Diversity and inclusion are a vital issue for many employers, but as an industry do we genuinely understand what they mean, their implications and the issues that need to be solved?
My guest this week is Jackie Glenn, Principal and Founder at Jackie Glenn Diversity Solutions and former Global Chief Diversity Officer at Dell EMC.
In the interview, we discuss:
- The amazing story of Jackie’s career
- The challenges of a Chief Diversity Officer
- Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and Belonging
- Is D&I really as much a priority for employers as it should be?
- The importance of auditing and the power of diverse teams
- D&I issues in the technology sector.
- Letting your audio match your video
Jackie also shares her advice for employers and talks about her book “Lift As I Climb: An Immigrant Girl’s Journey Through Corporate America.”
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from ClickIQ. ClickIQ is an automated job advertising platform that uses the latest AI and programmatic technology to manage, track and optimize the performance of your recruitment. Advertising in real time spend is focused where it’s needed the most to reach both active and passive job seekers across indeed, Google, Facebook and an extensive network of job boards. To find out more about ClickIQ, please visit www.clickiq.co.uk. that’s www.clickiq.co.UK.
Matt Alder [00:01:00]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 203 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Diversity and inclusion are key issues for many employers, but as an industry, do we really fully understand what they mean as well as their implications and challenges? My guest this week is Jackie Glenn, principal and founder at Glenn Diversity Solutions and former Global Chief Diversity Officer at Dell emc. Jackie has an amazing story and some fantastic insights to share. Enjoy the interview. Hi Jackie and welcome to the podcast.
Jackie Glenn [00:01:42]:
Hi Matt, I am so excited to be here.
Matt Alder [00:01:44]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Jackie Glenn [00:01:50]:
Hi, my name is Jackie Glenn and I’m the founder and CEO of Glenn Diversity Inclusion Solutions. I’m also the author of my book called Lift As I An Immigrant Girl’s Journey Through Corporate America. I am the former Chief Diversity Officer at EMC Corporation, now Dell emc and left there just a year ago to write my book and to just start a new chapter of my life.
Matt Alder [00:02:18]:
Now I’ve got lots of questions that I want to ask you, but before I do, I think it’s really important for people to hear a bit more about your story. So tell us, tell us a bit more about the story of your career.
Jackie Glenn [00:02:30]:
So my career started I am originally from Kingston, Jamaica and I came to this country, was sponsored to come to this country as a nanny. So my career started started in this country as a nanny in Shawnee Mission, Kansas and I did that for two years and then moved to Boston, Massachusetts where I had a lot of family. I started going back to school and working in a hospital. My first job in a hospital was as a unit clerk. I worked my way up from a unit clerk to a receptionist in the HR department. And because I believe in you don’t behave for the job you’re in. You basically perform for the job you want to be in. So even though I was a receptionist, I came to the job dressed in a suit, ready to be the next level person, although I was performing the job as a receptionist. And so that caught the eye of a lot of my superior. And I was quickly promoted to recruiter where I was in charge of recruiting for all the ancillary positions like housekeeping, the kitchen, the laundry room, anything. And I did an amazing job in that because most of those job mad were people who were from immigrants came to this country and they had no problem taking those job and really doing those job well. From there I moved on to being an HR business partner and I went back to graduate school. And while I was in graduate school, and this is really important for your audience to listen to, I took a look at my resume. Not on my own whim, but we had this exercise in class to look, take our name off the resume mat and just have someone else look at your resume for you and give you critical feedback. And one of the feedback I got was that I was in the same industry for way too long. And so after I graduated from from school, I started looking for jobs. And I particularly asked the Ed Hunter not to call me for any jobs in healthcare because that was my entire background. And so I ended up at EMC Corporation as the HR manager for the marketing department. And my career sort of flourished from there. I was the director of HR for sales and then my final job there, I was the chief diversity officer for the entire company, 60,000 employees globally. I did that job until most recently when we were acquired by Dell Computers. And I stayed through the acquisition and a year and a half after the acquisition and just left, as I said earlier on, to write my book and just to do another chapter. It was over 18 years. And as I said earlier, Matt, I really believe that people have to take a look every couple of years of where they are in their career and really either tweak it or change it. And so my tweaking was to leave, finish writing a book that I was passionate about and started a consulting practice. Glenn, Diversity, Inclusion and HR Solutions.
Matt Alder [00:05:47]:
Fantastic. And thank you very much for sharing that with us. I want to kind of perhaps dig into some of the things that you’re doing now in a second. Before we do that, can you sort of tell us a bit more about the types of challenges you faced as a chief Diversity officer and what kind of did you sort of do to overcome those?
Jackie Glenn [00:06:09]:
You know, one of the challenges that I saw over and over and over again, there’s so much challenges in my industry in terms of my particular focus area as Diversity, inclusion. And now Matt, it’s diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging. And I know it’s a long dragged out focus area, but I really believe that you can’t have one without the other. And what I saw was that a lot of company, especially the technology companies, they just had the biggest issues attracting, recruiting, retaining and developing women and underrepresented minority. And when I looked at a lot of organization, not just the one I came from, but a lot of different organization, we just really struggle with that. And I think that there is so much more that we can do and so much more focus that we can give this area. So we learn how as HR practitioner, not just how to recruit the people, but that’s the first step. How do we attract them? How do we make our company attractive? So a Jackie Glenn would want to come there and work. And once I get there, what are you going to do to retain me? How are you going to make me feel like I belong there? Are you going to make sure you treat me equitably? And I think company has not grasped that yet. As I said a while ago, I do a lot of consulting for medium and small technology companies and manufacturing companies and not for profit. And while their intentions are great, most of the time the leadership team or sometimes the entire organization is homogeneous and there’s nobody that looks like the people that they’re serving, the area they reside in. And gone are those days when you have all homogeneous or all white, to be honest, company where no one can equate. If I’m there, no one at the top of the house looks like me. And so I think that that is a focus area that as you look at, if I’m talking global, if you look at, I know in the US at the census data and how the demographic shift is occurring in different parts of the US and most parts of the US where there were majority Caucasian are now turning into a majority minority state. I think that’s happening over and over again in different areas of the world. And if you want to attract the best and the brightest man, you have to really start to step back, do an audit of how you’re doing business and really take a look at how you’re doing recruiting, who are your recruiters, how they’re trained and what are they doing to attract people that doesn’t look like that.
Matt Alder [00:09:14]:
Absolutely. So diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging now very, very diversity, inclusion, very, very big topic. See, it’s kind of always discussed at conferences. People are always, it’s very much seemingly a top priority for lots of HR departments. But I do get the impression sometimes that people don’t necessarily fully understand what they’re. What they’re talking about when they. When they. When they say it. So can you. Can you give us a bit more ins, particularly into the inclusion, equity and belonging piece? I know you’ve kind of already talked about it a little bit, but perhaps a bit more insight so people kind of really understand what the issue is here.
Jackie Glenn [00:09:55]:
So the easiest way, you know, when I explain. When I go out and speak, man, and I explain diversity, diversity is how you is who you are. You know, when you look at me and see me, you will see that I am a black woman. And you can see that. So I always say diversible is the visible piece of me and their invisible diversity. But when you think of diversity, it’s individual. It’s who you are. When you think of inclusion, they said diversity is being invited to the dance. Inclusion is being asked to dance. And so inclusion is, you know, is really making sure that everyone gets their voice heard. Everyone is including you. Just don’t recruit me just to have diversity at your company and then leave me in a corner and don’t ask me for my opinion, don’t involve me in anything and really just want me there because I make the landscape look different. So inclusion is making sure I feel included, and equity is also making sure I’m being treated equitably. Because a lot of feedback that we get from women and underrepresented minority is that, yes, they recruit me there, but I don’t ever say I’m not invited to give my input. And when I give my input, sometimes it’s frowned upon if I speak up. And then belonging you want when you recruit someone at your company, Matt, that they feel like this company is my company. I have a stake in it. I feel like I belong here. The leadership feel like they want me here, and I get that sense of belonging and that everyone is a team here. And I had that when I was at emc. I really had that. I felt like that was our company and we were working to make it better. And I think that’s why I stayed as long as I stayed now, we still had to work on making sure we had a diverse group, and we constantly kept at that. And, you know, when you do this work in diversity, it’s a journey. It’s never a one trick and then it’s done. It’s really something that sometimes you’re going in and you’re doing it. You’re looking at your numbers, and if Your audience are listening and want to really understand diversity even more. They have to take a step back and look at their organization. I always ask people to do this and just take an audit of your organization. Who is there? Because a lot of people sometimes Matt said, oh, I’ve got a diverse organization. It’s all white guys, but some of us have hair, some of us are bald headed, some, some of us are short, some of us are tall. And I get that that’s the dimension of diversity. But when I talk about ethnicity and racial diversity, I’m looking that your workplace is not just made up of the same people from the same background, but you want to have difference because difference drives innovation. Matt, if you and I are doing a project together, it’s gonna be a really great project because here you have this Jamaican woman with an accent, and. And here you have this. Are you English?
Matt Alder [00:13:06]:
I am English, yes.
Jackie Glenn [00:13:07]:
Right, so here. And the both of us are coming to the table with our lens, our background. It’s gonna be fabulous because it’s diversity. We’re coming with our different background, we’re coming with different thoughts, different mindsets, different experience. And that is what diversity is. And it drives innovation.
Matt Alder [00:13:27]:
Absolutely. And I couldn’t agree with you. I couldn’t agree with you more. So you kind of mentioned sort of auditing and taking a step and really sort of, I suppose, understanding where you are right now as a business. What would your advice be kind of after that to an employer in terms of how they might move forward and fix any particular issues within their organization?
Jackie Glenn [00:13:53]:
I think the first thing that employers want to do is really acknowledge the fact that there’s an issue there. And the first step is just to get an independent person to come in. And this is going to sound like a shameless plug, but it doesn’t have to be me, but it can be someone who can come in and probably do a listening tour or audit of the organization or really just get your leadership team together. And if you have a diversity person said, what does our numbers look like? Take a look at your metrics, see what it’s looking like. There are organization that every single person, that one particular organization look the same. And that is not gonna be sustainable. Because if you look, no matter where you are in this world, you need diversity. And it could be just diversity from generational diversity. There’s so many dimension of diversity. There is people with disability, you know, we’re talking about, you know, female, male, raise veterans. There is religious diversity, there’s lgbtq. So there’s all different dimension of diversity. But what I would ask people to do is just to step back and look at the makeup of their organization. And the way you do that, you get an independent person, a non biased person. And that’s why that would be my first recognition. Because sometimes when you’re doing it yourself, you tend to lie to yourself and say, oh no, we’re not that bad. I can’t tell you, Matt, how much people I’ve spoke to and they’re like, oh, we’re good, we’re so diverse. We’ve got one lady and we’ve got someone, you know, one Asian and one. That’s not it, that’s not. So they need to really take a real good look at the makeup of their organization. And then once they’ve done that, then they can decide, you know, what would we like to start with first? When I was at emc, one of the things we did once we did that was say, you know, women and underrepresented minorities, specifically Hispanic and blacks, were the areas that we really needed to sort of take a deeper look at. And so for a couple of years, while we focus on all areas of diversity, we made those three areas a little bit more extra touch because we knew that that’s where our numbers were showing that we needed to, to lean towards.
Matt Alder [00:16:22]:
Just as a, I suppose as a bit of an aside, as a question for someone who’s worked in the technology sector, do technology companies have a particular problem here or is this something that we. Something that you see in every sector?
Jackie Glenn [00:16:39]:
I think it’s a little bit pronounced in the technology sector only because it’s just, you know, everyone is fishing from the same pond. When you look at the demographic, it’s who we have going into engineering and who’s graduating and who is coming out. A lot of times we don’t have the mass of people that are coming out. But I think the biggest problem is that when you look at the top of technology organization, it’s all white male. Not that they’re bad people at all. You know, this whole notion of sameness is real. So a lot of times what end up happening is that they just recruit from recommendation and from referral. And if you ask me to refer someone, I probably would refer a woman of color because my network is filled with that. And so because a lot of times we were doing our recruiting from referrals, a lot of technology company, just the landscape didn’t change. Now I will also say that it’s really hard out there because everyone is looking for the same engineer the same people. But I think technology has a huge issue with attracting and retaining. And there’s a lot of pieces why that happened, which is for another podcast. But I think that they’re not the only one. The financial industry has the same issue, whether or not they want to admit it. And I think also in some manufacturing issue. My original career started out in health care, and I will say that health care, while they still have stuff to do, but I think that they tend to have the opposite issue where they do have a lot of diversity, but it’s usually in the ancillary role, maybe middle and the lower, you know, the entry level area. And when you start to move up to the executive ranks, that’s where the healthcare industry fall down. But when you look at technology and even the financial industry, they just have. Their problem is just a little bit more pronounced. I think every industry is having issue. You know, when you go into the construction industry, that’s another glaring problem. And I don’t think anyone get up in the morning and said, oh, we’re going to discriminate and we’re not going to hire people that doesn’t look like us. I honestly believe they don’t know how to do it and some of them don’t know how to do it. And because they’re profitable, don’t think it’s a problem. And I was told a long time ago when I started my career as a diversity practitioner that if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. I don’t necessarily subscribe to that because I think that even though they’re making profit now, as you look at the demographic shift, companies that are doing really well and they’re not diverse really have to prepare for tomorrow. And if they don’t start changing the landscape of how their company look, they’re not going to continue their success.
Matt Alder [00:19:59]:
So, final question. You mentioned that you’ve recently written a book. Tell us a bit more about the book and where people can get hold of it.
Jackie Glenn [00:20:07]:
Yes, and before I do that, I want to just say one more thing. A lot of company have good intentions. And because diversity and inclusion is such a big topic right now, with everything that’s going on, especially in the US there’s a lot of talks with company, there’s a lot going on. But I like to say this to the HR practitioners that are listening to this podcast that, you know, they have to let their audio match their video. And what I mean is that, you know, you can talk a lot and do a little. So your audio, if you’re saying you’re a company that has embraced diversity and you’re talking a lot. Your video, it needs to be shown somewhere that you really mean it. And I think a lot of companies talk a lot and do a little. And so I’ll end there. So my book is called Lift As I An Immigrant Girl’s Journey to Corporate America. And the impetus of writing that book was longstanding. Just being in corporate America and always being the only one or the only one of two or three and really looking at my other sisters in corporate America who had made it to significant heights in the organization and not look back to Lyft. I wrote it through an immigrant lens because of the time we live in. And I really wanted people to understand how I show up at work and the 10 tenets that I live by. So the book is a quick read. It’s 10 chapters, and each chapter showcase one of my gems. And I also showcase 10 other immigrants, one from Europe, from London. I have someone from Ghana, someone from Germany. I have someone from Costa Rica, Lebanon, India, Barbados, in Haiti and Cape Verde. And my reason for doing that, Matt, was to make sure that as you read my book, you could basically picture yourself in some of these people or in what I have to say. It’s an instructive biography that really talks about a time in my life when I had to show up bold, when I have to show up with integrity. Those are all my gems. When I had to be self aware, when I had to exercise trust. So the gems are self awareness, boldness, trust, empathy, resilience, flexibility, responsibility, and so on and so forth. And so I would love for your audience to pick up a copy of the book. You can get it on my website@glendiversity.com.
Matt Alder [00:22:42]:
Jackie, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jackie Glenn [00:22:44]:
Thank you so much. It was my pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:22:47]:
My thanks to Jackie Glenn. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your app store. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
