Do you want to be recognized as a great team leader, because of the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, or your gender?

Or….

Do you want to be recognized as a great team leader who played a role in transforming the healthcare industry because you saw, honored and valued the unique differences each team member brought to the table?

If you chose the second statement, this blog is for you!

Inclusivity

As a woman of color from the Bahamas, I know first hand how it feels to be looked at from a “diversity” perspective; labeled and categorized by surface level things that had very little to do with my purpose or performance. Becoming the first woman to graduate with an engineering degree from my college never magically created a feeling of “inclusivity” for me. In fact, I felt diminished when I was told I was hired for my first job as an engineer because I counted three times for the organization. I was black, a woman and an engineer. This, by the way, was in the seventy’s when DEI was “a thing” as it was called and there were very few woman engineers.

That feeling of “inclusivity” only happened after I investigated my thinking and beliefs about who I am in the world and threw out anything that didn’t align with how I wanted to feel everyday. I learned over time that to feel and be truly valued and respected, I needed to stop looking to bosses, co-workers, friends or even family for validation and start acting like someone who really valued and respected themself first.

Experience

In my experience, inclusive work cultures aren’t made by hiring diverse looking humans or righting inequalities in pay, although it helps. They are made because the people (everyone – leader and employee) within them are willing to investigate their own (often unconcious) internal biases about differences; the obvious ones and the ones that can only be discovered by spending time together.

After helping hundreds of frustrated healthcare leaders successfully and sustainably change their workplace cultures, it’s clear that embedding diversity into the fabric of the culture versus creating a temporary initiative on the fringes, is the solution. I’ve found the very language of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) keeps most people stuck thinking about representation (race, gender, sexuality, etc.), which keeps the never ending cycle in effect. That is why I’m excited to introduce D.N.A. a new approach to creating unity and ending the cycle of division that leads to medical error and disparity of care.

How cool that DNA just happens to be the unique blueprint of each and every human, inside the suit? 😉 Magic!