Episode 5: Geoffrey Canada on understanding your employees’ lived experiences

The big question: How can leaders better understand their employees’ lived experiences to effectively support career mobility?

Geoffrey Canada, President of Harlem Children’s Zone, put it best: “Good dental care doesn't make you a good student, but if your tooth hurts, it's hard to be a good student.”

Recruitment and retention is a topic on every leader's mind, but the question isn't actually about just recruiting and retaining top talent. Clearing obstacles plays a critical role when it comes effectively opening access and creating a culture of opportunity in the workplace.

In this episode of Opportunity Divide, Geoffrey Canada joins Guild CEO Rachel Romer and best-selling author Adam Grant for an important conversation on how leaders can successfully support employees’ goals and drive mobility outcomes, including:

• How taking the time to listen and understand employees’ lived experiences can drive real impact
• Ways leaders can clear obstacles and build better pathways to support career mobility
• Why uncovering actual challenges - rather than perceived challenges - is key to achieving positive employee outcomes

Listen now and subscribe below to get the latest on Opportunity Divide episodes.

“I don’t want to pretend everybody has the talent, right?  But talent … is equally distributed.  If you can find 15% of great talent in middle class communities, we will find those same numbers in the Harlems of this country. What we are going to have to do is first seek that talent out.”

Geoffrey Canada, President of Harlem Children’s Zone and founder of William Julius Wilson Institute

Meet the guests

Geoffrey Canada

President of Harlem Children’s Zone and founder of William Julius Wilson Institute

Geoffrey Canada is the president of Harlem Children’s Zone​ (HCZ), a world-renowned education and poverty-fighting organization based in New York City, and founder of William Julius Wilson Institute (WJWI)​. An innovator in the field of education, author, and leading advocate for children, Canada has made it his life’s mission to help young people from under-resourced communities succeed through education.

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Rachel Romer

Guild CEO

Rachel Romer is Guild’s CEO — a Public Benefit Corporation that provides employees of America’s largest companies access to education, skilling, and career mobility through their employers without paying for tuition or career services on their own.

LinkedIn

Adam Grant

NYT Best-Selling Author of Think Again

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and bestselling author who explores the science of motivation, generosity, original thinking, and rethinking. ​He is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 5 books that have sold millions of copies and been translated into 45 languages: Think Again, Give and Take, Originals, Option B, and Power Moves.

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Podcast transcript: Geoffrey Canada, Rachel Romer and Adam Grant

Rachel Romer [00:00:00]:

How can leaders better understand their employees lived experiences? And how can we strengthen talent, pipelines and cultures of opportunities in the workforce with that understanding?

Geoffrey Canada [00:00:11]:

I don't want to pretend everybody has the talent, right? But talent, as you said, is equally distributed. If you can find 15% of great talent in middle class communities, we will find those same numbers in the Harlems of this country. What we are going to have to do is first seek that talent out.

Rachel Romer [00:00:32]:

Recruitment and retention is a topic on every leader's mind. But maybe the question isn't actually about just recruiting and retaining tap talent. Maybe it's about creating a better understanding of how an employee's lived experiences affect their lives, their work, their capacity. Geoffrey Canada knows this firsthand. He is the president of Harlem Children's Zone, a world renowned education and poverty fighting organization based in New York City, and he's the founder of the William Julius Wilson Institute. Geoffrey is an innovator in the field of education, an author, and a leading advocate for children who's made his life's mission to help young people from under-resourced communities succeed through education and all of the services that wrap around to fight poverty. To realize his vision, Geoff launched HCC, or Harlem Children's Zone, a comprehensive cradle to career network of programs that The New York Times called one of the most ambitious social policy experiments of our time. Starting as a one block pilot project in the 1990s, Harlem Children's Zone today serves more than 34,000 students and families living in a 97 block area of Central Harlem in New York City. Geoff knows how the community you come from can impact the way you advance through life and through work.

