The show’s guest in this episode is Shirley Engelmeier. She has helped global Fortune 500 companies and emerging organizations develop and implement DEI initiatives that drive business results. With her passion for teaching businesses to leverage inclusion to drive employee engagement, productivity, innovation and retention, Engelmeier began to share her philosophies and thought leadership on DEI in books designed for c-suite leaders and executives.

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Driving Business Success Through DEI with Shirley Engelmeier

Well, hello, Mel. It’s great to be here with you today.

Hi Melanie.

I’m Melanie Parish, and I’m one of the CO hosts of the experimental leader Podcast. I’m an executive coach. I’m an author. I train high level MCC master certified coaches, and I love doing this podcast.

I’m Mel Rutherford. I’m McMaster University’s first transgender department chair, and I’m the co host of the experimental leader podcast,
yeah. So I have been thinking a lot about inclusion and kindness, and how kindness can be used to create inclusion and and one of the ways that I’ve really been thinking about it is we had, we’ve been working, having a lot of workers in our House, remodeling our kitchen, and I’ve been a big collaborator in that project on a daily basis with them, and and I realized how important it is to make them feel at home, to make them feel connected to the project, to have them feel appreciated. And and I just loved getting to do that. And we just had a big dinner for all of them, and invited them into our home because we’re finished, and we wanted to celebrate with them. And when I first was a leader, I used to think like being being a leader was like about being the boss and being tough and telling people, you know, hard things and the cold, hard truth. And the older I get in, the longer I lead, the more I realize that it’s a really gentle tap sometimes and sometimes it’s just an early invitation to be invested in a project that makes the real difference. So that’s what I’ve been thinking about.

Yeah, that’s really interesting. Being being the leader isn’t quite the same as being a boss. Sometimes it’s about just modeling and being there with them and supporting their goals. Some of the things I’ve been thinking about recently in my leadership is this concept of vulnerability and and this the advice that leaders get new. New Leaders get that you’re supposed to be vulnerable to the people that you lead, which I think is a strategy to be more relatable. But I’ve been wondering it to what extent that advice, that which is, you know, given to straight, white, cisgender leaders is also applicable to to leaders who are coming up from other other groups. We’re making space in leadership for lots of people these days, and the leaders queer or transgender or from has mental health diagnoses or comes from an economically challenging background? To what extent is that person expected to be vulnerable? To what extent is that person expected to disclose their background, their challenges and and, and who does that serve? I’ve just been wondering if this, this advice that leaders are supposed to bring their vulnerability to work is is actually universal.

I love this thinking, and I think it is interesting. Like, even as a woman, it’s it’s like this advice may or may not apply. It depends on how much power I have in the relationship I I often feel like coaching is a good foil to having to be vulnerable in the workplace, like if you have a place to talk with a coach about your challenges, then you don’t have to go to your boss to talk about your challenges, so you don’t have to reveal that you don’t quite know what you’re doing, which no one does, and and so then you can bring strategic vulnerability. So, oh, you know, I’ve been feeling challenged, but then I figured it out. So it’s. Like you can be more strategic about it, because I do think that power imbalances in the workforce are reinforced. I agree with you that they might be reinforced and and if somebody tells a story about a, you know, their vulnerable story about another culture, it might actually be othering, and might create distance rather than rapport. Yeah. I think that’s so interesting. I love how your brain works. Yeah, and let’s bring our guest on.

Well, Mel, I am super excited about our guest today. She is amazing. Long before there was diversity, equity and inclusion and DEI became the focus of organizational leaders around the globe. Shirley was leading the way, helping organizations build inclusive cultures to drive business success. She’s been a thought leader in DEI and positioning inclusion as a business driver for more than 25 years. She also has a new book out, so I’m excited to talk about that.
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Welcome.

I’m just delighted to be with both of you. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, I want to just dive right in. I am super curious to hear your thoughts about DEI. In Canada, we call it EDI and I’m curious about what you’re experimenting with in your life and work right now.

Yeah, I would say in my life, we’ll start there. First is, I’m in Minneapolis. We’ve had, like, the longest summer type spring weather ever, and I’ve been experimenting with digging up garden beds and replanting them with a fervor at a place I never have before, and somehow digging in the dirt this year seems to be feeding my soul as it relates to the work that We do. I’ve always called this from the beginning inclusion and diversity, and the name of my company’s inclusion Inc, and I always wanted to keep it in the realm of a business strategy, not because it’s not important at a personal level, not because it’s not important to individual dimensions of difference or diversity, but we really want the C suite and white leaders, many of whom have never experienced what it is to be the other to have staying power with this. So if we the D E and I that floated. And you said in Canada, it’s different. It confused leaders. They were already a little tentative here about what am I supposed to do to be an inclusive leader, and what am I supposed to do at these different dimensions of diversity, and now you have this glob of D, E and I, so probably for the last four years, we’ve been trying to help leaders separate that and talk about those as differently and how they’re business drivers for their organization and for their own development as leaders.

