S2 E1: Jarvis Sam on Cultivating Inclusion Amid Polarization
In the season two premiere of The Culture Kit, hosts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava tackle the complex question of how to create a culture of inclusion and belonging in the face of growing polarization in the workplace and society at large.
To help answer this question, Jenny and Sameer turn to DEI expert Jarvis Sam. Jarvis is the CEO and founder of the strategy firm, Rainbow Disruption, which advises organizations on developing practical solutions that champion DEI in the workplace. Before that, Jarvis was the Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer at Nike, where he spearheaded initiatives to enhance diverse representation and foster inclusive leadership. He also led organizational efforts around DEI with athletes like Serena Williams and Lebron James, as well as leagues like the WNBA and NFL.
Jenny, Sameer, and Jarvis discuss what an inclusive culture really means, go over actionable steps leaders can take to create and manage a culture of inclusion and belonging, and address some of the biggest myths and misconceptions surrounding DEI.
Three main takeaways from Jenny & Sameer’s interview with Jarvis Sam:
- Know your “why”: Organizations need to ask, “Why are we doing this work from the very beginning? And how does that link to key actions that we may have taken previously?
- Comprehensive integration is key: Inclusion can’t be an add-on. It should be a key attribute in every area of the organization including talent acquisition, management, and succession planning.
- DEI Is not just for underrepresented communities: Inclusive cultures are ones where every team member feels that they can show up as their truest selves.
Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!”
*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*
Transcript
[00:00:00] Sameer: From Berkeley Haas and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation, this is The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer.
[00:00:09] Jenny: I’m Jenny Chatman.
[00:00:10] Sameer: And I’m Sameer Srivastava.
[00:00:13] Jenny: We’re professors at the Haas School of Business. On this podcast, we’ll answer your questions about workplace culture.
[00:00:20] Sameer: We’ll give you practical advice that you can put to work right away.
[00:00:24] Jenny: Join us to start building your culture toolkit.
Hey, Sameer. Welcome back to our second season.
[00:00:31] Sameer: Hey, Jenny. It’s great to be back. So, what’s our question for today?
[00:00:35] Jenny: Well, we have a really big question. It is, how can you manage a culture of inclusion and belonging in the face of growing polarization in the workplace and in society at large?
[00:00:48] Sameer: Oh, a really, really easy one this week.
[00:00:51] Jenny: We wanted to start easy. That’s right. But this is on leaders’ minds everywhere. In a recent episode, you remember, we shared an interview that we did with pioneering Harvard Business School professor, Amy Edmondson, that went into some depth on why psychological safety matters in organizations. Psychological safety is definitely part of the puzzle of inclusion. Steve Brass, who was also on that episode, and is the CEO of WD-40, talked about the culture of belonging he’s fostered across his global organization.
[00:01:24] Sameer: Well, and today, we’re joined by another special guest, someone with a lot of hands-on practice in navigating today’s challenges and in advising leaders. Jarvis Sam is former Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer at Nike, where he spearheaded initiatives to enhance diverse representation and foster inclusive leadership. He also led organizational efforts around DEI with athletes like Serena Williams and LeBron James, as well as leagues like the WNBA and the NFL.
Jarvis has also held DEI roles at Snap and Google.
Welcome, Jarvis.
[00:02:01] Jarvis: Thanks so much, Sameer and Jenny.
[00:02:03] Sameer: Two years ago, Jarvis launched the strategy firm, Rainbow Disruption, which advises organizations on developing practical solutions that champion DEI in the workplace. And he’s also joined the professional faculty here at Berkeley Haas as a lecturer, co-teaching a course on business communications in diverse environments, a really important course in our curriculum. And he’s also been, of course—Jenny you remember— a featured speaker at our annual Culture Connect Conference.
[00:02:31] Jarvis: It’s so great to be back. It’s been a while since we connected.
[00:02:34] Jenny: It’s so great to have you here, Jarvis. And I know the class you’ve taught here has been such an incredible success, a really difficult topic to teach. So, we’re really grateful to you and know a lot about your deep expertise in this. So, I’m really excited about the conversation.
We always like to start with definitions. And so, if you could help us by defining what we mean by inclusion. It’s a term that’s been thrown around a lot, and I’m interested to know what it means to you.
[00:03:03] Jarvis: Yeah, it’s a big term these days. You’re noticing across Fortune 500 organizations, nonprofits, the startup world, and in governmental spaces, we’re seeing the term, “inclusion,” utilized in so many different ways and spaces. And for different organizations, it does mean different things. But the grounding approach that I use to describe inclusion, it’s how we create, put into actions and behaviors, experiences where we maximize or celebrate the rich diversity of our organizations.
