My ideas on how corporations can back up their newfound #blacklivesmatter awakening. I’m not focusing on boardroom diversity. I’m focused on the day to day people that are on the ground and on the front lines. Because if you are in line for a paid board position, you’ve already got a network, access and some kind of financial success. The rest of us, well.
Hopefully, my personal views don’t destroy my existing customer relationships. (Because this is what I wrote about later. The penalty Blacks in corporate receive when they speak.)
Here are my personal views and ideas on how to be authentic going forward.
- Provide significant “I have authority and can make a decision to hire and contract with Black businesses and help hire employees and I won’t get fired or demoted or marginalized if I make a mistake” level of annual budget to each of your Black leaders. Somewhere in the realm of 5% of your company’s annual pre-tax revenues will be a great start.
- Establish a Diversity, Inclusion and Pay equity team focused on Black employee advancement that has to charge back to the company as a cost center, and they will ONLY get funding if they get results. They will be required to measure that their actions resulted from clearly stated goals that go beyond “how many people filled out this complex and 30 page application/survey. But the Black leadership that runs the program, and yes, please make them Black, still gets significant annual seed money so they have flexibility. This ensures that you are not creating a “Black Gatekeeper,” because they have freedom to make a mistake so they don’t lose their job.
- Require that the diversity and equity results are part of the official annual report that your company files with the security and exchange commission and NOT part of the company pet projects typically called “social impact” report or “global impact” report or “community impact” report or “diversity” report. These reports are ridiculous and meaningless and no one really reads them except people that want to say ah-HA GOTCHA.
- Ensure that The One Existing Black Leader you hired, that you dump all the “Black Problems” on, is not the ONLY one holding up the boat to represent All Black People. Hire more Black people! Use The Good Ol’ Black Network (DM me, I’ll be happy to explain in more detail) so that the job is taken out of the hands of traditional and pretty terrible HR (or your AI-run HR Platform that was written by the old guard HR). There only responsibility is to ensure that Blacks who are being considered are “culturally fit.”
- Ensure Black leadership are involved and have *authority* to add cost in the local, national or global strategic budget planning process. Please make sure there is not just one single Black leader, aka, Gatekeeper, doing this. See #4 above.
- Overall, ensure that you are not using Black people as gatekeepers in your company to keep other smart, interesting, innovative Black people out and silently tell your people “Let’s just phone it in because we are still making billions!” type of environment. See #5 above.
- Hire Black-owned partners, suppliers and businesses at their full asking price and do not expect a discount or expect subpar service, product or solutions. The water is not colder on the white side. I promise. You will get superior product and service. So what if they can’t scale up and supply as bigly and grandly as your legacy white suppliers. Black business has to start somewhere. As long as the businesses have your minimum business insurance requirements, give the Black business a chance! What do you really have to lose? Think about this. What do you think will happen? (Listen to “Fear Of A Black Planet” by Public Enemy.)
- Black people that work at corporations: Switch it up and focus on non-celebrity relationships to help you advance yourself and ideas. Black celebrities have their own power. And we must stop being afraid that we will lose our job by speaking our own nobody-knows-us truth. I’m not taking about speaking out, but just by speaking. We can still deliver outstanding work, add shareholder value AND be authentic and still win! I want everybody Black to win, but I especially want Blacks that are working hard and viciously in the shadows.
- Back to the corporate leaders: What is the absolutely WORST thing that could happen if your contract with or hire a Black person? See #7.
Thank you for reading. I invite you to join my community where I share ideas, concepts and insights about business in my newsletter The Birk Creative Reset https://view.flodesk.com/pages/60662f4dc9533f4419aaa4ba
