Systemizing Inclusion for Lasting Change w/ Inclusion Strategist Amri B. Johnson

In this episode of Relationships at Work, I sit down with Amri B. Johnson, executive advisor, organizational consultant, and founder of Inclusion Wins, to explore what it truly means to systemize inclusion. We break down his Emergent Inclusion System—an approach that goes beyond checkboxes and surface-level DEI initiatives to create lasting, impactful change in the workplace.

Amri shares how organizations can operationalize inclusion through everyday practices, empowering skilled operators to carry the message forward, and building resilience that strengthens through adversity. We also discuss the importance of cultural intelligence, accountability through action—not just mandates—and how real inclusion is built into the DNA of how we work, lead, and connect.

If you're looking to understand how to make inclusion sustainable, actionable, and transformative, this episode is your blueprint.

Listen now and discover:

• How inclusion systems create lasting impact
• The role of cultural intelligence in driving change
• Practical ways to operationalize inclusion daily
• Why accountability is a shared, ongoing process

Join us as we reimagine what inclusion can—and should—be.

Hey! If you're enjoying the insights from our guests, you'll love our R@W Notes Newsletter. It’s packed with guest takeaways, the resources that inspire them, and my own tips on how we as leaders can be better humans for the humans the are responsible for. Go to RelationshipsAtWorkShow.com and Subscribe Now and help the workplace be more human.

And connect with me for more great content!

• Sign Up for R@W Notes
• Subscribe on Youtube
• Follow on Linkedin
• Follow on Instagram
• Follow me on Threads
• Follow on TikTok
• Email me anytime

Transcript

Russel Lolacher: And on the show today we have Amri B. Johnson, and here is why he is awesome. He's an executive advisor, organizational consultant, and inclusion strategist. He's the founder of Inclusion Wins, which works with companies of all sizes to make inclusion accessible, actionable, and sustainable. Those are all three really important things. He's the creator of Emergent Inclusion System, which I have a feeling we're gonna talk about today.

And he is formerly the global head of Cultural Intelligence and Inclusion for Novartis Institutes for biomedical research. And today we're getting into inclusion and systems and all of that. Good thing he's here to talk about it. Hello Amri.

Amri B. Johnson: Hello Russel. Thank you for having me.

Russel Lolacher: I'm so curious 'cause systems are so important when it comes to consistency and getting a lot of these DEI diversity... I'm getting into all that. I have so many questions, but before we get into all that, I have to ask the question I ask all of my guests, Amri, which is, sir, what is your best or worst employee experience?

Amri B. Johnson: I tend not to share my worst, but I'm going to today.

Russel Lolacher: Oh!

Amri B. Johnson: So I was a part of a really high functioning diversity and inclusion department at... I started that department with one other colleague in Cambridge, in the Cambridge, Massachusetts where the research division of Novartis was founded. And so I came in, we had basically a blank slate. It was fantastic. We got to really create some things that I think are exceptional and in a way, we were there to guide people to creating the culture that the president wanted to create at the time. A really entrepreneurial open culture where people could share ideas openly. We could debate robustly, we could learn together, and we could treat each other in a way that created the conditions for us to do that consistently.

So that was our charge. And so I, we did that and I was, I got into cruise mode. We were doing stuff, we had budget, we had everything you would ever want. And then all of a sudden the president retired, and then subsequently my boss that reported into him retired as well. And so, I was kind of in a place like, all right, we can continue this going.

We, we reorged, and I went into HR. For the first year, it was fine. The second year, the HR head that I'd known for several years also retired. So we brought in a new HR person. I knew her reputation. It was pretty clear. And a lot of people around the company knew her reputation. And I was like, all right, you guys gave me a heads up. Thank you. I can manage toxic bosses. I'm skilled at that. I work intention and complexity. That's what I do. And so I knew that there was gonna be some changes and I kept seeing signals that people weren't telling me. Things that were impacting my team, impacting my work, impacting a lot of people around the globe.

But I wasn't being included in those conversations. And I kind of sensed it, but nobody on the HR leadership team, with the exception of one person who is a person that probably saved me from going postal, they just didn't tell me. These are people Russel, that I helped, that I made contributions to, that I helped in their career, that I made suggestions that allowed them to get to places that they probably wouldn't have gotten to without my kind of advocacy and support.

And they just did not tell me. And I think what was the most disappointing, and it was actually hurtful. It wasn't hurtful of what the HR person, HR head did. I was expecting it from her. I wasn't expecting it from my peers and colleagues who I'd been in relationship with. And so I, I was hurt, I was disappointed.

I felt like their integrity was compromised. I know that they were just trying to save themselves. But I've been in situations where I know when you're in HR, you know about stuff before at the more senior you are, you know about stuff that's gonna happen two or three years from now.

And we knew there was a time when I had a colleague I knew about the reorg coming in the next couple years. She was applying for a new job and she, we were talking about it and I was said, take the job. She's like, why, you're not even gonna ask me? I think it's a perfect job for you. Because I knew in her department that she was gonna probably be one of the first people to go.

Now, I didn't tell her that we were gonna have a reorg. I just told her to take the job, and that's what I would expect from my colleagues, and that's why it was so hurtful. They didn't need to tell me that she said, keep it on the down low. Just give me a heads up. Give me something to show that we're in solidarity with each other, not in competition. And I found out differently and that was disappointing. I got over it and I eventually left the organization obviously, but that was probably the worst experience, not because of what the HR leader did. If you can call her a leader, right? But what my colleagues missed in building our relationship to, to be durable for the long term.

Russel Lolacher: Thank you for sharing that story. It brings up a topic I'm actually having with a lot of conversations with other people in fields and organizations that are having expectations of leadership and then being disappointed when those people show up without leadership skills. It doesn't have to be direct reports to your point, these are colleagues. But you're looking at them going, I lead this way. What you're doing isn't leadership. You're not prioritizing the relationship. You are saving your own ass. You are managing your situation, not leading within an organization. Yeah. How do you manage expectations when at the end of the day, you can only control what you can control, and you can control how you show up and how you lead your colleagues, your teams, everybody.

But when it's not reciprocated and your expectations is that they will meet you at least even halfway. I can't believe the amount of disappointment I'm seeing out there from people going, but they won't listen to me, but they won't, like, there's just this heartbreak to be honest.

Amri B. Johnson: Yeah. Yeah. There's my my five-year-old is not very quiet, and so you might hear him in the background.

Russel Lolacher: They agree with me, that's all.

Amri B. Johnson: I don't know an answer to how to manage it.

Russel Lolacher: Yeah.

Amri B. Johnson: What I can say is those who have influence in an organization have to be extremely vigilant to do their best to shift it. So if they see it and they're influential, they have to have enough courage, enough kind of wherewithal to know that kind of behavior will not just wreck cultures, it wrecks the ability for us to get stuff done, which is, pretty much what culture is, right? The way we do things around here and it, it gets compromised so quickly that if you have at least a few astute leaders, you can usually do something about it. I'm not saying that it has to be all of them but those, that it almost needs to be something that certain people are tasked to do and it becomes part of their integrity to put that into place consistently.

I, so I don't know the answer to that. I'm pretty good at foresight and I try to like, anticipate those things and build enough relationship that when it comes, I can just say something directly. Doesn't mean that it's comfortable, right? But I can say, Hey, look, I'm understanding this in a way that's not how it's coming from you.

Can you tell me a little bit about your motivation? If they give me a bullshit answer, I can be like, oh, okay, then I'm clear. Yeah. And then I can navigate the way I need to. But I spend a lot of time spent building relationships kind of in a network, and that's a big part of our work is how do you build the organizational networks and the social capital that allows you to build that up over time?

And if something comes and tries to hit you, if you get knocked down, you can get up stronger. And that's, that's the only way I've known how to deal with it, particularly in large organizations. In smaller ones, it's a little bit easier to navigate, but in large organizations you just have to keep being in relationship with as many people as possible that have influence and those that just have information, so you can be ahead of stuff when you need to be.

Russel Lolacher: One of the key reasons I named the podcast Relationships at Work, because it's such a vital piece of any great leader, is to foster and prioritize those relationships.

Amri B. Johnson: Absolutely.

Russel Lolacher: This leads me into my first question to kick us off, because what you're describing to me is an organization that doesn't define leadership. It doesn't provide, here's what our expectations of leaders are to maintain, foster relationships in the organization, and if you don't do X, Y, Z. You need to be held accountable. Colleagues in this organization, basically going, well, I'm just looking out for myself. I'm like, but that's not how we define leadership.

Amri B. Johnson: Right.

Russel Lolacher: Here's the accountability, where's the responsibility? And to go on and on. So I wanna start with definitions 'cause that's always such a huge piece of this show.

I didn't start out this way when I started the podcast. I'm like, everybody knows what everything means. No, God no. Like nobody can def, nobody defines diversity. And yet we use it in every other sense.

Amri B. Johnson: Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: So let's start with inclusion, 'cause that's our topic today. What, how would you define inclusion from your experience for an organization?

Amri B. Johnson: Sure. I'm actually gonna go back and use Peter Singer's definition of leadership, because that's a, that's kind for me, it's foundational. It's the capacity of a human community to shape its future. And so if you're building that capacity, you have to build it in everybody. 'cause it's not an individual capacity, it's an organizational, it's a human system.

