kurtis: [laughs] Right.

Shani: Because if everything was great, they would just tell you. [laughs]

Kurtis: Right, yes. After I had a position in a new role I met with an organizational development specialist and the first words out of her mouth were, “Kurtis, this team is so messed up it can’t be fixed. Good luck.”

Shani: You’re like, game on, challenge accepted.

Kurtis: [laughs] Right, right, yes. Over the next three years, then I was able to take- and really, part of the issue was a leadership issue, right? It seems to me that’s a recurring theme as well. We have leaders that are not bad people. They’re just not effective leaders and those leaders create havoc and discontent and disengagement and those kinds of things, and so I’ve had a number of opportunities then to come in and help change and change the culture and turn things around.

This particular team I was able over about a three-year period to increase engagement scores. An interesting thing about the company is about every three years we go through some pretty serious surveys where we measure engagement and we measure leadership scores. I’ve had at least two opportunities where I’ve come into a situation where I’ve had recent scores that have been in the tank, right? Pretty red, if you will. Then three years later, scores that can show some improvement and I’ve had a number of those kinds of opportunities to do that.

Shani: Okay, let’s actually talk about some of the ways that you have shared this hobby with your colleague informally, because obviously, you’ve had many opportunities to formally do it as part of your role but you also and this is where we’ll diverge into talking about the iggles, which for those of you who have ever been parents of young children, which I haven’t, but from my nephews, I know the other wiggles is with like some Australian TV show for children. This is not that wiggles. Wiggles stands for what good leadership looks like.

Kurtis: Right, yes.

Shani: Tell us a little bit about why you decided to- it’s a little vulnerable to share some of your experiences and tips in an organization that’s large and bureaucratic, go for it, so.

Kurtis: Okay, sure. I’ll tell you how that got started. I was reporting to a leader and we had gotten some survey results back for the entire organization, and it said that our leadership scores from the previous survey were in decline, and so the leader pulled the staff together and said, what can we do to improve our scores, essentially. Immediately, there were suggestions like, bring Shani in and have her teach us how to be better coaches, right? Which are great, great suggestions particularly when we want our leaders to be better coaches. Right?

Shani: Right.

Kurtis: There were other more generic type. Well, we need to send them to this training or this or we need to do the things that we’ve done in the past, right? We know that someone had a definition of insanity and that was to continue to do what you’ve done in the past and expect different results. Right?

Shani: Yes, exactly.

Kurtis: When I brought that up, of course, the leader pointed at me and said, “Okay, Mr. Smart Man, tell us what we want to do different. Tell us what you’re going to do different.”

Shani: Right.

Kurtis: [laughs] I was challenged and said, okay, yes, we’re open to something different. Go figure out what that is. I pulled my staff together and we did some brainstorming and for my own development, I’ll tell you what was funny when I started making leadership a hobby, I was overwhelmed at the amount of leadership material that’s out there and it was almost to the point where I thought there’s this is so overwhelming, I don’t even know where to start. I’ll never be a great leader. It’s just too much, right? I came across another quote and I think this one was by Robin Sharma. And he talks about these little incremental daily practices and improvements that when you aggregate those over a period of time you can be some changes, right?

Shani: Yes.

Kurtis: I decided that that would be my, my leadership development. My own personal leadership development strategy. I would pick something- a way of being if you will. Let’s just say I wanted to be more authentic, I would study how to be more authentic and then pick little things that I could do each day to try to evolve that and be better at demonstrating authenticity. That was the concept behind this idea of what good leadership looked like which was a concept that we picked for one week and we sent it out to the leadership team, and said, hey, here’s your focus area and we align those areas with what we saw in the survey. As for areas for development and we said this is what we want you to do this week and we gave them two or three simple suggestions for what they could do that week to apply that particular skill or behavior.

Shani: Great.

Kurtis: That started out in a small organization and then it was popular. It seemed to be very popular, lots of very positive feedback and now it goes to 4,000 I think leaders across Missile and Fire control and even other business areas in Lockheed Martin. It’s been fun to see that.

Shani: I think that’s wonderful. Honestly, that is what good leadership looks like, which is being out of your comfort zone to influence other people. I’m sure you didn’t get paid more for doing wiggles, right? It was just something that you felt passionate enough that you wanted to share some of the research and experiments that you were doing with other people and challenge others to be an even better version of themselves. That is exemplary leadership. Showing up and doing your job, that’s just part of what you do to earn your paycheck.

Kurtis: Right.

Shani: That goes above and beyond.

Kurtis: Right.

Shani: Sometimes I always am curious about and always pleasantly surprised whenever I come work with Lockheed and other organizations that I’ll just describe are left brain, right? When I’m working with your leaders they’re mostly engineers and legit rocket scientists. Right?

Kurtis: Yes.

Shani: How does the touchy-feely soft stuff go over with that population?

Kurtis: Yes, that’s a great question and as you can imagine, it’s uncomfortable. Right? For the most part, it’s uncomfortable. In fact, when we came back when the team came back with the idea that we wanted to do this weekly distribution to the leadership team, the first response from the leader was, “I don’t know how that’s going to go over.” What I said is, okay, how about this? What if we do a small experiment with a small group of left-brain leaders for six months and let’s get feedback from these left-brain leaders on what they think about this idea, right? That’s really what we did. We picked a small group and we started sending them to this leadership looks like.

They came back in six months and said, “We love it. We’re getting great value out of this. Yes, it’s having results.” See that was really what enabled the larger application of this was those left-brain engineering leaders came back and said, “Wow, these things are actually working. They’re working with people and so help us learn more of this.” We had a part of a campaign called Lead Like an Engineer. We actually leveraged their left brain thinking to a degree in the application of some of these softer skills, and these people skills to help them be more effective leaders. It was very well-received.

Shani: That’s great. Well, that helps fight the good fight of convincing people that that stuff it’s not actually tough. First of all, they’re hard to do but also when we do them, it’s what makes the difference in commitment instead of compliance from our people, right?

Kurtis: Yes.

