CEO Reflections
The CEOs with me today, and I’m going to let them introduce themselves, are people who have been very supportive of me individually in my journey over the last almost 18 months, whose work I inspire and also they’re just cool people. Now I say this often, nothing you do in this space is about proving to the world you’re perfect, just like nothing I do. There are plenty of people who are choosing not to engage, not to listen. So, I always want you to remember that even if we share some things that have you thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, we’ve done everything wrong. We’ve got to go back again!’ It’s ok, just be present today and know everything we’re doing is with a view to help.
So, hello, my wonderful guests, thank you for being here and being so patient with life. We’ve all been there so I’m not going to say anything more. I’m going to ask you to briefly introduce yourselves. And we’ll kick off in order of who arrived in the building first
Sandra
Hello, I’m Sandra Skeete, Chief Executive of Octavia Housing a housing association based in London. We provide housing for those in greatest need, currently housing just over 10,000 people in around 5,000 homes. But key to what we do is really making sure we connect with our communities. And provide support to people so they can really fulfil their aspirations and make the most of all the opportunities that we have in London. We’ve got just over 400 staff and mainly providing services around care support. But fundamentally just making sure that people are safe in the fantastic homes we provide.
Joanne
Hello, I’m Joanne Dewar, the CEO of Global Processing Services, which is a technology company that sits behind the really exciting FinTech space. It’s a very high growth sector. And I’ve been CEO for three years. I’ve got just over 200 staff and I really wanted to lean into this topic through a journey that we’re going talk about in a moment.
Shereen
Thank you and last but by no means least, John.
John
Hi, I’m John Wilson. I’m the CEO for Total Jobs Group in the UK but we’re a wider group globally, and essentially, we’re probably the UK’s leading online solutions partner. So we help people find jobs. We help companies find talent. We generate about five million applications every month for companies up and down the country, and other countries as well. And we do that with an awesome team here in the UK, about 800-900 people, but about 3,500 globally across the organisation.
Summer of 2020
I want to take you all back to the summer of last year, and to think about what was going on in your world, not just organisationally but also in life in general. Part of the reason we’re all here today specifically is because of our reaction and response to Briana Taylor’s murder, to George Floyd’s murder, and to my my equivalent, Amy Cooper in Central Park. John, if I come to you first what were some of the things going through your mind at the time when you started to clock that maybe the world wasn’t as you once saw it.
John
So, starting a tiny little bit earlier as I started this job just before lockdown, I’d say the back end of 2019 and as I was learning about the organisation, I wanted to do more on the people side. We didn’t really have ERGs as a company, and I had just very high level, general good intentions. Then it started to escalate as my colleagues spoke to me one Monday asking why we hadn’t done anything for International Women’s Day? Because we didn’t do anything. And that was unacceptable as we’re relying on people’s goodwill to do such things, when actually as a company we need to do them. And the great thing that occurred was as soon as we spoke to people in the company, is that they agreed and they wanted to do something too.
But then critically, we saw the murder of George Floyd on TV. It created a tremendous amount of pain in the organisation, an anger or desire and energy to fix what we could fix inside the organisation. We can’t change the world but we can change Total Jobs for sure. And the great thing about it was, it wasn’t just people from minority ethnic groups that were talking to us about, it was the LGBTQ community, it was women, it was parents, and fantastic thing then was by essentially just helping my colleagues do what they wanted to do, we managed to set up a number of fantastic communities within the organisation and a few other structures around it. It is really helping us internally change the way we operate for the good of every single employee not only in our company, but also in the companies that we help to attract talent and also in the talent that we’re attracting ourselves. So, it has a lot of wide-reaching importance. In general, for just being a good human, but also actually running a company that does what we do.
