Summer Special: What is HR's Role in Creating Diverse and Inclusive Organisations? (Interview with Torin Ellis)
Welcome to the third of our series of summer special episodes of The Digital HR Leaders Podcast, providing an outside in perspective on HR.
The brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police on May the 25th has unleashed a sustained and unparalleled wave of protests around the world. This terrible incident highlighted once again, the scourge of racial injustice and the responsibility we all have to speak up against discrimination in any of its ugly and reprehensible forms. We all need to commit to help to drive change in our companies, in our HR and People Analytics communities and in our societies.
The guest on this episode of the podcast is Diversity Strategist, Torin Ellis, who has worked with companies ranging from small 20 person startups to some of the biggest multinational companies, to help them identify inhibitors that stall the consistent achievement of the diversity, equity and inclusion objectives achieved through recruitment.
We start our discussion with the glaring injustices that the killing of George Floyd, once again, highlighted and then transition to how HR and recruiting professionals can support their organisations to be truly inclusive and equitable by following a simple and purposeful mantra, focus on people. You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.
In our conversation Torin and I discuss:
How the killing of Mr Floyd and the protests that it has inspired made Torin and other black people he knows feel
What those of you listening can do to help make a difference
Why true diversity, inclusion and equity results require leadership, un-wavering support and above all a focus on people
Why hiring managers are at the crux of progress and how data can reveal some uncomfortable truths
Examples of companies, including Nike and Allovue, who have created more inclusive organisations
This episode is a must listen for anyone interested in how to embed diversity in their organisations to create more inclusive and equitable workplaces. So that is Business Leaders, CHROs, Senior HR Leaders and anyone in a People Analytics, HR Business Partner or Talent Acquisition role.
Support for this podcast is brought to you by Insight222. To learn more, visit https://www.insight222.com.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today I am delighted to welcome Torin Ellis to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show Torin, it is great to see you. We haven't seen each other, I don't think since Paris last year for UNLEASH, in person. Now we are having to get used to this virtual world. Can you provide listeners with a quick introduction to your background and your current activities?
Torin Ellis: Yes absolutely. So, first and foremost, I absolutely appreciate you for allowing and trusting my voice with your listening audience, so thank you ever so much for that. You are right it has been a little over a year since we have physically placed eyes on one another, but again, thank you for having me here.
So for the listeners, I am a Diversity Strategist, a Risk Mitigator. I operate a little bit differently in the space than other D&I consultants in the sense that I focus on optimising talent acquisition processes through the lens of diversity. I am also a practitioner. So I am not a person who is only a coach or a trainer, if you will, but I am a consultant that gets in and knows how to rock some boolean strings just like the best of them. So that is me, Sirius XM, podcast Crazy and The King, Author of the book, RIP The Resume. Delighted to be here.
David Green: Torin, it is great to have you. Obviously there has been a lot happening in 2020, it has thrown quite a lot at us. There's been shock and worldwide condemnation at the brutal killing of George Floyd, we talked about it a couple of weeks ago. It has provoked protests all over the world under the Black Lives Matter banner. Once again it has just shown that the curse of racial injustice both socially and in our companies, let's be honest about it, has still not been resolved. As a black man, how are you feeling at the moment?
Torin Ellis: So I have got to tell you, I feel optimistic. I know that may come as a bit of a surprise, but I tend to think that even though the world is hurting right now, as Tony Morrison would say. We must be focused on the potential and the outcome. Black people have taught the world abroad how to love. We have been a hated and often hunted people and yet we have continued to figure out a way to teach the world how to love. So I am optimistic. I rise each and every day as James Baldwin would say, with hope. I innovate new hope each and every day that we are going to make progress in this time, that we are going to force organisations to recognise the bias and the injustice and the inequity that they have built in to their corporations and their corporate cultures. That we are going to force cities to pay respect to the progress that we are trying to pursue and seek and so I am just optimistic at this particular point.
