Jill:

This is The Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded February 15th, 2022. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer. My guest today is Clayton Sinclair. Clayton is Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Blue Ocean Brain, an HSI company. As an inclusion and diversity practitioner and leader, Clayton has coached and advised thousands of professionals over the last 16 years through one-on-one coaching, facilitated inclusion and diversity learning events, and enterprise-wide program execution.

Clayton is a certified diversity practitioner, and has designed and led programs for corporate diversity councils and employee resource groups, for companies across the United States, to launch or propel their journeys to becoming a more inclusive and equitable environment. Clayton is a subject matter expert in many areas related to inclusion and diversity, including tracking, naming difference, understanding group dynamics, having crucial conversations, the power of intersectionality, owning privilege, unconscious bias, becoming an anti-racist, alignment of intent, outcome, and more. Clayton is also a co-host of the podcast, Bourbon, Beer and Bold Conversations, which is a podcast I'm really loving. Clayton joins us today from his home in Atlanta. Welcome to the show.

Clayton:

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jill. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on with you. That was a heck of a run up. I don't know if I can live up to in person in the bio.

Jill:

It was fun to read about you and fun to pull together, so I'm excited for our conversation today.

Clayton:

Me too.

Jill:

If you're all wondering, like why did I ask Clayton to be a guest, I asked him here today, because many of us are starting to hear about or our companies are evaluating what's called their ESG performance. If this is a new acronym to you, ESG stands for Environmental Social Governance. If you do a quick Google of that term, it'll show you that health and safety, working conditions, employee relations, diversity, and cultural sustainability, as well as a few other subjects fall under that social or that S category in ESG. It's something for us to be paying attention to and learning more about as we strive to be the best leaders we can, serving our whole workforce. But before we into that S in ESG, Clayton, could you share with us a little bit about yourself? Because like nearly all of our guests, your career did not start out where you are today.

Clayton:

Oh. Did it not. I wish I had an hour just to unpack that piece, but I promise you I won't make it that laborious. I'm often thinking about sort of, "Do I really have an origin story?", because Jill, when you've been doing something for so long, it sort of just feels natural to you, but I guess I do. The shorthand version of it is I was asked to be on a diversity council back when I had an operational leadership role in financial services.

I just did it for a resume builder, if I'm just going to be completely honest and transparent with you. In fact, it was such a resume builder that on the first day of training, you know how they sit you in a room and they walk, or not walk, but go through calling on different people to say, "What do you want to learn in this program? What do you want to gather in this program?" That kind of thing. Knowing that this was a diversity kind of certification program, that was connected to being on a diversity council, my answer to that question was, "I'm the Black guy. There's nothing you can tell me about diversity."

Jill:

You brought your full ego with you, it sounds like.

Clayton:

Absolutely, right? I brought the full ego on, and I will tell you. What I learned from the program that was a little bit over a year long, was that in that phrase I used, Black guy, I really was only focused on one story; the Black part of that. I had no real conception or had never really thought about very deeply what it meant to be a guy in the guy part of that Black guy phrase. What it did in that yearlong training was to really open up my perspective to understand that I am more than one story and, more importantly, to be able to focus on more than one story. Then, the other thing that it gave me is, and this is why I call it a calling, is because honestly it saved my life by saving my marriage.

Jill:

Yeah. Tell us more.

Clayton:

Yeah. I had been married to my significant other. We're now going on 22 years, but at the time we'd only been married five or six years, and so we were kind of in that seven-year itch window. I had been in class one day, and came home to tell her this triumphant story of the lesson that I had learned or I'd picked up in class, and after I told her that, waiting for the congratulations and kind of patting myself on the back mentally, she looks at me and says, "I've been telling you that for years." It was just like-

Jill:

Like any good spouse would do.

Clayton:

Exactly. Yeah. It was this epiphany. It was like, "Whoa." I needed to be able to connect with her in a better, deeper, more meaningful way. I was able to do that through the tools and skills that I gained in this diversity certification. The thing that she told me years later was that she was, and I don't think I'm revealing anything that she wouldn't say if she were on here, that she was ready to kind of cash it in, kind of walk out the door, kind of find her bags and pack up. But because I'd learned to look outside myself up a little bit, because I learned to be more empathetic, because I'd learned to not only focus on that one single story, it really led to the restoration of our relationship. Like I said, I'm proud to report that close to 22 years later, we're still kicking, which doesn't mean it's easy every day, as you know.

Jill:

That's right.

Clayton:

But we're still kicking and committed in it, so it really saved my life, this calling to become a diversity practitioner, and so here I am.

Jill:

That's fantastic. So much is about the relationships that we have with others and what it does for us professionally, personally, as parents, as community members. Clayton, I wanted to just back the train up a little bit. When you started this training, you mentioned that you're working in the financial world. Now, those two things, where you are now and what got you into it, there doesn't seem to be a big connection there, but just so people understand, like where you started your career? You were working in the finance world. What does that mean?

Clayton:

I was working for a bank, a commercial bank. I was in their technology organization, and specifically I was doing project management for technology integration. When the bank would implement a new system, for example, then my team was the team that supplied the project managers to that effort, so we kind of kept everybody on task with the timelines and then within budget. I was in a role that didn't have anything to do with HR, which is where most people typically think these kinds of equity and inclusion roles are situated, and where they are typically situated, right?

