EPISODE #3.5:

Hiring a Chief Diversity Officer Isn’t Enough – With Kelley Bright

Or listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

“Hey we gave this unconscious bias training and hired a Chief Diversity Officer. Isn’t that enough?”

My guest this week, Kelley Bright, says she has heard these words countless times from clients in her 25 plus years with global professional consulting firms. Currently she is Mercer’s Kentucky Office Leader and Firm Partner.

And she has much to say about why diversity, equity and inclusion efforts fall way short of success! 

She claims that companies aren’t getting into the nitty gritty of race. 

They’re not saying the hard, scary things that make people really understand. 

Kelley says companies also point to their affinity groups, sometimes referred to as Employee Resource Groups or ERG’s.  

She mentions that company leaders say things like, “Hey, we got those.” People, that’s it. They’re the answer, we got this ERG, right?” 

But they aren’t the answer, according to Kelley.  Why? Because they aren’t led by diversity and inclusion experts. “They are just people. They don’t know how to solve this big, giant problem of how to be more inclusive and bring diversity. They are just a group of people.”

So, what is the answer? 

Kelley says top leaders of the organization must own diversity and support it with words, actions and resources. 

Here is a snapshot of a few topics we cover in this podcast…..

• Why companies should focus on inclusion first and then diversity. 
• How being PC and nice works against DEI success. 
• The difference between intentional racist acts, and unintentional bias. 
• The importance of open and continuous 360 reviews in the fight against racism. 
• The importance of not only hiring a diverse workforce but retaining them and how to do it. 

More about Kelley Bright

Kelley Bright is Mercer’s Kentucky Office Leader and a Partner with the firm. She works closely with her team of 700 professionals locally to drive Mercer’s brand in the Kentuckiana market and manages client relationships.  Kelley is also responsible for developing consulting talent. 

She has more than 25 years of experience with global professional consulting firms. Kelley serves as a trusted advisor to her clients to help them best manage their human capital assets. Prior to joining Mercer, Kelley was a business development leader at EY.

Kelley is passionate about the promotion and advancement of women in the workforce and serves as the executive sponsor for Mercer’s Empowering Women Together Business Resource Group. She is an active volunteer serving on the Board for Women Influencing Louisville, Committee Chair for Unbridled Charities, and as Eastern HS’s Volleyball Boosters Treasurer.

Kelley graduated with distinction from Western Kentucky University.  She is married with two kids, Evan and Paige, and two dogs, Taco and JuneBug.

EPISODE #3.5 TRANSCRIPT

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Welcome to The Conscious Culture Café, the podcast that explores how you can lean into your purpose, live your values and enhance your social impact through your work. I’m your host, Kathy Miller Perkins.

It won’t take you long to hear the passion that my guest today has for diversity and inclusion. And she emphasizes the importance of inclusion in the DEI equation. Kelley Bright has more than 25 years of experience with global professional consulting firms. Currently she works for Mercer where she is the Kentucky office leader and a partner. In addition to working closely with her team of 700 professionals, she serves as a trusted advisor to her clients to help them manage human capital.

Kelley welcome, it’s so nice to have you here with us today to talk about these critical issues from your perspective. Let’s start out by your telling the listeners a little bit about yourself and about what you do and your background.

Kelley Bright:

Sure. Thank you very much Kathy. So Kelley Bright, I am in Louisville, Kentucky. I have the immense pleasure of being the Kentucky practice leader for Mercer. Mercer is an organization that focuses on most corporations biggest assets, their people. And we do so through health and benefits. We do that through wealth like 401k, and we do that through career consulting. And a lot of what we’re going to talk about today comes from my hat that I wear in career consulting, because it is looking at how you both retain and attract candidates. I’m going to put on my lens of people of color today as we go through this conversation, but give you some suggestions on things that we’ve seen within our own company, but also with companies that we serve across the United States. So hopefully I can give you a few good insights. I’m going to openly admit, if people don’t see me, I am a white woman. So my frame of reference comes from that of a white woman, which I’m saying I’m on my journey.

