Amri B. Johnson - Rethinking DEI to Create Anti-fragile Organizational Cultures
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The world of business is more complex than ever. The world of human resources and compensation is also getting more complex. Welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast, your direct source for the latest trends from experts inside and outside the world of human resources.

Listen as we explore the impact that compensation strategy, data, and people analytics can have on your organization. This podcast is sponsored by Salary.com, your source for data, technology, and consulting for compensation and beyond. Now, here are your hosts, David Teretsky and Dwight Brown. Hello and welcome to the HR Data Lab's podcast. I'm your host, David Teretsky, alongside my co-host, best friend, partner in crime from Salary.com.

Dwight Brown. Dwight, how are you? David Teresky. I am wonderful this morning. How are you doing? I am okay, but I'm outstanding now. Do you know why? Tell me. Because we have with us a guest who we have already had so much fun in the pre-podcast. We were laughing, hooting, hollering. We were enjoying ourselves. That's right.

Amri B. Johnson, how are you today? I am wonderful, and we did have some fun. I hope we can continue it. I hope so, too. Oh, we will. Amri, could you give us a little bit of your background and about how you got to this point in your career? Sure. I'll start kind of way back. I'm a son. I'm a brother. I'm a public health guy. I'm a writer, author, epidemiologist, spiritual cultivator, entrepreneur, and

Uncle, husband, father of three. I have one son and two bonus twins. And I'm living in my third country of residence. I live in Switzerland and Basel. Four languages spoken in my home daily at our dinner table. And I speak about 1.75 of them.

I'm an American, and I at least don't just speak one of them. So I'm passionate about creating cultures from the hearts of individuals, cultures that get better from challenges and stressors because they have the relational fitness to do so.

Wow. So you're a Renaissance guy, ostensibly. I don't, I, you know, I've had people tell me what that, that word, and I'm like, um, there's other dark sides of my personality that might not make me so Renaissance. Do you want to give me that? Well, we've already talked about the fact that you, that you are related to Darth Vader.

so there's that and darth taught you to rake leaves darth taught you to rake leaves he did and all of his regalia you know in 95 degree fahrenheit weather wow yeah i am your father yes all right well that's awesome but that was not by the way that was not counted as the one fun thing that no one knows about you i struggled with this um

Before I became where I am today, running my company, Inclusion Wins, here in Switzerland,

before I was an epidemiologist, before I got into the space that we call inclusion or what a lot of people have been calling DEI for the past few years. I spent a lot of my early career, entrepreneurial career and public health career, probably focused more on my spiritual growth, at least as much, if not more on my spiritual growth than my entrepreneurial skills and business development skills.

And I wrote a book on work-life balance. That was my first book. I self-published it. It was only an e-book.

And it was a book on work-life balance based on Confucian principles. And so that's something that a lot of people don't know, at least not until, you know, my door gets banged down by another publisher to relaunch my e-book. But to date, not a lot of people know. Except for about a thousand people bought it, though. Oh, wow. I don't know if they remembered it or not, but...

Yeah, that's a respectable number. Yeah, it was pretty good for self-published. I was pretty excited. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow. I found out that my friend Dwight actually published a book similarly.

A while ago and forgot that he did it. And he forgot that he did it. So I forgot. The thing sucked so bad that I just kind of pushed it out of my head. Well, what we're going to do is we're going to pump both of them up to the New York Times bestseller list by including them in the show notes. So.

Works for me. I don't even know if I still, I need to repost it then. So yeah, just let me know. Well, yeah. Let me know if you have a link to it somewhere. Okay. Because sometimes in self-publishing, they're not listed in Amazon. They're listed somewhere else. Yeah, yeah. I never, that was before Amazon was really popular. So if I would have known what I know now. So we're talking about the 1970s, 1980s or...

It was in the 90s. Oh, it was in the 90s. Oh, there we go. No, no, no. It was in the early 2000s. It was in the early 2000s and I just didn't, I never put it on an Amazon platform, but I think I could republish it and re-update it if people were interested. It's a project that I've thought about for a long time. So for people who don't know, there's a thing called KDP, which is Kindle Direct Publishing. Yeah.