Shani: Even left-brain engineering types needs to connect with other human beings on another level in order to develop trust and respect and commitment and what I say all the time to people is get it out of your head that things like coaching and vulnerability and transparency are soft skills, because when you do them I’m telling you what you’re going to see more hard, cold cash.

Kurtis: Yes. Yes. Absolute evidence, right? By the way, they’re not easy to implement. It takes out of your comfort zone, it takes really pushing into leaning into that discomfort.

Shani: Absolutely. I’m working on that right now with a group of leaders, the activities that we did today. We’re pushing them just a little bit outside their comfort zone and proving to them I didn’t die of embarrassment. No one’s freaking out because it wasn’t perfect, which aligns with what you were just talking about in terms of small achievable steps, get one step at a time and when you look back you realize how much progress and growth has been made.

Kurtis: Absolutely.

Shani: Another question I have for you is what work do effect cultural chain in an organization which is more let’s call it old-school, a structured command-and-control. You guys your biggest client is the U.S. government and military and so forth. It might seem counterintuitive to have that kind of a regimented type of organization be open to cultural change and so forth. What are some of the messaging techniques that you’ve noticed have worked that other folks who work in similar industries can learn from you?

Kurtis: That’s a great question. Each one of the business areas in Lockheed Martin has embarked on some sort of a culture transformation or change type of learning very much for the reason that you stated. Our culture typically was very hierarchical command-and-control. There was a realization a number of years ago and it very likely started with our CEO Bob Stevens who started what he called full-spectrum leadership and was a focus on changing leadership behaviors. Then certainly Marillyn Hewson today just absolutely embodies what great leadership looks like and expects–

Shani: We’re coming back to her. I got questions for you about Marillyn.

Kurtis: Specifically our business area of Lockheed Martin Missle and Fire control is on a journey that we call culture optimization. Those words were picked specifically because there was a sense that part of the culture was very good. There’s an execution piece of the culture that was very good that we didn’t want to lose.

Shani: Right!

Kurtis: Yet, we realized that there were- if we continued in the same hierarchical, very top-down type culture, we were not going to be agile, we were not going to be able to attract the best and brightest especially as the great tsunami as our baby boomer generation starts to retire, we were not going to be able to attract the right people.

There was a definite realization in the senior leadership level that we needed to do something to change the pieces of the culture that we could change. About eight years ago we started down this journey of this culture optimization and it’s been something that we talk about we meet on we have leaders that go to seminars, it’s part of our surveys now. How is this culture optimization journey impacting your employee experience, for example. We ask those questions to get feedback and then we do things to respond into change. I’ll give you one quick example of something that we’ve done.

A number of years ago we had feedback that our culture was just very uptight and it was very consistent with command and control uniform kind of. At one point in our culture there was a need for that. What we do was very serious and so we have to take it seriously we have a great purpose and yet there was an opportunity to relax that if you will and still maintain the seriousness and the interest and the execution piece of it and so we started a jeans day. Every Friday or every Thursday before an off Friday was jeans day allowed us to wear jeans.

That was a big hit that was about three years ago. Wow, we don’t have to wear slacks and tie. We relaxed the dress code and then just this year we implemented a dress code called dress for your day. Essentially every employee if you are in a position where you are just working your job you’re not going to be meeting with customers or anybody any kind of an important meeting you can wear jeans every day of the week.

Shani: Basically saying you’re adults, dress appropriately for what you got going on.

Kurtis: Exactly.

Shani: Wasn’t that nice.

Kurtis: A novel idea right?

Shani: Yes. Treating people with respect that they actually have some common sense. Great.

Kurtis: Right. It’s just been a huge hit. It’s gone over very well. Of course, as you can imagine we had leaders that worried about it. They didn’t think it was going to be successful that were concerned and all those concerns were just not founded. It’s just been a great a great success. That’s just one example of some feedback that the company used in the surveys to help start to change the culture and help and show employees demonstrate that no kidding we trust you to make decisions about what you wear to work.

Shani: Yes, no kidding. I love that you called it culture optimization because you were speaking their language. What’s more engineering geek-speak than optimization. Meeting people where they are and making them feel like this is doable and then it’s not antithetical to how we work.

Kurtis: That as you can imagine very much resonated with to optimize something. We’re optimizing our designs we’re optimizing our processes now we’re optimizing our culture. Very much worthy.

Shani: Well, you know that’s music to my ears because the leadership tagline is culture and strategy have to meet. I love that culture has really been elevated to a strategic level in your organization. I want to spend our last little bit of time. You previewed it talking about your amazing female CEO Marillyn Hewson who was named CEO in 2013. Since that time, because you know me once an investment banker, not always an investment banker but I can’t stop myself. I look at the stock price for Lockheed, and it’s about slightly more than tripled since she took the helm. Is it economic or is it attributable to her? Tell us about how her leadership has changed the company.

Kurtis: My experience, of course, I would want to attribute it to her. I’m sure there are lots of factors that go into stock price. Clearly, she’s been a leader that’s just been just cutting-edge that has done so much for diversity and inclusion that has done so much for advancing women and minorities in senior leadership roles. If you go back 10 or 15 years and look at the board of directors in the senior leadership of Lockheed Martin and you look at it today you see a very different makeup of that senior leadership.

She has brought women into the senior leadership roles that are just absolutely phenomenal that demonstrate that the aspects and the nature that women bring into the world are extremely effective in leadership roles. Having that at the top then just permeates down through the organization. She has an expectation that leaders will create an inclusive environment. In fact I was sent to training that absolutely changed my life.

Shani: Oh! Good job!

Kurtis: It was diversity and inclusion training, it was by white men as full diversity partners and it was called the White Men’s Caucus.

