Speaking and Communicating Podcast

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Now let's get communicating.

Let's get communicating with Dr.

Frank Douglas, hailing all the way from New York.

He is here to talk to us about not only his illustrious career in the healthcare sector, but the work he does with DE&I workplace culture and helping leaders to help their teams deal with stress and anxiety.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Dr.

Douglas.

Hi, how are you?

Thanks for the invitation.

My pleasure.

I'm doing fantastic.

Thank you for being here.

Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, I was born in what was British Ghana, Guyana, South America.

Came to America in 1963.

It's noteworthy because I arrived in America on the 20th of August, about eight days before Dr.

Martin Luther King's memorable march on Washington.

Why that is memorable for me is that I came on a Fulbright Scholarship and I was on an orientation program for the Fulbright Fellows and Scholars at Yale University.

And three days into this orientation program, I experienced what I later learned that Dr.

King had said during his speech, namely being judged by the color of my skin rather than the content of my character.

So that was my first interaction with discrimination in America.

It was a bit of a jolt to me, but I became unfortunately quite familiar with discrimination in America in college, in graduate school, in academia, as well as in the pharmacy industry.

I'm very fortunate that I learned in a way how to deal with these episodes.

I struggled initially, but finally learned how to deal with them.

And that's one of the things I am now working hard to share with others.

Right.

I'm not familiar with the country, Goyana, but I grew up in apartheid South Africa.

It ended when I was 18, so you could practically say I was a grownup by then.

So when you first came to America, are you saying that was your first experience of discrimination?

Well, you know, we had discrimination at home, the lighter complexion blacks tended to get more opportunities, particularly for civil service, governmental jobs.

But one was never treated, you know, as though one didn't have dignity.

You know, I came from a very poor background.

As I tell people, I never realized that I was really poor until I came to America, because no one ever treated me as though I didn't have value.

It was a different thing.

You know, we understood that, yes, the white colonizers, you know, they were at the top of the heap, but they were very few in Guyana.

The lighter complexion blacks tended to have, particularly in the workplaces I mentioned, government civil service type jobs, tended to have a preference.

But education was really the discriminating thing, if you like.

And if one had done well at the various examinations, one basically had entry of various jobs and various opportunities.

I always find that interesting when I hear African Americans here, some of my friends, and they say that's also prevalent in the community, that the lighter skinned you are, the better the opportunities.

Because back home, we used to say, and I have a cousin who's so light skinned.

And we used to say, apartheid treated us the same.

What's the big deal?

So we don't put the lighter skinned one over the others.

We were all the same.

Basically, you're all black, the system says.

It makes no difference.

That's been a different experience for us in that regard.

So why did you decide to enter the health care industry after you graduated?

It was actually by accident.

And if I may tell the story that was the initiator.

After I completed my Ph.D.

in physical chemistry, I had a job at C-Rocks.

And for three months, I could not get a meaningful project.

And then one day, a white young man joined the group.

And within a week, he was placed on the most attractive project that we had in research and development at that time.

I went to have a discussion with my manager.

He was telling me the usual.

And I suddenly said to him, you know, Steve, don't think of me as though I'm Frank.

Think of me as though I'm Bob.

And I was just stunned to see the recognition come over his face.

As he said to me in a very thoughtful way, he said, you know, Bob has been here a week and I've put him on the artery project.

Well, I was furious.

I left his office in the fury, ran down to the office of the senior vice president to give him yet another example of my being discriminated against.

Now, two or three years later, as I thought about this, and after I left Xerox, and as I thought about that incident, something occurred to me.

I had missed two things.

The first was that Dr.

Tribus, the senior vice president, had hired three young black PhDs that summer to join the one black PhD that Xerox had at the time.

So it was probably more important to him that Frank Douglas would do well than it was to Frank Douglas, because he was on the line.

The second thing that I had missed was my desired outcome.

I really didn't want the senior vice president to go and have tough words with my manager.

I wanted a good project.

So had I refrained and had I asked the senior vice president, had I said, you know, Dr.

Tribus, could you help my manager find me a good project?

I might have retired from Xerox because he was three levels above my manager.

Just imagine if he had walked into my manager's office and said, find the man a good project.

