A conversation with Kazique Prince, Founder of both Jelani Consulting LLC and Courage Equity
“The biggest issue I find is that people overestimate their ability, the simple term is cultural competence, but more accurately is, they overestimate their ability to navigate across cultures effectively. They think they’re in one place because they made an investment. They’re super excited about this work. They know it’s the right thing to do. They made the business case for it. They’re totally invested. However, they don’t have the skills to actually navigate those conversations effectively. When subjects around race and racism come up or other issues, they find themselves using a lot of their lizard brain where they’re fighting, fleeing, or freezing. And so when those conversations come up, their ability to actually navigate is really diminished because they haven’t figured out for themselves personally how to sort through the moving parts they’re going on.”
Kazique Prince is the Founder & CEO of Jelani Consulting LLC, where he works with businesses and nonprofits as a DEI consultant. He also serves as the senior policy advisor and education coordinator for the City of Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, and has launched a nonprofit called Courage Equity that’s aimed at funding educators who focus on cultural fluency.
In this episode of Control the Room, I talk with Kazique about empathy-driven inclusion, psychological awareness in the workplace, and how reconciliation affects all aspects of an individual’s life. Listen in to catch a glimpse of what reality could look like if we shifted our collective focus from punitive scrutiny to empowering practices.
Show Highlights
[00:56] Kazique’s Career & Origins
[03:42] Navigating Multi-Layered Conversations Around Race
[08:31] The Best Indicator of a Company’s Priorities
[12:48] Cultural Competency as a Skill
[24:50] Truthfully Examining a Dishonest System
Links | Resources
Kazique’s LinkedIn
Jelani Consulting LLC
About the Guest
Kazique joins us today, from Jelani Consulting LLC. As a trained psychologist with years of on-the-field experience with areas ranging from grief, youth mentoring, substance abuse, and education, he’s amassed both an enormous set of skills in walking people through uncomfortable conversations, and an enormous heart for reconciliation and empowerment.
About Voltage Control
Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.
Subscribe to Podcast
Engage Control The Room
Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control
Full Transcript
Douglas:
Welcome to the Control the Room podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.
Douglas:
Today, I’m with Kazique Prince, founder and CEO of Jelani Consulting, LLC, where he is a diversity equity and inclusion consultant, working with businesses and nonprofits. Welcome to the show, Kazique.
Kazique Prince:
Thank you so much. I appreciate being here.
Douglas:
Absolutely. For starters, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got your start. What’s the origin story of Kazique?
Kazique Prince:
Well, it’s complicated. I’m a trained psychologist. I’ve been a psychologist since 2003, went to the University of Georgia, out there in the sticks of Athens, Georgia. I’ve been doing this work around diversity, equity and inclusion, for 25 plus years. I worked initially in substance abuse, education and treatment, also worked in higher education off and on for a number of years, worked with some nonprofits, used to work with a Catholic agency as a social worker in the Bronx. I’ve had a variety of different experiences, which has been really rich for me. I’ll say I’ve been running my company Jelani Consulting for the last 13 years, really focusing and honing down on this conversation around diversity, equity and inclusion. To be honest, I think the reason I got started in this work, because I found that they were just very difficult conversations for people to have, whether it was about race, gender, LGBTQ concerns.
Kazique Prince:
I had found that my conversations that I was having with people around alcohol and drug treatment were just as difficult, if not more difficult. And so doing this work around diversity, equity and inclusion, just seemed a prime opportunity to encourage people to really engage in a conversation and dialogue and really figure out ways of making a difference in their lives. Because I think the biggest challenge is that people want a sense of fairness. They want a sense of right and wrong, but how to have those conversations when you’re talking about racism, when you’re talking about people losing their lives because of the injustices they’re experiencing, it’s very, very difficult.
Kazique Prince:
I found that I enjoyed and felt motivated to have that conversation with people. And to be honest, a lot of people don’t know this about me, but there was a time I thought I was going to become a minister, and becoming a clinician was part of my, for lack of a better word, part of my ministry, but specifically focusing on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. So people feel more empowered, feel more alive, feel more actualized. It just felt the right pathway for me. I’ve just been really enjoying being able to be a witness to that experience for a lot of people and support them in their efforts. From a business perspective, I want them to make more money, because I know organizations that do this well, just do a better job of making money and doing the business that they’re focused on.
