Adam Torres and Shirley Engelmeier discuss DEI.
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Show Notes:
There has been a lot of conversation around DEI and whether or not it works. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Shirley Engelmeier, Founder & CEO at InclusionINC, explore InclusionINC and the current state of DEI.
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About Shirley Engelmeier
Long before diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) became the focus of organizational leaders around the globe, Shirley Engelmeier (she/her/hers) was leading the way in helping organizations build inclusive cultures to drive business success. She’s been a thought leader in DEI and inclusion as a business strategy for more than 25 years, first as a corporate leader in CPG operations, sales and organizational development and then, since 2001, as the founder/CEO of InclusionINC. Shirley recognized the critical implications of DEI for businesses long before most of her peers. For more than two decades she has helped global Fortune 500 companies and emerging organizations develop and implement DEI initiatives that drive business results.
Recognizing that her personal reach was limited and passionate about transforming businesses to embrace DEI to drive employee engagement, productivity, innovation and retention, Shirley began documenting her philosophies and thought leadership on DEI in books designed for busy C-suite leaders and executives. She is the author of Inclusion: STILL the Competitive Business Advantage (2018), an update to Inclusion: The New Competitive Business Advantage (2013) and Becoming an Inclusive Leader: How to Navigate the 21st Century Global Workforce (2014). In addition to her writing, Shirley is a TedEx speaker and is often sought out for speaking engagements.
About InclusionINC
For over 20 years, InclusionINC has been linking Inclusion, Diversity and Equity to business. Long before the global awakening and long before it was cool!
InclusionINC is a leading global consulting and learning organization specializing in inclusion and diversity solutions tied directly to client company’s business objectives.
Founded in 2001 by Shirley Engelmeier, InclusionINC set out to evolve the current thinking and business practices of diversity to inclusion, an actionable business strategy that garners direct ROI through greater employee engagement, productivity, innovation and retention as well as a means to sell more goods and services and reach emerging growth markets.
Today InclusionINC works with Fortune 500 companies on a broad array of projects including implementing inclusion as a business strategy to providing learning solutions, training, education, and consulting services.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Shirley Inglemeyer, and she’s founder and CEO over at Inclusion Inc.
Shirley, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks. Great to be here. Thank you so much. Alright, so Shirley, we got, we got a lot to talk about today, so we’re gonna get into deliberate disruption, unraveling the anti DEI ideology and getting back to why DEI works so excited to get into this. And also, of course, your work at Inclusion Inc.
And I guess, and to get us started though, we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So Shirley at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s what we do. Shirley, what mission matters to you?
You know, for nearly 25 years, Inclusion Inc has been helping businesses leverage inclusion as a business strategy. We do that by really helping leaders get it in a practical, Business centric approach, and I think most importantly these days as we help coach them on being able to articulate the business rationale for why they’re focusing on inclusion, diversity and equity.
So, so great to have you on and I mean, great topic. And one of the things that strikes me about your background, you know, you’ve been doing this for a couple of decades. So some of these conversations that are newer are just kind of like, you know, just happen. Like you’ve been here for a while. Like this is, I would argue it’s been a while in terms of being a part of that narrative and that discussion.
First off, how did you get into that space? Like how’d you get drawn? You know, it’s a very interesting story in that I have no background to do this. Okay. Like many of us, you know, we get opportunities in life because I was in consumer products right before this. I grew up in a time in consumer products that they took.
Anybody to train him, including a music major like myself. And when I realized that I got out of that was really a great set of, of analytics, you know, what’s the business rationale in the last employer I was at was Frito Lay super psyched to be there. I didn’t realize that that position as the only woman out of 26 division sales managers would prepare me for this work.
I’d ask why, because when I had the sixth best sales record and they had to collapse divisions, the guy who had the worst sales record, number 26, Got the job and I lost and so then I realized what it felt like to be the other how my difference may have impacted what happened to my career. My life, a couple of years passed and ultimately.
I believe this work chose me. I’m not, you know, in the beginning, I kind of thought you have no clue what you’re doing, Shirley, except I could say, what are you trying to accomplish? And the very first huge project that I landed was as a white woman from, as I say, Minnesota, I landed, I couldn’t tell by that accent, could not tell.
