DEI Reconstructed: Practical Steps to Doing the Work Right with Lily Zheng

Lily Zheng - Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Strategist and Consultant, Author

Regarded as one of the foremost specialists within the Diversity, Equity,and Inclusion (DEI) vertical, Lily has defined a crystal clear boundary between practice and preach.

A best selling author and a change practitioner, Lily penetrates the corporate shield and deconstructs the entrenched architecture of inequity.

This data-integrated approach, widely recognized as their IP, is both adaptive and responsive to each corporate ecosystem. Lily’s diagnostic review generates an objective and scalable plan with built-in accountability systems.

With an emboldened desire for an equitable world, Lily’s passion has become their professional roadmap, evolving from activist to authority.

In this conversation with Lily Zheng we deep dive into DEI to explore how to drive impactful, systematic change in our organisations and as individuals. Lily’s approach to DEI supports organizations to go far beyond intention into creating measurable, meaningful and quantifiable outcomes in the DEI at work. We learnt an incredible amount about this conversion with Lily, and we know you will too. Let’s dive in.

When it comes to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, often our intentions don’t always have the level of impact we truly want or need.

In this conversation with Lily Zheng we deep dive into DEI to explore how to drive impactful, systematic change in our organistions and as individuals.

Lily adopted a sense of duty at a young age, where academic achievement was a primary focus in the home. A first born child of Chinese immigrants. Lily’s parents recognized the value of discipline as a gateway to success.

An alumni of Stanford University, Lily holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology as well as a Master's degree in Sociology. While at Stanford, Lily worked as a columnist for the Stanford Daily, ranking as the most influential student in campus politics by the Stanford Political Journal.

Featured in Forbes “10 Diversity and Inclusion Trailblazers You Need to Get Familiar With”, the best-selling author and coveted keynote speaker has garnered an enviable and engaged following on LinkedIn, boasting over 118k followers on that platform. With an undisputable resume and cited portfolio of work, Lily’s fascinating journey through the intersections of culture, corporate, and self represents a relevant synergy to the evolving demographics, both societal and at work.

Lily currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with their wife. A fan of global cuisine, Lily spends their free time pushing their culinary palette to withstand extreme heat levels.

To find Lily’s books and to contact them directly, see their website here.

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For accessible access, view the podcast with closed captions below and access the full conversation transcript.

Episode Transcript:

Spk0 Sally Clarke Spk1 Lily Zheng Spk2 Alexis Zahner

[00:00:09] spk_0: Welcome to the We are Human Leaders podcast. When it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion, our intentions often fall far short of what we need or want and this gap has negative consequences for all of us. I'm Sally Clarke and today Alexis Zahner and I are speaking with Lily Zheng, a globally recognized D E I practitioner who penetrates the corporate shield to deconstruct the entrenched architecture of inequity. Lily is author of the best selling D E I deconstructed your no nonsense guide to doing the work and doing it right. And the forthcoming D E I reconstructed a practitioner's workbook. We learnt an incredible amount during this conversation with Lily and we are sure you will too. Let's delve in. Welcome to the We are Human Leaders podcast. Lily, we are so delighted to have you with us today. And before we delve into D E I practicalities, we'd love to hear a little bit about your personal journey and what brought you to this incredible work that you're currently

[00:01:20] spk_1: doing? Absolutely. First of all, I'm really happy to be here and having this conversation with you. This is going to be a lot of fun So diving into my personal journey as AD E I strategist consultant and practitioner, I typically started in college when I was involved with quite a bit of grassroots activism, student activism to make my university, you know, more equitable to address what we as student activists saw as racism and sexism on campus and you know, how students were getting treated and the resources that were available to folks and how our university, how the organization was dealing with these really big issues at the time, these societal issues of inequality. And so as activists at the time, I was working hard to try to shift system to change people's hearts and minds to make the university a better place. And as part of that journey, I engaged in a lot of protests, I engaged in a lot of direct action. One of those actions was a really big one. We sort of caravan over to one of the biggest bridges in the local area and sort of shut down the entire bridge with, you know, dozens of people. We all got arrested. Now I tell that story, not as bragging rights, but as a moment of reflection for me because, you know, one would figure that if you take a big action like that, people would look, people would listen, you'd get a whole bunch of attention, you'd be able to raise awareness of an issue. And the strange thing that happened is we all went out there we all got arrested. We made the news and nothing happened, like nothing happened. We went back to our university and said, well, we, we now have arrest records. We all have some trauma. We're definitely going to need therapy. It's a, you know, we're gonna go through the court process. Did we change anything on campus? And some of the leaders and administrators we were talking to were like, well, we're baffled as to why you did that. I'm so sorry, can we help you? I don't think this changed anything on campus that you weren't very clear about what you were trying to change in the first place. But I'm so sorry, you were arrested for no reason, can we help? And that story really makes me think right? Because it's not that protesting was the wrong thing to do, right? It's not that direct action was wrong. It's that as activists, we had fallen into the trap of prioritizing the optics, right? The visibility of our intervention rather than actually focusing on what it was that we were trying to change what it is we were trying to achieve. And so it was a very expensive lesson in the sense that we all, you know, went through a really harrowing experience and didn't achieve what we wanted to. And that experience for me really changed the direction that I was heading in it. It really led me to ask, how can we make sure that when there are these big actions when students, you know, or anyone or employees take the effort to organize and to push for change that we can achieve success rather than just burning people out for nothing. And that led me down the road of, you know, learning more about organizational change, of learning more about how movements succeed and got me into the diversity, equity and inclusion field where I am today as a strategist working primarily with organizations and their leaders, whether that's senior leaders, executives or their employee volunteers, their employee activists to wherever they're working from make change and ensure that when they put these efforts forward to make their organization better, they're more likely to succeed than fail. Building on some of the experiences that

[00:04:58] spk_0: I had amazing Lily, it sort of reminds me a little of that. I think what we see quite often in the Yeah, space is, is very performative, sort of superficial things that are done and very much sort of for show. And so what I'm hearing you saying is that you really work to create sort of actual meaningful substantive change in organizations by supporting leaders through that process. So thank you so much for sharing your journey and that powerful story with

[00:05:23] spk_1: us. Yeah, of course, you know, it does make me think. I actually have a bit of a pet peeve with the word performative. Oh which is that the word is useful but not in the way people think it is oftentimes when you hear folks, whether like D I practitioners or otherwise use performative, it essentially refers to, oh, this is something done for show. This is something done for optics. And the complicated reality in my perspective is that there are very few things that leaders and organizations do because they maliciously know that they're not going to work and they're just trying to like pull the wool over people's eyes more often than not. It's well intentioned but extremely ineffective changemakers doing what they think will create change and then simply failing. And so this conversation around performative can lead people down this false road of thinking. Oh, here are 10 activities that are performative and 10 activities that are not. And that's wrong, that's just straight up wrong. There's no such thing as a performative action or not. There's only does this action work or not. That's the only thing that we should actually care about. And so, you know, and that's honestly what many people, if there's an action that fails, we're likely to call it performative, right? And if there's an action that succeeds, we say, oh, you know, that was genuine, but everyone intends to succeed, right? Like all the time, we just don't have a good handle on why it is. We fail our efforts. And so, you know, I've never met a leader who says I'm getting ready to do some window dressing D E I, I'm getting ready to be all talk and no action because I genuinely think that, you know, they're making a difference, they're just failing to do so. So I would love if we could move past this conversation of like these 10 things are performative and these 10 things are not toward how can we make sure that the work we're doing works full stop.

[00:07:11] spk_2: Thank you for sharing that Lily because I think that is acknowledging as you mentioned, the effort that people do put in and that the intention behind the action is there and that there's no malice intended by it, not having the desired outcome. So I think that that is an opportunity for many organizations and leaders who are perhaps doing what we would typically class as you know, more of the performative things to enter the dialogue around. OK, well, how can something like and the one that we see so typically come up is, you know, the breakfast or the week of celebrating women's day and it's just breakfast and speeches and no process or systems change. So in my mind, they tend to be the, the more optic events and things like that that seem to fall into that category where folks think, well, this is just paying lip service to it, but no process is changing. So I think that's a really welcome opportunity for us to explore that in a different way. So thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to share that with us. And before we delve into more of the practicalities of D E I itself, you've done an awesome job in helping us sort of pick apart some of that language already. And I'd love for us to get a little more granular on the actual definitions of D E I diversity, equity and inclusion. Could you share with us some of your definitions lie around what these things mean? Absolutely.

