BIO: Jackye is an acclaimed thought leader and inspirational speaker on recruiting and DEIB topics. She brings years of experience recruiting across a variety of industries including tech, HR, legal, and finance. In her role as VP of Talent Acquisition and DEIB, she leads all related work at Textio, provides critical expertise to customers, and serves as a leading voice in the products Textio creates for the broader ecosystem. Jackye has been named one of the 9 Powerful Women in Business You Should Know by SDHR Consulting, one of the 15 Women in HR Tech to Follow by VidCruiter, and is on the Top 100 list of Human Resources Influencers by Human Resource Executive Magazine.

Transcript:

Jackye: So understand that the job is to create an inclusive workspace. The work is creating spaces for others who will come after you. And so that means you in that role are the voice for the voiceless, and you have to help build the space. You volunteer as tribute, you just do.

Andrea: Welcome to DEI Career Conversations. I'm your host and DEI career coach, Andrea G Tatum. In this episode, I was joined by Jackye Clayton, who's the VP of Talent Acquisition and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Textio. In this conversation, Jackye shared with us four of the skills that she believes that anyone who's looking to get into DEI needs, and she also shared some really phenomenal tips on what you may need to think about to help move the needle around DEI within your own organization.

Jackye has been named one of the nine most powerful women in business that you should know by SDHR Consulting. And not surprisingly, she's on the top 100 list of HR influencers by HR Executive Magazine. She's also the co-host of an amazing podcast called Inclusive AF, which I highly recommend you check out after this episode. All right, you're in for a real treat. So, let's get into it. 

Hi Jackye! I am so excited to have you on DEI Career Conversations with me today. I want to jump right in and start off by asking you to tell us all about your DEI career journey.

Jackye: Oh, thank you for having me. I love telling this story. I think my background has uniquely brought me to this space. It kinda came, I don't think most people that are in this work today, didn't start their career saying, “you know what I'm going to do when I start my career”. But my background started really in the technology space. I went to college, I hated it. I quit college, and, but I like nice things. So I was always trying to figure out, “what do I need to do? What's the hustle? Where can I get involved?” And at the time, without dating myself too much, it was within telecom. And slowly migrated from telecom to IT. And I took some time off to have my children. And when I went back to work, got a job as a recruiter. Now at that time, it was really in the technology space, and ultimately started working on the agency side of recruiting and moved to the corporate side of recruiting.

And at that time you were hearing conversations about how to recruit, and they literally would say, diverse people, or diverse candidates, is what people were saying. And I was interested, being a Black woman. I was like, yeah, what would you do? And I'm listening to this conversation. It was outside of a conference and a woman had just gone to a session. She was so excited because she had all these skills. Number one was the most common names for Black women, first names. And I was like, okay, my legal name is Jacqueline, my nickname is Jackye, and I spell it with a Y-E, I'm not on that list. So then it was the most popular surnames. Okay, so my last name, my maiden name was Forster, which is a English name. My married name is Clayton. I'm not on that list. I already told you, I didn't go to an HBCU.

I wasn't a part of the Divine Nine. I lived in at the time like Dallas, Texas where there's a ton of people. So I recognized that I wouldn't be found. At the same time, I slowly moved over to being an analyst for HR technology. And so these tools were coming out and I was able to use my background of technology, my understanding of DEI concepts, knowing how to search for candidates and some of that journey that has brought, flash forward a lot of years, to being a VP of DEIB and technology or talent acquisition, putting those worlds together. And that's how I got here.

Andrea: Oh my gosh, that is an incredible journey. I'm really interested to know what some of those names were because I find the same situation with myself. My name is Andrea. It's just not usually falling on that list. And in some ways, I do actually recognize that that's probably benefited me in some ways to have such a generic first name, but it is one of the challenges. And so as I think about what you do at Textio and thinking about, how do you remove bias, and so actually - - - why don't you tell us what is Textio first and foremost?