Kelley Bright:

I know that you and I have talked a little bit about the book, White Fragility, and that’s a little bit of this conversation. So I’m also trying to frame it with the new knowledge that I have around the lessons that I learned within White Fragility.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Well, I’m a white woman too. So this conversation is from the two white women and the rest of the season is African American women and women of color. So we’re the exception, this episode.

Kelley Bright:

Hey, we got to be part of the solution, right?

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Exactly. All right, well let’s start. You recommended an article that I found to be very interesting. It’s an article that Mercer wrote and produced a while back. And in the article, they talked about the high percentage of companies making public commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion. However, the very small percentage of these programs or these commitments that really have an impact. Can you comment on what Mercer found in their study?

Kelley Bright:

Yeah. There’s five distinct points I want to talk about a little bit. And the first one is, leading from the top. This has to be an initiative driven by the C suite. This is not an HR initiative. Yes HR does the onboarding, does the recruiting, but this was more about company culture. And what you have done to establish a culture that promotes and includes people of color. This also can’t be accomplished just by hiring a Chief Diversity Officer and saying I’m done. That’s not the solution.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Good point.

Kelley Bright:

There was a recent Wall Street Journal article that was written, that talks about the turnover for most Chief Diversity Officers. Do you know that it’s less than three years?

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Wow.

Kelley Bright:

And a lot of that has to be the fact that we hired this person, “You go change it.” And you give them this great wherewithal of things to do, but it’s one person. They typically don’t have the budget. They typically aren’t really treated in the C suite, like a C suite. There’s only so much they can do. So this truly needs to be an initiative at the top.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Good point. Excellent point.

Kelley Bright:

The second I’m going to say, is that we focus on diversity and inclusiveness. I’m going to tell you it needs to be the exact opposite. We need to focus on inclusiveness and then diversity. Because you can hire all the diverse people you want. We can bring them in by the truckload. You can have a higher rate of people of color coming in than white. But if you don’t keep them, you’re doing yourself a disservice. And you’re only going to keep them if they feel included. So we need to flip that paradigm of what we think about. It’s not just about diversity and walking the floor and seeing diverse people. It’s about being inclusive. And that is more than just people of color. You’re going to increase everything when we lift that lens to be an inclusive company, rather than just a diverse company. If that makes sense.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

So tell me a little bit more about what you mean by inclusive.

Kelley Bright:

And it’s really interesting. I know the university of Louisville is working on measuring belonging. So it’s this idea that I belong as part of this company. It’s part of my DNA because it’s what I do. We all know, and especially, I’m going to say during these COVID times, when we’re all learning how to work flexibly. For my folks that are home with kids, trying to homeschool, still do their job and all the other things on top of it, we’re learning to be a far more flexible world. And part of that needs to be, okay so now I need to include my work in part of everything that I do, that’s part of what makes me belong.

So it’s a little bit about understanding people. And I guarantee you, there has been more conversations, I’ve talked to even my managers personally, that’s saying they’re spending so much more time now touching base with people and just making sure they’re okay. “Are you okay?” On whatever scale that is. I do believe we’re still… And we’re going to talk about this I know in a little while, people are still very hesitant to have that race conversation. But in general, as organizations, because we are now not seeing people face to face, we’re having to have those one-on-one conversations and we’re going to need to talk about what it means to include you at work.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Okay. So I think what you’re saying is, inclusive goes beyond the racial issues, that there’s more to it than that?

Kelley Bright:

Correct, absolutely. So it’s all facets. And that whole idea of intersectionality, that you might be more than just… Well, you’re obviously more than just a person of color. You’re a person of color in a certain economic standpoint with certain children, no children. It’s all the different facets that make you, who you are.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Okay.

