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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I am your host Rich Helppie and with us today we have Dr. Lauran Star. We're going to be talking today about diversity, equity and inclusion. These buzzwords are out in the news every day. What do they mean? What does it really mean in practice? Today, Dr. Star is going to try to educate our audience. Dr. Star, welcome.
Dr. Lauran Star
Thank you so much for having me. This is wonderful. And hello to your audience.
Richard Helppie
Our listeners, our viewers, our readers are literally around the world so no telling where this is going to be picked up. (Dr. Star: I love it.) Dr. Star wrote a book called "Evidence Based Inclusion" and the tagline is, "It's Time to Focus on the Right Needle." What are we measuring? She has a PhD in industrial organizational psychology and is one of the first people in the United States whose PhD is specialized in inclusion. Her dissertation examined diversity training and its impact on perceived organizational justice - I'll tell you something; organizational justice is something I haven't heard about. Dr. Star's dissertation has been published, it's now cited as a foundational piece of evidence for inclusion, diversity and equity. But this is not just an academic story. She has been a senior human resource leader with over 20 years of successfully driving high performing organizational culture and employees. She is raising the bar by driving measurable change within organizations through data driven strategies. And all my listeners, readers, and viewers know I'm very much about data being - I want to say former - computer nerd, but perhaps you never lose that. She's known for uncovering blind spots to achieve optimal performance and enhance retention. She dives in where others tread lightly. So Dr. Star, welcome to The Common Bridge. How are you today?
Dr. Lauran Star
Great. Wow, that was a mouthful.
Richard Helppie
Indeed. Our audience wants to hear about you. Our audience likes to know a little bit about our guests so do you mind filling us in a little bit on your biography? Where did you grow up? What was your education like? And what's your career arc been like?
Dr. Lauran Star
I've done a lot of things. I believe in living life to the fullest. I grew up lower class - white lower class - in Billerica, Massachusetts. From there, I found that education was my way to get out of poverty. I joined the Army to help pay for my education - there was no money to send me - so I joined the Army. Really, that's where my journey in inclusion started. The Army does what I like to call forced inclusion; you don't have a choice. Whoever you're paired up with is who you're paired up with, and you have to rely on them for your life. I was a trauma medic, I served in the Gulf War in 1990. I've been all over the globe with the Army; loving every minute of it. Then from there, worked on my degrees, came back and put all those life skills into practice [as an] undergraduate. Then when I finally hit 40, I went to graduate school and finalized my PhD in DE and I. My career really has been all over the place. I started off in pharmaceutical sales and healthcare sales and did really well there, I think, in large part because I already had the inclusion lens in place. When I looked around - and I was a woman entering the workforce in the mid 90s - all I kept hearing was glass ceiling, glass ceiling, glass ceiling. I was conditioned out of that with the military so I didn't understand this whole glass ceiling philosophy. I still struggle with it today, I'll be honest with you, because I think often we, as humans, like to find blame and excuses. And honestly, if you're working in an environment that you see or perceive that there's a glass ceiling, you have two choices: change it immediately or get out. That onus falls on you, and again, that goes back to my military background. So that's pretty much me in a quick glance; I'm a mom of three amazing kids - whose kids aren't amazing. I will be an empty-nester next year, they'll all be in college next year, which is nice. I'm looking forward to that. And I drink a lot of red wine.
Richard Helppie
Red wine is a very good thing, particularly during the holiday season. And I thank you for your service in our military. It's a wonderful story in the way you've taken those lessons. And as far as being empty nested, they tend to rebound, just letting you know. Don't don't sell the big house yet. They're coming back for at least a little free lunch party. But with that, your book, "Evidence Based Inclusion: It's Time to Focus on the Right Needle," I thought that was a great title. Clearly our country has historical issues and that historical issue has centered up around black people where it was literally legal to own a person that had a drop of Negro blood in them. That was the law of the land. During my lifetime, we've had the Civil Rights Act, and we continue to make progress. There is opportunity now and more equality of opportunity; we still have a way to go. We have other groups that some will say are jumping on the bandwagon, and others will point out that maybe that class needs to have some type of protection. So let's talk a little bit about that. One of the things that you say in your book is diversity and inclusion aren't the same. Why do you say that? And why is that important?
Dr. Lauran Star
Oh, god, this has driven me crazy for the last 20 years. For the last 20 years I really honed in on DEI and the amount of organizations I've gone into and they and they start off with, we want DEI in the workplace. And then my question is, well, which one? Which one do you want to focus on? Well, we want all of them. But which one are we going to focus on?
Richard Helppie
Okay, and DEI: diversity...
Dr. Lauran Star
Diversity, equity, inclusion. And there's this mass confusion that DE and I are all the same thing. And they are not. Diversity has its own set of goals. Inclusion has its own set of goals and outcomes, and equity has its own set of goals and outcomes. And you cannot hit all three at once.
Richard Helppie
What are some diversity goals, some inclusion goals, and some equity goals?
Dr. Lauran Star
So when I ask people, how do you define diversity, I was amazed at the amount of inaccuracy around definitions I was finding. It's kind of like what your perception of diversity is, but that's not a business framework. Your perception is great but I need to understand what you think diversity means. So I really set out to level set first and foremost. So let's level set it for your audience - diversity. If you take a bag of Skittles, and you dump that bag of Skittles out, and you separate all the colors, so you have an orange pile, a red pile, a purple pile, a green pile, a blue pile, you have diversity in color; that's diversity. Diversity is a way in the workplace we can measure specific affinities; that's diversity, it really is that simple. The benefit of diversity or the goal of diversity is different perspectives. Fabulous. So that's what we're shooting for, by having all of these subgroups, is shared perspectives so that we can problem solve easier.
Richard Helppie
If I could put the green Skittles away, a diversity goal might be, you've got to get some green Skittles over here.
Dr. Lauran Star
You've got to get some green Skittles over here. But then I always ask that question, why? Why do you want the green Skittles? I know why you want the green Skittles. But we need to shake that out a little bit and be a little more courageous around asking those questions. Why do we want more green Skittles?
Richard Helppie
What are some of the answers you get that you support? And what are some of the answers you get to make you cringe?
Dr. Lauran Star
So I get a lot of, it's good business; and that makes me cringe. I'm sorry. It's [that] good business is just a band-aid blanket statement because that's what the executive team wants; another blanket statement. But anytime I see quota attainment; we want to improve diversity by three percent of people of color in leadership, I ask the why. And [it's] because we've decided that that will impact our business. Impact your business how? What do you mean? There is no solid answer there. And I follow that question up with the better question of, and how are you going to support that three percent? In other words we want diversity in an organization because we absolutely want diversity of perspective and thought.
Richard Helppie
Well, is it perspective of thought? Or is it diversity of ancestral heritage or external observations?
Dr. Lauran Star
It's your lived experience. At the end of the day, I want to know what my consumers lived experiences are.
Richard Helppie
Let me give you an example. Okay, if you took a person clearly of African-American descent, and they grew up with you in Billerica, Massachusetts, and worked those same type of jobs and then got into the military to get out, versus someone that was born in Cambridge and they were child of university professors, yet they happen to be African-American, how do you measure that diversity?
Dr. Lauran Star
Right, so we have two individuals - and that's a great question, Rich - we have two individuals that have the same skin color. They're both both black, but they both have very different lived experiences.
Richard Helppie
But if you're putting them in there with the Skittles, if I understand the Skittles; looking at the outside of the Skittles and going, okay, you're a black Skittle, in this case, and you're a white Skittle. So I'm trying to understand...I'm trying to get to a definition of diversity. What it sounds like to me is that diversity is about ancestral heritage and external appearance. Is there something else to that?
Dr. Lauran Star
Diversity is pretty much that, right? It's how we categorize groups of people. That's it.
Richard Helppie
Okay. So the diversity goal might be, we need more women, or we need more people with African-American Heritage or Asian-American heritage, something like that. Okay. So what would be a good inclusion goal, then?
Dr. Lauran Star
We have diversity out here in the wings, and it seems like business today - for the last 60 years...doesn't seem like for the last 60 years - organizations have been focusing on diversity, diversity, diversity. They've been hiring diversity, and it's created this revolving door because they don't have the foundation in place. The foundation is inclusion. So anyone that's listening, if your organization has any type of DEI initiatives, they better be focusing on inclusion. Are you just spinning a wheel here?
Richard Helppie
What does that mean though? If I landed in here from Mars - I guess that'd make me diverse too - if I landed from Mars, and I said, alright, I'm going to have a goal for more inclusion. Tell me a goal that maybe you gave to a client for inclusion, what would that be?
Dr. Lauran Star
Well, we first have to level set Rich, because inclusion means so much to so many different people. Inclusion is a culture, it's part of an organizational culture. And that culture is inviting and accepting of individual differences; where individuals have a seat at the table, a shared voice, their ideas are heard, and they're welcome. They can bring their whole self to work. What cracks me up...just yesterday, like just yesterday - if there was a camera in my office it would be like one of those funniest videos - the Senate shot down the Crown bill, which was a bill that allowed African-Americans or people of color to wear their hair the way they wish to wear their hair, rather than conforming to the norm, rather than conforming to the white normative - let's call it what it is - in the workplace. The Senate shot this down, they said, no, we don't want to put this bill in action. I have a lot of employees that are people of color that want to wear their braids, or their Afro and now they're being told no, it doesn't matter.
Richard Helppie
Yes, and we value everyone. We see everyone's strengths and areas of difficulties. Let me just say this; in any private enterprise - and I've been in a lot of them - I've never heard about a hair mandate. We've got some very unusual colors these days and the current styles, [but] I've never heard of that. In our government, of course, it might be a little different, a little bit weird. But also, I 'm trying to get to the core of inclusion, as you were talking about that, I kind of envisioned a conference table and people talking around [it] trying to figure out how to share ideas. I know that when I was in business - which was a lot of consulting - I told people, I want your whole brain here, because I paid for your whole brain and I expect the whole thing coming. So we're not trying to find a yes answer, we're trying to find all of our answers that we all agree on. Is that what inclusion is like? We hear from everybody and... So how do I know...if you came into business ABC and it had an inclusive culture, how would you know and similarly, if it didn't have an inclusive culture, how would you know? What would be the some of the symptoms?
Dr. Lauran Star
So from my consulting framework, from the consulting work I've done, I go into an organization and the first thing I asked for is retention numbers. Let me see your retention numbers. And then we shake those numbers out. That's when I apply the diversity lens. Let's now shake out those retention...who's leaving and is there any correlation among affinity groups; blacks, Hispanics, Latinos, women, men, white. Let's shake that information out first and foremost. Then I also look at sick days, what is our sick time look like here? Because when you have an inclusive organizational culture, your employees are much healthier. They like their job, there's a reduction of stress, they feel like they're part of something bigger. From there, I then start breaking down the numbers looking at advancement. So does your senior leadership team mirror your bottom team? Is it all white? Is it all white men? Is it all white women? Or is there some diversity? Are we seeing a sprinkling of or a mix of like minds? Like minded, that's that perceived sharing the different perceptions and lived experiences.
Richard Helppie
So it comes back to ancestral heritage and external appearance...
Dr. Lauran Star
And likeness. So when we say diversity, I don't want your listeners thinking, oh, well, then diversity is just my ethnicity and my heritage. Nope, it's veterans, it's a disability. Do you have a disability? That is a diversity; we have the eight protected classes here in the United States so businesses tend to focus in on them but that diversity range can...the different affinities that make us unique is mind boggling. Now we are 98% more alike when we look at the human genome; that two percent is the beauty of the human being. That's that uniqueness, our personalities, socioeconomic status, family, education, education level, type of education, parentage, and so forth beyond...to include race, ethnicity, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender - there's so much more there than just race and ethnicity.
Richard Helppie
But I'm coming back to what can be measured in a conference room. If it's all a bunch of ivy league educated folks from the northeast; black, white, brown, yellow, red, and they can identify as lots of different genders, but they pretty much are the same because they came out of the same way of thinking. Yet, it seems as if we've said, alright, inclusion comes back to diversity so you look very diverse, but in reality, you're not. And I only bring that up, because on this show, we've had a number of people on and they're very nice people, by the way, and not unintelligent, but grew up in the northeast, go to college in the northeast, go to work in Washington - they don't understand what the rest country looks like. Maybe they go out to the other coast and they're well meaning, but they just don't understand. It'd be really hard for a person that didn't come from your humble origins to understand what you had to go through to get there. My mom was a PhD, my dad was a PhD and, of course, from the day I was in the fourth grade I was trying to think about what type of doctorate I wanted to get. So let's move on to equality and equity. You say they're not the same. What's the difference between equality and equity?
Dr. Lauran Star
Equality is everyone gets the same, equity is everyone gets what they need. And in order to have equity in the workplace, we need the social infrastructure build up so that we're all equitable when we enter the workplace, and we don't have that.
Richard Helppie
So to each according to their needs, and from each according to their ability?
Dr. Lauran Star
Mmm-hmm, and we are finding that in the workplace, we are finding...
Richard Helppie
You realize that's a Marxist construct, correct? (Dr. Lauran Star: Yes.) Okay. And in the time that we've had the human race, that's never been possible.
Dr. Lauran Star
No. That's why my next book coming out is equity versus the...to be or not to be, equity versus equality. We've got to figure out how we blend these two to create a thriving workforce. And can we blend these two? I don't know yet.
Richard Helppie
Let's think about equality in terms of equal opportunity. Let's make no mistake that in our country minorities, new immigrants, homosexuals, and others that were perceived as different from the norm, were denied opportunity. They didn't get the chance. One of the things I valued in my career was that I was a computer programmer way back and the greatest thing is the computer had no idea what you look like. It did the same thing for everybody. It was a great leveler and I thought that was a very positive thing. So everybody had an opportunity to try to program that computer and you either could do it or you couldn't do it. Equity, though, is everybody's going to get something. I'm trying to fill in that gap; who determines what they need to get?
Dr. Lauran Star
Who determines what they need to get.
Richard Helppie
And similarly, who provides it?
Dr. Lauran Star
Oh, there's a cost to it. There is a cost to equity. Absolutely. One of the reasons college education is so expensive is it's that the number three spend falls under equity, which is providing services - educational services - like tutoring, additional lab time and whatnot, providing that to the students that weren't fortunate enough to grow up in New England, which has a very different education base than say, the South. But yet we still want diversity in our colleges in New England. So we take these students from the south, bring them up, and then we have to raise them up. That's equity. There's a price tag with equity.
Richard Helppie
Well, I might quarrel with you about the cost of colleges; when you look at the number of students, the number of teaching professionals and then you look at the administration and then the capital projects; not a mystery to me why it's at a ridiculous price. Then we've fueled it with obscene mafia type loans and that's another part of that. Dr. Star, my experience with equity - that with equity comes responsibility - and having led organizations and advised a lot of organizations, there's a split. There are people that want to earn equity through more responsibility and there are people that want to demand equity yet not shoulder any of the responsibility. Have you ever come across anything like that in your practice?
Dr. Lauran Star
That's our book of business right now. This is why equity is so in the gray. Because we have practices out there where companies are giving everything with no accountability. And then you have companies that are stepping up saying there needs to be some accountability and responsibility when it comes to this equity component. They don't know how to do it yet.
Richard Helppie
What would a goal of equity look like?
Dr. Lauran Star
So a goal of equity would be...from workforce - when I look at workforce - planning a goal of equity there is to make sure that your workforce represents your consumer base, that's equity.
Richard Helppie
What would an example of that be? If you could homogenize it, if you had a consumer company that does this, that was selling to this market...
Dr. Lauran Star
So I work with...one of my clients is a cosmetic organization. And from there, who do they sell their cosmetics to? We take a look at the blanket of who their consumers are and then we make sure that it's reputable in...or that there's that representation from the VP - or actually the C suite ñ down, that we have that representation, so that we have...if 13% are trans [people] utilizing this product, we make sure that we have 13% of our leadership staff are trans; that's equity. I don't know - and some of your listeners might be going, oh, salary equity, we want the salary equity - everyone out there, there's no such thing as salary equity. We have too many soft skills that need to be measured. But another skill that I learned in the military; military pays everybody based on your grade, everybody makes the same amount of money. But yet not everybody is everybody. Not everybody in that grade is equal.
Richard Helppie
In business, my simple formula was you return more to the business than it cost to employ you; everybody at that job and that metric. And if you're creating more value, you can make more money. (Dr. Lauran Star: You make more money.) That's the antithesis of picking someone based on one of those external views. We said this is the grade and if you make the grade - acquire the skills make the grade - then you'll be contributing more, then you'll make more money. And just before anybody jumps off, I will tell you that we had over 45% women in senior leadership. We didn't do that, by the way, on purpose. We just had this culture that was driven based on ability to serve clients and serve the business. The Department of Labor came in and did an audit and nominated us for an EVE award because they were...led by me, which I have a certain ethnicity that would qualify me but they didn't do it in that regard, but our next three people were all clearly people of color and I just never thought about it. We just...
Dr. Lauran Star
You didn't think about it. It was no, he has...[cross-talk]
Richard Helppie
It was because we had standards. Now I'm trying to think if I had to set out and say, okay, I've got to create equity and I've got to go out and hire people [who] have a certain external view or certain transsexual people; do they have the positions based on that external or do they have the position based on the fact that they can contribute to the enterprise? I guess I'm a little confused with this.
Dr. Lauran Star
So you said earlier that equity was having equal opportunity to everything.
Richard Helppie
No, I was differentiating, I was saying that equality was everybody gets a chance. (Dr. Lauran Star: Everybody gets a chance.) I grew up in a blue collar, lower middle class town, but I had a basketball, and we had places to shoot basketballs. So I had an equal opportunity to play basketball. I didn't have the skills to play basketball, being too short, too slow and the like, well, I had equality of basketball, but I didn't have equity. I'm not demanding the NBA give me a spot. (Dr. Lauran Star: Well, you don't deserve it.) Exactly right, but I'm saying I had the shot. I can also see in a situation like that, that a child that didn't have a basketball, they didn't have equality or equity.
Dr. Lauran Star
They didn't have equality or equity, yeah.
Richard Helppie
And so you can force equity, as you just said - unqualified folks - or you can create equality of opportunity. How do you split that when the federal government might come in and measure you solely based on your outcomes, on the fact that you were able to get enough Skittles of the right color?
Dr. Lauran Star
Skittles of the right color. Well, right. It's more than Skittles of the right color. It's making sure that they're qualified Skittles of the right color that are going to be innovative and productive and be able to actually do that job.
Richard Helppie
Is this where you're starting to talk about the affinity iceberg? (Dr. Lauran Star: Yeah.) Can you tell our listeners and readers and our viewers, what is the affinity iceberg?
Dr. Lauran Star
I love the affinity iceberg because it really gives you a gives a solid example. If you look at an iceberg, if you're out on the Alaskan waters, and you're looking at the iceberg - trust me, after you've seen the second one, you're done, it's time to order a drink, bartender to bring me a drink - they all look the same. They're white, they're cold, some might have a penguin on it if you're lucky. I've never seen a penguin. Some are tall, some are short, but they're pretty much all the same - boring. However, that's like people. We are...what you see on the outside is like the above the waterline of an iceberg. We might have different colors, but we're tall or short, blond hair, blue eyes, whatever have you, different skin color. That's it. When you dive - I'm a scuba diver - and when you dive underwater...so now we're in Alaska, and now we're diving, the true beauty - when I'm in a wet suit...that's temp regulated - so the beauty of that iceberg is when you're underwater because the light reflects very differently on that iceberg based on water temperature, salt content. The deeper you go - the deeper you go, the less salt, the more at the top, there's higher salt levels, same thing with temperature - you'll see fish at different levels. But you really see the beauty of that iceberg - much like people - when you go below the line. So when we go below the line now it's...and it's funny because I'm going to pull back here, Rich, I'm going to pull you back to an earlier comment, that yes, we've got a PhD up in New England, their parents are PhDs. This one's black, this one's white. They're pretty similar. They're actually really not. When we dive below, well, the heritage and culture that each individual brings, the parentage, their own critical thinking. Just because you grew up in the Northeast doesn't mean you have great critical thinking skills, doesn't mean that you didn't have struggles. You may have a little bit more privilege than someone down south, but there's more to it and that's all underneath the surface. There is so much more underneath the surface. They may be all carrying Kate Spade bags at BU. I'm going to pick on BU here, that might be all...
Richard Helppie
That could get us...that sounds a little stereotypical, but go ahead.
Dr. Lauran Star
I'm going to go with it; Kate Spade or Gucci or what...they're all...trust me. I was just on campus and I was like flabbergasted over the designer backpacks and whatnot. But they may be all carrying that. And we've got a nice mix of Asian and white and Hispanics and blacks and African-Americans. But I'm only seeing that tip of the iceberg, I'm only seeing above the waterline. When I start sitting down and talking with some of these students, they may have four languages under their belt, they may firmly believe in social justice, they may be bringing their culture with them, they may be immigrants, first generation, second generation. That's the beauty.
Richard Helppie
You're kind of making the case for an opportunity society that says, hey, if you've just arrived here, but you can do the work, great. And whether you come from a household that practices a certain culture, if you can do the work here, you're fine. And that's really what makes it great. Because you say in your book, you talk about the risks of focusing on the diversity initiative. And now I'm beginning to understand what you're talking about was, oh, okay, if you keep coming back to external, you're kind of missing everything. And I understand how it ties in with the view of that affinity iceberg; are we treating everybody the best and making sure that we're getting the best and the most from each person? Am I in the ballpark?
Dr. Lauran Star
You are 100%, in the ballpark. By focusing on diversity here's what we've created - and this is evidence based, all the studies are noted in my book - we've created a workplace that if diversity is your first line of attack in the DEI space, you'll create a workforce that is us versus them. I call it the lunchroom effect. I will go down to a cafeteria - if they have a cafeteria in house - I'll go down and look around. Are the Hispanic and Latinos all sitting together? Are the blacks sitting together? Are the Haitians sitting together? Are the Irish sitting together? When I look around and I look at that, I'm like, you clearly have created an us versus them. See inclusion; I go eat off everybody's plate.
Richard Helppie
I love the visual on that. And I think that it's a valid point yet, in trying to apply some kind of one size fits all we have the EEOC [who] says there are ten protected classes. Can you run through what those ten are quickly? I don't know if you can do that off the top of your head or not.
Dr. Lauran Star
Off the top of my head, let's see what we can do here. So the ten protected classes, we have race. And I will be honest, in the book I talk about race a little bit. There is one race, it is the human race. We need a better word for race and maybe that is heritage. Because when we think about someone that is black, in race, and the construct of race, when I when I speak to someone that's African American - and I've had this dialogue, and I'm like, we're all one race, we're all humans - you're not getting it. What we mean, what African-Americans mean, when we say I'm black and this is my race, is that what happens to me here affects a black person in Africa, just as what happens in Africa to a black person affects me here in the United States. It's a - yes - it's a collectivism of understanding.
Richard Helppie
Okay, so race is one of the ten.
Dr. Lauran Star
So race is one of the ten. Then we have...so we have race, we have gender. We have sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability...I'm like really going here...age. Let's see ethnicity. Did I say ethnicity? I think I said ethnicity. Okay, ethnicity. So I got two more...I don't know what the other two are off the top of my head, what do you got?
Richard Helppie
That's eight, a great place to start. So I think everybody can support the idea of accommodations for disability. I think we're becoming even better at that with the Americans with Disability Act. And now that people are understanding that mental health is also part of that, and that there can be accommodations and that people can have wonderful lives and contribute to their employer, even if they may have been locked out of the workforce in prior years. When I think about things like gender and...
Dr. Lauran Star
Sexual orientation and gender identity.
Richard Helppie
Some of those things aren't visible. (Dr. Lauran Star: No, they're not.) And so in hiring and such in various corporate cultures, your personal life [is] separate from your work life, and in fact, an employer can be in a lot of trouble for crossing a line about an employee's personal life, and also employers have some means of saying don't bring your personal life into the workplace, too. So we have that, and I don't know, just to tell you my experience as an employer, we were among the first to offer the same health care benefits to same sex couples. And we were so early on with it we couldn't find the product. Insurance companies were like, what? They didn't know; we had to find insurers that could cover our entire workforce, which was kind of interesting. And I think all those laws are very good. We don't want somebody to not get a job or to be discharged from their work or denied work for any of those things. And if you can do the work, fantastic, but isn't there some real risk in this ethnicity category? We're just going to lump all these people together because they kind of look the same. Are we seeing any of that play out?
Dr. Lauran Star
What we're seeing when we look at ethnicity as a protected class, what I'm starting to hear from my attorney friends that play in this field, is reverse discrimination. So what we're seeing is that this quota attainment of...okay, so we...ethnicity is a protected class, we want more people of color by three percent in leadership, then a white person comes along and applies for the position and gets denied. That's reverse discrimination.
Richard Helppie
Asian students were held to higher standards.
Dr. Lauran Star
Oh, that's affirmative action, right? We're still going through this with UNC - University of North Carolina - and Harvard. I think you're going to see more joining that from the Asian population. Is it okay for any organization, profit or nonprofit to say, we have enough of your kind?
Richard Helppie
And also, it's flying against the development of the human race; we are all blending. It's a rare person that has a single ethnicity. And in my experience, and I'm sure lots of others, trying to lump in Venezuelans, Mexicans, Cubans is nonsense, but the one that's really a howl for people that have any - any - historical view, is we're going to say, Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders, because they're all kind of, we think, the same shade.
Dr. Lauran Star
Oh, my gosh, isn't that crazy?
Richard Helppie
If you look into the history, there's a war between a lot of these people. So what about generational diversity and age discrimination, where do you stand with that?
Dr. Lauran Star
There was a big push-back in the 80s and 90s, that we were seeing a little bit more around that age discrimination. Today, we're not seeing it as much because our traditionalists are retiring. Our baby boomers are starting to retire. We're losing experience. So we're actually seeing a little opposite from that legal lens that organizations want baby boomers to stay in the workplace and not retire. We don't want to give them a reason to leave. So we need to give baby boomers and millennials tools so they can share ideas. (Rich Helppie: Absolutely.) And that's that inclusionary component. I've seen it right here. My husband, Murray, he's a baby boomer and he's an engineer. They hire fresh-outs in engineering. And he's like, oh, yeah, they don't want to work past five o'clock. I'm like, you don't want to work past five o'clock.
Richard Helppie
There's a lot of generational differences and I've talked about this on my show. It's something that we experience every day, that frankly, the numbers don't work. With a high school education and night school, college, I was able to get into a job and apartment, a car and whatever because of where the tax brackets were and where the cost of things were. If you try to pencil those numbers in today for an 18 to 25 year old, the numbers just don't work. It's not illogical for a person to say, you know what, why do I want to give up everything I've got when there's not going to be a reward there. And so it's clearly a thing that we need to, I think, address as a society. But I don't know, what are you seeing in your practice?
Dr. Lauran Star
I think...it's funny. I just spoke to a group of high school seniors. And one of the questions that we asked in the survey was, how big do you think your family will be? When you get the American dream - the house and the picket fence - how many kids do you want? It was scary, the human race is relying on Generation Z to procreate and they're saying, no, thank you, it's too expensive.
Richard Helppie
Those people that we elect and give the power to solve problems like that, to give hope and opportunity for a future generation, based on that vignette, we're failing.
Dr. Lauran Star
We are absolutely failing. But we're already seeing this in the workplace. We have eight million jobs more than we have workers. Eight million. Who's going to do the work? We don't have people to do that work. So from that technology lens, AI needs to catch up, we need to be doing much more in manufacturing that don't utilize human hands, because that number is going to continue to grow. They say by 2030, we're looking at 40 billion jobs not being filled.
Richard Helppie
Labor markets always come into balance, that either technology takes over or we do something else. And also the key is immigration. Yet, it's one other thing that we've managed to do in the worst possible way as a country. You talked about, in your practice, you do something called an inclusion immersion. What exactly is an inclusion immersion?
Dr. Lauran Star
As I walk the reader through the book, there are steps that you take; there is a strategic way to bring inclusion and diversity and equity to the workplace, there really is, and it is evidence-based; the studies support that. We start with that awareness, first and foremost, and then we climb that ladder. The last step is that inclusion immersion where you don't think about it. Your company had that, you weren't thinking about who are we going to hire, you were automatically attracting the top diverse talent out there, you didn't have to have quota attainment because you were already getting that. That inclusion - that brand awareness around your organizational culture of inclusion - word gets out.
Richard Helppie
We had technologies that were too heavy for certain people to carry; folks that needed walkers, one fellow didn't have sight, but he could do the work. And that's the beauty of a technology field because it still gets down to something very binary. Dr. Star, this has really been great and I do want to get you back on the show on one specific topic, if we could reschedule you also for a couple months out? (Dr. Laurean Star: Sure.) I'd love to have you come to us with some trends. What is it that you are seeing as the Diversity and Equity and Inclusion begins to move through the economy and through enterprises and not for profits. Are we getting to a better place? Because I'm sure it must upset some of our listeners and our readers and our viewers if we have people that don't want to work. And you said someone's got to do the work and heaven forbid they're the same people that don't want immigrants because then I don't know what you do at that point.
Dr. Lauran Star
I don't know what to do at that point. Exactly. But absolutely. Let's have an evidence trends show, that'd be awesome.
Richard Helppie
Yes, please. Okay, I will ask our producer, Brian, to get that on the calendar. As we wrap up through this very wide ranging and really nipping the tip of the iceberg here, what are some areas that we didn't cover today that perhaps we should have talked about?
Dr. Lauran Star
Oh, my gosh, I think we've only covered like, maybe ten pages in the book. I mean, DE and I, it's a big and heavy topic and we need to start talking about it. There's this trauma induced fear of diversity in the workplace. We need to start having these conversations.
Richard Helppie
I agree with that. Dr. Star, you've been a great guest and I know that we're going to get a lot of feedback on this. I hope it's from people that actually listen to the interview or read the transcript. Sometimes just the titles; we get unusual comments on it. I'll leave it at that. Any closing comments for our audience today?
Dr. Lauran Star
You can go to my website, DrLauranStar.com, and you will find a plethora of complimentary information out there. DE and I takes everybody - no one should own thought leadership in one bucket and I truly believe that. If you're struggling in your organization, don't hesitate to reach out to me, you can just reach out to me on my website and I will gladly get right back to you.
Richard Helppie
Fantastic. I do think people want to do the right thing. They don't know how and they need [something] definite and they need guidance. So we've been talking today about diversity, equity and inclusion; very important topics for this time in the arc of human history. And we're talking with an expert, Dr. Lauran Star, US Army veteran, PhD and practitioner of over 20 years. And so with our guest - with great gratitude - Dr. Lauran Star, this is your host Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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