Category Archives: influence

The Greatest Retirement Benefits You Can Give Your Employees

Posted on by
Reply

My Dad retired this past year. I’m already ‘leveraging’ him for some time. He has so much of it now! It’s like he won the time lotto and he’s throwing it around because he’s got so much of it. “Hey Dad, can I borrow a couple of hours!? It’s a busy week! I need you to pick up the kids!”

I read this article, The Huge Retirement Benefit You Probably Aren’t Expecting recently:

America is reaching a tipping point. Adults in the busiest phase of life, juggling kids and careers, number about 40 million, which is roughly equal to those near and in retirement, who typically have time on their hands. But the number of adults pressed for time is projected to grow slowly, reaching 49 million by 2050. By contrast, the number of retirees with plenty of free time will explode to 88 million, as more and more boomers retire.

When you add it all up, retirees will have 2.5 trillion hours of leisure time to fill over the next 20 years. This free time will redefine their habits and priorities—even their identities. And yet almost no one is planning for this sweeping change, according to a report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Age Wave.

Time is going to be the new currency of future generations. It’s like lake front property, there’s only so much. Unless you live in Dubai and have billions, then I guess you can make new lake front property!

The crazy thing is, organizations aren’t really putting that much effort into figuring this whole thing out. We’re treating it like we’ve treated retirement for decades. “Well, Bill’s retiring, let’s throw him a party, buy him a walker with a horn, and give his work to the new kid.” We aren’t thinking in a new context of what do these ‘new’ folks who are retiring really want?

What I’ve learned from Dad is we in HR are missing some things. Here are some ideas of Retirement Benefits you could offer, but you haven’t even begun to think in this new way of time:

1. Part-time, flexible Mentorships – Some people can’t wait to stop working for your organization. Many feel they’re being ‘nicely’ pushed out, or society makes them feel like ‘it’s time’ to leave. The reality, so many of your retiring employees would love to keep in touch. Help out the new kids. Lead mentor groups on how to deal with customer issues, leadership dilemmas, customer/client feedback, etc. And most would do it for free! They would volunteer their time!

2. Corporate Community Volunteer Programs – Remember, these super valuable, experienced, loyal former employees who love your brand, have a couple trillion (with a T) hours on their hands! Can you imagine how much good will you could leverage in the community if you activated your retirees as volunteers with some direction and leadership!?  It could transform your corporate presence within the markets you serve. BTW – hospitals do a great job at this! There is no reason you shouldn’t be able to do this in your organization as well.

3. C-Suite Bullship Detectors – Your executives don’t always know what’s really going on because they have a bunch of VPs kissing their ass telling them what they think they want to hear. Retirees are a great mechanism to tell your executives what is actually going on, versus what they’re being told. They’re like highly paid consultants, without the highly paid part!  We all need someone without a vested interest to tell us like it is, even when it stings a little. Your retirees would love to do this. Works really well for newer retirees who are still close to the business. Not so well once they get a ways out. You will be shocked at the bond your executives will build with these folks!

Something to think about. How are your new retirement benefits helping your former employees spend and invest their most precious commodity? Time.

 

Michael J Fox’s Perspective on Co-Workers #WorkHuman

Posted on by
7

Michael J. Fox was one of the closing day keynotes at the WorkHuman conference this year, and he killed it like you expect. One of the key takeaways I took from his talk was in regards to all those people you work with on a day to day basis.

Mike Fox laid out two things you should think about when you think about how you interact with your co-workers:

1. Enjoy the people you work with for what they can positively contribute to you and your organization.  This is all about focusing on the strengths of those around you. If you constantly focus on what someone can’t do, you make them miserable and you stress yourself out as well.  People perform better when you allow them to do what they’re good at. When you recognize them for what they bring to the organization, not what they don’t bring.

