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Essential Skills for Inclusive Leaders

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Learn on a Budget: It’s Easier Than You Think!

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“How Do You Learn on a Budget?”

During one of my programs on Creating a Learning Culture, a participant asked, “We’re facing serious expense pressures. How can we continue to support professional development? How can we learn on a budget?”

First of all, a disclaimer: One of my Strengths is Learner, which means I love to learn just for the sake of learning, with no end goal in mind. My other Strengths that amplify Learner are Input (collect information from everywhere), Intellection (think about ideas), Ideation (generate ideas), and Relator (talk about ideas).

My first thought was, “Is it even possible not to learn?” So, here are some tips on how you can “learn on a budget” and make it part of your daily routine!

Learning in the Morning

By the time I wake up in the morning, my husband already has the television turned to the morning news. In the two minutes it takes to make my coffee, I might learn about a new local controversy, business expansion, or human interest story.

Learning in the Afternoon

Even if I don’t go looking for new information during the day, it’s on my radio, on social media, in my email inbox. In the car, I’m likely to catch an NPR story that relates to my work in some way. If I’m not listening to NPR, there’s a good chance I’m tuned into a podcast or audiobook. (Did you know you can get free audiobooks from your local library? Talk about learning on a budget!)

Sometimes, during lunch, I’ll take time out to attend a webinar offered by a professional association, usually free for members. Trade magazines I don’t remember subscribing to show up in my mailbox regularly. There are stacks of books I’ve not read (…yet) in my office and on my nightstand. My Kindle runneth over. (You can also get print and eBooks from your library for free.)

Learning at Suppertime

When my family sits down to eat dinner together (still happens most nights), we talk about what happened during the day. I ask my kids what they tried that was new, what they’re reading or watching, and what they’ve learned. As we’re watching television together after dinner (usually Jeopardy!), we occasionally Google the answers (questions?) we don’t know much about.

Learning Anytime

Here are some more free and low-cost ways to learn on a budget:

  • Blogs
  • YouTube
  • Social media (especially if you follow thought leaders and influencers on LinkedIn)
  • Online magazines, such as Forbes, Inc., and industry-specific journals

I could go for weeks never spending a dime on professional development, but I can’t imagine going a day without learning!

What are your best tips for learning, on a budget?

Living Corporate: Media as Mentorship

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I often ask my audiences, “What perspectives does your network IGGNORE?” If you’ve read Network Beyond Bias or attended one of my programs, you know that “IGGNORE” is an acronym that represents different aspects of diversity. One great way to learn from different perspectives is to seek out media from non-traditional sources. You can even think of media as mentorship!

My friends at Living Corporate, for example, offer a variety of timely content that highlights the experiences of black and brown people in corporate America.

Podcasts

The Living Corporate podcast offers career advice and expert insights, all from the perspectives of people of color. Hosts Zach and Ade share their own experiences, interview guests, and respond to listener letters with honesty, sincerity, and vulnerability. Podcast topics range from “Ramadan at Work” to “Disabled while Other.” Newer episodes also include “Tristan’s Tips” to help young professionals with job search strategies. Also, be sure to check out Episode 10: Help, where Zach and I talk about allyship in the workplace.

Blog

The Living Corporate blog features articles that help underrepresented professionals navigate the corporate landscape. I’m particularly proud of See It to Be It, my own interview series highlighting professional role models in a variety of industries. The goal of this series to draw attention to the vast array of possibilities available to emerging and aspiring professionals. Particular attention is paid to support systems available for people of color within the industry. The first two articles feature Dana Beckton (Healthcare Industry) and Barrington Salmon (Newspaper Journalist).

Media as Mentorship

Regardless of your own demographics or background, you can learn a lot from Zach, Ade, their guests, and their team of writers. I know I have!
Remember, you can find mentors in lots of places, including print and online media, social media, and podcasts.  When seeking out mentors, try to learn from people with as wide a variety of perspectives as possible. And remember to think of media as mentorship. You will pick up insights you never could have imagined!

Insurance Certification Options for Data Analytics

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Are you an insurance professional looking to boost your résumé with new credentials? Consider a new insurance certification in data analytics.

Why Data Analytics?

You’ve probably heard a lot lately about big data, predictive modeling, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. These concepts are all possible because of the enormous amounts of data being produced every day. The data come from consumers’ browser history, smart devices, and data in the public domain.

At the same time, computing power has continued to scale at an astonishing rate. New hardware, software, and cloud computing technologies are evolving rapidly.

