Series Two, Episode Thirteen: Innovation and Inclusion

Julia: Hello, my name is Julia streets and welcome to DiverCity Podcast, talking about diversity and inclusion in financial services. In each episode we seek to shine a light on successful progress, call out areas requiring further focus and offer practical ideas to help drive change. In today’s episode we explore the topic of skills and organisational change, unlocking future talent, leadership, diversity and inclusion through an important lens, the lens of disability, and we are in the best of company. Today we bring a new sporting edge to diversity, as I’m delighted to be joined by not one, but two Paralympian greats, Claire Harvey and Lord Chris Holmes.

Our first guest is Claire Harvey MBE. A trained psychologist, Claire’s public and private sector career has included working with the criminal justice system and as head of inclusive leadership at KPMG, where she led the firms become one of the first professional services firms to contribute to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on LGBT+ rights.

In her sporting career, Claire was proud captain of the GB Paralympics team in London 2012, one of only two openly gay Paralympians in team GB. She used the platform to raise awareness about the importance of inclusion. So passionate that inclusion is a key life skill and should be taught early, Claire is now CEO of Diversity Role Models, a charity seeking to eradicate bullying in schools. Claire, welcome and thank you for joining us.

Our second guest is Lord Chris Holmes MBE. As a former Paralympic swimmer, Lord Holmes won nine gold, five silver and one bronze medal across four games, including a record six gold medals at Barcelona in 1992. At the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Chris was Director of Paralympic Integration and for four years held the role of Disability Commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Chris entered the House of Lords in 2013 and sits on the Future Talent Steering Group, examining the future of work and what this means for people and organisations. He is deeply passionate about technology and innovation, and is Vice Chair of the Parliamentary Groups on assistive technology, Fintech, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, and sits on many subject-specific committees. A qualified lawyer, he is Chair of the Global Disability Innovation Hub, Diversity Advisor to the Civil Service, non-exec director at Channel 4 and Chancellor at BPP University.

Chris, thank you very much for joining us today, and may we also take a moment to welcome your guide dog Lottie, who is quietly presiding over the events here at the House of Lords.

As always, we invite each guest to take a minute at the start of the show to talk about what they’re particularly focused on at the moment, and then we’ll take the discussion on from there. So Claire, let’s start with you. What are you working on right now?

Claire: So as you said, I’m at Diversity Role Models because I wholly believe that we need to teach young people early how to navigate the world around them, how to be inclusive to each other so that young people are growing up with the confidence and competence to be inclusive and without having their aspirations limited by what they think is and isn’t possible. I think that will help the future of business because young people will come in with expectations and come in able to navigate in a sensible way.

Julia: It is an interesting world to navigate at the moment because everything is constantly changing, so there’ll be much in that we’ll unpick for sure. Chris, Lord Holmes, Chris, if I may …

Chris: Call me Chris please.

Julia: Thank you. So, what are you particularly focused on at the moment?

Chris: What I’m trying to do, both within Parliament and beyond, is link together inclusion and innovation, as I fundamentally believe that inclusion is the absolute bedrock of any innovation. So I have a number of projects underway. I’m just pushing through a private members bill to prohibit unpaid internships. I think that would really help in terms of social mobility. I’m on a number of select committees both in terms of assistive technology and technology in general. I published a report on Blockchain, on distributed ledger technology in the autumn. So really pushing the opportunity from the fourth industrial revolution, and I believe that for many of the groups that have been excluded and under-represented across society, 4IR offers the greatest opportunity. It’s not an inevitability because of itself, technology’s neutral, but a real opportunity if we grasp it and if we ensure that gold, and that beautiful golden thread of inclusion, runs through every element of what we do going forward.

