Podcast appearances and mentions of aubrey blanche

In this episode of the Shortlist, we'll be examining the relationship between Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. We'll discuss whether equity should in fact trump everything else if you want to build a truly fair and inclusive workplace. Our guest today to help us dig into this topic is Aubrey Blanche who is the Founder & CEO of The Mathpath and Senior Director of People Operations & Strategic Programs at Culture Amp. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/socialtalent/message

Aubrey Blanche: Always ask how it could be more equitable. This is really core to the practice in what I teach. My theory of change is called equitable design, and it's really based in these beliefs that every decision, every action, or for every event, experience, program, system, product can either create greater or less equity. And I believe that the most powerful thing each of us can do is do the next slightly more right thing.   Oscar Trimboli: Deep listening, impact beyond words. Good day. I'm Oscar Trimboli and this is the Apple award-winning podcast, Deep Listening, designed to move you from a distracted listener to a deep and impactful leader. Did you know you spend 55% of your day listening, yet only 2% of people have ever been taught how? In each episode we explore the five levels of listening. Communication is 50% speaking and 50% listening. Yet, as a leader, you are taught only the importance of communication from the perspective of how to speak. It's critical you start to build some muscles for the next phase in how to listen. The cost of not listening, it's confusion, it's conflict, it's projects running over schedule. It's lost customers, it's great employees that leave before they want to. When you implement the strategies, the tips and tactics that you'll hear, you'll get four hours a week back in your schedule. I wonder what you could do with an extra four hours or a week. Aubrey Blanche is a math nerd and an empath who helps organizations build equitable processes, products and experiences. Her work combines an empathetic and intersectional approach with social scientific methods to create meaningful and sustainable change From fair talent processes and bias resistant product design to equitable algorithmic design and communication strategy. She helps organizations to think holistically about evolving to meet the needs of a rapidly diversifying and globalizing world. Aubrey and I explore listening for differences, practical steps you can implement in your organization to listen for the data of performance and equity while being conscious of change over time. That's the performance implication of listening for velocity. Aubrey changed my mind about my choice of where to spend my time in our deep listening quest and the consequences of choosing who and where I place my attention. Let's listen to Aubrey. What's the cost of not listening?   Aubrey Blanche: In the worst case scenarios, it's that you do actual harm to another person. In the work that I do, I'm so often talking to people, working with people, trying to support people who are very different from me. If I'm not able to listen deeply, there is a big chance that I contribute to them still not feeling heard. I work with marginalized people who are often unheard in the world, and so I can do harm by exacerbating that. Or if I'm not listening deeply, I can develop a solution that doesn't actually meet the need that's being articulated and could actually be harmful in some way. Listening is the first thing that we do when we want to support other people, when you scale it out, really, it's how we build a better world when we listen and we build a worse world when we don't.   Oscar Trimboli: Jennifer, a retired primary school teacher is a stay at home mom and her son, Christopher at the age of three, comes home from school. Jennifer says to Christopher, "What did you learn at school today, honey?" He said, "Mommy, mommy, I'm so excited. I learned the three is half of eight." Now Jennifer's a little confused. And as a former primary school teacher says, "Could you say that again, honey?" And he said, "Yeah, mommy, I learned that three is half of eight." Well, Jennifer puts her hands in her face and kind of shakes her head and she goes to the cupboard and she gets eight M&Ms out of the cupboard and lines them up on the kitchen table. She puts four M&M soldiers in one line and four M&M soldiers in another. She picks Christopher up and puts him on the kitchen table and says, "Honey, how many M&M soldiers in this row?" And he goes, "One, two, three, four, Mommy." And she goes, "How many on the other side?" He goes, "Mum, I don't need to count, there's four. They're all facing each other." And she says, "You see, honey, three is not half of eight, four is half of eight." With that, Christopher jumped off the table, went and grabbed a piece of paper, drew the figure eight, altered it in half, tore it in half vertically and showed it to his mum and said, "Mommy, see three is half of eight." In that moment in time, Jennifer realized that her son was neuro-diverse, non-neuro-typical. I'm curious, Aubrey, as you hear that story and you are in workplaces where people are obsessed with telling everybody else that four is half of eight and they're wrong because of their culture, their background, their professional experience, what do you take from the story?   Aubrey Blanche: I love that story. I think in math a lot of times, and I was like, "Oh, she's thinking in arithmetic and he's thinking in geometry almost, right? And shapes." In so many organizations, there's this homogenization that happens and I come from the tech industry where innovation is the thing, and often when you start from the premise that you don't know anything, you're actually able to better see that there's an assumption that like, "Oh, you're speaking in arithmetics, that four is half of eight," but Christopher didn't say that. He didn't say how. And so I see it as there was an assumption that led to a misunderstanding or I guess to put it in your language, an assumption that led to an inability to hear, an inability to listen. When I approach something like that, because I try, and I say try because I am certainly imperfect and fail at this at times, but if I hear something that's surprising or that doesn't align with my experience or what I know, the first thing I try to say is, "Can you tell me more about that?" Because what I've found is when I just ask someone for more but don't put constraints on what more means, they will take me down the path that they came from and it's usually not one I would've found or walked on my own. And often when you open it up for someone to continue sharing with you, you get that context. And so you have that realization that in the situation is, "Oh three is half of eight. How amazing." And I think that's true of neuro-diverse people in general, but maybe a spicy idea. I'm starting to believe that there's no such thing as neuro-diversity. Not that there aren't people with different ways of thinking, but it seems like every day there's someone new that I meet that identifies as neuro-diverse to the point where I'm like, "I think we might all just be different, and we might have been living in this collected delusion that there was something called neuro-typically in the first place." Speaking as someone who is neuro-diverse herself, I'm bipolar type one. Yeah, I really believe that we should start with the assumption that other people have lived and walked different paths and have entirely different ways of thinking and perceiving than we do. And if that is the first and only assumption that we make, I think we hear better, we listen better, but we also learn more and grow more as people.   Oscar Trimboli: One of the phrases I loved hearing from another conversation you had is "diversify your inputs". For me, the way I make that practical is on the weekend when I'm gardening and mowing the lawn, I am listening to podcasts from presenters that I absolutely fiercely disagree with. And for me it's a really humbling process that I've been doing for seven years now to make sure that I'm diversifying my inputs. What advice would you give for leaders out there to diversify their inputs in the workplace and outside so they can start to build muscles where they're listening not just for similarities, four is half of eight, but also to listen for difference where three is half of eight and zero is half of eight as well?   Aubrey Blanche: I think for me in my line of work, this might not be surprising, but I would start because difference can mean a lot of things. Some of the most impactful and important listening that we do is across lines of difference that have to do with privilege. When I think about I'm someone who has a big combination of privileged and marginalized identities, and I have absolutely learned the most when I have thought. As an example, I grew up in a middle, upper middle class household. And so for me, listening across that line of privilege, listening to someone who grew up poor or working class, I have learned more about the world and about humanity from thoughtfully and intentionally creating space in my listening diet for those types of perspectives. The advice that I would give to folks if you're non-disabled, listen to disabled experiences. If you're a man, listen to the experiences of people from marginalized genders. If you're a white listen to people of color. I am a very funny mix of identities. I'm white assumed, but I'm Latina and mixed race, but so I have this weird experience of both being a white person and being a non-white person in the American context. I was in a program in graduate school, so I pursued a PhD that I didn't finish, and I was putting on a program called Enhancing Diversity and Graduate Education, and it was for Black and Latinx students in the social sciences, and I was very intimidated to be in this room. You have to understand the people I was with were just so intellectually impressive. I did not feel like I had much to say in that room, but it was in that room listening to the experiences of the Black students in particular who experience a level of racism that I will never personally understand, that I began to actually understand racism as a system and as a social concept rather than as an individual problem because... So growing up for me, I had been teased by kids at school who would slam my locker and tell me, "Oh, you're the Mexican and that's why we do this." But I always thought that was an Aubrey problem. And listening to these incredibly brilliant students talk about the racism that they were facing on a daily basis, who I knew didn't deserve it because no one would deserve to be treated the way that they were describing, I not only learned to have more empathy and understanding for the ways that I could show up as an ally of people from that experience, but I actually more deeply understood my own life experience as well. And it was through that I began to articulate the ways that I belonged in my community and the ways that I felt upon in my community. If I had been talking in that whole meeting, I never would've heard those things that are now in the work I do. Probably some of the most fundamental things I've ever learned in terms of how they animate my work and my theory of change. I was a little late to my racial consciousness, but it came from listening to people who are more marginalized than me and it opened up my eyes to the way the world truly is, which personally inspired me to say, "Well, if it is this way, they built it this way. We can build it different if we make different choices."   Oscar Trimboli: As the Mathpath, managers in workplaces can intersect with volumes of data around performance of their organization, of their people, the intersection of those two, how does a manager listen to the data and turn it into insights and the information and action? How do they prioritize this tsumani of information that they have at their fingertips today so that they can make progress on listening to difference in a way that's actionable?   Aubrey Blanche: They call me the Mathpath, which is a bit of a Mathpath, which is a bit of a portmanteau of math nerd and empath, and it was something that someone actually coined for me after listening to me for quite a while and specifically listening to me articulate this challenge I was having where I didn't know how to sum up my approach to doing my work. So it's very much based in academic science and mathematics and it's very analytical and rigorous in that way, but also very much grounded in this belief in the dignity and the value of individual people's stories. I want to use quantitative information but not get lost in it because I am a big believer that is N=1 stories are just as important and powerful and someone's like, "Oh, you're a Mathpath." My brain exploded because I said, "Oh, that's what I've been trying to say." When I think about, or the managers that I'm coaching is like, "How do managers take a little bit of that energy and build it into what their version of that looks like?" I always say, "Look at quantitative data as suggestions that show you where to look for, or you might say, show you where to listen." One of the challenges that pops up in equity work all the time is you're dealing with what we call small n-sized data. So the fact is we're dealing with marginalized people who are often underrepresented. And so we don't always get the statistical power that we want to get this certainty that we crave out of data. What I always coach managers and my clients is that even if the data isn't statistically significant, it's directional and it tells you where to look deeper. I always encourage managers to look at women of colors' experience first because if there's some kind of dysfunction happening in your organization, it's going to impact them first. They're the canaries in the coalmine. If something isn't working for Black women in your organization, it's objectively a problem that it's impacting them the worst. And so prioritize their experiences and their quality of experience and creating space for their stories. And that's a way that you can solve these broader problems by prioritizing that experience. And it's a little bit backwards from the order of operations that people usually do, but I can tell you that it works. 2020, when I started at CultureAmp, I came in and I said, "We're going to focus on Black women." And the response was, "Well, why don't we focus on women? It's a much bigger category." And I said, "I hear you and no. And the reason we're going to focus on Black women is because their experiences will tell us the actual quality of experience at the organization, and if we improve their experiences, everyone else's experience will improve as well. But if we don't focus on them, they will be left behind and we won't be keeping the commitments that we're making to equity." And what we've seen, it's been, at CultureAmp is over the last two and a half years, we've seen an increase in overall gender representation at the company to the point where the majority of our VPs and executives are now women, including some women of color and the other side of the coin, it shows you where to listen, how do you listen? And I think there's a couple of skills that create the space that allow people to feel safe enough to give stories for you to listen to because especially if you're in a position of power or you're coming from an identity that's majoritarian, there's not a lot of reason that someone might trust you or feel safe enough with you to tell you their story. The first thing that you do is you state your intention. So when I'm in a one-on-one conversation with someone and I perceive where I know that they're across that line of marginalization for me. I say, "Hey, I want you to know it's really important to me that I create a safe environment for you to be open and honest with me, but I don't expect you to trust me. I expect that I have to earn that trust, but I want you to know that that's my goal." The second piece is articulate for your ignorance. So I always say, "I don't know your experience and I don't want to presume to, but I'm grateful to you for sharing it with me so that you could help me with some of my blind spots if you are willing." And I think that those two things build a lot of safety that may have really brought me a level of storytelling and authentic experience that I just never would've been blessed to be able to hear otherwise.   Oscar Trimboli: We contrast the absolute values in these reports, these data sets, that values are displayed at a point in time, and one of the things that you've pointed out is the value of relativity, and it... some of the relativities that my clients aren't conscious of, I'll sit in meetings which are, I'll use their language, I call them the pre-calibration meetings. These are meetings designed to allocate a fixed pool of compensation in a defined way to a group of people, and they have a group of heuristics to allocate bonuses. And often I'll ask them a series of questions about the pace of change over time rather than the point in time in which they're making a decision. Some people refer to this as the velocity of progress of an individual. Aubrey, what I'm curious about is what advice do you give leaders when they look at the data over time rather than just at a point in time?   Aubrey Blanche: Oh, so good. And you said one of my favorite words, which is velocity, gets me thinking in physics and the dynamism of the systems. I agree with you that having that longitudinal data or that data over time is just more valuable. I hear in those pre-calibration meetings having been worked with or looked at dozens of organizations, is it's always like, "What's the potential of this person?" So that's kind of the natural question, and that's really what you're rewarding. It's this future belief. And what the data would tell us is that past performance is the single greatest predictor of future performance. But one thing, the data often hides, longitudinal data gives you a clearer picture of past performance because one data point doesn't tell you a lot. A very specific example of this with CultureAmp is that in the of summer 2020, a lot of our Black employees were genuinely struggling, as you can imagine, just a horrific time. Asking them to get on a call and sell software or process expense reports was probably not their highest priority. And if we had taken a snapshot of many of their "performance" at that time, it would not have reflected their full body of work. It would've reflected the severe community trauma that they were being impacted by. And so for us, our way of, we think of it as like correcting the data, was that we actually released updated performance standards so that employees that were impacted by significant community trauma, certainly meaning protests and movement for racial justice of COVID-19, our "performance standards" were about articulating your needs to your manager, setting appropriate boundaries, seeking support to deal with that, including and up to taking additional time off. We changed the way the data was measured and collected to make sure that it reflected what we believed was performance in those moments, but we also were able to use previous performance reviews as a way to inform what's the average performance of this person, knowing that there's some contextual things happening in this point in time that might not be representative of their long term trajectory The other thing, I think he asked a great question about what the data hides, and the thing that data often doesn't tell us is the distance traveled. I'm adopted. I was born into a family that had many challenges, so low income, substance abuse disorder, mental health challenges, a lack of money. And I was adopted by a family that didn't have those challenges, but I have dear people in my life who were born into similar situations and didn't have random luck of... basically the randomized controlled experiment of getting with family And so that's distance traveled. The person I'm thinking of is probably equally as successful as I am in terms of career on paper. The data wouldn't show you that they have probably worked significantly harder than I have to get there because I got a bunch of help that I'm grateful for, but I didn't necessarily earn. And so I think that's one thing that we always need to be considering when they're reading this data is, do we know this person well enough to add our context of their distance traveled to achieve what they're achieving? And we can know sociology, we can know history to make some educated guesses. Nothing is a substitute for knowing a person and being able to get to know their distance traveled. That to me speaks to the velocity piece, which is someone who was born in the same circumstance as me and were standing at the same point now, the fact is they have greater velocity than I do and nothing against me, but I would bet on them over me if I were a betting lady.   Oscar Trimboli: CultureAmp's on a massive quest to change workplaces for the better. What advice would you provide to us in the deep listening community in our quest to impact a hundred million deep listeners in the workplace?   Aubrey Blanche: Always ask how it could be more equitable. This is really core to the practice in what I teach. My theory of change is called Equitable Design, and it's really based in this belief that every decision, every action, therefore every event, experience, program, system, product can either create greater or less equity. And I believe that the most powerful thing each of us can do is do the next slightly more right thing. I get a lot of requests for career coaching conversations with people junior in their career, and a lot of these requests come from people in my network whose kids are interested in HR or tech. And I like to say yes to them because I love the opportunity to mentor and support the next generation in how they're coming up, it's so important. But I have a rule. I always ask for the email intro and then I will write back and I will say, "I am so excited to get to meet you and support you on your career journey. I will be happy to schedule once you identify a classmate or colleague of yours who doesn't have the privilege of having a connected parent who I can also provide career mentorship to." And so I'm not saying no to that person, but I'm modeling to them and I'm pointing out that the reason they have access to me is because of privilege and I'm asking them to share that privilege. And selfishly, it means that I get to meet more incredibly interesting, brilliant, talented people who maybe I can offer a bit of advice to. I have found the number of people who have written back to me in even the parents who have said, "Oh my gosh, this is so interesting. I'm going to do this now." And you think of how many people get a little more advice and a little more help than they wouldn't have otherwise. It doesn't always have to be this enormous thing, but if each of us could do something that's just a titch more equitable or titch more fair than it was before, I think that this community with the reach that they have would change the entire world.   Oscar Trimboli: What's the question I should have asked?   Aubrey Blanche: What's the worst thing that you've done when you didn't listen properly?   Oscar Trimboli: And?   Aubrey Blanche: Mm-hmm. I created a workplace in which someone felt there was no one to advocate for them. And it was a situation in which I had a new coworker and they told me about an experience. They had been traveling to visit other team members, and the team member had said something super derogatory to them. And it was one of those things where the team member was not being intentionally malicious, but it was absolutely not okay what they had said. And the first thing out of my mouth was, "I'm sure they didn't mean it that way." And I'm horrified. I'm so embarrassed by the way that I behaved because what I did was I minimized her feeling. I didn't create space for the harm and the sadness and the pain that she experienced in that moment, and she ended up leaving the team less than a year later. I look back and I think if I had actually heard, if I had taken the time to really hear her experience, I would've responded differently. I probably would've acted differently. And I don't know if that would've been a different outcome for her. I can't guarantee that, but I think I can guarantee that her experience would've been better than the one that I created in that moment.   Oscar Trimboli: Aubrey changed my mind about how to listen to and for difference whilst reinforcing the importance of listening for the unsaid. When I said, "What's the question I should have asked?" I noticed a substantial change in Aubrey's tone and her pacing while explaining how the Mathpath learned so much from saying, "I'm sure they didn't mean it that way." Aubrey had the courage to tell this story, and it got me thinking, "How many times have I thought it without saying it, I'm sure they didn't mean it." It's made me more conscious in conversations now, it's one of the elements of the dramatic listening villain. You can take the quiz at www.listeningquiz.com to discover which one is your primary listening barrier. When you move your listening orientation exclusively from attempting to make sense of what they say and adjusting it slightly to an orientation where as a listener you have the curiosity to explore, "How can I, as the listener, help the speaker make sense of what they think, mean, and ultimately where they want to explore?" When you become conscious that the listener helps the speaker change the way they express their thoughts, you'll start to have an impact beyond words. Aubrey was generous enough to share a reflection about what changed during our conversation, and Aubrey will take to her next conversation. She'll explain this at the very end of the episode. I 'm Oscar Trimboli and along with the Deep Listening ambassadors, we're on a quest to create a hundred million deep listeners in the workplace, and you have given us the greatest gift of all. You've listened to us. Thanks for listening. I'm curious what you've noticed about my listening.   Aubrey Blanche: I appreciate it, and I want to take this with me, the beautiful pauses that you put in the conversation. To me it looked like digestion of thoughts and ideas, and so I want to take that with me. It feels like a gift.

