What DE&I Leaders Dont Talk About Enough But Should
In this episode I'm joined by Vijay Pendakur, Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer at Zynga.
Episode highlights:
Vijay’s journey from nonprofit to gaming
Why you can’t talk about inclusion without talking about excellence
What DE&I Leaders Don't Talk About Enough But Should
How Zynga is building diverse talent pipelines
How to Avoid Burnout in DE&I
Connect with Vijay on LinkedIn
Transcript
Natasha: Hi everyone, welcome to the All-Inclusive Podcast where each week I chat with industry experts and diversity, equity, and inclusion executives from the world's leading global brands who share their knowledge, experience, and actual paperwork to help inclusive employers create cultures of belonging where everyone can thrive. Today I have the great pleasure of being joined by Dr. Vijay Pendakur, Vice President and Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer at Zynga. He also oversees diversity strategy and coordination for their global operations spanning three continents, as well as leading their university relations, corporate social responsibility, and learning and development at Zynga. Welcome, Vijay, it's wonderful to be here with you.
Vijay: Thank you, Natasha, I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Natasha: No, me too. I'm so happy that you've been able to join us today. So, I think let's just kick things off. Tell our listeners about your personal journey to where you are today.
Vijay: Sure. My background prior to coming to Zynga was all professionally in the education and nonprofit sector. I was leading on diversity, equity, and inclusion for almost 20 years in the education and nonprofit space, primarily at universities in the United States. And I know you have a global audience, so I should be specific. I was at colleges and universities all over the United States in campus settings, working on policy systems and environmental approaches to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion for college students for many, many years. Those roles took me into very different contexts, moving between public and private institutions, moving between different geographic regions in the United States that have very different cultural patterns. And then also moving between what are often referred to as access institutions, which are really focused on admitting first-generation college students and low-income students and trying to empower them towards graduation. All the way through leading on diversity issues at Cornell University, which is an Ivy League institution where I served as Presidential Advisor for Diversity and Equity and Dean of Students. So, really running the gamut on the sector. And after doing that for a long time, I was so eager to try and apply my DEI skills in a different sector and breathe life into what I'm thinking of as the second chapter in my career. So, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to do that sector pivot and started in my work in tech about a year and a half ago as the inaugural Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at Zynga. And Zynga is a mobile games company. We make games that you play on your phone. We're the largest mobile developer in the West, and it's been a fantastic landing place for me to have my first experience leading on these issues in a publicly held corporation in a tech company in a space as rapidly moving and significant as gaming, which we can talk about more in the course of the podcast.
Natasha: Oh, nice, great. I mean, I'm not an avid gamer myself, but I do dabble in some of the app games. But I mean, so you've explained, you kind of started within more so the educational nonprofit sector, then you've moved into tech. But why are you doing DEI?
Vijay: You know, there's another podcast that interviews HR leaders where they ask the question, did HR find you, or did you find HR? And I think that "Did you find DEI, or did DEI find you?" is a version of the question you're asking. And you know, I think for most people, and I'll definitely say this for myself, if you end up in full-time DEI work, there is generally a personal story attached to how you became open and sensitized to the reality that life is not fair and that people are profoundly affected by systems and cultures that are either advancing their interests or excluding them from full participation in a variety of experiences from school to work. And so, for me, I think DEI found me based on my lived experience of life. A couple of parts of my story that are salient are, one, my parents are immigrants from India. So, they left India in the late 1960s and immigrated to Canada first, which had a more open immigration policy to Indian immigrants at that time. I was actually born in Canada, but I grew up in Chicago in the United States, which is a city in the Midwest. And I think having Indian parents that spent their childhoods in India and me being a kid growing up in North America, having to navigate that biculturalism that I think any second-gen immigrant family can identify with of having certain ways of expressing yourself or interests and having to constantly navigate a dual reality in your household. I also was fortunate enough to be able to travel to India quite a bit growing up and going to Southern India into villages that my parents come from that are not industrialized, especially