May 6, 2024 • 39 mins
Welcome to our first episode of season 2. To kick us off this season, we have the incredible Michael Reid, DEI, learning and linguistic expert, sharing his valuable insight into why some DEI initiatives fail and what we can do as leaders and individuals to ensure our DEI work is not just based on a one perspective point of view.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:11):
Hello and welcome to this first podcast in
our second season of a conversation with.
We're here today with the incredibly talented Michael
Reid, who I've had the luxury of being
able to work with for some time.
He's a linguistic expert, an inclusion expert, and has
worked across lots of different parts of the world.
(00:32):
We have a really good explore around all the
different aspects of language and culture and how they
really connect with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, how
they can show it differently around the world, and
some of the key challenges that he sees organisations
facing, as well as quite a handy few tips
towards the end of the podcast.
(00:53):
One of the things that you'll notice in
my conversation with Michael is how passionate both
of us get when we're talking about this.
And Michael is so passionate about this particular
way of looking at diversity, equity and inclusion.
One of the things you might notice a little
bit of slapping hands just because he's so passionate
in the way that he talks about these things.
So if there's any of those random noises
you can hear coming through, that's just Michael's
(01:15):
passion coming through in a slightly different way.
So grab a cover, kick back and enjoy this episode.
Okay, so welcome to the podcast.
We are talking to the
absolutely wonderful Michael Reid today.
Michael and I have been working together
(01:35):
for, oh, probably about a year and
a half now on collaboration projects.
So we've really got to know
each other's facilitation style and expertise.
And I'm very excited to have him here.
I'm going to let him introduce himself and tell you a
little bit about who he is and what he does.
Thank you so much, Zoe.
I am very excited to be here as well.
Like you said, my name is Michael Reid.
(01:57):
My pronouns are he and him.
I am a linguistic and cultural equity consultant.
I live in Athens, Greece.
I've been doing this work for 25 years now
and I started out in the social services sector.
Actually, I was a translator and interpreter
for the courts and hospital system in
the United States in Washington state.
(02:17):
And after about six years of doing
that, I went into language education.
For a while I was a language professor and soon ish.
After that I went into administration.
I was director of international recruitment
and coordinator for study abroad programmes.
And as I was doing that, I was also
sitting on the boards of several organisations working in
(02:38):
the DEI space, even though it wasn't called DEI
at the time, that's what it was, you know,
fair housing, anti discrimination, that kind of thing.
And as I was sort of doing those
two tracks, I started developing a series of
workshops, seminars, trainings on cross cultural competency, communication
(02:58):
and that kind of thing.
And somewhere along the line, I realised that there
was this enormous gap between the two fields.
You know, we had international education, international business,
on the one hand, that had this really
almost self satisfied conviction that they were already
diverse, they were already inclusive, just by virtue
(03:19):
of having the name international in their title.
And the fact of the matter is, that isn't true.
In fact, working in international education, at least
in the United States, it's a little bit
different here in Europe, but not totally.
But working in international education in the
United States taught me how very little
(03:42):
so many people in international education actually
care about diversity, equity and inclusion issues.
Like anywhere from paying lip service sort of
in the middle of the spectrum, to kind
of ambivalent, to openly antagonistic at times.
But then I would look over at my other track, which
was what would come to be known as the DEI track.
(04:04):
And it was so insular, so inner directed.
So this idea that the US, you know, and at
a stretch, Canada and the UK were the centre of
the universe when it comes to DEi, thought that I
realised that they weren't really doing inclusion because they were
(04:24):
excluding the rest of the world.
So at that point, I decided it was time for me to.
And I know this sounds incredibly
grandiose, please forgive me for it.
But to decolonize DEI, to make sure that when
we are doing it, we're doing it in a
way that really responds to the history, the culture,
(04:45):
the society, the background, the language, crucially, of the
people that we're talking to.
Because if I go and I talk to a
german audience or a french audience or whatever about
Emmett Till, about Medgar Evers, about Marcus Garvey, that
has no residence, it's not part of their history.
It doesn't mean racism doesn't exist in those places.
But that is not the entry point, because that's
(05:08):
not part of their either historical or lived experience.
So for these things to land, they have
to be talked about in a way that.
That resonates with people using material from that
society, from that history, from that culture.
So that is as brief as I am probably able to do.
Introduction brevity is not one of my skills, which I
(05:33):
really appreciate, because I get to train with you.
And sometimes when we're co facilitating, I forget that
I'm training because I'm just listening to you.
I'm like, wow, this is so interesting.
And then you'll be like, right.
And over to Zoe Sugar.
Okay, well, I appreciate it.
It's the same with all of the people I get
(05:53):
to co facilitate with just absolutely amazing talent and people
we're actually going to get on other podcast episodes as
well, so I can't wait to hear from them.
One of my favourite things that you say, I mean,
there's a lot of things, but one of my favourite
things that you say is that you don't like to
put a french solution on a brazilian problem.
And that's really what I want to look at
(06:13):
today is the idea of different aspects of DEI.
Like you say, you know, the UK, the
US, Canada, Australia, wherever, tend to have that
biggest idea of what we think about DEI
is what the world should think about DEI.
And I mean, listen, this is a
hangover from colonialism and things like that.
We know that massively the same way as English.
(06:35):
I'm doing air quotes for the listeners.
English as a universal business language
is also a hangover from that.
And listen, we're very lucky, you
know, I only speak English.
You speak many languages.
You've delivered for us in many languages as
well, and you deliver lots of different workshops.
But I think I'm really interested to hear how
language plays a part, how the way our different
(06:58):
cultures in the different parts of the world that
we're talking about really plays a part in those
common challenges that organisations can have when it comes
to really thinking about how to implement diversity, equity
and inclusion initiatives.
So I'm really excited to have
you here talking about that today.
I am very excited to talk about it.
(07:18):
I mean, you know me well enough to know that I will
jump on any excuse, or even if it just looks like a
slight excuse to talk about these things, I am all over it.
So, of course, what the listeners don't know is
that we probably spent about 35 minutes talking about
all of this before we could start recording.
(07:43):
And here's the thing.
If I were a different person, maybe after
those 35 minutes, I would have sort of
exhausted everything I have to talk about.
But that.
That's not even the appetiser.
That's like the aperitif for me.
And let's go. Now.
That was a piece of bruschetta.
Oh, this is like a amuse bouche for us. Exactly.
(08:04):
Exactly.
Oh, darn, I'm gonna get hungry.
Okay, so.
So let's.
Let's get stuck straight in then.
I'd really love to just get
your thoughts on a few things.
So I'm really interested to hear about your,
your ideas around language and how you think
it affects diversity and inclusion in organisations.
(08:25):
And, you know, listen we work with organisations
from around the world, but very heavily influenced
by the US and the UK, just because
that's where a lot of the bases are.
But of course we work in different countries as well.
But I'm really interested to hear how does
language affect D&I in those organisations?
(08:45):
You know, I take a step back and I
think, okay, what is the purpose of language?
What is language for?
There's a large scientific
aspect to linguistics, right?
When we're talking about phonology, phonetics, that kind of thing,
how does, how do the muscles in your mouth move
to create certain sounds and that kind of thing?
But there's a large amount of soft
(09:07):
sciences, humanities in it as well, right?
And that's, I am, I like to think,
fairly well versed in the scientific part.
Like, I can tell you where a front vowel articulates
or how a plosive articulates or whatever like that.
But historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, in
other words, the more humanities part
of it is really my focus.
So I look at what is the purpose of language?
(09:29):
And the purpose of language is to get what's in here.
And for the listeners, I'm pointing at my head
to get what's in here out to another person.