Douglas:
There’s a lot to unpack there. I’d like to start with, you use the word difficult and how truly difficult navigating racism and privileges, just because it’s so multi-layered and complex. There’s even taxonomy in language, people don’t understand. There’s fears about, how they might show up and how they don’t want to be labeled. No one wants to be labeled as a racist, but the fact that we’re part of a racist system, just pretty much makes us part of it, right? We’re existing in this thing, so we’re contributing in some way. I’m just curious if you have advice, because the one thing I run into tons when I even, unlike you, my work doesn’t center on this, but I bump into it a lot.
Douglas:
The thing I hear is that, well, I’m not a racist. I’m curious, if you have any advice for the listeners, if they’re trying to talk to a coworker or a peer or a loved one around racism and privilege, how do you have that conversation in a way that helps people understand that there’s multiple levels of this happening, so they can show up and be an ally?
Kazique Prince:
I really appreciate you asking this question, because it’s first acknowledging this is a difficult conversation. Because a lot of people say, well, just get out there, all you got to do is just talk. I’m like, this is kind of like dealing with money. There’s this quote out there that says, “Messing with my money is like messing with my emotions.” This is important. I don’t want to give the impression this is necessarily always going to be easy. I think the more you do it, the easier it does get. But the first thing I start off with, is acknowledging that what we’re trying to attack our systems that are in place. We have institutions that are in place and we’re less concerned about attacking people, but we’re really trying to challenge systems that perpetuate the biases that many of us are frustrated by.
Kazique Prince:
Whether it’s racism or sexism, this is not about going after a person who I can debate all day about whether they’re being racist or not. That’s going to be an ongoing dialogue. There’s still people debating whether president Trump has done anything racist or not. But the problem is that you can always run into the challenge of trying to prove to people that they’re racist, because it’s a personal dialogue or personal attack. It’s hard to have that discussion. It’s harder, I should say.
Douglas:
Where’s that threshold, right? It’s not binary. I think that’s the problem. People think of it as binary.
Kazique Prince:
Right, right. If you get engaged in that conversation on an individual basis, it’s very difficult. Oftentimes it doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t lead you anywhere.
Douglas:
You’re not fruitful, yeah.
Kazique Prince:
But if you’re saying, hey, we have institutions in place that have these results, like your hiring practices that led to a disproportionate number of men being hired compared to women, or you have the absence of people of color in certain positions at all, or leadership specifically. When you’re looking at the numbers, you can say, we know there’s something going on in the process, because we see these people missing in leadership, missing in the organization. We know that there’s problems in the tech industry, because when you look across the industry, there’s an absence of people of color in leadership. When you look at fortune 500 companies, you’re seeing the same absence of people who are just as talented, who are just as smart, but they’re not in those positions.
Kazique Prince:
There’s not a critical mass of people of color or women in certain industries that are led by mostly men. And so, at a minimum, you can say, the numbers show me there’s a bias, which probably indicates that there’s a system in place that led to that bias. Now it’s all our responsibility to get engaged, to figure out how do we change that, that wave that led to that to that present situation and create a new situation or a new dynamic. What equity is fundamentally about, is about changing programs, policies and procedures that led to the biases that we have in the first place.
Douglas:
I want to talk a little bit about what you notice when you’re working with clients, with these policies and procedures. What’s the low hanging fruit? I’m sure that there’s something that you see just over and over and over again, when you start working with a new company like, oh, yep. It’s there, there it is again, we need to fix that. Is there something that is just ubiquitous that you think would just be great if everyone just paid attention to?
Kazique Prince:
Yeah. One of the things I’ve learned early on, is that, one of the best indications of an organization’s investment and engagement with this conversation around diversity, equity, inclusion, not just the conversation, I mean that in a very obtuse way, but their engagement with this work, is when they’re willing to put money towards it. If you’re not putting any money towards it, this is not a priority. People ask me, well, how much money are we talking about? I said, well, like anything that’s important to me, there’s a substantial investment. At least 1% of my profits should be going towards this work. If I want to build a new building, if I want to start a really major initiative, that’s going to change the culture of our organization, putting $0 to it is a guarantee that nothing’s going to happen.