[00:08:33] spk_1: And this is the bit of a leading question because my definitions are different than the ones you might find in the industry. This was on purpose. So the definitions that many people think of when they see diversity, equity and inclusion is something like diversity is the presence of difference. It's all the ways in which we're different. Equity is making efforts to make things fair. Inclusion is about making people feel belonging. And so these are all, you know, fine definitions. I take issue with them not because I think there's poor behind them, but because they're very difficult to actually follow up on. If you say diversity is the presence of difference, then the common retort is well then isn't everything? Diversity? Yeah, that's true. Right? Like I've seen diversity workshops say, you know, whether you like mcdonald's or Burger King, that's an aspect of diversity. And I'm like, I guess, right? And that's enabled by this horrendously watered down definition that we've used, right? And it's enabled this conversation that started in the us from, you know, very real racial inequity and, you know, racist discrimination toward this completely whitewashed. Like, are you an introvert? Are you an extrovert? Like, that's good stuff to talk about. But it's getting away from the main topic. Right. And the larger problem with all of these definitions isn't even in how they've become watered down. It's that none of them are accountable. They don't let us gauge our progress. They don't let us know whether we're succeeding or not. And so you can have D E I practitioners messing around all day and not not having any idea whether they're actually achieving change because diversity is different and equity is trying to make things fair and inclusion is making people feel belonging, right? Like it's turned into a mantra that feels empty to a lot of people. And so when I was thinking about these definitions, oh, so I've said all this as a sort of forward to the way I've tried to reshape these, I wanted to make D E I definitions that you could measure that you could hold people accountable to and that you could actually feel good about yourself if you're able to achieve those definitions are as false. Diversity is the demographic composition of a given environment that all stakeholders for that environment feel represented by. So it's essentially whatever makes everybody in the room and outside of the room look at and think I'm represented there. I'm seen there, they get me. They know my issues. Now note that I don't give a specific, it needs to be X percent women, x percent black, x percent Asian X percent disabled, right? And one of the reasons reasons why I don't specify that is imagine, let's say the leadership team of a startup, right? Let's say it's three people. Can, those three people represent every single identity on the face of the earth. No, it's just functionally impossible. And so under the standard definition of diversity, you would say, well, no matter what they do, they'll never be diverse, right? Valid critique. I think that's a useless critique because that means that there's no way to succeed for a leadership team of three on a startup. But under this new definition, it's less about how many box do they check and more about regardless of how they are represented in terms of identities. Does everyone in the room look at them and think they get me? And that will likely require that, you know, there's probably at least one woman that will likely require that there's probably at least a person of color and that will likely require that they have other dimensions of diversity. But it's less about the box to check and more about their ability to make their stakeholders feel represented. And that's a measurable goal. That's something we can actually gauge, right? So that's my definition of diversity, the demographic composition that all stakeholders feel represented by and you can use a similar approach for equity and inclusion for equity. I use two different measures. One the presence of success and well-being for all stakeholders and the absence of discrimination and mistreatment for all stakeholders measurable. Very simple, easy to gauge and easy to say. Have we achieved this? Yes or no for inclusion, it's the presence of all stakeholders feeling respected and valued at work for whatever identities they want to bring to the table. That's it, right? It's very simple. You can again measure all of these things. There are numerous metrics behind each of these definitions and you can say we've either gotten there or we haven't. And these definitions I think are powerful because they're different, they're simple and they let us measure how successfully we are achieving the change that we're trying to achieve. I think

[00:13:02] spk_2: they're extremely potent, Lily. And I appreciate this notion of the all stakeholders approach feeling represented. And as you say, it can be really challenging for organizations. And the example you used was a startup of only three people representing potentially all stakeholders that their company you know, might represent. And I think that that was a really valuable way of articulating that. And as you said, the key thing we see so often missing in D E I is the measurable of it. And I think you're definitions, give us a very clear way to reframe what diversity equity inclusion look like and actually put some accountability and some metric to achieving those in a more practical sense.

[00:13:46] spk_1: That's the goal. Yeah, because the lack of accountability, the lack of measurable is probably the biggest Achilles heel of our entire industry. And if we're not able to measure our success, then all of our efforts will be doomed to failure. That's just how things will end if we don't get a handle on this stuff.

[00:14:03] spk_2: Yeah. It keeps us in that intention phase and sort of impact actually still being really elusive. Mhm

[00:14:09] spk_0: So I'd love to look at the kind of the key relational behaviors that you see as being key to underpinning a successful D E I program. I know you speak about this a little in your book D E I deconstructed. Can you sort of paint a picture for us of what those key relational behaviors might be?

[00:14:27] spk_1: Yeah. So relational behaviors in the sense that you know, these are actions that people can take with the each other within interpersonal relationships. So whether you're on a team, you're in a department, you're working together, your office mate, your desk mate. These are some common behaviors. One is the easy one, right ally ship, being able to understand the issues that other folks are facing. Other communities are facing and advocate with them alongside them to address inequity. This is a common one. It's closely linked to bystander intervention. That's a really important behavior at all most embodied by. If you see something, say something, right? So just ensuring that when misconduct or a micro aggression or a subtle act of exclusion occurs that you're not just there passively enabling it by doing nothing. And instead using your voice, using your power, your authority, your resources to say hold up, that's not OK. We don't do that here. Here we do this right here. We talk to people respectfully here. We acknowledge people's contributions when they speak up in meetings rather than saying the same thing and taking credit for it, right? Like these are two common behaviors and there are others building on some of these first two, working in solidarity with folks, not just waiting until something happens, but actively working together with them to say, hey, what are the big issues that you want to address at work? Here are the things that really matter to me. What can we do over the long term to shift these systems for the better. And the the reason why I mentioned this particular skill or behavior is because relational skills will only take us so far if we only work on the level of the interpersonal that will make it very difficult for us to get past that shell of the systemic, right? Like Sally, you and I can talk to each other all day, right? But if there's a fundamental issue of pay inequity inside of our organization, you and I talking to each other all day isn't necessarily going to fix it. Now, if you and I for example, share our salaries with each other and start a longer conversation with our team or our department about salary, right? Pay transparency. If we start diving deep into how it is that people are recorded bonuses or how it is that people are considered for promotion or what incentives people have to ensure that, you know, these processes are fair, then that conversation might go somewhere, but that's not just an interpersonal skill, right? That's starting to get into the realm of systemic change. And so the more we can get past this space of like, well, you know, we just have to make nice with each other toward this idea of we build these relationships specifically so that we can work in solidarity with each other to achieve systemic change. That's when we start seeing real progress, but it's harder, right? It's much, much