Check out this week's YNG BLK HR episode featuring Aubrey Blanche, Director of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp. We'll discuss how proximity to whiteness is a nuanced topic inclusive of colorism, racism, justice, self identity and more. Don't miss out! #YNGBLKHR #WeAreHR #ABA #AlwaysBeApplying #Inclusion #Allyship #Belonging #colorism #racism #justice --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/yngblkhr/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/yngblkhr/support

In this Talent Talks episode, we spoke with Aubrey Blanche, Senior Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp and Founder of The Mathpath. She dives deep into some of common challenges faced by organisations in their approach to diversity, equity & inclusion. 

With the changing employee-employer relationship, it has become an imperative for the employers to track keep a track of the latest priorities of the job seekers and employees. As we transitioned into the remote working mode and are bouncing back to the office floors, have the behaviour of the workforce towards the LGBT+ employees changed for good or bad? In this episode, Aubrey Blanche, Senior Director of Equitable Design, Product & People answered the questions.

In this episode, Michel interviews Aubrey Blanche. Aubrey is The Mathpath (Math Nerd + Empath), Senior Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp, and a startup investor and advisor. During this chat, she shares her experiences with us about evolving our process and being inclusive. She's a Latina, Queer, and Bipolar 1 and wants you to know that: You matter. Books recommended on the Episode: The Wake Up by Michelle MiJung Kim All Are Welcome by Cynthia Owyoung How To Talk To Your Boss About Race by Y-Vonne Hutchinson Inclusion Revolution by Daisy Auger-Dominguez --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/latinxswhodesign/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/latinxswhodesign/support

Zach sits back down with Aubrey Blanche, Senior Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp, to discuss data being the battleground for diversity work and more. Check out the links in the show notes, particularly Culture Amp's 2022 Workplace DEI report - it's must-read material! Want to know more about our LinkedIn Learning courses? Check them out! https://bit.ly/3k4havy Read Culture Amp's 2022 Workplace DEI Report. https://bit.ly/3JcwSzP You can connect with Aubrey on LinkedIn and Twitter. https://bit.ly/2Rqvtwj https://bit.ly/2ZyUha7 Visit Culture Amp's website. https://bit.ly/3E0qNDy Check out Living Corporate's merch! https://bit.ly/375rFbY Interested in supporting Living Corporate? Check out our Support page. https://bit.ly/3egO3Dk

I'm excited to share Episode 3 of Ask RPZ, with my friend Aubrey Blanche. This this episode we tackle some big, philosophical questions like: “What's a moment from your life of bridging understanding across differences?”  “What's a powerful moment of recognizing universal truth? We also get down to brass tax with: “What's the worst business decision you've ever made?” (Any decision made hastily and out of anger. ) And, very important: “What's your favorite flavor of ice cream.” (Mint! And I will die on this hill.)  If you enjoyed this episode, check out the first two episodes of Ask RPZ on my YouTube, and my recent longford interview with Aubrey Blanche here.

HR Happy Hour Episode 520 - Understanding the DEI Landscape featuring Culture Amp Hosts: Trish McFarlane, Steve Boese Guest: Aubrey Blanche, MathPath and Senior Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp This week, we spoke with Aubrey Blanche from Culture Amp about their latest report on Workplace Diversity, Equity, and Inlcusion. - The diverse workforce of the future, and how it can be supported - Importance of investing in DEI and how this helps the effectiveness of the organization - Initiatives that are most likely to support diveristy, equity, and inclusion - Why collecting data and auditing your performance matters - How connecting with external consultants is correlated with more equitabe and inclusive outcomes Thank you Aubrey, for joining the show today!  Remember to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts.

Engati is the world's leading multilingual Digital CX platform. It is a one-stop platform for powerful customer engagements. With our intelligent bots, we help you create the smoothest of customer experiences, with minimal coding. And now, we're even helping you answer your customers' most complicated questions in real-time with Engati Live Chat. Website: https://www.engati.com/ Blogs: https://engati.com/blog Check out our CX Library- CX Community page: https://www.engati.com/cx-community YouTube Interview series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL05g56Qg9-goNEUmZlGGPHWfVjQRPpwr4 SoundCloud Interview series: https://soundcloud.com/user-670584022/tracks Spotify Interview series: https://open.spotify.com/show/3G0uQwPnQib22emRi9VhUg Aubrey Blanch, Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp talks about if governments should be doing more to support equality, diversity, and inclusion within the workplace concerning legislation. She highlights what employees can do to tackle inequality and put pressure on their company to become more diverse and inclusive   Follow us on- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/getengati LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/engati-cx Twitter: https://twitter.com/getengati Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getengati/ Talk to us: contact@engati.com #diversity #inclusion #workspace #diversityandinclusioninworkspace 

Zach sits down with Aubrey Blanche, Senior Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp, to talk about data, equity, and systems. Want to know more about our LinkedIn Learning courses? Check them out! https://bit.ly/3k4havy You can connect with Aubrey on LinkedIn and Twitter. https://bit.ly/2Rqvtwj https://bit.ly/2ZyUha7 Visit Culture Amp's website. https://bit.ly/3E0qNDy Check out Living Corporate's merch! https://bit.ly/375rFbY Interested in supporting Living Corporate? Check out our Support page. https://bit.ly/3egO3Dk

Today's guest is Aubrey Blanche, who is both the Director of Equitable Design for People and Product at Culture Amp and the CEO of Mathpath. Aubrey is laser-focused on equitable design, and if you have any interest at all in diversity, equity, and inclusion you should follow her on Twitter.  In today's conversation, Aubrey dives deep into the nuances of what it means to build organizations that strive to be more equitable. This is something that needs to be held right at the heart of every organization. Aubrey emphasizes that there is no way to achieve equitable design. Instead, each of us can focus on what is the next best step that we can take. I hope you enjoy the powerful insights Aubrey shares in this conversation, and let us know what your next best step is.

In the latest #AskAVC episode, we talk about understanding and the importance of diversity, inclusion, and equity in startups. I am joined by Aubrey Blanche, Director of Equitable Design at Culture Amp, The Mathpath (Math Nerd + Empath), and a startup investor and advisor. Aubrey is a recognized thought leader when it comes to building more equitable businesses - and our conversation is full of actionable insights that any startup founder can utilize right away. Why using the word "diversity" might be counter-effective? Why you as a startup founder should care about equity (and no, we are not talking about ownership)? How to go about creating an inclusive culture at your company? In the episode, we give answers to these questions - and much more. If you are ready to level up your understanding of diversity, inclusion, and equity, and learn how you can apply it in your business today - tune in! Make sure to also: - Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RyanFloyd) for a lot more content on building SaaS B2B startups, as well as venture capital and entrepreneurship in general - Subscribe to my blog at https://ryanfloyd.org/, where I talk about why I invest in certain companies and broader tech industry issues - Check out my #AskAVC YouTube channel this podcast is based on About Ryan Floyd Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures where he invests in and works with, early-stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure-related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for Techcrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and is a regular contributor to The UK Newspaper. He's the host of the recently launched #AskAVC YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as how to pitch to an investor and how to combat sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally he finds time for surfing! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc/message

In this episode, we talk about what makes ethical design in your product and your company with Sarah Fossheim, creator of the Ethical Design Guide, and Aubrey Blanche, director of equitable design at Culture Amp. Show Notes Scout APM (DevDiscuss) (sponsor) Cockroach Labs (DevDiscuss) (sponsor) Ethical Design Guide Culture Amp Want to Read Rate this book 1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars Open Preview Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

Aubrey Blanche is an absolutely incredible human being. Aubrey joins me today to talk about her journey in the DEI space and why she is so passionate about the work she does. Aubrey is the Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp and I am a huge fan of her and this organization. In this episode you will learn: What equity in the workplace means to Aubrey Aubrey's mental health story Why building a culture of belonging in the workplace matters What it means to bring your whole self Vs your authentic self to work Aubrey's resources The Calm App The Inner Work of Racial Justice - By Rhonda Magee and Jon Kabat-Zinn This Bridge Called My Back - By Cherrie Moraga Chicana Feminism books Also, listen out for our very open conversation about fat-shaming in the workplace. Be sure to follow Aubrey on LinkedIn.

In today's episode of the As Told by Nomads Podcast, join Aubrey Blanche and me as we talk about racialization, equitable leadership, living outside the binary, and more. As someone who opted out from being often white assumed, Aubrey uses her story to teach people about race and privilege. She also talks about the effects of tragedy olympics in this episode and how the game of 'who's pain is worse?' squanders the opportunity for anyone involved to champion empathy. For Aubrey, it's not saying that we shouldn't engage in critique, but we should do so on the grounds of compassion and not on violence and argument. Find out more about how you can live outside of the binary in this episode as you tune in to Aubrey Blanche!Everyone Must Find Their Work & Do It!For Aubrey, right now, there's so much work to do on our idea that the way we do things is the only way. She thinks that our work is such a function of the privileges we hold that we spend a lot of time actively arguing with each other about what the best way forward is. This type of energy isn't the type that fights the needed fight. Aubrey likes to go back to a quote by Audre Lorde that says: "each of us must find our work and do it." Critique and constantly questioning concepts and things in place should definitely live on. But for Aubrey, the motivation behind and the goal after it needs to be precise. If it's to critique for the sake of argument, then that's not it. She believes that critique must be done on the grounds of compassion for each other in a way that preserves the relationships we have. And that should come with respect. We need to critique, but we don't need to critique with violence against the people who are walking the path with us—because that's a distraction. That's what white supremacy culture wants us to do—fight each other so that we can't fight it. And that's the win they should never get.Outline of the episode:[02:11] Promote representation, uniqueness, and other identities; lest we…[05:02] By being seen, I help others be seen. [10:04] On going through a process of racialization.[17:39] An experiment that leads to a full-time position that tackled organizational biases.[22:09] The level of secondary trauma typical for leadership roles and roles where it's your job to care.[26:17] Tragedy Olympics is a problem![30:05] The difference between a bullsh***er and a liar.[35:20] What is equitable leadership?[40:11] Allow your privilege to make an impact with the P.A.A. Model.[43:04] "Remember, somebody has to catch the football of our ideas and actions…." Resources:Website: https://aubreyblanche.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adblanche/Twitter: https://twitter.com/adblanche/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adblanche/Subscribe to the U.Y.D. Collective: https://tayorockson.podia.com/uydcollectiveStephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper's beautiful conversation about grief:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB46h1koicQConnect with Tayo Rockson and the As Told By Nomads Podcast on:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tayorockson Podcast:

Melinda Briana Epler, Founder & CEO of Change Catalyst, and Aubrey Blanche, Director of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp, talk about why it's critical to think beyond diversity and representation. With a shift to equitable design, we build equity, right the power dynamics, and create greater access and support for people in our workplaces and communities who are most marginalized. The conversation covers how to build our capacity to create and lead this change. About Aubrey Aubrey Blanche is The Mathpath (Math Nerd + Empath), Director of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp, and a startup investor, and advisor. She is the inventor of the balanced teams approach and a culture of belonging, and the Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment in the Atlassian Team Playbook. She open sources these methods and releases thought leadership and tools to create positive change on her website.Find Leading With Empathy & Allyship useful? Subscribe to our podcast and like this episode! For more about Change Catalyst, and to join us for a live recording, visit https://changecatalyst.co/allyshipseries There, you'll also find educational resources and highlights from this episode.Connect On SocialYouTube: youtube.com/c/changecatalystTwitter: twitter.com/changecatalystsFacebook: facebook.com/changecatalystsInstagram: instagram.com/techinclusionLinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/changecatalystsProduction TeamCreator & Host: Melinda Briana Epler Producer: Juliette Roy Project Manager: Emilie MaasFinance & Operations: Renzo Santos Director of Marketing: Ariyah April[Image description: Leading With Empathy & Allyship promo with the Change Catalyst logo and photos of host Melinda Briana Epler, a White woman with red hair and glasses, and Aubrey Blanche, a Latina with pink hair, glasses, and yellow shirt.]Support the show (http://patreon.com/changecatalysts)

In this episode, Damon speaks with Aubrey Blanche, Director of Equitable Impact & Design at Culture Amp. Damon and Aubrey discuss building anti-racist organizations, the work of Professor Ibram X. Kendi & her first memories of what equality and inclusion meant as a young child. You’ll also hear some special reveals about the content and speakers for Culture First as well as the announcement of our MCs for our North America event. Register for Culture First 2021 here: https://culturefirstglobal.cultureamp.com/?utm_source=cfpodcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=C%3A21q2cfg%7CD%3A2021_03_31%7C Listen to the other episodes mentioned in the episode here: www.culturefirstpodcast.com Read more about Culture Amp's Anti-Racism work here: https://www.cultureamp.com/antiracism/

Aubrey Blanche educates us on "diversity theater", how inspiration can be a creator of will, and what happens when you combine empathy and science. 

At the end of this conversation, you'll know why I was excited to speak to Operations Director, Kay Epps, after Michael Goldberg kindly made the introduction.  Kay talks about 'loving the bricks', working in a white male-dominated industry, and the resilience it took to secure the career she loves - a great lesson for today's new grads! Plus why it's important to have a coach & support network. We went into depth about the impact of the social justice events of 2020 & why this time it is creating the difficult conversations & investment that is needed in DEI. And belonging! She recommended Motivation by Daniel Pink and praised Atlassian for 'getting' motivation and the impact of Aubrey Blanche. She shared what it was like to receive an apology from her Executive, and why he was initially inactive; totally inspiring! We also chatted about shared responsibility and that we must get comfortable with uncomfortable conversations. And as for Kay's tips for hiring leaders & recruiters, grab a pen! ✍

At the end of this conversation, you'll know why I was excited to speak to Operations Director, Kay Epps, after Michael Goldberg kindly made the introduction.  Kay talks about 'loving the bricks', working in a white male-dominated industry, and the resilience it took to secure the career she loves - a great lesson for today's new grads! Plus why it's important to have a coach & support network. We went into depth about the impact of the social justice events of 2020 & why this time it is creating the difficult conversations & investment that is needed in DEI. And belonging! She recommended Motivation by Daniel Pink and praised Atlassian for 'getting' motivation and the impact of Aubrey Blanche. She shared what it was like to receive an apology from her Executive, and why he was initially inactive; totally inspiring! We also chatted about shared responsibility and that we must get comfortable with uncomfortable conversations. And as for Kay's tips for hiring leaders & recruiters, grab a pen! ✍

“Our brains only work best when we're cared for all around” - Aubrey Blanche   Failed it! Fam, we're excited to introduce to you Aubrey Blanche. More love, less hate, more universal connection. We all want to live in a world that Aubrey can help cultivate. Get ready to hear some important bits of information in this inspirational episode! In today's episode, Aubrey talks to us about: DEI & the “cookie metaphor” (you have to listen in to this one!) How the limits of America's obsession with productivity is the anti-caring for the human organism DEI work: take rest, don't quit   Links from show discussions: Stephen Colbert & Anderson Cooper Interview - Grief Check out improve it!'s Zoombie Toolkit Launching 3/29 for 2 weeks – stay tuned on learntoimproveit.com The Memo by Minda Harts book Aubrey's 2019 Best Reads Diversity Rankings Article Aubrey's Website URL Twitter: http://twitter.com/adblanche Medium: http://medium.com/@adblanche Linkedin: http://us.linkedin.com/in/adblanche   About the Guest: Aubrey Blanche is The Mathpath (Math Nerd + Empath), Director of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp, and a startup investor, and advisor. She questions, reimagines, and redesigns the systems that surround us to ensure that all people access equitable opportunities. Her expertise covers talent programs and accessible product development to event design and communications. She is the inventor of the balanced teams approach and a culture of belonging, and the Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment in the Atlassian Team Playbook. She open sources these methods and releases thought leadership and tools to create positive change at aubreyblanche.com.   About the Host: Erin Diehl is the founder and Chief “Yes, And” officer of improve it! and host of the failed it! Podcast. She's a performer, facilitator and professional risk-taker who lives by the mantra, “get comfortable with the uncomfortable.” Through a series of unrelated dares, Erin has created improve it!, a unique professional development company that pushes others to laugh, learn and grow. Her work with clients such as United Airlines, PepsiCo, Groupon, Deloitte, Motorola, Walgreens, and The Obama Foundation earned her the 2014 Chicago RedEye Big Idea Award and has nominated her for the 2015-2019 Chicago Innovations Award. This graduate from Clemson University is a former experiential marketing and recruiting professional as well as a veteran improviser from the top improvisational training programs in Chicago, including The Second City, i.O. Theater, and The Annoyance Theatre. When she is not playing pretend or facilitating, she enjoys running and beach dates with her husband and son, and their eight pound toy poodle, BIGG Diehl. You can follow the failed it! podcast on Instagram @learntoimproveit and facebook, and you can follow Erin personally on Instagram @keepinitrealdiehl here. You can also check out improve it! and how we can help your organization at www.learntoimproveit.com. We can't wait to connect with you online!  

In recognition of International Women's Day, and because it's a really important topic, this is a very special episode. The two straight, white, cisgender male co-hosts of this podcast sat this episode out, while Moe took over the mic for an in-depth discussion with Alison Vorsatz from Fairygodboss and Aubrey Blanche from Atlassian about diversity (a term they both try to avoid) in the workplace. If this episode doesn't change your perspective and compel you to action, you are almost certainly not a human being. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page. This episode originally aired on March 7, 2019.

Don't believe all the crap rules they tell you. Most of it is made up. Ask for whatever you want. My job title is "Head of Equitable Design" which was NOT the job that they were hiring for. I have a history of literally making up my own job. That's the thing about tech. It calls itself very innovative, but it's actually a very risk-averse industry. And so one of the lessons that I've learned is that there is a lot of facades about what is possible, and what you are told is possible. But if you can punch through that, hopefully non-violently, and just say, "Here's what I want!" I have found more often than not that you'll bring folks to you that want to give you that thing & share that vision. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-inventive-journey/message

Aubrey Blanche, Director of Equitable Design and Impact at Culture Amp, shares powerful tools and information to facilitate equity in your organization. Together, we discuss: - Why the word diversity doesn't always drive inclusion - Equitable design and how to make diversity work at work - The pillars of the Culture Amp anti-racism platform Follow Aubrey at https://www.linkedin.com/in/adblanche/ and the Culture Amp anti-racism pillars at https://www.cultureamp.com/antiracism/.

In this episode, I sit down with my friend Aubrey Blanche, Culture Amp's Director of Equitable Design & Impact. Aubrey has been someone I look up to as a tireless champion of inclusive and equitable practices. In this episode, we discuss: - How HR can become better antiracism advocates - Culture Amp's plans to become an anti-racist company - How she's teaching her parents about equity and racism - Breaking down terms and definitions in her work - Who inspires her work - Much more

In this episode, I sit down with my friend Aubrey Blanche, Culture Amp’s Director of Equitable Design & Impact. Aubrey has been someone I look up to as a tireless champion of inclusive and equitable practices. In this episode, we discuss: - How HR can become better antiracism advocates - Culture Amp’s plans to become an anti-racist company - How she’s teaching her parents about equity and racism - Breaking down terms and definitions in her work - Who inspires her work - Much more

Georgie chats with Culture Amp's Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact Aubrey Blanche (aka the Mathpath) about how we can address bias in the recruiting process.  New episodes of Drive will be in your feed every Wednesday. Subscribe now in your favourite podcast app so you never miss one.  Thanks to our partner Uber Eats for making Drive possible and to Fancy Films for producing it. #futurewomen #drivepodcast See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Zach chats with Aubrey Blanche, the Director of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp, about re-imagining tech and belonging. She discusses her complicated relationship with race and identity, talks about how to effectively combat diversity fatigue, and much more. Click the links in the show notes to connect with Aubrey and check out Culture Amp's anti-racism plan!Connect with Aubrey on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Visit her personal website.Check out Culture Amp's anti-racism plan by clicking here.Donate to the Justice for Breonna Taylor GoFundMe by clicking here.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Check out our website.Struggling with your Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) work? Kanarys—a Black-founded company—has your back. Regardless of where you are on your DEI journey, we arm you with the insights you need now to take action now. From audits to assessments to data-informed strategy, we'd love to be the partner you have been looking for. Email stacey@kanarys.com or learn more at https://www.kanarys.com/employerTRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and look, you know what we're doing, right? Every single week we're having real talk in a corporate world. And what does that mean? That means we're having authentic conversations that what? Center and do what else? Amplify. Who? Black. And who else? Brown people. I keep on doing this weird call-and-response thing. I guess I'm just really excited. But the point is we're having these conversations, and we typically have them with movers and shakers, and that could be executives to entrepreneurs to social capital investors to activists to elected officials to public servants, authors, you know, whoever. We're talking to everybody. Typically these people are Black and brown, but every now and then we'll have some white or white-presenting folks on the podcast as well, and we're really passionate about that. Our goal is that if you're a Black or brown person or one of the onlys in your workplace that you listen to this and feel affirmed and heard, and if you're not one of those people that you take this opportunity, a rare opportunity, to really hear some frank conversations about, and from the persectives of, Black and brown people about being Black and brown at work, and you can use that information to be a better ally. See what I'm saying? So it helps everybody, and so like I said, every week we have an incredible guest, so let me just put our own collective back at Living Corporate. We've had some incredible guests though, and today's no different. We have Aubrey Blanche. Aubrey Blanche is The Mathpath - that's a math nerd and an empath, which is wild because that's, like, the Dark Side and the Light Side of The Force coming together. She's like a Gray Jedi. Anyway, director of equitable design and impact at Culture Amp and a start-up investor and adviser. Through all of her work, she seeks to question, re-imagine and re-design systems--now, y'all know we're gonna double-click on that in a minute--and practices that surround us to ensure that all people can access equitable opportunities and build a better world. Her work is undergirded--I like that word, "undergirded." Undergirded. Just say that to y'allselves, y'all. Undergirded. Undergirded by her training in social scientific methods and grounded in the fundamental dignity and value of every person. Aubrey, welcome to the show. How are you doing?Aubrey: Hey. Thank you so much for having me. I feel, like, genuinely blown away at the idea that I get to join you, and also your intro makes me want to cry. I just love what you're doing. I love the mission and the vision. And "undergirded" is such a fun word.Zach: It's so great, right? There's certain words that are just really nice to say. "Undergirded." "Plethora."Aubrey: Right? I mean, [I'm a?] deeply over-educated human being, so just occasionally getting to use those silly $17 words that you don't to, but [?].Zach: You don't have to. Erykah Badu once said, "What good do your words do if they don't understand you?" But that's for another conversation, another day. Look, I read your bio, or rather let me be honest--I took out, like, the first 20% of your bio for the sake of this conversation, but what does all of that really mean? Like, what do you actually do?Aubrey: Yeah, what do I do? I feel like what I try to do is crush white supremacy with capitalism, which is confusing conceptually, but really what I think I try to do is harness the privilege that I have and I guess the oppression I've experienced as this very liberal human, and we can talk about what that means, and try to use the privilege that I've had and try to figure out how to scale those out. Like, that's the [?] thing in my soul that I'm trying to do, and right now I happen to do that within the context of technology and investing and finance. What I'm really interested in is learning the rules of systems so that we can begin to evolve those systems so that they begin breaking themselves down where they are harming people.Zach: I like that. I like that a lot. There's a lot of nuance in what you just said, so that's why I'm really excited to get into this. In fact, let's talk a little bit about, like, this moment where we are, right? And before we do that, like, let's zoom in on our interaction about you being on this platform, right?Aubrey: Right. So for folks on the podcast, basically what happened is Zach was awesome and reached out to have me on, and my first sort of response was "Hey, want to be clear that I'm white-passing. I want to make sure that we have sort of BIPOC folks in front of my voice. I'm really happy to speak sort of to my people, but I also want to be respectful of not taking up more space than I need to," and that for me is because--it's really important to me just, like, on a basic, ethical level. Like, we have this moment. It's always been important to listen to those voices, and I've tried to create that space, but it's especially important now because so many people are listening. So I think I'm trying to figure out where my role is in this moment as a woman of color but someone who does have white privilege in so many settings, and then on top of that I'm trans-racially adopted, so there's even more nuance inside that sort of like--Zach: Wow.Aubrey: Yeah, it's a lot.Zach: That is a lot. Okay, so when you say trans-racially adopted, like, your parents are what ethnicity?Aubrey: Yeah. So I'm mixed, and I'm Mexican-American, and as of about a couple weeks ago I found that the other part is Irish. Fun fact - adoption is weird and keeps coming back to you. So my adoptive mother is second-gen American on both sides, Euro-American, and then my adopted father is actually Euro-American and Indigenous. So he's Choctaw and has been an Indigenous legal activist in addition to being sort of corporate counsel, but my dad, what's interesting is despite the fact that I grew up sort of in the Indigenous community and things like that is my dad is also white-passing. So my whole adoptive family looked hella white, but we actually had a really complex sort of racial identity within our family.Zach: I mean--so I think it's important, right? I mean, we're gonna get there in a minute, but... so you operate in this space, right? I know when I first saw your picture I was like--do you watch Steven Universe?Aubrey: I don't.Zach: Okay. So you should check out Steven Universe, 'cause, like, you give me strong Rose Quartz vibes. And it's a compliment. Like, you should look up Rose Quartz. She's great. But you kind of look like a star. Like, you do all these talks and all these things, and so outside looking in it's like--I think you sit in this space that's really interesting. So I'm not gonna profile you, 'cause I've listened to what you actually have to say, but you sit in this space that's, like, you speak about diversity, equity and inclusion, you are white-passing--like, your experience and your identity is much more complex than that, but you sit in this very influential space and it's, like, kind of--what I'm curious about is, considering the space that you've inhabited historically around this work, and when you think about this moment--like, it's kind of like a watershed moment, right? Like, people are really starting to call D&I institutions to account, particularly white women in these spaces and groups. I'm curious, like, is there anything right now that you're more sensitive to? You kind of talked a little bit about you've been thinking about it more. Like, where are you at just emotionally and mentally around this work right now?Aubrey: Yeah. So I think, like, the Overton window of what we can talk about to white people has shifted, and so what I mean by that is my personal philosophy is that I'm someone who was born in a situation that was let's just say much rougher than the one I got adopted into, and something I've always carried with me is--like, the phrase I use to describe it is "Little girls born like me do not sit in rooms and talk to billionaires." It's just a fact. Statistically speaking, there's no reason I should be in the place in the world that I am. And so what I think about is I've moved through these very white supremacist systems, right? Like, I got to survive 'cause I need more SPF than some people, and I've learned how those systems work, but the problem is I always felt really alienated by them because they didn't align with my sense of self, because for a lot of complicated reasons I really have been socialized and racialized as a Latina because of the social context I grew up in, and I didn't actually understand whiteness until I went to college and people stopped being racist to me, and I was like, "Wow, I didn't know that was optional." Truly, and it sounds really silly to someone I think, but just given the specific circumstances of my life that happened. So throughout my 20s as I sort of my grew in my consciousness on this I kind of said, "There are particular spaces I can speak to that people who are darker than me can't," and I own and acknowledge that that is a relic and a fact of a white supremacist system, but it's also still true. So what I try to do, and I will admit imperfectly, which is why I think we need people to keep us accountable to this integrity, is I try to talk to people who are going to listen to me more or I try to say things to shift the Overton window so that when darker people of color say them they receive less abuse. So I recognize when I say something first--and I say first meaning in ths space, not that it's my magical idea, that I'm less likely to just get shit on for it because I look like Karen. And so I think about it like, "Can I be the linebacker for Black women? Can I normalize that idea so that we can make that space less hostile so then I can go, "Now listen to who you should listen to, and let me bring that voice into the room"? So I think that's my dual responsibility, and now because suddenly we're seeing communities actually capable of listening to BIPOC folks without immediately abusing I'm much more careful about where I step back, because I think I have less internal intuition about where the correct action is, and so I'm trying to be more deferential. So that's where I am, but I wouldn't say that I know what I'm doing. I'm figuring it out. Zach: No, that's a really honest answer, and thank you for the context and background. I think your premise, what you started off with in terms of your purpose, is different than most folks. Like, if you ask most people their purpose, like, they're not going to say what their real purpose is, because most folks--painting with a wide brush, but I mean what I'm about to say--most folks' goal is to, by some degree, be white men, right? So, like, their goal is to get as much power as they can. So, like, your whole framing of, like, "I'm gonna block for this other person so that they can have a platform to actually speak, I'm gonna leverage my access and my power and my privilege to then create space for darker-skinned Latinx, for Black women, for other people who are societally, historically in different ways just on their face," no pun intended. Like, that's just not the typical goal, right? So we've talked a little bit about the nuances of your identity and your background, and that's incredible. I'd like to talk more about the concept of being white-presenting while also at the same time being a person of color, right? My challenge, Aubrey, right now is that, like, that "person of color" term is starting to become this, like, junk drawer thing where, like, everybody's a person of color, but we don't really specify or name identity in this work, even now. So, like, that's why with Living Corporate, we don't say "we center marginalized experiences of people of color at work," we say Black and brown because we really want to be explicit with who we're talking about. You know, you brought up being white-presenting. I'd like to hear more about the nuances of, from your perspective, Latinx identity and how you present versus culture and ethnicity, and let's also add, like, the dynamic of how people perceive you.Aubrey: So I think it's something I think about a lot, and I want to bring in another piece of my identity that's been really helpful for me in figuring this stuff out, which is I'm also a queer person. I'm, like, bisexual or pansexual or--I don't know, whatever's something that's definitely not definitely gay and not definitely straight, and I don't really think about it much harder than that, but I have a lot of things that are, like, queer signifiers in terms of my identity but, like, could also just be confused for [alt?] straight people. So again, most of my identities are invisible and liminal, and the way that I think about it is that we talk about that identity construction is a process, and so I can't change that, like, I didn't grow up in a Latin family, for example, and I would never lie about that. Something that was really interesting to me was--I have a friend who's Indigenous who gave me a framework for thinking about this because I've struggled with my legitimacy as, like, part of the Latinx community or how do I relate to this label, "people of color"? I have a complicated set of feelings with that language but think it can be useful in terms of identifying a collective. For me it was really about who I am, and my identity is actually not something that can be challenged. The fact is, right, my lineage comes from people in Mexico, but I also can acknowledge that I have both colonizer and colonized in my DNA, and that is something [I have to?] deal with, but the thing that a friend of mine said that gave me the legitimacy that my identity is real is he said, "I can't accept that the fact that we are pale means we are no longer from our ancestors, otherwise they would have been right that they could [BLEEP] the indigeniety out of us." And that, like, is probably pretty harsh, but for me I was like, "Yeah, you're right. There's an energy. There's a spirit. There's a culture." Now, I, for my own well-being did need to be put in a different family than the one I was originally born into. I've had to connect with and sort of become a part of my culture as an adult, so I've had a little bit of a different experience because of what was important for me. And so I think there's that, but I think to pretend, like, my experience in terms of economics, in terms of the way that I have experienced racism and racialization, are meaningfully different than most or a big portion of the Latinx community, and I think for me that tells me what my role should be. So I'm grateful for the folks who, like, welcome me into the community and don't do the, like, "You're not legitimate 'cause you have a different story," a story that also understands--here's a fun fact - my adoptive mother is the most incredible person I've ever met, absolutely saved my life, and also we know that women of the dominant race, you know, bringing children from the colonized race into their family is [?]. Like, both of those things are true, and so for me I say because I have this almost armor in the systems we live in, my role is to listen to my community and advocate to the majority for it because I can be a translator, because I can move between, and so rather than seeing my ability to play with those systems of oppressions as questions about my legitimacy, I relate to them as in they give me a special role for my activism in the same way I think each of us have a special role in the way that we bring our activism to life in line with our purpose and our unique privileges and oppressions. So yeah, that was really deep for you, but that's my honest answer, and I think I try to hold the humility that, like, I've definitely [BLEEP] up, right? I've definitely done things that were wrong, but I try to surround myself with people who tell me that when it's happening so I can at least try to minimize the way that, you know, my white fragility or my internalized racism or any other -isms aren't impacting the people around me.Zach: I mean, you out here just casually dropping wild bombs. You're doing a phenomenal job. You should continue on this path. Like, stay here. So let's talk a little bit about the culture summit in 2019 that you were at a guest speaker, a keynote speaker [at,] and you talked about diversity fatigue in tech, right? So it's interesting--we're going to continue to nail on this the next few questions, but I feel as if--so the majority has had to be aware or care about Black people for... let's see here, has it been, like, three months? Two-and-a-half months? Like, it's been a handful of months. Like, it hasn't been that long, and people are already talking about being tired. So, like, I'm curious about when you think about the concept of diversity fatigue with, like, white leaders, and especially as you think about it at an organizational level, like, what have you seen work well to manage diversity fatigue?Aubrey: Yeah. I think the thing about it--and this really relates to this idea that I say a lot, which is, like, [BLEEP] D&I, and what I don't actually mean is, like [BLEEP] the goal, and I think they're actually related things. People are tired. Like, I want to sit there and be like, "How dare you get tired?" But I understand how the human nervous system works, so I have to, like, deal with that as a real constraint. But I feel like diversity fatigue is partially happening because everybody's had the same ten diversity talks for five years. They, like, put some money into branding and putting a Black face on their website, and then threw their hands up and said, "Why isn't racism done?" And so when you describe it that way you're like, "Oh, yeah, that was never going to work in the first place." So I think the solution to diversity fatigue, rather than us, like, yelling at people who are tired, which is just going to make them turn off, and I, like, hold in my heart the frustration that we have to do this, right, because people are tired. They've done enough. But again, philosophical versus practical rationalism there. I think it's this move to equitable design that actually I think fights diversity fatigue, because what are people tired of? They're tired of being lectured at. They're tired of not doing. So instead of saying, "We care about D&I," my response is "If you don't have a budget and you don't have a time allocation, I don't care and you don't count," 'cause I'm sorry, your caring didn't help anyone. And that's what equitable design is, right? It's about what saying "What is my plan? What is my process? What is my data about what's broken and what is my idea and my action about how we'll try to fix it?" And when you go with that methodology, suddenly everybody gets a job. So maybe it's--I'm speaking about Culture Amp in this exact moment, our programs, right? Our Black employees' job right now is to attend the mental health program we're offering for them and to take care of themselves. That is their job.Zach: That is so healthy.Aubrey: Right? Like, that is your job right now. In our company anti-racism strategy, our Black [campers?], your job is to take care of yourself. We've made it clear. We've brought in experts. My job is to build the corporate strategy, you know? Our CEO's job is to fully fund the plan. This equitable design idea gives everyone a job, and it's hard to get fatigued with something when you've given people, like, little win breadcrumbs along the way. So I'm not [perfect?], and if folks want to they can check out Culture Amp's anti-racism plan online. We didn't just publish the commitment, we published the operating plan, and at the end of this sort of six-month cycle we'll provide an update for folks because accountability matters. It's real. Cultureamp.com/antiracism if you want to check it out. The pillars are easy, which is support and care, accountability, education, and then access. So for me that's what equitable design is. It's everyone taking a look at the actions that they're already taking in their day and going, "How can I design this to create a more equitable impact?" So maybe you're giving a career coaching to that friend of a friend's kid. Why don't you ask that student to find an underrepresented classmate who you're also gonna give a career coaching conversation to? I'm telling you. I did it last month. When you read a book written by a Black woman, why don't you make sure you go online and write a review for it, because then the algorithm knows that people engage with that book. Right? It's not about always--although certainly if you want to donate to the movement for Black lives and everything I vehemently support you. I think people mistake that, like, activism, that anti-racism, that D&I is something separate from what they're already doing as opposed to a slight edit of the things they're doing. So that's how you overcome fatigue, and I'm totally fine if you as an ally--like, you just did that coaching conversation with someone who would not have had access to an executive before? Like, I'm chill if you pat yourself on the back for that. Go ahead. Like, I know, "ally cookies" or whatever, but if you want to self-high five or you want to tell another one of your friends who isn't marginalized from that group, like, "I did a good thing," and you want a high five from another white person, fine. Cool. If it keeps you motivated and it gets you to do the next 10 things over the next 10 and 100 years, then I'm fully supportive of that. So I guess that's where it is. Like, we fight diversity fatigue by doing things consistently that actually work. Zach: I feel like a large part of this work is massaging white discomfort or trying to figure out ways to, like, Jedi mind trick white folks into caring about Black and brown people. And, like, I hear what you're doing at Culture Amp. The link will be in the show notes, 'cause I just looked at it and it's fire. So it's worth, and I also shared it with a couple of mentors, but I'd like to get your reaction to what I just said and, like, if you agree with that, then, like, is that tenable in today's climate?Aubrey: That's such a good question. I was a little quiet because I was like, "Is it, like, 60% or 80% of the work?" Right? No, I think it absolutely is, and it's the reason that I choose to do this work, because I think something that people don't talk about enough--and I talk about in some communities that I'm building--us white-passing folks are the tactical weapons to solve this particular problem, right? Like, I don't just, like, code switch, although I do that too. I literally identity switch at work minute by minute because I have the unique ability to, like, feel both sides of the coin 'cause I've lived both sides of them, so that's actually a lot of the reason I do the work I do, because I know how much of this is, like, managing white discomfort, and frankly, my face partially manages white discomfort to have discussions about racism and white supremacy. So I think that's true. Now, your next question is really important. Is it tenable or sustainable? I have a complex answer to that. So philosophically my answer to you is no. My deeply practical, science lady answer is it's not an avoidable problem in the short term. So this is a weird theory I'm gonna give you, and it has to do with drug addiction, but I think it's relevant for anti-racism work. So here's a theory I've never spoken online before. So there's something really fascinating about drugs and how they work on the brain, which is that the dosage and the frequency that they hit the brain completely changes the brain's response to it. So, like, small amounts over time create resistance. Large amounts at once tend to cause addiction. I'm vastly oversimplifying, but just work with me. So I'll say people who experience racism--not people of color, but people who experience racism, we basically have been given doses of racial stress throughout our lives, so we now have resilience to it. I'm nto saying it's good. I'm not saying it's ideal. I'm just saying it's sort of a descriptive fact of the world. So white people, we basically have to dose them with enough racial stress in the right ratios at the right time to get them to be able to have these conversations, because what the research is telling us is white fragility is actually, like, people's brains perceiving they're in danger when they're in absolutely no danger whatsoever. Like, that's neuroscience. So philosophically I'm like, "Yeah, it's not sustainable," but we have to think about ways to give people experience through racial stress, white people specifically, so that they're resilient and can have the conversations, and I think that's the process that's happening right now in a broader cultural sense is that white people--I mean, have you seen the New York Times Bestseller list? It looks like my bookshelf. [?] on one of my shelves called "What White America's Reading." So what I'm saying is I think we're in a moment where white people are being dosed with racial stress in a way that they never have been, and so I am saying that, like, we're still probably going to have another--I don't know, I don't want to put a timeline on it. That's a terrible statistician thing to do, but I do think it will change because more white people are educating themselves, and even, like, white people that are in my family that I've never seen talk about racial justice before are, like, texting me and asking me questions. So, like, I'm really hopeful. I know how the 17 million different ways this could go sideways, but I have to hold onto that hope because that's what motivates me to push so hard right now. So I think that there's a real chance that there's enough white people who are like, "Oh, I get some rules now, and I at least know to shut up and listen," that we could build a coalition that's big enough to actually create fundamental structural change. Like, I have to believe that's true because that's what I spend all of my time pushing for.Zach: Right. I mean, I struggle with the ways that this space plays with language. I don't know, like, to a certain extent, Aubrey, like, the language itself becomes like, this test and, like, just becomes very classist, and it becomes really exclusionary, because we're talking in these very, like, esoteric terms that kind of mean whatever, right, and we write long Medium posts about this versus that, but at that same time a lot of folks are still using equity and equality interchangeably. So we really don't understand--when I say we I mean, like, just the common person, not even a D&I expert but just, like, the common person. I do think a word though, when we talk about this space and we talk about achieving belonging at work is, like, redistributing organizational power. I don't often hear the word "power," like, really employed in conversations, particularly around Black engagement, brown people. I don't hear that word. Have you thought about that? Is that significant to you at all?Aubrey: I think I want to add another word in, 'cause I agree with you, right? Getting really esoteric about language, it excludes people who haven't had those discussions about those specific subtle differences. I talk about equity. I actually don't really use the word equality. I don't think about equality that much.Zach: I don't either, but people be throwing--I've seen it. I've seen it, like, some big brands have used the word equality. I'm like, "Why are we--"Aubrey: I'll just give my particular view, and I want to do this without, like, throwing shade, but for me I tend to see people use equality when they're familiar with a lot of the, like, deep social justice theories, because they're articulating the outcome, and equality is the outcome of the process of equity, and the process of equity, by literal definition, is about redistributing power and opportunity, at least in the way that I perceive it. I think the other term that we have to talk about or that I think about a lot, and I can't believe I work at a place where I have, like, advanced, deep conversations with executives about this, is [?] collective organizational justice. I think justice is helpful because there's--I just learned a new type of justice, which is, like, my favorite fact ever, but thinking about, like, what does procedural justice look like, right? Equitable design creates processes that create procedural justice. I think about testimonial justice. So how do I make sure that people's stories have the space to be told in the ways that they need to to respect human dignity and opportunity? And so I think redistributing organizational power is at the core of what I do, so really what I'm doing all day, whether I'm writing a corporate strategy or thinking about what hat I need to wear in a particular conversation, is I'm doing a power analysis of the situation. Like, a good example of this, and I'm gonna put this out there, when I think about power and systemic power, right, one of the most abusive things that exists that most D&I leaders aren't even talking about are forced arbitration agreements. You have just [?] or also class action rights. So by including that in your employment contract to all of the CEOs and leaders listening, what you are saying is "[BLEEP] you and your power. You have absolutely no recourse that is fair if we mess up and harm you," and I truly believe that that's true, because what you're doing is stripping that individual of the way that they might balance their power against the power of a corporation with backers, and that's even ignoring the racial power dynamics or the ableist power dynamics there. So I think we would be so much better served if we talked about power, but then the other important thing I want to bring in--and I realize it's your thing, but I'm gonna ask you a question, which is I don't think that people understand the difference between power with and power over, and it relates to [?] earlier where I almost laughed--not at you, but you said, like, "You're giving up power," and I almost laughed because I don't think by creating space for people I'm giving up power, because my definition of power is "power with," so I believe that when I move out of a particular space, I am gaining power because the collective is gaining power and I'm a part of that collective.Zach: But, see, in that though there's, like, this--I don't know. You have to have a different mindset and premise that you're operating from to even see that as power though, right? Because most people don't--it's a zero-sum game. There's also, like, a very capitalistic mindset to it too. So if you heavily prescribe to historically oppressive systems and you're not necessarily, like--you don't think in communal terms or frames, then you're not going to see it that way. I agree with you though that, like, the idea of power with and power over is--and it's funny, because I didn't know that's what you were going to say. I didn't know that that's what that meant in that context. I thought you meant, like, power with being like--I don't know, I interpreted it differently. I think about the fact that a lot of people don't consider the fact that, like, even if they aren't high in an organization, they still have power by way of their whiteness, and that's not a theoretical power. Like, it's a real power. As an example, let's pretend you and I work at Culture Amp and we are a part of the same team. We have the same job. In fact, I may be senior to you in the organization. The reality is, like, if you wanted to, you could just share a couple of points of feedback to other people around me and I could be fired. Not at Culture Amp, but you know what I mean. You have the societal--you have advantages to where if you say, "You know what? I just don't think Zach is really cutting it," or "I don't really think Zach is that bright," or "I don't think" whatever or "Zach makes me feel uncomfortable" or whatever the case is, right, and so what was a struggle for me is when we talk about power, yes, we're talking about, like, the white executives, or just executives period, like, people who are in positions of organizational authority, but also the people who are not in organizational authority who still can harm Black and brown people who should, on paper, be protected, even by the very pessimistic and harmful rules that that organization has created for its own leadership. Like, they still don't really even participate or benefit from those protections because of the color of their skin or because of a disability or whatever the case may be, you know what I mean?Aubrey: Oh, yeah. Absolutely, and I think that's actually something we don't teach people. I think it's, like, American culture in general is very aggressive. Like, a lot of our cultural values are about control, but we don't actually have a dialogue about it. So those of us on the bottom end of the distribution in any context tend to talk about it, but the people at the top don't, and so yeah, I think people--also because we're in this sort of capitalistic society. I say that as if I'm, like--capitalism is like traffic. I don't like it, but I have to be in it. I got that from Nicole Sanchez. I want to give her a shout-out. She's brilliant. I can only say that she's someone who has guided me and taught me, and I appreciate her wisdom, and I don't even have time to describe how much I think she's great, but I think that's it, that people don't understand power. And also I think there's this weird game in--I think it's everywhere, but, like, American culture lies about it, where the thing is people actually, like, crave power and status, but they have to lie about wanting it, and it comes from our whole lie about, like, "Classes don't exist in America," even though they obviously do. "We're not a classist system." Yeah, we are. I've been on every rung of it. Trust me, I know. At different points in my life.Zach: Right. Let's talk a little bit about--part of your bio I read included the concept of re-imagining systems, right? So I've had on a few guests, and many of them believe that this is a watershed moment for, quote-unquote, D&I, HR culture, like, that whole space. Do you think there's any radical re-imagining that needs to happen today or that really should have happened a while ago but is certainly, like, further mobilized by this moment?Aubrey: Absolutely. I mean, like, the thing is the phrase--it's been repeated to me, like, every week, like, "Never waste a good crisis." Well, what I mean is don't waste the attention on these problems, because attention is what can get you the solutions. So yeah, do I think it's a watershed? Gosh, I hope so. I hope that companies stop doing unconscious training and we have honest conversations about the fact that it was conscious design decisions in organizations that create intentional discrimination and exclusion. I've been saying that to everyone with a C-level title I can talk to. If you're like, "Unconscious bias," I'm like, "It was never unconscious bias. You were just too fragile to hear it. It was conscious failures of leadership."Zach: Listen... I'll never forget--this was some years ago--I was talking to a leader about... and it was literally on my way out, 'cause I left, and I made a risk log as I was leaving. I said, "These are just things you need to know about the project we was on and the people on your team. Here are things that would help you if you just considered the risks." Got on the phone. I had already resigned, so, like, it was, like, my last week, right? So then we're talking and she's like... one of the risk ops on there was--I literally made it so soft. I said "potential unconscious bias," and her response was "I've never had a situation where I've been unconsciously bias." And I said, "Well, by the very nature of the concept you wouldn't know if you had been unconsciously bias, 'cause it's unconscious." So it's wild when you think about, like, the multiple levels of grace and outs that white people provide themselves through diversity and inclusion work. It's just not to me about justice, not about equity, really it's not about Black and brown people at all, it's just about shoring up power and control while kind of, like, protecting yourselves from litigious risk, right? But it's not real.Aubrey: You know what, Zach? You just said the word "risk," and I want to one, yes, +1,000 you, and I want to talk about the way that risk can be re-imagined, and it's a thing I've been saying to lawyers and executives, not just at Culture Amp. Like I said, literally to anyone who will listen, because I figure I have my, like, Hamilton, my [?] energy about this, like, how much [?] can we get in this moment? Which is that we can decide that risk means the company losing business because we have to fire an executive who's an abusive [BLEEP]. Like, violations of human dignity are a risk we cannot bear, and we simply choose, when we identify abusers, to remove them out of our organizations. Like, that's a choice that people can make about the definition of risk. And frankly, even if you're talking in capitalistic terms, if you think about how much companies spend on, like, external legal firms when they get sued for discrimation, it is so much cheaper to fire an executive and hire a new one. Or anyone in the organization, right? If they're not an executive they're even less financially, you know, sort of creating return for the business. So again I go back to this idea of re-imagining. Let's take the words and the concepts and just ask the basic question - "Do we have to do it this way? Is there a better way?" A company could say, "We value people being treated well because we know that treating you well equals better cognition, which equals more innovation, which in this economy, in our business, equals more dollars and revenue." We can choose to act as if that is true, and that choice and that action is what builds the world in which it is true. So I'm saying this, like, I live in an industry where everyone's like, "We're changing the world." I'm like, "You're shooting a rocket into space. Someone did that already." Not to diminish that it's an incredible feat of engineering to get a rocket into space. It's incredible, but it's actually less incredible than being like, "Maybe we should treat our employees like full humans who are deserving of dignity." Like, that doesn't seem that bananas to me.Zach: Well, it doesn't though because you're rejecting white supremacy and patriarchy, like, full-stop.Aubrey: Because it's lame and it diminishes--[?] I could drive, like, what, a Lamborghini because I look white? Like, my soul is not better off. Other beings aren't better off. Sorry, I'm going off on a tangent, but white supremacy diminishes everyone, even those of us who benefit from it. Obviously those of us who benefit should do more work full-stop.Zach: Right. I feel you. I also think it's wack, but that's the reason. So what about this time right now scares you, Aubrey, mathpath, white-presenting woman, complex background. Like, is there anything right now that you feel more in the spotlight or more pressured?Aubrey: The thing that I'm, like, deeply afraid of in this moment, to be specific, is I know what the United States does to people who don't identify as white in history, and I'm afraid that white America won't take the signals that we're deep down the road to genocide seriously enough until we all start dying in higher numbers. That is actually what I'm afraid of, that white people don't think it's urgent enough to burn [BLEEP] down over, because the fact is, like, there are children in cages. This has been happening forever. We have police forces gunning down innocent civilians of all colors, although we know some communities experience that disproportionately. So what scares me? People wanting to lull themselves into a sense of security because they want the world to be better than it is.Zach: Yeah, it's scary. I think about where we are right now and just the death count because of COVID-19, and I think the fact that "defund the police" is still becoming such a--people are still pushing back so hard. I say, "Y'all, the data's right here. They're not solving crime. They're bleeding communities dry because the budgets are way too hard. We are underserved in these other service areas." And yet that's still, like, a radical, crazy idea. We're still pushing back against, like, the idea of reparations. Folks are still sending kids to school, right now, in the middle of a pandemic. Like you said, kids in cages. You're right. It's scary because--I don't know. There's a certain level of awareness that's been really cool to see. Kind of weird, to be frank. As a Black person it's kind of strange. But at the same time I'm looking everything and I'm just like, "Yo, this is--" Just talking about the pandemic alone, like, we haven't even hit the second wave, and so it's just like, "What are we doing?" So I hear you, that's a fear of mine too.Aubrey: That was the honest answer. It wasn't an upper, but [?] all of these things are under people's control, to pay attention, to advocate [?], and that's what I was going to link it to. Like, if that's not the world you want to see, refuse to live in it.Zach: Right, no, 100%. Okay, so let's wrap it up on this one. If you had to give three things executive leaders should be keeping in mind when it comes to engaging and retaining Black talent specifically, and in general a more socially conscious workforce--you think about Gen Z--like, what would those three things be?Aubrey: #1: You need to go to therapy to deal with your own self-esteem, control and power issues. They will absolutely come out in the workplace. #2: You must educate youreslf, and the Google machine is an incredible resource.Zach: And it's free.Aubrey: Free! There are so many people from Gen Z and the Black community that have put their thoughts and life experiences online you do not have to go bother someone who works with you. #3: What you value is not what they value, and they are coming to power. You need to learn how to gracefully evolve with the world. Those would be my most heartfelt pieces of advice to make what is an inevitable transition something that you can participate in and bring into the world as opposed to something you can fight and that will be painful.Zach: That's something that just kind of happens to you, 'cause it's going to happen, right?Aubrey: I mean, like, [?] is destiny. We know where this is going, so you can either be a part of that change and come into that new world or you can kick and scream, but it's coming, and it can either be fun or not fun, and that's really up to you.Zach: I mean, first of all, this has been fire. We haven't done sound effects in a while, but I still have them. Sound Man gonna put 'em in right here. And a Flex bomb too. There you go. Okay. So this has been incredible. You know what? I'm calling it right here. Aubrey Blanche, you are a friend of the show. Culture Amp, y'all are welcome here any time. This is not an ad. Culture Amp, what's up?Aubrey: Thank you for creating this space. I'm really grateful for this space to get to unpack these things. I guess my hope is other folks who have some life stories similar to mine get some wisdom and inspiration out of it so that they can do something that makes the world more incredible. So thank you so much for creating this space. I'm really grateful.Zach: Look, I appreciate you. This is great. Y'all, this has been Zach with the Living Corporate podcast. You know what we do. We have these conversations every single Tuesday, and then on Thursdays we have Tristan's Tips, and on Saturdays we have See It to Be It with Amy C. Waninger. So we have, like, a whole network really on one platform. You just have to check in when you check in, okay? But look, that's been us. Check us out. We're all over Beyonce's internet. Just type in Living Corporate. We'll pop up. I'm not gonna go through all the domains. We got all of 'em except for livingcorporate.com. We have all the other ones, so just type us in and you'll see us over there. Until next time, this has been Zach. You've been listening to Aubrey Blanche, leader, mover, shaker. 'Til next time, y'all. Peace.

Georgie chats to Culture Amp's Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact Aubrey Blanche (aka The Mathpath) about how her experiences of discrimination cultivated empathy, why belonging is more important than inclusion in the workplace, and what leadership should look like in 2020.  Aubrey's recommendations Culture First podcast  Signal app The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre Lorde Any book by Pema Chodron  Aubrey's Good Reads list (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5586566-aubrey)  New episodes of Drive will be in your feed every Wednesday. Subscribe now in your favourite podcast app so you never miss one.  Thanks to our partner Uber Eats for making Drive possible and to Fancy Films for producing it. #futurewomen #drivepodcast See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join Change Catalyst Founder & CEO Melinda Briana Epler with Rachel Williams, Head of Equity, Inclusion & Diversity at X – the moonshot factory to discuss Creating Structural Change in the Workplace.Learn more about Rachel on her website: www.rachelannwilliams.com/⭑⭑If this is helpful, don't forget to subscribe to our podcast and like this episode!⭑⭑Additional resources:➡ "Continuing DEI Work During a Pandemic" with Melinda Briana Epler, Rachel Williams, Ulysses Smith and Jennifer Brown at Tech Inclusion Global Summit 2020 https://youtu.be/fS_RR4sUbsI  ➡ "Keeping It 100: What's Next with Culture & Inclusion in Tech?" with Melinda Briana Epler, Rachel Williams, Aubrey Blanche, and Candice Morgan at Tech Inclusion 2019 https://youtu.be/fU81EBsTJoY➡ Equity 101: Learn the basics of Startup Employee Stock Options carta.com/blog/equity-101-stock-option-basics/➡ Suggested Reading: There Are Actually 3 Types of Empathy. Here's How They Differ--and How You Can Develop Them All www.inc.com/justin-bariso/there…velop-them-all.html➡ Learn from HRC President Alphonso David on the Hierarchy of Identities https://youtu.be/ksuEv4Q6dhM?t=714 For more about Change Catalyst, and to join us for a live recording, visit changecatalyst.co/allyshipseries.Support this series: patreon.com/changecatalystsYoutube: youtube.com/c/changecatalystTwitter: twitter.com/changecatalystsFacebook: facebook.com/changecatalystsLinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/changecatalystsSupport the show (http://patreon.com/changecatalysts)

When you hear the terms, “Privilege or White Privilege”, what comes to mind for you? Do you immediately think of white people and attach the stigma of racism with it? If you answered yes, or your answer leaned towards yes...then YOU my friend, need to pause and disrupt your thinking. Because, the irony is that you, yourself, just exhibited negative unconscious biased behaviors. But, don’t beat yourself up, we ALL do this to some extent. It’s human nature. The key is to make the choice to CHANGE. In this episode, Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp discusses and shares how we should all be using our individual privileges to help other marginalized groups. Especially in this current “awakened environment” of racial and economic inequities.   Highlights: [02:54] Aubrey’s story [08:36] Taking chances [11:55] Solidifying identity as a Latina women [14:22] First experience in the tech industry [16:00] Addressing microaggressions [21:08] Making difficult decisions quickly [24:48] Supporting each other during the pandemic [28:21] Working remotely and being seen [32:25] Overcoming limiting beliefs [35:19] Aubrey’s favorite success habit   Quotes: “When you have something, work hard, because you've taken a seat from someone who may also deserve it, but didn't get it. And that's out of respect for those folks.” – Aubrey Blanche “I try to connect back to my journey to find compassion, but also remember that most people are fundamentally good and have been very poorly taught.” – Aubrey Blanche “Be compassionate to everyone, we are all doing the best we can and we don't always know what else is going on in the background.” – Aubrey Blanche “How do we constantly think of who's going to be the worst impacted and then think about what we can do to help.” – Aubrey Blanche “This is the greatest remote work experiment in human history.” - Aubrey Blanche “This is a time where no one really knows what the rules are. Decide what the rules are, tell people what the rules are, and then dare them to challenge you that you're wrong.” - Aubrey Blanche “Define the terms of the engagement for yourself. Because the fact is, the ones that are defined are going to keep you down because they're supposed to.” - Aubrey Blanche “What you say about yourself is what you believe in, it will become true because that's where your energy is going.” - Aubrey Blanche “You're brilliant, you're worthy, and the world needs what you're going to create.” - Aubrey Blanche   About Aubrey Blanche: Aubrey Blanche is The Mathpath (Math Nerd + Empath), Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp, and a startup investor and advisor. Through all her work, she seeks to question, reimagine, and redesign the systems and practices that surround us to ensure that all people can access equitable opportunities and build a better world. Her work is undergirded by her training in social scientific methods and grounded in the fundamental dignity and value of every person. Her professional expertise covers a broad range of equitable enterprise operations, from talent lifecycle programs and accessible product development to event design and communications & media. She is the inventor of the balanced teams approach to building proportional representation and a culture of belonging in the workplace, as well as the Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment in the Atlassian Team Playbook. She works to open source these methods for all practitioners and business leaders, and releases thought leadership and tools to create positive change at here at aubreyblanche.com. She is an advisor to a variety of groups seeking to build a more just world, including Aleria Research and Joonko. Her work has been featured in Wired, the Wall Street Journal, the Australian Financial Review, USA Today, Re/Code, First Round Review, and more. She also has previous academic affiliations with Stanford and Northwestern, and an appointment at the Equity by Design Lab at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Despite the accolades listed here, she asks that you engage with her work to judge her competence: traditional proxies of merit and/or competence help reinforce the systems that keep incredible people from the opportunities they deserve. Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adblanche/ Twitter: @adblanche Website: https://aubreyblanche.com/ Medium: https://medium.com/@adblanche  

