When you hear equity, diversity and inclusion - what do these words mean to you? Maybe they’re buzzwords that you’ve heard in the office. Maybe they’re part of an HR training that you’ve taken recently or maybe you've never heard of them at all and that's ok, too. In fact, I didn’t know what the word diversity meant until I was almost 18 years old.

Over the last two weeks I've been digging into feedback from my teams and leaders about how we can kick start our equity, diversity and inclusion programs to create lasting cultural change inside of our organization. What I've realized is that it's easier to get started than I thought. If you are at a small business or start-up you have a unique advantage of building a culture from the ground up.

Leadership shows up in many forms throughout our careers, in this instance, I’m encouraging leaders to be human. Show empathy, compassion, vulnerability and remain open to learning, making mistakes, and growing with your team.

Throughout my career as an org transformation consultant, I’ve spoken to many senior leaders who want their teams to be more agile. They wan’t their teams to work more like the ‘Silicon Valley’ startup instead of the top-down bureaucratic office of the 20th century. There are also countless leaders who are convinced that “agile could never work here” but aren’t exactly sure why.

A few months ago, in New York City, I hosted an interview with Mollie West Duffy — the co-author of No Hard Feelings: Embracing Emotions at Work when an audience member asked Mollie this question (I’m paraphrasing): How do you know during the hiring process if the job you are interviewing for has the right workplace culture for you? Mollie shared her thoughts then punted the question over to me to share my insights as well —

So I’ve been banging my head against the wall these last few weeks in attempt to understand how can we as an organization focus so intently on equity, yet still struggle to identify and define our point of view on how we speak about diversity and inclusion in the workplace more fluently.

Innovative teams inside of organizations are often tasked with tracking their KPIs (key performance indicators) against their company’s quarterly or annual goals. The problem is, KPIs evaluate teams and business units based on how successful they are (or not), are too slow to change, and don’t embrace learning and failure.

Teams inside of organizations are often tasked with “working more agile” or leaning into new ways of working. They are tasked with designing new products and services for their businesses. They’ve read the theory and understand the concepts, but putting theory into action can often be a challenge. I want to make it easy for you to understand and get started on getting your ideas in front of customers as soon as possible.

Becoming a learning or more agile organization takes time. It requires mindset shifts, team design, and leadership buy-in. Any team trying to get new products and services off the ground inside of an existing organization shouldn’t have to wait until everything is perfectly in place to start learning and becoming more agile.

Brilliant ideas are everywhere inside of our organizations and teams. Teams who are closest to the products and services that we’re building know the work best but constantly struggle to get their great ideas in front of leadership. In everyday change and on agile teams, small ideas can be implemented quickly as teams learn and improve products and services. It’s getting those nuanced, big, crazy ideas out there that can be tricky.

In every company and organization there is no shortage of brilliant ideas. We hired the best and brightest, after all. So why is it so hard for companies and organizations to do innovation? Why is the word “innovation” being used so often in every context, staff meeting, or quarterly earnings call? What does leadership mean when they say “we need to build more innovative products and services?”

Some of the things I am going to share in this post are going to be blatantly obvious, yet other lessons shared here might help a new consultant starting their career, or this may be helpful for anyone who travels for work from time to time.

On my journey to Philly from Brooklyn for the holidays I stumbled upon a podcast I hadn’t heard of: “Making Oprah.” Ironically, it’s the story of a TV revolution told by Jenn White and produced by Colin McNulty, both of WBEZ Chicago. It’s a captivating story of how a self-proclaimed overweight Black woman took over daytime television and became, I would argue, the most powerful woman in America…