The Courage to Change

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Kellie McElhaney, professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, shares her view on the economic, social, and emotional impacts of having the courage to make real change - in life and in business.

 
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Episode Notes

Dr. Kellie McElhaney, Distinguished Teaching Fellow and Founding Director of the Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership (EGAL) at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, talks to Jesse about how she blends inspiration and agitation to help students and business leaders discover how to grow and change, and about the times she’s needed to muster up the courage of her conviction to make real change in her own professional and personal life. She shares her view on the importance of corporate social responsibility as good business strategy, the role of our lived experiences in helping inform our ability to grow, and how Equity-Fluent Leadership is a key to building more diverse, inclusive organizations.

How can I use my position or business to do good in the world? How can my values and core competencies inform my corporate social responsibility strategy? How can equity fluency help me build a more impactful and profitable business? How can I develop more personal courage, and enable my business to make more courageous moves?

Guest Bio

Dr. McElhaney is the Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership (EGAL) and is on the faculty at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. She also runs her own Equity Fluent Leadership consultancy and advisory services for businesses, boards, and nonprofits. Kellie also founded the Center for Responsible Business (CRB). Kellie is a passionate believer in the potential and power of business to make positive change. She authored the book Just Good Business: The Strategic Guide to Aligning Corporate Responsibility and Brand. She also writes numerous case studies of companies who are investing in diversity and inclusion, and conducts research in the areas of equal pay, conscious inclusion, equity fluent leadership, and value-creating strategies of diversity and inclusion. As such, Kellie is a much sought-after global keynote speaker, corporate / c-suite advisor, strategy consultant, mentor, and professor.

Kellie holds degrees. from the University of North Carolina (B.A.), Ohio University (M.A.), and the University of Michigan (PhD). She lives in Oakland, California with her two college-aged daughters.
Linkedin: /kelliemcelhaney

Building Blocks

Think about your own lived experience and write down a few things:

  1. What do you think have been the top 2-3 influences in your life?

  2. How did you get to have access to those influences, those people or those experiences of those environments?

  3. How have those influences, experiences, or environments affect the outcomes to this point in your life?

Helpful Links

+ Episode Transcript

Kellie McElhaney [00:00:06] I think for the most part, the leaders look at me as a trusted partner where they can have real conversations and talk about real struggles. I want to do this by my board's thinking this way. I want to say this to this person, but I'm afraid I will offend and make a racist or a sexist remark. So I think it is a blend of being a trusted person with whom they can be one hundred percent psychologically safe, but also who has a strategic thinking focus. And the way that I create solutions, I'm just really interested every single day at finding solutions.

Jesse Purewal [00:00:49] From Qualtrics Industries,this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts and ideas fuels some of the world's most amazing products, brands and experiences.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:08] I'm Jesse Purewal. Today on the show, how Dr. Kelly McElhaney has blended inspiration and agitation to help students and business leaders find their way and how taking a phone call during a layover at O'Hare got her on the path to creating thriving centers for both responsible business and equality and gender leadership at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:38] Kelly, it's good to see you. How are you?

Kellie McElhaney [00:01:40] I'm great. Jesse, it's great to see you after so many years. I'm doing great.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:45] Well, where have you been staying safe these days? What do I find you?

Kellie McElhaney [00:01:49] You find me in what is now a home office, what used to be a TV room, and before that it was a guest room. So you find it right at home sheltering in place.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:58] And is is this where your students have been finding you to? Have you been doing the whole professor at home gig in the pandemic?

Kellie McElhaney [00:02:04] I have with dog and cat and two college aged girls prancing by not realizing that I am live teaching. So they have seen the whole family.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:14] And Kelly, how well does it turn out that the university, the University of California Haas School, how well does it turn out everybody was prepared to deal with something like this?

Kellie McElhaney [00:02:26] It was right in the middle of a semester for the way our semesters are laid out. Unbelievable preparation by the Haas School of Business. Our technology group has been unbelievable. And I'm absolutely just super grateful to not only the school, but the humans who just really made me feel that no question was stupid. All those professorial things I learned, they know far better than I.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:48] So, Kelly, you're a teacher. You're an adviser to companies. You're a thought leader. You're also an author. Those are those are labels. How do you organize and clarify your own place in the world? How should our audiences think about who you are and what you stand for as a professional?

Kellie McElhaney [00:03:04] I think in two different ways that might feel very opposite. One is to be a Chief Inspiration Officer. And I mean that truly I mean, today was the first day of class. And as I'm heading into my first class, I'm really focused on how am I going to inspire young people in my class right now. The second is, as a Chief Agitation Officer, how do I agitate folks out of their comfort zone enough that they grow, but not too much such that they shut down. And I again, time in history in which it is so easy to be agitated all the time.