Kazique Prince:
But if I say, I’m going to put X percent of my profits towards this effort, it’s going to guarantee something’s going to happen. What I’m also looking for is, what’s my return on investment? We know from the research that the return on investment can be anywhere from every dollar that you spend to about $7, to 10, $15 return. We already know that, right? And so those are the kinds of basic things I’m looking at. I’m looking at literally their budget going, how much, not time, not volunteers going out and doing community service, how much of your money have you invested in this? And then I want to see your staff that’s committed to this. If I can see that, it gives me a sense of what your investment may have been up to that point. If you had $0, that’s fine, my job is to help you reimagine your budget, so you can make this a priority.
Douglas:
The thing we run into most when thinking about this kind of work, is how people show up in meetings. I think that’s the hallmark of true inclusion. As we think about the work we do as facilitators, our job is to make sure everyone’s included. Ideally, we do it in a way where we’re not just going around round robin and calling on everyone, can we create really dynamic and truly inclusive types of scenarios? I’m just curious, is that something that you’re noticing and that you’re starting to see clients of you are starting to have more inclusion in their meetings or more contributions from everyone?
Kazique Prince:
When I think about people’s attempts to be more inclusive, the good thing that I’m seeing, is that people are trying to be more and more creative about how to create those more inclusive environments, whether it’s just having check-ins. Even for some of these more religious oriented organizations, them starting with prayer, not in the way of saying, okay, this is one way of praying, but just saying, I want to open it up for us to center ourselves, whether it be from your own faith tradition or another tradition, or no tradition whatsoever, but it’s a way of getting away from one way of running a meeting, which tends to be very output or outcomes oriented. We need to achieve these goals, during this meeting, at this time, versus relationship building, which is also important, right? Or it’s getting to know each other. And creating that inclusive environment means having a different exchange.
Kazique Prince:
Sometimes meetings might be led by a different person, each meeting, so you have a different feel of things. But the idea is that you’re not just using the meetings as a way of engaging with one another, but also meeting one on one, or smaller groups, but just really being creative about how do we conduct business with the same goal in mind of yes, we want to make money and improve our operations and so on and so forth. But we’re finding that there’s different pathways of doing that work if it’s done well.
Douglas:
Absolutely. What you’re talking about too, reminds me of creating more trust and potentially more psychological safety on a team. If you build rapport and you build understanding, then people are less likely to be judgmental or snappy. As we know, those dynamics lead to people drawing and not contributing in meaningful ways. I’m curious, when you see teams that are trying to make efforts, but maybe the inclusion is not there. What are some of the common issues you’re noticing or things that are holding them back?
Kazique Prince:
Well, it’s funny you say that, because the biggest issue I find is that people overestimate their ability, simple term is cultural competence, but more accurately is, they overestimate their ability to navigate across cultures effectively. They think they’re in one place, because they made an investment. They’re super excited about this work. They know it’s the right thing to do. They made the business case for it. They’re totally invested. However, they don’t have the skills to actually navigate those conversations effectively. When subjects around race and racism come up or other issues, they find themselves using a lot of their lizard brain where they’re fighting, fleeing or freezing. And so when those conversations come up, their ability to actually navigate is really diminished because they haven’t figured out for themselves personally how to sort through the moving parts they’re going on.
Kazique Prince:
And so even though their heart’s in the right place, their ability hasn’t caught up with their heart. A lot of the time, it’s sitting with them and really developing the skills that are necessary to have the conversation. But I would say the other issue is, again, I might have the right ideas. I’ll use one example real quickly. A lot of organizations want to recruit and they want to recruit more diverse people, but they don’t have any relationships with the people that they want to recruit. How are you going to recruit more people of color, whether it be black, Latino, or other groups, if in your own spirit, your spheres of influence in your life, you know no one who’s black or Latino or Asian? Your first step is to go build those relationships first, then tackle your goal around recruitment of that population.
Kazique Prince:
And so they prematurely go out there and start talking to all the black and brown people they can find on the internet and they wonder why people are looking at them crazy, going, who are you and why are you calling me? Those relationships are critical. I can’t sleep on the importance of taking those 10 steps back first, to make sure you have all the things you need in place first, before you tackle some of the big goals that you might be trying to attempt to deal with.
Douglas:
It makes total sense, because if you think about it, it’s two dynamics, right? On a purely un-relational standpoint and a purely mechanical and operational standpoint, you have to have a pipeline. I always tell people, if you’re trying to recruit, if you’re trying to hire today, you should’ve started recruiting four months ago. Otherwise you’re not going to have very good candidates, and they certainly won’t be diverse, because you’re just finding whatever falls out of the woodwork and that’s probably going to be through your network and people you know. Also it really resonates with me, because if you’re on the relational side, if you’re starting to understand these people, relate to them, you’re going to be able to A, change your policies, B, design a nice looking container that these people will want to be inside of.
Douglas:
Because often I see people wanting… It’s a lot harder if you don’t start early, if you start later and it’s 10 dudes in a garage and you’re trying to hire your first woman, they’re going to be like, I don’t want to be the first woman in this gym locker.
Kazique Prince:
It’s funny you say that, because when you ask people of color and women about going out and recruiting other people of color and women, they have no problem doing it, because their networks already exist. They already have the relationships. Just like with white men, who have a great idea and they’re sitting in the garage and they’re like, hey, let’s do this. What they’re really good at, is recording other people like themselves. But if they’re going to recruit anyone that’s not like themselves, they’ve got to be asking themselves, if I don’t know these folks already, I need to spend the cultural capital necessary, the investment that’s necessary to achieve it well. The thing is, it can be done. It can be done, not easily because it’s going to take time.
Kazique Prince:
For some organizations, it may be four months and maybe a year, because I’ll be honest, people of color, I can’t speak for everyone, but some people are a little suspicious. They are like, hmm, you want to use my context, so you can achieve your goals? Do I really want to work in your organization? Because y’all seem a little iffy about this diversity thing in the first place. That’s why that trust piece is so important, because they want to know, I would speak for myself, I want to know that you’re invested, not just for the short term, but the long-term gain other people that you’re trying to recruit.
Douglas:
And why me?
Kazique Prince:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Douglas:
Right. I think I really haven’t heard the word tokenism thrown around in a while, but that’s a very bad thing. We want to support communities and underrepresented individuals. But if we’re just checking a box and then not putting the work in and not looking carefully at who it is and making sure that they’re great for the roles, then that’s actually doing a disservice for everyone.
Kazique Prince:
Well, that’s what we experienced one or two generations ago with affirmative action. Hence why people don’t even like using that term anymore. When was the last time you heard someone say affirmative action? Right?
Douglas:
Unless someone is being derogatory.
Kazique Prince:
Exactly. It was because we went about it so haphazardly. We threw people in positions that, one, they weren’t given a chance. They were under-prepared or sometimes over-prepared, but their voice was small and diminished in so many different ways. It just became a self fulfilling prophecy of some of the troubles. The thing is, that’s still the struggle we have today, because people will do a lot of the same things we’ve seen for generations now, where they set up people for failure and wonder why they had the result they had. One of the big things I think we are faced with now as a country is that, what is the responsibility of business leaders especially whether they’re big or small to invest in their talent.
Kazique Prince:
Because think about how many people you know in your life who are really not that smart, really not that talented, but we give them all the grace that is necessary to be talented, to be really great, because someone sits with them and talks with them, gives them the inside scoop. They are treated like the special child, the golden child. Could you imagine if that happened for more people, particularly people of color, who never get that, how it would make a difference in their lives and how they would be successful. To me, that’s what equity is all about. It’s not giving the kid who was going to go to college anyhow, an opportunity, it’s giving a kid who never thought that was even a chance, an opportunity. And not just to go to college, but I want them to be chair of the federal reserve.
Kazique Prince:
I want them to be super successful, not just get by. I think that’s the struggle. It’s like, somehow I should pat myself on the back because I got this kid out of high school. He was going to do that anyhow. He didn’t need you for that. It may have been harder, but he was going to do it, because he was already directed to do that. But if you say, no, I’m going to invest in this young person, and I’m going to make sure they not just go to college, but goes to one of the best colleges and not just that, but they’re going to get a great job, that they can pay it forward. That’s a different kind of investment.
Douglas:
You’re talking about capitalization in society. How do we raise up? If you really think about the broader impacts of this work, it’s not just, how do we improve ROI and profits for a company, but it’s really capitalization of society. We, as a civilization will rise up in ways that are unprecedented if we can come together and work and collaborate, and also keep people from getting just ripped up by the system. I’m really excited about what Oregon is doing. The fact that there are people that are just getting thrown into jail for petty things, just because they had a bout with some drugs, and the next thing they can’t get out of this rap sheet they’re in. I don’t know. I’m really excited about programs like that and the work you’re doing can really just help us as a civilization.