And I know this industry is changing. Mel and I were at a conference in June or July, yeah, and and I’m wondering sort of, what do we think is going to happen in this DEI realm, and what do we want to have happen in this realm, in the next, you know, five to 10 years?

Yeah, I would say that. You know, I started this work well, way back before I formed inclusion in when, as a white woman from Minnesota, I was in charge of Denny’s consent decree, and there was racial discrimination. So again, I’ll keep redefining the way that is race is a dimension of difference, okay? And discrimination happened, and they took class action lawsuits very seriously. When, since the time 24 years ago that I formed inclusion Inc, we’ve been saying we should do this, because when you use inclusion behaviors, it drives your engagement, your productivity, your innovation, you keep your best talent and oh, by the way, we globally validate it. Improve the return on investment on that so that that piece of that we were kind of out there in the wilderness with that, but that has staying power. And so when you think about where we go in the next five to 10 years, part of it is, I just wanted to go back away from the disinformation that’s flow. Coding about it and scaring a lot of companies from doing fantastic work in this if you think about I mentioned inclusion, but the dimensions of diversity that we need to have in organizations today are so we can do a better job of selling goods and services to our customers and our clients, and so we can better understand their needs. And that somehow that deep heart, the diversity dimensions of it, it gets lost in translation. And I’m not quite sure what has happened the last year and a half, except that a lot of disinformation has come out about it. If organizations aren’t firmly grounded in why it matters for them as a business, they can’t get to the deeper work.

And Mel, do you want to weigh in here? Because I know you have lots of opinions about.

Well, I was going to ask the I was going to ask a question about inclusion, and when you’re developing a strategy for inclusion, are you is the strategy meant to address address everybody’s needs and include everybody? Or are you developing a strategy that sort of targets people and in groups and individuals who you think might not feel included.

Well, I think it’s both at the highest level, we think of inclusion to include as a verb, and it’s and I did listen to your podcast on kindness. While we can be kind when we include people or exclude people, the purpose is we’re saying, hey, Mel, you’re valuable for this decision that we’re going to make. I want your perspective generally. So inclusion is how we work, and we always think of it like if you’re just listening to this, I’m making a funnel with my hands that at the top of the funnel, every single person, no matter what level you are, you have felt what it is to be excluded or felt you had a great idea that somebody rolled their eyes side and got thrown to the curb. So we like to start with that, because once you start with that, then you can get heightened sensitivity and you can get knowledge from the like the internal assessment. Well, you think everybody feels like their voice is heard here, but let’s look at the metrics on that. And there are specific groups that that aren’t so I that starts our conversation there. Mal, wherever you want to go deeper on that, please let me know.

Well and I know from a leadership like from a development perspective, when I do hiring consulting, I have a fundamental belief that diversity in the hiring process gives multi faceted opinions and thoughts to anything that the organization is doing operationally, so whether it’s mental health or LGBTQ or race or religion or simply someone who has fractious opinions and can challenge the status quo. Diversity has this ability to expand the thinking when you have a monolithic hiring and people, the research does show that people tend to hire people like them. So if you don’t use a process to increase inclusivity or to increase the viewpoints intentionally, you will hire it’ll become an echo chamber. But I really like this piece of tying it to the products and services that you’ve developed, because if you can only see your point of view, then you aren’t able to serve your customers. This happens in pharmacy all the time, like that, products aren’t tested on women or people of color or you know, this is being talked about now more and more, and it’s a classic way that we look at what product development in medical in the medical field, and we have different risk factors in different groups.

