Episode 182: Doing What Matters
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…a two-time guest re-thinks her ambitions and approach to her career.
“When you're looking at a career goal and you're saying, ‘my ultimate mission here is to be a chief strategy officer,’ well, that's really a decision largely in the hands of others. But when I make it about my personal goals, then it's about, I'm in control of what I do with my life.”
Re-assessing what matters. Coming up on The Broad Experience.
I first spoke to Lauren Tucker for this show back in 2014. Lauren has been quite rare throughout her career in that she was a Black woman in the ad industry - and advertising is not known for its diversity. The second time she and I spoke a few years later, she’d had a pretty rough year. The business she’d left her agency to start with a former colleague had shut down. She’d moved from Virginia to Chicago, a city she loved...but despite all her experience, she was having trouble landing a job. Her beloved father died. Also, Donald Trump had won the US election and Lauren was gutted.
But back to her job hunt - even though ad bosses were making noises about making their agencies look more like America...she’d get in touch with them and say here I am, a black, senior woman in advertising…I can help you do this. They’d talk...but then, nothing...
“Now that everybody's, you know, gotten woke, right, and they want to get all these people of color and so forth, the same places that I've applied to in the past are all of a sudden calling me, and asking me, would I apply for this role?”
But she’s not. Because today she runs her own business again - a consultancy that helps advertising and communication firms attract and maintain staff from all different types of backgrounds. The business is called Do What Matters and it’s kept Lauren really busy lately.
And the more time she spends working with clients, the more she realizes how screwy the whole hiring process is. And I don’t think it’s just her industry. She says, for example...
“The job descriptions are really poor, the job descriptions are the dog's breakfast of all kinds of expectations, rather than performance-based job descriptions, telling people what they need to do to be successful on day one.”
She says this is a big issue. People apply to these jobs, often young people, and then Lauren gets a call when there’s a problem with the hire. She looks at the job description and thinks, no wonder they’re not working out, the job they’re actually being asked to do is completely different than the one advertised.
Then there’s who applies to these positions in the first place.
“And typically women and people of color will not apply for a job if they can't do 10 out of 10 of the expectations or 20 out of 20 of the expectations, white men tend to apply for roles. Um, you know, if they can do just one or two things on that list.”
Something else she says needs a re-think - referrals...
“...which if used in an improper way, continues to contribute to the cronyism that is endemic to a lot of the culture industries. And it's not that referrals and relationships are bad, but they still need to be put through, an inclusive hiring and management process that makes sure that we're making the best decisions, getting the right people in the right jobs…”
And making the most of what she calls people’s relevant differences - a perspective or experience they bring to the role that the company can benefit from.
AM-T: “And talk about that word inclusion for a minute. Cause I think a lot of people, when they think... they now hear this tone, you know, DEI diversity, equity, and inclusion, but until fairly recently, it was often just diversity. And I think for a lot of people they think of, ‘oh, well, redressing the balance, you know, getting more people of color into these industries and corporations,’ but actually when you talk a lot about inclusion and that means a lot more than ensuring that there are more people of color in certain roles, right?
“Absolutely. I mean this is really about - I mean listen, we have a lot of diversity, and diversity focuses on the canaries first. You know, again, we use the whole canaries in the coal mine as a really apt metaphor for what we're trying to do. And that is stop focusing on fixing the canaries, you know, increasing the pipeline - ‘We need to increase the pipeline. We need to get more, you know, people of color and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’
And what it does is it, it creates resistance to change because white men in particular feel like, well, wait a minute. What about me? You know what about my experience? And they're right in some regards, because there've been many white men who have reached out to me saying, I don't feel included because my discipline isn't respected, or I don't feel included because I don't fit in, I'm a working class guy and I don't fit in with the white shoe business of advertising. So the exclusion and bias comes in many forms. It isn't just about people of color. It's about women. It's about ageism, but more importantly, it's about cronyism and nepotism that is endemic to the culture business.”