in the 1980s. And being in a cultural and material environment that was so radically different than 1980s America as a young kid immediately produced the kinds of important schisms around, well, there is no normal, life is different in different places. As fundamentally as there's no stable electricity in this place where my relatives live or there's only one car that people seem to have access to, and actually, a lot of people are using carts pulled by a cow or a bull to get around the village. And then coming back to Chicago, right? So, like really navigating a lot of sort of cultural and cognitive dissonance very early on. Obviously, I didn't have this language for it, but what I had was the emotional sensibility that there's no default in life, that the human experience could vary wildly. And I think that if anybody who ends up on the DEI journey at some point in time, you have an experience with interculturalism, whether that's in your own neighborhood, you could do study abroad, you've got immigrant parents, you know, something happens that snaps you out of this idea that there's a normal, because that was one of my gateways into this work. And I would, I'll name the other one very quickly, or there's obviously more, but just to be concise, I'll name one other kind of origin story here. My parents, like many immigrants who come to another country, their desire to buy a house was really profound because it would mean metaphorically and also in a very real way that they're putting their flag down, right? You've made it in this new land. You've got a home. And so, in 1986, they bought a house at the border between Chicago and a northern community, the first northern community of the city called Evanston. And in this border zone where my sister and I grew up, the house was in the middle of a neighborhood that was almost all Black, very low income. The only other immigrant communities were Caribbean immigrant communities. And so, we grew up as two of the only Indian kids in our elementary and middle school and high school environment. And so, two things came out of this. One, deeply understanding what it means to be the only over and over and over again and how defining and lonely and painful that can be, which has given me that bridge of empathy to so many other communities, whether that be a racial minority community or being the only trans person on your working team, right? And then the other piece is that that is unique to me and has given me a lot of food for thought is I grew up actually coming to understand my racial identity as an Asian American through the lens of comparing myself to Blackness, not comparing myself to whiteness. And I think many racially minoritized communities come to understand themselves, if they're growing up proximal to white people, through a white-other binary and trying to piece out what does it mean in relation to whiteness. So, obviously, at some point in my life, I definitely went through that, I think as most racial minorities have to in a Western context. But in elementary school, middle school, all of the powerful and popular people in my life, whether that be culturally through music and movies or local church leaders or people who own local businesses or the principal of my elementary school, the principal of my high school, they were all Black. And so, a lot of my early understanding of my racial identity came in trying to suss out how do I relate to the concept of Blackness and particularly the Black American experience and where do I fit into that story, which is a different pathway into racial awakening than trying to understand how one relates to whiteness. And so, that's something more unique to my journey that has been profound for me and has stayed with me my whole life.
Natasha: Yeah, I know, that sounds so interesting. I mean, I can definitely resonate with your parents and wanting to lay down foundations when they came over, when they immigrated over to Canada, and then when you moved into Chicago. My background, my parents, my mom is... my grandparents are from Jamaica. They immigrated over into the UK, and that was one of the key things that they did. They actually left my mom and my aunts at the time back in Jamaica, and they came over when it was just the two of them to lay down that foundation because they wanted to make sure that they had a home for them to start off with and to grow their new life. And yeah, I think that they also tried to build a community where they were when they started and with people that looked and was from where they were from. I think that's kind of the first thing that we do try to do, I think, and that's something that I think a lot of people can resonate with. And when you enter a new environment, who else is here that's similar to me, that looks like me, or that has similar experiences to me, that's come from where I've come from? And then moving on to, for you, which I thought was really interesting and that's not something that I have encountered with someone where, for you, your comparison, what you were kind of looking at to find your kind of racial identity was Blackness rather than with most people it is whiteness. And what I wanted to know is if you could just tell a little bit more about how you then went from trying to find or looking at Blackness to then looking at whiteness and where you fit with that, could you tell us?