And it's a very easy way of being able to self publish books and manuscripts. And so, um,

I'm sorry. I keep getting wrong. It's okay. I really apologize. My wife has a really thick French accent and it comes out in a lot of different ways. So I'm trying to, depending on how bad she is. Well, yeah. Well, hopefully I'm your friend at some point. So I got to get it. So, yeah, but she's my wife, Dave. I mean, come on, but go ahead. Yeah. I'm not going to get in between the two of you.

I'm smarter than that. It hasn't shown it so far today, but I'm smarter than getting in between two people. Or not lately. So today's topic is one that we have talked about a lot on the HR Data Labs podcast, but not in this way.

And one of the things that's scary, if you have been paying attention to what's happening in the United States, is that organizational cultures are shifting at a breakneck pace to try and flee what they consider to be a more toxic version of what we've all taken for granted, which is that people should care about each other or at least include them.

So today's topic is inclusion in creating anti-fragile organization cultures where people actually have agency, they can think and act interdependently, and they're actually rewarded for their relational skills as much as their technical ones. And that enables their colleagues to do better work and thrive while fulfilling the organization's mission and culture together. So,

What is on your mind about all this? Because that's really huge. That's really a large undertaking. It is. And, you know, what's on my mind right now is I think what we're dealing with and that's kind of coming out of the U.S., where a lot of diversity and inclusion practices have come out of the U.S. And a lot of them were based on paradigms of old.

And so what's on my mind is I think we need to ask ourselves the question, given where we are and what the current tenor of the work many call DEI is, whether they believe in it or are completely against it.

We need to think about what's possible now that it's been framed in a way that for most people, they don't fully understand it. A lot of people are in support of it. Some people are neutral and some people are totally against it. And they might always be, but not necessarily for the reasons why we think they're against it. So what do I mean by that? I think the past probably three to...

for decades, we've been really focused on paradigms of the past, which were more restorative justice or reparative justice, rather, and kind of an anchoring on social justice and civil rights paradigms of the 1960s and into affirmative action of the 70s. And as things evolve, you have to shift the paradigms, and I don't think we did. And so for the past five years, after Floyd, after pandemic,

we've moved into this place where we've actually, when we were trying to reduce us in them, we've in a way recreated it. And it wasn't intentional, but I think it was the byproduct, the trade-off, if I may, of not really being thoughtful about what we wanted to create together. And so now I believe that

Given that, we can go in a different direction. We don't have to reduce it. We can make this approach to inclusion or what we call inclusion in organizations accessible to everyone. We can prioritize it appropriately.

And we can align it with who the organization aspires to be in their mission and purpose. So that's where I think we are. And I think we're starting to move, but we can't spend all our time mad at, you know, politicians because politicians will be politicians.

Well, I don't know. They've given us a lot of reason to be mad. No, no, no, no, no. Like, like focusing on wrong things or trying to start fights with our partners or trying to embrace people who bring out the worst in the rest of us doing just absolutely mind-bogglingly stupid things and couching them in the, we've gone too far and this woke culture baloney and

you know, whatever is, is what's to blame.

Really? We know that's silly. It's silly. It's dishonest. And they wouldn't even know what DEI was if we had done this in a way that was more in alignment with what I think we could have been doing. And I talked about this a lot in Reconstructing Inclusion. And I'm not, you know, kind of acquiescing to that kind of toxic behavior, because if people decide they want to take that tenor and

And that kind of signaling by the administration and a lot of people that believe in that administration, they'll see, you know, you've seen those memes F around find out. I think, well, I think, I think, I think they'll find out that if you anchor and allow people to have behaviors that actually reduce people's desire to want to come to the office, reduce people's creativity, reduce,

Um, uh, the office that everybody wants you to come to now, by the way, um, you, you, you, you have people constantly complaining about these behaviors that we have labeled as toxic. We can label them as uncivil. Um, and, and just generally people just like check out, they might even check out and stay. I don't know what's worse, checking out and leaving or checking out and staying. Um,

