2016-03-23



HRExaminer Radio is a weekly show devoted to Recruiting and Recruiting Technology airing live on Friday’s at 11AM Pacific

HRExaminer Radio

Guest: Joe Gerstandt, Diversity & Inclusion Consultant

Episode: 146

Air Date: January 27, 2016

Joe Gerstandt brings new clarity and fresh practices to diversity and inclusion work.Joe has worked with Fortune 500 corporations, small non-profits, and everything in between. He speaks at numerous conferences and summits, and blogs at www.joegerstandt.com. He is a featured contributor for the Workforce Diversity Network Expert Forum and his insights have been published in Diversity Best Practices, Diversity Executive, HR Executive, The Diversity Factor, The American Diversity Report, the Corporate Recruiting Leadership Journal, Associations Now, other print and on-line journals and he co-authored the book Social Gravity: Harnessing the Natural Laws of Relationships.

Joe grew up on a family farm in NW Iowa, served four years in the United States Marine Corps, including participation in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, attended Iowa State University and then spent 6 years working in management and business development for technology and communication companies. He then made a career change and went to work for a grassroots non-profit organization where he found himself drawn to issues related to diversity and inclusion and then became actively involved in that work.

Today, Joe believes that we can ill afford to continue applying a 20th century approach to an increasingly critical set of 21st century issues. A strong advocate for resetting the diversity and inclusion conversation, Joe sees diversity and inclusion as poorly understood and often misunderstood. His keynote messages and interactive workshops bring greater clarity, energy, and application to diversity and inclusion work.

Joe lives in Omaha, Nebraska (the middle of everywhere) with his patient, kind, patient, loving and patient wife, two daughters, a son, a dog, a frog, and a guinea pig.

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Begin transcript

John Sumser:

Good morning, and welcome to HR Examiner Radio. I’m your host, John Sumser. We’re coming to you today from beautiful downtown Emeryville, California between Berkeley and Oakland. Today we’ve got Joe Gerstandt with us. Joe is a diversity and inclusion consultant. From what I can tell, he’s the diversity and inclusion consultant. Good morning, Joe.

Joe Gerstandt:

Good morning, John. Thanks for having me.

John Sumser:

Yeah, did you like that little promotion there? You are the diversity and inclusion consultant, Joe.

Joe Gerstandt:

Yeah, I do appreciate it. It’s probably a bit much, but I do appreciate it. Thank you for that.

John Sumser:

Okay, how about if I say he’s my diversity and inclusion consultant?

Joe Gerstandt:

All right, all right. That works.

John Sumser:

We’ll get the right qualifier in there somehow. Why don’t you take a little bit and introduce yourself to the audience?

Joe Gerstandt:

Yeah, so my name is Joe Gerstandt, and as John said I do diversity and inclusion work, and I’ve been doing this work for a little over a decade now. I did it initially internally. My last, I guess, real job was I led the diversity, inclusion, and cultural competency efforts for a regional healthcare system. For the past eight years, I’ve done it externally, and so a lot of what I do is speaking. I speak at a lot of conferences. I get invited to client organizations to do presentations and workshops and design workshops for them, and I do some consulting and some advising, but all of my work is focused on issues related to diversity and inclusion. Prior to that, I spent some time in the nonprofit space. I also spent some time doing sales and sales management. I’m originally from Northwest Iowa. I’m a farm kid originally, and I also spent four years in the United States Marine Corps. I did bounce around a little bit before I found this work. I would have to say that I kind of found this work by accident to some extent.

John Sumser:

Could I summarize that as, “I have a broad range of experience that led me to this thing that’s about broadening people’s experience”?

Joe Gerstandt:

Yeah, I guess I’ve never thought of it that way, but I think that’s accurate.

John Sumser:

Cool, cool, so did anything interesting ever happen in your career?

