Podcasts about brgs

It's time to cross the line! This time with the TNA figures from Jakks! We also discuss Star Wars, Rush Collectibles 6-Sided Build a Ring, Immortal Champions from Boss Fight, Goosebumps, Abyss, BRGs for the month of June, Super Friends and so much more!Don't forget to check out the TB Toycast YouTube Channelhttps://youtube.com/@tbtoycast?si=e06DUqEiVgBd1o4B

Go Joe! Today we are diving back into GI Joe, and it's a little bit different this time as good friend of the show Steve Hoeker is setting in! We talk all about Joe Series 3, plus the new BRGs for the month of June, A theory about a new wrestling figure line, Super7, Jake The Snake available now from Hasttel Toy, plus more! Also check out the TB Toycast YouTube ChannelNew Unboxing videos every Monday, Wednesday & Friday! Plus what's on the pegs every Saturday!https://youtube.com/@tbtoycast?si=VpoLQUDujDUWU_bn

For Episode 112 I review recent figures in the Big Rubber Guys line including Harley Race, Matt Hardy & Ethan Page as well as the Demolition Major Bendies figures. 5 Star Eric joins me for NFL Conference Championship Picks and Predictions for the Jan 25, 2025 Saturday Night's Main Event and "Andre" Karaoke closes the show. Thanks very much to the listeners for your support

5 Star Eric joins me to talk about No Holds Barred: The Match as well as new Big Rubber Guys preorders, Arn Anderson, Tully Blanchard, Missy Hyatt and The Model Rick Martel. We also make our Week 18 NFL Picks and "Andre" Karaoke close the show. Happy New Year & thanks very much for listening

This episode is about the new Road Warriors Big Rubber Guys and a pair of Killer Bees LJNs I repainted as well as the matches each team was a part of from dueling Pay Per Views back on Nov 26, 1987. Five Star Eric joins me for NFL Week 14 picks and "Andre" Karaoke closes the show. Thank you to all of the listeners

In Ep 98 I am joined by Travis from TB Toycast to discuss the Big Rubber Guys line including the Series 7 releases of Warlord, Dusty Rhodes & Barbarian. "Andre" karaoke closes the show. Thanks very much to the listeners for your support

News from La Tooney as they are making a Ric Flair, BRGs reveal new dates plus much more! link to support Mitch below! https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-final-expenses-and-our-sons-healing?attribution_id=sl:5c1543ab-aeb6-4dd1-8995-3a0679546a0f&utm_campaign=fp_ss_icons_ai&utm_content=amp1v2&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link

Join the Women in Seed Production Network as we talk all things mental health with our special guest Carrin Carlson. Carrin has a diverse background in plant breeding and genetics, leading manufacturing operations, mentoring many different folks in all stages of life, all while supporting different BRGs and advocating for inclusion and diversity. In this episode, Carrin shares her journey with mental health, why it is so important to her, and tools she has learned and implemented in both her personal and professional life to create more balance, more mind/body experiences, and ensure she is managing her energy in the right places. Join us on this journey to mental health wellness!  

Giving ABC's more meaning, in this episode of The Data Chief host Cindi Howson, engages in a captivating conversation with Nisha Paliwal, the managing VP of Enterprise Data Technology at Capital One. Nisha dives into her multifaceted role as a tech leader, visionary, and advocate for STEM education. The discussion traverses topics ranging from the impact of technology on younger generations to the future of work in the era of AI. With insights into Nisha's unique ABC leadership framework and Capital One's innovative culture, this episode offers a rich exploration of data leadership and human-centered tech strategy. Key Moments:The impact of technology on younger generations [3:05]Nisha's leadership style: The ABC Framework [5:02]The future of work and AI's impact [15:56]Mitigating risks and building trust in AI [20:20]The importance of data in AI [25:22]Capital One's culture of innovation [31:18] Key Quotes:“Let's just be who we are and bring the best in others too. So all the people who I work with, bring their best self to work and are comfortable with whoever they want to be.” “I think AI might not be for everybody to start with. I think it's okay to wait and watch. I think it's okay to let it bake because again, these things are not cheap either, right? These require a lot of investment upfront.” “Data is the king these days, we have a lot of investment in data, we have about 1000 plus people and I'm here to serve them, to serve the organization, serve our product – I care about what we build.” Mentions:Databricks IBMHyperautomationGenerative AIThe Secrets of AI Value Creation Bio:Nisha Paliwal is Managing Vice President of Enterprise Data Technology at Capital One, where she has held a variety of leadership roles over more than eight years. An accomplished leader, visionary technologist, and passionate change agent, she has been a relentless advocate for leveraging technology and data insights to create true business value for more than 20 years. At Capital One, she also actively contributes to and holds leadership roles in the Women in Tech and Origins business resource groups (BRGs). Nisha has a big heart for her associates and desires for them to feel valued, engaged and psychologically safe. With a passion for introducing young girls to technology, she also mentors others and supports several STEM-focused non profits, with a long-term vision of bringing more women into the ranks of technology leadership. Nisha volunteers her personal time with three non-profits - Boolean Girls, CodeVa, and WingsForGrowth, which focus on STEM education for K-12 and education for women in leadership-related topics.Nisha is an avid learner who made the jump from microbiology to the tech world after teaching herself C# programming. She continues her life-long pursuit of learning by reading, listening to podcasts, and participating in internal and external speaking engagements.Nisha has recently co-authored a book “The Secrets of AI Value Creation,” published by Wiley, in her pursuit of learning and sharing those learnings with the community in the form of this book. Order Nisha's new book, The Secrets of AI Value Creation now. Hear more from Cindi Howson here. Sponsored by ThoughtSpot. 

February 2021 was Black History Month, a movement that is not and should not be confined to one month of the calendar year. Despite the best intentions of many companies to promise change in the workplace for the better, Black History Month's message can easily get lost regardless of the many corporations pledging to make a positive change in their industries. In the last year, the Black Lives Matter movement has gained worldwide coverage helping to pull focus on Black history and the Black contribution to American society. With the whole world watching, it is more important than ever for corporations to stay true to their word when they say they are doing all they can to create fairer opportunities for all. In today's episode, we want to keep the conversation of Black History & Culture going beyond a month of celebration to stay intentional with the essential and ongoing change across our society. We discuss the ways businesses can tangibly support Black culture, minority employees, and minority suppliers. We explain why it's important to recognize the differences each person can bring to your business and why the fashion to ‘not see color' is unhelpful when you have a mix of cultures and backgrounds that you should try to understand and celebrate. We also look at the evolution of America and just how black people have been an integral part of the building of our nation, how they have been overlooked in the past for their contributions, and of course, why we celebrate the changes that have happened, are happening, and have yet to come. “What actually makes us stronger as friends and co-hosts is realizing those differences, celebrating them, and not being ashamed to talk about them.” – Adam Moore This week on Breaking Barriers: Why intentionality HAS to follow corporate statements that promise meaningful change How Affinity groups (BRGs) can create safe spaces for dialogue between minorities and their employers Why ‘not seeing color' doesn't work for healthy diversity The Black creators, contributors, and inventors behind the technologies we use today Why Juneteenth is a Black holiday for some parts of the US more than others How Hire Ground can help you help your employees volunteer for equality initiatives How to approach ‘difficult' conversations on diversity A moment for Vernon Jordan the black businessman and civil rights activist who sadly passed away this month Connect with Hire Ground: Hire Ground's Website Hire Ground on LinkedIn Hire Ground on Facebook Hire Ground on Twitter Cloe Guidry-Reed on LinkedIn Adam Moore on LinkedIn   This podcast is brought to you by Hire Ground Hire Ground is a technology company whose mission is to bridge the wealth gap through access to procurement opportunities. Hire Ground is making the enterprise ecosystem more viable, profitable, and competitive by clearing the path for minority-led, women-led LGBT-led, and veteran-led small businesses to contribute to the global economy as suppliers to enterprise organizations. For more information on getting started please visit us @ hireground.io today!

2023 has seen a startling spike in anti-queer rhetoric and misinformation around the world and brands have been caught up in the culture war.Earlier this year, Bud Light was victim of a right-wing boycott for a partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, and Target received a high-profile onslaught of threats against staff for offering Pride products during the month of June. Both companies responded by capitulating to pressure.Cass Naylor is co-director of advocacy at Outvertising, the not-for-profit LGBTQ+ advertising and marketing advocacy group. He is also an independent diversity and inclusion consultant and campaigner. And until recently, he worked in comms and marketing for the Financial Times.He joins host Jack Benjamin and reporter Ella Sagar to discuss how media properties, brands and advertisers must do more to support the queer community, especially in the months outside of Pride.“Queer people know what pinkwashing looks like; we're very, very sensitive to it now and we react very badly to it", Naylor says. "And [brands] are not getting any better at it. So you need to engage with your queer employees and the forum to do that is through the staff network. I'm a big believer in internal employee activism advocacy through staff networks, ERGs [and] BRGs. Lean on them. They are your experts. But make sure that you deserve to be showing up where you're showing up and then be loud about it because we need companies to lead the charge."---This episode was edited by our production partner Trisonic.Visit The Media Leader for the most authoritative news analysis and comment on what's happening in commercial media. LinkedIn: The Media LeaderThreads: @TheMediaLeaderTwitter: @TheMediaLeader YouTube: The Media Leader

Assuredly, we have seen progress on LGBTQ+ rights worldwide with several countries legalizing same sex marriage over the past few years through legislative and court decision including Australia, Brazil, Cuba, Slovenia, Switzerland,  and Taiwan to name a few. Yet, many LGTBQ+ workers continue to be closeted and do not bring their full authentic selves into their careers. More concerning, according to a recent global study completed by Statista, there are approximately 71 countries where members of the LGBTQ+ community can face criminal charges. While we have seen some advancement for LGBTQ+ equality, many efforts have fallen short. Now more than ever we need LGBTQ+ business resource groups (BRGs) and allies to help cultivate an inclusive, safe, and respectful workplace for all.

The goal is to provide support for the workforce. The pandemic really forced this to the forefront from a mental health and employee retention standpoint. We were taking care of everything and everyone and there was no way to hide that anymore. You can sustain a healthy work/life balance and we shouldn't have to hide that. ~ Margaret Guerette, Reliance Matrix Co-Chair of the Women's Employee Resource Group (ERG) Have you ever felt the need to put on your "happy hat" at work to convince colleagues and bosses that you've got everything under control, despite being overwhelmed and utterly stressed out? Did you ever hear the term "work/life balance" and want to scream--just a little?  Prior to the pandemic, work/life balance was touted as something workers could achieve just by talking about it–and it was on them to make it happen. Support for employees from within the corporate structure to help them achieve that balance was rare, as workers hesitated to share their challenges while on the job. As Margaret Guerrette from Reliance Matrix tells us, Covid changed all of that. As employees “zoomed” to work from home, the world saw in real time just how difficult a work/life balance was to achieve. Workers' mental health was under attack like never before, and companies recognized the desperate need to provide their workforce with support, for the good of the worker as well as the organization. Enter the Employee Resource Group (ERG), a now formal umbrella term for corporate associations within an organization specifically designed to provide support for employees. The groups are often populated by workers sharing a specific identifier–women, LGBTQ, Hispanic, etc.–and bring together workers from across the company to share challenges, solutions and mentorship. Margaret notes, “The diversity of thought from women at all corporate levels and from different backgrounds makes us this power group; it's wonderful to see!” Here at Brilliantly Resilient, we know the value of a tribe. When companies recognize the need to support their employees in their entirety as people, everyone benefits, both with employee as well as consumer retention. Plus, it's just the right thing to do. Kudos to Reliance Matrix and all organizations that support their workforce with ERGs or BRGs. To hear more from Margaret about how to start an ERG within your organization, tune into this episode of the Brilliantly Resilient podcast, and be sure to listen in for these additional bits of brilliance: We should be, as companies, supporting  workforces in the efforts to be seen, stay healthy, and to have a healthy balance because you can do both. You can caretake, you can do well in your job, and it doesn't have to be one or the other. One of the true values of ERGs is that connectivity piece…we do have this community at work and your direct team might not understand everything that you're going through, but somebody at your company does and somebody can be a support for you. It really has to come from the top down. You have to see your senior leaders, your CEO and senior leadership team support that because employees at more entry level positions aren't going to feel able to participate fully in that type of work unless they know that leadership supports it. We're really lucky at Reliance Matrix to have that kind of leadership. The things you learn in an ERG transcend to other pieces of work. You feel that community and remember that human connection and everything works better. To learn more about Reliance Matrix, visit www.reliancematrix.com or Reliance Matrix on LinkedIn. Let's be Brilliantly Resilient together! XO, Mary Fran & Kristin  

On todays episode of the 12:15 podcast, the BRGs discuss their favorite in studio guest from this week, the guys dive deep into Todd's concerning notebook, and Marvin's new "Superstar" attitude. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today on HerCsuite™ Radio, Host Natalie Benamou, shares special panel discussion with DEI Cross Organization Council Co-Chairs hairs, Cathy Skala, Eliza Gonzalez, and Lydia Rohn. This program includes insights from three executive leaders who have vast experience in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, ERGs, ESG, Cultural Transformation and HR. Take a Listen and Discover: How Culture Drives DEI internally and externally What you can do to win executive leadership buy-in for DEI programs Strategies leaders use to support DEI organizational objectives Why DEI Is Important For Every Organization: DEI isn't a one size fits all. Understand the needs of employees to attract top talent. DEI needs to be integrated into every aspect of the business. What Can Organizations do to Ensure that DEI is at the Forefront of the Business: Be consistent with including the mission and how diversity is part of that mission. Manage the perception of your company internally and externally. Encourage inclusion and increase engagement, passion and a drive to belong. Key Take Aways: Find out about the biggest challenges DEI leaders are facing in this volatile environment What organizations should start with when looking to have inclusive hiring practices How can organizations infuse inclusive programs like BRGs into their DEI practice Why accessing an external perspective helps DEI and ERG Leaders Thank you Cathy Skala, Eliza Gonzalez and Lydia Rohn for sharing your insights today. Gain an outside perspective every month with outside expert speakers and facilitated peer-to-peer discussions inside HerCsuite™ DEI Cross Organization Council. Join the DEI Council. Our next DEI Council Program on December 14th with featured speaker Veronica Pelletier, Managing Director at Accenture. Register to attend. Schedule a call to learn about how HerCsuite™ is helping organizations advance more women at every career phase with turnkey speaker events, leadership development, and exclusive programs. Host Natalie Benamou is the Founder of HerCsuite™. Natalie is a speaker, podcast host and guest, board advisor and CEO of HerPower2, Inc. Reach out if you would like to learn about how to be a featured guest for this podcast at info@hercsuite.com. LinkedIn: Natalie Benamou | HerPower2 Lead | HerCsuite™ With gratitude this holiday season and always to our advisors, members and team. Credits: Thanks to Julie Deem and the Business Podcast Editor for editing our podcast. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/hercsuite/message

Summary:After a successful career that saw him in multiple CHRO roles for a variety of major companies, Dermot O'Brien now serves as a board member of multiple advisory boards. He's passionate about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEI) and has extensive experience with using data analytics to help organizations successfully implement DEI plans and, in turn, improve overall performance. In this episode, Dermot talks about why and how to build DEI into a company framework. Chapters:[0:00 -7:01] Introduction•Welcome, Dermot!•Today's Topic: Building DEI Into a Company Framework[7:02 -12:35] Why is having a diverse team and talent pool so important?•Better performance and better results•Avoiding a company culture that singles out[12:36 -28:08] What strategies can be employed to meaningfully move the needle?•Analyzing the diversity of leadership roles•Improving the sourcing of quality, diverse talent[28:09 -38:06] How can organizations engage this important topic and avoid past pitfalls?•Make sure change resonates and is meaningful to everyone in the organization•Leverage employee resource groups (BRGs)[38:07 -39:59] Closing•Thanks for listening!Quotes:“[Within an] HR talent acquisition team, whether it's sourcing internal people or sourcing external people, I have found that there's a lot of bias. A lot of the problems are actually in the talent acquisition area. . . . And so nobody wants to admit it at first, but then when you really get in there, you realize, ‘Nah, [talent acquisition] is not as strong as it needs to be.'”“One of the greatest, fastest strategies for DEI that I've ever put in place is take diverse people and put them in seats of power.Just do it, and then guess what happens? You put an African American female in, like the top executive level, guess what happens? More African Americans are showing up on her team.”Contact:Dermot's LinkedInDavid's LinkedInDwight's LinkedInProduction by Affogato MediaPodcast Manger: Karissa Harris

In this episode, you'll learn how to start and get buy-in for your employee resource group in the workplace. We chat with business resource group (BRG) leaders from Thermo Fisher and explore how their BRG's operate, attract new members, maintain engagement and what skills they gained from being a part of and managing their respective BRGs. We also discuss how to grow a community and examples of allyship with other groups in the workplace. What we discussed: 0:00 - Introduction 1:23 - Areas of focus for your Business Resource Group  6:01 - Getting buy-in, approval and support for BRG activities 8:20 - Is proving ROI a factor in maintaining buy-in? 11:40 - How do you promote your BRG and attract new members? 13:46 - Community Building 17:42 - How do you keep your members engaged? 26:07 - Successful examples of allyship with your BRG?

(Part 2 of 2) We continue our discussion with Candace Williams to learn more about how BRG leadership impacted her and what her plans are for the future.Ashleigh Hargrave  00:05Welcome to Mosaic, your Novant Health podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity. You'll learn more about the mosaic of similarities and differences that make us stronger, and how health equity benefits us all. Piece by piece. We're telling the stories of the beautiful mosaic of Novant Health. Becky Knight  00:25Welcome to part two of our conversation with Candace Williams, immediate past co-leader of our award winning women's business resource group at Novant Health. In part one, we focused on the work that has garnered some accolades, and on this episode, we are going to focus on how BRG leadership has impacted Candace. Candace, leading such a large BRG, even one with a strong co leader, executive sponsor and committee leaders -- It takes a lot of time and energy. With so many groups you could volunteer to serve, why did you choose to be a BRG leader? Candace Williams  00:58To your point, it is a growth opportunity, I saw it as that I saw. It as an opportunity to meet new people in the organization to grow my own skills. And really for the women's BRG, I've always been, I shouldn't say always, but like, as long as I can remember for many years, very personally passionate about helping people grow developing people, and it's particularly women. So the opportunity to help my colleagues to grow, to be able to identify different people to come in and to really pour into them with information and knowledge and learning to be able to plan and strategize how you know, what is this year look like? Are we focusing on mental health? Are we focusing on domestic violence and making sure that women are taking care of themselves is an international women's day and we get to collaborate with other BRG to do something fabulous and honor the contributions that women have made. It just has been, for me, it was just this opportunity to use a lot of the skills that I get to use at work, but maybe in a very different way to be able to be creative and working on our videos that we submitted with our application to be able to like I said, bring in these amazing speakers. So I just really saw it as a way to really sort of feed my passion like I care about it. It's exciting to hear people grow. It's exciting when people reach out to us and say that a speaker impacted them or something that we said impacted them. It's just amazing. So that it was it was for both my personal and professional development personally, I was fed my soul was fed as a result of it, it fed me. And then I also had an opportunity to feed others and the opportunity to learn from more amazing people because the big leader, you're able to connect with all these other amazing leaders across the organization. It's just fabulous. I mean, I really had so much it was like really hard to let go. But I think part of that is making room for someone else. Like I would have happily continued to do this for years to come. But they're amazing people who also want any that same opportunity. Becky Knight  03:21I would love to learn what is next for you. Candace Williams  03:24So outside of work, I'll say within Novant Health, I still will be very active with the BRG. I'm a member of the Women's BRG and the African American BRG still able to support the new chairs with finding speakers and just anything I can do to help them as they transition. So I'll remain active there and love that and be able to step up with African American BRG because when I took on the chair role women's BRG, I had to step back so I'm so I'm excited about continuing to support the BRGs. Outside of work, I'm very active. I'm in my last year as PTO President, my youngest son is a senior in high school. And so I've been President for probably six years and I've always been on the board of the PTO or PTA and some call it at their schools. I'm in my last year of Jack and Jill of America, which is a an organization of historically black Organization of Women, moms. And so it's really a mother organization, we support our kids and I've been active in that. And so I'm I'm able to kind of step back from that. I'm a sustainer and Junior League of Charlotte, and then recently joined, became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, which is a historically black sorority, and we strive to be of service to all mankind. And so with that, I know I'll be able to continue to give back to the community. And one of the things that being a big leader did and I said I was passionate about women and growth and development, but it really also sort of sparked this desire in me to do more and what does it look like so capacity for you? I shared that I spoke with the local university. I've actually got two speaking engagements in queue over the next couple of months. And I'm really excited about and really hope to do more of that because I love actually enjoy public speaking and enjoy sharing things that help feed women and help us to grow. I recently had an opportunity to share on the women's BRG call for the first time because all the years it was sort of like I was always scheduling other people and thought, oh, wait, what if I shared you know and so Jill and mothering allow me to share and actually Candace Whitfield who shared with me is going to be coming back and sharing soon as well. And then I, I've started coaching, so I've got some clients that I'm coaching because really, like I said, it's like pouring into women and the BRG really helped me to kind of unlock that gift, that desire that was in me and what does it look like for me to serve and give back to other women? Becky Knight  05:57Well, thank you. I am very thankful just personally for what the BRG has done for me as a team member at Novant Health and also in my role as a BRG administrative coordinator. Your leadership of the women's BRG, in your partnership on so many things has really raised the level for all of our BRGs. And so I thank you for what you've done the last few years and I'm excited for what lies ahead for you. So thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate it. Candace Williams  06:27Thank you, but Becky, before we go, I want to thank you too. You are an amazing support. As a BRG coordinator you are they're all extremely supportive. Novant Health didn't just come to the big game like this isn't something new. It's not a result of anything that just happened in culture. This has been going off for years, we've got amazing support all the way across the organization. It's clear that BRGs are valued at Novant Health and you're one of the reasons that we are also successful. So thank you Ashleigh Hargrave  06:59Thanks for listening to mosaic your podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity and Novant Health. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode.

(Part 1 of 2) Candace Williams talks about her term as co-leader of the Women Business Resource Group at Novant Health. Learn why their work was awarded the #1 spot at the national Impact Awards. Then join us for Part 2 where Candace shares how BRG leadership impacted her and how that's opening up new opportunities for her.Ashleigh Hargrave  00:05Welcome to mosaic, your Novant Health podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity. You'll learn more about the mosaic of similarities and differences that make us stronger, and how health equity benefits us all. Piece by piece, we're telling the stories of the beautiful mosaic of Novant Health. Becky Knight  00:24Hello, happy to have you with us for this episode of mosaic, where we focus on what Novant Health is doing in the areas of diversity, inclusion and equity. This episode will highlight the work of our Women's Business Resource Group or BRG at Novant Health. All of our BRGs are impactful and so so instrumental in embedding our value of diversity, inclusion and equity in every aspect of our organization. And the Women BRG is our most award winning. Their mission statement is the women BRG strives to offer a safe place for hard topics, a resource to gain tools for self-care and a place to increase skill, confidence and competence for team members in reaching their professional goals. And they have done just that. With me today is Candace Williams, who recently completed her term as Co- leader of the Women BRG, here to talk about how the BRG impacted our team members, and also how leadership impacted her personally and professionally. Candace, welcome, so glad to have you on this episode. Can you begin by telling us a bit about yourself and your role at Novant Health? Candace Williams  01:27Thanks so much, Becky. As you said, my name is Candace Williams, I serve as Director of Patient Advocacy and health humanities. What that means is I have the pleasure of supporting work across the organization that supports our patients and their loved ones. I think at Novant Health we're all advocates. And my role, I get to do things like our patient rights video in English and in Spanish to make sure our patients understand their rights, support our community voice patient family advisory councils, which is a way that we bring the voice of patients and loved ones in as we're making decisions and coming up with ways to better care for our patients. And then on the health community side, really the pleasure of the arts, bringing the arts into our facilities, partnering with other teams, like guests and volunteer services. And recently we've begun installing murals in our parking decks just to create a new environment. So it's about the patient and family member experience, and a team member experience and how can we use art to impact that? Becky Knight  02:31And Candace, you just ended a very successful term as C0-leader of the Women's BRG here at Novant Health. In 2020, the BRG placed number two at the impact Awards, which are a national recognition, and in 2021, you took the top spot -- number one! What did that moment feel like and what was running through your mind? Candace Williams  02:52Going into it, Becky, all we knew was that we were in the top 25. We didn't know where we fell in the top 25. We just knew we were there. And honestly, in 2021, I was feeling a lot of pressure. Because when you've been number two, where do you go the next year? you want number one! And so in my mind, I thought, Is it even possible could it be but this is what we want. We want to continue to improve and get better. So there was just a lot of anxiety. So as the countdown was happening, I was absolutely on pins and needles. I was actually in the car driving my youngest daughter back from college for the weekend and was listening in. And the closer we got like I'm screaming in the car, I'm making all sorts of noise in the car. And when we got to I think it was like number four, number five, and we still hadn't been called. I very wisely pulled over at a rest stop because I was kind of losing it and pulled over the rest stop. And I'm just sitting there just waiting. And when they said when they announced the number two spot, which meant we were the number one spot. I absolutely lost it. I was screaming, I was crying. My daughter was like looking at me like it was also strange. It was amazing. It was so amazing to hear that. And I think at some point during the night, I thought am I right? Like, I think we're in the top 25. But the numbers are still going down and they haven't gotten to us yet. Like it was very surreal. It was an awesome experience. Becky Knight  04:18Yes, that was very exciting. And you definitely, I recall, kind of putting out the intention of you wanted to be number one, and you would share that on calls. And so what did you do to earn the number one spot what was the work that was recognized?  Candace Williams  04:35Definitely was believing for that number one spot and we were saying it all the time as a BRG and just were really amazed when it happened. In terms of work itself, we saw an opportunity to create something for our team members frontline through supervisory roles. Now, while Novant Health has a training and personal development available, we really saw an opportunity to leverage some existing training. It was available in sort of a self-paced way and really create some accountability. And the way we did that was by selecting specific modules that we thought would help a team member who wanted to grow in their career. We also set specific timelines there were, there were timelines by which certain things had to be completed. We worked with this company to provide coaching sessions for our team members. So as an organization, Novant Health would cover team members to coaching sessions for free. And additional coaching sessions were $10 Each, we wanted to make sure that even that $10 wasn't an obstacle. So we agreed and determined that we would support any team member who needed that assistance with that $10. So that that even wouldn't be an obstacle for the team members. And so it was really amazing the feedback we received from those who participated in it, because they weren't taking advantage of what was already there. So instead of us we thought about do we want to build something from scratch, but we didn't need to completely reinvent the wheel, what we needed to do was present it in a way, like I said, that created that buy in, that created that level of accountability that encouraged people to take advantage of coaching, which is so valuable, and so many people don't understand the value of it. And so everybody who participated, agreed to a certain number of coaching sessions, a certain number of modules to work on resumes, and interviewing skills, and all those things. And so I think it really produced something wonderful. And those who participated gave wonderful feedback about it. Becky Knight  06:34That is, that is, yeah, great work, and was so thrilled that it was recognized, and I think sets the standard for what other people and other companies can do for their team members. And I like what you said about you don't necessarily have to reinvent it, but customize it. Know who, who your members are and what they need and create something that is accessible and relevant to that was so well done. And you did have a lot of other things that you did during your two years. When you look back, are there other moments that stand out as meaningful? Candace Williams  07:15Yeah, there are lots of things are a few things. One that I think about is how we work together to really build an eboard. When I first joined the women's BRG, it was really me and the other leader at the time, who was wonderful, but it was really just the two of us when I joined. And so we saw an opportunity to really create opportunities for other women, our organization to grow by being able to step up into these leadership roles. So I'm really proud of where we landed with this amazing group of women serving together to make things happen. Another thing that I'm really proud of is the speakers that we've been able to bring to our BRG. As I mentioned before, we're really focused on personal and professional development. So we've been able to look out at the year ahead, what are the things that we can do for our members, we've surveyed our members to hear what's important to them as well, and have just brought some really powerful speakers. One of the things at the end of each call that we ask them to do is to give us a call to action, what's the call to action for everyone who's participated on the call, because sometimes you can hear someone and you don't know what to do if they've said 15 things. What do you do? What's the one thing? So I'm really proud of the speakers, and that commitment to make sure all of our members leave each call with something specific that we want them to commit to being able to do. Another opportunity that serving open for me and for Candace Whitfield, who co-chaired with me until we both gave the opportunity to others, is that we've been able to actually speak at a local university to their women in graduate programs. And that's been amazing. And I know that that was a door that was open because of the BRG very proud, like I said, of the surveys being able to survey our members for what they want, what do they need? How do they feel about the things that took place throughout the year we send out a survey and after every meeting and invite feedback and we take the time to look at that and have it helped us shape the next year. And then the final thing I'll share is I had the honor of serving and representing Novant Health at the ERG and councils conference this year on a panel that talked about BRGs and was able to share with BRG leaders really across the world about what we're doing here at Novant Health and that was really awesome. Becky Knight  09:33All right, well, we will end there for now and continue our discussion on the next episode, where we will hear from Candace and how the BRG leadership experience impacted her. And what's next for her. I hope you'll join us Ashleigh Hargrave  09:51Thanks for listening to mosaic your podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity and Novant Health. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode.

Summary:Adriana DiNenno is a product manager for Infor People Solutions and has been with the company for 13 years. Day-to-day, she is a jack of all trades, working on a variety of applications within the HR Talent suite from Core HR to Health & Safety to Employee Relations. About a year ago, Adriana founded a group at Infor called the “Infor People Wellbeing”. It's an employee resource group that focuses on all dimensions of an employee's wellbeing, from the mental to physical to emotional, etc. The group strives to create a safe environment at work. Adriana is also the co-chair of “Infor People Wellbeing”.  In this episode, Adriana talks about how collaboration in HR technology can be an advantage for you and your network. Chapters:[0:00 - 4:51] IntroductionWelcome, Adriana!Today's Topic: Advantages of collaboration in HR technology[4:52 - 18:10] Helping others in the workforceUnderstanding what's going on behind the scenes of a recruiting platformThe importance of being a mentor for someone who needs helpHow resume building has changed dramatically over the last few years[18:11 - 23:04] Behavioral assessments for collaborationsWhy you need to do a behavioral assessment—even if you don't think you do!How behavioral assessments yields insights for better coaching[23:05 - 32:08] How teams and teamwork apply to HR and HR technologyWhy knowing the strengths of your teammates can help you be a better workerHow modern technology has enabled collaboration[32:09 - 33:46] Final Thoughts & ClosingThanks for listening!Quotes:“You may not understand that this recruiter has gotten thousands of applicants and why are you getting screened out so quickly? . . . That's not transparent to someone who doesn't see the behind the scenes in HR technology. Collaboration is really important [because] you can figure out what you can do to better yourself, take training, up-skill, network…”“I love my direct team, but the BRGs that I'm part of (the business resource groups) . . . specifically have made me so much more collaborative. I called a colleague yesterday and I said, “Hey, I need a favor. This is a strength of yours; can you give your opinion on this for me?” And I would have never known her if it weren't for collaboration.”Contact:LinkedInProduction by Affogato Media

Twitter's Head IDEA - JAPAC, Preet Grewal, talks to People Matters about the allyship framework, meritocracy in diversity hiring, eliminating racial inequities, and accelerating the DEI agenda at the workplace. Listen to the podcast for a deep dive into channelling leadership engagement to enhance inclusion, fostering education, advocacy and allyship through BRGs and boosting ethnic diversity through sustainable and scalable DEI strategies.

Donna -My son Ben was born in 1994 to a Mom who was an insulin dependent diabetic and had already lost another child at 12 weeks ….1 1/2 prior to Ben’s birth. When Ben was born he was perfectly healthy and mine and Greg’s bundle of Joy. As he grew of course as a Mom and a teacher I watched and monitored his growth and milestones. At age one he was babbling and saying Mama and Dada and then all of a sudden that just stopped and he stopped giving us eye contact and started pushing us away. Red flags started going off in my mind and I talked to his pediatrician and he said not to worry that it would come. Well… it continued to get worse and by age 2 1/2 our baby was diagnosed with moderate-severe Autism. Our whole world felt like it had crumbled around us. The hopes and plans and dreams we had dreamed for Ben were shattered. After a major pitty party and questioning God, Greg and I both prayed for the Lords strength and for God to use our test as a testimony. As we watched Ben grow we noticed that he loved music and was fascinated with guitars. We bought every kind of toy musical instrument he would even act like he was interested in. When he was 8 years old we bought him his first real child size guitar. He would strum it and try to chord it and absolutely loved it! I told him as he grew that if he would learn to play I would get him a nice guitar. As he grew all our Christmases became musical. He asked for different instruments each Christmas and his Granny, his Aunt Vickie and other members of our family would always get Ben something musical for his gift. Some friends of ours got Ben a DVD that had several lessons for beginners on how to play the guitar. Ben would go in his room and go through each lesson until he had it and then move on to the next lesson. By age 14 Ben had mastered all lessons and was playing on his own. A dear friend of our, Barry Scott helped him with his timing and rhythm. In the meantime I had showed Ben some chords on the piano and he began playing piano as well. So in 2012 after not being on the road singing for almost 9 years, I felt God calling us back into a ministry. We formed The Journeys. I sing, Ben plays, and my husband Greg speaks about raising a child with Autism. Ben is amazing and has been a blessing to so many. Without God nothing is possible but with God all things are possible. We thank God for our blessings every day!

On today's show we have our own Paulie Pabst on the show to discuss Marvin now joining the Danettes, the Randy Johnson interview and the possibility of going to his house for the Super Bowl. Also Paulie ranks his BRGs and Dylan makes his case for why he should be number 1. Enjoy! Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Becky Knight  0:00  Thank you for joining us today with me is Sonia Hart. And she's going to be with us to talk about the significance of Black History Month, really the significance of what's happened in the last year and how that's impacting the members of the Business Resource Group. And then what she sees is the future.Sonia, welcome. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself by way of introduction.Sonia Hart  0:21  Thank you Becky, for having me here. Um, my name is Sonia heart. I am in my day job, the program manager for heart failure for the Greater Charlotte market. I'm also the former chair for the African American BRG had been in that role for the last couple of years and was really excited to be able to pass that torch on to our new chairs. I have been with Novant for 21 years. So and we've seen a lot of changes throughout that time and just really excited about what the future holds.Becky Knight  0:56  Well, we are recording this in February, which is Black History Month. And I thought we'd begin with a reflection from you on a historical figure or maybe someone that is personally meaningful to you, someone that you think of this month and the contributions that they've made to Black history and American history.Sonia Hart  1:14  I think for me right now, the person that comes to mind is Cicely Tyson. And with her recent passing, just really learning about her life, and she had lived for 96 years. So she had a very full life. Also reading her book right now, which is very interesting. And just to kind of see the parallels of the things that she went through to get where she was as this world renowned actress, um, she's very introverted, very thoughtful. So she really reminds me of myself in a lot of ways as far as really being thoughtful about what's the next step or what's the next plan, and always having a purpose in mind. So I think for me, that's who comes to mind for me as a historical figure.Becky Knight  2:03  So you are a part of this modern history. So this last summer 2020, and really the whole year 2020 is one that will go down in the history books as being quite memorable for several reasons, both for the COVID-19 pandemic, and also the racial and social unrest following the killing of George Floyd. And I wondered if you had any thoughts on what it was like to be a part of the the leadership of the BRG, which is over 600 members strong, and what that was like to be a part of this time in history and to lead folks during such an upheaval and such a time filled with so many emotions.Sonia Hart  2:48  I think for me, personally, what I saw the BRG do was two things, it was a safe space, for those people of color, to really kind of just, you know, get together to talk about the issues that were at hand, especially with the pandemic and having to social distance. And then with the social unrest with George Floyd and, you know, trying to still remain professional at work, we're still having these feelings of how do I cope with this as an individual, and we did some really great sessions during the summer to really kind of bring home the point of it is okay to have the feelings that you have, and to make sure that they have outlets to be able to express their feelings and to know that they had support in the BRG and I thought we did a really good job of facilitating that and providing that safe space for them.Becky Knight  3:49  As someone who's been here, you said 21 years? How do you see or do you see a change in how maybe Novant Health would have responded 20 years ago to how it responded now? Have you seen a change in how we're able to talk about race and racism?Sonia Hart  4:06  I will honestly say I really applaud Carl Amato and his efforts as well as the executive team for the insight that they have on things and really taking a stand when it may not be the most popular at the time. We're always taught as young people that two things that you don't discuss in the workplace is your salary, and politics, or racism, or any of those types, untouchable subjects and I really think this past year in particular, that those subjects have now come to the forefront and it's important to have those discussions and share those feelings and have people be able to voice their concerns or their opinion respectful way, but to know that they everybody is not going to be the same or everybody is not going to agree and it's okay to be disagreeable, but just to always be respectful and I think call and the executive team did a really good job of showing that with their leadership.Becky Knight  5:08  How do you see the African American BRG as a place for understanding both the past, and also what's going on in the present?Sonia Hart  5:17  I will say to that question, Becky, that I do feel like we still have a ways to go with addressing the present. I think there are opportunities out there for us as BRGs to really reach across the aisle and have those courageous conversations and discussions to move race relations forward, as well as you know, developments of equity in our hiring practices, as well as just in general in day to day reactions with other employees, I think we still have, I think we've come a long way, in especially the part of being able to have conversations with a co-worker that may not look like you or may not have the same belief that you have, but I still feel as if there is still much more work to be done in that area.Becky Knight  6:12  Any last parting thoughts or words of wisdom as we close our episode?Sonia Hart  6:17  I would probably just say, in closing that I feel like Novant Health is on the cutting edge of what diversity and inclusion looks like. And I think that we have a really significant blueprint that I think other companies really want to learn from and follow. So I'm extremely proud to say that I have been a part of that for a very long time and still look forward to see what's next.Becky Knight  17:10  We're very fortunate to have you as a 20 plus veteran of Novant Health and hope you'll continue to to be with us and I know you're still involved in the Black + African American BRG as kind of a senior sage leader. And so really value that that history and that perspective that you bring as someone who's been involved for a long time, and people come in with energy and ideas. And we need those kind of elders in the group who can share their wisdom and expertise. So thank you for all that you've done for the BRG and for Novant Health as a whole. And thank you for being our guest today on Mosaic.Sonia Hart  17:46  Thank you BeckyTranscribed by https://otter.ai

00:05Welcome to Mosaic, your Novant Health podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity. You'll learn more about the mosaic of similarities and differences that make us stronger, and how health equity benefits us all. Piece by piece, we're telling the stories of the beautiful mosaic of Novant Health. 00:24Welcome, this is Becky Knight and I have the privilege of working with Novant Health BRGs. Business Resource Groups (or BRGs) play a critical role in our goal to embed diversity, inclusion and equity throughout the organization. BRG's are groups of team members gathered around a dimension of diversity. We currently have 14 groups, a few of which include pride for LGBT team members and allies, veterans, Latino/Hispanic and coexist our interfaith BRG. The newest addition to our big lineup is rebound, whose vision is to create an open and supportive environment to raise awareness of mental health and substance abuse diagnoses. We'll hear from the founder in just a moment. But first, I wanted to share some sobering statistics. Yes, our health care workers are heroes, for sure. But first and foremost, they're very human. Health care has always been a rewarding, but demanding calling and the recent past has showed us just how demanding it can be. While others waited out the pandemic at home our frontline workers faced it head on. From June to September 2020. Mental Health America surveyed health care workers to get a feel for their mental health and wellness. They have responses from over 1100 health care workers. And the statistics are pretty sobering. 93% of healthcare workers were experiencing stress 86% reported experiencing anxiety 77 reported frustration 76 reported exhaustion and burnout, and 75%. So they were overwhelmed. Clearly, our helpers need help. To find out more about this Business Resource Group and how it is supporting team members and the community. I have with me, Sarah Arthur. Sarah, can you share about your personal and professional background a bit. 02:30Thank you for having me. I act as the manager of community engagement here at New Hanover and previous to this job, I worked as a inpatient social worker, and a clinical social worker doing therapy with patients in the community. So I've always been really engaged and passionate about working with people that have a diagnosis of mental health or have struggled with substance use. I also have a connection with my family. Several members of my family have struggle with substance use disorder, alcoholism, opioid use disorder and bipolar disorder. So growing up as a child, you know, I truly remember several events that were pivotal to awaken me to this population and what my family was truly dealing with. One particular event my house almost caught on fire, because my cousin had taken too many opioids and was nodding off while smoking in our house. So I, you know, I struggled in the beginning as to whether I really wanted to work with people that has substance use disorder and pushed through that to find that I care about them so much, not only because they are part of my family, but because I can truly understand where they're coming from. 04:06How did those experiences inform your decision to try to start this group? 04:12So this BRG started because I feel that there was no voice for these employees within our system. I knew that we had patient family advisory councils for a lot of our different Institute's like our behavioral health hospital or Cancer Center. And also I knew about these BRG's that focus on different populations to give them a voice within our system and I just saw where this was truly missing. 04:48Was there anything surprising about the process of starting the BRG? 04:53It has taken quite a while to get people willing to join, especially leaders within our organization, because they didn't want to be treated differently for being a part of the group. But it's definitely taken off. And I've been amazed at how comfortable people feel at sharing their story and how supportive they feel about other employees that maybe have gone through an issue with employee health because of a certain medication they're on or they've been talked about by other employees because of some different behavior that they may be experiencing because of their mental health disorder. So I think that you know, the sky's the limit with this group. We named it rebound because truly those in recovery rebound higher. That's kind of our slogan for this group, just to give some hope for a lot of people, we have a lot of family members that have joined the group as well, and gotten support as they work to support their family and themselves. 06:10Thank you, Sarah, for persevering and for getting this rebound BRG off the ground, your tenacity, and your compassion is quite evident. So thank you for sharing that story with us. And I hope you'll join me to talk on the next episode about what the BRG is doing in the future, what your plans are and how those plans will impact both our team members and our community. Thank you so much. 07:34Thanks for listening to mosaic your podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity and Novant Health. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode.

Ashleigh Hargrave  00:05Welcome to Mosaic, your Novant Health podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity. You'll learn more about the mosaic of similarities and differences that make us stronger, and how health equity benefits us all. Piece by piece, we're telling the stories of the beautiful mosaic of Novant Health. Becky Knight  00:24This is Becky Knight and I have the privilege of working with Novant Health BRGs. Business Resource Groups or BRG's play a critical role in our goal to embed diversity, inclusion and equity throughout the organization. BRGs are groups of team members gathered around a dimension of diversity. They're a forum for the exchange of ideas, experiences, and perspectives. BRGs help us better understand ourselves and each other, and they help us keep our Novant Health promise to relentlessly pursue remarkable care every day, so patients get the compassionate, expert and personal experience they deserve. On a previous episode, I spoke with the founder of our newest BRG Rebound, whose vision is to create an open and supportive environment to raise awareness of mental health and substance abuse diagnoses. On this episode, we'll hear from a member of the Rebound BRG about how the group has supported her and her thoughts on reducing stigma in the workplace. We'll also hear from a member of our Women Physicians BRG to get a clinical perspective on mental health. Tanya, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. Can you tell me a bit about your role as a transporter in our organization? 01:40I am responsible for taking patients to procedures and taking patients up to the roof when they've been admitted. And I have a lot of interaction with patients. So I really enjoy just speaking with patients and helping them to get their mind off of things and just being there to support them in a unique role. Becky Knight  02:06Can you tell me a bit about the BRG you're involved in? 02:10Well, in New Hanover, we have a BRG that is focused on mental health awareness. It's called Rebound. And we are just trying to create a safe space for people to speak about what they may or may not be going through, what their family members may or may not be going through, just for them to be able to get help without being stigmatized by common misconceptions surrounding mental health. Becky Knight  02:55Would you mind sharing with me why you wanted to join the rebound Business Resource Group? 03:01I actually had a experience lately where I had to go in for a reactions with the medication and that reaction induced anxiety. Just that stigma of being afraid of going in for an issue that might coexist with anxiety. That is is the stigma that we're trying to combat. Becky Knight  03:35I spoke with Sarah Arthur in a previous episode, and she mentioned that in starting the BRG at first people were reluctant. And that's understandable, especially for a mental health group in the workplace. But that didn't stop you. Why not? 03:50I just have a great interest in helping people understand these issues and helping people understand that it's a medical issue, that there's a chemical imbalance in brain like we've all heard about. But we don't really know what to do with that information. That's just a sad thing, because it doesn't create that safe space that people should be able to feel when they go to a hospital for help. Becky Knight  04:18Yeah, definitely hospitals should be a safe space for sure. And I just appreciate what the BRG is doing because I think it's a good thing to be conscious of, for one thing, the words that we use to describe people and how even if we're talking, you know, among co workers, you think, well the patient can't hear you -- but your coworker hears you, your coworker hears what you're saying, and that might make them think twice about if you're a safe person or not for them to talk to. 04:48Everybody needs help sometimes whether that help is just talking to a friend or family member or a colleague or if they need to come in and get help from a doctor, you know, that's okay. And we're trying to create an environment where people feel safe to do that. Becky Knight  05:08Thank you, Tanya. I appreciate your dedication to your transporter role, and for helping our patients feel more at ease as you navigate them around the hospital. And I also appreciate your willingness to work towards educating all of us on how to be more compassionate with each other. At this point, I'd like to welcome Dr. Michelle Constantino to the discussion. She is a licensed clinical psychologist with Bariatric Solutions. She helps patients prepare for weight loss surgery, as well as help them live well after surgery. She's also a member of our Women Physicians Business Resource Group. Michelle, welcome. And thank you for being a part of this episode, I wanted to start with your thoughts on how the pandemic is affecting mental health. Michelle Constantino  05:55Yeah, I think it's been a huge change for people. I think people were isolated. And that was hard, especially people who lived alone. And then, I guess there's just different layers to it, because then there was people who are trying to also homeschool children and work full time jobs. So there was that stressor for people.  Becky Knight  06:16Yeah. And you've likely seen the reports by McKinsey, the Brookings Institution and others about how the pandemic has disproportionately affected women, especially women of color. So obviously, this is affecting our our team members, and they are feeling the impact at work and at home. A report from the Kaiser Family Foundation for women under 30, in particular found that 69% feel that the pandemic has harmed their mental health. So this is affecting our team members in their clinics in the hospitals and our corporate offices. It's something we need to address. And so if we're concerned about a family member or friend, coworker, or ourselves, What are the signs that the issue is more than just the normal day to day blues and blahs? When do we need to seek help? Michelle Constantino  07:07I think anything chronic so you know, we all have our days where we might just want to be left alone and might not pick up our phone or want to do something social. So that's, you know, normal, like I just want to kind of relax and you know, turn off from the outside world. But when that becomes a consistent pattern, so when you see someone doing that days on end, maybe coming home from work, and just isolating in their room, not picking up their phone, or missing work, you know, days of not showing up or not performing well. And, you know, your appetite changes, you can be more or less hungry for days. It's usually I mean depression, you see it, they say it's typically about two weeks. And that's when you want you want to know that something's going on. What else changes, um, you might sleep more, you might sleep less you you your sleep cycle can get disrupted, you might wake up really early or have middle the night awakening. So those are lots of signs and symptoms. Becky Knight  08:11So considering that mental health has long been difficult to access for many people, What tips do you have for how to access the help that you need? 08:24A couple ways to reach out for help are I mean, you can always just, you know, talk to a friend. At Novant, you can go through your employee assistance program. If you work for the hospital, you can see a therapist for free. You can also just call your insurance company, like call the number on the back of the card and they will tell you providers that accept your insurance. There is a website also psychologytoday.com. I love this website. When I've had a therapist in the past, it's honestly how I have found my therapist. You can go type in your zip code, you can check box, your insurance company and whatever you want to work on. Or you don't have to check any of those things. But you can see if you're working on depression, anxiety, just like life adjustments, relationship issues. And then it will populate profiles with pictures. And so you can read people's profiles see their picture and kind of get a feel for who might be a match for you. And then you can just email them or call them. And usually most therapists will give you like a free like consult. And so you can see if they're a good fit. And that's like the number one most important thing is to have a good rapport and a good relationship with your therapist. If you connection, you're probably not going to want to keep talking to them. So interview people . Interview and find a good connection. Becky Knight  09:46Do you have any tips for maybe for those of us who are working in healthcare, why it's so important to not stigmatize mental health and also for those who want to, you know, seek help, how to not let that be a barrier to them. It's okay to talk to somebody, it's okay. And it doesn't mean that somebody even has a diagnosis. And even if they do have a diagnosis, that's okay too. But don't make assumptions about anybody, like, you don't know what's going on in their personal lives. Like, they could have lost a family member during COVID. And they're supposed to sit there and dealt with that on their own like, it's okay, if they need to go talk to a therapist. A lot of mental health diagnoses are inherited. So there's a high percentage of you getting a disease from your family line. And when that happens, there's nothing you can do to change that, chemically speaking, right? You get your.. we all get what we get. And so what you can do is get support. And that looks like the right medication management. And I always say to my patients who come in and they're opening up for the first time I tell them, if you have asthma, you would use your inhaler to breathe, right? If you have diabetes, you take your insulin, so your sugar levels are where they need to be right? And so literally what mental health is hormonal imbalances in your brain. And so medication literally helps bring your hormones to where they need to be. There's a feedback loop between the brain and the body that works all day long to regulate all of our hormones. And sometimes that feedback loop just has a little miscommunication. And what medication does is get that communication back on track. So there's nothing wrong with that.  And any last words of wisdom or encouragement for folks to get the help that they might need? You're changing generations of dealing with mental health from, you know, maybe unhealthy coping to healthy coping, and people are changing that for their children as well. And I think it's a beautiful thing when someone can reach out and get help and make those changes. And so I think just you know, thinking about it, just like any other medical condition, you want your friend to take care of their bodies, they need to take care of their minds too. Dr. Michelle Constantino, thank you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom with us. And thank you to my earlier guests, Tanya, as well from New Hanover Regional Medical Center. I know that this will be useful information for many people. So thank you so much. Ashleigh Hargrave  12:28Thanks for listening to mosaic your podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity and Novant Health. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode.

Leila is joined by Darion Cranfield, Director of Retail Program Management, & Chair of the African-American Leadership BRG at WalgreensTODAY YOU WILL LEARN ABOUT:- Darion's personal and professional journey. Coming from a single parent family in Chicago, where there was a lack of role models so he had to find his own way, to becoming a parent when he was 20 years old and how that shaped his professional development.- How Darion wants to enable others to be leaders, give them their chance to shine. Have real models as role models within society as well as the business.- How the BRGs at Walgreens are more than just a 'group'. They connect the business to the employees and work with them for equity and to give them a voice.- Belonging is a state of mind, its a foundational element and once you have a sense of belonging internally, others externally can start to see it.- Walgreens internship programs and how they encourage diverse applicants and put some intention behind the effort. - Darion attends an annual conference with other retailers where they share stories, experiences and best practices, so workforces are coming together to value and empower each other, not working against each other as competitors when it comes to employees and development.- The inspiring work Darion does as chair of the African-American Leadership BRG, and what other BRG and ERG leads could learn from him.OTHER RESOURCES:https://www.linkedin.com/in/darion-cranfield-00873b90/

It's a new day, and a new day means new inspiration, and we promise you will not be disappointed. In episode five Tawana, VP of Implementation, shares her career journey, her mentorship and sponsorship connection with Debbie Dyson, President of National accounts at ADP, and being a Women in STEM. We also discuss the power of connection, whether it be with her global team or to balance with our relationships outside of ADP.

00:05Welcome to Mosaic, your Novant Health podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity. You'll learn more about the mosaic of similarities and differences that make us stronger, and how health equity benefits us all. Piece by piece. We're telling the stories of the beautiful mosaic of Novant Health. 00:25Hello again, this is Becky Knight coordinator of Novant Health 14 business resource groups. Business resource groups, or BRG's, are an important part of the Novant Health diversity inclusion and equity strategy. A BRG is a voluntary group of team members organized around an aspect of common identity, such as age, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or veteran status. The groups work together to support each other our business in diversity and inclusion strategies and constituency needs. One of the themes over the past year has been for our BRG's to host webinars to highlight holidays and observances that have special meaning to them. These webinars are an accessible way for our team members to share about their traditions, beliefs and culture. And it lets us get to know each other better, and to be able to better understand and anticipate the needs of our patients and communities. And this episode of mosaic, we'll hear from several Novant Health BRG members, sharing about Dia de los Muertos. samhain, Transgender Day of Remembrance, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. 01:37First we have David Avalos, sharing about Dia de los Muertos. 01:43Dia De Los Muertos basically is a custom, it's a custom that is derived from an old ancient Aztec custom. And then there has been some influence from the Catholic Church. So Dia De Los Muertos is translated into Day of the Dead here in the United States. Death is something that's very grim and solemn and sad. And that is not the way they view death in Mexican culture. So day of the dead is really a celebration. So it's a celebration of life, it's to honor your ancestors that have moved on, or that have passed away. So we're here in the States people are kind of solemn and sad, and tend to wear dark clothes and things of that nature. In Mexican culture, it's very loud and vibrant and colorful. So there's, there's a lot of beauty involved with the celebration of this Day of the Dead, you're going to hear later on about Samhain and how on that day, there's this veil that's between our world and the spirit world. And it is believed that the veil is thin during this time. So it allows spirits to enter into our world. And that's not a scary thing in Spanish culture. That's something where these are your ancestors. This is your family. So you want to welcome them. So that's why they have these altars with offerings and they have celebrations and parties and they usually cook food and the food that they cook is usually what that relative's favorite meal was. So um, Day of the Dead you all will probably know it as All Saints Day or All Souls Day. So we celebrate it on November first and November second. So November 1 is technically believed that's when the children who have passed come back to visit and celebrate. They call them on angelitos, which means little angels. And then on the following day, November 2, that's when the adults turn up for the festivities. They don't call them the angels, they call them the deceased, they call them difuntos. Family members usually will prepare for several weeks in advance for this summer celebration, creating their offerings and decorating their altars and things of that nature. 04:08Next, Willette Balsamo speaks about Samhain. 04:12You know it, most people know it, as Halloween. Here are some of the other names, there are many. All Hallows Eve, Samhain, it's hard to pronounce. A lot of the a lot of things come from Celtic, or Irish, if you will, Scotland, The Isles the British Isles. A lot of it came from them. Also Egypt. There's many many histories of where Wiccans, more modern version of witchcraft. But it was also practice in China. So everybody's got their own little twist on this. So the pronunciation is pronounced “sow win” like s-o-w  like a Mama Pig, or “sow ween.” The meaning of that. There's a couple of beliefs that it means summer's end, while others find that called fire of peace, and a lot of that has to do with the bonfires and the harvest, it's also called third harvest, spirit night, hollow mass, Mischief Night, probably heard that, ancestor night and more. And it's also during this time that we open our hearts and our bodies to death. We honor those that have died whenever it's usually those this year, but it doesn't matter you can honor whomever you wish. We acknowledge sorrow and loss. We believe in an afterlife. We also believe in rebirth or reincarnation. 05:58Our coexist and pride BRGs co hosted a webinar for Transgender Day of Remembrance. Here is Nick Stewart. 06:06Began over 20 years ago, Transgender Day of Remembrance is observed to focus on the persistent struggles, transgender people face in their everyday lives, and how others can share their love, support and hope. Today, we especially remember those who in the past year, have lost their lives as a result of transphobia and anti transgender violence. We come together to acknowledge that all people of all identities are welcome in our organization, in our facilities, and in our communities. We recognize today that some face violence and hatred simply for being who they are. We gather against acts of exclusion, anger and hate. And we respond with remembrance, hope, and love. We come together from different backgrounds, origins, groups and disciplines to intentionally remember that we are one humanity, and that all people are created beautifully. We stand together for those who have died for their families, and for those among us who identify as transgender, that they might know that they are not alone, that we stand with them, and that they are loved. 07:20Now we'll learn about Hanukkah from Marcia Lampert.  Hanukkah is a holiday that's really mostly based on folklore. It's not what we would consider a holy day. Our holy days are around the Jewish New Year Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, well, and Passover as well. So this is really a holiday that celebrates a bright message and a theme and allows us to celebrate freedom. The word Hanukkah means rededication. And that was the story in 2000 BC that a group of people destroyed the temple. And when they destroyed the temple, the eternal flame, there was not enough oil for the flame to continue more than one day. But miraculously, it went on for eight days. We go by like Muslim, we go by the lunar calendar, so it's never the same day every year, but it usually ends up in December. For eight nights, we light the candles and we say a prayer. And we also very much in the theme of everything we do we always eat. So we are always eating during holidays, foods that symbolize something. But in Hanukkah, because of the oil, the oil from the temple that lasted for eight days. The foods that we generally eat our homemade potato pancakes, you know, in oil, and jelly doughnuts made an oil, very healthy. So a lot of gathering singing songs. Again, making it fun. But keeping the same of this light that lasted for eight days, how we were able to take back the temple and renew our faith.  Finally, you Vaughn Dixon shares about Kwanzaa. 09:21Beginning December 26, and lasting for seven days. Kwanzaa is a celebration of community, family and culture, established as a means to help African Americans reconnect with their African roots and heritage. And there are three official Kwanzaa colors. Black, red and green. There are seven candles, one Black Candle, three red candles, and three green candles. Each candle represents one of the seven principles guiding Kwanzaa they are placed in a mission Masaba in a specific order, each candle is lit on a specific day of Kwanzaa of the seven day celebration. The Black Candle the principal represents you Mojo, which means the concept of unity is a focus on the unity of family, community, nation and race. This candle is always lit first on the opening day of Kwanzaa of which again is the 26th of December, day two is collegia Gulia, which is self determination is the second principle. It represents defining, naming, creating, and speaking for oneself. This is the second candle lit on day three, which is you Jama. This is the third principle and is defined as collective work and responsibility. This encompasses building and maintaining the community by working together, taking on each other's problems and solving them together. This is the third candle. The fourth candle is the principle of cooperative economics, you Jama. This encompasses building and maintaining individually owned stores, shops, and other businesses. This goal is to profit from these endeavors as a community so we're talking about socio economics and the community. This is the fourth candle lit. 11:34There are three green candles, each representing a specific principle. These candles are placed on the right of the Black Candle, and the last ones that are lit on day five, which is Nia Nia. This is the principle of purpose and takes on the collective vocation of building the community and developing it as a way to restore African Americans and pan Americans to their traditional greatness. This is the fifth candle that is lit on day six, which is Khumba KUUM. Ba this candle celebrates the principle of creativity. The goal of this principle is to do everything possible to make a difference and leave the community in better condition than what was inherited. This is the sixth candle that is lit. And finally on day seven, you Imani? I am a ni Imani. This is the crucible of faith. It challenges people to believe in each other and honor their struggle as righteous and that they'll be victorious. This is the last candle to be lit. All seven candles are lit on this particular day. 12:59Thanks for listening to mosaic your podcasts for diversity, inclusion and equity and Novant Health. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode.

In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Joy Dettorre, Global Leader for Diversity and Inclusion, and Stephanie Galera, Global Diversity and Inclusion Leader, at IBM. Our host, David Spinks, the VP of Community at Bevy and the Co-Founder of CMX, moderates the conversation. The business resource group program plays a central part in successfully managing IBM's 250+ employee groups across fifty countries that touch approximately 50,000 employees. Joy and Stephanie will reveal how BRGs create a space for diverse, inclusive, equitable purpose-driven workplaces, like IBM's eight communities, and why businesses need to invest in ERGs and BRGs. Who is this episode for? HR specialists, company leaders, and executive managers. Three key takeaways: 1. Unfolding the business resource group program at IBM: IBM focuses on delivering employee-centric programs and initiatives by creating communities of like-minded people and offering a space for diverse, inclusive, equitable purpose-driven workplaces. HR at IBM manages the BRG program, which focuses on intersectionality and allyship. BRG serves as a platform for employees who want to launch a program or campaign for these different communities. From a strategy standpoint, HR provides the structure or template that BRGs can be successful. IBM has three global communities: the LGBT+ community, The Women's community, and the People With Diverse Abilities community. In the United States, there are five other communities: the Black community, the Hispanic community, the Indigenous community, the Pan-Asian Community, and the Veterans community. 2. Why does IBM invest in ERGs and BRGs?: The business resource groups enable values like compassion, kindness, justice, dignity, and unity. They also create a sense of belonging and inclusion for the employees. The second part of that equation is about organization trust, companionship, and offering employees the opportunity to do something good. 3. Measuring the success of the employee resource groups: There are two ways IBM measures the success of an employee resource group. One is the annual employee engagement survey. IBM also experiments with something called "mini-pulse surveys," which are topical and spontaneous. They are anonymous and include a small number of questions. When measuring the employee engagement data, HR looks at two metrics: engagement and inclusion. They also break down these metrics by community. HR identifies challenges, sentiments, and the needs of the community. Furthermore, they look at the societal impact. All of the measurements influence bigger goals, like attention, retention, engagement, and representation. Notable Quotes: 1. “By nature and by blood, you're probably part of a community. But if I want to do something more, a BRG becomes the vehicle that I would use to create more impact, recognized and funded by the corporation.” - Stephanie Galera 2. “We all have one client that we serve. That's the IBM employee. That's why we exist. We need to create environments where these employees can feel safe, included, valued, appreciated, and an environment where they can thrive.” - Joy Dettorre 3. “These business resource groups create a sense of belonging and community, organizing employees around a common cause of driving passion.” - Joy Dettorre Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would that food be? Joy: Pasta and meatballs. Stephanie: Mushroom omelet. 2. What's your go-to community engagement tactic or conversation starter? Joy: If someone comes to me for help, I ask, "how can I help you?" But if I need help from somebody else, I tend to say, "will you help me?" Stephanie: The trip that my spouse and I had in the US, which talks about the benefits of actually joining a BRG meeting 3. If you could distill all of your experience as community builders and as community professionals into one bite-sized piece of advice for other community professionals, what would that advice be? Joy: Can we all commit to leaving every conversation and every interaction a little bit better than we found it, just based on how we behave. Stephanie: When you're in doubt about anything that you'd like to do, ask yourself, what's the worst that can happen. And most of the time, you'll find that things can be manageable. 4. What does the organizational structure of the groups look like? Are there any leads, and are they compensated for their work? There is absolutely a governance around our business resource groups. They constantly evolve and get better. But one thing in that governance model is an executive sponsor. There are also co-chairs, which are volunteer positions. They receive blue points, with which they can go into IBM's internal shopping store and purchase something. There are also some financial gifts and digital thank you cards. The company writes blogs to recognize their effort, and leaders make personal calls to them and offer specialty digital badges they can post on LinkedIn. 5. Do people need to fill out some form to specify how they contributed, or do you have it automated somehow? In terms of recognition, we do have a 360 feedback that's called a checkpoint where people can put in their goal, and it's visible to their managers so that if they achieve that goal, that becomes part of their appraisal for the year. Volunteers at IBM can also convert spent hours into grants. 6. Do BRG leaders have weekly or monthly hours carved out for the work honored within management rather than a volunteer expectation on top of their job? We know that some managers carve out a portion of some person's time to do this, especially if it's for a business unit or geographic location. Sometimes we ask managers to carve out time for this person as a leadership development activity. And other times, they balance it as a work of passion. 7. Is there a step-by-step playbook to help us launch an ERG? We have a playbook that we're writing, but I don't know if it will be available outside IBM. 8. When an organization is committed to DEI, there will be several instances where you have to engage in uncomfortable conversations around discrimination and unconscious biases. How do you start and manage those conversations successfully? It's about creating a culture across the entire ecosystem where allyship, diversity, equity, and inclusion are a part of all of those processes.

Ashleigh Hargrave  00:05Welcome to mosaic, your Novant Health podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity. You'll learn more about the mosaic of similarities and differences that make us stronger, and how health equity benefits us all. Piece by piece, we're telling the stories of the beautiful mosaic of Novant Health. Becky Knight  00:51Hello again, this is Becky Knight. On this episode we'll be sharing excerpts from the webinar our Native American BRG presented on Indigenous People's Day 2021. The BRGs mission is to educate, collaborate and communicate with people throughout Novant Health and surrounding communities, with a focus on understanding and improving the health of Native Americans, as well as bridging gaps of misconceptions and challenges among the Native American population. Rebecca Souza is the leader of this BRG, and her voice is the one you'll hear on this episode. We begin with a history lesson.   Rebecca Souza  01:31Before Columbus, there already were people here in America, all throughout the Americas, north and south. We know they were here at least 17,000 years ago, but actually, they probably were here as far back as you know, more than 40,000 years ago. They migrated to this continent from Asia via the Bering Land Bridge, which connects Mongolia to what is now Alaska. These early people were nomadic and they were hunter gatherers. They didn't live in one place, they moved around. Here in North Carolina and Wilson County we know that around 8000 BC, they started to develop more permanent sites where they would come in seasonally like for hunting. And then when winter came they might move to another site. And between 212 100 BC they started to develop more permanent locations. East of the Mississippi. This is mostly true for all tribes. Villages started to crop up and people might move from village to village depending on the season. But they were more permanent. And they were like still relied heavily on hunting, hunting, wild game and fishing and also gathering but they had started to develop agriculture. They were developing pottery and cultural traditions like mound building. And mound building is one of the only permanent types of structures that we have of Native American people in the past. Since most of what they use wood, animal hides, mud dobbing, that stuff doesn't last after people stop using it but the mounds, the mounds did last. And east of the Mississippi and all along the Mississippi River. There was many there were many mounds built and there are some actually still standing here in North Carolina in the town of Town Creek. You can go it is in a state park and you can go visit there. I'm actually going to visit there this month. Hopefully. The baseline of Native American agriculture was corn, squash, and beans. And those all start to be traded all around the continent and grown even here in North Carolina. It's important to recognize and appreciate that these people did create complex cultures and traditions. Becky Knight  03:59So how did Columbus State come to be recognized in the United States? Rebecca Souza  04:04Columbus Day was first recognized in 1892 by Italian Americans to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the voyage. Then in 1937, it was sort of established unofficially as the second Monday in October and then many decades later, it was set up as a national federal holiday. Because throughout the 19th and early 20th century, Roman Catholic Italian Americans were members of a stigmatized ethnic and religious group, as were many Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans. They campaigned for Columbus Day in order to place Catholic Italians into American history where they weren't really allowed to be before. Christopher Columbus sailed under the Spanish flag, but he actually was Italian. You have to you would have to understand that white was not a fixed term throughout much of the history of America. And many Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans were not considered white, by the dominant group of the time, they were all Northern Europeans, English, Scottish, German, French, you know that that's the background of the people that were considered white and so it changed. And at this time, Italian Americans did have a problem with discrimination and prejudice in this country. So they were trying to celebrate a famous Italian American history. Becky Knight  05:37That was a big aha moment for me. Learning that Columbus Day began as a way for one marginalized group to elevate their standing in America. But honoring their own struggle and resilience came at the cost of honoring someone who not only never stepped foot on American soil, he was instead in the Caribbean and Central and South America, but who directly and indirectly led to the enslavement and slaughter of millions of indigenous people. Rebecca Souza  06:01Part of the agreement of his voyages with the Spanish king and queen was that he would send gold and slaves to Spain. And he did. He didn't find a lot of gold, but he sent a lot of slaves. There's an estimated 5 million died within the first years of Columbus landing on one of the Caribbean islands. And that began the subjugation of the native people, the Americas that has continued for five centuries and so in many ways continues today. Millions have died from the disease or violence committed by European colonizers, and entire tribes and cultures were wiped out completely. As you can see, for many Native Americans, recognizing Columbus with this holiday, relives the trauma of violence and loss associated with European colonization of the American continent. They have continued to suffer great loss. Even today, Indian reservations are some of the poorest counties in the country. And treaties have been broken as late as the last 40 years, land has continued to be stolen for treaties. And even their children are being stolen still. When there are issues that require a child to be removed from the home of a native person. In many parts of this country, they will be put into the foster care system and then can be adopted out to white parents away from their native families. So they have continued to lose their cultural heritage. Becky Knight  07:38So now that we've learned more about the origins of Columbus Day, and the impact of colonization on indigenous people, what's the history on Indigenous People's Day? Let's hear again from Rebecca Souza. Rebecca Souza  07:51The first day of this type was celebrated in Berkeley, California in 1992. In recognition of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus voyage, it was actually a counter to Columbus Day, they were recognizing the inherent problems with recognizing Columbus. In 1994, the United Nations declared an international day of the world's indigenous people. So that became the first holiday to recognize indigenous people. And let me back up a little bit and talk about the word indigenous. Some people believe that indigenous or Aboriginal are derogatory terms, synonymous with savage or barbaric, and that's not what it means at all. According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, indigenous means relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a land, especially if that place was colonized by the now dominant group. So it's just recognizing that these people were here first.  Becky Knight  08:51So the word indigenous acknowledges that they were here first, is that what the day is meant to do? Rebecca Souza  08:58Well, it celebrates the history and contributions of Native Americans, as well as other indigenous people throughout the world. And it calls attention to the need to put diversity, inclusion and equity into history. To make sure our histories are inclusive of the facts, and all peoples. It reclaims the sense of culture and heritage for Native Americans and refutes the erasure of indigenous people. By recognizing a colonizer you have erased all the people that were there first. And we found this quote from a native person and it is “We are here, we are resilient. Our stories, people and land are important and worth preserving.” And that is truly what they what they feel, and what we feel is that this is something that needs to be preserved. Becky Knight  09:53In conclusion, Rebecca shared ways we can support Native American stories, people and land. Rebecca Souza  09:59You can shop native owned businesses. You can attend Native American cultural events to powwows.com, where you can find pow-wows throughout the country, including locally or you can go to any of the local tribes' websites if they have one, and they usually have a listing of any events they have going on. Research Native Americans of the past, educate yourself on pre contact and the history of the United States and native people. There's a lot we were not taught in school. There's a whole lot we were not taught in school. Educate yourself on the current trends and policies and initiatives that are important to Native American groups, such as the pipeline protests, water conservation, domestic violence, the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. These are all ongoing issues and you can find out a lot of information about them. Becky Knight  10:56What I'm not able to include in this episode is the robust discussion that took place following the full length presentation. We all learned so much and are indebted to Rebecca and the Native American BRG for correcting our misconceptions, and inspiring us to better honor the contributions of America's indigenous people. Ashleigh Hargrave  11:18Thanks for listening to mosaic, your podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity and Novant Health. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode.

So many companies are reworking their relationship with diversity, equity and inclusion actions this year, as they should. But for affinity groups within companies, like ERGs or BRGs, developed to support underrepresented groups - what is the best role for leadership to play? Should they be the driving force, or take a backseat role? Join host Christine Dela Rosa and debaters Dominique Ward and Shannon Winter, as they consider the best ways management can support these internal groups. In this episode, you'll hear from DEI consultant Frank Starling on the opportunities for accountability when leadership drives ERGs; and the Surdna Foundation's Mekaelia Davis shares why ERG members ultimately benefit more when they are in the driver's seat themselves. For the transcript and downloadable takeaways, visit https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast/work-check.

Ashleigh Hargrave  00:05Welcome to Mosaic, your Novant Health podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity. You'll learn more about the mosaic of similarities and differences that make us stronger, and how health equity benefits us all. Piece by piece, we're telling the stories of the beautiful mosaic of Novant Health. Becky Knight  00:24This is Becky Knight and I have the privilege of working with Novant Health BRGs. Business Resource Groups or BRG's play a critical role in our goal to embed diversity, inclusion and equity throughout the organization. BRGs are groups of team members gathered around a dimension of diversity. They're a forum for the exchange of ideas, experiences, and perspectives. BRGs help us better understand ourselves and each other, and they help us keep our Novant Health promise to relentlessly pursue remarkable care every day, so patients get the compassionate, expert and personal experience they deserve. On a previous episode, I spoke with the founder of our newest BRG Rebound, whose vision is to create an open and supportive environment to raise awareness of mental health and substance abuse diagnoses. On this episode, we'll hear from a member of the Rebound BRG about how the group has supported her and her thoughts on reducing stigma in the workplace. We'll also hear from a member of our Women Physicians BRG to get a clinical perspective on mental health. Tanya, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. Can you tell me a bit about your role as a transporter in our organization? 01:40I am responsible for taking patients to procedures and taking patients up to the roof when they've been admitted. And I have a lot of interaction with patients. So I really enjoy just speaking with patients and helping them to get their mind off of things and just being there to support them in a unique role. Becky Knight  02:06Can you tell me a bit about the BRG you're involved in? 02:10Well, in New Hanover, we have a BRG that is focused on mental health awareness. It's called Rebound. And we are just trying to create a safe space for people to speak about what they may or may not be going through, what their family members may or may not be going through, just for them to be able to get help without being stigmatized by common misconceptions surrounding mental health. Becky Knight  02:55Would you mind sharing with me why you wanted to join the rebound Business Resource Group? 03:01I actually had a experience lately where I had to go in for a reactions with the medication and that reaction induced anxiety. Just that stigma of being afraid of going in for an issue that might coexist with anxiety. That is is the stigma that we're trying to combat. Becky Knight  03:35I spoke with Sarah Arthur in a previous episode, and she mentioned that in starting the BRG at first people were reluctant. And that's understandable, especially for a mental health group in the workplace. But that didn't stop you. Why not? 03:50I just have a great interest in helping people understand these issues and helping people understand that it's a medical issue, that there's a chemical imbalance in brain like we've all heard about. But we don't really know what to do with that information. That's just a sad thing, because it doesn't create that safe space that people should be able to feel when they go to a hospital for help. Becky Knight  04:18Yeah, definitely hospitals should be a safe space for sure. And I just appreciate what the BRG is doing because I think it's a good thing to be conscious of, for one thing, the words that we use to describe people and how even if we're talking, you know, among co workers, you think, well the patient can't hear you -- but your coworker hears you, your coworker hears what you're saying, and that might make them think twice about if you're a safe person or not for them to talk to. 04:48Everybody needs help sometimes whether that help is just talking to a friend or family member or a colleague or if they need to come in and get help from a doctor, you know, that's okay. And we're trying to create an environment where people feel safe to do that. Becky Knight  05:08Thank you, Tanya. I appreciate your dedication to your transporter role, and for helping our patients feel more at ease as you navigate them around the hospital. And I also appreciate your willingness to work towards educating all of us on how to be more compassionate with each other. At this point, I'd like to welcome Dr. Michelle Constantino to the discussion. She is a licensed clinical psychologist with Bariatric Solutions. She helps patients prepare for weight loss surgery, as well as help them live well after surgery. She's also a member of our Women Physicians Business Resource Group. Michelle, welcome. And thank you for being a part of this episode, I wanted to start with your thoughts on how the pandemic is affecting mental health. Michelle Constantino  05:55Yeah, I think it's been a huge change for people. I think people were isolated. And that was hard, especially people who lived alone. And then, I guess there's just different layers to it, because then there was people who are trying to also homeschool children and work full time jobs. So there was that stressor for people.  Becky Knight  06:16Yeah. And you've likely seen the reports by McKinsey, the Brookings Institution and others about how the pandemic has disproportionately affected women, especially women of color. So obviously, this is affecting our our team members, and they are feeling the impact at work and at home. A report from the Kaiser Family Foundation for women under 30, in particular found that 69% feel that the pandemic has harmed their mental health. So this is affecting our team members in their clinics in the hospitals and our corporate offices. It's something we need to address. And so if we're concerned about a family member or friend, coworker, or ourselves, What are the signs that the issue is more than just the normal day to day blues and blahs? When do we need to seek help? Michelle Constantino  07:07I think anything chronic so you know, we all have our days where we might just want to be left alone and might not pick up our phone or want to do something social. So that's, you know, normal, like I just want to kind of relax and you know, turn off from the outside world. But when that becomes a consistent pattern, so when you see someone doing that days on end, maybe coming home from work, and just isolating in their room, not picking up their phone, or missing work, you know, days of not showing up or not performing well. And, you know, your appetite changes, you can be more or less hungry for days. It's usually I mean depression, you see it, they say it's typically about two weeks. And that's when you want you want to know that something's going on. What else changes, um, you might sleep more, you might sleep less you you your sleep cycle can get disrupted, you might wake up really early or have middle the night awakening. So those are lots of signs and symptoms. Becky Knight  08:11So considering that mental health has long been difficult to access for many people, What tips do you have for how to access the help that you need? 08:24A couple ways to reach out for help are I mean, you can always just, you know, talk to a friend. At Novant, you can go through your employee assistance program. If you work for the hospital, you can see a therapist for free. You can also just call your insurance company, like call the number on the back of the card and they will tell you providers that accept your insurance. There is a website also psychologytoday.com. I love this website. When I've had a therapist in the past, it's honestly how I have found my therapist. You can go type in your zip code, you can check box, your insurance company and whatever you want to work on. Or you don't have to check any of those things. But you can see if you're working on depression, anxiety, just like life adjustments, relationship issues. And then it will populate profiles with pictures. And so you can read people's profiles see their picture and kind of get a feel for who might be a match for you. And then you can just email them or call them. And usually most therapists will give you like a free like consult. And so you can see if they're a good fit. And that's like the number one most important thing is to have a good rapport and a good relationship with your therapist. If you connection, you're probably not going to want to keep talking to them. So interview people . Interview and find a good connection. Becky Knight  09:46Do you have any tips for maybe for those of us who are working in healthcare, why it's so important to not stigmatize mental health and also for those who want to, you know, seek help, how to not let that be a barrier to them. It's okay to talk to somebody, it's okay. And it doesn't mean that somebody even has a diagnosis. And even if they do have a diagnosis, that's okay too. But don't make assumptions about anybody, like, you don't know what's going on in their personal lives. Like, they could have lost a family member during COVID. And they're supposed to sit there and dealt with that on their own like, it's okay, if they need to go talk to a therapist. A lot of mental health diagnoses are inherited. So there's a high percentage of you getting a disease from your family line. And when that happens, there's nothing you can do to change that, chemically speaking, right? You get your.. we all get what we get. And so what you can do is get support. And that looks like the right medication management. And I always say to my patients who come in and they're opening up for the first time I tell them, if you have asthma, you would use your inhaler to breathe, right? If you have diabetes, you take your insulin, so your sugar levels are where they need to be right? And so literally what mental health is hormonal imbalances in your brain. And so medication literally helps bring your hormones to where they need to be. There's a feedback loop between the brain and the body that works all day long to regulate all of our hormones. And sometimes that feedback loop just has a little miscommunication. And what medication does is get that communication back on track. So there's nothing wrong with that.  And any last words of wisdom or encouragement for folks to get the help that they might need? You're changing generations of dealing with mental health from, you know, maybe unhealthy coping to healthy coping, and people are changing that for their children as well. And I think it's a beautiful thing when someone can reach out and get help and make those changes. And so I think just you know, thinking about it, just like any other medical condition, you want your friend to take care of their bodies, they need to take care of their minds too. Dr. Michelle Constantino, thank you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom with us. And thank you to my earlier guests, Tanya, as well from New Hanover Regional Medical Center. I know that this will be useful information for many people. So thank you so much. Ashleigh Hargrave  12:28Thanks for listening to mosaic your podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity and Novant Health. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode.

