146 How to Build a Real Workplace Culture of Inclusion that Delivers Results with Cynthia Owyoung |Partnering Leadership Global Thought Leader

Mahan Tavakoli: 

Welcome to Partnering Leadership. I'm really excited this week to be welcoming Cynthia Owyoung. Cynthia is vice-president of Inclusion, Equity, and Belonging for RobinHood. She drives the company's approach to enhancing its culture of diversity and inclusion. Cynthia is also the author of the book, All Are Welcome: How to Build a Real Workplace Culture of Inclusion that Delivers Results.

I enjoyed this conversation because Cynthia is practicing driving this culture of inclusion. So she speaks to it as a practitioner, rather than just a conceptual framework on how to make the organization more inclusive. 

I also enjoy hearing from you. Keep your comments coming mahan@mahantavakoli.com. There's a microphone icon on partnering leadership.com. Really enjoy getting those voice messages. Don't forget to follow the podcast. Tuesday conversations with magnificent changemakers from the greater Washington DC DMV region and Thursday conversations with brilliant global thought leaders such as Cynthia Owyoung. 

Now, Here's my conversation with Cynthia Owyoung.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

Cynthia Owyoung, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I'm thrilled to have you in this conversation with me.

Cynthia Owyoung: 

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

I'm excited to talk about your book. All Are Welcome: How to Build a Real Workplace Culture of Inclusion that Delivers Results. Before we get to that, Cynthia would love to know about your upbringing and how it impacted who you've become.

Cynthia Owyoung: 

Definitely. I am a born and raised San Franciscan. There are not too many of us. My parents actually immigrated from China, settled in San Francisco in a primarily African-American neighborhood. When I grew up, being and feeling very different, because I didn't look like the people in my neighborhood. And my parents have a very traditional Chinese culture that they come from. That was the dominant culture in our household. 

Growing up with that traditional Chinese upbringing in this very different, broad context around American society, gave me a really strong sense of biculturalism. I always felt like I had one foot in two worlds and sometimes three because of the neighborhood that I grew up in. And that resulted in never really feeling like I belonged anywhere. I was never Chinese enough for my Chinese friends. I wasn't black enough for my black friends. I definitely wasn't white enough for everyone else. With that and just who my family is. 

One of my brothers is gay. The other brother is developmentally challenged. I grew up with a lot of differences in my life. Seeing how people in my family would get treated differently because of who they are or how they presented or what people would make in terms of assumptions about them and what their potential was. That really taught me to have a sense of empathy for people with different lived experiences and to really want to correct for what I perceived to be social injustice or inequity in the world. Because I would see people like my own family treat my gay brother as somebody who has less than because he was gay. That's some sort of “unnatural thing” when he was a person just like everyone else. Or my developmentally disabled brother. Like, oh, he's not capable of holding down a full-time job. When in fact he's held one down for years and years and years, decades.

Those types of assumptions really have sharpened within me, like a strong desire to access opportunities, to make sure everyone is respected, to give everyone equal access, to really fulfill their potential in both work and life. It's really shaped the work that I do today.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

That empathy, Cynthia, I find is really important as we talk about diversity and inclusion. It's something that through your life experience, you had a chance to be able to see the world through different perspectives and different eyes. And that's really important for us as we want to become more empathetic leaders and make diversity and inclusion, a word that a few years from now, we don't have to refer to anymore. It becomes part of how we operate as individuals. So you had all of this in your upbringing, but what gave you the desire to do this for a living?

Cynthia Owyoung: 

That comes down to a particular moment in time for me. I had spent almost a decade in a career in advertising at ad agencies. At the end of that time, I just sort of felt unfulfilled and I wanted to contribute more to society as well as just find something that was more personally gratifying. I thought, well, you know what? Because of my brother who is developmentally challenged, I wanted to launch a nonprofit. I had decided to go into nonprofit management so that I could actually create an organization that would serve developmentally disabled adults in the Asian community, particularly because disability is such a taboo topic in Asian culture. There's a lot of services for children with disabilities, but not as many for adults. And I could see that with my brother and I wanted him to have a more fulfilled life by providing that.

