Getting Executive Buy-In and Fostering DEI at the C-Suite Level with Dr. Vijay Pendakur | Episode 1
Welcome to DEI Leaders by Crescendo. In this series, Sage Franch, CEO of Crescendo, hosts conversations with diversity, equity & inclusion practitioners, sharing valuable insights from their work.
Our latest conversation is with Dr. Vijay Pendakur, Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer at Zynga.
Listen to the podcast or read below for the edited transcript.
Sage: Hello, and welcome to today's episode of DEI leaders by Crescendo. Where we interview industry leaders and culture champions about diversity, equity and inclusion in practice. I'm your host Sage Franch, and I'm joined today by Dr. Vijay Pendakur, the inaugural Vice President and Chief Diversity Equity and Inclusion Officer at Zynga. Vijay, thank you so much for joining us.
Vijay: It's a pleasure to be with you Sage.
(00:33) Sage: I am super excited to have this conversation. I know a lot of people are interested in what a C-level role in this work does and how exactly you influence and track DEI outcomes in your organization. But first I'd love to actually get a little sense of how you came into this work, because you have quite an extensive background with degrees in history, a doctorate in education. So did you find DEI work or did DEI work find you?
Vijay: Oh, that's a great starting point. So I would say for me, DEI work found me and I can share a couple of quick anecdotes as to how that happened for me. I think one is being a child of immigrants. My parents immigrated from India in the 1960s to North America. And I think anybody who has immigrant parents knows about the awesome and oftentimes disorienting experience of biculturalism that happens when you grow up with parents that did not grow up in the culture that you're growing up in. So there was a lot of moments of trying to explore what it means for me to be Indian and what it means for my parents to also be Indian-American, but to have very different meaning-making patterns about how to make sense of that.
And so I think an early sensitivity and interest in questions of culture, how people make home and how people can come to a sense of belonging. Of course I didn't have that language right as a 13-year-old, but what I did have was a deep visceral feeling of displacement. And I would be lucky enough to go to India every couple of years for sometimes lengthy periods of time. And then I would come back to Chicago where I grew up and have a lot of cognitive and emotional dissonance around like wait so, almost all of my family is in villages, in rural Southern India, living a very different life than anything I think you could imagine in 1980s and 1990s America. And then I come back to Chicago and this is supposed to be my home, but I don't have a lot of people here who look like me or sound like me, or love me innately the way my family would in India.
And so, you know, early schisms that are productive in sort of thinking about how do people come to understand what it means to be at home figuratively, not literally, and what are the conditions that allow people to be safe and comfortable so that they can be their best selves. Which is really what we're trying to answer in many ways in workplace DEI. But I, you know, my own experience of growing up, I think really sensitized me to that because of my parents' status as immigrants. And then I think another way DEI work found me was through early meaningful and often painful encounters with injustice which a lot of DEI practitioner will share. Right? And so I, you know, I've been doing DEI work as a full-time job for almost 20 years now, which is not as normative in the industry, but I think I wouldn't have that story if I hadn't had some very early experiences with difference that were actually quite painful.
So my folks bought a house in a neighborhood in Chicago at the Northern edge of Chicago, right at the border with a suburb called Evanston, which in the mid-1980s was almost all Black, very low income and extremely dangerous. And so, there was a lot of incidental crime, there was a lot of gang violence. A year or two after we moved into that neighborhood, crack entered the community in a really profound way. And the crack epidemic that many American cities experienced, really affected my childhood because the level of gang violence and despair that I was exposed to in late elementary school and in middle school just opened my eyes to a number of, kind of fundamental human realities. One is that safety is not to be taken for granted. Right, and if you've ever felt physically deeply unsafe in your life, you know that you can't really function effectively when you're worried about your basic safety, and that was a lot of my challenges growing up.
And two, I also got to see my community change dramatically overnight due to structural conditions that they were not in control of. And while I didn't have that language again as a 10-year-old, something happened. Right, and I think that knowing that the kids that I was playing with in my neighborhood when we were eight and nine years old were all just good little kids largely. And by the time we were 11 or 12, many of them were going through their first gang initiations and they changed and the neighborhood dynamics changed. And so for me, there was almost like an unconscious quest to try and figure out what happened and how did that happen to my community. So there's greater forces at work here.