Julia: And these are really interesting times because we talk a lot on the podcast about the digital skills gap, and about how the Financial Services Industry, particularly, but this applies to many sectors, is looking to obviously embrace technology and data and analytics, artificial intelligence runs through that. But we are arguably struggling to reach a younger generation who don’t necessarily want to work in the city. So Chris, let me start with you. We talk about the Gig economy and we talk about different working models, what do you see as being very hopeful for the future in terms of how corporates can embrace new talent?

Chris: I think if we look at the issue, we’re trying to address that blight which has been on our society since the beginning really and certainly in recent decades, and that is the fundamental truth that talent is everywhere, opportunity isn’t. It’s really the start point for any organisation, not least those in the city. Surely you’d want to draw on the brightest and the best talent in whatever form and from wherever that comes from. So there’s a fundamental issue of organisations needing to look further, needing to look harder, for that talent. Through that, the opportunity for those institutions, for those organisations, and indeed for our society and for our country, is immense. If that’s put together with the opportunity from the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 4IR as we call it going forward, it really is potentially an exciting time to address some of those issues that have really held people back.

Be it in terms of disability, be it in terms of gender, be in terms of socioeconomic background. All and more of this can but won’t inevitably be addressed. It will still come back to those fundamentals of what is the attitudinal approach? What are the beliefs of people who are running organisations? What happens below the C-suite level in an organisation in terms of driving change? Because what we’re talking about here really is transformational change and we have to grip that. It’s not easy, of course it isn’t, otherwise it would have happened a long time ago and we wouldn’t be having this discussion today. But the first start point, people really have to believe that it’s not only utterly possible, but you absolutely have to go after it because now I think we’re facing a great situation where organisations perhaps haven’t lent into this as fully as they might. Truly going forward, I believe become diverse or die as an organisation.

Julia: And have you seen some good examples where corporates have a) got that joke, and b) brought in initiatives that will drive that change?

Chris: I think there’ve been some great examples, not least in the city and beyond where it’s been understood, where it’s been led on, where there’s been a clear commitment to cultural transformation through the organisation and where it’s been predicated on that inclusive culture. So not fixating on protected characteristics, though an understanding of them is obviously important, but going far more profound than that and understanding that if the culture is got right, everything, and joyously anything, can potentially flow from that.

Julia: And Claire, with your work with young people, you’re talking about the confidence and the competence. They look at this world that Chris has just defined and culture presumably plays very heavily into, “Yeah, that’s the kind of business that I can see myself working in.” Where do you see good examples where corporates have looked at how they need to project themselves, but also how they need to think about their culture?

Claire: I think we’ve kind of gone through the process of people trying to fix the people. I think Chris is absolutely right, we were in the space at the moment where people are looking at the behaviours and the attitudes and the values of the organisation and how that drives the culture. For me, the next step and the absolutely key step, is to unpick some of the systems and structures that drive behaviours and drive a culture. It’s great to talk about potential and talent is everywhere, but how you measure the talent will define where you find that talent. One of my favourite sayings is, “if you measure a fish by its ability to climb a tree, then it will think it’s useless for the rest of its life”.

We need to have a system that enables young people to understand what their talent is and then a system that enables them to really grow and thrive in that, and then systems in the corporate world that actually measure the breadth of talent rather than how we define talent and the very static rigid measurements that create barriers to people to actually showing their talent or even managing their talent in a different way that helps them grow in an organisation. That’s when we’ll really unlock things.

Julia: And do you see specific jobs where that definition or that measurement is changing or has changed over the years?

Claire: I think organisations have started to go on that journey. Lots of organisations I’ve worked with have started to look at actually how do we bring people into the organisation? What requirements do we need? A lot of that is still smoke and mirrors. You can do away with qualifications as much as you like if you know that your staff are still looking at which universities people went to. And that’s a great thing for disability. I went to Cambridge University to do my Masters. In reality, if I’d have been in a wheelchair at that point, there is no way I’d have gone to Cambridge because I physically could not get round it. That’s not a measure of my talent, it’s a measure of my ability to access somewhere. I’d have gone somewhere else and people would have taken a different view about it, because of the university I went to. So it’s really unpicking those pointers that aren’t written and aren’t in the process, but we know people use as proxies for talent measurement.