Kelley Bright:

With race being a large part of that, correct? Like we need to look at how people belong and be inclusive across the entire spectrum of what it could look like.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Okay. And back to the issue of race as one of the biggest parts of the diversity and inclusion puzzle right now, the one that the nation seems to be focused on more than any others right now. The day that the article, the Mercer article quoted showed a profound lack of awareness and understanding of the black employee experience. Can you say more about that? What do you attribute that to? Is it faulty assumptions? What’s going on there?

Kelley Bright:

Well, I think corporations have attacked this in a few very specific ways, that’s not answering the solution. The one is, “Hey, we gave unconscious bias training.” That’s a one time training right? And here’s the thing. We’ve all gone through the exercise where they say, “Okay, close your eyes. Imagine a nurse, imagine a lawyer. Imagine…” And at the end of the day did you imagine it was a male, female? They’re not getting into that nitty gritty of race. They’re not saying the hard, scary things that make you really understand. And it’s a one time training. We need to be more open about feedback, constantly and open.

And I think the other thing, the other little pitfall that companies have gotten into is, they create affinity groups. So some people call it BRGs, employee resource groups, BRGs, business resource groups. Whatever you call it. And they go, “Hey, we got those.” People, that’s it. They’re the answer, we got this BRG right? Well, a couple bad things about this is, one is those people aren’t diversity and inclusiveness experts. They’re just people. They don’t know how to solve this big, giant problem of how to be more inclusive and bring diversity. They are just a group of people.

They also, typically, aren’t given a lot of support. So “You can go do this, go do it.” Fine, but are you actually recognizing those people that are in your affinity group? Are you giving them company time to work on the initiatives and things they do? Are you giving them money? Are you making sure that they can financially do it? And you just can’t count on this group of volunteers typically, that are doing things on their own time to really move the needle. You’ve got to do something other than just saying, “Hey, we created this. So you guys go solve the problem.” That’s not their job/

Kathy Miller Perkins:

The groups aren’t facilitated then by experts? Correct? They’re self-managed or how do these groups work?

Kelley Bright:

From what I have seen the majority are, they’re internal groups. Because those, and I will say, even at Mercer, we have multiple. We have a women’s group, we have an LGTBQ group, we have a veterans group, we have a rising perfect. You name it, most companies have it. And it’s a lot, there are a lot of them. So you don’t typically… Each one has their own kind of means. But we need to focus on this one in particular, at this point in time in our history. Because it can’t just be another one of those groups that they say, “Oh, all you like people go get together and talk amongst yourselves.” Because that’s like… Well, we all say that we’ll use the phrase “Preaching to the choir.”

They need somebody else. And being very intentional again about what I started with, is this has got to be supported from the top. Much better having that group, and not all of them need executive sponsors, but we need an executive sponsor with an open ear when it comes to race. Because this is hard. This is really, really hard, tough issues right now to be talking about.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah, people are uncomfortable. And my experience, having worked in the corporate space like you have for a number of years, is that when people are uncomfortable, they look for ways to reduce their discomfort and still check the box. Nothing gets done that way.

Kelley Bright:

And not say anything. I think that’s the big thing. This is one of the things that White Fragility really pointed out to me, was this whole premise of being PC and being nice. White people are really nice. But by being really nice, sometimes we aren’t saying and speaking up. Even when we blatantly know things are wrong, we want to keep the peace. So if the black person didn’t complain about it, it must not bother them. Well, I’m just going to go along. And we’ve just been nice for so long that, one I think our people of color have stopped speaking up. They’re like, “What’s it going to do?”

Kathy Miller Perkins:

What’s the point?

Kelley Bright:

And then we have stopped calling out bad for bad’s sake. And I am a huge lover of Gen Z. Gen Z and technology are changing this. How can you look at anything that’s happening today, that’s videoed and say that isn’t a horrible treatment of a human being? I don’t care what color they are.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Right. So you’re saying it’s Gen Z that’s mainly doing the videos?

Kelley Bright:

Not necessarily doing the videos. I just think they are coming in, their history is going to be informed by other things other than what my history was informed with through school books and education. And even what I saw every single day. I led a very white, privileged, educated life. Because that’s how we’ve been built. I think Gen Z now is looking for more, they want more answers. They see the things that are wrong and they are questioning it in ways that it was never questioned before. And I do believe, I literally just finished the 1619 podcasts. Amazing, wonderful, beautiful. And it’s done in such a way that it’s compelling and heart wrenched and you know this is how it happened and we’re educating ourselves.

There’s just more materials out there that I think are readily available. And it’s done in such a user friendly fashion that more and more people are being drawn to it.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

That’s good. So we don’t really have any excuse for not tuning in these days. Well you refer to the book, White Fragility a number of times, the Robin DiAngelo book and you and I have both read that book and talked about it a little bit. One of the things that she argues in the book is that, people really aren’t aware, or we really aren’t aware of our own prejudices. Do you think that’s true? And how would that lack of awareness if true, how would that lack of awareness impact DEI efforts in companies?

Kelley Bright:

I think the concept that stuck with me most throughout that book is the idea that, when we hear the word racist or prejudice we equate it to bad. Then you get this good, bad continuum. Like, I don’t want to be bad, but I can tell you if you called me a racist, I’d probably cry. I probably really will. Because I’d be so upset because when I hear the term racist, I do I think torch burning, going out and-

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Intentional, something intentionally bad.

Kelley Bright:

Intentional bad. I think if we can take the hat off and say, well, this isn’t intentionally bad, that we are still doing things though that are racist. And I think it’s this other side of the intent. Like we can clearly see those bad things. Those are bad, we see those. I think what we don’t see is the simple day to day things that we do. And I think there’s this whole level of trust that’s going to have to be built because the only way we’re going to know, and this gets a little bit back into unconscious bias training, well that’s great, but if nobody points it out to me, I’m going to continue those same behaviors.

And I think what we need is live examples. And it’s funny because through that book, there was a lot of… She tried to point out bad examples and there was lots of defense around, “But I didn’t mean that.” Well it’s okay if you didn’t mean it, you didn’t know-

Kathy Miller Perkins:

You still did it.

Kelley Bright:

You don’t listen open heartedly and listen, then it’s not going to be taken very well. I had the fortunate opportunity to be part of a panel on male allies for women. And again, a lot of same concepts were coming up. But Humana’s Chief Information Technology Officer, had this great quote that I carry in my heart. And that is, “You can only be unconscious once. Once you’re told you have a choice and you can either change or you can do things the same way.”

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Oh, that’s beautiful.

Kelley Bright:

So you’ve got to think about that. You’ve got to be told the whole little part of that is you’ve got to be told because you are unconscious to it. And I think, more than any point in our lives, I hope people of color start feeling that… What is it? Right? The feelings of liberty to start calling out some of these things in a way that is respected. We joked about the fact that that book is now incredibly hard to find it sold out in hard copy on Amazon. I actually had to listen to it in an audio book, because that was the only way I could get ahold of it. There are so many people, white people right now, touching on this that I’m hoping there is a ripple effect of openness around change and that opportunity to have these more open conversations.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yes, I hope so too. Although I am concerned that I’ve started to see some negative reactions to the book.

Kelley Bright:

Oh absolutely.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

And so the backlash is going to be there. One of my other colleagues, who in fact I’d take another episode of this podcast said, “You can count on the fact there’s going to be a backlash at some point.”

Kelley Bright:

Absolutely. I think one of the things that we have to also own is there are absolutely the bad end of racist people. There are. And it’s like, everybody wants to say, “Oh, we all need to change.” Well, there is a group of people we’re not going to change. But I can tell you, corporate America needs to react because that is the only way. Money is the root of all things.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yes indeed.

