“When we think about breaking down the acronym, what is DEI? It really is about building systems of trust and it’s about purpose—which is, if we think about the human condition, we all want to show up at work and know that our work is meaningful. It’s about understanding and collaborating and value-creation; and all the data that shows that you need all those things to innovate and to create opportunities and to match to your market, to match to your users, to match to your customers.” — Oana Amaria
Show Summary
In this special episode of Stories From the Field, Robert Patteri, Partner/Head of Human Capital from Connex Partners, hosted a fireside chat featuring two members of Firefly’s leadership team (Oana Amaria and Jason Rebello). This session will reframe diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), moving beyond the acronym’s expectations and platitudes to overcome politicized narratives, blame-and-shame shortcomings, and cultural inertia. More specifically, it explored how belonging can be leveraged by adaptive leaders to bring about more human-centered client, community, and employee engagement strategies that maximize business performance. Listeners will come away with practical strategies for fostering and catalyzing a culture of trust by evolving their human resource policy, and investing in upskilling and leadership development programming. With adaptive leadership as a cornerstone, this episode will ultimately guide participants on how to empower their workforce, bridge divides, and maximize success in an increasingly polarized, uncertain landscape.
Learning Highlights From This Episode:
- DEI needs to be embedded across the organization, following the SIMPLE framework (Shared, Integrated, Measurable, People-Centered, Leader-Driven, Equitable).
- The core pillars of adaptive leadership are what guides high-trust cultures and innovation.
- How the success metrics of DEI are key to future-proofing your business.
- The key to building a competitive edge when facing technology and AI disruptions.
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About Connex Partners
Connex Partners offers an executive network of business leaders from some of the country’s largest organizations, connecting them with solutions and resources that serve to efficiently overcome challenges and achieve their strategic goals.
Full Transcript
Robert Patteri: Oana and Jason, thank you so much for taking some time today. I’m really, really excited to dive in. You both have a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of experience in an area right now, which is incredibly challenging. And that’s a balance and a nuance that really needs the right touch. And I know that Firefly is a company that has a breadth of experience around the change that is happening around human-centered leadership, and we’re going to dive into that, but maybe let’s just start off by giving a little bit of an introduction. Let us know about each one of you a little your background, and then really your experience around human-centered leadership. I’ll let you both fight over who gets to go first.
Jason Rebello: I think, I think I have the honor of kicking us off here today. So hello everyone. My name is Jason Rebello. I have the privilege of being one of the managing partners with Firefly Inclusion Solutions. I’ve been in and around this industry, wearing various different hats for over 15 years. But what I like to say is I really come from this hybrid world of both being a tech founder and also in leadership transformation work. So being able to really understand the challenges that organizations and leaders are going through while also balancing the need to really tap into the amazing people you have on your team. Right. So, our work at Firefly is really grounded in that simple yet profound belief that organizations don’t really change, people change, right? So, as leaders evolve and transform, so do the cultures of the businesses they lead. Ultimately, the people around them as well. It’s an exciting time to be doing this type of work, I think it’s more and more necessary.
Robert Patteri: Excellent. Thank you. Oana.
Oana Amaria: Yeah. Oana Amaria, founder and practice leader at Firefly. You know, as Jason mentioned, we’ve been doing this for a while. I’m going on 20 years and I’ve said that for a while. So, I kind of lost track, but I think there’s a benefit to that because to your point, Rob, DEI is changing, but DEI has always changed. I started when it was cross-cultural competence and leaders going abroad and trying to figure out how to get their global teams to connect and understand one another. And the neuroscience hit the organizational development pieces, right? So there’s, there’s such a history of the evolution of this work. And I think it’s very apropos with where we are now, because you have to continue to evolve and change. My background is actually in diplomacy, which is actually super helpful as I found in executive education and organizational development.
And I think that that is part of our strength at Firefly is that we do approach it from a very different lens. And we’ll talk about that a little bit as we go through today as to, you know, I think there’s…We’d be remiss without saying that there’s a lot of bad DEI out there too, which is part of the challenge of where we are today. But there’s also a call to action, which is, let’s, let’s figure out how to redefine, how to move beyond these labels, as we have it in this fireside chat to continue to fortify the organizations that we lead and we support.
