Inclusive Growth Show
Inclusive Growth Show
Fostering Belonging to Drive Diversity and Inclusion: Insights from Cordell Carter of the Aspen Institute
What if fostering a sense of belonging could be the key to overcoming resistance to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in your organisation? Join us for an eye-opening conversation with Cordell Carter, the founding director of the Aspen Institute on Belonging, as he shares his invaluable insights and personal journey. From his unique upbringing as a preacher's kid to his extensive experience at IBM and the Gates Foundation, Cordell offers a compelling narrative on how creating environments where employees feel seen, heard, and valued can drive both personal fulfilment and organisational success.
In this episode, Cordell emphasises the crucial link between organisational culture and inclusive growth, offering practical steps to cultivate an inclusive environment. Learn how simple yet impactful actions, such as a monthly book club, can build trust and understanding across all levels of your organisation. We also discuss the pyramid model of equity, equality, inclusion, and diversity, and the importance of executives understanding the 'why' behind belonging, inspired by Simon Sinek's principles. Tune in to discover how you can implement these strategies to motivate and retain talent while creating a culture of opportunity and belonging for all.
If you're enjoying this episode and looking to boost equity, inclusion, and diversity in your organisation, my team and I are here to help. Our team specialises in crafting data-driven strategies, developing inclusive leaders, designing fair recruitment processes, and enhancing disability confidence. With a blend of professional expertise and lived experience, we're ready to support you on your journey. Reach out to us through our website.
If you want to build a more inclusive workplace that you can be proud of please visit our website to learn more.
Welcome to the Inclusive Growth Show with Toby Mildon Future-proofing your business by creating a diverse workplace.
Speaker 2:Hey there, thank you ever so much for tuning into this episode of the Inclusive Growth Podcast. I'm Toby Mildon, and today I'm joined by Cordell Carter. Cordell is the founding director of the Aspen Institute on Belonging, and so it's going to be really fascinating conversation to talk to him about his understanding of diversity, equity and inclusion, his own personal experiences, the concept of belonging within the workplace and some practical steps that you can take away to start implementing in your organization should you want to create a culture of inclusion and belonging. So, cordell, it's lovely to meet you.
Speaker 3:Likewise, Toby. Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 2:That's all right, so would you mind? Just, obviously I've given a very high-level introduction there which doesn't give it justice at all, but could you introduce yourself a bit further for us please?
Speaker 3:Sure. So for the last 20 years or so, I have been actively engaged in various organizations across multiple sectors, starting with IBM, stops at the Gates Foundation, startups and then now the Aspen Institute and beyond. I really engaged in building communities and environments where people feel like they belong and thrive. I just didn't have the words for it. I just knew how I was, as a preacher's kid, wanting everyone to feel like they're a part of whatever we're doing, and that's just been the mark of my leadership experience and my practice, if you will, as a leader, just being inclusive. I just didn't have the right language for it. And so my stint in K-12, so, yes, kindergarten through 12th grade in the US as a Broad fellow, I think, really cemented my approach and my strong belief that we can go much further together than one person alone. These are just giant systems. It's really hard to pivot. It doesn't really matter how talented you are. You've got to figure out how to get other people on the boat. You really do, or you will sink alone. Trust me, I've been there, done that. And so now comes the Aspen Institute for the last eight years and this amazing platform where you have elite leaders that are self-selecting it and asking big questions about what is the value they're supposed to add to the world. They know they've been successful, but now they're trying to be significant. We build a whole organization around that idea and I said this is great as long as we're having the conversation together, which often isn't the case.
Speaker 3:And so I created the project Unbelonging. It happened after a pretty tragic circumstance in the US, with January 6th riots from 2021. I was asked by my CEO at the time to help create an external diversity equity inclusion program and I said that's great, let me find you a DE&I specialist, because that's not me. He says, no, you're an Aspen specialist, that is something that works at Aspen, and so help me figure that out. I said, okay, great.
Speaker 3:And so when I started doing the whole landscape analysis on DE&I and what's there, what's not you know me, I'm a natural historian I want to figure out where it came from, and so once you figure out how it came to be, you can understand how we get to the present day, 40 plus years later, and you have a strategy that's untethered to a big vision, and that big vision is that we are creating a land where we all belong and have opportunities to thrive, and this is the reason you see so much animus behind, or I should say against, de&i and inclusive strategies around the world private sector, public sector because folks don't understand where we're going with it. So this is my job to make sure that we know where we're going and why.