A human community capacity. And so when I talk about inclusion, I have lots of definitions Russel. We don't have time to go into all of them. But the one that I use most and that I, that's a big part of our, an inclusion system or what we call an emergent inclusion system in our new framework is any action that creates the capability or the capacity for people to thrive.

Any action that creates the conditions for people to thrive and for organizations to be generative, meaning they create extraordinary, what some people that write about generative organizations call "thick value". It's that value that shows up when things are hard. So it's not something that you can see your biggest ROI comes when you go through challenges, which are incessant nowadays, and that you can get through those because you have that thick value because you're trying to generate something.

And obviously there's a lot of other elements that go into that, but it's that ability to create the conditions for everyone. And I mean, everyone, to thrive and make their best contribution to the organizational mission.

Russel Lolacher: And nowadays you can't use the word inclusion without throwing in the D, the E and the B of E of it all.

So you kind of talked about it in the story you kicked us off with, which was you were tasked with setting up a program, you had all the money and the resources in the world, and suddenly not so much. And that is such a story of industry across the board. Sure. When it comes to current DEI approaches in organizations, right? So from your experience, before we get into how we fix this thing, let's talk about what the problem is. What is the current DEI approaches that you're seeing out there? What's working and what isn't?

Amri B. Johnson: Oh I'd have to say most of the DEI work that's happened over the past four years isn't working. And I'm not saying that to disparage it.

I actually wrote about it in Reconstructing Inclusion. You could almost predict it, Russel, right? It was coming where we were kind of running on the bandwagon. You know where the origins of bandwagon comes from.

Russel Lolacher: I don't.

Amri B. Johnson: It comes from PT Barnum.

Russel Lolacher: Oh, okay. Oh, that makes sense.

Amri B. Johnson: And so, so he basically had these bandwagons, he was just a salesman.

He was, he's like other people you might know in the political sphere and eventually politicians start bringing their own bandwagons literally to, entice people to vote for them. Barnum eventually went into politics. I don't know if you knew that as well as circuses. Yep. They kind of go hand in hand.

And so, so the bandwagon was after the death of George Floyd, must create ERGs. Must do anti-racism training. Let's go back and do the unconscious bias training again. Maybe for the 15th time that didn't necessarily produce the results that we wanted. Let's, let's shame white guys, that, that was kind of the trajectory and I'm reducing it quite a bit, but it was reductionism that created the conditions that we have right now. Reduce everything to race and in some cases gender, and use that to grieve and have grievances about those who they feel are doing that to us.

Now, I don't feel like I'm a marginalized person, but that became the language. Because of my skin color, some people would call me marginalized. Now, I have seen marginalized, and I've seen it in every shade that you can imagine in the world. I. So I don't qualify because of my skin color, but that's the connotation that we set up.

And so the result was DEI became about representation. And then to those that were in opposition, DEI became about hiring less qualified people who had darker skin than the majority in America, and therefore they weren't qualified to have those jobs. Now that's a silly way of thinking about things, but it's not inconsistent with the way it was perpetuated in the way that it was talked about. So I think the biggest things is that we spend a lot of time focusing on symptoms and not systems. And when you focus on, symptoms, you'll basically be in its perpetual kind of deadlock where you're kind of, you have a symptom and somebody thinks the symptom is okay for them.

And so they fight against you and you don't even go upstream enough to address the symptoms that are causing that adverse impacts that you're seeing and you're not being critical of how you're approaching it, so you can get as many people as possible involved so that there can be some change that's meaningful to not just a few. But to everyone.

Russel Lolacher: It almost felt like it was a checkbox exercise.

Amri B. Johnson: No doubt for a lot of people.

Russel Lolacher: Absolutely. Hey, go implement inclusion. What are you doing today? I'm implementing inclusion. I'm doing these five things. Aren't we being inclusive? Yeah. But that shows a huge lack of leadership. We're basically being asking our executives, our people at the top going, how do we fix this inclusion problem that they don't properly define?

We're back to definitions again and yet it's a look, we're doing a thing. And I love that you brought up that we're addressing symptoms, not diseases. 'cause that is a reoccurring theme that we don't wanna fix the problem, we want to just look like we're fixing the problem, which is not the same thing. And your employees aren't stupid.

They see the, oh, we're gonna pick the closest person of color and they're gonna be the face of this. And that's, look, we're doing a thing and then slowly up in their face, which we're hearing over and over in news articles now where it's well, DEI failed again. No, it's just been approached completely the wrong way.

Amri B. Johnson: Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: So what is the answer to inclusion? What should we be doing to ensure inclusion is a prioritized practice as opposed to a department?

Amri B. Johnson: Yeah. I think the... After, during the pandemic and after the death of George Floyd the, the, in a way the house was on fire. You had to do something and you brought a lot of people in that had a lot of passion, but they didn't have a lot of depth and skill.

