Speaker 1: More companies are promising to increase representation in the workplace, and now a new book offers a guide on where to start. A report on more than 800 companies from various industries found that 76% had no diversity or inclusion goals at all. Diversity, equity and inclusion consultant Deanna Singh has conducted diversity training for non-profits and Fortune 500 companies. Her book is called Action Speak Louder, a step-by-step guide to becoming an inclusive workplace. Deanna, so glad you could join us here. Good morning. Good morning to you. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Well, you really dig in here because you talk about your own experiences, about your ideas being stolen, about being passed over in the workspace. How did all of that inform this read?

Speaker 2: You know, really when I come to this work, I come to it from a very personal perspective and a very professional perspective. On the personal side, I actually am a biracial woman, and so my mom is African-American, my dad is Asian-Indian. They met and got married after knowing each other for just three months and didn't even speak the same language. Wow. Yes, and they've been married for over 40 years. Wow. I know, I know. And so one of the things that I got to learn at a very early age is that when you're able to create inclusive environments, right, these two people who on paper shouldn't have been able to make it work did and did it really well. You can create so many amazing things. So from a personal perspective, I've got to watch that my entire life. But I've also seen in the professional world how that same idea sometimes doesn't really translate, right? When you are a person from a marginalized community and being a woman of color and walking into spaces where I had leadership roles and just feeling like I wasn't seen, right? My ideas weren't as valued. I couldn't really get to where I knew I should be or where I was hoping to get to or as fast as I should have been able to. I think it was really the tug of knowing on the personal side, what can happen and the possibilities. And the professional side, just seeing that people were being held back from really fully thriving, understanding that, oh, if we could just do this, right, if we could just get people to start thinking about their workplaces more inclusively, people could thrive.

Speaker 3: Yeah. But I mean, speaking about not being seen, I was really struck by that data point in the introduction about how most companies, 76% have no inclusion or diversity goals. I mean, you can't improve on something that you're not tracking, right?

Speaker 1: Knowledge.

Speaker 3: So I mean, I guess the best read of what they're doing is they're just trying to be fair to everyone and letting the chips fall where they may. But I mean, what holds a company back from setting goals and then holding themselves accountable?

Speaker 2: You know, I think there's a lot of fear in this space. And unfortunately, what we've done is we've kind of moralized, you know, the conversation around diversity, equity and inclusion. If you are a person who understands it, you're a good person. And if you're somebody who doesn't, you're a bad person. And what's unfortunate about that is that what it does is it takes us away from being able to have a conversation about this being just another skill, right? If you're a good leader, you know how to create an inclusive environment. It's the same kind of thing that we would look at for any other skill set. And it's unfortunate that we've done it that way. And I think because we have moralized it, people are afraid, right? They're afraid to have the conversation. They're afraid to get into the conversation. And that fear holds them back from being able to pull this into their strategy.

Speaker 1: I think that a lot of people talk about this idea that we live in a meritocracy and the fallacy of that in and of itself. But more importantly, why is it important to have a diverse and inclusive environment in the workspace? What are the dividends?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's a lot of things. But one of the things that I would just say is that, you know, there's a lot of people who say, well, we do have a diverse community or we have a lot of diversity in our organization. And that's fine and good, but it's actually not enough, right? Because in order for you to be able to be really effective and get kind of the benefits of the dividends, right? The dividends are you can be more innovative. You will recruit more people. More people will be interested in your organization. You don't actually get that unless people feel included.

Speaker 3: One quick question as we run out of time. If you're an employee at a company and you don't think your company is doing well, you have a kind of a tough question for yourself. Do I speak up? Maybe draw attention to myself or do I not? What's your advice there?

Speaker 2: My first piece of advice is read the book. Because what I tried to do in the Action Speak Louder is really make sure that there were tangible things that no matter where you sat in the organization, whether you were the leader of the organization or whether you were working in the company, whether you just started, been there for 50 years, right? That everybody could take some of the tidbits there and use them to move forward.

Speaker 3: Deanna Singh, step one, read the book. Read the book. Action Speak Louder on sale right now. We'll be right back.

Speaker 2: Thank you.