e058. Expert Perspectives with Dr. Isaac Dixon

Including You Interview with Dr. Isaac Dixon

Full Interview Transcript

Voiceover Announcer:

This is Including You, the new series from Lead at Any Level. Including You features stories from chief diversity officers and other executives who are creating inclusive cultures in their organizations. Our goal is to show what’s working in companies just like yours, to give you the tools you need to keep pushing for progress in your own workplace. We want to create belonging and opportunity for everyone, including you. And now here’s your host, Amy C. Waninger.

Amy C. Waninger:

Welcome back to Including You. I’m your host, Amy C. Waninger, the Inclusion Catalyst. My guest today is Dr. Isaac Dixon. He is the president of VISTA HR Consulting among many other hats that he wears, and I am so excited to talk to him today. Dr. Dixon, welcome to the show.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

Thank you so much for having me.

Amy C. Waninger:

Well, I’m excited to talk to you because every conversation you and I have had has had me on the edge of my seat and we just get each other so excited and wound up about DEI, human resources, and organizational development. And so just quickly, can you introduce yourself to the audience? Just give a little bit about your background, your work history, and how you got to the place where you run your own consulting firm.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

I’ll try to be brief. I started in human resources way back in the days when it was called personnel management four decades ago. And my initial foray into HR was with Manpower Temporary Services. I ran a branch in southern California, was asked to move to Oregon to oversee the franchise operations here in Portland area. And after five years or so of growing our branch network and siting branches and training people, I moved into HR with one of my clients, which was Nike. So I worked in HR for Nike, GE Capital, Pitney Bowes Credit, and then in federal, state and local government before moving into higher education HR, following getting my doctoral degree in 2009.

I was fortunate enough to be the vice president of HR at Lewis & Clark College and then later at Portland State University, a public university here with, at that time about 23,000 students and about 6,000 faculty and staff and seven labor unions. You talk about a complex environment that tested all of my HR skills, but every place that I worked, I managed to learn something that I didn’t know about HR and about the whole world of managing people and trying to get the best out of them. So that’s what I had devoted my professional life to.

Amy C. Waninger:

And I’m so glad you have because your expertise is invaluable in this field. I’m wondering, when you are approached by clients or when you work with clients, what do they say are the reasons that diversity, equity, and inclusion in particular is so important to them?

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

That’s a great question and one that the answer to which has changed remarkably over the last three to four years. I used to hear a lot of the moral imperative people in organizations thinking that it was a good thing to do and being on the right side of history. But now I’m hearing more and more about the strategic value of diversity, equity and inclusion and the alignment of DEI with organizational mission, vision, values, goals, and objectives. And I’m glad to see that switch because I’ve been around long enough and I know that in our conversations we’ve talked about it, things that are initiatives get canceled when the budget gets tight. Things that are part of organizational strategy generally get funded. This is a really good switch and one that I’m happy to see made by business leaders.

Amy C. Waninger:

Because you mentioned budgets getting cut, I’m going to bring that up because as we’re recording this right now, in the summer of 2023, we are seeing… So the people on TV keep using the R word. I won’t say it. I will say that there has been some belt tightening in the economy and some purse string tying in a lot of corporations. But are you seeing people dipping and ditching DEI right now as part of this, what I’ll call a slowdown, and I’m going to avoid the big bad R word?

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

I think that what I have seen is I’ve seen a loss of momentum in some places, but you’ve had Supreme Court decisions that have given people who are less than committed to begin with an easy way out. And I think that organizations that haven’t committed to diversity, equity, inclusion as part of their long-term strategy and aligning it with their vision of where their organizations is going and how it’s going to get there, I think that those organizations are the ones that are expressing trepidation. I think that forward-looking organizations understand that their marketplace is changing, that the composition of their workforce has changed, and the very industries that they’re in are changing. If they didn’t understand that three years ago when this pandemic began, they’re going to have even more trouble adjusting coming out of it.