So there was a great level of willingness, but a not a lot of skillfulness. And so, the skills that you need to make inclusion normative in organizational life, those skills, they vary. But I think I, you started kind of introducing me around this accessible, actionable, and sustainable. Firstly, inclusion and DEI for that matter, needs to be about everyone. It needs to be about our common humanity. And if it's that you don't have this kind of back and forth and people believing that the notion of DEI is a zero sum game, but that's how it gets framed. And so, so that, that accessibility to everyone and all of our multidimensionality, which all of us have is important. And I'll just before I go forward with that, I'm gonna define, I use Roosevelt Thomas, who was a hero of mine in the diversity space before it was DEI, it was strategic diversity management. And Dr. Thomas defines diversity as any mixture of similarities and differences in their respective tension and complexity.

And so you're dealing with the complexity of humans. And you're dealing with the complexity of organizational systems. You're dealing with the complexity of disciplines, you're dealing with, the complexity of customers. All of that is a diversity. It's a mixture, right? Of similarity and difference.

And so if you wanna build capacity, you need skills to manage complexity. You need skills to do really robust sense making. You, you need to have going to back to the accessible, actionable, and sustainable you need to have things that are unambiguously prioritized. And what that means is we know when something's unambiguously prioritized in an organization.

Inclusion can be that way, but not inclusion as this kind of, fuzzy notion. Inclusion as a set of skills and capabilities that everybody needs to learn and build. And there'll be some people that just do it better than others and they should be deployed throughout an organization to be able to kind of guide others into that at the level of team.

At all your people systems, at the level of organizational hierarchy at your re, in your reward systems. And of course it has to all start within your strategy. And then the last part is act is aligned and has to be aligned with your organizational purpose or mission, reason for being, because if it's not, you could have all the skills in the world, but it won't be unambiguously prioritized because it's not aligned with why the organization exists.

So if the organization exists for all of its people to make their best contribution to whatever they're up to, whether it's to make money, whether it's to help people in some way, in a nonprofit sense, it has to be aligned with what you're up to. And when you do that the chances for it to be sustained are much higher.

So, so the idea of, being able to do good, good sense. Making the idea of being able to design your organization with inclusion in mind, from strategy to your employee candidate experience, the ability to manage, the similarities and differences with a cultural intelligence lens. I'm just giving you a few, the, under the understanding of organizational networks and social capital. All those things are a set of skills that when you bring them to the organization, it's not going to be cut and dry and easy, but any organizational challenge that you face, you'll have a better capacity to deal with it because you've built those skills and therefore, back to the definition of inclusion is creating the conditions for people to make their best contribution to the organization and thrive. Full stop. And so, so that, that's, I think we haven't really thought deeply enough sometimes about this work. We oftentimes are very reactive rather than reflexive. And so as practitioners, and you mention, and I'll end with my, my my words for whatever I'm saying right now after this. The idea of hiring somebody that's not qualified to do a job is the exact opposite of what anybody that wants to take a role in this work should do. If my organization came to me and I wasn't skilled, my organization, I'm an epidemiologist, but I haven't done it for a long time. If somebody came to me and said, Hey, we need you to be our chief epidemiologist, I said, I haven't practiced epidemiologist for 20 years. Like formally. No, I can't do it. I'm not, I don't have the qualifications for that level. You wanna bring me in as a junior person? Sure. I can relearn and maybe I'll get back up to the skillset that I need to even move up, but I'm not gonna take that just because I'm the person that you want to get to do it.

It's irresponsible and I don't wanna sit here and blame people 'cause like when people offer you a bigger salary and budget you usually just take it. But I think the lack of mindfulness to those who took these jobs is something that we have to at least face the mirror, look in the mirror around and accept some responsibility for.

Russel Lolacher: Yeah, I mean, I, we go back to defining leadership. Like we talk about the Brene Browns and the Simon Sineks as this is what leadership is, but all we do is promote and reward productivity. Sure. Or you fixed my problem. And that goes to, we need a body to fix a problem, which to your point, becomes a PR exercise more than an actual fix.

Yeah. A typical, like the George Floyd thing, we need to do something. Do you? Or is it a PR... it's, or is it the action of looking like you're doing a thing, even if it's the wrong thing, so you're not gonna hurt your stock price, so you're not gonna be hurting the PR realm.

Amri B. Johnson: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'll, I'll contrast what you said, that it's not always about productivity. It's oftentimes about people being getting greater exposure or they're very good at curating their image, and so like it's not always productivity. We don't always even think and talk about the fact that a lot of people get jobs and get promoted and continue to move up in an organization that aren't that good.

