Fostering Belonging to Drive Diversity and Inclusion: Insights from Cordell Carter of the Aspen Institute

For this Inclusive Growth Show interview my guest is Cordell Carter, Founder of The Project on Belonging at Aspen Institute. We’ll have an interesting conversation about the personal and economic benefits of feeling as though you belong within your organisation.

I asked Cordell to get us started by introducing himself a bit further to us.

‘For the last 20 years or so, I have actively engaged with various organisations across multiple sectors, starting my career with IBM, stopped at the Gates Foundation, startups, and now the Aspen Institute and beyond. I’m focused on building communities and environments where people feel like they belong, and they can thrive. My stint from kindergarten to 12th grade in the US as a broad fellow cemented my approach and my strong belief that we can go much further together than one person alone. These are giant systems. It’s hard to pivot, it doesn’t matter how talented you are. You’ve got to figure out how to get other people on the same boat or you will sink alone. Trust me, I’ve been there, done that.

Now comes along the Aspen Institute for the last eight years. It’s an amazing platform where you have elite leaders self-selecting in and asking big questions about what value they’re supposed to add to the world. They know they’ve been successful, but now they’re trying to be significant. I created the Project on Belonging at Aspen after the tragic riots in the US, January 6th, 2021. I was asked by my CEO at the time to help create an external diversity, equity and inclusion program. I said, “That’s great. Let me find you a DE&I specialist here. That’s not me.” He responded, “No, you’re an Aspen specialist and I need something that works at Aspen. Help me figure that out.”

I’m a natural historian, so when I started doing the whole landscape analysis on DE&I, I wanted to figure out where it came from. Once you figure out where and how it came to be, you can understand how we got to the present day. 40 plus years later, you have a strategy that’s untethered to a big vision. Our big vision is creating a land where we all belong and have opportunities to thrive. This is a reason you see so much animus against DE&I and inclusive strategies around the world in both private and public sector. People don’t understand where we’re going with it. My job is to make sure that we know where we’re going and why.’

My next question for Cordell was, ‘How have your own personal values and your family influenced the work that you’re doing in diversity, equity and inclusion?’

‘I’m a preacher’s kid and I think that has influenced my values greatly. The ultimate startups in civil society are religious organisations, especially Pentecostal organisations, because you don’t have the same licensure requirements as more established denominations. Anybody can say, “I’ve been called, I need to preach.” When that happens, the family is actively engaged because they are the first parishioners. They’re the first people that believe in your particular brand. As a kid, working with my parents and seeing their religious and faith endeavors, I knew I was a part of the show as well. I had to make sure that first Sunday, I’m singing the right song and making sure that people feel involved, that they find this is a place where they belong.

When we introduce those values into the space where we spend most of our time as adults, I refer to it as contrasting the secular and the sacred. The fact that 80% of our time is spent working is something that particularly drives me. I don’t want work to be awful because I have to spend so much time doing it. It should be a relatively pleasant experience. I’m not saying it has to be peaches and cream every single day, but it shouldn’t be drudgery constantly. Who wants to live like that?

Far too many of us do. On a Monday morning, many say, “Oh gosh, here we go again.” That is a horrible way to live. I don’t want to live like that, that’s not the environment I’m used to. I want my colleagues and the individuals that are purposely availing themselves to me to follow that as well.

So, that idea of being able to get along with people and trying to find common ground has definitely made its way over to my actual secular existence. It’s expressed massively in the work that I’m doing, more so now than when I first started working.’

I enjoyed what Cordell had to say. I agree with the importance of enjoying your work. We spend so much of our time in the workplace, and work plays such a pivotal role in our life. It gives us purpose. It helps us build relationships. It gives us financial income and security.

I was interested to hear about Cordell’s experience of how diversity, equity, inclusion has come about and its importance in today’s business world.

‘It’s driven off of procurement. The deep, dark secret of most economies is that the government is the largest customer of goods and services. It’s quite odd to have private sector business associations lobbying against government for taxes, but that’s neither here nor there. However, as the biggest customer, they are driving policy just by making procurement decisions. You don’t have to say, “Hey, I want to make sure that this is the first company I’m working with.” You merely say, “Well, here’s a requirement for the procurement order. There’s our RFP. Here’s a census. We need to know which of your senior leadership are people of color or women.” You don’t have to make a formal policy, but when you make a financial decision, you are making a policy because budgets are moral documents.

If you look back at the genesis of DE&I, at least in the American concept, you have to go back to the Nixon administration. We just started doing censuses. It was under pressure from civil rights organisations to diversify not only the federal workforce, but also the suppliers. So, you start asking questions to a few different agencies, such as, “Could you give us a census of how many employees are this, that and other? Describe your employee base.” The agencies and organisations with the most diversity are able to win more contracts, so others want to do what they’re doing. It’s a very competitive space, which is why I tend to keep most of my work to the private sector.

The private sector and the US military have two important things in common. The first is that they can’t tell a lie. The cost of living a lie is too expensive. If you’re military, and you’re working off a lie, then people die. You now have to serve another flag. If you’re within business working off a lie, your competitor will look at the real data and outwork you. Soon you don’t have a company and everything you have in a company is worthless.

I love working with these two sectors because they have to tell the truth. When you see private sector and our armed forces way out in front of everyone else on DE&I, that should be telling you something. They know what the customers are going to look like in 30 years from now. They’re playing for where the puck is going, they’re not watching the game. They’re trying to win the game.

The second thing they have in common is wanting a place to belong. In the private sector, it’s expensive to replace an employee. On the military side, you want a place where you belong because you need to constantly recruit for an all-volunteer force. You can’t depend on the 1% of American families that send their kids generation after generation to the military. So, I like people where their incentives are aligned to do the data-driven right thing. I’m trying to get more people to see that with my work.’

I like what Cordell was saying earlier about the procurement side of things and working with federal or government organisations. It reminds me of an interview with the founder of MSD UK, Mayank Shah. They represent businesses that are owned by people from an ethnic minority background. I learned some startling statistics out of that conversation. As an example, there are approximately 1 million ethnic minority-owned businesses. That accounts for one-sixth of all businesses. These businesses employ 3 million people, which is contributing £78 billion to the UK economy.

The other thing I learned was about the history. The Founder of MSD UK has done some work in the States. He said in the US, supplier diversity was mandated in law in 1972, requiring 8% of federal contracts to be awarded to minority businesses. This mandate has helped build large minority-owned businesses. Some of these are turning over billions of US dollars.

Unlike the US, we haven’t mandated this approach to supplier diversity in the UK and Europe. Mayank was telling me how this is a missed opportunity and a way to avoid some bad procurement practices. I think it’s important to revisit that.

Cordell agreed, ‘It’s an absolutely perfect encapsulation of where we are and how we got there. Data has shown and proven over and over again that diversity is good for the economy. In 2017, Citibank and McKinsey calculated the cost of structural racism. They looked from the year 2000 to 2016 and asked, “What are the costs for a lack of access to credit for certain communities?”

In the US, we still have economic redlining. Depending on your zip code, your credit score is lower. That’s simply by the virtue of where you live. You have all these people that don’t have access to capital in ways others of us do. The cost at that time from 2000 to 2016 was on the order of $20 trillion. Now, the US economy’s annual spend is about $24 trillion, so the annual cost of these barriers is $4 to $5 trillion.

What I like to say once I quote that research is, you can be as racist, sexist and ableist as you want in your house. But the moment you leave your front door, and you’re in the public space, we need you to behave in a way that shows you are trying to adhere to your fiduciary duty of increasing shareholder or stakeholder value. If you’re not doing that, and you’re purposely preventing others that are otherwise worthy of credit, or lack of credit, then you should be fired with cause because you’re preventing your bank from growing. You’re preventing your organisation and the economy from growing. You’ve got to go.

When I tell people to be as racist as they want in their house, it always raises a few eyebrows. I say it to be provocative and to make a point that this is an economic thing. We say that we are about values, but realistically America is about business. Let’s lean into that. You are losing business because of your personal behavior. That is not how you run a business. That gets folks thinking differently about these things.’

I endorse the point Cordell raised about being economic. It links back to the first book that I wrote, Inclusive Growth. I wrote that book because I wanted senior business leaders to understand that if they had a culture where their people could thrive, it was only going to help their business grow and prosper.

I know Cordell has worked with lots of different organisations, I wanted to know how working with a range of companies has shaped his own personal view on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Cordell replied, ‘I came into this work thinking that the resistance to DE&I was based on this notion of unfairness. Is it fair that we’re emphasising people of color or differently abled women over white men? However, that’s not the issue. It’s much more personal. 73% of our executive class in the US are middle-aged white men. The way we speak about DE&I, for the most part in the US, is not in a very inclusive manner. It runs antithetical to the aim. When I start talking about belonging and use American history as the sacred text of the civic faith, I find it really resonates with middle-aged white men. It means that they’re not hearing that the future doesn’t include them. They’re used to the pressure of peers saying, “Your successor cannot look like you.”

When I hear that, I say, “What mammal do you know that doesn’t seek to eat, reproduce, and fight to stay alive?” I know none. No mammals do that, so what makes you think you can go to an executive and say, “I need you to push a policy in which you do not see yourself in.”? That’s an inhuman thing to do. Nobody does that. Nobody will do that willingly. They’ll nod and wave, but the actual actions will counter that because they’re going back to their more biological prerogatives. I ask people to empathise with others, mourn a sense of loss, and then get past it. If we keep talking around it, we’ll never deal with the festering sore of people feeling left out, lost, and like they no longer belong. No one likes feeling that.

I concur with Cordell, in the conversations that I have with senior business leaders, they seem afraid of diversity and inclusion. I think even though they don’t admit it, a lot of them might be thinking, “I’m going to be overtaken here.” As Cordell says, who is willing to bet on a policy if they’re worried it will impact their own future?

The other day I was having a conversation with someone about the number of terms around diversity and inclusion that are being thrown around. We talk about diversity, equity, equality, justice and belonging. I think belonging is a real key part of the work that we do, so this led me to my next question for Cordell. I asked, ‘Could you just elaborate a bit more on the concept of belonging and how it relates to DE&I within an organisation’s culture?’

‘For me, belonging is, being seen, being heard, and feeling your contribution is valuable. It does not mean that you get your way. It does not mean that it’s a one-way street either. For example, I have to behave in good faith just like the organisation does, and we’re going to meet each other right in the middle. I’ll behave as if I belong and not wait for permission to act as such. Any organisation is going to create an environment where I can thrive, because my thriving means more value to them. That’s the concept at the highest level.

If you extrapolate it to what the national narrative thinks we can tether inclusion strategies to, I think it becomes all the more powerful. At the end of the day, I want people to stay in this game. I want people to believe in the idea of America. I want them to believe in the values of this organisation. That doesn’t happen unless people feel like they’re being heard. Belonging sits at the top of DE&I.

Your executive should be saying, “This is an environment where everyone belongs and has opportunities to thrive. I fully expect the leaders that report to me ensure that happens.” In fact, their metrics are going to look like what I call our DE&I KPIs. Those KPIs will aggregate up to the CEO’s KPIs that he or she reports out to their board. DE&I is in the middle of the organisation. It’s at the execution level. We’ve made it a strategic priority, but that’s not where it belongs. It belongs in the middle. Belonging should be the strategic imperative. DE&I is how we get to belonging. That’s how I see it.’

I love what Cordell had to say. I often share this pyramid with my clients where you’ve got diversity at the top of the pyramid. I say to them that’s the outcome because here in the UK, we do have a very diverse country. There’s a lot of diversity in the talent pools that we can draw from and the communities that we’ve got. Diversity is the outcome of doing all the other things below the bottom of the pyramid.

The bottom of the pyramid is equity. It’s about making sure that we provide equity because we don’t live in a fair society. From equity, we can ensure that we’re creating equality. We create a level playing field, and on top of that, we’re building a culture of inclusion and belonging. This means we’re in a much stronger position to be able to attract, recruit and retain a diverse workforce, which is ultimately the outcome that we want. However, we have to start at the bottom of the pyramid with our foundations.

My next question for Cordell was, ‘What do you suggest are some of the actionable steps that businesses could take to foster a culture of inclusion and belonging? ‘

‘The simplest thing you can do is starting by having a monthly non-ethnic or race-related ERG that’s just focused on learning together. I would call it a book series. For example, we’re going to do a book club on some books of great consequence. Take Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste. It’s a tough read, but if you go chapter by chapter with your peers monthly for a year, I think the environment and the level of their comfort with each other will fundamentally shift. They’re going to be creating belonging just in that group. Make sure the group is super diverse in terms of job responsibility, a place where it doesn’t matter what your title is. In this circle of trust, we’re going to follow Chatham House rule, and we’re going to be intellectuals for the hour that we have together once a week. It could be game changing. Then you can extrapolate that good feeling to the rest of the organisation.

Make sure you get some super executive champions to be willing to take off airs and just be a learner for one hour a week. Let everyone be a peer. It would fundamentally shift the game. From there, I would say bring in some individuals that could explain the difference between belonging and DE&I. Make sure your Chief Executive team understand why belonging is important and can articulate it in a culturally competent way to their employees. They need to understand why it matters and be able to effectively get that across to all their employees. That’s when you’re really empowering the middle of your organisation. Your talent management team need to go hard on organisational learning as well as holding themselves accountable to standards of behavior.

Make sure you have career pathing so that any young employees coming in don’t just see a bunch of people 30 years older than them blocking their success. Those employees have also achieved something out there, a record of work. We all had to get on that same treadmill and start earning that way as well. We need to fully articulate what that treadmill looks like instead of shooting in the dark.

There are a variety of ways that you can meet all the different types of diversity you’re going to have in an organisation. There are ways of getting around this without calling it specifically out. It’s what you do as an organisation that matters.’

I’m fond of what Cordell is saying there. We need to understand the “Why?” behind belonging and then proceed in developing the strategy. It reminds me of Simon Sinek, the management expert who wrote the book Start With Why. His famous saying is, “People don’t buy into what you do. They buy into why you do it.” That’s why it’s important to start with the “Why?” It’s hard because it’s very emotive. It’s quite difficult for us to articulate, but then you can figure out the “How?” and the “What?” after you’ve understood the “Why?”

Cordell endorsed my point, adding ‘The point is to create trust. When we’re at work, we have our professional avatars on. We tell ourselves, “I’m doing what I’ve got to do so I can go home and take care of my family.” We said before, 80% of your adult life is spent working. Do you really want that to be an awful task? Wouldn’t it be great to lower your arms just for a second and allow yourself to trust that your organisation actually cares about you? They want you to have a long run here because that’s mutually beneficial. However, you can’t get there by just speaking it. You have to show it.’

On the topic of books, I wanted to know more about the book Cordell wrote.

‘It’s in pre-sales right now on the Publicizer platform. It’s 75% done, but the publisher wanted me to get it out there and start spreading the news about it. The name of the book is ‘Becoming an Inclusive Republic: A Sermon on the Civic Mount.’ The goal of my work has always been to make the world a better place and for us to be better versions of ourselves. I’ve summed this up in a manifesto, where I focus on three big questions.

The first question is: “Who is we?” Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence. We hold the truth to be self-evident that all men are created equal, but what has that meant over the span of time? The second question is, “How has our notion of we evolved?” This is where you bring in all the different routes of the different suffrage movements and what they’ve hung their intellectual and spiritual hats upon to get people to move. Thirdly, “Where do we go from here?” ‘We’ in the plural sense. This is a collaborative exercise. It’s not something the country does for you. It’s something you do with your country.

That is the manifesto, and it’ll be out soon. It’s in pre-sales now, if you buy 100 copies, I’ll come and do the workshop at your place of employment.’

At the time of recording this episode, Cordell is at a festival. I know it’s something that he’s very excited about, so I asked him to tell us more about the festival and how anyone in the future can go along if they’re interested.

‘Today, I’m representing the Festival of Diaspora. It’s designed to unite leaders across the Americas, to connect us across our 35 borders, to celebrate our shared history and what I call the other AI, ancestral intelligence. Also thirdly, to collaborate together to bring about good in our world.

I’m representing here at a larger festival, which is called Petronio Alvarez Festival. It’s a celebration of Pacific Coast culture here in Colombia. We convene in different Latin American cities every February to quarter one. If you’re interested in the amazing work we’re doing here, go to Festival of the Diaspora. It’s the secular tent revival and it’s a lot of fun. We do first quarter every year in Latin America. For next year, in March of 2025, we’re going to do our first festival in Africa. Hopefully, we’ll see some friendly faces either in Medellin or in Nairobi.’

If you need any support to develop your organisation’s inclusive culture, then feel free to reach out to Toby and his team. The best place to start is either through their website at mildon.co.uk or just drop the team a line on LinkedIn.