Immigrant Leadership: The Key to Innovation and Cultural Transformation w/ Ukeme Awakessien Jeter

In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with author, mayor and lawyer Ukeme Awakessien Jeter on the importance of embracing immigrant leadership in the workplace.

Ukeme shares her insights and experience in...

• The unique leadership skills of immigrants.
• Intersectionality in DEI and bias.
• ImmiGrit as a concept.
• Transformative resilience over traditional resilience.
• Positional leadership in immigrant success.
• Why we need to revamp leadership development programs.
• Authentic networking for immigrants.

And connect with me for more great content!

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Transcript

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Russel Lolacher: And on the show today, we have you, Ukeme Awakessien Jeter. And here's why she is awesome. She's the mayor and council president for the city of Upper Arlington. For those not in North America, that's the state of Ohio in the United States for a little geography lesson. She's a lawyer and partner in a national law firm, mechanical engineer, and when she's not doing a hundred jobs, she's just writing books. She's got her new one being released called ImmiGrit, How Immigrant Leadership Drives Business Success. Oh, and she gets awarded for things. In 2021, she was named by Columbus CEO Magazine as one of its future 50 leaders. And she's also here with me. Hello, Ukeme.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Hello. Thanks for having me. Do you want to do all my intros? Like

Russel Lolacher: I'll just walk beside you.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Walk beside me? I was like, who is he talking...? Wait, that's me. He's talking about me. That's awesome.

Russel Lolacher: Thank you very much for being here. Before we get to immigrant leadership, super interested in this, especially from a diversity, inclusivity standpoint and so forth. But before we get into any of that, I have to ask the question I ask all of my guests, which is what is your best or worst employee experience?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: I'll go with best. I know people always think or the worst stuff always sticks. But I will go with best and perhaps one of my best employee experiences was when I was a project engineer. So when you are a project, If you've done any project work or you're the project lead, I mean, the buck stops with you.

It's, it's just a lot of crap that gets floated on you. And even after the project is done, it's just everyone cheers and they move on. And I remember doing this elaborate project and coming into my office like the day after, and there was this card that had been signed by everyone that touched the project on my desk. It was incredible. It's, I it's the only time I've ever gotten like a thank you signed by so many people. You'll usually get the, you usually get the boss card that says great work. That was fantastic and whatever. But to have a, a card the vendors, the, the team members that had been on the project or everyone had signed it was very humbling.

Russel Lolacher: Was this an organization in a culture where that would have been the norm? Or did that feel like out of left field? Wow, this is a touch of humanity. I don't usually get working in this organization?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: It was, it... I think the company at the time was going through that transition where they were really working on employee experiences. And, I hope they still do it. I have to go back and check because it's kind of involved to have your vendors and those kinds of things also signed. And this was before, people were working from home.

So actually on projects, you saw everyone. You can imagine that kind of employee experience is different now because some projects have done virtually, like all my vendors were local and could sign it. So, so I think it was a coming of, let's, let's, let's ratchet up this employee experience thing.

Russel Lolacher: So one more question to that. Now, this is something you, so you're looking at a great experience. What I asked you, you knew I was going to ask you the question. So you were thinking back at such a great experience you had. What have you taken forward with you? Because obviously it still resonates with you years later, to the point where it was the first one that came to your mind when I asked the question.

So what have you taken with you over your employee, your leadership journey to with your, those that you work with?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Yeah. Keeping notes on, while you're in the moment, on something that stands out in someone's work. We tend to give the annual review and the, mid year reviews and things like that when we lead, but instantaneous, Hey that portion where you did this or you want to call and Hey, when you chimed in, and you said that that really drove the point home. Being able to give that instantaneous gratitude and feedback is something that I kind of still carry through because it, cause it matters.

We, we get instant feedback when we're wrong, but very rarely... I, I once had, talking about I can go back to bad experiences. I once had a boss that would say, you'll hear from me when it's bad. Other than that, you're doing a good job. You know, and, and that's kind of like not okay either. Where the only time I'm gonna hear from my leader is when it's bad.