It was four days of this extremely immersive into how I see myself in my own biases, in my own upbringing and how that impacts how I see the world. Literally for me, that training, and I kid you not, I don’t say this lightly– and it was probably a situation where the student was ready. Me as the student, I was ready, and so that showed up for me in a way that really sent me on just another level of a journey of self-understanding and reflection and awareness so that I could make better decisions so that I could create a more inclusive environment. When I saw a situation, I’ll share it with you a quick story that I saw shortly after this training I went to, I was in a meeting and it was a brainstorming meeting and I was not leading, I was participating in the meeting. We were going around the table offering ideas and a female at the table offered an idea and the leader said okay, yes, thank you for that and went around.

Then one of the friends of the leader offered an idea that was almost, it wasn’t word for word with what the female had said but it was almost identical and you would’ve thought that this idea was sent down from the heavens. I saw the female actually have, you could see the disappointment, the discouragement just come over her physically. After the meeting, I got the leader aside and I said, can I share with you an observation that I had in this in this meeting. I shared with him what had happened and the leader was absolutely horrified. They had no idea that they had done that, and the impact that it had.

The leader ultimately went back and had a conversation with a female apologize profusely. Then came back in a public setting and said, I want this team to know that this was brought to my attention, and I want you to help me, not ever let that happen again. I’m making it safe for you to bring it up. It was things like that that I started to notice, and it really had a big impact. Frankly, I was horrified thinking, oh my gosh, how many times have I done that? A lot of that I think, in a lot of this journey that we’ve gone through from a diversity inclusion perspective has been with Marilllyn at the helm there and leading and demonstrating the behavior and helping us understand how we can create an environment and a culture that that allows all our voices to be heard. It’s really been phenomenal.

Shani: Marillyn with two Ls.

Kurtis: That’s right.

Shani: It reinforces how strong she is. She’s got two Ls in her name. God, thank you for sharing that story. I’m pleased to hear that the leader was receptive with the feedback and horrified and immediately went to clean it up because that ain’t easy either. To be like, oh my god, I screwed up. I’m horrified and just be open about it. I think that’s best practice because we can’t help our filters. We had the life we have, and we can’t help but bring them into every purview of our life, but we can be more self-aware and make some behavioral changes. Even just small, nuanced one to compensate for our biases. Even if the biases aren’t necessarily coming from a negative place.

Just because we have the bias is causing us to see or not see certain things. I think that’s the key is to make it safe for people to speak up and notice it. Then to own it and discuss it and ask for support around it and just like making a safe to have the conversation is such a big stride. Because diversity inclusion just used to be, all right, let’s look at a scoreboard. How many women did we hire? how many people of color do we hire? How many people with different sexual orientation did we hire? That’s not diversity, that’s a cop out. Diversity is like, do we really listen? that’s where the inclusion comes into. Do we really listen to all the valuable different points of view that diversity affords that?

Kurtis: Do we value their contribution? Do we value their voice? What was shocking to me was that leader totally had no idea that he had done that. It was clearly a blind spot that the leader had and when I pointed it out, it was this revelation that was just like I said, just really bothered him. To the point where he said, I need help. I have to create a place where if that occurs, people stand up right at that moment and let me know that.

Shani: By the way, the roles can be reversed too. Women are also going to have some missteps like that. We’re going to make some assumptions about men that are untrue or behave a certain way that in a defensive way that isn’t necessary. I think it’s everybody increasing their awareness is super important. Speaking of super important, I think that this conversation has yielded a lot of great lessons that I just want to recap for the Leadershifters who have been watching and listening. First of all, is the importance of remembering your mission, and this comes from the story you told me.

Even though in the moment, it didn’t resonate, but ultimately, that’s why people line up committed to their job, is understanding how what they do ties into a greater mission that aligns with the values. Certainly, there’s no better mission than then keeping the residents of the United States and others of our friends safe, and being able to protect ourselves. Whatever your company mission, and vision and values are, folks, don’t forget them. They’re so important. It’s like the default place to go when you’re feeling a little lost.

Kurtis: Leaders tie what people do what can seem like a very mundane task, a very unimportant task. It’s the leaders job to tie that back to the purpose, to the mission.

Shani: Because it’s easy feel like in your silo and not remember how this little job or that other job is connected, making the whole system work. Some of the other really great nuggets I thought came out today are it’s not impossible, culture and softer leadership skills with companies who are highly populated with left-brain types, whether it be the engineers or finance or lawyers or whatever. It’s not impossible to change the culture of a command-and-control historically organized company into one that is a little more agile and as you said. I think the key is, meet people where they are. Speak their language, explain to them what’s in it for them.

Don’t just make it radical like let’s shift on a dime because that’s never going to work. We need to take it one step at a time and enroll everybody in the success as it sounds like has happened with you guys. Not to belabor the point about what you experienced. After going through that intensive diversity inclusion workshop, but we have to end for these micro, I don’t want to call them aggressions, but micro mistakes. That cumulatively can build up to bigger biases and so forth. If you see something, say something. The TSA says that, if you see even a minor thing, professionally and politely and respectfully bring it to somebody’s attention so they can make it right, and they don’t repeat that in cycles.

Kurtis: Right, and make it safe for that to occur.

Shani: Anything else would you add as part of summary and wrap up here, Kurtis?

Kurtis: I would just say that, it’s really up to leaders to model that kind of behavior. In my experience has been, it’s not comfortable modeling that kind of behavior. I had an employee recently tell me I was wrong in a very public setting. My first thought was, oh no, that’s just making me look horrible, right? And then I caught myself and thanked the employee in a public setting, and said that that kind of behavior is what we want to encourage. We want this team to be able to call out the leader or anybody else and say, hey, I either disagree or I have an opposable opinion. You may not be correct on that. That’s the kind of behavior that we want to encourage.

I didn’t look bad. In my own head, I might have looked bad, but the reality was that team walked away thinking, “Wow, he’s human. We like this guy because he wants us to call him out. He wants us to question what he’s doing. He wants us to push back. He wants us to have opposable, he’s interested in hearing our voice.”

Shani: Absolutely, brilliant. I love it. Thank you for being you, and modeling what other people can be doing, could be doing and much-continued success to you and MFC and Lockheed and Marillyn with two Ls and all that.

Kurtis: Thank you so much.