Jill:

Right. Right, right. You were working in a role that's logical and process driven.

Clayton:

Yes.

Jill:

Right?

Clayton:

Yes. Yes.

Jill:

And doesn't probably have a lot of room for things that we might consider squishy.

Clayton:

Oh, my friend. If only you knew how little room there was.

Jill:

Yeah. Right, and so you make this big jump, career wise. Did you feel like you landed home?

Clayton:

I did. I don't know. Several people have said this, kind of this idea of if you love what you do, it never feels like work. What I'll tell you is that I love what I do, talking to people about being able to create environments that are more equitable, more inclusive. I really do. I love it. I wake up in the morning reading. Articles, posts, and social media is all kind of slanted that way, and I will tell you. I also read from other lived experiences.

I know some of y'all out there might be kind of, "Oh. Here's this kind of hippy, liberal minded sort of dude with this agenda."

And I'm like, "Yeah. I have one, but I also try to make sure I stay informed around lots of different viewpoints and perspectives," because in many ways, every viewpoint and perspective is kind of equally valid. If I don't know what it is, then how will I be able to ever think from the perspective of learning from it, first of all, but then secondly, if necessary, a finding a way to influence that perspective to maybe shift a little bit.

Jill:

Yeah. I think that's something that all of us, those of us in the environmental health and safety spaces, as what I have begun calling worker justice advocates, that we can relate to. We need to take in all perspectives in order to be able to move forward with our work and impact change for the better in our workplaces.

Clayton:

Yeah.

Jill:

Yeah. Wonderful. Clayton, thank you for sharing that story with us. It's interesting, for sure. I'm wondering, could you lay the groundwork for us here with this concept of ESG that I opened with, so that we can kind of dig into our conversation today?

Clayton:

Yeah, absolutely. Be happy to. Again, as you mentioned, the quick Googlenator can tell you that ESG is, the E is environmental, the S is social, and the G is governance. I am no expert on this framework, but I do have some expertise from the perspective of diversity, as well as cultural sustainability being a key component, to my view, for the S or the social component of this model, if you will.

My understanding of the movement is it is a way to think about how do we evaluate companies and corporations, particularly in many cases investors and other external stakeholders, who are looking inward into the company to say, "Are you building something that is sustainable for the long term? Are you paying attention to the environmental concerns within your purview?" Again, those social concerns, and do you have a governance, which I think, Jill, might be what you specialize in sort of fits in, but do you have governance to make those things that you say that you cared about, sustainable, right?

Jill:

Right. Kind of a kind of a foot in each.

Clayton:

Yeah.

Jill:

Safety falls under that social piece, and we can see that in terms of, like I framed up before, worker justice. Governance, because we are complying often. When it comes to health and safety, environmental health and safety, we are driven. Employers are driven through governance, through regulatory requirements that they have to do. Any of us who've been at this work long enough know that the real work begins after we're compliant.

Clayton:

Right, right.

Jill:

Yeah. Yeah, which falls did that social piece.

Clayton:

Yeah, right? When you think about then that social piece, there are some compliance components. What I'd say, and you alluded to it or actually hit it actually, Jill, so thank you, but it's the after piece somewhat of this S, is the equity and inclusion work that I do, and certainly the cultural sustainability.

If you think about this idea that a culture is a defined set of beliefs or morals, methods, or some kind of collection of human sort of knowledge, if you will, the dependency though is the ability to pass that on, and that's where this cultural sustainability comes to focus, I think, in the sense of what kind of culture are we or do we have, and then are we able to pass that on to our next generation in order to continue to get the benefits of whatever that culture is, right?

Jill:

Yeah. It makes so much sense. For any of us who've been doing this work in health and safety, for any amount of time, we hear the word safety culture, which is something that I've often bristled at, because I don't think safety culture is independent of the corporate culture.

Clayton:

Exactly.

Jill:

It is the corporate culture. You can't have like, "Ooh, we're going to have our own little subset culture here." It's either you've got this particular type of culture in your environment that is supporting employees to be the best that they can be, and safe, healthy, and productive. All of the things. Yeah, anyway. Please keep going.

Clayton:

No. I'm so with you, because culture is holistic. That's the point of it. It's in the informal. It's in the formal. It's in your processes. It's in your procedures. It's in the ways that you talk about things, right?

Jill:

Yeah.

Clayton:

I am so loving this idea, because one of the things I actually had written down was this idea that equity and inclusion cannot be bolt-on values. What you just said around safety is the exact same thing.

Jill:

It can't be-

Clayton:

It can't be a bolt-on, right?

Jill:

Right. Yeah.

Clayton:

So how do you embed it in the DNA of the organization? I think maybe, and hopefully many of your listeners have heard about this idea of what the benefits of having equity and inclusion baked into your culture are, and I'll just name a couple of them.

Jill:

Yeah, please. Please share. Yeah.

Clayton:

Yeah. One is this idea that, and Boston Consulting Group did this study back in 2019, so a little bit dated, but I think that the information still holds. It found that companies that had more diverse leadership teams were 45 percent more profitable than companies that didn't. That profitability is driven a lot by innovation, so it's this ability to take different lived experiences, different people, the diversity of thought, expertise, and ability. Combine all of that, you have more innovation. If you have more innovation, that ultimately bubbles up into having more revenue. More revenue ultimately bubbles up into having more profitability, so that's one of the key benefits. The other thing is that I'm sure many of your listeners work at organizations that are in, as is ours, this war for talent.