Kazique Prince:
Well, the thing is, I think that sometimes gets lost in this conversation around diversity, equity and inclusion, because there’s the troubling and depressing and heart-wrenching stories of oppression that we hear, right? We watch movies and we hear stories, and we’re just like, man. What the movement is really about, is exactly what you just described, is going against convention, being less concerned about punishing people and being more about lifting every boat. In higher education, they talk about inclusive excellence. What they mean, because the fear is that, we’re somehow lowering the standards to include other people. When in truth, we’re actually raising the standards, we’re raising the opportunities for profitability by expecting excellence in everything that we do. We can only do that if we provide an inclusive environment for the success of every individual.
Kazique Prince:
And so that mindset is a switch, but to be honest, it’s been one that’s been helpful for some folks who’ve been poo-pooing this whole thing. And I’m like, no, this is about making money and being better at what we do, because that’s where innovation, that’s where good ideas and creativity comes out of that. And so there’s people who are being straight up, totally questioning all of this, but when you’re talking about the bottom line or being more mission focused, they’re convinced and they see it. That’s the great thing about today versus just 10 or 15 years ago, we have the numbers to show that this approach is very effective in creating the profitability, or if not profitability, mission focus agenda.
Douglas:
Yes. Here’s the thing, the values have to be aligned. The value of the company is, we need more profits or we need to grow, or whatever outcome the company is seeking, or the nonprofit. The organization is going to have values, and they’re going to have a focus. If you can align with that, then that’s where you’ll be successful with any change initiative. Right? I think you’re spot on with, the focus has to be on revenue or the mission. I believe that any of those things are going to be better when you enable people to do their best work and they’re doing it. People take pride in doing a good job, that is inhuman nature, and if you can put people in a situation to do better work, that’s just going to be a better environment for everyone.
Kazique Prince:
You know what’s funny about this too, you know the other thing that drives this, we’ve done a really good job with our young people and trying to create these more collaborative teams. They work on projects together. In lab school, they do project based learning where they can go out and explore and find their own learning opportunities. The millennials have come into work saying, we expect you to do this. Forget what the generation X that I represent, we come in with the same mentality that we were given by our parents, just do the work, right? Don’t worry about the personal, just do the work. Millennials are coming in after we train them, and say, you know what, we want an environment that is socially conscious. That’s tackling big issues.
Kazique Prince:
I have a client who works in the tech field and says they want to be a part of a community that’s making a difference. It doesn’t matter if they’re making widgets. They want to make sure those widgets and the people who are part of the organization are doing good in the world. That’s what they’re demanding. You have very talented, smart people from various backgrounds saying, if I want to work here, y’all better be doing something.
Douglas:
Right. Yes. Making a difference. I love it. I want to come back to something that I’ve been thinking about lately. Are you familiar with the truth and reconciliation that happened in South Africa?
Kazique Prince:
Yes. Very much so. Thank you for bringing that up.
Douglas:
I just think there’s a massive opportunity with the change in leadership right now to make that a national focus. I’m just curious, how you think that could play out. If we had a national focus on doing some work like that here in the US.
Kazique Prince:
I fundamentally believe that we as an American community culture, it would be to our best interest to really invest in a racial reconciliation, racial healing process. It may not look like what they did necessarily, exactly what they did in South Africa, but there’s something that’s very important here that needs to be called out. We are still a country that still doesn’t tell the truth about the civil war. We still don’t tell the truth about what slavery was about. We still have too much of the population who believes that the civil war wasn’t about slavery. We have too much of a population just doesn’t want to acknowledge the history of slavery and racism that made this country successful. That this country was in many ways, promoted on the backs of black and brown and other people, to be where we are today.
Kazique Prince:
That unwillingness to acknowledge that, and just say, you know what, that’s a real thing. We need to have a vehicle or a means of having that honest conversation with one another. Because there’s still some deep generational grieving that’s going on around that. There needs to be some opening up of some hearts and some minds that have been totally closed. Not necessarily, always intentionally, sometimes it’s just, I didn’t know, because the system is set up to keep people blind. The system is set up to keep people ignorant. There’s so many people, in my opinion, after being around for as many hundreds of years as we have been as a country. There’s too many people walking around, not their own fault, who are like, you know what, I didn’t know. They saw George Floyd die and they’re like, I didn’t know.