Probably the latter. Probably the latter because it's destructive. If you want that and you want to pay the cost of that, it's something that you can't see immediately. But if you see some of the signals of it, if you decide not to do anything about it, good luck. Find out. But I so so I guess when I say.

not focused on silly politicians, they're not going to stop doing what they're doing. Why do we need to focus on what we need to do now? That's kind of where I am because politicians have always been politicians. Some of them I have agreed with in part, most of them I haven't, and I'm going to keep on moving so we can do this in a way that makes sense to companies, not just because it's, you know, feels good. It actually makes good business sense. Part of what I see with this is

And this is what, to me, makes it difficult. It's the polarity of thought. Yeah. It's the inability to meet in the middle on these things and the inability to listen to divergent viewpoints. Yeah. It's just somehow we've lost that. And I don't know where along the way we lost it. Well, it's a loss of propriety, right? I mean, we can't get along. Right.

I can't sit in a room and talk to people who are so biased in one way because they don't want to hear from me. They're thinking I'm going to try and change their mind and I'm not. I don't want to change their mind. I want to understand what they're talking about and see if I can relate to it so that we can have a conversation.

Yeah, I would agree. I'm in the process of reading a book right now that I consciously decided to read this book. And it is...

It is one of those that's on a pole where it is very anti-DEI. It's very anti a lot of things. And I chose to read it because I wanted to kind of understand from the other side what that was. And I kind of say reading it, eh.

It still makes me sick. And so I think this gets to exactly what we're talking about today. It's like, you know, you've got the two ends of the spectrum and in the middle they will never meet. Yeah.

I actually think, Dwight, that it's brilliant, first of all, that you're willing to be influenced by the so-called other. You probably know people that hold those views of the people that wrote that book somewhere in your networks that will never articulate it.

Right. They're probably willing to be influenced by you in ways they don't see you as other. And I'm not just talking about because you're a white guy. So just make sure for some people are going to hear that as that. Exactly. Where you work, your reputation, your expertise, what you've accomplished, what people know you for. Right. Who you are.

Right. Yeah. And that that willingness, I actually think there are more reasonable people than people on those polls. Now, some people don't agree with that. But part of me has to say, if we don't believe that that's possible, we'll never find those folks that are willing to at least go back and forth. Right. And at the same time, Dwight, we can acknowledge and as a practitioner of what we call DEI, I can acknowledge that.

One, some of the things that have gone on have gone too far. So what are people really mostly railing against? They're railing against the dynamics that have happened across the trans community, particularly with children. They're railing against so-called wokeness and feeling like they can't say what they want to say when they want to say it and how they want to say it, which none of us can and never have been able to. But the way that it was policed for particular types of standpoints and wording, that

it just wasn't helpful. It actually kept people from maybe even getting the feedback from, from good faith actors as well as they could have. And three, and three, the, the, the idea that, um,

We can't come together to work on something across differences when we have the right conditions to do it. I see that happen all the time and we haven't been deliberate about it and we haven't always been deliberate about building the skills so people can do it over and over and over again, even if we have some type of diametrically opposed view politically. I think humanity of us is a lot more intact than the media would allow us to believe. Yeah.

Yeah. Like what you hear so far? Make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe. This podcast is made possible by salary.com. Now back to the show. Well, why don't we pivot to the second question? Because we're going to be exploring all those things when we hit this, which is what direction do you think the diversity and inclusion industry needs to take after all of this anti-DEI sentiment? Hmm.

I think we need to, you know, group identity has been the biggest thing. We've been focused on group identity. And obviously for the past few years, it's been mostly on racialized or racial identities. And I think that kind of reduces people, even whatever identity, group identity it might be, it reduces people to a what?

We can talk about box checking all we want to, but it can reduce people and flatten people when we know people are multidimensional, at least 4D. I've been re-watching that book, Flatlands. I don't know if you've ever watched it, but it's really fascinating. It talks about the 2 and the 3D world, and then it gets a little bit into the 4D world. But it's quite fascinating. It's a really good kind of metaphor for where we are today, that we've really focused on people as being really 2D.

