DE&I is a Journey
Introduction: Marco Lindsey is the Associate Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Berkeley Haas School of Business where he has worked for 14 years. He also owns MT Lindsey Consulting where he delivers keynotes on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging (DEIB) in the workplace, and develops DEIB programming for his clients. Marco also works to connect BIPOC individuals to jobs in the tech sector and he looks at DEIB from a lens that intersects with policy.
Check out the full interview here.
Jocelyn: Tell me about your journey into the DEIB space, I know you started as Chief of Staff at Berkeley Haas, how did your role grow from there?
Marco: First off, thank you for having me. I'm glad that we can have this conversation.
I was the Chief of Staff for Berkeley and in that role it's purely administrative. There were HR functions, facilities, dealing with people, but there wasn't a lot of interaction with students. So I began seeing inequities that some of our students were going through and started providing resources to help address those inequities. This involved me taking money out of my own budget to make sure they could go to relevant conferences or that they had the opportunities to host events to give them a sense of belonging.
Also, I was already doing a lot of this work outside of work. First and foremost, it's my passion. I believe in equity. I'm a Libra so I think things should be equal. I've always had that passion to work in the community, especially here in the Bay Area, helping people connect to resources, understand their value, and that they belong in spaces that they've traditionally been left out of.
So I was in this Chief of Staff role and we had a crisis here at UC Berkeley with our students. And we were able to create a diversity & inclusion office in response to that. At that time I was able to create my own role.
I tell people this all the time as we're talking about being on a DEI journey, it is indeed a journey. And even though I do this for a living, I don't know it all. So none of us are there, we're all on a journey. Some of us are further along than others. And if you're not that far along, that's okay, because you have to start the journey somewhere. And none of us arrive, none of us will ever know it all. I'm continually and constantly trying to learn more and understand more so that I can be a better person and provide more resources and knowledge to those around me.
Jocelyn: That's so true. I'm always learning. And I think the other piece of that is that this work is always changing, right? The world is changing. People are changing, so that's a big part of it too.
And I actually had the pleasure, back in 2018, to go to the Berkeley HAAS Diversity Symposium in person event that you helped host. So I can speak to some of the amazing things you've helped host for students at Berkeley. It was really awesome.
Jocelyn: You work with 100 Black Men of the Bay Area, tell me about that organization and what you do with them.
Marco: Yes, it's the 100 Black Men of America. We're the Bay Area chapter. We have about 110 chapters and over 10,000 members. The organization actually started in the sixties.
We give out scholarships, this year alone, we've given out a hundred, $5,000 scholarships. Since 1989, we've given 1.9 million in scholarships for youth to go to school.
Each chapter has to focus on four areas:
Mentoring
Education
Health & wellness
Economic empowerment
Also, we have two models:
Real men given real time
What they see is what they'll be
So my focus area is on economic empowerment. It's about connecting people with the opportunities that are here in the Bay Area. There are ways that we focus on connecting people with the opportunities here, especially the tech sector. We also do a lot of teaching in regards to financial literacy. Unfortunately, what we find is that, in a lot of underserved communities, nobody talks about finances. Nobody talks about the importance of saving, about predatory lenders, or what APR is.
Marco leads a discussion
Jocelyn: That makes me think about the work I do around compensation and how people are so afraid to talk about the financial piece in general. Like asking about compensation and benefits before accepting a job offer and negotiating those things. As a society we need to get better about talking about money. So that work is really awesome.
Marco: Through 100 hundred black men, I had a lot of connections in the tech sector. And so back then, you know, what I decided to do was get a grant through UC Berkeley. I used my tech connections to host a discussion on engineering careers in tech. So now I’m hosting one on all the careers in tech where you don't have to know a code and back then we had Google, Yelp, Facebook, we had quite a few major tech companies there. We had about 300 people come to the live event in Oakland. The end result was that people got jobs and so we replicated that every August since 2016.
When COVID hit, we saw a lot of people have their employment negatively affected by COVID. A lot of people lost jobs and I'm a firm believer that you should never waste a good crisis. Since everything went remote, we were able to connect with people from Historically Black Colleges (HBCUs) across the world and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), 100 Black Men and 100 Black Women chapters, National Society of Black Engineers, the National Black MBA Association, all these other organizations that are nationwide. We can get them on a zoom and we can have more offerings. So we had some wonderful offerings including:
Black excellence in tech
How to break into tech
Meet the chiefs (four chief officers spoke)
Non-traditionally trained engineers in tech (coding boot camps)
Bridging the gap in tech (we partnered with the Latinx organizations to talk about how we can create pathways for Black and brown communities into tech)
Marco speaking on a panel
Jocelyn: The work you're doing to get people pathways into tech is so awesome. I think you said 60 to 70% of jobs in tech don't require coding. It makes sense to me when you think about it, all the support that those companies need. Things like sales and customer service and all the different pieces, but that's really great to be able to help people connect into that field.
Jocelyn: Talk to me a little bit about what Berkeley has done to support Black employees over the last year and a half. Do you feel like it's been enough? Can it ever be enough? What does that look like?
Marco: So I'll say no, it hasn't been enough. Can it be enough? Potentially.
I think that one of the issues that UC Berkeley faces is that as a public institution you have Prop 209. Prop 209, is legislation that came about that said that we can't provide any resources to one group and not the other. While in theory it makes sense, it's not an equitable solution. Sometimes what Jocelyn needs isn't what Marco needs, and vice versa. And if you have to say, “If Marco's going to get this then Jocelyn has to get this, then that might not be in the budget.”
UC Berkeley has done a lot for the Black employees in regards to providing resources for mental health professionals. We have affinity groups that meet. We've also had a lot of conversations with activists and people that are movers and shakers. Those are great things, but there's been a lack of representation. Our student population for Black students is extremely low.
And then it's difficult to build community when you don't have enough people here. I'm in constant conversation with Black colleagues where we say, “I don't have anyone, any people of color in my department.” And that can be isolating. I don't think that as a whole we've done enough to address that, so that way people can build community.
Jocelyn: Do you think with not having enough staff and students at the school, is it more of a recruitment issue, more of a retention issue?
Marco: First off, yes, it's a recruitment issue. we're not getting enough people into the pipeline and then also it's a retention issue because now if I'm here and I don't necessarily feel like my community is represented here. Then I'll go somewhere where my community is represented. So it's a cyclical process that needs to be addressed. So part of it is let's do better in recruiting, but then another part is, let's make sure that we're providing resources for those that are here and, you know, find out from people what they need.
Jocelyn: Definitely. Now, as a father, what challenges has Covid brought? How do you think companies can support working parents now and in the future?
Marco: That's a great question. You know training through COVID has been extremely interesting and difficult. One thing about the education system, we haven't innovated enough for our children. We still have the same model that we used over a hundred years ago where there a teacher stands in front of a classroom and pretty much preaches and they give homework and they do these lessons and tests, and we haven't changed that. And just given the way the world is, we know that it could be improved upon.
With that there are certain challenges that have come through COVID being a parent 24 hours a day and being an employee eight to 12 hours a day, and trying to teach your kids, there's a lot of overlap there. And I think that one of the things that companies either have done or can do is to provide more flexibility to their employees. And so what that looks like is asking:
Can you get the job done?
What can we provide to help you get the job done?
What are the resources that you need?
If you are getting the job done and whatever mold that works best for you, it's not up to us to change that.
I've seen some organizations who are like we're gonna do it this way. Right? Everybody has to come into the office, or everyone has to be remote. And depending on your own situation and the way that you have your life set up one or the other may not work.
Early on a lot of people thought you needed to have your camera on every meeting. But that's not sustainable. If my kids are running around in the background, they're gonna be a distraction to you. I'm gonna be thinking about it the whole time, because I'm gonna be concerned and my kids are running around and you're judging me. Small things like that I think organizations can do to create pathways to where people can be successful because all those same things that I'm talking about can help different types of people.
Jocelyn: I think those are great examples. It makes me think about the fact that when you adapt something for a particular group, you end up benefiting more people. For example, the voice to text was developed for people who are visually impaired, but now everybody uses it. And I think it's just like you're saying with having the cameras off, I do that with my team just to avoid “Zoom fatigue”. So having that flexibility can be really beneficial.
All those adjustments that companies make to innovate and going back to what you said about school, starting to innovate with how we learn too and how kids learn, I think is the direction in which we need to be moving.
Jocelyn: I would love for you to talk a little bit more about your consulting business and the types of services you offer. If anyone wants to connect with you about having you speak at their company, or do you work with them, what could that look like?
Marco leads a discussion at AfroTech
Marco: In regards to the services I provide I work with companies in a variety of ways, and it's primarily in tech, but I've worked with law firms, biotech, and in the food industry as well. Whether that's coming in as a keynote speaker, I come in and have conversations with organizations about inclusion, culture, leadership, anti-racism, anti-bias, anti-blackness, all these different areas in which we can learn to better interact with one another.
I moderate panel discussions as well. I did one for a talent summit, not too long where we were talking about the future of work.
I also go in and work with organizations on their recruiting strategies and working with the leadership team creating pathways for them to do better in the areas of inclusion.
One of the things I really like to focus on and I think is the root of some of the things that we do is the ability to give feedback. We have to be comfortable with understanding how, or making sure that our employees understand how to give management feedback.
Jocelyn: That is great. And they can contact you here. Anything else you would like to add?
Marco: I've been excited about the work that you do in regards to pay equity. I think that more people need to know about that. I think that’s one of the last vestiges that we need to get through. And a lot of people are afraid of it. It's extremely important and you're the only person I know doing it. And so if there are others, that means that there aren't enough.
Jocelyn: Yeah. I mean, you're right there aren't a lot of people doing it. There are some great companies that are doing the work, but a lot of them just service really big organizations. So where I can come in with smaller orgs I think that's really valuable. And then part of what I wanna do is get more people doing this work because I can't do it all. And so that's why I have the course that I'm doing. The course is a cohort model and we teach people how to do pay equity audits in their org. I am always looking for more people to educate on how to do it as internal practitioners or if they’re a consultant they can offer that service.
You can learn more about MT Lindsey’s services and book an appointment on their website. View our full interview here.