Russel Lolacher: Yeah. That's heartbreaking. But I also love the fact that you're talking about making sure there's humanity involved because as we know, performance reviews are all, did you do the check boxes? Are you above, below or exceeding expectations? It's not personalized at all. It's very much about, it's not about leadership. It's about performance, which are two kind of different things in the corporate world. So I love that. So almost having like sort of a, in radio we called it a Bit Book where you had a book with you all the time and you wrote little notes as you thought about them, but refocusing it as a leader to your colleagues, to those that report to you going, Oh, I got to remember to put that down. That's fantastic. I love that.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Yeah. Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: So we're talking about immigration leadership today. Now, a big part of the show is definitions. I do not like talking about anything without defining what we're talking about.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Good on you. You've heard what assuming does, right? The assumptions are not good. They make an ass out of you and me.

Russel Lolacher: Exactly. Exactly. So, I don't want to dive right into this without a hearing from Ukeme, who wrote the book, ImmiGrit Leadership. What is immigrant leadership?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Yeah. So this, the term ImmiGrit with this ubiquitous term that came up as I was writing the book. And it, it, it helps to take it just a step kind of behind as to where the idea from the book came up. So you mentioned I was elected to city council, when I was in 2021, it was a historic moment.

First person of color, first immigrant to be elected to local government in my city and my city was 103 years old. So this led to the honor of being asked by my Alma mater to come give the commencement speech in 2022. Now, my American story is an immigrant story. I immigrated to the United States at the age of 18 to attend college.

So this Alma mater that called me back. So it was this full circle moment. And I don't know about you, but I know at that point, I'd never given a commencement speech before, but you're thinking, you're thinking about, well, what am I going to impart on these new graduates? And you think, listen, you're full circle.

I remember when I was there. I hate to admit, 20 years ago, right? So two decades ago, I was sitting in that seat. So you've got to be personal. You've got to tell your story. And my story is the immigration story. And so I'm telling my immigrant story and how my immigrant story gave me these unique skills to be able to adapt to different situations because I have to do it all the time in the American culture.

Resilience, perseverance, different kinds of visa statuses and juggling all of that. Something's not working out how you want them to work out because of your immigration status. These are all things that you endure as the immigrant... through the immigrant experience. But in my experience, that has also made me a better leader.

And I encourage these graduates to go out there, go pursue their dreams, but also be willing to live life off script. The immigrant story is you generally live life off script. I got off that commencement stage and I had a slew of international students come up, but one particular one dropped a comment that they had never considered their immigrant experience as leadership skills.

They always just kind of have heard, seen the immigrant struggle and that stuck with me. And I thought, well, how is it and why is it that immigrants are not seeing themselves as leaders? What is causing that? And I'm, I'm a researcher. I got came to find out that only 3 percent of fortune 100 CEOs are immigrants.

And so once you start to see these macro reflections, you can kind of understand why an immigrant would not see themselves in leadership. Leadership doesn't reflect them. And so ImmiGrit came up as a term to coin these unique skills that immigrants possess, and that is a result of the immigrant experience.

Now, immigrants are not a monolithic group, by any means. We come from different socioeconomic statuses, right? Different parts of the... but the very act of moving to a country you're not from requires certain skills. Even the most resourced immigrants. So say you come here and you're the king of Persia. And you have a gazillion dollars.

You still have to exhibit resourcefulness. Like, where are you going to put the money? Who was, who are you going to trust? Like those kinds of things. So, that's how the term ImmiGrit came about. ImmiGrit is this ubiquitous term to define the skill sets that are unearthed from the immigrant experience.