And so when I went to college I started taking urban history, urban sociology, ethnic studies you know, any courses that could give me some information to answer these questions that came out of my lived experience of poverty, of injustice, of racialized violence and very quickly became awakened to what people would call social justice. And, then I was actually offered a full-time DEI job right out of my undergrad and sort of the rest is history. So those are two personal stories that are how DEI found me, how this work found me. And, obviously my relationship to the work has grown and changed over the last 20 many years as I've moved into adulthood and I have a family of my own and all of that kind of stuff, but in terms of the Genesis story of my commitment to this work I think about those things often.
(06:48) Sage: Thank you for sharing that. I think you know, a lot of DEI practitioners will resonate with that feeling of first identifying these themes in childhood and not having the language for them, but then kind of realizing years after the fact, wow, this is something that I picked up on just by living these experiences, but now I understand systemically what's going on and, that's where that drive comes from to really change it and to be part of a better future. I think it's so interesting that you have been doing this work for so long, many of the roles that I've seen have really been sparked in the last five to ten years. And we at Crescendo have been doing this work for about five years now and seen a real shift in what the kind of focus themes are, at least in the corporate landscape. How have you seen that kind of evolution over the 20 years that you've been doing this work?
Vijay: Hmm, yeah, yeah. Right. I mean, I completely agree with you that there's been a focus shift, particularly in the corporate landscape in the last five years, and I would also say that increased commitment and awareness level, it can be felt across nonprofit, the arts, education as well in the last five years. For me, I think it is helpful to frame the evolution of DEI commitment across multiple sectors in terms of certain historical eras. As a historian, you know, my undergraduate degree is in history, my master's in history, this is an innate lens for me, but it's also a lens that's oftentimes missing from the discourse that I think I can add. So, you know, the commitment to DEI work in organizations really functions as a microcosm to the broader social struggle around DEI, right?
And so, when you're looking at the civil rights movement, the popular civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, these are major social agitations that changed laws that changed many structures for people, that brought people into the ability to vote or the ability to be safe getting to and from school, a variety of things. And oftentimes those huge social shifts see changes happened without much of a change inside organizational life, whether that be corporate or, you know, nonprofit or private sector. You know in the sixties, seventies, and even in the eighties, there really isn't a lot of shifting going on in industry, in response to big changes in social mores and norms, which I think is fascinating onto itself. And what you see, after that is really the evolution of a big cultural agitation around language in the 1980s and 1990s, and oftentimes called, you know, the movement for political correctness. And this is where you start to see it intersect with the workplace more as workplace language norms start to shift.
But everything is really slow and there's a pretty big lag between social agitation and what's happening in companies for the 80s, the 90s going into the 2000s. And really what I've witnessed in the last 20 years is a shortening of that lag time between social agitation and company, like life at the company. And so partly I think what's been huge here is social media and the internet and sort of democratization of access to the issues, to the awareness, the language. And when many organizations kind of skirted around a structural commitment to equity and inclusion by doing small fringy things like multicultural celebration, you know, say, okay, well, we're gonna observe some heritage months and we're gonna celebrate the idea that difference is not a threat to our core values, which, you know you hope that the bar isn't that low, but it really was for that long.
And really in the last five years, what you see is a movement slowly pass multicultural celebration and into structural issues of inclusion and equity and a more serious commitment to the pipeline and talent acquisition. But the key thing here is, and I think many people can observe that shift, but what I tend to want to point out is that, the thing that has driven that shift is a much closer connection between social movements and the workforce, and a shifting zeitgeist in, let's talk about corporate, in corporate America, corporate Canada, corporate UK, corporate EU. The shifting zeitgeist is that there's a much thinner membrane between social movements and what's happening at work.
And the thinner that membrane gets and the more porous that membrane gets, the quicker reaction time we can see between social activism and corporate activism, right. Activist employees, which is a phrase that didn't even exist three years ago. And so again and again, as a historian of civil rights and a historian of social change, what we know is that power yields nothing without a fight and really what's happening is that companies, schools, nonprofits, arts councils, are recognizing that they can either shift or they can be embattled with their own workforce, which is an extraordinarily unproductive and uncomfortable place to be. And so the impetus for change again, is the involvement of the key stakeholders. And now we're seeing activist board members and activist shareholders, right? So every facet of the gem is becoming more engaged which really is, you know, if you look at the last 18 months and people are calling this the racial awakening or the great racial re-awakening, whatever language you wanna put to it, more important than the language I think is understanding that the catalyst for this heightened sense of awareness and commitment is really a thinning membrane between social movements that have been around for hundreds of years and corporate and nonprofit spaces that have historically been quite divorced from those social movements, and now are really dialectically or dynamically interconnected to social movements.
(13:13) Sage: Fascinating. That’s fascinating to hear from the historical lens. Thank you for sharing that historian’s point of view on it, I think that's really interesting. Let's zoom in a bit to the work that you're doing at Zynga. Can you give us a picture of how your organization is structured and, when you think about DEI outcomes, what are you focusing?
Vijay: Sure, sure. If there's any listeners on this podcast that are occupying inaugural DEI leadership roles, you know that there is a tremendous amount of startup and activation energy that just has to happen in the beginning. And I think everybody is really excited to start executing downstream tactics and that has to happen, but, so Zynga is a global, highly matrixed tech company, which is very normative for many tech companies. We've got operations in seven different countries. We have extraordinary autonomy for many of our studios. We grow through a significant amount of M&A, which really also complicates things. It's normal in gaming, but it offers a level of complexity and challenge when you're thinking about centrally planned operations. So one of the things I needed to do was to, and I was hired to do this, was to offer the company a global vision and strategy for DEI that we could start to then build out our tactical blueprint as a rolldown from, rather than a whole bunch of activity without the coordination that can actually help that activity maximize its net impact.
Right, and we know this over and over and over again, if you just set out to do a bunch of things, but you're not operating under a concerted strategy, then your input’s oftentimes not equal to your output. And there's a lot of entropy in that kind of an approach. And so from an overall vision and strategy, one of the things I did is just, I actually take a razor to this and say, what is the simplest capture of a model that people can grasp onto rather than developing something very, very complex. And when you're at 30,000 feet, simplicity, I think is critical, at least in my view of leadership. So for our overall global model, we have a very simple model. What we're aiming for is inclusive excellence and inclusive excellence is just a phrase that I didn't invent.
You know, more credit to the ancestors for putting this language together for us. But inclusive excellence is our vision commitment for what we aspire to, in every aspect of our DEI approach, and how we get there is a simple three-legged stool. There's three legs of the stool. One is to go out in the talent acquisition space and to be very successful in being a destination for underrepresented talent and doing all of the requisite things to become a destination for underrepresented talent. The second leg of the stool is to have a magnetic ecosystem that attracts and retains that talent, right? And so that's the internal workings of what the experience of work is and the actual mechanics of retaining underrepresented talent, which are much more complex than I think people give credit to.
And then the third leg of the stool is our social impact operation, making sure that Zynga leaves the world a better place than it found it. And this is for me, I think an imperative, more recent addition to what we should be conceptualizing as a corporate DEI model, is really closing the space between social impact and DEI. I'm lucky in that I actually have our social impact operation reporting to me. And so I can do this much more easily, but our approach to social impact dovetails with our DEI approach in that, we're looking at investing in underrepresented communities so that they can better participate in tech and real talk, better participate in gaming, right? There's some ROI to Zynga in this. And so each of those investments not only potentially increases our future talent acquisition advantages, but it also functions as amazing employer brand, as we're out there doing good in communities and telling that story, we can set up the virtuous cycle of Zynga becoming known as a place that is doing all of this really wonderful social impact work.
Now that increases the amount of passive candidate draw that we have in our talent acquisition funnel. And it also, if you look at the new emerging data around social good and employee retention, we know in early survey data on this, that employees are less likely to search when they believe that their company is moving the needle on social good. So there is even a talent retention mechanism in our social impact operation. And so that's our model Sage. It’s inclusive excellence is at the top, and there's three legs of the stool, talent attraction, talent retention and social impact. Now, obviously that's highly simplistic, which it should be at 30,000 feet and the devil’s in the details as they say. And the tactics that roll down from that are really what have to be carefully sequenced, data driven and regularly iterated as we learn as we go.