Jesse Purewal [00:03:40] Well, as you know, I'm want to to draw two by two. And I'm trying to think of the fear of being high on being agitated and low on inspiration. And I got to think that's not a place to be. So I love that you're foiling those to what has been unique or special about the degree of inspiration or the type of inspiration you've had to give to the community in this crazy time.

Kellie McElhaney [00:04:03] In an odd sort of way, Jesse, the most successful way I inspire people is by allowing them to actually feel it's OK to feel them. And we're just in such a high level of all kinds of emotions all at once. And the confusion around it all, I feel like part of what I do is just to give people space to both be safe and be brave with their feelings as well as their thoughts and to bring those two things. And I think that one of the ways I am successful at being able to inspire folks is to show them that their head and their heart are in the same being.

Jesse Purewal [00:04:43] And how did you discover the university professorship as an avenue towards being someone who is a chief inspiration and agitation officer? You started out your career in the private sector. You elected to make a pivot. What made you either have the courage or to do that? Or or why was it the obvious move for you to make?

Kellie McElhaney [00:05:04] My father was both an academician as well as an athletic director in the collegiate world. So I was born into a family of educators. My mother taught in K-12 with severely and multiply handicapped children. So they would like to take credit. You'll get this as a parent when you want to think that we have all this power and influence over our kids, I'll give them that. They did just it just didn't happen until I was in my later years that I recognize that. But I think in all honesty and with some some sense of sadness, I was so miserable in my experience in the corporate world that I had phenomenal company working with phenomenal people, but not doing anything that I felt was purposeful. I backed into the education world. I just couldn't I couldn't go on another day existing as I found myself existing in my corporate experience with.

Jesse Purewal [00:05:54] Kelly, Go go a little deeper for me. Like what? I mean, it's one thing to go from a brokerage house to an investment bank. It's quite another to say that the now I'm actually going to leave the sector. I'm going to put my life a little bit more in service of other people and help them grow despite the fact that was in your blood. I kind of think there was some catalysts that occurred to you along the way. So maybe unpack those for me a little bit.

Kellie McElhaney [00:06:18] Yeah, you know, the voice is always there and you find ways to justify it. I need to keep this job because I'm paying off student loans, which I was, or I need to keep this job because I haven't yet proven myself, which I hadn't. Or I need to keep this job because, well, being a banker, that just sounds really cool. I'll be really direct, I was checking so much of myself at the door every day to physically go into work, then I believe there was a day that I felt like I came out of the office and couldn't pick all of those things back up, like I had checked them, that I had sort of been lost touch with those components of myself. And how that played out was I knew I was uninspired. I was exhausted all the time for no apparent reason. I just didn't really have a lot of motivation to to get up in the morning and get into my office, which, by the way, I was in banking in the eighties. And if you weren't at your office by 7:00 a.m., you were late. So I remember walking in one day at seven thirty and my boss, he looked at his watch as I walked into seven thirty a.m. and he was reading the Wall Street Journal and he looked at me and he said, good afternoon. And I just remember thinking, You're kidding, right? You're sitting here reading The Wall Street Journal, which I already read at the comfort of my kitchen table in my pajamas. Like this is just a fake sort of environment. And so I got so uninspired and just sort of energetically not there. But I looked up various volunteer opportunities in the city where I was living at the time. And I took a volunteer opportunity to teach in a men's prison to teach communication. I was teaching more around storytelling and sort of personal communications and that the juxtaposition of those two experiences just came crashing. You couldn't ignore that, that I was much more motivated to walk into that men's prison and teach at night. I think while I was challenged in my day job as a banker, I didn't see how I was making change. Of course, I was extraordinarily challenged by walking into a men's prison at night. But the power to feel like I had the ability not to change them, but to ignite in them, the ability for them to tell their story, to really just listening to one person, the first person telling his story, which I also remember vividly, and I remember the look and just the energy in the room and just to see the light bulb go off in him and the power he felt at simply both telling his story about being listened to, being heard was very powerful.

Jesse Purewal [00:08:46] And this wouldn't be the last time that you would go through a significant reflection in your life. I think you went through a pretty deep process a little bit later when I've heard you say in a talk that you didn't want to be the Volvo driving soccer mom and you had gone on a path to sort of discover and define your values, can you talk about that stage of your journey, which is, you know, obviously after you joined academia and what what that looked like for you?

Kellie McElhaney [00:09:12] Two things came together. I was asked to give a TED talk, TED talk at the Presidio here in the Bay Area, and they wanted me to come and talk about what was my expertize and focus area at the time, which was a corporate social responsibility, but sort of almost additively. At the end of our prep session, they said, oh, yeah, we want you to talk about your core values. And I said, OK, no problem. So I sat down over time to work out the presentation. And of course, I did what I knew best, which was to work out the sustainability CSR part of the presentation and left the values to the end for a painful process. I came out with at that moment the the core values of being bold, authentic and connected and did the TED talk. And I think it was probably two days later I was driving my girls to school in my Volvo station wagon and a very affluent neighborhood. But in that moment when I looked around, it was all mothers dropping off their children to school, all white, all either dressed in sort of tennis wear or athleisure, very few of them heading off into a job outside of their home. And I just remember thinking, I don't fit here. I don't feel like I am being authentically me right now. And that was hard because I had two young girls and, you know, a life that we had created for ourselves out here in California that somehow just didn't fit.

Jesse Purewal [00:10:36] And who did you look to, to get to the other side of that?

Kellie McElhaney [00:10:40] I looked to a lot of people. And they all said the exact same thing in different words. You need to look within. You can only look at your you can only look to yourself for the answer here, because this is a big crossroads and the stakes are high. And so I had to really do some deep soul searching to say, is this the life? That I am comfortable enough in modeling for two children, and that to me was kind of the the sticking point for me was I can make the easy decision and stick and play this role or I can make the hard decision, show my girls what a hard decision looks like and then show sort of the afterlife of putting on a suit that fits far better, but I had spent a lot of time looking inward and I really wanted somebody else to give me that that answer.

Jesse Purewal [00:11:27] Is there a version of impostor syndrome that befalls anyone who is a university professor at a high level like you, just in the sense that, you know, in your own mind, in your own life, that you're a constant work in progress? It's like generation after generation of these people are sort of coming to you going show me the way and you've got to go, OK, let's have a conversation and here's the way. But at the same time, you're you're always building yourself. And that's got to be such a crazy paradox.

Kellie McElhaney [00:11:58] It is a crazy paradox. It's funny. I just got an email from one of those students. She's opening weekend. She's working at Amazon. And she said something to me that really struck me. She said, you know, you brought it, you brought it every single class. You brought it, you brought your frustrations. If something was happening, you brought your fears, you brought happiness, you brought your sadness. And she said it was just so refreshing to see somebody being so vulnerable, but not letting those feelings define her. So I remember seeing you angry with something that was happening, but your anger didn't define you. I remember seeing you frustrated one day, but the frustration didn't define you. What defined you was your comfort in being your authentic self in that class at that day. So I'm not saying I don't fight it, just I absolutely do. I am telling you that I get rewarded for doing just the opposite, which is not fighting and holding up that armor. That said, I've become I've learned the hard way. To not start out that way, you know, that was in day one, they had to believe in me, believe that I knew exactly what I was doing. I could tell them exactly what to do. You know, that comes over time and with trust. And I've also learned the hard way that I can't be that person with everybody. I've sort of had to learn to discern people and situations.

Jesse Purewal [00:13:19] Well, it is interesting to think about how inspiration and agitation are not only pedagogical in nature, that they are human in nature. And that student who appreciated the whole you, I've got to think, is one of many, many types of rewarding examples that you could have just just cited. How did you find your way into, Kelly, the domain of corporate social responsibility as you went through the university track and starting at Michigan and right now at Berkeley? Was it inspired by a desire to sort of push against some of the energies that you had encountered and experienced in your private sector career?

Kellie McElhaney [00:13:58] So I got into a PhD program not knowing exactly what I wanted to study. Again, I really at that time thought I wanted to become a university president. So I loved leading and managing in the corporate world. I just wanted to see if I could shift that into the academic world. And I was able to take a year off and move to China and teach at a university. In our off time, I and a woman from France was teaching at the university with me. We took a donkey. We paid twenty yuan to take a donkey up a really steep mountain. And two things happened at the top of that mountain. It was a treacherous path. I felt so, so sorry for this donkey. And we had negotiated a really hard twenty yuan to go up the mountain. But of course once we got there we learned it was forty you want to come back down. So that was a really cool concept of the crassness of capitalism in its most pure form. And I thought it was wildly cool that this individual entrepreneur had figured out this model. But the second thing, it was a very treacherous trek of this mountain, truly. I remember being up there and seeing a person with a cart selling Coca-Cola and another person selling Pond's Cold Cream. Remember thinking, man, we barely made it up his this this mountain. I couldn't get running water daily in my flat. It couldn't get electricity on any level of consistency. Somehow Coca-Cola figured out how they could get their product of this really craggy rock, steep incline. And I just remember thinking, you know, if companies can do that and the government can't or the public sector can't, I wonder if there's a way we can harness that pure power of capitalism, which I had just seen by this guy charging us twice the amount to get back down the mountain. Could we harness the power of the corporate world to create positive change? So it really was just high on the mountain. Aha moment for me. Then I went back to University of Michigan and as luck has it started studying under Professor Stuart Hart at University of Michigan, he's not there anymore. Now, called the Ross School of Business. And this is what he was teaching. And so I was just sort of the universe aligned. You have this mountain experience. You go through a door and you meet somebody who is that person high on the mountain who can help you navigate at. So that's really how it all came together.

Jesse Purewal [00:16:10] So interesting that you went to the the inevitability of the capitalist architecture and the possibility for it to be more, which just tells me that you're thinking ahead of the present, which has to be a good attribute for your students to keep learning from you. So just recognize that inherent in that story are a lot of, I think, wonderful assumptions that you made about the world as you went on in into the into the field and where we got to know each other at at Berkeley. You're your thesis was that corporate social responsibility was was not an activity. That was a strategy. So talk a little bit about that, because I think some people might equate CSR at some level with goosed up corporate philanthropy or they might just not totally understand what it means to be committed to a corporate social responsibility strategy.

Kellie McElhaney [00:17:02] That's been a long time since I started down that path. And I I want to believe that things have changed drastically. And when I really think through that, I still argue with people that it is not about throwing money at a cause, that that is straight up philanthropy and it's a necessary but wholly insufficient condition for systems change. I view it as a business strategy. This makes us a better business, reducing, reducing waste that saves me money as a company like there's a payout, there's an ROI for reducing waste, reducing plastic packaging, improving the lives of women who are selling my product in the factory. It just seems so obvious to me that there's a business return for that. And yet I think the easy mental model is to think that corporate social responsibility is just investing for your corporate foundation. And that is that is such a narrow piece of it all. To me. It is to figure out. What are my core business objectives on any given day? I think the challenge is what's my core competency? So if I'm in the financial world, which I'll use since I came from finance, what I know is finance. So improving somebody's financial literacy will both make the world a better place. But also the more financially literate society we have, the more they will come to my bank for banking services and products. So I think the second part, for whatever reason, has been where I've really seen companies trip up is to get involved in great philanthropic activities or even great CSR strategies that don't meet their core competencies. And so they mess it up.

Jesse Purewal [00:18:36] And we talk on this show about breakthroughs and how people build breakthroughs. In 2003 at the Haas School you founded the Center for Responsible Business, you really pioneered corporate social responsibility as a core competency, as a competitive advantage, I would argue, for the Haas School at UC Berkeley Financial Times that ranked number one in the world for CSR. And you were helping produce amazing graduates who went on to good companies and interesting roles. There were a lot of accolades and recognition in those years for all you did. By all accounts, it was a breakthrough. Can you talk about how you got the center off the ground in those early days and what some of the key ingredients to your success were?

Kellie McElhaney [00:19:24] The story is actually one of the more beautiful moments of my life because it brings together Bob Hass, who is absolutely a hero to me to this day. I really hope he listens to this because he is so humble. I've told him this multiple times individually, but I hope he gets to hear it on the on the airwaves. Two years ago, I came out to interview for a job in the CSR space at Haas I didn't know what the what was. They just knew they wanted to bring in somebody to do something. And for various family reasons and personal reasons, I was unable to accept the offer. The third year things have changed and so I had more freedom and flexibility were the offer to come up again. And very fortunately it did. And I was flying home, literally flying home for my interview from San Francisco to Detroit, Michigan, because I was at University of Michigan and I had a layover at O'Hare. But my cell phone rang and I answered it and he said, this is Bob Hass. And he said, I want you to take this job because I want to transform business education and I want you to be my partner in crime. And if you ever want to get somebody to take a job on the spot, there is no better language that I want to transform X, Y, Z. And I want you to be my partner in crime because they had me on the spot. I couldn't afford a house out here. I couldn't afford to live out here. I was moving a family and who, you know, completely uprooting a family, but just that. So the first thing that helped me to be successful was having somebody like Bob Haas in my court. There was also there had been a donor named Mike Homer, who was a Haas undergraduate, and he went through a lot of other start ups that quickly skyrocketed in the tech sector. And he had given a chunk of money to Haas. And he said, I want and he said, kids, this is when I was 40 years old. He said, I want kids to do it differently than I did it. I got out of school. I got really lucky. I made a ton of money and now I want to get back. He said. What I want to do with this money is to build something so that kids know that they can get out of school and they don't need to wait until they make millions to start giving back. They need to know they can do it immediately when they walk over that stage and get their diploma. So that helped a lot to have both the money and to people like Bob Haas and Mike Homer, who were just incredible leaders I'll just never forget. And then I met Mike and he was just this phenomenal, just hard charging, loud swearing, flip flop wearing guy who just welcomed me into his room and said, let's get this shit done, like, let's just get this done. And it was such a great experience that that's how I got the center. I had money, I had backers, I had business leaders. You know, my my first board at the center Responsible Business and my first founding board was Bob Hass, Mike Homer, Bill Campbell, who was the founder of Intuit, and Deborah Dunn, who was an EVP. She's Randy Komisar's wife, Randy's at Kleiner Perkins. She was EVP at the time at HP. And I like these to literally hire a driver to bring them up for a board meeting. I had no idea how phenomenal successful, famous they were. We just kind of gotten a room, rolled up our shirtsleeves and created a plan.

Jesse Purewal [00:22:31] Kelly, what did the brand of Berkeley Haas do for the center and what did the brand of the center eventually do for the the school? And and the question kind of behind the question is for leaders who are standing up these kinds of programs at universities, how should they think about the associations that are held in people's minds with the school and the kinds of new associations that need to be built out as you go through that kind of endeavor.

Kellie McElhaney [00:23:05] That's a great brand question, Jesse, such a brand guy, because I hadn't actually thought about it. The brand of UC Berkeley was both positive and negative in starting the Center for Responsible Business was positive because in my opinion, it's pretty inarguable that Berkeley is UC Berkeley as a top public institution in the world. People are going to listen when you knock on their door and say, I'm a professor at UC Berkeley. Can I talk to you about the center that I need money for new partnerships for? I do remember there being a significant amount of pushback on starting a center for responsible business in a business school. There were some professors who said this is going to soften our brand like they already think we're hippies. If you now put a center and give it this title of responsible business, it's even going to make us seem more a little more hippie, more leftist or whatever anybody was worried about. So it was this kind of odd brand conundrum of is this going to dilute? I remember distinctly somebody said this is going to dilute our brand as a top notch business school. And in fact, it did not think that that person didn't have their finger on the pulse of what the use of the world who are looking for MBA programs were interested in. But there's no question UC Berkeley opens wide doors.

Jesse Purewal [00:24:23] Well, it's in a brand calculous sense. It's a look forward reason, back scenario planning exercise to say, do we believe that we will produce the types of graduates who will both accrue to the economy and to the other areas that we want to create benefit in in a distinctive way that, to your earlier point, matches and builds on our core competency if we lean into something like this or will we not? And what I love about the decision to have a center within the school, but still clearly affiliated with the school and do all the things that you did with building partnerships with the private sector, was lay a claim to say this is how we think the world is going to work. And the reality is these academic private sector partnerships actually served as a really interesting emblem for how to think about lifetime learning and the relationship between universities and companies and all these other things that you think unlocked a whole bunch of adjacencies in the way that graduates like me and folks that I went to school with felt empowered to think differently about.

Kellie McElhaney [00:25:28] That's education. It is all about thinking differently. And I think that sometimes we forget that academic institutions don't tend to be high risk oriented. And I think at the time, there are a lot of people at the school who thought it was a high risk endeavor. Never once occurred to me that this was risky. I'm so glad to have that mentality because I probably would have done so much less in my life if I realized how many risks were involved. I just didn't see it as a risk. I saw it very clearly.

Jesse Purewal [00:25:57] Hmm. Kelly, talk to me about the dynamic in your advisory relationships with folks at companies in the private sector. Is it like therapy? Is it like consulting? Is it a little bit of both when an executive at a company says, hey, Kelly, I need your help? Paint a picture for me in terms of what that relationship then looks like and what the give and take is.

Kellie McElhaney [00:26:23] It's a great question because if I could go back for a PhD, I would go back in psychology because it turns out it's a lot of therapy that's just creating a sense of psychological safety with these corporate leaders. So I think very strategically, and I think that's the first reason why I have these relationships with corporate executives. But what I hear from corporate executives, corporate leaders with whom I work is that they can't have a lot of conversations. The feeling is that the higher up you go, the less real you can be in terms of saying what you don't know, what you're afraid of, where I've messed up, am I going to mess up? So I think for the most part, the leaders look at me as a trusted partner where they can have real conversations and talk about real struggles. I want to do this, but my board's thinking this way. I want to say this to this person. But I'm afraid I will offend and make a racist or a sexist or a fill in the blank ist remark. So I think it is a blend of being a trusted person with whom they can be one hundred percent psychologically safe, but also who has a strategic thinking focus in the way that I create solutions. I'm just really interested every single day at finding solutions, not sticking at the problem.

Jesse Purewal [00:27:39] What does it take to help someone unlock that, particularly given fiduciary responsibility and employee culture ownership and all of these other things that people are accountable for?

Kellie McElhaney [00:27:50] I think the thing I've heard a lot that always shocks me is that I validate what they think is the right thing to do, but are being told by others not to do. And sometimes they're being told not to do it because it is the right thing to do. And it will be perceived as taking your eye off the investment window or the profit window or all of the other things, I think. So I think the first thing is just really validating this this need to feel OK to talk about your feelings, to to act on your feelings, obviously in a well reasoned, well thought out pattern, is probably better if I talk to you and in real examples and sometimes I can name the company, sometimes I don't feel comfortable doing so. So in this particular situation, I'm I have done a lot of consulting for the company and I am a coach to the CEO. And it's a commercial, it's a commercial construction firm. You know, he's got this fleet of construction workers obviously working for him at this company or in covid. There's a large degree of them who are from the Latinx or Hispanic community. We know that covid rates are disproportionately widly hitting that to lay rates are just they've grown 400 percent in the Hispanic community. He knows that stress levels are at an all time high and he knows that in this particular construction world, mostly men, if not almost all men, mental health is a big issue. He's really concerned about mental health of his employees. These like but I can't say that because this is not a community of people who came for therapy. They didn't get into therapy as children. You know that therapy is not something that is part of their cultural background. It's not something they feel comfortable accessing, and I'm really worried about their mental health. So we have spent so much time talking through ways in which he can bring in speakers to touch on mental health but that's not the core part of their discussion, ways in which he can model small discussions around his own struggles with anxiety, which he had never told anybody until this year. It's really just an interesting experience of almost freeing him to be the CEO and human he wants to be not just the CEO that he wants to be and to have those kinds of discussions are just really so inspirational to see the amount of change he wants to make every single day,aAlong with being profitable,.

Jesse Purewal [00:30:23] When you think about the impact that you are having at costs and in these centers that you stood up and want to get to Igal, the Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership, next, do you organize it in your own mind as you are having impact on individuals one by one, or do you think of it as sort of the great ocean of impact that you can then have in a more abstract way?

Kellie McElhaney [00:30:50] Well, you know, the thing that puts me to bed at night for good or for bad is I think about it more individually. So when I look down at my zoom class today, I look at every individual student in that classroom and think, am I reaching him and I reaching her, why is he looking down? So I really am more of a, you know, the mass change that happens afterwards. I'm always shocked for my current Center, The Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership when when we were sitting down and conceptualizing that. And I say we a lot of it actually was just me in the beginning and there was no team. I had been asking to start something then much more narrowly focused on women in leadership. Now it is much more broad than just women, but had been asking to do something in the space probably for four years and being told in various different one of our locutions that, no, it doesn't fit in a business school. You need to go to a school of gender studies. But when I really just think that various deans that I run through got tired of hearing me ask, finally I was told, you can do it, go do it. You have no staff and no money, but go do it. But when I sat down to really think about what our core competencies went right back to corporate social responsibility in the way I think about it, what's our core competency? We develop leaders at Haas and in fact, I did some research. We graduate over a thousand leaders a year at Haas throughout all of our degree programs. So a thousand Haas leaders are descending upon the corporate world every year. We really sat there and thought, we're going to graduate a thousand leaders at Haas who understand the concept of equity fluency. I started to think more at mass scale on that, but I still think about each one of those thousand leaders that we develop every year.

Jesse Purewal [00:32:33] And how do you define equity fluent leadership? How have you seen that in action?

Kellie McElhaney [00:32:37] Kelly, we decided to get away from the word diversity, equity and inclusion because they were those three words cause a lot of emotional noise. So we wanted to back out and really look at how this is part of our core competency, which is developing leaders. So the concept of equity fluent-leadership is really quite simple. It starts out with understanding the value of different lived experiences, whether those are people on your team, whether those are your customers, your consumers, your competitors. It's really just to understand that the difference of the different lived experiences are actually something that will make you a far better human being, but a better leader and a better company. So we define it as understanding the value of different lived experiences and then courageously using your voice to address barriers, increase access and drive for positive change. But I got so excited to teach this new construct, so the first time I taught it was in a corporate classroom and I was just so proud of this new leadership construct. And I get in there and I'm talking about the value of different lived experiences. And how do you address barriers? What barriers can you address? And I had this like epic fail moment by taking the pulse on who was in the class and the conversation and how things are unfolding and huge a job for me, Jesse, was we don't even understand our own lived experience. So here I am pushing people to understand the value of different lived experiences. And we don't even know our own lived experience. Now we're talking about diversity, equity, inclusion or equity fluent leadership. And I teach this, I study it, I consult and advise in it. I read about it pretty much 24/7 until the summer with the Central Park Coopers situation with the black bird watcher. I didn't realize my own lived experience and I didn't think twice about it. But the first time I walked out my front door and looked down at my phone and realized with this phone, I have in my hand a possible weapon that could jeopardize a black man's life with the dial of three numbers, 911 it occurred to me that I don't even understand my own lived experience. That never occurred to me that I had that power in my hand. So a lot of equity fluency is really spending time understanding your own lived experience and how that shapes how you show up every day as a leader in terms of equity fluency. I mean, there's so many great examples lately of just watching CEOs step up and really say we we failed, we have failed black corporate America. We have failed you as employees for not having a more diverse leadership team. We have failed black owned businesses by not sourcing more from black owned businesses. There have been some really good examples of of equity fluency, unfortunately, late in the game we have to go through. We had to see a lot. I mean, obviously, these sort of the racial injustices of the world have been happening since the start of time. Sadly enough, we had to see a compressed version of them exploded on national TV while we were sheltered in place. So, again, here's how my brain works. It's late. Things have not happened for a really long time. But let's focus on what's happening and how we can accelerate it. The fact that Netflix moved billions of their own dollars into black owned banks, that that's such a beautiful example of both equity fluent leadership and corporate social responsibility. That's just not throwing money at black causes, that is taking cold, hard cash, that is sitting in white owned banks and moving it into black owned banks, which is a way to really sort of shift the system in terms of wealth generation.

Jesse Purewal [00:36:24] And not to mention the investments in and Shonda Rhimes and all the great examples are that they go deep. But I think it's worth pointing out that addition to your your two instances, because it goes back to corporate social responsibility as strategy, when a company takes 360 measures to promote that kind of change, it's real and it's authentic and it's needle moving as opposed to if you sort of issue a press release denouncing something bad and then sort of move on. Given the number of things, Kelly, that you think about and that you work on and that you hold yourself accountable for. How do you manage your time and prioritize your focus? How do you choose what to say yes versus no to? And how do you manage the majors and minors in your life?

Kellie McElhaney [00:37:16] I work with people who I like, I mean, there's so many disingenuous people out there. I just try to really maximize time with people that I genuinely like. But I'm also really focused on working with change agents. So courage is a metric that I don't think I've ever utilized before. But I look at working with people who have courage. They may not have turned it on yet. They may still have their hand on the switch on off. But I'm really interested in working with people who are willing to be courageous, who are really not going to live in a moment of fear of what's the criticism going to be if I do this? But just are really ready to sort of ignite and accelerate, but I do still struggle with saying yes as a woman saying yes, living out of fear that I won't be liked. But, you know, I have good people in my life who also say, why are you taking that job? Is it really going to create change? I have people in my life purposely who call me out on my B.S. So it's really funny. I'm somebody who has a pretty low tolerance for B.S. I've now been lucky enough to have people in my life who also give that right back to me and have low tolerance for my B.S..

Jesse Purewal [00:38:29] Kelly, I, I, I have noticed that you have continued to adapt and you've evolved your role your entire career. How would you take your own lived experience and use it to counsel people who are planning for a career that's going to take, you know, another four or five or six decades? How do you build a career anticipating a future that is so to be formed when it's so uncertain?

Kellie McElhaney [00:38:55] Anything I say is going to make it sound easier than it is. It's not easy. Maybe cataloging a list of the shoulds that are in your life or on any given day, all of those voices that say you should do this, you should do that, you shouldn't do this. If you just wrote a list of all of those things down, there's probably a nugget of wisdom in there of things that you're doing because you should versus things that you're doing because you believe in them, you feel them. They they really fire you up. But it is to over time start to pay attention to when you do feel moments of fire in your belly and how do I connect? How do I have more of those moments, not fewer of those moments. So it's almost more of a steady, slow shift towards towards what's in my belly. But I do think a lot of times we tend to create this archetype of somebody who had to take huge risk and sell everything they own and go make this big leap into a big idea that they were so unsure of. And I think that most change agents it's a little a little bit at a time over time. And then when you get better at it, you start to recognize, yeah, I have this vision. Everybody is telling me it's not going to happen. That means it's going to happen because that's usually when I'm most successful. But the little unlocks for me anyway, are much more successful than waiting for that huge unlock.

[00:40:17] Makes sense. Kelly, I want to move on to the lightning round of questions here just to get your first reaction on these. You're ready for this? Yes. Go for it. OK, Haas School of Business values. Our question, the status quo, confidence without attitude, students always and beyond yourself, which one resonates most deeply with you?

Kellie McElhaney [00:40:36] You know the answer to this, Question the status quo, every single day.

Jesse Purewal [00:40:40] Your biggest professional breakthrough.

Kellie McElhaney [00:40:43] Is realizing that it don't always have to be right, that sometimes, if not all the time, it's more important to focus on how to be effective.

Jesse Purewal [00:40:52] Where you think you'd be living if you didn't call the Bay Area home.

Kellie McElhaney [00:40:55] A beach in a warmer climate with a warmer water.

Jesse Purewal [00:41:00] The greatest challenge facing business leaders in this moment,.

Kellie McElhaney [00:41:03] Very, very easy lack of courage.

Jesse Purewal [00:41:06] The most influential author you've ever read or speaker you've ever seen.

Kellie McElhaney [00:41:11] Brene Brown has 12 different books. Dare to Lead's my favorite. But if you're not a big reader, watch her one hour special on Netflix and you'll get it all in one hour. But for sure, Brene Brown.

