Leading with Diversity Top of Mind: A Conversation with Brittani Marie and Shane Snow

Michael Rivo: Welcome back to Blazing Trails. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios. And today, I'm joined by my podcast partner, Rachel Levin. Welcome back, Rachel.

Rachel Levin: Thanks, Michael. You know I love always being here with you.

Michael Rivo: Well, that's very special. That's very nice. I feel-

Rachel Levin: I thought I could make you feel special. You know?

Michael Rivo: I do. I feel very special about that. Hey, we haven't been on air in a while. What's been going on with you?

Rachel Levin: I know. Well, just getting into the summer groove. It's pretty awesome here actually now in San Francisco because the rates are down so much that it really does feel like life is back to normal. We go to playgrounds, been to the zoo, can go to the pool, so just kind of enjoying that. What about you?

Michael Rivo: Well, I'm getting into summer too here. And yeah, every time I leave it's, " Do I have my mask?" And then you don't need it. But let's hope that this holds up, and it's not true everywhere right now.

Rachel Levin: Right, exactly. Exactly. And I know you dropped off your son recently to camp, which was probably unthinkable a couple months ago.

Michael Rivo: Summer camp. And they sent us a note that they have no cases, and everybody's tested. And so after a week, they don't need the masks anymore.

Rachel Levin: That's great.

Michael Rivo: Yeah, so he's having a good time. He'll come back, I think. Maybe not, he might just stay. He's done. He's done with us here. He's done with home.

Rachel Levin: Thanks, Dad. I'll see you when I get back from college 10 years from now.

Michael Rivo: Yeah, exactly. Right, right. He's 11. He's 11. He's done.

Rachel Levin: Today's episode I think is actually pretty unique because we're going to be talking about diversity and inclusion, which obviously is top of mind for lots of people. But what's interesting about our show today is we have two people that really tackled that issue kind of in a very personal way. Brittani Marie Turner, she's a lead brand editor here at Salesforce, and Shane Snow, founder of Contently. And Brittani wrote about this in the magazine, Vantage Point, that Salesforce put out last month, and talked about what it felt like to be the only female African American walking into this content company and how that experience was for her, and how Shane, the founder, took it as an opportunity and really reached out to her, and had some pretty honest conversations about the dynamics and what he needed to do to be able to bring more diversity. And so I thought it was a really nice, authentic conversation.

Michael Rivo: It's a way to tell this story in such a direct way. We hear about equality. We hear about the efforts that are being made. And this is the personal story for Brittani and Shane, who've had a long relationship now coming off of this initial conversation. So it was a really honest conversation. And Shane talked about these kind of micro opportunities to be inclusive, which he learned out of this. And he's gone on to write books about this and help lots of other companies in their journey as well.

Rachel Levin: Yeah, I think that idea of the micro opportunities and just ... And also, what's interesting, Brittani kind of opened up about her own biases that she had working with some people in the past, and kind of made assumptions about, and didn't turn out to be true, so yeah, just a very kind of thoughtful conversation that I think our listeners will get a lot out of.

Michael Rivo: Yeah. It's a good one. So let's take a listen to my conversation with Brittani Marie Turner, lead brand editor at Salesforce, and Shane Snow, founder of Contently. Welcome, Brittani.

Brittani Marie Turner: Hi Michael. Thanks for having me.

Michael Rivo: Great. Thanks for being here. And welcome, Shane.

Shane Snow: Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Michael Rivo: Absolutely. Okay. So Brittani, in the article, you talk about feeling nervous when you started your dream job. Lots of people feel that way. And what did you first notice when you walked into Shane's office?

Brittani Marie Turner: Yeah. That's a great question. I think I noticed how bright and sunny it was. I noticed also the energy. I was really taken by it seemed there were so many teams collaborating, I really couldn't tell them apart. But I did also notice that I didn't see a lot of people of color, if not any women particularly of color, or black women, if you will. And I think it's just one of those things that you always are kind of trained to pay attention to. Growing up in this country, it's sort of a safety mechanism. You look around and you try to find kind of a safe person to go speak to, or feel like, " All right. Hey, tell me. What's it really like to work here?" And I didn't have that person. I was a bit surprised because this was at the beginning of when content marketing was really starting to have a foothold in the marketing world. And this was a startup company that had a diverse array of clients and different global perspectives, and their content was amazing. So I sort of expected that it was coming from a number of different voices, and I was a little surprised that it seemed to be a lot of the same types of people.