I’m positive. I landed the Denny’s race relation consent decree and that that’s kind of the launch of the whole thing. Wow. And so, like, looking back in your in your career, like, when did, you know, you were That this was going to be something that you’d be sticking with long term. Like, how did you know that this wasn’t just another thing or just to like, how did you know this was going to really turn into a life mission or did you know, like, like how, how’d that come about for you?
You know, I don’t know how you make life decisions, but I. Rely on these kind of nudges around me. Oh, yeah. Right. So get, give me a sign. Signs, like things fall into place. Like God, the universe, however we want to word that. Like I look down to all the time, all the time. I’m like, I’m supposed to be, I have this weird feeling always.
Like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. Go ahead. Yeah, and so I used to put it out to the universe give me a sign as big as a 40 foot billboard in my front Yard. Oh, I like that I’m gonna adopt that. I’m like, I’m always I want I never thought to ask the universe for bigger signs Go ahead. Literally go ahead That’s because I thought you know, I’m really supposed to do this and I started doing this when I was a single parent And you know didn’t the universe know I needed a fixed salary and You And each time I do that, even in the current times we’re in, I get reassurance.
You’re where you’re supposed to be now. I don’t like that answer, but I came to the point that that’s really my personal mission in this is to help organizations understand the business relevance of creating a culture of inclusion. Hmm. Is that resonates with me and my family and friends and, you know, kind of how I roll in life.
Yeah. And so sticking in the early days a little bit longer, what was it like trying to even just, cause I don’t, in my recollection talking about DE and I’d like that was very early on. So that wasn’t quite like buzzword or this or that, like, what was it like in the early days, even just getting traction?
Well, you know, in the very beginning, before I formed inclusion, Inc, I worked for a company that had just started in this and quite frankly, you know, they’re long gone. It doesn’t matter. They didn’t really know they had one course. And so I would go out and in that day, it was about diversity or diversity and inclusion.
There was It was actually before I formed Inclusion, Inc. in 1992 that there was a consent decree against Denny’s, and I had to work with the Department of Justice. That was underneath this hair color is a lot of gray hair. Come on from that, because I’d have the department of justice saying to me, the people over there are all racist.
And I’m saying, wait, they had systems failures. Do I think some racist work? They’re sure there was racist everywhere, but they had a leveraged buyout and they stopped focusing on core training at the restaurant level. And so, yes, those early days I kept coming back to. What are they, the Department of Justice in this dissent decree and Denny’s in, I use quotes for those who are just listening in cooperation with a consent decree.
Is it that we are going to help them meet their outcome? And, and we created this very broad based training program that was focused largely on how to create a culture where everybody felt welcomed, but it was through specific processes. Like. It sounds so crazy because it’s so simple. Hey, who’s next?
Are you on the list yet to be seated? Because there were things that were happening by bias where white people being seated first, and they were being talked to first, so helped me understand that there are systems or processes that happen even at everyday interaction that exclude people. So, I want to jump around a little bit here.
Let’s get further into your book. So for all, for all my audience that have been listening to this show for a long time, they know that I love authors. I love bringing authors on. I love talking about books and I love helping them promote it. Cause I know how hard it is. to, to really put your thoughts together in a full, complete work.
Like a book, it’s just hard. It’s not easy. It’s a, it’s a long endeavor. It’s a long project, but I think it’s worthwhile for anyone that wants to get a message or story out there. Like I’m a big fan of publishing. So that said, first thing first, Shirley, like what was the, what was the inspiration for this?
Like, what was the inspiration for this undertaking? Cause it’s never easy. Okay. So this is the fourth book that I’ve written. The first three were more. How would I say it? Oh, look, inclusion, still the competitive business advantage. All the books that I’ve done or inclusive leader, how to navigate the 21st century global workforce is to keep in a really concise way.
So a leader could literally go through. I’m not kidding. When I say this, look at bullets, look at charts and at the end of it, go. Yeah, this actually makes sense to me for business. I wasn’t planning to write a book this year. I, hold on. You weren’t planning to just kind of happen. You must’ve been like really inspired.
That’s not. Okay, I was possessed. There you go. I wasn’t going to use the word, but was there a billboard planted in your front like, write the book? What happened? Okay, so here’s what happened. I’m going to give you a little retrospective to kind of frame this up. We can come back and go as ever deep as you want.
You know, my whole career until the murder of George Floyd, Which, as I sit in my desk here and point a finger to my right, like five miles there, over there, was to convince people. about the business centric nature of this work. Okay. So that big global awakening happened, George Floyd, COVID, all of that.