Vijay: Sure, sure. Yeah, this is a privilege and an honor to be able to share a story and to listen to your experience. And I can just imagine, as you were talking, I was thinking about how scary and terrifying it must have been at times for the first part of your family to come over to the UK and try and put down roots in pretty adverse conditions to Caribbean immigrants at that time. And kudos to your family for the success they've had so far. On my end, I think my initial some of the really powerful memories I have of grappling with whiteness came in high school. So, I went to a pretty large high school, about two and a half thousand students, and so, you know, six to seven hundred students per grade. So, there's four grades in the traditional American high school setup. And the high school represented a mixing of two communities, the low-income, predominantly Black community I grew up in, and then an astonishingly privileged white community from the north side of Evanston. And these, you know, there are many of these border zones right in the world, right, where, due to the contours of history, you end up with a working class or an underserved community really closely located to a very privileged community. And oftentimes, a public school represents the nexus or the contact zone between those two communities. Well, that's how an anthropologist would describe it. When you live through it at age 14, it's not very fun because I came to understand that I wasn't white primarily because I wasn't wealthy. And in my experience, and I'm not trying to assert that all white people are wealthy, in the experience I had of going to this place where it happened to be that many of the white students were very privileged going to the school financially, in terms of social capital, intellectual capital, there was a lot of, like, whoa, you know, the clothes, the language, the cars, the things that I would never at that stage of my life ever be able to have. I mean, my budgets were extremely tight in my family. And so, there were many, many micro moments of shame around not being able to fit in and not being able to command the currency that matters so much in adolescence around popularity and coolness and, you know, sort of social fluidity that white students were able to demonstrate with their privilege and social capital. And at that same time, the Black community that I'd grown up with was also going through a change. So, to name some complex stuff for our listeners here, you know, the Black community on the north side of Chicago was profoundly impacted by the crack epidemic in the late 1980s, early 1990s, and the response of intensive policing and mass incarceration. And so, my immediate community was shifting around 13, 14 years old from being a bunch of kids that I knew from growing up to heavily being recruited into street gangs and heavily exposed to violence, gun violence, drug sales. And so, in one school, you had kids that were driving to school in their new BMW because they turned 16 and a large portion of the school on free breakfast and lunch because they're low income and they can't afford food, a portion of the school actively participating in extremely violent street gangs that are dealing drugs, that are carrying guns. There was more than one shooting at my school every year that I was growing up. So, like, you know, handgun violence and gun violence get a lot of press now, but if you grew up in Chicago in the 1990s, the rates were actually much higher than they are now. And so, for me, I think the third kind of awakening I had that led me towards DEI work was actually trauma, was witnessing and experiencing some really painful things around violence, exclusion, shame, fear, that for me as a boy and as a young man growing up in that circumstance caused me to completely check out of the academic experience of school because my primary concern became my safety. And so, the idea of learning algebra or trigonometry or whatever was so abstract to me and so unimportant compared to finding a crew of guys that would keep me safe on the bus to and from school with all the crazy stuff happening around me. And why that's important for me as a DEI leader is it's a constant reminder that of Abraham Maslow's really important work around what it takes to actually reach the higher order stages of moving past surviving and into what you could call thriving or flourishing. But if we're not meeting minimum needs, then we can't expect people to optimize their humanity. And I've lived through that, right? I completely underperformed in academics as a result of being afraid for my safety. And so, for me, the broad umbrella of DEI work, the first-order commitments of DEI work are actually tied to fundamental issues of human dignity. If people don't have food, clothes, shelter, safety, then we, as a society, whether it's the UK, America, anywhere, right, we're completely under capitalizing on human potential. We've got all these potentially brilliant and high capacity humans, and the more you are focused on meeting your basic needs, the less you're focused on innovation, creativity, art, expression, all the things that we need if we're going to continue to grow and change and adapt to the challenges of the 21st century. So, you know, I think that last set of visceral experiences really sensitized me to the higher calling of DEI work because, of course, you know, where our conversation goes, there's tactics, there's strategies, OKRs, KPIs, but at the end of the day, DEI work is about unlocking the conditions necessary for human flourishing, and we can't lose sight of that in the roadmap of tactics and strategies.
Natasha: That leads me on to my next question. I think is why is DEI going to make Zynga different or your business different? I think that's an extremely relevant question, right? So, I'll answer sort of broadly and then for Zynga. First and foremost, I would say for any business or organization that wants to be relevant to the world, DEI is a relevant strategy. When you can de-politicize this, at the end of the day, diversity, equity, and inclusion are about calibrating the complexity and the sensibility of your organization to the complexity and sensibility of the world that you actually exist in. And frequently, when we see companies that come across as flat-footed or tone-deaf, they have moments, you know, you end up watching, and you're like, "Oh gosh, they're going down in a ball of flames on Twitter," you know, it's because they've actually lost touch with the actual complexity and sensibility of the customer base they're trying to serve, the relevance of the product in the marketplace, the sentiments of their own employees, or their students if you're talking about an educational pipeline, right? So, first and foremost, this DEI is not some sort of special add-on strategy that you can opt into. Either you're doing it and cross-cutting across everything you do, or you risk major losses due to a loss of relevance and sensibility. And I have a very strong perspective on that that I think is hard to argue with if you're just thinking about the work in a very sort of a political way and what it means to be culturally and anthropologically relevant to the base you're trying to serve. For Zynga, we... You know, what was very clear for us as a publicly held company and as a video game company is that there's huge opportunity in continuing the important work of making gaming just as thoughtful, sensitized, and complex as gamers. And the reality is we have several billion gamers on Earth. In the US, revenue from games is more than music and movies combined. Yeah, it's insane, yeah. Games are, you know, they're so unbelievably relevant as an industry. And there have been many moments, if you look at the past five to seven years in the gaming industry, that potentially signal, and I'm being pretty diplomatic here, or definitely signal that there is a disconnect between gaming companies and the production of games and the complexity and the sensibility of the world that we're actually located in. And that might be a disconnect around gender equity, it might be a disconnect around the language players are using, some players are using while playing games and the impact that has on other people, it might be a disconnect around narratives, visual depictions, and voice-over arcs in games that are potentially dehumanizing or stigmatizing or stereotyping of the people that they're actually trying to depict. There's been gaffes and dumpster fire moments on all of those issues within the games industry. So, you know, Zynga is very committed to not just being the premier manufacturer of mobile games, but actually doing this in a way that's socially relevant and contextual to the changing zeitgeist of the 21st century. And so for us, we use a framework called inclusive excellence, which is our language for our broad strategy for diversity, equity, and inclusion. And for that to break that into smaller pieces, I brought forward the language of inclusive excellence to Zynga for consideration when I started as the inaugural Chief Diversity Officer because for me, I think it's really important still today and hopefully in another 10 years, we don't have to fight this fight, but I think you should never talk about inclusion without talking about excellence because there's always the shadow of the doubters, the haters sitting there going, "Oh, so the diversity agenda is about quotas or lowering standards," right? Because you can't actually include those other people without watering down the special sauce. And I'm saying it very bluntly, but that is always in the room, right? And so for me, we don't talk about inclusion without talking about excellence because we are not lowering our standards for excellence when we do inclusion. And we're actually operating on the supposition that you cannot be excellent without inclusion, right? Because of the question of relevance, right? So if you are a homogenous organization serving a diverse player base, you're just standing in a field of landmines, right? If you are in the talent marketplace we have right now, if you are shedding underrepresented talent at a far greater rate than your majority challenge, you're just burning and churning money in the talent acquisition space that you could be spending on product development, right? So there's a bunch of knock-on effects for being an underdeveloped organization in DEI. So for us, the inclusive excellence model has a talent strategy, it's got an internal equity and belonging strategy, and then it's got a social impact strategy which, you know, the social impact portfolio reports up to me. So it's not just what we're doing for our employees in equity and belonging, it's not just continuing to invest in and shape that pipeline for talent acquisition, but also the third leg of the stool is social impact. In the 21st century, if you're a publicly held company, I think it's really important that you're leaving the world a better place than you found it. And it's not enough to simply say, "Hey, we maximize shareholder value, check, peace," you know, that's not enough right now. And I actually think that shareholders and boards and governing bodies, the public at large, is looking for corporations to be part of bending the arc of history towards something better than the record book of the 20th century has to evidence for us. Do you say was kind of your greatest challenge in trying to implement that and implement that change when you started with Zynga?
Vijay: I think that the greatest challenge for me has been, and this, you know, my perspective, right? The greatest challenge internally, it was well met and well received, I feel like I was lucky enough to enter the organization at a time when there was extraordinary interest and energy around DEI and people were looking for a leader to come in, offer an end-to-end framework, and start, you know, building strategy, tactics, roadmap, executing against goals, collecting data, iterating when we fail, right? That's... Yeah, you know, and the more we did that, the more people leaned in and leaned in, our ERGs dramatically grew, you know, there were lots of good things that I'm happy to talk about any of that. But I would say what you asked specifically about like the challenge, and I don't want to be Goldilocks about or you know, what is Pollyannaish about this, I think the hardest thing from that I've seen in the space and one that DEI leaders don't talk about enough is that hiring and pipeline development is extraordinarily hard, right? So out of those three legs of the stool, the talent acquisition piece, if you're in tech right now but even beyond tech, I just went to a meeting of a bunch of HR leaders heavily in the manufacturing and energy sector, they were actually saying the same things. So across most sectors right now, diversity is extraordinarily challenging in the labor market because it's not because of a lack of care, I think it's super simplistic to be like, you know, companies just aren't wanting to hire people of color, aren't wanting to hire women or aren't wanting to hire whatever group it is. If you disaggregate the data, there is a pipeline issue and I think that the DEI leaders are underserving the issues by not talking about this with candor and with courage, this is like sort of like the biggest elephant secret in the room, like when you, um, if you're looking for a full-stack engineer that has Unity experience, Unity is a development platform that's very, very important in gaming, right, um, and you do a search in the whole city of San Francisco, which is one of the greatest densities of tech talent in the world, there may be a hundred people that have the skill sets to do that job, and because you can hire firms to do this analysis for you, right, and then many of them are gainfully employed, aren't searching, and actually only a fraction of them are underrepresented, so you know that hundred, I'm not saying there's a hundred under-represented, there may be a hundred that have the skill and then you're looking at and you're segmenting the data based on identity characteristics so that you can tilt your funnels towards historically excluded communities and you go, "Oh my gosh, there's three people who are underrepresented with the skill set we need for this job in all of San Francisco, how are we gonna win this is the behind the door conversation in the trenches in the hiring space that I think we don't talk about publicly enough and so the question is why don't we talk about that, right, if it's so patently obvious why wouldn't we, you know, just name it. I think part of what's happening is there's a fear of being accused of doing nothing and so partly why I love having both the DEI portfolio and the social impact portfolio at my job is because there's a flywheel here so what we do at Zynga is we actually pretty laser focus our social impact spend in actually expanding pipelines of access into tech and gaming jobs by investing in early career talent collegiate talent, upskilling women in STEM, a whole bunch of philanthropic spends that can produce inflections and pretty quick ROI when it comes to reskilling or upskilling people to actually participate in the job market in the tech job market and in the gaming job market and so when we do that work we're planting flowers right and those flowers are going to bloom and they're going to help us the other piece is we actually get to tell that story as part of our employer brand story and internally the employee response when we share about the investments where we're making globally in in these like structured complex philanthropic partnerships so these are not like you know like a little like charitable donations these are like building pipelines right yeah the employees love that because they respond like they're working for a purpose-driven company and if you know the data you know underrepresented groups particularly but actually most employees these days want to work at a purpose-driven company that is doing good in the world and then we actually can tell those same stories with integrity and authenticity we're not we're not virtue signaling here we're value signaling in the employer brand marketplace and so in that fierce fight for underrepresented talent we actually use this the impact partnerships as ways to differentiate ourselves um as a company that cares about these things and is investing in these things and so then the few underrepresented candidates in the funnel might actually select towards us because of the values consonants or the values match that they're not going to get at another company that's still doing that 20th century run and gun you know shareholder capitalism thing where that's all they're doing is maximizing shareholder value and not actually leaving a positive footprint in the world around them gone are the days where people just get a job to get a job um.