One of the things that sort of intersects with this discussion on DEI has been, and folks can look at my LinkedIn page. I’ve made much of this discussion about where do we find talent. And Americans are in denial about the fact that we lost a half million working age adults during the pandemic. Unless you know where some secret closet full of people is located, this is a space we’re going to be in probably for the next decade. When the other part of it is that when the pandemic began, we instituted some of the most draconian immigration restrictions of any industrialized nation, most of which remain in place.

So you start to look at just the data, we’re going to struggle and we seem somehow amazed that we can’t find people to do certain kinds of work. 550,000 people who passed away, many of those people were what we called essential employees. Many of those people were daycare providers and truck drivers and warehouse people. I don’t know where you find that talent if we’re not allowing people to come into the country on guest worker visas and do some of this work. Talk to anybody that runs a construction crew. They can’t find help. And I really think that we’re going to be in… I called this space we’re in, and I have to admit I stole this from someone that I heard on another podcast, but this is the messy middle and we’re going to be in this space for some time. And Americans can be tremendously resilient and creative, but we need to stop denying reality about why we are where we are.

As my grandmother used to say, “Denying reality won’t change it,” and I think we need a good old-fashioned dose of reality and then put our creative and problem solving hats on. How do organizations do that? Embracing diversity, equity and inclusion, creating internship programs, automating routine work, transactional activity so that you can then take people who are doing that work and give them things that are much more fun and stimulating for them to do.

And for goodness sakes, on the part of women who are part of the workforce, if you’re a major employer, help them with childcare and don’t demand that people drive across town five days a week, pay for parking, hustling for work when they could actually do the work from home. They’ve proven to you that they can be productive from home. Why not be more flexible in how work is done? I think this is a great opportunity for all of us as employers to really begin to think about how work gets done and where it gets done.

Amy C. Waninger:

There are so many things that you just said that I’m sitting here just trying not to burst for wanting to say, “Yes, that.” And actually it’s funny, Dr. Dixon, because I don’t even know if you know this, but I recently wrote a book called Surviving the Labor Crisis that touches on all of these points. I don’t know if you were setting me up for a plug or not, but I’m going to take it if I can. But I wrote this book, it’s super thin. It’s only like 25 pages, but it’s all about all of the data that you just cited. And one of the things that we left out of this conversation so far is the largest percentage of our workforce up until a few years ago was baby boomers. And for 20 years, we kept talking about this retirement cliff that all the baby boomers were going to retire and be of retirement age by 2025 or 2023, and they’re going to retire, and what are we going to do?

And then people got excited about millennials taking over as the largest part of the workforce and totally forgot when the pandemic hit that, oh, we’ve got a huge section of the economy that is going to retire, a huge section of our workforce. So retirements increased, at the same time we lowered immigration, at the same time we’re not producing more humans to take these spots. And you’re right, it is a perfect storm of worker shortage that we’re going to be in for a while and we’re going to have to find creative macro solutions to this from public policy and kind of automation and technology, all the way down to micro solutions like make sure Bob doesn’t leave because we need him.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

I agree with you, Amy. And some of the solutions that people are coming up with, they’re taking the wrong turn in the road. 14 states have passed laws to make it easier for kids to work.

Amy C. Waninger:

Yes, child labor’s not the answer to this crisis. Let’s be very clear.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

We’ve down this road before. It’s why we have child labor laws in place. Transporting migrant children to the states to work in meat packing plants with dangerous chemicals is not the answer. I understand the desperation that some segments of the economy feel, but we have to come up with better and longer term solutions. And that calls for private sector, government to do much more work together, to listen to one another. And for goodness sakes, my entire lifetime we batted this thing about immigration reform back and forth. It’s time to get something done.