Jill:

Yeah. That's right.

Clayton:

And so, as new people in particular, as newly tenured individuals, I like to call them, are entering the workforce, they are really looking at organizations and saying, "I want to be somewhere where my values are reflected."

Jill:

That's right.

Clayton:

Right? And so if you take this idea that being equitable, being inclusive more naturally comes to the folks of us that are on the earlier side of their careers. I have a 20-year-old who's going to be starting a career, and I can tell you that he is absolutely much more tuned into this idea that equity is important to him. And more importantly, he has a greater range of people in his circle that have differing lived experiences, so he wants to see that reflected in the workplace that he is going to choose.

Jill:

Same with mine. You and I have children who are the same age, and it's the same conversation. Hearing that over and over again. I'm not hearing about, "I need to make this much money." I'm hearing about, "What's the experience going to be like? Is it going to be reflective of how I grew up? Am I going to have the ability to interact with people who are from different backgrounds, lived experiences, generations? How are all of these things going to support me in my work?" It's not like, "Tell me how much money I'm making."

Clayton:

And I like the juxtaposition of, since you and I are of a similar age, I'll ask you the question. Did you ever think about that kind of stuff when you were kind of starting out in your career?

Jill:

Never. Never.

Clayton:

Exactly.

Jill:

It was A) went to college, B) can you get a job, C) does it give you a livable wage?

Clayton:

Right, right.

Jill:

And kind of hard stop from there.

Clayton:

Right, and I'm telling you, I'm in the same place. I know your listeners can't see me, but I'm African-American. I'm Black, and I didn't have any considerations for what environment was going to be sort of nicer to me. Now, I will also tell you that I didn't experience a lot of overt discrimination or bias, so I'm lucky in that sense, but again, it wasn't even on the radar to be looking out for those things. Now, if it had been overt, I probably wouldn't have gone to a place to work that, that happened, but barring that, right? I didn't think at all about my own safety, in that sense, of psychological safety or safety of my emotional safety, maybe if you will.

Jill:

Yeah. Similar for me. It wasn't until I got into my first job, when I'm a woman, and realized, "Hmm. I'm a minority in this field."

Clayton:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jill:

I'm a badge carrying, 24-year-old female going on to construction sites, and my coworkers, there weren't very many of us either. Those sort of things crept into the career as challenges, and not having a lot of places that supported. I remember when I got pregnant, my manager, who had been a manager for probably 25 years, said, "I don't even know how we do this."

Clayton:

Wow.

Jill:

That's how few of us there were. Like, "What do we do with you?" Our generation, our lens, way different than our children's.

Clayton:

Absolutely. I can also tell you that when I announced to my manager that my wife was going to have a baby, I was not met with the same response, because the expectation for me as a man was different, I am sure, than the expectation that may have been put on you, as a woman, in that same kind of scenario, right?

Jill:

Right, right. Clayton, we're talking here about lots of different things, including generational impacts and what that means, but also the importance of really looking at all of these things with a particular lens so that, if nothing else, in this environment we can be the employer of choice.

Clayton:

Absolutely. Right. Absolutely. You've got to be able to win the war for talent, I've heard it been phrased, right?

Jill:

Yeah. Right. Right.

Clayton:

So doing that employer choice, it's key. It's not just what you said earlier. Yes, money has something to do with it. How many vacation days or PTO is offered has something to do with it. Location has something to do with it, but we're also talking more about some of those softer, more nebulous kinds of values that are also playing a huge, huge part of it. That's why, be because it is soft, because those values are kind of squishy, is why I think they have to be deeply embedded in the organization. Again, not just kind of bolt-ons, right?

Jill:

Right, right. You talked about embedding DNA, embedding this idea into the organization. Can you talk about what some of that can look like? What does that look like? We're talking about these things, but as health and safety leaders, which is the audience that we're talking to, and some HR leaders. Thank you, HR people, for listening to the podcast. They're like, "Okay. Clayton and Jill are talking about things that are like hitting a nerve with me, of either like, 'Ooh, is that really part of my job,' or 'I know this is part of my job, but how do I get there?'" Can you talk about some of those tangible things that people could be working on for themselves or helping their organizations get to start on a path at least?

Clayton:

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. I'm so glad that you said tangible, because even though these are soft sorts of things or even aspirational, in some senses that I'm talking about and that my work often revolves around, there are some tangible things that one can do. I always like to start, Jill, with the individual. Again, I'll direct you back to my long winding sort of how I got to this role, but that phrase I used, Black guy, on that day, and where I said it only encompassed one story. I really only ever focused on this idea of being Black. I only ever said one story. The first thing I think people can do is just seek out other stories, and particularly in the context of work.

You mentioned that your leader or manager kind of was in a conundrum when you came and said that you were going to have a child. As a man, what can I understand about that story and that lived experience that you had, right? In the event that you and I have a professional relationship, I don't have to ask you about a baby directly, or even that experience that was 20 years ago. Other than small talk around, "How was your weekend?", I might one day say, "Hey Jill, I want to sit down with you at some point and just ask you what really has been your lived experience as a woman, and either in the corporate environment or in your specialty as a health and safety expert, me professional," whatever the right word is.

But just start to dive in and say, "What are other lived experiences?" So seeking out those other stories, right? That's a huge one, because it's very easy for us to point and say, "Oh. That Clayton, he's kind of messed up. Don't do what he does." Either from a safety perspective or an equity perspective, a lot of perspective it's easy to kind of point at others. It is much harder to look within ourselves and say, "How am I contributing to this overall thing that I'm calling a culture? How am I contributing to building this environment or this place where I'm spending a lot of time with other people called my workplace?"

Jill:

Yeah. Being a story collector is what you're talking about and asking people to share their stories. As you're describing that, I'm thinking of one of my last jobs where a large portion of our workforce were refugees from, in particular, Myanmar, were the most recent. One of the managers told me one day, he said, "I've been trying to figure out why when we bring people together for like a lunch, none of our new employees are eating any food," and he said, "I really had to talk to them and ask like, 'Why aren't you eating? This is a free lunch. Why aren't you eating?'" And he said, "What I learned was we were serving cold food, and cold food is unsafe."

Clayton:

Oh. Yeah.

Jill:

Because of where they came from and the refugee camps they were living in, they knew that the way to stay safe in terms of not getting some kind of food poisoning was to eat food that was cooked. He said, "So from now on, when I'm hosting a lunch, we are having hot food. We are having cooked food, so people can feel part of." That was just one little story, and that supervisor was paying attention enough to know, "Hey, these people aren't just being jerks and saying this food isn't good enough. They had a real concern about..." Yeah.

Clayton:

That is amazing, because what you're kind of illuminating, hopefully for your listeners out there, is this idea that we make up stories all the time about why people are doing things or what's happening in any given context. This is such a great example of a person that went beyond maybe what the first story might have been in their head, to say, "I want to find out really kind of what's under the covers. What's going on here?", and then learned something, and then did something different by changing up kind of the menu and the food that they're bringing in.

Then, what I know that leads to is a sense from those employees of, "Wow, I belong here. People care about me. My leaders care." What that drives is this desire and willingness, when the time comes, it's like, "Okay. I don't even have to ask these folks to go above and beyond, because they've got a loyalty." You're building up this internal loyalty about making people feel like they belong, and it can be done in such simple ways, right?

Jill:

Yeah. Clayton, do you want to maybe talk about... I mean, asking people to tell their story of their lived experience might sound really intrusive.

Clayton:

Yeah.

Jill:

That might sound intrusive, but if people are going to do this in practice, and I'd encourage everybody to do this, be little, what's the word I'm looking for? Anthropologists. You're getting interested in people.

Clayton:

I love it.

Jill:

Yeah. What might some of those questions look like?

Clayton:

So definitely some of the questions, aside from the one I asked, but let me give you a preface, right? The first, I think, is to just simply make sure that you've got authentic relationships with people that aren't like you. Who do you sit with, if you sit in the cafeteria when you're eating lunch? Who do you go to for advice when there's something that's happening in the workplace that you need to talk to somebody, about a unique counsel? How broad is your circle, your sort of trusted circle? If there are a lot of people, so for me, if I only talk to Black men, for example, when I need advice or when I'm going to lunch, I'm only inviting Black men to eat lunch with me, then I might want to say, "Well, how do I expand my circle to make sure that I know more people, that I have more people in the network that I can count on?"

That's the first thing. You're exactly right about, though, the actual questions, right? This probably isn't a question that you want to ask someone that you just met, but after you have that conversation, then there are a lot of ways to broach it. If you want to talk about race in the workplace, for example, it doesn't even have to be that something bad has happened. You could just say, "Hey," again, back to riffing off the question that I posed earlier but, "Hey, Clayton. I think we're buds. We're buds, right? Aren't we? Hopefully we're buds. In that, I'd just love to know how you have experienced corporate America as a Black person?" It's as simple as that kind of question, because it's opening a door, and it's signaling to someone that, "Hey, I want to know about what's going on for you."

Then, your own work if you're not a Black person or the person of color, for example, is to, when you listen to that story, if that person's willing to talk about it, is contrast in your mind how your story has played out. If they talk about the time when there might have been discrimination or bias that they were unfortunate victims of in the workplace, think about that scenario and say, "Wow. As a _____ person, white person or non-person of color, do I think this would've played out kind of the same way for me in that same kind of scenario?" Again, back to, Jill, what you said around the idea of telling your boss you were pregnant, all the things that went into that announcement. Then, I ask myself when I hear you tell that story, "Would that have happened with me?"

Since it happened 20 years ago for both of us, I can say from data, right? I can say when I made that announcement, none of that stuff happened to me. That's interesting, so then you start to see that pattern that is contrasted, and it's really simple to do. All I will say is, the last thing, be authentic to you. If what I said around my start or intro doesn't work for you, then don't use that, but what I will say is find a way to broach the conversation, even though I know it feels a little bit sensitive. That's why I recommend having a fairly decent relationship with somebody before you go there. I did say last thing, but this will be last thing, I promise. I swear.

Jill:

Okay.

Clayton:

So you've got to also give that person the space to maybe not want to have that conversation the first time you ask them. But just know in your mind, and in your heart, that you've sent a signal that you're willing and open to it. Then, when the moment feels right to you, go back and ask again.

That's kind of, "Hey Clayton, I know that I asked you about your lived experience or your corporate experience as a Black person, and you didn't want to talk about it. I'm just wanting you to know that I am still curious about how that plays, how being Black has impacted you, if it has at all, or how you think about it, and how I might be thinking about it differently as a non-Black person, a non-person of color, or a white person. I do want to try and have that conversation with you for my own learning and curiosity, not to hold you up as some object of ridicule, some shiny object to pity, or anything like that, but I just want to learn something, man."

So go back. If you're turned down the first couple of times, folks, keep going back. That's not just race, even though I use that example. That's if you're trying to talk to someone that's a different gender than you are, if you're trying to talk to someone that might different sexual orientation than you do, if you know that kind of information about them, right? If you approach them one time, and you're one and done, then you've missed that opportunity to build that culture that we talked about, and you're lessening your opportunity to be able to pass on a great culture to the generations that are going to come after us, right?

Jill:

Right. That's right. You're making deposits.

Clayton:

Yes. Exactly. Deposits.

Jill:

You're making deposits and investment in that relationship. I think about different community committees that I've sat on in my lifetime, where the community leaders get together, who are the dominant culture, the dominant race, the dominant sex, and the big announcement is, "We need to be more diverse."

Clayton:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jill:

And then everybody has a different definition of what diverse means in their head, because it's not necessarily defined. Then, more often than not, in my experience, it has been, "Well, we invited them," the innocuous them, "to come here, and then they don't come, so I guess we've done all we can do."

The answer is, "No. You haven't. We haven't gotten curious. We haven't built relationships, and so how could we do that in our work as health and safety professionals?" Maybe you're building your first safety committee. You really want to be able to have a representation of your work environment.

Clayton:

Absolutely.

Jill:

And how can you build some of those relationships to get a full representation of your working environment so all those voices are represented, and not just the ones who are like, "Yeah. I'm a good talker. I'm not shy. I'll be on your safety committee," you know what I mean? We tend to often go for the easy people.

Clayton:

Absolutely.

Jill:

That will engage with us, and we don't have to try to draw everything out, but these are times when it really makes a difference to make an investment to get voices at tables, so that they can impact change in their work environment, and that you're not always just with the same like-minded people.

Clayton:

Yeah. No, no. That's 100 percent right. I think one of the things that is important in terms of trying to build really any team, but certainly the team as you described, Jill, is to first ask yourself... Well, let me say it differently. If the team's already been built, and you just realize kind of, "Wow. Everyone here is kind of similar," so first ask yourself, "Who are we missing?" You might be missing somebody that works on the front line, the shop floor. It might just be a bunch of managers sitting in the room. Again, that might be okay, but a lot of the times we don't ask the questions. That kind of first question is, "Who are we missing?"

Then, you can start to branch out and say, "Well, do we need somebody that's in the field or on the line, from a frontline perspective? Do we need an executive team member to be here, to hear these kind of revelations that we're going to be drawing out and these ideas. Who are missing." Here's one of the things also though, is that it's important to ask that question from the perspective of sex, race, or gender as well. I'll give you an example of that. I was putting together a command center. We were doing a huge technology implementation. We had this new software package that we were rolling out to over three million clients at an old bank that I worked at.

We were going to be implementing a command center or a war room. Some of you all may have heard that expression, where we were going to be operating 24 by 7, and it was in the office building, nice, and so I had made sure that there were snacks, and we had food, and we had shifts, and there were computers that people could log into to use. I'm just petting myself on the back for all these things I've done, and there was nighttime parking, and here's where it gets interesting. I had a woman coworker come to me, and she said, "Hey Clayton, have you worked it out with the guards to make sure they're in the parking lot, 24 by 7, so that we can have escorts to our cars from when we're leaving our command center shift?"

And I was like, "What?"

Jill:

Every woman who's listening right now knew what you were going to say before you said it, Clayton.

Clayton:

Exactly, right?

Jill:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Clayton:

I'm patting myself on the back for all this stuff I've taken care of, and here's the miss, right? For all the women on here, you know what I'm going to say next also, right? To the men, let me just be really clear, this was not Clayton intentionally wanting to harm women or not caring about women in situations. It was simply this idea that, as a man, I've never considered the need for assistance or for an escort when walking to my car late at night. I just haven't, right? I've also never assaulted anyone, quite frankly, but I've never assaulted women when I've been with them in parking lots late at night.

And so I just didn't have the frame of reference, so guys, if you're one of those types of people like me that feels bad when they hear scenarios like that, what I'm telling you is feel bad for a second, but don't stay there. What Jill talked about from the other manager that was dealing with the refugee situation, the trick is to, "Okay. How can I rectify? What can I do to be different?" And so I was like, "Hey, thank you so much for the feedback," but I think it also points to the idea of why you need diverse feedback on a team, because there are things that you might want to consider that you've never thought about.