[00:17:21] spk_0: harder. I think that's such an important point that you're making that this, you know, we do focus a lot. I think on this idea, I think thinking of the concept of sort of psychological safety that we can connect with each other. I see it a lot in burnout prevention as well that there's this idea of just being safe to sort of say how things are interpersonal sort of in a team environment. And that gets us only a really small part of the way to actually embedding long term change. And really preventing something like burnout or I imagine embedding D E I in the workplace. I imagine it also takes more effort, like it takes some courage on the part of leaders as well to be, you know, sort of moving past the creating a safe space to talk about things, to feel like an ally, to maybe say, to create that sort of a relationship that can stop the solidarity, but actually taking action towards making that the lived experience is uh goes quite a lot

[00:18:12] spk_1: on. Yeah. You know, there's something you mentioned that made me light up just now in what you said, which was psychological safety. It's actually one of the most misunderstood concepts in the D E I space specifically because we actually view it as a relational skill when it's not, it's actually not a relational skill at all. I'll share with you an example several years ago, I went into a large company to deliver a training on bystander intervention and psychological safety. My intention for that training was to teach this cohort of employees, very passionate, very bright employees, the skills that they needed to speak up to share feedback, to raise issues and to use their voice for good. I thought it was a great workshop. I thought I did a good job. I taught people the skills, we had some scenarios, we had some exercises and yet it is, I actually went back to that same company a year later. To talk to the same cohort and deliver the follow up. So my first question to that cohort because this is a very rare opportunity was, oh my gosh, how did things go after that first workshop? Did you use any of the skills? And I was stunned when they said, no, we didn't use any of them. And I asked like, wow, did I mess up as a practitioner? Did I just not teach you any of these things? And they're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, you didn't. Great job. You taught us the skills. But the issue wasn't that we didn't know how to do it. The issue was that none of our managers had created safe environments for us to speak up in the first place. And so psychological safety wasn't actually up to us. It wasn't something that we could just self help our way to create. It was in fact up to our managers who are able to use their power to create that inclusive environment. So absent that power shift, absent that change. These relational skills that you taught us were completely useless. They didn't say the word completely useless, but essentially it was, and that was a huge wake up call for me. We spend so much time teaching people these interpersonal skills as if they use them in a vacuum and they definitely don't. Right. Unless we're able to change the parameters of the system they occupy, we can give people, all the skills we want, but they'll never be able to use them. And psychological safety is a perfect example. It's not a relational skill. It's a systemic trait of the organization. It's enabled by leaders, it's enabled by power. And if we don't recognize that and we try to train our way through it, people will make the same mistake that I did right, deliver what was a solid training but addressing the wrong aspect of the problem and ultimately wasting everyone's time, I consider that one of my big failures as a practitioner, not because the training wasn't good, but because I didn't achieve what I set out to achieve. I tried to solve a problem that didn't exist. I

[00:21:03] spk_2: think addressing this power struggle is such an important part of the conversation, Lily. And when I heard you mentioning things that you were working with the group with, you know, speaking out sharing feedback, those sorts of things, the very key relational behaviors we see this so often in this space that it's this conversation around. Well, how do we create the space for people to challenge the status quo? But to me and you mentioned this idea that leaders need to be involved systems need to change. Could we just take one moment to perhaps identify some of those systems because I've worked in big organizations before where my manager, you know, perhaps wasn't able to create that space, but there also wasn't the mechanism in place for us as employees to perhaps escalate that we didn't know how to take that issue further, just in our direct team, that environment wasn't created. And so we almost felt was like trapped in that cage. We didn't know the mechanism or the feedback approach or how to perhaps report that further. And do you have any thoughts there around perhaps just some of the systemic things that need to be in place simultaneously so that those relational behaviors can you know, be reinforced almost yes.