Joanne
We talk about penny drop moments since the summer of 2020. My journey also started slightly before then because I found that I was suddenly being given the mic as a Female CEO in a private equity backed organisation as there’s not many others around. But I was given this mic to talk about what it’s like being a female CEO, and I realised that I had an amazing opportunity, but not every community gets such opportunities. And so, I’d already taken on a responsibility of, “What can I do with this mic!’ because then I can use it to address diversity and inclusion in its wider sense, as opposed to a singular focus on gender. I’m also somebody who is very uncomfortable with anything that’s linked to lip service. If I’m going to make any statement, if I’m going to make any change, it needs to be meaningful.
And so, as I’ve pulled together my first statements on the back of George Floyd’s murder, I was soul searching as to what to really do about it. What we could do that was sustainable, as opposed to the ‘flavour of the moment’. Over that summer, on holiday, I picked up the book by Reni Eddo-Lodge, “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race”. The title grabbed my attention. Why not? It had the perfect impact. So, I read that book on holiday and it was really eye opening and I came back from holidays to do something, but recognising that we’re not going to make any meaningful change about institutional exclusion until systemic racism becomes a white-on-white conversation. But the issue was, where to get started. And that’s where my brilliant people team came in. They found you! You are our specialist that could help us figure out a path forwards and enabled us to start to have the right conversations within our own team and colleagues. And you ran this great vehicle called the Listening Forum that enabled a number of our Black colleagues to share their experiences, share their stories, to the wider organisation. And even when we started planning, as you will remember, we were nervous about putting our colleagues through what we thought might be a traumatic experience, but every single one of them felt that the experience was empowering. And you know, they had an opportunity to be listened to, for the first time in their careers. And that’s started us on a journey. Of understanding, of reflection, of change. A lot of changes, some quite small changes, I feel that we’re now on that journey, and to help other organisations start that same journey.
Knowing the challenges
You all run organisations that can have a material impact on inclusion. Now, as you know, I’m not talking about people bringing their ‘full selves’ to work I’m talking about people being able to participate fully in society. All three of you and your organisations allow people to do that.
If we come now to economic exclusion, and specifically you Sandra, if we think about what was different starting from last summer and how that informed the way your organisation delivers its services, how you wished your teams to do thing differently.
Sandra
From my perspective, I’m working in a sector that’s very much focused on social purpose. And in an organisation, that’s got more than 150 years history of providing housing and support for our most vulnerable and doing that in a way where it’s not just about the housing, it’s about the person, it’s about you know, what is it that they need to be able to make the most of these opportunities that are available in London, or should be available to them. And in that respect, inclusion has always been at the heart of what we do. But having said that, the summers of 2019 2020, I’d say that I hit a wall, really.
And it was partly because we were doing so much at pace to pivot the organisation so that we could continue to do as best we could to meet the needs of our residents and people who use our services. And everyone was totally committed to making sure that we could do that, you know, even though there were certain services that we had to stop because of pandemic especially, you know, supporting young people, and some of the services to other people as well as well as just finding new ways to support them. But you know everyone was focused on that. And then, all of a sudden, the news hit and for me, it was, you know, when is this going to stop. And from my perspective, it really made me reflect on the fact that I’ve been doing this for a long time. You know at the start of my career, there was a real focus on race, you know, I was able to benefit from positive action that recognised that we needed more people who looked like me in the sector, but then it died down and no one said anything, and then 30 years later, we’re there again. So, it really made me reflect on what does it really mean in terms of social purpose in a sector like ours?
As Octavia I think, we were in a strong position as we had a strong legacy to build on, but you know, it made me challenge whether we’re really impacting in the right way. Are we really focusing on the right issues? And, you know, on the main, I’d say, yes. But there’s always that challenge in terms of, are we connecting in the right way, in our communities? And in terms of the services that we’re providing? Are there any disparities, and whether we understand what they might be? And we spent a lot of time looking at that data, as we often end up doing as CEOs to really understand how this issue is playing out within our organisation. For example, one thing we discovered was that in terms of our role as landlord sometimes you have to take action where individuals with tenants are not compliant with their tenancy. I mean, on the whole, our approach is to help people to sustain their tenancies. And we found that actually, Black tenants are more likely to be served with notice than others. So, we want to understand that better. We’ve got some financial inclusion services, and I really wanted to know if there was an issue for the Black community to access these services. We’ve really focused our effort in targeting those services to make sure that there isn’t any exclusion. We also found that Black residents were more likely to live in overcrowded housing, and so we’ve really targeted services to raise awareness, understand what the needs are and look at solutions. Although I’d say we’ve got a really good track record and we’re starting from a strong position it’s important to understand now, you know, to hear from your residential customers or service users, how does it really feel for them and their perspective.
