The Human in the Loop

Oh, and welcome to People Unfiltered, powered by ideas global. I'm your host, Evelyn Espinal. The People Unfiltered podcast is creating the future of inclusion, diversity, equity, activism, and social impact. We deconstruct the myths and failures of DEI, St. Bellos en la Lengua, to evolve it or a rebirth. We go beyond surface conversations and dive into the hard truths and unspoken realities for deeper discussions with insights and advice. Hello Jason and welcome to People Unfiltered. Hi Evelyn, I'm happy to be here. It's such a pleasure to have you here. You are somebody that has been in my life for a long time and I've been wanting to get you on the show. So thank you so much for agreeing to be with us today. Of course, I wouldn't be anywhere else. Excellent. So as you know, the show you always starts with that key question where we ask the invited guests what about your child's home and who you were has put you into the path that you are on today. It's almost like asking you what your origin story is. But what our audience loves about this question is that it gets to be a think to decide of who you are and how you make some of the decisions that you're making. So please tell us about your background and what put you on this path of working in the area of talent and diversity. Yeah. And I'm going to start off by saying this was not a plan. You've probably talked to people who have known their whole lives. They wanted to become a doctor or they wanted to become this that or the other. For me, it was gradual and there were a lot of stops in the road. But I'll maybe start and say I landed here because it's an amalgamation of different life experiences that I had. I guess leading up to the stage where I realized that talent, culture, and learning, you know, that was the space that I wanted to operate in. And so I'll maybe I'll just start with school undergrad. I was a communications major specifically broadcast journalism. And so I thought I was going to be a news anchor, but I'd say the skills I was practicing was learning how to tell stories. And I did that on the college television station. I had a radio show on the radio station, although that was all hip hop. It wasn't about news. I wrote for the school newspaper as well. So I think I was really building kind of a well-rounded ability both to learn how to listen, but also to learn how to communicate and through different mediums. Fast forward, I get to graduate school, I'm trying to figure out what to major in. And I felt, hey, you know what? It didn't work out and stepping into the communications field. Maybe I can teach kids to be better communicators. So I started down the path of becoming a high school middle school English and communications teacher, which I really enjoyed. And I'd probably say that really stretched me because, you know, in middle school, you've got tweens. And so there's one way that you engage with them. And then you've got that dynamic range that happens between 9th and 12th grade in high school. And so maybe that was my experience at figuring out how to connect across cultures, how to think about people and really bring empathy, emotion, as well as wisdom into perspective. And of course, I had to deal with other teachers, faculty, principals. And so maybe that was just part of getting exposure to senior leadership. And then, you know, kind of stepping into my doctoral program, I had realized, you know what? I don't think teaching is what I want to do right now. And trying to figure my path, I ended up deciding, you know what? I'm going to focus on corporate consulting and corporate training. So there I really started to get exposed to how do organizations work. What is culture? I really became intrigued about that in particular, especially as I started my career as a consultant. Every time I got a chance to go into a company, I was amazed that I got to observe their cultures. Find out what was similar, what was different, what I would change. And I'd say kind of the amalgamation of that really started to take shape once I got into role and found that there was a place that was very much focused on people. It was very much focused on culture and really the systems that make those two things work together. And so just to working, you know, I became exposed to this role called Chief Talent Officer. And my first exposure was that American Express, a guy named Steve Richardson was in that role. And I was intrigued by the title. Couldn't tell you what Steve did to this day. And other people say the same. Can't figure out what Steve did, but I was intrigued. And I wanted to focus on talent. I knew that was a key part of who I was and the work I wanted to do. And my next role at Pfizer, which is where you and I met, we had the pleasure of working under the leadership of a woman named Tanya Clemens. And Tanya, who was the Chief Talent Officer at Pfizer, really opened the door for me to go, this is the breadth of work and impact that this role can have. And also to show me that it was possible. We had two big similarities, maybe three. One is that we were both African American. Second is that we were both PhDs, which is something I still to the most part don't tell people because in public spaces, in public spaces and business culture, PhD comes across as theoretical MBA comes across as practical, but we shared that. And I think just the innate ability to sense and understand how systems operate within an organization. Because in some ways, it's a bit of a manufactured ecosystem. And once I got that exposure to Tanya, I actually set this as a goal for me to achieve in life. And since I've made it there, I've continued to