165. Confessions On Diversity In The Workplace With Damion Taylor
Progress Through Open Discussion
What can happen when we take the time to actually talk about the challenges that we're experiencing at work, the way that we're feeling, the things that we're experiencing, and ways that we can do it differently?
When we share our experiences, magic can happen.
We need to bring forward the experiences that we’re told, implicitly or explicitly, that we shouldn’t discuss.
If we can’t share the realities of what we experience at work, how do we make progress?
Damion Taylor (he/him) joins Erica and India to discuss how we talk about challenges at work.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
Why discussions of DEI need to go beyond the theoretical
How zero-sum games keep marginalized people from pursuing collective action
Why we need to be okay with asking for help
Why we have to play to the gray areas in order to improve workplace culture
Data-Driven Impact
Damion Taylor (he/him) has spent the last 15 years applying data and technology to entertainment. Both analytical and creative, he brings a unique skill set that’s in high demand for brands and media companies such as Warner Bros., NBC Universal, Machinima, Mitu, and New Form. This means he has spent his career observing and understanding the motivations that drive people's actions. After witnessing the Central Park Karen incident and the murders of Ahmaud Abery and George Floyd in 2020, he decided to use his company and skills to make a positive impact on the world.
He is passionate about music, photography, and spending time with his wife and son.
Creating A Safe Space For Difficult Conversation
On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Damion Taylor says he started the Professional Confession podcast to “try to break down a lot of the conversations, challenges that people have at work when it comes to diversity, or even tough conversations.”
He says that often, those difficult conversations either don’t happen or go sideways because of the emotional responses that happen, or lack of safety in having the discussion.
“We wanted to create a place where those conversations could happen, but there’s also something that’s immediately actionable coming out of it.”
He started the podcast in the wake of incidents like the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, and Central Park Karen (linked to clarify which Karen incident Damion refers to), “because those things left me feeling so helpless and like I couldn’t do something because I was too small. And then I realized that, wait, I have things that are within my control, within my power, that I can do to make it better.”
*We chose not to link to articles discussing the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery or George Floyd in order to spare readers from painful triggers surrounding these and other events of violence against Black people.
Damion chose to create a podcast because he felt that many podcasts focused on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion or on the workplace, and discussed DEI as theory, without providing as many tangible actions or solutions.
“I wanted to be that guy who could actually help someone make it better.”
Erica agrees that often podcasts in that space offer up actions that are overly prescriptive, “and when we’re digging into things that are not textbook, that are not neatly put into a formula of ‘this plus this equals this,’ it has to be approached from a very humanistic point.”
Damion says that is part of why he chose to use the format of anonymous submissions of real events.
“They don’t have to fear the repercussions…but at the same time, it’s a real scenario that people are experiencing. And if that one person in their corporate environment is experiencing it, the likelihood of someone else having experienced it or something similar is pretty high.”
He continues, “Being able to speak to real-world situations with real-world implications is more powerful than me making up a scenario and hoping that you can identify with it.”
There are two ways that people can submit stories to Professional Confession, they can leave a message at a Google voice mailbox, or they can send messages to Damion on LinkedIn. There are also two instances from his own career that he has used on the podcast.
He uses the original confession along with research from sites like Glassdoor to get a sense of the bigger picture and context at a company, “so that we can address really the entirety of that scenario because sometimes one person’s experience is just a sliver.”
The long term goal is to be able to turn the confessions into training courses addressing a variety of challenges one might face at work, and “understanding then how can we build empathy across those to understand that we all have our cross to bear, but there’s something that we can all do to help each other carry that load.”
It’s Not A Zero-Sum Game
Damion says that while the issues that come up on Professional Confession aren’t new, “the people talking about it, the people who are experiencing it, didn’t have, or haven’t traditionally had, the visibility or the platform upon which to discuss it.”
But, he says, so much has changed in the last two years. “The biggest [impact] is probably the more insidious part of, I think, what we’ve been seeing over the past however many decades, the relationships between people of color or between marginalized groups [that were] always contentious because there’s a zero-sum game that everyone believes is there that really doesn’t have to be there.”
He says that more recently, rather than the paradigm of competition between various marginalizations, “we’re starting to see some semblance of understanding across those groups that it’s different. It’s not worse. It’s not better. It’s different. And if we really want to make a difference, we need to create an environment in a world where none of us have to experience that.”
Erica adds that the zero-sum game of who’s more marginalized only serves to keep people from recognizing the real adversary.
“It keeps the people actually doling out the transgressions–they don’t have to deal with any of it…It just creates this terrible environment that is simply perpetrated to keep…that type of organization and togetherness down.”
Damion recalls an episode where a Black male consultant was frustrated that so much of the feedback he received around his presentations was “oh my God, you speak so well, you’re so articulate, you’re so charismatic,” and not about the quality of his work.
He believes the feedback is because he’s Black, but when he finally expressed his frustration to his white female boss and Asian male coworker, his Asian coworker said he was getting that kind of feedback as well.
“And it was sort of like this epiphany between the two of them, like wait a minute, two people who think that we’re in our own boat and no one else can understand us, we have this common experience.”
And his Asian colleague also dealt with comments and questions about where he was from because his English was so good, when he had been born and raised in California. And his female boss got comments about how it must be hard to manage a group of men or wow, you seem really smart.
“They all started to bond, realizing that there were these social constructs, these social norms that were really getting to all of them, and they were internalizing it and not vocalizing it and not trying to address it, but then thinking that they were on an island…And then they realized they weren’t. And so then they decided to support each other.”
Both Individual And Community
Reflecting on that story from the podcast, Erica says of the way those three colleagues came together after the Black consultant opening the conversation with his frustration, “it’s powerful when that happens and that we’re able to witness it, but I can’t help but wonder, what…can be done to foster better engagement beforehand so we don’t have to wait until someone is pissed off and fired up?”
Damion says that’s the million-dollar question.
Which is why he brings in experts who have experience in various areas as they come up on the show.
“One of them…pointed out that as marginalized communities, we tend to assume that if you’re an ally, you’re a white ally, or any sort of ally, you know what to do. You know what your job is supposed to be to help mitigate the situation. And that’s not always the case.”
In some cases, would-be allies hesitate to ask what’s needed because they don’t want to say the wrong thing, or come across as though they only care because of the other person’s race or marginalization.
At the same time, it is difficult in our society to ask for what you need. “We have this perception that it puts you in a weakened position.”
Erica notes the tension between individualism and community. “There’s this weird space of people not being quite sure of really which one is desired and which one is to be vilified.”
India agrees and adds, “I think that people, in general, may have a hard time seeing that it’s both. You can be an individual, and yet you are still a human.”
Play To The Gray
Erica says part of how we work with that tension is “being less fearful to have these types of conversations with each other.”
But that, also we need to make use of the data available to us in order to tangibly improve workplace culture.
Damion agrees and says that one of the ways he responded to the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Abery was to join the Multicultural Insights Collective, a group of business owners doing research around the language of diversity.
“What I can do is see if I can influence the places where the money is, where people spend a lot of time, right? Where the people have the ability to influence in ways that I don’t as an individual.”
Researching the language the people use around concepts in DEI, “knowing that people are talking about it, but sometimes talking past each other because I’ll say one thing and you’ll say the same thing, I mean something totally different.”
He continues, “We wanted to really be able to help companies understand how to talk about it. How do you build these diverse programs? How do you do these training such that you can address the fact that everyone is coming from a different perspective?...Let’s come from the perspective of where are people coming from and then build the training around that.”
In practice, that might mean investigating where some differences have happened, whether it’s generation, race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.
“You can start to figure out, oh, your experience gave you these specific points of view because the world has been that way to you.”
And Damion says you have to allow for nuance and gray areas because experience is never as simple as demographic categories like male or female or Black or white.
“We have to play in the gray and understand how those external factors shape the perception of individuals.”
Erica agrees that “no one is that simply quantified…We all have our intersectionality of our experiences and our families of origin and how we have been conditioned and it is going to shape our perceptions. And there are places that we can unlearn, relearn, and figure out how to address things differently for a better collective outcome.”
Find The Commonalities
Damion says one way to start taking action to embracing that nuance is to look for the commonalities.
“The differences are always there and you can find them if you look. Look for the commonalities. It sounds really easy; it’s really hard for people to do.”
Even with someone who you feel is diametrically opposed to you, he says if you focus on what you have in common or where things are similar, “once you start down that road, you’ll start to find a lot more than you thought there was.”
Ready to Dive Deeper?
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Connect With Damion Taylor:
Professional Confession Podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts