What's The Difference?

Sara Taylor earned a master's degree in Diversity and Organizational Development from the University of Minnesota. She served as a leadership and diversity specialist at the University of Minnesota for five years and as director of diversity and inclusion for Ramsey County, Minnesota for three years.

Sara is the founder and president of deepSEE Consulting and has worked with companies as large as Coca-Cola, General Mills, 3M Company, AARP, and numerous others. She has a new book, "Filter Shift: How Effective People See the World," that explores how our unconscious is actually making choices and decisions for us, all without our knowing — and how to change that.

• Sara discusses the pain and trauma felt by "Fernando," a gay man at a company she was working with, six months after the PULSE night club tragedy in Orlando
• Why a non-response from Fernando's employer after the shooting made him feel unvalued, unrespected, and unimportant to his employer
• How hate-based violence targeting marginalized communities is on the rise, reflecting the injustice, inequities, and disparities built into our society's systems
• Why employer silence after these attacks leaves their employees feeling unsupported and leaves external stakeholders in the dark about what the organization stands for
• Sara shares an important checklist of dos and don'ts organizations can use to better respond to and address these tragedies
• Why empathy, authenticity, sincerity, clear, and frequent communication, and deep commitment to your employees and their pain are vital
• Why short-term messaging isn't enough, and what steps you can take to clearly demonstrate your support over the long-term

• Website: www.deepseeconsulting.com
• Twitter: @deepseesara

Marlene Schoenberg has many years of experience as a speech consultant. Over the past 25 years, she has become an accent expert, specializing in working with international scientists, engineers, and executives. Her award-winning work has been honored by her professional peers. Ms. Schoenberg holds a master's degree in Communication Disorders from Boston University and an Adult ESL Certificate from Hamline University. She has worked with clients from around the world at major corporations in the Twin Cities and nationally. Industries she has served include food, computers, defense, education, health care, insurance, adhesives, tools, electrical power, and banking. Corporate CEOs and VPs have benefited from her services.

Marlene is the author of Pronunciation for Career Growth and Speech Insights for Success. She was a columnist for China Insight News for 3 years. Her work has been featured in The Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, Chicago Tribune, Info World Magazine, and the IBM Speech Viewer Times as well as on cable TV, Internet, Radio, and Channel 11 News with Kerri Miller.

In addition, she has been an adjunct instructor at several community colleges where she established speech biofeedback labs using the IBM Speech Viewer II. Marlene worked at the forefront of using speech recognition technology with high-level clients.

• How Marlene began helping newcomers to the United States modify their accents using her experience as a speech pathologist, and how this became a new career direction
• Why it is important to remember that every one of us has an accent, and why no accent is either good or bad
• Why there is a distinct difference between a discernible accent and an unintelligible one, and how Marlene believes speech patterns to be "old habits"
• Why assumptions based on accents are entirely listener-based bias, and why certain accents are considered more "sophisticated" than others to many American listeners
• Marlene outlines how she helps native speakers of American English better listen to and understand speakers with other accents
• Why learning to listen to and understand accents can be a powerful and marketable business skill
• How accents often trigger more bias than skin color, and how polarization can play a role in accent bias
• Marlene shares examples of accents triggering bias and of students who were able to use accent training to advance their careers
• Why the discernibility of an accent often depends on situational factors like background noise and differences between in-person and telephone communication

• Website: http://accentwisdom.com/
• Telephone: (651) 699-9233
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/marlene-schoenberg-13b4037/

Sara Taylor earned a master's degree in Diversity and Organizational Development from the University of Minnesota. She served as a leadership and diversity specialist at the University of Minnesota for five years and as director of diversity and inclusion for Ramsey County, Minnesota for three years.

Sara is the founder and president of deepSEE Consulting and has worked with companies as large as Coca-Cola, General Mills, 3M Company, AARP, and numerous others. She has a new book, "Filter Shift: How Effective People See the World," that explores how our unconscious is actually making choices and decisions for us, all without our knowing — and how to change that.