It is so incredibly unfortunate what happened to Mr Floyd, but it is not the first time. It is not to say that I am anaesthetised to what happened to Mr Floyd, I just understand that it is not the first time and unfortunately it won't be the last time, but that we have more people in the fight, people like you, David, people like others that are saying we cannot do this anymore.
David Green: There certainly seems to be a real movement around this and it seems to have some real momentum as well. I guess the important thing is now it is not just two or three months of the momentum it has got to go on and on until we solve these problems and get it sorted out so we have a more just and fair social system and also more just and fair organisations.
Torin Ellis: Well part of that is telling the truth. So from stages all across the world, I say, number one, people have to feel empowered. They must feel like there is some space for them to be able to tell the truth and even if that space doesn't exist, then they have to run the risk of some degree of sacrifice. Telling the truth sometimes is painful and it may cause and position you to have to be married to fight with sacrifice, but it is a fight that you have to endure.
So for me, I just see right now as a fever pitch and I say to myself that if in fact we recognise where we are, then we will understand that this right here is a moment unlike anything that we have seen since the 1965 Edmund Pettus Bridge incident. It was at that time that white America, I don't know about London, but I know white America saw broadcasts on their TV screens, black people, peaceful protesting black people, church going black people being beat up, being fire hosed, having dogs set on them by the police. So I think it is one of these times where America is recognising for real that we got a problem and unfortunately we have a problem that we have long ignored and so we cannot continue to ignore it. I hope that this moment pushes us in to the history books as having done something that had not been done in the last 50 years.
David Green: You said how you are feeling optimistic, I think that is great because at the moment there is some optimism around. How are other black people that you know, how are they feeling? I guess it is mixed emotions.
Torin Ellis: You are absolutely right. It is a wave of emotions. You have some that are depressed and fatigued with the conversation around racial inequality. You have some that are disappointed that people are still willing and fighting to put up Confederate monuments and yet they don't understand that you would not put up a statue of Hitler in a Jewish community, you would not do that. And so for me it is baffling that some white people do not understand what it is that we are trying to convey to them just in the most common of sense, forget political party and affiliation just from the essence of humanity, why would you fight to put up things, or to say or to do to demonstrate in ways that show that you have no capacity for empathy, that you are disconnected from humanity. Why would you even do that? And so yes we have a number of black people, friends of mine, that are going through a wave of emotions because in some ways, David, we are tired of having this discussion. We don't want our children to have to fight the same battle. We don't want to have to engage in the workplace with micro aggressions. We want to be able to operate with, bring your whole self to work. So it is an evolution of emotion. But what I often say, David, is that life is like wrestling a gorilla, you don't quit when you get tired, you quit when the gorilla gets tired. And this life right here is going to continue to come at us in many shapes, forms and fashions and so we just need to gourd ourself with strength and we got to keep fighting.
David Green: One of the things I have seen coming out of this is people trying to educate themselves better. A great example of this for me is my son. You may have seen on the news in the US, there were protests here. In Bristol, a statue was pulled down of a chap called Edward Colston who was a slaver, so why that is actually still up is beyond me, but my son started asking about it.
Torin Ellis: And let me tell you, let me jump in real quick. I did see that the protests were happening in London, but one of the images that stood out for me was an image from Reuters and it showed a black man ushering a white man away, something happened to him I don't know what happened to him because it was a still image. That is the capacity of love that I am talking about, even in the midst of our fighting for what it is that we are fighting for all around the world, we still find a moment to find compassion to wrap people in that love that I often talk about. I am sorry to have cut you off.
David Green: No, no, that is fine. In that still, the white man who hurt himself was actually part of the right wing group that was there protesting against the Black Lives Matter protest, but still the black man took him out of trouble and took to safety. So yes you are right, he really showed compassion and love at a time where you would not have blamed him if he had not felt those sort of things.
The statue in Bristol was interesting, as I said, because Edward Colston was quite a famous person and people have been asking for this statue to be pulled down for a long time, quite rightly because he made his money from the slave trade. He gave some of that money, as a philanthropist, to Bristol hence why there are loads of things named after him in the city. But my son started asking “Daddy, why have they got a statue up of someone who made their money from the slave trade?” He is 11. So I thought, well, if he can ask that question, why aren't politicians and people in power asking that question?