Robert Patteri: Yeah. And when you, when you say that word organizations, I just think about all the organizations that we work with and from our vantage point, really getting to hear from them the challenges when you’ve got four different generations now for the first time that have all different perspectives on this idea of D, E, and I and cross cross- cultural competencies. And how do we navigate this? And now we look over the last 18 months and how politicized it has become too. So, the fear mechanism that all of a sudden is in front of people on what do I do? How do I navigate? How do organizations move past that narrative to embrace that more human-centered leadership, high trust culture, right? I mean, and that’s such a broad question.
And yet one of the things I love about Firefly is that you embrace the change. A lot of people are afraid of the change and people can look at it from negative or from a positive perspective. And just as you said, Oana, this is something that is not all of a sudden new to us. This whole idea of how do we navigate this is in a constant state of change and flux, sometimes more than ever. More than others and right now we are at the apex of it being huge change. So how do organizations move towards that human-centered leadership, high-trust culture?
Oana Amaria: One place to start is that regardless of what we call it, we need to move beyond the acronym because if you sit and you talk to anybody regardless of their political standing, location, function, leadership level, right? Nobody’s going to show up at work and say like, I don’t want to figure out how to connect with my colleagues. Like I’ve not met, I think, maybe 1% of leaders are those types of people or individuals, right. And I say this because when we think about like breaking down the acronym, like what is DEI? It really is about building systems of trust and it’s about purpose—which is, you know, if we think about the human condition, we all want to show up at work and know that our work is meaningful. It’s about understanding and collaborating and value-creation; and all the data that shows that you need all those things to innovate and to create opportunities and to match to your market, to match to your users, to match to your customers.
And I say this because from our perspective, our philosophy at Firefly is that it should be simple, DEI should be SIMPLE. And what we mean by SIMPLE is it needs to be Shared, so the responsibility of DEI has to be shared across the lines of business and functions. It has to be Integrated, right? So how do we integrate it like any other thing that we do, whether it’s sales or whether it’s, R&D, or whether it’s the way that you assess whether or not you want to buy another business, right? It has to be Measurable. Doing Taco Tuesdays is not a measurable initiative, right? And I say this because you and I have made this, yeah. Part of it is, is let’s get rid of the fluffy stuff, or let’s acknowledge that the fluffy stuff is not the stuff, right? Not to say that there isn’t a value for starting where you are, I don’t want to minimize that sometimes we have to start with the people functions and the, the, the ways to get people to be a little bit more open and connect and curious. But we need to have metrics because metrics have to drive the business strategy and the people strategy and to be a holistic, successful, fortified business, you have to have your people in in mind when you do that. Right? So that’s the People-Centered part of SIMPLE, right? Is that it has to be seen a human center to be able to really impact. For example, we work with a lot of tech. If you’re not people- centered, you’re not going to connect to your users. If, if you have one of the clients we’ll talk about in a minute, is a dating app and it’s like, if, if certain people are having different experiences on your app, you have to solve for that. You can’t minimize and generalize and say like, Oh, everybody’s having this experience. It’s just the data won’t show it. Right. So how do we create the metrics for that? The last part, the last three letters of SIMPLE is really about Leader-Driven. So we often talk about for us, we’re the thread. We’re not the glasses, we’re not the belt, we’re not the shoes. You have to be the thread of your organization when it comes to DEI. So that means that you really have to have your senior leadership be a part of this conversation and drive and support and lead some of the initiatives. And then it has to be Equitable. And I think equitable gets thrown around a lot. And for us, it’s really about processes, systems, structures that we have in place that really allows people to and organizations to experience the full benefit of these individuals and their participation, right? Not the full benefit of Oana’s style and how it works for her or Jason’s style, or we think about how people problem-solve differently and etcetera, right?