Kelley Bright:

I want to give a huge shout out on Franklin Templeton, the company that publicly fired Amy Cooper. We need more examples like that. When companies say, not only do we not support racism, when we know about it, we’re going to do something. And I know HR issues are always hush, hush, and they’re sensitive. And most of them, you go away quietly. Look at the me too movement and sexual harassment. I mean, that was going on and we found out about all these people that were paid off and got to keep their job.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

It’s appalling

Kelley Bright:

It’s just like that. When we know people are out there that are openly bigoted, racist, how can you put your corporate logo and hat on these people and say, it’s okay. We need more examples of prominent companies openly saying, A, we’re not going to do this. And B, if you do it, I’m going to fire you.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yes, indeed. It takes courage. It does. It takes courage.

Kelley Bright:

It takes tons of courage. And again, I think the more things are videoed, Everything’s videoed nowadays. We’re going to have clear and clear examples and companies aren’t even going to have the choice anymore because this stuff’s going to be posted on social media before you can blink an eye. And you’ve got a split decision. Am I going to do what I’d like, 81% of the companies all say, “Oh yeah, we’re going to support this.” You’ve got a split decision to decide, are you going to do it or aren’t you? And there’s several companies right now that are completely embracing Black Lives Matter.

There are some that aren’t, and we as consumers have the opportunity to show our support because it’s very public. Some of these things are very public that have said they are not going to allow their employees to wear Black Lives Matter.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yes, exactly right.

Kelley Bright:

Don’t support them. Don’t support them. Don’t support those companies. If you truly feel passionate about it and want to do something, hold those companies to the end. And don’t frequent them if they’re going to not support it. And then celebrate those companies that are absolutely saying we support you.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yes. I couldn’t agree more strongly. And earlier, you talked about how so many companies are just doing these one day trainings or not even a whole day. Sometimes it’s less than the whole day, it can be a couple of hours and it’s-

Kelley Bright:

90 minutes.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

That people are going to change

Kelley Bright:

You can be unconscious bias trained in 90 minutes and you won’t be unconscious biased anymore.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Right exactly. Do you think that that’s a first step for some of the companies that are taking stronger stance or not? Or is it just an excuse? Or a check the box exercise? Or is it all of the above?

Kelley Bright:

And it needs to be more. So unconscious bias is the root of all these things that are going wrong because we are discriminating, we’re not even aware of it. I’m saying that it can’t be a standalone. I think one of the biggest opportunities we have is in training our people managers. To have those more open conversations, we need to make it okay now to ask people, are you okay? And guess what? They need to be able to say, “I’m not, but I’m not ready to talk to you about it.” There needs to be that flexibility. We also then need to measure these managers. Most companies, or a lot of companies, large organizations offer 360 reviews. That means you can give me feedback and I anonymously can’t see who you are. I have to have at least five, because if there’s only two, I can probably figure out who did it.

So there’s these great things called 360 reviews. However, we aren’t asking the hard questions in these reviews. Is your people managers treating you equitably or equally to other colleagues? Do you feel comfortable having conversations with him? There’s some tough questions that could be asked, because I may not realize Kathy, that you treat your employees differently. Because that’s not how I, as your manager, I might not see that you’re treating the people below you. Well, if we start asking some of these tough questions in 360 reviews, that’s how we’re going to find out. And you’re back to, if this person is truly racist, get rid of them. Put your money where your mouth is. If we’re going to say we aren’t going to support this, or is it somebody who’s just maybe less aware that Jeff needs more training other than the unconscious bias, do they need coaching?

They might be a great employee that has the best intent. Then you need to give them the tools to make sure that they are treating their entire workforce equitably. So I think there’s a lot to be done at that people manager level. I know a lot of organizations that you were promoted into managing people roles based on either your tenure or to get the next promotion. They never actually measured, can you do it? Are you good at it? Do you have empathy?

