Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Ilze Garda
(Opera music)
The voice that you've just heard was mine.
My whole life, I wanted to be a singer, a dancer, a performer.
I grew up in a musical family and, from a very early age,
I felt compelled to perform, to express myself,
and to hopefully move and inspire others.
When I began my vocal training,
my professional training for a career in opera and music theater, however,
I discovered that my voice was prone to injury.
I endured several vocal surgeries.
The recovery period from vocal surgery
includes several periods, 2 to 3 weeks, of complete silence,
and then your voice returns as a tiny squeak,
and then it's slowly and gradually followed by a resonant sound
that gains in strength and volume over time.
In my case, my instrument would be forever compromised.
Without an instrument that I could rely on to express myself,
and of course to make my living,
I knew that I needed to find another career beyond music.
I worked odd jobs for a period of years,
where I healed my mind and my heart from this devastating loss.
But then, something very unexpected happened.
My new field emerged,
and what would become my current work and my enduring life's passion,
and that is the work of organizational development,
and the opportunity and privilege that I have now
to build leadership, diversity and inclusion programs for the workplace.
I held corporate roles in this space for a couple of years,
and then, six years ago, I hung my shingle out,
became an entrepreneur, and started my own consulting company.
Today, I get to work every day with talented colleagues
who share my passion for building more inclusive workplaces for the future.
So, in hindsight, I was indeed meant to value and leverage my voice,
but just not as a singer,
but rather to tell my truth and to create a safe space for those
who historically have had little or no voice to tell theirs.
Many talented employees in today's workplace
tell us in focus groups and interviews that they don't feel comfortable
bringing their whole selves to work.
They are just getting by every day, but they're leaving their truest talents
and deepest passions elsewhere.
In any organization where this is true,
you can bet that the bottom line is being impacted.
I find this concept of not feeling comfortable
bringing your whole self to work especially powerful personally,
because it was my story too.
During the years that I was an employee in corporate America,
I held back, afraid to tell my truth for fear of being judged.
There are visible and invisible aspects of diversity in all of us,
and I'm no different.
What you think you might observe about me as true
- like my race, my gender, my generation -
and what you may not perceive about me, or wrongly understand -
my educational background, my religion, my sexual orientation.
As Marianne Williamson once said, "As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others."
So, liberating myself from my own fear
meant coming out as a member of the gay and lesbian community,
and authentically living my life.
In the workplace, this meant not changing the narrative
about how I spent my weekend, come Monday morning,
and not changing the pronoun about my partner of 15 years now,
Michelle, when I talked about her.
If this is true for me,
and took so many years, and was so difficult,
imagine how LGBT and non-LGBT people,
how much energy and precious effort
they are devoting every day in the workplace
to navigating, managing, and otherwise covering their deepest truth,
their gifts, their struggles, their richness, and their color
that could be contributing not only to their professional development
and their success, but actually withholding it from the organizations
that so desperately need every ounce of that energy
in order to remain nimble, flexible, and competitive.
What is the cost to this?
So this is a wake-up call for capitalism, in my opinion.
Capitalism is still saddled with homogenous management teams
that do not reflect the diversifying marketplace
which they are allegedly selling to.
It is also saddled with hierarchical management structures
built in a command-and-control era,
that stifle innovation and diverse voices.
All kinds of organizations today, for and nonprofits,
are struggling to capitalize on the exploding buying power
of minority communities and markets.
Consider in the last 20 years
that the buying power of Asian American communities
has grown by nearly 400%;
African American communities, 200%;
Latin American communities, 500%.
It's staggering to note the buying power of the LGBT community alone today
is estimated at $700 billion.
So, to capture these markets, companies must establish credibility with them,
and their internal talent is going to play a key role
in establishing this credibility, but it must be done right.
In the age of transparency, word travels fast
when companies do not walk the talk.
So, what's working? We seize things that are working in our consulting work.
And one of the things that excites me is the presence of employee networks,
thousands of employees strong in some companies.
These are networks like women's networks; LGBT, multicultural, Gen Y networks;
disabilities networks, veterans networks.
These networks are contributing to the marketing, recruitment,
and retention activities that their companies are undertaking.
So, any time you see an ad campaign
that manages to culturally, competently address a diverse market
through images and language that it uses in a respectful way,
you can bet that these employee networks are behind the scenes, making that happen,
contributing their knowledge, their social capital,
and their community relationships to making those campaigns a reality.
These are the same employees that are attending career fairs
and community events, representing their brands with pride
on their days off, on their own time, and sometimes on their on dime.
They are vouching for their employers as great places to work.
So, you can't buy endorsements like this.
Additionally, the war for talent is still raging;
recessionary environment, notwithstanding.
Companies are still seeking the best and the brightest,
and they vie fiercely to place on lists
like the DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity.
And they are still valuing that more than ever,
because they know what kind of message it sends
to the diverse talent that they are trying to source.
Lastly, it's very interesting to know, over the last ten years,
that publicly traded companies on that same list,
the DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity,
have outperformed the three major stock market indices
by an average of 25%.
So, diversity is good for business and the bottom line.
But we will need more:
more voices, more courage, more acts of inclusion for the road ahead.
My advice, of course: never take your voice for granted.
Challenge yourself to bring more of your full self to work every day.
Think about inspiring others,
not just with your job performance and how hard you work,
but who you are, what your story is, where you came from, what shaped you,
the challenges you've faced, what made you who you are.
Be curious and inquisitive. I call it being culturally dexterous.
Ensure your language is always inclusive.
Take responsibility for organizational culture,
even if you're in a small company.
And finally, be fluent in how diversity enables business.
So, whatever you choose, know that you are doing your part
towards nothing less than the reinvention of capitalism.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Host: Thank you, Jennifer.