Yeah, you had a lot there. I want to just dig into a couple respond to a couple of the things. So let’s think about both who we hire and, you know, opening the lens, the aperture, and if you position it in the way that, well, look, I used to work at Frito Lay. Don’t ask me how to sell chips to multi racial, multi ethnic groups. I don’t care if we do focus groups during the year. So who do we hire? And then. How do we create culture where those voices can be invited and really heard for the purpose of driving business success? And what you started out with reminded me that you know like you’re going to drive all of these different factors. Mackenzie and lean in have been doing work together since 2014 and one of the most astounding findings that they’ve had, and they do it just on women and people of color at this point, because that’s the most robust data they have, is if your leadership team has women in it, not just the C suite, but the top layers, you will outperform all the businesses in your industry by 39% every single factor. And then the same thing holds true for people of color. You know, for those of us going, hello, we knew that we are glad now that we have the number to support that, but it’s what you were saying. How do you get all of these different viewpoints and have a space that allows for difference of opinion? So I think that the power of both the culture of inclusion once the talent’s hired and this thought about, how are we going to open this and then intentionally advance talent, not because we’re being nice to a certain group? That’s where we kind of lose the thinking. It’s because we need that group in order to sell more goods and services. Very interesting economic statistic in the US, I know you’re in Canada, but to 1/3 of our economy is driven by multi racial, multi ethnic spend. That’s 1/3 of our economy. And I want to say, Okay, people, let’s wake up to that, because if that’s what’s happening, our economy would be flat. You know, in America, we’re all proud about our economy right now, right? But it has a lot to do with selling to those groups well.

And I think that one thing that I want to take a second to talk about is where we think that DEI/EDI, where did it? Where has it gone off the rails? What changes need to be made within EDI/DEI departments and I.

I’m gonna push back a little bit, and I’m gonna say the problem isn’t with the work. Do I think the work can week? Yes, I would. I would say the biggest hurdle or barrier to the work, as there was a tipping point with George Floyd’s murder here in the global awakening, is that people don’t understand what it means, and they don’t know what it has to do with business. It’s more from my perspective, after having researched for my new book, deliberate disruption, that there’s a lot of misinformed and blatant ideology that’s hitting the mainstream that’s not actually factual. I’m not going to speak to what people’s motives are for that I don’t know. I just know that we are in an onslaught of what I would call had been fringe ideologies before, here in the US that have made mainstream, and then people, for example, the Claremont Institute created legislation. And if, if you know, hey, Melanie, you’re the governor of a state, do you want to get rid of D, E, N, I and your public universities? Here’s the laws to get rid of it. Why would anybody do that? You’re preparing students for a changed workplace. So I my mission this year has been to say, excuse me, that’s not true.

So I agree with you that there’s misinformation, and I also, I’d love to hear Mel from you too. I think that there’s things that my opinion, the one that I would say where it’s gone sideways a little bit that gives fuel to the misinformation, because people feel like it isn’t working right is in putting too many things into DEI or EDI and. Having that department do sexual misconduct investigations, like having them be an investigative department, I actually feel like makes them go sideways a little bit. It’s really hard to both investigate and include. And so there are some key places I’ve seen the other places, which is why I like so much this idea of tying it to business values, that that’s the reason, is that we sort of start to try to just be nice to everybody and and in some of that are carrying our systematic caring in people being also off on stress leaves and things becomes adjacent to Edie and I, and yet we actually can’t afford what people are saying they need. So they’re employed, and then they have a stress leave and they’re out for six months, or they’re, you know, or they need to work from home after COVID, but the business needs them in person. Is there any other examples that you can think of? Mel, or maybe you Shirley after I, you know, sort of tell you what I’m thinking about, where it’s gone wrong.

Well, I just think it’s a conflation of items. It’s your point. What does this have to do with it, if creating a culture of inclusion? I’ll tell you our own global study that we did. We had in like US centric. What do you feel most included? And then we said, oh, we worked with as Southern Methodist universities, Executive Education Department, Dr Miguel Coones. We went to 14 countries, and then we came up with, what’s the return on investment when inclusion behaviors are used? I’ll give you a couple examples. Lenny, what do you think we’re considering making this change? I know that’s central to what you do. Now. Let me also clarify, inclusion doesn’t mean that each of us has a voice on all of that. And then really as important as that, like tight or maybe even a little bit ahead, is I need to provide rationale for everybody and why decisions are made. We might not like the decisions, but I have to provide that. So when we did this global study, when those inclusion behaviors are used, people, engagement improved 25% they were 10% more productive. They were four times less likely to leave and from an innovation perspective, they were 20% more likely to come up with good ideas then also share them, because maybe before they came up with a good idea, and somebody says, What are you talking about? Shirley? And so I think if, if we can find a way to ground in that’s about the cultural piece for everybody to to help maximize, you know, all of all of us being here and being ourselves, and the things you said, like auditing, harassment, oh, excuse me, that’s not that. Is that function needed? Yes, absolutely,

Yeah absolutely.