Speaker 2:So how have your own personal values and your own family influenced the work that you're doing in diversity, equity and inclusion?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, definitely being. I say, the ultimate startups in civil society are religious organizations, especially Pentecostal organizations, because you don't have the same licensure requirements as more established denominations, so literally anybody can say, hey, I've been called and I want to preach, and when that happens, the family is actively engaged because they are the first parishioners, they're the first people that believe in your particular brand. As a kid working with my parents and their religious and faith endeavors, I knew I was part of the show as well. So I had to make sure that you know first Sunday I'm singing the right song, that type of thing and make sure that people feel involved, that they find this is a place where they belong, and bringing those values I call it, you know, contrasting the secular and the sacred, bringing them to the space where we actually spend the vast majority of our time as adults.
Speaker 3:80% of our time is spent working is really behind my drives. I don't want work to be awful because I had to spend so much time doing it. It should be a more pleasant experience. I'm not saying it has to be peaches and cream every single day, but it should be drudgery every day. That's just who wants to live like that Far too many of us do. On Monday we're just like, oh gosh, here we go again. That is a horrible way to live and so like because I don't want to live like that and that's not the environment I'm used to. I really made its way over to my actual secular existence in, I think, some really profound ways, and it's really expressed in the work that I'm doing now, probably more so than any other point since 2000, when I actually started working.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really cool. I think it is important that you enjoy your work. You know we spend so much of our time in the workplace and workplace such a pivotal role in our life. It gives us purpose, it helps us build relationships, it gives us financial income and security, so it is really important. I mean, could you just explain to us how you see, or your experience of how, diversity, equity, inclusion has come about and its importance in today's business world?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's driven off of procurement. The deep, dark secret of most economies is that the government is the largest customer of goods and services the government and so it's very odd to have private sector business associations lobbying against government for taxes. I'm like, well, how do you think they pay you, my friend? So that's neither here nor there customer, you are driving policy just by making procurement decisions. You don't have to say, hey, I want to make sure that this is the first company I'm working with. You merely say, well, here's a requirement for the procurement order, there's RFP. By the way, here's a census. We need to know which of your senior leadership are people of color, are women. You don't have to really make formal policy, but when you make a financial decision, you are making policy, because budgets are moral documents, and so you would look back like where's the genesis of DE&I, at least in the American concept? You have to go back to the Nixon administration. We just started doing censuses. It was under pressure from civil rights organizations to diversify not only the federal workforce but the suppliers, the supplier diverse, and so he just started asking a question a few different agencies, just give us a census of how many of your employees are this, that and other. Just describe your employee base and you find yourself like, hmm, the ones with the most diversity are winning more contracts. Let me do what they're doing.
Speaker 3:It's a very competitive space, which is why I tend to keep most of my work to the private sector, because the private sector and the military have and the US military have two things in common they can't tell a lie because the cost of living a lie is too expensive. If you're a military, you're working off a lie. People die. You don't have to serve another flag. If you're in business, working off a lie, your competitor will look at the real data and outwork you and assume you don't have a company and everything you have in a company is worthless. And so I love working with these two sectors because they have to tell the truth.
Speaker 3:And so when you see private sector and our armed forces way out in front of everyone else on D&I, that should be telling you. That should be telling you something. They know what the customers are going to look like 30 years from now, and they're playing for where the puck is going. They're not watching the game okay, they're trying to win the game, and so modeling their behavior is. And then talking about employee retention as the objective function here, like you want a place to belong because it's very expensive to replace an employee On the military side, you want a place where you belong because you need to constantly recruit for an all-volunteer force. You can't just depend on the 1% of American families that send their kids, generation after generation, to the military, and so I like people where their incentives are aligned to do the data-driven right thing, and so I'm just trying to get more people to see that with my work.
Speaker 2:That's really cool. I like what you were saying earlier about the procurement side of things and working with federal or government organizations. And it just reminds me I did an interview with the founder of an organization here in the UK called MSD UK and they represent businesses that are owned by people from an ethnic minority background and I learned some really quite startling statistics out of that conversation. I just want to kind of replay it back here because it's worth going back to listening to that episode. What we learned from that episode was that here in the UK there are approximately 1 million ethnic minority owned businesses, which is accounting for one sixth of all businesses, and these businesses employ 3 million people, which is accounting for one-sixth of all businesses, and these businesses employ 3 million people, which is contributing £78 billion to the UK economy. And the other thing I learned really was kind of around the history.