So for us, that’s part of it, right? Is this piece around this SIMPLE framework of DEI. And we’re happy to, to link that for you in the show notes as part of this ’cause I think, it’s something that’s important, but there’s also data, right? And this is the piece that I think oftentimes people overlook or don’t spend enough time on, right?
Unhappiness at work is expensive. And I think the data is something like 1.9 trillion dollars, right. So if you don’t care about people, let’s just connect that to the dollar, to the dollar, right. And to what it costs you, right. And so I think there’s a Gallup survey that talked about just how that number is going up these days. If you think of all the call-to-action with the return-to-work for whatever reasons, policy wise people are doing, and making those decisions, right. It very quickly builds the business case, and I think oftentimes we get tired of like the quote business case for DEI. But let’s talk about the human case for DEI, right. And thinking about what that looks like. Jason, what would you add to this?
Jason Rebello: Yeah. No, I would say we live in a metric-driven world. And I definitely value the concept of true ROI. Like, what are we getting back for the investment? And again, you staying in the world of tech and using these analogies.
If I was running around trying to sell a solution or a platform that I could guarantee 74% less stress, if I could guarantee that it would give your team members 106% more energy. I can guarantee 50% higher productivity. I can tell you that by utilizing the solution, you’d have on average, your team members would take 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 40% less burnout. There isn’t a CEO or a team lead that would say, “I don’t want that solution. What is that solution?” And the truth of the matter is that that solution is high-trust, that those are the results. That’s the ROI that has been calculated for what it means to operate in a high-trust organization. High-trust equals high performance.
And that’s again why I think I’m really excited about this evolution that we’re that or recalibration that is happening now where it’s almost as if collectively, check the box stuff is no longer something that is going to be allowed to be done, like, that’s the message I receive, right. And I think, again, there’s case studies we have and references about how even some of the largest companies and most successful companies in the world are moving forward with their initiatives because of that reality. Again, it’s an exciting time to really be in a position to help organizations navigate this space and really get the type of culture and high performance that they want.
Robert Patteri: Let me ask you because I want to tie a couple of things that you both have talked about. Let’s start with outcomes. As we know, technology is driving so much of HR and now AI. And so if I am that HR leader, you can certainly appreciate so many unknowns that are tied to the need to have business outcomes because they are tasked like never before to have business outcomes, right?
And so you can appreciate the skepticism and the tension when numbers are thrown out of 30%, 70%, 50%. Because everybody says the same thing. Oh, we put guarantee, we put guarantee, but you don’t know until you start working with someone. And they’ve all had so many bad experiences in the past that how do you, you’re, you’re just locked, right?
How do you know how to make that decision? How do you know? How do I help my team get over that skepticism to develop that high-trust? Because every year, every two years, well, there’s a new label. It’s high-trust. Or, now we’ve got a team of teams or now we’re moving towards employee thriving, not employee gauging. And so it’s just it’s the new “new” right? So how would you help those HR leaders who are stuck there to move past that?
Jason Rebello: I think that’s a fantastic question. And I think, um. It really starts with acknowledging that there are bad DEI programs out there, right? Like, honestly, when I mentioned this word “recalibration,” that’s what’s happening here. And, we know personally that there’s bad DEI out there because we’re actually brought in to clean up or address the results of poorly, right, yeah, exactly, exactly. So yeah, for me, that’s the starting point. Yeah.
Oana Amaria: Really quickly. I have personally, and Jason knows all the boohoo stories, but I can’t tell you the level of bad we have come through and have experienced personally as practitioners with the blame and the shame and the language police and you can pick the thing, right? And what I think what Jason is getting at is like, there were, there’s a lot of heart out there and there’s a lot of good intentions that does not necessarily translate into good organizational development or credentials or pick a thing.
And I think I was, I was chuckling Robert when you mentioned like the new thing hype teams or what it made me think of the old days when it was a high-performing teams. Everybody was a high-performing team, right? And I just, Jay, not to, to introduce, not to entry too much into what you were saying, but I think it’s really important for us to talk about how we have personally experienced the bad. And, a lot of the leaders that we work with now are basically trying to regain trust because of what their organizations have gone through.