Adam Grant [00:01:52]:

Geoff, one of the things that's incredible about the work you've done is you've highlighted what leaders face all the time, which are knowing, doing gaps. We already have the information we need, but acting on that information is hard. How did you begin closing that gap once the data were staring in your face?

Geoffrey Canada [00:02:09]:

So, Adam, if folks came to my office, I would have a map of Manhattan. And this map was produced by someone who charted the incarceration rates in neighborhoods and communities. And if you were in jail, you got a red dot. If you looked at my zone, there were just blocks and blocks of just pure red. They weren't dots. The whole place was just sending kids into jails and prisons. At the time when I began to talk to wealthy folks about the investment necessary, which was going to be about $2,700-2,800 a year on top of their education costs, as they began to explain to me we couldn't afford it as a nation, I would point to that map and show those same kids and now this is 15 years ago, those same kids, we were paying $65,000 a year. Once those kids went into jail. I'm going to tell you a number right now, Adam. It's going to be hard to believe, but you look at New York City to incarcerate one person for a year in New York City, over $500,000 a year, it seems incredible. And if you think that we have decided we can't afford to do that in new work city, you are 100% mistaken. Some kids are worth more to the industries if these kids failed and if we saved them. And I have challenged this country to rethink the sort of lack of investment that we're willing to make in some children in some places while we do these poor investments in other areas. So it took a while. You can imagine I was yelling and screaming at this for a long time, saying, if you invest with me, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you an educated kid who's going to go to college and get a job and pay his taxes and take care of his family. If you don't, that kid's going to end up in jail. You're going to ruin his chances for getting a career, for supporting his family, for becoming a good citizen. I just think it's a foolish investment strategy that we've had in this country in some places.

Adam Grant [00:04:24]:

One thing that I really love about the way you communicated that is you didn't just highlight the benefits of investing, you also emphasized the cost of not investing. Here are the bad things that are going to happen if we don't pursue this opportunity, which psychologically is often more motivating when it comes to saying, all right, I'll gamble on something new because I don't want to be stuck with the status quo.

Rachel Romer [00:04:46]:

One of the biggest fallacies we run into at Guild all the time is the subconscious or sometimes conscious belief that talent is concentrated. We have so much data and so much research to show that talent is equally distributed across not only the US. And our communities, but the world. What have you done, especially as a nonprofit, that's having to appeal to donors and communities? And in our world we're trying to change the minds of HR leaders. How have you helped people better understand how well distributed talent is in communities like Harlem?

Geoffrey Canada [00:05:23]:

So let me tell you what happens if you don't have the belief that you just expressed that talent is equally distributed. So when we started the zone, we needed people with pretty significant managerial experience because we were scaling. And so you might be great delivering a program, but now you were going to be managing people. We knew that if our employees got the training and the support and the encouragement and somebody helped them unlock the secret codes of management, the do's and the don'ts of interacting and the way you approach folks and the way you meet people and talk to folks and understood how to support areas that they struggled in, saying that you just need some additional help and support. But you can master this. If we had not believed that we would be doing what a lot of employers do importing people from out of Harlem to come into our community to work instead of building the kind of competencies and talented leaders. Now, look, I don't want to pretend everybody has the talent, right? But talent, as you said, is equally distributed. And if you can find 15% of great talent in middle class communities, followed by 70% of what we consider average talent and 15% of what we might consider challenged talent, we will find those same numbers in the Harlems of this country. What we are going to have to do is first seek that talent out. Encourage, and I want to say this, work again, encourage, because a lot of folks have been getting reskilling signals. You don't have the right stuff, right? They received it in school. They received it if they went to college. We need to say, no. You simply need a new set of skills because you have demonstrated your leadership and your management in lots of ways that sometimes gets discounted. And we found folks who are managing their lives, their grandparents lives, their cousin's lives, all at the same time working, holding down a job, and they've got three kids. I'm like, you got that's it. I don't know many managers who are doing more than that. We need to simply take that energy, that determination, that focus, and teach you a new set of skills that will help you in an employment opportunity. Now, look, I know businesses sometimes believe we're not in the business of training folks and supporting. So my theory is fine. But you cannot avoid the fact that when you look around your firms, if you don't see an equal distribution of talent based on America, and America is this melting pot and you ought to be able to find black and brown and white and male and female, you ought to be able to find that whole rainbow. And if it's not the case, then you're not doing your job. And in my opinion and I'm going to say this, and I'm not being glib, in my opinion, you're not being a good American. Because in the end, for this country to really live up to all of those founding principles, we have to make sure there's equal opportunity for everybody. And we can admit jobs are critical if we're going to make sure that people have a perspective on life that is healthy when they are missing jobs. People like me have to come in and try and clean up all of the crisis that happens when people can't take care of their family. So when I say to be a good American, I mean it is critical if you want to reduce substance abuse, child abuse, domestic abuse, get people high paying jobs, and you will see all of those issues become reduced.