Kazique Prince:
It’s not their fault, because the system was set up for them to be blissfully ignorant. And then you got all these black and brown people and women too, who are like, let me tell you something, let me tell you about my reality. One of the best things is, last weekend Dave Chappelle was on Saturday Night Live.
Douglas:
Amazing.
Kazique Prince:
Amazing how he was just telling the truth in so many ways. What I loved about it, is that, and he said it, he says, I know many of you wouldn’t be listening to me if I wasn’t telling jokes, but boy does he use his platform of being a genius comedian, to really tell his story. And to me, that’s part of the truth and reconciliation, right? That’s part of calling something out. What we used to say in the black churches, you got a name and then claim it, shame the devil and tell the truth. To me, until you are willing to do that, it’s hard to reconcile things, because you’ve got too much a part of the community, the national stage, who are just denying the stuff that even happened. You somehow want me to work with you? You want me to be on the same page with you and you’re not even willing to acknowledge?
Kazique Prince:
And the thing is, the truth of matter is, just so real clear, we’ve gone on as a country unwilling to do that and we still function. But if we really want to be a more powerful country, that’s able to really commit ourselves and create the change and be the powerful entity that I think we want to be, if we’re willing to have that conversation, the result at the end, it may feel like magic or a miracle, but I think what people are already experiencing is the sense of man, we’re so much better off now, having that conversation than avoiding the conversation
Douglas:
100%. I think avoiding the conversations is what’s made it so tenuous, and it’s created situations where you’ve got good people that are blocked. It’s almost like having a psychological block where people go to a therapist. I’m not a psychologist, but the way I envision it is like, there’s some trauma that’s happened in past life and they can’t even unlock it. It’s because they know there’s racism in their family, their grandparents or their parents, and they’re ashamed of it. But admitting that, is them admitting they’re a bad person, and they can’t go there, that’s just not safe for them to do. That’s a hard thing for people to unlock. And so when I see some people act out and push back, I have some sympathy for them, but also it’s like, man, we can’t keep on like this. There has to be a way to move past that.
Kazique Prince:
It’s funny that you mentioned this, dealing with racial trauma and the blocks that we experience. Because, again, the system is set up and what I mean, is the system I’m talking about the system of white supremacy, is set up to not even mention that white people have experienced trauma around race. That there’s serious trauma that’s not just for the individual, but it’s generational. Because if I am out pain and venom and hate towards a group of people, and it happens for generations, you can’t tell me that doesn’t have an impact on me, because chances are, that venom is not being just directed at black people or brown people, it’s directly at spouses, it’s directed at children, that venom is being spread across. Until you’re willing to recognize that and call it out and then ask yourself, what are you going to do about it, and take some responsibility for it.
Kazique Prince:
I’ll use myself as a man, it is hard for me to acknowledge that in my family background, there is a major, really bad things that have happened in the name of manhood. As crippling as it may feel and daunting to imagine all of that, I can’t be the best father I want to be to my daughter and my son until I reconcile some of that. To me, as a country around race and other issues, how can we be a good friend, a good neighbor, a competent government, who is unwilling to just acknowledge that, not just acknowledge it, but do something about it. We’re too weak to deal with it. The truth is, we’re so powerful. We’re so powerful as people, if we just take the risk to go out there and do it.
Kazique Prince:
I think we sometimes tell ourselves, we can’t handle it. No, no, no, it’s too rough. It’s too much. I’m like, no, look at what we’ve dealt with as a country over the last 20, 30, 40 years, we’ve dealt with some really challenging situations. I am confident in our ability that we have the strength, we have the virtue and the means to do this work. I think we can tell the secret that somehow we’re too weak to handle it. It’s too much to bring up the past. And I’m like, no, no, I don’t think that’s true at all, because we deal with really tough stuff all the time. I think we can deal with this too.