That would have happened yesterday.

So that became a very important result in my life.

About five years ago, I was writing my memoirs.

And as I wrote that incident, something occurred to me.

And that was I had learned from that incident because I then recognized that thereafter, I had begun to what I call now reframe.

I had begun to reframe problems in order to deal with problems.

So that I, in spite of all of the discrimination, etc.

I ended up being the first black to be on the board of management of a top five global pharmaceutical company.

And as a matter of fact, was recognized for that and the innovation that I introduced to the pharmaceutical industry in 2007.

I was a black history maker awardee.

My passion and mission now is really to bring this process to as many individuals as possible who deal with the discrimination.

Well, congratulations on all those awards and achievements, very well deserved.

And then the next question becomes looking back the refrain methodology that we're going to talk about in detail.

We always say, you know, when you hear this self-improvement psychological concept, we always say, I wish I knew this in my early 20s, this knowledge, this these powerful insights, I would have done things way better.

Why do I discover them now in my 60s and 40s?

And as a matter of fact, I think it is very important to bring this methodology to the younger people.

In fact, I had a very interesting situation three months ago.

A young woman who had read my book reached out to me on LinkedIn and said, you know, I'm an expert in information management, and my colleagues like the process that you have.

And we don't really have a discrimination problem amongst our chief information officers, but we have a lot of conflicts.

And we think that this approach that you have outlined and demonstrated in the book could be used for a conflict resolution.

To cut a long story short, we actually had about two weeks ago a workshop.

First, I did a webinar to be sure that indeed it met their needs.

They presented two cases which we adapted to the methodology and had a workshop in which we discussed the two cases.

These were cases of conflicts.

They were really quite surprised and had many, many learnings.

So it turns out that not only with respect to discrimination, but having different issues in which there is significant disagreement in conflict.

And that can happen whether you're young or old.

This is an important methodology to be aware of.

Yes, because I mean conflict, it certainly happens even with siblings you love the most.

Conflict will always be there.

Your book, which you've mentioned, Until You Walk in My Shoes.

Here's the thing.

When it comes to race relations and discrimination, especially if you're black and you feel like you're being discriminated against, somebody who's not black might say you always bring up the race card, which I then see it as, then the issue goes out the window, then we're not going to deal with what's really happening, because now it has become the race issue and not what's going on, which is I've been here three years and this is the project I was supposed to work on, but a person who's been here only a week gets the better project.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

And as a matter of fact, when I first published the book in February, it was entitled Addressing Systemic Discrimination and Reframing the Problem.

I was in a workshop with 17 other authors and we were discussing each other's books and presenting to a famous author.

And they suggested changing the title for two reasons.

They said one, your book is about walking someone else's shoes.

And you start off the book by giving a very powerful example of someone not walking in your shoes.

So why not change the title?

So the title was changed to Until You Walk in My Shoes with the subtitle, a Reframing Methodology to Overcome Systemic Discrimination.

And now the second thing, why, and I've been asked the question, why I don't say racism?

And I say, no, I talk about discrimination because whether it is discrimination based on ethnicity, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, they all start in the same place, namely a bias, be it conscious or unconscious, that devalues another person.

And that is discrimination, and it can become very pernicious, particularly when it becomes systemic, namely very unconscious.

So I deal with discrimination.

And in fact, one of the other experiences I had, I say a young woman, she's an adult now, but when she was a graduate student, and I was at MIT, she was doing an internship with me.

And I heard from her, and she said she had read the book, and she had applied it to a problem in her family, and it had worked.

And she was so excited, she wanted me to know that.

Which then we are very curious, Dr.

Douglas, what is the Re-Frame methodology?

The framework is the following.

I believe that every organization, including the family, and you mentioned the family example, including the family, is based on two things, equity and inclusion.

Equity is set by the leaders.

These are the policies, the rules by which we are going to operate to achieve the objectives of the organization, the things that the family considers important.

And inclusion are the behaviors that the members agree to practice, to demonstrate that they value each other, to recognize each other's contribution, and to let each other know that they belong.

Equity and inclusion is the basis.

So that's one piece of the framework.

Second piece of the framework is that, what I've certainly found in my own experience, personally as well as in helping others throughout my career, is that in these situations, there's always an individual who is aggrieved.

And we may have lots of great programs in the organization to improve sensitivity, to try to improve the environment.

But often you will hear an individual say, I have a problem and no one is hearing me.

And so the focus of this is on the individual and to make sure, one, the individual is heard, two, that the individual is empowered to find what I call a better problem to solve, to get to their desired outcome.

In my example at Xerox, a better problem to solve, my desired outcome is to get a good project.

One problem is to deal with the discrimination.

Another problem was, how do I get the senior vice president to talk to my boss to tell him to get me a good project?

That latter was a better problem to solve.

Which means look at the bigger fish to fry.

Look at the bigger picture.

And in fact, one part of a better problem to solve is not only a problem that will solve the problem of the aggrieved person, but the solution of that problem will also improve the productivity of the work unit and others in the group.

So it doesn't just solve my problem if I'm aggrieved, but also the solution helps others around me.

The bigger picture indeed, yeah.

So that you don't just make it about yourself, but the bigger benefit of the whole team, the whole workplace.

Once I tell people, here's the situation.

I've been aggrieved.

I've been discriminated against.

And I go to my manager and I say, now I've been discriminated against.

Immediately, that manager, no matter how well-being they are, no matter how much they've been trained and being sensitive, no matter how empathetic, they are immediately put on the defense.

You know, they have to work through that defensiveness as soon as you say, you know, I've had the discrimination.

Now, if you go and you say, you know, here's a problem that's in the group.

And I think if we were to solve this problem, it would improve the productivity of the group.

And as a matter of fact, if we solve that problem, which also solves the problem that I have, then that's a different discussion.

So the bigger picture will solve the bigger problem, which and then the byproduct is that my individual problem has been solved.

Yes.

And even though, you know, it is my problem and it pains me, et cetera, I want a solution in the environment I am in.

I have to get the cooperation and the buy in anyhow or the implementation of that solution.

So why not find a problem which binds them in at the very beginning?

I give this example.

I'm doing a series of webinars at Lehigh University, and they gave a wonderful example, actually, after doing a couple of cases.

And they said, ah, they had actually reframed them.

I said, yes, you had.

And I said, I'll give you an example that's not dissimilar to yours.

When I was in medical school, shortly, I did a Ph.D., worked a year and a half at Xerox and then went to medical school.

And so I was an older student in medical school.

I had been a teaching assistant when I was doing my Ph.D.

So I had had some bits of little training and being able to evaluate students.

So I was rather surprised when I got there to find that it seemed almost routine, at least the last three years, that the medical student each year would have two to three of the eight to ten minority students that they had taken in, would have them repeat the first year.

And the reason was?

Well, they said they had not passed the critical courses and, you know, et cetera.

And, you know, I complained about it, had a little demonstration to the board, just myself, complaining to the board.

Not even stunned.

And then one day I was talking to one of the top students recognized, and in fact, he was indeed the top student.

And he was very upset because he and others felt that some, not all, some of the young women in the class were getting higher grades than they deserved because they were friends with professors.

And he was very upset about this.

And I said to him, have you ever thought about anonymous grading?

I said, yeah.

I said, if you went to the dean, you and a couple of the others and asked for anonymous grading, I bet you would get it.

So we got anonymous grading.

And the following happened.

One, not a single Black student failed a course that semester.

Whoa.

Two, one of my colleagues got three honors out of the four courses.

It was on an honors pass fail system.

Three out of four courses.

Yours truly got two honors out of four.

A single Black student failed.

A year later, Black student got four honors out of four subjects in the first year, both semesters.

When the grading became anonymous.

That's right.

Had never happened before.

But when the grading became anonymous, there was an actual example of reframing.

The White male students saw the benefit for themselves.

And in fact, they were the ones who went and asked for anonymous grading, which benefited us, the minority students.

Why would they ask?

What was their motivation behind asking for anonymous grading again?

They were very upset because they felt that some of the female women students were getting higher grades than deserved because they were friendly with some of the professors.

Right.

You mentioned it earlier.

I'm about to say, because back home, when you register for college and they accept you, you get a student number.

