What we say is just as important as what we do, when it comes to matters of identity, diversity, and justice. Every action begins with a conversation. But with evolving societal standards and heightened awareness, a conversation about identity can be constructive or harmful, which increases our anxiety about having them. So how do we talk about it?

Nicole Smith, editorial audience director at Harvard Business Review, addressed the issue in a fireside chat during From Day One’s June virtual conference. Smith spoke with Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, authors of Say the Right Thing: How to Talk About Identity, Diversity, and Justice.

Yoshino and Glasgow trust in the power of conversations. Both authors being gay men, they remember every single conversation they had when they came out to their friends and family. “[We] remember all the ones that went well, which were transformative,” said Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. “And we remember the ones that went not so well, which could often be quite devastating.”

Yoshino acknowledged that a conversation is not an ending point. “We ultimately are lawyers,” he said. “We believe in policy, we believe in law, we believe in culture. But all of those actions, we think, emanate from good conversations.”

Identity conversations, as defined in the book, are any conversations about the social identities we all hold. It could be an identity based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, disability, and more.

“There's a really long list, and we're trying to encompass any conversation that relates to that topic,” said Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. “It could also be a broader conversation about identity-related social movements, like Black Lives Matter, or the Me Too movement, or Stop Asian Hate. And we're ambitiously trying with this book to give people tools to have all those kinds of conversations.”

The book cautions against ignoring people's group identity, while also not reducing them to their group identity. “Is that possible?” Smith asked.

“People say to us, ‘That's contradictory, you can't have it both ways,’” said Yoshino. “I think we have to have it both ways. We have to be able to find that middle path. All of us are more than just one identity. But if you don't see the identities that are salient to how I navigate my world and my own lived experience then you're not really seeing me.”

Nicole Smith moderated the fireside chat discussion with co-authors Glasgow and Yoshino (photo by From Day One)

Other undesirable behaviors that jeopardize having healthy conversations about identity, diversity, and justice are what the authors call the four conversational traps: avoid, deflect, deny, and attack.

Deflection is when you change the subject to some other topic that you want to talk about. Deflecting to yourself is a subset of deflection, which can be done in a few different ways. One way would be to deflect to your own moral credential.

“So if someone criticizes you, if someone suggests that you displayed bias,” said Glasgow, “you would respond by saying something along the lines of ‘Don't you know that I'm in an interracial marriage?’ or ‘I grew up in a diverse neighborhood,’ or some other reason why you can't accuse me of doing anything wrong, because I have strong moral credentials.”

Another form of deflecting to yourself is by broadcasting your hardship, such as mentioning you had a difficult upbringing and therefore can’t be accused of doing anything wrong in the conversation. Yet another way would be deflecting to your good intentions, or saying something like, “I didn't mean it that way.”

All of these forms of deflection impede effective engagement in conversations about identity because they're changing the subject from the issue that the other person has raised with you.

“If someone comes to you and shares an experience or a perception that they've had,” said Glasgow, “they want to talk to you about an issue of bias or exclusion that they're experiencing. And then [if] you're pivoting away to some other topic, that person is going to feel frustrated, they're going to feel unheard, they're probably going to feel like you're not someone that they can come to with concerns that they might have in the future.”

Thoughtful conversations are an integral part of true allyship, or active support for the rights of a marginalized group you’re not a part of, versus performative or optical allyship. Yoshino thinks of allyship as an interaction among three different parties, or what he calls the “empathy triangle.”

“There's the ally, ‘I saw it,’” he said. “There's the affected person, ‘it happened to me.’ And then there's a source of non-inclusive behavior, ‘I did it.’ Effective allyship means going through the process of reflecting on yourself, as an ally, reflecting on your relationship to the affected person, and then reflecting on your relationship to the source of non-inclusive behavior and making sure that all three of those parties are fully in mind before you step into allyship.”

In order to be a true ally, it’s important to ask yourself questions about your motivations, your relationship to the affected person, and your relationship to the source. These questions could include: Am I doing this to virtue signal? Am I informed enough to ask? Does this person want this kind of help? Am I unintentionally burdening the affected person in some way? Am I challenging the source’s behavior, instead of calling them out as a “bad” human being?

“We want to give people broad principles for how to have these conversations,” said Glasgow, “but allow people to develop the actual words themselves, emanating from those principles that they've absorbed.”