And we're at least or even 3D with what we can see. But what people are is really more than the dimensions that you could ever see. And we need to focus more on who people are, not just what. So get them out of the box and into something more complex because that's who we are. I think that's one. Two, we talk about belonging a lot.

And I'm all for belonging. It's a feeling. It's a sense that we should have that we can come and go and we're valued for who we are. But I think what's talked about less is mattering.

So you talked and introduced the concept of agency, David. When you matter, we don't talk about this as much, but we talk around purpose and meaning. We talk about agency and significance, but we don't always build that into how we develop people. How do we develop people who are in influential positions in our organization? We can call them leadership. We can call them whatever. Right.

So valued for people is the baseline for who they are for value, for what you contribute, I think, is the scaffolding that allows people to keep holding on. I have a metaphor for that, that when I was talking to my buddy the other day, I talked about he started rock climbing at 41.

And so now he's like at V he's like at V eight. I think there's like 16 levels. So he's moved on to V eight. He's 53 and he's at V eight and he's climbing. So he shows me these videos. He lives in, in, in Georgia. And he shows me these videos where he's hanging on to 30 millimeters of, of, of a boulder, like upside down with his feet in splits on 25 millimeter pieces. And I'm like,

How in the world is he doing this? But he keeps finding the next boulder to get better on. And I think that's what people, that's what mattering is like to me, is we keep finding the next boulder and we keep giving people that next problem. They call it boulders problems, that next problem that can allow you to have that mattering. And I think that level of development, people want that as much as anything. And I think when you do that consistently and you develop the skills to do that for all of your people, it's,

you know, some people aren't going to be able to go to a V16 or a V4, but they're going to be able to make the contribution that they can make where they can make it. And some people are going to naturally continue to get better. Um, and we need them all. And sometimes it's not the right place. It might need to go a place where they know of other boulders that you can climb so you can leave, but leave fulling like you mattered, even though it might not be that you're going to continue to make contributions at that organization. And we need to

reward people for being able to teach folks how to boulder to the next level, as well as when to know when to go on to another place where there's new boulders. Well, but to that, and I love that metaphor, by the way, and I was laughing because the other guy over here, Dwight, he loves jumping off of boulders. We're not going to focus on that.

But the thing that bothers me a little bit about this is that people, in order to be able to feel and believe in the agency that you have, a lot of people have imposter syndrome and they just can't

create that agency in their mind where they believe that they should be, or they should ask, or they should climb that boulder. They're worried about that boulder falling on them. They're worrying about that next step or that next, you know, hammering that, that whatever that thing is called into the, into the fissures because they're worried about that next hammer hit. That fissure becomes the thing that breaks the boulder. Right. And so, um,

I listen to you talk about how people should matter, but there are so many tenuous relationships we have with our job. I'm worried about people making that feeling that

Be the reason why they don't matter or they don't feel like they matter and that they can't ask for that for that next that next boulder. Yeah, you know, that's obviously an issue. And that's why I think relational fit and where relational fitness comes in, because you can't get people even up to a boulder to even face it.

unless they know that you care. Like, why would I want to go climb on something where I can fall off from two meters or from six and a half, seven feet up on my back? No, there's usually a pad down there, but it still hurts. Right.

Right. Well, and so if people you're going to ask people to climb these boulders and to make that attempt, they need to know that you care. They need to know that you're open and willing to be influenced by them. They need to know that they are safe, that you're there to spot them. Right. And that that makes some people do not have those skills. And I believe if you want to prevent that.

either people from not climbing the boulders that your organization needs to do its best work or climbing and falling once and deciding they're not spotted and they're never coming back. You need to develop that sense of safety and what that looks like to every single person. We can call it psychological. We can call it sociological. We can even call it kind of emotional. However you want to call it on a safety spectrum, we need that. And then of course we need trust and

I often talk and have used this with some clients around the four levels of trust by Louise Diamond. First of all, I know that I'm safe with you. That's my baseline trust. You're not going to harm me. And we are interdependent in a way. The second one is you understand my interest. The third is you're going to advocate for my interest.