2. If you can’t enjoy the person you work with, be thankful you’re not them. We are all going to have people in our life that we have to work with that we frankly just don’t like. Could be personality, or skills, or attitude, etc. Mike Fox said you can still find a positive out of this by focusing on the fact you’re grateful that you don’t have their challenges, and by helping those people be the best version of themselves.

I love this philosophy!

Mike Fox was very big on this concept that judging others will get you nowhere. It’s such a big part of culture. I know I do some this myself, and it’s not something I’m ever proud of. The reality is judging others says more about your inadequacies than it does about the persons you are judging. It was a great reminder.

It was a great reminder. In HR and TA we tend to believe ‘judging’ is part of our job description, but it’s not. The best HR and TA Pros I know don’t judge candidates or employees but find what is most useful of those individuals and try and put those people in positions to be successful.

Finally, Mike spoke about fear. Fear others have when they look at him. They look at him expecting to find fear in him and instead see their own fear in his eyes. That statement made me pause. He’s not fearful of his situation. He’s happy life gave him this enormous platform to change lives.

Perspective. We shouldn’t assume we know others based on our own beliefs and fears. Here’s a guy who is facing an uncertain future, but he’s embraced the joy of living one day at a time. The real secret, he didn’t share, is we all are facing life one day at time, he’s just figured it out way before us!

 

Don’t Apply to College if You’re White, Middle Class and Male

Posted on by
320

I heard a female comedian the other day say one of the truest things I’ve ever heard:

Look, if you’re a white dude, and you’re failing in America, you’re really a failure! You’re like the definition of failure! You can’t be a white dude and complain about how hard life is. If you’re a white guy and you’re failing at life, you’re basically saying, “I can’t find a way to be successful in a society that was built for me.” That’s America.

Which is probably why Trump is trying to make it white great again!

What this comedian was saying is no one wants to hear white dudes whine about stuff. “Oh, it’s so hard to find a job.” “Oh, I can’t afford a house in the richest part of town.” “Oh, I’m not going to be able to retire until I’m 62.” In comparison to real people problems in the world, it all sounds stupid.

Did you hear the whole Kelly and Michael drama that blew up this past week? All said and done, Kelly comes out and says, “My Dad, who drove a bus for thirty years, thinks we’re all crazy!” Privilege, at any level, isn’t supposed to whine about shit.

So, all that being said, here’s my privilege whine:

College Acceptance and Tuition Payment is completely broken! 

My middle son is about to make his college choice. He’s got some great schools that have accepted him. He has some great ones that did not. His dream school was Duke. He also really liked Northwestern, Dartmouth, and UCLA. He has a 4.05 GPA on a 4.0 scale (honors classes give you additional GPA) and a 31 on his ACT (97th percentile of all kids taking this test).  He had the grades and test scores to get into all of those schools.

What he didn’t have was something else.

What is the something else?

He didn’t come for a poor family. He didn’t come from a rich family. He wasn’t a minority. He doesn’t have some supernatural skill, like shooting a basketball. He isn’t in a wheelchair. He isn’t from another country.

He’s just this normal Midwestern kid from a middle-class family who is a super involved student-athlete, student government officer, award-winning chamber choir member, teaches swimming lessons to children, etc., etc., etc.

Basically, he falls into this no-man’s land of what colleges and universities don’t want these days. Male and White.

Can I keep whining? Whatever, it’s my blog – buckle up! 

What is the other something else, from a financial perspective?

He got into Boston College, another dream school for him, and one that wanted him to come and continue his swim career at the Division 1 level. BC also costs $68,000 per year.

Colleges and U.S. Federal Government hate kids who come from families that do the right thing.  What’s the “right thing”?  He comes from a family that pays their mortgage, saved some money for his tuition and put money away for retirement.

Apparently, all those ‘positive’ things, like being financially responsible, are not liked by colleges and the federal government. Colleges and the U.S. Government would have preferred that I didn’t work, let my house go into foreclosure and was in debt up to my eyeballs. If that was the case, both the college and U.S. Federal Government would reward my bad decision making and pay for my son to go to school, fully!