Russel Lolacher: I can't remember where I read it, but I remember seeing that you had said that businesses, business leaders specifically, are not recognized the importance of fostering a culture itself that embraces the power of immigrant leadership. How are they failing?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Couple of things. I, I see two, and I write about this. There's two unique biases that we see in immigrants in the, in the workplace. And part of that is a failure of understanding intersectionality. I give this example, and I give this example in my book, on me being a black woman in America. I'm a black immigrant woman. My first MLK, so Martin Luther King Junior holiday in the United States.

I'm on campus. Obviously it's a long weekend. I can't go back to Nigeria for this long holiday weekend. So I'm on campus. I'm strolling across campus. Up comes this reporter and says, Hey, can we interview you? And I'm like, yeah, you don't, you don't think to ask what, what are you interviewing me about now? Now I do. Back then. I was just excited. Yeah! And this reporter asks me what does MLK, Martin Luther King, mean to you? Legitimate question, right? Only problem is Nigerian, not American. And so that is U. S. history and U. S. black history and not my history. I know about him because he was prominent enough that he was a world figure, but not in the way that a American would know.

And I'm talking about white, black, whatever, like the way that a native American should know about Martin Luther King from learning from the history books. So I froze when that question was asked. And then I kind of, I panicked. I said, Hey, I'm Nigerian, but you know what? I, I know who MLK is. And I felt this innate pressure to justify that.

Well, the similar things happen in the workplace where we miss the intersectionality of the immigrants. A. Because we don't track it. We don't know who are immigrants in the workplace are B. It's missing in our D and I discourse, right? And intersectionality is how you're different, going back I love how you say you define terms, but intersectionality... Kim Crenshaw is the, is the researcher that coined this term, but it's how your different identities lap on each other so that you have compounding discrimination in the workplace.

So your gender is one identity. If you're a female, that's a gender compounding. You're black. That's another compounding. You're immigrant. That's another compounding identity, right? And so where workplaces are failing is that the immigrant identity is not an intersection lens in which we compound onto other things.

And so we miss them in the DEI conversation altogether. And what happens when we do that is these unique biases that I talk about. Now, there's several of them, but there's two that are prominent. The accent bias, So how we, how things are said, we expect leaders to sound a certain way. There's a, and I, and I did a poll, like, how many, I should even ask you, how many leaders have you seen that come on TV with an accent, right?

Or give company wide presentations with an accent? So it leads to that where we're like, Hey, you can't give that presentation because, and there's countless of examples of that. And then the second is the foreign education bias. So that's unique to immigrants. So there's two, the two main or the two primary reasons people immigrate is one for a job and two for education.

So the category number one is for a job. Generally they're coming with their own education from their country. Well, we tend to attach level of intelligence from where you're from, or what country you're from. We, we don't think to ourselves, and it's tongue in cheek, but I'm like, the law of gravity is the same whether you learn it in English, learn it in French, learn it in Swahili, right?

So if an engineer is coming, or a doctor, the heart, the human heart is in the same place of the body, regardless of where that human is from. But we attach the level of intelligence to our education and where the education is from. And that creates for for an education bias in the workplace. So that's what, that's where I see leaders failing.

We don't see intersectionality. And so because of that, we're not able to solve for these unique biases that that happened to immigrants.

Russel Lolacher: You, you've mentioned CEO here. You've mentioned sort of the C suite executive side of things. Are we talking positional leadership or are we talking everyday leadership when we talk about embracing immigrant leadership?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Positional leadership. Because positional leadership is really where you start to dismantle biases because who we see as a leader, allows us to lead in our respective places. And so, so this my book, and I recognize the leadership is you can lead from where you are, but it was really about, positional leadership, the C suite specifically, because we get to, we tend to see a lot of, Immigrants lead in technical, in technical, like kind roles.

So your Chief Technology Officers tends to be an immigrant, right? Again, pervasive biases around where we think immigrants should be.

Russel Lolacher: So I guess we haven't really, I mean, I've talked about diversity, equity, inclusivity and belonging a lot on the show from different angles and different perspectives. So I think it makes a lot of sense just to continue that conversation here a bit, especially when we need to, this sounds horrible, we need to sell this. To be honest. I mean, that's, you're educating people with your book. We need to hammer home why immigrant leadership is something that is vital for an organization. So how do you convince those that may not be just going, well, it's working for me. What I'm already doing, our organization's profitable. Why do I need to change the way I think about D E I B within my organization?

How do you get ... how do you get it across to people?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Well, you may be profitable, but you're losing money on the table. Without a doubt. And I have countless stories and case studies in the book that shows that. You're missing innovation. Part of, part of the success of an organization is how well do you lead on change? How do you innovate?

And then lastly, you're also likely to miss out on sales because you're just not reflective or understanding your customer base like who you're serving. I'll just spend a minute kind of like dissecting a few of those. So the first thing is you're missing money on the table. I tell stories of, Levi's jeans, for instance, right? Was a German immigrant that created that for the gold miners, right? And he did that when no one else in America had figured out how denim, what kind of clothing gold miners should wear. The fact that he was an immigrant, he had come, had seen other things, he had been in another place, he understood materials from a different angle, gave him the unique advantage to innovate. The Moderna vaccine when, when we were going through COVID. Immigrant leadership. Immigrants led on that. Whatsapp, the now communication tool that we use across the globe. It was a creation based on the fact that how can I communicate with someone across the ocean. That was the theoretical hypothetical question that was asked in development.

So I say to companies, even if you're purely a national based organization and you're not global in any way, you serve people that are not necessarily just within your nationality. And so you've got to be thinking on these things. So that's how they miss out on profitability and innovation. And then, the what type of example, the perfect example of how we talk about your customer base.

I tell a story, of Avon in the book and Avon was losing money in these markets that had Hispanic and black people and did not understand why till they put those people in leadership. And their marketing and sales was different. How they created the ads were different because they had that perspective.

So the people that you are eventually buying your products, buying your services, your customers, right? The, the makeup of the U S is very different, and across the globe because of global migration, is very different from what it was 50, 60 years ago. I mean, think 50, 60 years ago when you thought about diversity, all you thought about was, African American, black and white, right?

We didn't have the didn't like Latin, LatinX. Those are recent definitions of diversity in our lexicon, right? And that's a growing population in the U. S. so you miss out on being able to sell your products and services to that market without having reflective leadership.

Russel Lolacher: Our show is very much about the employee journey, the employee experience, culture, so the one that really jumps out at me is how does immigrant leadership help employee culture? Like you're bringing new perspectives in. So I'm, I'm super interested from your perspective in your research, how have cultures benefited from embracing this type of leadership?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Yeah. Well, we are now a multicultural world. We just are. And so we've over indexed on IQ, so our intelligence, EQ, our emotional, our emotional intelligence. But our cultural intelligence is wildly lacking. And I'm not talking about, Hey, just knowing where, where a country is on the globe or, just knowing what they wear or what they eat.

No, I'm talking about being able, because you've, you've improved how you have curious conversations, being able to work with a varied team and still be successful. We know that part of the different stages of forming team you have your storming, you're forming, whatever. We know that for a team to be effective.

They all have to quote unquote, get along. If our population is already changing the dynamics of people that we have in the workplace is different for teams to quickly get up to speed is all about culture. It's all about how, how do we lead multicultural teams? It's all about our cultural intelligence, which is CQ.

That's how immigrant leadership improves culture. I tease because I'll go back to accent bias for a second. My, my favorite poet, 50 Cents, in one of his rap, in one of his rap songs, he says something like, you say, you say, talk fast. You just have to listen faster. It's the same thing with accents.

When like people dismiss accents, I can't understand them. I can't hear them. They're not on the team. Yeah. And it's it actually tells me your cultural intelligence when you dismiss accents because it takes active listening. Your hearing improves when you're able to understand different accents in order to work, rather than dismissing it.

So this is how the workplace culture changes as a result of immigrant readership.

Russel Lolacher: A word you brought up at the beginning. And I'm always kind of curious about this and love your perspective on it is the term resiliency. We talk about resiliency like it's the most amazing thing in the world. We talk about it like, Oh, we'll get through all the hard, especially after the pandemic.

However, from an immigrant leadership and, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but based on sort of how you mentioned it, is it's a different type of resiliency as an immigrant because you're being resilient to crappy, like to being treated poorly. You're being resilient against bad leadership.

You're being resilient against horrible processes. And you're bringing that into a workplace. What are your thoughts on resiliency when we talk about it, like such a good thing, but what are we being resilient against and do we need to be that... Should we have to be?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Russel, you hit on a thing I loved writing the most in my book because resilience is out of suffering. I actually, before I started writing and researching on it, I had rejected the term resilience because you're saying I have high resilience because I have high tolerance for pain and suffering. And it's just such a weird thing to celebrate. But I came across this Alma Mostyn. She writes a book called Type R leader, the Type R, R is resilience. And she explores this concept of transformative. resilience. And she has six pillars in there and you can go pick up the book and whatever. I had the good pleasure of interviewing her for the book and she's included in the book.

And that, that's a term I actually prefer when I think about the resilience that immigrants bring to the workplace, which is this transformative resilience. We are used to resilience being the ability to bounce back in its coroquial kind of meaning. Amma, in her book, talks about transformative resilience as resilience that springs you forward. And it springs you forward because of these six pillars in her book that she talks about and, and the, but the, the main thing I'm trying to say about it is immigrants, their resilience, right, is the ability to still preserve their mental well being, their mental health. To not take no for an answer, to not see that person as bad, or see that system as bad, or see that thing as bad because it caused it harm. To quickly kind of like forgive and spring forward, is not something that, most people do well, but immigrants have to do well in order to continue to thrive in the new place.

So that's how, I prefer to see the immigrant resilience, not as immigrant struggle or suffering, but more as it is, it is transforming them and the people around them. They're springing forward.

Russel Lolacher: And that is such a beautiful thing to model in an organization because resiliency shouldn't be, well, you had a horrible leader for three years and you're still here. Congratulations. Which just breaks my heart. So there's a lot of organizations that would love to be better at this, especially in words. Especially in posters, especially in websites where they say we're diverse, we're inclusive, we're all about belonging.

What are the actions you'd like to see organizations be putting into place other than the lip service of we want to be more culturally diverse. We want to embrace immigrant leadership, but maybe the, maybe the actions aren't connecting the dots. So I would ask you, are we needing to spend more time in the hiring process?

Is it more just becoming better world global citizens in understanding diverse cultures in how they lead?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: I would say all of those things, but let's start with low hanging fruit to, kind of like spend your money on top of the thing. A low hanging fruit would be, first of all, being apt at having curious conversations. We tend to ask a lot of why when we converse. The problem with why, is that it inhibits curiosity and curious conversation.

So we say things like, why do you believe that? That instantly puts me on the offense. Why do you do things that way? Why do you... just, that's how we bark out our curiosity, but that's not curious conversations. 'How' is curious conversation. So using anytime you want to use why, just start to use how. How did you become to believe that? How did you learn that that way? How do you do that? See how that instantly changes and allows that person to not be on the defense, but talked with you through the process. And when you do that and you don't have any outcome of the conversation, you're not trying to convince them one way or the other, you tend to advance your relationships when you have curious conversations. That's one. There's low hanging fruit. Everyone in the organization should be able to have curious conversations. I think organizations need to invest in the leaders, having cultural intelligence, but take them through, multicultural workshops.

I've, I've taken some groups through this and you can actually role play and have scenarios, cause people are like, people tell me sometimes you can't meet. I don't. I'm not there yet. I haven't hired, people there or my leaders are not there. How can my leaders learn? And it's you can have workshop scenarios and have, the role play with different, almost like the card games that you play.

This happens on your team, what do you do? And have very multicultural scenarios that those types of things improves your cultural intelligence. And then last in the big heavy lift is your leadership development programs. And that goes a little bit also to your hiring. First of all, you gotta get immigrants and diverse people into your talent pipeline.

So that, that happens with recruiting and sourcing talent and those kind of things. And we talked about eliminating those biases. So generally, if you're interviewing someone with an accent. I'm like, Oh, we can find someone else, right? Or the foreign energy. So you, you eliminate all that. You have better people in your pipeline.

Once you have better people in your pipeline, then you've got to develop them. So leadership development programs have to be a little bit more specialized than they are right now. Again, 95 percent of leaders are still white males. What happens with that is that our leadership development programs are designed to turn you into a white male. The way we say your presentations should be. So you've got the, the relationship development program to tell how to present, how did that, how to network, how to mentor, they're all styles and tools and whatever, based on a certain archetype of a leader... that's a white male. So we need to revamp our leadership development programs and that's at the top of the chain. And that's a little expensive.

Russel Lolacher: Fair, fair. What advice would you give to those immigrants who are coming into industries, looking to get more exposure, looking to get networked and seeing a process and a system that is not built for them,

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: Where should they approach... and I'm being very, they, like I'm being very umbrella here. And I understand I'd love to dig deeper into a few of these topics, but it's such a, it's such a meaty topic. So I want to start with at least broad terms of where, where can you start? What are steps you can take to be more proactive?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: I think bar none, the biggest thing that immigrants have to learn, especially because they in coming to a new, new world, new country they have to give up their social network and their familiarity with those networks. You start by building up your network. That could happen in with that doesn't have to happen at the workplace.

It could happen where you live. You could see the library board needs someone to serve you bring your perspective there. What's important, though, about when you're building your network is how you build your network. And this is where this process of assimilation versus adaptability comes in. There's, there's, there's a pressure immigrants feel, and the workplace and our communities force that is you, they force assimilation like, and we've heard the phrase when in Rome, act like the Romans. It doesn't help that people expect that you are American the day you land or if you're in Canada, you're Canadian. Me Canadian. And, and I caution against this forced or speedy assimilation when you're building your network. Building authentically. If you have chai tea, when you have tea, don't have a coffee with someone, invite them into your world, have, have your chai tea with them, invite them to chai tea, invite them to your dinner in the way that your dinner is.

If you guys sit on the floor, eat with your hands, show them as you are building your network, expose them to your culture and the things that are important to you and the values that you have and the meaning that you have. That's the beauty of building your network in an authentic way.

Because you'll get frustrated in the end after you've built it on inauthentic ways. Oh, I think I have to eat a hot dog to be American. So I'm going to eat a hot dog here. And then you, you get there and you're like, you just start to feel and start to underperform because you are not yourself.

So, so that that's on immigrants to do that work of building a network and building it authentically.

Russel Lolacher: What does success look like? What is... you wrote the book? What is, what are we trying to achieve here?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: For me, success looks like I set the number earlier, 3 percent of fortune 100 CEOs right now are immigrant. Yet 14 percent of the population is immigrants. 14%. Success for me looks like improving that, that number in the C suite. To at least be reflective of, or closer to that percentage. I'll take, I'll take 10 percent of our, of our, of our CEOs being immigrants.

Russel Lolacher: Yeah What are you afraid of in this? Because I mean, success is great. And I mean, you're, you're talking more vision than like incremental success, which, Hey, I'm a big fan of the visions and the missions and let's like real good ones like this one, but what are you afraid of in this journey to try to achieve that? Because, I'll be honest. What comes up to my, in my head is things like tokenism, where it's we, we checked a box, checkbox leadership, right? Look, we did a thing when you didn't change and move the needle at all, but for all appearances sake, look how great you're doing. So what, what are you, what are you afraid of?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Yeah, no, that's that certainly is my big fear. And I'll take you back something I said earlier. Immigrants are not a monolithic group. My biggest fear is that, only white immigrants benefit from this. Cause someone will say to me, Oh, this immigrants all the same. And that's a fear cause that's more palatable.