Just recently she was asked to help out at a client where a guy relatively new to his job was floundering...when Lauren started asking questions she found out he’d been hired through a personal referral, because they needed someone quickly. But they’d skipped much of the regular interview process, because they trusted the person who’d recommended him.
And Lauren knows that if she’s going to talk to clients about diversity and inclusion...she has to practice what she preaches.
AM-T: “You have this really interesting example in your own organization right, of inclusion. I mean, cause I asked you when I spoke to you offline the other week, so, you know, who is, who is your staff made up of? And you told me about this one guy...he does a lot for you, right?
“Yeah. And he's great. And he's a lovely person and yeah, he voted for Trump twice, which is unusual in my organization, but he is a valuable member, not only because he is brilliant at what he does and makes us look really great. Um, he's lovely to work with, but also because he does bring a perspective to our content that enables us to pressure test what we're trying to say about inclusion…”
This colleague designs their visual content, and he is like a lot of her clients - white, male, doesn’t live on one of the coasts, conservative. She needs to reach people like this every day. And this guy will tell her if something in their marketing materials or messaging won’t carry over.
Plus Lauren says, she runs an inclusion agency after all - she’s like, what kind of hypocrite would I be if I only hired people who looked like me and thought like me?
“He is a very important part of our company because he represents a relevant perspective. This is his relevant difference that he brings to the table. And I think that's a really important point, you know, when we talk about relevant differences, it's not this narrow perspective of diversity. We're talking about a broader look at diversity and diverse opinions and experiences that help us be relevant and connect to a multicultural, multi-perspective and global audience.”
Now I knew from speaking to Lauren on the phone before this interview that despite the success of Do What Matters...she was having second thoughts about her work life. She’s always been very driven. She rose up the ranks in the advertising world, she has a PhD.
But this work, the work of convincing clients of the importance of having different types of people at their companies, so that the company will be more successful...it’s tiring. Many of the executives just haven’t thought much about this stuff before - or they’ve considered it an annoying aspect of political correctness. Theirs is a clubby world for the most part.
They don’t always get it, and they can be insensitive.
“We often hear things that personally make us feel uncomfortable. We have to do a lot of candid conversations, which make other people feel uncomfortable and make our clients feel uncomfortable. It's a job where it's our passion for the outcomes, the impact that we feel we can make that is gratifying, but it can wear on your soul. It can wear on your soul because, you know, we always want to have more impact than we're having. We want to get there faster than we are. It takes time.”
She says it can feel like pushing water uphill.
She says everything she’s been doing, including the political activism she does outside of work... it doesn’t have the same allure it once did. She wants to do it but no longer can she see herself doing it forever. She says she’s always been an optimist...but some of what’s happened in the US in recent years has put a dent in that optimism. And it’s affected her feelings about her career.
AM-T: “When I spoke to you a few weeks ago, you said I'm done letting my career lead…”
“Yeah, so, you know, when I started this business, I also, wanted to think about what I wanted to do with my, the rest of my life. What did I, how did I want to start to transition into really focusing much more on my own desire to live my life, the way I want to live it and where I want to live it. For a long time I was obsessed with the idea of going to Panama, but we can talk about the south of Spain. We can talk about Amsterdam. There are lots of things! But there's also a more serious aspect to it. And that is as much as I believe in our mission...and as much as I love the ideals of this country, I'm also very concerned about it.”
She says she was raised to revere America’s ideals, and at least people used to agree on the ideals of democracy. Now she says even democracy seems to be up for grabs. Americans subscribe to different realities and misinformation proliferates online. She’s seen white supremacists raise their heads above the parapet more than once in recent years. Her generally sunny nature has been challenged.
Earlier this year after she got both her Covid vaccines she was planning a trip - seeing her mother and --other family for the first time since before the pandemic. She was gonna drive hundreds of miles, and she was talking to her brother and a colleague about it, saying she wanted to avoid highways...she wanted to take a more leisurely trip along back roads...