Shani: Thank you for being on the show. It’s always a pleasure. Leadershifters, you know how to reach me- [email protected], and of course on every social media that exists. Until next time, and thanks again, Kurtis.

The post 35: Leadershifting in a highly structured, left-brained culture with Kurtis Jetsel appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.

One out of five Americans experience a mental health issue every year, yet most people are still afraid to open up about it in work settings. After helping her daughter through a mental health challenge, Debbie Urbanik now helps companies elevate mental health to an organizational culture imperative from a benefits choice via her business, hope@work. As a leader, do you know how to distinguish between the signs of disengagement and depression? Tune in to this compelling episode to learn that as well as tips on running mentally healthy meetings and supporting people on your team who may be battling episodic or chronic mental health issues.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 34: Shifting mental health from a benefits choice to a cultural imperative with Debbie Urbanik

Shani: Hello Leadershifters, on this beautiful Fall afternoon. I’m coming to you with The LeaderShift Show with Shani from Arkansas where I’m here working with a client this week. My special guest is Deb Urbanik, who is joining us from New Hampshire. I really want to capture your attention here folks. Do you know that in any given year, one out of every five American is suffering from some sort of mental illness? It’s high time that we started having more open and honest conversations about this to take the stigma away from it. That’s one of the reasons that I’m having Deb on the show today.

Deb is a very experienced organizational culture consultant, we have a lot in common as it relates to that. In some personal experience that she’s had with her daughter over the past five years, she’s pivoted her consultant to include a huge component of helping companies become more inclusive around mental health with an effort she’s calling hope at sign work, so hope@work. We’re going to talk about that today. Welcome to the show, Deb.

Debbie: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Shani: Glad to have you. Like I said in the intro, it’s really long overdue for this conversation to happen. I feel like there’s been so much acceptance of otherness in this country and even all over the world for over the past decade or so as it relates to gender and sexual preference and race. Truly, we have a long way to go on all those as well, but the conversations are being heard and important people are taking stands and companies are doing a lot to improve diversity and inclusion and make everybody feel more comfortable, yet very little progress has been made on this front of mental illness.

Debbie: Absolutely, absolutely. Especially when it comes into the workplace. The exciting thing about this time is the ability for people to come out and be their true selves and bring their whole selves to work in most cases. What’s happening though, is that that conversation is happening and it’s growing within organizations, but the idea of being able to bring my whole self if I’m suffering from mental illness is there’s still a lot of stigma around that.

What’s really interesting, the reason that it’s become so much of a gap for me right now is because there’s been really amazing works in the culture industry as you know. Mostly over time, companies are spending a lot more time and energy really focusing on what is our higher purpose? How do we give it back positively to society? There’s been a lot of work about creating purpose statements that show the goodness that they really bring into this world. Then they’re creating values and principles that really support that.

There have been great progress, great steps taken with D&I Groups and that’s wonderful. When it comes to starting a conversation around really being able to be in an organization that says, “You know what, our people, one in five–” That means if I have a 10,000 person workforce, there’s a chance that 2,000 people are experiencing some form of mental challenge, whether it’s depression or anxiety and they’re spending a majority of their time at work. We are still at a place where there’s stigma around coming out and being able to talk about what I need in order to work well at work, in order to be productive, in order to contribute.

It’s that fear of, if I start to become vulnerable that I’m going to get passed over for promotions, that I’m not strong anymore. People will start to think of me as being weak or less than. I’m afraid to bring that part of myself to work. What happens instead, is the more you try to hide mental illness as having that be in a part my personal life as well. The more you try to hide it, the more difficult it becomes and the more anxiety that grows around it.

Shani: Absolutely.

Debbie: We have to create a place at work where it’s safe to bring that part of me to work and say, “I might need to make some adjustments for a little while. I need to do some healing.”

Shani: Right. It really should be no different than saying, “I have the flu, I need to take a few days off to take care of myself.” Or, “I broke my leg.” Right?

Debbie: Absolutely.

Shani: It should be no different. I can share from myself that I was very depressed about three and a half years ago, when I first separated from my now ex-husband because it was a really, really difficult decision. Probably the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my life, because– I don’t even have to go into the because. I felt very conflicted and anxious and I got very, very down, to the point where it was affecting my work in terms of my motivation. [chuckles] It was affecting some of my relationships and I just noticed that the self that I knew had gone somewhere.

Thankfully, I had the courage to ask for help. I went to see a psychiatrist and was put on anxiety depressants to get me through the period of difficulty. One differentiation that I want to make sure people understand, some depression and mental illness is episodic and it’s contextual to what’s happening in your life right now and it can ebb and flow. Other mental illness is, of course, chronic, just like if you’re type 1 diabetic. You have that your whole life, it doesn’t go away.

Debbie: Absolutely. Even when you are a chronic sufferer, you can go through phases of having better mental health and worse mental health as well. You can be a productive worker and still have those episodes that come along that really throw you for a tailspin too. I still admire you. Thank you so much for sharing that story, because I think, look at yourself and look at the qualities that you bring, you’re a professional, you’re a hardworking woman, you do dynamic things and you went through a phase of illness if you will. You were really suffering and you’re treating yourself so that you can get back out there and now you’re in Arkansas and still do the goodness that you do.

What I find really interesting too is, and this is especially true of our younger generation, that a lot of the people that are presenting now with anxiety and depression are actually really high-performing people. You think of some of the younger students in college and things like that. The instances of mental illness in the youth today is much higher than it had been in the past. We know that there’s a lot of theories around, “Is that social media? Is that they’ve been overscheduled for their lives?” There’s a lot of different theories. The point I want to make is that this young generation that is coming with presenting much more with anxiety and depression is now coming into the workforce as well.

Shani: That’s right.

Debbie: We need to be ready to start to address that and to make changes so that we can start to have better conversations around that at work. One thing I want to share comparing to your story is, number one, the bravery that you had just to speak out. I think that is what is going to start to change things at work. When you see people who are– They’re accomplishing things, they’re working hard, they’re attributing but they’re willing to stop and say, “Listen, I’ve had my struggles, I’ve had my share,” and be honest and vulnerable about that. I think that makes a huge difference.