Jackye: Sure. So yes, Textio is a product that helps drive inclusive conversations between people. So we create technology to help, I like to say save people from themselves. We want to help people attract talent and not repel talent by using exclusive language in their job postings. So for example, initially the company started looking for women in tech because a lot of the posts would say, “we want a rockstar,” “we want a guru,” “we want a wizard”. And turns out a lot of women do not self-identify as any of those things. That's part of that bro culture. And we found out if you use that language in California, maybe you'll attract people, but you use those words in Texas, you're not attracting those people, or in New York, you're not attracting those people.

So I was really doing a study of what words can help attract, which words repel, and then looking so that you're not being ableist, you're not being ageist, you try to have job descriptions that are neutral so that you have the greatest chance of attracting talent, including those that you might have rejected by using language that does not stand out to women or people in various ages. And so that's the initial product.

And then this year we came up with a product for performance feedback. Similarly, you would see people trying to give feedback, but they're not giving actionable feedback to Black people, to Asian people, to Hispanic people. You would see words like, oh, you're exceptional with Asian men, but you would never see those same words at the same cadence as you would for Latina women. And so really we're looking at, it's like a bias interruption, cut in the breaks a little bit and bringing micro learnings and bringing it to your attention so that you have a choice. And it's not, sometimes I laugh fierce, I wrote fierce in a job description and it came back and said, well, this word might be viewed as some people as being aggressive. And I was like, well, maybe. I'm using it. It was like, okay.

Andrea: I absolutely love that report that you all put out. It is a reference tool for me already that I have shared with countless people. I'll be sure to link it below as well, so other people can check that out. But when I think about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and obviously we're talking a lot to people who are thinking about getting into DEI careers, one of the things I find fascinating is that, the fact, there's not one DEI job. And when I think about an organization like Textio, you all are a part of the DEI ecosystem, but at the same time, you all are a company.

Jackye: That's right.

Andrea: And so I'd love to hear, how do you and the organization as a whole approach looking at being a part of that ecosystem, having a product, a tool that is really foundationally rooted in helping organizations become more diverse, equitable and inclusive, and also at the same time trying to drive that within your organization?

Jackye: Yes. So what's funny is we are a customer. We have our assigned customer success manager that we talk to about what's going on internally. We have those regular conversations and it's a client relationship. We know that we're all Textios, but it really is a client and product-owner relationship. So we started looking at the realities of the product because oftentimes people are looking at these siloed questions or asks, but they don't see the full ecosystem. So they have access to our ecosystem, we have access to the product and the product people. So we partner that way. But the way that we were looking at it is we understood from the beginning that Textio alone is not going to help you with your DEIB efforts. And so it was difficult because at first people assumed, oh, well, we work for Textio, so everybody must be inclusive and feel some kind of way.

Andrea: Got it.

Jackye: And we had to look at, when I got there, Kiran Snyder, who I report to, our CEO, was very transparent. I thought I knew what I was doing in this space. I don't know what I'm doing. I've done everything I know to do, and now I'm relying on your expertise. I'm expecting you to run and lead this. And so my first meeting, I was like, I might hurt your feelings. And she said, “that's okay. I didn't hire you to make me feel good. I hired you to let me know what we need to do to be better.”

Andrea: That's beautiful.

Jackye: Right? I was like, okay. And I push it, I keep trying. My boss passes every flinch test, has never flinched with anything that I've suggested, anything that we've implemented, and has been there with support, that has not always been the case. So the first thing that I looked at was the numbers. And this is the challenge. Early in my DEIB careers, as I mentioned, I was looking to get myself a job. I needed to know how I was going to rise to the top so that people could find me.

And so what happened, interestingly enough, is I started writing for a publication called Sourcecon. It's connected to ERE. You might have heard of Sourcecon before in the recruiting arena, but I was asked specifically to not write about women or people of color. And they didn't mean it as a slight, they were saying a lot of people write about people of color, or a lot of women write about women. A lot of Black people write about Black people. But what's the broader ecosystem when we look at underrepresented and underserved groups? And so it took me a minute, a long minute, maybe an hour of really trying to say-

Andrea: You had to like, let it wash over you.