We did a piece of work with some of the young people we support where we asked them to film,’ How does it feel,’ and they came up with a really creative idea to of a short film just getting us to think about how it feels walking in their shoes. So, for me, in terms of your question around services and have we had to do something different, it’s about connecting and making sure that you’re relevant and that you understand how it is now. For me as a Black CEOs, Black female CEO, my experience is going to be very, very different from everyone else, really. So we need to find a way of really understanding and connecting and making sure we remain relevant, that we know what the challenges are.
And we don’t necessarily try to just copy what we see in other places; we do what’s right for us and what’s right for our residents. It depends on your starting position as well, and you have to be sensitive to that.
Starting from where you stand
John, if you wouldn’t mind saying, what were some of the challenges that you’ve grappled with personally, and also when you’ve thought about how you were going to lead this with your peers, board and the rest of the company. What were some of the things going through your mind at the time?
John
It was your videos that that started me on this initially. And those first few days there was some kind of collective decision, that this is just not good enough. I’ve always been in commercial roles where getting the best out of people has been the way to demonstrate you’re successful. So, I always kind of thought I was pretty good at you know, emotional intelligence and seeing the needs of people and understanding how to create winning culture and all of this kind of stuff. You kind of go, ‘Yeah, I’m good at all that, and then you realise I’m not!’ I’m blindsided by thinking that I’m good at something, but actually, I’m totally ignoring quite large swathes of what my people care about. And so, I guess, I’m an advert on this conference today of you don’t need to be an expert to care.
You really do have to take action. And I remember we had a conversation where you said, ‘John, we can’t do this without your help and people like you who are the CEOs around the country’. And I’m honoured to be here with two female CEOs, because that’s not typical elsewhere. Therefore, it does fall on middle aged white men to do something here. And, like I mentioned before, I think listening to our people I found was the only way. I have the habit of sometimes going into solution mode quite quickly. I want to fix stuff. And I don’t think this is an issue to fix, this is a spectrum that you have to work on and understand where am I? Where are my people on it? And what is the next step.
We messed up a lot. I think there’s that desire to want to do something and it comes from a good place. And I think over the last year, we’ve learned an awful lot and we’re a lot more proactive about how we manage our business. The teams are involved to make sure D&I is a fundamental part of the decision-making process in all areas of the company. But that wasn’t the case a little while ago, and I think the for anybody that’s in my position, where there’s probably that little urge like I want to do something but I don’t know what it is. We often talk about when you’re uncomfortable when you’re learning. And right now there’s probably a lot of people that look like they want to do something that are desperately uncomfortable. Well, that means you need to learn something, because you don’t know the answer. Right? So read some books, talk to people. I think it’s important then to make sure that you’re not relying on the people that are experiencing racism that are experiencing an inequitable existence. You have to take some steps, put some effort, put some money, put some people behind it. Otherwise it doesn’t move and you can be guilty of creating more work for the people that you actually want to create a better working environment for, essentially. I’ve got to say if I speak to people in my team right now, we all know we’re on the spectrum and no one’s there yet.
I guess what my team feel like is that they can speak up. That there’s awareness of the issues. They feel like they can interject in decisions and say, ‘Hey, we have really thought about this?’ And I think you know, being uncomfortable for a period of time is good and healthy. Stick in there. Stay uncomfortable until you’re not and then go somewhere where you’re uncomfortable again. I think it’s vital. But I guarantee as soon as you talk to people, then you realise you’re not on your own and it’s not a CEO thing. It’s an entire organisation thing for wanting to do the work. And it’s mainly about getting out of their way and making sure nothing else gets in their way. But that’s what’s happening. And I think it’s not rocket science. Make an effort to listen to people, take baby steps and moves, and it’s okay to make mistakes. Where we are now versus where we were 18 months ago is vastly different. But at moments along the way, you know, sometimes you want the world to swallow you up because you put your foot in it or you messed up.
You have to get messy and scrappy and difficult and emotional. But it’s so worthwhile for everybody in your organisation. And we had this chat that we can change what happens when you walk through the doors of our companies, but we can’t change every single thing that takes place outside those doors. But if everybody changes what happens when you walk through the door of your company, it does have an impact on the society that sits around your business. The 800 people in my offices in the UK can do a lot.
Joanne
If I was to describe for those considering your organisation and thinking, right, I don’t have a problem with racism in my organisation, therefore that’s not on high on our agenda. But. Start to ask yourself questions. How many times do you recruit from within your network? And are you encouraging this type of recruitment rather than looking further afield? How many times within the recruitment process are you using the term, ‘I need the right cultural fit’? Because when you’re talking about cultural fit in recruitment, what you’re actually is unconscious bias. And equally when you’re using recruitment agencies or headhunters when they’re bringing an all-white longlist and say there’s just no one else, did you really push that? Did you try and find another agency that can give you a different answer? These were some of the first questions that I started to ask, and with this awareness you can start to make some changes.
Getting over the line
We can’t force people to get over the line, and, in this context, I call it over the line. Recognising that you might put your foot in it. You might say the wrong thing. You might do something and somebody’s like, ‘oh my goodness’, and you retreat back into comfort and nothing then changes. Within organisations you have so much more control. Okay some organisations are like large tankers, but actually 90% is within your control or within the control of your extended board, so it isn’t as impossible as some people feel. The hardest bit is about knowing where to start and I completely get that and you know, that’s why I do so and create so much content in lots of different ways because I’m trying to challenge that excuse.
completely agree with you that at the start it was scary as anything, and as much as I wanted to commit, I was so scared of putting my foot in it or saying the wrong thing because you see people hung out to dry for potentially saying the wrong thing and it’s a minefield. It feels like minefield, but when I got over the hurdle of having the first conversation with my first Black colleagues, we started getting together with a group of Black colleagues, who helped me understand. Who share and give me space to make mistakes and say the wrong thing. And, you know, great example is, you know, we talk about the acronym BAME. I didn’t realise what I might be saying. And you end up so scared that something can be taken the wrong way, that you end up saying nothing and that’s even worse, but can happen. So that’s where Black colleagues can help and lean in although not that should be their responsibility but just helping provide a safe space where you can normalise these conversations.
John
And that’s one of the things Shereen that your videos have done. I know from speaking with you that you were pretty worried about how they would be perceived.
Lived experience as a Black CEO
John, I was just a hot mess! I was so annoyed. I was angry. I was hurt. I felt guilty for all of these emotions and I just kept thinking to myself, how come we keep repeating the same fucking cycle? You know, and that came across. Understanding how racism operates, how systemic racism operates, I was really worried about how I would be perceived if I suddenly started saying my version of the truth. And my version of truth is not mollycoddling anybody. My version of the truth has been really challenging and so it was a lot of work. I still have to do that. You know, because I still have more people advising me on how I should approach this work. And it takes practice, the more you do it just like a muscle. And like Sandra said, you normalise certain things and play them down. I think what I will say and I’m going to come to Sandra because you touched on this, is what makes it easier when you’re doing this work, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a colleague, whether you’re a leader, whether you’re somebody on the periphery, whether you in a community, is if you’re clear about the reason why you’re doing it, it makes it a damn sight easier to silence the voice of discomfort that’s gonna force you to retreat into silence. You know, if I did all of this just for like applause for something like CEO Weekly (it doesn’t exist, it’s just an example), but if I was doing it for that, then there’s certain ways in which I would show up, certain things that I would do that does not do anything to positively impact people who look like me, people who look like Sandra, some of the people who we’ve got here today. Because I’m that focused, it’s not perfect, but that’s my North Star so I can guide myself.
So, Sandra you mentioned earlier that one of the things that is a plus and a minus, and I want to focus on this as it’s still a big issue, how much of us having the lived experience in this space is a ‘blessing’ versus how much of it is really challenging at times.
Sandra
I said earlier that I personally hit the wall that summer and I felt completely debilitated by it. Literally the energy was just taken from me and it took me a while to process what had happened. It took me a while to think about, well, if I’m feeling like this, how is the rest of this organisation feeling, and bear in mind, we’re all working remotely, I couldn’t just rock up and have a chat with someone and say, ‘You know, how are you feeling?’ and so I’m thinking, ‘What do I do next?’ But also, just feeling I’ve got an organisation to run. Up until that point I’ve been communicating with my staff on a daily basis because we’re in this pandemic, we weren’t in our normal work environment, and then it made me feel, ‘Gosh, if I feeling like this, this must be impacting so many of our people right across this organisation, so I need to step up’. I needed to do something about this. I thought I’m going to use how I feel. I’m going to park the fact that I’m CEO of Octavia Housing, this is just how I feel as a Black woman, as a mother to two children. And knowing that when I step away from my office, I’m not CEO of Octavia Housing, I’m just a Black woman in London.
And so, I just shared some of my stories, and I tell you it’s just some because they’re a lot, but I use them to really kind of say to the organisation. ‘This is what we’re going through. This isn’t something that’s happened the other side of the pond. We’ve all seen it, but this is something that hit us personally.’ I felt like it happened to some of my family and that’s why it took me a long time to process. My son was 100 miles away working and I was thinking, ‘This could have been him’. So, I was able to connect emotionally with how people might be feeling. And I thought this was really important and it’s about authentic leadership. It would have been so easy just to park it and say, ‘I’ve got to get the corporate message out’. It was just about me. And I’ll admit, I went to a leadership meeting, and I was talking about it, and I was just overwhelmed by the emotion. But I do think that vulnerability is really important. In some respects, it can be an advantage. If you think about how to channel it and as I said earlier, it means that you’re in a position from your own lived experiences, you can kind of understand, are more open perhaps to understanding or able to look at things through a different lens. I think that I think that is an advantage.
I’ll never forget my very first job in housing when I knocked on one of our tenant’s door and they were shocked to see a Black housing officer, and they were telling me things that they said they could never have told anyone else in the organisation before. It’s that ability to connect on the topic that is clearly an advantage. But it can be a disadvantage as well. I mean, the immediate one is the weight of expectation. You know, ‘Am I going to fix this and how quickly am I going to do it?’ Because you’ve got the power to do it. Yeah, we’ve got complex organisations, and what we’re essentially talking about is culture change. And we all know what that takes. That’s not to say we can’t start, but it’s massive and complex. It takes time. You’ve got to take people with you. So that weight of expectation on me because I’ve been there, I’ve seen it, I’m always really mindful of. And how this whole agenda might be perceived in the organisation because it’s been led by a Black CEO. In that this is not my agenda. This is the organisation’s agenda. I understand, that might be the perception. I’ve had to think of ways of making it really clear that this is something we are doing as an organisation because it’s part of who we are. We’ve got strong social purpose. We serve a really diverse community. Our staff are diverse. We know that there are issues that we need to resolve around our people progressing in the organisation. Yes, we’ve got a Black CEO, we’ve got a reasonably diverse leadership team. We’ve got a diverse board. But we know if we listen to what our Black colleagues are telling us, we’ve got more work to do. So, this isn’t my agenda. This is what we need to do as an organisation to truly demonstrate that we’re living our values, but because I’m mindful of how this might be perceived, I’ve made it my purpose to really ensure that this has progressed in a way where it’s evident that our board is really supportive of what we’re doing. I’ve got a member of our board who also chairs on the corporate committee that leads our people agenda. He chairs our EDI Task Force. I think that’s really helped to show this is something that the board and the executive are doing jointly, but there’s real strong leadership from the board. I also have an executive lead on this as well. So, they work really closely together. And I think that helps.