• Sara shares some of the important race and culture lessons that, as a white person, she wasn't taught but had to learn through the experiences of her mixed-race family
• Why it is important to recognize that our life experiences and opportunities often aren't universal
• Why What Would You Do's "Bike Thief" Episodes featuring John Quiñones highlights how the experiences we have can change solely based on who we are
• How individual bias creates disparity in many different aspects of our lives including how we are disciplined and even our economics
• Why large majorities of people have been proven to have unconscious stereotypical biases against people of color and other marginalized groups
• How widespread individual bias becomes systemic bias, with shocking statistics to demonstrate these systemic disparities
• How this systemic bias leads to very different interactions with police for black and white people
• Why we all need to know that divisiveness and polarization aren't just bad for the "other" group but is harmful to ourselves as well
• Why remaining silent perpetuates the systems of dysfunction in racism, and why fear, ignorance, and guilt support racial anxiety
• How our economy was built on a foundation of slavery, and how even our religious institutions supported slavery at one time
• How White Guilt isn't helpful, but White Accountability is necessary

• What Would You Do's "Bike Thief" Episode from John Quiñones: https://youtu.be/ge7i60GuNRg
• Website: www.deepseeconsulting.com
• Twitter: @deepseesara

Sara Taylor earned a master's degree in Diversity and Organizational Development from the University of Minnesota. She served as a leadership and diversity specialist at the University of Minnesota for five years and as director of diversity and inclusion for Ramsey County, Minnesota for three years.

Sara is the founder and president of deepSEE Consulting and has worked with companies as large as Coca-Cola, General Mills, 3M Company, AARP, and numerous others. She has a new book, "Filter Shift: How Effective People See the World," that explores how our unconscious is actually making choices and decisions for us, all without our knowing — and how to change that.

• Why the dominant culture in the United States is strongly focused on individualism rather than the group
• How the COVID-19 pandemic is challenging our individualistic society with new requirements sometimes at odds with our natural inclinations
• Why all of the challenges brought by COVID-19 are group-oriented and require a group-oriented mindset to effectively address
• Why many are struggling to see any personal connection to the group, resulting in some people protesting the measures we are taking to address the pandemic
• Why our orientation towards individualism is neither right nor wrong but is culturally ingrained
• Why viewing the individualistic perspectives of others requires a lack of judgment and an understanding of where these feelings are coming from

• The ADL H.E.A.T. Map: https://www.adl.org/education-and-resources/resource-knowledge-base/adl-heat-map
• Website: www.deepseeconsulting.com
• Twitter: @deepseesara

Sara Taylor earned a master's degree in Diversity and Organizational Development from the University of Minnesota. She served as a leadership and diversity specialist at the University of Minnesota for five years and as director of diversity and inclusion for Ramsey County, Minnesota for three years.

Sara is the founder and president of deepSEE Consulting and has worked with companies as large as Coca-Cola, General Mills, 3M Company, AARP, and numerous others. She has a new book, "Filter Shift: How Effective People See the World," that explores how our unconscious is actually making choices and decisions for us, all without our knowing — and how to change that.

• Why the COVID-19 pandemic has created powerful change in all of our lives, including health challenges and work changes
• How the team at deepSEE is using William Bridges' Transition Model, both for themselves and with their clients, to help adjust to these major changes
• Why change is far more than transactional, with psychological reorientation happening behind the scenes
• How the Bridges' Transition Model works with three stages of change: the "ending" or "letting go", the "neutral zone", and the "new beginning", and why the middle stage is the most complex and difficult to navigate
• Why COVID-19 has put us all in the low-productivity and chaotic neutral zone, and how knowing we are all at this stage can help better understand ourselves and our peers
• How to validate your feelings and narrow your focus to better deal with being stuck in the neutral zone

• The ADL H.E.A.T. Map: https://www.adl.org/education-and-resources/resource-knowledge-base/adl-heat-map
• Website: www.deepseeconsulting.com
• Twitter: @deepseesara

Sara Taylor earned a master's degree in Diversity and Organizational Development from the University of Minnesota. She served as a leadership and diversity specialist at the University of Minnesota for five years and as director of diversity and inclusion for Ramsey County, Minnesota for three years.

Sara is the founder and president of deepSEE Consulting and has worked with companies as large as Coca-Cola, General Mills, 3M Company, AARP, and numerous others. She has a new book, "Filter Shift: How Effective People See the World," that explores how our unconscious is actually making choices and decisions for us, all without our knowing — and how to change that.

• Why everyone is naturally predisposed to automatically identify who is a part of their "group" and who is "apart from"
• Why those that we see as "apart from" can instill discomfort and even fear, and why that sense of discomfort or fear plays a role in how we see the "other"
• How polarization, the second stage of development, limits people to painting groups in broad brush strokes with all members sharing the same traits and qualities
• Why our internal filters completely define our experiences of others, especially for those in the first three stages
• Why the social context of an environment and fear combine to determine whether we classify someone as "part of" or "other"
• Sara shares a story of a Jewish woman killed in a mass shooting and discusses the shooter's stage of development and inability to see his victim as a complete person
• Why you should take a look at the Anti-Defamation League's H.E.A.T. (Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism, Terror) Map
• Why the staggering increase of hate-based violence from 2015-2020 is based on our society's increased polarization and fear
• Why fear often quickly turns into anger, and why anger is almost universally the primary driver in incidents of violence
• Why the COVID-19 pandemic is increasing social fear, resulting in an 85% increase in gun sales during the month of March 2020
• What steps we can take if we begin to feel polarization or fear to help break out of those feelings

• The ADL H.E.A.T. Map: https://www.adl.org/education-and-resources/resource-knowledge-base/adl-heat-map
• Website: www.deepseeconsulting.com
• Twitter: @deepseesara

Sara Taylor earned a master's degree in Diversity and Organizational Development from the University of Minnesota. She served as a leadership and diversity specialist at the University of Minnesota for five years and as director of diversity and inclusion for Ramsey County, Minnesota for three years.

Sara is the founder and president of deepSEE Consulting and has worked with companies as large as Coca-Cola, General Mills, 3M Company, AARP, and numerous others. She has a new book, "Filter Shift: How Effective People See the World," that explores how our unconscious is actually making choices and decisions for us, all without our knowing — and how to change that.

• Sara reads an article she wrote for Forbes titled Full Contrast: How a Pandemic Exposes and Amplifies Systems of Inequity
• How COVID-19 is exposing many of the already-present injustices in our country in greater detail than ever before, and why injustices within our socio-economic, healthcare and education systems are of particular note during the pandemic
• How "equality" and "equity" differ in focus and impact, and why our cultural focus on equality created systems of inequity that give systemic advantage to some but not all
• Why those who are within the first three stages of cultural competence focus on equality rather than equity
• How there is inequity in our education system that causes black, brown and poor kids of all races to be two years behind white and wealthier kids as early as fourth grade
• How COVID-19 is impacting students who have limited or no access to the internet, with only 56% of households making $30,000 a year or less having access to the internet
• How the average white family has significantly more wealth than the average black or Latinx family, and how unemployment rates are impacting blacks far more than whites
• Why whites are twice as likely to be able to work from home, meaning black and brown workers are more likely to be forced to go to work, exposing themselves to health risks
• How a staggering number of black people prematurely die in America every day as a direct result of racial inequities in healthcare
• Sara shares state-by-state statistics of the disparity between the percentage of black residents of each state and the number of lives lost to the coronavirus

• Website: www.deepseeconsulting.com
• Twitter: @deepseesara
• Forbes article: Full Contrast: How a Pandemic Exposes and Amplifies Systems of Inequity

Ana Elisa Souffront has a bachelor's degree from Loyola University Chicago. She brings a perspective of advocacy and activism to Diversity and Inclusion. As an activist herself, she speaks to the importance of difference. Her experience within advocacy includes working on the Right to Marry Campaign in Minnesota, interning for Embrace Dignity, a non-profit working to partially decriminalize prostitution in South Africa, and also working as a fellow at the Minnesota Youth Collective, a non-profit political organization. She continues to push for the importance of diversity and inclusion as she looks to the legal field, attending law school in the fall of this year.

• How Generation Z, which is just now beginning to enter the workforce, is far larger than the other 4-5 generations in our workforce today
• How growing up with a diversity and inclusion practitioner for a mom made a lasting impression on Ana Elisa
• Ana Elisa shares some of the most common misconceptions about Generation Z, typically defined as workers born after 1997
• How Ana Elisa feels key experiences, such as growing up with the first African American President and the legalization of same-sex marriage, have impacted her generation
• Why being younger and more comfortable with difference doesn't necessarily translate into Millennials and Generation Z being more culturally competent
• Why Ana Elisa feels that Generation Z tends to expect more responsive and engaged managers and want face-to-face interaction
• How Ana Elisa anticipates Generation Z will impact the workplace, and how Generation Z is uniquely different from Millennials
• What advice Ana Elisa would offer to diversity and inclusion practitioners wanting to attract and retain Generation Z employees

• Website: www.mnyouthcollective.org
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ana-elisa-souffront-272b1a16a/
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/mnycollective/

Patricia Jesperson is Chief Curiosity Officer at EmployeeEXP, and co-author of the newly re-released Reversing the Ostrich Approach to Diversity: Pulling your head out of the sand. With more than 25 years working on the people-side of the business, she specializes in working with employers to create better Employee Experience outcomes.