Oftentimes, organizations will position the term “diversity” to only mean holders of certain types of identities. But for me, diversity really centers around this amalgamation of the various differences, perspectives, and experiences of which people hold. The inclusive culture is one where people don’t feel that they have to tone down, shield, or hide any elements of those beautiful dimensions of diversity, but rather where they’re illuminated. A space wherein leader behavior doesn’t just seek to tolerate those experiences of identity, but truly celebrates them, and where people can find and discover their truest selves within workplaces by understanding the impact that their identities have on the driving of things like corporate and business strategy and the operating goals of the company.
[00:04:11] Sameer: Super helpful, Jarvis. We’re also seeing these days a little bit of backlash against the terms, “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” So, I want to ask you if you can say a little bit more about what you see as the benefits of building an inclusive culture. And what do we lose when we don’t have one?
[00:04:25] Jarvis: High-performing teams are only successful where psychologically safe environments have been created. Organizations simply develop better products when they have diverse teams and diverse leaders, because you’re able to design and develop products that are coming from authentic spaces, where the idea of customer or consumer needs is not just rooted in a couple of surveys or panels that we’ve done, but rather where you have folks who are from and of communities brilliantly working on the products that ultimately go out to our consumers every single day.
[00:04:58] Jenny: Yeah, that’s so true. We know that encouraging diversity and establishing and cultivating a sense of inclusion is hard enough, but it’s also true that things are even harder right now because we seem to be in a period of extreme polarization. And so, I’m wondering, you know, what are some of the challenges you’re seeing when organizations face trying to maintain a culture of inclusion during times where there is such social and political polarization? We would be really interested in examples of what you’re seeing and how you’re addressing that.
[00:05:36] Jarvis: Yeah, absolutely, Jenny. You know, one of the biggest challenges that organizations face right now is, as we operate in deeply politically and socially polarized environments, how do you maintain a space where all voices feel heard, where they have a platform for conversation and where people can engage?
The unfortunate reality is, one of the common challenges is that organizations feel this pressure to pick a side on deeply polarizing issues. For many years, we were often told that topics like race, gender, human sexuality, geopolitical crisis, and challenges had no place in the workplace. What’s more, topics like politics, we’ve often said, don’t belong at work or even at our own dinner tables. And yet, now we exist in a world where politics is everywhere around us, where the separation between the social and the political is almost impossible.
Following the murder of George Floyd and the movement for Black Lives, employees are now increasingly demanding organizations to take a stand. For them, and we see a lot of research around Gen Z’s perspective on expectations of employers, there is a desire for organizations to say, “What side are you on? Who do you support in this regard? And what does your impact in terms of investment or contribution look like? And how do you support it? Are you going to develop a framework of sorts that can feel incredibly unnatural and inauthentic to the communities that you’re serving? And how are you going to show up in terms of public cost support for both your consumers who identify as part of that population, as well as your vast and growing employee base that supports this work?”
What I often tell these organizations, it is critical that you go back and ask your why. Why are we doing this work from the very beginning? And how does that link to key actions that we may have taken previously in our need or desire? Not to necessarily reduce polarization, because polarization itself is not bad, but our response in the face of polarization is incredibly telling for our many stakeholders that align themselves to our business every day.
[00:07:31] Sameer: So, Jarvis, it sounds like your point of view is that a business leader, an organizational leader can’t avoid these controversial topics. They have to engage with them because their employees demand it. So, what advice would you have for a business leader about how to actually navigate these topics without alienating some subgroup that is not happy with the stance that they’ve taken?
[00:07:53] Jarvis: Yeah, you know, I’m glad that we mentioned, Sameer, at the top of the call, the amazing work by Dr. Amy Edmondson. You know, psychological safety is so critical in this space. The work that she did with Google in their rework study in 2016 continues to identify psychological safety as the number one differentiating factor for teams when attempting to foster high performance in the workplace.
And so, the first piece of advice is 32leaders have to understand their own journey towards psychological safety. The way that we get there is really threefold. One, these leaders understanding their own journey toward vulnerability. Are you comfortable talking about these so-called underdiscussed or undiscussed topics at work to create platforms for people?
And I get it. One of the big detractors in leaders’ ability to have these conversations is the fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. Cancel culture is very real. And so, leaders would rather create space and not talk about them at all. However, in silence, it mitigates point number two that’s helpful. Leaders’ ability and need to actively listen to their teams around them.
When we see these big social movements arise or tragic or traumatic moments that communities experience, we can’t simply return back to work and say, “Business as usual.” On May 26, 2020, communities around the world were reeling from the impact of George Floyd’s murder, but specifically for Black employees and Black teammates in organizations. Their experience was so challenging, particularly because we were all navigating a global pandemic. To have video footage of the experience, leaders needed to take the time and create space for these teammates to understand, what does the future of work or the future of doing business amidst social polarization look like?