Michael Rivo: So Shane, tell me about Contently a little bit, about your journey, getting there, about the company. Just give us something context.

Shane Snow: Yeah. So the company started based on a couple of premises. One was I was a journalist and had graduated from journalism school with no job, like all of my peers during the recession. And we were watching the world of journalism kind of come tumbling down, or at least the full- time job prospects of journalism. There were a lot of freelancers who had all this great training, editors from the New York Times who were being laid off and being rehired as freelancers. So it was a big trend in the gig economy. And the other trend that was happening simultaneously was brands were starting to become publishers. Social media meant that you could talk to your customers. And in order to talk to your customers, you needed to tell stories. You need to have great photos and great blogs and whatever it was that your strategy dictated. And those two things, we saw an opportunity in between those two trends. We had freelancers from around the world working for us and writing for us. But when you walk in the door at our office, what you see are 10 white guys and their one Indian friend, who all went to the same colleges in the Northeast, Ivy League schools, who were all nerds who play video games, who all slowly started dressing the same because we hung out every waking moment together. And so you had this monoculture inside of the company in a place in New York, where you care a lot about being able to be who you want to be, and being inclusive. And yet, just organically, our company had turned into this very kind of like I wouldn't say intimidating place because everyone was nice. But if you walk in and you didn't look like everyone else, then you could see how there could be anxiety around: Do I belong here? Is this really where I'm going to thrive and be able to bring my full self? And it happened on accident, which until we saw it, we didn't see it at all, which I think is very common.

Michael Rivo: So Brittani, you walk in to this situation. And Shane, I think it's so interesting that the use of we in describing starting this company together, which is an inclusive term. But that we was this very small group of people. Brittani, it must've felt like you were walking into this we that was not you, and how that felt there. You described that. But then something happened. Did it feel like that? Or is that accurate?

Brittani Marie Turner: Yeah. Pretty much. Let me preface this with there's a little bit of a history that Shane may not even be aware of, as I was walking into the situation. But it wasn't exactly the beginning of my career. I had started in media in advertising at a big company. And I didn't have the most pleasant experience, should I say. I think I was trying to overcome a little bit of racial trauma, having first been another person of color in an organization that at the time, you rewind seven years ago, diversity and the importance and significance of it wasn't really widely talked about. Right? And those uncomfortable conversations just weren't expected. And so I had taken the year off, founded my own company, and decided that, okay, I still have a lot to learn. So I found the best content marketing company I could and said, " You know what, I'm going to learn how to do it the right way," and was following this company on LinkedIn. So it was a much more significant moment for me to walk into this company and then see that it wasn't quite what I expected. So then to Shane's point, I did have some initial anxiety. I'm like, " Oh, boy. Did I just do this all over again?" And I walk over to my desk, and I remember just trying to sit there and think about, " What am I going to talk to these people about? What do we have in common?" They have this really vibrant kitchen, and everyone's walking in and grabbing coffee. And I was nervous just to go in the kitchen and try to have coffee with someone. I'm like, " How do you do that?" When you don't come from those circles, or you don't have parents that raise you how to network in a corporate setting and make small talk, which I'm still terrible at. But anyhow, the founder, who I'd been following on LinkedIn, walks over to my desk like, " Hey, do you want to grab lunch?" And it was the first time that an executive had really just acknowledged my presence and really I think took a moment to say, " Hey, I want to get to know you," outside of the standard, oh, there's an onboarding. We brought you pastries, and welcome to our company. It's like it was very personal. And yeah, it meant something to me. It was a very transformational moment for me in my career to say, " Okay, I'm here. Now what am I going to do next?" So yeah.

Michael Rivo: And Shane, was that something that you did just meeting with different people in the company and going out to lunch? Or was this a special invitation?

