Juneteenth: A History

“To hear Vern’s story first hand….his struggles, his perseverance, his drive, his inner thoughts, his wit, his connection to his community…was a gift for each and every one of us,” shared one participant following one of his presentations. Other participants call him “dynamic” and “super engaging.”

What’s the most inspiring part of your job?

The most inspiring part of being a facilitator is sharing personal life experiences with people who have no idea of what it means be Black in America. During our Racial Justice workshops, I tell my story from childhood in the segregated south to fighting for civil rights as a teen to working in corporate America in the ‘70s. This gives perspective to the conversation on race and helps to facilitate understanding. Just seeing the impact of my stories and sharing is very rewarding. People come in with limited knowledge, but they leave wanting to know more, understanding that people who look like me have a different reality when they come to work every day.

What does inclusion mean to you?

Inclusion is viewing all employees, regardless of their Elements of Individuality, as valuable and prized resources that can help the team achieve desired goals. If you can master the people skill of treating everyone in your organization with dignity and respect, inclusion becomes effortless. If treated with dignity and respect, employees will come to you and that gap that we call the social gap will close, and you can evaluate a person’s ability and what they bring to the job without the noise of difference – it’s just a person that you’ve hired with skills and talents.

How did you get involved in IDE work?

Spending 25 years in a corporate environment as a black man, I was a living example for diversity and inclusion. When I finished that career and I looked at what I achieved, why I achieved it, and what I went through to achieve it, I felt that I could spend the rest of my life helping others, based on my experience, navigating these environments. Those 25 years gave me the knowledge and real-life experiences that propelled me into this diversity and inclusion workspace for the last 27 years.

How has the IDE field changed since you first got involved in this work?

Early in my diversity and inclusion career, organizations gave lip service to the work. When organizations did engage in the work, it was a check-the-box engagement without the requisite commitment to see it through. There was something called a consent decree that may require an organization to do sensitivity training. It was a temporary solution to an ongoing issue. Today, organizations recognize the importance of valuing all employees and the unique differences that each bring to work each day. They address the issue of how to make those differences be sources of strength rather being divisive and a source of weakness.

I’ve seen progress, and this is one reason why I’m still doing this work 27 years later. Today organizations are engaging partners like Inclusity on this IDE journey so that they can understand what’s causing this divide and what are the issues, and as the issues bubble up, how can they address them. Inclusity has been working with numerous clients long term. What [these organizations are] trying to do is impact their culture, how they do business, and set the expectations of employees as they come to work every day as it relates to people. Most corporations are concerned with the product, the process, the profit. If you focus on your people, the other things will happen.

Do you have a motto or personal mantra?

When I was in high school, I was a jokester and always acting out. One day my high school guidance counselor was giving me one of her “you’ve got to be serious about life” talks and shared the following quote which I adopted as my personal mantra. “He who knows not and knows not that he knows not, is a fool, shun him. He who knows not and knows that he knows not, is a child, teach him. He who knows and knows not that he knows, is asleep, wake him. He who knows and knows that he knows, is wise, follow him.”

What are three career lessons you’ve learned?

Be prepared. When you’re prepared, you’re ready to compete with anyone. Understand where you are, meaning understand your environment and spend time learning the culture. When you understand the environment, you can make an informed decision that you’re where you need to be. Be receptive to take feedback. Constructive feedback is a gift. Typically people will not take the time to provide the feedback unless they were vested in your success. Change your mindset and try to see the message as an opportunity.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to join the Inclusity team?

Make sure that you have taken a deep introspective look at who you are. Once you’ve done that, ask yourself why do I want to do this work? What do I bring to the Inclusity environment that will make me a valuable resource to the team? And most importantly, am I ready to invest the time to get ready?

In this blog, we hear from Patrick Hughes, a facilitator with Inclusity. He openly shares his perspective as a white male in the IDE space; he fits into almost every in-norm, dominant social identifier in our society. Patrick addresses the “elephant in the room” right upfront: ”Hi, I’m Patrick. I’m a white guy with a lot of privilege, and I’m fully committed to inclusion.”

How did you first get involved in inclusion, diversity, & equity (IDE)?

As a white male, what role do you play in IDE efforts?

I see myself as a partner, ally, and interrupter. I look at my role as partnering up with other people to make things happen, not leading the charge. I’m constantly looking at how I can be an ally for any marginalized group because I live in so many privileged categories and in-norm groups. I’m looking for ways to partner with or be an ally to folks that aren’t in-norm groups, so I can create inclusion. Also, because of this awarded privilege that I sometimes have, I look for ways to interrupt conversations that may be creating exclusion. I think about how I can use the voice that I’m given because of my gender and skin color to elevate others.

What are some of the lessons learned from engaging in IDE work?

I’ve learned a lot around how to be empathetic and how to hear and value others’ emotions and experiences. When I work with individuals and groups, I want to hear feedback so I can grow and create safe space where we can have relationship and dialogue. I’m not reluctant to initiate and engage in difficult conversations. Through the difficult conversations come strengthened partnerships and new insights. But, this must be authentic. If you engage in this way and don’t mean it, you’ll do more harm than good.

How do we engage white males in IDE efforts?

We need to disarm white men and create a safe space for them to share emotions around feeling excluded in IDE. If we don’t validate their experiences and feelings around exclusion, the overall objective of ensuring that everyone feels connected and valued will fail. White men need to see themselves as part of the solution – not part of the problem where they feel blamed and vilified.

What have you personally gained from working in the IDE space?

I’ve gained a richer life experience and deeper relationships. I’ve gained new perspectives that enable me to be a better leader. I now walk around this world from a conscious place as opposed to unconsciously through my socializations. The socializations and biases that I grew up with are not who I want to be in the world. For me, creating inclusion is creating the world that I want where everyone feels valued and empowered. Previously, I thought I was creating the world I wanted only to realize that there’s unconscious bias getting in the way of that. I wanted to create empowered teams and be a leader that everyone loved and admired, but I wasn’t. I was exhibiting behaviors that were contrary to what I wanted to create.

Why are diversity and inclusion everyone’s responsibility, including white males?

We cannot build inclusion if we’re excluding anyone. White men absolutely need to be at the table. They have the opportunity to leverage much of the power and privilege that they have been given to further the efforts of creating inclusion to benefit everyone. However, white men must be willing to step into uncomfortable situations and embrace change to make this happen. It can feel scary because the world has been set up to benefit them, so why should they want to change. Sometimes you have to risk a little bit to gain a lot. Once I was willing to risk alienating some friends and colleagues or being seen as a traitor or outcast, I found a whole new world open up to me on the other side. That world of inclusion now entails deeper relationships, more productive teams, and exponential growth in my leadership abilities.

Every June, businesses celebrate Pride Month to show their support for the LGBTQ+ community; however, true allyship requires advocacy beyond one month a year. The LGBTQ+ community and its allies need businesses to activate beyond Pride Month and stand behind the community year-round. Corporate America can demonstrate their true commitment through actively working to reduce workplace discrimination and supporting employees who identify as LGBTQ+ in the workplace.

Internationally recognized events like Pride Month should remind us of the importance of fostering fully inclusive workplaces. Instead, many companies fall prey to the phenomenon of “rainbow washing,” which is when businesses align themselves with Pride for personal gain, rather than to genuinely support the LGBTQ+ community. Examples of rainbow washing include public gestures of support such as corporate groups marching in parades, corporations adding rainbow colors to their logos, changing social media avatars, publishing support statements at the start of Pride Month, and using a rainbow to push products — all without the benefits of an LGBTQ+ inclusive workplace. For example, one Fortune 500 corporation updated its Instagram profile picture to include a pride flag despite donating nearly $1 million to anti-gay politicians.

Creating a genuinely inclusive culture means taking year-round action. How can businesses or organizations celebrate and support LGBTQ+ employees beyond Pride Month? There are ways to give more meaningful support to the LGBTQ+ community through intentional and concerted effort to build an equitable and inclusive workplace. The suggestions below promote LGBTQ+ representation and equality in the workplace through actionable steps:

• 1. Policies Should Be the Starting Point

  Set and enforce policies to protect LGBTQ+ employees such as non-discrimination (including sexual orientation, sexuality, and gender identify) and anti-harassment policies to ensure workplaces are free of discrimination and subtle acts of exclusion (microaggressions).

• 2. Offer Inclusion Training

  Provide diversity and inclusion training that addresses sexual orientation and gender identity, formal LGBTQ+ awareness training programs, as well as inclusive management training.

• 3. Commit to Inclusive Hiring Practices

  Level the playing field for all candidates with practices including inclusive job descriptions, bias awareness training for hiring teams, and diverse interview teams.

• 4. Promote Formal LGBTQ+ Allyship

  Allies are influential colleagues who openly champion and support LGBTQ-inclusive policies and employees. Allyship can take many forms, including implementing programs like Culture Champions, which provide participants the skills and tools to role model and foster inclusion.

• 5. Support Employees with Climate Surveys

  Conduct research to better understand the culture for employees who identify as LGBTQ+. The purpose of the research is to identify issues and concerns that impact the organization’s ability to have a welcoming and inclusive environment.

• 6. Expand Benefits

  LGBTQ+ employees often face disparities in access to healthcare and benefits such as parental leave. Offer paid family leave to include LGBTQ+ employees and same-sex benefits. Gender affirming health care benefits allow gender-diverse people to maximize their overall health and psychological well-being.

• 7. Establish an LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group

  Promote inclusivity and belonging through an LGBTQ+ ERG. An employee-led affinity group addresses the unique needs of the community and improves the working environment for hiring, retaining, and advancing LGBTQ+ employees.

• 8. Support Events Beyond Pride Month

  Engaging with the LGBTQ+ community beyond obvious events, such as Spirit Day, can send a strong message about a business’ commitment to diversity.

Supporting LGBTQ+ employees can look different from company to company, but the main goal is that every employee feels supported and valued. Employers have a responsibility to make sure all employees feel seen and supported in bringing their true and authentic selves in the workplace. If your company is interested in talking with Inclusity to ensure that you’re providing a truly inclusive work environment for all employees, we’re here to help.

This article on HRDive.com speaks to two 2022 trends that Inclusity strongly supports:

• Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (“DEI” is “IDE” to Inclusity) work is here to stay!  According to LinkedIn research,”78% of job-seekers expect to find DEI information on a company’s LinkedIn page.” LinkedIn’s Jennie Dede says, “Job seekers are not tolerating companies that are not taking it seriously …[candidates] really want to understand what the strategy is, what the investment is, how the company is doing things differently.”
• Leading with heart matters!  In part due to the reflection that the recent pandemic has afforded us, employees are more interested than ever in being cared for and treated like people, not just employees.

In a challenging environment in which securing and retaining top talent is super competitive, we urge organizations to consider engaging in or expanding their efforts to create inclusive workplace cultures where all people feel a sense of belonging and being cared for.  Learn more about how Inclusity can help your organization do that.

Imitation is more than just a sincere form of flattery. It is a way of life, and more importantly a way of improving life. Most of the pivotal advances in technology, art and culture throughout human history can be credited to the sharing of ideas between widely different groups of people. By traveling from one head to another, new ideas are developed and refined in ways that the original inventor could scarcely have imagined.

Modern numerals originated in India and traveled through Arabia to Europe, where they enabled the development of modern science centuries later. Tea was first cultivated in China, but migrated to Europe in the 16th century and eventually, with the addition of milk and sugar, became a quintessential aspect of English culture. A Japanese cartoonist named Osamu Tezuka was inspired by a childhood fascination with Disney films from America to create his own art style, which later returned to the U.S. in the form of anime and influenced a new generation of American cartoons. None of these innovations can be attributed to one culture exclusively; they are all the result of cross-cultural pollination.

Among the other products of this cultural interchange, we can count one of the most subtly influential revolutions in modern history: the rise of Japan after World War II from a savage and humiliating defeat to become one of the world’s wealthiest and most influential nations. After many years of trying to push the Western world and its culture away, Japan ultimately succeeded by imitating the best ideas the West had to offer and adding a few of its own. In the process, it relied on the advice of many American business experts, including a pioneering engineer and statistician named W. Edwards Deming.

