Real Talk: Should TherE be Room for Polarizing Views in Inclusive Spaces?

Developing and sustaining an inclusive workplace culture should be a priority for any organization that seeks to create an environment where employees feel welcome, and their perspectives are heard and valued. However, we live in a highly contentious society. With many people being influenced to move farther toward opposing ends of the spectrum on a wide variety of issues due to their lived experience, we can't expect people to simply put these perspectives aside when they arrive at work. Our political, religious, and social views inform what voices, behaviors, programs, and policies we see as being most valuable. So how can leaders credibly foster a culture of inclusion knowing that strongly opposing viewpoints will inevitably make some people feel psychologically and physically unsafe? Who should define the boundaries of safety? Where should the line be drawn in terms of which voices are welcomed or not? Is there room for strongly opposing viewpoints on your DEI committee?

Join Loeb Leadership's panel of experts as they examine these topics and offer suggestions on how to navigate through these organizational challenges!

Below is an Organized transcript of the discussion:

David Sarnoff: So welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for taking time out of your afternoon to join us today. I'm David Sarnoff. I'm the director of strategic partnerships and a certified executive coach with Loeb Leadership. For those of you who don't know, we're a management leadership training and development company, and we develop extraordinary inclusive leaders. Today, we're going to have a panel on where does polarizing views fit in an inclusive culture? Should there be a role for polarizing views?

So, Fritz, I'd love to start off the dialogue with you being the calming force, typically, on our panel. You talk a lot about identifying and defining what we're experiencing, the emotion we're feeling, what's going on in our world. So to start today, I'd love to get your perspective definition on what does it mean when we talk about when something's polarizing, particularly in the context of inclusive cultures, because we talk about being inclusive to a variety of differences, but we don't really address when there's polarization around opinions. So can you kick us off by what does that mean? Is it strongly held viewpoints about operational decisions that don't necessarily align with people, or is it something different than that?

• What does a polarizing view mean, particularly in the context of inclusive cultures?

  Fritz Galette: Well, thank you for starting me off with that question. In the title is something I want to talk about, which is the word polarizing. If you know a topic is going to be polarizing, if you know a topic is one in which they're going to be a lot of strongly held views and opinions, what's the first thing that's going to come up as we anticipate entering into those topics? You're going to feel something. And as a psychologist, who works with people all the time, all around asking people about what they feel, one of the first things I do is recognize whether we're entering into a topic that creates all kinds of emotions and feelings.

  And often when I'm beginning safe space conversations, I ask people to take a moment to just check in and notice what they're feeling, and notice what they're not feeling, and notice their ability to actually calm themselves and ground themselves in the moment, because many of us going into, sorry, rooms, where we're going to have very difficult conversations don't take a moment to check ourselves and ground ourselves. And today, I know we're going to be talking about it. We're going to have a lively discussion around this, but as a psychologist, I've got to remind us that the first thing we do before entering into any difficult conversation is to first check in with ourselves and around ourselves.

  And next, as we do that, we want to do things like ask ourselves, "What would we like to accomplish in this interaction with somebody?" We can have a debate. We can have a discussion, or we can have a dialogue in which we do something geared toward trying to understand what the other person is saying and most importantly feeling. And so as we talk today, I'll interject and talk about how we can really keep ourselves focused on the topic at hand, whatever topic we're talking about, and also manage our emotions as we do this.

• when there are polarizing views being expressed in a workplace, what's the first thing you would do?

  Fritz Galette: I would first seek to really deeply understand what the person's communicating to me. If it's a topic, they're trying to explain something to me, they're trying to tell me about their position, I seek first to really understand on a deeper level what they're trying to explain, not just intellectually, but on an emotional level. All of our beliefs, the things that we hold dear and true to ourselves are held connected through lived experiences and past experiences, and if you get curious as to where a person's coming from, and be curious about, well, where'd they learn that, or where they're coming from emotionally, you'll be able to see the connection between the thoughts they have, the beliefs they have, and the emotions they're holding. Often we skip the step of paying attention to emotion, and we go straight to trying to debate the content of the thing that the person is trying to debate. And if we do so, we'll probably lose them before anything, because most of us are not going to change our minds unless we have an interaction with another purpose person that gets to changing our hearts.

David Sarnoff: Great. Thank you so much, Fritz. So now let's get to that content. Joy, I want to bring you in, and with all the coaching and facilitation work that you do, but you also bring a scientific lens as you're training as an engineer that I always find fascinating. Where do we draw the line? Who gets to draw the line between what somebody considers polarizing, and somebody else considers disagreeing or debating, somebody considers threatening, and somebody doesn't consider it a threatening perspective? And apart from the obvious examples where somebody physically or verbally threatens somebody, who gets to draw the lines, and aren't those lines a matter of somebody's subjective perspective?

• How do we know what a polarizing view is?

  Joy Stephens: So you know what? I had a feeling you were going to ask me this, so I wanted to look this up, so I could credit this quote correctly. It's John B. Finch, but what I'm getting to is there's a saying, "Your right to swing your arms stops at my face." So if you're going to harm me or do damage to me, you don't have a right to. In your own expression of bodily freedom, you don't have a right to hit me in the face, and so there's been paraphrase time and time again, but when we apply it to the setting we're talking about now, you can have an opinion that disagrees with my opinion. You can have a held belief that disagrees with what I believe. When your opinions and beliefs start to damage my ability to live my life or to in a workspace my ability to be seen as promotable, as worthy, as a good working partner, because of just what you think, your opinion is damaging my literal livelihood.

  I can't get a raise. I can't get promoted. I can't even get considered for this role, because you don't like me, regardless of the fact that I am highly capable. Those sorts of things, that's where your right to your opinion starts to be harmful, and we oftentimes think of harm as physical. Well, they didn't hit them. Well, they didn't say anything bad. They didn't use a slur, but they still kicked their name out when the resumes went forward. They still just said, "I don't think she's ready," without giving any background. All of those things are harmful to somebody's ability to move in a corporate space, a legal space. I see it a lot in medicine, because like I told you before, I have a lot of friends who work in the medical field. An opinion can be a wall depending on how much power the person who holds that opinion has sway over.

“Your right to swing your arms stops at my face.”

— John B. Finch

• Who gets to decide whether or not someone's opinion is threatening?

  David Sarnoff:

  So my question, my follow up to that, Joy, and thanks for sharing that, is within an organization, a law firm, a company, a nonprofit, who gets to decide where that line is between somebody who considers it to be their rightful opinion, and somebody else considers that opinion to now adversely impact my wellbeing, my career, my profession? Is it a DE&I committee? Would you suggest they be empowered to set these standards? Where do you start?