Shane Snow: Well, at this point now, I look back on it, and just because Brittani is such an amazing person, it was a special invitation. And I was in the habit of trying to get to know people on a first name basis and learn their stories because that's part of the theme of our company, and also part of what I had some conviction about at this point in my journey too, and understanding this thing around diversity and around the benefits and challenges of working with people who are different. And also, frankly, I had this big question, which was: How can I as a leader navigate these kinds of exact things? How can I make this company a place so that the next person who walks in, or maybe it takes us 20 more people, but when someone walks in, they can feel like they can be who they are, and not worry about fitting in? That fitting in is not the point, actually. Contributing is the point. And I had questions about that, that I think maybe was a little intimidating to ask the new employee, but I wanted to learn, and so that was part of my motivation there.

Michael Rivo: So Brittani, tell me about the lunch. How was that for you?

Brittani Marie Turner: So the lunch, I remember kind of getting ready to go. I kind of saw Shane put on his jacket, and I'm just on my iPhone Googling away. What do I order to eat? Trying to come up with talking points, almost like an agenda because it's my first time having a lunch with a founder, if you will. Now at the time, Contently had really grown. It had a lot of press. It was winning a lot of awards, so I wanted to make a strong impression. But I was thinking business. I'm like, " Great. How do I go in? Maybe I'll pitch him a story." And we walk to lunch, and Shane kind of opens up with a candid conversation and started talking about the lack of diversity at Contently in a way that he was really holding himself accountable for it and kind of owning that this is what the company has become. But what really stood out to me was there wasn't a business interest, and he wasn't trying to tie the need for diversity to just innovation. At the time, I don't think he or anyone really knew. What are some of the core benefits of just having a diverse company? I think it really stood out to me that he came from a place of wanting to do the right thing. And we were at the height of some police brutality, and there were riots and protests and things starting to break out in New York. And you can only imagine, you're already navigating that. And then you go to a space where no one's talking about it, and you almost have to pretend like it's not happening. And so there are so many different layers that you have to bring with yourself into these spaces. And I think the last thing you want is just to feel uncomfortable at all, or like you just can't even laugh, or be yourself, or talk about what's happening on the news. So just the fact that he was able to have that conversation with me, it really held a lot of weight.

Michael Rivo: You know what I'm noticing is how difficult it is to start these conversations and how uncomfortable it feels. And there's been a lot of work on that over the past year or so that's changed in bringing some of these issues more outside of work, just generally into the conversation. But I'd love to hear from both of you how to have these conversations. What are some ways to set up a framework to break down some of those barriers?

Shane Snow: I will say that for me, the big insight, well, one of many big insights on this journey in learning about teamwork and through that, learning about humans and collaboration generally, a big insight is that if you can't talk about things, then you can't make progress together on things. And so I think that's getting comfortable having uncomfortable conversations, to me, it's not even about not being uncomfortable. But it's being able to spit it out and ask your questions, and to share without worrying that you're being judged. And yeah, I'm curious what Brittani's had more of these, I think more awkward approaches. I probably approached more awkwardly. So I want to talk about this, and I don't know the right way to say it. But at least that's better than not saying anything. That's my point of view.

Brittani Marie Turner: Yeah. I don't know. Firstly, I don't know if there's a right or a wrong way because I think the goal is not to try to get comfortable talking about such a sensitive and controversial topic. I think you have to really recognize that's not the end goal. The end goal is to learn and to really get into a space of expanding your thought process. But one of the things that I have noticed that works really well here at Salesforce, and there may have been other leaders I've worked with, they dedicate time to address and react to either current issues, or time to really talk about things that are needed in terms of cultivating diversity. So for example, on the content team, on the global content team, I think at the shock of learning the news of Brionna Taylor's verdict, the next day, I got a message. There was an invitation, optional, you can join this thing, but dedicating time to reflect and talk about how we feel in this moment. And what can we do going forward? And it takes the feeling of work out of diversity. So I think when you just open up and have an organic conversation and you dedicate time to do that, over time, it becomes a little bit easier and not necessarily comfortable. But over time, it becomes easier just to, now I know, every time that some that's happening externally, or even politically, there's going to be a calendar invite that comes out. And I actually look forward to them like, " Great, here's time to vent." I know this person is on the other side of the fence, and that's okay. But we can talk about it and come from very honest place. During our initial reconnection, Shane and I were talking about kind of the new role of leaders, and how the connotation of what it means to lead could be shifting. And I think historically speaking, especially in a corporate space, the word lead, it has a connotation of decision maker, and effectively leading the charge and almost like being right about everything, versus we have been, especially in the past years, we've all collectively been in a space where no one is right, and no one knows anything. So if a one on one conversation when it comes to diversity, maybe that's the opportunity as a leader to get to know the diverse counterparts on your team, and ask for help in navigating those conversations. So I just wanted to call that out, just connecting the dots that are actually like... That's a really good approach.