Joe Gerstandt:

Oh, yeah, lots of interesting things have happened in my career. I think for me, the work that I do it has to be aligned with and kind of an extension of who I am. As I alluded to, it took me a while to find work that really spoke to me and lit me on fire. My first work experience after high school was I spent four years in the Marine Corps. That was actually one of the two very positive work experiences that I had. That was a pretty valuable way for me to spend those four years. Finished my four years in the Marine Corps, came back to the Midwest, attended school at Iowa State University, but still really wasn’t … I just didn’t know what I really wanted to do yet. I ended up doing sales when I got out of college. I spent six or seven years doing sales and sales management, and that was kind of an interesting experience because I worked for some organizations that had good products and good services, and they also had these values that meant something to me.

They had these goals and objectives that I valued, but what I oftentimes found, at least in the organizations that I worked for, is as far as the day to day behavior, nobody really cared about any of that stuff. It was about these numbers, and so I always felt kind of at odds with the organizations that I worked for, and so my time in sales and sales management was a little bit unhappy just because professionally I wasn’t happy, and that usually means that personally I’m not a terribly happy person. As luck would have it, as I was trying to figure out what kind of career change I needed to make, I got a call about a job at a small nonprofit organization in Omaha called the Nebraska AIDS Project, and they do HIV and STD prevention. I was only kind of connected to that organization because I’d been doing some volunteer work for them, but I knew the position that they asked me about was the kind of work that I could get excited about. I was in no way qualified, but I said, “Sure, I would love to throw my hat in the ring,” and I ended up getting that job.

As much as transformational important as my experience in the Marine Corps was, my experience working with HIV and STD prevention was equally as important and equally as valuable. One of the things that that work experience did was it really challenged a lot of the ideas and beliefs that I had around some of these topics of diversity, and community, and equity. It exposed me to people that had had very different life experiences than I had, that were very different than I was, and I couldn’t overlook the fact that there were people that were treated differently by people, by organizations, by institutions, not because of anything that they’d done but because of who they were or because of who they were perceived to be. That was the turning point that pointed me towards this work. I still wasn’t thinking about diversity inclusion work in the workspace, but that was kind of the turning point that changed the way that I saw some of the stuff and led me down this road. I’m very thankful that I found this work, but in a lot of ways, I did find it by accident.

John Sumser:

I think sometimes you stumble over the best things, so it’s interesting to me. I don’t think that certainly my stereotype of a diversity and inclusion worker didn’t used to include the idea that that person could be a Marine or have Marine experience or have a military bearing. That was outside of my expectation set, but that’s how in the world, in the non-radio, non-theoretical world, you bring that bearing to what you do. It seems to me that that sets a very interesting model, because it’s not uncommon. It’s the holiday season nightmare is getting together with relatives, including the one very shrill political relative, and that’s what the stereotype of diversity and inclusion people is: shrill, political, shallow, and unfamiliar with business. You trounce all those stereotypes. It’s really quite an interesting thing, and I bet that makes you extraordinarily effective in your work.

Joe Gerstandt:

I think there are some aspects of that that help me connect to folks in the audience that maybe aren’t expecting to be connected to. I think one of my sweet spots when I’m doing a presentation or a workshop is there’s oftentimes a certain number of folks in the room that are convinced this topic doesn’t have anything to do with them, and I convince them otherwise by the end of that. I think some of that is about my background and my identity. Diversity inclusion work is really still in its infancy in a lot of ways. When I started being actively involved in this work, I bumped up against those expectations a little bit more. I think the field wasn’t as diverse as it is now, but people were explicitly surprised when I walked in the room, and they saw someone that was maybe different than who they were expecting. In the past few years, I think the people doing this work, and the approaches, and the methodology to this work continues to evolve and grow.