I think one of the good things that is coming up about this is that people who are in authority are being forced to answer those questions and hopefully we will see statues of that ilk being pulled down or put in a museum where you can say, “Oh, people used to put statues up like this.”
I do not know what you think about that and I know there has been stuff like that happening in the US as well. You talked about the Confederates and stuff like that, there are lots of those statues up there still that people hopefully are now going to start bringing down.
Torin Ellis: No, absolutely.
And again, I understand history and what I understand about history, having grown up in the Midwest, I grew up in Iowa. So what I understand about history is that my teachers made it a point to not really give me all of history. They like to start our conversation in school, by the way, they like to start our conversation with slavery.
They do not want to tell us that we are Kings and Queens, they do not want to tell us that all of humanity, if you put your finger on the map of where the first person was born, that person was born in Africa.
They are not telling us that history. I remember from, I think the word is cartography. All of our life, David, when we grew up, cartography wise, the map of Africa was always smaller than America. But if you look at the continent of Africa it is a lot larger than America, a lot larger than America.
So my challenge to people that are listening to this conversation today, and we can get into whatever you want to talk about from an HR tech and TA and all of that, we can do all of that.
But my challenge today is that you be honest with yourself, be honest with the fact that there are some barbaric and I don't even know the word that I want to use, just some very terrible things that have happened historically associated with a lot of these things that we revere; monuments, posters, street names, city names, there are some barbaric and very demonstratively, ugly history associated and attached to that.
Honour and respect that, but put that shit in a museum if you will. I am not saying it needs to be thrown in the river, although I am not crying over a statue being thrown in the river, they did it several weeks back in Baltimore, they did it with a Christopher Columbus statue here. They threw it in the river, down in Baltimore City.
The challenge that we have is that a lot of these statutes, for instance, when I think about Stone Mountain down in Georgia. Stone Mountain is the biggest monument to the Confederacy and they legislated that monument, if you will, that it is going to take an act of the State Congressional Body to be able to touch it.
Are you familiar with Stone Mountain? I won't spend a bunch of time on it, you can look it up.
David Green: I am not but I am going to.
Torin Ellis: David, they have emblazoned these three Confederate Generals, murderous, racist, rapist, Generals. They have been emblazoned them on the side of an incredibly large mountain in the Atlanta Georgia area and it is legislated. You can not do anything to it. So it is like a Mount Rushmore of Confederate Generals who are trying to rip the country apart and this is who you want to revere. No, we just got to make sure that we spend some time being honest with history, particularly the history that we are not taught, particularly the way that they have slanted history to be more in their favour versus not. We have got to recognise that.
And that doesn't say that I, as a black man, am better than you David, because everyone who knows me knows that I embody humanity. I love people, absolutely love people. However I am not willing to allow people to tell me anything less than the truth, especially now in this ageing stage of my life.
David Green: Yes and I think you are right to do so. There has been a real groundswell in our community Talent Acquisition, HR, People Analytics of wanting to do something to help. What are some of the things that we can do to help irrespective of ethnicity. What can we do to help? Other than educate ourselves, frankly.
Torin Ellis: Yeah. I mean, absolutely education is extremely important, but I think when we operate inside of our organisations we must recognise that if in fact we are, as I said a moment ago, going to allow people to bring their full self to work we may need to make adjustments for that.
I am not suggesting that workplaces become daycare centres, community organisations, nonprofit in thinking. I am not suggesting any of those things. I am just simply suggesting that when Torin and David walk through those doors, we swipe our badges, we bring to the workplace our condition, our circumstances, we bring all of that with us to the workplace.
So we can not work and talk about corporate culture, ignoring what it is that you have. You have a family, I have a family and we have different experiences and so we must be operating inside of our workplaces with a more acute sense of, how do we create the environment that allows Torin and David to both collaborate, co-exist, sync up with one another in ways that they have never experienced before. How do we do that? And what is it that we should be measuring?
I think where we have fallen short, David, is that we have focused so much on some of the data and some of the things dealing with our desk and our keyboard and our product roadmap and our service offering.
We have focused more on those things and less focus on the individuals. So we have lost sight of, in my opinion, how to really treat the person as a whole human. We have softly put coffee machines and ergonomic chairs in spaces and we have tried to make them more favourable by offering flex working schedules, if you will. All of that has been nice but I don't know if we have paid enough attention to the human. So when I say the human, I am saying, if women have historically been compensated less than their male counterparts, then how do we innovate in a way that allows them to experience a different benefit package, a different investment schedule, a different experience in the workplace that reminds them of how important, how valuable they are.
I don't think that people are doing things because they don't care, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I am just challenging us to focus more on the human and less on some of the intangible or the tangible things of our workplace.
David Green: I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, something that Adam Grant wrote recently really struck with me, research data backs it up. When majority groups stay quiet, the majority groups he was referring to was white men in the workplace, they inadvertently license the oppression of marginalised groups. So if white men stay quiet, people are penalised for raising up issues, whether it is women or ethnic minorities, they raise issues around diversity and equality. If white men stay quiet, then those people are penalised. If white men actually are a part of that conversation, they are more likely to be applauded for it, which is dreadful. But it really shows that you can't be silent, you need to actually stand up.
Torin Ellis: Yes you have got to recognise the power structure and no matter how much we like, or do not like to say it, white men are still in power.
They control the allocation of resources, they get to set the agenda in many instances and so you have to make sure that, for me personally, I feel it is extremely important that we include the people in power in the conversation. I am not saying that we defer all decision making to them. I am not saying we revere them I am just saying they should be sitting in the room and we should be working in concert to do something different, whatever different is.
I think back to, August, I want to say 2017 could be August of 2018, David don't quote me. Deloitte did away with their ERG groups, their Employee Resource Groups or Business Resource Groups in their organisation and so the reason they did away with them is because white men didn't feel like they were welcome, pause….
White men didn't feel like they were welcome. So for me, I just see that as an absolute fail all the way around, what is it that you were doing inside of your ERGs as leaders to not signal or to virtue signal to white men that they were not welcome. What is it as a white man that you are seeing when you are walking through the corridors or when you are reading email correspondence, or you were looking at readout reports of what the ERG did, what is it that you were seeing or were not seeing that suggested that you could not be a part of the group?
What is it from a CHRO standpoint that you were observing that you could not, or you could have put your hand on and said, no we need to make sure that is what inclusion is all about. I understand that people say that they want some safe spaces, but I can have a safe conversation and have you sitting in the room because I am comfortable telling the truth.
I have no problems saying what I am experiencing, but that is who I am, everybody may not operate the same way that I do. But I still think that we should have a collective of individuals working to solve these problems.
So you are absolutely right, white men can not be silent, they need not be silent and for the ones that are, especially if they are silent because they feel a loss, like speaking up is a zero sum game. If I allow them access, if I give them opportunity, if I allocate resources to them, then I am going to lose. If that is the posture that you have, then you do not need to be a
David Green: leader.
No and the problem with most of our organisations. They still are run by a group of white men in their fifties and above, so it is not diverse, it is not inclusive. Is it surprising that our organisations then have problems around, lets say minority groups, but women are minority groups and they usually account for 50% of the workforce or more but not in higher roles.
Torin Ellis: That is another example, it is the language in which we use when we refer to black people as minorities.
No, we are not minorities. When you look the world over, most people are of a darker skin tone so we are not a minority, but we have allowed that language to persist for far too long and we have become comfortable with mediocrity. I am not comfortable with mediocrity. I am going to challenge mediocrity. That is not to say that I am going to be a word police, it is not to say I am going to be a sensitive individual inside of the workplace. I am just going to hold people accountable. That is just what it is for me.
David Green: Certainly if we look at the role of HR, what should HR and HR leaders be doing? Maybe changing their language is one, using the right language would be helpful, but what are some of the other things that HR leaders and teams should be doing?
So you talked about the importance of actually helping people bring their whole selves to work and understanding people at an individual level and tailoring benefits to them as an example.
What are some of the other things that HR leaders and teams could be doing?
Torin Ellis: They can continue down that path of making sure that they are focused on the people inside of the organisation. Treating the people inside the organisation as people and operating inside of their interest in the business.
I think that HR, for far too long, it has protected the business. I think that they have focused more on the issues and the initiative of the business and not so much so the people. When I think about Me Too and the Time's Up movement, I think about how many women have gone through something that they didn't necessarily need to go through.
I think about the infractions that black people and the micro aggressions that black people have endured, they didn't have to necessarily go through them because HR was complicit in sweeping that up under the virtual rug, if you will, the digital realm. I think that they need to be focused on people.
I think about HR organisations that are administratively in posture and they are not looking at people with disabilities. They are not focused on the LGBTQ community. We need to focus on people and if they focus on people with the mindset of being more of a business partner and not a cost or a line item, then I think they will move in the right direction.
There is no one prescription as to what they should do in their organisation but the one thing that they have to do is focus on the people.
David Green: Yes and there is lots of talk about things like employee experience, the more progressive HR functions now understanding that actually, if we focus on the people it is not only better for the people, but it is actually better for the organisation as well.
I think that hopefully we will see more of that in the coming years and actually with some of the stuff that has happened this year, especially COVID-19 as an example, it may well be accelerated and we will start seeing that HR now are acting as almost the custodian of the people in the organisation and always elevating them in the conversation with senior leaders.
Torin Ellis: Absolutely and when we think about these listening sessions that a lot of executives are having, HR should be having listening sessions too. When I go into an engagement with the client, one of the things that I do is listening sessions with suppliers. So who are you doing business with? I want to have listening sessions with those suppliers.
Who are the HR tech vendors that you have in? I may have a listening session with the HR tech vendor and bring that information into how I form and help them shape their D&I strategy. It is important that we do a great deal of listening and so I think HR can be a great business partner. They can take care and protect the business, but they can also do a lot more listening so that they understand how do we effectively provide support, provide presence, provide a voice, provide trust to the people that we say we care about.
David Green: And actually I was going to talk a bit more about some of the work that you do actually. So obviously you help predominantly talent acquisition, but also HR by extension in organisations, helping to infuse D&I into how they hire, develop and retain people.
Now, what are some of the common challenges that you have come across, linked to diversity? And then how can those organisations overcome some of those challenges?
Torin Ellis: So I think the two challenges that I tend to encounter the most: number one is with hiring managers.
We just can not ignore the fact that they are the impediment to whether or not a person ultimately is extended an offer to join an organisation and so I don't think that hiring managers are bad people. I just think that there are a lot of biases. There is a lot of pattern matching, there is a lot of complacency, there is a lot of comfortable routine that they operate from. We have to be able to break through that. We have to be able to shatter some of those conceptions and in many instances, misconceptions. So the hiring managers are an area of focus for me when I go into an organisation.
Yes. I look at event curation and academic calendar and technology stack and ERGs and employer branding and corporate social responsibility. I look at all of that. I look at even more. But I look at those hiring managers, a good portion of my effort and emphasis is on them.
The second issue that I always uncover is plausible deniability. That is a legal term. I think that too many people operate with plausible deniability, they know that the data is there but they do not want to really pay attention David, to that data. They know that this particular business unit, this particular department, this particular team is operating in a way that is probably a bit nefarious or counterproductive to what it is we are trying to do. But if I don't ask for the data, then I have plausible deniability. I can pretend like I didn't see that. So I think what I find is that plausible deniability, we try to force organisations to say, I see what it is that you have been looking at. Here are some of the things that you need to be looking at, if you are really genuine and serious about this work, let us focus on this data right here.
