An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
You must create an internal inclusive system that allows for you to fully leverage the diversity you’ve bought in.
— Creating a culture of inclusion allows for you to fully tap into and leverage the strengths, perspectives, and lived experiences of a diverse broad range of stakeholders that represent not just your employees, but the people that you’re trying to sell to. Increasing diversity allows for better ideation, creation and development of tools, resources, and products. A more diverse internal team allows for an organization to see their products, tools, and resources through a lens that may not be reflected in the lived experience or perspectives around the table.
As a part of our series about “How Diversity Can Increase a Company’s Bottom Line”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chanin Kelly-Rae.
Chanin Kelly-Rae is the Founder and CEO of Chanin Kelly-Rae Consulting, a Diversity Management firm that specializes in Organizational Equity Needs Assessments & Strategic Planning, Meeting Facilitation, Training and Learning Experiences, Policy Development, Speaking and Executive Coaching.
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?
Since 2001, I have been helping leaders and stakeholders deliver on their commitment to maintain diverse, inclusive, and equitable spaces. The goal is to identify the divide between leadership intent versus decision making impact and find solutions where people feel trusted, valued, and respected. Today, as a Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) practitioner with more than 20 years of experience, I have always kept service and philanthropy as a way of life thanks to my enterprising parents who taught me the value of bringing everyone to the table.
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 take away you took out of that story?
When I do my trainings, I try to make cultural connections and connect people to what it is we’re talking about from their personal lives. Sometimes you can assume that everybody in the room, especially in a corporate environment, is a certain age. Recently, I was trying to connect an audience with The Wizard of Oz and something as innocuous as McDonald’s. I asked everybody in the virtual training about whether or not they had ever got breakfast at McDonald’s. I specifically asked, ‘Have you ever gone to McDonalds either in the 1980s or 90s to purchase breakfast at 11 o’clock in the afternoon?‘ This young man looked at me puzzled and said,”Oh I’ve never bought anything in McDonald’s in the 80s or 90s.” When I asked him why, he said he was only born in 2000. I just clutched my virtual pearls. I learned you cant assume how old somebody is because they may be younger than you assume and therefore they cant connect with whatever cultural reference that you’re making.
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?
“Build Nothing for Them, Without Them” is my guiding philosophy when bridging gaps and conducting life changing work in organizations across the world. I believe that you must bring everyone to the table to find out what is needed. The people you are trying to help must be part of the process.
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?
Sara Gersten-Rothenberg and Betsy Daniels, Co-Presidents of Triangle Associates of Seattle. They were very early clients of mine who wanted to do equity work in their organizations. I worked with them to redesign how they would engage in business through an equity lens. They decided as part of their journey that it was important for them to be able to model the values they said were important to them and part of that meant they needed to positively impact the experiences and outcomes of minority led businesses. As a result of that commitment, they have always made their offices available to me at no charge. They have even offered me office space in downtown Seattle. Today, they continue to support my business by retaining me for projects.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Everybody else does this work in a way that is very formulaic. I approach every client in the same way that I approach every individual. I look at who is in front of me, so it is very much an individualized tailored approach to the way that I work with my clients.
Are you working on any new or exciting projects now?
Yes! Currently, I am building roadmaps for success across the most populous part of the Puget Sound region, a coastal area of the Pacific Northwest in Washington state. I have a hand in half a dozen cities, our largest cities, where I’m working with them to build their own, more equitable, practices across the communities. This work is currently creating an environment that allows for municipalities that have always functioned as silos to now see themselves as a collective and collaborative part of a greater geographic regional work. They are all working on the same challenges and opportunities at the same time through their own particular vision or lens. They’re working on the successful outcomes of an entire geographic region, and not just the cities where they serve.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
When it comes to social justice, pay equity issues, and creating opportunities, my company is approaching the workforce in the same way that I’m hoping others do so. I’m very much against the idea that someone could work full time but be bankrupted by going to the doctor. So, my company provides 100% employer paid medical, dental, and vision benefits for both my employees and their dependents. I make sure that the company I created and lead works for all of us, not just myself.
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. (Please share a story or example for each.)
- Having a workforce that reflects the community will increase the bottom line. When people are spending their dollars, they want to know that a company is thinking about the full health (well being) of every community. For example, they want to know things like, “Does this company provide jobs? Does this company value my community?” It’s not likely that a community will spend their money with an organization that doesn’t spend their money on them. Customers today are demanding to see themselves reflected in the organizations where they’re going to spend money. People want to see that you’re investing in their community because you’re willing to hire people that look like them. If companies are increasing diverse representation, they are bringing different voices around the table which directly influences the company internally and externally.
- You must create an internal inclusive system that allows for you to fully leverage the diversity you’ve bought in. Creating a culture of inclusion allows for you to fully tap into and leverage the strengths, perspectives, and lived experiences of a diverse broad range of stakeholders that represent not just your employees, but the people that you’re trying to sell to. Increasing diversity allows for better ideation, creation and development of tools, resources, and products. A more diverse internal team allows for an organization to see their products, tools, and resources through a lens that may not be reflected in the lived experience or perspectives around the table.
- Research and Development (R&D). The more diverse your workforce, the stronger it makes your capacity to build, research and develop the tools, services, and products to meet customer needs. By creating a diverse space, it empowers the people that are tasked with developing products or services to meet customer needs. You can meet your customer base where they are as well as develop better relationships for the future.
- Messaging, Engagement and Communication. A diverse workplace helps you better communicate internally and externally. It creates pathways for an organization to meet customer base today and tomorrow and helps you better communicate across global, diverse communities. An organization that demonstrates the best practices of inclusion figure out quickly, how to structure communication, decision making and decide how to structure engagement so that they are able to fully utilize the strengths of the diverse talent that they brought around the table. An effective diverse organization that experiences a culture of inclusion is able to connect, communicate and then replicate that same culture of inclusion, not just for their colleagues, but for the customers or communities where that organization is present.
- Future Markets. Diversity helps better reach customers and expand market share through increased marketability. Systems self replicate. A diverse team allows for an organization to understand some of those things are missing in the market, so they see opportunities to build and develop for customers, not just today but the people who will become their customers later. For example, when you look at the landscape of makeup from the days of Max factor, they only offered a few shades to meet the needs of a very specific target audience. It did not meet the needs across gender or different skin tones, it was kind of a one size fits all.
But they quickly had to see and understand that in order to meet people where they are, you have to sometimes develop things that you’ve not been done before. Today, we now have makeup lines, like FENTY that is being produced to represent the full tapestry of the human rainbow with more than 40 different shades of makeup foundations.
What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?
I would say they have to be plugged in to their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. DEI is not something they can pass off to someone else. CEO’s are the first and last voice in the company to set the values and tone. If DEI matters to them, they must model it and hold everybody who looks up to them accountable and be willing to act when people are not creating an environment that is in line with the company’s DEI measurements. CEO’s must be directly plugged in with their company and be willing to make immediate change when people are not delivering or moving the needle.
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 🙂
Kenneth Chenault — former CEO of American Express. I would want to talk to him about leading organizations through change centered around their company’s core values.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
WEBSITE: WWW.CHANINKELLYRAE.COM
IG: https://www.instagram.com/ckrconsulting/
LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chanin-kelly-rae-she-her-hers-a8545b8/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/chaninkellyraeconsulting
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/CkrFirm
Thank you for these excellent insights. We wish you continued success in your great work.
Chanin Kelly-Rae of Chanin Kelly-Rae Consulting: 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.