Robert Patteri: Maybe what would be helpful is walk us through a story. Cause that’s the great walk us through a story of someone who had that bad experience. And, and what things they had to do through you to be able to get to a place of high-trust through human-centered leadership, right?
Oana Amaria: I think part of it is there are many stories. So I’ll just use one and I’ll keep it very generic because as you know, we have NDAs with everyone.
Robert Patteri: I get that, yeah.
Oana Amaria: As your members will appreciate, right?
Robert Patteri: Yeah.
Oana Amaria: Here’s I’ll start the story with with an analogy, right? I think oftentimes it’s about the execution not the idea, right, and how it gets executed and, this analogy that Jason shared with me recently that I love and is like the most profound, like I was like, yes, this is it.
Um, and this is the way that I would think about it is consider the difference between like planting seeds in like a fertile garden or environment or something that has its nutrient-rich soil versus planting it in wet concrete. That’s a quintessential like analogy of, of, of DEI efforts, right? No seed, wildflower, dandelion, whatever you want, whatever the seed is, meaning the human being, the dimension of diversity is going to survive in wet cement. Not even the most resilient dandelion out there, right? And so that’s the way that I would think about where we are right now, right? Is that if you don’t set up your DEI leader, ERG, whoever is doing this on behalf of the organization, if you don’t set them up, if you don’t give them resources, if you don’t if it’s not real, it’s the wet cement.
Right now, with that said, there are organizations that are very sincere and have that nutrient-rich soil and you have people that are hurt people with a personal agenda that are, that are doing terrible work. So one of the most recent clients that we actually, we did a whole, it was called a reboot from the top. Brand new CEO, brand new leadership team. We have a summit that we call Next Level Leadership and it really gets at the heart of how do we really take a beat and figure out let’s do a whole system assessment. Let’s figure out what we think we have as leaders and our values, what we think the culture is and where the organization tells us the culture is, and then how do we get there?
And it was It was an incredible experience with them because we spent these two days together and it became a really powerful case study for like the vulnerability of fortifying a business and like how you do that as a team and how you really build trust and get together, but also how do you operationalize transformation and moving from there. So we spent those two days together. We built the strategy. Everybody got “real real,” as they say, as the kids say these days. And then used our Embedded Partner strategy to really kind of flush it out for them. What does that look like? So now how do we operationalize this over the long haul, right? Like what does it mean to rebuild trust again? That was a big “aha” for them. Like they really don’t, you know…their team members didn’t have trust in them. And part of the reason that they were there, is some previous leaders had weaponized tools, language, programming. I mean, it became the blame and shame festival. Yeah. And I think part of our job, as Jason mentioned is to teach leaders and to teach your members how to ask the questions right back to adaptive leadership. Like, how do I ask the questions to know if this vendor has a clue? Right? And to really understand, like, what is the philosophy behind the work that they do?
And I think those are the questions that people were so busy in 2020 to 2022. And like getting in this programming and back to the “check the box” that Jason mentioned. But you still have to ask questions like how does this fit right into the work and also like this is an organization that is about making money and let’s just be real about what the function and the purpose is and then and not this isn’t activism, right?
So there’s all these functions that I think are important but not necessarily a part of realistically a part of like the corporate structure, right?
Robert Patteri: And what you just hit on adaptive leadership, which I know the three of us have talked about through our tenure. What does that mean? Right. So what does that mean and maybe apply that when you’re saying through adaptive leadership? How does that correlate to this idea of high-trust?
Jason Rebello: I love that. I love that question Rob because it relates to essentially one of the outcomes from one of our clients that we led through the same type of adaptive leadership course, right? So one of the outputs we talked about was high-trust, right? Well, that’s great. How is that really useful? As we move forward and one of the key ways is what happens if your industry, your funding or your customer segment is fundamentally disrupted because of things completely out of your control? Do you have the ability to kind of see and create the context for the fact that things are changing, right? That’s one aspect of adaptive leadership. Things are actually changing, right? The second aspect of adaptive leadership is do I have the ability to identify what is really at the root of what is changing the problem that’s causing this problem? And the most important aspect of that, asking that question is that I, as a leader, oftentimes in a, in a time of disruption and chaos, I don’t have the answers, right? But I have to be able to ask the right questions, right? Pull in the different groups, the different levels within my organization that might have a completely different lens into A, the problem itself, B, potential solutions as we move forward, right?