[00:22:15] spk_1: What a great question? I was raring to answer it as you were describing it. So several and these sound boring because I think we've romanticized the skills so much that like systemic change work just sounds like policy work. One is making more time for decisions that affect the entire organization to include comment periods, very straightforward time. Pressure is one of the biggest killers of any inclusive decision making process. If I need to make a decision in 10 minutes, I'm not gonna ask you Alexis, what your thoughts are. I'm just gonna make it right if I need to hire somebody in one week, I'm not gonna ask you to refer me people. I'm gonna pull a friend from college and get that role filled. And so making more time just straight up, making more time to gather feedback to consider our options, to really understand what it is we're working with. That is a huge systemic shift. And it requires that we rethink the workflow of almost all of our organizations which operate on a go go, go fast, fast, fast, do as much as possible possible with as little time as possible. Which definition makes it the enemy of D E I work. Any D E I work requires intentionality, intentionality requires time, right? That's one systemic shift. Another one make many opportunities for regular feedback, train leaders to invite feedback during their one on one meetings also include other avenues for feedback. Beyond just going to your direct manager, whether that's regular pulse surveys, whether that's bi annual engagement surveys, whether that's anonymous hotlines, whether that is a third party reporting platform for issues, essentially give employees, give workers as many different avenues to share their thoughts and feedback, make it easy, make it accessible, even reward them for doing it. And don't just give people ways to offer feedback but embed this idea. Yeah, that feedback is valuable into your culture, right? What if for every all company meeting, you had a period where you brought up the latest bits of feedback that you had acted on and celebrated the act of sharing feedback so that you can improve. Very small thing, right? You could just take 5 to 10 minutes at every all company meeting huge culture shift because you're essentially saying this is valuable to us. This doesn't make us angry, this doesn't make us upset. We're not gonna punish the people who share feedback, which many companies do, which incentivizes people to not share feedback. We're going to do the opposite, we're going to uplift it, we're going to celebrate it. We're going to say this feedback allowed us to do this really cool thing. Thank you for sharing it. Please share more feedback so we can keep growing, right? So all of these are examples. One thing you mentioned Alexis, right is you didn't have a clear direction for how to escalate an escalation protocol, right? Like that's a very simple policy change that can be made very clear, clarified guidelines or this is when you escalate to your manager, this is when you escalate it to your manager's manager. These are the expectations, this is how different folks can help you out. These are the benefits of doing so and then reinforcing that policy with some of these culture changes. Like I said, talking about feedback positively, right? And all of these things just focused on like what sharing feedback and giving more time, I could go on for like 30 minutes about these topics, but like these are not romanticized, right? Like these are not sexy things to talk about, give people more time. Like there's no way I can make that sound like appealing, sound bite, but that is systemic change in a nutshell. A sort of seductively simple idea that is enormously difficult to achieve in practice, that has fundamental reverberations for D E I work happening elsewhere within the organization.

[00:26:08] spk_2: I appreciate that so much, Lily. I mean, what I took from that was time feedback and clear mechanisms. And I think the time one is so important because we so often see again that intentionality fall flat and doesn't reach impact because it's a rush decision or as you mentioned, you know, the hiring process, hr teams are always seemingly under the pump. So they're making decisions based on previous structures and previous decisions and historical data and they're not taking the time to allow new information to inform the future. And I think that's just such an important place to start. And one more thing I just wanted to kind of, I guess, pause and highlight there is that this structural feedback mechanism or structural escalation process helps us highlight where psychological safety is deficient. Because I think that a lot of leaders assume that they're already behaving in a way that's psychologically safe. And the fact that people aren't bringing things up means there's no issues and that's just simply not the case. And if we're truly a leader, I think who's able to embrace feedback, we won't be afraid of that. If we're truly a leader who values psychological safety, we won't be afraid of perhaps things coming through an online feedback or escalation channel that we weren't aware of through the interpersonal piece. And I think that that is the necessary safety for people who might be the only person represented in the group or seemingly an ally who doesn't know how to safely challenge that power dynamic in the group. And to me that is just a critical, critical piece of that psychological safety puzzle. So thank you so much for helping us explore that.

[00:27:48] spk_1: Absolutely. One thing I want to add there, which is two metrics that you can use to measure good psychological safety in that respect. These are two that I look for. One, a very high rate of feedback and two, a very high rate of satisfaction that the feedback was resolved because you know, really safe, really inclusive environments. They're not places where nothing goes wrong. In fact, they're places where lots of stuff goes wrong. It's just people feel so good about the environment that they're able to bring it up immediately and they're able to see it get resolved. The most red flag workplaces are the ones where no one speaks up. So no one knows anything that's gone wrong. Their leaders go well because no one said anything we should be completely fine, right? Like we actually have lots of data from the workplace safety literature, right? Just like not looking at D E I just looking at like hazardous materials or wearing hard hats, right? That essentially says the same thing, the safest workplaces actually have a decent amount of complaints, they're just resolved really well, the least safe workplaces are so unsafe because people don't feel like they can report these safety hazards. Those are the workplaces that are most at risk for like fatal accidents at work, for example. Right. And you can draw that parallel to D E I very, very easily. If no one's sharing feedback when it's a small issue, that's a big issue on your hands and no one will know about it until it's too late and, and they've gone to CNN. Right. Like that so often how bad things happen? Right? Like, like employees say, well, I was shut down at every corner when I tried to speak up. So, lawsuit. Here you go. Now it's everyone's problem. And that's really the biggest sign that the company's internal system for dealing with feedback has just completely failed on every level.