Julia: Which comes back to exactly what you were saying, Chris, about the middle management layer and then still measuring in the same way that they’ve always been measured and always been led as well. Are you seeing some good examples where, or do you have any advice for those middle management layers to think differently and be encouraged and supported in thinking differently?

Chris: I think it has to be led. It’s difficult to get the Chief Executive and the ExCo, the board, to get this, but that’s one thing. But truly then leading on it and driving that middle management tier. That’s so often where change of any kind just stops and gets clogged up in wheels really, and that’s where the real focus needs to be. The way to achieve this is to tie it firmly into every single element of the organisation. When we were doing London 2012, right from the outset we said, “We believe the way to make good games great games is to have access, diversity and inclusion hardwired into every single thing we do and every decision”. Not as a nice to have, not a CSR, not to park in hr, but because that was the only way that we could truly deliver on that sense of this being a games for everyone.

Well, that’s the same for any organisation, whatever field they’re in. To get that breadth of talent as Claire rightly said, to re-imagine what we mean by talent and to then enable, unleash and empower that talent within these organisations. What’s not to get excited about with that?

Julia: Yes. Listeners will know that I keep coming back to this time and time and time again about how do you get through the sticky middle? They call it the permafrost layer exactly for that reason. And one of the dynamics there that comes through a lot is around the appreciation of empathy as a manager, and understanding that if you want to harness that talent that you were just talking about there, Chris, then you need to be spending time with people that are so different from you. Claire, I was very interested reading about your day job as CEO, about how you go into schools and you eradicate bullying in schools by teaching empathy. I wonder if there are some interesting parallels that can be taken from working with children (the talent of tomorrow) and corporates to think about adapting and adopting from what they learn there.

Claire: Absolutely, and I think actually the way that we do that is where corporates need to go because from my time in the corporate world, compare how we talk about financial governance to how we talk about inclusion. When you talk about financial governance it’s, “We must do this. This is a given. This is important.” When we talk about inclusion is, “We encourage people to, we aspire to, we are committed to …” The language is passive and the people in the middle, they are the absolute demonstrative thing of the culture. It doesn’t matter what the policy says. People at the top will set the policy, people at the bottom will follow the policy. The people in the middle navigate the system, flex the system to get what they want, and what they do is get what they think is rewarded.

So all the time we talk about inclusion as an add-on. We don’t hardwire into people’s objectives. We have allies. I’m a great supporter of people being part of the conversation, but we don’t have financial governance allies. We don’t have the one person in the room who’s going to talk about financial governance so then it doesn’t matter to anyone else. It’s a given in your job and if you’re not up for financial governance, you don’t work in the organisation. We’ve got to shift the language of inclusion away from reasonable adjustments. So, we need to change “Those poor disabled people, we’ll make adjustments so they can fit in”, to, “They’re talented, we need them and therefore we need to fit.” We need to make it possible for them rather than we’re constantly giving something up because the language is derogatory, the language is negative and it connects people’s brains with diversity means less talented, diversity means difficult.

Julia: An afterthought-

Claire: And that’s the thing we need to shift because that’s what will get the middle group, I fundamentally believe, you’ve got 10% of an organisation who love inclusion and will do anything to achieve it. You’ve got 10% of the people who don’t like it and will never want to do it. But the people in the middle actually don’t care one way or the other. They will go with what the culture requires and they will go with what’s easiest and quickest to get what they want. And that’s the group of people we don’t spend any time talking to.

Julia: As we’re thinking about that young talent coming into an organisation, clearly one of the biggest dynamics they bring is technology and thinking through very, very flexible mindsets around how you use technology to achieve what you want to achieve, how you use social tools in order to buy products and services and make life decisions. As they come into organisations, organisations have a lot that they can learn from them. How do we close that void so that in time it does chip away to the middle management layer to go, “If you actually want to achieve the performance and the financial governance rigour that you need, you need to be looking for smarter tools, and the smarter tools are run by smarter people.” Is that just hypothetical or is that actually achievable?

Claire: I think it’s absolutely necessary, and it is achievable, but it takes a brave organisation to really look at their culture and create an environment of psychological safety. You can have diversity. Diversity is all around us, whether we choose to see it or not. But being in a management role and being safe enough to offer other people’s views and know that you can be wrong sometimes and other people will have a different view to you and accepting that, you require psychological safety of your position. And when you’re new into an organisation, being able to offer that idea, being able to disagree with the most senior person in your room, being able to say, “No, I don’t agree”, also requires a level of psychological safety. And again, it goes back to that cultural piece. Unless you drive that, that is a valuable thing, then it’s pointless. You’ve got talent in your room that’s sat there doing nothing.

Julia: Where should that be insisted upon? Is that in the appraisal process? Is that in leadership training? I’m always a bit wary of training because we’ve had so much unconscious bias training and so much investments in other areas. Where should the time and attention be focused?

Claire: I’m sure Chris will have a view as well, but I absolutely love Chris… I love Chris, full Stop. But I love Chris’ view of-

Julia: A bit of a fan club going on here, it has to be said!

Claire: It’s actually Lottie-

Chris: It’s reciprocated.

Claire: It’s just Lottie I love. Chris is just a vehicle to Lottie! I think it’s that golden thread. It has to be absolutely everywhere and it has to be meaningful and there has to be a personal consequence – a positive consequence for doing it and a negative consequence for not doing it. That’s when you create shifts in behaviour.

Julia: I would almost push that a little bit further and argue that that should be therefore embedded in what matters, quite often in the city, around bonuses and payments of remuneration and full accountability that translates into something that people really care about.

Claire: And it has to be on absolutely everything. Not just the things that we think about when we think about people. I’m absolutely with Chris that inclusion is not a people issue, it’s a governance and culture issue, and therefore you need to measure it in things like who gets given what opportunity? Who gets given which placements? Who sat next to who? Those things that aren’t about people, aren’t about appraisals. Because when you get to the appraisal, the same as in education, when you get to the point that people are doing qualifications, whether they achieve or not has everything to do with the barriers along the way rather than their pure talent. So the measurement will be what you’ve set it up to be.

Julia: Yes. Chris, anything you’d add there?

Chris: I completely agree with that and fundamentally it either matters or it doesn’t matter. Now an organisation can choose to think it doesn’t matter behind the scenes and put up a very good glossy spin to what they’re doing or not doing, but ultimately if it matters, which it does, it must matter in every moment, in every policy practice procedure, in every part of the organisation, in every conversation, otherwise it doesn’t matter. It’s got to matter in every moment that we are on this planet. Otherwise, it’s just something for high days and holidays, something you could do if you’ve got the time, something to add on, something to get some CSR benefit from. Pointless, it’s for the birds. It matters in every moment.

Reasons to be cheerful on this I think, that if you put together Gen Y, Millennials coming through with what the disruptive force of 4IR will bring, we can be pretty confident that work as structured, organisations structured in the old way, are just not going to work for either those people coming through and the technology. So as I say, become diverse or die. It may be a slow, painful death. It may be an overnight death for those organisations, but death for sure it will be. But flipping that-

Julia: So these are your reasons to be cheerful, and we’ve ended up on death?

Chris: Yeah. Absolutely. There’s nothing to be more cheerful about than a non-diverse, non-inclusive organisation dying. That’s very, very much something to be cheerful about! So to flip that, the opportunity is immense because if you imagined it in a different sense and sat down with that middle management part of the organisation and said, “I’ve got a suitcase of cash here that you can have, all you have to do is open the suitcase. It’s not locked. There’s no combination. All you have to do is open that suitcase and embraced it.” They go “Give me the suitcase.” Well, we’re talking about something far more profound, far more meaningful, far more deliverable of bucks than just a suitcase of cash. It’s a stunning opportunity to empower, to enable people to flourish in an organisation. It’s something to be incredibly positive about without being naive as to the difficulty and the challenges, as Claire says, the barriers that are currently on that journey.

Claire: And I think we’ve set that up the wrong way. I mean, Chris is obviously quite a lot older than me. But even when I look back, the discussion particularly around disability was set up in such a negative way. People would come into organisations and say, “If you get this wrong in the Equality Act or the DDA as it was then, you’re going to get sued.” Why would you take a risk on employing a disabled person with that level of risk if you didn’t need to? We went through these ridiculous programs where you put people in a wheelchair or blind folded them for a day and then go, “Oh, now look, this is what it’s like.” Of course it’s not. I didn’t rock up for my first job in my first day of being in a wheelchair.

I’m sure you didn’t rock up when you first … you learn to navigate the system. So everything we talked around disability was negative. Everything we talked around was about how difficult life is – completely the wrong message. It’s no wonder now that almost double the younger people with a disability are unemployed, because you take on where they can get qualifications, you take on their ability to thrive in those environments and then you take on the negative views of people in organisations, the fearful views of people in organisations of doing the wrong thing. It’s not born out of not wanting to employ people. It’s a really toxic combination that we need to break down and we’ll only break it down by experience learning.

Julia: So that marks a perfect moment to turn to Cynthia and Robert who had been on the lookout for research to support today’s discussion.

Cynthia: The House of Commons Briefing Paper, ‘People with disabilities in employment’, published in January 2018, has some key findings. There were 3.5 million people of working age – 16 to 64 – with disabilities in employment between April and June 2017. This is an employment rate of 49%. The employment rate for people without disabilities was 80%.

Robert: People with disabilities are more likely to be working part-time than those without disabilities. 24% of people with disabilities aged 16 to 64 were working part-time compared to 36% of people without disabilities of the same age.

Cynthia: In the Facts and Figures 2018 Disability in the United Kingdom Report by the Papworth Trust, one in five employers said they would be less likely to employ a disabled person.

Robert: The disability charity Scope found that 48% of disabled people have worried about sharing information about their impairment or condition with their employers.

Julia: Thank you Cynthia and Robert, and as always links to the research and references can be found on our website, DiverCityPodcast.com. You can also sign up for early notifications of future episodes. Please do follow us on Twitter @divercitypod and you can find us on all good podcast channels. If you’ve enjoyed the show, we’d appreciate your rating, it really helps promote the episodes.

We’ve been talking quite conceptually, obviously it’s been a very important discussion, about corporate dynamics and culture and the situation … but I know Claire you’ve got some really key statistics that you’re keen to share.

Claire: Yeah, because I think what happens in the corporate world is we all make indicative decisions. We all make individual decisions about certain things and what we don’t do enough is hold up the mirror to say “what’s the outcome of that group of decisions?” And the Papworth Trust have produced some great research that really brings home the disadvantage that many disabled people face. So disabled people are twice as likely to be unemployed and 44% of working age disabled people are economically inactive, which is four times higher than non disabled people. If you add onto that, and this is Chris’s area in terms of technology, if you add onto that, that 50% of disabled people don’t have home access to the Internet. The more we rely on internet and information and technology to be a key driver in terms of key skills in the workplace, the further we’re going to leave this group behind.

Chris: When you look at the numbers of people who are currently digitally excluded, financially excluded, all the groups that you’d imagine are tragically over-represented – disabled people, older people, certain geographies, lower socioeconomic groups, all that talent not able to get onto the pitch. And as we go forward, digital skills and indeed digital understanding are just going to need to be core. Digital literacy will be as important as numeracy and literacy, and if people are shut out from the outset, what chance?

Julia: And one of the things that we talk about quite a lot on the podcast series and we certainly started our first podcast talking about race and the concerns that certain people have around the use of language. I mean, you must come across this quite a lot in terms of people just fumbling for the ways to describe who you are as an individual, your contribution at work. You’re smiling as I’m speaking, and already I can feel myself being very cautious about language to be using, and whether you talk about people with a disability or disabled people, et cetera. Do you come across this a lot or what do you say to young people at schools, Claire, about how to tackle the topic?

Claire: We come across it all the time. On a personal level I get at least twice a week the random comments that people feel the need to say something but don’t know what to say. So I’ll often be whizzing around London and as I’m going to get a tube, someone will say, “Keep going. You’re really doing well”, and things like that. Because they feel the need to say something, that nervousness, but they don’t know what to say. Equally, I hear people stumble around, “Are we going to walk somewhere? Are we going to stand up somewhere?” They’re just words.

What we teach young people is find the language that you’re comfortable with, find the thing that you feel identifies you, and then help other people use that. And be curious. You can know the difference between being offensive and being curious. If you get the language wrong, then people will know your intention is to get it right, but most importantly you’ll learn and you’ll use something differently next time. But I think that fear of getting it wrong, particularly in that middle management level where you’re being viewed from both sides in a spotlight, means that people just don’t have the conversation. We know from the work that we do that you can’t be what you don’t see, and that means you can’t be inclusive as a person who’s not within a group if you don’t see other people doing that successfully and you can’t be someone with aspirations if you don’t see anybody like you in that area. So it’s really important to break down and have that conversation.

Julia: And that’s where the role of the media plays a very, very important part. It’s encouraging when we look at how diversity is being represented on mainstream media. Chris, is that something you’re particularly focused on?

Chris: I think as Claire said, if there’s not the comfort, then there’s not the confidence, no conversation, no communication, no connection, no change. I remember years ago when I was working in the city, a lovely person on reception there, and one day they said to me, “You’re always so positive. You always look so smiling, particularly being unsightly as you are.” And I thought, “Well, I see what you’re getting at there and it’s all perfectly okay and better to have that.” It doesn’t matter if somebody gets the words wrong, it doesn’t matter at all. It’s about intention, it’s about attitude, it’s about enabling the environment where there’s the comfort and the confidence to connect and engage to anybody. Don’t assume, just ask. And if you get a negative response, that’s the other person’s problem, not yours.

When we were doing 2012, we wanted a broadcaster who could really share that vision and be so important in terms of the transformation around the Paralympic Games and working with Channel 4, and the coverage, I knew they could do a great job. Games time, sport coverage would be fantastic. But we worked together on the idea for a programme called The Last Leg, and as soon as we put the treatment together, I knew that this potentially would be the thing that would make the difference. Getting them to put it on the main channel, they wanted to put on E4, I knew it had to go on Channel 4 – on the main channel – and to have a section in there where it would be called, “Is it okay to…” And people would email in, tweet in, with all their questions and comments, to just demystify … to make everything around disability a safe space and take away all of the potential awkwardness, the egg shells, comfort, confidence, connection change.

Claire: We’ve gone from 4IR to 4 Cs!

Julia: It has been a fantastic conversation. I just want to take a moment to thank you both very much for joining us, Claire and Chris, thank you.

Chris: Thank you.

Claire: You’re welcome.

Kieron: This episode of DiverCity Podcast was produced by me, Kieron Yates, on behalf of Julia Streets Productions. Thanks to Cynthia Akinsanya and Robert Pinto-Fernandes for their insights. You can find out more about the guests on this week’s show on our website, DiverCityPodcast.com. Whilst you’re there you can also sign up to our newsletter for all our latest updates. To be sure of catching all our future podcasts, subscribe to our feed in iTunes or your favourite podcast app. If you’ve enjoyed this episode of DiverCity Podcast, remember to give us a rating or review, it all helps promote the show to a wider audience. Finally, our Twitter handle is @divercitypod. Thanks for listening.