Creating Elite Teams by Embedding Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Principles

Dr. Jim: [: 00:00:00

The person that is going to Connect the dots for us in this conversation is joining us today. She's the coauthor of The Conscious Communicator: The Fine Art of Not Saying Stupid the co creator of the Depth Model for D E I B messaging. She's a former filmmaker, a current conference speaker. She's a fireside chatter.

She's a YouTuber and she has a lot of other things that have ER at the end of it, including the founder of Kim Clark communications. Kim, welcome to the show.

Kim Clark: It's a pleasure to be here. I always enjoy our conversations.

Dr. Jim: Yeah, I'm looking forward to another hard hitting. Hard hitting, is that the right word?

, but really looking forward [: 00:01:00

Kim Clark: What I do, as you mentioned, it's really this intersection of diversity, equity and inclusion work and communications. So I'm a firm believer that all the DEI strategy and efforts that teams are putting together and implementing cannot be successful without communications. So how did I get here?

Why am I so passionate about this? And I'm very urgent about this work. And some of it is informed by my personal identities as well. I am a woman, a cisgender woman. I am a gay woman. I am a mom of two kids with disabilities. And I also have Native American heritage on my mother's side, Muscogee Nation.

vileges that come with that. [: 00:02:00

Now, when it comes to the work. I've run internal communication departments for over, oh my gosh, 10, 15 years. And I was in house running global teams at brands. You've probably heard of PayPal, GoDaddy, GitHub, for example. And while I was running those teams and putting together internal communication strategies for the global team.

I was obviously paying attention to what was going on outside of our walls from the social topics and the context and the crisis situations that were happening. And I started working with, who's now my mentor who's been a corporate diversity trainer for 40 years. She's been involved in everything.

inister, she's influenced me [: 00:03:00

So I have this. Side of me that understands being a part of a dominant group. And I also have this part of me that is informed by being marginalized. So it's very situational and I bring both in when I work with clients to help them. See the sides that I have personal experience with.

And then I bring in team members who have the variety of experiences that I don't have in order to round out the experiences for clients.

on the concept of privilege [: 00:04:00

That we'll recoil at that word and say that's not a thing. Why is it important that we recognize that most, if not all of us have some sort of privilege, especially if we're in the Western world? Can you share a little bit about why the concept of privilege needs to be understood, reframed, and accepted for us to move about the world in an appropriate way?

Kim Clark: When I talk about privilege, when I'm speaking to you is how things have been designed for me that I don't even have to think about it. So one kind of quiz to think about where we have privileges is to say, okay, explain yourself or, how do you describe yourself, what your identities are.

humanization for people with [: 00:05:00

It's a comparison game that ends up in an othering space. Privilege is successful by not being acknowledged. Acknowledging it, talking about it, being more aware of it. And that look goes into data and understanding how other people are having a different experience. I have my limited life experience.

There's no way for me to know all the things. There's no way I'm going to not make a mistake when I say the wrong thing. But because my experience is limited to my own personal experience and it's not the experience of anyone else. There's, that's where the collaboration comes in, where we can learn from each other.

topic of conversation. It's [: 00:06:00

So I have privilege in this space in that way. But if I were to shift over to another webinar or another conversation where we're talking about marriage equality or gender affirming healthcare, standing up for transgender people's rights, etc. I am now second class. I am less valued. I have less power. It actually is it's more of the, of people who are heterosexual, who are standing up as allies that are going to be talking to other allies who have the power.

So in one, one area, I have power in another area. I don't have power, but understanding and learning where I do have that power and that influence to be not just an ally, but actually risk some social capital in order to want to dismantle systems that are not working for anybody. But we have to recognize that.

ileges and in other areas it [: 00:07:00

thing.

Dr. Jim: When you think about your career. And you think about the game changing realizations that you've had throughout your career. What's the game changing realization that really shifted your perspective and your ability to build a high performing team?

