Taking a "Company Stance"

I was recently asked by members of our company Inclusion Forum, “what is our company stance on the Black Lives Matter movement?” This answer can be a quick and easy answer if we want to catch the PR/Marketing tailwinds of a national movement. So let me poke the thinking here….  

As a company, we have the usual standard answers: “we respect all persons regardless of race, religion, gender, gender preference, and we expect our employees to show the same”. When asked “what do WE believe”, you’re asking me to create a statement for 700+ employees, investors and other stakeholders. I CAN do that, even have the authority to do so, but I also want to be fully transparent and authentic with my answers. I’d like to say we have “zero tolerance” for racism, prejudice, intolerance and certainly hatred in all its’ forms everywhere all the time. The truth is we recently had to terminate a person in a position of relative power for vicious posts about protestors on social media following the death of George Floyd. So yes, we identified a problem and took action as an organization. But until we did, we had a PROBLEM. Do problems of prejudice and bias still exist in our organization? Likely yes. So what will we DO about it? That question is the call to action the current BLM Movement is pushing all of us to consider (I hope). I’m not going to give a trite PR answer here.

Substance Use Disorders and Mental Illnesses know no boundaries. These diseases don’t care if you’re rich, poor, black, white, a democrat, a republican, a racist or the most enlightened person ever in the history of the world. So when a mentally ill, male, “white-supremacist” was brought for treatment to the psychiatric hospital where I was CEO in the ‘90’s and proclaimed that he wouldn’t talk to “racial slur” Admission Counselor (who was HIGHLY offended and angered by the remarks), staff had to find me and ask me what to do. I said “get another admissions counselor to assess the patient and if appropriate, admit him! WE DON’T ‘GET’ TO CHOOSE WHO WE TREAT AND WHO WE DON’T.” We must stand ready to treat whomever shows up at our doors whether we like them or agree with them or not. So, taking a “company stance” on any particular issue has the potential of alienating some people from coming to our doors and I cannot accept that. We may not like some people or agree with their positions, but they are sick, and it is our responsibility to attract all people who need us, not create barriers to saving lives.

As a body of employees however, how we treat each other is a critical measure of who we are and is radically different than our outward-facing “company stance”. Internally, do “Black Lives Matter”? Absolutely! The research supports that systemic racism DOES exist and we have a responsibility to explore how our thoughts, words and actions impact those around us. We ALL have biases and prejudices.  

Recently, I shared with our internal employee Inclusion Forum the Harvard Implicit Association Test that can promote deeper self-understanding and awareness of our stereotypes:  https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html And I’ll be the first to confess that I grew up in north Alabama in the 60’s and 70’s during de-segregation, and definitely made racial comments and had ignorant racial expectations and stereotypes; sexist comments, attitudes and actions too. At 56 years old, I’ve grown, learned from my many mistakes the hard way, made amends to individuals and the universe as best I can today. 

When serving as a CEO in Memphis, Tennessee, every two years I would take the senior management team into retreat, beginning with several hours at the Civil Rights Museum in the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated. We also had the opportunity to spend time with Reverend Billy Kyles, who was very close with Dr. King (you see him standing on the balcony the day Dr. King was assassinated, pointing where the shot came from). The point of our gathering was to lean into uncomfortable conversations, examine ourselves, our motives, and gain commitment and alignment to grow and change as leaders. This process is an endless one for me. 

I drive a jacked-up, camouflage, 4-wheel drive truck and am an avid hunter. If you saw me driving down the road, what judgments would you make? When pursuing my Master’s Degree in Social Work, I explored my personal biases and prejudices in my class on “Oppression”, and was open and committed to change. As the only white male in the class, surprisingly I was also the only “Radical Feminist” in the crowd.  Go figure…. I suppose that’s why God gave me three daughters several years later. My point is regardless of your history, setting, status, even biases and prejudices, if open and willing to change, and actively seeking other perspectives with true accountability, we are all individually and corporately able to change. Awareness is the first step to real change, and the BLM movement is helping all of us open our eyes to real personal and corporate challenges. 

As AN INDIVIDUAL, I fully support the constitutional right to gather and protest (peacefully). What a gift to have open conversations with our daughters and sons to understand what “all this” means! I believe the BLM movement is timely, appropriate, challenging and is worthy of understanding (and personal support). But the company will not “take a stance” one way or the other at the risk of alienating someone who may need us for life or death. I pray that we pause, reflect, and take action where needed!