Jackye: Yeah. Because at first it was like, what about me? And then I realized in my own space as someone who is underrepresented, underserved, but still a element of privilege that I did not realize. And in that moment, I had to look and learn, oh wait. So the same thing that's happening to me is happening to other people. So I started writing and doing research and then saw the disparities. They're huge still, and a lot of these things happen at the polls. But I needed to understand, okay, what part of this narrative can I understand? And so we looked at all of the numbers. So we are a data-driven, systems-driven organization in order to drive that change.

Andrea: I love it. Data is one of my favorite words, I light up. And I'm like, that is such a key piece of the puzzle, but I just want to applaud something you said. And I think I oftentimes get those head-to-the-side looks when I'm consulting, when I'm training, and I say, even as a woman of color, I still have to acknowledge my own privilege because it's very easy for conversations on privilege to sometimes feel one-sided. But as a DEI professional, I have to acknowledge ableism. I have to acknowledge all of these other parts of myself that I can walk into a room with and be like, oh yeah, I can see where my privilege exists.

And that is a hard skill to start with because it's easy when you come from a marginalized group to have that, “what about me -ism approach.” And that can often be counterintuitive inside of the work of DEI. So when I think about the skills that it takes to do this work, Jackye, I would love to hear from you, what are three skills that either you say you use every day or that if you are hiring somebody to be a part of your team, what are three skills that you absolutely feel a DEI professional needs?

Jackye: Great question. So number one is going to be research skills and know how to analyze systems and not people first, analyze the systems that are in place. A lot of people, when we talk about the world of work, don't acknowledge that a lot of the ways that we do accounting and that we do hiring, is steeped in white supremacy, period. The way this all started was looking for people to work these farms and crop. That's how this went down in the first place in order to make these things successful. Also, looking at management where you had somebody sitting on the top of the hill, everybody working at the bottom of the hill. And so you have this archaic leadership narrative. Is that adding to this? What is the organization praising? Are they saying that they want people to take days off and appreciate themselves, but the people who are getting awarded are the ones that seem to work 12-hour days, seven days a week?

So you have to be able to look for it. That's why research is so key, because it's not going to be obvious at first. You have to look, listen for what people aren't saying and look for behaviors that, even though they, organizations say they don't praise that they do with their actions. So that's number one. Number two is really you have to be brave. And I don't know how to... When you're in this space, you have to have those conversations that your body is telling you not to say, you want to run from the situation and you're afraid, you have to be brave and you have to do it scared. That is a key skill. And the other piece is that you have to be a great listener. And maybe a fourth skill is being patient and understanding that you really have to listen to, again, and research what's happening and listening to what people are telling you because people tell you a lot more things than you'll actually see and listen for those experiences.

And then again, you have to be patient. A lot of times when I walked into organizations, I knew the answer in the first five minutes. 

Andrea: Yup.

Jackye: Like if you could just get rid of Steve, that would solve 25% of your problems. And the company would be like, okay, well we're not getting rid of Steve, so what else can we do?

Andrea: What else?

Jackye: And so you have to be able to navigate these systems and behaviors in a way that it is changing. And I also say, you have to learn that the plants that you're planting, the seeds that you're planting will develop into a tree, and you might not be there to feel the shade of that tree. And so-

Andrea: Yes.

Jackye: ... that's when we get back to being patient. The things that you are building today, we're not going to see instant results, but when you plant all those seeds, you know it's going to grow and you have to have that faith. And that's part of the patience of making sure that you know you've done everything. You've nurtured the seeds, you've done everything that you know to do, and also knowing when to move on.

Andrea: Ooh, I love it. Okay, so I heard you say the four skills. So research, being brave and sometimes being okay with being a little bit scared, being a really good listener, and that bonus fourth one, which is being patient. I could not agree more. Can you tell us about a time when you felt like it was hard for you to be brave or to have to be a little bit scared in this situation? Because I absolutely feel that in, it's literally a full-body experience with anxiety and nerves. And in that job you are realizing these are also people paying you. You want to keep your job, but in order to make progress, you got to push the needle. So I want to hear how do you manage that, being brave? What does that look like?

Jackye: Yeah, so one of the things, I have a therapist.

Andrea: Yes.