Vijay: I mean don't get me wrong there are situations and they're all there are times when you need i need a job and you need to be paid you need to get make sure that your your bills are paid you've got a roof over your head but where if we open up the opportunities for people to actually take a second and to to think and and to to decide actually you know what i do need a job but i i need a job where that organization actually means something they're like i feel like i'm contributing to something i have a purpose they're adding value to to the world another thing that comes up for me you know and this is i'll be forming this thought as i put it out there i think that you know i i'll i'll oftentimes listen to podcasts or watch like you know um youtube videos that are sort of ted talky they might not be actual ted talks but you know stuff like that where a leader is a leader is talking about their their pathway to innovation and i think in in most of the progressive business circles it's well understood that failure is at the heart of growth and innovation right in um and you'll see many leaders talk about i did this thing it completely bombed and then in the wreckage the apocalypse you know i had to pick the pieces up and stitch them together but we learned we iterated and we grew i don't think we do that enough in the dei space the the pressure on dei leaders to not fail is astounding in this moment right i think one of the casualties of of um polarization and um the current moment of populism that we live in globally right this isn't just a uk us thing but this is really a global trend line is that um you know uh polarization breeds binary thinking and um in the binary you are either doing the right thing or you're not doing the right thing but anybody who's an operator knows that that's not life right you are trying things you are trying to put best practice into practice you are trying to leverage data to create programs and initiatives and you're failing a fair amount of the time right like we try things that don't work and we don't really get the grace to talk about that right grace is about holding a space for the reality of human frailty so that actually the things that aren't working can drive our growth just as much as the things that are working and there's so little grace in the dei space right now the public doesn't have a lot of grace for it the internal employees don't have a lot of grace for it everybody is is feeling you know like people feel like i you need to make this work right now or the detractors and there are many are waiting for the first mistake to say right and so you think about the you know uh the the number of times that like one element of a diversity training gets taken out of context and then a disgruntled employee puts it online with no context around it and the whole company just gets taken down on twitter because they're you know they're anti-meritocratic or they're anti-male or they're anti-white and now the company is spending months of energy and money and pr time recovering from that that um that harm that was caused that reputational harm that was caused and they're not that money and energy and time is not going into advancing equity of justice and so i don't i'm not being naive to the reality that this is very high stakes work and we have to find ways within um safer spaces or braver spaces to actually start to talk about the reality of art that this work is an art and a science it's scientifically and empirically informed and the art part is that humans and anything humans touch are dynamic and complex systems that we have limited understanding over so when we try and implement something it could be straight out of the harvard business review right like proven you know there's a deep lit review on it and it can not work right and we and if we can't tell that story then we're underserving the broader movement towards human dignity because we're not actually empowering other companies our peers other dei leaders to learn and grow with one another and so um i don't think we can be elbows on the table in a state of defense and very proprietary about this if we all care about advancing the issues as a global community um but i also recognize that there's there is real risk in this and so i'm not saying that i have a perfect solution but i know i try and whenever i'm in gatherings and there's a lot of like dei roundtables and things like that out there i frequently lead with hey we tried something and it totally didn't work let me tell you about it and what we learned from that and how we're trying to improve and it kind of shocks the room but i'm trying to model the way i'm trying to model you know not everybody just flexing and flossing with like we do it perfect because that is not true to even get to greatness sometimes you're gonna have to fail like it's very rare that people that you're gonna do something and it's gonna go amazing first time round i mean i like i can't remember the last time i did something and it was amazing the first time around other than other than my daughter i think so far we're on a good track [Music] we're three years in and she's okay so i'm doing some good things there but i mean don't get me wrong there was definitely some pitfalls at the beginning i mean no one really do you know what i mean it's it's i'm just talking about motherhood here but yeah i think it can get applied to anything i think that yeah i mean it's good to talk about failures but also to talk about how you've overcome them and what you learn from them and i and i will riff on what you're saying as a parent of two very uh intelligent uh strong-willed and fiery daughters myself um i think parenting is an area that constantly reminds me of my own uh humility frailty and fallibility uh the number of times that my my wife and partner and i have have you know thought we had the parenting moves down and then something happens we're like oh we have limited control over the situation [Laughter] one thing that works one day the next day you try it and you're like okay maybe not that's not going to work don't fail how are you kind of finding the balance with long-term dei and avoiding that burnout all the easy questions