Because he comes from a family that made good decisions, Boston College, and the Federal Government thought it was a good idea for him to pay $68,000 per year to attend their fine university.

My wife and I have spent our son’s entire lives saving for them for college. We sacraficed to basically give them a fund that would pay two full years of tuition and living at a normal state four-year college. The other two years are on their own. We feel they need to shoulder some of that cost to appreciate what it is they’re investing in.

I get it. No one wants to hear about how the middle-class kid can’t go to the super high-end school of his dreams because he can’t afford it.

I’m struggling with this. I’m no different than any other parent who tells their kid when they were little, work your butt off and one day you can go to Harvard! When I should have said, work your butt off, I’ll make awful financial decisions, and then you’ll be able to go to Harvard.

Here’s what I know, and it’s a hard pill to swallow, if my son did exactly what he did (grades, involvement, etc.) and he was Hispanic (or Black, or American Indian, or from a poor country) and I had no money, he would be getting ready to enroll into Duke. But he’s not.

What did he do wrong? He was born into a white family that worked their ass off to give him every advantage in life.

White privilege is a privilege until it’s not. Until a kid’s dream is broken for something he can’t wrap his brain around. Believe me, I understand this goes both ways. I understand there are black kids who don’t even get an interview for a job because some white kid’s Dad already got them the job ‘behind the scenes’. That isn’t right either! In my mind, I don’t see the difference between these two examples.

Rant over. Colleges are going the route of corporate America. White guys are bad, everyone else is desirable, do whatever it takes, at any cost, to make sure this happens. Well, unless, your old, corporate America doesn’t like older people either, no matter what color or gender you are – but that’s a rant for a different day!

Hit him in the comments and tell me how out of touch I am, then remember this is all about a 17-year-old boy with a dream. A dream he worked his ass off to achieve.

Death of the Millennials

Posted on by
3

I was at a conference recently and one of the keynotes actually gave a presentation on how to work with millennials. I thought to myself, “how 2009 of this person to do this!” I’ve vowed at this point to never sit through another presentation on millennials in the workplace. Millennials are now dead to me.

Just as Baby Boomers, GenXer’s, GenZs, The Founders, etc., are all dead to me. All of us are people. All of us are in the workplace. All of us have to work together and get along. Focusing so much on one group over another just perpetuates dysfunction and confusion. I actually heard executives talking about kids graduating high school and believing they also are ‘millennials’. Just stop!

That all being said, IBM came out with an infographic about the myths, exaggerations and uncomfortable truths of millennials, last week, which sparked my little rant. I wanted to share these five myths and add some commentary:

1.Millennials’ career goals and expectations are different from those of older generations.

Turns out we all still, for the most part, want the same thing. Good job. Good pay. Stability. Don’t buy into the hype that any of your workers want to jump around from company to company. They don’t.

2.Millennials want constant acclaim and think everyone on the team should get a trophy.

Again, every generation wants feedback and told they’re a rock star, even when they’re not. As we age, we start to gain a little better self-insight that we might suck. When we’re young we think we’re awesome, even when we’re not.

3.Millennials are digital addicts who want to do everything online.

I have 8 aunts who are all in their 60’s, pushing their 70’s, all of whom spend most of their day on digital devices gaming and on social sites. This is the world we live in. My Mom would rather order a pizza online then pick up a phone. Welcome to modern day life.

4.Millennials, unlike their older colleagues, can’t make a decision without first inviting everyone to weigh in.

No one wants to be the one who made a decision that went wrong. In most corporate settings all workers play the CYA game by sharing decision-making responsibility. We all say we want to make decisions until we’re actually given that responsibility, then we turn into bowls of jello on the floor hoping we didn’t ruin our careers!

5.Millennials are more likely than others to jump ship if a job doesn’t fulfill their passions.

Guess what? Young people today have a ton of debt. That means you have to work and make money to pay down that debt. Then you decide to buy a house, get married, have a litter of puppies, etc. Passion is awesome. If you get a job you’re super passionate about, good for you, you’re winning at life. 99% of people will work in a job they like, make decent money, pay their bills, and probably will be passionate about other parts of  their life. I think they’re winning as well.

For the record, the last Millennials entered the workforce two years ago. Can we start talking about these snotty-nosed, spoiled brats who are beginning to enter the workforce right now with their Snapchatting and their video and their ability to brand themselves and never-ending gaze to the glow of their smartphone!? They’re calling themselves “The Founders”.

Go have fun with that. They named themselves…

The 3 Conference Speakers You’ll See At a Conference Near You

Posted on by
Reply

I was sitting at an HR conference last week next to my friend, Laurie Ruettimann, listening to someone talk about something they did at some company and made this statement:

“You know, you only see three types of conference speakers.”

We were bored. We start talking in the back like the bad kids in class. So, she played along and asked me what the three were.

Here’s my take:

1. Mr. or Mrs. Case Study – These speakers are usually one trick ponies. They did something good, once, at some company that has a big name, and now they get invited to speak at conferences. The basic speech is nothing more than them running down the path of what they did.

The entire breakdown is this: We had a problem. We came up with a solution. We implemented the solution. That was five years ago. Yes, Google does actually have bikes we can ride on campus.

It’s rare that case study speakers ever make it past this stage. Most aren’t that good at speaking, they just have this one thing and a corporate brand. Their skill was being at the right place, at the right time.

2. Mr. or Mrs. We Here To Pump You Up – These folks come in two flavors: 1. My own bullshit, and 2. I had bad shit happen to me, but hey! I’m still alive! First, let me say, I’m not dumping on these folks, they’re usually by far the best speakers you’ll see. This is their life. This is how they make their living.

I’m always amazed at how motivational type speakers truly believe in their own B.S. It’s really the only way you can do it. Can you imagine going from city to city, basically saying the exact same thing to people you know will never change, until one day you find yourself in a Holiday Inn Express in Cedar Rapids, IA with a gun in your mouth, sitting next to an empty bottle of gin. (Oh wait, I just described my last week)

3. Tomorrowland and The Sniper – These are the futurist/specialist type speakers. Everyone wants to hear what’s going to happen in the future, unfortunately, it’s all one big educated guess. On the specialist front, it’s also nice to hear a really talented specialist tell you how you should really being doing something. Unfortunately, most of these folks don’t keep doing it, so the ‘special’ advice they’re giving you is from five years ago!

I put these two together because you usually see these folks doing the same thing. It’s easier to talk about what you should be doing, instead of how to actually be doing it. Those the are the case study folks, but like I said above, they only know how to do it one way, with one company.

I will tell you, as one who has been to a few conferences, you’re most likely to walk into a disaster when it’s a case study speaker. They usually get invited because they come from a great company, but know one knows if they can actually speak or not. The biggest train wrecks come at this level.

But, I also have found some of my most favorite speakers at this level, because you just don’t know! Everyone starts somewhere. The basic equation of any of these three levels is three solid stories, some good laughs, and one ‘oh, you got us’ moments. If you can make that happen, people will leave happy.

Maternity/Paternity Plans in 2016 #HRTF16

Posted on by
2

Hey, gang! I’m at HR Tech Fest in Washington D.C. and so far there has been some exceptional content and keynote sessions!

One of those keynotes was given by Jim O’Gorman who is the SVP of Talent and Organization at Hulu. Jim spoke about the organizational evolution of Hulu going from startup to becoming a teenager. What I loved about the entire presentation was he works for a big brand, but he shared real world HR issues they have faced and how the solved them.

You don’t always get this from major brands. You usually get this very washed, clean view of how great everything is and perfect they are, and you leave really learning nothing. Jim gave solid ideas and examples of stuff any of us could do in our own shops!

