For everyone that's watching and everyone that's tuning in, thank you so much. I'm super excited to be here.And, as you heard, Shelley being introduced, you heard decades of experience. And Shelley and I were talking talking a bit about her book. And so, she and I both have decades of experience that we've turned into books, and I'm gonna try and take the decades of experience that turned into a couple 100 of pages of a book and now turn a couple of those 100 pages of a book into about fifteen minutes of conversation.

And so I'll reduce a little bit of some things and move kind of quickly, but hopefully give you the real essence of this discussion, the essence of this conversation, and some really kind of practical things that you can take away as you think about returning to your organization and things that you can do to make sure that you're turning inclusion into a competitive advantage inside your organization.

And so one of the biggest challenges that I hear often from folks is I'm too busy. Our business is too busy. There's too much going on. There's a lot happening. I don't have the time to focus on the things that I know are probably right, and yet in reality, they just seem almost secondary to running the business. And I think strongly believe that when we're doing this right, you're really weaving these things together, that it's not about inclusion and psychological safety and supporting folks or performance and revenue and profits. It's marrying those that when we take care of our employees, when we do the right thing, when we create the right culture, we are ultimately creating a performance driven culture as well. Because most of us show up to work and want to succeed and want to see the business succeed and want to thrive and want to do well.

And so part of what we'll talk about is how do you marry those things together. The other thing that tends to come up is that there are a lot of different things that you can try. A lot of these different widgets, a lot of different kind of gears. So how do you know which are the gears that you can fit together the most effectively and the most simply in order to drive the engine of the organization? How does inclusion fit with these other pieces in order to be able to really create that high performance culture and high performance machine? And I will break this down as I did in the book into really four key elements, and we'll talk about those elements to a bit, and really kinda understand what they mean and how they fit together.

And those four that we're going to pull apart, I come from a consulting background and have been in business for long enough that I love a good acronym. And so a b c s, the a b c's almost, if you will, break down into awareness, behaviors, community, and systems. And I'll talk to you about what each of those are, how they fit together, what they mean, what does it look like when organizations and individual leaders and individual contributors get it really right, and, conversely, what does it look like when maybe we're moving too quickly or getting some things a little bit wrong?

Not maliciously, but simply because we're not slowing down to pay attention and not slowing down for the sake of slowing down, but slowing down really to speed up, to really amplify and accelerate the course of the business. And so, I will break it down into each one of these. And so for example, I'll talk to you about each of the pillars that awareness, behaviors, community, and systems. And then I'll talk to you a little bit about what I call the eroding actions. So what are some of the things that you might commonly see done in an organization that are pulling back from this particular pillar that are making it more difficult for that thing to exist or to be really, successfully implemented in the in the company? And then what are some of the supporting actions? What are the things that you should be doing more of?

So if we're doing less of the things that we should be doing less of and more of the things that we should be doing more of, then what we find is that inclusion goes up, experience goes up, and ultimately the performance of the organization goes up as well. And that's what we're talking about when we say getting away from the buzzwords and getting away from some of the kind of more theory into the real practice of what does this look like. Because in a lot of ways, inclusion is action. Right? It requires intention. It requires moving things forward. It is not just the absence of exclusion. A good culture is not just the absence of a bad culture. It is truly moving and driving the organization to a point where it's performing and the people are benefiting and those things are creating this real, symbiotic relationship and virtuous cycle that they're feeding one another. The experience of the employees is feeding the performance of the organization, which is feeding the experience of the employees.

And I've had the fortune of seeing this done in many organizations, and the misfortune of seeing it when it's not done in organizations. And, hopefully, you're in one of the ones where it's being done really well and what you wanna do is go from good to great. So let's talk a little bit about how we get there. So one of the questions that I would ask as we think about awareness is how confident are you that you understand the problem that you're seeking to solve? And so in far too many instances, how do I continue to challenge some of those preconceived notions to make sure that I'm really being deliberate about what I'm learning, what I think I know, and before I'm taking action to ensure that the action that I'm taking is appropriate for the problem that I'm trying to solve.

And so some of the eroding actions that we may see, again, towards the top of this when we think about awareness, awareness is all about making sure that we understand the scope of the problem, making sure that we really understand what do we mean when we're talking about inclusion, What is the how are we confident that we don't yet have that?

Where in the organization might we be struggling with this? How are we going to move it forward? But before we move it forward, how do we make sure that we've got the full shape of the challenge and the problem that we have? And so I won't go super deep into each of these in the, kind of interest of time. But when we think about overconfidence or asking leading questions as opposed to really asking deep questions or open ended questions, when When we think about going to the same resources over and over again, even if they may not be the most appropriate resources for the challenge that we're trying to fix today.

So you may have heard the Abraham Maslow quote, when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. You can probably also think about leaders that continue to go back to the same resources that they did five or ten or fifteen years ago or maybe are trying to apply the same resource in a lot of different ways when that resource is no longer appropriate. But if we think about the supporting actions, the things that really drive greater awareness for us as individuals and for our teams and for our company, it's forgetting what you may think you know. Right? Taking that step back and really asking questions and interrogating ourselves to say, is what I think is true really true? Is that really what I'm seeing? How can I bring in other perspectives? And that goes back to the value of diverse teams. Right? How can I see this through the lens of some other people to help me get the full context of what's going on?

And then doing our research to make sure that we're not exhausting every resource out there, but that we are looking beyond the simple things. And so there are lots of wonderful podcasts and articles and research and materials and subject matter experts inside and outside of our organization that if we just expand that aperture a little bit, we tend to find that there are resources that we can explore that we weren't even thinking about previously.

So let's imagine we have the awareness down right. Right? We we we understand the nature of the issue. We've asked our questions. We've gone really deep. We've done our research. One of the next things that we wanna understand is what are the specific behaviors that you expect to see and hear that are going to help to resolve the problem that we've identified. And I will tell you that this is the thing that I feel like so many organizations don't quite get right because we identify the challenge and then we just say, be more inclusive. And quite honestly, if folks knew how to do that, we'd probably already be doing it. Right? Or what happens is we just take what we've been doing and dial that up even more.

And so that's where we find people that just send out emails with more people on copy or invite more people to meetings that are happening. And that's not what we're discussing. Right? What we're saying is how can we be really surgical and really precise and really deliberate? And so what are some of the actions that tend to put us in the wrong direction? When we're talking about behaviors, they can be things like being too general. So we're not specific. They're not things that you can genuinely see or hear. So we're not saying, well, during this meeting, we wanna do this type of thing. Or when we're giving feedback, we wanna do it in this particular type of way, we're just saying give better feedback, run better meetings, be more inclusive, value one another. And folks sometimes because we think, well, we we hire great smart people. We don't need to tell them what to do. To some degree, that is true.

And yet, in other instances, when there's too much ambiguity and a lack of certainty, we can struggle to bring people together and struggle to be really clear about what we're trying to accomplish. And so sometimes when we're doing that, we focus too much on sounding smart so we can use big words and really complicated language and things that maybe only make sense to a very small niche of our employee population. And yet what we're trying to do is actually use plain language to bring more people in and to make sure that we're delivering a message that people can really resonate with. And then instead of being overly narrow, you have to think about how do I make this shareable? I have the fortune of working in a company of 11,000 people. I've worked in companies that are larger and smaller, and what we don't wanna do is build behaviors that are only relevant for a very particular group. And And so as we think about how do we make it shareable, how do we bring more people into the conversation, that becomes an important filter for the way we think about the behaviors that we're describing.

So let's assume we've got our awareness down. Right? We're clear on the challenge. We've got our behaviors down, so we're really clear on what we're trying to to accomplish and what it should look like. Something that we could, you know, record with a camera phone or or, you know, really capture and say, did this thing happen or not? Now what we wanna do is think about how are we going to build alignment and energy. This work is is in essence change management. Right? And many of you have worked on change management and learned about change management and talked about or taught change management. And so behavior change is, in most instances, even more challenging than trying to figure out how to use a new tool or go into a different office or change some other element.

And so it really requires us to be deliberate about the actions that we're taking to build that alignment, build that energy, and change from what we were doing before to what we want to do going forward. And so as we're building community, as we're bringing people together, sometimes the challenges can be either going too broad, being too narrow, or focusing only on the facts. Right? We know that humans are motivated by stories. We know that storytelling is an incredibly powerful mechanism for getting us to move. And so instead of only focusing on why inclusion matters through the numbers or through the demographics, thinking about, well, what was it like when someone felt excluded and how do you bring that forward? What is an example of a time that we did hear more voices in the organization and that turned into performance, a better product, a better resource, a better outcome? These are the types of stories that resonate with people and truly equip us to then change behaviors and to think about how important this can be.

And similarly, instead of going too broad, we want to identify the crucial stakeholders. Who are the narrow few that we need to get at right away in order to be able to build some momentum and move things ahead? And then similarly, instead of only viewing this from our point of view, which is so often the challenge that we get when we're talking about change management, is this is what matters to me. Understand your stakeholders. Understand their perspective. Understand how that story may change depending on whose lens you're viewing it through. And so, again, moving through it quickly, but now we've nailed our awareness, we've nailed our behaviors, we've expanded it out to our community, We're bringing people together. One of the other important things that we need to do is bake this into the systems of the organization so that it doesn't rest with just a few people.

If it lives with a particular leader, then it leaves with a particular leader. And so we wanna make sure that it's actually woven into everything that we're doing as a part of the organization. And so how do you make it stick? What are the things that we need to do to make sure that these new behaviors, the community that we're building is really sticky and really kind of grounded in the fabric of what we do? Because so often whether through consulting or in working in other businesses, I've seen that sometimes what we say and what we value can be different. And so if we say we value a particular set of behaviors and yet the people that are getting promoted or rewarded or highly regarded or recognized are doing other things, then people will do those things. Right?

Those are the things that are driving revenue and compensation and recognition versus maybe the things that we put on a a wall or put up on our employee values. We need to narrow those and make sure that those things are one and the same. And so in systems, making sure that we're weaving them together, both kind of technological systems at times, but also behavioral systems. This can be the most complicated, but being overly optimistic, moving with a really fast degree of speed, or letting the systems overtake the behaviors such that the technology is the thing we anchor on or the compensation is the thing we anchor on versus really making sure that they're reinforcing and supporting the behaviors that we identified earlier in our process is not the ideal.

Right? Those are the eroding actions. The reinforcing actions are to think about where might things go wrong. And so if we're incentivizing a particular behavior, what are some of the challenges associated with that? How do we map this out to really understand the different elements? And then how do we make sure that the systems are always supporting the behaviors, not overwhelming them or getting in the way? Now, again, this was fifteen minutes of a little bit of this content. There's a lot to be able to pull apart here, but, hopefully, you have some resources and some tools that you can think about that help to move you from thinking about these more in philosophy to really anchoring them in the organization. And the thing that I would say is that this is a cycle. Right? That can be scary to some because it's not linear.

It's not awareness behaviors, community systems, and done. Check the box. Put your pencil down and move on to something else. But you get through that and then you say, great. We've instituted this system. So let's go back to awareness. Is it still the same challenge? Are there things that we need to look at differently? Are there things that we need to reconsider? Do the behaviors need to change? Do we need to bring new people into the community? Do the systems need to change? And that cycle over and over and over again allows us to really move the ball forward and to make sure that we're making really deliberate progress over an extended period of time and never stopping and never faltering. So I thank you so much for this time and this opportunity to be a part of this incredible conversation.

And Shelly, I'll turn it back over to you in case there are any questions or thoughts.