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Welcome to DEI Leaders by Crescendo. In this series, Sage Franch, CEO of Crescendo, hosts conversations with diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners, sharing valuable insights from their work.

Our latest conversation is with Kim Vu, Vice President of Environmental Social Governance at Remitly.

Listen to the podcast or read below for the edited transcript.

Sage: Hello and welcome to today's episode of DEI leaders by Crescendo, where we interview industry leaders and culture champions about diversity, equity and inclusion in practice. I'm your host Sage Franch and I'm joined today by Kim Vu, Vice President of Environmental Social Governance at Remitly. Kim, thank you so much for joining us.

Kim: Sage, thanks so much for including me today.

(0:33) Sage: I am so excited for us to have this conversation. We've been working together now for quite some time, and I know that our audience is very curious about how to build a learning culture of DEI in their organizations. So I'm super excited to hear your thoughts and advice for our community on that. And just to get started, I'd love to hear about you and your role and how you came into this work. Did you find DEI work or did DEI work find you?

Kim: Such a great question and first off, thanks for inviting me to participate. I'm excited to be here, just going to share a little bit about some of the lessons learned over the years, and how I got into this work. If I found DEI or if it found me, I think it's kind of a little bit of both honestly. My background has been in financial services for over 20 years. The first half of that was focused on being in the business, running lines of business, and the latter half has been focused primarily on environmental, social governance and corporate social responsibility. I came into that work because I saw while I was in the business, so many opportunities to think about how we could create greater impact beyond the bottom line, and really thinking about the power of the resources that a company has to create change in communities. And so that's what piqued my interest to make that transition into environmental social governance and in corporate social responsibility.

And as part of that over the years, for folks who are familiar with CSR, you know the primary focus has kind of always been on what's the employee impact on communities, how can companies create greater social benefit for the world. And over time, I think what has shifted quite a bit because of the ways in which we've experienced life and how the world has changed so dramatically over the last few years but specifically the last two to three years, with social and economic unrest and the global pandemic and environmental shifts and changes that are happening all over the world with disasters becoming more common as part of our shared lived experiences. But we're all experiencing them differently, and that actually kind of helped me I think come to a point where the realization of how important actually weaving DEI into CSR work is.

Historically, diversity, equity and inclusion work has been primarily a function of the people team and HR. Really kind of focused on how do we create inclusive environments for employees and it predominantly kind of just lived there, right? But what I found over the last few years is how important, as we think about not only employee experience where we think about the impacts of the varied lived experiences identities against the impact that we're trying to create in the world as organizations, and how it's important to really kind of think about that intersection. And so, I found the work in terms of making conscious choices about shifting my career but the DEI work also found me in the work that I was doing in ESG. And seeing the value and the power and the need to be able to see how important it was to think about the re-allocation of corporate resources through the lens of the different experiences of those who may be impacted and who need to also be at the table for those conversations around how we re-distribute resources.

(4:40) Sage: That's super interesting. I talked to a lot of DEI folks who are in the process of advocating to move DEI out of the HR function and distribute it across the business or put it into a more high-impact area or high-ownership area of the organization. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts, with DEI being a core part of ESG or CSR, how are you structuring your organization to make maximum impact, and what are the outcomes that you focus on?

Kim: So on our journey at Remitly, when we think about diversity, equity and inclusion at our company, it was really built into the mission of our organization. So for us it was HR plus and plus plus – you know, many things. Because as we think about our business, we started out with identifying an issue within financial services by seeing that there was an inequity in exclusion of immigrants to be able to access financial services, specifically remittances, in order to make it easier and more affordable for them to be able to send their money home to their families in different countries. And so, with having that in mind as we created the business, of kind of recognizing that the core of what we do really kind of solves and brings into the fold, more inclusion and equity to a historical financial services system that has left a lot of people unbanked and underbanked. And so as we thought about DEI at our company, we really tried to weave it in throughout the business from the start. And when I joined the company two years ago, it was really at a place where the company was ready to be able to kind of look at it also structurally, across the organization. To say what are all of the policies and practices and programs that need to be reviewed and improved? And what are the things that we actually need to implement and put in place as we grow as an organization?

Being that we were in a very high growth stage of the life cycle, it was the perfect time for us to start to think about that before we became a really large company that you know, structures and systems start to bake in and are much harder to unwind. We’re at this place where we're malleable enough to be able to say okay, like this isn't working, let's fix that, this is working, let's establish that. So it's in this place where we can tweak and continuously improve on those different practices and policies we have across the organization in HR, in product, in compliance, in customer success. Just kind of giving you examples of where it shows up in our conversations.

(7:52) Sage: That's such a phenomenal way to approach it, and you know, as an impact-driven company ourselves at Crescendo that really resonates with me. I think that high growth phase when you have a lot of new folks onboarding can be a time of great opportunity and great challenge for folks who are really working to make an environment inclusive for everybody. Particularly when you are starting with maybe a more uniform workforce and suddenly welcoming a lot more diversity through hiring. What were some of the things that you found to be most impactful at that high growth phase that really made a difference to folks who were already on the team and who were joining and growing with you?

Kim: Yeah, I think one of the things that helped us, and we’re continuously iterating on it too so it's not something that's static, right? I think that's the thing when you're thinking about how do you create an inclusive culture, it's not to say okay, check the box, I did this thing so now it should work. Right? Especially where we're at with being in that growth space recently, having IPO-ed and continued to experience the growth as a company. So lots of people are joining constantly, so that shifts the dynamics of our culture, and inclusion starts to kind of shift and evolve as well. And so it's really important for us to really focus on culture and inclusion. And then I think a lot of companies are constantly thinking about how do we continue to recruit and bring more people in? But I think it's also more important to think about what does our culture look like and is it set up to be able to welcome in all of the diverse lived experiences and identities that we want to bring into the workplace so that we make better decisions, so we can build better teams and a better product. And so we spent a lot of time around thinking about culture in terms of what are the practices that we need to put in place to really help and create that environment – and we start on day one.

So for example, as we continued to grow the new hire orientation onboarding experience for all of our employees, they see our work around DEI in several different places in that process. They've actually seen it before they even came to the organization through our recruitment process because we actually require all of our employees to go through an inclusive training workshop before they become an interviewer to participate on an interview panel. So we’re trying to be really mindful of how we welcome candidates into the company. But even as they're coming into the company as new employees, they're also seeing that on their day one. Through videos that we incorporate into their learning journey, they spend time with me as part of a new hire orientation where we engage in a learning activity as part of their onboarding experience to help them with getting experience very early on about how we want everybody to show up curious and wanting to learn from and appreciate everybody’s different lived experiences and stories, and encourage folks to be able to do that. All for the benefit of creating a more inclusive culture and ultimately so that we have built a strong sense of empathy for different lived experiences that help us actually create a better product and better solutions for our customers.

Sage: Yeah, that's really great. From the very first time that somebody encounters Remitly, I mean even just in the wild you can really feel how important this is to your company. And then joining to have that incorporated from day one in such an authentic way, it's very powerful.

Kim: Yeah, I was just going to add that one of the things that we do to continue that learning for our employees, so they don't just see it on day one and then it goes away, we've actually built in a number of different routines as well on company time to encourage continued learning. And so, one of the things that we offer to all of our employees is 8 hours a month of learning and development time where they can utilize that time to increase their capabilities around the skills that they're trying to learn for their job or their next role, but it also includes the time that they spend to set aside to learn about different topics that they might be interested in, like unconscious bias or how to be a more inclusive leader. Things like that, that we’ve created content and provided content or access to so that they can utilize that time to be able to learn.

But we've also set aside routines like our DEI all-hands and office hours which happen on a weekly basis. So what we found is that while it's really important to be able to have company-wide trainings and have folks talk about particular issues like once a year or twice a year, we recognize that that's not enough right? And so, what we've done is created spaces where folks can learn on a weekly basis if we set aside one hour a week, for all employees to be able to engage. And so example, the first week of the month is allotted to all of our affinity group leaders to come together and connect and learn from one another, create community and space. The second week of the month we do a DEI all-hands for our North American teammates. Our third week of the month we do a DEI all-hands for international teammates and then the fourth week of the month we host office hours, which is a more unstructured space for open dialogue and questions.

(14:22) Sage: Yeah, that's awesome and those opportunities of bringing people together to have that open dialogue can really have very positive shockwave effects throughout the organization. How are you measuring the success of these initiatives? What are you looking at to see if these are going well or maybe you know, these are areas we need to pivot?

Kim: So, our kind of all-up overall view on whether or not our efforts around this are working is the belonging score as part of our engagement survey. It’s really understanding the data behind employee responses to the question “I feel like I belong at Remitly”. And so that becomes our north star in terms of gauging inclusion at our company, and so that's kind of the all-up one that we look at, but there's obviously a lot of other metrics that we look at beneath that. And one of them that actually has been really helpful for us and we continue to explore it and figure out how to make even more meaning from it, is actually the data that we're getting from Crescendo.

And so with employees engaging on the Crescendo platform and selecting different topics and sharing with us, which topics are most valuable, the things that they're learning, the things that they want to learn more about, it’s actually giving us information about understanding, okay, here are the gaps and areas that we probably want to spend a little bit more time on. Like if folks say, I'm wanting to learn more about the experiences of immigrants and refugees as part of their learning, which makes sense for our business, it gives us the opportunity to be able to then take that information and add more content to other parts of our programming outside of Crescendo. And so that's an example of kind of some of the data points that we're gaining from actually using learning technology like Crescendo, where it's adding value for the individual employee from the microlearnings, but on the back-end really giving us the power to understand how our employees are learning and what's valuable to them.

(16:55) Sage: That insight can be very helpful and I'm glad that you're able to get that through what we're doing together. How much of the learning would you say is self-directed by individuals learning on their own, versus that group environment where people are coming together to talk?

Kim: Yeah, I'd say it's a mix and we do that intentionally because I think what's really important to recognize too when we're thinking about learning and developing, is meeting people where they are. Not only on their learning journey but just also from a timing perspective, because everybody's schedules are so full and so packed, and so we want to be able to create a mix of different engagements that allow for more folks to be able to engage where they're at and what's available to them. And so, I would say it's a mix of both. I think being able to have self-directed resources for them to learn is really key to being able to provide them an environment where they can kind of say, this is the time that I've set aside where I can learn about particular topics, but also equally being able to create spaces where folks can come together because I think there's a lot of power in taking what you learn and actually putting it into action and having a safe space to practice it. And so I think self-directed learning is a good place to absorb and intellectualize what you're learning, but it's in the group spaces where folks come together to then practice what they're learning, is where they’re really internalizing the learning that they're having.

(18:47) Sage: Is there any particular story that comes to mind that you can share about when you've seen that happen?

Kim: Great question, I'm trying to think, there's so many different experiences and stories I'm trying to pick one. But I think one of the things that has been really valuable, for example, there's been several instances of this, not necessarily in the group learning environments, but you know so many of us are on shared communication channels. Whether you're using Slack or other platforms, but you know lots of conversations happen on the platform, and sometimes, really kind of understanding intent versus impact. For example, how folks are learning and want to share their learnings. Sometimes, maybe folks will share something that they're learning, but it creates a harmful impact to somebody else when they post it. And so it's been an opportunity for the organization and employees within the organization to say, hey, how do I communicate that to someone, right? Rather than having like a big cancel conversation on Slack, it's encouraging and teaching our employees the skills to be able to say, hey, I noticed this post that you had on the channel. You know, help me learn a little bit more about why was that important for you to share, is there an opportunity for us to put for example, a trigger warning on it before you posted, here's why.

And so, taking the dialogue online to offline, one on one, and be able to create the space for folks to have the skills to be able to introduce that dialogue with one another offline and then bring it back online to be able to say, hey, I had a really great conversation with so and so, appreciated the feedback that I received. Here are some of the things that I'm just adjusting to shift this conversation in a different direction. And so I think like we've had a few examples of those over the years that have been really great to see because folks need to see how it happens. And these are the things that happen on a more daily basis versus more larger issues. It's kind of those smaller day-to-day interactions of like: how do I learn how to bring up a difficult topic or provide constructive feedback and engage in a dialogue that might not be easy to have and is so personal? But in a way that respects each person with lived experiences in the moment and holding the space for each other, for those conversations.

(21:54) Sage: You know I have to ask, when you look at an organization, it sounds like this is extremely well organized and you can get very deep in a lot of these subjects with folks. And that model behavior, being able to demonstrate how we want this type of thing to be handled here, who does that fall on? Is that your role as the you know, as the most senior DEI leader here or is that kind of distributed? And how do you think of your role in interplaying with the individual learning journeys of all of the folks in your organization?

Kim: Yeah, I would say it's a collaborative effort, right? And so, there are expectations for our leaders to be engaged and involved, and we create. So for example, going back to those routines that I just mentioned around our DEI all-hands and office hours, those are co-hosted with a senior leader and myself. So it's one of the ways in which we want to make sure that we're creating accountability, visibility of our senior leaders, and participating in hearing and learning alongside our employees. And so that creates the model behavior that you were mentioning earlier. But also it spreads the responsibility and accountability across the organization. Ultimately, yes, I am the one that's kind of spearheading some of those efforts, but it's really around a collective effort and shared responsibility in terms of who owns DEI across the organization. You know, I frequently reference one of our cultural values – be an owner, to remind folks of that. That DEI is all of our jobs, not just not just mine, not just my teams’. So I think how we try to weave in and remind folks by also leaning in on our cultural values really helps connect the dots and tie it together for folks.

(24:01) Sage: Awesome, awesome. I have one last question for you. You know, at Crescendo we love our actionable tips. So what is one actionable tip or takeaway that you have for the DEI practitioners who are listening to this conversation who want to get started with fostering a really healthy culture of DEI learning in their organization?

Kim: Yeah, I mean there's so many things that we can do, but I think for us and what's made it so successful for us, is listening to our employees. I think start by creating the space for continuous feedback and input. With our employees, all the programming and routines that we have in place, even including Crescendo, is only useful and successful if our employees find it valuable. And I don't know that unless I'm plugged in and connected to them, and so one of the most valuable things that I've appreciated and learned as a DEI leader is the value of the employee’s voice. And so I would say, where to start in terms fostering that culture of learning is, how do we create that space where we're learning together? And that starts with employee engagement and feedback, and valuing employee voice in that process.

(25:29) Sage: That is fantastic advice and a great note for us to close out on. Kim, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your awesome experiences with us. I know that our listeners at home are probably taking down as many notes as I am as they listen to this and they might want to ask us some follow up questions after listening to this episode. Where can our audience connect with you and follow your updates or reach out?

Kim: Yeah! I appreciate the opportunity to engage and share. I'm always, in the spirit of learning, continuously looking to learn from others as well, so welcome the connections.

I'm on Twitter and also on LinkedIn so that's where you can find me.

Sage: And what's your Twitter handle?

Kim: It's @Kimmilyn.

Sage: Perfect, perfect. You know, thank you again for this conversation. Really appreciate the opportunity to learn from you today and very excited to see how this continues to evolve as you continue to grow.

Kim: Awesome, thanks so much Sage. Really appreciate our continued partnership and in the learning journey as well.

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Welcome to DEI Leaders by Crescendo. In this series, Sage Franch, CEO of Crescendo, hosts conversations with diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners, sharing valuable insights from their work.

Our latest conversation is with Gary Cooper, Senior Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Business Partner at Amazon Web Services.

Listen to the podcast or read below for the edited transcript.

Sage: Hello and welcome to today's episode of DEI leaders by Crescendo, where we interview industry leaders and inclusive culture champions about diversity, equity and inclusion in practice. I'm your host Sage Franch and I'm joined today by Gary Cooper, Senior Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Business Partner at Amazon Web Services. Gary, thank you so much for joining us.
Gary: Thanks Sage, appreciate you having me.

(0:32) Sage: Yes, so happy to have you on. We're going to talk about allyship today and especially how to cultivate authentic allyship. So this is a question that we get all the time from our audience, our listeners, who are wondering, what is the role that allyship plays in DEI work and how can I really mobilize these potential allies, and get them and inspire them to be part of the movement? But before we get into that, I'd love to just hear a little bit about your background and how you came into this work. Did DEI work find you or did you always know that you were going to go down this path?

Gary: Yeah Sage, it's a great question. So first and foremost, I think it's important – I’m a straight white cis able-bodied, currently able-bodied man, and I start there nearly from fact that that is the lens through which I start. And when we think about allyship and the practice of it and developing, I have to acknowledge that that's where I start from. And so that has cultivated me, that has shaped me, that has influenced how I navigate this. It also means that there are a number of ways in which I've been afforded an opportunity to navigate those things simply through my identities. And a little bit about the role that I play as an Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Business Partner, our role has evolved over time. But really I think it's to help an organization go deeper. So we partner really closely with HRBPs, Human Resource Business Partners, to follow the trends from a talent lifecycle perspective, from recruiting to onboarding, to growth and development and then at some point, if and when somebody leaves the company, our role is to take that talent lifecycle deeper and look at the ways in which our processes, our systems, our interactions are producing inequitable outcomes and to try and drive systems changes into those. I think early on, I used the phrase “I just have a passion for this work” and I'm not trying to throw shade or discredit anybody that's still like “I have a passion for DEI work”, but I've come to realize that I don't think that's enough. And so, from a vocation, versus career, versus job standpoint, I think service work has always been in my DNA. And that's largely what I see DEI work as, it's what I see allyship or advocacy as. It's service work. And so I found it at Amazon through deep relationships with people. But if I look back over the course of my time before I got here, you know there were things that I was doing, I just don't know that it would have been called DEI work at the time or I don't know that we had the language at the time to call it what it was. So a little bit of both, but at Amazon I think I sort of sought it out. Trying to figure out what that meant for me as a white guy to be in this space.

(3:37) Sage: Interesting, interesting, and I know a lot of DEI leaders kind of find their way to this work through a real patchwork of different roles and different things where a lot of DEI advocacy that they're doing is almost side-of-desk, before it becomes a full-time opportunity. And I think part of, I'm sure what we'll get into as we dive into allyship, maybe that's how it starts. Maybe a lot of us start out as the allies or aspiring allies and then find our way into this work, as it becomes clearer and more concrete to us and we decide to turn that passion into education and into activism and active work. But what does allyship really mean? We've talked about this before and I think that a lot of folks have kind of adopted it as a bit of a buzzword, but what is the definition of allyship in your point of view?
Gary: Yeah, I mean, you're right. We oftentimes we want to be the good one. We want to be good, and so we send all these signals that we are safe or an ally. But for me, allyship is commitment to eradicating the systems that benefit me. And that’s big and that’s not something that I think I'll ever see happen in my lifetime. And I don't mean to say that like there's a despair or a lack of hope, but quite frankly, white supremacy is at least you know, in the US context, in the European context, white supremacy is a system that is not going away easily. And there's so many ways in which we perpetuate it. I perpetuate it through my actions because I live in a society that is deeply embedded with it. And so for me, allyship is that commitment to practice, that commitment to deeply inspecting and then acting to change those systems that benefit me. And I think that's oftentimes where it gets really tough for folks and for me, because there's all sorts of ways in which we want to, for our families or our lives, we want to have things, we want to live a comfortable life. We want to sometimes not think about all the ailments of the world. We want to go have fun, we want to have a nice house, we want to have our kids in a good school. And there's all sorts of ways in which those terms get loaded. But it's a question I continue to ask myself, is how am I aligning to or diverging from systems of oppression today?

Sage: Yeah, it's certainly not easy to stand in the face of opportunity and confront how you've had access to that while others haven't.

Gary: That’s right.

(6:14) Sage: And then actually make decisions, right, to say you know, not this time, this time I'm going to do something else and go a different path. When you say that these systems are not going to be dismantled or eradicated within our lifetime, how do you maintain hope and drive to continue even though you and your children might not necessarily see that big systemic change that we’re all trying to work towards?

Gary: Yeah, I don't know what the alternative is. I mean to me, the alternative is sort of self-centered and it's not a way that I want to at least live and try and model for my kids. There are days that are more difficult than others, right? There are days for anyone who's a DEI practitioner, this isn't coming as any groundbreaking information, but there are days where there's a lot of despair, there's days where you want to go do something else. By context, there was a time in my life where I was on a path to going to divinity school and potentially being a minister. And one of my good friends said in a conversation that as he was on his path to being a minister, he was challenged by professors and other ministers that if there's anything else you can do, go do that. And so I did. I went and I tried a lot of other things and I won't say that DEI practitioners are ministers, I think there's a number of ways in which people would find some problematic aspects to that, but it is a way that I see as a service-oriented vocation and I just can't do anything else – I've tried that. So there are little wins that I've learned over the course of the last four years to recharge the battery, to refill the cup and keep moving.

(8:04) Sage: The space requires a lot of self-care and community-care for sure. So let's switch gears a little bit here and talk about not just the experience of being an ally and finding our way into allyship, but for DEI practitioners that are in roles either at organizations or folks who are independent consultants supporting others with this work, how can they encourage people who may not be engaged in this work already or may not even be aware of it really, to interact with allyship and to really start this journey?
Gary: I think that really all depends on what identities you hold. You know at the outset of this, I mentioned a lot of the ways in which I identify. And I think there's a way that DEI practitioners, in specificity to race right, like I take a page out of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, where he talks about how the burden of racism is on the shoulders of white people. And so, the burden of getting people into the allyship practice, the burden of getting people into the space of seeing the collective beyond the individual, I think, should be on the shoulders of those with the most privilege in the community that you're trying to activate. And so what I mean by that is if you are a white practitioner, then how are you activating other white people, and doing so in a way that creates a commitment to that service? Now Sage, you and I chatted before and I'll be honest, the place that I struggle is that oftentimes a good tool to do that is to show how the practice of allyship benefits the individual. So when we think about encouraging people to interact with or engage with or get into the practice of allyship, oftentimes we have to think about ways that by doing so, it can benefit that individual as an ally. So they either have more moments of recognition or it's going to help them become a better operator in their role or it's going to help them get promoted. And I struggle with that. I have seen it work, I have seen it be a good tool by which people can get people started, and perhaps over time, they become more committed than just the individual outcome. But I worry sometimes that that activation as a self-serving measure, it distorts what allyship is supposed to be doing. But I don't know, I'm curious how you see that Sage, in terms of if this program or this thing is going to help you become, you know, a better engineer or a better salesperson, then let's get you into allyship. Versus, there are inequities around you, there are communities that don't have equal access and we're asking you to right that ship.

Sage: Yeah, it's an interesting kind of thought experiment in a way, like is allyship without altruism really allyship? And the way I view it, I try and think about: what is the desired outcome here? You know, are we trying to get a net positive change in our organization or our community, and if so, does somebody’s intention for the work change that outcome? If somebody is doing this work in a self-serving interest, does that change their ability to actually contribute to a more equitable organization or community? And I think it really depends on a case-by-case basis, there's definitely not a blanket answer for that. But in many cases people who are more center of the privilege wheel, let's just call it that, who are not challenged through their own experiences to be part of this work, they don't necessarily feel that severity. You know when they don't see it reflected in their own life as challenges and that's why you hear people say, oh well, I have a friend who faced this or now that I have children and a daughter and my child came out. Then suddenly it becomes clear to them because they hadn't had to confront that previously. But I think that those same folks you know, if they had an on-ramp earlier into this work, even if it's a self-serving on-ramp, I think that on-ramp can expose them to concepts and open the door to genuinely care about this and become genuine allies in a non-self-serving way as well. That's kind of how I view it. I would say more often than not, the benefit of getting these folks engaged in this work in some capacity is probably more significant than the cost of them being engaged in this work for self-serving purposes, versus not engaging at all.

Gary: Yeah. In there, I'm really glad that you mentioned on-ramp and again, from a US and European – Western concept, I'll stick to race for a second. There's oftentimes the question around what is the place of a white, and in particular, a white man who is a DEI practitioner. What is the place in this work for us? And that on-ramp, I've used that language in that context. My role if it is useful, should be to be an on-ramp for other white people and actually, to in some capacity provide that challenge that often comes with proximity. So like where can I reduce the burden for the communities that I seek to serve by not having to have have them be in proximity with someone who may create more harm in the short-term as they're practicing learning, growing. You mentioned, sometimes some men have a daughter.
That they are like, woah, I don't want her to be burdened by the barriers that women face, but I was cool with it up until I had a daughter. Or the phrase that I hear often out in Seattle and other places is, I don't want to live in that neighborhood because it's a bad neighborhood or I don't want my kids to go to that school because it's a bad school. And beyond the, “what do you mean by bad?”, let's further identify it, say the thing out loud. What we're inherently saying though, is we're okay with other kids going to those schools, we're okay with other kids being in those neighborhoods or other families being in those neighborhoods, but not me. I see the activation, like my role should be to bring that narrative to folks who look like me, who identify like me, and be an on-ramp for them to move into the work.

(14:54) Sage: So why do you feel that as a cis white man, you're better positioned to convince other cis white men to become an ally? What is it that makes you more successful in those areas?

Gary: I don't know, I don't know that I’m better positioned. I mean I also, in stereotypical gender norms or whatever, I check other boxes too right? Like I played football in college, I love football, I love sports, I drink beer, I do all these other things that connect in these stereotypical ways. And so I think there's a component of me that can connect with people, they know who I am, like they see themselves in me and then there's just a component of me that doesn't align with the same systemic inequities that we may just blindly sort of navigate through or actively act in accordance with. And so you know, I don't know that I'm any better at it than somebody else, I just think the burden is on me. I think one of the places where, as I've listened and talked with other people, whether it's at Amazon or in other places, there are a number of times when people will tap my shoulder, my virtual or proverbial shoulder, and say, hey, I'm having a hard time with this person, can you come in and take this over? And so that's a part of what I'm here for. To reduce that burden, to reduce that labor. You know, hopefully over time I've gotten better at it, and I continue to do it in a way that is effective. But I'm not clear that, for those of us who, again with race as the center, those of us who are white, if we've raised our hand to begin this work why we're not taking on the burden of activating allies or getting more people in who look like us.

Sage: Yeah, this is a question that I get a lot. A lot of folks are saying, you know, I care about this and I identify as an ally. I want to engage in this work but I don't know what is my place. And there's a hesitance around taking up too much space – and I think that's wise, we should all be very conscious of the space and energy that we are taking up and dispelling in a room.
But I think what you're kind of hitting on here is that active and educated allies have a real opportunity to capitalize on this in-group bias that we all innately have as humans. Where, we are more likely to respond favorably to people who reflect our own identity. And no matter which identity it is, I think we all have that opportunity to recognize that and that's why the privilege wheel is powerful tool to be able to see, okay, this is where I actually have privilege or power and I can use that. Spend that and connect with others who might see themselves reflected in me and help them along that journey in a really productive way that leads, like you said, as an on-ramp into them taking on a lot of this burden themselves and hopefully spreading it further.

Gary: Yeah, one thing to add in there Sage. For many, I would push on the “I identify as an ally”. I think that's where we start to get problematic, where we think that there's an arrival place, that there's a place by which, like I am now an ally and I don't think that ever exists.
I don't think there's like a banner I can put my yard or a sign or something that I can attach to my badge, no.

Sage: Ally bumper sticker.

Gary: Yeah, I mean some of them are good signals like I get that. I get you need to have some signals, but it really is about what you are doing. It is what you're doing driving towards the intended outcome. Or do you have better intentions than your impact? And one of the things that has helped me tremendously over the years, at the time I think it was Global Digital Citizen Foundation who put out this ultimate cheat sheet for critical thinking. And it goes through the who, what, where, when, why, how questions, right? There's this PDF that I actually continue to have on my screensaver, and I look at every day where it's like in anything that I'm doing, who does this benefit? Where did I learn this information? How do I know this is true? Why is the thing that I'm seeing a problem or a challenge? Who is it a problem for? And those are sort of those refining questions that I continue to do as my own practice to ensure that at the end of the day, whatever impact is happening is driving towards that equity and not just, I have some really good intentions, but that I'm constantly trying to challenge myself around. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who is it for? How do you know that that's what they need? How do you know that that's what's being asked for?

Sage: Yeah, we have a similar resource that we use at Crescendo and that we share with the folks particularly when we loop in senior leaders and do senior leadership workshops that are more centered on a specific department or area. And we're always challenging people to look at: how are you going to debias this decision, or this situation and be conscious to include the groups that have not had an opportunity to be part of this conversation? It goes so far beyond like you said, identifying as an ally. It's like you have to build this into your daily practice and every single person really has to be a part of that. And I think that's part of what we do as DEI practitioners is trying to get people the inspiration to be part of this, the understanding of why it's important, and then the daily practice of okay, now, what tools do I have in my toolkit to actually incorporate this into my day-to-day work? So that it's not just something I think about when we do a training, but it's really something that we think about daily and are constantly challenging ourselves with.

(20:42) On that note, I would love to talk a little bit about one of the questions that we hear a lot, particularly from DEI practitioners and organizations who are under-resourced. Which is a common problem where they're given a fixed budget or a fixed set of resources, whether that’s time, money, etc., and have to choose, when am I going to invest in supporting the underrepresented or marginalized folks here, versus fostering a culture of allyship and investing in the people who have not yet been challenged by and engaged in this work. What would you say about that and how do you build a balance between the two?
Gary: Yeah, it's a great question. So my thinking on this comes from, or rather, it centers a quote, and I'll paraphrase it, that Ijeoma Oluo had a couple of years ago. Essentially it boils down to if your DEI work centers the majority, if it centers white supremacy, if it centers the able-bodied, if it centers men, then it is not equity work. Now, Ijeoma, her quote is quite more prophetic than what I just tried to state, but essentially “who are you centering?” is an important question. And I do understand, you know it's almost this chicken and egg conversation right, like if you don't have allies, how are you going to drive towards your inclusion and equity goals? But if you are centering allies, are you assisting people from underrepresented communities in your organization? If your work is defined by equity, and I think that your inclusion or the outcome of that should be equity within your organization where budget is limited, where time and resources are limited, you have to prioritize and center the needs, the outcomes for those underrepresented communities.
I think if you can get leadership on board with investments into their behavior changes, clear statements of expectations. Their culture work, while you may have some of it that tries to activate allies and engage allies, it's done so because you need a culture that's better for the advancement and growth and development of non-dominant culture folks.

Sage: Yeah, thank you for that perspective on that. I think that quote is really powerful, I think that’s a really good way to look at it. And that's one of the things that a lot of us struggle with when we're trying to get that leadership buy-in is that this work has to really work towards equity. You know, there's still a lot of question about okay, when is it equality, when is it equity, which words are we using now, but we have to look at the outcome. We have to look at: how are these decisions that we're making at this level, affecting different populations within our community differently? And we have to be aware of that, we can't ignore that. And we have to really invest in correcting it even if we don't see it. And this is another challenge. If we don't see it in the three years that we spend with an organization, knowing that we are working towards a bigger goal, is an important thing, and recognizing that it does take time to actually affect that change, especially in large organizations where there are thousands of moving pieces. You know this isn't something that happens overnight and we have to recognize that and it's a marathon. You know, it really has to be continuous.
(24:18) I know we're coming up on time here, so I was going to ask you about what happens when we mobilize potential allies. Did you want to talk a little bit more about that?

Gary: I'm at AWS, I'm at Amazon. And so you know, Amazon has seemingly, infinite resources. Now, internally, we know that that's not entirely true. We know that there's resource constraints, and in ways that colleagues of mine are still fighting for budget, for time, for focus. For those who are at the small, maybe startup mid-level companies, I do think there is a concept of diversity debt and it was talked about a few years ago in respect to Uber. But at some point, I guess I'll wrap it up into this concept. Where in the past and in some ways today, if you are building a physical space, a physical building, and you don't have physical accessibility built in at the design phase. So when you're drawing the blueprints, you're developing what this building is going to look like. You may be told, hey, we may not have that many folks who need accessibility or who have accessibility issues, it's a bit costly right now, it's maybe not in our budget. I would offer that having to go back and retrofit, post-finishing the build, is much more costly. Both from a monetary standpoint and from a human standpoint, or like who had to endure an inequitable space for that long. That when you're talking about equity culture change for those of you who are at the precipice of the start of a company or it's at a small to mid-level and it's growing, the more that you can utilize the resources that are out there. And that's where I think you know Sage, y'all do a really wonderful job at Crescendo. A lot of the offerings that y'all have, take the manual burden off of individuals trying to do this off the side of their desk, and it creates this sort of always-on, this sort of constant lane of DEI topics, as a way to embed it into a day-to-day practice. And if you can get that mobilization of just a day-to-day practice of consuming information, I think in the long term, you have a culture of people that are more collective-focused and not individual-focused.

Sage: And then that in turn leads to, we're basically investing in people having the knowledge, awareness and capability to make better, more equitable decisions as they then create new systems, create new organizations and environments, and evolve our current lens.

Gary: That's right.

Sage: Yeah, love that. That’s powerful.

Gary: And as they're making the decision, it's no longer the diversity decision, right? You no longer have to have me in the room. You don't have to have an IDE business partner or a DEI practitioner in the room. You’ve scaled yourself. You've gotten to a place where people are like oh, wait a second, who is that benefiting again? No, that's not the right decision here because of this information that I now have.

(27:32) Sage: Awesome, okay, so as we wrap up here, my last question for you is what is one actionable tip that you have for the DEI practitioners who are tuning in today, who want to start now and are aiming to inspire and engage those potential allies?
Gary: Yeah, it is a place where I fall short often, but for those of us who have privileged identities and we are trying to activate others with similar identities, being able to go into those moments with an amount of grace I think is important. And what I mean by that is, if I have just learned something or if I spent the last couple of years refining, reading, sort of really engaging in a particular topic, the moment that I think that I have a grasp on it and that I need to then challenge folks who are like me with that topic, and get them activated, I can't necessarily beat them over the head with that knowledge in a way that accuses them of not knowing what they don't know. If that makes sense. And that gets tricky because I do think that there's a responsibility to hold people accountable. And there's this tricky balance I think of being able to, with the privileged identities that are ‘like’ in those moments, being able to sit with that individual and provide some space for them to work through their own sort of reactions.

Sage: Yeah, so what I'm picking out from that is meeting people where they are and recognizing where they are on their journey and that will cause them to receive this information in a different way. Is that right?
Gary: I think so. And I will offer that you also have to know where you can afford to do that as a DEI practitioner. And that's why I say where there is a match with privileged identity. So if I’m in a space with another white man, I'm going to engage in that differently because I can afford to have him make some of those mistakes, say some things that may have been hurtful for others. But I have that privilege. I have the ability to kind of take that on because I'm equally matched in terms of our identity privileges.

(29:57) Sage: Yeah, thank you. That is a great note for us to close out on. Gary, thank you so much for joining us today. I think we've done a lot of interesting exploration of this complex, you know, more complex beast than many people who are starting this work think it is - complexity of allyship. So thank you again for sharing your experience, and where can our audience connect with you to follow your updates as they kind of digest what we talked about here?

Gary: Yeah, thanks for having me Sage, I appreciate it. And in some capacity, I hope there's a level of vulnerability with how at least difficult I find this at times. There's rarely a single right answer. It's a practice, it's a continued evolution. I'm on LinkedIn, though I haven't updated in a while. Gary W. Cooper is my handle there, that's the same for Twitter. But mostly LinkedIn is where I tend to update.

Sage: Alright perfect, well thank you again and hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.

Gary: Thanks Sage, you too.

View Details

Welcome to DEI Leaders by Crescendo. In this series, Sage Franch, CEO of Crescendo, hosts conversations with HR and diversity & inclusion practitioners, sharing valuable insights from their work.

Our latest conversation is with Dr. Vijay Pendakur, Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer at Zynga.

Listen to the podcast or read below for the edited transcript.

Sage: Hello, and welcome to today's episode of DEI leaders by Crescendo. Where we interview industry leaders and culture champions about diversity, equity and inclusion in practice. I'm your host Sage Franch, and I'm joined today by Dr. Vijay Pendakur, the inaugural Vice President and Chief Diversity Equity and Inclusion Officer at Zynga. Vijay, thank you so much for joining us.

Vijay: It's a pleasure to be with you Sage.

(00:33) Sage: I am super excited to have this conversation. I know a lot of people are interested in what a C-level role in this work does and how exactly you influence and track DEI outcomes in your organization. But first I'd love to actually get a little sense of how you came into this work, because you have quite an extensive background with degrees in history, a doctorate in education. So did you find DEI work or did DEI work find you?

Vijay: Oh, that's a great starting point. So I would say for me, DEI work found me and I can share a couple of quick anecdotes as to how that happened for me. I think one is being a child of immigrants. My parents immigrated from India in the 1960s to North America. And I think anybody who has immigrant parents knows about the awesome and oftentimes disorienting experience of biculturalism that happens when you grow up with parents that did not grow up in the culture that you're growing up in. So there was a lot of moments of trying to explore what it means for me to be Indian and what it means for my parents to also be Indian-American, but to have very different meaning-making patterns about how to make sense of that.

And so I think an early sensitivity and interest in questions of culture, how people make home and how people can come to a sense of belonging. Of course I didn't have that language right as a 13-year-old, but what I did have was a deep visceral feeling of displacement. And I would be lucky enough to go to India every couple of years for sometimes lengthy periods of time. And then I would come back to Chicago where I grew up and have a lot of cognitive and emotional dissonance around like wait so, almost all of my family is in villages, in rural Southern India, living a very different life than anything I think you could imagine in 1980s and 1990s America. And then I come back to Chicago and this is supposed to be my home, but I don't have a lot of people here who look like me or sound like me, or love me innately the way my family would in India.

And so, you know, early schisms that are productive in sort of thinking about how do people come to understand what it means to be at home figuratively, not literally, and what are the conditions that allow people to be safe and comfortable so that they can be their best selves. Which is really what we're trying to answer in many ways in workplace DEI. But I, you know, my own experience of growing up, I think really sensitized me to that because of my parents' status as immigrants. And then I think another way DEI work found me was through early meaningful and often painful encounters with injustice which a lot of DEI practitioner will share. Right? And so I, you know, I've been doing DEI work as a full-time job for almost 20 years now, which is not as normative in the industry, but I think I wouldn't have that story if I hadn't had some very early experiences with difference that were actually quite painful.

So my folks bought a house in a neighborhood in Chicago at the Northern edge of Chicago, right at the border with a suburb called Evanston, which in the mid-1980s was almost all Black, very low income and extremely dangerous. And so, there was a lot of incidental crime, there was a lot of gang violence. A year or two after we moved into that neighborhood, crack entered the community in a really profound way. And the crack epidemic that many American cities experienced, really affected my childhood because the level of gang violence and despair that I was exposed to in late elementary school and in middle school just opened my eyes to a number of, kind of fundamental human realities. One is that safety is not to be taken for granted. Right, and if you've ever felt physically deeply unsafe in your life, you know that you can't really function effectively when you're worried about your basic safety, and that was a lot of my challenges growing up.

And two, I also got to see my community change dramatically overnight due to structural conditions that they were not in control of. And while I didn't have that language again as a 10-year-old, something happened. Right, and I think that knowing that the kids that I was playing with in my neighborhood when we were eight and nine years old were all just good little kids largely. And by the time we were 11 or 12, many of them were going through their first gang initiations and they changed and the neighborhood dynamics changed. And so for me, there was almost like an unconscious quest to try and figure out what happened and how did that happen to my community. So there's greater forces at work here.

And so when I went to college I started taking urban history, urban sociology, ethnic studies you know, any courses that could give me some information to answer these questions that came out of my lived experience of poverty, of injustice, of racialized violence and very quickly became awakened to what people would call social justice. And, then I was actually offered a full-time DEI job right out of my undergrad and sort of the rest is history. So those are two personal stories that are how DEI found me, how this work found me. And, obviously my relationship to the work has grown and changed over the last 20 many years as I've moved into adulthood and I have a family of my own and all of that kind of stuff, but in terms of the Genesis story of my commitment to this work I think about those things often.

(06:48) Sage: Thank you for sharing that. I think you know, a lot of DEI practitioners will resonate with that feeling of first identifying these themes in childhood and not having the language for them, but then kind of realizing years after the fact, wow, this is something that I picked up on just by living these experiences, but now I understand systemically what's going on and, that's where that drive comes from to really change it and to be part of a better future. I think it's so interesting that you have been doing this work for so long, many of the roles that I've seen have really been sparked in the last five to ten years. And we at Crescendo have been doing this work for about five years now and seen a real shift in what the kind of focus themes are, at least in the corporate landscape. How have you seen that kind of evolution over the 20 years that you've been doing this work?

Vijay: Hmm, yeah, yeah. Right. I mean, I completely agree with you that there's been a focus shift, particularly in the corporate landscape in the last five years, and I would also say that increased commitment and awareness level, it can be felt across nonprofit, the arts, education as well in the last five years. For me, I think it is helpful to frame the evolution of DEI commitment across multiple sectors in terms of certain historical eras. As a historian, you know, my undergraduate degree is in history, my master's in history, this is an innate lens for me, but it's also a lens that's oftentimes missing from the discourse that I think I can add. So, you know, the commitment to DEI work in organizations really functions as a microcosm to the broader social struggle around DEI, right?

And so, when you're looking at the civil rights movement, the popular civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, these are major social agitations that changed laws that changed many structures for people, that brought people into the ability to vote or the ability to be safe getting to and from school, a variety of things. And oftentimes those huge social shifts see changes happened without much of a change inside organizational life, whether that be corporate or, you know, nonprofit or private sector. You know in the sixties, seventies, and even in the eighties, there really isn't a lot of shifting going on in industry, in response to big changes in social mores and norms, which I think is fascinating onto itself. And what you see, after that is really the evolution of a big cultural agitation around language in the 1980s and 1990s, and oftentimes called, you know, the movement for political correctness. And this is where you start to see it intersect with the workplace more as workplace language norms start to shift.

But everything is really slow and there's a pretty big lag between social agitation and what's happening in companies for the 80s, the 90s going into the 2000s. And really what I've witnessed in the last 20 years is a shortening of that lag time between social agitation and company, like life at the company. And so partly I think what's been huge here is social media and the internet and sort of democratization of access to the issues, to the awareness, the language. And when many organizations kind of skirted around a structural commitment to equity and inclusion by doing small fringy things like multicultural celebration, you know, say, okay, well, we're gonna observe some heritage months and we're gonna celebrate the idea that difference is not a threat to our core values, which, you know you hope that the bar isn't that low, but it really was for that long.

And really in the last five years, what you see is a movement slowly pass multicultural celebration and into structural issues of inclusion and equity and a more serious commitment to the pipeline and talent acquisition. But the key thing here is, and I think many people can observe that shift, but what I tend to want to point out is that, the thing that has driven that shift is a much closer connection between social movements and the workforce, and a shifting zeitgeist in, let's talk about corporate, in corporate America, corporate Canada, corporate UK, corporate EU. The shifting zeitgeist is that there's a much thinner membrane between social movements and what's happening at work.

And the thinner that membrane gets and the more porous that membrane gets, the quicker reaction time we can see between social activism and corporate activism, right. Activist employees, which is a phrase that didn't even exist three years ago. And so again and again, as a historian of civil rights and a historian of social change, what we know is that power yields nothing without a fight and really what's happening is that companies, schools, nonprofits, arts councils, are recognizing that they can either shift or they can be embattled with their own workforce, which is an extraordinarily unproductive and uncomfortable place to be. And so the impetus for change again, is the involvement of the key stakeholders. And now we're seeing activist board members and activist shareholders, right? So every facet of the gem is becoming more engaged which really is, you know, if you look at the last 18 months and people are calling this the racial awakening or the great racial re-awakening, whatever language you wanna put to it, more important than the language I think is understanding that the catalyst for this heightened sense of awareness and commitment is really a thinning membrane between social movements that have been around for hundreds of years and corporate and nonprofit spaces that have historically been quite divorced from those social movements, and now are really dialectically or dynamically interconnected to social movements.

(13:13) Sage: Fascinating. That’s fascinating to hear from the historical lens. Thank you for sharing that historian’s point of view on it, I think that's really interesting. Let's zoom in a bit to the work that you're doing at Zynga. Can you give us a picture of how your organization is structured and, when you think about DEI outcomes, what are you focusing?

Vijay: Sure, sure. You know, if there's any listeners on this podcast that are occupying inaugural DEI leadership roles, you know that there is a tremendous amount of startup and activation energy that just has to happen in the beginning. And I think everybody is really excited to start executing downstream tactics and that has to happen, but, so Zynga is a global, highly matrixed tech company, which is very normative for many tech companies. We've got operations in seven different countries. We have extraordinary autonomy for many of our studios. We grow through a significant amount of M&A, which really also complicates things. It's normal in gaming, but it offers a level of complexity and challenge when you're thinking about centrally planned operations. So one of the things I needed to do was to, and I was hired to do this, was to offer the company a global vision and strategy for DEI that we could start to then build out our tactical blueprint as a rolldown from, rather than a whole bunch of activity without the coordination that can actually help that activity maximize its net impact.

Right, and we know this over and over and over again, if you just set out to do a bunch of things, but you're not operating under a concerted strategy, then your input’s oftentimes not equal to your output. And there's a lot of entropy in that kind of an approach. And so from an overall vision and strategy, one of the things I did is just, I actually take a razor to this and say, what is the simplest capture of a model that people can grasp onto rather than developing something very, very complex. And when you're at 30,000 feet, simplicity, I think is critical, at least in my view of leadership. So for our overall global model, we have a very simple model. What we're aiming for is inclusive excellence and inclusive excellence is just a phrase that I didn't invent.

You know, more credit to the ancestors for putting this language together for us. But inclusive excellence is our vision commitment for what we aspire to, in every aspect of our DEI approach, and how we get there is a simple three-legged stool. There's three legs of the stool. One is to go out in the talent acquisition space and to be very successful in being a destination for underrepresented talent and doing all of the requisite things to become a destination for underrepresented talent. The second leg of the stool is to have a magnetic ecosystem that attracts and retains that talent, right? And so that's the internal workings of what the experience of work is and the actual mechanics of retaining underrepresented talent, which are much more complex than I think people give credit to.

And then the third leg of the stool is our social impact operation, making sure that Zynga leaves the world a better place than it found it. And this is for me, I think an imperative, more recent addition to what we should be conceptualizing as a corporate DEI model, is really closing the space between social impact and DEI. I'm lucky in that I actually have our social impact operation reporting to me. And so I can do this much more easily, but our approach to social impact dovetails with our DEI approach in that, we're looking at investing in underrepresented communities so that they can better participate in tech and real talk, better participate in gaming, right? There's some ROI to Zynga in this. And so each of those investments not only potentially increases our future talent acquisition advantages, but it also functions as amazing employer brand, as we're out there doing good in communities and telling that story, we can set up the virtuous cycle of Zynga becoming known as a place that is doing all of this really wonderful social impact work.

Now that increases the amount of passive candidate draw that we have in our talent acquisition funnel. And it also, if you look at the new emerging data around social good and employee retention, we know in early survey data on this, that employees are less likely to search when they believe that their company is moving the needle on social good. So there is even a talent retention mechanism in our social impact operation. And so that's our model Sage. It’s inclusive excellence is at the top, and there's three legs of the stool, talent attraction, talent retention and social impact. Now, obviously that's highly simplistic, which it should be at 30,000 feet and the devil’s in the details as they say. And the tactics that roll down from that are really what have to be carefully sequenced, data driven and regularly iterated as we learn as we go.

I think beyond that kind of work of setting up a high-level vision and strategy for the company, so that all of the parts of the orchestra are actually making music together, which is important in a first-year investment. We have some local efforts as well that are not centrally directed. And I do think in globally matrix organizations, this is really important to support is that we have centralized strategy, locally differentiated tactics. So if a game studio in the UK needs to respond to local conditions and pull off DEI tactics, that may be different than our studio in India, our studio in Finland. Great. Let's support that and make sure that the teams there have maybe some support from this central DEI team on the logistics in heft, but they're really shaping the tactics that on the ground to be culturally and contextually salient to the problems that they face and the opportunities that they have.

And a lot of our employee engagement and diversity is celebration initiatives that are locally driven as well, because they're driven out of the ERGs. And so the last, I think part to this painting with a broad brush that I'm doing right now of our approach to DEI is really heavy investment in employee resource groups. This isn't news to anyone but employee resource groups have become even more important in the shift to remote work or hybrid work because they can serve as a key site of fostering belonging and psychological safety. And 70% of our employees at Zynga are active at an ERG, which is a data point that I'm extraordinarily proud of, but we didn't get there happenstance. We got there by really investing in the ERGs so that they have strong budgets.

They have regular interface with executive leadership. We're adding more value for them in our developmental roadmap in 2022, but our ERGs pull off a lot of local belonging and employee engagement activities through bringing in speakers, through holding events, through having fireside chats. And so if you think about, unless you have unlimited headcount in your central DEI team, which most organizations just don't have the resources for, our ERGs, if we partner with them strategically, they actually serve as the best amplifying mechanism we have. To make sure that the amount of activity necessary in a global company meets the employee desire for engagement, which wouldn't be possible if we only were centrally directed. So I'll pause there, because that was a lot in response to your question, but that's a kind of a high level fly-over of our approach to DEI.

(21:35) Sage: That is an incredible number of engaging employees with your ERGs. That's phenomenal. That's the highest that I've seen. We get questions all the time, you know, how can I get people to and why they should engage in our ERGs? How can I encourage people to see the value in this and not see it as side of desk? So what would you say to other folks who are trying to get ERGs off the ground, looking for that higher engagement and that cultural accountability for DEI?

Vijay: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that this is an area of great interest across the industry and it's an area where, when I came into my role at Zynga and you know, my background is not in tech, my background's in education. And one of the things I did is I looked at ERGs through the lens of student organizations on college campuses because to me, employee resource groups function as really clear analogs of student organizations on college campuses. And they're solving for similar problems. They're actually doing similar activities. And in times of strife, they're engaged in activism in ways that organizations on college campuses are actually engaged in activism. So when I looked at ERG engagement, I was able to pull from a 20 year playbook of working with student organizations on college campuses to increase the quality, the breadth and the depth of student org life.

So part of what I think is advisable to your listeners is a couple of things. One, making sure that you work with your ERGs to help them understand how to set up their e-boards with clear roles and clear responsibilities so that work is distributed across an appropriate number of people. Oftentimes ERGs form organically at corporate because there's a few passionate people who share an identity and they mobilize a group. And that organic formation is really important. I'm not discounting that, but after an ERG is up and running, it really helps if some central folks can step in and partner with the ERG is to say, hey look, a great way to distribute work so that we don't burn out our champions in this space is to make sure that you have minimally these five roles or these seven roles on an ERG e-board.

And the reason you want to distribute in this way is so that it becomes more sustainable because the reality is, this is not your primary job at the company. And so we wanna make sure that this doesn't get in the way of your primary job and that you do this from the standpoint of joy participation and meaning, but not burnout. So role clarity and role distinction, I think is really important. A second thing I would advise is that each ERG have an executive champion. And what I mean by that is an assigned person who is at the vice president level or up. So VP, senior VP, EVP, or C-suite that is assigned to the ERG as their executive champion. And what that means is this person's not gonna attend every ERG meeting. They're not gonna show up at every origami class or cooking demo.

You know, that's just not realistic. But in best case, you wanna define with clarity, the role of the executive champion. So let's say they come to an e-board meeting once a month for the first half of the e-board meeting. So 30 minutes, that's a reasonable load expectation for an executive member of your company. And what they do is they listen and they help problem solve with items that the ERG e-board has prepped for that agenda, because oftentimes the data shows that ERG e-boards are over representative of the entry and mid-level within a company. And so what they don't know how to do is navigate the company's bureaucracy effectively because part of being a manager is just not fully understanding the politics and the dynamics between finance and you know, another division and the company. And so they're trying to pull off something and they just don’t know how to get it done!

And part of what it means to be a vice president in a business in an organization is you actually have the reach and the vision to say, okay, let me open a door for you, or let me explain why you’ve got to know in that instance. So the executive sponsor gives the ERG a regular dialogue with leadership, and the executive sponsor can actually serve as an agility mechanism within the company to turn around and at that executive meeting where all the vice presidents and the C-team meet say, hey look, I just wanna give folks a heads up that in our LGBTQ community where I'm an executive sponsor, I think that there's growing dissatisfaction with our benefits package because of the way that there's some gendered language in the family leave benefit, that's actually alienating and marginalizing our trans community or our same sex adoptee community or whatever it might be.

Right? So now the executive champion can escalate an issue to the group that actually can make a difference and change on that issue much more quickly than normally an ERG can. So I think the addition of an executive champion is a huge add. And then the third, and I know this is a lengthy answer Sage, but I'm going deep on this because I think it'll add most value for your members. So thanks for giving me the mic time, but the third add I would say is to try and reduce friction for your ERGs when they go to engage in programming. So one of the things on my team's 2022 roadmap is actually we're bringing in some vendors solutions that allow our ERGs to book speakers and book events like experiences for their members with way lower labor overhead. Because one of the things we were hearing from our ERGs is like, we have good budgets, so thank you for that, but we don't have the time or the training to go out and figure out how to get speakers or how to actually set up contracts, how to spend this money in ways that don't piss off our colleagues in the accounting office, right, or the legal office or the procurement office.

So there are actual vendor solutions out there that simplify all of this for your ERGs, so that they're operating within a choice ecosystem where they’re basically just going out and spending credits in a prearranged contract. So you have like almost one contract to rule them all, lord of the rings reference for any of you Tolkien fans out there, right. That allows the ERGs to then stop spending time and stop worrying about the minutia of event programming and event management and actually just, with way less friction and more agility, go out and book speakers and events much more quickly. And so this is another add that can reduce the labor burden on your ERGs so that we can try and solve for what's starting to creep up in the DEI discourse globally, which is, are the ERGs a source of empowerment or are the ERGs a source of exploitation?

Because if you don't add in the kinds of things I'm describing, the ERGs are basically doing a huge amount of unpaid labor for the company. They're generating belonging, they're doing the DEI work and the company is sitting there benefiting from all of that. But actually those people's jobs are to be a programmer or to be an accountant or to be a lawyer, it's not actually to serve as a replacement for your central DEI function. So I think we have to, I mean, my word to the wise to the folks who listen in on this podcast is, get out ahead of this eight ball or get stuck in a situation where you're dealing with employee activism when they start to feel really exploited. The other thing we're looking at in 2022 is the incentives and rewards for ERG leaders. If you're on an e-board and once you codify what it means to be on an e-board, then this gets easier to do. But how do we start to invest and reward in e-board members so that they actually get something for the amazing work they're doing for the company. I'll stop there, because that was a lot on that topic, but it's a topic of passion for me. And it's an area I think that most organizations of size can relate to.

(30:00) Sage: Yeah, and I think a lot of our listeners are going to take back a lot of these actionable tips that you've given them here. I think this is great to hear the detail, and really, never apologize for a detailed answer because that's exactly why we're here. Thank you so much. One of the common things that I'm hearing as you kind of explain how you view DEI at Zynga and in the world in general, in the corporate landscape, is that visibility to and connection to and through the leadership teams, it's key to success. So what would you say about the importance of C-level responsibility for DEI?

Vijay: You know, I couldn't agree more Sage that it's important to have C-level responsibility for DEI for a couple of reasons. One approach, and a mentor gave me this metaphor that I'll share with you about a fish tank. So if you think of a company as a fish tank one approach to doing DEI work that I don't think is as productive, is to imagine your DEI investment as the treasure chest in that fish tank. So if you've ever seen a real nice fish tank, maybe at a nice restaurant, there's a lot of kind of toys and bobbles in the fish tank. And if there's a treasure chest, it's attractive, there's nice things in that treasure chest. Potentially if the fish were to go over to the treasure chest, they might be enriched by their experience at the treasure chest.

But the fish have to go over to the treasure chest in order to actually gain any benefits from the treasure chest. And a mentor said to me once, don't go build a treasure chest with DEI. Instead, you can be much more effective by trying to make yourself the water filtration system of the fish tank. Meaning a really great DEI operation should be the filter that the entire business goes through. And we know, and we say it all the time in DEI work, right, for DEI to be successful, it really needs to cut across everything. It cannot be a specialty program. So if I'm gonna be the water filtration system for the organization, one of the things that I think that's required to make that bold statement come to life is proper placement in the org chart. And I think if you don't have C-level representation, especially if you're a company of a certain size and complexity, it is very difficult to position DEI as a living, powerful and productive membrane that cuts across all aspects of the business.

And so treasure chest or fish tank, oftentimes when I see organizations that are well-intended and that wanna do this, but maybe they don't have the resources or they don't have the willpower, and their whole DEI function is, you know, maybe a lower level role that doesn't have access to the leadership, that doesn't have access to the vice presidents, and really doesn't have the executive presence that comes with the title, I think they're building a treasure chest, right? This person is gonna do some things, they're gonna spin off some programs, they might be able to get a couple of vendor ads that do some important things for the company. And that does add value. What they cannot achieve, is becoming the water filter that actually everything has to pass through. And so that's one reason that I think C-level responsibility for DEI is really important.

It's not just the optics of how that plays and I actually don't think companies should do it for the optics. I think you do it because of how it enables the function to grow and expand in ways that allow for real change. I think a second reason that a C-level role can add value is oftentimes then what you get is the ability to put numerous portfolios underneath that person. So for me, I always explain to my partners at Zynga or when I'm talking with folks outside of the company, I'm a vice president at Zynga and I'm also the Chief Diversity Officer, but underneath me, I have the diversity function. I have the social impact function. I have learning and development and I have university relations. And that's actually what drew me to the role, because for anyone who's ever held a diversity role, and you don't have any other functions, you only have one crowbar or lever to make change.

And for me, I love the fact that I have these other functions underneath me that have huge relevance in the diversity space and also have relevance in the non-diversity space. Right? So take L&D for example, learning and development, right? So of course there are obvious overlaps between DEI and L&D, but there's a lot of L&D that doesn't have anything to do with DEI. And what overseeing that function gives me is another way to build relationships and add value with the businesses, who all are clamoring for L&D upskilling so that they can have of get better productivity out of their employees, but also retain their employees. And when I'm delivering value in the L&D space, it adds to my brand capital within the company to then turn around over time and have maybe a tougher or more frictional conversation with the business leaders about something in the DEI space, right?

That brand capital transfers. And so same thing, in the university relations space when we make major improvements in our junior talent throughput so that, we made a bunch of changes to our collegiate internship program, now we're converting into full-time employees at a much higher rate, we're solving a problem for the businesses. That brand capital transfers back to me so that if I need to put my thumb on the scale for a tough inclusion decision, I can do that! Right, and so I think also a C-level role that has the breadth and heft, because of some other units underneath it, can really help the diversity champion be more successful in the kind of circuitous approach that I've just named.