Number two, just knowing that it isn’t something that says that you’re not a good worker if you have mental illness. You can still be a stellar performer. Those two things are not mutually inclusive, right? You can be a top performer and have mental illness as well.

Shani: Yes. It’s just part of relating with other people. Everybody’s had struggles in their life. I don’t care who you are. We need to be able to talk about that. I think Brené Brown has done a really nice job of introducing the concept of vulnerability into more casual conversations in the workplace. This is one of many topics that people need to feel okay being vulnerable about. I think that it would actually be a cop-out if I didn’t talk about it, right? I don’t think I’m weak because I had to seek some assistance during a difficult time. I think A, it makes me stronger to have asked for help rather than suffer alone or without some assistance-

Debbie: Absolutely.

**Shani: -**and to share the story for inspiration with other people.

Debbie: Absolutely. Absolutely. There’s another element that I want to share to this that I think is really interesting. It has to do with this idea of being willing to share and to own the conversation at work. One of the things that I found really really interesting as I was doing the culture work and then had to start going through the process of understanding mental illness better as my own daughter was going through it who’s now 23. She’s been diagnosed with anxiety and depression and she’s had a really hard time with it it’s a severe condition that she’s going through.

As I was having conversations and understanding that diagnosis, of course, I’m looking at the list of the symptoms. In my culture work we also have the conversation a lot about employee engagement. Here’s the rub that I found, this is one of the gaps that really was a wake-up for me, a leader shift if you will, that I think needs to happen. If you list and I’m going to use my little cheat sheet here but if you list the traits of a disengaged employee, some of the traits include a lack of enthusiasm or apathy. Another trait that was described was a complaining attitude which is, makes a big deal out of small things. Solitude or prefers to work alone.

A lack of initiative, just doing the basics to get by and increased absenteeism. There’s more of a tendency for them to not be at work. I line those up and I looked at the traits of depression. These traits of depression are off of the Mayo Clinic website just so that you know where it comes from [link]. The top one so where we look at disengagement and lack of enthusiasm, the Mayo Clinic says it’s a loss of interest in normal activities. We look at disengagement, complaining attitude makes a big deal out of small things, depression, irritability frustration, angry outbursts.

If you look at disengagement, solitude, traits of depression, isolation; a tendency to isolate myself. Lack of initiative for disengagement, tiredness, lack of energy, small tasks feel really big and then increased absenteeism. When you look at depression, depression presents itself with sleeplessness and also symptoms of pain that are unexplained like terrible headaches, backaches and things like that. The symptoms are so similar and then you imagine the workplace where you have a new manager who’s come in and that manager’s saying, “I’m going to impress my bosses and my team’s engagement scores are going to be sky-high.

I’m going to be looking to get rid of my disengaged employees because I want to make sure that I’m growing an engaged team and really putting my best foot forward.” You might have had a stellar performer in the past who’s gone through an episode of depression and it’s really affecting them at work and if that manager doesn’t have that awareness to say, “Is this person really disengaged or could they be going through something, could it be depression that’s affecting them?” Then they’re going to start managing that person and managing meaning, “I might start giving you some warnings or put you in a performance improvement plan.” That kind of thing.

I think we need to have that conversation too of, “Hey managers, you don’t have to solve for depression that problem is with your providers, your therapist, your professionals. What you really need to be able to do is say, “Do I have the wherewithal to think about it and understand, could this possibly be depression of a once high-performing employee that I need to really think about.”

Shani: Absolutely. What’s the attitude you’re facing out there right now as you start to have these conversations because right now I would say mental health is relegated to, “Well, as long as we have an Employee Assistance Program we’re covered.” As you and I were talking, mental health is really an organizational culture issue and we need to elevate it to parts of how we’re inclusive and empathetic and so forth just like we would be if someone came out of the closet at work or whatever the case may be. How are these conversations being received as you embark on this?

Debbie: Well I’ll tell you. One of the things, I just read an article about a really large beverage company that is actually taking great steps around mental health. The great steps that they described were, “We’re going out and we’re looking at our benefit package and we’re going to really ramp up the exposure. We’re going to do some more teletherapy and things like that.” Which is great, wonderful but they also say things like we’re going to do some manager training as well. The conversation that’s out there right now today is still largely around solutioning around it.

It’s like let’s offer some different solutions or therapies on the outside of things but what the conversation really needs to shift to is, if we are going to truly be a mentally healthy workplace, we need to create an environment where it is safe for people to come and again bring their whole selves and have these issues. Which means that we need to think of it as a cultural issue first. Before we start adding layers onto our benefits, start saying do we have cultural practices today that could actually be negatively impacting people’s mental health? When we do our projects and we look at culture, the structure that we do is typically to start with those higher-level–

You can’t dictate what a culture will be. A culture we know creates itself over time and it creates itself because of influences. Those influences can be external or internal. What we want to do is identify what do we want to have as cultural norms. What are healthy cultural norms for people who are struggling with mental illness? That is that we do things like we create openness and communication, we create a sense of belonging, we have good empathy and awareness of others. Those types of qualities are things that you want to build in and make sure are a strong part of your culture.

You don’t have to say with a label that, “This is a mental health behavior.” What you have to do is create behaviors in environments where we are creating things that are going to support people who are struggling that they’re to create that safe environment. It starts with thinking about culture and being mindful of the behaviors that will create that supportive environment. Then doing a check with your employees as you’re doing culture work to say, “We’re not just going to align people to work success behaviors. We’re going to say one of our cultural norms is that we bring our whole self to work.

What that looks like in practice is that we have these behaviors present and we are going to remove barriers to having those behaviors and we’re going to do more to reinforce them as we have the employees’ journey.” That’s the work that really needs to happen and that should happen with the employee base. It really should be we’re co-creating the behavior like the key norms that are going to help to make sure that we’re a company that really supports people with mental health challenges.

Shani: It sounds like what you’re saying is that it’s everybody’s job to make this shift. Those of us who know something about or have experienced it either personally or with someone close to us need to speak up about it and share experiences to make people understand that it’s normal and it happens. We need culture at the top, empathy key norms to make it important for this to become part of the conversation and of course to model it and we need all the people and managers and supervisors who live the behaviors and be comfortable talking about it know how to ask the right questions to figure out is it disengagement or is it depression and then what to do when you know the answer.

It’s incumbent upon everybody.

Debbie: It is. It really is. I think it is– Thinking in terms of it is almost like a form of a MeToo movement if you will. Those few people who are brave enough to get out there and share their stories. I want to let you know there’s a really great study that came out last year by the American Heart Association. They ended up with their corporate board creating a report on mental health in the workplace and their corporate board has executives on there from Bank of America and Johnson & Johnson and they shared stories. I believe it was Bank of America that had executives because they are working on mental health as a cultural issue and they had executives go out and have challenging conversations.

The challenging conversations were leaders who were willing to go out and share their story. Because leaders spoke up, groups were finding then, “Hey, if they can do it’s safe to do it here.” It is going to be that top-down, it’s going to be hugely important but then I have to also say for me it was very grassroots being able to talk about this at work. It started for me because a peer of mine we went out to dinner, I was really struggling with my daughter’s challenges she had left a large university, she had to come home. She was in a really bad state. I wasn’t sharing it with my workers a lot.

This woman when I went out to dinner with her she opened up to me about her son’s challenges and she was this woman who I hugely admired. She was this amazing dynamic strong salesperson out there and she was just one of those women that just has an aura around her when she’s out there. She shared her challenges that her son was going through, and what it was doing with her, and how it was affecting her. When she opened up to me, I was chilled head-to-toe and I finally felt like, “I can talk about this. It’s okay, I’m not alone.” I felt so alone before.

Knowing that I was in a place where someone else who I admired had struggled, it completely opened the door for me and it made me also feel that ownership to talk about it with other people too because there’s people who are just like me, who’re afraid, if I show my vulnerability then my work might come out and say, “Well, she’s not able to do these things because she has these struggles in her life.” That wasn’t the case when push came to shove and I started talking about it. I did find support, but that doesn’t happen everywhere and it needs to happen everywhere. It starts with us being brave I think.

The other thing is self-advocacy too. If you’re struggling with it as a personal challenge, the American Disabilities Act is there for you and your company has to support you. Know that if it’s hard for you to be brave, you may have to go and advocate for yourself, but you need to advocate for yourself because it is your right to have a workplace that is going to help you as you go through mental illness, as well, it’s part of that Disabilities Act, and it’s something that you have a right to as well.

Shani: Okay, if someone feels they have been discriminated against, passed over for promotion or paid poorly, not commensurate with the performance just because a company is aware- As I’m outside here in the wilderness there’s bugs flying around. -that if you feel you’ve been unfairly treated as a result of having disclosed then you actually have some stand on to make it right?

Debbie: Yes, you absolutely do have a support there and it does require, you would need to have a diagnosis, that’s part of it, but you absolutely have a right to stand up for yourself, and to expect work to help you during this time. There’s ownership on us as individuals to take those right steps and get the official diagnosis, the medical diagnosis as well.

Shani: Let’s go from culture-strategy to some more tactical things. I know you’ve got some advice for our Leadershifters who are watching and listening on how to run mentally-healthy meetings, what are those tips and tricks?

Debbie: All right, I just wanted to tell you that there’s a little story with that. I myself struggled with some anxiety challenges as I was going throughout my career and it was one of those examples of where it ebbs and flows. I had been promoted to a management position with a great company in New York and I was really excited going to attend my meetings. I walked into a management meeting, and the presenter immediately closed the door, and said, “Okay, we’re going to go around the room, we’re going to introduce ourselves, and we are going to tell a little bit about our background and get started.” Again said, “We’re going to have breaks at 10:30 and 1:00, and until then your focus is here in the room with me. Let’s go, it’s a busy day.”

Okay, doors shut. People start going around the room, and as I’m watching people go around the room and it’s getting closer to my time, this of course was triggered by a lot of things in life, but I started to panic and have a basic panic attack in the moment. It finally got to me, and I barely was able to spit out two or three words about who I was, it was very obvious that I was struggling immensely with that, and I immediately passed it to the person next to me, only accomplishing maybe two of the many steps that she had wanted me to do, but it was horrific for me. As a new–[crosstalk]

Shani: My heart is racing a little bit for you even hearing the story.

Debbie: Yes, and it was a time in my life where I was starting to have panic attacks. I had my third child, gone back to work, and all of that was contributing, and I really didn’t understand it at that point. For me it was terrifying, I didn’t understand why my body was doing this, but what a presenter, a person leading a meeting could do to make it a mentally healthy meeting for somebody who might have panic disorder would be, number one it’s possible, let the people know that this is a meeting, we’re here together to get some great stuff done, the door is going to stay open, if for any reason during the meeting you need to step out, feel free just to stand up and exit, and just come back in quietly, so we don’t disrupt people.

Then there’s also the ability instead of just doing the formal go around the room, and take off your name or worse yet, let’s memorize everybody’s name in the room and the last person has to talk and make a joke about every person in the room, let’s instead have a one-on-one, let me get to know you, let’s find 10 things in common exercise as we kickoff, and then you can introduce each other to the room. When you introduce each other, if the person is really struggling, then they can opt-out, they can say, “Hey, introduce me, and then do you mind just introducing yourself or help me to introduce you?”

You create an environment where people who can speak well in front of a group can do it, and that’s great, but if people are struggling, they feel safe to be able to get up, take a breather if they need to or know that they’re not going to be put on the spot. Other tactics are things like if you’re gathering like we as consultants often you do workshops, where you want to get people’s ideas, I was trying to make sure that I let the room know that if you are struggling and you don’t want to share an idea in front of everyone, either come grab me on a break or I give them a method to get me the idea after the session. I’m not losing because again many of these people are brilliant people who are struggling, I don’t want to lose those ideas. There’s all those tactics you can play.