  Joy Stephens:

  I think you start, and that's a good question, and I like the way you put that. I think you start with the people who are being harmed. You start with the marginalized community, the marginalized individual that says, "This is hurting me," and then you move from their statement of their lived reality to that committee, because sometimes a committee can be you can't have everybody on a committee, and so there can be gaps. There can be things that are overlooked. There can be things that are not on their radar.

  So someone says, "This ideology, this type, this process, this tradition is hurting me, and hurting people that look like me," and that committee should say, "Let's objectively look at this and see if this is true, examine all of the factors that go into it," and then for that particular thing, that is where the line is gone. And it's not just one line all the way across. It can be everywhere depending on the situation, because you have to take individuals and communities into... You have to consider them individually. We talk about people not being a monolith. That goes not only for different demographics, but within that demographic.

  David Robert:

  Yes, everything Joy is saying I agree with 100%. I would add an additional layer to that. This is why the culture piece is so important, right? And we often encourage our clients to start the culture conversation with a simple question, "How do we want people to feel about our organization, our firm? When they're here engaged in the work, what's the feeling that we want them to have, that experience?" And so once you have that question answered, then you have I think additional sort of intel and evidence to then say, "What are the behaviors, the policies, the norms, activities that we have to be engaged in as a community within the firm that are going to accelerate that feeling?" Right?

  That becomes easier to determine where those lines get drawn, right? Because if there's a perspective or a voice that's actually creating a challenge or interfering with that vision that you have, that feeling you're trying to foster, then that's where it becomes problematic, right? I mean, just you've articulated some aspirational culture for your firm or organization, doesn't mean there's not going to be disagreements or not going to be hiccups on that journey, right? But more often than not, the default should be to behave in a way to align around programs and policies that are actually going to fuel that feeling. Right?

  So that's why it's often if you skip over that step, the culture piece of it, it becomes really tricky to figure out where those lines get drawn. Those lines become somewhat elastic in terms of you tolerate things versus not tolerate things, and it becomes very complicated and confusing to people as well.

David Sarnoff: And, David, my reaction to that is to create the buy in, to get as many people within an organization to participate in what you discussed about mutually agreed upon behaviors and expectations, again, I think messaging is incredibly important, creating the opportunity for people who are resisting to have an opportunity to be heard. Leadership in organizations play a vital role in this dynamic, but I want to go back to DE&I committees, because I think they're put in an untenable situation in many cases, where they're marching orders are to create an inclusive culture. They're not empowered. They don't get a lot of leadership, and many of the committees that I see are not very diverse.

They tend to be mostly in many cases, people of color from marginalized communities. I don't see a lot of white middle aged men in DE&I committees and law firms, so whoever on the panel would like to weigh in, how do you create, or how would you advise to create the right makeup of a committee, or not the right is not a good term, a constructive or positive objective?

• How do you create a positive and constructive DE&I committee?

  Joy Stephens: I'll jump right in here. So a DE&I committee has to have power, and that power has to be expressed and not implied. They have to have the ability to make changes, or at least at a very minimum, to have the ear of the person, a trusted ear of the person that can make those changes. And so to your point, DB, sometimes you'll see a committee that is created from they want to have people in marginalized communities on the committee, but no one that is available has enough clout, status, power, et cetera, and so you get lower level people on the committee with an absolute heart to see something done, no expressed power, no implied power. Don't get a chance to talk to the executives, or the senior partners, or the leaders in the organization, and so they become hamstrung from the get go.

  They can't really do anything other than scream into the void, which can be frustrating. And sometimes you'll see the people on those committees leave from their frustration. Now, how do you get the people in power assuming that there aren't enough representative folks from marginalized communities at that higher power level? How do you get those people in power to want to be on a DE&I committee, to take the time to do it, because it is time and energy consuming? That's where the coaching comes in. That's where you have to convince someone on a one-on-one basis, having a heart to heart discussion, this is why this is a good thing to do. It's the right thing to do, and you are the one to do it. You have to get that message out to the people with the power to do something different. David?

  David Robert: No, I mean, I was going back as you were talking, Joy, because oftentimes when we're working with clients on culture transformation, there's a similar committee, a culture sort change agent committee, and oftentimes I'm generalizing here, but it's some truth to it, that it's usually a committee of people who just kind of made eye contact at the wrong time, right? And they get kind of pulled into it unexpectedly, or they were sort of voluntold to be on the committee, because I had to put somebody in the committee. It's going to be you, and it's not a lot of strategic thinking about who actually has to sit on that committee, people who have high degree of credibility, who are highly visible in the organization, who have some influence don't always have to have authority or power, but maybe have influence. Those are the types of people you want.

  I think you have to be really strategic in terms of who has to be on that committee, and not just let you know the ones who volunteer for everything kind of fill that committee out, right? Because again, what happens, that committee becomes more of a window dressing and not really a decision making or a part of the governance decision making process in the organization, which it should be, but oftentimes they're limited in what they can do. They're more of a think tank than a decision making body, but I think going back to who draws the lines, I think it has to be a negotiation too. I think every organization has to decide for themselves kind of what does this environment look like? What's tolerable versus not tolerated, and let that be a very unique, customized conversation internally, because I think a one side fits all approach just doesn't work I don't think.

  Fritz Galette: I like to highlight that often I end up talking to, if I'm with them, some of my colleagues here, when we're in those initial calls, we're talking to usually the most motivated and inspired people in an organization, whether they have the power or not. They're usually the people who are feeling this, who really want to be part of a bigger cause, and I'm often saying, "We're going to need a bigger boat, and we're going to need as much power as we can get together." And usually in those initial contacts with one another, we actually start doing a great job of modeling, listening to one another, and really deeply understanding the hurt points, and the things that have happened to bring us to the table in the first place, and then we work together to try and locate the other stakeholders who may not be in the room, who could be part of the mission to really get these engagements going in such a way that we can do cultural transformation.

  About two years ago, just right after George Floyd, I was getting called into those rooms all the time, and people were in a lot of pain, and they were asking for, "Do something, help, help," and we would try to as quickly as we can come up with some implementation strategies to help them, but we learned over time that unless you think about culture, unless you strategically think about what can be done in the long term, most of the things we're going to be doing are just going to be one offs or putting a bandaid on a situation. So I encourage people to continue to come to the table and try to do that, but, yes, we've got to look at things from a larger strategic future oriented standpoint, where if we don't have the people in the room that have the power to implement that change, then we've got to work to slowly build coalitions around that, to get them in the room, so that we can really do this, and do it right.