I think there’s a lot of great stuff coming into this work and coming into this field right now. Like any other practice, there’s some stereotypes, and some of them have some truth behind them. Some of them don’t. I can remember a time when I was talking to an organization about doing some work there, and their senior VP of HR stopped in the middle of the interview and said, “You’re just going to have to help me. You’re just going to have to walk me through this. How is it that you, a white guy from Omaha, Nebraska, is doing diversity inclusion work?” He actually said that, and if you think about that, that’s kind of a silly thing to say when you’re interviewing someone for some potential work, but I think those expectations about who does the work and how the work is going to be done were even that much more narrow five, or seven, or eight years ago. I think we’re moving in the right direction. Like I said, there’s a lot more diversity and a lot more science and a lot of new stuff coming into this field, and I think it’s a pretty exciting time to be a part of this work.

John Sumser:

It’s interesting stuff you do, and I want to pick at some of the things that you just said there. I don’t know how people get along without stereotypes. The idea that you can modify those stereotypes, because I’m not sure they go away, but it’d be interesting to hear your view on whether or not they can go away, and to have people modify or improve or something their stereotypes in an intentional fashion is not something that human beings have historically done or done well. It’s a new way of thinking about what human beings are capable of, I think, that wasn’t part of the 17th century, say. Now I am a deep partisan for the issues that you’re talking about, but then I spend some time with people who are not, and they don’t understand how to do what you’re asking, I think. This is a question about, on one level, what’s the practical reality of changing a cognitive bias of some kind? Two, when you deal with a universe of people who maybe don’t understand how it would be possible to make a change like you suggest, what do you do?

Joe Gerstandt:

I think there’s a few questions in there. I’ll try and dig into …

John Sumser:

Sure, sure.

Joe Gerstandt:

… to at least a couple of them. When we’re talking about the conversation about cognitive bias and we’re talking about stereotypes, I think one of the most valuable things to do, and I think a lot of this is starting to happen now, is helping more people understand that they actually do have cognitive bias. Bias has been a pretty problematic idea. I think just the word is threatening and offensive to people because for so long we’ve correlated bias with bad intentions or bad character, and so it’s very hard to talk about bias showing up without someone feeling like they’ve been accused of doing something wrong. Bias isn’t necessarily about your intentions or your character. As you I’m sure know, there’s three, or four, or five dozen different cognitive biases that there’s been quite a bit of research around. They’re kind of blind spots in how we process information.

Some of those dynamics apply to our interactions towards human beings, so I think just making people aware of the fact that you can be a good person, whatever that means. You can have inclusive intentions, and values, and beliefs, but you still have bias. You still have to do work if you want to have unbiased interactions. I think keeping it in front of you is a big part of that. I know that when I am intentional about that that it changes how I interact with people and how I interact with information, just remembering that I don’t necessarily just see facts. I see interpretations. There’s no hatred or fear required for that. The only thing required for that is for me to be awake around other human beings. We are naturally and automatically judgmental, but we’ve really tied a lot of baggage to that idea of being judgmental.

In fact we are. We’re naturally judgmental. It’s probably one of the reasons we’ve survived this long as a species. I think just by keeping that in front of us and realizing that sometimes we’re making decisions about people based on what we think we know about them rather than what we know about them, helps reduce the impact of those biases. It relaxes our grip on the certainty that I know what kind of person this is just because I’ve seen a few things or a few behaviors. That alone, I think, is fairly powerful. I think that A, the impact that stereotypes have on a person can be reduced over time, and I think that stereotypes can change over time. I see just in my lifetime, I see stereotypes around gender and orientation, not that they’ve completely gone away, but they have faded drastically. You can just take a look at the way that people are portrayed on television and in movies today compared to thirty, or forty, or fifty years ago.

We were inundated with some very strong stereotypical messages about the role of women, for example. You see far less of that. I think that over time, stereotypes can modify and change. Maybe some go away, maybe some don’t. As I think I mentioned, I grew up in Northwest Iowa. I hear my parents talk about, they also grew up in Northwest Iowa, and how when they were growing up, whether you were dating a Protestant or a Catholic was a really big deal. That’s not a very big deal in almost anywhere in this country anymore, and that’s happened in their lifetime. I don’t think any of this stuff changes easily. I don’t think any of it changes quickly, but I do think it changes, and I think that if you want to, you can do some things to not necessarily carve bias out of your brain.