Jill:

Right. I think even that example that you gave, again, is where generational differences come in too. We're talking about all of the, I don't want to call them labels, but all of the ways that we are as human beings, and the way that we walk through the world, and generation is different too. When my son started college this year, he's second year of college, living in an apartment for the first time, and has this friend network. Some of his friends are women. He said, "I'm hosting game night at my apartment, and we're going to get done late at night. I'm really thinking about how my female friends are going to get back to their places safely."

Clayton:

That is awesome.

Jill:

He said that to me. He said, "Mom, what do you think I should do about that?"

And I'm like, "Okay. There's an escort service on every campus. Here's the things. Here's the phone number. Put it on your refrigerator so you guys can call, and this makes it easy." Again, I think that's a generational difference, where he's tuned into that in a way that maybe other generations haven't or because of their lived experience.

Clayton:

Absolutely, right? That's the point of making sure that you've got folks that have those different lived experiences, particularly when we're talking about things, like if you want to implement a safety committee. You want people that have just started. You want people that have been there forever, right?

Jill:

That's right.

Clayton:

You want people that are from all the myriad colors of the rainbow, from a race and ethnicity perspective. Again, just because we have differing lived of the experiences, that bring things to the table, that can help improve the environment for everybody. If you just have a bunch of Black dudes in the room, who are right-handed and five foot eight, like I am, then you might not get a fullsome kind of solution to the varying problems that you are considering. Let me give you one last example.

Jill:

Sure.

Clayton:

Because I think it hits it very well. You and I are of a similar age, so the older listeners, hopefully, maybe younger too, but older I know will identify with this. Remember those old-school refrigerators that had the handle on the left side of the refrigerator, as you looked at it? Before this day of French doors for everybody, right?

Jill:

Yes. That's right.

Clayton:

Think about that. When you pulled that refrigerator door open with your right hand, what happened?

Jill:

Yeah. It was easy for you to-

Clayton:

You saw the food, right?

Jill:

You saw the food. You could walk right in.

Clayton:

Right. You could walk right in.

Jill:

You were standing in front of it. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Clayton:

I have a left-handed child, and his grandmother had one of those refrigerators. He walked up to it the first time on his own. He was walking, so probably about two, maybe less than three. Certainly, wasn't talking, and he's natural, so he pulled the door with his left hand. What happened was the door banged him in the head.

Jill:

Oh my God. Yeah.

Clayton:

Now, I thank you-

Jill:

Poor dude.

Clayton:

I know, right? I thank you for giving my son a little bit of sympathy, but my point of that story is when the people designing refrigerators were sitting in that room, 60, 70, 80, whatever it was years ago, do you think they were like, "Oh. This is our time, our chance, our master opportunity to make life hard for lefthanded people"?

Jill:

That's right. Yeah.

Clayton:

Now, they may have been, because I wasn't in the room, but they probably weren't thinking that. What probably happened is a combination of a couple things. One, I think statistically it's roughly 20 to 30 percent of people globally are lefthanded, and maybe it might even be less. If you take that statistically and you say there were five engineers in the room, that means that the chances that any of them were lefthanded is probably very slim, right? And so you just had a bunch of right-hand people going, "Let's put the handle on the left so that when we open the pool from the right, you see the food."

Again, there was no plot. There was no notorious thing where. "We're going to screw over left-handed people." It was probably that there just weren't any left-handed people in the room, at the table, when they went and tested out the design in the test market. There just weren't, and so nobody said, because no one had had the left-handed experience. Now, you have a left-handed person in that room. They go, "Oh. You know what? We can try it that way, but we;ve got to make sure that when we do testing on this before we release it, we get some left-handed people in there to tell you what their experience is going to be."

Jill:

Right, and then over time...

Clayton:

Exactly.

Jill:

What we've seen happen is that you can actually mount the handles on different sides of the refrigerator doors.

Clayton:

Exactly, right? Yeah.

Jill:

Yeah. Yeah, so it can fit or whomever.

Clayton:

Yeah.

Jill:

That's great.

Clayton:

Or French doors. And by the way, sometimes left-handed baseball gloves cost more.

Jill:

Oh yeah. It's like the pink tax. It's like the pink tax.

Clayton:

Exactly. It's like the pink tax. Exactly. Again, when you're understanding these different lived experiences, then you can start to go in and understand, "Wow. Wait a minute. Why do left-handed scissors cost more? Why does a left-handed baseball glove cost more?" Over time, could that put someone who is financially constrained at a disadvantage, being left-handed? I don't know, but as a right-handed person, if I'm thinking about those things, then when I'm trying to, again, think about my safety committee or establishing this new process and procedure, at least I have the broadest viewpoint possible.

That's what I'm trying to help us get at, is this idea of having that broad viewpoint. You said it best, Jill. Making deposits, because that was the second thing I was going to talk about in terms of how do you sustain this value of building a great culture, is you've got to be consistent, right? You've got to continue to make the deposits, even when it seems like the deposits aren't earning any interest. Keep making them, because they will over time. If you have that consistency, then that is the second way to embed it.

First, you model the behavior yourself. Second is you've got to be consistent, consistent, consistent, consistent, right? I mentioned a lot of groups that I tend to belong to earlier, so around being male, around being Black or African American. My consistency challenge always is to continue to think about what other lived experiences do I need to be thinking about when I do my work. I'm not a veteran, so I have to reach out and find people that I know have veteran status to understand how their lived experiences, their challenges, and triumphs when they're in the workforce, when they come back from serving our country.