In this episode, we’re talking about how as an industry, tech should strive for equitable design, and how you can harness your privilege to help create diversity, with Aubrey Blanche, director of global head of equitable design and impact at Culture Amp, and Founder and CEO of The Mathpath. Aubrey talks about how the term “diversity and inclusion” might not be as actionable as you might think, how “culture fit” may not be the thing you actually want, and how we should all be using our individual privileges to help other marginalized groups. Show Links Digital Ocean (sponsor) MongoDB (sponsor) Heroku (sponsor) TwilioQuest (sponsor) Culture Amp The MathPath HTML Python (programming language) R (programming language) Plantir Meritocracy Diversity and Inclusion (DNI) Atlassian Atlassian: How to start a learning circle with your colleagues Culture fit Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Textio Diversity in tech too often means ‘hiring white women.’ We need to move beyond that. How white women in tech can harness their privilege to help create diversity The Diana Initiative Intersectionality Culture Amp: Diversity & Inclusion Survey The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table

Zach chats with Ruchika Tulshyan, award-winning author & CEO and founder of Candour, about equity's place in the future of work. Ruchika explains to us what it is about the diversity, equity and inclusion space that had her commit so much of her life to it, and she ties her breadth of experience back to her childhood in Singapore, where she grew up with people of all different nationalities, cultures and religions. She takes us through her career journey and graciously shares her struggles and triumphs along the way.Connect with Ruchika on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.Visit her personal website. You can find out more about Candour by clicking here.Check out Ruchika's Harvard Business Review contributor page and get reading!Read the pieces mentioned in the show, If You Don't Know How to Say Someone's Name, Just Ask and Women of Color Get Asked to Do More “Office Housework.” Here’s How They Can Say No.Learn more about the books Superior and So You Want to Talk About Race.Visit our home page!TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, everybody? It's Zach with Living Corporate. That's right. I'm back. It's probably Tuesday, or maybe you're listening to this later. It's, like, a Wednesday or a Thursday. I don't know, but we're recording this, and we're recording this, of course, we're having real talk in a corporate world. We center and amplify underrepresented voices in the corporate space, and by corporate space I just mean at work, okay? So this is not, like, an elitist thing, right? So, like, if you work at Wendy's, hey, this is for you too, okay? If you work at Goldman Sachs, this is for you too. And you're probably a white man listening to this, and if so, hey, man, thank you for listening to the podcast. I hope that you learn something from this. But this is for everybody is my point, and we do this, we amplify and center underrepresented experiences, by having underrepresented folks--these are, like, influencers, journalists, activists, educators, public servants, entrepreneurs, executives, recruiters, anybody, really, who is able to really come on and just have some real talk with us. And we've had some amazing guests every single week. I mean, every single week we have some fire--I mean, fire fire fire guests, and this week is no different, okay? 'Cause you know who--I don't even know if y'all know who we have, but I'm up about to tell you. We have Ruchika Tulshyan. Ruchika is a diversity & inclusion strategist, award-winning author and journalist. She is the author of "The Diversity Advantage: Fixing Gender Inequality In The Workplace," a book on strategies for organizations to advance women. Ruchika's company, Candour advises a number of organizations on diversity, equity and inclusion strategy. Ruchika is also the 2019 inaugural distinguished professional-in-residence for Seattle University's communication department. Ruchika, hold on. I've gotta let the air horns fly. How are you doing?Ruchika: I am doing very well, Zach. I'm so excited to be here. [children cheering sfx, both laugh] I love it, I love it. I really do.Zach: We gotta get into it. We gotta get into. You're an author, a journalist, an international speaker, and a CEO of your own consulting firm. Like, what is it about this space, about this diversity, equity and inclusion space, that had you commit so much of your life to it?Ruchika: You know, it wasn't planned at all, Zach. And I grew up outside the United States. I'm from Singapore originally, so I think about food all the time. In fact, right now while I'm talking I'm thinking about "What's my next meal?" But--Zach: What's your favorite food?Ruchika: So, you know, being from Singapore, we eat everything, but probably anything Asian, anything with noodles or rice. I can eat rice for breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper, snack, midnight snack. [laughs] You get the drift.Zach: Yes. No, I do. So do you like pad thai?Ruchika: I'll never order it in the United States 'cause I've had it in Thailand quite a few times now.Zach: Oh, my gosh. What it is like in Thailand?Ruchika: It's so different. It's not sweet. It's just--it's got this beautiful... it's like umami, you know? Like, there's a different flavor altogether. So yeah, I haven't--you know, I tried it once or twice in the U.S. in different cities, and I was like, "Yeah, this is not going to be the thing for me."Zach: You know, it's interesting that you say that, because I remember--so I went to Japan. I was in Japan for a couple weeks last year--well, in 2018--and I remember just eating the food there. It's like--it's crazy that, like, most Americans don't have all of their toes cut off from diabetes with how much sugar we have in our food, right?Ruchika: Yes, yes, yes. And that's--I mean, I could talk about this all day, because, you know, I think about this all the time. And again, I think it's all related, right? And I think even talking about diversity and inclusion, like, really understanding people, finding a common language based on food I think is something that's really special and a very, very important way to connect with people.Zach: You know, I 100% agree. And just one last thing about the food, 'cause you talked about, like, when you have something in the States and then you--for me, 'cause I'm from here and, like, all my people, as far as I can go back, are from here, right? But when I went to Japan I had sushi in Japan. I said, "Wait a second." [laughing] Ruchika: Right? Isn't it completely different?Zach: I said, "What?" I just was--I mean, I had, like, a spiritual moment. It was just like, [blessings come in sfx, both laugh]. I said, "My gosh, my taste buds." Ruchika: Isn't it? And all their food, everything. I mean, if you've had chocolate in Japan, if you've had, like, cookies in Japan, if you've had a cake in Japan, it's like nothing you've ever tasted before, you know?Zach: Yes, and I'm just--and how conditioned I've been eating here, it's like--I'm used to, like, if I eat something, like, a big meal, I'm used to be a little--like, a little sleepy afterwards, right? So I'm like, "Wait, why can I still walk? I can still walk around and, like, think cognitively after eating this meal. [?]" Okay, so I'm sorry. Long segue aside about food--but it's important though. It's a connection to culture. I'm right there with you. Ruchika: So we were talking about diversity and inclusion, right? [both laugh] And how did I get into it? Well, you know, it's connected. You know, it is connected. So I think I was kind of built for this in some way, although it wasn't planned. So growing up in Singapore, I just grew up with people of all different nationalities, all different cultures, all different religions, and it was very much a way of my life, and I moved around quite a bit when I was younger. But what it really exposed me to was the fact that, you know, at the end of the day we're all the same, you know? In many ways we want the same things. We really, really just want to be happy. We want to be heard. We want to feel valued and respected. And so I really grew up with that concept, you know, as a part of my life, just the way it was. You know, my friends were from all over the world, my teachers were from all over the world, and I really grew up with sort of an idealistic, almost Kumbaya sort of belief in the world, and when I moved to the United States about eight years ago, that was a very big shock for me, you know? And I really saw what I still think in some ways is modern-day segregation. You know, I really saw it in full force. There's a stat that three out of four white Americans don't have a single friend of color, and I think that's really concerning, because I grew up in a very different sort of environment, and it really made me see the--it's awesome. I mean, just talking about food, you know? Being exposed to different cultures, different types of food. I feel so lucky, and I actually think people are missing out, and so for a vast majority of Americans, the most diversity they ever experience is actually in the workplace. So, you know, I'm sort of setting myself up to saying that, you know, that was the early part of my life where I really felt, you know--I just had a connection, but I never thought that I would work in this field. I didn't even know this field existed. And what changed for me is I began my career as a journalist and was really happy about it, loved it, then moved to Seattle and sort of transitioned into tech, because that's what everyone does here, and it was the most challenging experience of my life, you know? I really encountered sexism and racism that I just wasn't--you know, I didn't think that it could happen to me. You know, I really grew up with the mindset that you work hard, you work smart, you put your head down and you do your thing--and sure, you know, you raise your hand for opportunities, you're confident, et cetera, but I really didn't think that it would make a difference, you know? My gender, my race, sort of the way I scope, my accent, my name. I didn't think these things mattered, right? I know, so naive of me now that I reflect back on it. And it was a very rude, painful emotional awakening and really kind of created that empathy in me where I said to myself, "This cannot be the way that more than half the population is being treated in the workplace, right? And these are their experiences," and as a journalist I started collecting experiences. I started collecting stories and case studies and even data, right, and research, and it was very clear that something had to change. So I wrote in my book, five years ago, at a time where people said, like, the way that women can, you know, advance in the workplace is they need to lean in, right? That was sort of the narrative of the day, that it was something lacking in women, there was something lacking in people of color, and they had to change, and I'm really glad that we're thinking about this as a systems change that actually doesn't--you know, if you have been stereotyped against, if you have had--you know, if people have this preconceived narrative about who you are and what your potential is in the workplace, it doesn't matter how much you lean in, you know? I mean, like my friend Minda Harts says--you know, CEO of The Memo and has an awesome book out on it, on [?] of women of color at work, Zach. I know you know her. It doesn't matter how hard you lean in if you're a woman of color. You are just not going to be able to get ahead until those systemic biases have been addressed, and so that's what got me into this work, and it's a long-winded answer.Zach: It's long-winded. This is a podcast. [both laugh] But no, you're absolutely right. I'm right there with you, right? And it's interesting, when you talk about, like, systemic versus, like, individual actions--I'll say for me, it's been frustrating, like, just transparently, like, being a black man in majority-white spaces. And I'm in, like--I'm in professional services, right? So consulting, and a lot of times when there's issues that come up when you're dealing with folks or people want to frame you as being "angry" or "frustrated" or whatever the case is, like, whatever trope you want to kind of pull out, right, and then you share those frustrations with, like, other people who are not underrepresented, who are a member of the majority, their feedback or coaching is often, like, things that you need to do and change, but it's like, "Yeah, that's not really the problem." And not to be arrogant. We all have places where we can grow and mature, and emotional intelligence and social intelligence and personal awareness, all of those things are very important. At the same time, like, have the moral courage to actually talk about the systems at play and how there are a lot of things that really aren't our fault. Like, there are things that are being done to us or that we are--you know, it's asymptomatic of larger systemic challenges, and it's tough though. It's tough to have those conversations, especially for folks in the majority. Some of them literally just don't know how. Some of them it's just so uncomfortable they don't--you know, how much of that is real? How much of that is, like, you imagining it, right? But to me I'm just noticing more and more--like, I'm getting increasingly discouraged when you have these conversations, you know, and it's like, "Yo, can we just have a conversation about, like, why is it that this person constantly calls this person or these types of people too opinionated or loud or aggressive or angry or--" Whatever the case is, right? Like, you kind of see it over time. And it's funny that you bring that up about Minda Hart. Shout-out to Minda Hart. What's up, Minda? In fact, hold on. I'ma get some air horns for you and Minda. [both laugh] So what you're speaking to about leaning in, right, and how the concept of leaning in, it was promoted by a white woman with--and I recall there being major articles written and, like, championed about the fact that women of color can't lean in, exactly what you just said, and so I'm curious, when you talk about your focus on gender equity, what does that look like, and how are you introducing intersectionality within the concept of gender equity? Like, how does that practically show up for you in the work that you do?Ruchika: So Zach, let me tell you one of the biggest career mistakes I ever made in my life, and that was to write a book that overall lacks intersectionality. And my students will tell you this, because I make the poor things read my book for one of my classes. And so, you know, every class we have this discussion about, you know, the fact that my book lacks intersectionality as well as that it really treats gender as a binary, right? Which is fully my fault and also a big part of the larger system of publishing and editing, et cetera, where that, you know, concept of intersectionality is still lacking, right? And I don't know--even right now, I don't know if management theory has really caught up to the fact that you really need to have a very intersectional approach when you think about gender equality, right? Like, it is not just about the challenges that white women face. It is really about--if you really want to make change, it is about looking at the intersection between how women of color, both those intersections, experience the workplace, and then especially, from there, expanding that to include other marginalized identities in the workplace. So I will be the first to admit that my book lacks intersectionality, and my hope is, in all the work I've done since and will continue to do, I absolutely cannot--you know, I absolutely cannot take an intersectional approach. That being said, I really think, again, the key to making a difference when it comes to workplace gender equity is having a situation where the voice of the person who is the most marginalized in the room is centered so that the workplace works for all, right? So if the workplace was built by, say, a cis-hetero white man and that's who the workplace is built for, if you do not consider the experience of what, you know, a woman of color, a black woman for example, a trans black woman of color, what's the experience, you know? And who may have, you know, disabilities, cognitive, temporary, physical, whichever--or a combination. If you do not start there, then you're going to continue perpetuating systems which alienate, you know, women, and especially women of color across the board, you know what I mean? So you really need to start with the person who's the most vulnerable who is having really the most challenging experiences in the workplace and then expand from there and think about "What is it that they need to be successful," right? And how can that be incorporated into the fabric of what you do? And that's why part of what I love to do, I love speaking to large corporations. We just talked about someone who works at a large corporation who we both know, but really for me the--you know, I also really love working with smaller teams and startups, because when you can build intersectionality, when you can build inclusion and equity into the very fabric of your organization, right, when you're building it from, like, one to five to ten to twenty employees, that is where you can really make a change, and I have seen that happen personally.Zach: You know what? So first of all, you know what I'm saying, like, while you were talking I didn't want to cut you off, but in my mind when you said--when you, like, owned up and you said, "My book does not address intersectionality," I was like [record scratch sfx]. 'Cause I was like, "Wow, that's incredible, because everybody--" I want everybody to stop. Stop what you're doing. You're driving your car, you're doing whatever you're doing--especially you, diversity, equity and inclusion supposed subject matter experts--stop and see what Ruchika just did, okay? I asked her a question, a direct question about a very important concept if you want to consider yourself a diversity, equity and inclusion expert. You see what she didn't do? She didn't get all defensive and fragile. She outright owned something that she didn't do and her commitment to improve in the future. Some of y'all need to learn from that. I'm talking to you. Yes. If you think I'm talking to you, I'm talking to you, okay? Shout-out to you. That was dope. Ruchika: Thank you.Zach: You're absolutely welcome.Ruchika: And listen, I'm not--you know, I don't at all claim to be perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and I do want to double-down on this point. Like, I've said it before, and I'm gonna say it again. I think growing up both outside this country as well as sort of in some way out of, you know, sort of the Western way of living has meant that I have had to approach DEI in the United States with a tremendous amount of humility and a learning mindset, right? I mean, in the country I grew up in, gay marriage is not legalized, right? I didn't have any friends growing up who were out. The first time I actually came in contact with someone who was openly gay, for example, would have been sometime in my 20s. You know, openly, right? So what I'm trying to say is that you can have been brought up a certain way. The people you love may believe that, for example, having friends of different colors or treating people from different backgrounds equally, maybe you grew up thinking that's not the way life should be, but my point is you can grow. My point is you can learn, my point is that it takes a tremendous amount of humility and learning to get to that place, and you absolutely can get there.Zach: Amen. No, I agree, and I think we're coming into an era where people are just getting, like, less and less tolerant of, like, corporatized nonsense, right? So, like, there's going to need to be, eventually, some sort of reckoning with, like, the systems at play. In fact, we're in a unique position because it's an election year where we almost have kind of, like, a countdown. We know one way or the other there's going to be an--like, there's going to be another explosion, and there are going to be more and more people supposedly very surprised all over again, but I think--I also think that just, like, societally and generationally, like, we also have folks and younger folks who weren't able to vote who saw the nonsense last time but weren't in the same position who are in a different position this time. So I just think that the--I think that the dialogue is going to still be just as present if not more present than it was in 2016, so the imperative to really--like, to your point about humility and being willing to learn, centering the most vulnerable and continuing to seek to grow and develop yourself in this space is important, because I just don't think that some of the trends that I saw in this, like, environment over the last decade I don't think is gonna be sustainable this upcoming decade.Ruchika: It isn't. And you know, Zach, while you were talking I was thinking of this idea. You know, coming to this country as an immigrant, my experience was definitely steeped in and very much the way that I was told that I would be successful in this country was to uphold white supremacy, right? And I have to acknowledge that for us to really make a change, we need to address anti-blackness in a lot of immigrant communities, including the ones I'm part of, south Asian primarily. And I think it's very important to really drill down into that a little bit more, you know? And if we do want to see a change, even in the workplace, you know, I work with tech companies, and there's a lot of, like, "Oh, we don't have a problem with people of color. Like, there are a lot of Asians doing really well in our tech company." I've had leaders write to me--I used to write a column for a supplement of the Seattle Times, and I had people all the time from large tech companies being like, "Oh, but our CEO is a person of color." "Oh, but our," you know, whatever it is, you know, "Our top people are people of color," and I really had to stop and say, "Listen, it's not about people who are already represented in the workforce. If you really want to make a change, can you tell me how many black people are leading at this company? Can you tell me how many black [?] people [?]