[00:29:32] spk_2: Thank you for taking us there, Lily, because my next question was going to be exactly that. How do we start using data to ensure some of these meaningful improvements? And I think that's a really important that psychological metric is really important. Are we actually getting feedback? And are people feel like the feedback is actually being acted on? And I know in my experience, there's nothing more frustrating as an employee to perhaps have your opinion asked or to raise an issue and have leadership tell you, oh, your feedback is important to us. And then six months, 12 months time, see that nothing's changed. I think in my personal experience, nothing's turned me toxic quicker than seeing the issues I've raised, have absolutely nothing done about them. And I can only imagine how people who raise issues continuously around things like diversity, equity and inclusion and see no action on them, just become so disenchanted with how their organization treats them and seemingly feel that their views or their issues are un valued by the organization. Like it has a really deep personal frustration attached to that.

[00:30:37] spk_1: I see that so often. It's definitely not just your experience, Alexis. It is everyone's experience in the workplace. For the advice that I give readers will often say we care about data. Data is important. Let's collect more data and the answer or the response to that is you're already collecting tons and tons and tons of data. Sure we can collect more. But before you gather more, why don't you do something with the data you have? And there is such a ironic desire to collect more data coupled with such a lack of desire to do anything with it that I see from most companies, even companies with very well resourced well built out data science teams. They'll essentially say like, you know, we're gonna send all of these folks who are paying top dollar for on fool there to collect tons and tons of data about stuff and then say, what is your opinion? What should we do based on the data? These team say you should make this investment. And the leader says that's interesting. I won't and then we'll just do the other thing like this happens all the time, right? Not even looking at the E I looking at like, you know, normal business operations, it pisses off all the data scientists that I know. Right. They're just like now, why did I do my entire job? Right. Like at the end of the day, the data you gather means nothing if there's no commitment to actually use that data for data driven decision making. And it requires that leaders before they even ask for data can do the work within themselves. To say if the data disagrees with my predilection, I will commit to following the data, right? Like it's such a baby step and it's one that I can confidently say, you know, the majority of leaders are not able to say with confidence, they'll say, you know, I will do whatever I want to. And when the data agrees with me, I'll feel really good about it. And when the data disagrees with me, it's because they messed up because I'm always right and like, gosh, nothing gets me mad faster, right? 100

[00:32:31] spk_0: percent agree. Lily, I think it's so frustrating. I was gonna ask you what the disconnect is there, but I think you've nailed it right there is that having not done the work in themselves to get comfortable with discomfort and potentially having to, you know, have that, you know, really strong set of leadership skills to be able to put aside what I think is right? What I think is the the best course of action here and listening to the data, what can leaders do to kind of lean into that? Is it something that you'd almost advise them to say, look as you're gathering data, like do start to do this work on yourself, like start to really ask yourself these hard questions and give honest answers. What would you suggest?

[00:33:07] spk_1: I think it's about trusting your team honestly, because I often see this behavior come from leaders who are not willing to let go of control, right? Like they want everything to be up to them and they want to have final say over things, they never want to feel uncomfortable because they're worried that if they let things go, that things will fail and it'll reflect poorly on that, right? It's coming from a very reasonable place. It just manifests as a very toxic behavior. And so I say to those folks, you know, work with your team, especially the folks who will be giving you these recommendations. And you know, really, if you don't trust these people, it's that right? Like empower them say here is I'm gonna give you a little bit of authority a little bit of freedom to just do whatever you want here. You're only accountable for the results, sit back and wait and see what happens. Most likely if you've hired a good team, they'll deliver the results and you'll say, wow, like I had to tell you what I wanted and then you just did it. That's nice. I trust that. Let me give you a little more responsibility, right? Do it to get it and see what happens there over time, the more you do that you'll be able to someday say, hey, I want you to create an extensive data analysis project looking into this core problem. I've given similar things to you many times. This is the biggest scale I've ever done it on, give me your recommendation and justify it with, you know, some of the things you're seeing, I will make a decision based on that, right? And now you're at a different place because you've built that relationship of trust and you know, hopefully you let go of some of your own ego over repeated experiences of seeing these folks deliver. So that when the moment comes, people say you should do this, you're like, great. I trust you, I'm going to do it right? Because we also have to consider this from the leader's point of view. If you don't trust your team, of course, you're not gonna take their suggestions, right? Like, you know, you don't want to be on the hook for someone else's mistake. And if you genuinely think, you know, better than your entire data science team, right? There's probably some underlying problems between you and the team or you yourself or your team that need to be addressed, right? So rather than saying this is just one leader's problem, I try to, you know, problem solve from an environmental perspective, right? Like every stakeholder is involved when things go wrong, how can we fix this in a way that involves every stakeholder

[00:35:25] spk_0: and love that you're mentioning also how incremental that process of building trust is Lily, that this is not something that you just flick a switch and it's on, but it's something that a leader can really invest time and effort in to really build it to a really high potentially transformative level. Now, I know in your book, D E I deconstructed, you're no, not this guide to doing the work and doing it right? You know that it's important that we engage critically and often with power. And I really just want to sort of zoom in on this for a minute. Can you explain to us the concept of power in this context, why this matters and how someone might take practical steps to start engaging critically and often with power?