There’s some skills to managing people that I think sometimes… Hopefully really good managers develop it over time. But what if part of your training when the first time you become a people manager is, you need some training on inclusiveness and diversity. And I don’t think that’s typically a curriculum that is taught to people managers. I know at Mercer, we are doing that. We’re building that into our curriculum and it’s part of what that step does. So I just think more companies need to think about that intentionality of making sure that that is part of the understanding of a people manager, it’s part of their job. Is you need to now attract and retain people of color. We’ll get to that in a minute, but I’ve got some ideas around that.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Well let me ask you a couple of other things first, before we get to that. And I want to go back to the 360, the idea about 360’s because I’ve been involved with administering 360’s, I’ve been on the receiving end of 360’s on and on and on. And I believe in them. One of the issues though that I have found with 360’s is a lot of companies ask the people, the targets or the subjects, to pick the people to write them. And what I find is that they pick people that they think are going to say good things about them. How do you handle that? How do you do it? What is the right way to do it?

Kelley Bright:

It’s got to be everybody that person reports to. And honestly you should be able to get… I know in the system that I work in and the company I was with prior to Mercer. You could go in and give feedback on anybody at any time. Here’s the other piece, it can’t be one time a year. So it can’t be, “Oh, it’s midyear review time. I need to go get my five reviews. And I get to pick the six people I want to do it.”

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yes, exactly.

Kelley Bright:

It needs to be continuous and it needs to be a system. And there’s all kinds of great systems out there that allow you to do this year round. And it’s really good for a lot of companies maybe that are project based. So I might work with this person, just for this project for two months, and then I’m never going to see them again. Well, you should get feedback right, then right at the end of those two months. And it just needs to be perpetual. So the idea that anybody can give feedback and it’s company-wide, here’s the button, you go in and you pull up anybody’s name in our organization and you can give them feedback. And by the way, it is perpetual. You can always give this feedback.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

We were talking about the importance of people skills or managers. And one of the things that I also have noticed is that some companies are asking their middle managers to facilitate conversations about race and their middle managers may not be prepared to facilitate those conversations about race. In which case they might do more harm than good. Not intentionally, but because they don’t know how to do it. Have you run across anything like that? And do you have ideas about how we might address that?

Kelley Bright:

Yes, absolutely. And it’s funny that kind of goes back to my… You can’t put all this pressure on your middle managers, they’re not D&I experts. Neither are your BRB people. They are D&I experts. And most companies typically have one person that’s a D&I expert. That’s the Chief Diversity Inclusiveness Officer that most likely you’re not going to hold on for more than three years. So that’s beyond a joke. Here’s the thing, and no company’s going to like this answer to this. You got to hire somebody, you got to hire somebody that this is their bread and butter. You’ve got to admit, I don’t know how to fix this on my own. And then, it’s always, I have to acknowledge, I have a problem first. That’s always the first step to correcting anything.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yes, there is that. Yes exactly.

Kelley Bright:

You can’t put this kind of pressure on the groups that aren’t prepared to handle it. You probably are going to have to pay somebody. And trust me, there are so many great, even inexpensive options to have somebody look at what you do and how you do it and how you can help. There’s trainings out there for your managers. You need to rely on somebody or some system that is truly educated and articulated in diversity inclusion. That is a skillset.

That’s just like, if you’re a CPA and you know how to audit those financials, that’s a skillset. Well, being able to coach, we need to see that as the same skillset. If you’re a big enough company, hire more than one person. Have a whole team, which some big great organizations, I’ve been very fortunate enough to work with Victoria Russell at Papa John’s. And she has an amazing team and they had a ship to move. They had a big-

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Oh they did yes indeed.

Kelley Bright:

And to see what they’ve done, but it’s because she is given the respect. It’s because she was given the budget and it’s because she was given the team and amen to what she’s done to move that ship for that organization.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

That’s right. That was a company in crisis. It would be nice if companies could get there before they’re in crisis.

Kelley Bright:

Yes. Wouldn’t that be nice. But when it’s the top of the house that is the problem, again back to that’s why my number one, number one, number one, this has to be a C suite issue. This has to be an issue that from bottom to top, and guess what? Back to my, there are bad racist people. Well, what if one of your bad racist people is sitting in your top and you don’t even know it?

Kathy Miller Perkins:

That’s right. Yeah no kidding. That’s scary isn’t it. Talk about risk.

Kelley Bright:

Exactly.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Well, I know that you have a lot of examples of companies that are doing this right. That are really, truly addressing the issues. So how do companies make real progress in this space? This DEI space?

Kelley Bright:

I want to say, the first thing you got to do is you got to measure it. You got to know where you start from. You’ve got to collect the data. One of the… And it’s interesting that we have had way more requests than ever before, around pay equity studies.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Oh, that’s interesting.

Kelley Bright:

So what is your pay equity? Absolutely people are now, other countries require this. United States, I doubt we ever required it. Just, that’s too big of a move something out there. But are you doing pay equity study to see what you’re doing? What is your input and output? So meaning, okay you’re recruiting, you’re doing all these great recruiting things, but are you retaining and at what levels? So there’s another big, big, big, big thing to look at. Right now, there’s about representation of people, not just people of color, but black people specifically is about 13%. Our population is about 13%. Only 2% of all the executives in the United States are black.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah, that’s appalling

Kelley Bright:

Some of the things we got to do, we got to have more diverse slate. Every time there’s a promotion, is your slate diverse? It needs to be. And I’m going to give you a concept here that most companies are going to cringe and say, “Oh, I don’t like this idea.” You’re going to have to pay more for a person of color.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Oh interesting.

Kelley Bright:

It’s a supply and demand issue here.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Really?

Kelley Bright:

It’s a supply and demand. If you want to promote somebody and you only have so many diverse people in your organization, guess what? So does the organization next door. And if they value diversity more than you, they’re going to pay him more. And you might have to pay him more.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah, interesting.

Kelley Bright:

And then we got to increase the pipeline. So I look at programs and this hasn’t happened yet as far as I’m aware of. This is a Kelley idea completely. We got to look at some programs like what hospitals are doing with nurses. So there’s a shortage of nurses. So guess what? These hospitals are coming up with programs where they pay these individuals to go to nursing school, get their degree and then they contract with them to work with them for so many years. So I know there are lots of organizations that their excuse, I’m going to use the word excuse, is “Yeah, but there aren’t people with XYZ degree.” Well, guess what? You might have to create the pipeline. Get together with your… Like if your company’s not big enough, and hopefully it is, to afford this, then work with the association that’s part of your industry, whatever that might be.

And guess what, you might actually have to start offering scholarships to minority candidates, to get them the professional skills that they need. So you’re going to have to have some specific program. We have to look at recruiting tactics as well, just like the sheer physical recruiting tactics. There’s a lot that has been done around the research of looking at your successful people in role A, and what’s all the attributes that they have. And then using that to model how you find everybody else.

Well, guess what if all of your ‘successful people’ are white people and especially white males, and you can model your pattern for how to be successful in the company of that. Guess what? You’re probably not going to have a lot of people of color and then you’re going to dissect what that model is to make sure. And there’s probably some technical skills that maybe everybody needs to do the job. It’s those soft skills that you ‘measure’ that you need to look for them to make sure there isn’t some bias in that measurement. Because now it gets touchy, feely, and all of a sudden you’re going to weed out all of your people of color because of that model that you used to judge by was based on a bunch of white people.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Absolutely. And there are still a lot of companies doing that. There are a lot of companies that I was familiar with and I’m sure you’re familiar with that use as part of their selection process and assessment of how well the individual will fit into their culture. And I understand why they do that, but… It worries me.

Kelley Bright:

Maybe there’s a flaw in your culture?

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Well exactly.

Kelley Bright:

And back to my point we made just a few minutes ago and guess what? You’re never going to see it. You’re going to have to hire somebody to tell you. You are not a diversity or inclusiveness expert. And these folks… And pay them, pay them what they’re worth, treat them like a skill, just like you’d hire your accountant to come in and look at your books, hire a D&I expert to come in and look at your company culture and tell you where some of those implicit biases exist and they’ll help you overcome them.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah. And it goes way beyond just training on implicit bias. Way beyond.

Kelley Bright:

And again, I don’t want to say you shouldn’t do it. You should absolutely do that training. Just realize that’s a drop in the bucket of making change.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Absolutely. Yeah, it’s a systemic, interpersonal and systemic issue change.

Kelley Bright:

Correct.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Well, this is very, very interesting. And I could probably keep you here all day. But, since you don’t have all day, let me ask you, what would you like for the listeners to take away with them today?

Kelley Bright:

I’d like them to take away the fact that, don’t think that we can’t shake corporate America. Because we have to. The time is now. There are too many things that we can clearly see today, that we can absolutely change. But the only way it’s going to change is by speaking up. And one, we as white people need to sit, or me as a white person in corporate America where the representation is mostly white at the leadership level. We need to listen. We need to be willing to listen and we need to let our employees of color know it’s okay to speak up. Because I do. I think we, for way too long had this very passive… Don’t see, don’t tell, that is just not going to be okay anymore. And back to… It’s all about economy here.

If we, as human beings are going to support those organizations that are clearly saying things like Black Lives Matter. If we put our dollars there, they’re going to listen. We need to make sure Board of Directors are more diverse. Because if they’re more diverse, they’re going to drive companies to act and perform a certain way. And part of that measurement is going to be around, what diversity do you have within your organizations? And once these large organizations start doing some of these things, it will trickle down. People that come from these large organizations either start their own, the entrepreneurs. It’s going to change how organizations are run. And that’s another great thing I think corporations can do is, look at your own vendors. Are you using diverse suppliers?

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Oh, that’s an interesting comment.

Kelley Bright:

There’s other ways that you can support diversity beyond just hiring somebody from diversity and inclusion. But looking at your vendors and your suppliers. Back to one of the examples I just gave, giving people time to commit to this, whether it’s in your community or whether it’s in your own organization, I will dare say, I’d be interested to know the statistics around how many companies have these BRGs, BRGs any groups, whatever you call them, that actually reward people for being in them, and give them the time to do it. Because those two things tell me you value it. So I know there are great examples out there. One that I can think of is GE Appliance does an amazing job.

I actually have a story to tell about how well they do on onboarding. From day one they connect, depending upon kind of what your classification is, they try to connect you with somebody from that… I think they call them affinity groups. They might call them BRGs as well. With that group from day one, so you have somebody. And it’s a large organization so they have a lot of people to pull from. So they could connect a veteran with a veteran or their African American group with somebody that’s African American. But what’s even more cool, they actually will do this during the interview process, which is just amazing. What would you think if day one, you were connected with somebody like you that said, “Let me help you navigate this company. Let me help you navigate this company through our lens.” And that stays with you. Wouldn’t you feel, back to our original conversation around belonging, when you feel like you belonged a whole lot more, and this company really cared about you and wanted to make sure you took those first steps to make you want to stay for the long haul?

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yes. Yes indeed. Great ideas, great suggestions for the listeners. Thank you so much for being here. This has been a stimulating conversation. I knew it would be.

Kelley Bright:

Thanks Kathy.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

I really enjoyed it.

Kelley Bright:

You’re more than welcome. And again, I’m going to tell you I’m absolutely no expert, but I am somebody who cares deeply about us making changes and I’m still learning. So all my friends out there, I’ve opened the door. I’ve told it to our ethnicity resource group at Mercer that I am a white woman who is trying. And if you help me along this journey, I promise to do my best.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Thanks for listening to The Conscious Culture Cafe. If you liked what you heard, connect with us at millerconsultants.com. You can access the show notes and receive our free materials. See you next episode.