OK. Well, it is time to get started. So I will go ahead and do that. Um Welcome to stepping stones from diversity learning to equitable actions. And um I do want to say once again real quick that that is Harrison Lake in the background.Uh If anyone's interested, Harrison Hot Springs uh in British Columbia, Canada. And as we, um as we go through this, I'm going to build up through the different things we're gonna talk about. I'm just gonna start with an introduction. My name is Cindy Gross. My pronouns are she her? And I spent 25 years in tech and, you know, heads down most technical person that I could be a sequel server, big data, the Windows team, uh all sorts of involvement in moving people off of on premises into the cloud in, in my case, Azure, and then something happened and I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about that.

And so now I'm a generative coach and that means that most of the time I'm asking questions way more than I'm telling anything else. So it's, it's really about leaning into an inquisitive curiosity. I'm also an adaptive leader. And my adaptive leadership principles are all throughout everything that I'm gonna be talking about. For the uh the rest of the presentation. Adaptive leadership is a type of leadership that is relationship first and it is all about changing hearts and minds, repointing people involved in an effort towards a new way of looking at the world in a new way of working together so that you can create an outcome that is beneficial to everyone who's directly involved in the situation.

Too often, decisions are made by somebody at the top of the hierarchy and they're made without consulting the people most affected. So adaptive leadership is a way of approaching that differently so that stakeholders truly have input into the solution. I'm the CEO CEO of my own small business called befriending dragons. And overall, I'm just a very joyful person now that I'm not within the constraints of the corporate environment. I do want to take a moment to do a land acknowledgement. Some of you may be familiar with this and uh I live in Issaquah, Washington. That's just outside Seattle in the United States. I do live on land stolen from the Duwamish and the coast. Salish. I'm a citizen of the United States and the Delaware tribe of Indians and Cherokee nation, which means that I am the descendant of colonizers and those they tried to destroy. And it's very important to think about our connection to the land. It's very important to think about how history shapes us and how being rooted in our history and understanding more about the realities of what's happened in the past. Gives us more options for how we choose to go forward into the future. If you want to find out what traditional land you reside on, you can go to native dash land dot C A that's in the lower left hand corner.

And if you want a much longer example, um based on uh a land acknowledgement I gave it's around three or four minutes long. Um At the CEO venture announcement this year, you can go to medium dot Befriending dragons.com. And I, I do encourage you to learn more about the lands that you live on. We're gonna talk about systems of oppression and how individuals operate within systems. So for example, racism is a systemic unequal distribution of power and resources on the basis of race to uphold white supremacy and you can go back and substitute sexism, gender and patriarchy as well. So that's what I mean when I talk about systems of oppression or when I refer to purity cultures, that's what I'm talking about. And the way that systems work is that s systems set the norms, they set what's acceptable, they set all of the boundaries around us and the boundaries are often well hidden and they're disguised as things like merit or best or we only hire people who have done something that is very vague but is made to sound very definite.

Uh They're based on exclusion and they're controlling possible outcomes even if it's not easy from the outside to see what those possible outcomes might be. And systems will continue to produce those outcomes regardless of the intent of the people in the room. Every person in the room can have the best intentions in the world to not be racist and the outcomes could still uphold white supremacy. So that's some foundational knowledge for what we're going to talk about. So when we talk about stepping stones to equitable actions, these are things that workplaces need need to do in addition to traditional de I or diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. So the things I'm gonna talk about today are reshaping white male bars lasting systemic disruptions and a tool that I call question the narrative. So let's go into that. Um I spent, as I said, 25 years in tech and that's a world where being hyper, logical, emotionless and always sure you are 100% right? Is just table stakes for entry to the room. Constant reminders that I didn't fit in a room full of men. I said I had women candidates for open position and my manager's immediate instinctive response. Anyone wanna guess we won't lower the bar for them. He didn't know anything about them.

He just assumed they weren't emeritus enough to uh to be hired and read between the lines because he was also telling me the bar was lured to let me in as the only woman on the team. But in reality, these bars weren't lowered, nothing was lowered because the bar is shaped like those already in power. The bar is shaped and overwhelmingly built around the profile of white men. It's full of irrelevant gates that exclude many qualified people and it can cut the rest of us to shreds as we fight our way in. I changed so many things about myself instead of changing the system that I never fit because the system didn't change. I was constantly thinking, why can't I get me right as if there was a right way for me to exist in the universe. But the system was telling me there was one right way because I love dragons. I was wondering why my dragon skills are too shiny, not shiny enough. Why is my dragon roar silenced? Which means I lost my voice. When did I start spending so much emotional energy to walk a fine line between likable and competent? When did I give to the bullies that are encouraged by the system? And that white male bar became even tighter and more cutting when I reported the worst bully, a sexual harasser to my manager, my manager told me to silence myself to keep quiet.

What I heard or what the system told me with my manager's voice was that my voice was destructive to my career. The brilliant jerk as he was called who harassed me was considered too valuable to the team. And I was clearly not valuable enough. I was bleeding from the white male bar. I took my dragon roar. I internalized it as a silent scream. I tried to muffle my inner cries. I focused on creating success by being less authentic because that's what the bar required. I knew if I could make myself one of the guys I could win. I tried so hard to squeeze myself through those white male shaped success bars without being cut to shreds. I tried to control everything myself, my voice, my manager, my coworkers, how much of myself I shared with those closest to me only I couldn't, I didn't, the more I silenced myself, the more I changed my dragon more into a silent scream, the more I lost myself. And that's what the system taught me to do. The system taught me. I was a solitary dragon safe in my lonely cave. I was surviving. Thriving. Wasn't a thought. I hoarded my energy, my thoughts, my feelings and I shape shifted into a shadow of myself. I closed all the gates around me to keep the bad things away, ignore. And I also kept the good things away. And like so many trauma victims, I internalized the bully's actions, the system as my own fault.

Hr tried to find the balance of action so neither of us would sue or speak out too. Much. Even after they agreed the bully had harassed me, but they misjudged because I spoke out. I reclaimed my voice in small groups from a stage and then loudly for the entire world to hear. I left Microsoft without signing their confidentiality agreement without letting them steal my voice. Once again, in return for a few months pay with help of my therapist, good friends, coaches.

I stopped looking at myself as a scary dragon. The jerk who bullied me, the coworkers who excused him. They don't define me. I don't have to shrink myself. I don't have to become invisible and silent to people like him. I choose to see myself as a friendly dragon who can fly where I want when I want, how I want. But there's the reality of the system, a white patriarchy, a system that builds success bars shaped like a narrow subset of cisgender, heterosexual, fully abled white men because of my own white privilege because of the perseverance and grit and pure luck that let me slide through the edges of the white patriarchy for a while.

At 52 I have the freedom to put myself in a world where I can thrive. My dragon scales are just fine the way they are. I choose what kind of light to shine on them, on myself and I continue to befriend my internal dragons instead of trying to fix myself because there's nothing wrong with me and there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with most of the people who face barriers in tech no matter what the system says. Unfortunately, for all of that to work out for me, I had to leave. Tech. Tech lost my 25 years of experience. Tech lost my extensive global network across multiple technologies, companies, industries and skill sets. Tech lost me. And this is why we have to reshape success in hiring bars. So tech doesn't keep losing everyone who doesn't fit a narrow mold. So how do we do that? Will we create lasting systemic disruptions? We start with befriending our internal dragons. So the things we tell ourselves about how we have to exist, how we should do. Things are shaped by the systems around us, the cultures around us, the people around us and we can choose to respond differently to listen to our internal dragons diff differently. And I call that befriending dragons and hence the name of my business.

We can nurture equitable cultures, we can stop blocking marginalized voices. We don't need to save other people, the people who are marginalized by the system, women, people who aren't white people with various types of disabilities, people with autism, we don't need to save them.

We need to unblock them. We need to make sure that they have the power they innately have and that it's rewarded within a system that they have decision making power. And that requires finding the right levers. And that requires leading with empathy with changing the way that we look at ourselves and the world around us that we lead with empathy, community connection relationship first and learning in public. One of the tools that I use to do that is something I call question the narrative.

And if you do these four things with everything that's going on around you, you have a good chance of disrupting the systems. And the first question to ask is always who is centered in the story, who has agency, who makes the decisions, who gets to decide what the next next steps are? A lot of times when you hear about a harassment, like the story, I tell people will say, well, what about him? That is centering him, what they should be asking is, what about me? What about my coworkers who abandoned me? Those are the questions asked by who's being centered in each of those and that includes our internal voices and the internal stories we tell ourselves. So any story that we hear repeat, amplify or tell, ask who's centered, think about the power dynamics, who had the agency, what gave them the agency? Would they have had an agency in another system? And by agency, I mean, the ability to make our own decisions like the leading lady in a movie has all the agency.

And what are the other truths when somebody says, well, we hired this person because they had five years of experience instead of that person that had four years of experience. And that's the reason that they give, you can ask. And what else like, did you hire somebody who looked just like everybody else on the team or did you hire somebody who adds something to the team? The fact that this other person might have communication skills that the person you hired didn't, they might have lived experiences, they can bring, uh maybe they understand how to deal with online harassment because it's a black woman or an indigenous woman. Uh a trans woman who has lived through that and has built in strategies and the fact that they might have one less year of experience in that specific technology maybe isn't as relevant as you're making it sound so always do the end. I agree. It's true that this merit based statement you're making is true and what else is going on there? What are some other ways we could tell this story to each other and what are some other ways that we can look at this? How can we get curious and inquisitive about this to tell a more equitable story?

So if you do those four things, every time you read a news story, every time a leader in your company talks about a hiring initiative or how promotions happen, use these tools to help figure out more about what's going on and open up options. So coming back to the practical side of things, everyone needs to own Jedi. It's no longer DN I diversity inclusion. It shouldn't be diversity, equity and inclusion or de I it should be Jedi to be justice equity, diversity and inclusion and it's not something that belongs in.

Hr it's not something that you get at foods festivals and from famous people. It's something that each one of us owns every day from the way we set deadlines and choose projects to the way that we hire and promote everything about that is owned by everyone. And that's one of the ways you change the systems. You think of uh Jedi as risk management, you can avoid large payouts to people who've been harassed, you can avoid but bad press and more importantly, you can open new markets by creating innovation. We have a mountain of evidence that highly diverse teams and most of the studies are done on racially diverse and or gender diverse teams, highly diverse teams greatly outperform monocultures, teams that come in and um have everybody thinking the same. They don't break the mold, they don't truly disrupt the industries, they claim to disrupt, they may cause a lot of problems, but they're not doing the sort of innovation that can really create a substantial change and generate income for the company. And then last of all, make sure you're using the right levers. It is amazing what two or three people can do to influence one person who has control over a lever while everyone else is out focusing on food, famous people and festivals. So thank you for listening. We've got just like two minutes for questions. I do wanna say I offer one on one coaching anti racism workshops and any custom program to go much deeper into all of this. But it's not really about me whether you use these um things or not.

The thing to really think about is think about the systems that are at play and not just the individuals that are play. So any questions, go ahead and type in the chat window if there's anything you want to know, I don't see any questions. So, um, once again, my name is Cindy Gross and I'm at befriending dragons.com. And, uh, I wanna thank you all for coming today and I hope that you're able to use some of the tools that I've presented to create lasting change in your workplace, your lives and your communities. Thank you.