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Welcome back to Changing the Trajectory, where we focus on the lasting impact we have the power to create in multicultural markets and communities. I'm James Seth Thompson, and this is Part Two of our Courageous Conversations episode with Audra Bohannon, client partner at Korn Ferry, and my colleague Janessa Cox Irvin, Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion at AllianceBernstein. In Part One, we started to explore some Audra-isms and why this work is so important to all of us. Now let's dive back in and find a little bit more about the why and our commitment to this work.
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Tell us a little bit about what fuels you, what is that part of the heart that drives the passion for the work that you do today in a very relentless manner? Every time I have an opportunity to work with an individual or with a group to support them
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in being their best and I see the impact that comes out of that, it fuels me. When I think about doing this work for as long as I am, sometimes people say, Audra, how can you do it? Because you're always out there, you're always working.
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I said, because when I see the growth or when I seethe twinkle, twinkle in the eye, it fuels me because I can see it serving what I feel is important, and that is that people have the right to be at their best and that anything I can do to help remove some of those headwinds or help them manage the headwinds better, then I can sleep really, really, really good at night. Now, another thing too that fuels me, James, is that when I was young in my career,
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I allowed people to step over me, you know, when I, when people would do things that were wrong, I would just, I just didn't know how to manage it. And, I went through an experience where my back got strong, my vision got clear, and I am fortunate that happened when I was in my 20s. And I remember saying to myself, I will not be the grass and the world will be the lawnmower. I am no longer going to allow people to just roll over and treat me any kind of way they want to.
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And that moment I pivoted and I began to really see my value and I thought about how I would help others see my value as well. And it also helped me to understand that I have to role model how I want to be treated.
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And once I got that in my head, I am real clear about how I engage with people and how I, in fact, most people who know me, especially in the firm, I say there are two things that I do not work well with, and that's to be patronized or marginalized. And when those two things come up, we have to have a conversation. And I was talking to someone one moment and they were treating me in a way, and they were so patronizing and I sort of slipped a little bit. You know, I cannot, I cannot. The Detroit, Detroit, Detroit came. Detroit came. Detroit came out, Janessa.
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And when I finished, the person finished the conversation, I said, Do you think I'm new, you know?
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We have to rework this a little bit and it just, it just keeps you in around ensuring that you role model and you can be at your best, so therefore you can serve others and then you, and you get real clear about your non-negotiables. And when I talked about patronization of marginalization, those are non-negotiables for me. So as I continue to get older and wiser, I get clearer about how I want to be treated.
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And then therefore it gives me my best. It puts me in a place where I can bring my best to those that I'm serving.
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I love that the D town had to come out a little bit. I love, I love those, I love those moments, because I couldn't agree more. I again, recently had a conversation actually with my spouse about this. And we always at home, we talk regularly about bringing our professional best to the office at all times. But there are moments where you need to let people see another side of you for them to really understand who you are. And I think to your question, names about like sort of who we are and being an outlier in certain instances or an outsider, I think for me,
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As a queer woman of color, immigrant, right, who came here in the 80s, and I remember distinctly my mom who has an engineering degree, came to this country and folks did not recognize said degree. Right, because it wasn't from a school that they recognized. And so my mom, who is to this day my, like, the ultimate hustler to me, in terms of when I think of someone who just knows how to get things done, that is my mother. And that is why it has shaped very much how I lead and how I do things. I remember distinctly being at least maybe six years old, six or seven.
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And my mom decided, you know, I will have this child and I was raised by a single parent. Right. So I have the child to take care of. And in the vein of, you know, do what I have to do,
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she was selling encyclopedias door to door. And I remember being in, you know, raised in New York, so I was in Long Island and we were walking around a neighborhood where, yes, you guessed it, folks did not look like me, who did not look like my mom, did not have the accents that we had from the Caribbean. And this woman, I will never forget this. I actually wrote the part about this in my college essays, opened the door and the look on her face, looking at my brown-skinned mom with her brown-skinned daughter who wasn't super polished, didn't have this perfect American accent.
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But I was a happy kid. But for her, she was, the look of disgust on her face that we would even dare to knock on her door to disrupt her perfect life. And at six or seven my mom recalls the story well, I remember walking away and I looked back at that house and looked at my mom and I said, that's never going to happen again. That's never going to happen to us again. And I have lived my life by that. There will not be a room that I walk in,
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to your point about the non-negotiables, there will not be a room that I walk in, where folks will think it's OK to speak to me in a certain manner. I think I strongly believe what you said, Audra, in terms of you have to teach people how to treat you. I also think about that in relationships you have to teach people how to treat you right.
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And I make it a point to do that. But I also try to make sure that I try to be quite vulnerable sometimes in the way that I do interact with people, because I think that opens up vulnerability on their end. So when I talked before about I want to make sure that when folks are talking to me at work and they want to ask me questions like, can I say Black? Can I say African American? What is it? I want to make that OK for them. Right.
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So I'll share things about myself to make sure that they feel comfortable sharing things about them. But you know, that outlier mentality, that outsider mentality is why I feel that throughout my entire career, I think I've grinded the way that I have, and unapologetically so. I will never apologize for that. And sometimes I think my approach has been called, you know, abrasive or aggressive. You know, the terms that we tend to hear when folks when we may be saying things that folks don't love to hear or saying it in a way they don't want to hear because we're too direct.
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I become OK with that to I just point as I've gotten older and gotten more senior, I had to be very comfortable in who I am and how I present and being very clear on the words that I want left in people's mouths when I walk out of the room. And I had to be OK with that.
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Janessa, when you and I were both having conversations about what we have found as our non-negotiables. So when someone told you needed to tone Janessa down, when I said that, you know what, I'm no longer the grass in the world is a lawnmower. One of the things that I also want to make sure that we talk about is the whole idea that if you don't stand strong on those kinds of issues and be clear about your non-negotiables, it puts you in a place where someone can touch your spirit in a way that will cause it to be compromised.
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And one of the things I can recall is that I had a I was having a conversation with a woman and she said that she was in a situation where she had received a promotion, not a promotion. She had received a bonus. And she was so excited and she wanted to do something special for her mother. And what she wanted to do with that bonus was to go buy her mother an Hermes scarf, because her mother thought that was the most precious thing to have. And she flew to New York, she went to the boutique and she pushed the button to get into the boutique and they would not let her in because she was a Black woman.
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She said it was like someone went after my spirit. She called it spirit murder. And one of the things that I think we need to understand, and you talked about it, James, coming from the standpoint of headwinds that hit you, headwinds that you have to manage, is that if we don't understand and get clarity around the non-negotiables, what we end up doing is defaulting back and accepting those things that can go after our spirit. And actually, as she used the term, murder it.
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So over time you find that being bold and being great and stepping into it starts to diminish. And we move to a place where we get very safe and comfortable. And as I said earlier in our conversation, we settle. So what do we have to do to protect our spirits? What do we have to do to understand that it is a journey that is ours to take and not to settle, as I said earlier, or put ourselves in a place where our spirits will be diminished.
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Yeah, the position of being an outlier, an outsider for me, pulls out my hustler gene. Yeah, right. Oh, yeah. I'm a very strategic hustler. Yeah. And you know, what fuels me is I want to see all people, but specifically people in communities of color have a greater contribution to economic and community development.
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And, you know, when I think about the conversations I have, the root of all of that is basically since the face and age of wealth is changing, we should have a bigger contributory role to the marketplace in the communities we live. And yes, I did bring you, Janessa, to that event a couple of weeks ago with these Black women investors. But for me, I want to create the tailwinds. I want to push investors to invest with intent, invest what impact.
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And I think that's how I best utilize my heart, which drives my hustler gene.
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You know, this idea of the changing face of wealth just, in my mind, really means that there's a paradigm shift that we just all have to be mindful of.
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And I have a good friend, Shawn Rochester, who wrote a book, The Black Tax, and it really chronicles as an example why Black Americans only own two percent of America's wealth. And it really comes down to partly education and from a solution perspective, really focusing on PHD, which is to purchase, hire, and deposit within that community and, not to talk about Chicago again,
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but I did do an event a couple months ago on supplier diversity. And to me, you know, when I think about the bridge between diversity, inclusion, and the impact diversity & inclusion can have in the marketplace, a lot of times it is along the lines of supplier diversity and a lot of people don't think about it. It should actually be part of a firm's kind of diversity & inclusion strategy. And it's simply as contributors to the procurement process, corporations and organizations spend money.
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You could be very thoughtful and intentional on how you spend that money and who you spend that money with. And the huge opportunity here is to be mindful and to be intentional about driving those dollars to influence minority- and women-owned businesses.
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Now, think about the contribution that makes to the economy, both in that community and also think about the families that are now generating new assets and wealth literally through the lens of diversity & inclusion.
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So you both just shared some amazing thoughts. But I'm always struck by how great it is that the work that you both do actually contribute to the work I do, and actually helps me define and create that bridge between this idea of cultures and values. We're all focused on cultures and values in some sense, but there is a commercial and community impact that I hope through my hustler gene, I can get permeated throughout the country.
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So any other thoughts on that? Because I have one more Audra-ism. One of the things that you triggered for me, James, based on what you just shared, was another powerful three-letter word. I said the "and" between diversity and inclusion. But the second one is "see".
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And you talked about how do you help communities see, in your example, you talked about the Black community. When you think about supplier diversity, how can you help organizations see? "See" really is when people can begin to understand and see the possibilities, then it begins to move us in a different way in terms of the strategies that we're going to implement to help us be successful. However, that success, however we define the success. So I think it's our work,
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especially in our conversations that we've had, it really is about how do we help people gain sight? How do you help organizations gain sight? How do you help systems change or pivot so that the sight can...
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So everybody can see and open up new possibilities and do things differently. So if you go back to the whole notion of courageous conversations and being able to have this level of conversation around the trajectory of diversity and inclusion, it really is how do we all begin to see things differently or expand the aperture so that now I can I look at it a little bit differently than I did before, because I think by being able to do that, it puts us in a position of being able to see, see the way in which we can now operate.
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And everybody owns a part of it.
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You know, one hand does not clap. That's my favorite. I was actually going to talk about that. We all have to participate. That is my hands down. I literally have it written here. That is my hands down favorit Audra-ism of all time. One hand doesn't clap because it drives so much of what we do and why we do it. So when I talk about being vulnerable, right, so the one hand doesn't clap means I then have to allow myself to give something so that that person can then give something back and then both hands are now clapping. Right.
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So and to your point, James, about when we think about communities of color, one of the conversations I've had with folks when even talking about the role that you have and the importance of it, I try to explain to people by sharing some of my own stories that if we're talking about the Black community, Black, Black is not a color, it's a culture. And you have to understand that. And I want to be helpful in helping you to understand that. It's a little bit different than maybe some of the other dimensions. Right. So the one hand doesn't clap.
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I cannot tell you how I use that in my daily life, in my relationship. I use it at work. I use it everywhere because it's so true. You can't just do it with just the one. You cannot. You can't. And just to close out this topic and this Audra-ism around the head and the heart, I will thank Audra because you helped me recognize that there's a difference between being a change agent and a fighter.
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Right. And that has basically changed my life because to me, that's the definition of recognizing the impact of operating with head and heart, and I've also further defined that for myself in saying, fighters sometimes lose but change agents always win. And that's really changed... That's my own James-ism. I mean, there you go. All right. But that means a lot to me. Right.
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And it really kind of scopes how I go about doing the work that I do. One more Audra-ism ism here is just as awesome as the other two. I'm going to read this because it is a quote. And I would love for you to share where this came from.
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You need to have the ability to believe in my potential. The best way I can represent that is through an experience that I had with one of our clients and I was doing a focus group and this was a focus group looking at what are some of the challenges that people of color faced in the organization and in this particular focus group based on ethnicity, there were Hispanics, Latinos, they were African Americans, Blacks. There were Asians in the room. And I asked them a series of questions and they shared with me all the challenges they were facing.
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And as we got ready to exit the room, because I had to take all that information and put it into a report to be able to provide to the leadership of the organization so they could see what are some of the unique challenges that people of color face. I said to the group as they were walking out, is there anything you want me to share? Is there anything you want me to share with your leadership? And one young Hispanic male, as he was walking out of the room, he looked at me and he said, Audro, would you please tell them to believe in my potential?
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And so when I talk about potential, I'm talking about the fact that for some groups, they have to deal with rumors of inferiority, that they were not born with enough. You might call it intelligence, being smart, whatever it is, but they have had to live with that. And that's usually they both.
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If you want to focus on affinity based on race, it would be for the Black and Hispanic communities. And so when you have to live a life, always wondering whether or not people think you're smart enough, whether or not they think you have the potential enough, that's a lot of space in your head trying to manage that. And so this whole notion of potential, I think, is always an interesting thing.
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And my thought is that if you're born whole and I'm saying whole, is that you, everything is here, physically here. We learn a human language by the time we're two years old, I can open my mouth and say something. You can understand it. You can say something back to me, two or three years old. If we can learn a human language, which is one of the most complex things you can do,
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we really are capable of doing a lot. We all have potential to do the jobs of our organizations and do them well. However, some people or some groups are thought not to be able to do them. And here's the last piece. I was working with a client and we did a huge diversity and inclusion initiative. And once it was over, sitting at my desk, I thought it was a success. He called me up and he says, Audra, and this was the CEO. I said, yes, let's say his name was Bob. He said, I say, yes, Bob.
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He said, we're getting ready to put out a job spec for a job, and marketing is putting it together. And they said, we're looking for qualified minorities. And I just want to know whether or not you feel saying qualified minorities is acceptable. And I said, absolutely. You can say qualified minorities
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all you want to, as long as you are also willing to put in the ad, you're looking for qualified White people. And he said, I knew I shouldn't have called you up. And he put the phone down. And so one of the things that infuriates me is that when people think about positioning someone for a position based on race and ethnicity, they feel like the standards will be lowered.
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And that's why you always say, I want to make sure they are qualified. Why would they not be qualified? Your organization hires top talent no matter what the difference. So why would you even go there? But see, it touches that whole notion of rumors of inferiority. Audra can have that job because she is intelligent and she's smart, because she comes from a group where they're thought not to be.
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And our organization is going on an aggressive diversity agenda. So we're bringing in more ethnic diversity. So she's getting a job because she's Black, not because she has the talent and not because she has the expertise. So this whole, there's certain things in our language, potential, qualifications, that used to code who can do something and who can't.
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And I think, you know, coming from a place of courage, we need to wrestle that down. Let's just call it for what it is. You just reminded me of a couple of comments that came out of a conversation I had about support, diversity and it aligns with this idea of believe in my potential. And is the fact that there are organizations and corporations who are nervous about doing business with women and minority-owned businesses because they think that there's going to be a dip in quality. And that's what I'm talking about.
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And that, even though I might have a five-star review on any website, that five star review is not worth the same as a five-star review for a vendor that is not women or minority-owned. You know, and again, this is just one of those situations where there's so much overlap between workplace and marketplace that I all hope that we seek to achieve.
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But I'd be honest, that didn't feel right hearing that, because my response is, we're not aliens. Right. Why would my work be any less than that of the traditional vendor that you would seek to hire?
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And you know that this idea of believing my potential both resonates for me, obviously internally as it relates to professional development and advancement. But again, when I think about advancing the cycle of economic growth and opportunity, we have some work to do there as well, for sure. Yeah. And how many times have you heard that some people are judged based on their performance and other people are judged based on their potential? Yeah, that's two totally different, coming from two totally different places. Yeah. And then I think on that and that you add the added layer of complexity about the concept of the moving goal post.
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Right. So if we're saying that the goal is here and everyone needs to meet that goal, why does the goal posts have to move for people of color? Why is that? Right? Is it a potential issue? Is it a performance issue? What's going on there? So that, we tend to see that quite often as well.
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Yeah, well, ladies, this is awesome. I feel like we should have this chat every week. Great. I'll bring the wine. As often as you can get down here, Audra, I really appreciate it.
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You know, this this conversation and dialogue was all about courageous conversations. And, you know, I want everyone to just kind of recount these Audra-isms to help define your path forward as you're looking to be impactful in whatever you do. Live by design, not by default. Work with your heart and head and believe in one's potential. You know, I always say an invention is nothing without intention, right? An invention without intention is actually useless.
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So, you know, my call to action for all of us as we continue to do the work we do and those who are listening is to find a way to live by design and not by default. So I want to thank you ladies again for joining. This is awesome. I think we need to go get some butter cake. Now, I definitely like that idea. Thank you, ladies. Thanks, James.
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I hope you enjoyed today's episode. We love to hear from you. So please e-mail your thoughts, questions, and any feedback to diversemarkets@Bernstein.com. Be sure to share, subscribe, and rate us on iTunes or anywhere you listen to podcasts and check us out on Twitter at BernsteinPWM. Bernstein: Making money meaningful for individuals, families, and foundations for over 50 years. Visit us at Bernstein.com.