[00:36:06] spk_1: Yeah. So power is our ability to influence outcomes in the way we want. Very simple. Power is anything we can use to make thing X turn out like thing Y usually when people think about power, they think very narrowly about what researchers call formal power, sort of formal authority that comes from having something in your job title, say I'm going to make you do this Sally, because you report to me, you have no other choice, right? You consider that as power. If we don't have that sort of formal power, then we think that we have no power. Now as I talk about in the book, there are many, many, many other types of power besides just formal power. For example, there's reward and coercive power. Reward, power is the ability to give people something that they want. So if I said, you know, Sally, like I know that you really wanted to talk with the stakeholder that I'm friends with. If you do this thing for me, I can set up a conversation with you too. That's valuable. Coercive power. Sally, I write something awful about you on social media. If you don't give this thing that I want, right? Like that's coercive power, the ability to harm the ability to take something away. There are other types of power, information, power, knowing something that's valuable in the moment, right? Get this Sally. Like I'd have knowledge that your neighbor is about to. I don't know, like let go of their lawnmower and like destroy your front door and making things up. Right? That's valuable because then you'd be like, oh my gosh, I'm going to get off this podcast and stop my neighbor. Right? There's expert power. The power that comes from being seen as an expert in the space. We're having this conversation right now, right? Like the advice that I give is valuable in the situation because you've come to me to talk about D E I. And then finally, there's referent power which we know by a different name, charisma, the power that comes from being respected, being liked and being seen as someone that you want to listen to. Now, these six forms of power are very valuable because everyone has access to them, everyone has access to at least one of these forms of power. And so when people in workplace situations say I'm powerless, I can't do anything about the situation. I almost always disagree. They are speaking from the fact that they may not be leaders with formal authority over the situation, but that doesn't mean that they're powerless. There are so many different angles that I just talked about that they can use to create outcomes in the way that they want, they can talk to different stakeholders, they can leverage their authority, they can try to gain more information, they can try to offer rewards if the time is right for it, threaten punishments, right? There's a reason why the social media call out is really useful to take down companies that you know, people are saying are doing performative D E I, right? And some sometimes the people doing those call outs are like very junior employees, their power doesn't come from their formal authority, it comes from their ability to rapidly in seconds destroy a company's brand, right? Via Twitter. All of this is power and it's not good or bad, right? Like I don't really agree with the perspective that a power is always good and you can do whatever you want with it or B power is always bad. And if you play the game, you sort of poison the, well, it's somewhere in the middle power is a tool and if you use it to achieve the goals that you want to achieve and you have, you know, good goals. If your goals are diversity, equity and inclusion, your goals are helping people, your goal is a better organization, then I think you can and should be leaning into this idea that power is just a tool that you can learn to use more

[00:39:27] spk_2: effectively. I think that's a really helpful perspective there, Lily. Thank you because I do see that, you know, and, and the example I gave earlier in my working team, it did feel as though we were powerless because we weren't in a formal position of power within that organization. And it didn't feel that the structure was going to support us in any way to take out issues forward. So I think that understanding where our power lies, as you've mentioned, and there is those five or six different types of power that we can tap into. I think that perspective really helps us understand through which mechanisms we can bring up our issues and where we can actually influence change based on sort of perhaps where we are in the formal power structure, but also then what power is available to us as an individual. So thank you for sharing that. I think that's really, really a beneficial way of looking at that and, and an empowering way of looking at that from an individual perspective.

[00:40:24] spk_1: Yeah, let me give you a quick example actually for D E I working groups, because it's a common stakeholder group that I work with. And the common sort of refrain from this group is we don't have enough power. The recommendation that I always give or at least one example of power that you have. But don't know is if you're a working group, ad E I working group, you are seen by hopefully marginalized employees within the organization as a positive representative entity that has people's best wishes in mind, right? That's fighting for diversity, equity and inclusion. You probably also have decent amounts of information about what's happening in the workplace because you're all passionate and you want to make change and you want to be accountable to marginalized employees across the organization. So you're seen as a valuable representative entity and two, you're seen as having a lot of useful information. If you go to a V P who really wants to be seen by their department or their employees as a leader who gets it, but absolutely has no information at all about what's going on. You can say, hey, we can give you these things, we can cosign some of the efforts you're doing, but you need to use some of your formal power to make some decisions that will benefit people, right? That's the building block of coalition building. Like that's literally the first step to building any sort of D E I coalition saying you have your own objectives, we have our own objectives. We are complimentary with each other. Let's achieve our own goals together to get done what we want to get done. And that's a perfect example of you as a working group with very little formal power. Nevertheless, using more power to create a coalition and achieve change. And that's just like the one little micro step you can do that as many times as you want with as many stakeholders as you want, especially those who have power that you don't, which is why power analysis is really useful knowing what you lack and then knowing what you have. But like this is really something that like anyone, any group, any entity can start thinking about, right? Like there are so many creative ways to leverage our power and our access and resources in the service of D E I that I think many people are just not seeing because it's not