So I will give you an example, anytime I go into an engagement, I say, give me the exit interviews for the last two years. I want to talk to those folks. I want to find out why they left the organisation. I do not want to hear only why you say they may have left, I do not want to hear from Hiring Managers as to why people have left the team, I do not only believe Glassdoor reviews. I want to talk to David. I want to spend some time with David, give me 10 or 15 minutes with David and if I can’t talk to him, let me read what his responses were on the exit interview. Let me surmise myself whether or not I think that it was true, honest, transparent.
There is a little bit of agility that takes place there, but it is another layer of information.
So that plausible deniability, it is something that I think too many leaders suffer from and I challenge them on that.
David Green: You talked a little bit about the data side of things and I think we certainly, with the organisations that we work with, I think most organisations are very good at counting diversity, they are not very good at measuring inclusion. We talked about that a little bit earlier, I think that the recent McKinsey study is the third one now, around diversity that shows once again, that it makes good business sense to have a gender and ethnically diverse leadership team because those companies perform better.
So there is a really good big fact for a start and second, they found that the big challenge is around inclusion. How can organisations get better at inclusion?
Torin Ellis: Number one, they can put some representation in their leadership levels. It is a lot easier for me to affect a percentage or a number or a change at the leadership level, at the directorship level, far easier than it is for me to do it down here when I have a thousand people, 10,000 people, 60,000 people. Whereas up here in leadership I may have a few hundred people, at the director level I typically have less than 20. So I can do a lot more from a perception from a messaging standpoint if I start to focus on leadership and director level representation. That off the rip. That is a little bit of a street phrase, that off the rip, shows that an organisation is trying to do something to move the needle and so what I say is, sit your ass down and change your corporate bylaws or your corporate charter and do what needs to be done so that we can expand that board of directors.
If the bylaws or whatnot says that we can only have 11 people then change that joint to say that we can have 13. I know we want to have an odd number, so let's change it to 13 and let's go out and find some representation of people that are not there, that automatically sends a signal to our employee base.
It sends a signal to the markets in which we do business. It sends a signal to the partners that we collaborate with. It sends a signal, it is a loud signal that this is important. Then we can begin to work backwards and down to the other levels of an organisation. We have to send a strong message that inclusion and representation, that belonging and equity are important and until they do that, David, the rest of it is performative. It is merely lip service. It is non demonstrable, it is mediocre, again, I don't want you to pacify me. I don't want you to placate to me. I want you to be honest and promise to me, that's what I want. I want honesty and a promise. I don't want something that just rubs the bottom side of the belly, when you have a little dog or a cat they want you to rub their stomach and then they put their paws up in the air and all their feet up because they are happy that you are rubbing their stomach. Now I don't want you to rub my stomach, I want you to feed me. I want you to make sure that you understand that I am about to protect you. I am going to protect you because I am going to make sure that that bottom line is looking healthy. I will make sure that the creative contribution that I bring is measurable.
I am going to make sure that I am highly engaged and I am productive. That is what I am going to do inside of your organisation. We don't need any more reports, we have enough reports that say that diversity and inclusion is great for the business case. These are smart people so I am not trying to convince them of anything anymore, except for get off your ass and do what you say is important.
David Green: And it is funny you say that about Hiring Managers because obviously the data is there, you know who the Hiring Manager has hired in the past, you know the people who have left that person. You know the people that person has promoted within the organisation. The data is actually there.
As you said, perhaps some people too often are turning a blind eye to what the data is telling them.
Torin Ellis: Absolutely and they are doing that far too often and they have done that for far too long. If we are honest again, HR this is where you have got to stand in, this is where you got to step in and say, you know what?
We ain't doing that no more. We are not doing that anymore. I feel like we are at a point where we can turn a corner differently and we can build some extremely strong organisations.