Jackye: And I have a life coach. Those two things are very important. But the first thing that came up, I think it was the first time I did a listening tour. When I came to Textio, I did a three-month listening tour. And you know me well enough to know that's hard for me, where I am not giving suggestions, I'm just asking questions and writing things down and trying to put all the pieces together. And as the head of DEI and TA, I was part of the interview process as a fly on the wall. And I went through the whole process and I got to the end where they made a decision. And so the team was like, so what do you think about the process? And I said, this is gross. I was like, this process is gross.

Andrea: Oh no.

Jackye: We're going to be changing it in the next two weeks. I will come back to you with my recommendations. And so that was probably just, at first I was like, oh my God, I'm going to get fired. And it's like my first month here and I'm about to get fired. But what I realize is that it's difficult when I use the narrative and you use the vernacular and jargon within DEIB where people don't know what you're talking about when you're like, you don't need all of these people to be part of this process. And they're like, aren't we being inclusive? We added 12 people. And then you're like, oh, well you actually have this thing where everybody's looking for this type of bias and everybody's confused.

And so another example of being brave was when I came back, this is the program that we're implementing. I don't ask for permission to implement the system. This is what we need to do to solve it. And you have to be able to say, I'm the expert in this, or this is my field of expertise, not yours. And so no, really, your opinion doesn't count in this instance.

Andrea: That is so challenging because one of the things that I find, especially in the work of DEI, is that everybody does have an opinion, everybody feels that they should contribute and you want them to, but at some point, decisions have to be made.

Jackye: That's right.

Andrea: Policies have to change because you'll get stuck in a cycle of, I call it, an analysis paralysis. I love that you talked about doing that listening session, taking the time to do it, being a part of it, all of that is important. But then being able to concisely say, here's what we're going to change, move on it, action on it, and then start to test and see what are we seeing from this? Are we seeing a positive change? How do we tweak it? Do we iterate on this? All of it.

Jackye: Yes. And the way you have to, there's a couple of sentences that I think are helpful phrases for anyone in DEI. One of them is saying, when you get to that place, and we all do, when you say, “this is what we need to do”, and somebody else says, “oh, I think we should do this instead,” then you as a DEI professional have to say, “why don't you think that's been done so far? With all of the knowledge that you have, what has gotten in the way of you implementing that program that you just suggested”? Because that's a valid question. Most of the time they will say, “oh, because it's not my job. Oh, because I don't report to that person, or, oh, we tried it, but nobody was responsible for it anymore.”

And you're like, “I can appreciate that. Thank you for sharing that. From what I can tell, this is going to be the best solution. I'm glad to hear where you are”. But you also need to know- - - and this is something I learned from my boss, there are real times when it's important to get people's opinions and where, there is a time when you have to bring people into the fold to make those decisions, but everything that you bring forward is not up for discussion. And so the other piece that you have to ask is, or you just say it like this, “I'm sorry. When you hired me, you said this is what was needed, but I'm hearing something else because I gave you the plan. And that isn't satisfying to enough. Is it because you don't think it'll help you reach your goals, or has your goal changed based on the information that I gave you?

Andrea: Jackye, Jackye, Jackye, Jackye. Ooh, you hit it. I think for a lot of folks who are new into the DEI space, as we have seen the extreme growth in terms of DEI and a lot of folks who maybe have never even held a DEI position before getting tapped, whether it's tapped from another role or you're coming into an organization, people are writing these job descriptions about what they want for a DEI person, but they may not truly actually be ready to make those changes. And so I have had so many conversations with people who are like, “Andrea, what do I do now? They hired me. Here's what they told me they want me to do. I put together this plan and now they're challenging me, now it's not good enough. Now they want to wait.” But I think you hit the nail on the head. You've got to be able to ask that question, why did you bring me here? I assume you felt I had some level of expertise, that I was the right person to move this forward because otherwise y'all would have done this already.

Jackye: That's right. And the second part is, after that, when you have your one-on-ones during that listening tour, you need to ask every single person, so why do you think Acme Brick has had a hard time hiring people from underrepresented groups?

Andrea: Yep.