I think beyond that kind of work of setting up a high-level vision and strategy for the company, so that all of the parts of the orchestra are actually making music together, which is important in a first-year investment. We have some local efforts as well that are not centrally directed. And I do think in globally matrix organizations, this is really important to support is that we have centralized strategy, locally differentiated tactics. So if a game studio in the UK needs to respond to local conditions and pull off DEI tactics, that may be different than our studio in India, our studio in Finland. Great. Let's support that and make sure that the teams there have maybe some support from this central DEI team on the logistics in heft, but they're really shaping the tactics that on the ground to be culturally and contextually salient to the problems that they face and the opportunities that they have.
And a lot of our employee engagement and diversity is celebration initiatives that are locally driven as well, because they're driven out of the ERGs. And so the last, I think part to this painting with a broad brush that I'm doing right now of our approach to DEI is really heavy investment in employee resource groups. This isn't news to anyone but employee resource groups have become even more important in the shift to remote work or hybrid work because they can serve as a key site of fostering belonging and psychological safety. And 70% of our employees at Zynga are active at an ERG, which is a data point that I'm extraordinarily proud of, but we didn't get there happenstance. We got there by really investing in the ERGs so that they have strong budgets.
They have regular interface with executive leadership. We're adding more value for them in our developmental roadmap in 2022, but our ERGs pull off a lot of local belonging and employee engagement activities through bringing in speakers, through holding events, through having fireside chats. And so if you think about, unless you have unlimited headcount in your central DEI team, which most organizations just don't have the resources for, our ERGs, if we partner with them strategically, they actually serve as the best amplifying mechanism we have. To make sure that the amount of activity necessary in a global company meets the employee desire for engagement, which wouldn't be possible if we only were centrally directed. So I'll pause there, because that was a lot in response to your question, but that's a kind of a high level fly-over of our approach to DEI.
(21:35) Sage: That is an incredible number of engaging employees with your ERGs. That's phenomenal. That's the highest that I've seen. We get questions all the time, you know, how can I get people to and why they should engage in our ERGs? How can I encourage people to see the value in this and not see it as side of desk? So what would you say to other folks who are trying to get ERGs off the ground, looking for that higher engagement and that cultural accountability for DEI?
Vijay: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that this is an area of great interest across the industry and it's an area where, when I came into my role at Zynga and you know, my background is not in tech, my background's in education. And one of the things I did is I looked at ERGs through the lens of student organizations on college campuses because to me, employee resource groups function as really clear analogs of student organizations on college campuses. And they're solving for similar problems. They're actually doing similar activities. And in times of strife, they're engaged in activism in ways that organizations on college campuses are actually engaged in activism. So when I looked at ERG engagement, I was able to pull from a 20 year playbook of working with student organizations on college campuses to increase the quality, the breadth and the depth of student org life.
So part of what I think is advisable to your listeners is a couple of things. One, making sure that you work with your ERGs to help them understand how to set up their e-boards with clear roles and clear responsibilities so that work is distributed across an appropriate number of people. Oftentimes ERGs form organically at corporate because there's a few passionate people who share an identity and they mobilize a group. And that organic formation is really important. I'm not discounting that, but after an ERG is up and running, it really helps if some central folks can step in and partner with the ERG is to say, hey look, a great way to distribute work so that we don't burn out our champions in this space is to make sure that you have minimally these five roles or these seven roles on an ERG e-board.
And the reason you want to distribute in this way is so that it becomes more sustainable because the reality is, this is not your primary job at the company. And so we wanna make sure that this doesn't get in the way of your primary job and that you do this from the standpoint of joy participation and meaning, but not burnout. So role clarity and role distinction, I think is really important. A second thing I would advise is that each ERG have an executive champion. And what I mean by that is an assigned person who is at the vice president level or up. So VP, senior VP, EVP, or C-suite that is assigned to the ERG as their executive champion. And what that means is this person's not gonna attend every ERG meeting. They're not gonna show up at every origami class or cooking demo.