“We need to be careful in the language that we use, because we are starting to make a false equivalence between unsafe and uncomfortable. There’s a lot of things that make us uncomfortable, but there’s a different set of things that make some people feel unsafe. For example, when we talk about being asked (not told) to say “Happy Holidays” so that it feels inclusive, that’s different from saying “You cannot say Merry Christmas.” Some people feel uncomfortable with that. But does that stop you from living your life? Does it stop you from being promoted? Does it stop you from being considered? Does it stop you from making it home at night? Unsafe and uncomfortable or different things, and we’ve got to stop making them the same, because that’s where we end up with polarization. Because if we said, “Hey, shouldn’t everyone have a right to celebrate their religious holidays?” Yes! I don’t think that’s a polarizing statement at all. But when we start to make sides, so that we can pick them, then we start having problems.”

— Joy Stephens

• How do you address opposing viewpoints in the workplace without creating a wider conflict or marginalizing people?

  David Sarnoff: Yeah. I was actually going to go there next, David, when you said about drawing that line. So I'll just jump right in, and I do want to share with the audience, we had no prior knowledge that a draft brief would leaked from the Supreme Court, but this whole notion of inclusive cultures, meaning in my opinion having the ability to articulate and communicate different opinions, lived experiences, points of view, perspectives, at some point, depending on the issue, meets an equally opposing force. And we do hear from people who feel that they're told to be quiet, and let's just use a political example of somebody who may hold a liberal to moderate viewpoint, that has an opposing view than somebody who's politically conservative. Where does that get addressed in the workplace without creating a wider conflict or marginalizing people?

  David Robert: Yeah, I mean that's I think a pretty common example, right? The politics, and oftentimes our clients are like, "Ugh." You can have a policy like, "Listen, don't bring politics into the office," but that's kind I think not practical, right? Because it's part of our lived experience, and that does kind go through the lobby door at the beginning of the day, right? But how do those political differences pop up, right? And what's the implication? Because I think about we all have different ways of defining and approaching inclusion, but I think about inclusion as bringing together diverse perspectives and opinions, but in the spirit of respect, collaboration, and community. So there has to be some shared vision of where we're going together, knowing that we're going to disagree at times, and maybe have different perspectives along that journey, but we're actually moving in the same direction.

  Where I think it becomes problematic is where those differences of opinions actually stall the work, or make someone feel either physically or psychologically unsafe, and I know some subjectivity to that, but I think that's just kind of my take on the inclusion piece of it, right? There has to be some shared purpose in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. If you don't have that shared purpose, then I think that conflict will always be unhelpful, right? And the example that I gave before, DB, when we were prepping for the call, right?

  I'm not a deeply religious person, but I could understand how somebody might say, "Wait a second, so we're celebrating Black History Month. In June, we do Pride Month. We're celebrating Pride Month, but I can't say, 'Christmas,' in December? What's that about?" And I could see making a case like, "Well, isn't my religious beliefs not being celebrated visibly in the organization? Isn't that counter to our sort of mission around inclusion?" Right? And how would we respond to that? I'm sure that's happening at workplaces, right? And I know I feel bad that Rini is not on the call, because she had a great response to that, but I think we could serve her well here.

  Joy Stephens: I have a great response, and actually I'm thinking about it now, and I think we need to be careful in the language that we use, because we are starting to make a false equivalence between unsafe and uncomfortable. There's a lot of things that make us uncomfortable, but there's a different set of things that make some people feel unsafe, and I think we don't do enough around making that not be the same. Using that same example, we talk about Black history. There's Asian American Pacific Islander recognition. There's Hispanic recognition. There's Pride recognition, and all of those groups have been left out of conversations, left out of the spaces, the room where it happens, the power, sometimes left out of the ability to even send their kids to college, buy a home, get a loan, all kind of things left out, and that has caused them to not be able to take care of their kids the same way.

  But there's a lot in the systemic discrimination against different demographics that makes them unable to live a healthy and safe life, and then we talk about things like being asked, not told, but asked to say, "Happy holidays," so that it feels inclusive. That is different from saying, "You cannot say, 'Merry Christmas.'" You absolutely can, but if you're going to say, "Merry Christmas," say, "Happy Kwanza," and, "Happy Hanukah," and everything else that happens in that timeframe, and if that makes you uncomfortable, does that stop you from living your life? Does it stop you from being promoted? Does it stop you from being considered? Does it stop you from making it home at night?

  Unsafe and uncomfortable or different things, and we've got to stop making them the same, because I think that's where we end up with polarization. Because if we said, "Hey, shouldn't everyone everywhere have a right to celebrate their religious holidays?" Yes, I don't think that's a polarizing statement at all, but when we start to make sides, so that we can pick them, then we start having problems.

  David Robert: Yeah. I mean, I've always said if somebody finds my sexual orientation to be unsavory to them, or they think it's immoral, more power to you. I don't really care about that. That doesn't bother me at all, but if you want to use that belief to create policies within my working environment, or going to limit my full experience, or prevent me from accessing opportunities, and information, and resources that others have access to, then it's a problem for me, right? So I don't care how people feel about me personally. I'm way beyond that in my life, but if you're going to limit my ability to live my full life, then that becomes a very different conversation, right?

  I'll be the first to admit that I oftentimes immediately default to this idea of psychological unsafety without really giving the person the benefit of the doubt, right? So if I see as an example, somebody wearing a Make America Great Again hat, I immediately think, "That person is a racist. They're a homophobe, and they're an enemy to me," right? And it's really an unfair perspective, right? So because that person could be super, super sweet and just has a different political affiliation than I have, and why couldn't we actually make some kind of connection? Right?

  So I think we have a responsibility to give each other the benefit of the doubt, even at the workplace too. If somebody says something that doesn't feel right, or does something that doesn't feel right, rather than jumping to some kind of reaction, I think to Dr. Fritz's point, is to say, "What's going on here, and is there an opportunity for me to enter into a conversation, so they understand how I felt about that," right? And then find some common ground and move forward, right?

• What is the difference between uncomfortable and unsafe?

  David Sarnoff: And, Fritz, can you speak a little bit more to that distinction between uncomfortable and unsafe? Because I find that a very interesting description that people are going to have different definitions of, and maybe David works in an environment where he is much more comfortable and free to be himself, where in other organizations, people couldn't even disclose their sexuality without feeling marginalized.

  Fritz Galette: I live in a world where I'm constantly asking people, "What was that experience like for you?" And I do so because it's obvious to me that no one is experienced the same by multiple people in the room, and you'd be surprised. If you survey a room full of people after something has just happened, somebody has just made a speech, something has happened in the news, I'm just checking in with you to ask you what was that like for you. Some people are uncomfortable. Some people are feeling less safe. Some people are triggered, and the differences between all of that is usually based upon the experiences people have had before, which is why I'm often reminding all of us that when we ask somebody, "How are you doing," we're asking them a quite complex question, if they were to answer it honestly, and to consider all the different facets in areas of their life.