So that's just a reality. And if we're smart in organizations, we will, we'll recognize that. And they're still gonna be around. They're not gonna go away. We like 'em. They create, they bring something to the table, but it's not just productivity. And so if you are looking at just at productivity, you'd probably have different types of people moving into leadership roles because it's oftentimes the image that gets you over more so than your skillset. And I think that's important for everybody to understand is, a big part of the representation problem at senior levels in organizations is networks. It's not just that people are racist and that's the way we just describe it.

Oh, it's just racism. I think. No it's probably favoritism, it's probably in group bias, whatever that's there. And there might be a racial element to it. But not always. Oftentimes it's just people you got to be in contact with more. So if you went to Harvard Business School and you happen to be black and your friend is the CEO, your chances of moving up are higher than somebody who's not you moving up.

That is the reality of the situation. It's networks. And by, by the, obviously people are attracted by people that are more like them. But it's not the, it's not, it's that, that like them isn't just about the way they look on the outside.

Russel Lolacher: It comes back to the relationships, but it's sometimes the darker side of relationships. It's the dark side.

Amri B. Johnson: It's true. Social capital is not a panacea. It, it has to be mindfully created and it, you have to oftentimes go to the outliers in your network to find something that you wouldn't find with those who are you closely bonded with.

Russel Lolacher: You're very focused on inclusion, and I'm really curious to get into your framework on inclusion systems and how best to go approaching that, but I notice that you mention inclusion and don't mention DEI as much and the re, and I hear a lot going like it's a math equation.

You have diversity and if you add equity, and then if you add inclusion, you'll have belonging and then everything is fixed. What are your thoughts on that oversimplification of inclusion or DEI.

Amri B. Johnson: I mean, I somewhat talked about it earlier, Russel. It's the reduction of it has made it seem like anybody can do it and do it well or guide people to do it well.

It's made it that, it's just about race and gender. My, my mentor, kind of, hero Roosevelt Thomas wrote a book in 1991 called Beyond Race and Gender. A lot of deep diversity practitioners at the time went apoplectic on it. Because they're like, what? It is all about race, right? And he was right like way ahead of where we are now. It's 2025 and we're still really focused on race and gender and I'm actually excited about some of the pushback now because now maybe we're rethinking what it means to create the conditions for people to thrive. Diversity always exists if there's complexity and there's diversity alongside of it, you can't escape it, right?

And so anybody that thinks, oh, I don't like diversity, you don't know what you're talking about because it's, when you think about diversity, you reduce it down to being, to representation in organizational life. And that's one form of diversity. When you say bi, when you put the word bio in front of it, people have a totally different way of looking at it.

But when we talk about it in the corporate sense, it's always about representation. And some of us as practitioners perpetuate that because that's all some of the folks know. And so, I think if we can move into understanding belongingness, understanding, mattering.

Understanding people's agency and how important it is to have that agency to to make sure people know that they matter. You can belong and not actually advance, you can feel very comfortable. There's a lot of people that feel like they have psychological safety, but they don't feel like they can bring a new idea to the table 'cause they don't wanna lose it.

So is that really psychological safety? All these words come up from the academics that we throw around. And some people are good at facilitating it, but it always comes back Russel to how we relate to each other. It there's, I think I, that's why I really like the name of your podcast because that's what it always comes back to, is how we create the conditions with one another because we understand ourselves as interdependent.

And to understand that interdependence means you, you do the things that help people do their best work.

Russel Lolacher: So a lot of your work is around inclusion systems as a framework. Now I find that really interesting and I'm such a supporter of that, but I also go, but isn't that just another nice way of saying check boxes?

Like we're just doing the same thing over and over again to make it normalized in an organization. So what do you mean by an inclusion system as a framework, and how is it different than those DEI programs that have been so failed?

Amri B. Johnson: Sure. So when I think about an inclusion system, it's a set of skills and capabilities that allow organizations to go beyond resilience.

Okay. And so what do I mean by that? If you've ever read any of Nassim Taleb's work particularly the book Anti-Fragile or Skin in the Game. The notion of anti-fragility means when you go through stressors, just like when we weight train, we break stuff down and we have these stressors and we get stronger as a result.

So an immersion inclusion system is a way for organizations to go beyond resilience, and that's in people and in organization. So it's a set of skills, capabilities, and belief systems that we move into discussing to get people to the place where in any time you're having challenges, you can actually get stronger as a result of the challenges. You get stronger in your relationships, you get stronger in your ability to work through complexity. You get stronger in your ability to have some foresight to see what's coming and so that you can address that because you've built these relationships and together. You can figure it out. There's nobody intelligent enough to deal with what's coming and what's here.