You know, that's just not realistic. But in best case, you wanna define with clarity, the role of the executive champion. So let's say they come to an e-board meeting once a month for the first half of the e-board meeting. So 30 minutes, that's a reasonable load expectation for an executive member of your company. And what they do is they listen and they help problem solve with items that the ERG e-board has prepped for that agenda, because oftentimes the data shows that ERG e-boards are over representative of the entry and mid-level within a company. And so what they don't know how to do is navigate the company's bureaucracy effectively because part of being a manager is just not fully understanding the politics and the dynamics between finance and you know, another division and the company. And so they're trying to pull off something and they just don’t know how to get it done!
And part of what it means to be a vice president in a business in an organization is you actually have the reach and the vision to say, okay, let me open a door for you, or let me explain why you’ve got to know in that instance. So the executive sponsor gives the ERG a regular dialogue with leadership, and the executive sponsor can actually serve as an agility mechanism within the company to turn around and at that executive meeting where all the vice presidents and the C-team meet say, hey look, I just wanna give folks a heads up that in our LGBTQ community where I'm an executive sponsor, I think that there's growing dissatisfaction with our benefits package because of the way that there's some gendered language in the family leave benefit, that's actually alienating and marginalizing our trans community or our same sex adoptee community or whatever it might be.
Right? So now the executive champion can escalate an issue to the group that actually can make a difference and change on that issue much more quickly than normally an ERG can. So I think the addition of an executive champion is a huge add. And then the third, and I know this is a lengthy answer Sage, but I'm going deep on this because I think it'll add most value for your members. So thanks for giving me the mic time, but the third add I would say is to try and reduce friction for your ERGs when they go to engage in programming. So one of the things on my team's 2022 roadmap is actually we're bringing in some vendors solutions that allow our ERGs to book speakers and book events like experiences for their members with way lower labor overhead. Because one of the things we were hearing from our ERGs is like, we have good budgets, so thank you for that, but we don't have the time or the training to go out and figure out how to get speakers or how to actually set up contracts, how to spend this money in ways that don't piss off our colleagues in the accounting office, right, or the legal office or the procurement office.
So there are actual vendor solutions out there that simplify all of this for your ERGs, so that they're operating within a choice ecosystem where they’re basically just going out and spending credits in a prearranged contract. So you have like almost one contract to rule them all, lord of the rings reference for any of you Tolkien fans out there, right. That allows the ERGs to then stop spending time and stop worrying about the minutia of event programming and event management and actually just, with way less friction and more agility, go out and book speakers and events much more quickly. And so this is another add that can reduce the labor burden on your ERGs so that we can try and solve for what's starting to creep up in the DEI discourse globally, which is, are the ERGs a source of empowerment or are the ERGs a source of exploitation?
Because if you don't add in the kinds of things I'm describing, the ERGs are basically doing a huge amount of unpaid labor for the company. They're generating belonging, they're doing the DEI work and the company is sitting there benefiting from all of that. But actually those people's jobs are to be a programmer or to be an accountant or to be a lawyer, it's not actually to serve as a replacement for your central DEI function. So I think we have to, I mean, my word to the wise to the folks who listen in on this podcast is, get out ahead of this eight ball or get stuck in a situation where you're dealing with employee activism when they start to feel really exploited. The other thing we're looking at in 2022 is the incentives and rewards for ERG leaders. If you're on an e-board and once you codify what it means to be on an e-board, then this gets easier to do. But how do we start to invest and reward in e-board members so that they actually get something for the amazing work they're doing for the company. I'll stop there, because that was a lot on that topic, but it's a topic of passion for me. And it's an area I think that most organizations of size can relate to.
(30:00) Sage: Yeah, and I think a lot of our listeners are going to take back a lot of these actionable tips that you've given them here. I think this is great to hear the detail, and really, never apologize for a detailed answer because that's exactly why we're here. Thank you so much. One of the common things that I'm hearing as you kind of explain how you view DEI at Zynga and in the world in general, in the corporate landscape, is that visibility to and connection to and through the leadership teams, it's key to success. So what would you say about the importance of C-level responsibility for DEI?