enjoy it. And it's something I want to continue doing into the future. That's a fantastic story. Thank you for reminding me of Tanya. I follow her on Facebook. And she's amazing. And she is very inspirational to me as well. Yeah. An amazing woman and a fantastic leader. You've been incredibly successful in your role supporting talent and diversity in organizations. And now you're on the frontier of working in the space of AI and really thinking about how you integrate that into the world. I'm really curious about how you now get your career as a man of faith. I know that you've been a man of faith that you cherish your religion, that you do community service work as well. How is that intersected with the career that you've been managing? Well, such a big question. I may be start and say, you know, I think because of my faith, at some point I unlocked a can-do will-do attitude. Right? Particularly if it was authentic, right? My heart was in it. My mind was in it. And it wasn't being done for alternative purposes. And so that allowed me to, I think, start creating these big audacious goals. One of the things I share with you in our kind of prep call was my first position out of graduate school was with the censure. And I didn't really know what a partner was, but my goal was I want to become the youngest partner at a censure. So that was really the start of audacious goals, but I really believed that that was something that I could become. And that both mindset and kind of can-do will-do attitude has followed me throughout my career. And I've also placed it as something that I've prayed about because I want to do work, I continue to do work. Personal rewarding and meaningful. And it's not something that I feel that I have to do. And so I think the combination of the faith, the attitude that I've brought to it and just the drive has really made the difference. And I say kind of secondarily, I don't always view it through the lens of I'm doing this out of black man. There are times when that comes into play, but I think from a personal standpoint, I'm just thinking about how do I realize my biggest dreams? And at the intersections where I need to look through the lens of my ethnicity, when I need to look through the lens of my faith or I need to look through the lens of even my background, I'll wear those. Those are all sitting on the foundation of the, the, the can do will do attitude in the, the big audacious goals. So where does the can do will do attitude? What, what's the origins of that? Is that come from your childhood? Does it come from any particular incident? How did you develop that kind of an internal compass that was pushing you forward? Yeah. I don't always know that I can pinpoint it to, you know, one specific experience that I had, but I think it's, it's a couple things. I think one, and particularly my mother, very, my mother and father are similar and very different at the same time. But my mother was very much a go getter. My mother at times, you know, had at least two jobs. My mother was always doing something. I saw her at a young age. And none of my parents went to college. My mother became an interpreter for the deaf. And so I remember as she was training for that, spending hours in the mirror, signing to herself, right, to learn and, you know, then she'd go downstairs and maybe she'd be typing something because she also, took ads for the Philadelphia inquirer, right. So she, she always had multiple jobs, but she was working towards something. So I think some of that comes from what happened in the household and particularly mom, because that's how she was wired and I'm more like her than I am like dad. I'd say second is, you know, I had a lot of derailers or setbacks. Derailers is definitely a tiny acclimatist language. But I had a lot of things that experience is that they could have stopped me very early in life. So, you know, the first thing is, you know, I would, I got kicked out of a lot of schools just for bad behavior, growing up. inconceivable to me. I know it's inconceivable. I failed the seventh grade and had to repeat it and was blessed to be able to do eighth and ninth grade in the same year and end up graduating high school on time. A couple of run-ins with the law. Not for anything violent, but, you know, the last one. I was a freshman at college and I decided I was going to become the intermediary between students in the bookstore. Right. As a way. What does that mean? What does that mean? Well, if you needed something from the bookstore and it was a hundred dollar book, maybe Jason gets it to you for 25. Right. Or you like the sweatshirt there. So, you know, there was five finger discount happening. And so maybe there was an element of entrepreneurship. That I have. That's why I see the self determination and business owner mindset. There we go. There we go. But then, you know, I got arrested. I got caught. I got arrested after taking some items and being handcuffed in front of your peers on a college campus, which is not mean, definitely wasn't familiar experience that we saw when you and I were going through due college. But that really. The image seared in my head of the students seeing that happened to me and maybe the throw an inclusion lens on it. I probably I would say I know I felt extra bad because I went to a predominantly white university that had about 7,000 students and only about a combined 200 black and Latino students. So I was one of the few and I was one of the few and now I am living into the stereotype and that really became the pivotal moment where I said, I've got to figure out a different path. Wow. That's incredibly powerful and such a contradiction of the