AVA DUVERNAY: SEEING THE REAL US

AUTHENTICITY ■ Johné Battle, Miami

When They See Us is not just the title of Ava DuVernay’s powerful four-part Netflix series about how the Central Park Five teenagers were falsely accused of rape and how long it took to prove their innocence. (They lost five to twelve years of their lives in prison.) It is also her clarion call for inclusion through authenticity, which has driven her mission-driven filmmaking.

DuVernay’s work as a writer, director, producer, and film distributor has included the historical civil rights drama Selma, the criminal justice documentary 13th, and blockbuster hits such as Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time, which grossed more than $100 million at the box office with its norm-breaking diverse cast.

These hits have made DuVernay the highest-grossing Black woman director in box office history, and the most decorated. She has garnered the Academy’s Best Picture nomination for Selma, and the film won the award for Best Original Song; sixteen Emmy nominations and two Emmy Awards; a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award; and a Peabody Award. When she’s not working on her projects, DuVernay is inspiring the work of other people of color and of women through her nonprofit film collective, ARRAY, which was named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies. She also sits on the advisory board of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and chairs the Prada Diversity Council.

DuVernay has created a movement grounded in being authentic to what matters most to her, what matters most about her, yet all in the cinematic frame of us.¹ She’s intentional about reframing old narratives that may have painted us in a less than positive light, in ways that challenge all to rethink what we may have thought to be true. According to Oprah Winfrey, “Ava has the rare ability to capture humanity in all of its beauty, ugliness, and truth. . . . She has a gift for illuminating the stories of the underrepresented and unseen.”

When They See Us, for example, “takes boys who were . . . reduced to an indistinguishable pack of animals . . . and insists that they be viewed as individuals, children worthy of love, and then years later, men worthy of justice,” writes film critic Emily Nussbaum in a New Yorker review. “If they’re free, we’re free.” In recalling meeting with the men whose stories she captured in the Netflix series, DuVernay reflects, “I think of the day that the men wept in my arms and I wept in theirs as they told me that I told their story better than they could have imagined.”

Hers is one of these stories. From the tough streets of Compton, California, she has arrived at a pinnacle where she is doing the groundbreaking artistic work she loves, with purpose and impact. “There’s a lot of really beautiful work that’s left by the wayside because it just hasn’t pierced through the cultural consciousness,” says DuVernay. She’s committed to doing more of the piercing through the authentic telling of more stories of those who have been overlooked and misunderstood.

“I’m really fortunate to be in a position now to make work that I love, with my own independent vision. . . . [This] is a rarified honor . . . especially for someone who looks like me, someone who looks like us.”²

NELSON MANDELA WAS NOT BROKEN

EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE ■ Fayruz Kirtzman, New York City

Not too long ago, I stood in front of cell number 5, a seven-by-nine-foot room in desolate maximum security prison Robben Island, five miles offshore from Cape Town, South Africa. There, Nelson Mandela had slept naked on a damp and cold concrete floor, a lightbulb burning bright twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for thirteen of his twenty-seven years behind bars, for fighting against the racist apartheid regime. In addition, he had done forced labor, breaking rock at the quarry for many hours a day. He could only receive one visitor a year, for thirty minutes, and one letter every six months.

To this day, I still cannot shake the juxtaposition between the cruelty and dehumanizing treatment Mandela received over such a long period of time and his refusal to succumb to dehumanizing his own captors.

How did he manage to accomplish this?

Mandela demonstrated emotional resilience in every aspect of his life. His composure amid the most dire of circumstances was singular. He did not crack. He did not riot. Instead, he lobbied for pajamas, he petitioned for medical care when needed, he influenced the slowing of the walking pace to the quarry to a more sustainable one. He often used disarming humor to win his captors over, like the time when he referred to the eight guards who had escorted him to an interrogation as his “honor guard.” And whatever concessions he won he did not accept for himself, unless his fellow prisoners also received them.

Mandela also exemplified situational awareness; while never giving up his fight for human rights, he sought to truly understand his opponent. He urged his fellow inmates to study Afrikaans, despite their objection that it was the language of the oppressor. His reasoning was clear: “We are in for a protracted war. You can’t dream of ambushing the enemy if you can’t understand the general commanding the forces. You have to read their literature and poetry, you have to understand their culture so that you get into the mind of the general.”³

The impact on those around him was profound. In 1978, an eighteen-year-old pro-apartheid prison guard, Christo Brand, was assigned to guard Mandela. He says, “When I came to the prison, Nelson Mandela was already sixty. He was down-to-earth and courteous. He treated me with respect and my respect for him grew. After a while, even though he was a prisoner, a friendship grew. It was a friendship behind bars.” This friendship lasted even after Mandela was released, and it extended to Brand’s family.⁴

Mandela’s situational awareness extended far into his postprison life. He knew that despite the widespread support he was receiving, there was an element of “White fear” in his country, and he worked to alleviate rather than ignore it. He entered into a government of national unity with Frederik Willem de Klerk, the former president of South Africa’s National Party. Mandela invited for lunch Percy Yutar, the man who had once headed the prosecution against him and who had called for his death sentence. After this meeting, Yutar called Mandela “a saintly man.” Both Mandela and de Klerk won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for their efforts to reform their country.

In 2002, Mandela wrote, “Today when I look at Robben Island I see it as a celebration of the struggle and a symbol of the finest qualities of the human spirit . . . rather than as a monument to the brutal tyranny and oppression of apartheid.”⁵

This is emotional resilience—the key to Mandela’s inclusive leadership. And that is why his country to this day calls him Madiba, “Father of the Nation.”

MINDY KALING HAS NO APOLOGIES

SELF-ASSURANCE ■ Karen Huang, Philadelphia

Shortly after Molly Patel (played by Mindy Kaling on Late Night, the Amazon original comedy written by her) lands her dream job as the sole woman on a team of White male comedy writers, she overhears Tom (played by Reid Scott) complaining about her getting hired instead of his brother. “Right now is a hostile environment in which to be an educated White male . . . It’s staggering how unfair it is . . . They completely overlooked my brother. She’s like a diversity hire or something.” Tom, we later learn, inherited his job from his father.

Much to his chagrin, he turns around midconversation to see Molly glaring at him. She snaps, “I’d rather be a diversity hire than a nepotism hire, because at least I had to beat out every minority and woman to get here. He just had to be born.”

In fact, Kaling herself was hired through NBC’s diversity writing program, but she did not possess the wherewithal, at age twenty-four, to confidently speak up for what she deserved. She explains, “For a long time I was really embarrassed about that. No one [on The Office] said anything to me about it, but they all knew and I was acutely aware of that. It took me a while to realize that I was just getting the access other people had because of who they knew.”⁶ In the years since, Kaling has won awards, critical acclaim, and fans and become one of the few women of color to achieve Hollywood success for herself and for inclusion.

Rather than let others box her in with her race, ethnicity, gender, or appearance, Kaling has expanded the mainstream ideals of beauty, introduced nonclichéd, diverse characters to a broad audience, challenged the diminishing assumptions that thwart women of color, and demonstrated that including diverse perspectives is “actually valuable and a better way to make money and to reach more people.”⁷ Crucial to these accomplishments is her self-assurance, a belief that she can succeed by being herself because her original ideas, talent, personality, and appearance have value just as they are. Like Molly, she had the confidence to defy typecasting and to unapologetically take a seat at the table for herself and for other people of color by writing characterful, diverse roles and stories that simply didn’t exist in Hollywood.

For The Mindy Project, a romantic sitcom that Kaling created and starred in, she invented Dr. Mindy Lahiri, a hilarious, unabashedly boy-crazy, fashion-obsessed, self-proclaimed “hottie” ob-gyn doctor who confidently grabs attention, unlike the stereotypically thin, smart, “model minority” Asian female characters favored by Hollywood. As such, Dr. Lahiri was hailed as the most subversive female lead of 2014.⁸

Kaling’s self-assurance has also led her to champion inclusive diversity behind the camera. Her cadre of writers is always diverse. Kaling explains, “For many years, I thought that hard work was the only way you could succeed, but it’s simply not true . . . Particularly if you’re a woman of color, you need people to give you opportunities, because otherwise it won’t happen.”⁹

Finally, Kaling has used her self-assurance to challenge people—primarily male interviewers—to examine their exclusionary ideas and assumptions about women and success.

While doing press for Late Night, a journalist asked Kaling if she has “impostor syndrome.” She replied, “I actually don’t, because I’ve really put in the time,” and she questioned his implicit assumptions by noting that a thirty-nine-year-old man would never be asked if he felt like an impostor for writing a movie.¹⁰

In response to the Where do you get your confidence? question that male journalists frequently ask her, she notes the insulting reasoning behind it: “You [Mindy] don’t look like a person who should have any confidence. You’re not White, you’re not a man, and you’re not thin or conventionally attractive. How were you able to overlook these obvious shortcomings to feel confident?”¹¹

Mic drop, Kaling.

SEEING WELL BEYOND THE SURFACE

INQUISITIVENESS ■ Sahar Sarreshtehdari, Berlin

How did the Korn Ferry executive search senior partner figure out that a doctoral candidate finishing her thesis on memory cultures of diaspora communities, using second-generation Iranian immigrants in Germany as the case study, had what it took to be an executive search consultant?

A few years ago, the person who is my manager today saw me in action in Berlin at an annual convention for Iranian diaspora business-people in technology. More than two thousand Iranians, Germans, and North Americans had come together to network, exchange ideas, and work together.

My team and I were in charge of looking after the speakers and making sure the sessions ran smoothly. A Korn Ferry partner was attending the conference, given his long-standing interest in Iran. We spoke briefly, and that’s when I shared information about the thesis I was working on. He asked me some insightful questions about why I had picked the topic and how I had gone about the research.

We stayed in touch over the next year while I continued to live in Munich, and one day, via LinkedIn, he reached out to ask me what my plans were. It was good timing. I had not quite settled on an academic career track yet, but I did not know much about what else was out there. He asked whether I would be interested in exploring a career in executive search. At the time, I didn’t even know what that was!

Nevertheless, being the adventurous type, and given that he kept telling me he saw qualities in me that would be valuable in executive search, I accepted his invitation to visit Korn Ferry’s Frankfurt office. It would be the first time for me seeing a corporation from the inside. As I flew to the interview, I wondered how someone like me, who was not corporate in demeanor and thinking, could be effective in a fast-paced, commercially driven environment.

After a full day of interviews, the partner actively sought to understand how I was experiencing the process. What was I thinking and feeling about the people I was meeting? Could I see myself doing the work? He pointed out how someone with my curiosity and research abilities would do very well in finding greater diversity for our clients’ candidate pools.

I found myself learning new things about myself in this new context.

The partner’s curiosity about what motivated me, my own different cultural background, and the unique ways in which I saw the world was a demonstration of his inclusive leadership. Through his inquisitiveness, I felt valued and appreciated precisely because of my own diversity.

Here was a leader who wanted to learn from me but was also very effective at helping me learn new things about myself. It completely changed my professional life.

FLEXIBILITY IS NOT JUST GOOD FOR YOGA

FLEXIBILITY ■ Kristin Hibler, Portland

Performing improv, explains comedian Ryan Stiles of the American improvisation show Whose Line Is It Anyway?, is like jumping out of an airplane and knitting your parachute on the way down. Improvisers make up a story in real time, with other people, in front of a live audience. It requires an extreme openness to ambiguity and the unknown.

Inclusive organizational leaders also must be great at improvising. It makes me think of two leaders—one who did it well and one who didn’t—and the impact it had on their ability to achieve business objectives.

“Maria” (name and identifying details changed), a general manager at a global hotel chain, is a corporate improviser. After successfully establishing three US-based hotels, she was sent to Japan to open the hotel chain’s first hotel in the Asia-Pacific region. When she arrived, she quickly learned that the rules were different.

For example, she noticed that decisions didn’t get made during meetings. It was as if all the strategic ones had been made well in advance. She learned that if she wanted to get buy-in and move forward with big decisions, she would have to spend more time having “meetings before the meetings,” building engagement and consensus in advance to ensure there would be no loss of face during an actual meeting. She changed her approach, and it worked. Her team appreciated the time she had taken to learn their way of doing things, instead of forcing her way. This built inclusion and, with that, trust.

In essence, Maria improvised to manage the diversity around her. She jumped in and tried things, even though the path ahead was not clear. The key to her improvised flexibility was getting to know and understand the differences around her; it provided the necessary guidance through uncharted waters.

While Maria’s flexibility enabled her success, the lack of flexibility shown by her colleague “Jason” hindered his. Jason was the general manager for the chain’s Boston location and had been tapped to open its first hotel in Africa. Ethiopia was a risky location, given its slow (but growing) tourist and business footprint. But if anyone could do it, management thought, Jason could. In Boston, he was known as a logistics rock star who excelled at cutting through red tape.

However, within several months, it became clear that what worked in Boston wasn’t going to work in Addis Ababa. The red tape was all too familiar, but cutting through it was a different story. Jason hit roadblocks at every turn. His quick, decisive, and tough style had led to stellar results in Boston. In Addis, though, he was way behind schedule and not getting much done.

Jason was perplexed and frustrated that what had been surefire ways for getting things done was not working. He had put together an operational plan with an aggressive timeline, established key performance indicators for each of his teams, and empowered them to implement. Meanwhile, he assumed responsibility for engaging their senior stakeholders.

His inflexibility was his downfall. As someone used to getting straight to the point with his contemporaries, he had seen little value in the Ethiopian cultural ways of doing things. He judged it as wasting time through recurring and protracted ceremonial coffee sessions.

Not surprisingly, the local politicians and business leaders, whose buy-in was critical for the hotel chain, ended up calling him “the Steamroller.”