As a result, a new discipline has emerged: data science.  Jobs that didn’t exist five years ago are now changing the business of insurance. You won’t want to be behind the curve on these new concepts. Now is the time to start learning about insurance data analytics!

The Institutes’ new AIDA insurance certification

The Institutes offers an introductory-level Associate in Insurance Data Analytics (AIDA) designation.  This program provides an overview of statistical concepts, loss triangles, and other fundamentals.

The courses are:

  1. Big Data Analytics for Risk and Insurance
  2. Risk and Insurance Analysis Techniques

Recently, I earned the AIDA designation from The Institutes. I found it valuable in understanding the work of the data science, actuarial, and modeling teams I support. One of those data scientists is now pursuing this designation as well. She believes it will help her tie her analytics experience to the work she is expected to do within the insurance industry.

Insurance Data Management Association (IDMA)’s insurance certifications

The Insurance Data Management Association (IDMA) offers an introductory course and two levels of certification for insurance professionals.

IDMA offers a standalone introductory course, Data Management for Insurance Professionals. This course offers an overview of the data issues insurance companies face. The course is an inexpensive, low-commitment option to help you get started. It does not, however, apply as credit toward the certification program.

If you want to learn more — and add an insurance certification to your résumé — consider their four-course designation path. The courses are:

  1. Insurance Data Collection and Reporting
  2. Insurance Data Quality
  3. Systems Development and Project Management (waived if you have the Associate in Technology (AIT) designation from The Institutes)
  4. Data Management, Administration, and Warehousing

Students can earn the Associate Insurance Data Manager (AIDM) designation with no prior coursework. The Certified Insurance Data Manager (CIDM) designation is available for students who have completed additional coursework from other institutions.

I recently completed the CIDM certification. Thanks to the AIT waiver, I only needed to complete two more courses to add CIDM to my credential list. Full disclosure: I did fail one of the exams on the first try. Nobody’s perfect!

New insurance certification options from Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS)

Finally, Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) now offers a Certified Specialist in Predictive Analytics (CSPA) designation and will soon launch a Catastrophe Modeling certification.

While I listed them here, I’ve not yet explored these insurance certification options personally. My colleagues in the actuarial discipline, however, were very interested in learning more.

Additional Reading on Data Analytics

If you don’t want to commit to a certification, consider picking up one of these books to learn more. In particular, I recommend Predictive Analytics by Eric Siegel.

Et Tu, Latte? Starbucks and Everyday Racism

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My Twitter feeds were once again abuzz with scandal. Starbucks, it seems, has just unwittingly entered the conversation about racism in America. And not in the way we would have hoped.

Police officers handcuffed and forcibly removed two real estate agents from a Starbucks in Philadelphia. Melissa DePino‘s video of the incident went viral. Their crime? Waiting while black. According to the NPR report,

When police arrived [in response to a 911 call], two Starbucks employees told them two men had asked to use the restroom but were told they couldn’t because they hadn’t purchased anything. The men allegedly refused to leave after being asked by Starbucks employees.

What Starbucks Got Wrong

  • The Starbucks employee(s) involved in the incident denied two men use of the restroom because the men hadn’t purchased anything. White customers at that location were not required to order before gaining access to the restrooms.
  • Then the Starbucks employee(s) asked the men to leave because they had not yet made a purchase. According to witnesses, the two men were sitting quietly at a table, waiting for a friend to arrive. Hardly an unusual situation. If you were sitting quietly at a coffee shop, waiting for a friend to arrive, how would you respond if you were asked to leave?
  • Starbucks employee(s) called 911 to report disturbance and trespassing because the men did not leave when asked. The men had EVERY RIGHT to be there. There was no emergency.
  • Finally, Starbucks headquarters has so far issued a response to the incident that’s even weaker than their blonde roast. Certainly, Starbucks needs to investigate the matter thoroughly from an HR and legal perspective. However, perhaps their first response should have been a mea culpa on the lack of diversity among their own employees at the Philadelphia location in question.

The Problem Is Bigger than Starbucks

  • More than half a dozen police showed up to escort two real estate agents out of a coffee shop. Instead of de-escalating the situation or understanding the perspective of the customers in question, they placed two men under arrest. Police held the men in custody for eight hours. As real estate agents, how much did that cost them? Did they miss client meetings or sales?
  • White people on social media who said “There must be more this story” were infuriating. Abuse by authority figures is NOT the fault of the abused. Yet time and again, white people assume that authority figures can be trusted because we can usually trust them. We don’t fear for our lives when we get pulled over for speeding. We don’t get “randomly selected” for additional screening. We don’t get denied service or access to public places (unless we’re gay). And so, here we sit, blinded by privilege, wondering why we can’t all just get along. Instead of thinking critically about all the things people of color might have done to contribute to their own abuse, try applying your critical thinking skills to how you form your own assumptions.
  • News media organizations replayed the viral video of two black men being cuffed by six police officers. When white people commit actual crimes, we tend to see images of them provided by their families. We hear about their family relationships, their jobs, their medical histories. When black people have done nothing at all wrong, news outlets reinforce “dangerous criminal” stereotypes by showing handcuffed men in police custody. When people of color are victims of crimes by authority figures, we hear about every traffic ticket and character flaw they’ve ever had. Again, critical thinking by a white audience is a moral imperative.

How We Get This Right

For this section, I ask for direction from friends in the black community. I have seen calls for more of us to emulate the white allies who challenged police during the incident. That’s a great start.

Many folks are also calling for a #BoycottStarbucks or a sit-in movement. To this, I have a number of questions. What can Starbucks do to make this right? In other words, what is the end game for a boycott? How do we fight the everyday racism that makes situations like this not just possible, but commonplace? How can I use my privilege to stop the abuse of people of color?

Finding these answers won’t be easy and may take a while. In the meantime, I’ll be waiting for my friends to arrive before placing my next order at Starbucks.

Abolishing ERGs: A teachable moment from Deloitte?

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ExecsMy social media feeds are all abuzz with the news of Deloitte replacing its Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) with “inclusion panels.” The move reportedly seeks to address the concerns of Millennials who have a much different view of diversity issues than Gen Xers and Boomers. And then there was the perspective of the [mostly white, predominantly male, likely cisgender, not particularly Millennial] executive team. Deloitte executive Brent Bachus said that he and other white male executives ‘don’t know that I necessarily felt like I knew what role I was being expected to play, or if I even had a role.”

My Gut Reaction Was Not Very Productive

Can I be honest? My initial response to Bachus’s remarks looked a little like this:

Frank Costanza airs his grievances.

So I sat down and reflected on my gut reaction, as I have advised others to do. Then I talked to my straight, white, cisgender male husband about the feelings I had and asked for his point of view. Finally, I am ready to respond to this situation thoughtfully, in an attempt to make it a teaching moment from a non-executive perspective.

Potential Impacts of Eliminating ERGs

From the Company’s Perspective

If your company is considering eliminating ERGs, allow me to remind you why ERGs are so important for companies:

  • Finding and attracting diverse talent
  • Introducing new employees to the corporate culture
  • Identifying and retaining top talent
  • Expanding into new markets and customer segments
  • Including fresh perspectives in the corporate conversation

Abandoning ERGs can send a message to stockholders, customers, and prospective employees that these issues are no longer priorities for your executive team. Certainly, ERGs are only one part of a company’s talent and marketing strategies. Remember that they can also be the most visible indicator of your company’s commitment to diversity. For example, a lot of job seekers I know filter out companies that don’t tout ERGs on their career web sites. At a minimum, be ready to tell your candidate pool and customer base — clearly and often — how you will address these issues without ERGs. Specifically, how will you fill the gap that will be left in the wake of successful ERGs?

From the Employees’ Perspective

Next, let’s remind ourselves of the additional benefits of ERGs for employees:

Maximum Effort

  • Professional development opportunities for employees at all levels
  • A sense of belonging for employees who feel like outsiders
  • Ability to address ignorance and stereotypes head-on

Many diversity practitioners and a good number of my own colleagues cite ERGs as a primary driver of employee engagement. ERGs require tremendous volunteer effort from a company’s employees. ERG work is usually unpaid and often unrewarded; sometimes it even goes unnoticed. Yet employees show up in droves to work extra hours, stretch beyond their respective comfort zones, and pour their hearts into this work.

Why do they do this? Because it means something to them. It gives them an opportunity to be and to celebrate themselves because of who they are, not in spite of it. Instead of asking them to downplay their differences in a corporate environment, ERGs provide a safe space to leverage that difference. I’ve had colleagues tell me that their ERG involvement is frequently what keeps them going when things get rough in their “day jobs.”

Where will all this discretionary effort go if you eliminate the opportunities created by ERGs? My guess is that many employees will spend that time on their résumés and job searches instead.

Teachable Moments for Executives

At the risk of getting permanently blacklisted from the Deloitte hiring machine, I believe these executives have done themselves some great disservice. For other executives, let’s break this down with a view from the middle of your organization. This particular view comes from a cisgender, white, bisexual, college-educated, highly ambitious, female middle manager from a blue-collar background.

To the rest of us, the C-Suite looks like an ERG for cis, straight, white men

[bctt tweet="To the rest of us, the C-Suite looks like an ERG for cis, straight, white men" username="LeadAtAnyLevel"]

First, some numbers:

Deloitte executive Brent Bachus said he didn’t know “if [he] even had a role” to play in the company’s ERGs. I hope executives elsewhere recognize that this is how a majority of their employees feel about their companies’ executive teams! 

While no one person bears the responsibility for executive demographics. we each have a responsibility to understand our role in perpetuating them.

Furthermore, we all owe it to ourselves to sit somewhere we don’t feel like we belong. Everyone can benefit from the experience of being “other,” at least occasionally. What does it say to your employees if you are unwilling to experience briefly what they live daily?

Being an ally is a responsibility, not a birthright

[bctt tweet=”Being an ally is a responsibility, not a birthright” username=”LeadAtAnyLevel”]

Mr. Bachus’s remark was reported without full context. Still, it is a microcosm of the sense of entitlement that so many people with privilege convey. I get it, you run the company. Would you show up to a facilities management meeting and then dissolve the maintenance department because you didn’t have a clear role? Would you eliminate the cybersecurity team? The Human Resources department? Accounts payable? Given all the benefits of ERGs to your company and your employees, why treat those organizations differently?

Allies need to stop seeing ourselves as the rich, white saviors who liberate disadvantaged masses in every single Hollywood movie ever.

Do you know what all these groups need? We need allies of all backgrounds to show up and listen. Again, and again, and again. We need allies to listen whether they like what they hear or not. Even when there are no answers. Especially when no one else is listening.

And, as much as we need allies to listen to us, we need to listen to each other. After we’ve listened, and only then, can we authentically ask, “How can I be a better ally for you?” Whatever the answer, we need to be ready to act with courage and conviction.

Proposed Alternative: The “Both/And” Perspective

Inclusivity and allyship is critical to the success of ERGs, and every effort to include more perspectives deserves positive reinforcement. To that end: Deloitte, I’m glad you’re including white male executives in your diversity and inclusion conversations. By being more inclusive, and especially by including those with great organizational power, you ensure that more people are participating in the conversation. You should continue having conversations about inclusiveness. And I invite you to go even deeper by including ERGs in a multi-faceted approach to diversity and inclusion.

We need male leaders to be engaged in and pushing for inclusive conversations. AND we need avenues for employees at all levels to feel welcome to and engaged in our companies.

What You (Yes, YOU) Can Do Right Now

Corporate executives

  • Fill your talent pipeline with intentional diversity
  • Work with your senior leadership teams to quantify the value of your company’s diversity initiatives
  • Carefully consider the internal and external messaging that comes with any changes to your diversity strategies
  • Conduct listening tours within your company that include ERG representatives
  • Ensure ERG activities are promoted and rewarded within your company
  • Consider adding ever more perspectives to your corporate conversations
  • Download Jennifer Brown‘s Diversity Starter Kit for CEOs and start a conversation

Customers, stockholders, college students, and potential job candidates

  • If diversity work within a company is important to you, speak up
  • Ask salespeople and recruiters about their company’s diversity initiatives and results
  • Don’t underestimate your influence

Employees

  • Build your network with intentional diversity
  • Talk to your manager, ERG chairperson, and others in your company about the impact ERGs have, from your perspective
  • Join an ERG if you haven’t already
  • If you are a member of an affinity group ERG (one that’s “for you”), invite an ally or potential ally to join you
  • Speak up, whenever you can, wherever you can, about who you are and why it matters. Be the role model you needed five, ten, or thirty years ago.
  • Ask a colleague how you can get involved in an ERG that’s outside your affinity group
  • Listen to others’ stories and learn how to be an effective ally from their perspectives

Please, share your perspective

I’m open to learning different perspectives on this topic. If you have a different take, or there is more to the story than I found in my research, please, share your comments!

For more on the power and importance of ERGs and diversifying your professional network, check out Network Beyond Bias: Making Diversity a Competitive Advantage for Your Career.