Shane Snow: It's a huge relief as a leader to realize that you shouldn't be the one with all the answers because if you are, that's a huge point of failure for your organization, for your team. If you have to be right about everything, then that's not smart. And so if your job as a leader is to figure out how to help the team be smarter than you, that's liberating. It takes some pressure off of you, but it also changes how you have to deal with people. And so that's been a big outcome for me of all of this kind of journey and understanding our differences, and how not just the moral case for being inclusive, but the pragmatic case for it. It means you have to shift the way you lead. But yeah, I love that we were able to kind of talk through that recently when we reconnected because I think it's so important just to recognize that you shouldn't be the bottleneck if you're the one in the position of power.

Michael Rivo: And Brittani, I've heard you talk about team agreements as a framework and a technique to open up the conversations. And that's beyond some of what we're talking about, that's just sort of how we show up, how we work together, which sets the framework for all kinds of conversations. Tell us a little bit more about the team agreements and how those work.

Brittani Marie Turner: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it actually ties the diversity in a sense that we all work different, and so the teaming agreement that we have on our global content teams, it's essentially a documented kind of crowdsourced agreement, if you will, where everyone... We have a framework of throwing in strengths and weaknesses, and then everyone collaborates on really just pet peeves. Or what should you not do? What are you not expected to do? And then we all kind of sign off on it. But think about the global scale of a team all coming together and throwing in one of our pet peeves, and how we start to learn each other in that way I think was a really great strategy to just getting us to collaborate safer, and practicing really effective communications. But yeah, in a nutshell, we crowd source what are our strengths and weaknesses, so we all kind of document how we want to work. What are we not good at? And that's really spelled out loud and clear. But I think in relation to diversity, that teaming agreement was really helpful for me in a remote setting because there's so much anxiety when you're working remotely, especially if you're new. You don't know what's the standard for excellence, if you will. Right? As my boss explains it, Jessica Bergmann, it really helped to clarify the unspoken rules. And that's like, oh, my gosh, it's just like when you're a person who works so differently, and when you're a person of color, that's the secret to success. We need someone to tell us. What am I not seeing? And what's not on paper here, so that I can get that part right? Because this is a whole nother conversation, and Shane and I have kind of talked about this. But culturally, we're very different. If you are a person of color, historically, it's not safe for us to garner so much attention and to expand ourselves. We kind of shrink. That's not okay, but I think that's why you see on social media if you pay attention, you see many more thought leaders, women of color, men of color, speaking out, trying to have a voice in certain spaces because historically, we've felt restricted to do so. It just wasn't safe, or you were barely in the company to begin with. So who am I to show up and disagree and have all these other ideas that countered yours? Right? That sort of helps alleviate the anxiety around: How do you show up? And how do you make effective decisions and choices?

Michael Rivo: And Shane, this gets to one of the key ideas in your book, Dream Teams, and in the work that you've done around this, around trust. And that aligns so much to Salesforce too. We say that trust is our number one value, and that's our customers' trust with their data and et cetera. And also, trust in each other and trust with our communities. So having been at Salesforce for a while, I'm understanding how important that is to all the different stakeholders and how that makes a great business, and a great community, and relationships. It's such an important idea. Tell me about how you think about trust within the context of Dream Teams.

Shane Snow: So the Dream Teams framework, basically when I set out to understand: What fundamentally do teams that exceed the sum of their parts, what do they fundamentally have in common? And the first one is you have to have people who think differently. And you think differently because you've lived different lives, because you are different, you have different identities. You've been treated differently. You've gone through different things. You've learned to navigate the world differently. But a group of people that all think the same are going to be only as smart as the smartest of those same thinkers. So the starting point is you have to have people who think differently, do different things, come from different places, if you want the team to be better than its most powerful person. The second thing is you need to actually engage those differences. You need to mix those ingredients. If you have different perspectives, you are going to communicate differently. You're not going to be on the same page when you say the same words sometimes. You're going to be afraid to get into things where you disagree, or things are different, the way that you see them because you want to preserve the relationship. But then preserving the relationship, the easiest way to do that is to just have people who all kind of think the same. And then the third part of the Dream Teams model is that if you're going to do that effectively, you're going to mix different people and their different ideas, then you have to be willing to adapt and change and learn and grow as a result of what you learn from each other, and be willing to admit that you're wrong. Be willing to admit that there's a better way, now that you've learned other perspectives. And so that boils down to intellectual humility. But that all doesn't work if you can't trust each other. And so that's why an environment where you don't believe that the other person has your best interests at heart, or the company's best interests at heart, you're not going to put your neck out there and have a debate. You're not going to take the extra time to try and hash out your difference in perspective, and learn and understand and admit that you're wrong, because if you admit that you're wrong, and you don't trust them, then they could use that against you and get you kicked out of the group or whatever. And so it's all intertwined. But for me, that idea that I benefit from understanding other people's points of view, and I benefit more from inquiring, polling, a brain trust of people who are different than me than I do from polling a brain trust of people who are my greatest friends, knowing that I benefit from that makes it easier to go through the discomfort of having to wrestle with other people's points of view, having to wrestle with the disagreement. But yeah, I have tried to make a habit of leading with trust building, showing that I care about people, showing that I want what's right for the broader whole, the broader group, before I get into I disagree with this, or I want to understand how you disagree with that. It's a long way of getting at that, but it's the moral thing and the pragmatic thing about diversity all line up when you can have hard conversations and disagreements, and trust that you'll still be cool. We're going to be okay, even if we disagree. And maybe we'll actually learn something and get better together. But it doesn't work if you don't believe that you both care.

Brittani Marie Turner: I think the work to build trust in a diverse climate actually starts before you bring on the people. And I think leaders should also understand that it looks different for people who don't look like them, the average summation of your team, simple because, for instance, just speaking candidly, if you went to college with most people who look like you, and maybe early in your career, most people look like you, well, you already know. There's already kind of this subconscious comfort of they can do the same things you do. You're used to seeing them in the same environment. If someone from, I don't know, Japan, with a very different accent, and they come in, and you've never worked with them, but they have a very strong accent and they sound like a foreigner. So you don't naturally trust that they understand everything you're saying. Or they may reference content strategy as a totally different language, or a totally different word for it. But you don't naturally recognize that as the same thing. Right? So there's not the same level of trust and competency when you're working with people who refer to things differently or sound different.

Michael Rivo: Shane, you had talked about this idea of these micro opportunities. And Brittani, what you were describing there of the interaction with somebody with a really thick accent, maybe that's a micro opportunity, which is: Hey, can I have it in my conscious mind to say, " Am I really paying attention to the content of what's happening here? Or is this just a miscommunication because of language"? Or just having that consciousness to think about it at that level, is that an example of a micro opportunity? Because it seems like this is just going to be so many small things in how you think about interactions on a daily basis. Am I getting that definition right? Tell me a little more about micro opportunities.

Shane Snow: Yeah, I think so. I mean, culture is built of all the little things we do, and all of the different pieces we include. And I think inclusion operates on the same principle. It's not some big grand gesture of hey, you're part of the team because we threw a party when we hired you, and we did a press release that we hired you. That's not inclusion. Inclusion is all of the little micro things that you do, micro opportunities you take to make someone feel like they belong, and that they belong as themselves, not as someone who you want them to be instead. And I think actually, where you're going with a colleague who has a harder time with your native language, a micro opportunity for self reflection for sure. I think also, the thing that happens too often is when you hear your other colleagues say, " Well, I don't think Unmo understands what we're talking about. I don't think his English is good enough. Or I don't think he's good enough to do this job," taking the micro opportunity to stand up and say, " Well, maybe we shouldn't make that conclusion without talking to him first, without actually exploring this." Taking the opportunity to point out that we're drawing conclusions based on incomplete information, based on biases, those things, even when someone's not in the room, taking the micro opportunities to reinforce that I think contributes to that culture as well. The problem for me is I don't know what I don't know, and I don't know when I'm missing those opportunities. But certainly, when you spot them, you should take them.