“I was like, wow, I haven't driven in a long time. I don't want to take the interstates. I'd like to just drive through the back roads and both of them were like, why would you do that? That's unsafe. Don't do that. I'm like, ‘this is my country. And you're telling me I can't travel how and where I want to go, because of the fear of, you know, meeting the wrong white person.’ I'm just going to say that, whether it's the police officer or somebody else, this is 1950s kind of crap, and we should be beyond that, and it looks like it's getting worse.
I'm a solution builder. I don't like living in the problem, but there's a point in your life where you just say, maybe it's just time for me to drop out.”
And pass the torch to someone else. That's why she has this idea of retiring to Panama, or somewhere else outside the US...she doesn’t expect those places to be free of racism. But she says if she has to feel like a guest in her own country, why not be an actual guest in someone else’s?
“Now does it completely conflict with my love of Chicago and my desire to make this city better, and my desire to stay? I feel that conflict constantly, but I at least want to have the options. And so my rallying cry of Panama is really about making decisions that allow me to keep a personal lens on where I need to be in my life. And that actually makes me much more decisive and strategic in running my business. And I think it actually has led to a more financially successful business than my previous businesses have been.”
She says she often thinks about her dad, a World War II veteran who died five years ago. He was always clear-eyed about what he wanted from his career...
“I think my father had a very successful career, I think because his goal wasn't to have a successful career, his goal was to have a career that helped him achieve his personal goals around taking care of his family, making sure his kids graduated from college, went to grad school if they wanted to, made sure his wife was being taken care of, making sure that we had a good life...you know, he was offered significant opportunities to be in senior management at banks around the country. And he turned them down because it would take time away from what he cared about, which was his personal goals of his family. And I wish I had actually understood that earlier. I didn't realize that until, as I said recently, when I thought I've spent my whole career chasing, trying to be a chief strategy officer, being seen as a high profile lead of an agency. And I don't think it - it encouraged me to make decisions that actually were, were against my own personal life and passions.
She put a lot of energy into going after things at work. Still...
“Like so many people in advertising, I've had all these career ambitions only to be laid off or only to be blocked. And while I can shake my fist in the air to say, I should have not been blocked, or I shouldn't have been laid off, that was somebody else's decision. And I decided that I was tired of leaving my life in the hands of others.”
Which is partly why she started her own company.
Looking back, she realizes so much of her progress in a corporate setting was controlled by other people.
“You do what you can to get noticed by those people, to produce for those people...but it's not really in your control. Whereas if I make it about my personal life, and I think, how do I enhance my personal life through this job or through this job, then I can start making decisions about those jobs based off of what's going to get me where I need to go. And I don't think it's a selfish thing. I think it's just, what do I have control over? And what I have some control over is what, how I respond to the world. I can't control the way the world responds to me.”
Lauren and I spoke in the summer, a few months before her birthday.
“I will be 58, um, in September. And, you know, it's, it's an interesting time for me. Um, because you know, one might argue that I'm, you know, past middle age, but you know, we're talking about, I just had a conversation with my 89 year old mother about, Hey, she might live until her mid, you know, 105 or what have you, right? And so I do think like many of my friends, I think we're all trying to figure out what the future holds and if there are dreams, what those dreams look like.”
She says she doesn’t have the same fantasies of achievement she did when she was younger. But she does want to achieve in a different way. She wants to do things that have a positive affect on others’ lives...now to do that she says she needs to achieve a certain amount of financial independence first...she’s not quite there yet. But she wants to do more community work...
“...do things that matter to me, as a Black woman and do the kind of writing and thinking and production of content, about what I really think needs to be out there without necessarily thinking about the impact it will have on my business or my professional reputation. I just want to say what I think...and oftentimes you’re limited. Don’t get me wrong, I have a very free reign with this company, but I still have that in the back of my mind. So as I look towards 58 and beyond, I'm doing a lot of serious thinking about how to prepare my life in a way where I can maximize the freedom to do what I think matters.”
Lauren Tucker in Chicago. Her consultancy’s website is at LetsDoWhatMatters.com.
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I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.