As the curious type, Patricia has spent the majority of her career exploring how to maximize the talent experience with an emphasis on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) and Total Rewards. This drive for exploring what-ifs enables her to deliver custom content as well as EmployeeEXP proprietary models to help her clients attract, retain, develop and engage talent. Examples include The EmployeeEXP 8 x 9 Box Communication Analysis™, a re-imagined/re-purposed 9-Box that invites organizations to explore their approach to communicating key programs to increasingly diverse talent. It asks the question, "how confident are you that what you spend on Employee Experience is aligned efficiently to attract, retain, and engage today's diverse talent?" She also introduced The Inclusion Matrix™ (IM) in 2019, which elevates the conversation from traditional DEI training to creating inclusive and engaged leaders.

Believing that one must continue to learn to keep current, she seizes opportunities to always-be-learning through teaching at Augsburg University as a professor in the MBA and adult-education programs and her Board experience e.g. Human Resource Executive Forum Board, Augsburg University Alumni Board, Chair of the Workforce Development and Education Policy Committee for the MN Chamber, and Director of Diversity Inclusion for SHRM MN State Council.

• How Patricia transitioned her career to working in diversity and inclusion and the people side of business
• Why Patricia believes that diversity and inclusion practitioners can learn valuable lessons from business development and marketing
• Why an outcome-based approach to diversity and inclusion can be more effective than a content-based approach
• How Fortune 500 and 1000 businesses lead the way for diversity and inclusion, and why now mid-market businesses are realizing the need to embrace D&I to compete for talent
• Why support for a sustainable diverse and inclusive culture needs to be available at all leadership levels of an organization
• Why human resources and diversity and inclusion shouldn't be compartmentalized into separate silos but be viewed as a part of an organization's overall success
• How Eric S. Raymond's computer programming essay, The Cathedral & the Bazaar, can teach the value of a faster, more innovative and collaborative process
• Why organizations often make the mistaken assumption that they have communicated their message clearly and that it is universally understood

• The Cathedral & the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond: https://amzn.to/2xnJnsT
• Reversing the Ostrich Approach to Diversity by Amy Tolbert, Patricia Jesperson, and Alexis Parra: https://amzn.to/2XxDtjH
• Visit The Forum Podcast, where Patricia Jesperson is an upcoming guest: https://forumworkplaceinclusion.org/podcast/
• Website: https://employeeexp.com/
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/patriciajesperson/

Sara Taylor earned a master's degree in Diversity and Organizational Development from the University of Minnesota. She served as a leadership and diversity specialist at the University of Minnesota for five years and as director of diversity and inclusion for Ramsey County, Minnesota for three years.

Sara is the founder and president of deepSEE Consulting and has worked with companies as large as Coca-Cola, General Mills, 3M Company, AARP, and numerous others. She has a new book, "Filter Shift: How Effective People See the World," that explores how our unconscious is actually making choices and decisions for us, all without our knowing — and how to change that.

• How we have three kinds of cultural preference filters that exist as a spectrum: direct vs. indirect communication, hierarchy vs. egalitarian, and task vs. relationship
• How the direct vs. indirect communication filter determines whether we prefer to address things face to face and with specificity, or indirectly and through metaphors and stories
• Sara offers an example of a past client company in Germany looking for help dealing with Japanese employees where direct filters were clashing with indirect filters
• Why working remotely creates a unique challenge due to missing out on conversational cues and body language that help us communicate face-to-face
• What steps you can take to communicate with someone who prefers a communication style opposite your own
• Why someone who prefers a hierarchy filter will look to leadership for decision-making, while an egalitarian expects others to make their own decisions
• Why working remotely can create a disconnect between hierarchical and egalitarian team members, and why generational differences might also have an impact on this disconnect
• Why trust and communication are the solutions that can help bridge the gap between hierarchy and egalitarian
• Why working remotely is particularly challenging for people who have a preference for relationship-based work over task-based work
• Why frequent check-ins and other daily touch points can help build trust and strengthen communication

• Website: www.deepseeconsulting.com
• Twitter: @deepseesara