Rachel Romer [00:09:33]:

Adam I've got to imagine, you know, a lot of the tangential research around the dignity of work, given what you study. So I'm I'm curious to hear what you think.

Adam Grant [00:09:43]:

What I'm reminded of immediately is another sociologist, actually a Parivam Conan schooler, who showed that when people are in repressive jobs where they don't have a lot of respect and freedom and control, they not only suffer at work, they also become more authoritarian parents at home. And what they're trying to do, sadly, in those situations is basically reclaim the control they're missing at work in their homes. And then that creates a cycle of challenges for the next generation that they raise. And so I guess for me, Geoff, I would just take your argument further and say not only do we deprive people of opportunity when we don't give them meaningful work, we also do lasting damage to their children.

Geoffrey Canada [00:10:23]:

I couldn't agree with you more. Most of my work that I do is the impact on children of families who have seen their opportunities vanish. When you become hopeless, when you don't see there's a future for you, it's really, really hard to stay a good parent because you just keep running into these signals from the world that says you're not worth it. You're not who we built this country for. We really don't care about you and the struggles you're going through. And that has an impact on families, which is really quite devastating.

Rachel Romer [00:11:05]:

Jeff, you connected something earlier that you just hit on there too as well, about giving folks pathways to leadership and to more than just a job, but a career. And one thing I work about when I look at the last 50 years of building corporations is we got in that habit that you called importing talent. The rank and file were going to work from the community and we were going to get college grads to manage them. And it feels like we copied that a bit off the military of a bit of an officer soldier model. And as far as I can tell, it didn't work. You've done this fabulous job of building your leaders from within. What do you do differently? And what would you encourage these companies to do differently when they're promoting from within building management talent, building leaders from the communities they serve.

Geoffrey Canada [00:11:52]:

You have to know who your employees are. This is sometimes more complicated than one might think because all of us put up walls and we all have presumptions about who the other folks are. So if you're in a situation where you're not quite sure if you're welcome because you're a person of color or you're gay or lesbian or something, you're liable not to show who you really are to people. You might be more reserved because you don't want folks to judge you or maybe even to know you. And I find that a lot of times what people are reacting to is a sense of familiarity, which sometimes can be very culturally biased. Here's one of the most controversial things we begin to do. I said to my team, so now I'm talking about our schools, that 80% of an employee's benefit, salary bonus raises had to be on demonstrated performance. You could bring 20% of your own baggage to that and you would be amazed at how hard people struggled with this, because in the end, they would want to promote folks who I could just look at the data and say, this person was not performing. And when you asked why the person who was performing wasn't really getting the same opportunity, you heard this sort of soft. It wasn't bigotry because these weren't just black and white folks, but you could just tell that this person did not feel comfortable for reasons that often were not clear to me with this other employee. And this is within the same race, so we're not even throwing race into this when that comfort could even be more challenging. Sometimes it's based on one word. I asked them a question and they used a term. So you're going to hold that against that person forever? You're going to decide that person's from the street, and therefore you can't invest in them because that person used a phrase that maybe they thought was comfortable everywhere else, but you felt it didn't fit into your culture. So I think we're human. We all have human nature. As folks who care about this issue. I think we just have to keep pushing folks to make sure folks have an opportunity to learn the skills and to some degree to say, and if you don't see any diversity, that's your fault that you haven't done your job, because that's not America and it's not going to be good business sense. Anyone who's dealing with business that they know, it's a big country and a big world out there, and having diverse sets of experiences will help you navigate that for real.

Rachel Romer [00:15:10]:

It's so interesting to think about how many layers of systems sit under all those biases and how we counter them. Adam, I'd be curious if there was one thing you could do to counter bias in promoting processes, what's the top thing you recommend?

Adam Grant [00:15:27]:

Adam I think the fundamental challenge, Geoff, that you're describing is we have prototypes of leaders, and those prototypes are often biased by who we've seen lead in the past. And so predominantly that's a white man who usually comes from an upper class background or something that's substituted for that background if he didn't have it. And so when people don't match the prototype, we then look for excuses not to promote them either explicitly or implicitly. And I think that we've got to shatter the prototypes. We want to do this when it comes to gender and race and sexual orientation and every other dimension of diversity that's relevant here. But I think more important than that even, is to give people models of what effective leadership looks like. That shatter the prototypes. So we see this, for example, a lot with women. There's a study, actually, by Alan Benson and colleagues which shows that on average, women got higher performance ratings than men, but the men were more likely to be promoted because they were judged as higher potential, even though the women who did get promoted outperformed the men. And when I see data like that, I immediately want to ask, okay, what about potential? Is not being captured under your performance ratings? And why isn't it part of performance? Or why are you putting so much weight on your potential ratings when in fact, performance in many cases is a better predictor of where people are going to land? We should be looking at leadership as a set of skills and a set of values. And assessing whether people have those skills and values is part of the promotion process, but developing them before they get to that assessment is a bigger part.

Geoffrey Canada [00:17:10]:

Well, I just couldn't agree with you more, Adam, in particular, about developing those sets of skills. There was a time when there was no alternative for the human brain when it came to certain kinds of skills and functions and other things, those days are over. With technology, there are so many skills that we no longer have to possess internally as long as we know how to find them externally in as quick a moment, in fact, faster than if we were trying to figure it out ourselves. And yet we're still holding those old skills against folks today. I think we're still acting with the same kind of belief systems where if we got people and they had access and they had basic training, the skills that they could master really are really quite incomprehensible. And part of the problem, Adam, is that the managers are not aware of how these sort of new skills could change the workplace and even a playing field. They're still using the old measurements. You sit down without any aid, without any help at all, and I want you to be able to do all of this out of your brain. That's not even reality for anybody anymore. And I think if you were not in that cohort that was trained in that way, then that's being held against you, even though it's totally unnecessary in today's technological environment.

Adam Grant [00:18:51]:

Yes. I mean, this also goes back to a point that you were speaking to earlier. It's remarkable to me how much tacit knowledge and how many particularly soft skills are vital for people to advance but are just not taught. I'm thinking, for example, of a Stern and Westfall study. This is a study of how do some people land seats on boards of directors in companies? So breaking into the very upper echelon of organizations. And it turns out that one of the predictors is using what are called stealthy or sophisticated influence tactics. So instead of standard ingratiation, where I just walk up to Rachel and flatter her. I compliment her to Jeff, knowing it's going to get back to her, but that she's not going to know that I was trying to flatter her. That's a technique, right? That, it turns out, is effective in landing you a board seat or a promotion. And guess who knows those techniques? People with fancy pedigrees who were taught those skills or got to watch someone use those skills. If we taught those, it would become much easier than to acquire whatever other skills are necessary to rise up an organization, and we don't. So, Rachel, you're going to fix this, right?

Rachel Romer [00:20:03]:

I mean, working on it, that's actually the perfect transition to the thing I wanted to ask Jeff about. Jeff one of the things I love most, and I think, you know, I read whatever it takes a long time ago and became obsessed with the Harlem Children's Zone, first and foremost, because the wraparound service model. But the idea that what happens in the classroom is just one ingredient resonated so deeply with me because I was a community college advisor at the time, and we were trying to scaffold basically, on the premise that what was happening in those community college classrooms simply wasn't sufficient to get people good jobs. It wasn't working. We're constantly now trying to convince employers of the same thing. Handing their low income employees a MOOC or an online piece of content with no instruction, no mentorship, no tutoring, no classmates, no projects, ain't going to do it. How have you convinced people of the value of wraparound services and these experiences that teach those tacit and soft skills that Adam's highlighting?

Geoffrey Canada [00:21:05]:

Yeah. It's hard for folk, I think, who have not experienced the challenges of growing up without financial resources in this country. What people really face. It is hard for people to understand the sacrifices folks often have to make in order to hold down a job, much less invest even more emotional and psychic energy and trying to learn a new set of skills. When we talk about wraparound services, it suggests, you know, your customer, so in this case, your employees, you actually have some understanding of what it means. I cannot tell you the number of tech jobs in the big companies. And as soon as I went in there, you know what they started bragging about? Their childcare centers. Oh, yeah, we got great childcare centers. I understand why, because where I come from, you can't find any childcare. And if you can't, how are you going to manage someone asking you to work late? Can you work a weekend? These are sacrifices that people are making. And sometimes the answer is, I won't take the job. I can't do that. We try to think about wraparound services is what are the key variables that are interfering with the development of this person and which of them can I have an impact on? Not all of them, but if there are things that actually interfere with you getting an education or continuing with your education. And often it's not $20,000, it's $100. And I know somebody you can call that can actually help you with this. That, to me, is the key to supporting folks and giving them both the support, the skills, and sometimes the time to get to the next rung in terms of the employment.

Rachel Romer [00:23:10]:

We have spent so much time convincing employers to stop funding so many MBAs and we could say all the right things about why that was the right thing to do. But then we showed them the data, which is that the ROI on funding that next master's degree, those next leadership programs, those MBAs, was actually flat to negative. Whereas the ROI of teaching one course, one high school completion program, one English as a Second Language, one bachelor's degree for their frontline workforce was exponentially higher on a per dollar basis. And it turned the CFOs into our fans. But it took a lot of years to get anyone to even look at the data with us.

Geoffrey Canada [00:23:51]:

It seems so counterintuitive to folks because this is one of the things that I believe happens. You believe that what you did before was critical to what you have to do moving forward, and you don't really stop to think, what I was doing before, maybe it was only 70% or maybe only 60%, or maybe only 50. We are so worried that if we start tinkering around, something is going to break that we sometimes ignore the facts. We ignore what reality says to us. Like, of course getting an MBA is going to be great for my company. Maybe the facts doesn't point that out. And when you show people the facts, unfortunately, I know, because it's human. Only good thing about being a psych major. I know the first thing people are going to try and figure out is what's wrong with those numbers? I know you give me bad numbers somewhere. No, that's not my company. There's time to be something wrong with those numbers because we want to hold on to this set of beliefs instead of looking at that data and saying, hey, you know what? This is a much smarter investment for this company to make. If we invest in these frontline workers and give them some skill up so that they can get these next series of jobs that we won't have to advertise for and train people for and do all the things that cost us a whole bunch of money that we wouldn't necessarily have to spend.

Adam Grant [00:25:19]:

Well, I feel a responsibility to say, as the person who's been teaching MBA students for almost two decades, that I wholeheartedly agree with everything that's been said, to the point that if somebody is considering getting an MBA, they have career prospects that will allow them to pay for their own degree over time. We don't need the employer to step in. It's always seemed like such a clear moral case that societally, we should be investing in the people who have the least opportunity. I think, Rachel, you've made the business case for it, and, Geoff, you've proven it through your work. I think that one of the things that I've really learned, Geoff, from your work, and I know this has been a big theme for Rachel as well, is that clearing out obstacles is a really important part of opportunity.

Rachel Romer [00:26:04]:

Geoff, one of my favorite quotes of yours is this good dental care doesn't make you a good student, but if your tooth hurts, it's hard to be a good student. Knowing that we're in this really critical moment of debating, what role should the private sector play, what role should the public sector and the nonprofit groups that you've funded play in the social safety net? Jeff, where do you stand on that today, and what do you think are those critical investments we need to make that aren't in the classroom, aren't on the job, but wrap around people's lives? And who should be making those investments?

Geoffrey Canada [00:26:40]:

Rachel, let me tell you the area I am the most concerned about in this country when it comes to most citizens, but in particular the most vulnerable citizens. And it is the toxic stress that our families and children are facing. You cannot go a day in this country without hearing of mass murders. I just had an advancement here. I'm at our school, and they're using cold announcements, and all of us are thinking, oh, my God, is this the moment? Oh, that's in a medical emergency, okay, that's different than the other, because we have to practice and train for a stranger to come in and intentionally want to kill students and teachers. This is happening all over America. We are living with this. You put this on top of the trauma that folks have gone through from COVID the trauma that folks are going through right now, because the marginal ability to keep a roof over your head seems to be disappearing in this country, and you're just going to have a mental health meltdown in America. It is going to happen at every level, but in particular, the most vulnerable families are going to be the ones who I think suffer the most. So for me, my number one focus is we've got to do something to support the mental health aspects of what's going on. But this mental health issue, it's serious, it's real. We see it all over. Here's the other thing that I think is absolutely critical. We need to make sure that we can provide the basic educational services and supports that children need, and that is broadband for everybody that are devices that are able to function at home, at school, and in the workplace. These are essential tools for living, and everyone should have equal access. But here's the other part that I really worry about. Equal access without equal training. And support is not going to produce a level playing field. So I think these are areas as a nation that we're going to have to tackle.

Adam Grant [00:29:03]:

Well, I know where we should start. I think we need leaders in every sector to spend more time listening to and learning from Geoff Canada.

Rachel Romer [00:29:11]:

Right. The conversation we had today with Geoff really brought home the magnitude and the power of the inadvertent trade offs we make in our society every day. Thinking about that cost, he said to educate a kid out of Harlem versus the $500,000 to fund their spot in a New York jail is so striking and simple and powerful, and yet we constantly fall into academic and behavioral fallacies that convince us that we should treat the investment in humans as a cost center. And it just today felt like a powerful, powerful, but simple wake up call that if we keep doing this in schools, in work, in higher education, in pre K, in all the elements of our society, we're going to keep getting the same result. But if we talk about the quantifiable measurement of investing in someone versus caring for them after we fail to invest in them, there's so much to do there. We rely on them, but can they rely on us? I'm Rachel Roemer. We'd love if you'd join us to continue these important conversations. To do so, click the link in the show notes next time.

Adam Grant [00:30:41]:

You have to make that kind of investment before you can create a level playing field. And I think it's that lack of patience in talents, discovery mechanism that is one of their principal failings.

Rachel Romer [00:30:54]:

You'll hear from bestselling author and speaker Malcolm Gladwell as we pose the question, how can you unlock the potential of those you lead? And while that's the crux of the conversation, you'll also hear a story he's never shared before.

Adam Grant [00:31:09]:

Why have you been keeping this secret from me all the time? We've been friends. What do you mean? You were goodwill hunting, Malcolm. No, I was trying to make some money.