One great idea he had was sharing their Maternity and Paternity programs that Hulu has recently put in place, and the challenges and results. Ironically, Dawn Burke and I just had this same conversation about her own HR shop and the challenges they have had with instituting a modern maternity program.

What does this have anything to do with an HR Technology conference!?

That’s the cool part. Jim, and Hulu, used their HR analytics and technology to prove that developing a new Maternity/Paternity program would increase engagement, loyalty and retention. The money it was going to cost, would come back in spades by the increase in these other metrics.

Sure it was the “right” thing to do, but it also have to make financial sense to the organization.

The Hulu program gives the primary caregiver 20 weeks of pay (12 weeks in a row – think the traditional FMLA time that is required but with pay), and 8 weeks of pay that can be used as transition time.  These 8 weeks is to be used to slowly transition those primary caregivers back into their work life.

Primary caregiver is defined as birth mother, same-sex parent who is going to primary caregiver or father if the father is going to be the primary caregiver.

On top of this, the secondary caregiver in Hulu’s program, traditionally the father, also gets 8 weeks of paid leave to use as they need to support the primary caregiver. That means a secondary caregiver can decide when this time needs to be used, within the first year of life of the child.

Hulu’s philosophy was we can’t build just one maternity/paternity program because everyone’s situation is different. It has to be flexible for all of our arrangements. Each family is different and unique, and if truly want this program to deliver our desired outcomes (increased retention, high engagement, and loyalty) we need to develop a program that is customizable for each person.

“Customizable”!? HR? Benefits? Policies?  Wait, that sounds different!

Sounds pretty cool to me. Sounds like the future of HR to me.

Combine great ideas with what our employees actually want and need with technology and organizations can make great things happen!

Check out HR Tech Fest – it’s their first year in the U.S., and they put on a really great conference. No detail was forgotten, the content was world-class and the attendees were highly engaged! I’ll be back!

Employees don’t leave organizations, they leave…

Posted on by
2

BOSSES! Right?! Right? Right…

For at least the past two decades, the foundation of employee engagement has been built on this one simple principle. Employees don’t leave organizations, they leave Bad Bosses.

So, if you want highly engaged employees just don’t have assholes for bosses. Super easy! Just hire and train great leaders and your employees will be engaged and productive and all will be right in the world.

Then along comes Harvard and their stupid studies:

“Good leadership doesn’t reduce employee turnover precisely because of good leadership. Supportive managers empower employees to take on challenging assignments with greater responsibilities, which sets employees up to be strong external job candidates. So employees quit for better opportunities elsewhere — better pay, more responsibility, and so on.”

Wait, what!? This is exactly what your CEO said she feared when you wanted to dump all of that money into leadership development. But you said, “If we don’t develop our leaders the people will leave as well!” So, what happened? We did so well at developing and empowering our leaders they pushed our best employees right out the door to other opportunities!

Ugh! This HR thing is hard. We think we’re doing the right thing for twenty years, then we find out we did it all wrong! Don’t fret, there’s some good news:

“There is a silver lining, though. Former employees with good bosses are what we call “happy quitters.” When the consultant company asked them about their feelings toward their former employer, their responses were overwhelmingly positive. Questions included Do you hold positive opinions about your former company? Would you refer employees to work for the company? and Do you see yourself as a potential boomerang employee? Good leadership, then, is an important tool for building goodwill with employees, which they are likely to retain as alumni, in turn becoming sources of valuable information, recommendations, and business opportunities later on.

The upside to losing well-led employees, however, comes with an important caveat. Our research finds that good leadership generates alumni goodwill only for those employees who experience good faith retention efforts when they quit. So managers should go to bat for their employees and counteroffer if they can. Our findings indicate that such retention efforts are critical for preserving the goodwill created by good leaders with employees, which can then be translated into a continuing relationship with them as alumni.”