(36:04) Sage: Very insightful. And I love this fish tank metaphor that really clears it up for us. It's so vivid that imagery, and it makes perfect sense. When I think about you know, I've been observing the trend in the DEI space and I hesitate to call it an industry because that feels a little bit wrong. But according to LinkedIn, Chief Diversity Officer was the number one fastest growing title in 2020. Why do you think that is, do you think that people are realizing that what you've just described is the way forward or is it driven more by this social unrest?

Vijay: I, oh boy. You know, I will give you a very positive answer and then I will give you the skeptics answer and I think both are true for me. So I think that there was a realization that prior efforts prior to 2019 needed the C-level heft and the, conductor to the orchestra. You know, oftentimes, I play guitar. Music is really important to me and I think a lot about musical metaphors in the work. And, you know if you've ever seen a super group perform, where it's a bunch of really talented musicians that were famous from their last group they were in and they come together and you go see their live show and it's just not what you thought it was gonna be. You know, you can have an all-star team and if they are not in sync in the right way, in a way that is catalytic and generative, then you don't get the kinds of superstar outcomes that you're looking for.

And I think partly there was an authentic search for people to bring vision and coordination global strategy to efforts that had organically grown and idiosyncratically grown in the last five years that needed that coordination, right, in order to deepen and extend impact. So that's the positive answer. I also think that there was some virtue signaling in the rush to add the Chief Diversity Officer role. Companies were looking for a very public way to mark their commitment to these issues, and adding a C-level role is one way to do that, particularly if you're under pressure to diversify your C-team. So if you are looking at a C-team that is missing gender diversity or missing racial diversity which many say C-teams are, so if there's any CEOs out here or board members out here, you know, it's getting to be a little bit tired, right, we've gotta fix this.

But I think that there was a rapid move. So this is the skeptical answer, right? To make sure that if on your company's website, when people looked at the about us section and they clicked on the leadership tab, that there was one face that looked a little bit different than the rest of the faces. And that's a very skeptical answer, but I think I would be pollyannish to not name that as part of what was going on. So here's a word of caution on that though, if there's folks out there that are listening, higher education - where I spent 20 years prior to pivoting to tech, has been doing this kind of sleight of hand for quite some time, of going out and hiring the easy roles to diversify so that a president's cabinet, a president's cabinet if you're not familiar with universities, is the top leadership team of a university, so it's kind of the analog of a C-suite.

And higher ed came under pressure a decade ago to not have the president's cabinet be reductive - all white men, right. Quote unquote. And so, the first move was to go out and to get a underrepresented person to be the head of either diversity, if there was a cabinet level diversity position, or student life, because the student life role is the second easiest to diversify. And what ended up happening is universities overly invested in the virtue signaling of cabinet diversification in positions that do not have the ability to affect some of the issues that are most pressing for universities. So for example, one set of issues is faculty diversification, right? Who's doing the teaching at universities and universities were under a ton of pressure to diversify faculty, have been for a while.

And 10 years later when they diversified the student life role, or maybe they added a cabinet level, chief diversity officer, faculty diversity hadn't moved, because those roles can't actually affect that problem. And so to borrow from that and learn from that, right, that's the canary in the coal mine for corporate America. If you, in the last year and a half went out and you hired a chief diversity officer, partially because you needed to add an underrepresented face to your C-suite, know that the changes that the workforce and the world will expect of you in coming years cannot be done only by the chief diversity officer. And if they don't have amazing partnership or other underrepresented group members in the chief legal position, the chief people officer position, the chief finance officer position, the chief executive officer position, the chief operating officer position, you go on and on, then eventually your horizon for change will evaporate.

And we can borrow from the nonprofit sector and learn from the nonprofit sector’s struggle in moving past some early stage change initiatives and understand that the kind of sleight of hand of saying, well look, we're not all white men in our in our C-suite, look we've got this chief diversity officer. Great, that's a start. It cannot be the end of the journey and transformational change, so that companies reflect the diversity of the world around them is imperative if we're gonna actually continue to produce innovation that meets the needs of the world.

(42:18) Sage: Thank you for putting words to what a lot of us are feeling and seeing, and not knowing how to express. You just put that so eloquently. And, I know a lot of people are gonna take these sound bites back to their leadership and say, this is what I've been trying to share with you and tell you over the last year. You know, this whole conversation has been so insightful and just had so many amazing takeaways. I was wondering as we close, what is one actionable tip that you have for the DEI practitioners who are tuning in today on securing executive buy-in?

Vijay: You know, I get asked this question quite a bit and I think it's because, we, all of us in the trenches know that you can't get the change done without executive buy-in. And so I appreciate the chance to end with this Sage. I don't pretend to have a silver bullet here. I can offer some wisdom that I think comes from some successes and I can offer the wisdom that also comes from having not succeeded. Right. And, I've learned a lot through trying and failing. And as they say in the design space failing forward or failing upwards. So one way, I think I've tried to secure executive buy-in is to check a impulse I have to name, where my own unconscious or implicit biases come in. So an impulse I have because DEI work found me and I didn't find DEI work is the value proposition for DEI work is completely intrinsic to me.

I can't not see the world this way. I cannot wake up in the morning and not have a sense of urgency around equity, around fairness, around justice. It's just who I am. And while that makes me someone who can sustain a multi-decade career in work with all of the weathering effect that happens when you do DEI work full time. I have to know that, that sword, any keen blade cuts two ways, right? And the downside of that orientation is that I tend to under-think how to position the value proposition of this work. And so to correct for that and something I've had to work on a lot in the last year as the inaugural chief diversity officer at a tech company, is to start with the question, what problems are the businesses trying to solve in my company, rather than starting with the question, what is a hot innovation in diversity that I can bring to my company?

Because when I, when the Genesis of the innovation is the sort of altruistic commitment to equity, then I have to solve a downstream issue of creating ROI to the businesses in the thing that I'm trying to do. That's the treasure chest in the fish tank, right? To go back to becoming the filter, a completely different design logic is to go sit with this senior vice presidents at Zynga and to understand what they are stuck on, what is frustrating to them, where they feel a sense of exasperation. And they don't have to express that to me in DEI ways. I just need to understand what their reality is. So part of this is to do that kind of deep listening, empathy-building, and journey mapping that comes out of design thinking. You know, I went to do the design thinking bootcamp at Stanford several years ago, and it was really transformational for me.

So in doing that deep listening with our business leaders, the second kind of design question I asked myself is a question that actually a business leader gave me. He said to me, I want you to develop initiatives that my teams will fight over. And I was like, oh gosh, that really struck me as being very powerful. What can my central DEI team build, add, develop that the businesses will be fighting over. That's such a different frame than we have to do this because it's the right thing, and if you don't do this then you're not bought into our DEI model, right. That is the grist of the last decade. I'm tired of that churn. I'm tired of that kinda uphill slog. I'd rather sit with the businesses, understand their problematics, then turn around and design something that comes out of deep empathy and connection with them that when I bring it back to them, they go, holy cow, can I get two of these?

You know, so one way to get executive buy-in is to rethink the precepts of your design journey and moving away from, because actually I think the bias I have is the bias many DEI practitioners have, is to start from the standpoint of our intrinsic passion. I think we kind of need to pull the plug on that in some ways, the passion's great, it’s what gets us out of bed in the morning, but the design precept needs to be, what can we create that the businesses will fight over? And the only way to do that is to design in deep partnership with the businesses around the things that they actually care about, the problems they're actually trying to solve. And that may mean that some of the things we know we need to do in order to advance an equity agenda, have to be put into what we call V2 or V3, version two or version three, which means further down your roadmap, but doing it this way and having V1 be the business priorities is what builds up massive capital for you at your company, so that when you turn around and you bring something up that will advance equity, but may have a more diffused value prop to the businesses they turn around and go, you know what? You've been such a great partner to me and I trust you now. So yeah, let's do it even though it's a little bit murky to me as to why this is good for me. And that's the position you really wanna be in as a DEI leader.

(48:22) Sage: That is fantastic advice and a great note to close out today's podcast on. Vijay, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing all of these fantastic tips and your experience with us. Where can our audience connect with you and follow your updates as we go forward?

Vijay: Yeah, well first, this has been such a enriching journey for me to be on with you Sage. So thanks for inviting me into the conversation with your listenership. I would love to stay connected to you all out there in the universe. I think primarily LinkedIn is the place where I am communicating most about these issues and am learning most about these issues at this point. So you can find me on LinkedIn. You can also find me on Twitter, although I'm primarily a lurker on Twitter. So I use Twitter to read but I'm not sharing as much. LinkedIn is my most active place of engagement where I'm learning and sharing most about workplace DEI issues, and I look forward to getting those invites to connect with you. Mention that you heard me on the podcast so that I understand how we're getting connected and that I add you that way.