man that I see before me and the man that I know. But I'm wondering then about authenticity and being your authentic self when you're in any kind of a professional and school type environment. So many people of color don't have the opportunity to be completely authentic. Right. That's not advised that they be their true selves. How did you manage that? How did you form the identity of who you are authentically while you were in these systems that often do operate under these. Are you serious? I think the story I just told in some way will play a little bit of part in this answer in that I was first in my family, my direct family to go to college. I was first male in my extended family to go to college. So other than you're going to go to college, I didn't have a roadmap. I didn't have anyone giving me guidance as to you. This is how you should show up. This is how you should act. This is what it's expected of you. So I do think I kind of came into different systems, different levels without anything hindering me because I didn't know and no one, no one had told me. Now, of course, I learned some things along the way and found out that there was a certain way like we had to be suited and booted when we went to work. There was a certain way that we spoke. We often talk now about code switching. Definitely I code switched to make sure that I was accepted and there were aspects of my life that I did not bring to work. They definitely happened outside of work or they happened in the very small, you know, black Latino friend group or anyone else who was part of that small friend group at work where you felt like, okay, I can really be myself here. Honestly, that was in really hibernation mode until I went into tech and my time at Fitbit pre-COVID was very eye opening because the assumption was you should be able to bring your whole self to work. Because the tech industry, I give them a lot of credit things that we didn't question out loud, but we question in our head many of the founders of tech looks for ways to break that down. Right, they looked for why do we need to wear a suit and if we're only just talking to ourselves in the office. They broke down the hierarchy of your working towards a corner office know where team are all working in an open environment together we can easily talk, learn, ask questions from one another. And also, I'll even credit, you know, we had happy hours at work. Right company sponsored happy hours. And so we could make selections on what was being played on the Spotify playlist. You know, so I really started to learn, okay, I don't have to conform to a style of dress. Right, I don't have to conform to, you know, what's happening in the person that with the person that's sitting behind the closed office door because that was not a thing they welcomed me to what kind of drink to you like, you know, what kind of music do you want to hear during happy hour. And so I really began to start leaning into how can I bring more or all of Jason to work and I'd say the real precipice was my next role at Expedia. I completely embraced it, you know, I really, I found my sneaker head culture. So I started focusing on buying sneaker sometimes pausing meetings because there was a sneaker drop. And I just, that was the only time. I could build a bid for it. You know, being able to be okay that there's a faith element of me that should show up at work, whether that was being part of the Christian Slack channel or just hearing about more personal issues that were happening with my team members and saying, hey, you know, I'm going to add you to my prayer list and pray for you. And I also follow up to see if anything had changed. And I'd say lastly, you know, there was support from, you know, my chief people officer and others, one of the running jokes. And I didn't mention this to you earlier because we would have quarterly business review. So me and my team, we get ready for a quarterly business review. I always had to open with some type of cartoonish slide or some type of music reference. And so a Beyonce album had dropped. And so the opening slide to my team's QBR presentation was beyond say with this quote. And I forgotten that at a dinner, I had made something about I was not in the beehive. And it just kind of went from there and it became a running joke, you know, about Jason in the beehive. But, you know, those are things. And in the past, I'm, you know, particularly younger in career. I wouldn't have done. You know, I wouldn't have tried to make Christmas wrap videos or just, you know, share my playlist with folks. And so those little elements, you could say, you know, it's music, it's culture, they can be things that many underrepresented minorities may not share holistically at their organization outside of their small trusted group. And I learned between Fitbit and Expedia how to open myself to go, this is me. This is who I am and every part of it is actually important to me being able to do my best work. I love that story. I'm thinking of you with a playlist. I just would like to speak. I'd like to see your playlist. But I was thinking about this idea of corporate mobility, right? And in your role as a quiet talent and diversity, can you share with us a little bit about the work that you did to ensure that you are having an impact in how people of color show up in organizations, right? So as we go higher in the organization, there's usually less diversity. So you in this pivotal role, what were some of the safeguards that you put in to ensure that that pipeline was being built in a way that you could begin to ensure more diversity moving up the organization? Yes. I will start with, I call it my open door policy. And my open door policy means anyone in the organization has access to me, regardless of what my level or title is, VPSVP, EVP, anyone in the organization has open door access. And I think that is important because senior leadership can come across as gated. And, but it's a two way street. They can't just be, I'm telling you, I have an open door. I need to come to your open door as well. And so fostering relationships with all employees, but you know, intentionally, with, excuse me, members of employee resource groups, attending their events. So I'm there. I'm not just asking them to come to me and making myself, you know, accessible is one. I'd say two is really ensuring that diversity, equity, inclusion is built in to the programs and practices that my team is responsible for. And I can maybe give you a couple of examples. When I was at Expedia, we were in this train. It was very weird. I joined Expedia and they're like, oh, we're putting in the nine box. I mean, this is literally like my first day on the job. And I was like, why are they putting nine box in? I'm like, it's like a 25 year old thing. And don't worry, companies are still doing it right now. And, and someone told me they were like, Jason, when you joined, it was already too late, right? Like, but we, probably about a year and a half later, we pulled nine box out because we recognized that there was bias in it. And so we were trying to figure out what are ways where we could unbiased performance management. Right. So that was one taking out nine box. Another would be just before you go to the next story. I think for our audience, can you describe the bias in nine box? Can you just sort of give a little synopsis of why nine boxes not currently being used today? Yeah. So nine box is exactly as it sounds. So think of a checkerboard with just, you know, nine squares along it. And one axis is potential and one axis is performance, although those can change. And in each of the boxes moving to the top right, they kind of work from low, maybe not in the right role to top right. This person's career needs to be accelerated with say, you know, one or two position moves in the next few years. The thing is, every definition is written by human and every definition is interpreted by a human from wherever they come from. It's really hard to get to a shared understanding with that because everyone has their own. And I don't want to call it bias, but everyone has their own perspective that does not create alignment. So that's one. The second part of it is to get there into that conversation or be considered in the nine box. It's either by level and typically starting at a senior level, there's low representation. So the outcome is going to be low or equal representation in general. Second is that I lost my train of thought. Second on on that is. Oh my gosh. Give me a second. I lost my train of thought. So just one is interpretation. I think the other part that's important there is, you know, just the actions that come out of it. And there can be disparity in how much investment is made it made an individual's in order to be able to get them ready for another opportunity. And I'd say, you know, lastly, it's just the language that is used when you're using nine box. There's one element of a manager plotting someone there. The other part of it is a talent calibration conversation. And still to this day, no one's really, really good at it. But in those conversations, there are platitudes. This person's a rock star. They're fabulous, you know, which not always driven through data and outcomes delivered. And so if one or two people have a great perspective of Evelyn and the other people don't need just rock with it, you know, you've not really challenged to go, is this an equitable decision that's being made as a fair decision that's being made. Hopefully that helps. That does. That helps a lot. I think it's one of the things we always want to make sure that our audience is learning as they're going through this process. So that was excellent. And you were going to share another example. You said you had to one was performance management, probably since you stopped me, I probably. I have to take notes right little notes, the one I get paused. I'll take you then to this idea of the American melting pot, which you talked about before. Yeah. So share with me what your view is of considering a culture in a country where all of these differences are coming together. And how you translated that into the decisions that you were making in your talent roles. Yeah, you know, probably also apropos that we have just as a nation celebrated our 250th. I guess anniversary or birthday, since we were founded and the continual debate about the ideals of what we were founded on. And we were definitely not found in all nine deals of a melting pot, but over time, I think that we've learned that we needed to value everyone that is a citizen and contributor of this country. At the same time, when we take a look at where and how decisions are being made, you know, we see disparities in terms of representation. It's that all different levels, not necessarily in line or working towards being in line with how the country demographically is represented. And in organizations that's mimicked to and as you progress. Actually, it's it's really weird. It's actually a mirror. You could do a really good side by side analysis. If you looked at socioeconomic status and education rankings in the United States on a whole and juxtapose data against the same kind of data on representation inside corporate organizations, you're probably going to see a very similar connection in terms of what those representation percentages look like. I would love to move to a place where we have maybe not equal representation. I think that's impossible. But the whole idea of a melting pot is we're taking the best of the best of all of who we are. And I still think that that is important for us to strive to achieve to so that we are not creating further in balance in the organizations that we work in because the organizations we work in are intentionally designed. Right. And so in order to ensure that that design system is more fair and more equitable, we need to be intentional about how do we ensure that voices from as many pockets of our country's diversity are there. Working in the organization have opportunity for career growth and development and that there's a shot at middle management, at senior management, at executive management, and even at the board level. And sadly, we are still not there. I mean, when you look at Fortune 500 CEOs that are black or female, those numbers have not significantly moved and some of them have moved backwards. And particularly those who are African American who are CEOs of Fortune 500 company. So it's an aspirated. that I think we all should be working towards. And when we look around on the teams that we're on and the functions that we sit in, I'm certain we can see where there are gaps and what can we be doing to change that. I fortunately sit in the seat of leading talent. And so we can put expectations or asks, you know, on the front end around, you know, we ideally are targeting diverse slate for hiring for positions internally or externally through talent acquisition, you know, through learning and development, we have the opportunity to partner with employee resource groups as well as managers and make sure that inclusion is set as an expectation for how teams should be designed, how managers should be thinking about the teams that they organize as well as, you know, Estee are thinking about successors for roles that they have on their team. So there are different levers that might, myself, the teams I lead that we can help with that. Ultimately, the manager who's in charge, whether it's a middle manager or a senior manager is responsible for making the best decision for the organization. - Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. You mentioned the 2250 year anniversary of the country and it's problematic history that we've had. In the last two years, D.I. has been under blame in attack by the government. And what I've noticed in the work that I've been doing is that it's gone underground. So the work that you're describing still being done, maybe now under the banner of leadership or simply inclusion. So the norming creature has changed. What's your view of this kind of progression that we're doing and what's a prediction around the future? How do you think we're going to continue to work on these D.I. topics with the animosity and challenge that we have from the government? - Yeah, I think there's a positive progression opportunity and I also think that there is an opportunity that has been derailed and that we're missing out on. So let me start on that last point first. One of the things that we could do two years ago, three years ago is you could still educate, and I'm not talking about unconscious bias training, but you could still educate someone on understanding what this diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging mean. Right? What are examples of how it's shown up well in the world? Where examples where it has not shown up well in the world? To begin to help people put on the glasses, right? Where they can see things that were in plain sight, but maybe they didn't see them before. I think that's an opportunity that's being missed right now because where's the education path? Again, I'm not talking explicitly about the training that's made the news, but I'm talking about awareness, understanding, and learning about practical application in your personal life and in your professional life. So I think that's something that we'll have to figure out how to solve for. On the progressive opportunity side, one of the things I learned from one of my former chief people officers was, let's design for inclusion from the beginning. Now, I was fortunate in that designing for inclusion from the beginning, when I was in that role, I had a background of having also led inclusion and diversity. So I was steeped in it. I had someone from the inclusion and diversity team who was dotted line directly poured into my group. So we could design for inclusion because there was capability and myself and the other woman on my team, we could also train, right? And inform and educate so that we could do a even better job of designing for inclusion. Really that has been to me, like the Holy Grail, you get to a point where everyone is just automatically wired to design inclusion into whatever they're doing in the workforce, right? Whether it's a product development strategy, whether it's a go-to-market strategy, whether it's research, whether it's a talent management or HR practice. And so I think that's good. We'll continue to be challenged by the fact that we may not be able to measure impact in ways that we've become accustomed to. I still think it's important that we are demonstrating business impact through diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives. Now it's a bit conflated because you can't call it out. So how do you make that connection is going to continue to be a challenge in the foreseeable future. And actually, if you add in AI, I think that creates another layer of ambiguity when you try to tell the story. Because there's bias in AI that is not always easily discovered, right? So when you've got practices that are being automated, it becomes then even harder to identify those, to figure out how to correct them, and also can you trace its origin story, you know? The origin within your organization, it's the origin from the provider you've purchased it from and the developer that made it, it's kind of convoluted. So we just have to continue to work and do the work that we know is right and figure out a strategy for educating those coming behind us. So the skill, capability and hopefully the will is not lost to keep fighting the good fight. - Yeah, I do, I worry about the capability to do diversity work because when it was all out in the open post-Storage forum, we did have a lot of people who put up a shingle to say that they could do diversity work and they didn't actually have the potential to do that, right? So that lends itself to performative DEI, which lends itself to the attacks that we've received. Now that we're thinking about, you know, your great segue into AI, right? Now that adds an additional complication. I'd love to hear your thoughts on, you know, what are some of the safeguards we need to put into place, knowing that AI is based on the biased data that we've created, right? We're teaching it to think the way we think, which have the unconscious bias they didn't have. - Yeah, this is going to hurt some arguments, I think, because when you're doing kind of talent and culture work in an organization, you're doing it at scale, whether your organization is 200 people, 2000, 20,000, or 200,000. And so with that volume, it becomes very opportunistic to say we're going to do all performance reviews and compensation decisions through this agent. We need to have the human in the loop as part of that process and as organizations are starting to redesign performance management, this is actually a very important area that should not get lost. And I don't know that every HR function has the skill and capability to break down a process and system to really identify where and when do humans need to be involved and that a whole decision flow is not automated, right? So I mean, performance management is one, it's easy, it kind of happens to scale. The other side of that is engagement surveys. I don't know if we still need to call them an engagement survey, but some type of workforce survey. And I'm going to force, I don't think we need to ask our digital workers and agente AI what their experience is like. But that's another area where it's very easy to go. Let's just send all this data through AI and we'll do what it tells us in terms of summarizing recommendations, summarizing communication messages and themes. I still think it's important. And I remember, you know, I've, I'm certain you've seen Evelyn too, leaders in HR who will print out every single comment, right? That's me where there's 10,000 and they'll go home and they're reading for the weekend as I'm reading through every single employee comment. That's a level of human judgment, curiosity, insight that I don't think AI has the capacity to replicate. Now, should someone have to give up their whole weekend? Maybe not, there's probably a good in-between, you know, can we just work from a representative sample of the comments along with the data. I do think it's important that we don't completely push humans out the loop. And the last place I'll mention because this is really ripe and it's coming is in recruitment until an acquisition. You know, there are already organizations that are starting to replace many of them. many of the elements of recruitment with agents. Because agents can reach out to you and say, "Hey, we're interested." Click on this link and schedule, your first conversation. You could be communicating with a bot where most organizations want some type of human connection to their talent, right? Because that relationship makes a difference in the first part of the employee experience. But if we begin automating more and more elements of that, it's going to have a negative impact on, it's going to create a jaded view for people who join the organization because they were going to have fewer human touch points with individuals. I think we haven't yet gotten to a place where AI recognizes or asks questions about an individual's background. I'm not saying it's not possible, but then to figure out what's the path I should take? Is it the typical path in preprogram? Or is there an alternate path? Or is it customized, right? I continue asking questions to customize the path for this individual as they are going through the process of trying to figure out do they fit and we fit and we should hire this individual? - Yeah, I think there's a lot going on with AI. The big thing for me is how quickly we're going to adapt our ability to integrate it. And in the end, asking these sort of cautionary tail questions to make sure that we're doing it in the right way. I'm actually reading a book right now, "Plug F skilling." And the whole book focuses on, how do you prepare yourself to be able to learn about AI and be able to integrate it into your work? It doesn't even get into what AI is and getting into that part of it. It's just this idea that you need to have a different mindset and really be thinking about a growth mindset as you're trying to integrate these new technologies. - Yeah, let me just say. - Yeah. - I want to add something, because this is important. It's happening again and it's not really being talked about in the same way. And that is, so if you think about the.com era and the companies that have been created, particularly in Silicon Valley, around the internet age, we realize that there was a lack of diverse representation, particularly from black and Latino, men and women, and creating those companies and building that wealth. And so, even during my time in the Valley and Bay Area, we had a focus on how do we find more black engineers? How do we find and develop? So I don't want to just say we were hiring, but how do we find and develop more black engineers? How do we find and develop more black and Latino product managers? How do we find and develop and grow more designers, right? And those were areas where there were already gaps. And so there were few founders from underrepresented backgrounds. There were more, though not nearly as much as we hoped for in terms of individuals working, particularly in tech and product roles in those organizations. Now we're at the age of AI. Can you name two AI companies that are being talked about have been created by an African-American man or woman or Latino man or woman? I'm not saying they don't exist, but they're gap. And many years ago, a friend of mine, Randall Pinkett, a lot of people may know him. He won, I think it was season four of the apprentice. And one of the things he said on a TED talk, 'cause he's an engineer by training. As you said, black and Latino people, we need to move away from being consumers and become creators. And so we've done a lot to bolster the wealth of a lot of companies because we are very much steeped in a consumer mindset. We are not in a creator mindset. And so we're at another gold Russian flexion point. And is this gonna be another example? Because no one's thinking about it from adversity, equity, inclusion, lens, VC capital, private equity, private markets, they're investing in the names that CMBC and Bloomberg, the 20 companies that are being talked about every day. I don't know how much they are being focused on the underrepresented groups that have good ideas that are not getting the funding and support. - Yeah, that's a fantastic point. Thank you for making them. And it brings me to a story that you shared with me that speaks to this behavior of people in color. And it's your friend Ty. It was a story of how his sort of bold and unapologetic actions at work really raise awareness for you on how we are going about ensuring that we are making a difference for others that are similar to ourselves. Would you mind sharing that story? - Yes. So Ty and I were both actually at the time. We were the both senior, most, at the right word, senior most black individuals in the company, whether it was African-American, Caribbean, we were the senior most. Both of us were reporting into the sea level and needed to build our teams up. And Ty looked around at the gaps in representation, being someone who was in the technology job family and he made a decision. You know what? I'm gonna focus on hiring as many black people or all black people into these roles as I can. And when he told me that, I was like, wow, that's bold. I'm just looking for the best people. I'm not focusing on trying to improve, representate, which is maybe in hindsight, I think is that an approach I should have taken? Who knows? But I do know that when Ty did it, he went to the CEO and one of his one-to-ones and he told the CEO, he said, you know, those positions I had opened, he said, I've been filling them and I've been filling them all with black people. And he said, you know what else I'm gonna do? And the CEO said, what? He said, I'm gonna keep hiring black people. And CEO didn't say anything. And I think the point of that is, Ty didn't lower the bar, right? And when I'd say collectively, he and I looked around the organization, it didn't seem like other people had a care in the world. And maybe that's too hard, but, you know, they didn't seem to mind if they were of Indian descent and were hiring only Indian people, or if they were Caucasian and were hiring all Caucasian people, it didn't seem to be a concern for them. No one was challenging, at least maybe challenging out loud. They may have been challenging on blind, right or in slack channels, but, you know, they weren't saying that out loud. And that continues to create less fairness and equitable opportunities for individuals from underrepresented backgrounds. And I believe one of the areas that becomes hard as, I'll point to me, moving up into different levels of senior leadership is how much to pull on that. At the same time, I wanna make progress, but do I lean all the way? As Ty did, do I lead three-quartered lean three-quarters of the way? And I think when you look around organizations where there are few underrepresented minorities at the top, I'd say you're not gonna find that much more in the immediate level below them. You know, probably two levels further, you'll start to get more into the meat, but the CEO minus one, minus two, that is where there are huge gaps. And even when you look at boards of directors, I can't recall seeing recently a board of director group that was say 50% African-American or 50% Latino. And not that it needs to be, but typically there's one, maybe there's two, if there's a board of 10, there's a board of 15, it's not 30%, it's definitely not 40%. And not saying that's what we need to go for, but in order for us to continue to make progress, I do think you need to see incrementally more representation. And it does fall to individuals like myself to figure out what's the best approach for the organization that I'm a part of, to leave it more diverse, equitable, and fair within a supporting, inclusive, and high performing culture as possible, hopefully more so when I leave than when I began. Yeah, the story, I love the story for its boldness. Yes. But I also think of two things. One is when we were teaching about unconscious bias. One of the things that we would say is that what's happened in the past is that readers have hired people who look like them or wait to the same school that they do so there's this affinity. And so for some reason that then becomes a bad thing. And so when you are now a person of color, you're being scrutinized on whether you've done that or not. And then the other thing that comes to mind was the project that I worked on in an organization where we actually looked at the ratios. So we looked at the top leadership team and saw in terms of gender balance. How often did they hire a woman versus a man? And what we found was that the women were hiring less women than the men work. And it always feels like there's some sort of tap that you feel you're going to get scrutinized and you're going to be called that you're doing something biased that you are trying to change the demographic. But there's some systematic ways of going about making that change. And I love that your friend had the support of the CEO in being able to make that kind of action. Yeah. And I'd say sometimes a story and data is not enough. So many organizations have a top 200 meeting. Stand on stage at a top 200 meeting and look around. I've done it. Where I was the only dark skined Latina from the US in the entire 200 plus organization. So there you can-- and so in those rooms, it breaks down by function. We naturally sit with who we know. So by function and by region. So you get another lens on diversity as well when you're standing in front of that group. And sometimes it's more the picture is worth 1,000 words. And so sometimes that's also what's needed to get the conversation going around what else should we be considering. Is this where we want to be? And if this is not where we want to be, what are we going to do to make a change here? Well, I love the career that you've had and the opportunities that you've had to make change and how you're thinking about the future. I think it really is inspirational that you're now trying to integrate AI into the work that you're doing and that you're consulting business. I think it's really going to flourish. Is there anything else that you wanted to share with our audience before we leave? I would say the world is changing rapidly right now. You need to figure out how you are not going to be left behind. You don't have to be a forerunner, but how are you not going to be left behind? We are entering a stage where it's very possible that more decisions will be automated decisions that either humans just go, yup, rubber stamp, we're going to go with it. Or they'll be heavily infused with data that may not have had a human in the loop for the sermon like I talked about. That is going to have an impact on the types of jobs that are hired moving forward, the types of jobs that are retained moving forward, and what characteristics will distinguish you enough to keep you around and roll as organizations make change. And so to your point of reading the book up-skilling, people need to figure out what are the resources that you can go to. I think a couple that I would just say in terms of learning about AI, section.ai is an organization and their whole purpose is to help companies transform into AI first organizations, but they run a whole lot of free webinars that can help you learn not just about AI, but how to lead change, how to focus on AI from a marketing perspective and different functions. So that's one. And it's free. Anthropic Academy is another. All of their learning is free. That can teach you core concepts around AI. And I'd say third is you really want to start thinking about what are personal use cases and professional use cases for AI. So you can start finding ways to get familiar with it. I'll give you one. I have an agent that is a travel agent that I built. And so our youngest son is about to go off to college and my wife and I will be empty nesters. It is helping me narrow the post college drop off trip that my wife and I can take. So the personal use case we like to travel, I entered in all our preferences where we've gone, we like Mary-Opt properties for points, all of those nuances. And then it can help me will through the 170ish countries in the world to go where should we go, what we do, why would we enjoy it? So find those personal use cases on the other side. And this is just like new and off the press. My next article in my series on AI and talent strategy is going to be focused on leadership team effectiveness because I believe that in the age of AI, how we approached senior team effectiveness and helping them become high performing has actually changed. The way we did it two years ago is not, I used AI to actually build an assessment that a leadership team can take to help them understand where they need to focus. And so that's kind of a professional business case, but we need to find both ends to help us become more comfortable with using it, but also to understand what it gets right, what it gets wrong, how do we adapt our thinking style because we no longer need, well, it's no longer a choice to just go to Google and type in a search query. Now we can move from being consumers to creators. - Creators, excellent. That's a great place to close. Jason, it has been such a pleasure to have you with us. I think you're incredibly insightful. And I should be saying Dr. Williams, right, I can't let go of that wonderful PhD. But thank you so much for spending time with us today. I'm sure my audience is gonna be really great. - Awesome, it's been a pleasure to be here and I've enjoyed talking to you as I do always.