  Is everything alright? Well, for people who are Russian or Ukrainian descent, most would not say, "Everything is all right," and most of us are actually not saying, "Everything is all right," if we have any awareness of what's happening in the world, but if we can encourage in our conversations and in our dialogues a culture of really checking in genuinely with one another, if each of us are doing it on a regular basis, we might get a sense. So if you've got committees, and you have a committee of people, but the committee isn't very diverse, but there is some diversity, is the committee a safe space for people to have a dialogue and a conversation? If it's not, you would want to work to do that.

  If any of your workspace spaces are not entirely safe to open up, and be honest, and be genuine, we want to be working toward that. Another thing we tried to talk about before, and I don't want to get too far away from it, but what we were talking about before, you were asking questions, David Sarnoff, that made me feel like the same thing that often happens is, where do we begin? Where do we begin? When you enter into systems that have needed attention for a long time, you can begin over here. You can begin over there. You can begin over there, and we begin wherever we're at.

  So if we first meet you, and I'm talking to a diversity committee, and you're saying, "We need to do something," we start to look for the pain points. We start to look for what's making you have this conversation right now today, the presenting problem, as they say in the clinical world, and then we work our way from there, but we're hoping eventually to get to, because I look at things systemically, to the larger system at hand that caused this problem, and that must happen through ongoing dialogue, conversation, at times debate, comfortable and uncomfortable, and we need to be willing to make the mistake, and be caught, and be told, "You're triggering me," and then when that happens, an opportunity to go, "Tell me more about what just happened, so I can better do better next time."

David Sarnoff: So, Fritz and I wholeheartedly agree with what you say, but it's not so easy for people in organizations, those individual contributors, who are confronted by a manager supervisor, who may put them in that unsafe space. And what I really enjoy about our dialogue panels is oftentimes we give some really good actionable items and takeaways for people to do, and I'm concerned for those individual contributors or groups within organizations, who don't feel empowered, or don't know how to take that first step without bringing more pain on themselves. So if somebody feels that a line was crossed and going to HR, which could be a great resource, isn't necessarily going to change the inclusion dynamic, what should they do?

• How do you change an organization to be more inclusive? Where do you start?

  Joy Stephens: I almost cut you off, DB, when you're like, "It isn't easy." I'm like, "Nobody ever said it was." If it was easy, we would've done it by now, right? We put people in space. We've sent robots to other planets. That wasn't easy either. We spent millions of dollars to do it, but I oftentimes hear, "Well, this is hard." Yeah, it is. We're talking about changing lives, changing lifestyles. I love to use my example of you losing weight. If you are told you're diabetic, and I'm speaking from my mother's experience, God rest her soul. You're told you're diabetic. You have to change the way you eat. It's going to be hard to change 50 years of lifestyle to do something to extend your life, and you can choose to cut out the things that they tell you to cut out, to start eating more leafy green vegetables, start exercising more, drinking more water, and it's constant. You can't do it for a year and think you're good.

  This has no end point. You have to do it forever. This is you're changing the way you live, being an ally, being a member of a DE&I committee is the same sort of commitment. You are changing the way you live from now on. Now, if you think, "We can do this and an encapsulated project, and it'll be done once we finish setting it up," that's like putting a Peloton in your living room, and then hanging clothes off of it. You had everything right there, but you didn't go far enough, and you have to keep doing it. Again, speaking from a friends experience.

  David Sarnoff: But quite often in our DE&I work, we talk about embracing differences, race, gender, sexual orientation, neuro diversity. Those are just a few. There's many more, physical diversity, but when it comes to ideological diversity, and there's some people who aren't going to change, or not embrace your viewpoint, and I understand it's about getting to a level of dignity and respect of other people's opinions, and still being able to achieve the mission of the organization, but how do you set up that framework to allow that ideological difference to take place?

  Joy Stephens: I think this goes back to what Chris was talking about, about being able to have a dialogue. Can you talk to somebody else and have a conversation where different ideas, even different positions, polarized positions, can be exchanged, and discussed, and maybe come together, find some middle ground, establish a détente, if you will. Okay, we're going to agree that this is what I hold, and I am going to understand that even though I have these opinions, I cannot use them to swing against somebody else. If you can get there, then we can all get along, for lack of a better way to put that, but very often, people will feel, and I'm not picking any particular demographic, because I've seen it across races, genders, colors, everything, people will feel like even though they have their own personal desires, they don't want to see someone else's life being lived in front of them.

  I've heard that phrase, "I just don't want to see it." Okay. Understand though that they have a right to stand there. They're not even swinging at you. They're just standing there, and you're saying that them standing there is as offensive to you as you swinging at them, and so just using that same metaphor, and I think getting people to sit through an awkward conversation is the first step. And when you asked earlier, "How do you start," what happens if you are a frontline manager or an individual contributor, and you're having to have an awkward conversation, or deal with someone that you feel has overstepped the line that has been drawn or agreed upon? How do you deal with that difference in power, et cetera.

  And the answer is you just do it. Somebody has got to be the first one to jump out the plane. Somebody is going to have to be brave enough to say, "I don't think we should take this sort of abuse anymore," or, "I don't think we should allow this sort of discriminatory language anymore," or, "I feel that this is harmful to either myself, or other members of my demographic, or other members of that demographic, and we should not accept it anymore, because until somebody takes that first step, nobody is taking that first step, right? Somebody has got to do it."

  And oftentimes you will see them sacrifice their promotability, sacrifice their career at that point. Sacrificing for civil rights is nothing new, and we think of civil rights as marching in the street, but the civil rights is standing up or confronting someone after a meeting and saying, "The things that you said are harmful." It's the same continuum.

  David Robert: Yeah, Also, I mean, another good starting point could be to initiate a conversation around that inclusion is not a zero sum game, right? So giving somebody else opportunity that wasn't there before doesn't take something away from you, right? And I think oftentimes those who are in the... Now, again, generalizing, in the majority, they often approach civil rights or inclusion as I'm losing something, so that somebody else gets an opportunity. That already kind of sets up the conversation or situation for failure, right? Because your defense mechanisms go up. You're grasping at all these things that become polarizing in your defense of why you think you're right.

  And I think, again, it goes back to we're creating an inclusive culture for everyone. It's not just creating an inclusive culture for those who have been historically marginalized or underrepresented. It's everyone should have opportunities to advance, and to excel, and to thrive, right? And I think if we can get beyond that zero sum hurdle, then it becomes a little bit easier, I think, to engage people who might be a little bit hesitant or digging into their perspective.

  David Sarnoff: Yeah. Thank you for that, David. And I think there's some organizations that have a more entrenched zero sum mentality than others. And having that self-awareness and evaluate where your organization is is really important when it comes to that. I'm sorry, Joy. You wanted to add something?

