How Diverse Voices Are Changing The Narrative

After beginning his career representing hundreds of authors from top six publishers, Blair Bryant Nichols moved into the management of founders, entrepreneurs, executives, authors, and celebrities with various work streams, projects, and personal interests acting as a chief-of-staff, manager, or agent. He has deep expertise in developing speakers for corporate events, conferences, and other thought leadership opportunities, including internal and external communications.

As a manager, coach, and consultant, he helps diverse individuals and/or socially-driven companies foster new strategies for operations, communications, business development, and partnerships across all appropriate areas to further develop and enhance their bottom line and brand. Blair is the author of?Before You Fall In Love , a series of personal essays on Medium.

He is a former Co-Host of Inside The Greenroom podcast, which is a behind-the-scenes look at the ever-changing landscape of live events and the speaking business. He got his MBA from UCLA Anderson with a specialization in Entertainment Management. He is my particular speaker management, I’m happy to say.

Thank you, John. I’m constantly reminded I need to shorten my bio but thank you for sharing.

It’s quite a list of accomplishments. I always like to ask my guests to take us to their own story of origin because we love storytelling here on the show. You can go back to childhood, high school, college, or wherever you first felt like, “I like communications. I like connecting with people.” A show you were on in high school that you were like, “I’m going to be in the entertainment business in some way, shape, or form.”

I was a Literature major as an undergrad because I loved books. I thought I wanted to work in government. I realized that law and government didn’t excite me as much. With Literature, I felt like I could explore something that I was passionate about, all while having no idea even that the publishing world existed. Even though I was reading my entire life, I never thought about the business behind it. I set my sights on that and landed at the HarperCollins Speakers Bureau.

My journey, as I’ve started to reflect on it more and more in my career, certainly began much earlier. I went to a Catholic high school in South Carolina. The day before I graduated high school, we were at the church that we were using for our baccalaureate mass, the traditional mass the day before our graduation. It was going to be the time when they were announcing all of the honors for the senior graduating class. There were only 33 of us. It was a pretty small newish school in the area so it was a pretty intimate setting.

The big awards of the night were salutatorian and valedictorian and officially announced those to the community there. I grew up gay. I was in the theater. I was a nerd. I was not an athlete. For me, the imagination, the culmination of my adolescence was going to be this graduation, and being the valedictorian and giving that speech felt like my Oscar moment. You’re giving that speech. You fantasize about finally feeling some validation and reward for a lifetime of anxiety and sometimes bullying. Especially in a Catholic school, questions about your identity, and everything else that’s going on.

I like the combination thereof valedictorian and feeling validated. That’s a clever play on words there.

Maybe there’s a connection there. As they got closer to announcing these top two positions, they got ready and they announced, “Salutatorian Blair Bryant Nichols.” I was a salutatorian and everyone clapped. It was a nice moment and then they announced who would be valedictorian and my entire class stood up. I can’t tell you what it felt like at that moment to feel ultimately defeated. It wasn’t just that this classmate had beat me in my GPA, had outperformed me on tests, and we went head-to-head.

What had happened a few months earlier as we were gearing up for the end of the year and there were about four of us with very similar GPAs all taking multiple APs and finishing up with finals. They said that they needed a little bit more time to determine who ultimately would be the valedictorian. What was going on behind the scenes in my conservative Catholic high school was that my headmaster went to the drama teacher, someone I was very close with, and asked if I was going to come out during my graduation speech because that was the rumor.

I wasn’t publicly out. I had told a couple of my friends. I was out to my family who was supportive. My mom was a teacher at the school. She had heard what was going on behind the scenes. Ultimately, what they decided to do was not reward it to the person who had slightly the highest GPA. They decided to let the faculty vote. Now, imagine being my mother and watching her son who should have been rewarded with this top honor, see her peers, colleagues, and boss decide to hold an arbitrary vote. They selected the person who is much more aligned with their faith, who had demonstrably done more in the church, is more involved, and in their eyes, is a better example.

The funny thing is they still let me give a speech. I’m not sure why this was big prevention, but it prevented me from receiving something that I felt like I had earned. As privileged as my life has been and was to that point, it gave me that first taste of discrimination that didn’t sit well. It planted a seed in me that made me want to rebel against society, organizations, and systems that held people back for racist, bigoted reasons and be a champion for diverse voices.

I landed in this industry because I love publishing. It was a great opportunity to get into this world. It took me from HarperCollins to Hachette, Simon & Schuster, GTN, and bigger agencies. It took me from New York to LA and where I still live. Ultimately, it took me to where I’m at now, starting my own business that’s devoted to diverse voices and championing people who are not White straight men.

There are a lot of speakers that I first worked with in this industry that fit that description. In fact, most of the highest-paid speakers ever heard of in that description aren’t celebrities. They’re former CEOs and presidents. They’re the people who you would expect to be receiving these types of paychecks. The people who were getting booked for diversity talks were always the low man on the totem pole. We’re always getting the least amount of fees and we’re considered not as important or valuable as these other speakers.

I’ve come to see and research shows, again and again, the value of diversity, innovation, creativity, and all these different things. I don’t offer speakers of the world who just speak about diversity. You’re not an expert in diversity. You’re an expert in storytelling and sales. You’re a master at it. You just happen to be diverse. That’s what the marketplace wants. They want new perspectives. They want people that represent all sides of the industry, all silos, or whatever it may be, but they want them to also represent different parts of their population of their employees.?

Hopefully, by working with people that don’t always look exactly like them, they’re getting what they’re investing in, new perspectives, and ideas. They’re getting something more from that talk, workshop, or whatever it may be because if they just brought in someone that looked and thought like them that reinforced what they already knew, there’s not going to be a lot of change. I’m sure you’ve experienced that in organizations and seen when it goes well and when it doesn’t go as well.

You’re 100% correct because the assumption that everyone is a White, straight male just because you happen to be White and male is consistently surprising to me. You always have a choice on how you come out and let someone know you’re gay. It could be, “My husband and I,” or, “My ex-husband,” in my case, whatever you say that lets people know without having to say I am gay.

It lets people know that the assumption of this is not accurate. Everyone I know who has gone through that process of coming out has faced some level of pushback. “We’re not so comfortable with you.” Especially the hiring process often is, “I want to be able to go have a beer with this person,” and stereotypes that go around that if someone’s gay, they’re not into sports, this, or that.

They can’t possibly relate to my life. There’s way more that we have in common than we have not. If you’re not able to find the connection points with people because of your sexuality, then that’s on you. The perception is a lot of people are like, “I don’t even want to try. I don’t want to take the risk of having it be awkward for me.” You don’t make anybody feel awkward, but they need to understand. What you said is that the different perspectives of diversity, whether it’s gay, a different race, gender, or whatever the issue is, diverse ideas create diverse concepts and creativity.

If you keep listening to your own bubble to get your news, then you never have other perspectives. That’s not where any growth comes from. Your management company is BBN Creative Management. You only manage people who are diverse in some way. I thought that was a fascinating niche. I love the story of where you got your own sense of, “This isn’t fair. This isn’t right. I can’t be the only person experiencing this so I’m going to figure that out.”

Just because someone is diverse, again, the stereotype was, “That must be your topic.” There are so many assumptions that everybody makes about things that they don’t know about. Ironically, it’s the same problem in business that I see a lot. They go, “This is a big company, therefore,” and then they put all the stereotypes about them, “They’re not flexible. They’re not nimble. They treat people like numbers.” That’s not the case in every big company. Nobody wants to be the recipient of stereotypes or prejudices, yet we all are programmed with it. Can you speak a little bit about what people can do besides bringing in people, whether it’s a speaker or employees to make people feel welcome?

I want to comment on some of the things that you said because that idea of having someone that’s like us, that fits our culture, and is going to be a good cultural fit, you hear that a lot. That’s code language for, “They’re like us. They look like us. They think like us. They’re going to fit in. They’re not going to rub anyone the wrong way.”

You want people with diverse ideas. You want people that differ in size, age, and everything. The most successful teams are ones that are diverse and it’s a flat egalitarian-type model rather than hierarchical. You want people that can work together from all different perspectives, but not with one person, the appointed leader in some structure that makes anyone feel less than. That’s just a little bit about teams.

One of the things that I love most about working in this industry with people like yourself and getting to meet so many amazing, smart people in their areas of focus is now I’m working with a woman named Vivienne Ming who’s a transwoman married to another woman. It is pretty diverse. She has talked about the neuroscience of trust. She’s been one of those speakers talking about diversity for many years.

Businesses keep inviting her back to make the case for diversity and the case has been made. There’s data and research in reams to support what I mentioned around creativity, innovation, engagement, and pay equity. All of those things that especially my generation and others care so much about now in our workplace. She got interested in why it is so difficult for people to put these changes in place.

Pragmatically, they know what the benefits of diversity are, yet a lot of these trends continue. A lot of these things happened in corporations or small companies or whatever the case may be. She did further research and found that it’s back to our biology. You and I have a sense that we’re similar. We have similar backgrounds. We both grew up in a similar part of the country. We’re White, we’re gay, we’re male, but it’s even down to if your intestinal flora is the same as someone because you live in the same thing. You have a similar diet. It comes down to so many factors that are completely innate that it makes meeting someone else risky.

It’s a risk. It’s effortful. When you go out, you meet someone, and you click, that’s how we all judge whether or not they’re a good match. We’re like, “We’re going to get along well. I didn’t vibe with that person if you’re in LA because that’s your first impression. Oftentimes, that’s the person that’s going to help you grow and change the most, expose you to new perspectives, and make you uncomfortable.

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