Jackye: Everybody knows. Everybody acts like they don't know, but everybody knows in the one-on-one situation. So when I first, so I've been working at home for over 10 years. It was not the pandemic. I am a weird unicorn of a person because of my background. And so I am especially attractive to startups and technology, which means I've worked for companies, but I live in Waco, Texas, and I like living in Waco, Texas. So I've had the gift of being able to stay. So I've worked for several companies based in Seattle. Seattle has a huge Asian population, and I worked, literally the company that I worked for before this one was across the street from this company. And I still don't... They know each other. I never met any of these people before. So in having the conversation, I knew that there was a high population, but I didn't see that internally. And what was surprising, it was like, I always look individually at departments and I say, whose voices are missing from the table?

And I asked, and it was interesting, of asking the question. I would say, “Hey, where are all the Asian people?” I mean, I just was curious, I just wanted to know, and where are the people? I didn't understand. And so what was funny is people start telling you things where you're like, where did this happen? And I found out that a consultative group at one point said, the only people that are important to diversity, equity, and inclusion are Black and Hispanic people, and no other group counts as being diverse and underrepresented people. It wasn't something that was embraced internally, but other people who were Asian heard that and voted with their feet just because they weren't sure, is that real? It wasn't real. But you can understand if somebody said, oh, Black women don't count. I'm pretty sure I'd walk away too.

Andrea: I'm out.

Jackye: I don't know what you're talking about. And a lot of people came out of 2022 saying, I'm a DEI consultant with no benchmarks or no experience making things as most people who started with, I want to help me, people who look like me, people in my family, my children, my aunties, my uncles, that's who you're trying to help, my immigrant father, all of these things, whatever your lens is. And so we had to look at what systems were getting in the way, where were we hiring people? Why was this a problem? And we ended up being intentional. I saw this way back in some archives. The things were, I saw this on this piece of paper, none of the plans were implemented, but it was still an artifact that existed.

And so the first thing that I needed to do was, I was like, this feels weird. So I'm going to look at all of the numbers. We broke it down and we did the intersectionality. We asked people to take surveys, and people were really hesitant to fill out surveys because they weren't sure what we were going to do with the data. Was I a safe person? And so it's difficult to have a conversation and say, I think you're lowkey racist, but it's not difficult when you're like, the numbers say you have 1% Southeast Asian people at the organization. And so we're going to be focusing on how we can apply the skills and what we've learned with our job descriptions to post it into places. So our research means we need to find where are the majority of Southeast Asian candidates. We're going to post there, we're going to join these groups, we're going to partner with all of these organizations. And again, we look at a departmental basis, not a company basis. From a company level, everything looks great.

Andrea: Yes.

Jackye: But if you look at, with the company, the department within the department, within the department, some of them don't look that great. So monthly we take the report to the executive, these are your demographic numbers, these are the voices missing for the table. This is what we're going to do on the TA side. What are you going to do on your side?

Andrea: Yeah. Yeah, because you can add all you want, but if people are walking, it’s not gonna be, we're not going to make progress, we're not going to make the progress we want to see. I love all of that. This is not a unique situation that you, that you just talked about. I just want to reiterate, this is so common that I hear from DEI practitioners of just like there's no one size fits all. You have to get in there, you have to figure out what's going on, and then you create the solutions for that organization. And then you keep going down, not just, like you said, not just the company as a whole, but what's happening in your sales team, what's happening in your marketing team, what's happening in your finance team? Because all of those actually tend to look very different. And what you're trying to drive in terms of diversity for a marketing team and an HR team, those are going to typically be heavily white women in those-

Jackye: Yes.

Andrea: ... organizations within your company. Might look a little different in finance, looks a little bit different once you get down to your technical talent. So you can't just say, we're going to do this one thing. You have to really be able to create those solutions at that micro level, because it's easy to have numbers that look good on the surface without having both that quantitative and qualitative data of what's going on. So I love everything that you just said about that. Okay. I've got... I want to just know then, what is one thing that you wish you knew before you really fully made that transition into being a DEI leader yourself?