Often when you witness non-inclusive behavior, it requires an immediate response. But when you can't think of what you're supposed to say in the moment, you experience a phenomenon called “staircase thought.” It’s what happens when you leave the room and you're walking down the staircase, and you immediately think of the perfect comeback that you should have said when the comment was made.

“We wanted to provide people with a sort of menu of options that would enable them to overcome that staircase thought,” said Glasgow. “The first step is go down the list, figure out which one sounds authentic to you, commit it to memory so that you can have it when something happens.”

“Inevitably in these conversations, we are going to mess up,” said Yoshino. “It's not a question of if, it's a question of when, and so we thought it would be really useful to have a strategy for how to apologize.”

It's important to be generous to people who make mistakes because it's only a matter of time before we're the affected person, and only a matter of time before we ourselves put our foot in it, and are the forces of noninclusive behavior.

“We actually want to create something that's a bit more like a coaching culture,” said Glasgow, “where people commit to coaching each other to do better in these conversations, rather than condemning them out of hand.”

Samantha Campos is a freelance journalist who’s written for regional publications in Hawaii and California, with forays into medical cannabis and food justice nonprofits. She currently resides in Oakland, California.

Using AI to Revolutionize Hiring for Top Talent

With the help of artificial intelligence, a task that would take hours, days, or even weeks to complete can now be done in five minutes, says Mike Aronson, senior director of talent acquisition at Johnson Controls.In talent acquisition, AI has been a useful tool in generating job descriptions, screening applicants, and sourcing candidates. During a panel at From Day One’s November virtual conference, executives touched on how AI has revolutionized hiring the best candidates and streamlined productivity.Balancing AI and Human OperationsLesli Stasiek, senior director of human resources at Cencora says that they maintain the “human touch” through the hiring process by still interacting through recruiters and hiring managers, while also using Phenom AI as a way to drive efficiency in filtering through applications on a daily basis. “We don’t have enough recruiters to go through everything, so we’re leveraging the AI at the top of the funnel,” said Stasiek.Cencora is still at the start of its journey with utilizing AI but Stasiek shares that she hopes it can be leveraged “internally to empower employees and give them the resources to build their careers and drive better discussions.”AI is being implemented into talent acquisition to quickly check off tedious tasks that may be taking up time that can be investing towards more productivity. When it comes to creating job postings, AI is also used to source the best candidates through algorithms within job boards. During the hiring process, AI minimizes the time recruiters spend on summarizing interview notes and conversations to provide to managers.“It’s not replacing the person. It’s making the job a bit easier so that they can have a conversation around why [they] think this person’s good,” said Aronson.Companies who use skills-based hiring processes also benefit from the efficiencies of using AI to filter through applications that match the best skill sets. Angie Lombardo, global director of operations for talent acquisition at Arcadis, says the company’s applicant tracking system has an AI that will help rank the talent pool based on skills.This tool is helpful in regions like India and the Middle East where they receive thousands of applications within a week of posting a job opportunity, says Lombardo.Mitigating Bias in AIAI functions through system memory and if human bias has already been incorporated, machines will learn to replicate the same bias. Jenny Cotie Kangas, director of talent-centered transformation at Eightfold, says that it’s important to understand how you’re using the AI, how it’s coded, and the necessary guardrails to prevent wrong decision making.“When we’re talking about job descriptions and leveraging [generative] AI for job descriptions, it’s always important to run that through some sort of anti-bias tool,” said Kangas. “We want to kind of reset and recalibrate and make sure that we’re creating job descriptions that are truly inclusive.”AI is useful in eliminating the natural human bias such as what Kangas describes as the decisions she’ll make when she’s really hungry and when she’s not. Generative AI tends to be more male leaning, she added. The system may also be seeking “charged words” to identify patterns from the past in order to predict next steps. Kangas adds that even when companies use tools like AI, it’s always important to layer other tools on top to make sure all pieces are being covered.Utilizing AI for Internal GrowthAI’s efficiency not only helps with sourcing applicants but it can also help identify current employees who are ready for development and growth as future leaders. Especially in organizations with thousands of employees, it’s almost impossible for managers to know every employee well enough to identify possible candidates.Lydia Dishman of Fast Company moderated the discussion among industry experts (photo by From Day One)“Tools like this allow us to look at not just career pathing within a function, but across multiple functions or business units,” said Stasiek. “You drive that connectivity and you drive that networking and then you can grow your pipeline and your succession planning exponentially.” Investing in the career development of current employees also increases engagement and retention.Tracking the Applicant ExperienceThe digital platform of AI, allows everything to be tracked and digitized for future data analysis. For example, hiring managers can see what questions candidates are asking a website’s embedded chatbot and understand what they are looking for and what problems need to be solved, says Aronson.The reason why websites like Amazon are visited so regularly is because it’s easy to use. Company pages should be emulating this simplicity to improve the candidate experience during application processes, he added.Especially with the culture of recruiters “ghosting,” improving the candidate experience is also a key aspect to attracting the best candidates, said Kristen Baller, head of talent acquisition at DISH Network. By using AI to cut down tedious tasks, recruiters have more time to focus on “engaging and partnering with the candidate throughout their journey,” she said.The Challenges of AIAI is a powerful tool within the corporate space and it’s now being used by more companies, but what challenges can rise with increased use?“I think education is what we’re going to have to really think about,” said Baller. “We’re giving all these teams a Ferrari but nobody’s taught them how to drive it.” Stasiek emphasized that education is important to create awareness, but change management is where leaders can really see the impact of implementing a new system.As we remember that AI is a machine, Lombardo points out that “the more that we use AI, we do have to be careful that we’re not just using AI to do our work, but we are putting that human touch on it before we put anything out to be viewed.”Jennifer Yoshikoshi is a local news and education reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Creating a Purposeful Workplace Experience

With the major threat of the pandemic behind us, the big question is unavoidable: should we all return to the office? If you feel like opinions are sharply divided, well, you’re right!“A recent survey from McKinsey found that 52% of employees prefer a mix of both: they love that hybrid workplace, valuing flexibility, but also recognize the benefits of working in person,” said moderator Lydia Dishman, senior editor for growth and engagement at Fast Company. “And research from Gallup shows that employees who feel engaged in their workplace are more likely to want to return to the office, particularly for team collaboration and relationship building.”Deloitte reports that organizations with a strong focus on employee experience see a productivity increase of up to 20% and it also helps with turnover rates. “Ultimately, it's up to the leaders to set the policy and model what the ideal workplace situation looks like,” Dishman said during an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s October virtual conference.Corporate leaders have been saying it a lot lately: We want to make the office a magnet, not a mandate. They can make that a reality by creating the kind of experience that re-engages workers with their leaders, their colleagues, and their roles. How can employers be intentional about the workplace as a welcoming community and place where workers can fulfill their need for connection and purpose, inclusion and belonging?Encouraging In-person InteractionIt can be hard to encourage in-person interaction, even when back in the office, when employees are plugged into a post-pandemic productivity mindset of sitting at a desk, powering through tasks, and then going home. Providing team leaders with additional support can help them facilitate the organic in-office interactions that so many of us have been missing.“We’re trying to guide leaders with tools. At CSL, we’ve just launched a series of tools called Moments That Matter,” said Kim Robbins, senior director, HR change and culture at CSL Behring. “It’s encouraging leaders to coach their teams about being intentional about the work that needs to happen.” The training helps them understand the difference between moments that require ‘heads down’ focus time alone in the office or at home vs. times when they should be providing face-to-face support, such as when onboarding new hires. “Could we be encouraging people to randomly meet for lunch or come together for events? We’ve positioned all this in a framework about planning the way you work, so that people could be intentional and do some assessments for who might be missing in their network that could really help them feel that greater sense of connectivity and belonging,” Robbins said.Executive panelists from JLL, HR Media & Co., CSL Behring, and Lam Research spoke about "Creating a Purposeful Workplace Experience" (photo by From Day One) Antoinette Hamilton, global head of inclusion & diversity at Lam Research, says that employee resource groups, which first came into prominence as a way to stay virtually connected during Covid, are now another structured way to encourage organic in-person interaction. ERG’s can “be a place to connect, meet some new people, and do something for a great cause,” Hamilton said.Taking an Empathetic Approach“Empathy is a foundational principle of making a workplace someplace you want to go to,” Dishman said. Much of empathy, says Judith Ojo, CEO of HR Media & Co., comes down to open communication. “Some employees are not fond of being in the office. Maybe they can’t get enough work done or they’re constantly interrupted,” Ojo said. Make sure you understand where your employees are coming from and what they are looking for, then respond in kind. For the issues Ojo noted, creating a quiet zone, collaboration space, or wellness area for meditation can go a long way to making an employee feel comfortable, seen, and supported. Such an adaptive workspace can be helpful for fostering inclusion.Empathy can mean different things for different people, and leaders need to be prepared to take the cue from the employees. “I think listening sessions are really important. The key is you’re not trying to solve the problem. You’re listening,” said Tina Leblanc, Ph.D., head of DEI, Americas at JLL. “You listen. You pause. You come up with a solution. And then go back and say, ‘What I heard was…And these are some ideas.’ And then also ask them, ‘What do you feel we can do as a team to be more inclusive?’ That way you’re not putting your own biases [onto it].” Regular employee surveys can encourage employees to come forward.Building the Ideal WorkplaceFor many employees, Dishman says, it seems like a hybrid environment is the ideal. But making organizations cohesive and productive in a hybrid setup can seem far easier on paper than it is in practice. “Building trust within hybrid teams is really crucial to ensure collaboration and productivity,” Hamilton said. Her team does this by leaning into their core values: clear communication, mutual trust and respect, and transparency. Her organization wants its teams to feel cared about, and have created a manager track with training that incorporates inclusive leadership.Senior leaders need to communicate goals and parameters, Dishman says, so that the office continues to be a hub of connection – and so that everyone doesn’t come into the office two days per week only to spend those days on Zoom. “One thing that we have is collaborative conversations, where we bring people throughout the whole office, and even in different buildings, together,” Leblanc said. The company also encourages group lunches on Mondays, coffee on Wednesdays, and desserts on Fridays. The key is to keep thinking, ‘How do I make this more enjoyable?’ to encourage people to get up, get dressed, and commute into work. Employees should leave feeling happy and productive, says Leblanc.Hamilton says managers should be given the tools to be able to articulate the benefits of on-site work. “You’ve failed if you walk into an office and everyone is on a Zoom call,” she said. “We have to be intentional about how we work differently when we come back into in-person environments,” she said. “Managers are the catalyst for getting that done in a consistent way across organizations.”Robbins’ office encourages employees to be intentional about their meetings and not jam their schedules unnecessarily through a collaboration audit. “Do you really need to still be a part of all these meetings? Could you just only attend when there’s an agenda topic relevant to you, where you're a subject matter expert or [the] person to move this goal forward? Or could you delegate it to a junior team member to give them exposure and have greater connectivity in the office?” she said.Her organization has also invited “puppy trucks” from local animal shelters to visit so employees can play with puppies during breaks. Such activities should feel organic, and companies must be careful to avoid scheduling what feels like “mandatory fun.” Again, employees will look to their leaders to set the tone, so managers should be the first ones to dive into activities and bring the team along, Leblanc says. Let them know attendance is optional, but if they do go, ask them to bring a friend. Such participation also makes senior leaders feel more accessible. “Humanize yourself,” Leblanc said.Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.