Deming was born in 1900 in Sioux City, Iowa, and grew up on a chicken farm belonging to his grandfather. With parents who had both received a university education, he was encouraged in his academic pursuits and ended up enrolling in the University of Wyoming when he was still 17 years old. After graduating with a BA in electrical engineering he continued his education, studying mathematics at the University of Colorado and Yale. By the early 1940s Deming was a recognized expert in statistics and quality-control techniques, and had begun to work for the U.S. Census Bureau.

Deming’s work on the census, as well as several wartime lectures he had given on the subject of applied statistics, drew the attention of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers during the U.S. occupation of Japan. MacArthur was disturbed and frustrated by the disorganization of Japan’s post-war economy, which made it nearly impossible to keep communication and supply lines open. This was an especially grave concern in a country where many citizens were still homeless and starving, desperately in need of supplies that the existing infrastructure struggled to bring them. MacArthur was convinced that Deming’s expertise would be essential in fixing these problems, so in 1947 he asked Deming to come to Japan and lead two critical projects: the upcoming 1951 Japan Census and an educational program to teach modern business methods to the Japanese.

Deming, MacArthur, and everyone else trying to rebuild Japan at this time faced a grim prospect. Nearly half of the country’s industrial plants had been destroyed in the war, with staple industries like cotton having been particularly hard-hit. Production levels of basic commodities sank to where they had been fifteen years before, but the country’s population was almost 10% higher than in 1930. The public mood was dismal, summarized by many with the word kyodatsu, literally “exhaustion”. The only hope for Japan was to rebuild as quickly as possible, with as few mistakes as possible.

Fortunately for Japan, avoiding mistakes was precisely what Deming knew how to do. Statistical process control, which he had used during the 1940 U.S. Census to cut errors down to a bare minimum, was exactly what the country’s new factories needed. He also advocated continual improvement of manufacturing processes, better product testing methods, and the use of foreign market surveys to establish a global customer base. Many diverse factors contributed to the post-war “economic miracle” that began at this time, but this new way of doing business would prove decisive in establishing a competitive advantage that Japan would maintain for the next half-century.

Using Deming’s new methods, Japan rapidly moved up the ranks of manufacturing nations over the next several decades. During the years of the U.S. occupation Japan had been seen by most Americans as a producer of cheap toys and ceramic knickknacks, but a decade after the occupation that image had changed radically with the advent of Japan’s world-class transistor radios and motorcycles. By the late 1970s Japanese automobiles, musical instruments, electronic calculators and industrial equipment, among much else, were considered equal to anything made in Europe or the United States.

Japan was so successful, in fact, that the countries it had copied were now starting to fall behind. During the 1980s, many American companies found themselves outcompeted by Japanese firms and responded by imitating the techniques used in Japan. Total Quality Management and Toyota’s “just-in-time” production system became hot topics in the business world, and later inspired home-grown American programs such as Motorola’s Six Sigma. Just like Walt Disney’s big-eyed animated characters, the business concepts pioneered by W. Edwards Deming had travelled to Japan, adapted to their new home, and then returned in a different form.

Many countries across the world, including the United States, are in the middle of troubling economic developments right now. Factories have been shuttered, international trade has shriveled, and unemployment has skyrocketed. Many of us, for the first time in our lives, now have to adjust ourselves to a smaller and more constricted economy, just as Japan did in 1945. In such trying circumstances, it would be easy for us to feel exhausted and hopeless as well.

However, maybe what we need, more than financial help, is simply a new way of doing things. Japan got itself out of the doldrums by abandoning its conservatism and accepting new ideas from far away. It took advantage of the diversity of ideas that prevails across the world, and in the process leapfrogged the competition. The brilliant new solution to our current predicament doesn’t necessarily have to come from overseas. It might be struggling to express itself in some obscure corner of your own country. It might be in your own organization, buried underneath the weight of tradition and social pressure. It might even be in you. But to benefit from that idea, we have to find it first, and be willing to use it no matter how foreign it appears.

In the words of an American TV program from 1980:

If Japan Can…Why Can’t We?