What’s more, though, three, they have to make inclusion a lived practice by setting clear expectations and holding themselves and their peers accountable. For so many organizations, navigating polarization becomes either an afterthought or an add-on. The number of listening sessions that my firm has done, for example, amidst current geopolitical polarization are numerous. And the number one issue with this approach is that leaders and organizations will do the listening session and then move along from the conversation, hoping that teammates feel satiated enough for this to no longer be an issue.
However, it will continue to come up again and again if accountability, regular feedback for forums for people to highlight their perspective without fear of retaliation is not built into the system or approach with which we’ve developed.
[00:10:21] Jenny: That’s so interesting, Jarvis. So, say you’re a leader, you’ve answered your why, you’ve acknowledged that you’re going to feel vulnerable, you’re ready to commit, what are some very specific steps that leaders could take to create an environment where inclusion is prioritized as a core value?
[00:10:40] Jarvis: First and foremost, integrate it into everything that we do as an organization. So, a lot of leaders engage in various different approaches that touch the talent life cycle. Whether it’s the hiring, attraction, and engagement of talent, promotion, advancement, and development of talent, or general performance management of talent through things like succession planning, inclusion has to be a key attribute in every one of those spaces. For many organizations, inclusion is a bolt on, but for organizations that are highly successful in this regard, they build it as an embedded approach within their work. For example, during my time at Nike, when we focused on what inclusive approaches to recruitment look like, we took the time to audit our end-to-end recruitment process. Literally, from the first moment we say hello to talent, through various talent attraction approaches, to the interview process, who’s seeing our job descriptions, how they interact with it, how are questions being asked of talent? Are we consistent in our navigation and mitigation of bias with that talent? All the way through approaches to succession planning. How can we create and invest in future talent to ensure that they are ready when future career opportunities come up?
[00:11:47] Sameer: Super helpful framework you’re talking about here, Jarvis, but I wonder if you can give us one concrete example of how you embedded inclusion into everything that an organization was doing or into many of the systems and practices.
[00:11:59] Jarvis: You know, one of the most exciting pieces that come to mind for me is, actually, some of the work that we did at Nike in the supplier diversity space. You know, Nike is an organization that has, for many years, had a really strong procurement practice and approach. At the time, when I was there, a nearly 60,000-person company operating across corporate teammates, manufacturing, distribution center and retail. In all of those different spaces, obviously, there’s a number of partners within the marketplace and suppliers that support the continued operations of the business.
But when you start to look at how much of that supplier spend is actually going to women-owned businesses, Black or BIPOC-owned businesses, military veteran-owned businesses, or businesses owned by people with disabilities, you quickly start to see that, amidst all of the amazing work that you may do to change the representation of your employee population, the actual socioeconomics of how your business is contributing to the macroeconomic environment of these communities is sometimes missing.
We realize, whether you’re talking about the venture space, how underrepresented communities continue to be underfunded, and the supplier space as well, underrepresented communities do not get big contracts, oftentimes, because we’re not in the rooms or integrated into the programs and practice.
And so, several folks that were part of my team at the time actually developed an academy that brought together underrepresented suppliers, gave them insight into how Nike’s supplier approach works, so that, as they’re doing or responding to RFPs, as they’re thinking about contracting and negotiations, they have the tools and resources that are necessary.
Now, the impact, Sameer. In 2020, we set a goal that, over a five-year period, by 2025, that Nike would achieve $1 billion in supplier spend. Well, I left Nike about two years ago, and we had actually achieved and exceeded that total by 2022. Now, the company’s on an amazing trajectory, as outlined in its impact report, to continue to move toward understanding, what would $1 billion a year look like, as opposed to a five-year trajectory.
So, that’s one, just, clear impact example of what happens when we focus on integration investment and do this work right.
[00:14:04] Jenny: Wow, that’s so impressive. And using that, kind of, precise diagnostic approach seems like it really yielded some huge impact. Wow. I mean, one question I have that I think you’re perfectly positioned to answer is, what are the biggest misconceptions about DEI, and inclusion, specifically? And what advice would you have for handling the kind of resistance that comes up when you’re trying to embark on these pathways? What do you do when people are hesitant to embrace an inclusive culture?
[00:14:38] Jarvis: Yeah, I love this, Jenny. There’s a few that come to mind. I think one of the first misconceptions is that DEI is only work to support, elevate, or amplify experiences of underrepresented communities. You know, as I highlighted earlier in the call, diversity, really, is that combination of all of our different unique perspectives and experiences, which includes that of cisgendered, straight, white men.