Brittani Marie Turner: Yeah. I think that's spot on. I think in terms of micro opportunities, I was thinking about a time. So one, I think as a leader, just knowing that when people come to you with information, not necessarily questioning it, but always kind of challenging the team collectively to also have that same consciousness, and that if there are a lot of assumptions that are made when people are different, and it may not sound like it when you're hearing it, but I will share kind of a slightly embarrassing story, where I was an executive, but I was also making the assumption that someone wasn't fit to do something, just to show you how easy it is to fall into that trap. I spent some time in Haiti. So while I was there, I was consulting with this firm called inaudible Nexus, kind of a pro bono basis, helping with some small government projects. And we had hired a young lady who was Haitian, and in America, if you're Haitian, that basically means you're black, which there's a lot of controversies around that. But she looked just like me, curly hair, she's a black woman, she sounds like me, but she spoke five different languages. She was, oh my God, so impressive. But in the workplace, when it came down to, I'm very assertive as being raised as a Southern black woman. We're taught to be a little authoritative and to be well spoken, if anything. And in meetings, she was actually very quiet. And she didn't say anything, and she wouldn't make a decision about anything. Now what I did know was that this girl's backstory, she had spent five years in Shanghai, and she went to college there, which means that the formative years of her adulthood, she was shaped by an Asian culture, and the part that she was in apparently, women are more reserved and shy and quiet. But she looked like me, so in my head I'm like, " Well, she's not being assertive. She doesn't care." So I told the person at the time, " I don't really think that she's interested or has many thoughts." And it was the first... It was one of... Well, it wasn't the first time, but it was one of the few times where I've been called out on even my own assumptions. And she said, " Well, she spent the last five years in Shanghai. People there aren't assertive and outspoken." And it was a very American woman moment for me. People there aren't like you, basically. And I never, I don't know, that story always stuck to me because I was actually close friends with the girl. But I felt like, " Oh, my gosh. Why is she not taking initiative here to do anything? She's kind of just waiting." We make assumptions and think introversion, for example, especially with black women, there's a lot of social media memes that say, " Black women aren't allowed to be introverts." And I have experienced that when I... It's one of the reasons that I worked remotely for the past five years. When I did go into an office setting, there was so much pressure to be something different. Right? If I was quiet, it's like, " Hey, you should go do this. Or do you want to go do this?" Or you seem angry, I would get a private conversation, it's like, " Oh, you seem upset." I'm like, " I'm just quiet because I'm focused."

Shane Snow: Oh, no.

Brittani Marie Turner: But it happens just because people don't know you, so they're trying to assign a meaning to, oh, you're quiet, when it's like now really, most, especially women of color, we're not very chatty when we come into the office because we're taught to work very hard and to make sure that we have everything accurate, and we just do the very best job. And that takes a lot out of you, where you're not able to go and kind of chat and have coffee, and you're not thinking about those things. You're kind of single track minded when you're in the office. Obviously, that's changed a lot. And I talk a ton now, but five years ago, you couldn't have paid me to go make friends and have those conversations, just because it wasn't a priority, and it wasn't a part of my culture. It was like work is work, friends are friends. Separate those two.

Shane Snow: And I don't think it should be put on you to have to do that if that's not how you roll. I don't think that it should be a bad thing. And my perspective changed on introversion when I had a mentor who, the quote that stuck with me forever when he talked to me about you don't want culture fit, you want culture add. And when I realized that people who are shy and don't want to come to the happy hour are an example of someone who is different, who is going to add to the culture because they roll differently. And so actually, I shouldn't expect them to get out of their shell. And if you do, it's fine. But if you don't, it's also fine. That's not how we're brought up to think. We're brought up to think that's not contributing. But actually, you contribute in all sorts of ways besides just being outspoken or outgoing.

Michael Rivo: Shane, Brittani, thank you so much for joining today. It's been such an interesting conversation. Thanks for joining us.

Brittani Marie Turner: Yeah.

Shane Snow: Absolutely, my pleasure. Thank you both.

Brittani Marie Turner: Thank you. Super excited.

Michael Rivo: Okay, wonderful. That was Brittani Marie Turner, lead brand editor at Salesforce, and Shane Snow, founder of Contently, speaking about the power of inclusion. If you want to learn more about their journey, go to salesforce. com/ blog. Thanks for listening today. If you like this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios.