Joe Gerstandt | keynote speaker, freedom fighter, freak-flag flier

I consistently see organizations with unnecessary barriers slowing their D&I efforts down or blocking them altogether. Want to move forward? Here are six opportunities to consider. I will unpack each of these further in following posts: Clarify your foundational language and logic. This is the dead horse that I will apparently continue beating for the   [Read More…]

  I no longer remember where I first came across it, but I have kept some version of the above image in my journal for many years now. It is one of the lenses I apply to clarify my own thinking around what exactly I am doing and whether or not I am focusing my   [Read More…]

Over the past year or so, I have had a number of conversations with female colleagues that work in and around the HR space regarding sexual harassment. It should not have surprised me, but it did, that so many of them had personally experienced harassment, that so many of them had experienced it numerous time,   [Read More…]

I benefit from a tremendous amount of privilege. I have, throughout my life, received the benefit of the doubt, from people, organizations, and institutions, including when I did not deserve it. When you are on the advantaged side of things, privilege is a terribly easy thing to not see. Two things seem to come quickly   [Read More…]

I have written here frequently and recently about the importance of getting crystal clear on what inclusion means in your organization. One of the big reasons this is so important is that it makes it much easier to then identify specific behaviors and practices that comprise an inclusive employee experience. This in turn makes it   [Read More…]

I am skeptical. I am not skeptical that it is true that human beings are your organization’s most valuable asset. I personally have little doubt that it is true — rather I am skeptical that you actually believe it, and here is why. If you and the rest of your organization truly believed that, I   [Read More…]

Last week I wrote about picking specific chunks of the workflow in your organization to focus your inclusion efforts on as an alternative to the easily overwhelming goal of culture change. I then wrote about and shared some ideas of how we might do that with meetings. Today I am going to get even more   [Read More…]

The first mistake, the most common mistake, and possibly the most limiting mistake that organizations make in the name of inclusion is failing to clarify their objective. They get all revved up in pursuit of a vague, ambiguous target only to find themselves confused, exhausted, and struggling to show progress a year or two down   [Read More…]

In my last post, I talked about focusing your inclusion efforts on a specific aspect of your culture or work experience. One of my favorite early targets for intervention is meetings. Meetings are an aspect of work that often touch all or nearly all employees. They are also commonly not very intentional, not very inclusive,   [Read More…]

Far too many organizations bite off more than they can chew in trying to make their culture more inclusive. They make some proclamations, bring in some training, and then… hmmm, what do we do now? Is anything changing? What was the objective again? Culture change requires a lot of resources, a lot of patience, persistence,   [Read More…]