Vijay: You know, I couldn't agree more Sage that it's important to have C-level responsibility for DEI for a couple of reasons. One approach, and a mentor gave me this metaphor that I'll share with you about a fish tank. So if you think of a company as a fish tank one approach to doing DEI work that I don't think is as productive, is to imagine your DEI investment as the treasure chest in that fish tank. So if you've ever seen a real nice fish tank, maybe at a nice restaurant, there's a lot of kind of toys and bobbles in the fish tank. And if there's a treasure chest, it's attractive, there's nice things in that treasure chest. Potentially if the fish were to go over to the treasure chest, they might be enriched by their experience at the treasure chest.
But the fish have to go over to the treasure chest in order to actually gain any benefits from the treasure chest. And a mentor said to me once, don't go build a treasure chest with DEI. Instead, you can be much more effective by trying to make yourself the water filtration system of the fish tank. Meaning a really great DEI operation should be the filter that the entire business goes through. And we know, and we say it all the time in DEI work, right, for DEI to be successful, it really needs to cut across everything. It cannot be a specialty program. So if I'm gonna be the water filtration system for the organization, one of the things that I think that's required to make that bold statement come to life is proper placement in the org chart. And I think if you don't have C-level representation, especially if you're a company of a certain size and complexity, it is very difficult to position DEI as a living, powerful and productive membrane that cuts across all aspects of the business.
And so treasure chest or fish tank, oftentimes when I see organizations that are well-intended and that wanna do this, but maybe they don't have the resources or they don't have the willpower, and their whole DEI function is, you know, maybe a lower level role that doesn't have access to the leadership, that doesn't have access to the vice presidents, and really doesn't have the executive presence that comes with the title, I think they're building a treasure chest, right? This person is gonna do some things, they're gonna spin off some programs, they might be able to get a couple of vendor ads that do some important things for the company. And that does add value. What they cannot achieve, is becoming the water filter that actually everything has to pass through. And so that's one reason that I think C-level responsibility for DEI is really important.
It's not just the optics of how that plays and I actually don't think companies should do it for the optics. I think you do it because of how it enables the function to grow and expand in ways that allow for real change. I think a second reason that a C-level role can add value is oftentimes then what you get is the ability to put numerous portfolios underneath that person. So for me, I always explain to my partners at Zynga or when I'm talking with folks outside of the company, I'm a vice president at Zynga and I'm also the Chief Diversity Officer, but underneath me, I have the diversity function. I have the social impact function. I have learning and development and I have university relations. And that's actually what drew me to the role, because for anyone who's ever held a diversity role, and you don't have any other functions, you only have one crowbar or lever to make change.
And for me, I love the fact that I have these other functions underneath me that have huge relevance in the diversity space and also have relevance in the non-diversity space. Right? So take L&D for example, learning and development, right? So of course there are obvious overlaps between DEI and L&D, but there's a lot of L&D that doesn't have anything to do with DEI. And what overseeing that function gives me is another way to build relationships and add value with the businesses, who all are clamoring for L&D upskilling so that they can have of get better productivity out of their employees, but also retain their employees. And when I'm delivering value in the L&D space, it adds to my brand capital within the company to then turn around over time and have maybe a tougher or more frictional conversation with the business leaders about something in the DEI space, right?
That brand capital transfers. And so same thing, in the university relations space when we make major improvements in our junior talent throughput so that, we made a bunch of changes to our collegiate internship program, now we're converting into full-time employees at a much higher rate, we're solving a problem for the businesses. That brand capital transfers back to me so that if I need to put my thumb on the scale for a tough inclusion decision, I can do that! Right, and so I think also a C-level role that has the breadth and heft, because of some other units underneath it, can really help the diversity champion be more successful in the kind of circuitous approach that I've just named.
(36:04) Sage: Very insightful. And I love this fish tank metaphor that really clears it up for us. It's so vivid that imagery, and it makes perfect sense. When I think about you know, I've been observing the trend in the DEI space and I hesitate to call it an industry because that feels a little bit wrong. But according to LinkedIn, Chief Diversity Officer was the number one fastest growing title in 2020. Why do you think that is, do you think that people are realizing that what you've just described is the way forward or is it driven more by this social unrest?