I think there’s a system in our brain that that’s kind of what it does. Its job is to jump to conclusions and make assumptions, but I think if you just keep that in front of you, we can do a much better job of making decisions and interacting with people based on real information instead of the stuff that we make up about each other, which I think is a pretty powerful dynamic.

John Sumser:

That’s interesting. You’ve written a book called “Social Gravity.” What’s that about?

Joe Gerstandt:

Yeah, so in addition to the work that I do, which is pretty much all focused on diversity, inclusion, a little bit on authenticity, I also do some work under the Talent Anarchy brand with Jason Lauritsen. We speak, and one of our messages and kind of our first big message was social gravity. After we’d been delivering that message for a while, we eventually sat down and wrote a book about it, but social gravity is really about the importance of relationships. It’s about the importance of relationships, and I think most people know that relationships are kind of important. We don’t spend a lot of time focusing on that aspect of it, but we unpack some network science and some things that make networks really powerful. We talk about the importance of diversity in the network, and we talk about social capital, and then the bulk of the book is focused on, “And here’s some things that you can do. If you want to have a bigger network, if you want to have a more robust network, here’s some things that you can do.”

That’s been a really popular message for us. We’ve delivered that to a lot of audiences, and I think it’s a nice combination of it’s a great message for you if you’re early in your career and are maybe focused on other things besides building your network, and it’s a great reminder of some things for some folks that are further along in their career that know it’s really important, but they’ve gotten really busy doing other stuff. Kind of the idea behind the title is just as physical gravity pulls physical objects in a certain direction, if you’re intentional about building and caring for your network, social gravity pulls ideas, and people, and opportunity to you. That was some of the first work that Jason and I did together. Early on in our careers, we both spent a lot of time building a network, and we were able to do some things and eventually wanted to share some of that message and some of those experiences with folks, so that’s what that book is about.

John Sumser:

Do the two worlds overlap, the sort of Talent Anarchy, which I take to be some ideas about the importance of social and network inside of organizations and then the inclusion and diversity stuff?  Do you blend those two? For instance, could you tell somebody how to think about building a more diverse network?

Joe Gerstandt:

Yeah, there is a little bit of overlap, and there’s actually a section in the “Social Gravity” book about the importance of diversity in your network. There is a little bit of overlap. The conversation around authenticity shows up in both of those bodies of work. There’s a little bit of diversity that shows up in both of those bodies of work, but there’s some things that are unique about it. The stuff that I do with Jason, the Talent Anarchy stuff, that’s primarily about the social gravity. We do some presentations and workshops around the idea of hacking. We do a hack lab experience, which I think you’ve been through. Then we also talk about … We help folks, especially HR folks, come to a better understanding about what innovation really is and how it really happens. There are some times when diversity and some of these other topics show up under that brand as well.

John Sumser:

Today, you’re headed well into 2016. What’s exciting for you? What are you seeing on the horizon?

Joe Gerstandt:

I am excited. I think for the first time in the past two or three years, I am feeling really excited about this work. It’s not because I think that we’ve done it or that we’re on the home stretch, but I think there are more people and more organizations that are actually serious about doing the work. There’s more people getting involved in this work, and they’re not just coming out of HR. They’re not just lifelong diversity practitioners, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I think it’s wonderful that we have more CEOs, and more folks coming out of finance, and more folks coming out of tech that are starting to pay attention and get involved in these issues. I think actually most of the work is in front of us. I think our communities and organizations have continued to get more diverse, but I think we’ve done almost nothing to actually build inclusive places and spaces. We haven’t been intentional about building inclusive work experience for employees.