I'll give a perfect example. We tend to think the British accent is smart.

Russel Lolacher: Well certain British accents are smart. There are a lot British accents.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: You, it's true. Well we hear an accent. We hear a Nigerian accent or any other African country accent or Spanish accent and we juxtapose that with a British accent. And we're going to say, Oh, the British accent is smart. Yeah. I'm good with that. And they're an immigrant, right? In the very literal definition of an immigrant, it's someone living in the country that they were not born in.

So my big fear with this work is because of our deeply rooted, and especially here in the United States, history with colorism, with racism, is that we begin to see this work and it only benefits the palatable immigrants for us, which is the white immigrants.

Russel Lolacher: I'm also concerned a lot with socioeconomic issues because Immigrants are not all at the same economic level when it comes to going to school, what schools they can get into based on their financial situations. How do we help those systems in order to, again, we're being pretty broad here, but I don't want to assume that everybody coming over and anybody coming into North America will say, who's looking to be a leader who may be the most amazing leader, but does not have the same opportunities because of their, where they're coming from. So how, how do we, how do you look at this?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Socioeconomic dynamics.

Russel Lolacher: Fix everything. Come on, Ukeme!

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Fix it! I see this in community. It's not even in the workplace. You see this in community. We see this at every strata. I think the issue for me when I look at socioeconomic dynamics is always about access. Does everyone have a fair opportunity? That's how we fix it. And access to the same opportunities, right?

I mean, give an example of swimmers. Why people say, Oh, black people don't swim. Well, we look at community and where were the pools? The community pools were not near them. That's, there's no access to water for them to practice swimming. There's access to a track for them to run. That's why you see, see more runners, black people runners.

There's access to a basketball hoop in the community park. But we didn't put a pool. We didn't put a golf course. We didn't put tennis. That's what I'm talking about. That's, that's what, levels the playing field when we think about socioeconomic issues is access to the same opportunities.

Russel Lolacher: Well, Ukeme. You wrote the book. So I want to ask what you're most hopeful about then, because you didn't write a book just to go into this ether of the void of well, it's a problem. It's always going to be a problem. I don't know why I wrote this thing. So why are, what are you hopeful about of getting the message, the education around immigrant leadership out to the world?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: I once had a leader that would give books to us to read. And it was always like these weekend reads. And he would say the size of this book is intended this way. That way you can finish it on the weekend. And that stuck with me when I wrote this book because I was writing for leaders.

All right. I was like, how do I write a book that they can finish in the weekend? So it's only about 224 pages. So my hope is they're not like, Oh my God, like I have to read this. It's a, it's a quick read. They're very practical tips. There's a lot of case studies in there. A lot of interviews with experts is written in three parts and each part can be read independently.

So my hope is because it is written for leaders, HR professionals, and the benefactors of it are obviously immigrants... my hope is that the two kind of audiences read the book immigrants, it helps them with their development, how to have conversations around their leadership development.

And then on the leader end, it helps them kind of look at systems in your workplace. Again, from the low lift to the heavy lift and start to say, how can I do some of these things? So it's my big dreams here.

Russel Lolacher: Thank you so much for this. I am going to wrap it up with our question we do at the end here, which is Ukeme, what is one simple action people can do right now to improve their relationships at work?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: I say take someone that you have never had a meal with before to lunch. So in your workplace, you've never gone to lunch with, take them to lunch.

Russel Lolacher: That is Ukeme Awakessien... Oh I'm going to get this right. Ukeme Awakessien Jeter. She is a mayor, council president, a lawyer, mechanical engineer. Oh, by the way, she just wrote a book. It's called ImmiGrit, How Immigrant Leadership Drives Drivers Drives Business Success. I will reedit that.I'm sure. Thank you so much for being here.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter: Oh my gosh. It was wow. We blew through time and covered a lot of things. Thank you so much.