I don't live with a physical disability, so I have to go find people that live with that physical disability, to say, "How can I make access a little bit easier for you?" It's just that idea of being open to consistently looking for those other stories, and then last but not least, holding yourself and your teammates around you accountable. This kind of is the hard part, particularly if you're not a manager or you don't have a leadership position. You can kind of feel sometimes [inaudible 00:48:02] or that you don't have the ability to kind of influence those above you.

Jill:

What does that look like in practice?

Clayton:

I think it's two things. One is, if you have a good enough relationship, you can go to someone, approach them, and point out that, "Hey, in that meeting that we were having, I think you kind of dismissed Clayton's idea, and you mentioned that because he's young in his tenure, he hadn't been around the block, he didn't know as much. I don't know that kind of is a way to help him feel like he really can contribute to this team." That's a way you kind of could broach it if you have that relationship. If you don't have that relationship, you might be able to find someone that you do have that relationship with.

You might know Jill, and you can go to Jill and say, "Hey Clayton, I've seen," or say, "Jill, I've seen Clayton in several meetings now be dismissive of people that are younger in their career. Is there a way that you could kind of talk to him, because I think that we're limiting our opportunity to get the full value out of, I don't know, Marco, because he doesn't feel like he's speaking up, because Clayton keeps kind of either jumping over him or, as the leader, making those kind of dismissive comments." It doesn't always have to even be you directly that can foster that sense of accountability. Maybe you get one of the peers of that leader to be able to go and do that, right?

Jill:

Yeah. I've done that with teams as well, especially in meetings. I've given feedback to people and say, "I noticed that when you've call on people for feedback or to tell a story, or you're talking about something everyone needs to know or learn, you tend to call on the same people that are like you."

Clayton:

Yeah.

Jill:

Of course, it's easy to pick on people that are like you. It's easy to pick on people that you know that are going to speak up and are going to take your idea and run with it, but challenge yourself to call upon people who you don't normally call upon, people who aren't like you. I've given similar feedback on, "You do a really great job with this. Keep doing that." The stop, start, continue thing.

Clayton:

Absolutely.

Jill:

And when you're giving examples, perhaps think about not always framing them in a sports' analogy.

Clayton:

Right. Exactly.

Jill:

I mean, like that kind of feedback. People that you've made deposits with, that you're talking about, can take that and say, "Huh. I never noticed that about myself."

Clayton:

Yeah, and the ability to do that, right, Jill, also is a skill, I think. To your point, in terms of when you're getting that feedback, so this is for us, your listeners, who are managers or leaders in their organization, when you get that kind of feedback, lean into it, right? Because so often we jump to this idea of, "Well, wait a minute. That's not what I intended. I didn't mean to make Jill feel dismissed by never calling on her in that meeting," and hey, I get it.

When I'm getting that feedback, sometimes it can be a little bit painful or a little bit uncomfortable, but I've had the best moments where I've really been able to learn something, and then do something different, by leaning into that feedback and listening, really hearing the person. When Jill comes to me and says, "Hey, you're doing this," or "You're doing that," I'm really going to try to lean in as a leader to hear her. That's the key to being able to make the changes that are positive, that build this kind of culture, that hopefully will make us an employer of choice, make us more profitable, and then be able to pass that down the line for generations and generations to come, so that when our 20-year-olds, Jill, are where we are in our career, they are having a different kind of conversation, but they're having it at a place that maybe you and I helped to build.

Jill:

Yeah. Right. Yes, absolutely. Clayton, I'd like to talk about journeys that those of us who are leaders, and anyone who's listening to this, an employee of health and safety, we are leaders. We are modeling behavior. We are leaders. How can people continually update themselves to be on a journey? I'll set up a little bit of an idea for those of us who have been at this work any length of time. There are different personas of people who do our work in health and safety, and one of those personas that's not a popular one, that some of us have fallen into, is being what we call the safety cop.

Clayton:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jill:

And being that person who's always trying to catch, be punitive. We look for something that was wrong. We're telling people that they were wrong. It doesn't do anything to build relationships. I, myself, have been guilty of that early in my career. I literally had a badge, and so I had to figure out how to use that batch for good, in terms of building relationships with people and not just saying, "Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Here's your fine. Here's your fine. Here's your disciplinary action. Here's your this. Here's your that." As we grow and expand in our careers as influencers, as leaders, how can we put ourselves on a journey? What does that look like?

Clayton:

Yeah. That's a great question, right? What I'll tell you is, from an equity and inclusion perspective, it's going to be different for everybody, because we all have different blind spots or areas where we need to really connect. For me, it was and continues to be gender, so how do I play a role into propping up sexism or discrimination of women? I'm happy to say that I don't think I play much of a role in that today, but I am seeking feedback, to your point, from women, asking them, "Hey, how am I showing up in this meeting? How am I showing up in these settings?", which is part of it.

Then, I'm acting on that feedback, but I really think it's a commitment to understanding what your blind spots are, to knowing that you have them, first of all; to try to understand and learn what they are, and then simply to hold yourself accountable to being different, and then rinse and repeat, over and over and over again, and understand that it is exactly what you said, Jill. It's a journey, right? I almost like to liken it to an excursion, because on a journey you kind of can know where you're going. You can journey from your house to grandma's house, and you know where it is. You know the best roads and all that kind of stuff. On an excursion, a safari, or an expedition, there's often kind of a learning component. You're trying to see something you've never seen before.

You're trying to do something you've never done before, and so I actually think about it. That was one of my challenges for myself in 2022, was to think about, "How do I stay on an excursion where I'm continually learning, where I'm continually asking the right questions, where I'm continuing to show genuine curiosity about the world around me?" And if you do that, that's how you get on the path. Last but not least, if you get on this equity and inclusion train, if you will, or journey or whatever you want to call it, you're going to mess up. You're going to meet a time where you say the wrong thing or you do the wrong thing, and I always get this question. "Well, Clayton, what do I do?" First of all, apologize, own it, move on, and be different.

Don't make it bigger than it has to be, but stay in the game, because often when we mess up, when we're given that corrective feedback, we don't see it as a gift. We see it as punitive, like you just said earlier, Jill. We see it as, "Jill's punishing me for this." No, she's given me valuable feedback about how I'm showing up somewhere. So take it in, and then do something different, right? But I think we don't have that commitment to doing something often, Jill. We have that thought of, "Well, someone else is going to do that. If Jill's the safety officer, if Clayton's the diversity officer, then isn't that their job?", and I'm going to circle us all the way back to where we started, which is to embed this stuff in our cultures, to embed safety in the culture, to embed inclusion in the culture is everyone's job.

Jill:

That's right. That's right. Every health and safety professional just said, "Amen," because it's the thing that we're always saying. It's like employees are like, "Here comes that person, that safety person. We better do this. We better act this way."

We're like, "No, no, no, no, no. That's not what this is about. It's embedding." Yeah. It's embedding.

Clayton:

That's awesome.

Jill:

Yeah. That's fabulous. Clayton, I know we're running short on time. One thing I'm thinking about right now, if someone's listening and thinking, "Okay, so Clayton's given us some really great ideas. It still seems a little bit squishy to me," are there places that people can go to learn, where they're taking training or reading certain things, that they can do independently or that you can weave into a company?

Clayton:

Yeah. I think there are a number of great resources that you can use through even the old Googlenator, right? I would start on thinking about maybe watching a few short videos. There's a bunch of content on YouTube that is made by people that have all kinds of different varying lived experiences, and so just going out and finding a four or five minute video. Hundreds of them talk about these different experiences, maybe of what it means to have a different sexual orientation in the workplace and in life, quite frankly. What it means to be, I'm a man, a Black woman in the workplace and some of those experiences. Again, just kind of being curious, and you could certainly push your company to buy stuff and augment the resources that you have available.

But quite frankly, even if you don't have power to do that or desire to do that, you can always do it for yourself in terms of just some of the general ways that you can continue to look into, "What are these different lived experiences like?" It's Black History Month, by the way, when Jill and I, when we're talking. I don't know when you'll air this, but at any rate, today it is. I always talk to people and say, "Hey, look up a black author." I think a lot of people have the misconception that, "Oh. Well, if this book was written from a woman's perspective," for example, "then it must not be for men," or "This book is written from a Black person's perspective. It must not be for white folk." We start to immediately make those kinds of assumptions.

What I'd say is get out of that assumption, and go read a book by a Black author. It doesn't have to be a novel, or go find a Black podcast in popular media and listen to a couple of their podcasts. We cut ourselves off often artificially, because, "Oh. Well, that's not for me." I would even say, this is a bold one, but if your organization has employee resource groups, I would almost be certain that they are not limited to the people that they serve. For example, if there's an African American or Black employee resource group, I'm certain that the membership is not exclusive. If you are not a Black person, a person of color, or a person of color of another ethnicity, but not particularly Black or African American, join that Black African American resource group, because you'll learn something, right?

Everywhere I go, where there are resource groups, I always join the groups that are not necessarily germane to my life experience. I always join the women's ERG and, quite frankly, some of the best programming comes from those other groups because of the perspectives that they bring to the topics that they are surfacing, right? And it's easy to do, and join it with the mindset, again, "If I'm going to learn something, I don't have to take over, right? It's just this idea, I think Jill, of finding what feels good to you, finding what feels right to you, and again, just being consistent around it. It needs to be authentic for you, because if it's not authentic, you won't stick with it, just like a diet, right?

Jill:

That's right. Amen to that. Amen to that. Clayton, the things that I took away today, the things that I've made a note of, one being that story collector; asking about people's lived experiences, being consistent, continually looking, learning, and collecting those stories, modeling behavior that we want to see, holding our teammates accountable, asking ourselves what our blind spots are, what don't we know about one another, and staying on the excursion, as you said, Staying on the excursion.

Clayton:

I love it. I love it. You captured it all. You captured it all.

Jill:

Clayton, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, your expertise, and your training with us today. Really appreciate it.

Clayton:

Thank you so much for having me, Jill, and I am so appreciative of your listeners out there and the job that you're doing to bring this awesome content to them, so kudos to you.

Jill:

Thank you, and thank you all for spending your time listening today. More importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good, making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day. If you aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player you'd like. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more health and safety professionals. Special thanks to [inaudible 01:02:36], our podcast producer, and until next time, thanks for listening.