The show’s guest in this episode is Marie Deveaux. She is an executive leadership coach, DEI consultant, and international speaker with 20 years of experience in corporate training and development. She has worked with organizations like Facebook, Spotify, and the Ford Foundation, focusing on fostering self-awareness, compassion, and effective communication to build cultures of belonging. Marie holds a Master’s in Management, is a Professional Certified Coach, and enjoys baking and audiobooks in her downtime.

—

 

Listen to the podcast here

Fostering Belonging Through Leadership with Marie Deveaux

Hello. I’m Melanie Parish. Welcome to the show. I’m an executive coach and author, a content creator and an adventure. I’m going to start claiming other identities as we as we go. And your who?

Hi. I’m Mel Rutherford. I’m one of the CO hosts of this show. I’m McMaster University’s first transgender department chair, and I’m happy to be here. Well,
I’ve been thinking about flexible neuro pathways when I’ve been thinking about, you know, things that I think about when I drive in my car. And I’ve been thinking about how, how frustrating I find it when people have rigid thinking. And that made me think, like, as a coach, what could I do to help people who get, like, stuck in a, in a in a rut, like, how could they start to change their flexibility in their brains? And I was thinking, well, like some of it’s just like adventure stuff, like, if you go to church and you sit in the same chair every time, try sitting in new places, like, just start changing your perspective and and then I was just trying to think of all the ways that you could do that, like eating new foods, or, you know, saying hello to a person who you wouldn’t usually say hello to in a room. And I don’t know, my brain is really excited by this idea of just trying things that you aren’t the most comfortable to see how it creates flexible thinking. What are you thinking about?

Well, I was thinking about awards, because when I first stepped into leadership space, I was really conscious of my job being to support people, help them do their work better, and to lift them up. And just recently, I’ve started getting excited about awards as one tool that we can use to lift people up and and shine the light on good work that people are doing. And so I’m I’ve been nominating people for some pretty big awards recently in my department, and it’s and and by the way, it’s just a lot of fun when they win.

Well, and do you ever think about like, if you if you recommend one person, you don’t recommend another person, what do you think the impact of that is? Do you think there’s a possibility of any negative impact, or is it just good leadership to recognize people differently?

Well, I think it’s important that the awards that are awarded Be sincere. So when award opportunities come up, I look at I make sure I’m looking at everybody. I like, literally, I pull up I’ve got a sheet of everybody’s picture, so I look at everybody, and I make sure, you know, I pull out the person that’s that’s appropriate for the award. And, yeah, I think somebody would be really bummed if they were overlooked for an award that was a really good fit for them, and I and I didn’t bring them into that space.

So the leadership is to make sure that you’re looking is appropriate, fair, all of those things.

Yeah, I want to look at everybody. I want to make sure I don’t overlook somebody who would be really a good fit for a specific award. Yeah, I think
that’s really interesting.

And I am very excited about our guest today. Her name is Marie Deveaux, and she’s an executive leadership coach PCC through the International Coach Federation. She’s an effective communication strategist, a DEI consultant and an international speaker, and I think she’s got a really cool assessment that we’re going to talk about. So I can’t wait to connect with her.

—

Hi Marie, welcome to the show.

Ah, thanks so much for having me.

Well, oh, I have a question, um, I’m curious, like, how you’ve been experimenting in your life and work? Yeah. Recently?

Yeah, well, I like to think as an instructional designer and Melanie, maybe you can appreciate this as another person who creates a lot of content, but all of content creation is an experiment, and especially in the workshop space, in the coaching space, working with other humans, we’re constantly experimenting with new ways to introduce ideas to people, how to open up conversations, how to get people to engage with each other. All of it is experimentation. And I think most recently, and you mentioned the assessment, but that’s my latest experiment, which was prompted by a client, you know, is working with clients, and they were really struggling with this concept. And I said, Okay, we need to apply a different entry point. And so started thinking about personas in the workplace and what that looks like, and a new assessment pool was born, right? But I do think the process of working with teams and working with other people is always embedded with that level of experiment taking and play.

