Summary:

In this episode of the HR Impact show, host Dr. Jim is joined by Ashley Brundage to dive into the topic of empowerment in the workplace and discuss ways to leverage the unique differences among team members. The conversation highlights Ashley's remarkable journey from facing significant challenges to becoming a pivotal figure in fostering an environment where everyone can thrive.

Ashley unpacks her experiences in the financial industry and recounts how her background informed her perspective on resource allocation and the critical nature of inclusive hiring practices. The discussion navigates through the importance of emotional intelligence and how DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) frameworks must evolve beyond checkbox exercises and transform into integral facets of leadership and organizational strategy.

Key Takeaways:

• Empowerment is essential for leveraging diverse teams' unique differences to achieve high performance and representation.
• Resource allocation is crucial in DEI, and understanding employees' varied backgrounds is vital for creating an inclusive environment.
• Emotional intelligence plays a key role in advancing empowerment and self-actualization within professional settings.
• Creating a DEI-friendly infrastructure is necessary before introducing initiatives to ensure sustainable and supportive growth within the organization.
• DEI should be viewed as an organizational leadership opportunity, contributing to improved retention and business outcomes.

Chapters:

0:01:17 Ashley Brundage shares the questions and findings from her global research study on empowerment

0:06:12 Ashley Brundage's experience in the banking industry and its influence on resource conversation

0:10:07 Utilizing the Empowerment Self-Assessment Questionnaire to understand and memorialize one's existence

0:15:06 Ashley shares her success story at PNC Bank and emphasizes the importance of DEIB programs.

0:19:49 Ashley calls for DEI leaders to create a welcoming environment for people outside of marginalized communities.

0:23:19 Dr. Jim emphasizes the financial benefits of diversity and retention in organizations.

0:27:19 The success of empowering differences in different industries and roles.

0:29:08 Key steps to building an empowerment culture: benchmark and track empowerment, emotional intelligence, and avoid politics.

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Ashley Brundage: linkedin.com/in/ashleytbrundage

Music Credit: winning elevation - Hot_Dope



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Let me give you a little bit of background on Ashley. She's the founder and president of Empowering Differences. And that was an organization that she spun up throughout her career. She's spent time in major financial institutions and during her time there, she overcame harassment.

Ashley Brundage, welcome to the show.

Ashley Brundage: Oh my gosh, I'm so thrilled to be here. Thank you, Dr. Jim,

Dr. Jim: You and I have talked before, so I'm I'm pumped to have an opportunity to chat with you again. A good place for us to get the ball rolling is for you to fill the listeners in on. Any of the things that I left out in your bio that you feel is important for them to understand about your background, your experience, and that's going to inform this conversation that we're going to have today.

I really wanted to know the answer to three important questions about people driving empowerment for others. One is. What is empowerment? Because it's very much an ambiguous term that people use very differently depending on what they have access to and where they are in the world. So those answers were very much all over the place, but a lot of them centered around resource allocation and have people having emotional ties to things in the world.

The second question I asked people in my global study was what. Do what impacts their empowerment along their journey? And really actually 63 percent of the people told me it was things that impacted them around their own selves, their own makeup, their own access to resources, their weight, their height, their hair color, their social economic class, how much money they had in their pocket.

And so I thought, Oh my gosh, I'm going to do a global study and I'm going to be finding out this important information. I better link it to something that's going to make an impact for people. So the last question centered around the impacts and what do people do to drive empowerment for other people?

But also how they can understand what to do to drive empowerment faster based on the differences that we have as a human. And I was like, Oh, wow, I feel like I just hit the lottery and this really made an impact. And I would probably say that it's really what's driven me to continue down this path of being an entrepreneur.

Leveling up to add tools and resources to help people on their journey.

Dr. Jim: I really appreciate you sharing that that context. There's a couple of things that I'm curious about related to what you mentioned. And a lot of the conversation that we're going to have today is going to be in and around the topic of empowerment. But one of the first things that you mentioned was the issue of resource allocation, and I'd like you to expand on that a little bit and tell us what's the relationship between resource allocation and your ability and success at creating an empowerment culture?

This process of what you go through to operate each day is a different thing based on what you have access to. When people are trying to drive diversity, equity, inclusion.

Really this path of equity centers around resource allocation. If you don't know what people have access to, if you have people on your team and they don't have the same resources, they're sitting there wondering, okay, I'm in the career van, I'm in the pay range. I'm in all these things and at the end of the day, but did anyone really ask me what my current financial position is?

And this is why it's so important because there are people are always wondering what someone makes, and it's always on their mind, especially people who live paycheck to paycheck and living paycheck to paycheck is part of how our world works, unfortunately, for so many people, and this is why it's so important to have this broader understanding of what resources they have access to.

Dr. Jim: I think the perspective that you bring to the table when you're talking about access to resources is actually at least informed by your career trajectory in banking. So I think it's worth some time to talk through how that lens of experience informed the resource conversation that we're having right now.

Plus I did that in one gender. And then I did the banking industry rise from a part time bank teller. To becoming the national vice president of diversity, equity, and inclusion in four years in a different gender and having seen both environments, I have to tell you how people are treated, how they're respected, how they're listened to, all of those things were extremely different.

And so all of those things impacted this. So I think it's really important for people to realize you can learn so much from so many different people around the world. This is also one of the reasons why I try to sell people like even your Uber driver, right? Could be the most powerful person that you speak to today.

You literally never know. This is so hard sometimes but we don't think that the people who we talked to could literally be someone that could give us the expert advice. But if you treat everybody like that, then this is where you can always uncover a knowledge piece that you never thought you would understand before.

Dr. Jim: So I really like that point that you just made about, theoretically, the Uber driver that you're with could be the most powerful person that you encounter in the day. But oftentimes we're trapped in this positional authority mindset. If somebody looks the part, if somebody acts the part, then we think they are the part versus, a broader perspective.

Ashley Brundage: It really comes down to emotional intelligence. And the more things that you can do to center around how you exist in the world and what you feel and how you memorialize that is really important. One of the things that we create as a resource for anybody who goes on our website is our empowerment Self-assessment questionnaire.

This questionnaire results up with 21 open-ended questions to get you thinking about your existence in the world and what empowerment means to you, how you interacted with others how you move about the world, and how your differences are impacting or impacted. By the empowerment, these are things that are going to help you to come with your own existence, but memorialize it.

And that's self actualization is like your big, huge, excitement moments that you can acquire when you're on this journey of helping you. Understanding power.

How has that related to some of those game changing realizations that you had through your career that helped you build a team?

Ashley Brundage: It really comes down to navigating your awareness of what we call the top 10 empowering differences. These 10 empowering differences impact everybody. And what ends up happening a lot is when we do diversity work, we tend to pigeonhole diversity work to just be about race, maybe gender, and maybe a couple of other things.

And then when we are looking at it in that construct, of course, we're going to, we're going to make some of the people feel like it's not about them and then it doesn't involve them. But really, the definition of diversity is the presence of differences that make us all unique. So technically, every single one of the eight and a half billion people on the planet are different.

But what really needs to be the focus here is that the leaders who really. Go work to empower and to be empowering differences, right? They're the ones that are learning about the differences and realizing that's a, that's an actual statistical advantage. Having somebody who is different on your team, if you only hire the best person and think that just by hiring the best person is going to get you to navigating the best team.

But at the end of the day, if my lived experience isn't an actual statistical benefit that you take into account on your rubric, then something's seriously wrong. Because I'm going to open the door to building a relationship with 2 million additional people in the United States of America that maybe you didn't already have an inroad with, and that you're already not selling to.

And then, if I'm going to also say, Hey, by the way, I can also create this inroad too. The 1. 7 trillion buying power of the LGBT business community and an estimated 1. 4 million LGBT business owners in America, you're not thinking about all these things while you're interviewing me and comparing me to the person who maybe has more education or maybe has more work experience in that field.

Dr. Jim: There's a couple of things that you mentioned that I think deserve some additional context.

You mentioned the buying power of the LGBTQIA plus community. You also mentioned the, I think it was 1. 7 million people in the U S that are part of the transgender community.

Ashley Brundage: Or more than 2 million. Estimated. And that, those statistical numbers are really old. It's probably way more than that now.

Dr. Jim: You're not pulling those numbers out of thin air. And there's actually a use case and case study in your own experiences of how you actually drove business impact because of who you are and what you did. I'd like you to share with us what that story.

Ashley Brundage: I was the top sales producer at PNC Bank for three, three straight years. And so I delivered on my promise to deliver relationships in the community and to grow and cultivate business. I got inducted into the Employee Hall of Fame in my fourth year working there.

That was the fastest anyone had ever done that. There was only like. 300 lifetime employees in the Hall of Fame still. They just awarded a new Hall of Fame class this year. And I still have a great relationship with many people there at that organization, even though I don't work there anymore. And I think that's testament to why it's so important to think outside the box potentially when you're hiring people and look for someone who it maybe isn't your normal hire,.

But at the end of the day, I felt comfortable enough to be a part of the team and be a part of the program because there was a program. And so that's why it's so important. I feel like I'm hopefully answering both your questions at once, but this program and these programs for diversity, equity, inclusion, or belonging, or whatever we're calling it today, idea, Jedi, you name it.

Every time I show up at a pride event, an employee resource group, or business resource group, or D. I. V. event, and we're talking about the LGBTQIA plus community, or we're talking about the disability community, because I belong there as well or if we're talking about women, and I belong there, as a triple certified minority diversity owned firm.

I'm moving in all three of those spaces often and every single time I look around the room and I do a whole little scan and I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, I really hope that there's a lot of people who really should be here to learn about these lived experiences. And what ends up happening is about 90 percent of the people who show up to these kinds of educational forums and events is really the marginalized community and the allies.

Dr. Jim: When I take inventory of what you said, there's sort of two key things that I want to pull out of there one, and this is evidenced by your, hall of fame status at at PNC, The reason you got there is that you're a member of the team that look like the community that you serve.

So that's a general principle that businesses should take. If you want to build an elite team, an elite organization, a high performance organization, you have to have team members that reflect the communities that you serve. So there is that lesson that's drawn out of there, but there's another component that you mentioned too, that I think is important.

And John Graham, he's he's an author that I've had on on different shows before he often says you, why would you hire people and bring them into a burning house? And the burning house is one that doesn't have the infrastructure to support those diverse communities that you're hiring.

So that's the other aspect that I think is important to call out. You mentioned something. In the last part of your answer, that if the DEI ecosystem that you have within your organization is just allies and people from underrepresented groups, you're not going to make an impact.

Ashley Brundage: Honestly to quote myself from USA Today last month what was DEI called before it was called DEI,? If we go back in time, D I diversity affirmative action, EEO civil rights, women's suffrage, you name it, and then ultimately we get to the point where leadership and people who were in charge were all white guys.

Especially in America. At that point, what was it called? Cause it's, there still was a program and the program ultimately was called leadership because whoever was in charge learned as much as they could about the people who were different so they could make more money and sell more crap.

At the end of the day, if we don't make DEI be leadership, it will fail. And that's why we have to turn it into leadership because. It's a leadership opportunity, it's a leadership conference, it's a leadership event, and if you think about it, and if you're listening, or you're watching right now, and you close your eyes, and you literally think about if you had a button on your internet homepage, and it said leadership opportunity, click here.

Dr. Jim: One of the things that I want to highlight out of your answer is the financial benefit component of it. When you had talked about, when you work this all the way back leaders looked at what can I do? What can I learn? What can I execute to make, more money out of this and sell more stuff?

There's a financial benefit associated with doing this work anyways. So if you're looking at it from the leadership tier down, if you want to impact your biggest spend in your organization, that's personnel. More of your people are going to stick around in an environment that has that looks like them.

And here's where the retention component comes in. you don't do that. You're going to spend a lot of money getting people in the doors, you're going to spend a lot of money getting them onboarded, and they're going to be gone in 12 to 18 months because they don't want to stick around in an environment where nobody mirrors who they are or is welcoming to who they are.

In each of those instances that you get, you're going to spend up to 250 percent of that person's annual salary and replacement costs. So if you're looking at it from a dollars and cents perspective. If you want to control your costs, build a better ecosystem where people stick around. Great stuff, Ashley. And I always like, hanging out with you and chatting about this stuff. We've talked about the why and the what I want to get to the how. We've been spending this entire conversation talking about empowerment, and I'm sure there's people that are listening that are saying, Oh that all that stuff is pretty squishy.

It doesn't really drive bottom line results. How do you measure it and tie it to business outcomes?

And I realized that, okay if we're tracking empowerment and that's what some people feel it is time and money. My second question about the differences led me to think what if we were just tracking people's empowering differences? So we built a proprietary technology that measures the 10 empowering differences in 90 seconds.

And then we benchmark it, we track it, and then we connect it to the actions from our research. So each of the actions have a prioritization list. For each of the 10 empowering differences. So depending on where your teams rate their 10 empowering differences, they get a different actionable insight makeup.

Now the interesting part about the actionable insight makeup is that empowerment, as we've already discussed, could be something that someone seizes control of for themselves, or it could be something that someone shares with others. And hopefully over time, people and M and leaders and. People who really excel realize that they should connect their empowerment to people.

So like for me, I have racial privilege. And so that means I have lots of empowerment for my race. So that means that I should be doing things to drive empowerment for other people's race who are different than mine. And so that shows up differently based on the things that I do to who I choose to mentor, who I choose to sponsor to come to my conferences on the cruise ship.

All of those decisions are made specifically around how I can drive empowerment through my differences for the differences that are going to make the most impact for people. And so that's something that everyone could be doing very easily if they use our digital platform to help them map out where their empowerment should live.

Or the company, you name it, all of those things can happen through tracking all of their deliverables around impacting and driving empowerment for people.

Dr. Jim: When you describe the platform, the measurements, the data, the analytics and the outcomes, when you think about maturity models for D. I. B. or even organizational development, like what stage of maturity should an organization have when they're looking at bringing this in house to give them an idea Of what they should be focusing on.

Ashley Brundage: all over the place, honestly. The interesting thing is that we do this for the C suite. We do this for the board. We do this for the newcomers in an organization. We do it for a broad mix of people, but then we do it in different types and different segments of industries.

So we're doing a before and then after, and we provide a change impact score. So if you're doing anything in the HR space and you're wanting to win in the HR space. You're probably paying someone who's a leadership expert. You're probably paying for an employee engagement platform. You're probably playing for some kind of survey or EMP score platform.

You're probably paying for some consulting on the results. And so at the end of the day, you can. You can pay one, and have Empowering Differences come and we can actually provide you a platform that serves all of those needs.

Ashley Brundage: Yeah, so definitely benchmark and track the empowerment. That's the easy one. Have the ability to help people connect with their emotional intelligence and their awareness of this. And then don't get caught up in the politics. Be, everything that I do is extremely apolitical in nature or on purpose because I don't ever want empowerment or leadership to be seen as something that's political in one side of the form of the other.

This is the reason that I consulted last year for the Joe Biden White House. And it's also the reason that I won an award. From the governor of Florida, so moving across political parties is extremely important in this space to make it seem that what you're doing actually is legitimate.

Dr. Jim: if people want to continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Dr. Jim: Thanks for hanging out with us, Ashley. I think we really covered a lot of ground in this conversation and I'm grateful for you hopping on the show and having this conversation with us. When I think about the conversation that we had and the things that stood out to me, there are three things that stand out.

We're setting ourselves up for failure when it comes to building a high performance team. The other thing that stands out was your point about there needing to be an infrastructure in place. Before you start working on embedding empowerment into your organization, and that applies for D. I. B. In general, you can't just wish it to happen.

You have to have some foundational elements that are established so that you can be successful in doing the work. The last thing, and this is arguably maybe one of the most important things, there should be a business imperative to move these initiatives forward.

About embedding that representation across all layers of the organization. So you've created the foundation and the template for success. If you say that you're hiring philosophy is to hire the best people and your team tends to be one demographic or majority one demographic or class.

You're not really committed to hiring the best people. you're committed to hiring the people that you're most comfortable with, and that's not going to yield you the results that you need. Again, thanks for hanging out with us, Ashley. For those of you who have listened to this conversation, we appreciate your support give us a review and let us know what you thought.

Also, don't forget to join our community, the HR impact community. You can find that at www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact. And then tune in next time where we'll have another great leader sharing with us, their game changing insights that help them build high performing teams.