I think about VCs and the money that they invest inside of some of these ideas. I am not suggesting that social media platforms are not worthy ideas, but wow. Think about all of the ideas that we have and can be investing in and think about all of the business partnerships that we could be pursuing that are addressing climate change or addressing food deserts or addressing policing or addressing pay and equity, or addressing fin tech from a women's stand point of view, health issues. There are so many things that we can be doing.
I believe personally, when we bring representation to these organisations, we put ourselves in a far better position to chase a broader definition of diversity and when I say broader, what I mean is the products and services that we are delivering, the communities and geography in which we do business, the creative contribution and innovation of the people that we have and then of course, the people that we have on our teams. That is the broader definition of D&I for me and so if we do that, look at how beautiful life could be for us as an organisation. I am chasing beauty.
David Green: Well, I think that is what we want.
It is mainly HR professionals that listen to this podcast so lets inspire them, can you give a couple of examples of companies that have successfully created those types of inclusive organisations? Presumably you have worked with some of these companies, how did they create it, how have they embedded it and how have they sustained it?
Torin Ellis: Yes so I think of a small organisation here in Baltimore, a company by the name of Allovue. From the very beginning Allovue made it important that representation and inclusion was a part of their hiring process, that hiring journey, that corporate composition. Allovue operates in the space of educational fin tech, it is an Ed Fin Tech organisation. What that means is they look at how cities across the country allocate their budget for their students in school systems. So we know the history, we know that schools in wealthier zip codes or in white neighbourhoods are probably more resourced, they have more computers, they have different curriculums, better textbooks and all of those other things. What happens to the schools in the inner city?
They are often shortsighted and whatnot. So Allovue is working on education for our young people and they are doing it with a very diverse organisation, diverse team. I love Allovue. They have done that from the very beginning when they were 10 people now to up to where they are now, I believe that they are approaching 100. Another organisation that I think has done a decent job I wouldn't say a great job, but a decent job would be Nike. I don't want to get into it real heavy because they are a client, but what I would say to you is that they have had some very public missteps. So you can get out on the internet and you can see some of the things that happened to the organisation, 2016, 2017, 2018, you can see some of that. I think that they have done a very good job of trying to build transparency, efficacy, speed, alignment. They have tried to build that into their process of hiring. What they said to me is, Torin, how can we make this process uniform all the way through for the people that we bring into our recruiting funnel?
I said, the people. Not just black people, not just Muslims, not just Indians, not just LGBTQ, but people. Because they know how I operate. What I tell them is that if you do D&I right, you do all of recruiting right?
So how can we add speed, transparency, alignment, efficiency, consistency? How can we do that in our entire process?
And I think that they have done a yeoman's job of it, at least putting in the ground work to attempt to build that into a system that impacts 60,000 people, if you will.
David Green: Yes and a big brand, it is a brand that everyone knows. So a good example.
What about HR tech companies? Obviously there is a lot of HR tech companies out there, we certainly see them when we were at UNLEASH there are hundreds of them there. Are there any particular HR tech companies you are seeing out there that are really helping organisations on this topic?
Torin Ellis: Yes, there are so many of them, David, I hate to start calling names. I got an email a couple of weeks ago from the founder of one of the organisations out of Seattle.
He looked at my D&I starter kit and he sent me an email, he said Torin why am I not listed in that starter kit? Because inside of my D&I starter kit I kind of walk people through, If you can't afford to bring in a consultant, or you are not sure where to start, here are some of the things you should be thinking about.
Then in the back I put in consultants that I think that they should consider, media outlets they should use, HR Tech vendors that they should use and so his name wasn't in that list and he sent me a fun, nasty email. Like, yo, I've gotta be on that list. So I have to update mine.
So I don't want to call any names, but here is what I would say, I would say that if you are reviewing HR Tech for your organisation, because you know your DNA, you know what needs to be done, what has not been done. Just think about and make sure you ask them, what are they doing to help organisations with their inclusion and representation, challenges, efforts, initiatives, what are they doing in that regard?
And if they can't give you a substantive answer, then you need to evaluate that. I am not suggesting that you do not use them I am just suggesting that you have to be honest and ask the question and you need to force them and hold them accountable for the type of response they give you. If in fact you really care about D&I.
I say this to all of my clients now, if you are on this mission and you have brought me in as a consultant, I am going to look at your suppliers list of third party recruiting agencies and I am gonna reach out to every single one of them and if they do not have a D&I initiative, I am going to encourage you to kick them off the list.
I mean, why would you be working towards D&I and they are giving you candidates that are not really helping you with your slates, that doesn't make sense. So the same thing for HR Tech vendors, you got to ask the question and hope that they are aligned with where you are trying to take the organisation.
David Green: Great and your D&I starter kit, Is that something that we could put a link to when we publish the podcast?
Torin Ellis: I don’t know if you can put a link to it, I am not that technically advanced. What I can do, I am good on email, I bet I can get David a copy of it and you and your team could figure out what to do with it.
How about that?
David Green: Okay. We can do that (see: D&I Starter Kit). The last couple of questions. Firstly, we are asking all the guests on the show in this series this question, what can HR do to drive more value? Especially if we think of the post COVID post 2020 world.
Torin Ellis: Yeah. I just think I have said it already one, focus on people. Second, I want them to focus more on workforce projects and not so much so on workforce planning. I need them to make sure that they are thinking about how we will be working in the days, weeks and months ahead, years ahead as a matter of fact, and think about how we focus on the project based work that we will all be enduring and undertaking and not only on distributed teams, agile teams. I think it is going to require that they look at the sum total of that experience.
So more focus on people, more focused on projects.
David Green: Great and then last question. What are the one or two things that everyone listening to this episode can do to help make a difference?
Torin Ellis: Hmm. Very good thing. Okay, so one, I think that we can listen. I think that if in fact you are sincere and you really care about our being able to make some progress that you put yourself in a posture of listening.
When I speak on stages, I tend to light up a room from the very beginning and that is not to impress you, David, but that is to impress upon your listeners that I come through real heavy and I am very, very forceful in my presence from the very beginning. But then by the time we start moving at top speed in the conversation, people are like, yo, I am on this journey with Torin, I am really taking this flight with him. He is not yelling at me, he is yelling so that we are all moving in the right direction. So I think that people can place themselves in a posture of listening, not in a posture of defensiveness, not in a posture of fragility. Just understand where people like myself, people on the disability spectrum, people from LGBTQ and other marginalised communities, where are these individuals coming from? What condition and circumstance are they bringing to the conversation? Just listen.
Second thing that I will say very quickly is read the book The Colour of Law, by Richard Rothstein. If you read the book then you will understand in a different way how racism, prejudice has been baked into institutions and systems that we all experience or some people benefit from. The Colour of Law by Richard Rothstein.
David Green: Okay. We will put a link to that as well in the material around this.
Funny that you talked about when you come on stage, so I saw you come on stage when you were the MC for UNLEASH in Las Vegas a couple of years ago and I was going to be MC’ing unleash in Paris three months later, you are amazing on stage, you are a phenomenal speaker. I was like, oh my God I have got to follow Torin. So anyone that has not seen Torin on stage, I would definitely recommend it once we get back to in person events again, so thank you, Torin you certainly made me try and polish up my act for Paris.
Thank you for being a guest on the show Torin, can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media and find out more about the work you do?
Torin Ellis: Most certainly, you can follow me across all of social media @TorinEllis. That is the same across all of social media.
If in fact you download the SiriusXM app on your mobile device, you can listen to my show on Sundays at 1:00 PM Eastern here in the US where I talk to primarily executives around career development, diversity and disruption.
Then last but not least, if you want to continue to submit yourself to the learning experience you can catch the podcast that Julie Sowash and I do crazyandtheking.com. We titled that David, because Julie has a hidden disability and so she wanted to respond and respect and be transparent about her disability and then they refer to me as the King of D&I.
David Green: I can not think of a better way to describe your Torin. Thank you very much for being on the show, it has been a pleasure.
Torin Ellis: Mine as well. Thank you ever so much.