I’m curious about the your instrument, and I’m curious in particular about what you do with the results of the instrument and how you use the results to support the organization.

Yeah, so for this particular tool, we were addressing a particular inconsistency or challenge that clients were having because we do a lot of work supporting teams around intercultural dynamics and how people communicate with each other, and how that, in turn, impacts and creates culture. And with this particular client, we were noticing people were really struggling with those who were more task oriented, connecting with those who are more people oriented, and in discussing it with them, we discovered people were not seeing those as a spectrum, but actually as, like, fixed things. And so we said, oh, this is really interesting, and it was causing a lot of tension, and how we were hoping to bring them into conversation with each other. And so we said, Okay, well, what if there was a tool that could help people self identify some of the behaviors that are causing them to look one way or the other? And in my experience, I have found when we give people something objective to view as an example of what they’re doing, it makes it far easier for them to understand, reflect and identify how it’s showing up for themselves. So with this tool, people are they take an assessment, and then we’re able to align the results of that assessment to our set of behaviors, or a persona, and with those results, we can then immediately respond to when these behaviors show up. This is how this impacts intercultural dynamics in the workplace, and who are things you can do to either leverage the strengths of that persona or notice when it becomes maladaptive, and what are the antidotes to that? Right? And with this tool in particular, I think it’s particularly useful because I have a lot of teams who, especially in their dei journey, everyone wants to know, okay, I understand all of this in theory, but what do I do? What do I do? And because we’re talking about interpersonal skills when it comes to equity, inclusion and belonging, that can get very, very nuanced very quickly, and that can be frustrating for people who just want to do something. So some people, what if there was a tool where I could say, well, when this behavior shows up, here are some things to try, right? Not as prescriptive as I can get when it comes to interpersonal skills. Here are some things to try. Here are some places to look and so that’s how we’re using this tool, especially for leaders to start looking at, okay, this is the set of behaviors that I’m noticing that I’m constantly engaging in. I saw I could try this. Can you help me think through what that looks like? So it really segues nicely into coaching dialogs and giving people concrete action step to move forward as they’re integrating some of the ideas and concepts.

Yeah, I’m familiar with some measurement tools that are designed to kind of identify the breakdowns or the, you know, next, the next growth opportunities. Is there any purpose for a tool to have a way to identify things that are going right, or to give out some, you know, attaboys, or identify things that are going well in the organization.

Well, absolutely. And I think kind of speaking to Mel your your affinity and love for acknowledgement and recognition, I am also very much a believer in strengths based approaches, and when people can recognize and be acknowledged for the things that are going well, it’s affirming. It gives them confidence, and that’s a nice reward for them to continue doing those things. So that’s also part of this assessment tool, is making sure people understand in all of our behaviors, there are things that are supporting us that act as bridges to where we want to go, and then there are things that are going to act as barriers. And sometimes our bridges can look like barriers, and our barriers can look like bridges, right? Depending on. Context. So it’s giving people that acknowledgement of like, Hey, here’s when these behaviors are actually supporting you and your goals, and then also, here’s when this may not be supporting your goals and this is acting as a barrier. And with that nuance, with that distinction, giving people a reference point, start examining and doing some of that own self examination work of really being critical when they’re in the situation themselves. Is this the behavior I need right now?

I like that a lot, especially the orientation to the organization’s own goals.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it has to be oriented towards those goals, right? People don’t change because we want to. They change because they want to.

So I think, I think that’s so true, and I think I think there’s especially with intercultural communication, so many times people have, like, good intent and poor execution. And so it’s not, it’s not actually like when you picture, you know, an assessment. The I would guess, the people that are well intended probably get the best results from something like this, those who are ill intended, like who have ill intent, can’t, won’t, won’t change, but those who are oblivious to things that their behaviors, they’re doing that aren’t effective, could get a lot of juice, but I don’t know. I’m just saying stuff.

Well. Melanie, I’m curious, when you say those who based on intent that people would get different things from the tool, Could you say more about that?