Amy C. Waninger:

Yes, because we have so many unfilled jobs, 5 million at last count unfilled jobs that even if everybody was working, that’s looking for a job.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

Basically it’s zero unemployment now, given how low the unemployment rate is, 3.7. That’s pretty much full employment in the United States. And we’re not the only nation that’s facing this problem. This is a global issue. And the nature of migration and immigration has changed. And we focus on the border with Mexico and people trying to get into the country from Central America and South America. Of the top five nations represented by applications for immigration, just over the last year, the number one nation was Afghanistan, followed by Sudan. It’s become global migration.

And so much of this, yes, there’s war and violence and narco trafficking and all those other reasons, but there’s also been the huge impact of climate change. Pakistan is in the fourth year of a drought. Sub-Saharan Africa and India have seen this too. And so where do people go? They go someplace where they can find opportunity. The United States is one of the few places left where they feel that they can come and start over and build a life. And people say, “But these people are going to come in and they’re going to get welfare benefits.” No, they don’t get that. And many of these people pay taxes for years and never claim Social Security.

Amy C. Waninger:

There are a lot of large global forces that are converging right now. We’re seeing climate change is huge. We’re seeing the advanced urbanization of people. So our cities are more populated than they’ve ever been. We’ve got geopolitical conflict in places that we haven’t had it before. In addition to geopolitical conflict where it’s always been worse.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

[inaudible 00:13:50] graduated 11 million college graduates just a month ago. There’s no jobs for them. They’re trying to encourage these young people to move back to the rural areas and take to the fields. I didn’t go to college to do that. You’re creating discontent among some of the best educated members of your society. And there are a number of other countries that are facing some of the same things. Japan is struggling with job creation right now. Europe is in a recession. Yeah, you are absolutely correct. There’s the intersection of a lot of things that are challenges, but could be opportunities if we work together.

Amy C. Waninger:

Absolutely. And this is cross industry, cross sector of the economy.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

Yes.

Amy C. Waninger:

I know there’s pilot shortages, there are nursing shortages, there are trade shortages, there are construction shortages, there are shortages in the knowledge economy, doctors, mental health practitioners. It’s really every-segment.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

It’s school teachers.

Amy C. Waninger:

Public school teachers, which I have a whole theory about that. And especially in the case of public school teachers, if I may, we abuse people to the point when they leave in droves and then we wonder where did they go. And we’ve also, at the same time have this-

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

And public school teachers, we know that the retention rate goes up when a first year teacher has a mentor or a coach. 63% of public school teachers leave after just one year, 63%. That’s six out of 10. And it’s been like that for decades. Oh, and we don’t want to forgive any of the student loan debt. Okay.

Amy C. Waninger:

As college costs are soaring relative to inflation, which is already high. And it’s interesting to me because so many companies and industries try to recruit their way out of a retention problem. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

Yeah. Having been in the recruiting end of the business, and of course I always say that as an HR person, never forget that you’re primarily a recruiter and a retention person, keeping people is far easier than finding them. And you have to create an environment where people are constantly challenged, where they’re constantly getting feedforward feedback rather than this annual litany of sins known as a performance review. Ask them on a quarterly basis, “Where are you now? Where do you want to go? What does the gap between the two look like? What resources can I put at your disposal to help you close the gap? And over what period of time are you thinking that you want to move up or move out?”

And the world of looking for a job has changed too. In the old days, you had to read the Sunday paper and type a letter and resume, put in an envelope, send it out via a snail mail and wait for somebody to call you. Now 24/7, you can look for a job. If you’re not getting that kind of feedforward feedback from your manager, supervisor, business owner, you’re not feeling like you’re involved in the lifeblood of the company and you’re not understanding where you’re going next and how you’re going to get there. It just seems like you’re being pushed out the door and more and more people are saying something. I’ll take up on that.

The other thing that’s happened at an astonishing rate over the last couple years is more women than ever before are starting businesses of their own. As one young woman put it to me, “I’ve been laid off twice in the last four years. The next time the bus goes over the cliff, I’d rather be sitting in the driver’s seat than a passenger in the back.” Her business is doing very well, by the way. She started her own home mortgage company where she underwrites the loans to women who are single heads of households. She’s not had one default. She’s made over 400 loans.