Constant Change Is Bad for Business Because It’s Bad for Human Performance

In the corporate world, change is inevitable and organizations that can’t change don’t last long. Oftentimes, change is considered a good thing until you talk to people on the frontlines of it.“At some point you have to recognize that there is a contradiction between the simplistic idea that change is necessarily a good thing and the lived experience of change on the front lines, which seems to be anything but a good thing,” said Ashley Goodall, a leadership expert and author of The Problem With Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance.Goodall spoke with Vox's editorial director of tech, climate, and world teams, Bryan Walsh, at From Day One’s October virtual conference. They spoke about how to navigate constant change in the business world.Uncertainty, Control, and Work Without MeaningGoodall has had a long career in the corporate world as an HR executive, most recently at Cisco. He's seen major change from the outside and inside and identifies three key themes prevalent in any chaotic change. The first is uncertainty. “We don’t do very well when the future is uncertain and when somebody says there’s a big change coming, that’s almost the definition of uncertainty.”The next is control. “When you take away our sense of agency, we feel helpless. There’s a phenomenon called learned helplessness, where people just phone it in, because they’ve been trained by their environment that whatever they do won’t make that much of a difference.”Learned helplessness is the psychological name for a loss of control, Goodall says, but it also goes by another name. “Quiet quitting is probably pretty close in a business context for people saying, ‘Hey, I don't know what I do here. Why am I trying?’”Bryan Walsh of Vox interviewed author Ashley Goodall, left, during the fireside chat (photo by From Day One)The last theme is having a sense of meaning. “We have a desperate need for the world to make sense to us,” Goodall said. Organizational change often disrupts the essential social connections that define how people work and identify themselves. Shifting teams or altering org charts can dismantle these "social graphs," leaving employees struggling to adapt. On top of that, humans have an innate need to make sense of their environment. When conflicting messages about the organization’s direction emerge, employees often feel lost and disconnected, unable to contribute effectively.Goodall noted that while leaders often recognize these challenges, their focus tends to remain narrow—fixing one change initiative at a time. The issue arises when multiple initiatives, driven by different leaders or consultants, pile up, creating chaos. To address this, organizations must rethink change holistically and prioritize creating a work environment that supports human connection and meaningful contribution.“And it’s the aggregation of all of this that is really pernicious, which means that organizations need to think differently about change, and more broadly about the experience of work here every day, and does it support human contribution,” Goodall said."What can leadership do when it comes to actually executing change?” Walsh asked. Goodall says there needs to be a sliding scale to determine when change is necessary. “The first thing to say to organizational leadership is, do less. Change. But do less. If we get through our collective heads that this isn’t an unalloyed good, this is something that can create harm more than it creates good, then I think you pause and set the bar higher on organizational change.”This doesn’t always happen but leadership can be proactive about “turning the volume down,” he said.“You can involve employees in telling you where the volume currently is,” Goodall said. "What would happen if a leader came in and said, I’m going to spend the next few weeks learning everything that works really well here, or everything that we should preserve, or everything that’s valuable, or everything that’s special, or everything that you really care about, so that we know what to protect. And once we’ve understood that, then we can think about how to improve things.”Leaders can help employees navigate change by anchoring on stability and framing it as a clear, process-driven outcome, while taking steps to promote consistency amid the chaos of multiple initiatives.Stability is a Necessary Precondition for Improvement“You could say stability is kind of the opposite of change. What does that look like?” Walsh asked.Goodall distinguished between change and improvement, which he says aren’t the same things and given a choice between the two, people would choose improvement. “The thing that we’re chasing in all of this is improvement. Well, stability is a necessary precondition for improvement.”People struggling in an organization amidst a sea of instability don’t lend to improvement. Goodall believes that improvement and positive change come from team environments, where employees know what’s going on and are valued. “If we are able to stipulate that organizational value, organizational productivity, organizational innovation, organizational goodness comes from humans working together.”If you have the above, then you’ll have something like stability, Goodall says.“What does stability look like? Stability looks like I have space to figure out the best use of my time. I’m given some autonomy.” For Goodall, true stability at work comes from personal confidence, strong team dynamics, and leaders who foster meaningful connections and mutual support.Digging more into that predictability and stability, Goodall talked about his use of weekly all-hands meetings, something Walsh pointed out that, in his experience, executives tend to despise.Goodall did not spend a whole lot of time prepping for these meetings. Instead, he used them as a personnel barometer. “It was a conversation for the leadership team that everyone got to tune into and ask questions of us.”“What we were trying to solve was, if you know what’s going on, you have space, you have agency, [then] you have predictability. You get to see the people leading your organizations when they’re not on script–when they’re not following the talking points that the communications team has put together for the all hands," Goodall added.The meetings would start with slides of birthdays, service anniversaries, or something random with a photo to spark conversation or a laugh. Then they would move onto business, and different teams would simply talk about what they were working on, what was working for them, areas of difficulty and challenge, what was coming up in the future, and more.And making things weekly, instead of a few times a year, gives organizations the opportunity to handle change as it’s happening, according to Goodall. All of this is "profoundly stabilizing." “We did this every week for years and years, and it became an organizational ritual, and people still talk about it. All we were doing was ritualizing stability and explaining to people what was going on.”Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in Greater Greater Washington, The Washington Post, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.

How to Overcome Fears of Talking About Identity, Diversity, and Justice

RELATED STORIES

Using AI to Revolutionize Hiring for Top Talent

Creating a Purposeful Workplace Experience

Constant Change Is Bad for Business Because It’s Bad for Human Performance