Michael Rolph - Conversations at the Intersection - powered by Happy Scribe

Sacha Thompson is a respected and certified DEI coach. For the next 30 minutes, we'll get an exclusive look at some of her conversations with others in the field. Welcome to DEI After Five.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this episode of DEI After Five. I am really interested and excited about this next conversation. As I've shared before, many of the conversations or many of the folks that will be on this show, I have met throughout my career in DEI. Today's conversation is no exception. So my guest today is Michael Rolph, and he is with New Sincerity. Hey, Michael. And we're really just going to have a really great conversation about just kind of DEI and how you got into this work and all of the things. Right.

Right. I'm looking forward to it.

Thank you so much for being here. And you and I had these conversations all the time. Get on Zoom and just talk and brainstorm. But I want folks to know, how did you get into this work? What was it about it that just kind of excited you?

Thanks so much and thanks for having me on. It's an honor to be a part and just to hear when we talk about this as a vision for one of the things you are going to bring to the community. And now just because you get things done, here we are. And I'm just honored to be a part. So I've got kind of a unique background. I've worked in Tech since kind of its early days, and I've been CMO of a cybersecurity company. But I also have a counseling degree in a background in multicultural counseling. I've worked in the last several years to see an opportunity to bring the change that I want to see in the world into the world of work, the work that I do. So the focus right now is creating partnerships with New Sincerity. So all of my partners are all women of color, and we approach DEI and corporate work a little bit differently and are seeing some interesting results and kind of driving some engagement.

So you touched on something just now, and I'm just going to call it out elephant in the room like you are a cis-gendered, straight white male. Right.

These are two things.

Yeah, right. All the things that a lot of folks are saying you are who this work is not about, right?

Absolutely.

And so how do you take that on?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think that when I first started so I studied black studies in undergrad back in the day because I just realized as a young person that I didn't get the real history and did a lot of different things in the world of work. And now being in this space, what I realized is that kind of leaning into my background of mental health is that a lot of folks weren't seeing themselves in the solution. And I knew that it didn't make sense not having any lived experience that I could go out and speak and say, hey, I have every vertices of privilege that there is. And I recognize that. But I also because I've worked in the mental health field, it's about building relationships and engagement. And I realized that the opportunity to actually engage folks, many folks that may not believe in the value or the importance of the DEI at work, if they could see themselves in the solution and then see in an active dialogue, in an authentic conversation what trusting relationships can look like, what sharing power can look like, then it stimulates new conversations and new thinking. And that's kind of what myself and the partners bring into this training and workshop component is this active dialogue. And I have a unique role. My role is to do some things that you don't see from a lot of leaders, which include active listening, which includes showing vulnerability. And those are the types of things that I think create enough curiosity and interest. And when that happens, we have folks that maybe aren't invested in DEI start to lean in. They start to get curious. And that curiosity, then it leads to change. And that's kind of my theory of change in what we're doing.

You said something just now that the curious cat and me kind of jumped into, because we talk about mental health a lot. I talk about it a lot. And some of my guests are therapists in this space, but we talk about it from the perspective of wellness and self care for practitioners, like, what do you need to do to take care of yourself? But with your background, there's this very unique intersection of mental health and DEI. Right. And so how do you see those two things merging as you're doing your work with your clients?

It's a great question. I developed a theory of change for New Sincerity. It was actually born as a digital magazine in 2016, and we told hundreds of stories that were kind of aiming to disrupt bias. And it was short form content. We had about 175,000 followers on Social. The algorithms didn't like the content as much as we did. We built a big audience. But my goal there was actually to get content that was truly intersectional to go viral. And I did some other things in the world of work. And I came back to looking at DEI through the leadership experiences that I've had in different sorts of roles. But that mental health piece kept coming up because I was leaning on the training and also to work with clients to actually build relationships. And what I found was that these very foundationary skills, when you study mental health about active listening, about, there's a technique called a broken record where you reflect back what you've heard. And the literature proves this out, too. Like, we're not heard as people either in the world or at work. People are waiting to get their piece in. They want to share their idea and their thought. And so I thought, hey, if we could take all of the educational components of DEI, which are super important because we need to share that knowledge. But we could also model and practice skills like listening to folks, restating back what we heard, admitting that when we make a mistake, when we don't have the answer, actually, those practices bring people into the material, and that's where we start to see some change. And I'm an optimist, I'm a humanist. So I believe that if we can practice some skills and see a little bit of change and deepen up one relationship, that we can spread that through the organization.

I love it because basically what you are honing in on is what does inclusion look like? Right. We talk about wanting to be seen, valued, heard. Right. But it's like you all are modeling that behavior through these workshops, through you sitting in a role of listening. Yeah. I think that's a piece that is often missing in this work. Right. We talked about diversity, equity and inclusion with that inclusion piece of, okay, what does this look like in the day to day? How do you model that is critical. And so the active listening. I do that in a lot of my facilitation work as well to where it's the broken record. Right. Let me repeat back what you said, because that may or may not have landed on my ears the way that you intended for it to land. And so sometimes it's people hearing things like, oh, no, that's not what I meant at all. Right. Okay, well, let's clarify. And so with that dialogue, with that conversation, you start to build trust, you start to build relationship, as you were saying, and you can deepen that connection so that you can continue to do the hard work.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, as usual, just like you always frame things in a way that I was like, oh, what Sacha said, that's what I was getting at first. I met years and years ago, I was like, this woman, she breaks down the complex, the intent. This is emotional work. There's deep, deep, intense suffering that's involved in the work. And I don't go into organizations and try and practice therapy. We can't do that. It's actually kind of dangerous. But when you said, yes, this is the practice of inclusion. That's what I'm aiming for. That's what I'm aiming for. And then I believe that if we model that through video interaction with myself and partners, and I do things that to me are pretty simple and intuitive. But to the world of work and folks that leaders that have been trained, leaders aren't trained in vulnerability. That's not a skill that comes up in a leadership development program. It doesn't come up in grad school, in an MBA program. No one says you should be vulnerable. And that will create psychological safety, and that will endear your team to you. It doesn't come up. I mean, it should and maybe the next generation it will. But I think I'm here with my partners to be a catalyst in a new expression of leadership. And the theory is and I think it's proving out the theory is going to reduce suffering because it's going to drive awareness. And you put that together in your work in a practical application. That's why folks like myself are just magnetized to your work, because you walked that talk.

Thank you. It's funny because in another episode, we talked to Farah Harris, who talked about emotional intelligence. And as you were talking, I'm like you're absolutely right. There are very few leadership programs, and I've been through quite a few of them. I've got my MBA and all of these other things. Very few of them talk about the importance of emotional intelligence as a leader and being able to tap into that. And as you're going through leadership or as you're kind of going up the ranks, I mean, very few places even teach you how to be a manager. Right. Say, oh, okay, you can do this work. Great. We're going to just give you a couple more people and go figure it out. And so it's really that missing piece of being able to understand who you are, being able to understand that vulnerability is a strength and not a weakness. Being able to step out and show, okay, I make mistakes as well. And it's okay. Right. That's how we learn together. That's how you build that psychological safety that you're talking about 100%. The other thing that you touched on and I want to make sure that people understand is you have put together a number of practitioners to kind of do this work. You go into organizations and do this work, but all of them have intersectional backgrounds. And you talk about the importance of intersectionality in this work and how you are using that, again to model that behavior. And so I want you to talk a little bit more about that and the importance of people seeing themselves as a part of these teams.

Yeah, great question. Great question. I think that is one of the things that's most exciting about this collective that we're building is that these other practitioners are not what we would call professional DEI facilitators. That choice is based primarily because when I want folks to see themselves in the solution, that means taking whatever they might have learned in a training in a little lightning talk that we might do and actually practicing it in their next meeting or interaction. Right. And this comes down to this idea of the beginner's mindset, which is that you don't have to be an expert in anti racism, psychological safety, or your understanding of systemic oppression to go and be a vulnerable leader. And these other practitioners are gifted facilitators and experts in a range of different disciplines. One in particular focus is on disability and kind of actually helping brands evolve their marketing to connect more with the differently abled community. Right. And being a gifted communicator, being very heart led, and being just a really talented human being, she brings her whole self to the work. But we also show folks that you don't have to read 50 books to go and give some of these things a try. And practice is a big part of our theory of change and how we work. Because if we're vulnerable and we have this beginner's mindset and we practice, the practice means that you reach out to someone at work and you're just like, gosh, I've only worked with this person in two meetings over the last couple of months, but I'm just going to say like, hey, how's it going? I hope that wasn't awkward. That extension for an introvert is a big risk. And we want to model that. We want to model what interaction or conversation might be a little sloppy, right. Little unscripted. Because that's how life is. Life is mostly unscripted.

Yeah. And it's very interesting because we've again talked about this. So much of this work is getting people passed their own fears. It's messy and ugly. And that's okay, right? It's okay for it to be uncomfortable.

100%.

Yeah.

And it's especially important for folks who look like me, who have my background, especially the younger generation at work. They are not accustomed to someone who looks like me saying, I don't know, I'm not sure. To some folks, it seems simplistic. But to people that have a deep background in HR or leadership, the nuance of on a continuous basis, saying, hey, I don't know what to do here or in a meeting, seeding power in a very visible way to other folks that are younger or black, Brown, gay, et cetera. When we see the power of the moment and of the meeting and do it in a visible way, it creates a marker in someone's mind. And the reason is, unfortunately, that's different. It doesn't happen a lot. But when that happens over time, that to me is what psychological safety actually is. We can practice it rather than just read a manual and talk about it in a kind of an academic way. Then people start to say, gosh, I can look for that, I can watch for that. Or leaders can say, well, gosh, I thought it was more complex than that. And my message is like, actually, when we wrap up this training, you can do that. You can do it over slack, you can do it over email, or you can do it in front of your folks.

Yeah. And that's how you change culture, right. It's the one time it's not going to change anything. Right. People will tend to say, okay, what the hell is happening? But if you do it on a consistent basis and again, constantly model the behavior that's how you start to shift culture, especially if it's coming from leadership. And so those are the moments that can happen almost immediately. Right. I always talk about what can we do now? That's one of those things that we can do right now. What is something else that leaders can do right now that can start to get them stepping out of their comfort zone?

Ask for help. Right. There's lots of different ways to ask for help. And you can once again, I think about platforms and tools a lot, because if I try and insert a training, it's a new thing into a very full calendar. What I oftentimes see is or even here is like a visible groan of like, oh, man, I don't have time. But if I can think about existing workflows, slack is a way that we are working actively, and then there's a skill that will lead to these outcomes we're talking about. Right. Active listening, promoting psychological safety. You can just say, hey, squad, really quickly. I'm not sure if we should try and launch early on this because it's not quite complete or hold off two weeks. What do you think?

Yes.

And what we're doing as a leader, we're not committing the whole organization to a giant new strategy, but what we're doing is signaling. I want to hear from you. And I'm also cognizant that the leader doesn't have to take any of that advice. And also we're not burdening the team by saying, I need a whole new report. Give me a one pager on why we should do that. No, we're not doing this. We're actually just having informal dialogue. Not about DEI, we're having informal dialogue about the work. Like, this is what we're here doing. Right. And another way to do that is to say, hey, team. So I'll let you know, I could have done this thing better, and it doesn't have to be yesterday or last week, and it doesn't have to be a big one where like, actually, we totally missed our number from Q four. That's a lot. That's a lot of vulnerability. And it can actually shake the confidence of folks. Right. Just like, hey, I missed this. I realized that we had a big project, and I kind of thought it was a medium sized one. And so I gave everybody two weeks. Honestly, I should have given you four. So I own that. And I'm going to do better next time.

I'm sitting here thinking back to some places that I've worked, and if that was what I heard from a leader, how that might have changed how I felt about being there. Right. Because not only are you modeling the vulnerability, you're asking for feedback. You are also kind of taking down the barrier between levels. Right. Because there is a hierarchy that many companies love that there's a hierarchy, and they thrive on the fact that you're not at this level or that level. And so therefore, you shouldn't talk to someone at this level. And so it removes a lot of those barriers and again, leads to helping with that psychological safety. Right. So a lot of the work that I do around that is share some of your mistakes. No one's perfect. And so many people, especially folks that are younger in their careers, see these leaders that walk on clouds. They're absolutely perfect. They don't make mistakes, which adds another layer of pressure, because then you feel you can't make mistakes.

Yeah, they take that in. I do see it from younger leaders who are getting back to this mental health piece is living too strongly in your ego in the world of work. And they're actually like, they're doing the thing that the leader is doing that ultimately is making work. Not so fun, not so safe, not so rewarding. But it becomes habit for me because young folks at work are like, well, that's what it takes. Evidently, that is the skill base that's going to get me from A to B.

Right.

And I'm ambitious, too. And so that's what I'm going to have to do. And it also stifles creativity. It stifles innovation. We have giant data sets and all these things. So part of me is like, okay, so we've been tracking DEI for what, 5678 years? Nothing is moving the needle. We're going to keep doing the same thing. And so we're trying to start some new conversations, ones that I'm working on this multi generational piece, too, because I've been in the world of work and in the world of tech for a long time. And I found that folks that are newer to the world of work, it makes me uncomfortable. Honestly, I don't want to talk too much about my age, not so much because of insecurity, although there's a little bit there. But I don't want to talk about it because I seem to see that folks, they get distracted. And instead of listening to what we're talking about, they're like, and I appreciate the curiosity, but I have a plan. We have a lot of work to do. Let's stay focused. Let's empower yourself, others, your colleagues, and let's get this work done. So I leaned away from this multigenerational piece, but in the spirit of vulnerability, I'm going to bring it in here because this is an audience of practitioners. I'm just going to be open to digging into it a little bit. But that multi-generational piece, it's one of the barriers to connection. It's really happening

It's huge. I have a series of workshops called the Foundations. And one of them is on the generations. And that one is probably the one that folks are just like, I didn't even think about that. Because when you think about it, this is the first time four generations have been in the workforce.

Wow. I hadn't put that together.

Yeah. So if you look at baby boomers, if you look at baby boomers and you look at the characteristics of that generation. And what has shaped that generation versus what is it? Gen Z,

What letter on we are now?

Yes. Gen Z. Right. And what has shaped them growing up? There are a lot of commonalities that I think they don't even realize that they have. There is probably more in line with those two generations than not. But because of the age difference, you start to see they're just old. They don't get it, but their work ethic is very similar. So I think those are conversations that we do need to have because that is where a lot of the conflict is happening, and it is. And then you start talking about ageism. Right. That's an -ism that we rarely talk about that's out there. So, I mean, gosh, that could be a whole other episode.

We should tackle it. We should talk. I'm super curious about it.

Yeah. Because I think it's one that we hear whispers of, but no one, especially in the workplace, is really okay. This is a problem. Like, we really need to figure this out. Yeah.

And we take on one more thing. It just feels heavy.

Exactly. I want to kind of lean back into what you said about mental health, because as I'm doing this series and as I'm talking to folks, I always want to think about what do we need to do to take care of ourselves. Right. We're always filling everyone else's cup. What's in our cup? What are we doing to fill ourselves up? So today I have green tea. That's what's filling my cup. But what are the things that you do to kind of help rejuvenate you as you do this work?