Jackye: Yes. So the thing that I wish I knew was that the most common resources that are created and the methodology that you Google to how can I implement systems and services and diversity, equity, inclusion, are white-centered. So they're not going to necessarily work for everyone. And so what I was finding is that these systems are built to try to help people that are underrepresented, but they were never built in order for me to feel, me as a Black woman, to feel safe in those places. So every solution has to be bespoke to your organization. And I wish I would've known that I'm going to have to build this myself and buffet the things that I read as to what makes sense based on where my company is.

Andrea: Absolutely.

Jackye: I find it fascinating because this is a company that for the most part, like I said, they all have a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but understanding that the things are, most of the information and materials that come out are trying to help people learn how to deal with me. So I'm like, I didn't know I was the problem. And it's like, and I'm not the problem. Okay. So that's something that I wish that I knew, because those are the things that even your most ardent ally has been fed. These are the narratives that has been fed. And so we are looking at what is fair and balanced? And so those pieces. The other thing I wish that I realized is that, when I first started, is that people aren't going to do things because it's the right thing to do. I feel like people will say, oh, well, this is right. We know that this is good. This is something that we embrace and we, it's something that we support.

And it ties right into, I talk about food a lot, I love food. But this is the same narrative that people had when they were like, you know, you just need to give people nutrition facts and they will be healthier, and will still go to Starbucks and get one drink that has a hundred percent of their calories, 300% of the sugar, of the dairy, all of these things that... And they know.

Andrea: Yeah.

Jackye: People know because when you drive and get a number one at McDonald's, it tells you this is 1800 calories. And you're like, make it a large Coke, please. So people know-

Andrea: Upsize that for me.

Jackye: ... the right thing to do. Yeah. People know what the right thing to do. And so I also wish at the beginning that I would've started where I am now at focusing on the systems and activities that have brought us to the place where we are today instead of trying to convince someone that they needed to support me. And so I like to call it, we are creating a tough-to-fail environment. So if you're still failing, it's by choice. And what I mean by that is we implement systems so that we've changed. When I first came, there were eight people on an interview loop. I was like, there's no more than four people on a loop. And someone said, and I said if you want to know why I picked that number, it's because I Googled it and I figured we'd start with four, and if it didn't work, we'll change, but let's start so we don't introduce bias to the interview process.

And the other thing is that I'm not an expert, I'm a student. And it's important to keep—

Andrea: Yes.

Jackye: … that mindset that you may have more resources at your hands, you might have done more research, but you have to study and learn the situation that you're in with your office. And so can't, as we say in Texas, just cowboy up and say, oh, there's a new sheriff in town. You have to understand what's going on within your organization and what moves you need to make to help this organization. And whatever, if you've met one DEI professional, then you've met one DEI professional.

Andrea: Yes.

Jackye: Because you are working on very specific things with these companies. So if you've met one inclusive company, you've just met one inclusive company, it doesn't always translate.

Andrea: Spot on. People always come to me and they say, well, what all do I need to know? And I'm like, there's no blueprint. There is no all, it is constantly evolving. It's constantly changing. You can do your best to know what you know, but then you also have to totally be fine saying, like you said, going to research more, top skill that you mentioned. I'm going to keep learning. I call myself a gatherer of skills because I need to constantly be adding more into my own tool belt and be okay with being able to say, you know what? I don't have that answer right now. Let me either go find it out or bring someone to the table who I know has deep knowledge and experience in this particular avenue that maybe I don't. Because it is impossible to think that one person can do all the things, knows all the things, and is going to perfect it every single time.

Jackye: That's right. That's right. And you can't do it alone. The other part is make sure that you have other people in the same type of work that you're doing that you can have some of these conversations with. Because there are days you will be reminded of why people don't do this work. Before you get started, you're like, I know exactly what we need to do. And there will be moments when you're like, that conversation right here is why people have walked away in the past, because of that. You're like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. And you can't, you just need people in your life. And that's why it's so important to have a therapist and a coach, because there are days that are more painful than others because what you're being exposed to, especially as Black women in particular, are things that we weren't exposed to on a regular basis.