Jesse Purewal [00:41:22] I like I like it. A company or organization you'd dearly love to have egal work with.

Kellie McElhaney [00:41:27] Levi.

Jesse Purewal [00:41:29] Why Levi?

Kellie McElhaney [00:41:30] It is a company that I think has really just relentlessly focused on real values, just a really values driven company that's been through so many different high profit, high loss, high profit. But they've never lost touch with who they are as a company. It's almost like they're a human. It just feels like a very human company with super strong values and integrity.

Jesse Purewal [00:41:54] Your secret sauce, that thing or combination of things that's unique and special about how you show up,

Kellie McElhaney [00:42:01] Agitate and inspire, but not too much of one and not too little of the other.

Jesse Purewal [00:42:05] And three words that describe your leadership style,.

Kellie McElhaney [00:42:09] Daring, big hearted and vulnerable.

Jesse Purewal [00:42:13] And Kelly, one final question for the builders listening. If they wanted to know what the most important piece of advice they should take from you, given the world as you've seen it, the world as you've experienced it in the world as you've helped build it, what would that advice be?

Kellie McElhaney [00:42:28] Use your voice. There's probably no worse feeling than sitting there and saying, I should have spoken up, I should have done this. Just use your voice,.

Jesse Purewal [00:42:39] Kellie, thank you. Thank you so much, as always. It's been a pleasure. I'm glad that our paths crossed and continue to cross. And though I am indebted to you for much, I will continue to be indebted to you for. More use that career in finance to make sure you're keeping track of my debits to you, because now I have one more thing to add to the list, so thanks again.

Kellie McElhaney [00:43:04] You should know how how much pride there is in getting a call from a former student who's done something amazing like this, plus all the other things you do, plus managing a family as well as a significantly full time job,.

Jesse Purewal [00:43:17] It certainly is that. OK be well,.

Kellie McElhaney [00:43:18] Thanks, Jesse.

Jesse Purewal [00:43:30] I can't tell you how great it was to have this conversation with Kelly. She's a force. She's a force for good, and she's been a force in my life for sure. I knew when I went to Haas at Berkeley that I'd be focused on corporate social responsibility. And it was there that I met Kelly. And it was while studying with her at Haas that I discovered the linkages between CSR and strategy and brand and marketing, which is what led me first to Starbucks and then, of course, to Prophet in the world of Brand and now to Qualtrics.

Jesse Purewal [00:44:00] When I asked Kelly for those three words at the end of the conversation to describe her relationship style excuse me, her leadership style, I have to tell you, I smiled, but I wasn't surprised in the least to hear her answer: Daring, Big hearted and Vulnerable. I think she put all of that and more on display in this conversation, and we are all better for it. I would have personally added versatility to her list. We talked so much about her career teaching Intrapreneurship advisory, being a mom on and on. We covered lots of ground and it was it was hugely compelling. So a thousand thanks, Kelly, for all that you do for this week's building block. I'd like you to dwell a bit on Kelly's perspective on lived experience. She's in dialog with lots of students and leaders about how to understand lived experience and the value of different lived experiences and how to address barriers. And she got vulnerable in this dialog and told us about her aha that maybe she hadn't been aware of how exceptional her particular lived experience was until she reflected on the confrontation between Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper in New York in May of 2020. And she thought about how she needed to show up a little bit different every day as a leader. After that, what I'd like you to do is think about your own lived experience and write down a few things. Number one, what do you think have been the top couple influences in your life? And number two, how did you get to have access to those influences, those people or those experiences or those environments? In my case, I mean, we just talked about my relationship with Kelly. I'd say one key feature of my lived experience is I've been able to do what I have, largely because of the people in my life that I've had access to who've chosen to be self selfless and and give their time and energy and perspective to me as I've grown. But ultimately, that came my way because I grew up the son of two parents with advanced degrees who instilled in me the value of getting educated and who created time and space for me to do it when I was young, when so many other people around me didn't have that same chance. So I'm grateful for that. Yet in some ways it's taken the better part of my life to really get it. So please do some reflection on your own on this lived experience piece and see who you want to go write a thank you note to. If you want some templates for this exercise, check out the show notes right here in the app. You're listening to this episode on or over on our website, Breakthrough Builders Dotcom, that's Breakthrough hyphen Builders dot com. Hit me up through the website and share some of your reflections. I'd love to hear from you. Take care. Breakthrough Builders and be well.

Jesse Purewal [00:46:46] Thanks so much for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other listeners find us. And please tell your friends. Breakthrough Builders is a production of the industries team at Qualtrics. The show is written and hosted by me, Jesse Purewal. Mastering by Nate Crenshaw. Post-production and music by Clean Cuts Audio, part of the Three Seas Collective. Design by Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon and photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Jeremy Smith, John Johnson and Kylan Lundeen.

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