259 Diversity Equity and Inclusion Deconstructed for Leaders with Lily Zheng | Partnering Leadership Global Thought Leader

***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***

[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: Lilly Zang, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I'm thrilled to have you in this conversation with me.

[00:00:05] Lily Zheng: Thank you for having me. I think this is going to be a lot of fun.

[00:00:08] Mahan Tavakoli: It is going to be a lot of fun and I can't wait to talk about your book. D e I deconstructed your no nonsense guide to doing the work and doing it right. But before we get to that, Lily would love to know whereabouts you grew up and how your upbringing impacted the kind of person you've become.

[00:00:26] Lily Zheng: It's such an interesting question. I've actually never been asked that specific variation of it before, so let me give it some. . I was born in the peninsula of the San Francisco Bay area in a upper middle class mostly white and East Asian suburb. So that should actually tell you a lot about my upbringing both the good and the bad, right?

Good in the sense that I had the enormous privilege to have access to great education growing up. Relatively, uncomplicated conversations about history and race and whatnot, which was a negative as well, because it meant that, my exposure to some of the reality, our country, our history, the current state of inequality in the world were less accessible to me for many years.

But how all of that impacts who I am today? . That's an entire podcast, right? I think it gave me a real sense that I as a person have a strong responsibility in the world, not just to myself, but to the communities that I am a part of and the communities around me.

I was raised with a very strong sense of responsibility a strong sense of duty and work ethic, and I absolutely carry that on to today. I think something else, growing up in the environment that I did, taught me was also a sense of gratitude. Given that both of my parents are first generation immigrants, I definitely grew up as many children of first generation immigrants did hearing lots of stories about, all the ways in which my parents and my ancestors and folks had struggled and sacrificed and whatnot to get me to the place where I am today.

 I think a lot about that. I make sure that. , I recognize the many privileges that I have and try to give back. Try to, pay it forward and to make sure that future generations after me are better off than I am.

[00:02:32] Mahan Tavakoli: What a beautiful way Lilly to think. Take on that sense of responsibility the privileges that we all have with the opportunities we are afforded to then give back more to people around us. So what was it that specifically got you interested in d e I as a way to give back and make a difference in the.

[00:03:00] Lily Zheng: To be frank I didn't get into d e I to give back. I got into d e I because I was seeing workplaces around me being awful and horrible places to be . I had my own personal experiences of working in workplaces that were not inclusive, were not equitable, we're not great places to be for people like me.

For, other people of color for queer trans folks, for non-binary folks. And I saw all of this, and not only that, I saw efforts to fix these workplaces fail over and over again. And so I first got into d e I out of a sense that, wow, this industry. is going in and fixing all of these broken workplaces.

But it didn't take me very long to realize that the industry was really bad at doing this, like really bad at doing this. And so as an early practitioner, I remember doing all of this reading and all of this research and starting to question, starting to think this is not as clear cut as I thought it would.

the folks who have been doing this work for a long time aren't necessarily creating the impact that we want to see. And so because there's no linear path to just learning how to do good and learning how to be effective in this work, I tried to blaze my own and I try to find my own space in the field and to compile.

All of the knowledge from practitioners past so that those in the future maybe won't, not make mistakes, but will at least make different and more interesting mistakes than the same mistakes that folks have been making for decades and decades.

[00:04:43] Mahan Tavakoli: Lilly, the quote is attributed to Einstein, where definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different

The approaches with respect to D E I. Haven't produced results, and in many instances they've actually done more harm than good in organizations.

I have seen it firsthand over the years where there has been diversity training or whatever you want to call it, and afterwards there was more hostility in the organization. What is it that we can do, or how can we think about it? So we approach it differently so we don't do the same things to end up getting the same results.

[00:05:26] Lily Zheng: It's funny you bring up that example. Actually some research dating all the way back to the seventies and eighties saying essentially the same thing. Some of the first iterations of d e I trainings were these events called encounter groups, which basically, to sum it up, put a bunch of white men in a room, put a bunch of non-white folks, people of color, women, et cetera, in a room, and then just smash 'em.