Shani: Right. What I was thinking about when you were talking about putting people on the spot with this litany of questions, at least prepare people in advance like we’re going to go around and introduce ourselves, and these are the five pieces of information and I want everybody to be prepared to share so at least you can make some notes beforehand that’ll help you if you think that I won’t be able to ad-lib in the moment.

Debbie: Absolutely. I’ve been in training sessions where the trainer actually thought they were doing a good thing, and pulled a person up on stage that had said, “I’m really uncomfortable about doing that,” and made them do a mini piece of a presentation, and honestly, I think that made the presenter feel good because they thought they were helping someone, but at the end of the day the woman came over to me and said, “Please don’t do that to anyone else. That was really difficult.”

I think it’s also an empathetic awareness of again that some people struggle with this, and to let people set their tone. Let them sit in their chair if they’re going to make a point, they don’t have to stand up to make their point, let them sit if they want to. There’s ways that we can have a fun and productive meeting that allow people to present or be part of it in the best way they can.

Shani: Right, it reminds me of something I do. I keep a leadership presentation and influence skills workshop, and as you can imagine a major component of that is the storytelling skill, and a lot of times really powerful stories that we would want the employee in a professional context are very personal stories, and that’s what makes them memorable, and that’s what is engaging and it makes the connection between the presenter and other people is being able to see themselves in the presenter’s story.

When we’re doing this in the workshop, what I do is– because most of the practices people have to get up and present, but we don’t even do that until there’s a certain comfort level, but the way that I key up the storytelling is we get into a circle and also I never have more than 12 or 13 people in this class, because otherwise it starts to get too overwhelming and whatnot. We’ll have maximum, a dozen or so people in a circle which all of a sudden feels a little more intimate, friendly, and safe than sitting at the conference tables and whatever, and I go first. I share a story, where I set the tone for, “This is okay and this is safe,” and then people have their reactions, and then they feel more comfortable.

Debbie: Yes, absolutely. I think allowing yourself to be vulnerable first and show that it’s okay that’s hugely important, I totally agree with that. I think you bring another point two is that we know that in some of our roles, we have to be able to stand and present. There’s different positions that you’re in that we need to overcome, but I think that there’s ways to make sure that you’re creating environments where people feel safe to stand up and give their best and make sure they’re doing it in a place where they can be vulnerable if they need to.

Shani: Right. I think where this all boils down to is humble psychological safety, because the term psychological safety is so potent right now in organizational development and culture and leadership development work popularized by Google. They did their study, I think it was called Project Aristotle a few years ago to try and identify what is the secret sauce of our most successful team when they crunched all their numbers from reviews and engagement and feedback on managers and so forth.

They determined that the most successful teams at Google had one thing in common and it had nothing to do with the number of Harvard MBAs or engineers or rocket scientists or whatever. It was the teams that had psychological safety, meaning people felt safe to share their ideas, make mistakes without being made to look bad, to speak up even if you had a difference of opinion with the team’s leader or so forth and that there’s just an openness to different, diverse opinions and ideas and perspectives. Here, it’s like legitimately, not just figuratively, psychological safety, it is actually. That’s what I’m like I want to call it double psychological safety.

[laughter]

Debbie: Legitimate real-deal psychological safety.

Shani: Yeah!

Debbie: 100%. I’m reading the culture code that Dan Quayle’s– I think that this is going to be the shift, don’t you think, for the future when it comes to culture that he speaks a lot to belonging and the power of creating that sense of belonging within groups and that’s, again that sign of a strong team is when you can really create that foundation. That’s where I think that we need to shift as a culture of employers as well, is that, we are all out there, companies are trying to do their best to have that succeed, get their growth, but they need to start to think of themselves as we are people who help not only the communities by donating and doing good things in the communities, but we create these amazing communities within our workforces and they’re communities of belonging as well.

I think there’s obviously a line again that we have to be really cognizant of and that is that we don’t expect employers to be therapists, we don’t expect them to solve the mental health issues, what we do expect for them to do is to create a place where workers can thrive and everybody has a chance to thrive regardless of mental health.

Shani: Let’s get really prescriptive here- if you’ve got a manager, a leader, or a supervisor, just someone who is in charge of managing people and they want to do a better job at this, but they don’t want to make any assumptions and they’re new at it, they’ve never really grappled with this before, or they’ve just avoided it before, what are some steps that they can take if they suspect that someone on their team is in the midst of some challenge here?

Debbie: Great question. I would do two things, outwardly tactically, I would immediately look at our organizational policy so that I understand what tools are there for this person. Number one meaning I would be looking at do we have in any RG or support group? What kind of benefits do we have? Then I’d be absolutely connecting with HR because this will be a conversation that we do have to be careful about, we don’t want to invade someone’s privacy and we don’t want to be assumptive in any way. We want to be thinking about, consulting with HR and saying, “I suspect but I want to do this well and I want to support this person because if we’re a good manager we’re creating that environment of belonging and support.”

It’s a positive, that tactical work, but then emotionally myself as a manager, I would, number one, want to make sure, “Have I created a place where this person feels comfortable to approach me?” If the reason I suspect there’s a mental health issue is because of one of those descriptors of disengagement, meaning they’re appearing more apathetic, they’re out of work more often and this is someone who has historically been a positive contributor. I would absolutely, in my coaching conversations, make them feel that sense of safety to say, “I’ve just noticed just a change in your performance and it concerns me because I know you and I really feel like you’re such a strong contributor- is there anything I can do to help?”

If you open it up that way and you don’t say, “I think you might have mental illness.” You make it a positive conversation about, “I’m here for you and is there anything I can do to help?” That person if they truly are struggling, if they trust you, they may come forward and say, “Yes, in fact, I’m struggling right now and I’m not really sure where to go or what to do.” They would also want to make sure they know about the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Shani: Absolutely.

Debbie: That piece would be a part of it. If you as a manager haven’t created this place of trust where employees come to you when things are going so well in their personal life, then that’s a reflection, that’s a self-reflection on you as to be what kind of manager do I want to be? I want to be someone who can get things done but I want to be someone who can create a thriving team as well. I question myself emotionally to make sure that empathy is on. [laughs]

Shani: Yes, empathy on and let’s just be real, there are some leaders out there who either aren’t incredibly empathetic, or they’re just old-school, they’re tough guys, tough girls, they can still be tentative to this too.

Debbie: Yes, and honestly, that’s where– This is where culture comes into play.

Shani: Oh my God, sorry. I think being outside.

Debbie: It’s that Arkansas air.

Shani: I think there are some allergens in the air because I wasn’t coughing like this inside.

Debbie: [laughs] No, I think that’s where culture comes into play. If we are an organization that wants to create a place where everyone can thrive, then that means that we have behaviors in place that we expect of our employees and our managers and that means that we would expect our managers to have a certain level of empathy and support. If we have a leader who is old-school, who creates an intimidating environment where people don’t have a sense of trust, where they’re afraid to speak their mind or contribute, then we have a framework in place because of our cultural, our principles, our shared principles or commitments or our values that says this is not someone who fits into the culture we want to be so that there’s ways as their leaders are coaching that they can address that.

That’s another reason why it’s even more important that companies don’t leave this off the radar when you work on culture, make sure that it’s part of parameters that we’re setting. Again, it doesn’t have to be labeled mental health all the way through it’s do we prioritize empathy? Do we prioritize belonging and support in communication and openness?

Shani: Absolutely. Well this has been an incredibly valuable and interesting discussion and I just want to summarize with a few of the key takeaways here. Let me start by saying, if there is any other – name it – that have impacted 20% of your workforce and you weren’t paying attention to it, what the fuck?

Debbie: [laughs]

Shani: This is important. I know it might feel awkward, or scary, but as we talked about, this is everyone’s responsibility to create the kind of culture where we can feel free to bring our full selves, good, bad and ugly and get the support we need because if we are ignoring it and not showing up for these people, the organization suffers. Of course, the person suffers but so does the organization. This really is a way to create a win-win.

Managers, be aware, notice, don’t just be looking out for disengagement, know now that something else could be, don’t make the assumption but it’s possible that something else is going on and the employee is depressed or anxious or has something else going on. I think your advice, just be open and when you’re in a one-on-one meeting, of course, this is not a conversation to have at a team meeting or around other people, it’s just like, “Hey I’ve noticed this and it’s unusual, what’s going on for you?” You just ask it in a compassionate way and get the conversation going. It’s not like, “Hey, are you depressed?”

Debbie: Exactly.

Shani: There’s a way to be graceful in having a conversation and making it important to create this safety and belonging and inclusivity even in meetings. Sure, these are professional business meetings and that doesn’t mean we need to forget that we’re all human beings, but to recap some of the advice that Deb gave us today, giving– not like forcing everybody to be locked up in a room. Even if the door needs to be shut for privacy reasons, giving people the permission to take care of themselves and go and come as they need to for the meeting. Another tactic would be if you think that people are going to be a little timid introducing themselves, get people to spend some private time one-on-one, getting to know each other and then introducing their partner, which is always a fun way to do things and not just create safety but it’s a little more fun than just getting up and saying, “Hi, I’m so and so and I work in the such and such office.”

Debbie: Exactly.

Shani: Because I think that one-on-one they’ll get some really interesting specific information with each other that they get to share which creates more of a sense of belonging. It’s going to be like Deb introduces Shani and she is from here and she has two cats named Delane and Kramer and suddenly there’s other people in the room with, “Oh my God, I love cats,” or “Oh, she must be a Seinfeld fan.” It’s just creating connection. I love that idea.Then also if someone is afraid to speak up, making sure that they know there’s an open invitation to share their idea offline, either after the meeting or on a break, or what have you. Those are some tips to create a logically safe meeting or mentally healthy meeting.

Let’s see, super, super important, because really this is the takeaway from this conversation you guys. If you think you’ve got someone on your team know that it’s now your responsibility to have a conversation and just open it up and before you do so prepare yourself at least the first time so you know what the company’s policies are, what the benefits are and what pulls are at your disposal and of course consult with HR because they are trained to help you make these conversations, easier for you to have and to give you all the highlights of the things that you can then mention to the employee if it does come out that they have some sort of mental illness, either episodic or something more chronic.

Ultimately it’s not for all of us, it’s for those of us who are having issues, speak openly and honestly about it, whether it’s our selves, our friends, our families it’s upto senior leaders who are craft in culture and it’s up to them to walk the talk and talk the walk, both and for everybody to hold each other accountable for it, and if you see something– I say this all the time, if you see something, say something. It’s not just in the airport, if you see a suitcase unattended. If you see something that’s not right around this issue, for example, don’t let it pass unnoticed. Escalate it, elevate it, talk to the person, whatever needs to be to make sure that people are treated right. Would you add anything to my summary?

Debbie: I think that was beautiful, absolutely and thank you so much for letting me come on and talk today, I really appreciate that.

Shani: It’s my pleasure. Good work that you’re up to and if people want to reach you, get some help at work, going in their organizations what’s the best way to get in touch?

Debbie: Okay, so right the now the website is under construction so, for now, find me on LinkedIn, Debbie Urbanik on LinkedIn, and you’ll see me out there as an independent consultant with D. Whitney Consulting which is my company and hope@work is part of that offering, so that’s great.

Shani: Excellent. Well we’ll absolutely stay in touch because I share your passion for this and I’d love to make referrals or collaborate to bring this into more organizations.

Debbie: I love it. Thank you so much, Shani.

Shani: Thank you and thank you Leadershifters for listening or watching. We’ll catch you next time on the LeaderShift show. Until then you know how to find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and of course theleadershiftproject.com. Until next time. Mwah.

The post 34: Shifting mental health from a benefits choice to a cultural imperative with Debbie Urbanik appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.