I think that’s what a big chunk of the work that’s coming next is going to be, and I’m pretty excited about it. The narrative just grows. There’s an ongoing conversation about diversity in Silicon Valley. There’s an ongoing conversation about it in Hollywood and in Washington, D.C. I was thinking about this a couple days ago. The first time I spoke at South by Southwest, this was six, seven years ago, I would say. The first time I spoke there, I was on a panel that was specifically about diversity, and I think it was maybe the only thing on the agenda. As you know, that conference has a massive agenda. I think it was maybe the only thing on that agenda that was specifically about diversity. It was either the only thing or one of a few things. The last time I spoke at South by Southwest, it was just either last year or the year before, there was a whole bunch of sessions on that agenda that were specifically about diversity.

I saw several presentations and workshops that weren’t specifically about diversity inclusion, but those topics came up. I think there’s, the community of people that are actively involved is growing. I think there’s new science and there’s new research that’s coming into this work. I feel hopeful because I feel a change in the momentum and the progress of this work.

John Sumser:

That’s interesting. Tell me a little bit about an inclusive work experience and what you mean by that. If that’s where the work is, what’s that look like?

Joe Gerstandt:

From my perspective, that has to be grounded in what it means to be included as a human being. I was never technically an HR practitioner, but I’ve spent a lot of time in and around that body of work. One of the things that’s always been kind of frustrating to me about that body of work, and the management and leadership body of work, is that it’s oftentimes not rooted in anything that’s fundamentally human. I think that we continue to be surprised by very human tendencies. I talk to organizations, and they continue to be surprised by the fact that they’ve got silo problems, or that they’ve got people that dominate meetings, and these are I think very basic human social tendencies. I don’t understand why we’re not bringing that understanding and that knowledge into the workplace so that we can design things a little bit differently.

When I talk about the inclusive employee experience, that starts with an understanding of what it means and what it feels like to be included. That’s where we start. Before we talk about anything regarding the organization, what does it mean and feel like and require for me to feel like I’m included? What kinds of things do I have access to? What do I see? What do I hear? How do I interact with people? Once an organization builds that kind of framework, then you can work back from there, and you can say, “Well, what kinds of behaviors and practices generate this experience?” That’s where I start. I start at the very root level when I’m talking about experience. I see more people talking about employee experience. I see people talking about candidate experience, but it’s almost always about processes and practices. It’s never really grounded in anything uniquely human. I think you’ve got to look to anthropology, and sociology, and psychology, and social psychology, and glean from that what some of the basic requirements for human beings are, and then you start to build out from there. That’s, at least, the approach that I take.

John Sumser:

I wish we had a day because I would love to ask you two questions. We’ll do you this the next time. The two questions would be I’d be fascinated to hear you talk about being a dominant person in meetings, which you are by profession, teaching people about meetings, about the trouble with having dominant people in meetings or people who dominate the air space in a meeting. That must be a wonderful irony in your life.

Joe Gerstandt:

I’m not a dominant person in meetings. If I’m presenting, I play a different role, but I’m not a meeting person in general, but I’m not a very dominant person in meetings. The problem isn’t the dominant person. I’m not saying that. The problem is the way that we design meetings. We continue to be frustrated by the fact that one or two people out of eight dominate the conversation. It’s a pretty simple thing to fix. We just change the rules of the meeting, but organizations on top of organizations on top of organizations fail to do that, and they continue to be surprised by the outcome. I think it’s a pretty simple thing to fix. I’ve helped lots of teams fix that. I think designing the employee experience, a team meeting is a wonderful place to look at and design differently, because basic understanding of human nature tells you what kinds of things are going to consistently happen.

For example, one or two people are going to dominate that conversation. If you don’t want that to happen, if that’s not for you an optimal outcome, if you don’t think that’s a good way to have meetings, then you have to put different kind of practices in place that don’t allow for that. I think meetings is a nice tangible chunk of work that you can look at and very simply design in a different way for different outcomes. I just see for some reason we have a hard time doing that, and we continue to be surprised by the fact that we’ve got a couple people that dominate the conversation. We’ve got some people who don’t say anything at all. We’ve got silo issues, and we’ve got conflict, and we keep being surprised by things that are just innately human. They just happen everywhere that human beings are together.