Ideally, you put a white man in a hot seat and you grill him for 30 minutes to an hour. Just ask them really pointed questions designed to make them extremely uncomfortable. And you know what encounter groups do? They make people upset. They make people lash out. They make people discriminate more. And that was in the seventies. And for the listeners, if that sounds anything like a D E I training you've ever witnessed or been a part of, that is a perfect example of we've been doing this for 50 years and it's still bad and awful, and doesn't work so here's what we can take away from the long history of d e i not working. We can also.

Not just recognize that d e I hasn't worked, but try to understand why it hasn't worked because that why is the answer to how we can design d e I better. I just outlined a couple of the failure modes of encounter groups, for example. They tend to polarize folks. They tend to make people feel a strong sense of threat and shame and blame.

And we know from decades of social science research that when you make anyone feel shame and blame, they typically don't respond the way you want to. They don't magically turn into better people. They typically attack the messenger, deflect, become defensive, have backlash effects, all of that. So if there could be a rule number one, it's we can't get by threatening people by making people feel like they're under attack, that you're trying to take something away from them. And so you can look at initiatives that work and initiatives that don't, and boil it down to did this initiative make the people at targeting feel good about becoming better people? Or did it make them feel bad about starting off as bad? And that's one of the really big dividers between things that tend to work more and things that tend to work less. So that's one big takeaway. 

Another one is that there is no intervention in the world, no matter who designs it, no matter how fancy it is, that will fix systemic problems.

in 60 to 90 minutes. It just doesn't work. There is nothing out there that will do that. And if someone is promising that they will do that, it's fake. That's snake oil. It doesn't work like that. Only systemic solutions solves systemic problems. And so when you try to design work that's effective, you need to be planning for the long haul and not just arbitrarily long initiatives for no reason, but you need to spend time.

Really addressing the root causes of inequality. You need to spend time, training new behaviors and incentivizing new ways of thinking and acting. You need to spend time working with people in positions of power to give them better ways to use their power to support equity and inclusion rather than undermined it, you need to make people understand that this isn't a trendy.

This isn't a phase. This isn't a one and done a checkbox, none of that. This is a long effort to achieve outcomes that matter to the entire organization, and it's going to be taken seriously. We know that long-term efforts pay off much more than check the box, get it done immediately. Even though the immediate efforts are sexy, they're appeal.they're convenient. They make people feel good about themselves. Sometimes we have to resist that those don't work. So we'll start with just those two, make people feel good and plan for the long haul.

[00:09:38] Mahan Tavakoli: That is really important, Lily, what you mentioned to make people feel good in that, there are a lot of times where the initiatives, isolate one group or another. Make people feel bad and as a result, they ensure the failure of whatever it is that you are talking about. And the other thing you mentioned, which I really appreciate, is that it takes a systemic approach and it takes a long-term.

Mindset around it. After George Floyd's murder, there were all kinds of press releases and organizations talking about importance of different initiatives. Couple of years later, a lot of that has died down for quite a few of those same organizations. They've moved on to the next topic of the day, so it requires a longer term systemic approach.

And to that end, I also want to touch on the. You mentioned changing hearts and minds should not be the goal. That approach is not effective. How come?

[00:10:45] Lily Zheng: This is one of the big controversies in the D E I space, given that practitioners will. Divide themselves along the lines of oh, I do hearts and minds work. I do systems work. I'm not going to go out there and say that no hearts and minds work is effective. I think that's hyperbole. I think a, it is possible to change the way people think and change the way people engage.

And it is possible to really, turn someone who doesn't believe in this work into someone who does. But my argument here is that if our problems are systemic, , we need to be affecting change systemically and hearts and minds doesn't scale very easily. Now why doesn't hearts and minds work is the question here.

And my answer to that is that hearts and minds typically articulates that you need to change everything about how every single person engages to be able to. An organization. Examples of heart and minds approaches that I've seen. A company of 10,000 people brings in a group of a hundred trainers to train every single one of those 10,000 people.