Speaker 2:So the guy that founded MSD UK has done some work in the States. The guy that founded MSD UK has done some work in the States. So what he said is that in the US, supplier diversity was mandated in law in 1972, requiring 8% of federal contracts to be awarded to minority businesses, and this mandate has helped build large minority-owned businesses. Some of these are turning over billions of dollars but, unlike the US, here in the UK and Europe we haven't mandated this approach to supplier diversity. The guy that was interviewing his name's Mayank Shah. He just says this is a missed opportunity and a way to avoid some bad procurement practices. So I kind of just wanted to go back to that episode really and kind of revisit some of that wanted us to.
Speaker 3:I wanted to go back to that episode really and kind of revisit some of that. Yeah, it's absolutely perfect, uh, encapsulation of of where we are and how we got there. Data has shown, proven over and over again, that diversity is good for the economy. Um, and I don't know if you are referencing or have heard of the, the uh city bank, uh research that they did in 20, citibank and McKinsey this would have been 2017 or so and they actually calculated the cost of structural racism. So they looked from the year 2000 to 2016 and said what are the costs for lack of access to credit for certain communities? Because in the US we still have economic redlining, if you will, where, depending on your zip code, you know your credit score is just lower just by virtue of where you live, and so you have all these folks that don't have access to capital in ways others of us do. And the cost at that time, from 2000 to 2016, was on the order of $20 trillion trillion with a T. Now the US economy annual spend is about $24 trillion, and then the annual cost of these barriers is $4 to $5 trillion.
Speaker 3:And so what I like to say now when I quote that research is like be as racist, as sexist and ableist as you want at your house, but the moment you leave that door, your front door, and you're in the public space, we need you to behave in a way that shows that you're trying to adhere to your fiduciary duty of increasing shareholder or stakeholder value.
Speaker 3:If you're not doing that, if you're purposely preventing others that are otherwise worthy of credit a lack of credit you should already be fired with cause, because you're preventing your bank from growing, you're preventing your organization and the economy from growing, and so you are working against this, my friend, and you can't stay. You got to go. And so when I tell people to be as racist as they want their house, that raises a few eyebrows, but I say, to be provocative, to make a point, that this is an economic thing. We say that we are about values and all that, but let's call it what it is America is about business. Fine, let's lean into that, let's lean into that. You are losing business because of your personal behavior. That is not how you run a business, and so that gets folks thinking differently about these things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really like how you're saying this is economic, because it's kind of linking back to the first book that I wrote called Inclusive Growth. Because I wrote that book because I wanted senior business leaders to understand that if they had a culture where their people could thrive, it was only going to help their business grow and prosper. Now I know you've obviously worked with lots of different organizations, and how has working with lots of different organizations shaped your own personal view on diversity, equity and inclusion?
Speaker 3:Well, you know, I came into this work thinking that it was the resistance to D&I was based on this notion of unfairness. Right Like, is that fair that we're emphasizing people of color, differently abled women, over white men? That's really not the issue at all. It's actually much more personal. Much more personal. Okay, 73% of our executive class in the US are middle-aged white men, and the way we speak about D&I for the most part in the US is not in a very inclusive way. It runs antithetical to the aim. And so when I start talking about belonging and using American history as the sacred text, if you will, of the civic faith, I found that it really resonates with middle-aged women basically men my age because what they're not hearing is that the future does not include you. That's not where they're not hearing, and they're used to hearing that. They're used to having pressure, saying your successor cannot look like you.
Speaker 3:So what I say to people when I hear that is what mammal do you know? Doesn't seek to do three things eat, reproduce and fight to stay alive. I know none. No, mammals do that. Okay, they all do those three things. So what makes you think you can go to an executive and say I need you to push a policy in which you do not see yourself in. That's just not, that's an inhuman thing to do. Nobody does that. Nobody will do that willingly. They'll nod and wave, but the actual actions will be counter to that, because they're getting back to their more biological prerogatives here. And so I ask people to empathize with others and let's mourn a sense of loss and then let's get past it. But if we keep talking around it, keep layering it with words, we'll never deal with the festering sore that is people feeling that they're being left out, that they're lost, that they no longer belong. No one likes feeling that.
Speaker 2:I agree with you and conversations that I have with senior business leaders. I think they are afraid about diversity and inclusion. I think, even though they don't admit it, even on some other than conscious level, they're thinking I'm going to be overtaken here.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:And, like you say, who's going to bet on the policy like that if they're worried about their own future?
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, and so we have to be more inclusive about our talk about inclusion.
Speaker 2:I like how you're talking about belonging, because often I mean only the other day I was having a conversation with somebody saying there's just so many terms around diversity and inclusion thrown around. We talk about diversity, equity, equality, justice, belonging, and I think belonging is a real key part of the work that we do. I mean, could you just elaborate a bit more on the concept of belonging and how it relates to DE&I within an organization's culture?
Speaker 3:Sure, you know, for me, belonging is, you know, being seen, being heard, feeling your contribution is valuable. Does that mean that you get your way? It does not mean that it's a one-way street either. Like I have to behave in good faith, just like the organization does, and we're going to meet each other right in the middle. I'm going to behave as if I belong and not wait for permission to act as such. Any organization is going to create an environment where I can thrive, because my thriving means more value to them.
Speaker 3:Okay, and so that's the concept at the highest level. If you extrapolate it to what is the national narrative that we can tether inclusion strategies to, I think it becomes all the more powerful because, at the end of the day, I want people to stay in this game. I want people to believe in the idea of America, I want them to believe in the values of this organization, and that doesn't happen unless they feel like they're being hurt, and so where it fits with respect to D&I is at the top. So your executive should be saying this is an environment where everyone belongs and should have opportunities to thrive, and I fully expect the leaders that report to me to ensure that happens. In fact, their metrics are going to look like what I call our D&I KPIs.
Speaker 3:Okay, and those KPIs are going to, I guess, aggregate up to the CEO's KPIs that he or she reports out to their board, and so D&I is in the middle of the organization. It's at the execution level. We've made it a strategic priority and that's not where it belongs. It belongs, actually, in the middle. Belonging should be the strategic imperative. D&i is how we get to belonging. That's how I see it in my mind.
Speaker 2:No, I love that because I often share this pyramid with my clients, where you've got diversity at the top of the pyramid, and I say to them that actually that's the outcome, because here in the UK we do have a very diverse country.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of diversity in the talent pools that we can draw from and the communities that we've got, and diversity is the outcome of doing all the other things below the bottom of the pyramid. Right, and the bottom of the pyramid is equity. It's about making sure that we provide equity, because we don't live in a fair society, and then from equity, we can ensure that we're creating equality. We've got that level playing field and then on top of that, we're building a culture of inclusion and belonging, and that means that we're in a much stronger position to be able to attract and recruit and retain a diverse workforce, which is ultimately the outcome that we want. But we have to start at the bottom of the pyramid with our foundations. So I really like kind of practical things. What do you suggest are some of the actionable steps that businesses could take to foster a culture of inclusion and belonging?
Speaker 3:You know, the simplest thing you can do is start to have a monthly non-ethnic or race-related ERG that's just focused on learning together and I would just call it a book series. Like you know, we're going to do a book club on some books of great consequence. Take Isabel Wickerson's cast. You know it's a very tough read but if you go chapter by chapter with your peers monthly for say, a year, I think the environment, the level of their comfort with each other, will fundamentally shift. They're going to be creating belonging just in that group and make sure it's super diverse in terms of job responsibility, a place where it doesn't really matter your title. In this circle of trust we're gonna follow Chatham House rule and we're just gonna be intellectuals for this hour that we have together once a week. It could be game changing and then extrapolating that good feeling to the rest of the organization, I think.
Speaker 3:But in terms of how can I start for zero money? I would start with a book club once a month and make sure you have a. Get some super executive champions to be willing to take off airs and just be a learner for one hour a week and everyone is just a peer. It would fundamentally shift the game Fundamentally okay, and then from there, I would say bring in some folks that could explain the difference between belonging and D&I. Have your executive, your chief executive team, make sure they understand why belonging is important and can articulate it in a culturally competent way to their employees.
Speaker 3:This is why it matters at Kroger Foods. This is why it matters at Barclays Bank. This is why we're doing this. And then the how is the D&I, and that's when you're really empowering the middle of your organization, your talent management team, to go hard on on organizational learning as well as holding ourselves accountable to status of behavior. And then make sure you have career pathing, so that these young folks coming in don't just see a bunch of people 30 years older than them blocking them like no, these folks have actually achieved something after a record of work. You, my friend, had to get on that same treadmill and start earning your way as well, but I'm fully articulating to you what that treadmill looks like, whereas before they were just shooting it. There are ways of getting around this without calling it specifically out. Is what you do as an organization, though that matters.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love what you're saying there because firstly, you're saying understand the why behind your belonging and then develop your strategy. That reminds me of Simon Sinek, the management expert, who wrote the book Start With why, which is a fantastic read, and his kind of famous saying is you know, people don't buy into what you do, they buy into why you do it. So that's why it's important to start with the why. It's hard because it's very emotive, it's quite difficult for us to articulate, but then you can figure out the how and the what after you've understood the why. And then I really like your suggestion of a book club, because it's really simple, practical, actionable and there are so many good books out there. And it doesn't even have to be a book, could it? It could be a podcast, it could be a blog post or something.
Speaker 3:Exactly. But the point is you create trust. When we're at work, we have avatars on. Okay, I'm a professional in here, I'm doing what I got to do so I can go home and take care of my family. But again, we said before, 80% of your adult life is spent working. Do you really want that to be an awful task? Would it be great to lower your arms just for a second and allow yourself to trust that this organization actually cares about you. They want you to have a long run here, because that's mutually beneficial. But you can't get there by just speaking it. You have to show it.
Speaker 2:So, talking of books, you've just written a book, haven't you? Yes?
Speaker 3:yes.
Speaker 2:Can you let us know a bit more about what your book's about and how we can get our hands on a copy?
Speaker 3:Sure, sure. It's in pre-sales right now on the Publicizer platform. I'll send you the link, but it's Publicizer with a Z. It is about 75% done, but the publisher wanted me to get it out there and start spreading no news about it. The name of the book is called Becoming an Inclusive Republic colon, A Sermon on the Civic Mount.
Speaker 3:And, to sum up, like all the work I've been doing for the last 24 years and the aspiration I have, not just for the United States but for the Americas and for the globe, to just be this better place, a better version of ourselves, is summed up in this, essentially a manifesto where I focus on three big questions who is we? You know our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, the Holy Truth, the Self-Evident, the All-Mentor, Creative, Equal, Like. Who is we? What does that? What does that mean over the span of time, our 248-year history of the United States? The second question is how has our notion of we evolved? And this is where you bring in all the different routes of the different suffrage movements and what they've hung their intellectual and spiritual hats upon to get people to move.
Speaker 3:And then, thirdly, where do we go from here? And this is the only time that lowercase we, because I want people to know. That means it's in the plural sense. This is a collaborative exercise. It's not something the country does to you, it's something you do with your country. That is the manifesto. It is out. It'll be out soon, it's in pre-sales now and if you buy 100 copies, I'll come and do the workshop at your place of employment.
Speaker 2:That's brilliant. Yeah, I'm going to go and get myself a copy. It sounds fascinating. Thank you, and also, you've got your exciting book out, but at the time of recording this episode, you're actually at a festival.
Speaker 3:I am.
Speaker 2:I know it's something that you're very excited about. Can you tell us a bit about what the festival is? I know it happens every year, so obviously we're recording this episode in August, so it's going to be too late for somebody to attend right now. But how can they go along to future festivals?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so today I'm attending, I'm representing, the Festival of Diaspora, which is designed to unite leaders across the Americas, to connect us across our 35 borders, to celebrate our shared history and what I call the other AI that's, ancestral intelligence and, thirdly, to collaborate together to actually bring about good in our world. And so I'm representing here at a larger festival which is called Petronio Alvarez Festival. It's a celebration of Pacific Coast culture here in Colombia, and so we convene in different Latin American cities every February to quarter one. But if you're interested in the amazing work we're doing there, go to festivalofthediasporaorg or festivalofthediaspora, depending on how you pronounce that word org and it's the secular tent revival. It's a lot of fun. We do first quarter every year in Latin America and for next year, in March of 2025, we're going to do our first festival in Africa, and so hopefully we'll see you either in Medellin or in Nairobi.
Speaker 2:Brilliant Well, cordell, thanks ever so much for joining me today. It's been really lovely to sit down with you and have a conversation. I've really liked your perspective on belonging and the importance within corporate cultures. So thanks for joining me and thanks for tuning into this episode of the Inclusive Growth Podcast. Hopefully you've taken away some inspirational thoughts, different ways of thinking, but also some practical things that you could start implementing in your organization right now. I really like the idea of starting with a book club, and why not start with Cordell's book? He?
Speaker 3:did promote it to begin with.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, go and get a copy of his book and put that on the reading list. So until next time. Thanks ever so much for tuning into this episode and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode, which will be coming out soon. Cheers, take care, bye-bye.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Inclusive Growth Show. For further information and resources from Toby and his team, head on over to our website at mildencouk.