Amy C. Waninger:

Amazing. And you bring up a good point about people starting businesses because it’s never been easier to do that than it is right now. And also beyond starting a business, there are so many opportunities in the gig economy where people can just float around from gig to gig or they can do several part-time jobs, very part-time. And then there are all these jobs that didn’t exist before.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

And then there’s childcare and other things a lot easier and a lot less expensive. The amount of money that people spend per week getting care for the kids, it’s criminal.

Amy C. Waninger:

If you can even find childcare.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

Exactly.

Amy C. Waninger:

Which a lot of people cannot.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

And how many of those childcare workers were lost during the pandemic? We haven’t even begun to… This lack of recognition about what we went through and how it’s impacted our lives is something that I think we really need to come to terms with. And the fact that there’s only been one brief public ceremony marking how many lives we lost and who those people were, a lot of them were our colleagues in the workplace. Just not talking about it is not healthy. It really isn’t.

Amy C. Waninger:

No, I agree. And it’s not just the deaths to COVID, it’s also the disability caused by long COVID.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

Yes.

Amy C. Waninger:

It’s the caregivers that have had to leave the workplace to take care of people who have been disabled by long COVID. And it’s also-

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

And those are disproportionately women.

Amy C. Waninger:

Yes. And also the mental health toll that is taken in terms of mental health crises, suicide rates, burnout. We’re seeing a lot of people disengaging for their mental health or even losing people to their mental health crises. So this is a snowball effect I think that we’re going to continue to see for quite some time because we’ve not emotionally recovered, we’ve not spiritually recovered, we’ve not financially recovered. And in terms of our social organization and our community building, we’ve not recovered.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

True. And I think the other part of things that you touched on is the fact that we need each other and we need to be able to talk through this. I have done some work with people around grief, loss, and recovery. And you can’t recover until you acknowledge the loss, you understand the grief that you’re living with, and you can learn to let go. And we’re not there. My little catchphrase is, Americans are great in a crisis as long as it doesn’t last for more than 30 days. After that, our attention wanes and we want to go on to the next thing. And this is just one of those things that we can’t afford to do that.

Amy C. Waninger:

What do you see as the best step forward for folks that are listening, folks that are doing DEI work right now, working in HR, working as corporate leaders? What’s one step you feel like they could take right now to improve the situation for them, for their colleagues, for their employees at work? And it might be something as simple as gather together and acknowledge the loss, or it might be something as big as workforce development programs. What do you see as a step people could take right now to start to heal some of these big wounds that we’re talking about?

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

Learn to ask more questions than make statements. And then listen to what people tell you. For every one statement you make, ask three questions, and then truly, actively listen to what people tell you. They’ll tell you what they need. They’ll tell you what they’re thinking, but we have to learn to ask more and talk less.

Amy C. Waninger:

Brilliant as always. Thank you Dr. Dixon for sharing your insights and this rich conversation with our audience. I appreciate you so much.

Dr. Isaac Dixon:

The feeling is mutual. Thank you once again for inviting me on your program. I appreciate it.

Amy C. Waninger:

Of course.

Voiceover Announcer:

If you’ve enjoyed this episode, follow Lead at Any Level on LinkedIn and YouTube, then join us for Including You video simulcast every Thursday at noon Eastern. Including You can also be enjoyed each week as part of the Living Corporate audio podcast series available on all major podcast platforms. Learn more at living-corporate.com.

Including You is brought to you in part by Lead at Any Level, a boutique training and consulting firm improving employee engagement and retention for companies that promote from within. Lead at Any Level, leaders can be anywhere and should be everywhere. Learn More at leadatanylevel.com.

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Amy C. Waninger:

That’s it for this week’s episode of Including You. Be sure to join me next week when my guest will be Evan T. Green from the Portland State University School of Business.