And then the fourth is you're going to advocate for my interest even when I'm not around. So building those, I call that the cost of inclusion. But the idea is you have to build skills to get there and

you have to do it with people. It can't be something that's done deductively. Like, oh, this is a theory, let me go put it into practice. You have to put it into practice and then see what works for each unique individual in your organization and not make any assumptions that what you do is actually what they need.

And so to me, if you want to reward something in the future, reward people's capacity to create that capability for themselves and for the organization on a consistent basis. And I know not every organization is there, but anybody that has big influence needs to

take into consideration caring, first of all, because that's where all the interdependence starts. And most of the newer, I'd say, leadership frameworks all talk about interdependence. But do we measure for it? Because there is measurement. Do we actually assess for it? Do we train for it? Do we get people ready to do that regularly? Because in my opinion, with the world we're in now, you can call it VUCA, you can call it Bainey, whatever you want to call it.

Those skills, they're just as important, if not more important than the technical ones, in my opinion, or my experience, too. How do we build that at scale? Is that a leadership quality that you're training? Is it a cultural? Meaning, is it something that a company needs to adopt as a...

as being one of their philosophical and mission vision value statements. We care about our people. We trust in our people. We, we support our people and then actually live it by being able to show that people can fail and not lose their jobs. I think you, you definitely have to build the capacity, but you have to make it, um,

you have to have some skin in the game on it because if people, cause there's been a lot of diversity stuff that's been out there and people are told they must do this. Thou must do this in diversity or we let go versus like, look, these are skills that we know and that there's enough evidence that supports that when you do that, you just get more from your people and they perform better and teams work better. And I think that,

I think companies should make it a part of their organizational design. So you can call that in your values and principles, or you can call it in your strategy. I think I would call it in my strategy. I put it in there because we believe that that level of relational fitness and the relational skills actually allows people to do better work. At that point, the other piece for me is...

It's important to both evaluate for, but also to understand this notion of leadership. And you guys are probably familiar with Peter Senge's definition of leadership. Leadership is the capacity for a human community to shape its future.

And so the idea is that leadership is not an individual attribution towards a number of people that happen to have more power in organizational life. It's a, it's a relational construct, just like inclusion, that everybody's there to shape the future of the organization. Every single person needs these skills. So at scale, it's not one time or two times it's

introduce these concepts, put them in people's kind of purview and say, this is, let's talk about what that looks like in action every day, not just the training, but here are the principles. What does it look like? Here are some frameworks that can help you and then put some things into practice, see what's working. Cause you just don't know. Like inclusion is a lot of things. The outcome is always the same. People thrive in the organization themselves.

contributes value beyond just the bottom line. The way that, you know, what goes through my head with this is as a leader, you have to realize that so much of this is fear-based and, you know, I'm, I'm afraid that I won't matter. And, and that theme kind of goes no matter where you sit on the spectrum of things. And,

And so doing what you were talking about and also going after the fear, going after whatever it is that's creating the fear in people's minds and being able to be a leader through the fear. Because isn't that, I mean, being a leader, that's a lot of what you do is getting people past their fears. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, would you agree with that? I would. I think it's, it's getting people over their fear of loss of something. Right. And I think that that's, if you think about this in terms of experimentation, a lot of people don't do stuff because they're scared they're going to fail. Exactly. Right. Yes. If I was scared to fail, like I would be done because I've done a whole lot of it. Right. Like,

I just did it a few hours ago. I've done it all year, right? And if you don't create... But I work for myself, so my fear is a little bit different. Is my business going to be successful? Am I going to be able to feed my kids, right? But...

But the, but it's still a fear. I think everybody has that fundamental fear. Am I going to lose something that allows me to not be able to live my life, you know, as comfortably as possible, or at least safely as possible. And so I think that's, that's part of the caring part. When you care about something, you don't want them to be scared. You want them to know, like, look, if you fail, I fail. We all have to move through this together. Let's talk about it as quickly as possible.

Because failure is inevitable. It's can we recover from it when it's the most challenging times or does a person that has a high managerial level automatically collapse with people rather than say, all right, here are the parts of what happened. Some of these parts we don't need. Let's continue to build on the ones that we do.

And we learn something, we can move quickly. Because the fear is just, we just needed some evidence that what we were doing was working or not, or how it was working and what we need to adjust. And to me, that's, yeah, it's always there. But if your goal is to create the future, it's part of the path. I don't think you can ever succeed without having failure as part of what you have or what you do.

It's part of your success. Exactly. It gives you that grounding. Every journey story you've ever heard. Right. Exactly. Let's go to a movie theater and see if we can actually see a movie that doesn't have failure as being one of the, you know, underlying tenants of it. Right. And, you know, how many Shakespeare's.

Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind. Go to salary.com forward slash HRDL consulting to schedule your free 30 minute call today.

But I think what we're going through now is really, though, to what Dwight was talking about, it's the fear that, and again, fear is hard to overcome. It's the fear of being part of an organization and it starts to change.

And the leadership starts to provide different messaging. And you all of a sudden feel like you're on an island, not supported. And you look around and you say, oh my gosh, what am I doing? Why am I here? Because now in the environment that we're in, we don't feel as supported. We don't feel that messaging anymore. And how do we move that forward?

I know it's a tough one. No, I had a colleague that was going through a really hard time and she just felt completely ostracized. And she came to me to talk about this. And she told me the story of, you know, really what was going on. And we got to the heart that

A lot of the way she was engaging, she was actually right, you know, but rightness has never transformed anything. So she was right in her stance, right? But we really talked about

Are people really focusing on relationships the way that they can in organizations? Because when CEOs signal stuff, a lot of times they're just signaling to the market. They're not signaling to their people. And I'm not. This is who they are. They're signaling to the market. And sometimes what we see on the outward signals to the market isn't even actually what's going on. But it's the message to the potential workforce that could come there. So that's on the CEOs. But internally...

We have to be like, okay, how can I support my colleague that's right next to me in my cubicle here? How can I support my team in a way that we weren't able to? So when I started talking to this colleague years ago, I said,

do people know how you can contribute and support them? And then how do you talk about how you support each other? And she spent a lot of time listening, a lot of time engaging. And over time, her approach to what at the time was drug safety that she was working on, that became the approach. And it saved the company money because it reduced timelines and it got projects kind of moved out of the pipeline faster.

Because she just exercised not just her technical acumen, because she was amazing at that, but she wasn't amazing at asking the right questions, engaging people, letting people know that she's invested in their outcomes as much as she is her own and that theirs are interdependent. She spent a lot of time on that and it made the shift. So I think my point in that is.

At the times that we're in now, there's going to be some crazy stuff that comes out of the mouths of politicians, the mouths of individuals. But I think by and large, most people want to just be normal.

you know, engage for who they are and do good work and go home and take care of their lives and feel good about that work. And I think we can only do that by coming closer together rather than using an ideological stance, whether it's on one pole or the other, to move us further away from each other. Like, we have to kind of put our heels in and say, I don't agree with you on a lot of things, but on this mission of this organization, I agree. And how can we make that happen together and

allow us both to do our best work or all of us, this team to do our best work or the organization to do so. So I wish I can say I have some pessimism. I do, but I also have seen it and I'm working with organizations still in this DEI thing where somebody asked me the other day if I still had a job, I still do. More important than ever now. This DEI thing. I love how you term it. I believe inclusion is

is can be a superpower and what it is when it is and it's consistently done you create a company that lasts you don't just create what i you know if you've ever read any ari de hoze um it's not a puddle company it's a river company it's one that goes and has is in an ecosystem it builds on itself over time and it lasts if you want that then engage with your colleagues like you care about them and and help them do their best work and and some will most i'd say will will respond in good faith

I think you just had the mic drop moment there. So I think we're going to end it there. I think that we will see how these organizations deal with the political wins as well as their employees and how employees stick it out or where they'll walk with their

walk with their, uh, their hours. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. We're going to have to have you back and see maybe early next year, mid next year, see how things transpired and see, see where everything wound up. I hope so, David, I would appreciate it. And Dwight, thank you all for the time. It was a delight. The delight was ours. Thank you. Well, thank you for being here, Dwight. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. And thank you all for being here. Take care and stay safe.

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