What does this all mean?

You better get a heck of a lot better at Off-boarding! Off-what?  You know Onboarding but in reverse. Make employees feel really good about leaving you! Make them feel like they are valued and you don’t want to lose them and you’ll do anything to keep them. When they leave, they’ll be more likely to return or recommend others go work for you.

Most companies off-board like this:

Leaving employee: “I’m putting in my two weeks notice, I have this great opportunity to challenge myself and I have to give it a shot.”

HR and/or Hiring Manager: (while ripping their shirt) – “You are dead to us! Leave immediately. Don’t return to your desk, we already have security guards boxing up your crap!”

You laugh, but it’s mostly true. We suck at off-boarding, which is why most of us suck at alumni hiring. Fix that!

The First Rule of Recruiting

Posted on by
Reply

Sometimes we go so far into the weeds in recruiting we forget what is really important.

We have to have a brand!

We have to have an ATS! Or a new ATS!

We have to have a CRM! What the hell is a CRM!

Our job descriptions need to be better!

Our career site sucks! Don’t they all!?

We need to relaunch our employee referral program!

There are literally a million things you could focus on in recruiting and you still would have a list of crap you never even got to.

You know recruiting isn’t difficult. It’s not like we’re trying to launch the space shuttle. Recruiting is finding people for your organization. People are everywhere. We just need to talk them into coming to work for our organizations.

It’s the first rule of recruiting – Just let people know you’re hiring.

We make it so difficult when all we have to truly do is let people know we actually want to hire them. Do you have any idea how many people would really want to work for your organization, but they never know you are hiring or were hiring?

Recruiting is really only that. Just letting enough people know that you want them to work for you until you’ve reached the right people. It’s okay that you will reach some you don’t want. That’s part of the game.

To reach the people who you want, and who want you, you have to let a lot of people know you’re hiring.

Letting people know you’re hiring goes beyond your career site. It goes beyond job boards. It goes beyond employee referral programs. It’s a philosophy throughout your organization. It’s about an understanding that you want everyone to know that you’re hiring.

Most organizations don’t do this. It’s a combination of issues, but mostly it’s conceited belief that letting people know you’re hiring seems desperate. That we are too good of an organization to let everyone know we are hiring, because we don’t want everyone, we only want a few.

This is why most talent acquisition departments fail. Simple conceit.

Great recruiting isn’t conceited, great recruiting is about being humble enough to let people know you want them.

Who is responsible for the lack of good workers?

Posted on by
9

It’s parents. First and foremost I blame parents. Parents are the number one reason you can’t find good workers because parents want their kids reach higher than they did. Thus, if Mom or Dad worked in a blue collar profession, they want their kids to look down on that work. It’s subtle. Most parents don’t come out and say “what I do is bad”, it’s more “I want you to be better than me”, by doing this, you’re telling your kids, what I do isn’t worthwhile.

It’s teachers.  It’s our job to prepare you for college! No, it’s not, it’s your job to help prepare them for life after high school. That doesn’t have to be college. When did we turn public education into college preparatory and not life preparatory? Public Education has gotten so bad that the only paths a kid has after high school are college, the military or prison.

It’s the government – oh there’s a popular one.  The government has subconsciously told kids that working with your hands isn’t worthwhile. How? They no longer give public education the funding that is needed to teach skilled and semi-skilled trades in schools. When I went to junior high and high school I took wood shop, metal shop, electrical shop, automotive repair, a cooking class, etc. I was told by my government, as part of my education, that these skills were important to society.

It’s the media. Besides “Dirty Jobs” which is played off as a goof reality show, what show makes you feel like working in a job that makes your hands dirty is a worthwhile and valued career in our society? None. Even if a manual labor type job is portrayed, it’s usually portrayed in a comedy sense of look how screwed up my life is for working this job. Our kids are blasted by the media constantly to only look up to people who work in white collar professions.