So I decided to go to grad school, and, in grad school, a couple of things happened. I had such great timing that I ended up graduating during the first tech bust. So there were not a lot of jobs out there. A lot of people who had job offers were getting rejected at that time. So not a great job market. 

At that time, also my brother who had held down his job for 13 years, he was laid off because of automation. He was working for a bank. He was, one of the people, late at night counting. I don't know if you remember this, will date me completely, but, ATMs used to actually take cash and checks in envelopes. And so he would be the one of the people who would process all of the money and the envelopes that came through the ATM's. Now that is all done via imaging. There was no need for his role. He lost his job. I had to help him find another one. It was exceedingly difficult. It took me more than two years to actually help him find that job. 

And then the third sort of confluence of events is at that time in grad school lights up in diversity management course. And a woman at Toyota. And I remember this so distinctly she had a diversity management role there. And she came in and talked about it and I was like, oh my gosh, the light bulb just went on. You do this for a living. People pay you to create access to opportunity. How is this possible? 

And talking to a lot of folks about launching a non-profit, many of them told me It was a good thing to actually be in school to actually get more experienced, develop my business, to develop my business network that I would have a smoother time launching that non-profit.

All of these things together convinced me that the non-profit is still in my life plan. I'm just going to delay it a little bit. And I'm going to go do what that Toyota, the diversity manager, did at the time and really think about how instead of knocking on people's doors, how I can actually open them for others.

That's what made me decide. I was going to go into this as a field and as a career. And 20 years later, I'm still doing it.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

And you have been, both again, advocating for it. You have written this book, but at the same time, Cynthia, you are at the heart of Silicon valley. And many of the conversations I have with people talk about Silicon Valley companies as being some of the most vocal with respect to the need for diversity and inclusion. And some of the companies that have the least diversity and inclusion with respect to their teams, especially higher ranks of the organization.

Why has there been so little progress over the past couple of decades, this is not something that is new. Why has there been so little progress with respect to the diversity and inclusion within these organizations in Silicon valley?

Cynthia Owyoung: 

It's a great question, Mahan. And my perspective on this is it really comes down to two things. 

One, I think that there is a lot of hubris in technology. We think that we can solve all of the world's problems. We're here changing the world in all these multiple ways and we are. You think about these little devices that we now call phones, which are really mini computers that change how we do everything in terms of interacting with the world and immediate gratification, when you can press a button and a package shows up at your door two hours later. Amazing things have changed as a result of technology. But it also gives us this sort of false sense that we can do anything. If we say it, it will happen. 

And the second thing that contributes to this is that it actually takes courage. And people, really changing the way that they think about how they recruit and develop and retain and serve talent and customers today.

I think that combination of thinking that we know it all, and not having the courage to really do what it takes to change. What made you successful to date? You really have to rethink those things that you think are driving your success and open up your lens to moving forward in a completely different way. I think that there is a lack of desire to really do that. 

Those two things are what I think is driving the lack of progress in Silicon Valley today in this space.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

I love your authenticity, Cynthia, with that answer. And you mentioned it in the book also, it starts with the desire. And when there is a lack of desire, there'll be all kinds of excuses and all kinds of surface initiatives that won't really move things forward. 

I'm a big advocate for objectives and key results. Initially at Intel and then John Doerr popularized that in Silicon valley. Almost all companies use it with respect to moonshot thinking for everything. There hasn't been as much moonshot thinking and desire to make progress on diversity and inclusion.

Cynthia Owyoung: 

I think there is a lot of good intention in this space where people recognize it's an issue we should correct for it. But we have this tendency to think that great talent only comes from like these top tier schools. Or, we need people with a certain kind of experience in order to drive this type of product development.

When you think about it, you see these job descriptions where people are like, oh, I want somebody with three years of web three experience, because we're driving web three now. But web three’s only been around for like a year. You know, it just blows my mind that there's so much of this, well, I've been working on this for a while, so I need other people who have these exact type of experience as well. But that limits your talent pool to such an extent that you’re just driving for more of the same. We have a really hard time lifting ourselves out of that because we think this is what a good quality talent bar looks like. This is what we need to have in order to drive the hustle culture that we're trying to perpetuate. And that just leaves out this whole swath of people who would be amazing and are incredibly talented and can do the job, but just don't fit that kind of a mold.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

And that applies to all of us, Cynthia. I picked on Silicon valley, but every single one of us and our organizations can approach it with that perspective. I love how in the book early on you say context matters and it's constantly shifting. Get used to feeling like you don't know everything because you don't. But if you're persistent, open to experimentation and willing to admit what you don't know, you just might lead the way for others to follow in driving diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging for all. So this is not just about Silicon valley. There has been very little progress and needs to be more. It's for all of us to have that learning mindset that you talk about, that we can look at things differently and we can make a difference to bring about more diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in our organizations and society at large.

Cynthia Owyoung: 

Yeah, absolutely. I think you look at really the majority of industries today. You see some of the same patterns. I was in tech for most of my career. And then I made the switch to financial services. I guess surprising, but not surprising at the same time was the conversation while the context of it was different. The nuances of it were different. And it was really the exact same conversation we're having when I was in tech. We don't have enough women, we don't have enough people of color. Where are the people with disabilities? And why don't we have more people with military backgrounds in our company? How is that being driven from a customer perspective as well? 

Exact same conversation that I had in tech. You just sort of switched the type of customer that we're looking at and the type of product that we're trying to build and sell. So much of the conversation around how to solve it ends up being very similar as well in terms of developing that pipeline of talent, reaching further back in education.

How do you get more people interested in a financial services career or in a tech development career? Try to get more people or give more people access to these types of opportunities. Whatever that might look like if it's like more financial literacy when they're younger, or if it's coding camp in middle school, things like that.

The details are different, but the conversation is very much the same. And then you look at just how leadership is defined in our country in particular. Wherein so many industries that you would think would be more female dominated, that still at the highest echelons, you'll see straight white male, at the top. The restaurant industry being a really good example of that. Food service and food and beverage. Those areas in marketing are another one, like areas where you see high proportions of women making up all of these lower ranks, but they don't make it to the top.

There's definitely more to it than just a particular type of industry or a particular technical need. It's about how we think and how bias, sort of stereotypes have been defined over the years and in our cultures and how that impacts the way, what we think and interpret and make assumptions about other people. And then that then leads to the decisions that we make around who the best talent is. And you see the patterns that we have today.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

For leaders to impact their own teams and organizations, Cynthia, and become more inclusive leaders. What are some steps that they can take? Majority of the audience of this podcast are leaders who have bought into the idea of the need for inclusivity and understand the need for inclusion rather than just diversity. How can we become more inclusive leaders?

Cynthia Owyoung: 

There are so many ways to do that. I think it all starts with educating ourselves. I think we have to become aware of what the issues are. We have to understand other people's concerns. We have to know our history and what has led us to this point of where we're at today. And really becoming more aware of our own biases and how that plays out in our own decision-making or how we interact with others. So that's like the first thing, get ourselves educated and aware. 

I think part of that, relatedly, is the second thing, which is, creating more proximity to experiences that are different from your own. There's a lot of research out there in social psychology that says that, the closer that you are to a particular community or an issue that is not something that is part of your own background, the more positive emotions and affect you have for those other communities and experiences. And the more positive affect and emotion you have, the more connection you're going to make and the more motivated you are to actually help address that. So I think creating tighter proximity to some body or community that is different from yourself is another really great way to practice and develop your own inclusive leadership skills.

And then the third thing is really how do you put yourself in other people's shoes. You have to  create that sense of empathy and action around it. Get that education, create proximity and understanding, and then like, do something with that information. Do something different than what you had been doing for the past, however many years. Whether that is how you hire, how you promote, how you think about evaluating people, who you give your plum assignments to at work. All of those things are things that you can actually sit down, re-examine and, redefine in some way, in terms of how you actually approach and execute on those processes.

Because there are processes, each one of those that can be changed. And we each have the power to do that. Whether that's through inquiry, like questioning why we do something the way we do. And is there a way to do it better? Or if that's through, the decisions you make around. Even things like, when I look at who I want to send to a leadership development program, as an example. Who am I thinking of? Is it always the same people? Who have I missed? That's a key  question to ask yourself that will drive a different action. 

So I think those three things are really key.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

It is critical and it's something that every single one of us can do. I find when it comes to conversations around leadership, specifically diversity and inclusion in organizations, there's a lot of pointing up, pointing down, pointing sideways rather than taking on responsibility. While yes, systemically organizations need to think about recruiting differently. And the CEO and the board of directors are responsible for some of that. However, part of the point that you make and comes across clearly in your book also is that every single one of us from the individual employees, to the frozen middle, to the leaders of the organization can play a role and need to play a role to bring about that change.

Cynthia Owyoung: 

That's absolutely right. Each one of us has a role and a responsibility to drive change in this space. Because, when we're talking about inclusion and equity, we're not talking about it solely from the perspective of an underrepresented group. We're talking about it for everyone. When you see companies doing pay equity study, they're doing it across the board for everyone. 

Even if you are a white, straight male, if you're underpaid compared to everyone else, then you need to be equally paid. And the same thing applies if you don't fall into that category. If you think about the work in this space, the ideal is for everyone and we don't want anyone to feel excluded. And we all have had that experience as human beings in our lifetime. And no one ever enjoys that as far as I can tell, not any people that I've ever talked to. 

So how do we ensure that everyone feels a sense of belonging, a sense of connection, they're included and they have equal access to all the opportunities that could be in front of them? And so I think that is part of how we have to also, accountability for that responsibility as well. 

You mentioned, I talked about frozen middle. Because very often in organizations, you see grassroots, frontline employees, of which there's usually a higher proportion of underrepresented groups who definitely want to be able to see themselves reflected at higher levels of the organization.

So we'll work, and make efforts to support diversity, equity, inclusion effort in the organization. And then you see like the CEOs and the C-suites and the VPs, they have accountability for the organization as a whole and the culture and the people. And so definitely taking some responsibility. But that frozen middle, those middle managers, they often say, well, that's my boss's job or other people are doing it, so we're fine. And which isn't the case because every decision that a middle manager makes, whether it is hiring or if it is, those assignments and who gets what. Even if you think about who you go to, who are your go-to people inside the company. If we're not thinking about that through a lens of who am I not tapping. Where is having difference here is going to actually help us accelerate and innovate more. Then we're missing the opportunity.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

In trying to take advantage of that opportunity, you lay out a framework, which I really like. You talk about the four P’s of the inclusion ecosystem, people place, product, and planet. How do these four P’s play a role in creating a more inclusive ecosystem?

Cynthia Owyoung: 

Definitely. And I think it's really important to emphasize here that those four P’s are part of a virtuous circle. If you only focus on the people piece. Only on the talent piece, I think companies that do that their progress gets stalled at some point. Because then you're not really taking advantage of the pull from the other pieces. 

You see so many companies that focus on bringing in people from different backgrounds into their companies. And yet year over year, their representation numbers don't move in any significant way despite the millions of dollars they might be spending on some of those pipeline partnerships. And usually that's because they haven't taken the time to also make sure that their culture is inclusive and welcoming to people of all backgrounds. And so you see these people coming in the door and then leaving at the exact same rate that they're coming in. So your numbers will never shift. 

So you have to focus on the inclusive environment. You have to have inclusive leadership. You have to have those frozen middle managers who know how to manage differences well so that the people that you're bringing in will stay. And then you can actually shift those numbers. 

And then the other key part of that around the product, that is what are you developing? What is your company or organization selling? Who are you selling to? Who are those customers? The world is getting more diverse, not less. We're getting more interconnected, not less. We have to have greater knowledge of how you meet those diverse schools. And if you don't have the talent and the culture internally, to be able to do that well for your customers, then you're not going to survive as a business. 

And then conversely, we all operate within a broader context. We're in a bigger society. We're in something that is bigger than ourselves. That society there's legislatures, there's governments, there's laws and regulations, but there's also communities and people that we should be thinking about and caring for in some way.

Those are the things that can also help drive how we think about talents, how we think about our customers, because it's legislation that is legislated climate change efforts. There's also demand from the communities for more diversity, equity and inclusion focus by companies.

You think about 2020 and, the murder of George Floyd and the social unrest that happened after that. I mean, those are all societal influences that have driven companies to make bigger, broader, deeper commitments in this space. All of those things, if you do that right, you're actually creating talent and customers of the future for your company. And that becomes this reinforcing cycle. So I think it's really important to address all four.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

It is a cycle and it is a system. It is not just intervention in one area or another, and that's why I like the way you have put it, Cynthia. Now you also mentioned in the book the importance of measurement, which I think is really important. How can inclusivity be measured and managed properly?

Cynthia Owyoung: 

Great question I think, one of the ways to measure inclusion and belonging, I think there's both harder quantitative metrics and then there's more softer qualitative metrics that will give you a more well-rounded picture around that. 

So if I think about the quantitative metrics, attrition numbers are absolutely key to monitor to see if you are seeing people from different backgrounds and leaving at higher rates than other groups within the company. That is definitely a lagging indicator, because if they've left already, you are too late. But it will help you understand if there's something underlying issue that you really need to address. And that is related to the more qualitative side, which you can convert into quantitative numbers if you do inclusion surveys of your employees. Where people will tell you, do they have a sense of belonging? Do they have a strong connection? Do they feel engaged at work? Are they fulfilling their potential? Asking those kinds of questions will give you a really strong indicator of whether your culture is truly inclusive or not.

Those two combined will help you diagnose where there are hot spots in your organization. Where maybe you have a type of function or policies or leadership that aren't really conducive to driving the representation and inclusion that you want to see. 

And then the other thing that I always recommend to people is beyond just those numbers, get out and talk to people. If you're in your ivory tower and you're only paying attention to these surveys, then you're not getting the real stories that are happening on the ground in your organization. We're going back to the idea of proximity. You really have to get out there. You have to talk to your employee. You have to understand what is happening, what are they experiencing and feeling and engage with them around that. 

It's amazing. One of the things that I always do when I go into an organization, one of the first steps is part of, sort of an overall DEI audit. I have focus groups or interviews where I talk to as many people as possible about what they're experiencing at the company. It's really astonishing the number of times that I've heard from people. “Wow. I can't believe you're asking me these questions about inclusion and my experience. That means so much to me.” Just the act of going out and asking, can make a huge difference in the culture of your organization and how diversity equity inclusion is actually perceived.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

Asking is an important step. Then, the listening with empathy that comes after that. And then some of the organizations I interact with Cynthia, they've done a great job asking the questions, not as good a job with a listening and not as good a job with the actions that follow. So some of the employees and team members are tired of being asked.

They say, “We've been asked these same questions over and over. When is the action going to follow?” So it's really important to ask with an open mind, to listen with empathy and to then reflect that in some of the actions that the organization is going to take. So people see that their input is being put to good use and rather than being asked, just for the sake of being asked.

Cynthia Owyoung: 

Absolutely. There's no faster way to create disengagement with your employees than to ask them their opinions and then do nothing with it. Right? If they don't see the connection to them sharing what they think with you, to an actual action that the organization is changing, that the organization is making, you've kind of wasted their time and your time, frankly, as well.

So don't do that. It's just common sense that people want to see that change happens because of what they shared with you. That's definitely a sort of like leadership 101.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

Cynthia, all of us have opportunities for improvement and all organizations have opportunities for improvement in all areas. Most specifically with respect to this sense of inclusion and belonging. But when you look at organizations, what might be some that you say have made good progress or are examples that we can learn from as we work with our teams and organizations to create more of an environment that is inclusive and creates a sense of belonging for the team members?

Cynthia Owyoung: 

I think that there's no one organization that does everything right. What you can do though, is to look at different organizational practices that seem to be making a difference in how diversity equity inclusion is represented in their organization. 

And so I think there are several practices of different organizations that we can look to. And, oftentimes large organizations like Cisco don't get enough credit for all of the work that they do. Google got a lot of credit back in 2014 for being the first company to release their representation numbers in a deep way. And that's actually a misnomer. Cisco was doing it much earlier. Intel was doing it much earlier and they didn't get any credit for it. It's awful. I think being transparent like that as a practice within an organization is a really great thing. And you can see how that has shifted the conversation, not just within those companies, but industry wide. Those three organizations doing that I think is a fantastic thing. 

Related to that, what Pinterest did next was they actually shared out specific goals that they had set for their organization so that it could drive accountability around those goals, both internally and externally. That was an awesome evolution, Being transparent about the goals for accountability around that. And then monitoring your progress and reporting on what you did that actually helped you achieve that or what you didn't do that made it fall short. Pinterest does that really well. And then they share their tools and their lessons learned that everyone else can then use and apply. So I love that as well. 

And then the third type of organization real practice that I think is really great is, what smaller companies practice. You think about companies like Lever in this space or Unify ID. These are small startups that thought about diversity equity inclusion from the very beginning. When they were 10 people, they were having conversations about that. It was clearly important to them from a values perspective. And it was clearly important to them from an organizational practice perspective. And so what that resulted in organizations that had in Lever's case, 50/50 gender balance. Because they looked at it from, when there were 10 people, they had a diversity committee, they talked about that onboarding, they made sure they had gender balance in hiring, et cetera. 

Unify ID, they had, earlier, maybe two or three years after they formed, they were like 80% multicultural, like multinationals. It's that type of intention from the very beginning that I think also makes a huge difference when you're small and every hire can make a difference. Your DEI ship, so to speak, versus when you're much bigger. So when you get bigger, that perpetuates itself and makes a huge difference. I think those types of things are those practices of those companies are things that I would look to as role models.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

Baking it in from the start, whether start of an organization or someone taking it over a team, a level of transparency, and then accountability to a broader group of whether within the organization and or the community. Those are great practices for all leaders, Cynthia.

Now, the other thing that is happening is, we are going through constant disruption in the work environment with respect to remote work, hybrid work with some organizations, wanting people to come back to the office. We'd love to know your perspectives on the future of work and how diversity and inclusion will play a role in that future of work.

There've been a lot of studies looking at the fact that primarily people of color are more hesitant to go back to an in-person environment. In many instances, women want to spend less time in the office than some of the men. And there is an advantage to the in-person experience for many leaders interacting with their team.

How do you see that future of work and balancing it in a way that it accounts for continuing progress on diversity, inclusion and belonging, rather than leaving people of color or women behind as compared to those that are willing to spend more time in the face-to-face interactions in the office?

Cynthia Owyoung: 

I think companies that feel like they have to bring everybody back to the office are companies that are not acknowledging that the future of work is here. The more flexibility that we give people, in their work schedule, in their work locations, the ability to work from home or work from anywhere, those practices are really going to help us drive more diversity and inclusion inside our companies.

But we have to do that very intentionally as well. If we're not careful about how we make sure that people who are remote versus people who are in an office have equitable access to opportunities, to promotions, to FaceTime, with leaders, then we're not actually going to drive for more diversity equity and inclusion which we'll end up creating less as a result. So we have to put mechanisms and policies into place to really support that. 

And then I think, you know, again, not forcing people into anyone mode. If you have the capability to do that, obviously there are some organizations like hospitals, you have to have people on site. There's not as much wiggle room for flexibility there. But the fact that people can have telemedicine appointments like that.

There's ways to incorporate some of this which are fabulous and fantastic. And I think more people should do it, frankly. But, being able to give folks the option, the optionality is really important. Because, as you said, many people of color, many women, find being in an office actually more stressful, more anxiety inducing because being around other people means they have to spend more energy covering who they are in a lot of ways. That's been done. 

If you want to find out more about covering, go read the Deloitte study on covering and Kenji Yoshino’s work, it's all fabulous. And really explains kind of the route around this. But if we want people to really be able to contribute their full energy into their work, and do the best work of their lives, then we have to give them the opportunities to do it in a way that's comfortable for them and not forced into some kind of past traditional, I want to say outdated mindset of where work needs to be done because we've proven over the past couple of years that it doesn't have to be done that way.

I think the more that we acknowledge that future is here and that being able to attract talent from anywhere and allow them to work anywhere, give you a leg up in terms of supporting diversity in your workplace, the faster we'll actually get to that point of working ourselves, like DNI people out of a job which is for me the goal. I want to be like dentists, I want to be able to work myself. Nobody has cavities if nobody has diversity issues, then that will be the goal.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

That is an outstanding goal Cynthia, as is your book. Now, in addition to your book, are there any leadership resources, books or otherwise, that you typically recommend for leaders as they want to become more inclusive leaders in their organizations and have a broader impact in the community at large?

Cynthia Owyoung: 

There's a really great book that I recommended to many people called Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele, that talks about stereotype threat. That is a really good way to understand different experiences that people have from underrepresented backgrounds and what they're up against. I always recommend that book as a way to kind of get started. Along with Blindspot which is all about unconscious bias, by the two Harvard researchers who really developed the implicit association tests, that really started a different conversation in the DEI world. How we need to look at systemic structures and interrupt bias through that, as opposed to just relying on good intention.

So those are two foundational books.Two more recent books that I would recommend to people to really take that to the next level is, The Wake Up by Michelle MiJung Kim. She talks about how she talks about the history of a lot of systemic oppression and how it expresses itself in organizations and how we need to work on ourselves first in this space, to really take it to another level.

And then, How To Be An Ally by Melinda Epler is great for people who are in the majority groups, to understand that again, this is not just the problem of the oppressed. It is a responsibility to everyone. And if you're in the majority, you need to know how to ally with people who are not. So I think that's another really great book to read.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

Those are great recommendations and a couple that I look forward to reading, a couple I've read and love because, again, as I also referenced, what you mentioned in your book is that a lot of this is us understanding that we need to continually work on ourselves, learn. And that's a big part of the process of bringing greater inclusion to our teams and organizations.

Cynthia, how can the audience find out more about you and connect with you and your book?

Cynthia Owyoung: 

First off they can go to my website, www.cynthiaowyoung.com to find out much more about the book. It also links to my speaking and consulting organization called Breaking Glass Forums, which is www.breaking.glass that people can also go to, to find out more about my work.

I have a YouTube channel that has videos of a lot of leadership development work that I've done in the past as well. And people can connect to me on Twitter. My handle is @CindyOwyoung, on LinkedIn, under my name, Cynthia Owyoung, or on Facebook, under Breaking Glass Forums.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

We appreciate both your book, Cynthia, and the conversation for the Partnering Leadership podcast. Thank you so much Cynthia Owyoung.

Cynthia Owyoung: 

Thank you so much for having me, Mahan. It's been such a great conversation. I really appreciated your deep dive questions. Thank you.