Vijay: I, oh boy. You know, I will give you a very positive answer and then I will give you the skeptics answer and I think both are true for me. So I think that there was a realization that prior efforts prior to 2019 needed the C-level heft and the, conductor to the orchestra. You know, oftentimes, I play guitar. Music is really important to me and I think a lot about musical metaphors in the work. And, you know if you've ever seen a super group perform, where it's a bunch of really talented musicians that were famous from their last group they were in and they come together and you go see their live show and it's just not what you thought it was gonna be. You know, you can have an all-star team and if they are not in sync in the right way, in a way that is catalytic and generative, then you don't get the kinds of superstar outcomes that you're looking for.
And I think partly there was an authentic search for people to bring vision and coordination global strategy to efforts that had organically grown and idiosyncratically grown in the last five years that needed that coordination, right, in order to deepen and extend impact. So that's the positive answer. I also think that there was some virtue signaling in the rush to add the Chief Diversity Officer role. Companies were looking for a very public way to mark their commitment to these issues, and adding a C-level role is one way to do that, particularly if you're under pressure to diversify your C-team. So if you are looking at a C-team that is missing gender diversity or missing racial diversity which many say C-teams are, so if there's any CEOs out here or board members out here, you know, it's getting to be a little bit tired, right, we've gotta fix this.
But I think that there was a rapid move. So this is the skeptical answer, right? To make sure that if on your company's website, when people looked at the about us section and they clicked on the leadership tab, that there was one face that looked a little bit different than the rest of the faces. And that's a very skeptical answer, but I think I would be pollyannish to not name that as part of what was going on. So here's a word of caution on that though, if there's folks out there that are listening, higher education - where I spent 20 years prior to pivoting to tech, has been doing this kind of sleight of hand for quite some time, of going out and hiring the easy roles to diversify so that a president's cabinet, a president's cabinet if you're not familiar with universities, is the top leadership team of a university, so it's kind of the analog of a C-suite.
And higher ed came under pressure a decade ago to not have the president's cabinet be reductive - all white men, right. Quote unquote. And so, the first move was to go out and to get a underrepresented person to be the head of either diversity, if there was a cabinet level diversity position, or student life, because the student life role is the second easiest to diversify. And what ended up happening is universities overly invested in the virtue signaling of cabinet diversification in positions that do not have the ability to affect some of the issues that are most pressing for universities. So for example, one set of issues is faculty diversification, right? Who's doing the teaching at universities and universities were under a ton of pressure to diversify faculty, have been for a while.
And 10 years later when they diversified the student life role, or maybe they added a cabinet level, chief diversity officer, faculty diversity hadn't moved, because those roles can't actually affect that problem. And so to borrow from that and learn from that, right, that's the canary in the coal mine for corporate America. If you, in the last year and a half went out and you hired a chief diversity officer, partially because you needed to add an underrepresented face to your C-suite, know that the changes that the workforce and the world will expect of you in coming years cannot be done only by the chief diversity officer. And if they don't have amazing partnership or other underrepresented group members in the chief legal position, the chief people officer position, the chief finance officer position, the chief executive officer position, the chief operating officer position, you go on and on, then eventually your horizon for change will evaporate.
And we can borrow from the nonprofit sector and learn from the nonprofit sector’s struggle in moving past some early stage change initiatives and understand that the kind of sleight of hand of saying, well look, we're not all white men in our in our C-suite, look we've got this chief diversity officer. Great, that's a start. It cannot be the end of the journey and transformational change, so that companies reflect the diversity of the world around them is imperative if we're gonna actually continue to produce innovation that meets the needs of the world.
(42:18) Sage: Thank you for putting words to what a lot of us are feeling and seeing, and not knowing how to express. You just put that so eloquently. And, I know a lot of people are gonna take these sound bites back to their leadership and say, this is what I've been trying to share with you and tell you over the last year. You know, this whole conversation has been so insightful and just had so many amazing takeaways. I was wondering as we close, what is one actionable tip that you have for the DEI practitioners who are tuning in today on securing executive buy-in?
Vijay: You know, I get asked this question quite a bit and I think it's because, we, all of us in the trenches know that you can't get the change done without executive buy-in. And so I appreciate the chance to end with this Sage. I don't pretend to have a silver bullet here. I can offer some wisdom that I think comes from some successes and I can offer the wisdom that also comes from having not succeeded. Right. And, I've learned a lot through trying and failing. And as they say in the design space failing forward or failing upwards. So one way, I think I've tried to secure executive buy-in is to check a impulse I have to name, where my own unconscious or implicit biases come in. So an impulse I have because DEI work found me and I didn't find DEI work is the value proposition for DEI work is completely intrinsic to me.