I don't even say it's coming. What's here right now, there's no single individual that has the capacity to move through the level of complexity that we're dealing with now. Nobody does. It's always about the system. It's always about the people that are moving through that system. And so the emerging inclusion system enables people to be better at that and therefore they become better at their relational capacity, their relational skills. They become better at understanding and finding what's working versus always looking for what's not working in an individual or in an organization. They become better at identifying who in their networks can give them what they need at that point in time so they can kind of merge all that stuff together. And it's done in a consistent manner. It's a normal way of being. And then of course you're able to put that into your entirety of your organizational design from strategy, as I said earlier too, the employee experience and you're able to measure it.

And so, and when I talk about measurement, some of it, the gamification of, of engagement surveys is a whole nother episode, but that's one potential measure. But a lot of it's the stories and that those who are the most influential in the organization own the narrative, whether it's bad or good, they own the narrative of the culture because that's all it is. It's the stories about how things get done around here. They're owning that story. And then when they see something that's not in alignment with what they're trying to create around the mission and the strategy, they go back and say, Hey, this isn't getting us where we want to be. Let's get into dialogue about how we can shift this. And so, and it's not always at all at once. It's a few people over here, a few teams over there that take on something. That they then come back and talk about in the organization and we talk about and teach all that in the emerging inclusion system.

And it's not something that stops, um, Russel. It's not something, we do a course and we're done. We do courses, but it's not that the courses really like, it's really like the, it's like the fuel. And it's a renewable source, so you are always going back to it to make sure that you can build on what we teach and always lean on us in our community to to reinforce that over time, through whatever new leadership comes about.

So you're putting that capability in the hands of more people, what I call skilled operators of an emergent inclusion system, so that they could do this incessantly and then when they leave the organization, hopefully it's an, it's a really amicable parting they go and they can do that wherever they go.

So the idea is not to build a skill just to help your organization now it's building a skillset that is durable and portable to where wherever one might go.

Russel Lolacher: What do you say to a leader that's maybe growing an influence, but not at the executive level? Because I hear what you're saying and I think it's really important, but I'm also hearing it has to come from the top.

No, but if, and agreed, and that's the thing. There'll be a lot of leaders going, I'm waiting, I want executive to implement this, but I can, I have my team. I can control the experience of my employees. I can't wait around forever for CEO X to finally get their head outta their ass and make inclusion a priority versus another DEI program. So what does a leader themselves... do they lean into things like cultural intelligence? Do they lean into that, skillset?

Amri B. Johnson: You lean into something that fortifies your relationship so you can get through stressors better the next time they come about. Whatever that might be.

Cultural intelligence is one arm of it. In and of itself, you could go deep into cultural intelligence and increase your leadership capacity and there's good research to back that up over time, but if you go deep enough into something, you see that there's some magic that's even, that transcends that notion.

And so the more you do it, the more dialogue you have, the more you have a framework that you can work through with colleagues, then as you continue to expand your toolkit, you can do more, right? But kind of initially you learn in the emerging inclusions of the system, you might have an affinity for one part of what we teach.

And you go deep into that and you utilize it, and you talk through it, and you get more people to learn it, and you're like, okay, what else? People get hungry because it's like, well, this is working. This is helping us work more effectively as a team. This is when we're giving each other robust feedback because we build a level of trust.

We know each other's interests. We're digging into that, regularly. We're representing that interest when you're not in the room. We're doing all these things that build the capabilities, the capacity that create the conditions for everyone to make their best contribution. And it might be in a small space where you're just a junior manager and it obviously it could be at a larger level, but everybody is in their own fractal.

And that fractal by its nature is gonna impact the whole, that's the interdependence part of what we teach in their emergent inclusion system.

Russel Lolacher: We talk about the benefits of this though because I'd like to, because we talk about how important it is, but as we both know, leadership training doesn't seem to start till you're in your forties.

It only seems to be focused on executives. It's not middle management. It's like, oh, we're gonna wait till you're at a certain level before we'll even teach you what leadership is. I'm looking at you, every university. Like it's horrifying that we wait so long to figure out what leadership even is. And that's what's needed for furthering this inclusion space.

So we need to be a little bit more intentional earlier. So how do you tie it... things like cultural intelligence to all the things we're talking about to real numbers, tangible benefits.

Amri B. Johnson: Well, I mean, culture is not so easily tangible. But if you look at the impact of it when it doesn't go right, it always affects the bottom line.

So if I was to put like artificially say, people that are more culturally intelligent are usually more successful when they're an international situations, either as a manager in that situation or as an individual contributor. If I was to say, people that are more culturally intelligent have the ability to work through and solve problems with people differently than them, than others are, and particularly in a multinational organization.

Those are all things that have some tangible impact on a bottom or top line. If I work through a situation with a customer that is not necessarily telling me everything that we need to know to make this transaction work, and I have the capacity to be like, you know what? I need to really think through how I'm asking this customer questions, because if I'm asking them a question in the way that I ask my boss, who is a dude from Kansas, like Amri, that's never really spent a lot of time outside of the US other than trips just to go and drop in on the teams around the world, then you're missing something.

The cultural intelligence lens, the culturally intelligent lens says, you know what? I don't think this person is coming forth to tell me what's there, because they don't want me to lose face. They don't wanna lose face, or they don't want somebody that's more senior than them to lose face as one example.

And so if I know that, I can ask the question a bit differently like I'm trying to get to a story. I had a story once when I was inside. A colleague of mine she's Swiss German, and I got put in charge of the old approach to inclusive culture work throughout the organization. A whole 120,000 person organization. That was my domain. She was working on the work-life, work-life integration part.

Russel Lolacher: Okay.

Amri B. Johnson: And she was doing a great job, but I had spent a lot of time working on this. I had written a ebook about it years ago. I've been at this since early two thousands. And so, I was like, come to me and blah, blah, blah. But what I didn't realize is that in her hierarchical way of thinking and her high power distance situation, I didn't... I was her peer. And so I wasn't senior to her, so she didn't feel like she needed to come to me to report to me. It took me a year. I consider myself cultural, intelligent guy.

Culturally intelligent guy. And, and Russel, I did until we sat down face to face at breakfast in New Jersey. New Jersey? Yes. New Jersey. I didn't get where she was coming from and I was like, I didn't, I, yeah. And myself, I used the F-bomb, but I was like, wow, I just missed it. Because I didn't go to her with the right approach.

I just got frustrated and I was like, you need to tell me. And I went to my dark side, right? And if I would've looked at that with a culturally intelligent lens, we would've gotten stuff done faster. Which eventually the organization ended up doing a global parental policy that changed parental leave for, for fathers significantly, and that was the last project I did before I left the company, but we probably would've gotten to it sooner because it was on my mind for a long time. But she was kind of a bit of a bottleneck, and it wasn't her fault, it was mine, because I didn't approach her with the ability that I had, but I did not put into action.

Russel Lolacher: We've mentioned it a few times, and I just wanna give a, or I want to get you to quickly define cultural intelligence because we do, we've mentioned it quite a few times. But I kind of want to just at least set the framework on that.

Amri B. Johnson: Yeah. It's cultural intelligence, also known as CQ. It's our ability and set of skills to work with people different than us.

And it, there's a whole research base behind it. David Livermore, who's a friend and somebody that I just consider one of my... I guess I can call him a shining light in this space. He's written several books. Most recently he re published his Leading With Cultural Intelligence book.

I think it's probably up on my shelf somewhere, but you can't see it in this shot. And it's one of the pillars of my theory of change cultural intelligence, social capital. And then of course, inclusion systems have been always at the heart of it. And I have a whole chapter about it in, in Reconstructing Inclusion in my book.

Russel Lolacher: If we're getting a little closer to the end here, I'd love it if you would just paint a picture of what an operationalization of inclusion looks like. If it is part of an organization, it is part of a DNA, how do we show up or what are we looking at day to day, week to week, month to month for it to look like a system?

Amri B. Johnson: Well, the idea of a system is that it's complex in this particular sense, particularly any human system. There's a complexity to it. When I'm trying to work to create that with an organization, over time, we really kind of insert these skill sets in one or two areas and we get as many people on board as possible.

So if people have a culture council or a DEI council, or they have employee resource groups, we wanna start putting those people in a position where they're learning these ideas, these skills, these capabilities, these beliefs so that they can then utilize them wherever they might be. So the ideal situation is you get people in a place where they have built some capability and you say, Hey, we want you to work on one thing in a team that you spend time with. If it's a manager in your team, if it's somebody that's working on a team, maybe we put some one thing in place that will allow them to be a guide for others in the organization to take this on. It's just a set of behaviors. It might be an exercise we've done. Situations where we were talking to people about listening and good questions. So we'll put 'em in a situation where they're monitoring the room and then they're giving that feedback back to the meeting participants to say, this is how you ask questions. This is how you listen. This is the many times that you've interrupted each other.

And what did that create for you? And you could open that up to say this, there's no, this is no blame placing space. This is a learning space for us to learn how to do this. And the thing that we do every day, which is meeting. Who, who didn't speak who we did, who didn't we refer to in that meeting?

And do that consistently until people start building some I guess, for lack of a better word, muscle around it. So that's just one way to do it, but you need to get as many people as possible to be what I call skilled operators of an inclusion system involved. Get them in action regularly, utilizing something, some of the things that they've learned, and then constantly talk about what that means and how to double down on it with across the organization, wherever others are.

And then of course, enrolling other people to to learn those skills as well. You use one. It's not a, it's not a, it's not a linear thing. It goes, it's a cyclical process and you're, it's always constant iteration.

