This week Jean interviews Dr. Myrtle Bell, author of Diversity in Organizations. Dr. Bell talks about the value of diversity, the resistance to it, and how to overcome the resistance without the use of quotas.

She says, “I really believe that people don't know what they don't know,” and “sometimes empowerment is just being able to decide not to do something; that means you're strong enough to say, I'm not doing this.”

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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

The ability to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lead consciously⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ can open your eyes.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jean Latting⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.

Lisa Fain is the head of the Center for Mentoring Excellence. She spoke with Jean about the growth potential for mentors and mentees when they truly speak with, listen to, and respect each other’s personhood.

Nobody owns difference. Everybody owns difference.

Lisa says: "Relationships involve getting to know one another. It involves real curiosity. Seeing you as a human being with whom I want to have a relationship, that starts to create some accountability for change and that gets super exciting."

People think the mentor's job is to be the sage on the stage. A good mentor is a guide on the side.

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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

The ability to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lead consciously⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ can open your eyes.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jean Latting⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.

Hamza Khan’s book, Leadership Reinvented, offers a roadmap to productivity, resilience, and constant change. In this podcast, he and Jean Latting engage in an animated conversation about leadership, resilience, belonging, and burnout.

He speaks of his own experience.

He offers much to contemplate, including his own experience as a Muslim erroneously placed on the do-not-fly list. Ironically, as an entrepreneur with 2 million views of his TED talk, his clients included Homeland Security and the Canadian Air Force.

I consider myself fortunate that I found a very accessible keyhole issue with which to explore systemic oppression: occupational burnout.
What are the system level reasons why I burned out? Sure enough, a lack of fairness in the workplace, unsustainable workload, insufficient uncommunicated values, insufficient reward, lack of control, poor/toxic community.
Fundamentally, what's at the heart of broken systems of systemic oppression? It's people who are propping up the status quo. And the status quo isn't the avoidance of a decision. It's a continuous past decision.
We eventually arrive at the dark core of personality, which is human beings' hardwired capacity to accept, neglect, or provoke the disutility of others, in order to maximize their own utility.

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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

The ability to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lead consciously⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ can open your eyes.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jean Latting⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.

This week Jean interviews Amri Johnson, CEO of Inclusion Wins, "a global cooperative of product and service providers focused on people-related solutions for organizations of all sizes." He is the author of Reconstructing Inclusion: Making DEI Accessible, Actionable, and Sustainable. Amri Johnson has a few provocative things to say about the current state of efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. "Contact theory basically said, when you bring people together as equals, and I'm not talking about economically, but as under the Constitution equals, and you bring them together to solve a common problem or to address a common goal, and you give them time, and so you have them connect with each other over time, and you have some sort of institutional support, prejudice gets reduced significantly.

"And that research, along with many hundreds of psychologists telling the courts that segregation harmed Black and White kids, it wasn't just about harming the Black kids. They came together around it, and that science was the other piece to go beyond the moral abhorrence of segregation, and separate but equal. "And so what we did, where we had the opportunity to actually create more contact, we didn't solidify the contact, we just kept hammering at what White people are doing wrong, kind of collectively, and I think it took us from the potential for something transformational to something that was reductionist and, you know, it was getting major blowback." He also has much to say about the importance of dialogue, acceptance of personal responsibility, and the need to get out of the victim mentality.

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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

The ability to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lead consciously⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ can open your eyes.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jean Latting⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.

Who are you? And how do you want to be known? One can be Black, male, heterosexual, cis-gendered, liberal, college graduate, athletic, married. Which matters to you? Which will cause you to be judged by others who don’t know you? What would your DNA test think you are? How do you self-identify? Our identities affect our allyship with those who are being marginalized because of one or more of their identities. What would cause you to stand up on their behalf? Watch or read Jean’s interview with Bärí Williams, lawyer, tech expert, and author of Diversity in the Workplace: Eye-opening Interviews to jumpstart conversations about Identity, privilege, and Bias.

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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective.  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

The ability to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lead consciously⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ can open your eyes.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jean Latting⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.

Speak up! But how? "You don’t know my boss." Daniel Oestreich knows the dilemma well: he coaches people and groups on how to speak their truth with dignity and curiosity. Dan says: "The word I like these days is dignity, that we should be treating each other in a way that reinforces dignity of whoever you are." What does dignity look like? And what are the temptations that take us away from dignity in our relationship building work? Dan lists 10 characterizations of dignity, including identity, inclusion, and safety, that are paramount in being able to speak your truth; he draws from a book by Donna Hicks, who worked on reconciliation with Desmond Tutu (author; Dignity: Its essential role in resolving conflict).

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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective.  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

The ability to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lead consciously⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ can open your eyes.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jean Latting⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.

If you lived close to the equator, how might your skin color protect you from harmful radiation? And if you lived far from the equator, would this protection be as critical? 

What about Vitamin D? How might your closeness to the equator and the lightness or darkness of your skin affect how much you are able to absorb?

Nina Jablonski proposes these two factors – susceptibility to harmful radiation and absorption of Vitamin D – as the simple explanation for why people have different skin colors, a product of evolutionary adaptation.

Leonard Jeffries Jr, former chair of CUNY’s Black Studies Department in the 1990s, referred to Blacks as “sun people” and Whites as “ice people.”

He said many other things that were deemed a lot more inflammatory, getting fired from his position as a result, AND he was correct in this statement.

Interesting tidbit: his nephew Hakeem Jeffries is a US Congressman and Democratic minority leader.

So why is there so much value judgment on skin color? That’s a harder question, taking us into the historical evolution of the slave trade and emerging science of epigenetics.

Watch this week's interview for some fascinating observations.

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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective.  ⁠⁠⁠⁠Join us⁠⁠⁠⁠.

The ability to ⁠⁠⁠⁠lead consciously⁠⁠⁠⁠ can open your eyes.

⁠⁠⁠⁠Jean Latting⁠⁠⁠⁠ is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.

This is a remarkable podcast with a remarkable woman. Dr. Menah Pratt-Clarke is Vice President for Strategic Affairs and Diversity at Virginia Tech. Her parents earned PhDs in the 1960s and had to navigate racism and sexism in academia.

Dr. Pratt learned how to follow the whisper of the spirit, work within and without the system, address racism and sexism head-on, and promote impactful diversity initiatives.

In the podcast, she tells how she did it.

And how she manages to live a life with no regrets.

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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective.  ⁠⁠⁠Join us⁠⁠⁠.

The ability to ⁠⁠⁠lead consciously⁠⁠⁠ can open your eyes.

⁠⁠⁠Jean Latting⁠⁠⁠ is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.