?"Zach: Ooooooooh, goodness gracious, Ruchika. What you talking about? [laughs]Ruchika: You know, how many indigenous women, for example, are [?] at your company? Then let's talk about equity.Zach: Well, 'cause we're not a monolith. And you're absolutely right, right? There's this idea--and there's terms that we use, and, you know, this is the thing. Living Corporate is a positive space, you know? If we make any, like, direct statement--we have real talk, but, like, we're not--you know, we're not trying to be overly mad all the time, right? [both laugh] As hard as it is, but, like, one thing that grinds my gears is, like, people using the term "people of color" when we're really talking about specific underrepresented groups. Like, let's actually name and give those groups the respect--like, because if you say black people, that's already a very complex group. So, like, let's at least say--if we're talking about black people, let's just say black people. If we're talking about south Asians, let's say south Asians. But, like, when we say people of color, it's like--you know, I don't know if you have it, but every black person who's listening to this podcast knows what I'm talking about. You have a junk drawer in your house? It has, like, nails and, like, batteries and everything in there, right? Ketchup packets. And that's really what "people of color" is, it's just a junk drawer term. We're just gonna throw--if you're not eggshell white you're a person of color, right? And it's like, how do we break out of that? And so let me ask you this then. When you ask those follow-up questions and you start asking them to be specific, you know, and you ask, like, "Well, how many of this particular group do you have?" Then what does the conversation--what does that shift look like in conversation?Ruchika: Most people are tremendously uncomfortable and don't want to engage, right? And that's also--I'm happy to get off this topic because then I can talk all day, but part of it is the terminology and the language is flawed. In the same way "people of color" is flawed, so is "Asians." [?] Indians and Indian-Americans, you know, capture some of the highest income groups in this country, but in the same category of south Asians--just if you look at the south Asian subcontinent--[Bangladeshi?] immigrants have the lowest rates of poverty, some of the lowest rates of poverty in this country. So what I'm saying is already the terminology that we use to describe, you know, race is extremely flawed. And by the way, I'd like to shout-out to a book that I'm reading that I love already. It's called Superior by Angela Saini. She's a British science journalist. I'm actually part of the team bringing her out to Seattle to speak at our university here. And I just love this book, because it really dives into how race science came about and the very flawed logic that is being used to show that there are differences biologically between the races--which, by the way, she argues very, very well, using tons and tons of data and research to show that that's absolutely not true, [that?] race is a social categorization and we absolutely must acknowledge the experience of different people socially because of, you know, these categorizations. Biologically, there really aren't that many differences. And so I think my point--you know, I'm gonna go off on a tangent here, but people don't want to engage because we are so comfortable with this idea, "Oh, no. Let's not talk about race." That's a very interesting thing that I've really noticed here in the United States. In fact, I did some of my tertiary education in the United Kingdom, and then I, as I mentioned, grew up in Singapore and moved around quite a bit. What I found is that really in the United States, people don't want to talk about race, and as a result of not talking about race, they uphold racism, you know? It's just--it's baffling to me, it really is, and I think if you can't address it--and, you know, I've now moved to Seattle, which is really--you know, another shout-out, my friend Ijeoma Oluo's book So You Want to Talk About Race. Excellent book. I highly recommend it to every single person out there. Amazing. I make my class read it every year, and they're so grateful. After my boring book they go to her book and they're so grateful. You should see the evaluation papers. They're like, "[?] boring." [laughs] But my point is without us really naming and owning some of the huge systemic barriers we've had in the workplace, I think we're just gonna let the status quo run, and I think you have to be brave enough to get super uncomfortable and address those challenges.Zach: You know, and it's interesting you say that, right? And of course I agree. It leads me to the next question I have, which is recently Goldman Sachs announced that they won't be taking companies public without at least one diverse board member, and then they went on to emphasize gender diversity. My first question is do you think that this is substantive, and then two, or Part B to that, do you believe black and brown men are largely excluded from DEI initiatives, and if so, why?Ruchika: Okay, so firstly do I think that it's substantive? I don't think so, not at all. I think actually the word diverse--like, I think "diverse board member" already is just problematic. And here's another shout-out. You know, Aubrey Blanche talks about how you cannot--the word "diverse person" is actually problematic. Like, there's no such thing as a diverse person, right? [?] a white person is diverse, right? So diverse itself, you know, like, back to language, like, name what you mean, and what you mean here is "underrepresented," right? Like, that's what Goldman Sachs meant by one diverse board member. What they meant was underrepresented or underestimated. [?], but underestimated board member is what they were talking about, right? So already that training is problematic. And I think if you emphasize gender diversity, I really think you're missing the boat, right? Are female founders underrepresented and underestimated? Absolutely, right? But here's real talk. In the Fortune 500, 19% of the C-Suite is made up of white women. Only 4% is made up of women of color, right? So if you're really talking about systemic change, if you're talking about not trying to go through the same systems that are already in place, then you really have to look at race. Without that intersectionality, without actually naming that not only do we mean one board member from a underrepresented background in terms of gender but also race, you're just really perpetuating the problem, right? So I think that--I just think they didn't go far enough. I like the idea. I like what they're trying to say. And we also know that in many, many cases, white women do perpetuate similar systems of patriarchy, right? If you talk to any woman of color in the world, she has a story for you about that.Zach: It's so interesting that you say that, right? Because I really want to talk about the role that white women play in upholding--not only upholding white supremacy, but also ironically--or unironically--patriarchy as well, right? And so it's like, what--I think there's more research and work to be done, and/or I'd love to just bring on more folks to just really deep dive into that subject, because I think it's worth discussing. I think that it's--as a black, straight man, I benefit from patriarchy, and I have my own privileges. I do believe that white women sit in a very unique position in America, or just in the world in general, in that they are an oppressed group but also heavily benefit from white supremacy, and so it's just curious. And you're absolutely right, I've talked to plenty of women, black and brown women, who have their own experiences and frustrations, and I've seen them as well. I've seen oppression in action at work. But I do find it to be an underdiscussed topic. I know that there are articles and things out there. I still just think there's many more conversations we could have around it. I'm curious as to what's gonna need to happen for us to, like, just more unabashedly address the topic head on though.Ruchika: Absolutely, and I think it's, again, that being comfortable with getting really uncomfortable, because I think so much of, again, sort of the leftover of workplaces that were designed for and have been sort of continued on by white men, I think it's very much like you don't talk politics at work, you don't--you don't bring your sort of real, authentic self to work, and we know that that's changing with the next generation. I did want to answer your question about black and brown men largely being excluded from DEI initiatives. I do think so. I think black and brown men are--I think they do face some very specific and very, very difficult challenges. From a research standpoint, they--you know, we know research can always be flawed, but McKinsey's Women in the Workplace study, their report--I in fact have it in front of me--shows that, at entry-level, men of color represent 16% of entry-level jobs in corporations, and when it comes to the C-Suite, that's down to 9%, where with women of color it's 17% at entry-level and 4% in the C-Suite. So we know that, you know, while there's a huge underrepresentation of men of color, the percentage of underrepresentation of women of color relative to how many actually enter the workforce is really stark, right? Like, a quarter versus closer to half. So my point here is I think when you look at the data, you know, I can see why perhaps the experiences of men of color are sometimes left out and excluded from DEI initiatives. I do think it's a very, very important part of--again, if you really want to make substantial change, you do have to include them. The only other way, again academically, I've looked at this is what I've found is that when you address the two historically most underestimated identities in the workplace, right, or historically lower-status identities--and that's gender and race, so women of color--that's where you can really make a big difference, because if you look at white women, they benefit from, you know, one high status, the [?] of being white, but one low status, and for men of color it's patriarchy. You benefit from it. So I think there's this--I think it's a very delicate dance, but do I think we should build corporate diversity initiatives without including the experience of men of color? Absolutely not. I think again you will miss out, and again you're gonna leave things out that really are crucial to making sustainable change.Zach: So you speak about change and you talk about, like, the future. You know, it's curious, 'cause as millennials--as we've entered the workforce, you know, there was this collective anticipation from thought leaders around "Okay, yo, watch out, 'cause millennials about to shake it up. We about to cause a ruckus, you know? It's about to be crazy over here," and there was a lot of that talk. I'm curious, you know, how have you seen that in the work that you do practically, the infusion of the millennial generation, and then what, if any, shifts do you anticipate as Generation Z comes into the workforce in the next decade?Ruchika: You know, I don't really 100% know how to answer this honestly. I mean, I teach students who are at the sort of cusp of millennial, Gen Z, and it's really amazing to see, you know? They're very, very different, at least in the sense of being at least aware of some of the huge problems we see in the world today. I mean, they're the people most impacted by climate change, for example. And I do see that there is a very early understanding of social justice and why this is important, and that really gives me a lot of hope, right? You know, when I taught five years ago, my students weren't that socially justice-minded in the way that they are right now. So already in five years I'm starting to see a huge change. At the same time, I think, again, they're inheriting systems that were built with patriarchy and white supremacy at the core of them. So what's interesting and exciting to see is many reject that, and they're starting their own businesses, they're doing their own thing, they're in their own side hustles and their side gigs, and that's really interesting, and that's a very important part of the change of the future of work. At the same time, I think without addressing those systems of oppression, you are still gonna find many millennials who will continue to co-opt into them for many reasons, right? I mean, this is the generation that's the most financially insecure in close to a century, and they're really, really struggling with a lot of the mistakes that the generations before them made, and so I think that there's no perfect answer for this. I think what I will say is that it's exciting to see at least the data showing that millennials and Gen Z really care deeply about, you know, working in a place where they can live out their values, and they would actually--a significant portion of them would actually rather take lower pay than work for a place where their values don't align, and that's really exciting. That is a very different way of looking in the workplace. And again, maybe sometimes--I mean, I'm a millennial. Maybe I wouldn't be doing the work I'm doing if I was not a millennial, right? Like, maybe I would have had that terrible experience in tech and I would have been like, "Well, you know, this is just the way that it is, and life's like that, and I need to continue." And I just want to admit that there's tremendous privilege in me being able to do that. I mean, I talk to immigrant women whose ability to live in this country is tied to working for a job no matter how toxic it is, right? I talk to many, many, many people who have had to continue working in workplaces that were terrible for their mental health, terrible for their health in general, and they just had to, right? For a variety of financial reasons, health insurance, et cetera. So I do want to acknowledge that.Zach: So let's do this. Let's talk a little bit about you, right? You have so much going on, and so I just want to make sure that we really give you space for you to share what you're excited about this year and just what you're focused on.Ruchika: Thank you. Indeed, I do a lot. I don't like to talk about myself, but I will say my goal for myself this year is to do a lot more speaking based on some of the topics that I care about, and, you know, it's really inspirational when I'm able to address a room of people, and I've had people come up to me and say, "Thank you so much. This is the first time our leader has heard about unconscious bias and the experience of women of color," or "This is the first time we've actually had language around what diversity, equity and inclusion means, and thank you for saying the things that you've said." So I think part of my goal for this year is just to continue being a very vocal advocate for women of color, for people of color in the workplace, keeping an intersectional lens when it comes to, you know, diversity efforts. So that's something I definitely want to do. I do write for Harvard Business Review, and my hope is to do a lot more work for them as the year comes along. I would like to share one article with you, Zach. Actually there are two. One that I'm really, really proud of is one I wrote very recently about why it's important to pronounce people's name correctly. I know I have a challenging name and an unfamiliar name in this country, and it really makes all the difference if you think about inclusion, and as time goes on this absolutely includes people's pronouns and other sort of very subtle ways of making sure that you include people, and one of the easiest ways is to make an effort to get their name right. And so it sounds so simple, and it makes all the difference, because my name, 9 out of 10 times, is mispronounced. Like, even when I pronounce it correctly for people, they don't want to listen, and I think that is something that really needs to change. So there's that. The other is I really hope to continue writing about and speaking about topics that, like, generally we don't easily talk about, and for me one of those is talking about office housework. So a couple of years ago I wrote an article about how women of color are asked to do more office housework, right? So this means all the non-glamorous work. It can be actually, you know, correlated to housework, like, you know, ordering lunch, doing the dishes, whatever it is, tidying up after meetings, but it also relates to the non-glamorous work at work, you know, like taking meeting notes or sitting on committees that don't lead to promotion or mentoring the interns, for example. Like, i t's not gonna impact your performance review, and so I really want to continue shedding light on these topics that people generally don't talk about, but they do actually make a huge difference when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. Zach: Man, shout-out to you, Ruchika. This has been super dope. I'm so excited. I love your work, I love your writing. We're gonna make sure we have all of your information in the show notes, including the books that you referenced, and then, like, let's just make sure--you know, you're a friend of the show. Like, you're welcome back at any time. So if you have anything you want to plug or you want to promote, you come here. We got you, okay? I'm serious, we got you. Let's see here. Before we let you go, any parting words you have for us, for the folks listening in, for the--so we call... so did you watch The Avengers?Ruchika: You know, I did not.Zach: Okay. All right, so--Ruchika: In my defense, I have a 3-year-old, and life is very full. [laughs]Zach: No, super respect. I definitely get it. My wife and I are welcoming our first kid.Ruchika: Oh, congratulations.Zach: Thank you very much. I was gonna make a reference. So, like, on Living Corporate, we call aspiring allies Buckys, because in The Avengers movie, Ruchika, Captain America had a friend, and his name was Bucky Barnes. But, see, Bucky Barnes got hurt, and he had to get some medical help, but his medical problems were so complex they had to actually send him to Wakanda, which is this fictionalized African nation--Ruchika: I know Wakanda. [laughs]Zach: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so--[laughs] and so then he goes to Wakanda, and they end up calling Bucky "The White Wolf," you see what I'm saying? Because he's, like, a friend of the Wakandans. So, you know, it's a long way of saying we have a lot of Buckys listening in, aspiring allies, and I'm just curious if you have any words for them, for the Wakandans listening in, and for everybody in-between.Ruchika: Ooh, wow. Okay, that is such a big sort of closing. [Zach laughs] So listen, I'll start first with the Buckys. I think here's the deal. You know, I think it's always--it's easy to, like, talk and believe that your frame of reference and your narrative is the most important or the most significant, and I think what we need to really start doing is to step back and listen. Like, literally listen and open up your networks and open up sort of your privilege and open up your world for people who haven't had that experience, right? And what I mean is, like, for example, I'm a small business owner. Buy from me. Don't come to me and say, "Oh, you're doing great things. I'm so proud of you." Buy from me. Refer me, you know? [cha-ching sfx] Yeah, literally. Like, it's literally that, you know? And if someone's doing great work at your company and, you know, you're a white man with a lot of influence, recommend the woman of color. "Hey, you know who should run this meeting? This person who never gets to do that," you know what I mean? So for me it's about moving away from being a passive ally into an active accomplice, and I've heard this framing from a few different people. And so it's really about being very active. So that's my thoughts about, you know, Buckys. When it comes to people of color, when it comes to people who have been underestimatd, I had an experience last week where I was underrepresented. It was really hard. It really, really hurt. I think in those moments you really need to find your people. Like, you need to find your people. And they can be Buckys or they can be fellow Wakandans, but you need to find your people that you can really come clean with, that you can sit down and be like, "Hey, this horrible thing happened to me. Tell me I'm not crazy," because for a long time, especially everything that actually led me to this moment, has been me pretending like, "No, everything's great. I'm fine. Yeah, some moments are tough, but otherwise I'm doing great. I'm working super hard." And I think we forget, like, we need those mental health checks. We need people who we can rely on, who can navigate some of the really, really hard stuff you have to navigate when you are underestimated at work. Does that work? Does that help? [laughs]Zach: Does that work? Let me tell you something, you're dropping mad bombs. [Flex bomb sfx] That's incredible. Man, no, absolutely it works. Thank you so much, Ruchika. Now, look, you were talking about the importance of pronouncing someone's name, and let me just say as an example, it is very important, y'all, and my country self--and I know some of y'all may think I come from Connecticut, but no, I'm actually from Georgia. Like, I'm very country, and--Ruchika: I love Georgia. I lived there for a while.Zach: I appreciate that, and yes, Georgia is a dope place. I'm from Rome, Georgia. Shout-out Rome, Georgia, and then shout-out to Mississippi 'cause that's where I'm from by way of 'cause that's where all my people are from. But look, you want to take the time, y'all, and really slow down and make sure you can--and ask. Like, people will always respect and appreciate you trying to ask and seek as opposed to being like, "What's your name? I'ma just call you Bob." Like, "No, don't call me Bob. That's not my name," right? Like, "My parents gave me this name. This name carries weight and meaning and history and culture, and it's part of who I am as a human being that exists on this plane of existence with you, so please take the time to understand how to pronounce my name." So with that said, Ruchika Tulshyan...Ruchika: Thank you very much.Zach: Thank you very much. No, you were a beast. This has been great. Very thankful to have you on the Living Corporate podcast. That does it for us, y'all. You know where to check us out. We're on Twitter @LivingCorp_Pod, Instagram @LivingCorporate. We're on all the different DSPs, so we got Spotify, Apple... I don't think we're on TIDAL. Maybe. I don't know. Holla at me, Hov. "It's ya boy!" I don't know. But we're on all the other DSPs, okay? So if you Google Living Corporate we will pop up, okay? You know, if you want to make sure--if you're a browser person, you're not really trying to take any risks, you know, type in www.livingcorporate.co, livingcorporate.tv, livingcorporate.us, livingcorporate.org, livingcorporate.net, living-corporate--please say the dash--dot com, but we don't have livingcorporate.com, okay? Australia has livingcorporate.com. The day that we're able to wrest livingcorporate.com from Australia is the day that we have arrived, okay? Ruchika: Wow. So you went out there and you got all of those domains?Zach: We've got all the domains.Ruchika: Wow. That is really--look, that takes a lot of work. I mean, obviously, you know, I'm, like, totally in awe, but this is, like, double the awe. That means you're really serious about this.Zach: Oh, we're not playing. So if you type in Living Corporate dot anything else we will come up, it's just that livingcorporate.com--so Australia, it's, like, this corporate housing website thing. It's really strange. And I've been, like, doing my work. I've been doing my Googles, my research, trying to figure out "How can I get this domain?" But you know, Australia's a big place. Living Corporate, we're only--you know, we're just one little company, but we're gonna get it though one day. Anyway, the point is we're all over. If you want to send us a listener letter, look, DMs are wide open. We are not elitists. You don't have to follow us, and we don't have to follow you, for you to DM us. Just hit us up, baby. We'll respond. Ruchika: But you should follow Living Corporate because their podcasts are so incredible, and really, if you care about, you know, making real change and you want to hear from people who are out there who are really making change, between all of you and your guests, I mean, I learn something every single episode.Zach: [straight up sfx] You hear that? Did you hear what Ruchika Tulshyan said? Come on, now. Goodness, gracious, the love is real. All right, y'all. Ruchika: I mean it.Zach: And I feel it, so thank you. Y'all, this has been Zach. You've been talking to Ruchika Tulshyan, speaker, innovator, educator...Ruchika: All the things. [laughs]Zach: All the things, you know what I'm saying? Give her all the things. Don't play, okay? And make sure, Harvard Business Review, if y'all listen to this, you know... don't play. She's dropping that heat.Ruchika: Hey, this is a very important part of this whole thing, okay? It's really important to spread the love and to, what I say, you know--you know, this is not a case of, like, sending the elevator back down, which is super important, especially, like--I say this a lot when I talk to a room full of women, but it's really important to be able to share the love and, like, be real, and be real in the sense like, "I need this. Can you help me get there?" And I think that's one thing that, if you've been underestimated at work, you've been told for so long that, you know, you don't matter or what you're doing isn't important enough, then it becomes hard to ask for help, right? I mean, all of the lean in narrative is about "Oh, you need to ask," but you have always been shot down or you have been shot down 9 out of 10 times, then of course you're gonna have bloody imposter syndrome, you know? Zach: Oh, my gosh. Yo, we gotta--okay, so do we need to have you back, like, for a variety of reasons, but certainly to talk about, like, how to ask for help and just, like, managing the emotional labor of asking for help over and over and over again, 'cause you're absolutely right. I mean, now, look, my dad, he's a salesman. Like, that's really who he is, and so I get it from him. Like, I'll shoot. Like, I'll shoot over and over and over again, but it doesn't change the fact that at the end I'm exhausted, and it's defeating to hear "no" all the time or to be undermined or for you to be told no, and then someone else comes along and asks for help and basically they end up doing a watered-down version of what you wanted help to do, you know what I mean? Like, that is... ugh, anyway. Goodness, y'all. Look, Ruchika got us over here about to have a whole new podcast in the wrap-up section of the show, but that's okay, y'all. Look, you've been listening to Living Corporate. Make sure you check us out. Check out the show notes. 'Til next time, y'all. Peace.Ruchika: And I'll be back. [laughs]Zach: And she'll be back. [laughs]