  Joy Stephens: Yeah. I was just going to say, going back to the idea of who is allowed to speak their mind, again, from that zero sum mentality. A phrase that I grew up here is, "We can all eat," right? It doesn't have to be me or you, and I think when we started to set things up like that, where it's me or you. People feel like they're losing, and I know I'm parroting a lot of things that David Robert just said, but one of the things I think we can't overlook is there are a lot of people in the majority. That's why we call them the majority, right?

  And so if we leave them out, we are becoming the thing that we're trying to fight, right? And so we cannot leave people behind, or if they don't want to get on board, they just get cast aside, et cetera. There's a reason they feel the way they do. There's a reason that they were conditioned, exposed to these things, raised this way, et cetera, whatever it might be. There is a rationale that makes sense to them as to why they think and feel the way they do, and this goes back to Fritz's understanding, needing people to understand why you feel what you feel, and if we can have that conversation of how'd you get here? What makes you feel this way? Let's talk about it.

  And then to share their lived experience, and then for me to share my lived experience, and to see how there are similarities, commonalities, some differences, but those differences may be surfaced or maybe environmentally caused. Maybe I can change their mind. That's a one on one conversation, and that's where we don't leave anyone behind it, and we don't leave anybody out, but it's awkward. It is super awkward. It is triggering. It is hard, and this is why you need trained people, folks with a whole lot of patience, and folks who can dedicate the time and energy to do this, because going back to the idea of having someone who's like an individual contributor or a frontline manager, I've seen administrative assistance be leaders of ERGs.

  They may be so caught up in their own quest for equality that they can't see other people struggle, or they start off with a chip on their shoulder. Removing that chip is surgery, and so you need people who can have those type of conversations or moderate. I know Fritz has done a lot of this moderate, that conversation, so we don't leave anybody behind, or put people out, et cetera. It's hard. It's very hard. It's very necessary, but it's not for the weak.

David Sarnoff: So just to go back to David Robert, because you brought up culture, and we've been talking a little bit on the micro level of how this looks within organizations, but I'd like to go a little more macro here, and being our culture expert, what are the implications of allowing for polarizing opinions? When an organization puts a Pride flag on its website for Pride Month, when members of the organization may disagree with that, how does that impact culture? How does culture remain intact?

David Robert: Well, so I mean, that's a loaded question. That's pretty complicated, but—

But that's why we're here.

• How is workplace culture impacted when employees disagree with company values?

  David Robert: It goes back to, first of all, a plan, right? Culture, I mean you can have an unintentional culture that you've kind of inadvertently created, but if you want an intentional culture, you have to have a plan in place. There's a process behind doing that, and a big chunk of the culture transformation is communication, and our rule of thumb when we're advising clients, that when you're just sick of hearing yourself talk, you're about halfway there. So communicate, communicate, communicate about what you're trying to do, what each of us stands to gain by buying into this vision, by aligning around the vision, and how we're all going to work together to get to that sort of future state, right?

  And you have to communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate, so that people don't... Again, I always say, "We're always parsing information and building a narrative of what's happening around us, and if we don't give people accurate and full information, we're going to plug those gaps with our own experience and our own perspective, and that may not always align with what is really happening," and it's usually not very flattering to the organization either when we're left to kind of create our own narrative, right? So you have to communicate extensively, frequently about what you're doing, especially when things become uncomfortable. Don't lean back, lean in, and give people opportunities to think through what's going on, work through their emotions and their feelings about that particular instance, and giving them permission to do that, to engage in those kinds of conversations, but oftentimes when I see organizations there, it's all good intention.

  They have articulated some vision of where they want to head from a culture perspective, but when you get deeper into the organization, you're asking people, "What's the culture like here, or what do you think they're trying to accomplish from a culture perspective?" You have wide variations of what people's understanding is of what you're trying to do, right? So you have to continue to check that alignment, check that understanding, and that becomes a really, I think, a huge part of the culture transformation, whether we're talking about DE&i, or things like collaboration or respect. The process of getting there is the same, and again, communication is a huge, huge component of that.

  David Sarnoff: Thank you so much, David. And I also would like to remind the audience, we welcome your questions. If you want to submit questions in the chat, if you want to comment on anything that the panel has discussed or said, whether you agree or not, we welcome the feedback. Go ahead, Fritz.

  Fritz Galette: A thought I had around communication is that we can be communicating, but also in there I heard David say the word alignment, and that's when you're checking in with how people are receiving and experiencing your communication. If you forget to do that, then the communication may be one way, that we need a process by which we are also checking this feel, the sense, the impact of how people are experiencing those communications, so that the process that we're leading has a real life and engage process to it. We can't just communicate, and then have people just accept it as dogma. They've got to be participative in giving some feedback, and then if we notice certain segments are not communicating at all, we should get real curious about finding out what's going on with them, because if we don't find out what's going on with them, they may leave the organization and take with it any training that we've given them, take with it any feedback we would've needed to have heard from them.

  David Robert: And first, I mean, I often think about thinking about over the last 50, 60 years what's happened with civil rights in our country. A lot of that for me, I guess is just my personal perspective. A lot of that has occurred because of I think two major things. One is entertainment. We see different people on TV. I mean, when I was growing up, there was no gay characters on TV. I mean, we had the center square or Hollywood Square of Paul Lynde. So I didn't have any role models, but then in the last 15, 20 years in particular, there was a ton of gay characters on TV, right? So it just feels more normal to me, and I would imagine that people of color feel the same way about that as you get of that. But the second is organizational behavior, right? I mean, I think about the unbelievable trajectory that has occurred in American culture around acceptance of gay people, and people's who have sexualities or genders other than your own. A lot of that's been driven by corporate behavior, so there was no obligation for corporations to provide same sex benefits. They chose to do that for a variety of reasons. And as more and more corporations began to provide benefits, to create atmospheres where people felt safe, then that translated into public opinion, right? And so I think we can't underestimate or diminish the role that organizational behavior plays on advancing some of these really important civil rights things as well.

• What happens when being too inclusive backfires? When making room for different views pushes people away?

  David Sarnoff: So thanks for sharing that, David. And so what I hear is that corporations, law firms, companies engage in a lot of inclusive behavior for self-serving reasons in some part, but maybe for greater humanistic reasons as well. But part of it is to retain great talent, to attract talent, to retain talent, and to create pipelines within the organization and advance people into leadership roles, and I'll throw this out to the panel, whoever wants to weigh in, can these efforts go too far where they're having the reverse effect, where they're causing people to leave the organization, if they don't feel that the inclusion efforts are addressing their concerns, perspectives when they may be viewed as polarizing?

  David Robert: Well, it kind of goes back to that Christian example I gave earlier. So I can envision a situation where somebody who is on the more conservative spectrum of whether it's political, or social attitudes, or perspectives, how they might say, "You know what? This thing is very progressive to me. I don't feel my voice actually has the same spot it had before," and therefore, they're going to opt out and go somewhere else, right? So I could see that happening, but I think that there's a way to intercept that before it happens, right? It goes back to communication.

  So it's making sure that person feels visible. You're reinforcing the notion that we're creating an inclusive workplace for everyone. It may not always feel that way, or may not always be seen that way based on the micro nature of some of these things, but trust that the overall overarching goal is to create a space for everyone here, right? If you're not reinforcing that message, back to communication again, right? Reinforcing that over, and over, and over again, then you're really creating an opportunity for someone to create their own narrative, and then opt out, because they feel they're no longer welcome or no longer fit into the fabric of the culture, but there's ways to prevent that, but again, takes initiative, and effort, and time.

  Joy Stephens: Exactly. And I think it is not a 100% success rate either, and you're going to have people who are from what we've been historically calling marginalized communities that are not going to feel that this is a place for them. They're going to leave and go somewhere else. In your example, DB, if we go hypothetically too far in the other direction, apparently then you may have people who are cisgender, white heterosexual males, a Christian, able bodied, they're all of those things, and feel that their voices are not being heard or that their culture, their heritage, their traditions are they're being forced to throw it away just to keep that job. And they may decide to go somewhere else.

  Both ends, to David's point, could have been potentially salvaged with more conversation, more understanding about where the company was going, or the firm was going, more discussion, a chance to hear their grievances, et cetera, and they may choose to stay. If that doesn't work, and they want to leave anyway, you're not going to be able to keep everyone, because there's a quote I love to use, "Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance," Nathan Rutstein. And so what he's saying with that is it's okay to not know something. It's okay to not understand somebody else's point of view. It's okay to have never heard this growing up, whatever it might shape out for you, but when you decide, "I don't want to hear it. I don't want to know. I don't want to try. I don't want to listen. I just want to do what I'm doing and disregard everything else," that is an emotional decision, to Fritz's point, because there's always something to learn.

  We pride ourselves as a educated individuals on being able to learn. We teach our kids, "Learn something every day," is the phrase that we throw around until someone challenges an idea that you hold dear. Now you don't want to learn nothing else. So there is going to be from a bell curve standpoint, those percentages on either end that hold a prejudicial belief about the other side, again, on both ends. They may not come to the table, but the table should always be there. You know what I mean? For them to if they decide to engage, we've got to be ready to engage them.

  David Robert: Yes. Joy, I love what you said, because this kind of came to a head with the vaccine stuff, right? I mean, there were organizations who actually fired employees because they refused to get vaccinated, a personal choice they made, right? I mean, I'm not judging whether it was the right decision or the wrong decision, but was there a missed opportunity to have a conversation around both sides of that perspective, those who want to get vaccinated to protect themselves, and the people they care about, and just be a good citizen, I guess, and those who chose not to, because maybe they're skeptical, because they have a lived experience of distrust with the healthcare system, or the government, or whatever the issue is, right? But shouldn't those perspectives be allowed in the same workplace, right? And a negotiation has to happen around how do you actually create an environment, whether it's onsite or virtual, where both those people can actually derive an income here and thrive, right? So that was to me, a really visible, uncomfortable period in our culture, because it was so polarizing

  Joy Stephens: When we talk about conversations, that was an intersection of two different polarizing ideologies. The first one being vaccinated versus not vaccinated. The other being work at home versus back in the office. There were a lot of people that wouldn't budge about going back in the office, and they didn't want to hear it about the opportunity or the feasibility of working from home. If we had all been able to come together about one issue and then the other, maybe some people who didn't feel they needed to get vaccinated or didn't want to, could have worked from home and kept their job. So none of that was explored, because everybody was digging into their position.

David Sarnoff: We do have a question from the audience, so I would like to address the panel, whoever would like to take it. I'll just read it, "People are afraid to speak up. Those who have been discriminated against, and those who have not. There is a whole new feeling in the workplace today. How do we address those who are never discriminated against to still feel included as many now feel excluded with the new wave of DE&I, since all communication is directed towards DE&I?"

Joy Stephens: I'll take a stab with that one. So I think first of all, I think that that's a great observation. How do you give people... And even the idea that some people have never been discriminated I would challenge, because even, again, that cisgender, heterosexual, Christian, white male may have had issues when they were younger. They may have been bullied when they were younger. They may have grown up in a working class home and didn't have advantages. There's always something, some adversity that people have faced, and I think if we use that as a starting point. Everybody has been through something, and let's start to make parallels between what you've been through, lines of what I've been through. There may be a severity difference. There may be an intensity difference, but you get it. This happened to you, and this is what's happening to me. Can you understand? And so now we're all talking. I think that phrase, "Can you understand what I've been through?” is something everybody should have a right to ask, even the people that we may assume haven't been through anything.

Again, we're making assumptions about their visual cues. A six foot, blonde hair, brown eyed, broad shouldered, squared chin, CEO look may have had an abusive household. We don't know. I'm just making things up as I go along, but giving them the chance to speak their truth should be de rigueur. It should be part of what we do. It's going to be uncomfortable, and then maybe they don't understand some things that we've been through, but that's going back to that dialogue. It always comes back to talking. So much can be resolved with a good conversation, and it doesn't have to be a debate point, counterpoint. Tell me how your life has been, and I'm going to tell you how my life has been, and let's maybe write some notes about what's been the same.

• Find the feelings that can connect us

  Fritz Galette: Joy, thank you for saying it, so I don't have to keep repeating myself, but it really boils down to that, because I've talked to members of organizations from every level, and earlier the question before was like, "What do you do when?" And I go, "It depends. It depends who you're talking to, where they're standing, what their resources are, what they feel empowered to do, what their experience has been." And there's a topic that's cognitive, that we can be polarized by, but where I always go, it's my Jedi trick, is I go to feelings we all have. No matter what we believe, we all have certain feelings. We have the ability for anxiety, and sadness, and the 450 or so other words that are used to describe emotions in the English language, and so when I'm talking to people at any side of the political fence, if I want to get past the surface polarizing issues, I go to the feeling, and I find feelings that I can connect with, and I have had, and we can agree both are valid based upon our lived experience talking.

  David Sarnoff: And, Fritz, I've used your strategies quite often, particularly on this topic where you talk about finding those common values and common belief. You value education. I value education. You value family. I value family. And how do we build off those foundations to get into more messy, sticky conversations, as opposed to just jumping right in with pitch battles.

  Fritz Galette: You hungry? I'm hungry. You thirsty? I'm thirsty. Basic life feelings and needs.