Kim Clark: I have led many teams, even before I finished, I have the privilege of a college education and a master's. And before I was even done with my undergraduate degree, I was already running teams. I had 10 people reporting to me and I wasn't even completely done with school yet. So in managing teams over time, one of the things that I really look for is a balance across the team.

f conversation, big thoughts,[: 00:08:00

We're talking about wonderful ideas. So this is not to get compartmentalized as diversity of thought. I do not mean that. There is a professional expertise that you can bring with personal identities and personal lived experiences that enrich the team.

tegies, it was very tested in: 2016

It happened during the weekend. And on Monday morning, I was, there was a, I was working at GoDaddy at the time. So I was an in house communicator running a global team internal communications team. And I [00:09:00] was flooded with emails saying, we're angry. From a variety of employees from all over the world.

We don't know what to do with this. We can't work. We're very distracted. We're grieving. We don't know what to do. And so I rapidly put together basically a virtual vigil, and I called in my mentor to help me put together this virtual vigil. I said, everybody go book some conference rooms so you can be together in person and the rest of us will be all remote connected.

And we had HR involved as well. But basically that session, allowing people to have the space to talk in a workplace environment. This is long before the murder of George Floyd. That was a tested moment that I realized that all the work that we had done in putting diversity, equity, and inclusion in place, building the relationships, having the technology ready, having the content there.

ss me and access my team and [: 00:10:00

What employees needed in a workplace environment, recognizing it was something that happened outside our doors and had nothing to do with our work, but had everything to do with people who are personally and professionally impacted by the incident. That was absolutely a game changer and it elicited how I was structuring relationships and building my team moving forward.

Dr. Jim: I want to drill in a little bit because it's a really human example about how something can happen externally and you need to do more than just have a perfunctory statement. You need to actually make it real in the in, in the halls that you walk in.

rs be more intentional about [: 00:11:00

Kim Clark: At that time. There was a tremendous amount of involvement by our organization in a lot of. Social topics proactively. There's a great partnership between legal HR communications, marketing, et cetera. And we were very proactive around pay equity, for example standing firm that At the time, there was a lot of conversation that had begun around gender neutral bathrooms and at tech locations.

ose tabs on the pulse of the [: 00:12:00

We did employee engagement surveys, like a lot of people, but we didn't put the emphasis necessarily on the participation. It was more about the cadence of the communications and taking actions on what we heard. That's what builds trust. It's not, Hey, we had 93% participation. Here's our themes and we never talk about it again.

So it's the proof points and following up with actions that are actually meaningful to employees. And having those listening that's, what's the saying we have two ears and one mouth. Because we need to be listening twice as much. And so when we do that, we're able to meet the needs of folks.

where now we talk about race [: 00:13:00

Dr. Jim: There's a lot of interesting things about what you just said that I think we can expand on. Here's what I gathered from what you just described in the day to day workspace, you're presented with a number of choices. You have the choice to be transparent or not. You have the choice to be communicative or not.

You have the choice to be treating the workplace as a place where it's only work stuff or it's the whole person stuff and you have a choice on which lane that you pick. And then you have the choice between just listening, or you have the choice to listen and then act.

ck the option that is On the [: 00:14:00

Kim Clark: It may be not necessarily a quantity thing, but more of a quality thing. So we learned through the global pandemic that we are human beings first as employees. We are not cogs and machines, our mental health, what's going on in our family. If somebody had COVID, for example. That was all very real.

Many of us worked from our homes. Those of us who have jobs that have that kind of privilege. There's that word again. Some of us did. And if we were to ignore all of the ecosphere that employees are in, then we lost those employees basically, because we can't be asked to be productive at a hundred percent.

unemployment of people with [: 00:15:00

So there's these things that are going on outside of the world that impact us because we're people. And if you're going to ignore that, if you're going to ignore the political division that is happening at the context, you're missing the point that your company. Is a microcosm of the larger society.

s that happen on the inside, [: 00:16:00

That's where the depth model come is in that we introduced in our book, the conscious communicator that helps organizations own their particular lane. They don't have to do all the things, but they do have to do their thing. And then find a way to support their employees in a very broad sense to allow them to be the whole human beings as they are, because the more and more organizations can get involved and start eliminating the barriers and the problems that we're dealing with on the outside.

And being influential and impactful in that way, the more and more we are able to authentically show up a hundred percent as employees, as productive, innovative employees that we wish to be. We don't want to just survive at work. We want to thrive. But we need the organization and leadership's help.

Dr. Jim: There are going to be potentially people that are going to be listening to this conversation.