natasha um you know so i have had the i i think the privilege of doing dei work full-time since 2002 um and if you're if if i was total if i was fully in corporate life that would almost be impossible given that most corporations didn't have the function resourced in that way in 2002 let alone in 2015 um but because i was in education non-profit you know they were investing in this stuff a little bit earlier than corporate america um and so 20 years in there is not much of a choice but to have developed the hard way some coping mechanisms resilience strategies so a few of the things i can share that have been helpful for me um and and again everyone's wellness plan has to be contextual to them right so i don't mean any of this to be prescriptive so i can i can only share from my highly limited you know human experience but one has been um probably the biggest investment for me has been um years of therapy years um so i shared earlier in this conversation about some of the things i lived through growing up while those things gave me the fire and the and the internal compulsion or or uh commitment to do dei work they actually positioned me as the most likely to burn out if that was going to be a moniker because every day i was fighting the fight of my life that's not sustainable i also was so angry that i probably wasn't very kind or accepting to the people around me that didn't get it um and i wasn't very kind or accepting to myself when i failed and as we already established failure as part of the journey so um you know the i won't get into all of it here but i ended up finding my way into therapy with with a professional counselor uh in my mid-20s and i spent 10 years working through various unresolved trauma my own meaning making my relationship with myself my family my identities and that work was singularly the most important work i have done for myself as a leader um because you know if you if you're familiar with daniel goldman's research on emotional intelligence self-awareness is actually the driver of emotional regulation and so you cannot manage your emotions if you're not aware of your emotions and a lot of the early work of counseling is what am i actually feeling and why right yeah and particularly growing up as like a man in the 80s and 90s like emotional awareness was not um on the dashboard right it was i was really alienated from a deeper and authentic understanding of what was happening for me um as a heart-centered individual even though you would think dei work is very touchy feely i was completely alienated from my emotional core and so i cannot manage complex teams complex issues respond to stakeholder conversations that are very high risk and very passionate sometimes if i'm not managing myself first and foremost right and so i would say to anyone who wants to pursue dei work long term whatever therapeutic modality and it doesn't have to be talk therapy right talk therapy and psychotherapy is only one way of achieving healing but investing in your healing addressing your trauma and and um foregrounding and investing in your emotion in your emotional intelligence will pay dividends through your whole life it'll pay dividends in your personal life uh i hope my wife also appreciates the work i've done in that space and my daughters but but it'll pay dividends at work um and i see it all the time um so that's that's one piece that is a is a resilience and a wellness strategy for me and has been part of my my sustainability program for my dei work i think another one has been the movement towards um from idealism towards pragmatism and i say that knowing i'm opening myself up to some criticism here but but i'm just speaking my truth right so i am far more pragmatic now than i was 20 years ago um i i operated on a lot of what should be uh for a very long time now i think there's an important role for the dreamers right um and there's an important role for the the narrative of should in in giving um putting wind in the sail of change work right um you've no no major inflection on the on the human journey towards dignity and equality has happened because of pragmatism people people get lit they get fiery they get together they're like oh no no this whole thing's got to change right and so like that's how movements happen that's how revolutions happen that's how that's how um you know the every coalition for for change in a positive way has has happened and the actual tactics of changing complex organizations to uh and and bending them towards something better whether that be equity or justice or inclusion or belonging or whatever it might be whatever your framework is that work is detailed it's pragmatic it involves a lot of iteration and failure it's methodical and so for me because i've spent particularly the last 10 years of my career leading larger teams and operating at the enterprise strategy level you have to move to a level of pragmatism right around around thinking as an operator not an idealist and and for me the more i've been able to embrace being an operator the more it has actually positioned me to do this work in the decades and not the months because my emotional highs and lows are are a little more sustainable i'm not riding as intense a roller coaster of of elation and disappointment um and and so for me that's been very helpful in in keeping the emotional gas tank from running out i just want to say thank you so much for for sharing your your personal story with us your journey and and your insights and for being here today just for everyone out there how can they connect with you
Natasha: oh well thank you so much for the honor of being able to have this conversation and i'm looking forward to all of the micro conversations that come out of what we talked about today um easiest way to connect with me is on linkedin i would love to to stay connected in that way and i'm a lurker on twitter so i am on twitter you won't see me post much but i read uh so that's another way but my primary platform i think for engaging on these kinds of issues is linkedin so i'd love to engage with your audience um as we advance diversity equity and inclusion in the world of work thanks so much again bj and we'll speak to you soon bye