I mean, if they were actually like, you know, we’re part of the queer community, if there’s hate in there, they’re probably not going to learn from an assessment. But if it’s actually just that they’re they’ve never considered it before, but their heart is in the right place, then they’re probably going to get a lot out of something.

Yeah, well, I think that’s that’s kind of the the trick in all of this work is to encourage people to think differently. And I don’t think people can think differently, and then until they can really recognize what it is they’re doing right and so, and I think this is, again, part of the inspiration for this tool is, you know, I’m talking with these clients and noticing I’m like, you don’t even understand what I’m talking about, right? And so looking at, okay, what is a different gradient or a different entry point in this conversation? And it was going back to Okay, can I give you tools around self awareness and language around what I’m noticing that you don’t yet see, right? And that’s where introducing something like a persona, right or an avatar gives people a little bit of that distance where, now, this is not a personal attack. I am truly responding and observing behavior. And I think this is one of the things that becomes really critical when we’re working in change spaces, is having people separate who they are from the behaviors that they are. Human beings. We are not our behaviors. We do behaviors, right? That is not who we are. So, you know, just because you wet the bed, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, right, but you wet the bed, right? Can we acknowledge that that happened, okay, can we all look at the impact of that? Does that help you move towards your goals or not, and from that place, can we decide, hmm, what can I do to change this behavior?

Do you find that some of this work, it seems to me it would be tricky to do this work in a group, because people don’t want to be called out in front of their colleagues. How do you navigate that?

So this is exactly it, right? And I think Melanie to your earlier point, this really bridges what Mel is kind of poking at here is this idea that in any community setting, if we’re in a workshop, there are going to people who are at different gradients in their understanding of equity, and who are open to different degrees to changing what they currently think. And I used to work in a lot of education environments prior to starting my firm, and in the K through 12 space, we would often say the students who were your high achievers that were getting everything right. We call those your high flyers. And then you have your students who are really struggling to understand the concepts. And I worked at an organ organization who called those students your below grade levels, or your beagles, right? And so it’s the same for adults. We have some high flyers, people who are open, who are ready to learn, who are ready, ready and eager to experiment with new concepts and ideas. We’ll try it on. And then you have people who are really struggled, who are struggling, who are our beagles. And so what happens in a group setting is beagles start to feel. Shame for the things they don’t know. And shame is a trauma response, and once we’re in that space, now, no learning is going to happen at all, because now we feel we need to protect ourselves. Ego is now in the room. Learning is not going to happen, right? So what’s helpful is that if people do have some of that separate time individually to work through, Okay, where am I and how am I approaching this? This is also where we start looking at other mediums of engaging the client. So it might be we have separate sessions, and we do do this often at high tides, but having separate sessions where leaders can meet with someone one on one, prior to going into the group session and kind of set, okay. Well, what do you want to get out of this session? How do you want to be in the room? Right? And can kind of provide some of that scaffolding to get our beagles close to where the high fires are, so at least they can engage in the conversation from a place of self awareness, instead of shame or needing to be in self defense.

That’s really interesting. I feel like we like, glommed on to this assessment thing. And I think you do a lot more than that. What else are you thinking about these days?

Well, something that’s been in my head quite a bit is this idea of abolition. And I recently read Trisha hersey’s Rest manifesto, and she mentioned the term abolition, and it got me really thinking like, Oh, that’s not a word you hear as often as we probably should. So as I am want to do, I went down a rabbit hole all of these articles about abolition and thinking about why abolition is not more present in our current vocabulary, because at its root, abolition is about choosing to not do harm and choosing to rehabilitate those who have harmed. And I was like, Oh, this is fascinating. And it had me thinking about how often we look outwardly at where harm is coming from, instead of inwardly. It’s like, oh, how powerful would it be to really embody abolition, which means we’re willing to look both ways. And I think a lot of the discomfort people have is then in recognizing, oh no, I too, am participating in harm. What do I want to do about that? And how do I go about my own rehabilitation process as part of this greater ecosystem? So that’s something that’s been on my mind. But I I’m always reading like 17 books at a time. There’s a lot of things swimming around in this head.