Russel Lolacher: But you use one of my favorite words, which is consistency.

Amri B. Johnson: Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: Which is just let's do this as a workshop and then never talk about it again for three years and then say, Hey, were we successful?

So I'm seeing a lot of people that may roll their eyes and look at this as going, oh, it's another DEI program. Oh, this has been so failed. What are we doing differently? And they'll just dismiss it out of hand when we know it's a system that is the reason these things are successful, not one-offs.

So to be consistent, how do we keep leaders accountable to implement these things? Because it's a, we start off with hiring. We start off setting up these frameworks, but as we both know, these can fall off. People get busy, quote unquote, busy.

Amri B. Johnson: That's whole idea of holding leaders accountable. I don't know if I fully believe in it, because a lot of people are trying to do that, speak truth to power, hold them accountable, like they're like the moral kind of voice of the world or of the company.

I, I think what holds leaders accountable is people in action manifesting this every day. And if you are in a meeting and you're behaving like a jerk. And somebody says, Hey, are we missing anything here? It's not a call out. Say, are we missing anything? Or going to somebody afterwards and calling them in and say, I don't know how that, that, that actually advanced the project.

How are you doing? Like, just some everyday relational skills that say, you know what? I need to own this with you because if I'm in the room with you and I'm interdependent inside of this team, this is impacting all of us. And so I wanna be able, and that's where those skills come in. I wanna be able to say What's up? I we, I think we missed some stuff in that meeting. The person might need to be defensive. It's not gonna work every time, but the willingness of those people that have built those skills to be able to maintain their center enough to enter into those conversations with a colleague out of a sense of care?

That, that's the only way accountability happens to me. And then when leaders see the results of it they can get on board a little bit more. It doesn't mean you're not gonna have bad behavior, you're not gonna have jerks. It, it's, that's not gonna go away. That's just the nature of humanity.

It's like how can you manage it when it gets hard? How can you manage it when things fall apart? Can you get stronger or do you either just kind of get back to the baseline status quo? Or do you actually, dissolve or have long-term problems because of it? That's what the nature of an inclusion system is, that beyond resilience is about people learning the capabilities to do that with their colleagues that haven't built that skill.

And being committed to it, even when it's hard. And the other part of accountability is managers giving some of their people that space to take on that role and that it's not just held with one person, like the head of DEI should not be the one, the person holding that. It should be distributed and it should be clearly stated, communicating it over and over again, and not just from the CEO but from all managers around the company. And of course, the way to build it into reward systems is always plus with you talk about accountability just recognition. It might not even be always financial, but it's some type of reward that gives people exposure. So, so that that's probably the best. I, this whole holding people accountable. I'm always a little skeptical of it 'cause I think it's a little bit like, I can do that and I, I could, if somebody has more power than me, it's not gonna happen. But you have people taking that on for themselves. I think we elevate it and then people see that it's worthwhile for the org.

Russel Lolacher: I could see, I could totally understand what you mean by the holding people accountable. Hold people's feet to the fire. My worry is that, and I agree with you, it's not up to an individual. It is a system accountability that needs to hold leaders accountable.

For... like I always talk about we have bad leaders and we always punish bad leaders, but we never punish the person that hired them. We never punish the person that they respo... they report to. That allowed them to be a bad leader for however long. That's where I'm sort of going around where's the accountability of, well, if an organization has a culture of accountability, then it's baked into the system already.

Amri B. Johnson: No, I agree with that. I'm not saying that we shouldn't have accountability measures. I just think the idea of holding them accountable actually creates a notion of separation. It's them over there versus us, and so I'm really like careful not to go there. Like if you build it into your recognition systems, you recognize those people that get that recognition regularly, those are the people that should be considered for the next level of leadership.

Russel Lolacher: Completely agree. I love ending on a completely agree comment. So before we get any further Amri, thank you so much for taking the time today to dig into this, but we're gonna wrap up with our bookend question, which is, sir, what is one simple action people can do right now to improve their relationships at work?

Amri B. Johnson: They can care. And when I talk about caring, I'm not the most touchy feely DEI guy, but my notion of care is that my success and yours are interdependent. My care for you means that I want you to grow because if you grow, I do. And so some people would call that Ubuntu. I am because we are. It's a, it's was spread during post-apartheid South Africa quite a bit.

And it's kind of part of the symbol of my book cover. And so if you care because you know you're connected and interdependent to me that's the best way to make relationships at work robust and, built for the future.

Russel Lolacher: That is Amri B Johnson, he's an executive advisor, organizational consultant, and inclusion strategist and the founder of Inclusion Wins. Thank you so much for being here today, sir.

Amri B. Johnson: Such a pleasure, Russel. Thank you.