So every time you write a test, assignment, exam, it's all student numbers.

And there's no way a professor can tell that, OK, this student number belongs to what type of student.

You know what I mean?

It's just a number.

It's kind of anonymous.

Well, that's how I grew up in the British system.

Because at the age around 15 and then at 17, 18, we took these exams.

And they were set either by the London University of London system or the Cambridge University system.

And what would happen is we would get a number.

You add your number, and at the end of the exam, you would see them putting all the papers together, putting them in the big envelopes, et cetera.

And then they get mailed to England.

And about three months later, they were sent back and then they unravel the number.

We've mentioned examples of applying the reframe methodology in the workplace culture.

But what role can leaders and C-suite executives play in this regard?

You know, as I say in the book, leaders are really responsible for the equity part.

And one of the things that I do in the book, actually, is to give some simple ways of assessing equity and inclusion in an organization.

So within an organization, you know, you go through the website of an organization or you go to the annual report and there are wonderful things that they say about how wonderful their system is, their employees are their number one asset, etc.

And then you see that, as a matter of fact, they had a number of cases against them for be it racial discrimination or gender discrimination.

And you wonder, well, how come?

So it's important for leaders to be really focused on the equity side of things.

And how do you assess equity?

Some simple things.

Are there people in the organization who seem to have privilege?

Are there individuals for whom it doesn't matter if they perform poorly?

There seems to be no consequence.

They're not criticized, etc.

They seem to get the favorite projects in life.

Is there privilege in the organization?

Are there processes that deal with issues of unfairness?

Are the personnel processes very transparent, etc.?

And the third thing, the prospects.

Namely, is there a clear relationship between your performance and the opportunities you have?

Or are the projects for promotion, etc.?

So just those three things.

You look at that, you can assess equity in an organization.

And what leaders really have to do is to basically pay attention.

And, you know, they do the surveys, etc.

Very important.

And this is why we are in Safe Haven Dialogues.

We focus on the individual because this gets missed.

What leaders do is they, there may be one or two individuals who complain.

And then they say, but on the average, we have 10,000 employees, with just one or two complaints, it's not a problem.

Or, you know, okay, we have 100 minority employees, one or two complain, that's 1%.

You know, there's really not a problem here.

It's just that individual.

Well, the reality is people often will not complain for reasons like fear of losing their job.

So if you take the individual complain and show that you value that individual and work through that complain from a viewpoint of what are the issues of equity that individual is facing?

What are the issues of inclusion that individual is facing?

What, therefore, is a problem they're facing?

Because the reality and we plot a equity inclusion culture matrix, because it doesn't matter how a company describes its overall culture.

Yeah.

Within any subgroup, there is a culture there.

And that culture is often driven by the frontline supervisor and the coworkers.

And that's the culture that an individual is experiencing, regardless of what's said on the website.

Well, you know, when you're walking the beautiful reception desk, and they have all this beautiful English word, integrity, everything sounds beautiful when you walk down the company hallways.

But as you said, it is usually not congruent with what the actual employee is experiencing.

And the reality is what leaders should do is that when those cases occur, is they should use those cases to test whether the things they have on the wall are really real.

That's what one should do.

One should not say that that individual is an outlier.

The reaction should be, we say we're inclusive.

This individual is saying they don't feel that they're being included.

Let's look at how we practice inclusion.

Let's see what we can learn from that individual.

Dr.

Douglas, one of the things you do, you get asked to speak on these issues.

So when you go to conferences and you're the keynote speaker and you talk about these issues, what is some of the feedback you've received after giving these types of speeches?

The questions, you know, and the feedback usually is a new sort of touched on it.

And in fact, one person asked the question, well, how do you get leaders to participating something like this if they're not willing?

And my response was you have to seek out willing leaders.

If an individual is not interested in being fair and is not interested in being inclusive, it's a punishment to put them through programs, teach them how to do that.

So what's the solution in that regard?

One solution what we are offering is indeed to deal with the for the individual to deal with the problem, take the responsibility to be empowered and to go forward.

And we give them a way in which to present their case, etc.

So we would coach an individual on how to do that.

Because if you're in an environment and the environment, the culture is inimical to the way you want to be treated, it is your responsibility to let the culture know that is not working for you.

Don't sit around and do nothing about it and just be a victim.

The second thing you have to do is you have to look for allies, because invariably you're not the only one who is in the problem.

There are others and you may be surprised.

So you look around for allies and then you discuss.

Example I gave in medical school, my white male classmates became allies.

In the grading example you gave earlier.

They became allies.

And in fact, rather than us going and making the complaint, we relied on our allies because they had a similar problem in which they felt they were being treated unfairly.

So you look for allies again for what's the better problem to solve.

But the key thing is not to be a victim, to be empowered.

And that's one of the things which we do.

We take on individuals and take them through the process and help them to find that better problem to solve so they can have that dialogue with their manager.

The better problem to solve.

The bigger picture solution rather than the individual.

Yes.

What is that bigger problem?

What's that bigger picture that includes my problem?

Right.

So you kill two birds with one stone.

Yes.

You kill a big bird.

Dr.

Douglas, is there anything I haven't asked you on this subject that you were hoping our listeners will hear from you today?

At the beginning, you actually mentioned it.

And this is really so important because it's underappreciated.

A major study was reported in which the investigators from Boston University, they had followed about 20,000 Black women over several years.

I think it was 20 years.

And what they found was the group of Black women who reported discrimination in their workplace or dealing with the police or dealing with housing, they had a 16% higher incidence of heart disease than women who did not have the same experiences.

And what is not appreciated is the impact that stress in the workplace has on well-being and health.

And so one of the messages, which, you know, I try to tell individuals, even though you may shrug it off and say, well, you know, I don't think it's worth by fighting about it, it is nonetheless taking a toll on your health.

And the truth of the matter is, you know, it's taking a toll on your well-being because you take it home.

And many times we sort of have to really spend some time just getting the load from work off of us so that we don't react, you know, from the frustration and anger with our family members.

And we don't want to react at work so we don't jeopardize our jobs as well, as you mentioned earlier.

Absolutely.

Well, we spend so much time there trying to behave appropriately that we do not jeopardize our jobs, that we can't be in something we talk about, our authentic self.

Right.

So we spend an awful lot of time being somebody other than who we really are.

And that is stressful.

And would you say that it negatively impacts your productivity at work as well, which then becomes the cycle of not being your best at work and obviously affecting your family as well when you get home?

No, it does.

And this is why we actually focus on, rather than focusing on DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, the inclusion, we focus on EIE, that is equity, inclusion and individual engagement.

Because if someone feels they're being treated well, effectively, they're being included, being recognized for the contributions that they belong, they're motivated, they're engaged.

Of course.

So a better measure and metric is what is the individual engagement?

And GAAP has done over 30 years on tremendous studies, hundreds of thousands of employees, 64 different countries, I think 96 industries, and demonstrated that those companies in which employee engagement was in the top quartile, had 24% greater productivity than those companies who were in the bottom quartile.

And those companies also in the top quartile had fewer retention problems, fewer safety problems.

So from a productivity and profitability perspective, when employees are recognized, are motivated, feel engaged, they produce more.

Absolutely.

Those are worth of wisdom from Dr.

Frank Douglas, the CEO of Safe Haven Dialogues.

Thank you so much for being here today, Dr.

Douglas.

I appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you very much.

Please give us again the titles of your two books, especially the one that we mentioned during our discussion.

Yes, look for Until You Walk in My Shoes.

It is subtitled A Reframed Methodology to Overcome Systemic Discrimination.

Until You Walk in My Shoes by Dr.

Frank Douglas.

You can also find the various things we do, Safe Haven Dialogues, on our website, which is safehavendialoguesllc.com.

safehavendialoguesllc.com.

safehavendialoguesllc.com.

I will put that in the show notes.

Are there any other socials where people can reach you?

Yes, I'm very, very active on LinkedIn.

You can find this also on Facebook, on LinkedIn and Instagram.

I will put that all on the show notes.

Thank you very much, Dr.

Douglas.

It's been an honor to not only listen to your wisdom, but also to learn of the Reframe Methodology, and hopefully we can apply it both professionally and personally.

My pleasure.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking on Communicating Podcast once again.

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