I’m fascinated by this idea. I may join you in the rabbit hole. It’s a really cool idea. Thank you for sharing. I don’t even know if I have a good question. Do you have any good questions popping into your mind? 

Yeah. I mean, it seems like Yeah. I mean, I’ve the Lord. Abolition is not part of my daily vocabulary, but it seems related to the concept of harm reduction, which is something more I hear about these days. Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting.

Well, and also I think that it, it the idea that there’s dialog that can happen in those spaces where harm is done and harm is like, reparation can happen. Healing can happen. I was trying to explain this today to someone who was having challenges in a marriage, and I was like, you know, it’s a really marriage is really resilient. You can, you can. You can try talking it through like you can. You can stay with it. You can choose not to, but, but people can overcome harm if you, if you put down the weapons, if you don’t weaponize everything, yeah, interesting idea.

I agree, I agree, and I think there’s so much in what you’ve shared there, Melanie, around the power of communication, but also the desire to want to do the repair work.

Yeah, it seems to me that one of the one of the tricks here is enrolling the person who has done harm in number one, staying engaged, and number two, deciding to de escalate and try to repair.

Yeah, yeah.

I’m curious. Like, can it come from both directions, or does it have to come from the person who did the harm like does the willingness have to come?

Yeah, so I think there’s a lot of there’s multiple schools of thought on this right. And I I draw a lot of my my work from non violent communication. And Marshall Rosenberg will tell you, we only need one person to be practicing. For it to be effective, and I would assert that doesn’t always feel very good to doing that work. It’s lonely and it can be very burdensome. And so I do think there is always room, because again, if we’re talking about interpersonal relationships, I think you really do have to start with, well, what do we want the relationship to be? Because then you have both multiple people at least fighting for the same thing, right? If we’re not both aligned and where we’re going, Are we truly in right relationship? So I do think that is part of it, and to some extent, I like to think, and I hope that many of us are having conversations in our relationships around, well, what do we want it to be, and who do we want to be in this relationship? So that when conflict intention arises, we can return to that as kind of our North Star. And that’s a lot of how I think about feedback conversations, actually, is looking back to the north star of hey, we said we wanted to do x, and now we’re over here doing like Z. Did you notice that? What can we do about that so we can get back to where we said we wanted to go. But for teams, if they don’t have that alignment of we’re all trying to be in a certain type of relationship with each other, that’s a non starter, right?

Yeah, it’s, it’s all of this. My brain is loving this conversation a lot, and I’m really enjoying this idea that that you can invite people to feedback, you can invite people I, I think sometimes earlier in my life, I I’ve I was less aware of how people tried to manipulate other people to get what they wanted all the time. And the the longer I think about that, the more I’m like, Well, I don’t want to do something to you, which leads me to do many things different, like I want to be in relationship, like I had somebody give me a quote on a paint job, and we weren’t aligned in what we what I was asking for, and what he thought he was doing. And so halfway through the job, I was like, he kept trying to not do what I wanted. And finally, I was like, do I have to do? I need to pay you more so that we just renegotiate this job so we all get what we want. And he was like, Yeah, that would be and it was like, Oh, well, I don’t want to do anything to you. I want to be in relationship. And so it’s interesting, how many things that touches that I don’t want to, I don’t want to get something, you know, out of someone that they don’t want to freely give.

Yeah, but I think that’s always the negotiation and true partnership and true collaboration, right? Is really moving ourselves away from an either or, but looking at the both end of how can all parties needs to be met, right? And that is, that is the whole conversation, right? And if we can both be willing that that’s something that we’re interested in and and for all parties, this is for not just one to one relationships, but thinking about teams, especially where things get really interesting, how can we choose to continue to collaborate to make sure all needs get met. Yeah.

Any tips? Do you have three good tips for like, being better at leadership in the DEI space.

or being better at DEI in the leadership space or just being a better human in all spaces.

I mean, I’m a huge advocate for curiosity. I think it applies in so so many different facets and avenues. This idea of leaning into growth mindset, beginner’s mind. How can we really explore the possibilities we haven’t thought of yet? And I do think that is a nice gateway for a lot of collaborative conversations. And let’s you wanted three tips.

Maybe one’s good. I wasn’t sure about the question. You know, sometimes I’m better at the question than others. If you have two more great if not, maybe Mel will do one and I’ll do one. Oh, I like that. Yeah, let’s, let’s co create some tips tag mine. I know what I would say. It’s like the feedback loop and in a real circle like that. And that requires not just that you’re giving feedback, but that you are seeking feedback on a regular basis to to hear more voices as a leader.

I’m going to go with being aware of the psychological impact of the hierarchy, and specifically what I mean by that is so I mean. Endorsing this, the idea of curiosity, but I also think that it’s diff it’s more work if you’re in a position of power to understand what’s going in the minds of people who are working for you, than vice versa and and therefore it is work. And I think it’s worth being conscious that there’s work there’s work there, and being intentional about being curious about people who have less power than you have.

I love that addition.

Okay, well, this has been an amazing conversation, and I could talk to you guys all evening long, but I think we’re coming to the end of our interview. Marie, where can people find you? 

I’m, of course, on the internet. If they search my name, they could find me, but I would prefer if they came to my website and took a look at this assessment, which is going to be at https://mariedeveaux.com/self-assessments/

Oh, thank you. That’s and we’ll put that in the show notes as well. And it has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

I’ve so enjoyed speaking to you both. Thank you so much for having me.

 

—

Well, that was really fun. That was fun.

Yeah, that was really fun. I love that we were talking about things that we talk about all the time, like, you know, in our in the evening, in our armchairs, you know about feedback loops and listening and all those things. It was really fun.

I thought it was really important. When she was talking about orienting any intervention to the organization’s own goals. In my department, a few years ago, we had a consultant come into our space and say they were going to replace our culture with a different culture, without showing any curiosity about why we had the culture that we had, why we had designed this culture to support the mission and vision of our department. And it didn’t land, and it didn’t go over, and we didn’t work with that consultant for very long.

Yeah, it there’s some you can’t just impose a culture. You it like, you know, it has to reveal itself. I think, yeah, and it is interesting when you say that. I don’t think you had a bad culture, but sometimes there is a negative culture that you do need to shift, and it makes me curious about doing that, and how does that happen.

Right? But you can’t do that without enrolling the people in the organization, and probably by acknowledging their stated goal and mission.

Yeah, I think that’s right. And, and I mean, sometimes a culture changes. When people leave, are fired or retire, so sometimes that is the way to a new a new culture as well. That was kind of a dark thought to end on. Anyway. It’s been fun to be here with you. Go experiment.

Go experiment.

Important Links: 

Marie Deveaux

Marie Deveaux is an executive leadership coach, effective communications strategist, DEI consultant and International speaker.

Marie has brought her training and inclusive workshop programs and talks to organizations across the media and education sectors including firms like Facebook, Essence Global, WPP, the 4As, Rocketship Education, Spotify, KIPP New Jersey, and the Ford Foundation.

Marie’s 20 year background in corporate training and learning and development has cultivated her consulting and coaching philosophy to one that is focused on self awareness, compassion and effective communication as an avenue for fostering deeper connections in relationships. Through this lens, we deepen capability in how we are relating with our work, ourselves as workers, and with those who co-work alongside us. These are the building blocks of cultures of belonging. Where you work should nurture who you are, and Marie is on a mission to support as many nurturing work relationships, for as many people as possible.

Marie holds a Master of Science in Management from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor of Arts in English and American Literature from New York University. Her executive coach training was completed at ICF accredited Accomplishment Coaching. She is a Professional Certified Coach, and member of The International Coaching Federation. When not speaking or training she enjoys baking for her husband and two children, and listening to a good book.


Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

Join The Experimental Leader community today: