[Un]phased March 29th

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, lisa, thinking, employees, folks, organization, hill, hiring, growth mindset, color, fixed mindset, black, diversity, pandemic, wells fargo, andre, support, pool, ralph lauren, recruit

SPEAKERS

Dr. Shaunna Payne Gold, Dr. Lisa Ingarfield

So Lisa, you remember this was a couple of years ago where the Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf, apologized for speaking, pretty much out of the side of his neck concerning the limited pool of black talent. Because a lot of people were like, What, wait a minute, what are you talking about? Do you remember that? It was a couple years ago. I know. I know. pandemics are dog years. But it was a

while ago, right? Yeah, I do remember it. But I'm kind of shocked. It was a couple of years ago, like it feels like it was six months ago. Like it's a very familiar memory. And I was Yeah, so it's pandemic time, I

guess. Right. Right, exactly. And, you know, he said it, he apologized and really got slammed for saying it. But I'm still seeing some of the same trends in the workplace that have the same sentiments. They're just not saying it publicly. And so I really do think that that statement has some endurance to it. And we need to kind of think through what that means for hiring these days, especially as we're coming to through beyond a pandemic. So let's see. Let's do it. I'm Dr. Shawna Payne gold, and I go by she her her pronouns.

And I'm Dr. Lisa englefield. And I go by she her hers. Welcome

to Unphased a podcast to disrupt your normal and challenge your brain to go the distance. So Lisa, look, I am sick and tired of these people that keep saying that there is a limited pool of whatever talent, limited pool of women, limited pool of people of color limited pool of anybody. I'm, it's like a broken record. And I'm looking around thinking to myself, there just can't mathematically be true for every single industry, it just, it can't be true. And so you hear people like this guy, Wells Fargo saying there's a limited pool of black talent. It's like, okay, here we go. With the finger pointing, we're pointing at the employees rather than doing some critical reflection on what an organization may not be doing to attract those people. It just it burns me up.

It is the blaming of the employee rather than the looking internally. And I think that that's a theme that has kind of threaded through a lot of our podcasts. And the work that we're trying to do is this persistent action or narrative where it's the problem of the individual or the group, right, because we talk about that in sport with few women or few folks with disabilities, few people of color participating in certain sports, and often it's, well, they don't want to or they can't or blankety blank, right. And never mind, never the organization looking internally about what they are or not doing to create inclusivity and accessibility for, you know, the kind of non normative Athlete of the white male. So it's it just echoes of that seeing it, you know, it's not Wells Fargo's fault. It's these other external forces that they have no control over, you know. They're not me

kind of Exactly, exactly. It can't be me, it can't be us. Let me throw my hands in the air. And, you know, I can't say I was shocked, even though I know the financial industry relatively well. My mother worked for 46 years in the banking industry as a teller. And this is actually very funny, Lisa. So I jokingly say to my mom all the time that she worked in the same building for 46 years, but worked for four different banks. So she worked for the bank when it was central fidelity, and then it became fidelity. And then it became, I don't know what it was. And then it was Wells Fargo when she retired. It just yeah, it kept changing. And she used to talk about some of these things all the time. And it's like, wait a minute, there's plenty of folks out there. But again, it's that blame game of it's easier for me to blame individuals in this nebulous quote unquote, talent pool, this non existent talent pool to actually look internally. Why question is always okay, well, what have you done to attract a very deep and wide pool? And what have you done to build relationships within the community or within those professional communities? And this just this stinks of HR laziness in my mind, it just stinks of laziness, because you can't build it in they will come when it comes to certain industries, you just, that's just not reasonable and it's raising blame because oh, well, we put energy into so many other things then, if they really wanted to work would apply what get out of here?

Well, and I'm thinking, as you're talking that the banking industry in particular, you know, has a very painful and unpleasant history when it comes to exclusion. And so that is almost certainly contributing and to not really reckon with that in in your hiring practices and how you're recruiting, retaining and promoting bankers, I guess of color with very poor and remise. You know, and. Right, right. And that's gonna be true of other industries, too, but, and sport being one of them, but banking, in particular in the US context, you know? Right. So yeah, it's very, it's lazy. And I think ultimately, what the laziness is doing is maintaining the status quo. Right. So this is intentional. Whether that's a conscious intentionality or not, I don't know. But we know that generally operate, you know, in the right hand, so not being proactive about how to recruit, where to recruit, how you write job descriptions. Yes. You give us your offering, like, is it like nine interviews, you know, times of the day that are really inconvenient, you know, like, how are you opening up that process? And then how are you treating your employees once you come in, because like we've talked about with sport, you can bring people in women, folks of color, folks with disabilities. But if you do nothing to change the culture, in finance, in banking, then those folks won't stay. So the talent pool is almost a meaningless point.

Right? That's right. That's right. That's right. And, you know, you're making me think of something, Lisa, I remember when my mother was about to retire just a few years before she was about to retire. And she said there was just so much pressure on sales, rather than the actual banking, you know, so how many accounts can we get open? And how many? How many savings accounts? Can we open? And what's frustrating? I think, is that, okay, that amount of energy that you put into those communities to try to coax them into opening accounts and getting loans and all these other things, the same energy you put into trying to make them into your customers, let's put that very same energy into bringing them into the industry as a career path for them knowing that, obviously, this country was built on, not black folks, finances, okay. So in fact, this entire country, we've had a lot of time tearing down the wealth, the little bit of wealth that black people actually did have. And so given that, are we putting any effort into swinging the pendulum the other direction, least I need to do a little bit more research on this. But you know, we've, we've already talked about, you know, Black Wall Street in Tulsa, and so forth. But also, it's another thing I'm doing a little bit of research on, I heard it on a podcast, but I haven't read on it yet, on what's called drowned towns. So black communities that were in low lying areas that were purposefully drowned, so that their businesses, it's the the water equivalent of great fires, where they burned down entire black neighborhoods, businesses, etc. So we have all that going on. So that means that yes, there are still folks that are black and other ethnicities that are interested in finances. But again, you have to recruit in context, knowing and embracing the history of what's happened to black folks and money and understanding money. So, you know, I don't think we can separate those two, even as we recruit folks into even considering a career in finance so that these two but Lisa, we haven't yet talked about the, you know, kind of the ripple effect, right? So if organizations aren't doing a good job with recruitment of, especially people of color, then how is that inherently disenfranchising and completely burning out the people that you do have working for you? It's just right. One problem creates in more, right?

Yeah, and if you do have a small number of folks of color in your organization, they are most likely going to get tokenized. We've also talked about you know, diversity in our like, marginalized identities are the ones who get picked to be on the on the diversity committees that then have no money and no power right. Or someone who's brought in usually a person of color as a DI person, and then they start to kind of like shake The ground a little bit, and then the white, the white power maintenance kind of like kicks into drive and that person doesn't last very long. So it's like this elastic that keeps snapping back. And so I think that for those people who are in the company, um, there have been, they haven't undo our undo level of burden, right, in part, because the company does such a crappy job of hiring a diverse workforce. Mm hmm.

And, you know, Lisa, I'm sure that you've heard this before on, you know, in positions you may have been in and hearing decision makers. I mean, these other lamest excuses I've ever heard for. I mean, we know that based on the data, saying there's not enough in the pool of a particular group, just based on the data, it's just not true. Right. And we also know that there, there's like a laundry list of excuses that are made for not even looking for them. So, you know, the biggest one that I hate is, well, I'm down for di I'm down for diversity and inclusion, but they've got to be qualified for the job as if the two aren't the same.

Yes, yeah.

Are you serious? Yeah. It's just the excuses are so easy to create, and people buy it. People buy it and say, Oh, it's, it's the, it's the back end way of saying I don't, I think that we're going to need to reduce our level of qualification and skill in order to get the diversity that we want, when in fact, you don't have to lower the bar, there's plenty of people that can clear the bar with ease, you just have to go get them.

Mm hmm. Yeah, that's an excuse. It's like a self fulfilling prophecy, right? Like, we are not able to hire employees of color. So we blame them for that. And then, you know, white employees in the workplace look around and say, oh, there aren't that many employees of color here. Therefore, there can't be that many who are qualified. And then when the organization attempts to increase the ranks of employees of color, they've already either implicitly or explicitly created the culture that the ball had to be dropped, which then feeds into the stereotype. That's not true at all right? But it just feeds itself in a cycle. That's right. of hiring. In competency, I suppose. Yes,

yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Well, and I'll have to go back and find at least maybe we can share it with our listeners, and especially anybody that's on our unfazed podcast, Facebook page. There was this great graphic. I don't know if you saw this, Lisa. But it was this great graphic that showed all of the Supreme Court justices thus far, in comparison to Ketangi. And how the qualifications, you know, people are like, Well, yeah, she's just there for whatever reasons just for diversity, but not for qualifications. But when you look at the grid, like the cross chart of everyone else's, there were Supreme Court justices in the past that didn't even have a law degree that sat on the Supreme Court of this country, right. And she's a graduate of Harvard Law and was editor of the Harvard Law Review, but she's not qualified enough to hear yes, preconceived notions pre Oh,

yeah. That makes me think of Hillary Clinton, right? The most qualified presidential candidate candidate in decades, and qualifications don't mean shit. Right. Exactly about racial or gender bias. Yeah, because the only reason that she could possibly Ketangi Brown could be possibly nominated is because she's a black woman, not because she graduated from Harvard Law, not because she has a pristine history, already nominated to a appeals court, you know, like, can't be that no has to be something else has to be something suspicious about it

has to be something else. There has to be something where she doesn't meet the standard and someone is making an exception in order to make sure that we have race on the bench. Come on now. And that's exactly what people are saying, or at least that's the rationale that they're creating for themselves. That's just simply untrue. But we do it all the time. In that we know Supreme Court justice is not a regular old job, but we do that for regular old jobs all the time. Oh, well. She's the only woman so she may not be as qualified but we needed a woman because we don't have any. And and there I say this Lisa, you just bring reel me back in if I'm going too fast. This connects back to a little bit of what we were saying about imposter syndrome too. It's like, right, how many times and this is not a brag or to your own horn thing, Lisa, but how many times have we showed up for whatever whether it was an actual job or consulting or volunteering or teaching? And we're thinking, Hmm, I know, I'm not a heavyweight in this room. But I bring some things to the room. But I'm not a heavyweight to the room, only to find out after everybody else opens their mouth that Oh, I actually might be a heavyweight in this room. And I'm going to do it with humility and to the best of my ability, but I came in not thinking that. Right? It happens all the time. It happens all the

time. Yeah, I would say that is an experience. White straight men, rarely experience, particularly those who are kind of middle upper class, folks. And so my dominant experience, I think, with individuals who experience marginalization in this country, this imposter feeling, and I wonder how that's going to translate when Judge Ketangi Brown is on the call,

right, right. Right, exactly. And, you know, I think that translates to, you know, many folks that can be tokenized. I think, you know, I don't know, I'm just grateful that at least we're in an administration that's willing to challenge people to get out of their comfort zone and at least talk about these things, right, because Ruth Bader Ginsburg tried to get us to talk about these things. And she spent her entire life speaking on topics that continue to be improperly painted as divisive. But now we're at a place where yeah, let's talk about it. Let's talk about it all day, and especially really desperate employers who say they're not only desperate for employees, but they're also desperate, supposedly, for diversity, equity and inclusion. Now, you're being forced out of comfort zones to talk about these issues. At the same time, if you're really that desperate for your business, your organization, etc. To move forward, you now have no choice. Like, I feel like the post pandemic employee, supposedly employee shortage is the perfect way to push employers backs up against the wall to make them really respond rather than hanging out in their own comfort in the past, because we see that too. And what does it look like for them to finally come out of their comfort zone?

But then they're not really right. Like, I think, or maybe they're, they attempt to, and then they realize that, oh, this is raising some questions and making me uncomfortable. And that means I have to maybe rethink the whole way My company is structured in terms of its hiring and promotion, etc. So I don't want to do that. So we'll just then shift the blame to the fact that there's not a pipeline or there's no talent for or, you know, women don't want these jobs or whatever, right.

Oh, my gosh, see this. So Lisa, this reminds me so I just came back from the park. Y'all watching my little boys ride their new bikes. And this park that we go to, we call it it's, it's called Allen pond Park in my little boy, he calls it pond Park. So we went to pond Park, and there's hills and so forth. And he's trying to get used to this bike, and he's trying to get used to switching gears on the bike. And so he stops in the middle of the hill and looks back and says, Mommy, I can't do and I said, What's wrong, son, you know, so, you know, hit your gear right before you get on the hill. Don't wait until you're on it and hit the gear. And so Kendrick said, But Mommy, this hill shouldn't be so steep. Right? The it's the hills fault. Okay, it is the hills fault that it is too steep and I can't get up it right. Instead of saying Mommy, I have to work a bit harder on switching my gears or Mommy, I have to get my legs stronger. Or Mommy, I need to get my momentum up a bit more going downhill right before I go up hill. It's the hills fault. It is not Kendricks fault. They can't get up that hill. That's what this reminds me of right now that decision makers and people who are hiring are saying it is the hills fault. Okay. It is not my fault. It's not my organization's fault. I've been here for 20 some years. I've done the best that I can. It is not my organization's fault is the hills fault girl. I'm like what? Oh, it's are you serious? But that's exactly what gets through. It's everybody's fault but is right.

And he was more than quite genuine in his expression. Right? But I don't give that same grace to these CEOs of companies, including sporting companies who make those excuses, I think that that's largely lazy and calculated.

Right? Yeah, my, I'll give a pass to my beloved seven year old riding his new bike. But as for the rest of y'all grown people who are stuck in fixed mindset thinking and not growth mindset thinking, and Lisa and I are not giving you an inch, okay? Not one inch.

Okay? I want you to explain that fixed mindset and growth mindset set, because I think that actually could be a really useful concept for our listeners who were thinking about hiring or working in an organization that sucks at hiring a racially diverse, tough employee,

oh, my gosh, oh, that is so good. Well, I'm, I'm still getting my arms around it a bit, because I've been asked to work with a particular client on some of their strategic strategic planning. And it's actually with an organization that has a big gap where they have a lot of people that are new to the organization, and then a ton of people that have been there their whole careers. And so we see a number of different things as far as generational gap, you know, their approach to work, etc. And, you know, one of the first things they mentioned was that we need to do this strategic planning, but it's not going to work unless we have some type of mindset, mindset shift for everybody. So the younger generation, not accusing the older generations of not being equipped, and the older generations not accusing the younger generations of, Oh, you just want to do things new, just for the sake of doing something new? Why can't we also hold on to things that still work? And so doing a little bit of research on the concept, and it's, it's interesting, because fixed mindset does everything to maintain the status quo and stay as comfortable as possible, right? So fixed mindset is, you know, I'm going to avoid challenges all together. So that would be like Kendrick saying, I'm not even going up the hill at all, I'm just gonna find a flat flat and just go for it. Right. So avoiding challenges at all, ignoring criticism at all. And the best way to ignore criticism is usually by doing as little as possible. Putting less effort in, or even your intelligence or talent is fixed, whereas you think that there's no more that I can learn, or there's nothing else that that conference or that book or that training could ever teach you. And usually, it's the assumption that not only will I never improve, but in fact, I don't even need to improve because what I have going on right here is enough. That's fixed mindset. Growth Mindset is, okay, I don't care if I have to follow up this bike 17 times to get it up that hill one time, I'm gonna do it because every time I fall off, I'm learning something new, about what to do or what not to do. They learn from feedback and criticism, they put more effort in each time they try something they keep trying and never give up. So this reminds me of a good friend of mine who DNF on her one 40.66 times before she finally did it. Okay, that's a growth mindset. Learning by failure, and also accepting that this will take time and hard work. So the growth mindset, by definition assumes that something is going to be difficult. However, the outcome is worth the difficulty, right? And you would think everybody on the planet in endurance sport would get that because we do it every damn day, right?

Yeah, yeah. But

not so much. Right. So, you know, that that's what's so interesting to me is that growth mindset is inherent to, in my opinion, it's inherent to our athleticism. But I'm not sure if it's inherent to the business, the the back end business of endurance sport, the organizations of sport, the clubs of sport, we do it all the time with our bodies, but we may not do it in organizations.

That's a really great point. Because I'm thinking with tech too, right? It's always evolving. And there's a massive bright, grind set mindset. Yeah, in relation to technology, how that is changing all the time, and how can we be better? How can we use our bodies differently? And how can we use technology to enhance our capacity to use our bodies differently, etc, etc. So yeah, in that sense, we're like cutting edge front edge of thinking about evolution and change. But you're right, that back end piece, kind of the nuts and bolts that enable the growth mindset on the front edge is really fixed. Yeah. And there's not a lot of flexibility there or belief that, you know, something is structured improperly, because while we're always innovating with this tech. So why don't you change anything on the backend? Versus? Yes, we're innovating, but we could innovate even more. Right, right.

There you go. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, the, I think, you know, thank you for reminding me about the growth versus fixed, because I'm still learning about those particular topics. But I do think that's where, you know, when you go back to the gentlemen with Wells Fargo, his statement clearly came from a fixed mindset, I firmly believe that there's a limited pool of black talent in the finance industry, and therefore, we're gonna keep doing what we've been doing, versus a growth mindset of, we need to do some things differently. Because even if he did believe there was a limited pool of black talent, which is not true, statistically. But even if he did believe it, he never placed the blame on the organization to go out and find them in that growth mindset. So that was the first thing I thought of when I heard that on the radio a couple years ago was that it's not true. But even if it was, you're still employee blaming, once again, that it's their fault and not ours. I'm like, come on, you got to take some of that responsibility.

Yeah, cuz rather, because you could look at that and say, Okay, there's this limited pool. Well, then what are we doing to be really competitive? And yes, fireable as an employer to attract this quote, unquote, limited pool, right of blackness. And then it actually went down that road, you would realize there's not a limited pool, but you would be shifting the way that you market yourself as your culture, and that is going to be beneficial in the long run, right. Yeah,

exactly. Exactly. Yep. Yep. So. So, you know, I think all of this is getting really interesting as we kind of, I don't know, if we're at the end of that whole employee tsunami, they were talking about before where, at the beginning of the pandemic, people felt they were going to lose jobs. But now that we're at the end, they realize that it's pretty much their market. You know, it does shift things because, you know, I think it goes back. I don't know if you've ever thought of it this way, Lisa, but for me, I've tried to always position myself in a way that says, okay, yes, I'm being interviewed by them. But I'm also interviewing them to make sure it's the right place for me to be. I think the weight is becoming heavier on the Okay, employer. I'm interviewing you much more than you're interviewing me in this relationship or potential relationship. I think that wait has shifted. And I hope it stays that way for a long while, frankly.

Yeah, I agree. I agree.

All right. So what do we have this week? hell nah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, let me let me hop into the well, no, let me let you go with the hell nah, first and then we'll end up

Hell yeah.

Hell no.

Okay, well, my hell nah, is a little bit of a apology slash reframe. One of the really interesting things are learning points, I think is that you know, when we share the hell yes. And the hell knows on here, we've heard about it, we generally take the information from reputable news sites, or you know, firsthand information where we've heard from people who were involved in the incident, but a couple of weeks ago, or a couple of episodes ago, I talked about Prince William, and his alleged comment around how it was alien to see war in Europe, Visa V seeing war in Africa and Asia. And that was reported widely. I mean, it was on all sites, you know, left and right of the political spectrum. I mean, I felt very competent sharing that, as it turns out, he was it seems like he was maybe misquoted, or there was some information removed from the quote, I don't know whether purposefully, but it changed the context of his comment. So what he actually said was, then everyone is horrified by what they are seeing. It's really horrifying. The news every day, it's just it's almost unfathomable. For our generation, it's very alien to see this in Europe. So the for our generation is so yes, seen for Generation X for millennials. It is not something we have grown up with, right? So he wasn't seeing that folks in Africa and Asia are more prone to war, and that Europe is to civilize the war. It was more that we live in it. We have not lived through something like this. I mean, I guess you could still argue that's debatable, but from a kind of long term perspective, how it was taken with people attacking him about British history and all of that good stuff. Not good stuff that stuff right. I thought that was interesting. And so then that did come through and I think a lot of the news outlets did amend their coverage but it just shows how it's actually a good lesson in Dei, right? How you can remove a couple of words and change the meaning and change the context. That can actually like, shift a lot for a lot of people. So absolutely, yeah. Mia culpa on my behalf. Still don't love the Royals, but I will acknowledge that his comment was not as disgusting as I at first thought.

a good one. All right, well even Unphased a podcast produced by feisty media and supported by the outspoken women in triathlon Summit.

Edited and produced by the fabulous Amelia Perry.

Email us at info at Unphased podcast.com and find us on social at try to defy at Dr. Gold speaks or at outspoken women in try. I'm Lisa.

I'm Shauna thanks for listening. Stay Unphased, folks. See you next time.