And something happened, bam, D E and I comes on the scene. I love inclusion, diversity, and equity note. I say it differently. And I come back to why, however, you have leaders who are already. about the difference between inclusion and diversity and why it mattered for their business. And now we have an acronym that’s completely intimidated them.
So I’ll come back to any of those, however you want. The book came about because here’s, here’s what happened. I was going. Oh, my gosh. This is the best work we’ve ever done. This is so deep. Everybody from electrical companies, construction companies, scientists, engineers, they’re now willing to step into it.
And a couple of things happened before January of this year that, that made me realize something was going on, but I kept coming back to, Oh, organizations finally got it. Yeah, in January of this year, I realized the depth level of the disinformation campaign that was going on and I had a little inkling of that from you remember when.
In 2022, there were these two kind of seems like they just popped up like the anti woke bill in Florida and the don’t take the bill that. And I just said, Oh, yeah, what, what are they doing down there? But I realized on January 24th of this year that what they were doing. Had been implementing something the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank had started in 2019 and they said, Hey, Adam, here, you want to change your state legislature?
Here’s all of the work to make it. Illegal to do this at universities and each day after that, I’d get up and I’ll have to write a white paper on this. And about a week and a half later, I either say possessed or my hair was on fire that I’d have to. I said, I have to write a book on this from my place in the world.
Say this is highly funded. It’s strategic. I sound like a conspiracy theorist here. I am not that it was going on behind the scene. And, and everybody says, Oh yeah, yeah. You’re talking about project. 2025 this was happening way before project 2025 started to happen and so it was showing up all over. It was showing up.
You know, it’s a, we’re not going to fund it in universities, but there’s a clear reason. We’re not going to fund it in business. Let’s create this whole disinformation campaign. And so that book was the fastest cranked out book probably. Well, in, in my lifetime, I can say against those other three books because it’s such urgency.
About having to get this message out. And so as you were going through that process, like, what was that like? Like to be, cause I’ve never, I’ve never had that, like being possessed to crank out a book fat. It’s never happened to me. Like I’m, I know that’s obviously a lot of years went into this and it’s your fourth edition, but like, what was that like?
So I think the first thing that it was like was each day. I felt like I had to take an energy shower from the toxic disinformation that was out there. Oh man, so first you needed a bath after that. I know. I wasn’t expecting that answer Shirley, I’m not going to lie. I would call my closest friends and colleagues and go, You can’t believe what I learned today.
You know, I was like, it was like a whack a mole. One more thing. One more thing, right? Yeah. And then I thought you were driving them crazy. I’m sure as I was driving myself crazy, but I know I felt like, well, I felt like it had to be written. Yeah. I think that my, I have a business coach of like 13 years. He said, wait a minute, why are you starting with the disinformation?
You start with why creating a culture of inclusion is going to drive change. innovation by 20%. You start with the fact that it’s going to help them sell more goods and services. He knew my whole deal. He knew that you’re not going to ask me a baby boomer in Minnesota to sell to Gen Z or when I was at Frito Lay to sell chips to Latinx.
I don’t know that. And so he goes, keep positioning this as real. why it works and then lift up the information, disinformation that made this come about. And that helped me frame because I kept saying, I got to tell people everything. No, you have to let them know, remind them. This is why it’s here. And the other thing is this is a little bit of a tangent, but I think it’s critical.
There’s a huge difference between inclusion, diversity, and equity. And this frame of D E and I has done us no service. So when that happened and whoever created it, it just flew across the globe. Inclusion is how are you going to hear people’s voices to drive business success? How are you going to ask the person who’s doing the job and white men?
This is no ding on white men. I’m married to one and have two sons that are, I want them to be highly successful. They too understand what it feels like to be excluded from the process. That’s different than, Oh, I want to expand my business. I may need to have more diverse representation here. And it’s going to help me sell more horse beer, as I was speaking about before.
It’s going to help me attract more clients. So the punchline is. If you create a culture of inclusion, hey, and with the D, if we know we have bias and I say, if we breathe, we have bias. So no shame. Then that will result in equity. That became a huge piece of the work we did with leaders and executives since George Floyd to say, I don’t want to have academic discussion about equity.