We all stopped valuing hard work. Dirty work. Difficult work. Unpretty work. Not socially acceptable work.

We are all to blame.

We need to start telling kids, little kids, it’s okay not to be a doctor or lawyer or banker. That being a plumber is a wonderful, fulfilling career. Being a line cook, creating someone’s meal, can be a really good job. Building some’s car is a noble profession.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped telling our kids that ‘working’ is a good thing, and started telling them, you need to go to college, because ‘working’ is bad. We have generations of kids being raised that think ‘working’ is bad. We should strive to get jobs where you don’t ‘work’. You should manage. You should lead. You should facilitate.

Not work, lord no. You might get your hands dirty. You might get a stain on your trousers. Someone might see you working! We are not a working-class family! Worst of all? You might actually like it! You might like fixing something. You might like building something. You might like creating something.

I miss a time when working was as valued as education.  When you could look up at your Mom and Dad and be proud of them for working at a job that brought them home dirty, but brought them home for dinner.

Does my black face make me look more diverse?

Posted on by
1

I’m sitting at the conference room table. It’s surrounded by my peers, most of which are white, one other, besides me is black, sprinkle in a couple of females, welcome to corporate America. We’re here because the white folks want to talk about how diversity is important. The entire time this conversation is happening they just keep staring at me and my black face. I do believe they think diversity is important.

I agree, diversity is important. We need to do something about it at our organization.  But, I’m not who they think I am.

Yes, I’m black.  But, I’m not diverse. In fact, the color of my skin is the only diverse thing about me!

I grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb. Not an upper-middle-class black suburb. An upper-middle-class white suburb. So, most people would actually call this a rich suburb. I was classically trained as an opera singer. I didn’t play basketball. I was a great student. I work in a white collar profession. I eat at the Olive Garden with my wife and three kids. I drive a Toyota SUV, the big one.

I might be more ‘white’ than the other white people at this table, but I have a black face. Apparently, because of my black face, I should be chosen to ‘run’ diversity for the organization. Apparently, I understand the ‘struggle’.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a black person living in America. The white female CEO of our organization walked past me on the first month on the job. I recognized her immediately and said a jolly, “Good Morning”. She said nothing and walked past me. Not an hour later she realized the black man she rudely walked past wasn’t some random black guy, but a mid-level executive in her organization, and she stopped by to give me an excuse and a jolly good morning back.  I know she wouldn’t have walked past a white peer of mine without a greeting.

So, my black skin does present a challenge, but it does not make me diverse.

I ask the group, “why not Tom?” Tom, you see grew up in the inner city. Blue collar environment, with a single mom. Tom walked past a GM plant every day on his way to school. Once in a while, he would the workers selling dime bags out of the trunk of their cars in the GM parking lot. Tom played basketball and went to school on a scholarship. It was his only chance to get out of his neighborhood. Tom’s friend network has more black faces than mine, by a lot!

Tom grew up poor. Grew up surrounded by black people, Hispanic people, Asian people, people on the fringes of society, people I didn’t grow up around. Tom saw things I only saw when I went to the movies, which my parents paid for. Tom went to Baptist church, not because he was close to Jesus, but because the black women would cook a hot meal each day for the kids in the neighborhood. Tom has lived a diverse life.

“Tom!? Tom can’t lead up diversity, he’s…”, they stop before stating the obvious, like somehow saying “he’s white” out loud will change the color of his face.

Tom is diverse. Tom actually is passionate about diversity.  The only thing Tom doesn’t have is my black face.

It’s decided, I’ll take on diversity. I’m better “suited” for it, they say.

(Before you lose your minds and wonder why a white guy wrote this, understand that this came from a friend of mine. A friend with a black face who doesn’t have this platform. He told me the story, I wrote it. It was a story that needed to be told. Diversity isn’t about color, yet most organizations still make it about color. It’s the sad state of diversity in organizations in America.)