Journey Towards Anti-Racism Ep10: Conversation with Kit Hughes (EP.63)
Updated
June 23, 2022
In episode ten of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews Kit Hughes, Co-Founder and CEO of Look Listen, a consulting company working at the intersection of creativity, data, and technology.
This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”
Are you new to the series? Check out episode 54 where podcast co-hosts Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova introduce and frame the conversations. Download the accompanying study guide. And explore the other episodes in this series with guests:
Raphael Bemporad (Founding Partner) & Bryan Miller (Chief Financial Officer), BBMG
Ted Castle (Founder & President) & Rooney Castle (Vice President), Rhino Foods
Ron Carucci, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Navalent
David Devan, General Director & President, Opera Philadelphia
Jared Fishman, Founding Executive Director, Justice Innovation Lab
Jay Coen Gilbert, Co-Founder, B Lab; CEO, Imperative21
Marc Mannella, Independent Consultant, Former CEO KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools
John Orr, Executive Director, Art-Reach
David Reuter, Partner, LLR
Sydney Skybetter, Founder, CRCI; Associate Chair & Senior Lecturer, Theatre Arts & Performance Studies Department, Brown University
Want to explore related resources primarily *not* by white guys? Check out our compilation of 30 books, podcasts, and films.
Host: Tim Cynova
Guest
KIT HUGHES is a typical technology entrepreneur. He dropped out of college to start a company (it failed), spent a period of time homeless (by choice), and became an overnight success (slowly). Eventually, Kit returned to school as a two-time research fellow at the University of Georgia leading experimental technology research projects exploring mobile computing and connected devices. He credits his business smarts to his studies in strategy and innovation at MIT Sloan. Kit co-founded Look Listen in 2007 as a mash-up of a digital studio and a consulting company working at the intersection of creativity, data, and technology. Look Listen grew to have offices in Atlanta, Denver, and Portland with three centers of excellence: Brand Experience, Performance Media, and Marketing Automation. He has worked with a variety of B2B and B2C brands across multiple touchpoints: Anheuser-Busch, Arrow, BP, Char-Broil, Coca-Cola, Flextronics, GE, NCR, Philips, and Steve Harvey. Under Kit’s leadership as CEO, Look Listen was recognized as one of the fastest growing privately held companies in the US by hitting #408 on the Inc 500 in 2015—staying on the list three years in a row—and has been in the top 100 fastest growing companies in Atlanta three years in a row, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle Pacesetter Awards. Find out more about Kit here.
Host
TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi all, it's Tim. Before we launch into the episode, I wanted to let you know about a companion resource we've developed in tandem with our White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-Racism Series. It's a study guide that includes questions, specific to each episode, that can aid in deeper reflection.
Tim Cynova:
In particular, if you're a white guy listening to these episodes, I invite you to download it and journal your reflections. The guide is linked in the episode description and also on the main series page, on workshouldntsuck.co. Thanks so much for listening and onto the episode.
Kit Hughes:
White people don't think about themselves as white people. White people think about themselves as people, and they don't understand that everyone else thinks about themselves, as fill in the blank people. Black people. Asian people. We don't have any qualifiers onto the words we use to describe ourselves. We call ourselves Americans and we call the people that were here before us Native Americans and I'm excited to see that there is more of a understanding now of indigenous populations.
Kit Hughes:
But the thing I want to really say too, that ties into that, is that it's a journey for white people to understand that they are white people and it's a self-reflection and that's really uncomfortable. Anybody that's gone through therapy understands that it is uncomfortable to examine yourself and examine the blind spots that you have and that's why therapists refer to it as, the work, and I love your language around calling this, the work, as well. The deep feeling that I have is, oh, this is going to take a while.
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well that. We've paused our regular podcast episodes to produce this 10-part mini-series called White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-Racism.
Tim Cynova:
While you can listen to the episodes in any order, if you're joining us in the midst of this adventure, I invite you to check out Episode 54 of our podcast, where my co-host Lauren Ruffin and I introduce the series and frame these conversations. All of the episodes, as well as a whole host of amazing resources on the topic, not by white guys, can be found on workshouldntsuck.co.
Tim Cynova:
In this series, we're talking with a variety of white guys who are personally and professionally engaged in anti-racism work. When asked, they each define the work in slightly different ways. Some articulate it as anti-racism or anti-oppression work. Others say they approach it more through a justice lens. Others inclusion and belonging. Still others, equity and impact. Through these conversations, we'll explore the moments that led each of them to do this work, including their initial realizations, that this was work for white guys to be doing.
Tim Cynova:
We'll discuss what's been most impactful and resonant to them in the journey, what's been most challenging, and since this is a podcast about the workplace, we'll discuss how this work shows up in the organizations they lead and the ones they work with.
Tim Cynova:
On today's conversation, I'm joined by Kit Hughes, Co-Founder and CEO of Look, Listen, a consulting company working at the intersection of creativity, data, and technology. You can read more about Kit in his bio, linked in the description for this episode. So in the interest of time, let's get going.
Tim Cynova:
Kit, welcome to the podcast.
Kit Hughes:
Well, thank you. Welcome to you as well.
Tim Cynova:
Thanks so much.
Kit Hughes:
How many people have actually welcomed you to your own podcast?
Tim Cynova:
You might actually be the first one who has welcomed to be the podcast. So yeah, I appreciate that.
Kit Hughes:
I'm happy to be with you, Tim. I really am.
Tim Cynova:
In our green room, we talked about how we've had conversations about this topic over the years, but haven't talked about recently, so probably we haven't connected in about a year or so, so really interested to hear how things are evolving for you personally and professionally.
Tim Cynova:
Before we dive in, how do you typically introduce yourself and your work these days?
Kit Hughes:
You know, I'll start with, after I get over the claustrophobic panic that I have when somebody asks me what I do, or how do I describe what I do, it's a panic because I have to like put myself in a box and I don't like that. I can feel sort of cagey around that. So after I get over that, I usually say that I'm a CEO that believes in business as a spiritual pursuit. I'm a self-taught designer. I'm an underdog investor. I'm an aspiring philosopher-king. And then I always throw in that I'm a lapsed musician, so that if the audience of people that are asking me, "Tell me what you do or who you are," that there's maybe an angle in all those things that gives people a point entry.
Tim Cynova:
So we did a session together for the Conscious Capitalism Community and I was looking at your bio and I realized, we like grew up right down the road from each other, both musicians, both white guys, but went in really different directions in our careers and then somehow met up decades later. You were, by far, a more successful musician and probably a cooler one than I was, because again, I played trombone and you were like a rock musician.
Kit Hughes:
We also maybe even look like cousins too. We both wear black rimmed glasses and let our hair do its own thing. And so I think the only difference is I wear all black, but I think that we could look like we're actually family members.
Tim Cynova:
That's true.
Kit Hughes:
Distant family members, at least.
Tim Cynova:
Very much so.
Kit Hughes:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
So when we first met, we were at the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit, and you had asked a question in one of the sessions around the community's commitment or the intersection with the work around diversity and inclusion. And after the session, I was like, got to connect with that person. And we did. And I'm curious, are diversity inclusions, the lenses you're using today for the work, has that changed in how you're approaching the lenses you use for this?
Kit Hughes:
I'll say that I can't help but be the white guy that speaks up in the crowd of mostly white people to say, "What about diversity, equity and inclusion?" Or calling out the fact that, Hey, in that session specifically, there was talk about Conscious Capitalism and I love that organization. We're sponsors of the organization. We're chapter members. But that question that I asked and raised my hand about was tied to, we can't separate what we believe in conscious capitalism, or even a pursuit of being more conscious beings, when we don't include the fact that we have otherness going on and that we have separation, systemic separation, from other humans, whether that be because of age, because of background, because of skin color, because of religious beliefs.
Kit Hughes:
I think I've always felt like since a very, very early age, that was a live wire inside of me, if you will. That nothing felt like an energy source more than when someone was treated as an other, or when there was a homogenous huddling together that just didn't feel right to me. And so I think throughout my life, it's expressed itself in different ways. And you know, where I am now, like even referring to myself as an underdog investor, part of my work is I truly, truly, truly believe that a capitalism and capitalistic structures have alienated people that are not white and other characteristics, but that is a core characteristic.
Kit Hughes:
And so when I talk about being an underdog investor, I have seen the tremendous economic potential, both for generating wide economic potential inside of a city or a community, but then also the economic potential to change things like generational wealth and reverses wealth gaps through entrepreneurship, through building businesses.
Kit Hughes:
And so, yeah, part of my work in this season of my life, has also expressed itself in a different way than it did when I was in art school or when I was growing up, so it very much is still sort of core to who I am.
Tim Cynova:
Can you unpack a little bit of those early days around, you talk about there's a live wire in you, but how did you realize this was something?
Kit Hughes:
I'd like to first say and I may start every answer with, I'd like to say first, or first and foremost, because I feel like you have to answer these really super sensitive questions sometimes with caveats.
Kit Hughes:
I love where I was from. I actually just figured out last week, speaking with my parents, that I'm a sixth generation Kentuckian and so our roots run incredibly deep in Kentucky. Not in any kind of grandstanding way. It wasn't like I have a family member that was a state Senator or anything like that. We were farmers. We were community members. So I incredibly value where I'm from and the environment that I was raised in and had tremendously loving parents and grandparents.
Kit Hughes:
But what I saw in starting in childhood, we were in a incredibly non-diverse community. Very, very white and this is not, I'm making some sort of generalizations here and I'm not talking about my specific family members or whatever but what I observed was, people talking about people that weren't white as other and extrapolating characteristics of the one person of color that they knew, to an entire population and creating this monolith of understanding and I just saw that as wrong. And that was kind of at an intellectual level.
Kit Hughes:
But then when it got down to this like really superhuman level, the group of kids that I kind of ran with when I was really young, one of them being of African American heritage, and he was sort of rare in our community, and we grew up together. We all played basketball together. We didn't feel separate in that childhood. And then when you reach those teenage years, to have one of the white friends that was part of that circle, to join the Klan, to join the Ku Klux Klan, was stunning to me. To basically say, "How in the world could you have grown up with this person and been so close and how could I be so different from you when we've had very similar sort of childhoods?"
Kit Hughes:
I didn't know how to handle that information, so I got a little punk rock about it. I kind of got into arguments with Klan members and on the verge of these fist fights and the ways that you handle things when you're a teenager. And so the first day of my senior year, I made a T-shirt that said "Racism sucks," on it and wore it to school and the authoritarian figure at the high school said, "Turn your shirt inside out. It says sucks." And it's like, wow. You're telling me that I can't criticize racism because you don't like the word sucks. It showed me how different I was and how I saw the world. It also started to, I think, teach me how I need to approach the conversation.
Kit Hughes:
So going off to college, I went to art school, and I started to see that this live wire in me wanted to express itself through my artwork. I started to just experiment with different ways of dialogue. I started to make artwork about... And this was the mid-nineties. I was starting to realize that this was going to be a challenge in my life and so I did this project called The History of White People in America and the small Christian-based college that I went to, did not like that. And while I had support from a few people, they really shut down the project. They put pressure on me through my peers not to do this project, and it wasn't criticizing them directly. It was trying to open a conversation in a dialogue format.
Kit Hughes:
I was like, "Okay. Well, this is not going well." And so I dropped out of that school and I started my first company. It failed and then I went back to school to a much bigger state school and I was like, all right, well, I'm going to try this again. At that point I had been in business for a couple of years. I had taught myself design. I had felt like I was an adult now. I was allowed to make this kind of artwork. And so I did this project called Colored and that project was shut down and that project was in 2002, I think. 2002, 2003.
Kit Hughes:
And so I was told that white people can't make work about racism. White people can't make work about race issues and there was this nervousness to white people making art about this and my work was specifically tied to white and Black race relations. And so that was a real turning point for me when they shut that down. And then I realized, "Okay, I've got to be more..." Well, first off I need power. I need power because if I have money and power, I can make whatever artwork I want because those people in power told me that I couldn't. So that was when I decided I need to also repackage the way that I talk about race relations and I need to go and get money in power, so that I can make whatever kind of artwork I want. And that's when I started to go more heavily into business and realize that's the avenue by which to get money in power so that I can rent my own gallery, or rent my own building and show my work.
Kit Hughes:
And so I started a journey in which I became less combative with the type of artwork that I produced. I was able to speak at the International Child Art Olympiad on the Mall in Washington, a few years after that project called Colored gut shut down, and this was children from all over the world came and on the National Mall, I was invited to speak And so I gave a talk, talking about color.
Kit Hughes:
I said, to summarize it, I just talked about how color. Whatever you do, color. Bring color into this world. Be proud of your color. Be, kind of this whole thing, and I realized that, okay, that's actually the position that I need to take a little bit more of, to make sure that people can intersect with my own drive around reconciling these really problematic beliefs about people being other. So that's a lot to take in, but I wanted to take on that journey because it was kind of that journey from a spark in me, all the way to me understanding that I needed to actually interface with people publicly kind of differently and my journey to say, I need to figure out how to actually do more of that.
Tim Cynova:
A couple of things resonate. The racism sucks and reminds me, which of the people who, whether they hear Work Shouldn't Suck are like, "Well, I couldn't wear that button." And we're like, "So you're like the pro work sucks or should suck." It's like, it's so strange to be met with that reaction.
Tim Cynova:
The history of white people is interesting. I feel there's some direct correlation to the conversations that are happening right now in the country around critical race theory and in schools, in workplaces, the conversations that as we know, started to be more prevalent after George Floyd's murder in May of 2020 and now what's being met. Organizations starting to have the conversations and then drawing the line of like, "No, we're not going to talk about anything political. It's going to be an apolitical space."
Tim Cynova:
In your recounting that story, I hear the echoes in where we are today, around that makes me as a white person feel uncomfortable or shameful or I feel bad. And so this is the workplace. Those are feelings I shouldn't be having here, or I shouldn't need to talk about race or racism in the workplace. We should just all get along and realizing, well, that's a pretty privileged place to be coming from.
Kit Hughes:
It is.
Tim Cynova:
To be able to say those things. In life, to be able to turn that thing off.
Kit Hughes:
I agree with you and I think part of this journey, talk about the journey that white people are on that white people don't think about themselves as white people. White people think about themselves as people and they don't understand that everyone else thinks about themselves as, fill in the blank people. Black people. Asian people. We don't have any qualifiers onto the words we use to describe ourselves. We call ourselves Americans and we call the people that were here before us Native Americans and I'm excited to see that there is more of a understanding now of indigenous populations.
Kit Hughes:
But the thing I want to really say to that ties into that is that it's a journey for white people to understand that they are white people and it's a self-reflection, and that's really uncomfortable. Anybody that's gone through therapy understands that it is uncomfortable to examine yourself and examine the blind spots that you have and that's why therapists refer to it as, the work. I love your language around calling this, the work, as well. And a deep feeling that I have is, oh, this is going to take a while. We didn't get here overnight. We're talking about programming of consciousness of white people for centuries, maybe even longer.
Kit Hughes:
I understand an immediate reaction might be, "Well, there's a documentation of slavery by non-white people in other cultures," and those kind of things. Give me a break. I'll self-edit my curse words out. I'm going to try to not curse in this entire interview, but give me a break. When those arguments start to be lobbied, or sort of lobbed in response to the fact that we need to self-examine, it just shows actually where somebody is in their journey. That it's going to be harder for them.
Kit Hughes:
I have a belief that we need to understand that we're signing up for something that's going to take generations to correct. It doesn't mean that we slack off now. This is a long endurance race but we're unwinding centuries of programming that is going to take a bit. And so if we look at let's just take the past 400 years.
Kit Hughes:
The past 400 years, they were pretty good for most white people. What the hard reality is, is that financial gain has a kind of a messy history when it comes to squeezing other people, including other white people. I might add. Squeezing other people in order to have that financial gain. I think that part of what even business has to come to terms with is that it's going to take us a while to unwind this, but the businesses that are doing the work right now, that there will be an economic advantage and a competitive advantage, to whether it's attracting the workforce, whether it's actually bringing better products and services to market because of diverse viewpoints. All of those things from a business perspective, lead to a level of success that anyone would take, but that it's people are scared or they don't understand yet because it isn't the previous metrics of the past 400 years of product market fit and all of those things that you think about when you're running or starting a business.
Tim Cynova:
I think one of the interesting things and hopeful things that's happened in the past 18 months or so as we've been going through a global pandemic, sort of a racial awakening in the United States, is that people who haven't seen the systems and structures in place are starting to see the systems and structures in place and how we talk about white supremacy culture, that's embedded in the laws and the structures and everything here. People are starting to intersect with this in a different way, I think, as the system is being stressed. People are starting to realize, oh, that's problematic. And the question like, all right, well, what can we do about that?
Tim Cynova:
I think this is from a work standpoint, this is a really interesting place to be as people are asking themselves, how can our policies and our language and our practices and programs and initiatives be looked at through a lens of anti-racism, anti-oppression, justice, equity? How can we take our like hybrid work policies that many organizations have right now and say, "Does this work for everyone or just the white guys in power?" We're not going to solve racism in our lifetimes, but what can we do right now and how can we use our power and privilege in the roles we hold to be a part of that change?
Tim Cynova:
In your own organization, look, listen. You've wrestled with systemic racism. I remember one of the last times we talked, you've put out an action plan and been publishing around what your hopes were for that. Can you unpack a little bit more of like, what's it been like? How has that been received? How has it changed? Where are you now?
Kit Hughes:
I'd be happy to. I'll just say that I appreciate our previous conversations that we've had publicly that have been broadcast and I appreciate this dialogue because I think this is what it's going to take. It's going to take people sharing notes and saying, "Well, this is working right now." And somebody jumping in and saying, "Wait, it's working, but that's a short term fix." We would do this with our finances. We would do this with business processes. We would consult other CEOs. We need to be having this dialogue in the same vein as we do financial performance and business processes and those kind of things. So, thank you for being a person that is making these kind of conversations possible.
Kit Hughes:
I'd like to actually describe briefly, before I get into how things are going and the seasons that we've had as a company, and we grew really fast. We were on the Inc. 500, a number of years ago. We went through like this rapid growth. Company founded by two people, me and my co-founder. We were childhood friends. We grew up in that same kind of small town, Kentucky environment, not diverse. And what we found ourselves understanding a bit was, I think early on was, the power of business to affect people's lives, to change people's lives, even in small ways.
Kit Hughes:
I think that we had it easy early on because we were in Atlanta, we were conscious guys. We found ourselves having our first sort of season as a company, getting up to about 20 people and having a beautifully diverse group of people. I'm talking age, ethnic, geolocation, thought, backgrounds, racial and ethnic diversity. All these kind of things and we didn't catch it slip away soon enough. When we kept growing and it was this between 20 and 25 people was when that diversity started to really peel off.
Kit Hughes:
I have spent many sleepless nights trying to go back and say, "Was it one thing? Was it this? Was it that?" We all know, it's never just one thing. As much as human beings we want to truly believe that the cause of something is one thing, nature is such that it is never just one thing. Like we were so disconnected from nature.
Kit Hughes:
Because of the way our brains are wired and work and the way our society is has worked, we need to put things in boxes so that we can understand them. Over time, we've built structures. Our societies and cities and those kind of things that actually are built around our ability to have the cognition to understand and manage those things.
Kit Hughes:
When you go out into nature and you go off the grid, you start to understand that nature operates in a way that we cannot truly comprehend and so I have to remind myself, and my company, that it's never just one thing. That when I look at that moment, I think we made human decisions and it was likely due to people we put into leadership. It was likely due to our hiring practices. It was likely due to our management and appraisal practices. It got a little too far away from us.
Kit Hughes:
I tried to express a dissatisfaction with it, as it slipped away. It was difficult to get anyone to pay attention to it because honestly, it's just the way we were all programmed in business. Like, "Well, what do you want for me to do about it?" It was hard and I didn't have the tools. I did not have those tools by which to say, "Here are points of entry in which we can deal with this."
Kit Hughes:
And so we went through a season in which we lost that diversity and I made a huge, huge, huge mistake as a leader. I said, "Okay. Well, I can't get our company to understand that this is a problem, so I'm going to take that energy and that passion I have for this topic, and I'm going to send it elsewhere." And so what I did was I took that energy outside of my company and I made investments in Black owned businesses and minority entrepreneurs. I did a huge disservice to the company that I co-founded and last year was a humbling point for me because everyone woke up. Everyone woke up to that moment in time where, call it what you will, the fog cleared. The scales fell off the eyes, whatever, and people realized in that moment in time that there is a big, big problem.
Kit Hughes:
I sat down and I came clean on the mistakes that I made as a leader, as the CEO of a company, and I wasn't doing it to get credit. I told people, "I'm not saying any of this to get credit. I just need for you all to know that I made a mistake and this is how I made it and this is how we're going to fix it." I solicited advice from anyone that had ideas.
Kit Hughes:
So what we did last year as a company was we said, okay, we're going to look at our processes from top to bottom. We admit that there may be systemic racism in say our annual appraisal process, in how we hire, all of these things by which we bring people into the company. We took a version of my letter that I sent into the company post-George Floyd and we gave a public version of that letter and announced our commitment to changes and then we were really happy, within 90 days, to be able to say, "Here are the things that we have done."
Kit Hughes:
I want to track back to one thing, which is in 2019, after that conference that I met you at, I felt incredibly moved to try to do something at a level that helped people like us. When I say people like us, I'm referring to white males, in positions of power, to give them points of entry.
Kit Hughes:
So I wrote an open letter to white male entrepreneurs. I literally wrote it on the deck outside of that conference during the last session, I said, "Here are tangible ways in which you can actually help. You can take a minority entrepreneur and you can introduce them to your banker. You can take a minority entrepreneur and introduce them to your attorney." All these systemic things that we, in a good way, that we actually have access to because of systemic racism, we need to give out and we need to be Trojan horses into the system for these entrepreneurs that are not treated the same way.
Kit Hughes:
And so I gave these very tangible things and I also said a few things that were a little harsh, and I hope that in time, some people will forgive me. But I said, "Stop writing books about what you did that was successful and as your company and believing that in 250 pages, another company can just pick it up. If you don't have an entire chapter or more dedicated to the fact that systemic racism actually helped you achieve those things."
Kit Hughes:
And so that was not well received by some of my peers and I'm not apologizing for it, but I just hope in time that they understand that I'm not attacking that book that they wrote after they exited a company. You know, that's the thing that a white CEO does is that they write a book and say, "This is how I did it." It's like, stop doing that. That energy that you put into that, take that energy and disperse it elsewhere.
Kit Hughes:
One of the things that I introduced in that letter as well was a mantra that white male entrepreneurs, and I specifically say entrepreneurs because we're a different breed than just a CEO at a big company that's classically trained. We create wealth and can time hack the creation of wealth and systems, as entrepreneurs.
Kit Hughes:
And so what I said was, "Here's a mantra that you should consider and it's my mantra. I will not prosper until women prosper. I will not prosper until people of color prosper. I will not prosper until everyone prospers." And you could flip it and make it non-negative by saying, "I will prosper when women prosper. I will prosper when people of color prosper." That's probably the better way to say it, by making it positive. But what it is it's meant to give points of entry because we founded our company wanting to be a company that puts women in positions of leadership. We achieved that, but because of just that focus, we actually left some systems behind that allowed for people of color to prosper and so that's what we're sort of course correcting.
