Equity Requires Leadership - A Conversation with Y-Vonne Hutchinson

Y-Vonne is the author of How to Talk to Your Boss About Race and CEO of ReadySet, a diversity and inclusion training firm that helps tech giants, political leaders, media outlets, and Fortune 500 companies speak more productively about racism and turn talk into action. To date, ReadySet has worked with hundreds of companies around the world to build, manage, and grow diverse teams. In a former life, prior to founding ReadySet, she worked as an international labor and human rights lawyer for nearly a decade.

What strategies, tactics, equity and culture solutions have you personally seen work, and why do you think they worked?

What I think works, is to make diversity equity and inclusion part of a long-term strategy within an organization. It requires there to be leadership that are invested in making sure there is clarity about the value of DEI to the organization. DEI is a lens through which all aspects of an organization can be viewed. Who you bring in, who you promote and how they advance are all aspects of DEI, but so is the story a company tells about itself, the company’s marketing, how it reaches out to local communities and communicates with them, as well as the products the company creates and who they serve. Leaders in an organization must be able to articulate why it’s important to them and the organization to look through this lens so that initiatives and strategy related to equity and inclusion are not siloed from the rest of the organizational goals. To say oh, wouldn't it be nice if we were all different colors and had different abilities and were different ages has no meaning from a business perspective. That means when times are tough it will be the first thing to be cut. What works is for leadership to be able to articulate the why that benefits the company to make DEI solutions are invested in and stick.

What do you think is changing in the workplace that organizations need to start proactively and preemptively thinking about?

I think there are many changes happening simultaneously in the economic and social landscape businesses and organizations operate in. Changes in worker empowerment and demographics are increasing the calls for organizations to focus on sustainability and social responsibility. Covid related deaths and disabilities are and will continue to have impact on the workforce and what workers will need in their workplaces. Advances in technology are increasing the ability and demand for remote work as well as impacting the kinds of work people do. Remote workers are being impacted by climate change with workers productivity disrupted by extreme weather like floods and hurricanes. These are just a few of the more major forces organizations will have to adapt their work environments and policies to in order to stay competitive.

What does the phrase culture eats strategy for lunch mean to you?

The way I interpret that phrase is that you can plan all day but if your culture sucks then you are not going to get very far. How effective can an organization be if employees are unhappy, if they're not engaged, or they're fighting with each other? With my own company, ReadySet, while I have visions and plans for the company I have to continually turn back to the team, make sure they are aligned and address problems or problematic behaviors as they come up. We work on our own culture all the time; making sure we problem solve, enforce correct and align on company issues according to our company culture and values. If we do or do not the result trickles down into what we produce, what our clients see when they interact with us and what internal employees experience that makes them want to stay or leave.

Do you think it’s possible to change an established workplace culture? Why or why not?

Oh, sure it's possible, but it's very hard. Many aspects of work culture come from leadership and are baked in from the beginning. What leaders allow, don’t allow and incentivize through rewards and accountability measures will become part of culture.  Part of what makes shifting an established culture difficult is that it is easy to conflate an organization’s values with the culture. I think an organizations values are generally static. Because values are often part of a culture, people can think cultures don’t or should not change much, when actually, culture is dynamic and nebulous. As CEO I don't necessarily want ReadySets culture to stay the same. We are having internal cultural conversations that can be hard and uncomfortable. I think that that's good. I think that the ultimate outcome of those discussions will be good and that they will have a positive impact on our culture that may change it in some ways. I think a dynamic culture, and conversations within that culture based on values are good things to be working toward. Whenever we have a cultural question, we go back to our values to try to answer it. In some cases, the values of an organization need to be updated or changed and then a culture fostered around those values can be built but it takes leadership to consistently own, articulate and promote that. It is a lot of hard work and that’s why so many organizations struggle to do it.

When it comes to equity in the workplace what do you feel people aren’t thinking about? Is there an example you can share that illustrates this for you?

There are so many things impacting workplace equity that are outside of the workplace. I don't think that workplaces talk enough about the impact of disability and access on workplace equity. Historical systemic issues of inequity for black American people and other marginalized groups are being exacerbated by macro-level issues like covid. Covid has been a mass disabling event disproportionately impacting communities that are already living with massive inequities. Equity is about how we equip people to have similar outcomes yet many current accommodations for disabled folks in workplaces undermine their needs and interests. I don't think many businesses really are prepared for the scale of disability that we will have to grapple with given our current Covid policies.