Yeah. And then on the dimensions of of diversity, I I saw the other day, there was a forum at Fortune, and I don’t remember which executive participant was here, but they said it was a black man CEO, and he said, we’re asking the wrong question. We should be asking, why there are so many white men in the C suite? Because if you think about the differences driving a better way to serve your current customers, your clients, and to expand it, you want to have that like visible, literal dimensions of diversity, but also all the other potential things. I’m not trying to minimize that some of those are more complex than others. My big driver is you have to change the way leaders operate, and the culture invites differences. And again, I like harp on this to for the purpose of business success. That is like in 2007 2008 a lot of things shut down because it wasn’t business centric. I’m seeing some of that today too. Maybe people jumped on a bandwagon. They didn’t know why they did. So couple thoughts there.

What tools do we have to measure inclusivity in a workplace?

So I think of this a lot like great leadership, right? When you say, what are you that’s you know your expertise in terms of leadership. So what do you want people to model? Some of the clients that we work are really keen on the these. We call it alert, you know, the Ask, listen, encourage, respond. And think that’s this really cute little acronym that came out of that very robust global study. And so how you measure that? That you can ask on employee surveys, if you like, my opinion is asked. I feel like my ideas are able to come forward. It might be an inclusive leader skill set that you want to have, or you might say you’re opening a new market. This was a ways back, but we had an organization that was, let’s just say, selling everything, you know, bedroom furniture and all that. And they were in LA and they didn’t have any Spanish speakers. Now that’s like a hyper exaggerations. So everyone gets How are you going to sell to that market, which is the majority market in LA, if you don’t have Spanish speakers, or you don’t have recruiters who can speak Spanish to interview anyone, right? And so I, I’m kind of exaggerating in a way, because people get so wound up in in the biggest issue that I see here in some of the pushback is on equity. Let’s just say that if you create a culture of inclusion, and you realize that there are differences, and I always add this, if I breathe, I have bias or unconscious bias. So know that I have that if I focus on those two things, equity will be the outcome, and belonging will be how I feel. And so somehow, you know, there’s a lot of messiness, and there’s a lot of leaders that never knew what inclusion and diversity meant, and now they feel really pressured, like they’re supposed to know what. De and I go, it’s not one thing, folks. And what are you back to? How do you measure it? Mel, what are you trying to accomplish within your organization? What is your primary mission from a culture of inclusion. Maybe your turnover is too high and you’ve gotten feedback through that. Maybe it’s your opening new markets, maybe your current and so you have to advance dimensions of diversity. I think of it though. I’m repeating what I said in the beginning. It’s a lot like great leadership and whatever metrics you put on that, or tools to enhance that are very similar.

And Shirley, where can people find you?

Well, thanks for asking. We’re at info@inclusion-inc.com, yeah, love to hear from that’s on Amazon. Yeah, it’s on Amazon. And we did this one just as an e book, and we and we priced it in such way at a really low threshold price, so that people can educate themselves and have some ideas about how to help manage the bush part.

That’s great. Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to dive into this topic with you.

 

Thanks and delight. Yeah, it’s just been delightful to be with both of you, and hello there up to the north from Minnesota.

 

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Well that was really fun. I loved how Shirley was talking about the business case for equity, diversity and inclusion. Yeah, what did what thoughts did you have?

Well, I was, yeah, I was interested in how she was linking inclusion and leadership, and the importance of leadership in that inclusion. And, you know, I asked her the question about, is there a metric? Is there a way of of measuring inclusion? And one of the things she mentioned was turnover, if your employees don’t feel included, if they’re, if they’re, if it’s not a comfortable workplace for them, they’re going to leave. So thought that was interesting.

Well, I when she said that I actually had the thought that you could actually have turnover as a problem too, because if no one leaves, it’s really hard to change the diversity in your organization. So if people never leave, you never get a chance to change the makeup of your workplace, right, which I found fascinating as well. Well, it has been so exciting to be here today with you and go experiment.

Go experiment.

Important Links: 

Shirley Engelmeier

 

Long before diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) became the focus of organization leaders around the globe, Shirley was leading the way in helping organizations build inclusive cultures to drive business success. She’s been a thought leader in DEI and positioning inclusion as a business driver for more than 25 years.

Since 2001, as the founder of InclusionINC, she has helped global Fortune 500 companies and emerging organizations develop and implement DEI initiatives that drive business results. With her passion for teaching businesses to leverage inclusion to drive employee engagement, productivity, innovation and retention, Engelmeier began to share her philosophies and thought leadership on DEI in books designed for c-suite leaders and executives.

Shirley also addresses the reasons behind the anti-DEI pushback that has emerged over the past three or so years. With extensive and credible research that validates the profitability of well reasoned DEI approaches, she wants to ensure business leaders can move beyond the misinformation that is becoming more and more mainstream and implement DEI in a way that enhances their business strategy.


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