Inclusion reflects a set of beliefs as well as a set of feelings. Those beliefs and feelings feed on one another. When I have a set of beliefs that my presence is valued, that I'm significant and meaningful contributor to the life of the group or the organization, then I truly feel included. I truly feel a part of it. But that's not enough. I also want to feel as though the contributions that I'm making are acknowledged, recognized, and valued in a just and equitable manner. We focus a lot on the belonging components of inclusion and a bit less so on the equity and justice aspects of inclusion. You can belong to a system and be positioned at the lowest rung in that system. We have a lot of diversity in our organizations, but it's stratified so that there are individuals who feel that they belong and perpetually belong in those lowest levels within the organization. Their experience of true inclusion will come when they felt that their contributions were valued and when they felt that they had the power and the influence to shape decisions, not just for themselves and what they do and how they show up in organizations, but also for the decisions and choices that the organization makes as a whole. So inclusion means that I am also able to sway, shift, move, influence the strategy, the core values, and the culture of the organization in which I belong. If we're really serious about advancing diversity equity inclusion initiatives, we can't just talk about belongingness in terms of these universal perspectives or beliefs. That we all want to have a sense of significance is true. We all want to belong, yes. For some individuals, it's more difficult to feel like you fit into the culture of the organization or not. But even beyond the belongingness conversation really advancing diversity and equity efforts requires us to think about the ways in which we position people in organizations and the opportunities that they have to be valued for their contributions and to shape the strategy, the core values, and the culture of the organization itself. For me it was a question as I thought about what Laura was saying and agreeing, especially with the notion of belonging and seeing how equity fits into it. But it also got me thinking about the hierarchy, Laura, because there's some people who actually by virtue of their position, are absolutely needed to engage and create, and to be a part for example of strategy-making, but there are other people who are working at lower levels of the organizations, is not what they're supposed to be doing. How do we square that circle when we start thinking about equity when the organizational structure may in itself have hierarchy and status connected to it? [inaudible] That is so spot on, Martin, because it's really about the executive leadership. If the executive leadership isn't signaling to senior managers and the organization as a whole, that this is important, that it's not how to trickle down on any sort of meaningful way, then people at lower ranks are going to take over. I think that executive leadership needs to demonstrate the value, not just in words, but even what are they doing to increase the presence of African-Americans in senior leadership in that organization. How are they participating in recruitment? How are they connecting to individuals so that they have shown that they're really invested in these kinds of outcomes? Which also I think creates a natural sponsorship for new African-Americans coming into an organization. I think the values are also communicated through the ways in which we treat the people at the lowest levels of the organization. So even at you're the lowest level of the organization, if you're a cleaner in a health care system, you probably wouldn't dictate the strategy around a merger and acquisition. That would be a disconnect. But you would be able to call attention to some of the operational decisions, some supply chain dynamics, some customer service, and critical care issues that are coming up. You'd probably be able to point out medical errors that occur on a regular basis. Because you're the one who's there observing all of these dynamics at that level on a day-to-day basis. But we tend to conflate that hierarchy with sense of worth and legitimacy, and so we treat people at the lowest levels of the hierarchy is if they don't have the wisdom associated with their own practice in their own sphere of influence. I was referring to what that would look in feel like at all levels of the organization for someone to feel valued and respected for what they were doing at that level, recognizing that influence does change and their expectations would change based on where you sit in that hierarchy, Martin. Yeah, that's a great point. I'd like to pick up on what you're saying, Laura. You ask what does it look and feel like? One way it looks is that I see that there are regular routines and rituals that invite me to the table and ask me for my opinion, ask me for my voice, ask me for my experience, that they invite my stories about what it means to work and value the wisdom that I might have to share even at a lower level in an organization. When you say feel, I think about that on a very deeply somatic level. It's something I feel in my body. It's something that feels like resonance. Not only with my fellow coworkers, but the environment in which I work, with the culture in which I work and that's working on a very subtle but very powerful level of the vagal nervous system. The way that my brain response to that, the hormones and the neurotransmitters that gets spurred off from that, and so I think there's a way in which we could go much deeper when we think about feeling. It's not just something intellectual and attitudinal, but it actually is something that we're feeling in our bodies. I was going to build on the [inaudible] too. What I find so incredibly interesting about this conversation, what I always feel like whenever I get to talk with this wonderful group of people is issues are actually even so much larger than the organization. I think, in a lot of what we're talking about now, you replace the word organization with society, you've had the exact same conversation. I think one of the things we know a lot of the research has been done is people take culture which are involved with things elites talking about right around routines, rituals, stories, stratified groups, and they port them into their organizations. There's not as clear of a boundary as we imagine between society, organizations, and those things reify themselves. Except now there's a selection mechanism too, it's becoming even stronger, in many regards, because now it's not just who we are as a society, is who we pick to be in our group. That becomes an even larger mechanism to strengthen and reify a lot of these systems and being able to understand how did the stratification happen, what are the cultural signals, what are the social signals that we put a lot of importance on that lead us to make these delineations is such an incredibly important thing to understand and try to change some of those rituals and understand some of the power dynamics that are there, and create space where people can have upward voice and channels to leadership. I find all of this so interesting. Organizations are such an interesting microcosm of grander conversation we all are trying to have. I love having it with you all. When I think about these things, I draw on a few experiences I've had and conversations that I have with people in organizations. I'll describe two. One of those as being in an organization that has what I call diversity at the hat and diversity of the shoes. Diversity at the hat and the shoes looks like this. You've got a couple of very prominent, visible women, African Americans with Latinx folks who are visible because of their prominent positions in the organization. Actually, there's very little in-between until you get to the shoes. When you get to the shoes, wow, we got a lot more diversity. These companies will often report out, by the way, the total diversity percentages by race or gender, while not recognizing all we really got is hat and shoes. I've been in such organizations. In talking about feeling authentic, I don't feel authentic in those organizations. My second story relates to an earlier stage in my career when I worked in the fashion industry. When I worked in the fashion industry, one of the fascinating things about that industry, it's predominantly female, but not at the top. This is an industry that I worked in places that were 70, 80 percent female, but the people who ran the company were all men. So the second thing I think a lot about is being a man in that situation, bonus. Wow. Do I have it made? I wonder and question how often those of us who appear to be in the advantage position feel uncomfortable about our advantaged position. How often do we say, "It's really great that the guys are all getting promoted and that we're in the minority here. I don't know that I'm going to do anything about it because it's all working from the top. Maybe one day when I get to the top, I'll change it." For me, those things never make me uncomfortable either hat and shoes or when I'm in what I call an unearned advantage position, I'm not comfortable with either of those. I think a lot about how to bring those questions out into the organization's I'm a part of. I think it's a great point about recognizing privilege in all of these spaces. It makes you think about a story that Michael Satt, the CEO of [inaudible] talked with me, which is when he was first starting out, he was trying to pitch a deal in [inaudible] and he had no idea what he was doing. He just want to set up experiences that he had at work, and he was in a co-team with JP Morgan. The night before the pitch, the guys from JP Morgan stayed up all [inaudible] giving him tips, helping him structure, setting him up for success. The next day, he was able to present. Those sorts of collegial connections in a relationships are happening all the time and people have to recognize, one, how have they benefited from their social network to be in the position that they are in; and two, are they keeping those experiences simply within that network or are they passing down the experiences that they've benefited from to get there, because no one gets there on their own. That narrative about whether or not you're here to triple or you were born n Earth are too many people think that they were building a triple and they would just [inaudible]. [inaudible] build on that, there's actually some really interesting very current research by a great colleague of mine that I'd like to, also building on Greg's point, which was like people say, "Maybe I'll do something about it when I get higher up." It's actually an open question that people feel that way. I think certainly, some people do. But there's actually increasingly research that shows that people are presented with evidence of other's hardship, they feel motivated to claim hardship of their own. As a way to be able to say like, well, not I mean, don't we all have a heart. Almost I compare with the two. I don't know if there's appropriate term, but it's like a grief Olympics. It's like, let's see who can claim more and more hardship, or who had to come up from the hardest position to get to the top. I hope there are a lot of people who say I want to change things and who don't also wait to layer to the top, [inaudible] change this middle. But I know there's a lot of work to be done to address why there's such a strong motivation to also claim hardship when you're presented with other people's hardship. I think that's evolving dissonance. We all talked about discomfort. When it comes down to who gets chosen to be mentors, who gets chosen to be brought into a certain group or team. If I'm a high-level leader, who do I feel comfortable with? I might tell myself I feel comfortable everybody. Let's be honest. We feel more comfortable with people who share a cultural touchstones, who've seen the same films, who've read the same books, who go to the same kinds of things on the weekend. That's human nature and it's understandable. But if left unchecked in unquestioned, it can lead to these dynamics where people who are homophilous or all real similar help each other out and group together. Then again, we talked about putting in this reified status structure from outside.