The other thing for me is really looking at your corporate strategy, i.e., what’s your purpose, and we’ve used this as an opportunity to really look again at our purpose, and as I said, fundamentally we’re there to provide housing and support. But we’re now an organisation that uses this to tackle inequality, because that’s fundamentally who we are. Because the other thing for me is I don’t want to step away, and the agenda dies. I don’t think it will. But it’s always a risk in any organisation. It’s not about the three of us CEOs sitting here, it’s how you leave the legacy. I said, I started my career where there was a real focus on EDI but it didn’t keep momentum. We’re now tapping into it again. So, I need to know that this is bigger than me.
John
I think that’s a critical point. We have this conversation too, because often it starts and then it’s like, ‘Oh, what happens if that person leaves do we still carry on?’ And I think that t was something that we grappled with pretty early on, about wanting to make sure that this was not like ‘John Wilson’s agenda’. There was no agenda actually. And it’s funny you talk about dealing with challenging situations and making sure that you don’t retreat into yourself if someone calls you out. I think, for me, my agenda is that I don’t have an agenda. Like I’m generally genuinely just trying to do the right thing by the people who work in my organisation, by the people who apply for jobs on my website, by the customers who want to hire people. No one can call me out on anything because what we’re doing is fundamentally the right thing because what is the opposite of diversity, equity and inclusion? It’s homogeny. It’s unfairness. Exclusion. No one’s signing up for that. But also, people are not signing up for actively making things more diverse, creating equity, driving inclusion, and you’ve got to sign up for that. I think that’s important. And then critically, I guarantee you, if you manage any group of people, and you speak to your people they will want to do this work to so we have our fantastic employee resource groups, but also created a management taskforce. They’re a very wide and diverse group of managers across the organisation whose job is to listen, to hear, also to listen to the leadership and make sure that we’re evolving how the company operates and works in order that it’s just a feature of our business. That decisions get taken in a way that recognises all of this stuff which hadn’t happened before. And I think the ability to have it in the fabric of your organisation, imperfect as it might be, it’s a really good point.
Closing views
So I’m going to come to you for your final word, to you Joanne, if you had a room full of CEOs, and we’re all here, and they were listening to this whole conversation, what would you say to them if they’re still like, ‘Oh, I’m not sure about all of this.’ What would you say to them?
Joanne
I think that there’s a couple of points to build on from what’s already been said. Some of the first things that need to be done, when you really start to speak to your colleagues and you realise some of the things that potentially playing on their minds are absolutely the things that every organisation should be doing anyway!
By this I mean providing transparency on how pay rises and promotions actually work, giving visibility of recruitment and opportunities. By doing internalised salary benchmarking, as well as external. They’re all things every organisation should be doing anyway, but they may not be doing it in a way that’s transparent. And your Black colleagues don’t want special treatment they just want equity. And I think to build on what you were saying in terms of that real responsibility as a Black CEO. I think I’ve got a real advantage here in being a white female CEO, because there are aspects of my lived experience that are nowhere near as complex as the Black experience. But the whole idea of whether you’ve experienced discrimination, and the flip side as to whether you’ve had a genuine promotional opportunity, and people look at it questioningly and say, ‘Well, that was probably just positive discrimination. You only made this list because they were looking to put the female in there’. So that concept of tokenism, that kind of thing I’ve got an awareness and appreciation, which means that as I work with my Black colleagues and trying to find the right way forward, I’m equally not wanting any question mark to be created around their real value. So, working with them in that way is super valuable. And it all comes back to a final conclusion that is having those conversations with your Black colleagues because the answers very often are within your organisation.