So that’s part of what it means to be an adaptive leader. We’re identifying the adaptive challenge, where we’re ensuring that we’re asking the right questions to the right groups. We’re making sure all we’re getting all the unique perspectives that we need in order to really understand what needs to happen. How do we move forward? What shifts do we need to make as an organization and the way we build this product or fund, whatever, right? And then really creating a culture where we empower the people once we’ve come up with this collective sense of this is the new direction to really to a get everybody value-aligned and then be empower them to do the work, right.
And then, as you are iterating in this new path and new things start happening, really make sure as an adapt, one of the aspects of the, one of the more important aspects of adaptive leadership is making sure you have systems where people that are on the front lines can say, “Hey, we’re noticing something that based on the direction we’re going, the new solution isn’t quite working.” Now, as a leader, I can say, well, that’s not that’s not good news that I want to hear. So let’s just ignore that. And let’s keep plowing forward, which many companies do. There’s plenty of headlines within the last six months of examples of companies not wanting to pay attention to the people that are willing to tell them the truth about problems that are happening within their operation.
Now again, that is why this aspect of being able to protect people, willing to tell you the truth, give and empower people to do the work. Once you got everybody aligned, because you’ve asked the right questions, that’s in a nutshell, the power of adaptive leadership. It’s also a huge part of creating trust within your organization, right? We’re not hiding from the realities, right? We’re acknowledging the challenges. And we’re really sourcing collectively, how do we move forward? And then we have our decision-making teams that are on the hook for making the decision to go whichever direction, but we’ve been able to employ and get insights from all the different vectors so I can see a more clearer picture than what I might see if I’m just operating from the C-suite.
Oana Amaria: I love how you brought that to life, Jason. And for those listening, we base a lot of our work on adaptive leadership from The Work of Leadership. If you’re familiar with Laurie and I think it’s Heifetz is the way you pronounce their last name. And it gets to this idea of seeing around corners. And, and the reason this is so important to us is because back to if you can be an adaptive leader, you will be an inclusive leader, right? It’s not a separate thing. And I go back to like, we’re not the belt and the shoes. And this is why adaptive leadership is so important. And this is why the pillars of adaptive leadership is so important is because I think traditionally we have shown up and we expect our leaders to show up as like technical leadership, right?
Like you have this defined problem. You’re going to fix this widget. You’re going to fix this piece of equipment, right? That’s not how it works with us. That’s not how it works with human beings. We don’t have a defined—it constantly changes. The only constant is change, right? So this idea of adaptive leadership and showing up with the questions, not with this solution to the problem, helps.
And we say this. At the core of every year at Firefly, we’re surviving something right and you think about, you know, five years ago, we were talking about Covid and how to get everybody online and how to do global sessions across the world on Zoom, right? And that’s adaptive leadership, right? How do you even get people to push past their lack of whether it’s equipment at home when we were all doing this from our home offices to really being able to collaborate with people. And I really have a very optimistic stance that we are capable of moving past this. And the reason this really matters is because you already see in the headlines.
I mean, just between our prep Rob for this conversation and coming back from break, the company is taking their own stance on DEI. And I know that you wanted to ask a quick question. I don’t know if it’s going in this direction, but I think that’s really important to mention, right? We will look back on these moments like we did with Covid. And see who made what decisions, and did that serve the purpose, and did that serve your employees, your customers, your members in the way that it needed to be. Right. And I think that’s the part that you can’t get away from. And this is, this matters because there’s a lot of noise out there. And we know that it’s bankrolled by very specific activism. But if you look at the actual data of what people think about DEI, and we’re happy to share this with you as well. And I’m just going to read off here. 78% of U.S. adults support businesses reflecting diversity. 60% of workers say inclusive cultures are essential for retention. Speaking of all those generations across the workplace, Rob, right? And then companies with strong DEIC improved belonging, innovation, and profitability. Again, if you ask any human being, like, really, you don’t want inclusion? Nobody’s going to say no, right? Really? Like, really? You don’t want to, you don’t want to figure out how to work better with your team. You really want your day to be longer because nobody’s getting along? Is that what we’re signing up for? Right? And I think that’s the part is let’s get back to the human being. Let’s get back to emphasizing dignity.
Robert Patteri: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I mean was affirmative action wrong? There was a reason why affirmative action came into play, right? Because there was a need. Now, it really was the beginning of when we started addressing these things. Yes, we can go back to Martin Luther King Jr., which, we’re honoring him coming up. And you go back to Abraham Lincoln. We can go through all of the transition. It’s to you, to your point, we’re in a constant state of learning and flux. It doesn’t mean that our perspective of the need is wrong. It’s how do we address it? And that’s really what you’re talking about is there are so many people that been damaged, hurt, did not get to outcomes. They were ideas. There was language. There was shaming. But the underpinning is there is need. How do we address it?
And I guess that gets to where I was coming out of adaptive leadership, and I wanted to piggyback on when you were talking about identifying talent, Jason, the right now upskilling, reskilling. You know, trying to identify who are these mid-level managers, because look, leaders don’t have the tools to be able to engage this. So how can they possibly pass that on to the next level, right? Or the next generation. So we’re starting that now. So, but how do we deal with those mid-level managers who are already in place, knowing that they might be butting up against something that is not optimal with regards to that high-trust.
Um, it’s a very complex matrix. So again, I love story because again, if you’re looking to reach out and your mission is to be able to help those audience members who are listening, the best way to really engage that is through story, right? Through use cases, business cases, examples, because I’m sure it’s going to ring the bell of those who are listening. Is there anything you can point to where you have that paradigm shift? Go to high-trust with that complex matrix of mid-managers not knowing which way to go, leadership still in the learning curve.
Oana Amaria: There is an organization that we have worked with from the very beginning, also in tech, I won’t name them. And we were tasked, and this was like a three-year project of doing a program for mid-managers. Right. Um. And, and we touched 4,800 people across four different regions, really, realistically. And one of the biggest challenges and one of the biggest things that we learned through rolling out this global scale program is that you can offer all the training you want. If you are not protecting their time to create that space of growth and learning and if you if your enterprise priorities—we would be in these sessions and leaders would say “Yeah, I have 38 P0 goals, which one do you want me to drop?” So my response to that is we have—and not based on our opinion, but based on what our clients have told us—some of the best programming out there, some of the best coaching tools, some of the best different experiences that we curate.
It doesn’t matter if this person is working a 22-hour day because it’s like death by Zoom meetings or pick a thing. Right. And so I think that’s part of the challenge. Training is just a way in. It’s a launching pad for change for systemic change. How are we supporting leaders? And then how are we investing in the leaders that actually we lovingly refer to them sometimes as like the “frozen middle,” because what happens is none of the investment goes there. You have leaders at the top that get a lot of investment, a lot of growth, a lot of forming. You get people at the bottom, individual contributors that will have some sort of self-led learning because that’s all the investment is there for. And they’re the hungriest because they want to grow and they want to become leaders. And then you have the folks in the middle that you are depending on some other company’s investment in them as managers or them copying their previous manager and what they thought was good to operate in your organization.
And so, it’s not about the programming. It’s about how are you protecting that time and that space? How are you reinforcing what you say is a, is a key need? And I, and this is really hard for organizations, right? We’re not saying that without realistically knowing what it takes because they are the people that move the needle in the organization, but we have to be able to support them. We have to give them the tools to be able to do that. And we have to give them the time to be able to invest in that.
Jason Rebello: Yeah. And if I can add one more thing, a success metric in my mind is, and this is unique because of the length of time we’re able to work with set client—we experience through the requests from them, the deepening of the work, right? So once this group gets acclimated, goes through the training, starts implementing these practices, they’re able to, as through the course of this being better managers, uncover new things that are opportunities to solve with this lens that we then get brought into to kind of co-create and as a partner with them.
So that to me is like wherever your starting point is because different organizations have fundamentally different starting points as it relates to this type of work. A metric of does it work is, does it just stop there? Does the impact just stop there? Or does it continue to cascade throughout the levels of your organization and throughout the different departments going from HR to now going to the product team that wants to really dig in to creating a new solution based off this new awareness? Right? To, moving on further and further and further. How do we do talent acquisition? How do we ensure that we’re able to pull the best and brightest talent from places that might not be right in our immediate pool? How do we do that with intentionality, knowing where the world is going? Like, that for me is the true success metric, is that over time, we’re not doing the same old, same old thing. People within the organization are growing their capacity to create high performance. Change is shown through the deepening of the dynamics that we’re brought in to, to work with them on, which I think is just a really powerful testimony.
Oana Amaria: I love that. Oh, what I was going to say is, so what Jason is talking about is we started with like an overarching strategy and approach with this client. And then a lot of those leaders that were required to, to be a part of this— implicitly or not, right? Then found it so valuable that they brought us in to actually penetrate through the business and to your point, Jason, right? Like if we’re now working on product equity and like what that looks like, right? Like if we can get out of the talent lifecycle, not that that’s not important, but getting into the business is where you see the impact. The other piece and I know that I’m going to bring this up because it’s showing up in all the headlines, right? When you think about sourcing, right? That’s a big topic, right? Part of it is about that intentionality, right? Part of it is about where are we showing up? Are we going to the same places? Are we still tapping? We used to work with a client that had like mini Amazon and mini this and mini that, right? And it’s like these, the way that we’re creating the mini me is right. There are very simple, simple, but intentional ways to just show up, show up in different spaces to have access. Cause a big part of this is about access, right?
Robert Patteri: Where Jason, you were leading to in that you piggybacked on Oana is future-proofing. That’s what you’re doing because again, in overseeing the practice and hearing from so many of these HR leaders and then, of course, what we read as well, that’s the biggest concern because the rapid state of change right now is just untenable. When you look at what’s on these HR leaders’ plates and dealing with so much cultural and digital transformation, I can take a deep breath because I’ve navigated and I’m starting to understand this paradigm shift. But we’re talking about adaptive leadership, or we’re talking about human-centered leadership, or talking about the things that are in the here and now, well, what’s six months or a year from now going to look like? And how do I future-proof that because talent is at a premium right now. So how do you address that?
Oana Amaria: I mean, I just love like the approach that Costco took because it’s such a great parallel to like Walmart, for example, right? It also shows the, the thing we don’t talk about often is like the power structure of how organizations sometimes make these decisions and like what’s behind it, right? But you use the data. Like that’s what Costco said, you know, our employees have told us that this, this matters and it shows up in their offerings or merchandising, the way that they promote all these things, right? Apple did something similar.
I think for us, future-proofing is back to the SIMPLE framework, right? Like if we’re, if we’re not sharing the responsibility, if we’re not creating metrics, if we’re not following this, like you would for any other part of your business, then we’re not doing this, right. And this is true for even, you know, remove the subspecialty of DEI and just do good organizational development, right? And to me, I understand and I have a lot of heart. A lot of our stakeholders are HR leaders, right. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be internally and dealing with these times and these changes. And what I could say is that the more you can invest in your people, the easier it should get, right?
Because you would, you would foolproof it with people being able to learn how to observe and connect. You would foolproof it with people being able to communicate. You’d foolproof it with people being able to give feedback across difference, which there’s a lot of stuff. We have a lot of programming on that. All of these things make us better human beings and make us better at communicating the thing that isn’t working and not being afraid to tell my leader right or communicating my needs as an emerging leader, for example. So there’s a lot of different things that can be pulled through. And frankly, there’s a lot of cautionary tales on the danger of doing it wrong.
Robert Patteri: Well listen, I know we’ve covered a lot. I want to sort of bring us to a close. And the worst question everybody gets at the end is if there’s one thing you could, one great piece of advice, because, how do you, how do you reach into your bag of tricks and give one piece of advice? So I’m going to go there. Knowing that obviously it’s one of many, but in all seriousness, if I am an HR leader, and I’m looking to take one thing away from this call with all of the change that’s going on, knowing that again, next week, things change a lot as things do from administration to administration. And so there’s a lot of trepidation, there’s anticipation. What would that one nugget look like? So I’ll, I’ll give you each a shot at that.
Oana Amaria: When we think about moving beyond the labels, what that means to me is focusing on what truly matters. And that means that we’re building systems that work for everyone. Like that is the essence of what this is supposed to be. And the reason I say this is, eliminating DEI programming does not solve organizational challenges. It won’t improve engagement. It won’t enhance all the things, right? Like just pretending that microaggressions don’t exist, doesn’t make them go away.
So I don’t want to engage in magical thinking. And I would say, let’s be real about the power plays that happen and the politicking and the political savviness of what it takes to run organizations and let’s take that into account right so that we’re not scapegoating programming and initiatives and whatnot. I would say that’s like my personal takeaway from all of this is let’s just work on connecting with human beings again.
Jason Rebello: One of the things that I had the opportunity to do over the last month and a half, during this kind of like downtime is intentionally tap into our collective leadership network and my own personal leadership network, people that are running companies that are at the forefront of a lot of the technology that is going to be just that we are all going to be inundated with, right?
So, and I want to share that the little nugget that he shared with me says, essentially, Jason, thanks to AI, the work world will look vastly different in the near, near future, right? World Economic Forum estimates 85 million jobs will be impacted by AI by 2030, right? Millions of new roles, roles that don’t even exist, right. All these things are going to be created and in this rapidly shifting world, he says his we’re sharing that our value is going to shift from being defined by our education and our work history or past achievements and really by something more essential, which is our human skill set. It is leaders and team members and managers and having teams that have top tier human skill sets: empathy, emotional intelligence, teamwork, creativity, mentorship, leadership. Like those are the things that are going to set the organizations apart in a world where everybody has the top tier AI, whatever it is that can do a lot of the technical things. I don’t, they don’t need 30 programmers anymore. They need two. Two that have the technical skills and our top tier in the human skills to be able to like put these two worlds together and really optimize for the solutions they’re trying to solve. And that really resonated with me again, given the work that we do, right.
We, I really feel, and what I love about being able to be a part of Firefly Inclusion is that we are truly at the forefront of helping human beings that happen to be in leadership roles be better human beings so that they can tap into the true human capital potential that they have, right? To be able to solve whatever the problem is with their unique solution that their company is really trying to bring to the world. And if we can focus on that instead of policing each other and like how do we unlock the potential that is being suppressed by bad work culture, right? That’s what I’m excited about. So my outlook is actually hopeful. It’s hopeful about what’s happening as far as leadership transformation, right in this country and the world because it forces us all to recalibrate in I think a very, very important way.
And I’m looking forward to working with and we are looking forward to working with any leader and any organization that really gets that and wants to ensure that they future-proof their organization in this way. So it’s an honor and a privilege.
Robert Patteri: Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. I guess I’ll close it with saying for me, it’s like taking the stone with the ripple and the wave analogy, we can put technology, AI, everything to get the perfect trajectory, right? How hard it should be thrown, everything. But if you put the people in the middle of, of that, and without people that stone is just going to sink, but when you are people-centric, the ripple effect that it will have in life and the number of lives that we can change and affect for the better. That’s really what life is about, right?
I mean, us, our skills, the things that we wake up and get to do, those of us in HR, that’s a byproduct of what’s underneath all of it. And that’s the human connection, the relationships that we forge and build. And those are the most important things. And I can tell you one thing. My life is better for having you guys in it, and I’m super grateful. I’m grateful for your insights, grateful for your talent, grateful for the audience. And our goal at Connex Partners is to be able to help, right? To, to be a helpmate, to be a learning mechanism, to just be a piece in the cog of the information that’s out there that can make an impact for better.
So thank you so much everybody for listening. Thank you, Jason and Oana for your participation.
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