For some reason, that understanding of human nature, that human science doesn’t seem to be showing up in the professions that claim to be about human beings. I’m confused by that, but maybe there’s something that I’m missing. I try to root my work in that. If we’re going to design things, if we’re going to hire people, and train people, and lead people, we should be first and foremost experts in human beings, and I just don’t see that.

John Sumser:

Yeah, well there’s a world of things that we could do with this conversation, Joe. It’s always extraordinary to talk to you. You raise a number of fascinating questions. I frankly haven’t personally considered the questions that there could be other ways and an inventory of possible outcomes that you could discuss in advance of having meetings on a human and internal political level. That’s a really interesting idea. That’s a really interesting idea. That tends to be a very hard conversation to have. It’ll be good to remember that. It’ll be good to remember that. In the next couple of months, where are you going to be? This is the part of the show where you say, “Come out and see me at the Iowa State Fair.”

Joe Gerstandt:

Yeah, I would love for you to see me at the Iowa State Fair. I’m not booked to visit there any time soon. I don’t know that I have a lot of conferences the next couple of months. I’ve got trips to Rochester and Chicago. I’m doing the opening keynote at the Atlanta SHRM meeting that’s coming up in March. That’s March 29th. Jason and I did the opening keynote there a couple of years ago. That’s a great audience and a great room. I’m very much looking forward to that, seeing some of the SHRM folks in Atlanta. For conferences, I don’t think other than that I have have anything booked until a little bit later in the year. I’ll be back at SHRM Annual this year. This will be my sixth consecutive trip there. I like speaking at that conference. That’s a pretty good opportunity to connect with folks as well.

John Sumser:

What are a couple things you’d like the audience to take away from this conversation?

Joe Gerstandt:

I’m not sure. We’ve gone in a few different directions, but I think regarding the core body of work, I think one of the greatest challenges to diversity inclusion work isn’t necessarily the resistance that it faces, and there is some real resistance. This is still a body of work that provokes implicit and explicit threats today, but I think even more so than that resistance, these are concepts that are just horribly misunderstood, poorly understood by individuals and organizations. If you’re convinced that this work doesn’t have anything to do with you or it’s not relevant to your organization, I would just push back on that a little bit and dig a little bit further into it. Start by just getting some real clarity, at least for you and your perspective around what those words mean. You and I were talking about this. I think one of the things that makes it hard for us to have actionable conversations about diversity is that the word means something different to everyone.

I think in my experience, putting together a common language for folks makes those conversations much more meaningful and actionable. Maybe put aside some of your assumptions about what you think the work is about and reconsider it, and take a look at some of the work that’s being done. That’s, I think, one of the things that I would leave folks with. I’m pretty easy to find online. If there’s anything that I can do to help with that, or if anyone’s interested in having a conversation with me about that, I’m happy to do that. I think one of the most important things that I do is to try to help people find a new clarity regarding this body of work. Again, I think A, it’s really in its infancy, and it’s commonly misunderstood and poorly understood.

John Sumser:

What’s a good way for people to get a hold of you?

Joe Gerstandt:

Probably the best way is to go to my website, joegerstandt.com, J-O-E G-E-R-S-T-A-N-D-T .com. I’m on Twitter, and I’m on Facebook and Instagram and all of the places. I’ve got a unique enough last name that if you just type Joe Gerstandt into Google, you’ll have a whole bunch of places and ways to find me. I think I’m pretty easy to find. Like I said, if there’s anything that I can do to be helpful, I’m an email, or a phone call, or a Tweet away.

John Sumser:

Fantastic, so we’ve been talking with Joe Gerstandt, who’s a highly renowned diversity and inclusive consultant. Thanks for taking the time to be here, Joe.

Joe Gerstandt:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

John Sumser:

Yeah. You’ve been listening to HR Examiner Radio. We’re coming to you from now slightly lit up downtown Emeryville, California. I hope you have a great day. Thanks so much for being with us. Take it easy.

End transcript

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