Kit Hughes:
For a white male that's in business to understand. These are points of entry. Okay, I get it if you can't feel like you're solving everyone's problem. Start with gender inequality. Start there and then also don't forget you haven't prospered yet when you solve that problem, but that it's when people of color prosper as well. And then when you get to everyone and the fact that we are all connected and that we're interconnected. Interdependence is one of my favorite words and concepts and you look to nature. It exists in nature. It exists in human nature, but we can't totally understand it or accept it. And so that mantras meant to be that.
Kit Hughes:
I'll rattle off a couple of quick hits that we've done as a company, beyond my own admission and we've done, you know, commitment pledges. Like in Atlanta, there's a great a program called The A Pledge, in which all of us agencies have gotten together and have pledged to create diversity inside of our industry, given ourselves timelines. We've made commitments. I signed the Georgia Hate Crimes Legislation, and I pledged to do so in every other state that we did business, that we had a presence, that type of legislation came available. I had no issues in doing that. But putting signatures on things are kind of like, "Okay, that's fine to commit, but you need to start showing it."
Kit Hughes:
We changed our HR processes in the most simple way as well, when we go to recruit. We said, "We cannot fill a position until a person that meets a diversity qualification has been interviewed." Also, when we go to schools to recruit, we need to go to more diverse schools. We cannot go to primarily white institutions. I'm also not saying that we have to exclusively go to HBCUs.
Kit Hughes:
In Atlanta. We have this amazing university called Georgia State. It's not an HBCU, and it's not a primarily white institution, but it's incredibly, incredibly diverse. So let's show up at GSU job fairs. Let's make sure that the universities we're recruiting from, actually have the fabric that we are looking to create inside of our company. And by making those few changes, we have seen immediate, immediate movement of the needle in returning us to what we were in our founding up to that 20 person range.
Kit Hughes:
We also created a DEI Council in which we're figuring out ways to engage our entire group of people. What we've ran into as a challenge is that it's really hard to engage everyone because not everybody's in the same place and I understand that a challenge that other CEOs are facing, but that doesn't mean you give up. You continue to play with formats. You continue to play with training. You continue to iterate, we're a culture of continuous improvement. We want to make sure that we're figuring out ways to constantly engage.
Kit Hughes:
And most recently we have decided that our DEI efforts for our council are actually going to be focused on creating a piece of content. A really, really cool piece of content that in a positive way, brings DEI education out there. What we found is a way that we can enlist our people through the work, through their own art forms, to actually create something. And so we've assembled a team internally that includes all of our business units, and it includes a diverse amount of people that are going to help to create this piece of content and it's going to be really, really cool. We've brainstormed it together. We're conceptualizing it. We're going to produce it together and it's a gift to the world in a way that says, "The DEI conversation doesn't have to always be around exactly what you're doing wrong. It's on the celebration side."
Kit Hughes:
That same message that I gave on the Mall in Washington, DC, around color and it's positive. It's like celebrate color. Embody color. That is what we want to be able to do with this piece of content and so we're super excited about it. It will be released next year. It will be a really cool piece of navigable, non-linear content, that has some cool interactivity to it and that tells a great story. I'll be happy to share that with you when we get done, but those are ways in which we're looking to engage people that may not all be in the same exact place.
Tim Cynova:
Kit, thank you so much for sharing your personal journey, your vulnerability, your mistakes, your learning, as a reflection of this lifelong journey we're on together and thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Kit Hughes:
Thank you for creating a forum for us to speak about this, for being open to the dialogue, and I do want to say, I hope nothing came across as me pretending to have all the answers. I think I might have all the questions, but I definitely don't have all the answers and this is a journey. Everybody needs to absolutely understand that and you've got to pack that backpack and get on the journey as soon as possible.
Kit Hughes:
I appreciate you, Tim, for creating this dialogue because it's going to help. It's going to accelerate the journey. It really truly is. So, thank you for that.
Tim Cynova:
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