  David Robert: And I would add that if I were someone who has not experienced discrimination, is to kind do some of the hard work to ask yourself, "Why?" Why you think? Were you just lucky, or do you possess qualities, whether they be physical, ethnic qualities that actually put you at advantage during the duration of your life thus far, right? And I actually think that's a powerful voice that can be added to the mix around, wow. I have not had that experience. I'm hearing examples of people who have the pain they're carrying with them of having been discriminated against. Right? I don't want to experience that, so raise your hand. What can I do to make sure that that doesn't happen, to make sure that for the rest of your life, you're afforded the same opportunity that I had, the same privilege that I had of not having to experience that, because I can tell you having firsthand experience of discrimination, it's embarrassing. It's humiliating. It's painful at the time. We learn to cope, right?

  Anybody who's been discriminated learns to cope with it, and kind of compartmentalize that pain, so it's sort of external to us, but it's a horrible feeling, and you can't help but internalize that, right? I mean, it's very common in the gay community that for decades and decades, we've been told that we're evil. We're predatory. We're highly sexual, and you internalize that, and you begin to believe that, and then your behavior then follows suit, right? So I think it's a real important role that people who have not been discriminated against really A, empathize and understand what the experience is like, and then lean in, actively play a role in making sure that we are creating an environment where that doesn't happen again, right? Yeah.

• Q&A and Wrapping Up

  David Sarnoff: Thanks so much there. I just want to say we're coming up on the hour. I want to be respectful of everybody's time. The panel will stay on for a little while to answer questions or encourage people to stay with us, because we love having these conversations, but I did want to acknowledge and thank everybody for attending, and those on the panel for your words of wisdom. Joy, would you like to add something?

  Joy Stephens: I was going to piggyback on what David just said about the things that you see in media, on the news. The examples that you have shape how you think you can be, and I'm listening to him talk about people putting forth tropes about being hyper sexualized and evil, et cetera, for the gay community, and I think about all over the movies that I saw growing up about the Black community, where you're a gang member, or a prostitute, or a maid, and that was kind of it. And so what would my young mind have thought was possible? How were young Black men being expected to behave? There's a lot of people that used to say, "I'm from the streets." I'm like, "You're from my neighborhood. You have a two parent household. Why are you acting this way?" That's what they saw. So this idea of challenging those stereotypes, even stereotype of the Karen in the chat can be challenged, so that we don't raise another generation of people who visually ascribe characteristics to folks without talking to them first.

  David Robert: Yeah. I mean, it's pretty well known in sort of gay entertainment that for the first 20, 30 years of movie making, we were all either prostitutes or serial killers. Those were the only gay characters on TV or in movies, right? We're either sex workers, or we were actually killing people. Yeah, absolutely. I totally get that.

  David Sarnoff: And those stereotypes do play a very impactful role in how people treat each other in the workplace, because we talk about the microaggressions and explicit and unconscious bias in the workplace, where we talk about people working remote or in the office. There were a lot of people that I heard from marginalized communities who preferred working remotely, because they didn't deal with the stress and burden of the day-to-day biases they experienced in the workplace, and the stress on their bodies and minds that that created, and raising awareness around that. What are the impact of our words and actions? But I'm sorry, go ahead, David.

  David Robert: That's so interesting. I was just doing a workshop the day, and I was doing some research for it. So if you're a heavy drinker, [inaudible 01:01:39]. If you're a happy drinker, you're likelihood of dying early or prematurely is 40%, let's say. If you're a heavy smoker, it's 50% or 60%. You have a 70% greater likelihood of dying prematurely if you have toxic relationships, both socially, personally, and in the workplace. And so I was presenting this to a client. I said, "Listen, there's a moral obligation that we have to make sure that you are creating an environment where people can actually can build healthy relationships, because there's a health risk here." I mean, I share the data with you. It came out of the University of California Irvine. There was a study about two and a half years ago, and they were following a cohort of people throughout all industries, and measuring and evaluating the overall health of relationships in their personal life, but also at work.

  And there was no difference between the negative impact of personal relationships versus toxic work relationships. They had the same negative or adverse impact on your health. I thought that was profound, profound. And you think about all the health implications. You may not be eating properly, not exercising, not taking care of yourself, and all that over time kind of weighs down on you. And for me, I'm not even sure how I would have gotten through COVID without a mental breakdown, if I didn't have people around me who I could talk to, and be honest with, and just be there in a very safe environment, right? I don't know how I would have.

  David Sarnoff: And to that point, David, we all work together with a lot of clients or over half our clients are in the legal profession, and it's well documented research, particularly with attorneys, that their high rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, self harm impacts the way they treat other people, and how they show up in the workplace, and why that mental health, and wellness, and mindfulness, and Fritz can certainly speak to this, because he does so much of it, why that's critical to creating these inclusive cultures by getting people to access the resources to get better.

  Fritz Galette: This data and our experiences are really bringing us to something I've known throughout my career, that the primary place where people suffer mental distress is in their relationships at home and at work, and when you give people measures of stress, particularly at work, no matter what their job is, even if they're a high tension, high rise steel worker, if there's conflict at work, they'll report that as higher stress. And if we don't pay attention to that, we get the negative outcomes we've been experiencing. Go ahead, Joy.

  Joy Stephens: So first off, David Robert, please send me that study. I would love to have it.

  And secondly, I'm thinking I've got 15 thoughts in my head around the fact that I'm seeing more and more. I'm 48 years old, and I'm seeing more and more posts on Facebook of someone who is 39 and has died of a heart attack, and who is 41 and has... "Y'all pray for me, I'm going in for surgery for ulcerative colitis," or also just an ulcer. I myself have recently had surgery that was hormone and stress related, and so I'm thinking about... There's always a guy outside my door. I'm sorry if y'all can hear the noise in the background, but I'm thinking about the changes that have happened specifically in we'll say let's use white collar spaces, whether it's legal, medical, academic, corporate, et cetera. I'm thinking of that phrase from we'll just call it 60, 70 years ago, in the workplace you don't talk about... What is it? Race, religion, and what was the last one?

  Politics. No race, no religion, no politics. And why did we start saying that? And did we start saying that? But if you think about who was in those white collar spaces 70 years ago, it was a particular race, a particular political ideology, and a particular religion, hypothetically, generally speaking. And so that phrase became normalized, because they didn't want to talk about this. Again, there's that emotional commitment to ignorance. I don't want to hear about your struggles. You just do the lower level work that I'm hiring you to do, that I'm letting you have. But then as people from different backgrounds started to rise up in the ranks, you started having awkwardness as people move into those spaces, and it was very unsafe. A lot of reason that a lot of harassment laws are on the books is not just to make up something to demonize men, or white people, or whatever. It's because there was a really physical danger that resulted in the government having to step in and say, "Do not do these things in the workplace." They come from a real place.

  David Sarnoff: Yeah. And somebody from the audience also acknowledged that it's not just people in their forties and fifties, that there's Gen Z struggling, suicide rate, substance abuse, self harm. It's really across the board, and it's at epidemic proportions.

  Joy Stephens: Right. The opioid crisis is not just rural. You're seeing it in the high rises, and uptown, all over the place. People that are self-medicating to escape from whatever stress. To your point, Fritz, I always held that relationships are the same, whether they are personal or professional. You are interacting with another human being, and it's going to affect how you see yourself, how you see them, how you see the world, and whether it's your spouse or your boss, either way, you're going to think about it all day. You're going to worry over what they think. You're going to in some toxic cases, wonder what you can do not to set them off. It's all the same, and it all can be exhausting, and damaging, and detrimental to our health.

  David Sarnoff: One last question I'd love to throw at the panel, and somebody in the audience also asked for us to share that study, and we'll certainly email it with our summary, write up, and takeaways, but we talk about allyship and getting more voices in the conversation outside of people from marginalized communities. If you each could give us your thoughts and takeaways on how to increase allyship, how to get more white men involved in promoting inclusion and promoting mentorship and sponsorship within organization?

  David Robert: I can start the conversation here. So I think it goes back to this idea about empathy, right? So is there an effort to increase those people's understanding of what it's like to be at a disadvantage, to be in the minority, right? And not from a sympathetic perspective, don't feel bad, but to really do the hard work to really understand that experience, what it has meant to them, right? And I think if you can get at sort of an authentic level of empathy, and, wow, if that had happened to me, how horrible I would feel, and how humiliate I'd be, and the impact it would have on what's happening in my life.

  I think that creates a really compelling call to action, where it's like, "Wow, I didn't realize the extent that someone feels about being discriminated against or being in a minority." I never really had an opportunity to think about it, but now I'm getting a better picture of what that feels like, and therefore, hopefully that would tug at some heartstrings and say, "I got to do something, right? What's my role in helping to shape a different future for us." Right? So that's where I would start, is the empathy piece.

  Joy Stephens: I want to piggyback on that and talk about the word privilege, because so often, especially nowadays, people hear, "Privilege," and they unconsciously put white in front of it, and then there's this... So there's a whole lot type of privilege. There's Christian privilege. There's male privilege. There's straight privilege. There's able bodied privilege. Being right-handed is privilege, because there's left-handed people out here who absolutely are tired of getting their hand dirty signing documents, but beyond that, you have to understand that privilege does not have to be tied to money, and very often we hear there's a phrase, "You live a life of privilege," and it sounds like you have mansions, and trust funds, and summer homes, and vacations on the Riviera, et cetera. That is money, and that is only one of over two dozen types of privilege.

  When you understand that privilege can be something as simple as you never had to ride the bus, and then understanding how because you've never ridden the bus, you don't understand how sometimes the buses break down. They could be late. They could affect how fast you get to work. And so as you're looking at someone with your never having ridden the bus, and you're docking them pay, or telling them they got one more time before they're fired, and you don't know they ride the bus, and what their life is like, you have apathy for what their lived experience is, and apathy is the polar opposite of empathy.

  So if you can sit and listen to, "Why are you always late?" "Well, I take the bus, and this is the only one that runs every hour." And so thinking about those things, or something as simple as understanding that privilege can look like you've never had to, I don't know, have surgery or have anything to stop your mobility or accessibility. You have both use of your arms, use of both of your legs, and when the elevator is out, you don't think about how someone else in a wheelchair is going to get up upstairs. You just run upstairs, and then wonder why they're not in a meeting. Pay attention.

  David Robert: I love this. Yeah, I love the bus description, because years ago, when I was commuting, before I joined the Loebs, there's a group of folks who would take the bus from this rural community, into the city, right? And every year, the bus company wanted to cut the route, because it wasn't profitable, and these people would go, I mean, they would protest, and I thought to myself, "What are they doing? Who cares? It's a bus thing. Take your car into work." Right? Well, I found myself taking that bus to work, that same bus route to work, because I moved into the suburbs, and I didn't have to take the bus. I could have driven. I hate driving. I could have driven, but I just opted to take the bus as an option, right?

  And as I took that bus day in and day out, I started to make connections with people on the bus, and they had to take that bus, right? They had no car. They had no transportation. So every year when the bus company was threatening to cut the line, it was terrifying to them, because how am I going to get to work? How am I going to earn a living and put food on the table for my kids, right? So it was an eye opener for me, and that's when it turned from sympathy to empathy, and, wow, if I were in that position, I'd be out there protesting too, and making sure that bus line wasn't cut, and I found myself out there protesting with them to keep the bus line, right? So 100%.

  David Sarnoff: They got an ally. Fritz, thoughts on nurturing that?

  Fritz Galette: I'm going to utilize that example there, because life sometimes hands us experiences that puts us proximal to people who've had other experiences. And all of a sudden, we start to get an idea of the lived experiences of those people. So if we're trying to solve the bigger problem here, if I'm the white man who feels ostracized, we got to get the message to me to try and connect to and find reasons to connect to people I've not hung out with. We need opportunities to put one another together. You always see in heterogeneous communities, more inclusive, well, you often do, inclusive and understanding thoughts of one another, more tolerance and understanding of one another, but when people are segregated as they are so in life, and through lived experience so much, they often don't have any idea what other people are experiencing.

  Within organizations, we need to look for avenues for connection, even if it's social, connections on getting people on the same committees, and pulling people in who have been kind of quiet, but as we approach them, we need to build our culture, so that if we approach them, we don't aggress against them, no matter who they are, because if we have no relationship with somebody, and we ask them, "How are you," their answer is going to be based upon their relationship with us. And if we press that question, because I'm trying to be inclusive, and we repress it, we might aggress against them. We need to do these things strategically, slowly, empathetically, and over time.

  And this is why we call it building a rapport in psychology. If you're going to work with a client, and you're going to really help them, you have to build a relationship with them. All the things we're talking about don't really work that well, unless we've taken the time to build the relationship, but you can when you're really being strategic about it, you can build relationships relatively quickly over time, but don't stop, because if you stop, ain't nobody going to trust you again.

  David Sarnoff: Thanks so much, Fritz. I think that's a great note to end on. Again, thank you so much to our insightful panel, Lindsay Millan, our producer, thank you for all the hard work you put in to get this event off the ground and on the webinar, and thanks so much for the audience, staying with us for this afternoon, and please feel free to email us questions. If you go to Loebleadership.com, you will be able to contact us, and we will follow up with the summary and takeaway sheet. Thank you again so much.