I will highlight that, in some organizations around the world, truly, their approach to DEI has created a dichotomy of “us versus them,” where cis straight white men don’t feel a part of the conversation or narrative.
Creating inclusive cultures that obsess belonging requires us to ensure that every teammate within the organization feels that they can show up their truest selves at work. To do that, Jenny, we often leverage some of the very powerful research from Dr. Kenji Yoshino and Deloitte in 2018 on identity covering, where the research was so incredible in that it showcased that about 45% of straight white men, according to their research studies, also cover elements of their identity at work.
This is such a necessary paradigm shift in our understanding of the way in which we elevate and amplify all voices at work. And so, debunking that myth that this is only in support of one group or one population is necessary toward challenging even some of the current rhetoric attacking DEI.
The second is this, though, that the work is a zero-sum game. For many organizations, they moved very quickly in response to George Floyd’s murder in leveraging DEI programs to be their resolve for some of that. And so, by the time we started to see all of these other social movements arise in 2021 to present, they were focused on, “Well, how do we do this for this community? Must we imitate or emulate that for the next community,” so on and so forth.
What that created, though, is a zeitgeist that this is a zero-sum game, that, for one population to win, the other literally needed to be denied either access or take a smaller piece of the pie to be successful. That is a massive myth, Jenny, because it assumes that one population can exist in normalcy in how they navigate or impact spaces, while others then have to fight for scraps simply to grow or elevate within the organization.
And so, I spend a lot of time debunking that myth by helping organizations understand through things like strategic workforce planning, where and how we can build inclusive models to support succession planning so that that zero-sum game approach doesn’t happen.
But the final myth that I want to highlight that I think oftentimes comes up in the world of diversity, equity, and inclusion is that investments in the programs just don’t work. I challenge that all the time, because while some organizations have not seen the progress that they desire, we have to question the setup, strategy, and structure of the approach that they build. For many of these companies, their approach has been so deeply programmatic in nature that that’s why it hasn’t worked. They’ve built programs, they’ve done pilots, but they’ve never actually attached approaches to it that enable us to measure and monitor the impact and that considered scale of the work.
[00:17:37] Sameer: So, Jarvis, that’s a great setup for the very last question we have for you, which has to do with a theme that comes up a lot in our podcast. And that relates to the measurement of culture, because we know we can’t manage something if we don’t measure it properly. What do you think are some of the best indicators of a culture of inclusion? And what are the new ideas that are emerging in practice for how to actually measure it going beyond even traditional survey type instruments?
[00:18:04] Jarvis: Surveys and pulse checks have historically been the way in which we measure inclusion. Things like employee engagement surveys, culture pulse surveys, culture-specific surveys about particular communities, and then cutting or disaggregating that data to understand if there’s a differentiated experience for certain communities versus others.
However, what more organizations should do is leverage psychological safety metrics. There are a ton of new assessments that have arisen based off of a lot of Edmondson’s work that question insights around safety and taking risks, the ability to speak up, or employees’ ability to be their authentic selves. That, paired with more qualitative approaches like focus groups.
Because understanding and confidence that things like engagement surveys are truly confidential remain at an all-time low for a lot of organizations.
But furthermore, things like behavioral metrics and looking at things like turnover and retention rates, leveraging exit interviews to give us more insight into experiences there. Things like internal mobility. How often is the organization moving talent around in ways that focus on advancement and development?
But finally, some of the more cutting-edge approaches that I’ve seen happen that a lot of organizations aren’t yet using, but things like cultural artifacts as signals can go a long way. Doing language analysis on communication. Take a look at the way in which people from different cultures communicate via email, slack, meetings, understanding, do we use inclusive language? Are we operating through the lens of competition or collaboration? These tend to be really great tools and resources that help give us signals in how we move toward assessing, is inclusion working or not?
[00:19:41] Jenny: Wow, Jarvis, I knew that this was going to be a high wattage and deeply informative conversation today. And you do not disappoint. I want to thank you for your incredible insights and expertise. And really, thank you for joining us.
[00:19:56] Sameer: Thank you Jarvis. That was great.
[00:19:59] Jarvis: Thanks so much, Jenny and Sameer. It is my pleasure.
[00:20:03] Jenny: Thanks for listening to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer. Do you have a vexing question about work that you want us to answer? Go to haas.org/culture-kit to submit your fix-it ticket today.
[00:20:17] Sameer: The Culture Kit Podcast is a production of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at the Haas School of Business, and it’s produced by University FM. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to hit that Subscribe button, leave us a review, and share this episode online, so others who have workplace culture questions can find us, too.
[00:20:37] Jenny: I’m Jenny.
[00:20:38] Sameer: And I’m Sameer.
[00:20:39] Jenny: We’ll be back soon with more tools to help fix your work culture challenges.