Douglas:
I’m part of a Slack group of consultants, and when the George Floyd situation, it really was erupting, right there in the thick of it. We all started to have an internal dialogue around what are the policies around this group. We were all reading how to be anti-racist. We were thinking about what are the racist policies around this group and how did this group come together. There is one gentleman in the group, we had a long conversation around privilege. He was a white gentleman and he had real issues with that term and him being labeled as having privilege. It comes back to my comment about binary, because I think he saw it as someone labeling him as having privilege, because he said, I grew up poor.
Douglas:
I was right there with a bunch of poor black people. We didn’t distinguish between white or black. We were all just poor. The point we were trying to make was like, look, I know you worked hard to get an education and to dig yourself out of that situation. But you have to be honest with yourself that being white definitely helped you on that journey. Now, you don’t have as much privilege as someone who’s born in Beverly Hills and their father is a director, and just without any audition in the film or whatever, that’s a whole different paradigm. Around the same time, it was before this whole conversation. I saw this really interesting, it was this group of children were in a field, they were outside doing, doing some games. It looked like a summer camp kind of thing.
Douglas:
The counselor was telling everyone, everyone started off on a line together, and they said, take one step forward if your parents could afford textbooks when you were in elementary school. And then it just got more and more tech, take one step forward if you attended college, take one step forward if you were given a credit card while you were in college. It was just like, boom, boom, boom, one after the other until all of a sudden, one kid is still standing at the starting point and they’re all just vastly spread out across the field. And it’s like, that’s to me what privilege is about, it’s not about me having privilege and you’re not. It’s about like, wow, people are on various parts of this playing field, there is no equity.
Kazique Prince:
I think for a lot of people who live with privilege, one is like, I remind people privilege is like being a fish in the ocean. And you realize all of that ocean water that you’d never paid attention to is your privilege. You’re breathing it and you’re living it. And now you’ve come to the understanding that it’s there. It’s a little bit of shock to the system. But when I talked to my friends who happened to be white and poor, they’ll have the same argument. I think one of the big issues here, is that they’ll see the stats and say that a white man with a high school diploma on average can make more money than a black man with a PhD. On average, the numbers are clear, but for them that’s not their lived experience.
Kazique Prince:
Their lived experience is, I bust my butt. It was rough. I was eating government cheese and Spam like the best of them. Who are you to point the finger at me about privilege? I didn’t have any privilege. I’m like, my experience has been, for those people, oftentimes it takes someone else with lived experience over a period of time to make the case for why, it affirms their experience, but also give some insight that something about you being white gave you opportunities that the same person with the same talent as you will not receive. They’ll see it in those kinds of exercises you just described. They’ll look at their friend, who’s sitting right next to them, who they know is just as talented as they are, and be like, wow. Wow.
Kazique Prince:
I try to be graceful and patient with folks like that. It can be a little frustrating, don’t get me wrong, but it’s that until they see someone, they’re intimately connected to, who they trust, they’re able to give them some insights that the numbers just won’t give them. Because what they’re looking at is for that lived experience that tells them your experience is maybe not quite accurate.
Douglas:
That’s the problem with statistics, right? It’s like, it has nothing to do with my lived experience. I love that you brought that word, because that’s part of the taxonomy around DEI that I stumbled into. I don’t know, maybe three or four months ago. It really resonated with me. The framing that I learned, and someone was making claims about this and that. And then the retort was, how can you argue with someone’s lived experience? Wow. If we’re really going to be tolerant and support people, we have to embrace people’s lived experience, even if we don’t understand it. That happened to them. Maybe we could be a little understanding.
Douglas:
I guess, I want to maybe end with circling back on how we design better meetings and better experiences for our employees that are inclusive and supportive, collaborative. A lot of the work we do is based around design thinking and using human centered design practices, because these tools, these techniques were created to design things for humans. Well, guess what, our employees are humans. We want to design experiences for them, we can turn those same tools we use externally for products and point them inward, so we can have empathy. My theory is, if we want to create an inclusive situation, let’s do some ethnography. Let’s understand where people are coming, what they’re hoping, what their fears are, what they’re looking for in the world, what they need.
Douglas:
If we can understand that, then it becomes crystal clear what we need to do. Because someone was asking me, with this remote environment, how do we support our employees with children? It was in one of our weekly facilitation practices. I was sitting back just listening. People had a lot of great ideas. And then I asked the gentleman, I said, have you spoken with them about what they need? There was just a little bit of silence. I was like, I think you should probably start there, just interview all of them and find out what are their schedules, what challenges. As soon as you start to sketch with them, to talk with them, to get curious with them, then you can start to understand their needs. And then that’s how you make things inclusive.