00:05Welcome to Mosaic, your Novant Health podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity. You'll learn more about the mosaic of similarities and differences that make us stronger, and how health equity benefits us all. Piece by piece, we're telling the stories of the beautiful mosaic of Novant Health. 00:24Welcome, this is Becky Knight and I have the privilege of working with Novant Health BRGs. Business Resource Groups (or BRGs) play a critical role in our goal to embed diversity, inclusion and equity throughout the organization. BRG's are groups of team members gathered around a dimension of diversity. We currently have 14 groups, a few of which include pride for LGBT team members and allies, veterans, Latino/Hispanic and coexist our interfaith BRG. The newest addition to our big lineup is rebound, whose vision is to create an open and supportive environment to raise awareness of mental health and substance abuse diagnoses. We'll hear from the founder in just a moment. But first, I wanted to share some sobering statistics. Yes, our health care workers are heroes, for sure. But first and foremost, they're very human. Health care has always been a rewarding, but demanding calling and the recent past has showed us just how demanding it can be. While others waited out the pandemic at home our frontline workers faced it head on. From June to September 2020. Mental Health America surveyed health care workers to get a feel for their mental health and wellness. They have responses from over 1100 health care workers. And the statistics are pretty sobering. 93% of healthcare workers were experiencing stress 86% reported experiencing anxiety 77 reported frustration 76 reported exhaustion and burnout, and 75%. So they were overwhelmed. Clearly, our helpers need help. To find out more about this Business Resource Group and how it is supporting team members and the community. I have with me, Sarah Arthur. Sarah, can you share about your personal and professional background a bit. 02:30Thank you for having me. I act as the manager of community engagement here at New Hanover and previous to this job, I worked as a inpatient social worker, and a clinical social worker doing therapy with patients in the community. So I've always been really engaged and passionate about working with people that have a diagnosis of mental health or have struggled with substance use. I also have a connection with my family. Several members of my family have struggle with substance use disorder, alcoholism, opioid use disorder and bipolar disorder. So growing up as a child, you know, I truly remember several events that were pivotal to awaken me to this population and what my family was truly dealing with. One particular event my house almost caught on fire, because my cousin had taken too many opioids and was nodding off while smoking in our house. So I, you know, I struggled in the beginning as to whether I really wanted to work with people that has substance use disorder and pushed through that to find that I care about them so much, not only because they are part of my family, but because I can truly understand where they're coming from. 04:06How did those experiences inform your decision to try to start this group? 04:12So this BRG started because I feel that there was no voice for these employees within our system. I knew that we had patient family advisory councils for a lot of our different Institute's like our behavioral health hospital or Cancer Center. And also I knew about these BRG's that focus on different populations to give them a voice within our system and I just saw where this was truly missing. 04:48Was there anything surprising about the process of starting the BRG? 04:53It has taken quite a while to get people willing to join, especially leaders within our organization, because they didn't want to be treated differently for being a part of the group. But it's definitely taken off. And I've been amazed at how comfortable people feel at sharing their story and how supportive they feel about other employees that maybe have gone through an issue with employee health because of a certain medication they're on or they've been talked about by other employees because of some different behavior that they may be experiencing because of their mental health disorder. So I think that you know, the sky's the limit with this group. We named it rebound because truly those in recovery rebound higher. That's kind of our slogan for this group, just to give some hope for a lot of people, we have a lot of family members that have joined the group as well, and gotten support as they work to support their family and themselves. 06:10Thank you, Sarah, for persevering and for getting this rebound BRG off the ground, your tenacity, and your compassion is quite evident. So thank you for sharing that story with us. And I hope you'll join me to talk on the next episode about what the BRG is doing in the future, what your plans are and how those plans will impact both our team members and our community. Thank you so much. 07:34Thanks for listening to mosaic your podcast for diversity, inclusion and equity and Novant Health. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode.

For Aon to do its best work on behalf of clients, colleagues must be able to work, express, be and live in a way that is true to themselves. With that in mind, in 2020 Aon formed the Global Inclusive Leadership Council (GILC). One year after the establishment of the Council, GILC Co-Chairs Jennifer Bell and Eduardo Dávila join the latest episode of the “On Aon” podcast for a conversation about the present state and future plans for inclusion and diversity (I&D) at Aon. Andrea O'Leary, Senior Director, Culture and Change at Aon and herself a member of GILC, hosts.What inspires the co-chairs of Aon's Global Inclusive Leadership Council? [1:27]Highlighting business resource groups (BRGs) and Aon's GILC as champions for inclusion and diversity. [3:27]Five pillars that are embedding inclusion and diversity into Aon's culture. [6:09]Current and upcoming efforts of various BRGs in advancing the work of the GILC. [8:55]GILC accomplishments and highly inspiring efforts. [14:01]Actionable steps anyone can take to be an I&D ally. [16:32]Would you like to dance? [19:49]Additional Resources:Aon's websiteInclusion and Diversity at AonMore information on the Global Inclusive Leadership CouncilHR Director media coverage: “Role models are essential to change perceptions” Tweetables:“When you think about what we're trying to accomplish as a firm, it really revolves around action and impact.” — Jennifer Bell“We are working together to make Aon an even more inclusive and diverse place of work.” — Eduardo Dávila“Inclusion and diversity are at the heart of our mission and what we're trying to accomplish.” — Eduardo Dávila“We're connecting to the GILC globally to continue to collaborate, partner and accelerate where we want to be as a firm.” — Jennifer Bell“Make intentional connections by getting involved in at least one BRG today.” — Eduardo Dávila

