Real Talk from the Boss Lady
On August 31st, Elizabeth Harrison and Jeffrey L. Bowman joined Munson Steed on Rolling Out's ‘A Seat at the Table’ series, to discuss how our partnership with Reframe is working to culturally transform Corporate America. Although progress continues to be made, a long journey lies ahead and as People Leaders it's important that you're prepared. Please see below for some of the excerpts, and to listen to the full conversation, check out the link here.
“One of the things we had to really do to reshape this conversation was to redefine the business model. DE&I was meant to integrate Corporate America based on race and identity outcomes and sucess is based only race and identity. Blacks only account for 13% of the U.S. population but often time in our business, blacks as a group over-index on the impact of culture. Our goal was to see the value and impact based on culture, so we redefine and restated the problem statement.”
“When we talk about culture there are five stages of culture – monocultural, multi which we’ve been for more than 30 years, now we enter the space of cross-culture, polyculture and transcultural. So by restating the problem, we then are able to go in and diagnose the attitudes and behaviors of where a company is on a scale of one through five. With our cultural assessment, we are able to see where they are as it relates to their score, the company structure, strategy, the systems, segments, and solutions. So when we do the assessment we are able to see where the issues and barriers are.”
“I had an epiphany about five years ago, before Black Lives Matter was on the scene. I looked around at the people who worked for me and my clients – the CMOs and CEOs, and everybody looked the same. I sat back and literally transformed the agency to now we’re over 40% diverse. It was an AHA moment that initiated my wish to transform my culture to be a better place to work and to be”