The fundamental fact of the human experience is that
we have no consistent, replicable access to the inner
world of other people unless they choose to share
(09:50):
it with us through language, right?
And when I'm saying language, generally we think of
spoken language, but it could be signed language, it
could be whatever, some form of communication, right?
So that is the core purpose.
I sort of take it back to that step.
Then when we go another step, we say,
okay, language is a reflection of what's going
(10:12):
on mentally, so we can take clues.
And this is why it bothers me when
people say, oh, well, it's just a word.
Oh, well, it's just this, it's just that it is.
But everything is just something, but it also has something
behind it and it also serves a particular purpose.
So we could say, oh, well, we call it a chairman.
(10:32):
It could be, you know, woman, it could be somebody who's
non binary, whatever, but we just call it a chairman.
What's the problem?
It's just a word.
Here's the problem.
It is a historical holdover from a
time when those positions of authority were
reserved for male identifying people.
And it reflects a certain way of thinking that you
(10:53):
might still even have and not be conscious of it.
And that's one of the really big
things that we need to remember.
And we talk about this a lot in
linguistics, especially sociolinguistics, what we are conscious of
in terms of our communication is only part
of what's actually going on.
There's a lot of unconscious stuff going on
in communication, in our word choices, in our
(11:15):
syntactic choices, all of those kind of things.
So language points to the thought.
It isn't the thought, right.
The word chairman is not per se bad.
It's the thought and the history
that it points to and reinforces.
If it's continually used, that's where the problem is.
(11:37):
So when people say, oh, why do
you care so much about language?
I say, because language is indicative of things.
Now, let's break it down to something more specific
when we're talking about actual different languages, because what
I've just talked about is sort of the concept
of language, the theory of language.
It can occur even among speakers of the same language.
(11:58):
L one speakers, in other words,
native speakers of the same language.
When we're talking about different languages, we
have a layer of complexity added, because
let's just give this as an example.
And this was brought up to me
by another colleague who speaks German.
I don't speak German very well.
I can get by, but it's not great.
We were talking about DEI stuff and talking
(12:18):
about the complexities of using the term race
in English with german speaking audiences, because a
lot of german people will have learned in
school what that word translates to.
They'll maybe translate it in their heads in German, and
one of the main words will be the word that
Hitler used in mein kampf to talk about the purity
(12:40):
of the race and all of these kinds.
So it has this automatic, very legitimate negative connotation
for people that that wall is going to go
up immediately, right now, if I don't know German,
if I don't understand the culture, if I don't
understand the history, I don't know where those potential
stumbling blocks are and how to talk around them.
(13:02):
Another example for me is just even talking
about race at all is going to look
very different from language to language.
A major eye opening experience for me was when I was
living in Japan, I was going to school, and I had
grown up in California, which, as people may or may not
know, has a very large spanish speaking population.
(13:25):
So a lot of people in California
have at least passive competence in Spanish,
even if it's not their main language.
So I had a lot of friends when
I was living in Japan, going to school.
I just sort of happened to fall in with a
group of friends from South America, Chile, Paraguay, that.
And you know, we would hang out.
Cause we sort of shared some stuff.
And I remember we were talking one
(13:45):
time and my friend from Paraguay said.
Cause I mentioned something about being black.
And my friend from Paraguay said, you know.
And this was like what?
To me because I was a teenager at the time,
it's like, you know, in Paraguay you wouldn't be black.
Like what do you mean? Of course I'm.
Of course I'm, I'm. I'm black.
Like I remember the first time I went to a small town
(14:06):
in the United States and somebody shouted the n word out of
me at me and chased me out of a public bathroom.
Like I'm black, just in case you don't know.
And he's like here's the thing.
We would call you Moreno because that is, that's the, that's
the colour we go by sort of what the shade of
the person is not genetic stuff or anything like that.
I was like oh, whoa.
(14:28):
And then, you know, I got more into it and I
talked to my friend from Chile about it and he's like
yeah, that's kind of how we do it too.
And like I said, my mind was just blown by that.
And I realised that even how we classify race, what
we say is black, what we say is white.
Whatever is extremely dependent on, on where we are.
(14:49):
And if we're talking to people and if we
insist on using only one language then we're going
to say things that don't really line up with
how they've carved up the world, right?
So if I'm speaking in Portuguese and I'm speaking with
somebody in Brazil and I, you know, I use the
word black to describe myself, they might look at me
(15:09):
and be like why are you saying that?
You know, why are you saying your, your,
you're Preto, your negro when you're clearly parto?
So that is another area in
which language is really important.
Because if you're a global organisation and you say this
is our standard DEI training and everybody will get the
same training and they will all get it in the
(15:30):
same language and they'll be happy about it, guess what?
The only people who are really going to fully,
fully, fully get what you've done is people who
are either enculturated or acculturated in the same framework
as the person who created the training.
Because they'll get the references, they'll
(15:50):
get the language, they'll get.
If I'm talking to somebody in the US and they say
I'm black, even though clearly I am also partly scottish.
They know what I mean when I'm saying black.
They know that that is my
social identity, that's my political identity.
If I'm giving a training here in Greece and
I say I'm black, people are like, are you?
(16:13):
You look like maybe you're, I don't know, brazilian,
because I've gotten that here, like, you brazilian?
Are you puerto rican?
Are you egyptian?
I get egyptian a lot, that kind of thing. So. Or maybe.
Maybe southern Greek, like down
in Crete, something like that. Right?
So that's the thing.
If you make this one language, one
(16:33):
worldview, one lens, standardised model, it's not
going to work for everybody.
And honestly, and I understand fully, by the way,
I am at least self aware enough to realise
that I'm beginning to get into a rant.
So I promise I'll stop in the next 30 seconds.
But it seems very strange to me because
it is self evidently obvious from the foundational
(16:56):
principles of equity that you cannot do the
same thing for everybody and even have a
problem prayer of getting even broadly similar outcomes.
The whole idea of equity is that we
give people what they need to have the
opportunity to get broadly equal outcomes.
And yet in DEI, somehow we think we're exempt
(17:18):
from that and we can just deliver one kind
of training to everybody and it's going to fit
everybody across the board and do the job. Hell no.
I mean, come on.
Like, just even a moment's
reflection should tell us that.
But I think part of what it is is
that english speaking anglophone privilege is so baked into
(17:40):
the way we do things that it becomes one
of the unconscious biases that we talk about.
It becomes exactly what we talk about.
It becomes the water that we swim in and we don't
even notice it until somebody outside us points it out.
So, rant part one ended.
Look, I didn't ask you to come on
(18:01):
this podcast to give me short answers.
I knew that that was a good video
and that's fine, because I think everything that
you just said there is so valid.
And I think it's really useful for people
to listen to this because it's certainly a
trap that I have fallen into before.
You know, I'm from the UK, right?
I speak English, I learnt German and French at school.
(18:23):
Couldn't remember a bit of it.
Now, I did get an a in German, but
I can't remember sausage because I haven't practised it.
But my point being that I haven't needed that, right.
I've had the privilege of being able
to work all across the world.
I've travelled to different parts of Europe.
I've even delivered inclusive language sessions in Germany,
(18:44):
you know, speaking English to the german team.
So there's just some really interesting aspects of the privilege
that has come with the fact that I speak English
and the fact that, you know, I've learned Spanish separately
as an adult and okay ish with that.
But that was also just to travel around South America
so that I was able to communicate with people.
(19:05):
But you just brought up so
many really interesting things there.
And I know we're talking about language, but ultimately, a
lot of your experiences as a black man and the
language that you've had to adapt to get other people
in different parts of the world to understand that has
just really connected skin tone discrimination in my head.
Because ultimately, ultimately, that's naturally a lot of what
(19:28):
racism is, you know, depending on how dark or
light you are from colonial times and still very
much neo colonialism right now, you've got that you're
more or less accepted in different communities, depending on
how dark or light your skin is.
So I think that we've kind of
touched on a thousand different things there.
(19:50):
I'm really interested to hear from you just some
examples of where you've seen language really connect people
and really be used quite effectively in training.
So whether it's in your own DEI training or
you've seen somebody else that's really talented and was
(20:10):
able to basically utilise some of the things you
were just saying then to help people from around
the world to go, ah, okay, hold on.
Talking about race in Germany is extremely
different because of the historical context to
what it is in the UK.
Whilst there's still a lot of taboo around talking about
race and racial inequities in the UK, and also, of
(20:32):
course, in the US and in some of those similar
countries where we all speak English, it is very different
because there's a really different connection.
We see it in some of the workshops we
do with people from Japan and Korea and places
like that as well, where the connection doesn't land
because it's just not seen in the same way.
But have you seen it language utilised in
(20:54):
a more effective way in DEI trainings?
I have, and in a few ways. And I'll start with sort of
the shallower ones, let's say.
And I'm going to kind of borrow heavily here
from the educator Zaretta Hammond's idea of, like, the
culture tree, right, where at the top we've got
the leaves and the fruit, the more accessible surface
(21:15):
stuff low emotional impact, and then going down onto
the branches and the trunk where it starts, and
the roots where it starts to get really deep.
Like this is speaking to who I am kind of thing.
At the shallower level, I've seen it be impactful,
not entirely great reasons on the shallow level, because,
for example, I've seen it my, you know, done
(21:36):
it myself, and I've seen it where you're talking
to an audience for whom English isn't their native
language, and you're able to throw in a few
words, a few concepts or whatever of the, you
know, from their language or from their background.
And I want to make it, you know,
I want to make a real careful point
here to not conflate language and cultural background,
(21:56):
because somebody from Angola, somebody from Brazil, are
both completely and from Portugal, are all three
of them completely native portuguese speakers, but have
wildly different cultural contexts and backgrounds.
So I'm not saying that one
is coextensive with the other.
I've seen people's faces light up when
I'm working with an audience in India.
(22:17):
And I'm saying I reference the prejudice that some people from
South India face, or the fact that in a lot of
offices in India, Hindi tends to be the main language.
But people from South India, they might speak Tamil
or Malayalam or Kannada or something like that.
I've seen people go, thank you.
Thank you for speaking to that. Thank you for.
And of course, we all know we
(22:38):
talk about it all the time, right?
And we experience it, too.
We know how good it feels to be
heard and seen and acknowledged like that.
Because even though I might know how many
scheduled languages there are in the indian constitution,
or I might have this broad idea about
indian linguistic politics or something like that. Cool.
(22:58):
But people also know where I'm coming from.
They know I was born in the US, they know I
live in Europe, they know that my native language is English.
In other words, they know I am.
In that sense, I am of the privileged class,
and I don't need to know about them. Right?
Because that.
That's always the dichotomy, right?
The minority must know how the major or.
(23:20):
No, because it's not a minority.
Majority things when it comes to English, actually, because
English is only spoken by 18% of the world,
and we're talking from functional to native speakers.
So English is a minority language globally.
So let me rephrase it.
The less powerful must always know how.
The more powerful and often accommodate to how,
the more powerful work, the more powerful can
(23:42):
choose or not to learn about and adapt
to and accommodate to the less powerful.
So there is this sort of baked in assumption
a lot of times in people that, well, you
were born in the US, you grew up speaking
among other languages, but you grew up speaking English.
(24:05):
You don't have to know.
Thank you for, you know.
And it's almost a sense of gratitude
in a way, and it make.
But it makes me feel.
I'm like, but no, don't be grateful.
I'm doing what I should.
You've learned whole ass language.
I don't speak Tamil, I don't speak
my layallum, my Hindi is shit.
Like, you're the one who learned that you did the work.
(24:26):
I'm placing most of the communicative burden the system
has placed and I am allowing it to reproduce
through me, has placed the communicative burden almost entirely
on you to learn to speak how I speak
and receive information in that way.
The very, very least I can do is know what the
(24:47):
hell I'm talking about when I'm speaking in your context.
Right?
So I love that people feel so heard
and seen and I really appreciate it.
I even had one participant in a session one
time almost come to tears because they're like, finally
somebody is saying something that means something to me.
But I also know it is sort of a holdover of
(25:11):
sort of being resigned to your place in a way and
not expecting somebody from the more privileged class, quote unquote, to
have to know anything about where you're coming from.
Oh, wow.
I mean, again, so much to unpack there.
I think a lot of people probably don't
know the fact that that English is only
spoken by about 18% of the world.
(25:32):
And like you say, that's not native
speakers, that's everybody that speaks English.
So that's not a big number, really,
when you think about the world.
And I love the way you also talked about
minority and majority, because often we talk about people,
especially in the UK and Europe and the US,
places like that, where we're talking about the minority,
and I'm using air quotes, who are actually tending
(25:53):
to be the global majority.
We're talking about people in China and India and Africa and
places like that that tend to be so hugely impacted by
the language that we use and the social programmes and the
social value in the work that we do as well.
And I also really loved that you picked
up that sense of responsibility because it's definitely
something that is buried deep within me.
(26:15):
I'm constantly thinking about how can I, as a
person in the DEI space who is not trans
make space and learn about the trans experience.
As somebody who is white, how can I make
sure I'm not taking space up here without really
putting in the work to understand what it is
(26:35):
to be black or indian or whatever. Whatever, whatever.
So actually, that sense of responsibility is something that
I think every DEI practitioner just naturally has built
into them and it's something I know we work
really hard on in our DEI training sessions with
organisations to get them to start to understand that
(26:55):
sense of responsibility, responsibility without it feeling overwhelming, because
that's a bit of a balance.
Right, right.
So I'm really interested to hear a
little bit more about some of the
challenges you think that organisations might face.
So I'm just interested to hear, especially when
we're thinking about language barriers, cultural nuances and
stuff like that, when people are putting in
(27:17):
DEI initiatives in organisations, you know, they're doing
all these wonderful things, but it's just not
landing because global.
What are some of the challenges
that you think that they're facing?
And can you give us any ideas on how
they might be able to get over those challenges?
If a person from a particular cultural background
is getting a training from a completely different
(27:38):
one that doesn't even speak to their cultural
background, they're going to shut down.
And then what happens?
The people who received the training didn't
really get much out of it.
At worst, they've become antagonistic
to the whole idea.
The people who developed and promoted the training and
oftentimes the people in the c suite think, well,
we didn't get any results out of this, so,
you know, it's shit, let's toss it. And then just.
(28:00):
It makes them just kind of sour on the. Sour.
The word, yes. Sour is the word I want.
Sorry, I could only think of the
word in Greek for a second.
It makes them sour on the efforts in general, because
even though we work in a field that is very
much about both the quantifiable and the qualifiable, we are
working with people who are going to be looking at
the bottom line and they will see, oh, this effort,
(28:22):
we invested a lot in it and it didn't pay
off, so we're not going to do it again.
And to me it doesn't make any sense at all.
Again, it's the equity thing.
You've got to give people what they
need to be able to understand something.
What I see happening is a lot of people
in non us places and especially in Europe, I'm
(28:44):
going to speak from that perspective because that's where.
Where I live, that's where home is.
When we bring it in from the outside and
we don't adapt it at all, we give them
a lot of fuel to say, this isn't ours.
You're just imposing it on us. Wow.
You want to be so decolonial or decolonized, and yet
you're imposing these ideas on us in your language that
didn't come from us, that don't know our history.
(29:06):
That's your problem.
That's not our problem.
Now, they're right up until the
point they say that's your problem.
That's not our problem because.
Because that's what we do.
We fuel the people who, for their own agenda, want
to pretend that racism doesn't exist in Europe, which you
and I both know is far from the truth.
But if we don't approach it in the way that
(29:27):
it exists here, then we give all sorts of fuel
to the people who want to discredit it with a
broad brush, again, for their own ideological reasons.
And the people you're talking about, there are
people that are in huge positions of power,
huge positions of influence, and obviously we're not
(29:50):
just talking about racism, we're talking about every
different aspect of this.
But, yeah, massively rife.
But I think this is really interesting because
there's some real nuances that I've definitely learned
in my years of working in the learning
and development field across Europe, across the world,
lots of different things like that.
(30:10):
And that's really helped me when I came
into the DEI field and really started focusing
on this from a learning point of view
and then working with people like yourselves, people
in various different collaboration projects.
It's really, really helped me to understand that
you can't, like you say, you can't put
a french solution on a brazilian problem.
It's just, it's never going to land, it's never going
(30:30):
to work and you're going to turn people off.
And that is exactly the challenge that
we've got now as DEI practitioners.
You know, we can't just rest on the
fact that we educate ourselves consistently about these
things and we can't just rest on the
fact that we're having these really important conversations.
We also need to think, well, how can I adapt
the way that I do things to suit the needs
(30:53):
of my learners, regardless of their cultural background and language
and all of those sorts of things?
And I think something that a lot of DEI practitioners
do really well, sadly, a lot of DEI practitioners don't
necessarily put that to the forefront of their mind.
And then it's that kind of one size fits all,
which, like you've said, we're trying to create equity here.
(31:14):
You can't create equity by delivering the
same thing to every single person.
It's just not going to land.
You have to connect with that in a
way that resonates with you in your language,
like you're talking about in your culture, in
your experience, from your personal point of view.
Otherwise, the people we're working with are never going
to get that sense of responsibility and that sense
of ownership that they can do something to change
(31:36):
the things that we're talking about here.
I like the way you used the word ownership. That was.
That was really.
I think that's really key to it. Oh, cool. Yeah.
It's a word I'm sometimes a bit reluctant to
use because sometimes it can scare people away.
So you kind of have to build
up to that sense of responsibility.
I think one of the big projects you and
I are actually collaborating on at the moment, you
(31:58):
know, we talk a lot more about practise. Right.
Than act, because people need to feel more comfortable
to practise having these types of conversations, practise doing
these things so it doesn't feel like the whole
world is on their shoulders, because it isn't.
And actually, the more each of us practise
talking about these things and understanding different people's
(32:21):
experiences and different people's perspectives and.
And all of those sorts of things, the less taboo
it's going to be to talk about these things and
just to get them out in the open. Right.
Because that's a big part of the challenge that we
face, is everyone's a bit secretive about the way they
feel about things and the experiences that they've had.
And they don't realise until they've gone through
(32:42):
something really horrific that the person they've sat
next to for three years in the office
also has been through something really horrific.
And they've got that bond.
And so there's just so many things when
we can open up the dialogue and listen.
Obviously, I'm talking in English right now.
We're talking to each other in English.
It doesn't necessarily have to be in English, but we
just have to open up that dialogue for us to
(33:03):
be able to practise being a bit more humane to
one another and just really starting to understand how can
we influence, how can we take ownership, responsibility for the
equity and that kind of environment that we would really
like everyone to be in. Absolutely. And that. And I.
That's why I love so much the way that you used
(33:24):
the word ownership there, because to me, part of what that
points to, and it's everything, everything you just said.
And it's, again, it's that idea that it becomes
internal, it becomes yours, not something that was imposed
on you, it becomes something that's yours, it relates
to your history, it relates to your culture, it
relates to your society, your lived experience.
(33:45):
So could you give us some sort of.
Just a really simple tip or a suggestion that
you think people who are in the positions of
power in organisations, maybe they're in the positions of
decision making around this type of work, something we
could give them to help them to address language
and culture related challenges at work.
(34:07):
Even if it's just something really simple.
Just understand that the way you look at
the world is not the only legitimate way,
and fully, fully get what it means.
Everything that follows on from that,
that's an emergent property of that.
Understand that your way of the world isn't the only legitimate
way of looking at it, and then act on that.
Create localised trainings, create more, you
(34:32):
know, workshops or elearnings or whatever
that are geared to particular populations.
You can even do it hybrid. Maybe the.
The in person session or the, you know, the synchronous
session is going to be in English, but the pre
work can be translated into Dutch or, you know, whatever.
One of the things that drives me absolutely
(34:53):
up a wall about the discourse around DEI
pushback is how expensive it is.
And I'm not saying that there aren't some DEI offerings
that are perhaps more expensive than they should be.
That's entirely not just possible, probable.
But the fact of the matter is, ain't
no company out there going into bankruptcy because
they spent too much on DEI.
Let's just be real honest about that.
(35:15):
We've seen the budget allocation.
Exactly.
They're managing much other parts
of their business incorrectly.
Let's just get real, real straight on that one.
Yeah, but these are simple things to do.
But they do require commitment.
They require the moral courage to make that
investment, and they require the moral courage to.
(35:39):
And this is something that we all have problems with as
human beings, including those of us who work in DEI.
They require the moral courage to decenter yourself and
say, the way I look at things, the way
I talk about things, the way I understand things,
the way I experience things, is not universal, and
it doesn't need to be universal.
And it's not even the standard
by which other things are measured.
(36:00):
It is one of many.
Know how much you don't know.
Seek to correct that state of not knowing as much
as possible and then be prepared to do what you
need to do to really bring that into life. Yeah.
Thank you.
I think that's a really nice way
to wrap up our conversation today.
(36:20):
I think some of those tips, whilst
some of them are more simple. Yeah, you're right.
There's complexity that sits behind them, but that shouldn't
scare us off actually bringing them to life.
Absolutely not.
I think that internal, that first personal aspect,
start to learn more about different types of
people, different cultures, different languages, different backgrounds, people
that are different to some of your aspects
(36:42):
of your identity, is a really powerful tool
to start to understand those different perspectives.
And I think if that's not something
we are proactively doing, that can be
a really, really good place to start.
I just want to thank you so much for this conversation.
Obviously, I loved it because we love working together.
(37:03):
I'm talking for you, obviously, but
I love working with you. Oh, same thing.
I love working with you.
So I've been thrilled to do this talking with one
of my favourite people about one of my favourite subjects.
Yeah, sign me up tomorrow, same time. Right. Hello.
Right.
We get paid to talk for a living.
This is the best job in the World, seriously.
I think that there's just some really useful
things for people to take away there.
(37:24):
There's definitely going to be some light
bulb moments for people that have never
really thought about language in this context.
They've never really understood the difference
between language nuances and cultural nuances
because they are different.
But of course, they're closely connected
in lots of ways as well.
So I think there's going to be some really
useful things for people to take away and I
hope they've enjoyed listening to this as much as
(37:45):
I've enjoyed having this conversation with you.
So thank you so much for
taking the time, Michael, thank you. Thank you.
It has absolutely been my pleasure.
What an amazing person Michael is.
And just some really fantastic insights into the way
that you can really take your diversity, equity and
(38:07):
inclusion initiatives into that cultural awareness piece and really
starting to think cross culturally, cross language and across
the whole of the globe.
I particularly liked the things he was
talking around, decolonising DEI, really decentering ourselves
as well, a little bit about that
responsibility space and just the passion that
(38:28):
really came through from Michael there.
I think you get a really good sense
of what a wonderful facilitator and coach he
is for the people that he worked.
We really hope that you enjoyed this episode and
were able to take something really useful away.
Come back and listen to episodes with us to find out
more really useful things around the work that we do.
Hello and welcome to this first podcast in
our second season of a conversation with.
We're here today with the incredibly talented Michael
Reid, who I've had the luxury of being
able to work with for some time.
He's a linguistic expert, an inclusion expert, and has
worked across lots of different parts of the world.
(00:32):
We have a really good explore around all the
different aspects of language and culture and how they
really connect with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, how
they can show it differently around the world, and
some of the key challenges that he sees organisations
facing, as well as quite a handy few tips
towards the end of the podcast.
(00:53):
One of the things that you'll notice in
my conversation with Michael is how passionate both
of us get when we're talking about this.
And Michael is so passionate about this particular
way of looking at diversity, equity and inclusion.
One of the things you might notice a little
bit of slapping hands just because he's so passionate
in the way that he talks about these things.
So if there's any of those random noises
you can hear coming through, that's just Michael's
(01:15):
passion coming through in a slightly different way.
So grab a cover, kick back and enjoy this episode.
Okay, so welcome to the podcast.
We are talking to the
absolutely wonderful Michael Reid today.
Michael and I have been working together
(01:35):
for, oh, probably about a year and
a half now on collaboration projects.
So we've really got to know
each other's facilitation style and expertise.
And I'm very excited to have him here.
I'm going to let him introduce himself and tell you a
little bit about who he is and what he does.
Thank you so much, Zoe.
I am very excited to be here as well.
Like you said, my name is Michael Reid.
(01:57):
My pronouns are he and him.
I am a linguistic and cultural equity consultant.
I live in Athens, Greece.
I've been doing this work for 25 years now
and I started out in the social services sector.
Actually, I was a translator and interpreter
for the courts and hospital system in
the United States in Washington state.
(02:17):
And after about six years of doing
that, I went into language education.
For a while I was a language professor and soon ish.
After that I went into administration.
I was director of international recruitment
and coordinator for study abroad programmes.
And as I was doing that, I was also
sitting on the boards of several organisations working in
(02:38):
the DEI space, even though it wasn't called DEI
at the time, that's what it was, you know,
fair housing, anti discrimination, that kind of thing.
And as I was sort of doing those
two tracks, I started developing a series of
workshops, seminars, trainings on cross cultural competency, communication
(02:58):
and that kind of thing.
And somewhere along the line, I realised that there
was this enormous gap between the two fields.
You know, we had international education, international business,
on the one hand, that had this really
almost self satisfied conviction that they were already
diverse, they were already inclusive, just by virtue
(03:19):
of having the name international in their title.
And the fact of the matter is, that isn't true.
In fact, working in international education, at least
in the United States, it's a little bit
different here in Europe, but not totally.
But working in international education in the
United States taught me how very little
(03:42):
so many people in international education actually
care about diversity, equity and inclusion issues.
Like anywhere from paying lip service sort of
in the middle of the spectrum, to kind
of ambivalent, to openly antagonistic at times.
But then I would look over at my other track, which
was what would come to be known as the DEI track.
(04:04):
And it was so insular, so inner directed.
So this idea that the US, you know, and at
a stretch, Canada and the UK were the centre of
the universe when it comes to DEi, thought that I
realised that they weren't really doing inclusion because they were
(04:24):
excluding the rest of the world.
So at that point, I decided it was time for me to.
And I know this sounds incredibly
grandiose, please forgive me for it.
But to decolonize DEI, to make sure that when
we are doing it, we're doing it in a
way that really responds to the history, the culture,
(04:45):
the society, the background, the language, crucially, of the
people that we're talking to.
Because if I go and I talk to a
german audience or a french audience or whatever about
Emmett Till, about Medgar Evers, about Marcus Garvey, that
has no residence, it's not part of their history.
It doesn't mean racism doesn't exist in those places.
But that is not the entry point, because that's
(05:08):
not part of their either historical or lived experience.
So for these things to land, they have
to be talked about in a way that.
That resonates with people using material from that
society, from that history, from that culture.
So that is as brief as I am probably able to do.
Introduction brevity is not one of my skills, which I
(05:33):
really appreciate, because I get to train with you.
And sometimes when we're co facilitating, I forget that
I'm training because I'm just listening to you.
I'm like, wow, this is so interesting.
And then you'll be like, right.
And over to Zoe Sugar.
Okay, well, I appreciate it.
It's the same with all of the people I get
(05:53):
to co facilitate with just absolutely amazing talent and people
we're actually going to get on other podcast episodes as
well, so I can't wait to hear from them.
One of my favourite things that you say, I mean,
there's a lot of things, but one of my favourite
things that you say is that you don't like to
put a french solution on a brazilian problem.
And that's really what I want to look at
(06:13):
today is the idea of different aspects of DEI.
Like you say, you know, the UK, the
US, Canada, Australia, wherever, tend to have that
biggest idea of what we think about DEI
is what the world should think about DEI.
And I mean, listen, this is a
hangover from colonialism and things like that.
We know that massively the same way as English.
(06:35):
I'm doing air quotes for the listeners.
English as a universal business language
is also a hangover from that.
And listen, we're very lucky, you
know, I only speak English.
You speak many languages.
You've delivered for us in many languages as
well, and you deliver lots of different workshops.
But I think I'm really interested to hear how
language plays a part, how the way our different
(06:58):
cultures in the different parts of the world that
we're talking about really plays a part in those
common challenges that organisations can have when it comes
to really thinking about how to implement diversity, equity
and inclusion initiatives.
So I'm really excited to have
you here talking about that today.
I am very excited to talk about it.
(07:18):
I mean, you know me well enough to know that I will
jump on any excuse, or even if it just looks like a
slight excuse to talk about these things, I am all over it.
So, of course, what the listeners don't know is
that we probably spent about 35 minutes talking about
all of this before we could start recording.
(07:43):
And here's the thing.
If I were a different person, maybe after
those 35 minutes, I would have sort of
exhausted everything I have to talk about.
But that.
That's not even the appetiser.
That's like the aperitif for me.
And let's go. Now.
That was a piece of bruschetta.
Oh, this is like a amuse bouche for us. Exactly.
(08:04):
Exactly.
Oh, darn, I'm gonna get hungry.
Okay, so.
So let's.
Let's get stuck straight in then.
I'd really love to just get
your thoughts on a few things.
So I'm really interested to hear about your,
your ideas around language and how you think
it affects diversity and inclusion in organisations.
(08:25):
And, you know, listen we work with organisations
from around the world, but very heavily influenced
by the US and the UK, just because
that's where a lot of the bases are.
But of course we work in different countries as well.
But I'm really interested to hear how does
language affect D&I in those organisations?
(08:45):
You know, I take a step back and I
think, okay, what is the purpose of language?
What is language for?
There's a large scientific
aspect to linguistics, right?
When we're talking about phonology, phonetics, that kind of thing,
how does, how do the muscles in your mouth move
to create certain sounds and that kind of thing?
But there's a large amount of soft
(09:07):
sciences, humanities in it as well, right?
And that's, I am, I like to think,
fairly well versed in the scientific part.
Like, I can tell you where a front vowel articulates
or how a plosive articulates or whatever like that.
But historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, in
other words, the more humanities part
of it is really my focus.
So I look at what is the purpose of language?
(09:29):
And the purpose of language is to get what's in here.
And for the listeners, I'm pointing at my head
to get what's in here out to another person.
The fundamental fact of the human experience is that
we have no consistent, replicable access to the inner
world of other people unless they choose to share
(09:50):
it with us through language, right?
And when I'm saying language, generally we think of
spoken language, but it could be signed language, it
could be whatever, some form of communication, right?
So that is the core purpose.
I sort of take it back to that step.
Then when we go another step, we say,
okay, language is a reflection of what's going
(10:12):
on mentally, so we can take clues.
And this is why it bothers me when
people say, oh, well, it's just a word.
Oh, well, it's just this, it's just that it is.
But everything is just something, but it also has something
behind it and it also serves a particular purpose.
So we could say, oh, well, we call it a chairman.
(10:32):
It could be, you know, woman, it could be somebody who's
non binary, whatever, but we just call it a chairman.
What's the problem?
It's just a word.
Here's the problem.
It is a historical holdover from a
time when those positions of authority were
reserved for male identifying people.
And it reflects a certain way of thinking that you
(10:53):
might still even have and not be conscious of it.
And that's one of the really big
things that we need to remember.
And we talk about this a lot in
linguistics, especially sociolinguistics, what we are conscious of
in terms of our communication is only part
of what's actually going on.
There's a lot of unconscious stuff going on
in communication, in our word choices, in our
(11:15):
syntactic choices, all of those kind of things.
So language points to the thought.
It isn't the thought, right.
The word chairman is not per se bad.
It's the thought and the history
that it points to and reinforces.
If it's continually used, that's where the problem is.
(11:37):
So when people say, oh, why do
you care so much about language?
I say, because language is indicative of things.
Now, let's break it down to something more specific
when we're talking about actual different languages, because what
I've just talked about is sort of the concept
of language, the theory of language.
It can occur even among speakers of the same language.
(11:58):
L one speakers, in other words,
native speakers of the same language.
When we're talking about different languages, we
have a layer of complexity added, because
let's just give this as an example.
And this was brought up to me
by another colleague who speaks German.
I don't speak German very well.
I can get by, but it's not great.
We were talking about DEI stuff and talking
(12:18):
about the complexities of using the term race
in English with german speaking audiences, because a
lot of german people will have learned in
school what that word translates to.
They'll maybe translate it in their heads in German, and
one of the main words will be the word that
Hitler used in mein kampf to talk about the purity
(12:40):
of the race and all of these kinds.
So it has this automatic, very legitimate negative connotation
for people that that wall is going to go
up immediately, right now, if I don't know German,
if I don't understand the culture, if I don't
understand the history, I don't know where those potential
stumbling blocks are and how to talk around them.
(13:02):
Another example for me is just even talking
about race at all is going to look
very different from language to language.
A major eye opening experience for me was when I was
living in Japan, I was going to school, and I had
grown up in California, which, as people may or may not
know, has a very large spanish speaking population.
(13:25):
So a lot of people in California
have at least passive competence in Spanish,
even if it's not their main language.
So I had a lot of friends when
I was living in Japan, going to school.
I just sort of happened to fall in with a
group of friends from South America, Chile, Paraguay, that.
And you know, we would hang out.
Cause we sort of shared some stuff.
And I remember we were talking one
(13:45):
time and my friend from Paraguay said.
Cause I mentioned something about being black.
And my friend from Paraguay said, you know.
And this was like what?
To me because I was a teenager at the time,
it's like, you know, in Paraguay you wouldn't be black.
Like what do you mean? Of course I'm.
Of course I'm, I'm. I'm black.
Like I remember the first time I went to a small town
(14:06):
in the United States and somebody shouted the n word out of
me at me and chased me out of a public bathroom.
Like I'm black, just in case you don't know.
And he's like here's the thing.
We would call you Moreno because that is, that's the, that's
the colour we go by sort of what the shade of
the person is not genetic stuff or anything like that.
I was like oh, whoa.
(14:28):
And then, you know, I got more into it and I
talked to my friend from Chile about it and he's like
yeah, that's kind of how we do it too.
And like I said, my mind was just blown by that.
And I realised that even how we classify race, what
we say is black, what we say is white.
Whatever is extremely dependent on, on where we are.
(14:49):
And if we're talking to people and if we
insist on using only one language then we're going
to say things that don't really line up with
how they've carved up the world, right?
So if I'm speaking in Portuguese and I'm speaking with
somebody in Brazil and I, you know, I use the
word black to describe myself, they might look at me
(15:09):
and be like why are you saying that?
You know, why are you saying your, your,
you're Preto, your negro when you're clearly parto?
So that is another area in
which language is really important.
Because if you're a global organisation and you say this
is our standard DEI training and everybody will get the
same training and they will all get it in the
(15:30):
same language and they'll be happy about it, guess what?
The only people who are really going to fully,
fully, fully get what you've done is people who
are either enculturated or acculturated in the same framework
as the person who created the training.
Because they'll get the references, they'll
(15:50):
get the language, they'll get.
If I'm talking to somebody in the US and they say
I'm black, even though clearly I am also partly scottish.
They know what I mean when I'm saying black.
They know that that is my
social identity, that's my political identity.
If I'm giving a training here in Greece and
I say I'm black, people are like, are you?
(16:13):
You look like maybe you're, I don't know, brazilian,
because I've gotten that here, like, you brazilian?
Are you puerto rican?
Are you egyptian?
I get egyptian a lot, that kind of thing. So. Or maybe.
Maybe southern Greek, like down
in Crete, something like that. Right?
So that's the thing.
If you make this one language, one
(16:33):
worldview, one lens, standardised model, it's not
going to work for everybody.
And honestly, and I understand fully, by the way,
I am at least self aware enough to realise
that I'm beginning to get into a rant.
So I promise I'll stop in the next 30 seconds.
But it seems very strange to me because
it is self evidently obvious from the foundational
(16:56):
principles of equity that you cannot do the
same thing for everybody and even have a
problem prayer of getting even broadly similar outcomes.
The whole idea of equity is that we
give people what they need to have the
opportunity to get broadly equal outcomes.
And yet in DEI, somehow we think we're exempt
(17:18):
from that and we can just deliver one kind
of training to everybody and it's going to fit
everybody across the board and do the job. Hell no.
I mean, come on.
Like, just even a moment's
reflection should tell us that.
But I think part of what it is is
that english speaking anglophone privilege is so baked into
(17:40):
the way we do things that it becomes one
of the unconscious biases that we talk about.
It becomes exactly what we talk about.
It becomes the water that we swim in and we don't
even notice it until somebody outside us points it out.
So, rant part one ended.
Look, I didn't ask you to come on
(18:01):
this podcast to give me short answers.
I knew that that was a good video
and that's fine, because I think everything that
you just said there is so valid.
And I think it's really useful for people
to listen to this because it's certainly a
trap that I have fallen into before.
You know, I'm from the UK, right?
I speak English, I learnt German and French at school.
(18:23):
Couldn't remember a bit of it.
Now, I did get an a in German, but
I can't remember sausage because I haven't practised it.
But my point being that I haven't needed that, right.
I've had the privilege of being able
to work all across the world.
I've travelled to different parts of Europe.
I've even delivered inclusive language sessions in Germany,
(18:44):
you know, speaking English to the german team.
So there's just some really interesting aspects of the privilege
that has come with the fact that I speak English
and the fact that, you know, I've learned Spanish separately
as an adult and okay ish with that.
But that was also just to travel around South America
so that I was able to communicate with people.
(19:05):
But you just brought up so
many really interesting things there.
And I know we're talking about language, but ultimately, a
lot of your experiences as a black man and the
language that you've had to adapt to get other people
in different parts of the world to understand that has
just really connected skin tone discrimination in my head.
Because ultimately, ultimately, that's naturally a lot of what
(19:28):
racism is, you know, depending on how dark or
light you are from colonial times and still very
much neo colonialism right now, you've got that you're
more or less accepted in different communities, depending on
how dark or light your skin is.
So I think that we've kind of
touched on a thousand different things there.
(19:50):
I'm really interested to hear from you just some
examples of where you've seen language really connect people
and really be used quite effectively in training.
So whether it's in your own DEI training or
you've seen somebody else that's really talented and was
(20:10):
able to basically utilise some of the things you
were just saying then to help people from around
the world to go, ah, okay, hold on.
Talking about race in Germany is extremely
different because of the historical context to
what it is in the UK.
Whilst there's still a lot of taboo around talking about
race and racial inequities in the UK, and also, of
(20:32):
course, in the US and in some of those similar
countries where we all speak English, it is very different
because there's a really different connection.
We see it in some of the workshops we
do with people from Japan and Korea and places
like that as well, where the connection doesn't land
because it's just not seen in the same way.
But have you seen it language utilised in
(20:54):
a more effective way in DEI trainings?
I have, and in a few ways. And I'll start with sort of
the shallower ones, let's say.
And I'm going to kind of borrow heavily here
from the educator Zaretta Hammond's idea of, like, the
culture tree, right, where at the top we've got
the leaves and the fruit, the more accessible surface
(21:15):
stuff low emotional impact, and then going down onto
the branches and the trunk where it starts, and
the roots where it starts to get really deep.
Like this is speaking to who I am kind of thing.
At the shallower level, I've seen it be impactful,
not entirely great reasons on the shallow level, because,
for example, I've seen it my, you know, done
(21:36):
it myself, and I've seen it where you're talking
to an audience for whom English isn't their native
language, and you're able to throw in a few
words, a few concepts or whatever of the, you
know, from their language or from their background.
And I want to make it, you know,
I want to make a real careful point
here to not conflate language and cultural background,
(21:56):
because somebody from Angola, somebody from Brazil, are
both completely and from Portugal, are all three
of them completely native portuguese speakers, but have
wildly different cultural contexts and backgrounds.
So I'm not saying that one
is coextensive with the other.
I've seen people's faces light up when
I'm working with an audience in India.
(22:17):
And I'm saying I reference the prejudice that some people from
South India face, or the fact that in a lot of
offices in India, Hindi tends to be the main language.
But people from South India, they might speak Tamil
or Malayalam or Kannada or something like that.
I've seen people go, thank you.
Thank you for speaking to that. Thank you for.
And of course, we all know we
(22:38):
talk about it all the time, right?
And we experience it, too.
We know how good it feels to be
heard and seen and acknowledged like that.
Because even though I might know how many
scheduled languages there are in the indian constitution,
or I might have this broad idea about
indian linguistic politics or something like that. Cool.
(22:58):
But people also know where I'm coming from.
They know I was born in the US, they know I
live in Europe, they know that my native language is English.
In other words, they know I am.
In that sense, I am of the privileged class,
and I don't need to know about them. Right?
Because that.
That's always the dichotomy, right?
The minority must know how the major or.
(23:20):
No, because it's not a minority.
Majority things when it comes to English, actually, because
English is only spoken by 18% of the world,
and we're talking from functional to native speakers.
So English is a minority language globally.
So let me rephrase it.
The less powerful must always know how.
The more powerful and often accommodate to how,
the more powerful work, the more powerful can
(23:42):
choose or not to learn about and adapt
to and accommodate to the less powerful.
So there is this sort of baked in assumption
a lot of times in people that, well, you
were born in the US, you grew up speaking
among other languages, but you grew up speaking English.
(24:05):
You don't have to know.
Thank you for, you know.
And it's almost a sense of gratitude
in a way, and it make.
But it makes me feel.
I'm like, but no, don't be grateful.
I'm doing what I should.
You've learned whole ass language.
I don't speak Tamil, I don't speak
my layallum, my Hindi is shit.
Like, you're the one who learned that you did the work.
(24:26):
I'm placing most of the communicative burden the system
has placed and I am allowing it to reproduce
through me, has placed the communicative burden almost entirely
on you to learn to speak how I speak
and receive information in that way.
The very, very least I can do is know what the
(24:47):
hell I'm talking about when I'm speaking in your context.
Right?
So I love that people feel so heard
and seen and I really appreciate it.
I even had one participant in a session one
time almost come to tears because they're like, finally
somebody is saying something that means something to me.
But I also know it is sort of a holdover of
(25:11):
sort of being resigned to your place in a way and
not expecting somebody from the more privileged class, quote unquote, to
have to know anything about where you're coming from.
Oh, wow.
I mean, again, so much to unpack there.
I think a lot of people probably don't
know the fact that that English is only
spoken by about 18% of the world.
(25:32):
And like you say, that's not native
speakers, that's everybody that speaks English.
So that's not a big number, really,
when you think about the world.
And I love the way you also talked about
minority and majority, because often we talk about people,
especially in the UK and Europe and the US,
places like that, where we're talking about the minority,
and I'm using air quotes, who are actually tending
(25:53):
to be the global majority.
We're talking about people in China and India and Africa and
places like that that tend to be so hugely impacted by
the language that we use and the social programmes and the
social value in the work that we do as well.
And I also really loved that you picked
up that sense of responsibility because it's definitely
something that is buried deep within me.
(26:15):
I'm constantly thinking about how can I, as a
person in the DEI space who is not trans
make space and learn about the trans experience.
As somebody who is white, how can I make
sure I'm not taking space up here without really
putting in the work to understand what it is
(26:35):
to be black or indian or whatever. Whatever, whatever.
So actually, that sense of responsibility is something that
I think every DEI practitioner just naturally has built
into them and it's something I know we work
really hard on in our DEI training sessions with
organisations to get them to start to understand that
(26:55):
sense of responsibility, responsibility without it feeling overwhelming, because
that's a bit of a balance.
Right, right.
So I'm really interested to hear a
little bit more about some of the
challenges you think that organisations might face.
So I'm just interested to hear, especially when
we're thinking about language barriers, cultural nuances and
stuff like that, when people are putting in
(27:17):
DEI initiatives in organisations, you know, they're doing
all these wonderful things, but it's just not
landing because global.
What are some of the challenges
that you think that they're facing?
And can you give us any ideas on how
they might be able to get over those challenges?
If a person from a particular cultural background
is getting a training from a completely different
(27:38):
one that doesn't even speak to their cultural
background, they're going to shut down.
And then what happens?
The people who received the training didn't
really get much out of it.
At worst, they've become antagonistic
to the whole idea.
The people who developed and promoted the training and
oftentimes the people in the c suite think, well,
we didn't get any results out of this, so,
you know, it's shit, let's toss it. And then just.
(28:00):
It makes them just kind of sour on the. Sour.
The word, yes. Sour is the word I want.
Sorry, I could only think of the
word in Greek for a second.
It makes them sour on the efforts in general, because
even though we work in a field that is very
much about both the quantifiable and the qualifiable, we are
working with people who are going to be looking at
the bottom line and they will see, oh, this effort,
(28:22):
we invested a lot in it and it didn't pay
off, so we're not going to do it again.
And to me it doesn't make any sense at all.
Again, it's the equity thing.
You've got to give people what they
need to be able to understand something.
What I see happening is a lot of people
in non us places and especially in Europe, I'm
(28:44):
going to speak from that perspective because that's where.
Where I live, that's where home is.
When we bring it in from the outside and
we don't adapt it at all, we give them
a lot of fuel to say, this isn't ours.
You're just imposing it on us. Wow.
You want to be so decolonial or decolonized, and yet
you're imposing these ideas on us in your language that
didn't come from us, that don't know our history.
(29:06):
That's your problem.
That's not our problem.
Now, they're right up until the
point they say that's your problem.
That's not our problem because.
Because that's what we do.
We fuel the people who, for their own agenda, want
to pretend that racism doesn't exist in Europe, which you
and I both know is far from the truth.
But if we don't approach it in the way that
(29:27):
it exists here, then we give all sorts of fuel
to the people who want to discredit it with a
broad brush, again, for their own ideological reasons.
And the people you're talking about, there are
people that are in huge positions of power,
huge positions of influence, and obviously we're not
(29:50):
just talking about racism, we're talking about every
different aspect of this.
But, yeah, massively rife.
But I think this is really interesting because
there's some real nuances that I've definitely learned
in my years of working in the learning
and development field across Europe, across the world,
lots of different things like that.
(30:10):
And that's really helped me when I came
into the DEI field and really started focusing
on this from a learning point of view
and then working with people like yourselves, people
in various different collaboration projects.
It's really, really helped me to understand that
you can't, like you say, you can't put
a french solution on a brazilian problem.
It's just, it's never going to land, it's never going
(30:30):
to work and you're going to turn people off.
And that is exactly the challenge that
we've got now as DEI practitioners.
You know, we can't just rest on the
fact that we educate ourselves consistently about these
things and we can't just rest on the
fact that we're having these really important conversations.
We also need to think, well, how can I adapt
the way that I do things to suit the needs
(30:53):
of my learners, regardless of their cultural background and language
and all of those sorts of things?
And I think something that a lot of DEI practitioners
do really well, sadly, a lot of DEI practitioners don't
necessarily put that to the forefront of their mind.
And then it's that kind of one size fits all,
which, like you've said, we're trying to create equity here.
(31:14):
You can't create equity by delivering the
same thing to every single person.
It's just not going to land.
You have to connect with that in a
way that resonates with you in your language,
like you're talking about in your culture, in
your experience, from your personal point of view.
Otherwise, the people we're working with are never going
to get that sense of responsibility and that sense
of ownership that they can do something to change
(31:36):
the things that we're talking about here.
I like the way you used the word ownership. That was.
That was really.
I think that's really key to it. Oh, cool. Yeah.
It's a word I'm sometimes a bit reluctant to
use because sometimes it can scare people away.
So you kind of have to build
up to that sense of responsibility.
I think one of the big projects you and
I are actually collaborating on at the moment, you
(31:58):
know, we talk a lot more about practise. Right.
Than act, because people need to feel more comfortable
to practise having these types of conversations, practise doing
these things so it doesn't feel like the whole
world is on their shoulders, because it isn't.
And actually, the more each of us practise
talking about these things and understanding different people's
(32:21):
experiences and different people's perspectives and.
And all of those sorts of things, the less taboo
it's going to be to talk about these things and
just to get them out in the open. Right.
Because that's a big part of the challenge that we
face, is everyone's a bit secretive about the way they
feel about things and the experiences that they've had.
And they don't realise until they've gone through
(32:42):
something really horrific that the person they've sat
next to for three years in the office
also has been through something really horrific.
And they've got that bond.
And so there's just so many things when
we can open up the dialogue and listen.
Obviously, I'm talking in English right now.
We're talking to each other in English.
It doesn't necessarily have to be in English, but we
just have to open up that dialogue for us to
(33:03):
be able to practise being a bit more humane to
one another and just really starting to understand how can
we influence, how can we take ownership, responsibility for the
equity and that kind of environment that we would really
like everyone to be in. Absolutely. And that. And I.
That's why I love so much the way that you used
(33:24):
the word ownership there, because to me, part of what that
points to, and it's everything, everything you just said.
And it's, again, it's that idea that it becomes
internal, it becomes yours, not something that was imposed
on you, it becomes something that's yours, it relates
to your history, it relates to your culture, it
relates to your society, your lived experience.
(33:45):
So could you give us some sort of.
Just a really simple tip or a suggestion that
you think people who are in the positions of
power in organisations, maybe they're in the positions of
decision making around this type of work, something we
could give them to help them to address language
and culture related challenges at work.
(34:07):
Even if it's just something really simple.
Just understand that the way you look at
the world is not the only legitimate way,
and fully, fully get what it means.
Everything that follows on from that,
that's an emergent property of that.
Understand that your way of the world isn't the only legitimate
way of looking at it, and then act on that.
Create localised trainings, create more, you
(34:32):
know, workshops or elearnings or whatever
that are geared to particular populations.
You can even do it hybrid. Maybe the.
The in person session or the, you know, the synchronous
session is going to be in English, but the pre
work can be translated into Dutch or, you know, whatever.
One of the things that drives me absolutely
(34:53):
up a wall about the discourse around DEI
pushback is how expensive it is.
And I'm not saying that there aren't some DEI offerings
that are perhaps more expensive than they should be.
That's entirely not just possible, probable.
But the fact of the matter is, ain't
no company out there going into bankruptcy because
they spent too much on DEI.
Let's just be real honest about that.
(35:15):
We've seen the budget allocation.
Exactly.
They're managing much other parts
of their business incorrectly.
Let's just get real, real straight on that one.
Yeah, but these are simple things to do.
But they do require commitment.
They require the moral courage to make that
investment, and they require the moral courage to.
(35:39):
And this is something that we all have problems with as
human beings, including those of us who work in DEI.
They require the moral courage to decenter yourself and
say, the way I look at things, the way
I talk about things, the way I understand things,
the way I experience things, is not universal, and
it doesn't need to be universal.
And it's not even the standard
by which other things are measured.
(36:00):
It is one of many.
Know how much you don't know.
Seek to correct that state of not knowing as much
as possible and then be prepared to do what you
need to do to really bring that into life. Yeah.
Thank you.
I think that's a really nice way
to wrap up our conversation today.
(36:20):
I think some of those tips, whilst
some of them are more simple. Yeah, you're right.
There's complexity that sits behind them, but that shouldn't
scare us off actually bringing them to life.
Absolutely not.
I think that internal, that first personal aspect,
start to learn more about different types of
people, different cultures, different languages, different backgrounds, people
that are different to some of your aspects
(36:42):
of your identity, is a really powerful tool
to start to understand those different perspectives.
And I think if that's not something
we are proactively doing, that can be
a really, really good place to start.
I just want to thank you so much for this conversation.
Obviously, I loved it because we love working together.
(37:03):
I'm talking for you, obviously, but
I love working with you. Oh, same thing.
I love working with you.
So I've been thrilled to do this talking with one
of my favourite people about one of my favourite subjects.
Yeah, sign me up tomorrow, same time. Right. Hello.
Right.
We get paid to talk for a living.
This is the best job in the World, seriously.
I think that there's just some really useful
things for people to take away there.
(37:24):
There's definitely going to be some light
bulb moments for people that have never
really thought about language in this context.
They've never really understood the difference
between language nuances and cultural nuances
because they are different.
But of course, they're closely connected
in lots of ways as well.
So I think there's going to be some really
useful things for people to take away and I
hope they've enjoyed listening to this as much as
(37:45):
I've enjoyed having this conversation with you.
So thank you so much for
taking the time, Michael, thank you. Thank you.
It has absolutely been my pleasure.
What an amazing person Michael is.
And just some really fantastic insights into the way
that you can really take your diversity, equity and
(38:07):
inclusion initiatives into that cultural awareness piece and really
starting to think cross culturally, cross language and across
the whole of the globe.
I particularly liked the things he was
talking around, decolonising DEI, really decentering ourselves
as well, a little bit about that
responsibility space and just the passion that
(38:28):
really came through from Michael there.
I think you get a really good sense
of what a wonderful facilitator and coach he
is for the people that he worked.
We really hope that you enjoyed this episode and
were able to take something really useful away.
Come back and listen to episodes with us to find out
more really useful things around the work that we do.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.