Audio Source: https://share.transistor.fm/s/d717f16dFollow Julia Che's work on Openess, her new open source funding/community startup.Topics Discussed  in sequential order, but timestamps arent available bc the audio has been cleaned. Swyx shares about his background, previous career in finance, Gamestop & shorting it, transitioning to tech at age 30, community building. What it means to be a GitHub star, what's so appealing about open-source & why participate? "Open-source sets tech apart from every other industry because we share so much.” Figma CTO Evan Wallace's design tool, esbuild. The future of open-source, corporatization of open-source. The biggest pain points in open-source. GitHub sponsors, Patreon and HackerOne. Learning in public, React and the beginner's mind Deep work vs. learning in public, Andy Matuschak's working with the garage door up. On creators being enslaved by their own structures and systems in producing creative content. Living your life in high-definition, idea velocity. Building a personal brand as a developer. The Developer's Journey & community building. Diversity, equity & inclusion in open-source. Where open-source devs could use a helping hand. Governance “Ultimately software is an expression of values and if you fundamentally disagree with the values of the people running the project, then you will eventually disagree with the code as well because it will just encode the values over time. Having welcoming and inclusive values is important.” Swyx's favorite open-source project: Svelte. Hawker markets in Singapore, “Food is the great equalizer in Singaporean society because rich & poor people eat the same things.” How to get started in open-source as a developer. Space in the community for non-technical contributors. Transcriptswyx: [00:00:00] I was recently on the building openness podcasts with Julia Che. Julia is building a startup to solve open source funding and build open source communities. This is her first time doing a podcast interview, so there is a little bit of awkwardness here, but I thought it went off relatively well. We talked a little bit about learning in public, being a GitHub star and building developer community. So here it is! Julia Che: [00:00:26] Swyx I am so excited to chat with you today. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this inaugural interview of this podcast. You're my, literally my very first guest ever on the show. So I couldn't be more delighted, honestly, So you have a pretty strong following of dev community on Twitter.And so they know who you are, but for others who might not have come across you before, can you share an overview about yourself, who Shawn Swyx Wang is and what you're currently up to?  swyx: [00:00:55] Sure. And thanks for having me. It's it's an honor to be considered and I'm happy to help launch your podcast, which is pretty exciting.I'm Shawn. Aye. Work at Temporal is head of developer experience. And I'm originally from Singapore. Mostly work in New York previous career in finance, where I did everything from currency derivatives to treating GameStop in, shorting it and actually making money. But I transitioned to finance transition to tech at age 30, and then essentially did a bootcamp.And since then I've been, I've worked at Netlify AWS and now at Temporal on the side, I do quite a bit of community work. So I used to be the moderator of our stature, BRGs, which is the subreddit for reactive Oliver's the largest JavaScript framework. And that, that grew from like something like 40,000.When I joined to over 200,000 now  I recently left that to run my own paid community, which I run for my book. And that's available at learninpublic.org as well as a, another framer community, just cause I like it. But this time starting from zero, I literally started to, I think we just hit like 9,000 or something like that.And we're going to launch our third conference this month. So, yeah. I like community stuff. I like blogging. Happy to talk about any of that. Julia Che: [00:02:10] Awesome. Yeah. I mean, you're a very active member in the open source community. You're even a good pub star. So I'd love to know what that means.And furthermore, what open source means to you? swyx: [00:02:23] Honestly, it's just. Beta test slash super user program. Just like a lot of companies have like some kind of recognition for people who are  maybe prominence users. Also, they give you some swag. So this microphone that I'm using is what I'm good hub. And yeah they give you events, look at some of their upcoming features and it can ask you for feedback.So it's a little bit of a status in recognition in exchange for some work, but every one of us love give up, get up so much that we don't mind. Cool. Julia Che: [00:02:54] And so what do you find appealing about open source and what makes you want to participate? swyx: [00:02:58] The source is one of the things that make makes tech.  So different from every other industry.Particularly, I came from finance, sorry, let me turn off my discord because it's going to do that maybe in a few minutes. Well, opensource makes sets, sets tech apart from every other industry because we share so much. So there are two, there are a few benefits coming out of that. One is that we have to duplicate work a lot less.Like we can just stand on the shoulders of giants a lot faster. And And build faster, in theory, the practice is that it's very messy, but in theory, if you find the right things that you can reuse, that you can use them forever and it's totally free and you can inspect the source, you can change it.It's a really wonderful thing. The second thing is that you actually get a lot of scrutiny over the highly used open source. And I think some of the, I don't know who said this, but. No sunlight is the best disinfected. Whenever people write software there's bound to be bugs, especially security holes.And when and more people looking at it, the better. So that's a very strong reason to open source. But me personally, coming into the industry, I think that the personal reason is that it's a great way to learn because that the code is a source of truth. And you can literally just open up the code and read what, what goes on under the hood.Not a lot of people do it, but every time I do it, I find I learned something new and it really is a reliable way to level up very quickly. So I think I owe a lot of that. It's open source. Like when I. Was in finance. A lot of the way that we used to learn was like you go to college, you learning some textbook and then you pass some CFA exam and then you try to work on your investment thesis or your pricing model, and that's proprietary.And you do not share that with any other banks or hedge funds.  And I realized that's fine, but it's very zero sum. We have to look at things like I win only if you lose.  Whereas in tech it's a fundamentally more positive somewhere. I can give the way my what I, my secrets are the things that, the thing I spent millions of work on and not only do I not lose, I might actually win from like getting more reputation or getting contributions from the external community or even.Increasing my reputation as a  an employer. So people want to come work with us based on the work that we've, that we do internally. This is an example actually, of something that happened recently, Figma is a very popular designed tool. Their CTO, Evan Wallace actually started working on a build tool in his three-time called yes.Build. And it's just such a high quality. Tool that actually, it definitely increased my own perception of what it's like to work at Figma because if the CTO does this for fun, imagine what it's like working with him on a real thing at work. So it's that, there's definitely a marketing angle to it. Julia Che: [00:05:34] And so that is that indicative of a shift that's happening within open source and. What are your thoughts on the present state? What that shift is and what the future possibly is of open source? swyx: [00:05:47] That's such a huge question. You cannot possibly have a good answer to that. I'm sure. Open source used to be a more stick it to demand type of thing.Very famously. Unix was a very closed source, licensed operating system. And Linux was started just to clinic because they didn't want to pay for your next.  And I think that really, that culture, we persist in some way today, but now there's a lot of corporatization of open source. Like open source is my business model and try to create some funding around it.That's by the way that's what the company I work at. Does we have an open source framework anyway, trying to monetize that by doing a cloud hosted offering, but that's a normal way. Any different from elastic search or Mongo, DB, or name any other  open-source company. Yeah. And then, and now that, it's so established, I think that a lot of people will try to.Really like open source, which is not a thing that used to happen. So, which I think is a positive, because a lot of people will be screened out by the traditional hiring processes. Like you have to go to a recognizable university or you have to right. Pass the right interviews. No, but what if they actually wrote software that you already use?Like yeah, you should hire them. So, so yeah, I think it's a positive, like it. Julia Che: [00:06:57] Cool. Cool. So based on your experience, what are two or three of the biggest pain points you face as a developer in opensource? swyx: [00:07:06] Well, that's interesting, based on experience, what are the two or three of the biggest pain points I faces as a developer in open source?The first one is definitely that documentation internal documentation is pretty lacking. So when I. Try to want to contribute. There's not really a map. You just have to figure your way out around there's a movement towards documenting the architecture and the design principles. So there's a blog post or movement called architecture.md where they want you to rate your sort of overall organizing principles for contributors.But I only see. Two or three people actually do that. The vast majority just have they're caught out there and they just assumed that you'd still be in the deep end and you just figure it out. So it's, so the learning curve is just pretty hard. And then I think the other thing is just making it worthwhile because a lot of the times I look at a lot of open source projects out there.I'm very, I admire them.  But they're never going to pay me anything. So it's literally just doing stuff for fun. And I can think of a couple other things that I can do for fun. That would pay stuff. So I would, I'm more inclined to go do that. So that's definitely me as an indie hackers type mentality where.I definitely am more focused towards trying to try to do interesting things and get paid for it as compared to someone who just does things purely for intellectual fulfillment. And that's fine too. That's like, if I never had to worry about money ever again, I would do that. Cause I just, I love ideas and I love like, Hey, this thing should work.How come? No one's done it. And then I just go do it. And then it, and it blows everyone's minds. That, that, that seems like a wonderful way to spend time. Unfortunately, I, I'm still very much in trying to Pay my loans more so, so I'm not there yet, but I would like to be someday. So I think funding.Yeah, I think it's my, Julia Che: [00:08:56] so what are your thoughts about these two sort of monetizing models? One would be the GitHub sponsors or Patrion, and then two is that hacker one bug hunting, bounty source type of program. swyx: [00:09:10] Well, hacker one is successful. So a way for them, particularly how they keep people anonymous, which is very important to have your culture. But that's only you focus on security, right? So, and a lot of the times it's very scoped when you set up a bug bounty program and the real surface area of your attacks. Sorry, the real attack surface area of your company is completely on scope. It's like people can pull you in a thousand different ways. Then talking about GitHub sponsors. I don't like it. I don't think it's right. I think it's Becky.  And a lot of times it's developers paying on a dual buckets to the open source developers. When it really should be the companies that employ them. Why should the, why should developers be paying on the dual pockets after tax as well?Which is sorry. So yeah, I mean, I think it's a, well, it's a nice move. I'm not gonna, heat on that. I think GitHub that he's doing something is better than not doing anything. And they also matched donations for the first year, but I'm not sure it solves anything.Julia Che: [00:10:06] Okay. Yeah. Thanks for your thoughts on that.  So with regards to learning in public, you've written extensively about learning in public. Can you share your thoughts for our listeners on what it means to learn in public and why this has become such a significant part of your process and your work?swyx: [00:10:23] Yeah. So learning and public is this idea that the vast majority of our lives we've been conditioned to learn in private all the way from a formal education. Even to the way that we learn at work it's very much like, go through courses try to skill up to yourself and then execute that there's no.Recognition of the value of putting stuff out there. And when I look back at my own career that the most positive, higher return on investment things that I did were things where I learned in public. So literally writing up notes on whatever I just learned or writing notes to myself from three that's six months ago.And it's not this idea that you should broadcast every single waking moment of your life. We're not talking about becoming the Kardashians but the default is 0% public. And I think that people and developers in particular are not at all well served by having things zero by default. So I was mainly just encouraging people to go from zero to five or 10% public.So the vast majority of the time, you're still going in private. And what happens to it when you're learning in public are quite a few things which are very similar and tied into opensource which is for example, you you put your, when you write your stuff up when you write up your knowledge or rehash it in certain way and put it in your own words, you retain more, right.And that's the value. It's a valuable thing in and of itself. Even if you, if no one else read it, you still win. And then I really like, I'm really a fan of. Single-player games. The second thing is if other people read it they're very incentivized to spot mistakes because that's how the internet works.When someone on the internet is wrong, you're cheating. You're just crawling over broken glass to go fix that. And lastly I think it really helps for people who are working on the thing. So let's say I used to do a lot of writing on reacts and now I wrote about the react library. You can bet the core team of reacts developers are reading it because they want to know how, what the external perception is.And if they, if I get a right then I'm helping to amplify their voice because I have something that they don't have, which is a beginner's mind. The, if they've lost the ability to relate or understand what it's like to come into something fresh. So you can provide a lot of value for other people, but mostly I pitched learning in public as a selfish thing.Don't do it out of the goodness of your heart, do it because you genuinely believe this is the best way to learn do it because you've learned faster this way. And you grow your brand, your network, your skills all at the same time. And when you survey the menu of other possible things you could be doing in order to learn and grow your professional skills, this is by far the clearest and most effective way to do that.And you can do it sustainably for a very long period of time. Julia Che: [00:13:01] I love that. I really do. I would love to do it more myself swyx: [00:13:05] while you are with the podcast. Yeah. Julia Che: [00:13:09] My first podcast interview. Yeah. So you know what to share and what not to share. I saw on one of your most recent newsletters that you talked about deep work versus learning in public.And so is learning in public. Something that you've been maybe rethinking lately with that newsletter, or where would you go with that with regards to deep work and learning in public from a personal perspective? swyx: [00:13:30] Yeah, that's a great question. And thanks for picking up on that in the newsletter.I think the newsletter is definitely the main, closest thing to like a public journal where I just. Right. What I'm going through every week and enough people find it useful that I just keep going for now. I never really know when these things end, but I enjoyed the journey, it's not about the destination.So the idea, the problem comes when. Because learning in public is very tied to feedback. Like the whole goal is swyx: [00:13:54] that to establish this vicious or virtuous cycle of feedback loop, right? You put something out and get feedback and you improve it. Maybe you're wrong, maybe you're right. You just get encouragement or you get an indication of where to improve and you just keep going and going.And the whole idea is that, that, that loop is a lot faster than if you did it by yourself.  The problem comes when you try to have a feedback loop that is too fast and you're constantly, you're putting out you're tweeting something and then you're constantly refreshing the, see the number of likes that it gets.That's completely pointless. There's no point to doing any of that. So, there's a conscience, you should try to do some deep work and some amount of that means that you should ignore. The the people around you or the people trying to give you feedback? I think the two of them are not necessarily at odds because you can just, have long checks, deep work, and then and then share it and interact with your leaders and your peers and your mentors.And then go back and go back to the deep work cycle all over again. But the work is done something new to me. I don't struggle with it because I do multitask a lot. And I think that I've lost some ability to focus for long periods of time. So I'm trying to get back more into the habit swyx: [00:15:03] of deep work and cutting out some of the more noisy parts of learning in public that haven't been so useful to me.So it's definitely a balance there's definitely ways to do. Then any public badly. For example, if you pretend show yourself to be an overnight expert.  I'm definitely, always in favor of being more authentic. I like the idea that the way that Andy Matsu shuck, who's a former we ask what's team member, but I think now he's like an independent researcher and just general writer and thinker.He calls it working with the garage door up. So you can be working on your stuff in the garage, and really deep into it. And you just leave your door up. So you're not really looking at whether people are looking at you or not, but some might someone might be learning from what you do.And that's a nice analogy. I'm not sure how well it translates because your behavior just changes. Right. So when you know, people could be looking at you. So for example, I used to live stream on Twitch when I was writing and I found that was very distracting because I would be trying to narrate whatever was doing or I'd be checking the comments to see if anyone was like responding so that I could respond to them in times that they will stick around more.And that's all very.  Secondary to just writing the damn thing. So,  so I think there's ways to do deep work and learn in public. Right? And you have to think about what makes you want. Julia Che: [00:16:13] And so what are your thoughts on creators who feel as though they become enslaved to their own systems?For example, as it relates to creating content on a schedule and constantly having to draw out creativity from yourself on that on that system schedule that you create for yourself. Wow. swyx: [00:16:31] Good question. Is that a fear or is that a, I don't know. I F I feel like, so I think people approach it as in a few ways.Sometimes the use that as a crutch or a certain, they use that as a mental barrier to prevent them even getting started in the first place.  But then also I do see that people after, a couple of years of doing this stuff And so both are, so on the one on one side I'm supposed to tell you, no, it's bullshit.Just do it, see what happens. And then on the other side, I need to be very sympathetic and go like, yeah, burnout is real and you got to take care of yourself and just take a break and come back. And at some level I think that's a, that's where I've landed. I have been studying a lot of creators and it seems like the sustainable humans schedule is once a week. And you do that for a hundred times in terms of consistency. And you work your way up towards some level of quality where you figure out your voice, your creative pursuits your your favorite topics. And after that, whatever, paying your dues you're welcome to. Lessen Slack off on the consistency and just work on quality based on your inspiration.So, the model I have for this is well, but why, which is Randall when roles thing? I think no, Tim urban, Tim Mervyn. And he used to, he actually did a couple of interviews where he laid out. The process he used to get started, which is literally consistently post every single week for two years.And once he got only once he got to some level of readership, then he let himself come and go as in terms of creative output. So now you'll see entire months where he doesn't pause anything and that's fine because he's working on stuff. He's gained the trust of readers. People still pay him on his Patrion, even though they don't get anything from him.And that's a wonderful place to be in. A lot of people don't, they'll get there though. So you are a slave to your  that's not your slave. You are beholden to your schedule a bit especially for people who are like, in the middle rungs of like just getting, going and like making a promise to their subscribers.I especially see this from like sub stack authors, writing these newsletters. If you sold a one-year subscription, you have to write for a year. And they're like, Oh, what if they anxious? Hadn't done anything this week. No, suck it up. You'd just gotta write it. So for those people, I say that just, this is a idea of weighing in my mind, try to live your life in high definition.And what I mean by that is that there's a lot of joy in life. There's a lot of interesting stuff in life that we just skip because we try to live life fast. Slow down a little bit and notice that the cool, interesting. Beautiful things and write about it and talking about it. Like there's a lot of ideas that just come up in casual conversation, a lot of stories that can be told that haven't been told, just because you take them for granted slow down and, go over them again and realize that this is interesting to someone.And you can tell it because not everyone knows about it and Yeah, I think it's very reasonable to come up with at least one idea a week. So w the challenge I've set for myself currently is Ivy mixtape, where I come up with a podcast or audio snippet once a day. And if you put that, put yourself through that which in the finance, what we call idea velocity like the process or the discipline to just come up with, Hey, this is a story.Hey, this is a cool thing we can write about to come up with something like that every single day. Then once a week is walking the park. Julia Che: [00:19:40] Cool.  So how important is it to build a brand as a developer? swyx: [00:19:46] How important is it to build a brand new developer? That's interesting. I personally, yeah, it's only important.It's minorly important. It's not it's not the be all end all. And nobody likes the person who was all about building they're building up their own brand.  But it is vitally important that everyone that matters to you that you want to potentially want to work with knows that you exist and knows who you are and is when you can do and wants to work with you.There's this fuel rungs of. Of the, with the brand building, right. First, get that to know that you exist second, getting to know what you do. Third, get them to want to work with you. Once you're there, then you'll have all the opportunities that you ever want in your life. And you can start building event because what's the point of being super famous.Everyone would just want to tell you what to do, or, govern your life in some way. So a lot of people, when they get to a certain level of recognition, just stop. Because they realize that there, there are pitfalls to more reach as well. So I'm not there yet. I will be, and I can see it because I have friends who are already way past that.And it's a struggle because first, you want to get noticed for the stuff that you do. So you do, you didn't want to have some sort of reach. But too much. And then it starts to become a liability. And there definitely there's a lot of cases in celebrity culture that have documented that.Julia Che: [00:20:59] Cool. Yeah. I'd love to switch up a little bit and talk about your article that you posted on dev Tio with regards to the developer's journey. As a funnel, can you explain this for our listeners? swyx: [00:21:11] Ah, so this is about the community builder thing. Yeah. So, I work in developer relations for another fine AWS, and now I help to manage developer relations people.And  it's very closely tied to marketing, right? Like the whole point that you hire these people is to better communicate to developers than traditional marketers, because you are a developer yourself and the. Traditional way of viewing these things as a marketing funnel, which is very similar to the process.I thought about there's top of funnel and there, one is they haven't heard of you. Second is like the one is they don't even know they need you, or they're not even aware of their problems. So you've got to make them aware of the problem. Second is you've got to educate them about like the number of solutions that are available in their space.And third is you've got to sell them on why you're the best. Something like that. They should give you money now,  that's a traditional marketing and sales funnel. And that, I think that's where that a lot of marketing functions in tech companies are set up, which is fine.There's nothing wrong with it. I think there's Well, what we're trying to do is create a more human approach to that alternative to that where you don't necessarily know sometimes because a lot of times when you do, when you. Structure these things in such a linear fashion, then when you end up doing is making everything very transactional to the point where, when I was going to conferences, I would be asking for everyone's name tags and signing up and asking for their emails and putting them into our CRM so that we can follow up and all that bullshit.And it was, it made our conversation very strained and artificial because I wasn't, I clearly didn't care about them and he goes to care about making them my number, go up. And it's very ineffective because the bicycles are so fricking long in tech. I can hear about a thing and I would just decide to not, and this is literally what I do for new technology.So I'll hear about an Utelogy I'll say. All right, cool. Very good. Roughly get what it's about. And then I sit on it for a year. Right. Just to see if it sticks around. If, because if it doesn't stick around, then I w I'm not gonna waste my time. But if I'm still hearing about it a year later, then I'll go try it out.So show me a compensation or evaluation process that. It is evaluated over a year. None. Right. Everyone wants instant ROI preferably within the quarter. Just doesn't happen. So, so, I think that there's a lot of effort towards breaking out of this traditional marketing performance marketing role, because that's what you do in e-commerce.That's fine. E-commerce like, yeah, you want to sell handbags or a shave or I don't know. That's what you do with that. That's great quotes, but if you want to sell. Tech developer technologies where like they'll be working with you for years. It's a much longer cycle and it's more relationship based and sometimes people can the word that comes to mind is orbit because the company that sort of made this started this movement, it's called aura.love.And so instead of modeling it as a funnel, they call it orbits. Like sometimes the people coming closer to orbit, sometimes they come out, it's no longer a linear thing. It's just more based on where they are in their lives. And and the only thing that you try to do is bring people closer.And, but you don't really beat yourself up if they floated away for whatever reason, And I think that's a very healthy way to do these things. And it also means to me, which I didn't really write about and then vocals, I also means to me that you should have some empathy for how people feel about your competitors as well.Like, if your marketing funnel is just about you, then you're serving yourself and really you should be serving your customer, your intended target audience or intended user. Understanding what they need and sometimes recommending them to do other things. If your yours tool is not their best solution, right.You're not trying to cram your stuff down people's throats. So I think that's what the, sorry, this is a very long winded answer to say. I think the funnel is very linear and transactional way of doing things very yeah, finite some very, a very finite game and. The S the cycle or the orbit or whatever we were calling.This is the alternate is the opposite. We want to play infinite games with on a relationship based basis. And to understand it from the perspective of a customer, not from the perspective of the company. Julia Che: [00:25:14] Yeah, I love what orbit's doing. I'm following Rosie or we're following each other on Twitter and just starting to get to know each other through that.Have you used orbit and what are your thoughts on tools such as these for not only community building, but also open source? In swyx: [00:25:29] general? Yeah. So I've used Oregon forest spout society, youth just like as an open source thing.  Well, it's good for, getting numbers. Which that's the thing like a lot of developer relations professionals are existential concerns right now is just with justifying their cost to the people that pay their money.So it's a valuable thing to justify ROI and have numbers and track growth over time. And all you want is just tries to go up into the right  That's great. I just wish that there were, there was more that it could do. Obviously they're working on this, it's still pretty early days. But yeah, like, instead of just telling me who my highest reach or increased change in in, in love, developer love and is what they call it.Just tell me, give me suggestions, like, Would this is, are these two developers, interested in the same things, but they don't know about each other. Okay, great. Like, tell me to make the intro and myself as the community manager, I can go out and meet the intro.A lot of that is gonna be locked up in a basically manually done by the community manager, just holding everyone's interests and profiles in their heads. But really you could, make the suggestions out of that. I don't, there's a lot of things I'm sure they've thought about this way more than I have.Right now I just look at it as an analytics tool, but what I would really like for it to become a suggestions or like, idea, generation tool of like stuff that we could do with our community.  Julia Che: [00:26:47] Yeah. So what are your thoughts on diversity, equity and inclusion? The Eni and open source.swyx: [00:26:52] In opensource. Wow. Okay. The baseline is that partially people, nobody knows who you are. You're if you're just a username on GitHub.  So on that level, if you want, nobody can really discriminate against who you, unless you show who you are. That's a very, that's a very first cut answer. The more realistic sort of social economic reason  I hesitate to mention this is that a lot of people will contribute to open source only do they do it because they have the time and the resources will do it.So a lot of others don't therefore the people who learn faster during an open source are the ones who are already privileged. Therefore if you hire.  And you look at someone with an open-source track record and you look at another person with, without an open-source track record you may be accidentally biasing against someone who just straight up, just didn't have the background to do it, or it didn't have the friends or didn't have, or whatever.There's any number of reasons to to not get involved in opensource. And that's completely fine. I mean, we need to be aware of that when hiring but otherwise, That Al a bunch of caveats. Okay, well, this is very unfair and in some ways open-source is also very unfair but compare it to a world in which open-source did not exist.And we ha in tech hired the exact same way as every other industry, including finance opensource creates opportunities that did not exist before. And that should be celebrated.Julia Che: [00:28:12] So at openness which is a startup that I'm exploring and building right now. Yeah, we're exploring how to help open source devs to do more of what they love. And so where do you think open source devs could maybe use a helping hand?swyx: [00:28:25] Where are you open source, devs, helping hand. Wow. I have a very small, and I don't know if like a bit, this is the biggest answer or not. But it's just the first one that comes to mind because I have a investment in this space. So a triaging issues. When when you open source something you take on. Not just, you're not just responsible for the code and you're also not suddenly responsible for every single user who comes in and demands a bit of your time. Whether or not it's default for holding your software wrong  or is actually something that's an issue in your software that you need to fix.So, I do think that a lot there's no culture of like a separate triage system that gets on the maintainers to figure out the priority level of the thing. And it's just a lot of work. And actually a lot of people just refuse to open source stuff just because they don't want to handle all that stuff.They just want to quietly ship and it's completely fine. It's just, that, that means that a lot of stuff does not get open-source then that could have been if only we had a better. Contribution or triaged culture.  So one of the things in which I'm personally interested in a front end space is to decrease the cycle or make it a lot less of a burden.And so we replay that IO is a company that basically spun off from Firefox, from Mozilla and essentially they're recording apps in the browser, so that People can create bug reports very easily in play, and the developers can play them back to exactly spot what went wrong. So instead of like typing and describing what you did, just send a replay and people can step through the code themselves.And that's a very nice deterministic way to fix bugs in triage and prove that you actually faced this bug. So, but in, in larger open source, I actually, I've actually named this idea before.  Which with with Henry Zhu who runs babble and it's this idea called maintainers, not MD or like this, the separation or maintain or concerns, because right now a maintainer is expected to be full stack.They have to handle everything from start to finish community all the way down to code. And probably we could split that up and probably we can make them limited term because. Something that's super annoying as well, is that there's no end of term, once you take up a responsibility, you're stuck with it until you just vaguely walk away and there's it's perceived as a chore rather than an honor.I like it to be an honor. So the model that I think about is actually the social clubs of like our parents' generation, where. It, they might, vote in like a president or a treasurer and they would all have distinct jobs and they will all hold it for a certain term, right. For six months or a year.And you can just go like, yeah, I was president of this club from like 2016 and 17, and here's the next president and the next president. And. And it's nice, a nice limited term of responsibility. It's it's sectioned off. So not like it's not one person that's handling the whole thing. And I think we could do that in open source.I haven't really, ever really like, meet any noise about this idea, but I think it's interesting. I think we should try it. Julia Che: [00:31:18] That actually plays into the next question quite well. Is. How does governance play into the future of open source and why, and how is it growing as a field of interest? swyx: [00:31:28] I mean, it's, I don't know if it's growing. I think it's always been important.  I think bad governance certainly can make me choose not choose the projects. W despite everything else being great about it. Ultimately open-source ultimately software as an expression of values.And if you fundamentally disagree with the values of the people running this project, you will eventually disagree with the court as well. Cause it would just encode the values over time.  Yeah, so, having, welcoming inclusive value is important. And don't know what else to say about that.I, I, there's and the ones that say, like, how do you communicate with your users when you release projects? How long were you going to support things? And back port security fixes and stuff like that. You're doing all of this. There's 101 things that you would like to promise to people, and then you're in limited time and your resources.So, so you have to let some things go. And it's a very difficult conversation because people don't want to let go of their pet topic, like, and and so everyone's making their own trade offs in various ways. I don't know if we can improve upon that, but that's just the way I see things.Cool. Julia Che: [00:32:30] And so what is one of your favorite open source projects right now? swyx: [00:32:36] Huh spell it is my, so one of my favorite open source projects just cause I'm working on the community side of it. And I am friends with the creator and it's just a very interesting in the independence framework that is doing extremely well against a much, much larger competition.And I like, I like seeing the underdog perform. And I also love when I read the code, how simple it is. And I think.  So sometimes we get too wrapped up in complexity that we don't see that there's an alternative that is good enough. And I definitely see salt in that way. Pushing back against the complexity of some of the software that we've created for ourselves and saying like, yeah your thing is great, but you may not need it. And yeah, just, I love that kind of story.  Julia Che: [00:33:20] I'd love to ask you a personal question about Hawker markets in Singapore, if you don't mind. Yeah, when I was there, I became, yeah.  When I was in Singapore, I became really quickly obsessed with Hawker Martin because obviously food is the food is amazing and then the price point is even better.But what have you tried the Michelin star stalls? And please tell me about it. swyx: [00:33:40] I've tried it once. There's a very long line, obviously, this guys that's one of the first street food stalls ever get a Michelin star.  But it's like not that different from what you normally get from non Michelin starred restaurants.So this restaurant is randomly got picked by whoever. So I don't really care about, some random, critic's opinion that, they're just all generically, like quite good because the formulas. Pretty well-known and I appreciate that. So, my, my thesis around this whole thing is that food is the great equalizer and seeing the same in society because rich people and poor people eat the same things and they don't pay very much for it.And that's wonderful. Julia Che: [00:34:17] Yeah, that was what I loved about it, as well as people go for the food and the enjoyment and it brings people together, which is the best part about it. Okay, thanks for humoring me about that. So what would you recommend to devs that may want to get more involved in open source?And what's the best way to start,  swyx: [00:34:33] Start with something that you already use, because then you already have a lot of familiarity with that project and you feel a satisfaction when you've made a contribution and you see it in, in the day-to-day use of your own work. So, so don't. Don't do the thing where someone opensources a hot new project that you haven't used and you try to contribute to that.But you just won't have empathy and you not gonna stick around anyways. So don't even waste your time. Don't waste their time as well. But yeah. Start with something that you already use and and always check with them on your direction first, before filing the pull request because a lot of people do drive bipole requests and that actually increases maintainer stress because they know they have to say no to you or massively change your work because they, you never checked with them in the first place.It's very impolite.  Yeah. Th there is an etiquette that you learn, when you first get started that. Maybe someone should write down then probably if you already have, but you just have to learn it after a few rounds was doing it.  And I think, yeah, no, it doesn't have to be code as the other points that I always give people.So people always want more documentation. And even if you want to code, you don't have to contribute to quote code. You can write tests and there's never enough tests and people always want to increase more coverage of their code or replicate or reproduce the bugs that are people.Our reporting, just like the triage issue that we talked about earlier. So all of these are contributions that are very valid and you can work your way towards landing a PR in, in, in the core code. But yeah, I do highly recommend that people get into it. It's possible to over-commit. So, be fast to, to just say like, okay, I've been off more than I can chew.I need to, put this down or give this out to someone else. The worst thing is to take up responsibilities. Like I'll be in charge of that and then to drop the ball because other people are relying on you. So don't do that. And then just everyone does it, everyone over commits.So just recognize when you've done it and just go back and just getting like, yeah, I've taken on too much. Julia Che: [00:36:22] Do you think there's space in the community of open source for. Non-developers or yeah, non-technical folks. swyx: [00:36:29] Yeah. We have we have a couple in a small society court core organizing team.And yeah they're there for the people. It's a very nice community and they can do project management. They can do event organizing. They can talk about like,  the marketing and the blog posts and the YouTube tutorials. There's so much there's in fact, like the court is the smallest part of what it takes to run a successful community.So yeah, if you want to do that's great. It's just I think it's very rare because as a developer, like if you're not a developer, swyx: [00:37:01] What are you really you don't really use the. The tool that you're supporting in the first place. So why are you there? You just, yeah, you just genuinely like the people but you could be doing any number of other things.Like, I don't know, like gardening, like astronomy, that's the same level of connection there. Julia Che: [00:37:17] Yeah. For myself, it's. My brother was an open source developer. And yeah, so I had that little bit of osmosis, like 20 years ago. And then more recently I've been consulting and  in this space a little bit more anyway, we won't go too much into that. It's your interview here? swyx: [00:37:33] No is fine. I like that people share their perspectives and yeah, I mean, I don't what the motivations of other people are. I just, I just have my own lens of things and it'll really think about scent too much time thinking about what other people are motivated by.Yeah. Julia Che: [00:37:47] Okay. So where can we find where can we find you online? Sorry. Right. I'm gonna ask that again. Where can we find you online and learn more about what you're learning in public? swyx: [00:37:56] Sure. So I always send people to my site now, six.io. It's got all the links to everything else, if you ever need it.And I, I do have a weekly newsletter that you can subscribe for more thoughts. I always love to share the best of what I read in other people as well. And yeah I think if anything, I hope to encourage people to go through the same journey that I did because it's really changed my life.And I wish that people would try it out just to see what it can do for them. Julia Che: [00:38:22] Well, thank you so much for your time.

Our guest host Ross Tucker joins us today to talk about how his relationship with the DP Show started and he also tells us who his favorite Danette is. Ross also tell us how he joined Chat Row and he ranks his list of favorite BRGs. Enjoy! Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.10.10.334508v1?rss=1 Authors: Penisson, M., Hirotsune, S., Francis, F., Belvindrah, R. Abstract: Human cortical malformations are associated with progenitor proliferation and neuronal migration abnormalities. Progenitor cells include apical radial glia, intermediate progenitors and basal (or outer) radial glia (bRGs or oRGs). bRGs are few in number in lissencephalic species (e.g. the mouse) but abundant in gyrencephalic brains. The LIS1 gene coding for a dynein regulator, is mutated in human lissencephaly, associated also in some cases with microcephaly. LIS1 was shown to be important during cell division and neuronal migration. Here, we generated bRG-like cells in the mouse embryonic brain, investigating the role of Lis1 in their formation. This was achieved by in utero electroporation of a hominoid-specific gene TBC1D3 (coding for a RAB-GAP protein) at mouse embryonic day (E) 14.5. We first confirmed that TBC1D3 expression in wild-type (WT) brain generates numerous Pax6+ bRG-like cells that are basally localized. Second, using the same approach, we assessed the formation of these cells in heterozygote Lis1 mutant brains. Our novel results show that Lis1 depletion in the forebrain from E9.5 prevented subsequent TBC1D3-induced bRG-like cell amplification. Indeed, we observe disruption of the ventricular zone (VZ) in the mutant. Lis1 depletion altered adhesion proteins and mitotic spindle orientations at the ventricular surface and increased the proportion of abventricular mitoses. Progenitor outcome could not be further altered by TBC1D3. We conclude that perturbation of Lis1/LIS1 dosage is likely to be detrimental for appropriate progenitor number and position, contributing to lissencephaly pathogenesis. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info

Supporting diversity isn't just the right thing to do, it's a business imperative. With Business Resource Group memberships of more than 10,0000, listen in as ADP Canada BRG leaders share their insights into why BRGs are essential in driving business value through greater innovation, better team productivity and higher financial performance.  At the end of this podcast, you'll have your very own blueprint to establishing a company BRG. – let's dive in!    Bonne nuit by Bluemillenium (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Bluemillenium/60179 Copyright © 2020 ADP, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be distributed, reproduced, modified, sold or used without the written permission of ADP. The information is provided "as is" without any expressed or implied warranty, is based on generally accepted HR practices and is advisory in nature. This content is provided with the understanding that neither the presenters nor the writers are rendering legal advice or other professional services. Employers are encouraged to consult with legal counsel for advice regarding their organization's compliance with applicable laws. This material is current as of the date of this episode (July 20, 2020).

There are more women being hired today for entry-level positions following college graduation; however, this trend isn't translating for more experienced women transitioning into executive positions. Why is that? How can women break the glass ceiling in corporate America? We talk with Nicole Mitchell with Honda Manufacturing of Indiana about this topic. ---- Do you have a question? Looking to get help on a business decision? Know a great guest for our show? Email roipod@iupui.edu so we can help your organization make better business decisions. ---- Ready to take your next step? Check out if a Kelley MBA is right for you: https://bit.ly/3m2G6D5 ---- Show Notes: Shane: Hey all of you ROI listeners out there… Before we start today's show I wanted to briefly reflect on what we've noticed some of the most successful people do to help accelerate their lives to meet their goals. And what it comes down to is developing a vision and implementing a plan to make that happen. That's what it comes down to… And in this episode of The ROI Podcast – we're going to hear from someone who has some insight on how women can meet their professional management goals using the principle we discussed. Let's get to the episode! (The ROI Podcast Intro Music) Shane: Hello everyone! We're back with another episode of The ROI Podcast. I'm Shane Simmons recording solo today… I appreciate you listening to the podcast. We've been recording this podcast for about 8 months now – and we talk to a lot of managers, entrepreneurs and some of the greatest leaders around the country. And our guest today is going to talk about an issue we've dealt with as a society forever – and that's the underrepresentation of women in executive level positions – and the trends we're starting to see – but also how women can take action to help move them towards that direction. Nicole: Men run the corporate world still - we see it in data, and it's something that we can't deny. Shane: That was Nicole Mitchell. Nicole works at Honda within the Indiana Office of Inclusion and Diversity which works to develop inclusive strategies – well, I'll let her explain it better. Nicole: “Inspiring Inclusion” here at Honda Manufacturing of Indiana, or HMIN, is our slogan to create an inclusive and engaging environment for our associates; that encompasses everything from what we're doing externally in the community and working with different populations to 1) get people excited about the automotive industry and expose them to all the interesting and innovating things we're doing here. Also internally, making sure we're creating equitable opportunities for development and promotions on moving up so that we have that representation. Shane: That's important for many reasons – but Nicole brought up a statistic that many people may not realize – and that's only 1 in 10 senior leaders is a woman. And according to a Mckinsey Study with Lean In, we're actually seeing more females graduates being hired within entry level positions – around 57 percent – but that's not translating to the executive positions. And asked her why that is… Is some of it sociological? Here what Nicole's response. Nicole: I think not as much as it used to, women do still take on quite a bit of the household chores. However, we are starting to see a little more balance in the younger generation of males taking on some of those activities as well. You're seeing more households having two people working and bringing in income there, so we're seeing more balance. I don't think that it's necessarily that, I think it's opportunity and understanding how to navigate the workplace to position yourself to get opportunities and be thought of. I think that's our biggest challenge still. And that's what Nicole is going to help our us understand – how can women, minorities, or anyone really, put themselves into position to succeed. Nicole: One of the big things is [to] take a step back sometimes and watch people – I'm in a lot of meetings, and before I engage some individuals as mentors in formal and informal mentorships, I take a step back and watch how people interact and see where you can find a connection point; not everyone is going to be the best mentor for you. Once you take that in and see how people are interacting, it's about not being afraid to go up and say something, like, “Hey, I saw how you handled that meeting, I'd love to sit down and pick your brain on what I could be doing to do better in meetings”. Think of a topic - I think the mistake people make with mentoring is they want someone to come in and fix all their problems. Sometimes it starts just with a simple question, “Can I pick your brain about x?”, and it really helps somebody start to focus on how they can assist you, and everybody always wants to help somebody else. One of the biggest things is being mindful of what you're asking to start that mentoring partnership - that's a really critical first step. Shane: So step 1: Find mentors… Reach out to people you aspire to be like and pick their brain… Listen, you don't have to reinvent the wheel – often times people have already accomplished what you want to and they can help guide you… This is something that's come up several times in our episodes and there's good reasoning behind it. Ok, next piece of insight: Nicole: interaction with your managers – sometimes we can be intimidated, and I have to remember that with some of our younger associates that they may not have had a ton of interaction with some our senior leadership. How do you make sure that you do have those interactions and you're taking advantage of them? As much as we want to think that we're hard workers and our hard work is going to get noticed, sometimes it's also those relationships and networks. Being exposed to your managers, having interactions, even if it's in a meeting by asking a question, those things really stand out. Those are two big [tips] that I would suggest people be mindful of and take a look at, and they're pretty easy to start to implement today.   Shane: One of the points that Nicole brought up when it came to mentoring was that women shouldn't only seek out other women to be their mentors. She says women need that balance and having a male mentor – especially one who has had success in your field – can be extremely valuable. Nicole: But the thing that I think is great is when we can have men mentoring women, it helps break down barriers, and it really is a two-way street for learning, which excites me. Being able to share how to maneuver the workplace politics - as much as we don't want to say they exist, they do – and men do a fabulous job on that. They can really help teach women and guide them on how to be successful, and not taking it away from who you are as a woman or as a leader, but help you understand how to leverage your strengths to be successful in a company; mentoring from the male perspective is crucial. I've had some fabulous mentors here, and throughout my career, that has gotten me to the place I am. Without them, I know I wouldn't have understood how the world works with the different companies, so that's been great. From the female, I think that they can also open the male's eyes in those mentoring relationships on challenges that they might not have been aware of. We talked about the stat of men think we're doing well with women in senior leadership, but being able to have two-way communication through mentoring, I really think that you can break down some of the barriers and misconceptions, and we can take steps to create that equitable environment. Shane: Lastly – Nicole recommends Business Resource Groups within a company – so for example, Honda has what they call LAMP – or Leadership Advanced Mentorship Program. This particular program is a yearlong program and they take their members through different sectors of the company including meeting with executives to help them better grasp what it takes to be at the executive level. Nicole: Business resource groups for companies, again, I truly believe that diversity and inclusion are two-way conversations, and having items like business resource groups and programs, like LAMP, allow us to have those two-way conversations a little more. We call them BRGs, business resource groups, Nicole For instance, women have a tendency to say the success was a team success, which it was, but you played an integral role in the success of that team. Positioning that for yourself in your review process is an opportunity, and a good tip to get you to move forward into those manager roles. Business resource groups allow women to have some of the training and discussions around that, and a safe space to be able to acknowledge it and provide and create ways to overcome those things. BRGs are phenomenal assets to a company, and it also allows companies to ask a question like, “What are we missing?” If you have the viewpoint that women are not represented in management, versus what management may think, business resource groups are a great way to have that dialogue to say, “well here's some things that we could do better” or you could communicate what's happening in the environment a little more to make it more inclusive, interesting, and exciting for women.  (Closing Music) Shane: So to wrap things up – you've got to take action on finding a mentor – findings someone who can help guide you through the challenges you're going to face. Be active within your organization, and talk to your managers – ask them questions and really show them you're interested in taking on advanced roles. And finally, if your organization has a resource group – utilize that. Build your network, create new experiences, and stay persistent! (The ROI Podcast Music) Closing Comments.