Centering Relationships to Bring Healing to DE&I

Introduction: Dr. Armando Hernández is currently the Chief Diversity Officer at Journey Mental Health Center in Madison Wisconsin. Before working in the DE&I space, Armando worked as a Licensed Psychologist with nearly 20 years of experience focused on equity-centered practice in community-based settings. He is a dynamic speaker and a national consultant in the area of integrated healthcare and has provided numerous workshops and academic courses in mental health and culturally responsive practice. I spoke to Armando about his work in mental health and DE&I.

Learn more about Armando here.

Jocelyn: Tell us about your journey from being mental healthcare professional to working in the DE&I space.

Armando: I started my career as a psychologist, a mental health professional there, I sort of felt like I grew up in that space. And then I went on to a few other roles within the mental health field. I started leaning into administration in more of the organizational development component. Before actually coming back to Journey, I worked for our local public school district promoting mental health initiatives. Throughout all of my roles, I was always interested in that diversity, equity, and inclusivity lens. 

At Journey, they have had a historical engagement with cultural competence. And of course, along with many organizations, there was a nudge in 2020 and they posted the position of Chief Diversity Officer. Journey was a place of great energy that I really feel connected to and that I continue to appreciate the work that they do and to go back with this focus is very exciting.

For me, I've always been interested in the intersection between mental health, and race, gender, culture, etc. There are many flavors of psychology and mental health practice and I studied counseling psychology, which has been a leader in the field that we called multicultural counseling. This goes back decades since the seventies and eighties, looking at the basic fact that not only all human interactions are cultural, but that really, the counseling encounter, the therapeutic space is obviously also cultural so that when we don't attend to the cultural dynamics of it, we're certainly missing something. And of course, in the last few decades, we have been able to evolve that analysis with our increased understanding of implicit bias.

It’s always been natural to me to look at my own profession through that social justice lens. And there's always been a gap for me. And the gap is around this idea that culturally responsive practice is primarily an individual endeavor. So for me, I always find myself being really committed to this and even having conversations about it, but not really seeing an organizational effort that supports that. If you care about these things, then how has your organization, your leadership, and your context supported you? I was wanting to lean into being a leader within the larger organization to support equity, belonging, and racial justice.

Jocelyn: The topic of mental health is huge right now, especially in the DE&I space. How are you leaning into this part of DE&I since this is the focus of your industry?

Armando: For me, there are so many different connections between mental health, staff wellness, and equity work. I feel that staff wellness is a critical condition to really promote belonging and equity within organizations. 

We know that our staff is tired, they're struggling, it's difficult, there's so much change. So for me, it's important to combine wellness with the work of belonging and equity.

Jocelyn: How is the conversation around mental health different when you are speaking with mental healthcare professionals? Does that make it easier?

Armando: One of the big initial barriers to conversations around mental health and wellbeing is the stigma, the real fears that are associated with it. You are having to recognize the added struggles that come with stress, anxiety, depression, etc. So, I think that there is by design, more of a recognition and an awareness. When you are a professional, you're still wanting to present yourself in the best way. So those automatic associations are there, but I think that there's definitely more of a sense of openness and willingness to explore. There's a fundamental understanding that we all have emotional lives and that we are impacted in different ways.

Right now a contemporary mental health approach is also trauma-informed, which recognizes the role that trauma plays in mental health and in our lives. That connects with trauma that it's race-based, gender-based, et cetera. But a trauma-informed lens is not only about recognizing the prevalence of trauma, but also recognizing the importance of resilience and incorporating a growth mindset that can build resiliency. It also highlights the importance of the history of what has happened to us. This is really important to the present moment. 

Jocelyn: Well, I'm sure you've seen this over your career, but it feels to me like people and even maybe younger generations are getting more and more comfortable talking about mental health. And because of that, employees are starting to demand that companies start recognizing it. I think we're going to see that shift in all industries, but I think you're coming from a great place, working with people that already have that knowledge.

Armando: That's right. And for me, there's such a strong connection between wellness and so many different components, but mental health is definitely one of them. And you can't talk about mental health without talking about healthcare access and healthcare insurance, which also gets into the domain of benefits and how we're supporting our own staff. 

Many of our companies have Employee Assistance Programs and those benefits are a very preliminary initial support. 

In the context of this pandemic, employees may very well be really triggered by the isolation they’re experiencing and may have increasing depression and anxiety, and that may require additional support. And if I have health insurance I have a community that supports access to mental health services, ideally, mental health services that are linguistically appropriate and that are culturally responsive. That's going to be a great benefit. The more openness that you mentioned, I think it's really important because it allows us to have those conversations that are critical.

Jocelyn: What challenges have you faced as you have taken on this role? Anything you weren’t expecting?

Armando: Many, many challenges and many surprises. We know that the space of DEI is very politicized at this moment. I think one surprise is wondering “do we have a basic ground that we can stand on in order to build momentum, collaboration, buy-in, etc.”
When I think about the challenges, the thing that comes to the top for me is the idea of this paradox of leadership. The idea is that on the one hand, as a senior leader within my organization, I have this call to be an agent of change. I bring in knowledge, I bring in strategy, I bring in influence to shape structures and policies, and systems. And then, on the other hand, I'm really supposed to be more of a facilitator. If I'm the only agent of change, that's not really going to have a real impact.

I need to balance my agency for change with my roles as a facilitator. Creating momentum and nurturing buy-in goes along with supporting collaboration and looking at this process as a long-term transformational process. 

Jocelyn: Yeah. I found that same thing when I was at a previous organization creating employee resource groups. It's in the name, they should be employee-led, but then I had to figure out how do we make sure these keep moving forward without me as the leader of it having too much control. They needed some push but making sure I was stepping back and listening most of the time and that's a challenge to balance for sure.

Jocelyn: Are there any programs or projects you are currently working on that you are particularly excited about that you can share with us.
Armando: One of the ones that are very exciting and is a growing edge to the DE&I field. I think it's an area that could be really evocative coming from the educational world. The implementation of restorative justice strategies. Basically centering relationships and looking at the importance of dialogue, connection, and healing. 

It's about creating a space of connection and through that, restorative circles are one of the powerful strategies in that space. I'm beginning to roll that out within our organization. The possibilities of that can be quite powerful.

Jocelyn: Yeah. That's so interesting because I've just started dipping my toes in the idea of restorative justice and how can that apply to the employee experience? Because I think, like you said, it's really been used in education mostly, and then of course in the criminal justice space as well. I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you're planning to apply that to the workplace. 

Armando: There are two ways. The main one is through circles. We all know the space that we're in when we look at it through a lens of race and gender and the murders of George Floyd, Brianna Taylor and so many black men and women. This creates a sense of ongoing trauma and ruptures within our communities. So the question is, what are we doing to create spaces for collective healing? 

How are we supporting intentional connection and dialogue? The Circle can provide an effective response to our current moment. The beauty is that Restorative Circles have a very clear structure for us to be in a relationship with each other, to reconnect.

The second one involves incidents within our own organization that involve harm, like microaggressions, or an explicit, racist, or discriminatory incident. We, of course, need to follow policy, but the piece that often gets left out is what is the impact on the people that are harmed? What is the impact on the community that witnesses that harm? And most importantly, how are we repairing and restoring our sense of connection?

Jocelyn: I love the first piece, cause that's not a way that I thought about using it in the workplace. I think it really ties into affinity groups or employee resource groups, but it's doing them in a little different way, which I love. The second piece is how I've been thinking about it. When we're thinking about things like a written warning or performance improvement plan. How can we do this in a way that is more of a style of restorative justice?

And as an HR person, I have always tried to have more of a conversation in those, versus this as a reprimand, it's about improving the employee. That should be the mentality going into any conversation where there's been some sort of harm. Like if somebody's being accused of harassment, it's a conversation to figure out what happened and what was the impact.

As HR professionals we need to go about this with a different attitude, we're here to support employees. We're here to make them better. Some employees don't want to be there and they don't want to make that improvement, but you've got to give people the chance.

Armando: Yeah, we are centering the relationship over the written rule. We're dealing with humans with full dignity and there's an interpersonal process that is happening, it's beyond just a person who committed harm.

Jocelyn: I think you are right in that this work, in general, is about relationships and centering relationships and can only be successful when we do it with the community as a whole.

Thank you so much for joining me to have this discussion and bringing these topics to light.