Individually, super expensive doesn't scale really well. In effect, everyone really gets only 20 minutes of dedicated time. And do you really expect that you can change everything about how people are and how people behave in 20 minutes a person? and frankly not even 90 minutes a person, not even two hours a person.

 I boil it down to this I'm a student of social psychology I don't have to get into the whole debate between social psychology and personality psychology, but essentially there are two trains of thought. One is that the situation controls behavior and the other, that personality and individual traits control behavior.

I'm on the situation camp. I firmly believe that if you design the right situation, you design the right culture, the right norms, the right environment, you can essentially incentivize any kind of behavior. And the best example of that is all of our toxic workplaces in which everyone in them acts toxically, despite none of those people being inherently bad people.

So do you think in a toxic workplace, every single person's heart and. Has been bent towards toxicity. No way. No way at all, right? We know people are good. We know people are inherently good. There's no way that, toxic workplaces just have horrible, evil people, and yet we see horrible, evil behavior at scale.

Why? Because the workplace is shaped that way. The workplace incentivizes that, so flip it on its head. If we wanna design a good workplace that creates good outcomes at scale, that creates inclusive cultures, do you need to have a group of fully good, fully inclusive, perfectly good people in that workplace?No, actually you don't at all. Students of social psychology know that if you just create the contain, For those behaviors. If you make it much easier to act in inclusive ways than to act in exclusive ways, if you incentivize the right behavior, if you create the right processes norms systems and policies, then you can take a person that's maybe not the best person and you'll find that they'll still conform to workplaces that are designed well to make them, act in inclusive ways.

And that, I think is the. We don't have to be trying to change everyone individually to create environments that are better than what we have now. And the best example of that is just how messed up our environments are right now, even though they're filled with good people.

[00:14:28] Mahan Tavakoli: I. Mindset Lilly first and foremost, because it is a view of people primarily being good people, wanting to do good things, and creating the environment to allow them and enable them to do the right thing as opposed to one that views something inherently wrong with people. The second one is that at the end of the day, it's the behaviors that matter most.

We can't read or dictate people's thinking or intentions, but we can build systems that enable the right behaviors that allow for a more equitable workplace. So that's why I really love the way you put it and. More appealing to everyone to be part of that rather than isolating one group or another as being the problem people,

[00:15:24] Lily Zheng: Fully agree. Fully agree. And talking about the difference between thoughts and behaviors is so critical because here's the thing, oftentimes people come to me and say, Lily, I know my colleague is biased. How do I get rid of the. Or biases, and my answer is usually not what they expect because they're hoping that I say, oh, you just do thing A, B, and C and voila, you can wipe their brain clean and make them a good, pure human being. The secret here is that you have biases. I have biases. . The only difference is that there are some people who let their biases control their behavior and act in terrible ways, and maybe work in workplaces that enable that. And then there are people who don't. The difference isn't how good or bad people are, it's to what extent those behaviors are enabled by their workplaces and to what extent they know the expectations for better behavior.

 I hate to say it, I could think biased. all day. I could think Women are inferior. Women are inferior. Women are inferior, right? Doesn't mean anything. If I'm able to be mindful about my behavior to make sure my impacts are equitable, it doesn't matter what horrible thoughts are floating around in my head. For the record, I don't, have horrible thoughts floating around in my head all the time, but occasionally, I'll have a thought that's like that wasn't the best thought. I've made an assumption that I shouldn't have made, but that's completely separate from what behaviors I'm exhibiting in workplaces with my colleagues.

And, the real secret is that we can just design workplaces where people behave equitably without needing to get into the business of legislating people's thoughts, right? It's just about making sure that we know what behaviors are tolerated, what isn't tolerated, what inclusive behaviors look like, how is that's incentivized, and we're all on the same page, 

it's possible to be respectful, and it's not that.

[00:17:20] Mahan Tavakoli: which is also why what a lot of organizations were into, and some still are, the unconscious bias training. Can also be counterproductive in many instances. As you said, we all have biases. I had a great conversation with David McCraney outstanding podcast and outstanding book, how Minds Change, and he talks a lot about the different biases that we have and what guides us.

We all have it. The point is, To hope for a bias-free work environment. The point is to have an environment where people's behaviors are aligned with the kind of behaviors you wanna see in that workplace. And one of the points that you mentioned, Lilly, which is important, is the need for outcome focus in this work.

Why is outcome focus so important in D E I?

[00:18:23] Lily Zheng: outcome focus is a way of thinking about this work that's grounded in what are we trying to achieve at the end of the day rather than. What are the inputs we take to try to achieve it? And I would argue it's absolutely critical. Given the D E I industry's long history of spinning our wheels and ultimately affecting nothing or very little.

Now to explain more about what it means to focus on outcomes, it essentially means before you even start any initiative, you should know what it is you're trying to. There's a lot of folks who say, I'm building a plane while I'm flying it. That's all well and good, but are you building towards a set of blueprints?

An outcome focus is a set of blueprints. It's saying this is more or less what we're trying to get to. This is more or less what we want to achieve. We want a workplace that is, let's say, free from microaggressions. We want a workplace where everyone feels comfortable bringing whatever parts of themselves they want to work.

We want a workplace where, Candidates from every community want to work in. We want a workplace where leaders feel really engaged, really satisfied. Where retention is really good, where our customers think of us and think they're a good company, they're doing good work. They really care about people like us. If we focus on those outcomes, then everything we do to try to make things better, needs to be grounded in that. And this often steers the conversation towards measurement towards metrics, accountability, ways to gauge the impact of our work. And it's deeply uncomfortable because a lot of d e I work has historically not gauged impact.

It's essentially said, look, , I'm going to have a conversation with your entire company for 60 minutes, and I believe that it's going to do good. What good, how good to what degree, what amount? What's it going to fix? Don't worry about it. I know it's really going to shape how people think and how they engage.

What behaviors is it going to change? In what ways is that behavior change going to sustain? How does that allow us to achieve our longer term? D e I. Most people can't answer that, and that's a huge problem because it means that if you have no grounding in those outcomes, you can deliver one engagement, 10 engagements, a hundred engagements, and have absolutely no clue if any of them work.

And this is why people say d e I is a waste of time, right? Because so much of this work is grounded in inputs and just relies on our own internal beliefs as practitioners saying I feel like I did a good. , I don't think we're allowed to just say we feel like we did a good job. We have to be able to prove it 

there's no way we would hire a plumber to fix our plumbing and then have the plumber walk out saying I feel like I put in a good amount of effort. Like you say buddy, did you fix it? If it's not fixed, it doesn't matter how good the plumber feels about it, it's not fixed.

Go back there and fix it. but we don't take that approach to d e i. We don't take that approach to a lot of people related interventions because we either don't know how to, or we're scared to quantify this work, to measure this work, to hold ourselves accountable for this work. And that's why so many people perceive it to be amorphous.

Not accountable. Not serious, just to check the box exercise, because we don't have this accountability built.

[00:22:00] Mahan Tavakoli: that's an important point that you mentioned. Lily. Most of my career has been in the training field, and I had a conversation with Jack Phillips. Done a lot around measurement and part of the problem with a lot of training that is done in organizations is the lack of measures. D E I even more which is why then it is not valued by a lot of people, especially on the business side, in the organization.

And when times get tough and things get hard, they say we can do. With it, because as you said, it's not what problem are we fixing or what are we addressing and what are the outcomes we are looking for? So what would be those outcomes? Because I want to go on the flip side of it. You do make a point, and I agree with you about the dark side of making the business case for diversity.

So if that's the case, What would a team or an organization looking for measures, what would they be measuring that is outcome oriented rather than we got people in a room for 90 minutes or nine hours, it doesn't matter. Talking about D E I.

[00:23:15] Lily Zheng: Yeah, great question and I'll start with the first part where you bring up, one critique that I've had pretty often is that the business case for diversity is dangerous. I'll talk a little bit more about that very quickly. What I mean by that, is one of the most common rationales for d e I initiatives is the d e I business case.

Essentially, more diverse companies equal more productive companies, more creative companies that have a better bottom line. That argument has been around since the eighties. It's been around for a long time. It's been used in every iteration. It was a big centerpiece of the Roosevelt Thomas school of d EI starting from the seventies and.

it also doesn't work. In the sense that if you use the business case for diversity, you tie, diversity to the business's bottom line. It turns out if your business is in a decline, that actually increases their willingness to cut diversity. And by tying, the hiring of people of color to business outcomes, that essentially makes people of color women and marginalized groups feel like commodities,

you essentially boil things down. , if you hire another black person, you'll make $20 more a year. It's dehumanizing. It's honestly rude. , that's absurd. And you can't prove it. It's not instrumental, it's not functional. It's not tied to any sort of real how does this happen?

How is it that hiring more diversity actually makes us more money? That conversation never happens. It's. More diversity equals more money. You should do it. And it's a really spurious argument, which is why I tell people not to make it. 

[00:24:54] Mahan Tavakoli: Lilly I wanna jump in on that one, which is a great point. Before you continue. A couple of years ago I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry because after the George Floyd murder, where a lot of organizations were talking about the business value of most specifically diverse senior teams, there.

 Consulting firm that had the go-to study on the value of diversity on senior leadership teams. And I just thought, okay, I will look at their senior leadership team. They had an all white male with one. Senior global leadership team of a dozen people, so they have to study. Talking about the business case for it, even the consulting firm having done the study wasn't living up to it. So you can poke a lot of holes in that business case.

[00:25:53] Lily Zheng: And it also doesn't drive behavior also, like I've never met an executive who didn't care about diversity. And then you say, Hey. He give you a very broad, abstract promise that more diversity will get you more money. And then that executive goes, wow, I've suddenly decided to care about diversity.

It doesn't work. It's at best a post hoc explanation for executives who have cared about diversity all along to give another argument for why they should care. That's probably where I've seen it used the most, but should we be making let's call them functional cases for our diversity, equity, and inclusion?

Yes, absolutely. But we should be extremely realistic with what we promise. So what I tell folks, I don't tell folks that more diversity gets the more money. I can't promise that financial returns have a lot to do with a whole bunch of factors and company diversity. I'm sure it's one of them, but it's not one of the big ones.

So what can we tie? Diversity. The more diversity your company has, I'm pretty certain the more trust you'll be able to build with a wide range of customer communities, the more legitimacy you'll be seen to have by a wide range of stakeholders. I can promise that the healthier your workplace culture is, the more inclusive it is, the better your retention rate's going to be.

I can promise that. I know for a fact that when people work in toxic cultures, the turnover is very, The more representative your leadership team is going to be, the more people will trust them, the more people will listen to them, and the more junior level talent from different communities will feel seen and to feel like they have a career feature in your company.

I could promise that. So each of these things are functional cases for diversity that are tied very specifically to what having a more diverse, equitable workplace can. But they're not these grand sweeping promises that promise too much and can never live up to it. I think we should absolutely be making these sorts of more tactical cases for diversity all the time.

Like they're useful to have pay equity, that's a huge draw right now for talent and the war for talent is really messy right now with all the layoffs that we're currently seeing. Folks are flocking to companies offering great pay offering great benefits, offering remote working options.

So can I say that these policies are associated with greater talent? Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Because we have data on it. Yes, we need to be making these cases for d e i, but we need to be realistic and tactical about how we talk about this work. There's absolutely a benefit to doing it, but we can't oversell it and we can't make the candidates, the employees from marginalized communities feel like we are objectifying them to benefit the business for whatever.

[00:28:55] Mahan Tavakoli: It's outcome orientation, but outcome orientation with a promise that can be delivered. It's not outcome orientation to return to shareholders or whatever else you come up with that. Could be correlated, but it's a lot harder to be able to show those measures and build toward them so it's outcome orientation that is relevant and can be measured to see if the initiatives are making progress or not.

Now, one of the issues. Lilly is that a lot of organizations that I've had conversations with and some Silicon Valley types are big advocates for meritocracy and the importance of meritocracy. Anytime questions around diversity and inclusion come in, they talk about merito's importance.

In the culture of the organization, how do you balance that? How do you look at meritocracy within the framework of D E I.

[00:30:06] Lily Zheng: It's funny you mentioned that because Silicon Valley loves meritocracy. Yes. And Silicon Valley should also love data accountability and the scientific method. And so usually when someone says, our company is a meritocracy, I say, that's great. Prove it. What do you have to show that your company is actually a meritocracy?

Because a meritocracy is a place where decisions are. on skill, value worth experience where everyone is treated fairly and evaluated on the basis of their work. That's a bold claim. Do you have data backing it up? 0% of the companies that have ever made that claim to me have any backing of it. So rather than actually saying we are a meritocracy, what they're trying to say is, I perceive things to be a meritocracy, or, I wish things were a meritocracy, or I care about meritocracy.

All great things. And as a consultant that actually specializes in survey assessment. I take folks at face value. I say, look, if you have a meritocracy but you can't prove it, then that doesn't really help anyone does it. So let's collect some data. I'm totally agnostic about it. I genuinely don't know what I'll find.

Maybe I'll find a meritocracy. Spoiler alert. I've actually never found a meritocracy, but I'm open to the possibility of finding one. What we typically see is senior leaders who believe in AM meritocracy, and yet all of this non meritocratic behavior happening rampant in their company that they're either not aware of or blissfully ignorant of or turning their cheek, 

 Look, I believe in the concept of meritocracy as much as anyone else in this country, like the US loves merito. and a lot of companies that claim to be a meritocracy are just in complete denial that their perception of meritocracy is entirely based in the idea of their company and their head, not the actual company that they work in.

And so if we care about that, then we should care about actually creating it. I think we can all align on that. . In a true meritocracy, there wouldn't be racist discrimination in a true meritocracy. Candidates wouldn't be getting fired from roles because of their gender or because of their requesting of remote working accommodations.

In a true meritocracy, we would have diversity, equity, and inclusion, but in many companies that purport to be that they have every problem under the sun, the only thing that they actually lack, Is a meritocracy, like they're everything but that. So it's a great place to start a conversation, but if someone's in denial and they're not willing to actually fact check themselves, then that just tells me that their perception of am meritocracy is a way for them to avoid reality rather than, a way for them to hold themselves account.

[00:33:05] Mahan Tavakoli: I love the way you put a challenge, whether your organization is truly a meritocracy or not, and I would add to that. I can come up with a new bias. We can call it meritocracy bias, in that we believe that some of the senior executives that I've interacted with, because I have been successful, it's my merit that has gotten me to the point that I've gotten. 

[00:33:29] Lily Zheng: If you've ever seen the picture of the world War II planes with the bullet holes in the wings that story comes about from the planes that came back from the battlefield having bullet holes in certain areas. And so the engineers said, , maybe we should be shoring up those areas that have bullet holes,

so that these planes will get not shot down better. Completely missing the fact that all the planes that were shot elsewhere didn't make it back, and so leaders look around and they say you made it. I made it because we made it and we had a good experience. This company must be a good place, but they miss every single other person who is pushed out because of discrimination.

Who never got a promotion because of favoritism and bias, who, I don't know, worked in such a toxic environment that the first chance they got to work somewhere else, they took it. They don't see these people because they're not there anymore. And leaders need to recognize that if they have risen up to those positions, more often than not they're the exception and not the rule.

They should be trying to understand why there aren't more people. Who had that experience, they should try to understand the experiences of those who have had the worst experiences, because oftentimes those are the folks who have the most insight into the company, not those who have been the exception, who managed to succeed despite the company, not because of it.

[00:34:56] Mahan Tavakoli: What an outstanding. Example, Lil, I had heard of that specific case, but I had never married it with that survival or survivorship bias within an organization where are the bullet holes that you are reinforcing, forgetting that the planes that fell down or didn't make it back had the bullet holes elsewhere.

 That's a outstanding example that you married with. Meritocracy or success within the organization and the biases that come from it. Would love to know from you, Lilly what are some of the practices of great organizations or teams?

Couple of examples that we can say, this is what we can aspire to do more.

[00:35:43] Lily Zheng: Great. I'm going to do my best to list a whole bunch of practices. Something to start with is leaders need to recognize, and this is a good thing, that they actually can't and shouldn't do this on their own. They need help. Leaders need help. They need to be making decisions.

They need to be assessing the problem with a team, and so I would highly advise people look into participatory and collaborative decision making. I would look into seating and sharing power. and how leaders can work together with other stakeholders in their organization to try to understand the problem together, to problem solve together, to get shared buy-in to create the solutions.

I think a lot of leaders these days especially I would say a certain type of leader that believes that they have to be this sort of stoic, unflappable, perfect leader who never makes mistakes. Find d e I really difficult. If there's any one thing to know about this field is that the right answer is often not clear, not easy, and not simple.

And so leaders like that really struggle cuz they come to me saying, Lily, I just want the one right answer. I just wanna be able to shout it from the rooftop. The one thing we gotta do to fix all of this. And I told him like, , that's not how this stuff works, the problems are complex.

I can say something like systemic racism, simple term, not a very simple thing. In practice, systemic racism, for example. Means that your policies are biased, your processes are biased. Your internal culture rewards the wrong things. The leaders that you've chosen model the wrong behavior. The incentive set up for employees, don't support them being inclusive.

All of these things. So if you wanna give me, one fix for that, it doesn't exist. Complex problems, they require complex solutions and they require more than one leader. Saying I'm here to fix things. It's something that everyone has to fix together. So practices that work, sharing decision making power, sharing power, frankly, bringing in more stakeholders into the process of assessing the problem and fixing the problem.

That's thing number one. Thing number two. if you are problem solving, recognize that not every problem is built equal, and symptoms are not the same as problems. Oftentimes, when you come up with d e i, problems and challenges, leaders will hear about, employees who had a bad experience. For example, they'll say, Hey, I talked to a manager, and the manager was very rude towards me and denied me a promotion.

The quick takeaway manager is the problem. , get rid of the manager, fix the problem. Most cases. Most cases, it's far more complex than that. That one incident of discrimination, for example, that's more likely to be the symptom than the cause. Get curious, dig in deeper, ask, why did this happen? Talk to the manager.

Who knows? Maybe the manager is a raging bigot and they're the only raging bigot in your company and you get rid of them. Problem solved, more likely than not, the manager will say something like, I have no time to give performance evaluations. I have no training in how to do this work effectively. I don't know how to resolve.

This employee had some performance problems, but we have no ways to offer support. I'm not given advice on how to communicate with these people. My senior manager managed me like this, so I'm going to do it like this to my direct reports, all sorts of things. And what you start to uncover is that every problem, most d e i problems in a company go deep.

They're complex, they're complicated, so avoid the allure of simple explanations. For D E I related issues, it's almost always a systemic issue. That's why it's so persistent. That's why it's so hard to fix, we can't be pulling weeds. We have to be pulling roots. 

Other things that work. Take your time. That's another really good practice. Especially when it comes to hiring. For example we talk a lot about unconscious bias. One of the biggest exacerbating factors for bias is actually time pressure. So I know for a fact that if you asked me to hire the best candidate for a role and gave me a month or two months, I'd come back with a really good can.

I'd reach out to all my networks. I'd do some relationship building. I'd make sure that I source some good people. I'd make sure that the candidate pool's really nice. I'd send you back some nice folks. If you said, Lily, find me a candidate in 15 minutes, who do you think I'm gonna find? I'm gonna find my friends and my friends probably look and think like me.

So it doesn't matter how, inclusive, I think if you give me 15 minutes to do a thing, I'm gonna flip my bias, which is on full blast because that's the only thing that'll allow me to meet your request. So again, talk about designing the situation, right? The only difference between those two scenarios, it wasn't evil biased Lilly versus pure, non-biased Lilly.

It was a Lilly given two months to fill a role versus a Lilly given 15. . That's the only difference, so if you want more objective decisions, if you want something closer to a true meritocracy, if you want, bias interrupters, give people time and resources to actually do it 

this stuff takes money. This stuff takes effort and energy. So invest in it. 

[00:41:08] Mahan Tavakoli: Those are outstanding points. Lilly you mentioned, for example, taking your time, our heuristics, a lot of times cognitive biases. People see them as negatives. They are not, they are short. Ways for us to make more quick decisions, we need cognitive biases for our survival.

That said, there are times where we need to be mindful of those cognitive biases. So what you're mentioning is, for example, in the hiring process, slowing it down will enable us to then go around those cognitive biases and be able to make a better decision. Love your point about involving your team, and most specifically you mentioned that curiosity and questioning, which.

is with primarily the intention of finding out systemic issues to address rather than individual personal issues to address. Not that, there aren't times where an individual couldn't be the problem. That can be the case, but far too often we quickly reach the conclusion that it's the individual rather than asking the five why's.

Being curious to find out what systemically is contributing to this. So I love those thoughts and perspective.

[00:42:34] Lily Zheng: thank you. Why is the most powerful question? Why really allows you to dig deep? And the best thing about why is you don't have to be a senior leader to ask it. You can be a junior employee and ask why. And here's the thing.

if one person answers why, they're likely to come up with one answer. But if you have 10 people answer why? You have 20 people, 50 people. That starts to get to a real understanding of why, genuinely, why problems happen and not just an abstract academic understanding, but a tactical, practical one that you can then look at and be like, now that we know why this is happening, we can interrupt it, we can change.

We can design better, we can design a better organization, a better container for these behaviors that incentivize better ones, and disincentivize the ones that we don't wanna see.

[00:43:25] Mahan Tavakoli: And one of the things I love about your book is that you cover both power in there and the fact that each and every one of us can play a role in this. This is not just something for the senior leadership team or a c e O of an organization. Every individual, depending on where you are in the organization, can play a role.

Influence for the better, before finding out more about how the audience can connect with you and your book, Lilly would love to know are there other leadership resources and practices you recommend? 

[00:43:59] Lily Zheng: The cheeky answer is I have something like 500 references in my book. There's a lot of references, a lot of resources are in there. 

I recommend the Wake Up by Michelle Meju. Kim is excellent. It's a really good book for leaders trying to, recenter why they're doing this work and to find their sort of inner compass. I also really includes analytics. It's a book focused on d e i metrics.

How to be an Inclusive Leader by Jennifer Brown's pretty good. Inclusion on purpose by to TOK is really nice as well. I quite like that one. Look. 

 I would start by asking yourself, where do I need to grow as a leader? What do I need to learn about? Because frankly, not every book in the d e i space is for every person at every stage in their.

And so if you're looking for metrics, look for a metrics book. Don't look for a touchy feely book. You're gonna be disappointed if you're feeling adrift lost, you need some personal coaching and guidance. Don't look for a metrics book that's not gonna make you feel any better. That's not gonna answer your problem.

Work together with maybe a trusted thought partner, colleague, a friend, a family member to. , how do I need to grow? Where do I need to be better to do better? And then look for resources that'll help you do that, 

[00:45:14] Mahan Tavakoli: and a great place to start Lilly is with your book. a lot of value and real deep thinking, which I appreciated showing. How to approach and think about d e I in a way that. Be impactful in the organization. So a year, two years, five years down the line, we have actually made a difference and are in a different point and place rather than feeling like we did a lot of things but didn't make much progress on that journey.

So how can the audience find out more about you, Lilly, and your.

[00:45:58] Lily Zheng: The easiest place to learn more about both of these things would be through my website lilly zang.co. Co. That's one place that you can learn a lot about the work that I do learn about this book by others. You can also, find the book anywhere books are sold. So Amazon. Barnes and Noble IndieBound you can buy from my publisher, bar Kohler publishers.

Lots of great places to learn about this book. You can also visit my LinkedIn where I post incessantly probably two or three times a week. 

[00:46:28] Mahan Tavakoli: Outstanding. I really appreciated reading the book Lilly, and this conversation with specific action steps that the audience members can take. Really appreciate you joining this conversation. Lilly Za, thank you so much.

[00:46:45] Lily Zheng: Thank you for having me.