The Verblio Show: Our Good Intentions Aren’t Enough — Practicing Diversity, Equity & Inclusion with Dr.T

In a recent episode of The Verblio Show, Our Good Intentions Aren’t Enough — Practicing Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Steve Pockross, CEO of Verblio and Dr.Tolonda Tolbert, Eskalera’s co-founder and Head of Strategy and Culture sat down to discuss her 20+ year career as a Diversity and Inclusion leader, how to bring diversity, equity and inclusion to the workplace, important lessons for business leaders and a lot more.

Here are some of our favorite excerpts:

“We gotta move faster than this and I knew technology was a way to scale impact”

“I realized the barriers were the same regardless of the industry — People need more support than a day of diversity; they need more support than a workshop, they need ONGOING support. We talk about it as an irrigation drip approach instead of like a water hose on one day, firehose on another day and you can’t take it all in, and you’re left with ‘what do I do next?’. And so I wanted to build something that was going to be ongoing and really support people on HOW TO DO inclusion. There’s a lot of awareness-building but you need to move beyond awareness to action and really focus on inclusive skill building because that’s what’s lacking across the board”

“Another barrier is that at least in corporations, people tend to focus on leadership…trickle down doesn’t work! Everyone needs to know these skills; everyone needs to be trained!”

“It’s important to do learning in the flow of work in order to be relevant and apply on the daily…And then it needs to be integrated into all of your systems and all of the business lines. I knew technology could help us do that”

“Another piece that people really underestimate is that measurement is really a fundamental part of accountability and progress. And you really can’t change what you don’t measure.”

“People need a lot of support”

“One of the things people really struggle in the space is recognizing and mitigating your own biases and prejudices and learning new behaviors and habits is a deeply personal journey. And so, we at Eskalera, really try to create a judgment-free zone where your responses are anonymous and you don’t feel like somebody’s ready to ‘chop you’ — it’s more like one-on-one coaching on how to have effective and inclusive relationships, how to do inclusive processes if you’re a manager or a leader”

“Changing ourselves is hard and that’s when you want to change. So it’s got to be one of these things like wash, rinse, repeat…and people have to practice so it goes from something that feels foreign to then feeling like I can do it unconsciously…”

“How do you build trust with your direct reports? How do you have courage? How do you create psychological safety for people? How do show your humbleness? When we are building these skills, we are showing people how to be transparent and that is part of building trust”

“You have to be willing to say ‘I don’t know’ and be intentional about learning.”

“Creating transparency for EVERYBODY is a real key to inclusion — it allows for people to feel like they’re in control of things otherwise people’s imagination can go down a dark alley you don’t want to go down.”

What are organizations should be doing? “It’s never too early or too small to be working on an inclusive environment because at the end of the day, everybody wants inclusion”

“It’s important to build inclusive skills”

“Organizations tend to hire people from their networks and so they have affinity biases — we all have affinity biases. We like people who are like ourselves… that’s something we have to be constantly aware of and do things to counteract that”

“Diversity leads to better business outcomes; better innovation”

Tune in and check out the full episode to listen to a great conversation!

Thank you to Steve and the Verblio team for this great conversation. The time to move culture forward is now.

For organizations that are serious about improving their Diversity and Inclusion, Eskalera is offering 3 months of complimentary training — helping to develop skills across your entire organization, and drive systemic and sustainable change. Get started today!

Originally published at https://eskalera.com on July 16, 2020.