In this episode, Brandon Laws sits down with Tara Jaye Frank, author of The Waymakers, to discuss her new book, a roadmap for fostering workplace equity. The two discuss how we can recognize and seize opportunities to interrupt systems and processes that hinder equity in the workplace —- all with the goal of opening doors and ushering people through to greater levels of contribution.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Tara Jaye Frank is the Founder and CEO of TFJ Career Modeling LLC. A workplace equity strategist and author, Tara is passionate about helping business leaders make a way for underrepresented talent.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
POWER DYNAMICS
In the introduction of her recent book, The Waymakers, Tara Jaye says that “inequity is rooted in power dynamics,” and unfortunately, that they exist in almost every system in which we work, in every educational system, and certainly in government.
Inside our workplaces, when we determine who to hire, who to promote, or who to invite into a certain room where information is being disseminated, we are witnessing power dynamics at work. Power is everywhere, and “it’s usually concentrated within a select group of people,” according to Tara. Whether that power is or is not shared “dictates the degree to which other people can succeed.”
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Inequity in the Workplace
“Inequity happens outside of work, but inside of work — which of course is where I focus most of my effort — it has to do with who’s getting the access to the information that people need in order to be successful. The power network that we need. […] Equitable outcomes are tied to equitable opportunities, and not everyone gets those opportunities to show and prove, to win, to demonstrate results that other people get.”
The Learning Loop
“But when we are deciding who to put into a leadership development program, for example, […] we say that this program is for high potential people. Usually, the high potential people are those who remind us of ourselves, and if the people making those decisions are all of one ‘ilk,’ if you will, then the folks who end up getting selected to be in that learning loop, to learn and grow and create those relationships, are more of the same. And so these are those chances where you’re either in the learning loop or you’re outside of the learning loop, and those opportunities tend to perpetuate themselves.”
It’s How It Is
“Do people wake up and say, ‘I’m gonna hold people down today’? Uh, no. For the most part, they don’t do that. They go into the environment, and they do what they’ve always done. There are orthodoxies, I think, in any given environment — where this is just how we’ve always done it. This is how we make decisions. This is just how things are. And at a point, we don’t really question those things because it’s just kind of part of the fabric of the company. […] If we don’t train ourselves to intervene, to interrupt some of these processes and to ask better questions, then they don’t ever change.”
The Burden is on Us
“We can take responsibility for our role in facilitating change by asking better questions, by pushing back against bias that we see and experience by being an upstander and not a bystander. So there are moments like that every single day in the workplace where we have the opportunity to interrupt those systems and processes by just stopping the train, right? Like, hold on, wait, let’s talk about this.”
Starting Where You Are
“I honestly think everybody needs to start where they are. You know, the reality is that not everybody even really knows where they are. […] The most common thing that happens is if a CEO or C-suite leader reaches out to me and says, ‘We want to do better than we’ve done,’ I usually say, ‘First, let’s have a conversation about what you know about your company, your culture, and how your employees are experiencing your culture today, because everybody wants to go to the best practices, but the best practices for one company aren’t necessarily the best practices for another.”
Assessing the Culture
“My frame is ‘seen, respected, valued, and protected’ because I know that when people feel seen, it helps with attraction. When people feel respected, it leads to belonging, right? When they feel valued, it helps with retention. And when they feel protected, it unlocks innovation. So for me as a former business leader, that’s the frame that is useful and practical for business leaders inside companies, and there are ways to assess the degree to which people feel that way.”
LEARN MORE
Pick up a copy of Tara Jaye Frank’s book, The Waymakers: Clearing the Path to Workplace Equity with Competence and Confidence, on Amazon or wherever books are sold.