02:26 - Lauren’s Superpower: Remembering Useful Yet Sentimental Facts About People 03:57 - Lauren’s Professional Background 07:35 - Bias in the Downsides of AI * Automation vs. Augmentation * Meredith Broussard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Broussard) 11:15 - Media and AI/How the Media Affects People’s Perception of AI 14:32 - Concerns of Small and Midsize Businesses Pertaining to AI 18:37 - How to Mitigate Bias in AI 22:23 - Ethics in AI * Loomis v. Wisconsin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loomis_v._Wisconsin) 25:39 - Defining Bias in AI * Georgetown University Law Center (https://www.law.georgetown.edu/) * Unconscious Bias * Harvard Implicit Bias Test (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html) 32:04 - Fairness vs. Accuracy in Algorithms 38:30 - Preventing Bias in AI Resources * Gartner (https://www.gartner.com/en) * Towards Data Science Blog (https://towardsdatascience.com/) * Github (https://github.com/) 41:00 - Working Remotely * Proactively Communicating * Setting Boundaries 50:45 - Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace * Slack (https://slack.com/) * Aubrey Blanche, Atlassian (https://www.atlassian.com/) Reflections: John: Lauren talking about the work she’s doing to pre-educate people so they can prevent themselves from getting in trouble even before they build their models. Chanté: It’s not enough to just be doing this internally. Bias happens in all shapes, sizes, and forms and it’s important to recognize that. Jacob: In a biased society we can’t expect completely unbiased data; therefore we can’t train an algorithm on the theoretical equitable world that we want to create. There will always be a trace of the bias we have now. Lauren: The first step is acknowledging the bias exists in the first place. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps,LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Lauren Maffeo.

This week’s conversation is with Aubrey Blanche, the Global Head of Diversity & Belonging at Atlassian. We discuss how Global brand, Atlassian, works to create inclusive spaces for their global employees.

Aubrey Blanche is the head of Diversity and Belonging at software giant Atlassian. She shares insights that will change the way you think about inclusion and most importantly change the way you lead. Host, Helen McCabe, the founder of Future Women.

Bogged down in buzzwords like Diversity and Inclusion? Lost on how to make real change in your office? This time, the Girl Geek X team is tackling intersectionality, from the language we use to the action we can take. Featuring speakers from Realtor.com and Atlassian. Hosted by Angie Chang and Sukrutha Bhadouria and Gretchen DeKnikker. Produced by Rachel Jones. Recorded by Eric Brown. Featuring Sarah Staley, Aubrey Blanche and Heidi Williams .Support the show (https://girlgeek.io/attend/)

In the second of a two part episode we take a look at culture and diversity and learn how successful companies are thinking about this and what we can try in our own companies. We speak with Farai Madzima, A UX Lead from Shopify, Remya Ramesh, Senior Design Manager at REA Group, and Atlassian’s Global Head of Diversity and Belonging, Aubrey Blanche. We learn that both of these important topics are much more nuanced than you might think. Follow True North on Twitter or subscribe to be notified of new episodes.

Why is “culture fit” a bad fit for creating an inclusive work culture? Aubrey Blanche, head of diversity and belonging at Atlassian, was a guest on Inclusion Works recently and shared her thoughts about how most businesses seeking to diversify are doing it backward. Blanche calls culture fit one of the worst talent concepts that's ever been invented, one that is anti-innovation. At Atlassian, they interview for values alignment instead. They look for specific behaviors that are congruent with their corporate values. These include: A commitment to candor and transparency Thinking about the folks around you Finding some joy in your work Their interviews are designed to tease out the people who have demonstrated those behaviors in the past and who want to work in a way that is collaborative, positive, and additive to the culture. Blanche said applicants don’t need to fit a perfect mold, just be interested in going above and beyond to support and help their colleagues.

In the first of a two part episode we take a look at culture and diversity and explore what they are and how they can be viewed differently. We speak with Farai Madzima, A UX Lead from Shopify, and Atlassian’s Global Head of Diversity and Belonging, Aubrey Blanche. We learn that both of these important topics are much more nuanced than you might think. Follow True North on Twitter or subscribe to be notified of new episodes.

Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity & Belonging at Atlassian, joins the program to discuss the research that Atlassian has done about creating more equitable organizations, and why they have chosen to make that information available to the public. Aubrey also reveals a language shift that they are using at Atlassian, and the importance of having conversations at a team level. Discover the innovative approaches that Atlassian is taking when it comes to gender diversity and the skill sets that DE&I professionals need to develop.

Atlassian's Designer of Equitable Organizations Aubrey Blanche talks to App Academy about how tech companies can invest in their workers in an equitable way. She also discusses the difference between "call-in" and "call-out" culture, how companies can be more accountable to their workers, and how managers can help be agents of change.

In recognition of International Women's Day, and because it's a really important topic, this is a very special episode. The two straight, white, cisgender male co-hosts of this podcast sat this episode out, while Moe took over the mic for an in-depth discussion with Alison Vorsatz from Fairygodboss and Aubrey Blanche from Atlassian about diversity (a term they both try to avoid) in the workplace. If this episode doesn't change your perspective and compel you to action, you are almost certainly not a human being. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Aubrey works with teams across the business to provide greater opportunities for everyone to join Atlassian and do the best work of their lives there. Her work spans the talent lifecycle from increasing access to technical education for underrepresented minorities through recruiting, retention, and advancement of all Atlassians. She relies heavily on empirical social science in her work, and has developed a new team-level paradigm for external diversity reporting. She believes that leading with empathy is the key to driving meaningful, sustainable change and creating highly effective teams.   In all areas of her work, she seeks to design effective interventions, programs, and talent practices that create equal opportunities for all Atlassians, and for the global tech industry. She is heavily involved in multiple industry groups seeking to define new standards for company transparency, reporting, and investment in diversity & inclusion. She is an advisor to SheStarts, a Sydney-based accelerator focused exclusively on supporting female founders, BeVisible, and Joonko. She is the co-founder of Sycamore, a community aiming to fix the VC funding gap for underrepresented founders.   Aubrey's talk, How Atlassian Is Building A Balanced Team   Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)   Becoming (Michelle Obama)   Monetizing Innovation (Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg Tacke)   Don't forget, to get in touch with me either try the contact page of the site or follow me on Twitter, where I can be found at @Jenny_Radcliffe

Aubrey talks about the systems based approach that her team uses to recruit underrepresented and underestimated talent in tech.  She also shares how giving up is not an option as exemplified by her own personal journey into tech.

The post Aubrey Blanche – Bonus Episode appeared first on Diversity & Mentorship In Tech.

Recorded live at ATC 2018 in Sydney, Aubrey Blanche from Atlassian chats with Dave and Jared about diversity and belonging. We really enjoyed this chat and if you listen right to the end you may even get to hear Aubrey belt out a rendition of Ave Maria.

We promised a round two, and we're delivering! Felicia went to San Francisco to support their new City Organizer, Lorin Bond, and met up with Aubrey Blanche, this time in person, at Atlassian's offices! Aubrey's changed her title from inclusion to belonging and they get into all the reasons why in this super fun and informative interview. ALSO this is our last podcast for a while. We're taking a hiatus! If you're devastated, tell us, and it will motivate us to get this puppy back on, but for now, we've decided to take former podcast guest Janet Comenos' advice and focus! Happy summer!   For a complete calendar of events, visit www.shegeeksout.com!  

We have been fangirling over the very smart, very kind, and very funny Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity & Belonging at Atlassian. As always, we start with exploring how she got to have this fancy cool title, and then dig into what it all means. Atlassian released their second report on the State of Diversity and Inclusion in US Tech and talked about what people are sharing... a sense of fatigue when it comes to tackling issues around diversity and inclusion. This is part one of two... In the second episode, coming out in a few weeks, Aubrey explores why we're moving beyond inclusion and talking about belonging. Stay tuned! For a full schedule of events and show notes, visit www.shegeeksout.com.  

We spend all of our time on Helping Sells Radio talking about how to help customers achieve outcomes. In this episode, we're talking about how to help employees be their best at work. Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Atlassian, talks about how creating inclusive workplaces helps teams perform at higher levels and do the best work of their lives. Get on the email list at helpingsells.substack.com

Aubrey Blanche joins the Hiring on All Cylinders podcast to discuss her work leading diversity & inclusion for Atlassian. She shares her thoughts on why there is no silver bullet for diversity, why inclusion efforts have to take place at the team level and how recruiting can lead the effort to create balanced teams throughout an organization.

A conversation with Aubrey Blanche, the Global Head of Diversity & Inclusion at Atlassian. Plus, we chat about Buffer's family leave, our teammates who are parents and Buffer babies!