[00:42:32] spk_2: obvious. I think you're very right there, Lily. So thank you so much for helping us explore that a little more. I think that's probably given a lot of folks especially you know, myself and I'm sure many listening an opportunity to reflect and perhaps reframe where they do and can have impact using some of that power. Now, I want to dive a little deeper into looking at some of the I guess metric outcomes of a functional and a successful D E I program that's working. Can you give us a little insight into what AD E I program that's working well, might look like something, some hallmarks of what that might be. And on the flip side of that, perhaps what it might feel like for employees working in an environment where these programs are actually working successfully? Yeah, I

[00:43:17] spk_1: will be slightly tongue in cheek and start with the answer that I just defined a whole bunch of outcomes at the beginning of this conversation and I'm just going to return to them to start my answer, right? If your workplace has succeeded in these ways, you have a workforce composition that everyone feels represented by all of your employees. And ideally your customers, your clients, your vendors can look up at senior leadership at middle managers, at your vendors, at your customers and say I'm heard this is a place where people like me have a voice, people like me can succeed. People like me can get things done and you know, attain power and have great careers and make a difference in the world that's measurable. Looking at equity, two things, the presence of success and the absence of discrimination, one you have very low discrimination rates. People are saying, you know, I feel like I'm treated pretty well here. I feel like I'm not being, you know, treated worse because of my identities than the presence of success. Looking at promotion rates, hiring rates, looking at the proportion of glamour work or uh high hope file opportunities, looking at salary, looking at bonuses, looking at the utilization of vacation time, looking at the hours that people are working. Are there any disparities across that? If no, you've achieved equity, right? Looking at inclusion, do all the groups feel respected at work? Do people feel like they can bring whatever identities that they have to the office? Do they feel like they can be seen as who they are? Do they feel like they can talk about the things that matter to them without fear of persecution without fear of discrimination? Can they bring up feedback? Can they bring up potentially negative critiques? Can they talk about hard emotional topics? Can they reference the news if the answer to all of these things is yes, then congratulations. You've achieved diversity, equity and inclusion. If the answer is yes for some groups but not all of them, then not bad. You've created an environment that's good for some groups. Extend that to everybody, right? Identify where those gaps lie and and who isn't included in these positive experiences and private improvement for everybody. And if the answer is no for anybody. And you have a lot of work to do. But that's like almost a boring answer, right? Because there are so many ways we can measure the presence of diversity, equity and inclusion. We just have to think about it a little differently rather than this body of intentions that we just try our best at and just keep throwing the same speaking engagements and workshops at the wall and move towards this idea that, you know, D E I is an accountable program. It's a, it's a way of thinking about outcomes within our organization and holding people accountable. And just once you get there, you know, solving problems, finding solutions one after another until you've achieved your end goal and that something to

[00:46:13] spk_0: celebrate, you've painted a really beautiful picture for us Lily of what that might look like. And I think you mentioned, you know, you've achieved D E I, but it's also I think to some extent you're achieving because it is that ongoing process of continuing the work and not an end goal. But that process of evolution, which is a really empowering way to look at it as well because we can continuously be, you know, up leveling our game as we get access to more information and really evolve the program. I feel like we could talk for hours. I'm gonna finish off with one last question if I may and it's a really important one for me personally, your book explains that being a true ally isn't just about having the right beliefs. It's about doing the right work. What is one thing leaders can do right now to actively do the right

[00:46:56] spk_1: work? Ask their teams what that work is, right? Because at the end of the day, don't just listen to what some consultant on a podcast tells you to do. Right? I don't know your team. I don't know your employees, your employees know themselves, they're able to tell you what they need. And so as a leader, I think it really you to look back and say, who is it? I'm trying to serve, who am I trying to empower? Who am I trying to benefit? And what do they need? Genuinely being curious about the answer, not assuming, not saying, well, this is what I would need. So I'm just gonna give it to them, but being humble and saying, hey, team, I want to meet your needs. Better help me help you. It's that simple, right? And whatever they say they need, it's your job as a leader to empower them and that's

[00:47:44] spk_0: it. Thank you so much, Lily. It's been an absolute delight to speak with you today so much to reflect on and sort of, yeah, really take away, I think for all of us, we really appreciate your time. Thank you for being with us and we are human

[00:47:56] spk_1: leaders. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:48:05] spk_0: Thanks for joining us for the We are Human Leaders podcast. You can find more about Lily and their work at W W W dot Lily Zen dot co and in the show notes and join us as part of the human leaders movement at W W W dot We are human leaders dot com. See you next time