I can't not see the world this way. I cannot wake up in the morning and not have a sense of urgency around equity, around fairness, around justice. It's just who I am. And while that makes me someone who can sustain a multi-decade career in work with all of the weathering effect that happens when you do DEI work full time. I have to know that, that sword, any keen blade cuts two ways, right? And the downside of that orientation is that I tend to under-think how to position the value proposition of this work. And so to correct for that and something I've had to work on a lot in the last year as the inaugural chief diversity officer at a tech company, is to start with the question, what problems are the businesses trying to solve in my company, rather than starting with the question, what is a hot innovation in diversity that I can bring to my company?
Because when I, when the Genesis of the innovation is the sort of altruistic commitment to equity, then I have to solve a downstream issue of creating ROI to the businesses in the thing that I'm trying to do. That's the treasure chest in the fish tank, right? To go back to becoming the filter, a completely different design logic is to go sit with this senior vice presidents at Zynga and to understand what they are stuck on, what is frustrating to them, where they feel a sense of exasperation. And they don't have to express that to me in DEI ways. I just need to understand what their reality is. So part of this is to do that kind of deep listening, empathy-building, and journey mapping that comes out of design thinking. You know, I went to do the design thinking bootcamp at Stanford several years ago, and it was really transformational for me.
So in doing that deep listening with our business leaders, the second kind of design question I asked myself is a question that actually a business leader gave me. He said to me, I want you to develop initiatives that my teams will fight over. And I was like, oh gosh, that really struck me as being very powerful. What can my central DEI team build, add, develop that the businesses will be fighting over. That's such a different frame than we have to do this because it's the right thing, and if you don't do this then you're not bought into our DEI model, right. That is the grist of the last decade. I'm tired of that churn. I'm tired of that kinda uphill slog. I'd rather sit with the businesses, understand their problematics, then turn around and design something that comes out of deep empathy and connection with them that when I bring it back to them, they go, holy cow, can I get two of these?
You know, so one way to get executive buy-in is to rethink the precepts of your design journey and moving away from, because actually I think the bias I have is the bias many DEI practitioners have, is to start from the standpoint of our intrinsic passion. I think we kind of need to pull the plug on that in some ways, the passion's great, it’s what gets us out of bed in the morning, but the design precept needs to be, what can we create that the businesses will fight over? And the only way to do that is to design in deep partnership with the businesses around the things that they actually care about, the problems they're actually trying to solve. And that may mean that some of the things we know we need to do in order to advance an equity agenda, have to be put into what we call V2 or V3, version two or version three, which means further down your roadmap, but doing it this way and having V1 be the business priorities is what builds up massive capital for you at your company, so that when you turn around and you bring something up that will advance equity, but may have a more diffused value prop to the businesses they turn around and go, you know what? You've been such a great partner to me and I trust you now. So yeah, let's do it even though it's a little bit murky to me as to why this is good for me. And that's the position you really wanna be in as a DEI leader.
(48:22) Sage: That is fantastic advice and a great note to close out today's podcast on. Vijay, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing all of these fantastic tips and your experience with us. Where can our audience connect with you and follow your updates as we go forward?
Vijay: Yeah, well first, this has been such a enriching journey for me to be on with you Sage. So thanks for inviting me into the conversation with your listenership. I would love to stay connected to you all out there in the universe. I think primarily LinkedIn is the place where I am communicating most about these issues and am learning most about these issues at this point. So you can find me on LinkedIn. You can also find me on Twitter, although I'm primarily a lurker on Twitter. So I use Twitter to read but I'm not sharing as much. LinkedIn is my most active place of engagement where I'm learning and sharing most about workplace DEI issues, and I look forward to getting those invites to connect with you. Mention that you heard me on the podcast so that I understand how we're getting connected and that I add you that way.
That wraps up this episode of the DEI Leaders podcast, if you want to listen to the audio version click below. Look forward to more episodes with key insights from DEI practitioners!
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