The other part is that when you get treated the way everybody else gets treated, it feels weird. So here's an example. So I built the program. My boss was like, let's publish your work. Now because of my background, I'm not trusting you. You want to sell my work. And then they're like, no, I don't want to sell it. And then I'm like, oh. So my work has no value. I'm going through all these things in my head that I'm used to going through as a DEI professional. And then it was like, oh, well, why don't you get marketing to help? Oh, you want it to be a marketing thing? And it was like, Jackye, now keep in mind, I've known my boss again for six years. I've worked for them for a year. I've known them for six years. And they were like, no, Jackye, you're not a marketing professional, so I don't expect for you to put it in that place.

You're not a data scientist. But guess what? We have data scientists that will put the graph together for you. And we have a marketing team. These are people I'm gifting to you. Would it help if I gave you a program manager or a project manager to help you with this project? And I started bawling because I was like, no one has ever, ever in this work offered to help me and take that heavy lift from me. I've had to learn how to make pivot tables, how to find colors that match and which ones look better and should it be a pie or a bar chart? I've had to do that on my own. So when people treat you like everybody else, you need a minute because it is a scary, scary place to be.

Andrea: And that is sad. It is so unfortunate that that is the trauma that we've experienced, and it's what we expect first. And it's like, oh, wait, wait. Oh, this is what I was asking. Oh, let me settle into this new norm. Let me get, it's jarring. I agree. But that level of support is what you want, you want to have a team supporting you and have people developing with you. Because like I said, not one person should be doing this work alone.

Jackye: That's right. That's right. But it's important to realize that we are bringing, we talk about generational trauma and passed-on trauma, but there is the one that we experience outside of work and the one that we experience inside of work, and those are really different things. Externally, I can get pissed off because you're trying to check my bag when I leave Walmart. I can address that. But when I'm trying to talk to my boss who tells me I'm not working enough and I know I've got a kid in college and I have to pay tuition, there are things that you're used to accepting because you have to take care of your family and take care of the things you need to take care of that you're used to cowering down. So understand that the job is to create an inclusive workspace. The work is creating spaces for others who will come after you. And so that means you in that role are the voice for the voiceless, and you have to help build the space. You volunteer as tribute. You just do.

Andrea: Yes. Yeah. I'm going to end on that right there, Jackye. I mean you just, that was it. The gems that you have dropped for people, I absolutely am so excited for people to hear this, and I really hope that they take everything that you have shared with us to heart. And I want to give you the chance to share one last thing with our audience in closing and tell us what is one resource, a book, a podcast, a video, whatever it is that you really recommend to someone who is aspiring to get into the profession of DEI?

Jackye: Yes. So I recommend the Racial Healing Handbook. I think I might have it on my desk.

Andrea: Okay.

Jackye: The Racial Healing Handbook is so important. Our executive team is going through it. We go through a chapter a month, because really it shares the narrative of what I, as a woman of color may be experiencing, but it also shares the journey of the majority group and what white people may have been experiencing all this time, starting with how did we come up with these ideas and how we can change the narrative because the systems that have, happening that we are all a part of happen to all of us. And that's an important narrative to understand, we are working with the information that we had, right, wrong, or indifferent.

And this book helps me to overcome some of that trauma and to understand, and I'm not, like this is real. And it also helps others see how they are participating in either making things better or participating in adding to the problem. And so it has all of that, and it's been a real positive journey for me. And I recommend getting an outside facilitator to work with your group with that. Don't do that with your team because you're going to get your feelings hurt, but have somebody come in. I recommend that wholeheartedly.

Andrea: That's amazing. I'm going to add that resource to DEIcareer.com so people can learn more about it and check that out. Jackye, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. This has been a wonderful conversation, and I'm going to make sure I put all of Jackye's information, the research that we've talked about today, all of that you'll be able to find it below. But thank you again so much and have a great rest of your day.

Jackye: Thanks, you too.

Andrea: I hope you all enjoyed this episode of DEI Career Conversations. My goal is to help create more transparency about what it really means to work in diversity, equity, and inclusion while helping experienced professionals gain clarity about how their passion, skills, and experience can make a real impact. To learn more, visit DEIcareer.com. Don't forget, subscribe to this channel, like the video, and share it with your friends. We'll see you next time.