I can assure you if you do these two things. People will also feel like they belong and you will have equity in the results. So that had to come through loudly and clearly too About how they’re differentiating don’t glob them all together because it’s not helpful. So surely Obviously you spent some time on this book.
It’s it’s it’s in depth. It’s a culmination and it’s a fourth of your books what do you hope that the readers walk away with after digesting this after going through the content? What do you hope they walk away with? I want People to twofold. I’m providing them the rationale, the language for why this could matter for their business.
They still have to internalize that right and say our specific business case. Yeah, I’m also. inviting people to have the courage to say what the business case is. A thing that’s been coming to me lately as I’ve been watching, I think there’ve been six companies that have like in a nanosecond dropped their program.
And it’s, we can talk about that later, but I keep saying, why are you cowering to disinformation? Why aren’t you using the same brilliance that you have to market your products to tell everybody both internally and externally, that this works. And the other part of the book, of course, is, you know, we have all these realignment in, you know inclusion programs that are both for execs leaders, you know, for the masses through e learning so that people can remember Oh, yeah, that’s why we’re doing this.
Yeah. So surely one of the things that you also talk about are the core inclusion behaviors. Could you maybe could you maybe because one of the big things you’re known for as well is like the business case for all of what we’re talking about, not just that it’s right to do it type thing, but the business case.
So talk about a little bit about those behaviors. Sure. So the behaviors how that came about that we globally validated those is this, Adam, we, we realized that for about, I don’t know, through 2012, we validated inclusion behaviors, but they were us centric and, and since 2012, we continually validate these.
So what I’m telling you is still holding up. I think that’s because we’re all humans and we. like to be included in things. And so we said, look, what are the top behaviors that make you feel included? When we partnered with SMU’s executive education department, Miguel Canonas, we also said as a culturally normative.
So I want to just share like a highlight on that. When I think about China, for example, I think about hierarchy, even in China. Individual contributors across the whole spectrum wanted to hear their voice heard, even if it wasn’t culturally normative. And so here are these, out of this, these super simple behaviors, the two most important ones are Ask me what I think implied.
I’m the one that does the job. And it doesn’t mean you have to ask me all the time. And it doesn’t mean I have input on what the CEO does from my place. And the second one that I think is as or more important is providing rationale for why decisions are made about how decentralized we all were during COVID.
If people may not like what they hear, they can be given the rationale. Now here’s the punchline on these. Can you imagine something that costs 0 and all you’re doing is changing how you interface? It’s going to drive your engagement. 20 percent Yeah, it’s going to make these are the findings, the return on investment of that work.
People are going to be four times more likely to stay their engagements going to double to 25 percent and 10 percent more productive. Like where else can you get that kind of return? Right? Right. So surely the I mean, the book is out. Yeah. It’s doing well. You got, you have your, I should say the multiple books out, but the book is out and what’s next.
I mean, what’s next for you. What’s next for your company? Like what’s next. So seriously, all seriousness and my praise of what you’re doing here, Adam and mission matters. I think that people being able to hear. My voice directly address this and really like, I mean, I make some corny jokes, I know, but the no nonsense.
Hey, I like corny. A lot of people like corn. I’m in for corn. Walt Disney was called corny once upon a time, too. I read a lot of his biographies and he said, millions of people like corn. Go ahead. Yeah, there you go. So, but my no nonsense business approach to this, I want people to hear that. Yeah. As well as read it.
We are. We’re starting our very first live event to a group of invited business leaders here on October 8th, and those will continue. And there are a lot of, um, beyond the book tour kinds of things, but press releases that are going out dressing the specific. Issues that we see that continue to happen.
Yeah, the in and day out. It’s great Shirley, if somebody’s listening or watching this and they want to follow up They want to pick up a copy of the book. They want to learn more about inclusion inc How do they do that? So if you want to get a copy of the book right now We’re doing it as an ebook on amazon super simple to find disrupt Deliberate disruption, my name.
If you want to get ahold of us, you can go to www. inclusioninc. com or stop anti DEI dot com. Awesome. And for everybody listening or watching this, just so you know, we’ll put the links to that and the show notes as well. You can just click on the links and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet.
Hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, new thought leaders, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. And we don’t want you to miss a thing. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button.
And Shirley, thank you so much. This has been so much fun and I wish you much more continued success with the book and the book tour. Thank you so much. It’s a privilege to be with you.