Speaker 1:
If you are addressing needs, that is ultimately inclusive, because everyone’s going to be taken care of. I’m just curious, that’s been a real epiphany for me over the last year. Especially as I’ve seen more and more HR people showing up at design conferences and stuff, it just gets me really excited to think about a discipline that’s typically unfunded and how do we shift that conversation. I wonder if that overlaps with your work at all and what you’ve been noticing,
Kazique Prince:
Actually, it does overlap with my work, because whether it’s a design thinking approach or whatever, but as you know, one of the first steps is collecting data, right? Oftentimes we forget to go ask our employees what their experiences are like. The thing is, you don’t want to overwhelm your employees with a 17,000 item questionnaire. You want to give nice little pulse surveys, with maybe five or six questions, that really helped to give some insight of what their experiences are. But let’s also not sleep on the importance of those interviews and sitting down with people and saying, hey, what’s been your lived experience in this area? By receiving that insight, those perspectives and collecting that data and making sure you have people at the table who are part of the decision making process.
Kazique Prince:
It’s not just asking people, but actually making sure they’re part of the conversation at the table. I think what you’re going to find out are the solutions that folks are looking for, because what may work over at X organization may not work at Y, but the process that’s going to be similar for both organizations, is their willingness to go out and ask their employees and have leadership in place who are going to make these things come to fruition and be willing to take the risks that are necessary. Because I think what we’ve been faced with, the coronavirus pandemic, and I would also say the racism pandemic, is that we are forced to look at work differently, because people are at home with their kids, and some of us don’t have partners who can support us, so we can work, just on work.
Kazique Prince:
People have had to be really creative. What I want to know is how they did it. How did you run between raindrops in the middle of a thunderstorm and still got things done, or did you? It wasn’t even realistic to expect you’re going to do that in the first place. What’s the end result? What are we going to find out after all this settles down a little bit? We get the vaccine out and everyone’s finally settled down. I think what we’re going to find out, is that people suffered a lot through this. We’re going to find out our kids suffered, because the educational system fell apart. We’re going to find out that many parts of our economy fell apart, and we were just living on a lifeline.
Kazique Prince:
The question I’ll be asking myself, and I hope my friends is, out of this pandemic, what did we learn, that we can use to make ourselves a better organization, a better community. Because right now I think what we’re not facing is the carnage of this last year. I like to believe that out of every, for lack of a better word, failure, is opportunity. I want to see how we as a country take advantage of the opportunity. So whether it’s the racial healing, reconciliation conversation, I think needs to happen, or the innovations that we find that families had to implement to survive all of this. I think there’s something about, I think we as a country, whether it’s the great depression or even the great recession we had, we learned a lot. I just wonder if we’re ready to hear the truth about this experience.
Douglas:
Well, a lot there. I really appreciate you spending the time to talk with me through this today. It’s already gotten my gears spinning in some new directions and hopefully listeners might be inspired to think about the work ahead of us and how they might show up and contribute. I just want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a parting message.
Kazique Prince:
This work around diversity, equity and inclusion is not for the faint of heart. This does require us to build the muscles, the spirit, the stamina that’s necessary to work through it. The great thing is that we are not alone. There are other people who are struggling, who are uncertain, who are scared, and we are much better together than we are alone. And so if you do nothing else, but search for someone else who’s also trying to make a difference, who might feel scared and alone as well, just like you, maybe they just don’t know what’s going on, but they want to know. Make sure you go out and find someone who’s wanting to do the same thing and get on that gravy train together, to figure out some solutions.
Kazique Prince:
Because doing it alone is not, we’re never supposed to do this stuff by ourselves. But I think if you find other people who are committed to this work, whether it’s in your church or synagogue, at your job, where you have your kids play at the park, you’ll find that there’s a lot of people who are looking to make a difference. I would encourage you to take that risk and reach out to someone in the attempt to make a difference.
Douglas:
Amazing. Thank you so much for chatting today, Kazique.
Kazique Prince:
Well, thank you so much. I appreciate the invitation and conversation.
Douglas:
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe, to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more head over to our blog, where I posted weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.