In contrast, halfway around the world, Maria, despite also being in a culturally different environment, was called “the Improviser.”

FILMMAKER ALFONSO CUARÓN HAS US SEE WHAT OTHERS SEE

EMPATHY ■ Gustavo Gisbert, Chicago and Caracas

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s 2019 Oscar-winning story Roma, told through the eyes of Cleo, an indigenous domestic worker in a middle-class home in Mexico City, was a cinematic and societal breakthrough.

At the core of Cuarón’s tour de force was his powerful debiasing approach: empathy. He chose to not use his own middle-class perspective to tell the story. Instead, he took the more difficult route of telling it through the perspective of his real-life nanny, Liboria “Libo” Rodriguez. He spent hours with her to capture how she remembered the past. The many surprises in how different their memories were led to a much more powerful film.

Cuarón used empathy to shed light on what makes us both the same and different to one another. He reflects on how a unique and differentiated story can paradoxically uncover universal human experiences: “[Roma] is a film about a very specific family, in a very specific society, in a very specific time in history, but at the end . . . it’s about something that we all share as humans.”¹²

“I see [life] as a crack in the wall,” says Cuarón. “The crack is whatever pain happened in the past. We tend to put several coats of paint over it, trying to cover that crack. But it’s still there.”¹³

Cuarón’s empathy is grounded in knowing his own story. From street vendor scenes in Mexico City’s plazas to political violence interrupting mundane activities, he shows awareness of his unique cultural experiences and humility in not trying to cover the cracks. The pain, the perplexing experiences, the things he valued most, he opens these up to audiences to explore freely on their own.

Now Cuarón’s empathetic art is significantly influencing change. Cleo’s story is a look at an era intimately known by Mexicans but never narrated from the perspective of someone historically ignored. The movie character represents the more than 2.4 million domestic workers across present-day Mexico, more than 95% of whom are female and from indigenous areas and who have been discriminated against through abuse and injustice. And the story within the story is that lead actress Yalitza Aparicio, who gave a breakout performance as Cleo, had never been in a movie before. Cuarón discovered her acting skills in rural Mexico.

Cuarón’s nonmainstream approach led to blockbuster ratings among a diverse array of audiences and has influenced millions—in fact, the whole culture—to consider embracing those who have traditionally been excluded. To do so, he found ways to make the strange familiar, the differences valued, the discomfort comfortable.

“The emotional reaction of people that watched the film,” says Cuarón, “gives me hope for diversity.”¹⁴

LAUNCHING ONE THOUSAND INCLUSIVE LEADERS

STRUCTURAL INCLUSION ■ Marji Marcus, Boston

To make the transformation toward greater diversity and inclusion, leaders at the very top must become inclusive leaders. But they cannot create an inclusive culture alone. What they need is one thousand inclusive leaders in every corner of the organization.

Imagine if one thousand inclusive leaders could learn to recognize different learning and thinking styles, build rapport and trust with those both alike and different from them, invite new people to the table, and actively seek out contributions from those who bring different experiences to the discussion, and thus elicit the personal best from each individual.

Imagine if one thousand inclusive leaders were practicing inclusion in talent review discussions, when deciding whom to bring onto a team, or when assigning a plum developmental opportunity.

Imagine if one thousand inclusive leaders were rewarded for desired inclusive behaviors just as they were rewarded for achieving other goals, such as winning clients or meeting sales targets.

But how can an organization exponentially multiply its number of inclusive leaders?

It requires the ability to provide knowledge and develop skills in a scalable way. While the top twelve or the top one hundred will have access to deep assessments measuring inclusive leadership, as well as executive coaching and other reinforcing interventions, the large group of middle managers must be ramped up differently. One of the most intractable unresolved obstacles to advancing diversity and inclusion is the mindset of the middle manager—you know, the one who hires and fires, and develops and promotes. Or not.

For sure, training is foundational. But so is access to just-in-time tools they can use to interrupt their unconscious biases. They need structurally inclusive processes and systems so that job requirements, behaviorally based interviews, success profiles, and other evaluative tools are bias free. They need methodologies such as inclusive design approaches that they can capably apply to remedy department-specific inequities. And they need to be as capable as many have become in Six Sigma and safety procedures.

Finally, managers need to be understood by their organizations. They face myriad pressures that compete for their time and attention. They, too, need to feel included, valued, respected, and supported in ways that help them to perform and to become inclusive leaders. As organizations demonstrate greater empathy toward their middle managers, those managers will be more curious about their own team members and will better see the unique value that each person brings.

When this type of behavior proliferates across an organization, the true benefits of a diverse and inclusive organization will start to be realized and sustained—one manager, one team, one department, one function at a time.

It’s time to unleash one thousand inclusive leaders in your organization.