And they're going to [: 00:17:00

Kim Clark: I can easily say you're going to have a tremendous amount of unwanted attrition and have very big difficulty in attracting, especially a wide variety and diverse set of candidates to your company. If you're not acknowledging and owning your space and your role in your impact. On social topics and providing a broad sense of impactful, helpful, meaningful support for your employees as whole human beings.

five generations within the [: 00:18:00

But there's a whole conversation we can get into around products and services that you're missing on new, missing out on new markets and revenue generation and all the different ways. If you don't learn more about all of this, you're actually. Unintentionally cutting out parts of communities that could be your customers.

If you were to embed DEI into your work, the list is very long. A lot of DEI practitioners don't get into the business case because it's been proven by data for years. So if you need convincing on a business case with. Revenue generation, product and service innovation, then you're just looking for ways to escape actually embedding DEI when it's all right here before you, DEI is already happening.

hin the workplace. And right [: 00:19:00

And that's what we're wrestling with. That's the goo stage of going from a caterpillar that we know that we can't be a we can't do the caterpillar thing anymore and just stay low to the ground and keep our heads low and walk really slow. We have to go through the metamorphosis.

We have to build up the strength of our wings in order to break through and actually fly. So we're in that, that awkward stage, that messy stage where we have to have these conversations that we've never been having. We've never had before. We haven't been trained to have before.

ody who can be a part of the [: 00:20:00

And it's less about, oh, as in DEI just dropped out of the sky. That's not what happened. DEI is already here, but it's completely wild west. And it's not working. It is not working. And now we're utilizing certain terms to polarize within our workforce. That's absolutely unacceptable.

We have to be in alignment. We're a team. And leaders can really foster that because it should this polarization within our workforce when we're looking for ways to benefit everybody within our workforce. Cannot be on our watch.

Dr. Jim: When I think about putting everything that you just mentioned onto a bumper sticker, there's two business impacts that stand out. If you want to have people that are eager to join your organization, you better make sure as a leader that your organization looks like the population that it serves and the customer base that it serves.

e going to want to work with [: 00:21:00

If you want to become an elite organization, if you're not. mirroring the communities that you serve. And internally, you don't look like the people that you want to hire. You're going to have big problems in ever getting to that status.

Before we wind down, let's let's put some frameworks together. When we opened the conversation with how do you become an elite team? What are the things that you need to do? You had, you talked about some of the game changing experiences that you had that really helped you push the envelope in terms of creating high performing and elite teams.

If we break all of that down into a framework. What are the things that leaders need to be thinking about from your perspective, that's going to help them be more effective in creating high performing teams?

omes of DEI is psychological [: 00:22:00

They know what needs to be fixed. So that takes us right back to psychological safety. And so that's where. We're in team environments where there isn't a fear of retaliation, that there isn't a fear of humiliation for bringing up ideas feedback, criticisms of the projects or how we're working or whatever it is that we're basically rallying around similar problems and wanting to do the best.

e in order to keep ourselves [: 00:23:00

And we're going to keep messing up. And we're going to keep causing the same kinds of problems. So building into our processes, our systems of inclusion is a key way to keep ourselves accountable. So what it comes down to is if you want diversity, equity, inclusion as a result, it must be part of your process.

It doesn't happen by magic or accident at the end. It must be strategic and intentional throughout how you do the work.

Dr. Jim: Where can people

find you?

Kim Clark: You can find me on LinkedIn, DEI communications. Kim Clark is my URL. Also, I have a website. And it's KimClarkCommunications.

com. You can also find me on social and TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. All of those links are on my website, KimClarkCommunications. com, and you can always get the book, The Conscious Communicator, The Fine Art of Not Saying Stupid. Stuff. , family friendly version. .

ey hear the chat that we had,[: 00:24:00

You have a choice between communicating or not. You have a choice between being transparent or not. You have a choice between being a compartmentalized workplace or a workplace that is inclusive. All of those are choices, but one set of choices will put you on the path to being elite.

That's what I picked up in listening to this conversation. And the alternative. Is being left behind. So it's up to you as the listener to decide which option is appealing to you. Do you want to be the place where you're making the right choices? You're creating the right kind of culture where people are flocking to, or do you want to be the kind of organization that is the equivalent of the phone book?

tell us how we did, and then [: 00:25:00