An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
If you don’t listen, if you don’t ask people what will help them thrive. If you don’t care, if you’re not open, if you don’t think about their safety — psychological and otherwise — where your teams and some individuals are concerned, you’re not going to have trust.
As a part of our series about “How Diversity Can Increase a Company’s Bottom Line”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Amri Johnson.
For over 20 years, Amri (say Ahm ree) Johnson has been instrumental in helping organizations and their people create extraordinary business outcomes. Johnson is the CEO/Founder of Inclusion Wins and the author of the new book “Reconstructing Inclusion: Making Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Accessible, Actionable, and Sustainable.” An inclusion strategist, executive advisor, social capitalist, epidemiologist, and entrepreneur, Johnson’s mission is to create thousands of organizations that thrive via inclusive behaviors, leadership, structures, and practices. With an English and biology degree from Morehouse College and a Master’s degree in Public Health from Emory, Johnson is building a global cooperative of people-focused solution providers whose work is informed and enhanced by inclusiveness. He is currently based in Basel, Switzerland with his wife and children, and works with organizations around the world. Learn more at inclusionwins.com.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive into the main part of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you share a bit of your “backstory” with us?
I grew up in Topeka, Kansas. My father was a mortician. He did everything — embalmer, funeral director, and all-around entrepreneur.
My mother was an educator. She has a Ph.D. in early childhood development and worked in various capacities in education from middle and high school levels through the college level. She currently still runs my late father’s mortuary. My mom is a jack-of-many trades. Her family dabbled in a variety of businesses, too. So we’re a family of entrepreneurs. That was what my experience was like growing up.
I went to Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA. The college of Martin Luther King, Jr. and many other great Black men. It shaped my views on what I wanted to create in the world.
I met an epidemiologist early in my career, and I didn’t care for him much at first. He irritated me. But he understood me and gave me so much affirmation about what public health could do that I could use it as a vehicle. Following college, I went to graduate school to study epidemiology at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. My public health career followed.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us the lesson or takeaway you took out of that story?
I got a job, which was my second job out of graduate school. The head of the local health department asked me to take on the head of epidemiology or director of epidemiology and health promotion job. And I had a team of 10. A lot of them were older than me. Pretty much all of them except for a couple. One of them had a son born on the same day in the same year as me. So it was like I was working for my mother. But she was so generous with teaching me a lot. But what I found is, you know, I was young, and I was a poor manager. I was fortunate to have people around me that knew that I was green and looked out, including an assistant that had been an assistant for many executives in the state government. And she just knew leadership, and so she indirectly taught me that, along with many other senior people in the health department, contributing to my development. So I got so obsessed with my poor leadership management skills that I decided to make it into a career.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you tell us a story about how that was relevant in your own life?
“A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still .” My father used to say that a lot. Some people attributed it to Ben Franklin, but we don’t know whom it came from exactly. I worked in this space of organizational change, and I always feel like it needs to come from people’s hearts.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion intersects with organizational development and change. You can’t convince somebody of something that they don’t want to be convinced of. So I spend more time in dialogue, seeing what’s of interest to people rather than trying to convince them straight away.
Once that relationship trust is built, I think there’s more willingness to be influenced by me even though I might not be somebody there are so familiar with. But I think when we can do that — and it’s something that I practiced — build that trust enough for people to engage with you in an open and vulnerable way, you can transform things, and it’s never against someone’s will.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are?
There are many. And it depends on if we’re just talking about career. I don’t separate my personal and spiritual life from my work. I don’t go and talk about my spiritual life all the time during my work, but it’s there. It sits in the background.
So I had a pastor when I was young. His name was John T. Olds. He was the first pastor that I knew and he was the closest thing to Jesus that I ever had met at the time. He said something once from the pulpit that he repeated frequently. It is how can you appreciate people? It’s not just be thankful to them but how can you appreciate them and how can we show that appreciation? And so that’s something that I carried with me in the way that I engage in the world, engage with my team and my clients. It’s that level of appreciation for people’s uniqueness, as well as their greater humanity. So that’s really been at the center of my life. It really stood out. I’ll never forget that time that he said that from the pulpit.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
I think it’s that we are really trying to do two things. And this is part of the work of creating an “inclusion system .”We’re trying to do it for all of our clients and then even for those who aren’t clients. We want to inspire this notion that we can create the conditions for everybody regardless of their identity or their background. We can create the conditions for everyone to thrive. And the only way we can do that is when we have the right dialogue on an ongoing basis and create the space for those dialogues. So that those things that help people thrive, that help them feel like they have a sense of autonomy and agency — that they are learning that they’re making their best contribution to the organization.
That’s really at the heart of everything we do. Now, because we work in diversity, some spaces are about getting people from various backgrounds in the door.
But for us, that’s only step one. Because even if you get those so-called people from diverse backgrounds or from more diverse backgrounds and you’ve historically had in, you have to do a lot to keep them, which takes more energy effort.
A more recent story is when we partnered with a university to do a racial equity summit. I haven’t been big in the social justice space. Ironically, I work in DEI and my social justice kind of lens has always been there, but I haven’t been kind of very focused on race like we’ve seen in the past couple years after the murder of George Floyd. Now it’s always there in the background. It’s always discussed, but it has led my work. But in this case, I got a chance to facilitate with some amazing practitioners.
One was the head of the diversity at the university, and then a couple other OD practitioners. We did a summit that was supposed to be 300 people, which was manageable. It was done online during COVID.
It was tough.
There was a lot of tension in this space. And we facilitated this event and all the things that came during and all that’s come after has been from the hearts of the people. The people drove it. At the heart of our work is the fact that we’re trying to create culture from the hearts of all the individuals in an organization. That collective kind of thread that goes through everybody is what we’re trying to create. Creating it and implementing it together is not the responsibility of a few. It’s a shared interdependent state of being and that’s what we try to foster all the time, and in that experience of facilitating that event with those colleagues, we were deeply connected in that experience.
The participants that we’re engaged in these dialogues — to really start thinking about an approach or strategy for equity in the organization — were connected. That’s been maintained so we’re really excited about that.
Are you working on any new or exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
We have some projects that are ongoing. One of them is with a financial services company. They’re mostly algorithmic and digital in the work that they do. Most of the people are quants and engineers. They are really smart people.
But what’s been really brilliant about working with them is their leadership team. Particularly the COO & CEOs, they’re really committed to this dynamic conversation about equity, diversity, and inclusion, in a way that’s really unambiguously prioritized.
They’re putting the effort and the resources in. They don’t want this to be something that’s short term. They really want this to be built on the foundation of who they feel like they are and who they want their company to be. So that’s exciting because it’s atypical. They are so generous with what they’re trying to do with their folks, that it almost seems surreal. It doesn’t seem like that’s the kind of place that’s typical when you talk financial services. But they’re breaking the mold of what a financial services company can do. And we are reconstructing it in a way that I think is going to tell a really profound story to all the people that might seek to work there, as well as those who continue to help build this really dynamic culture.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
I think the project with the financial services company will help the employees there. They have a passion about climate change and make significant contributions to such causes. So I think they’re really focused on making sure they have diverse representation in the organization and high levels of kindness and compassion with one another. That, in and of itself, I think, ends up going out into the world when people live and experience that every day. I think most of these people, the way I’ve experienced them is that’s a lens that they have. And they want to do work in the community as a result. So like there’s a kind of an edict inside.
And it’s being expressed in some of the things that they choose to engage in the communities where they do business. So I think that’s going to help people, in terms of my success bringing goodness to the world. I hope so. I’d say one thing that’s really important to me is to do what I can to make contributions to people that we’ve developed relationships with, and they want to thrive.
I’ve mentored a lot of women scientists. Science is a difficult space for women — science, engineering, STEM disciplines as a whole. And just negotiating and helping them look into the mirror to see their own power, while most of the time they’re looking out the window.
We let them see in the mirror to say, “Hey, here’s where your power lies, here’s your agency. Here’s how you can navigate sometimes tricky, and even sometimes hostile situations successfully.” I feel like I’ve done that a lot. I’ve done it, and I’ve seen the people that I’ve engaged with whether they were women in STEM disciplines or anyone else who wanted to navigate the world to make their mark. I feel like I’ve done that quite a bit, and it’s just kind of become natural over the years.
Ok. Thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main part of our interview. This may be obvious to you, but it is not intuitive to many people. Can you articulate to our readers five ways that increased diversity can help a company’s bottom line.
It’s actually Diversity and Equity and Inclusion. So I think, you know there’s plenty of research that says when you have diverse teams you have better outcomes. That’s there.
But I think sometimes that’s made kind of cliche that “diverse teams get better outcomes.” It’s not the diverse teams in and of themselves; it’s that difference coupled with the ability to navigate across those differences both cognitively, and with people’s identity. So we want diverse thinking among those diverse people and those things usually go hand in hand. And so when you bring people that are different together, they have more of a tendency to challenge ideas; there’s more dissent. Dissent is what you need if you want to really have unique solutions and to innovate, so that’s a real thing.
It’s also making sure that you bring diversity in, but give people the skills. When I say skills, I mean things like helping people learn better perspective-taking. People are able to recognize when there are value dynamics or value conflicts and they’re not attached to their own values or biases or preferences, traditions, and conveniences. As one of my heroes in the diversity space, Roosevelt Thomas, often talked about is the importance of giving people the space to understand how the diversity of their background might be in conflict with somebody else. So I’ll give an example there.
I had one client. They came to me and they worked in the safety element of drug discovery. I do work with a lot of health care and pharma-related firms. So, this particular group was a part of early, before-the-clinic safety. But the nature of their roles spanned all the way from the bench almost directly to the bedside, so they’re pretty well-experienced. So they were challenged because the drug discovery development team they were working with saw them more like a transaction. It was like they were a vendor, although they were internal employees.
And so they came to me and they were like, “I just don’t feel like we’re really integrating into the team.” So I asked them a little bit about the structure. And they said it’s more of a transaction. They have us come and talk about the safety issues, but if there’s a problem and we have to slow something down, it’s usually just a sign of disappointment. And we probably could have anticipated or done something to make sure we didn’t slow down, if we had been included more earlier.
And I said, well, that’s a really compelling argument. If I’m on a team and I want to speed stuff up or I want to be able to understand the safety data earlier and get early readouts in a way that allows me to anticipate what might come later on, even if we can’t get an early readout just because the nature of how you have to do the drug discovery process. But in any case, we can be anticipating what we could be learning, or how we could maybe even mitigate some safety issues while we’re thinking about our respective compounds.
So I said, well, why don’t you contract with them? This idea comes from Peter Block’s work on Flawless Consulting and Contracting. So they went to the drug discovery team leads and said, “Hey look, we really want to be able to provide you with the best safety data as early in the process as possible. We want to be able to tell you and give you some insights, before it can potentially slow the project down.
We feel like we can do that a lot better and we need from you to include us in the meetings in a more robust way. Meetings after the meeting, maybe even talking to us about crafting or giving some input into an agenda so that we could share where we are and maybe talk about some of these things earlier in the meeting, or sometimes in between meetings, to help form the agenda. And then if there’s meetings after the meeting, let us know.”
And so they did that, and the result was that the teams gelled more. They saw safety as a helping force.
The safety folks felt like they were listened to. Some of the people on the drug discovery teams got to spend more time with the safety people. They learned what to think about as you get later and closer to the clinic, which the preclinical safety people had a better idea of, than a lot of people that had been mostly in discovery in their scientific careers. So there were benefits everywhere. But the biggest benefit was to projects. Because the project timelines are historically slowed down, often because of safety issues, which you know you can expect. That got reduced across multiple teams in a variety of ways over a couple, three years when I was able to talk to them and observe. So qualitatively and anecdotally they shared that.
It also played out in the timelines that we had some quality quantitative data to look at. So that was one of the things I’m really proud of and something that I think you can take into account that there were differences. There was diversity there across disciplines.
They were all trying to achieve the same goal because they all work for the same company that wants to get the drugs approved that patients need.
They just weren’t on the same page on how interdependent they were, and that if they included each other — if they were open to being influenced by each other — that they would have the ability to really do great work in ways that they couldn’t have expected before they embarked on this one.
What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees to thrive?
The biggest way to help your employees thrive is listening to them. To ask them, “What is enabling you to do your best work to make your best contribution?”
What can you do more, what can you do less of, what can you do differently with them — ask them that, and don’t just ask them once. Because those things change. If we can say anything about COVID — the way people were feeling at the beginning of COVID, the way they were feeling six months in, a year in, 18 months and even until today — how they’re feeling about the pandemic and all the things that have happened in between, including the deaths and dehumanization of people of color. Those things matter, and you have to ask people where they are. You need to do it regularly, and you need to do it with care.
When you do it right, you’re doing it with an openness. You’re making it safe for people to share, and you’re doing all you can to constantly build trust. So that’s an acronym: Care, Openness, Sharing, Trust. That’s the “COST of Inclusion.”
If you don’t listen, if you don’t ask people what will help them thrive. If you don’t care, if you’re not open, if you don’t think about their safety — psychological and otherwise — where your teams and some individuals are concerned, you’re not going to have trust.
So those things go hand in hand and then they’re bigger than just Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. They are critical to any organization, to any team, any leader that is committed to leadership. Those things are all costs that they would gladly pay if they really understood how to give their people what they need to thrive.
What advice would you give to other business leaders about how to manage a large team?
Large or small, I want to give people direction.
I don’t want to give it to them unilaterally. I want to say, “Here’s where we’re going.” So there is some vision to that. But it’s not a vision where I just kind of sat around and I’m the visionary and I’m going to tell you this. It’s an active vision that says, “Hey, here’s what we’re seeing, here’s what some of our clients are saying, here’s what is in alignment with who we are values-wise.” And start pointing in the right direction and leave it open from the outset. There will be times that there are some non-negotiables.
But for the most part if you’re going to do something that’s going to influence somebody, you want them to be involved in it. People commit to what they help to create. The more you can get people in a space where they can help you create something, the more that they can own it and say “Hey, based on what I know, this is not going to take two weeks. This should take me like two or three days.”
On the flip side, saying, “Hey look, I know we have this timeline that’s aggressive. But if we have to do this, we’re not going to get the return on it that we want, so we need to push back at least a little bit, as much as we can, to make sure we really thoroughly vet this.
I think that’s the biggest thing. Give people good direction, and then let them fly and let them make mistakes, and let them come back. Let them iterate with you. Let them ask you as many questions as they need to.
And know that you’re not going to be the only one with the answers. If they come to you with questions, you can say “Here’s how it occurs to me,” and they need to also go to other trusted people who are influential in their organization, people who are influenced by the work that’s being done, or who just have great insights based on their expertise or their experience.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this 🙂
I love Dave Chappelle even through all this controversy. I love Denzel Washington. I love the work of Jordan Peele, as a director. I’m a big fan of so many literary artists. I like Tracy Chapman. I just feel like she would be quite interesting. She just seems like she’s really deep and insightful.
I’d love to have breakfast with Alice Walker. I can think of quite a few people.
But one of the ones who keeps coming to mind is George W. Bush. There’s always been something about him. I didn’t always agree politically with him. But just as a person, I think he’s seen so much. And I think he has a level of compassion and a perspective that I think would be really one that I would get a lot out of.
I saw his dad speak years ago and his dad was a master storyteller. I think we’re in Palm Springs.
And he just told some amazing stories when I heard him speak. I imagine W’s similar so it’s just an ironic feat. I know it’s not a political statement, even though I grew up with a mother that’s Republican. But I would love to have a coffee, breakfast, or lunch with him. I think he would be quite interesting and have some great things to share.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Please find us at inclusionwins.com. Here are links to pre-order my book, Reconstructing Inclusion: Making DEI Accessible, Actionable, and Sustainable. The release date is October 4.
https://benbellabooks.com/shop/reconstructing-inclusion/
https://www.amazon.com/author/amrijohnson
Thank you for these excellent insights. We wish you continued success in your great work.
Amri Johnson Of Inclusion Wins On How Diversity Can Increase a Company’s Bottom Line was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