That's a great question. And we've talked about like, you and I have always found a way to touch on self care, and then we get back into it. And when I talk about you to my colleagues, because you've been doing this work for a long time and you have this resilience that's extremely important. Right. Burnout is very real. We've talked about how can we keep the cups filled. Right. For me, having a meditation practice from back in the day, it's really important. And the pandemic has been especially challenging. My wife is a doctor. She works for the Department of Public Health. So the energy at home, it's heightened. She's working on the pandemic to help keep the city of San Francisco safe. And it's a lot I need to be there for her and her for me. We've got our daughter here at home, and a lot of folks think about meditation as like one, this is too woo woo. And I'm not into that meditation. Basically, it's a 2000 year old breathing exercise. So it doesn't need to be. Once again, the beginner's mindset really helpful here. Five minutes of breathing and maybe once in the morning, once in the evening, you put the timer on have no expectations, but it does all these things chemically in the brain about releasing the cortisol from the front brain, which is tied to stress, especially in tech. In the corporate world, there are ways we're supposed to do these things. We have all these meditation apps, for example. And I like to keep things really simple. When people talk about ask me about meditation and they want to get all of the details. And I'm like, it's just just a practice. Five minutes in the morning or five minutes in the evening. Start there, do it for a week. If you stick with it for a week, Pat yourself on the back. Because starting new habits is hard. So that's a huge part. The other part for me, that's hard. Like, I like people. Pandemic makes it hard to connect with people. So I'm reaching out to have conversations sometimes with colleagues and folks in the space that don't have a goal. And that's actually just more about that relationship building. It reminds me that I'm working this together even if we're not working on a project together.

That sense of community. Right. That's so critical.

It's important to me. It kind of keeps me going.

And it's so funny. I was talking to our producer earlier, and I'm going to sit back because I want you to see my T shirt. Right. Self love is so gangster. Right.

I just saw the self part when we first came out. That is so awesome.

Yeah. Right. So that is kind of this mindset of reminding me that, wow, that's what you need to do. That is it self care, self love, those are the things that are important. And so that has been kind of a theme and ongoing theme throughout the series and my work, I just wanted to kind of touch on that because again, you and I talked about the burnout piece and needing to take time away and just reflect and just be.

Yeah. I'm also here because being a straight white man, a lot of folks that they're like, hey, I just need to talk to Michael just to be like, hey, is it going to be okay? Are we going to be okay? Is it actually working? And I'm here to say, yes, it's working. And that touchstone. I'm a connector. Right. That's a big part of my theory of change and how I live in the world. And being a connector helps me be someone that can be what we call the safe object and help reassure and be a part of that healthcare solution. Right.

So as a connector, how can people get in contact with you if they wanted to reach you?

The best way is actually LinkedIn because it's a way during our busy work lives, we can build and expand networks. This idea of weak ties is really important to me. And when we start to find that we have more people in the world of work in common than we knew before kind of inspires some confidence and then also LinkedIn messaging. It allows us to just find innovative ways to work together. So definitely get on LinkedIn connect anytime. And then I'm always down for an exploratory call 15 minutes just to talk about the work, the theory of change, and then even to explore partnership. Right. Like the more of us that are doing this work in the world, the more change we create. So I would probably say find me on LinkedIn. You've got the name there your email.

Yes.

And we'll go there. Yeah.

Perfect.

There's an email up on the screen there.

Wonderful. So, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today. I think there was so many different pieces that folks can get out of this and the importance of just how we approach this work. Right. And how do we make it not a burden to model the behavior that we're looking for.

So well said. So much gratitude for you and your work. Great connection. Great connection. Have a great one.

Thank you. All right. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. Again, feel free to follow up with Michael. You got his email address on the side right there. You can also follow me on LinkedIn or anywhere on social media at the equity equation. Be sure to subscribe as well so that you can get these notifications right in your inbox and we will see you at the next time on our next episode. Have a good one.