Leveraging Your Potential to Build an Inclusive Culture Part 1

1. Leveraging Your Potential to Build an Inclusive Culture: Part 1 types of industries, and diverse career goals want to achieve their personal potential in whatever impassions them and gives them the opportunity to grow and live the lifestyle they desire. People from all walks of life, all Daphne Magna, sits down with Peter Szczerba, Founder & Host of Own Your Potential podcast, to discuss from her viewpoint as an entrepreneur and an Inclusion and Culture Consultant - someone who helps leaders get the best out of their diverse employees - how to help them achieve the potential they all want and deserve. Peter - Welcome back to the Own Your Potential you'll hear stories from leaders across the globe about how they've taken control of their career growth and lessons on how you can too. Podcast, where www.toughconvos.com

2. Today, I'm very excited to be sitting down with Daphne Magna, who's the founder of Tough Convos, and a management consultant who specializes in anti-black racism, inclusive leadership, and team culture. Daphne, I'm really looking forward to sitting down and having this conversation, I'm just excited at the type of value that's going to come out of this and the insights and the learning. So why don't we just jump right in and get to it, you mind walking us through your career journey and the story up until this point? Daphne - Definitely, you know, it's always a story when someone asks, what you do, and, and how you got there. But as the founder of tough convos, it's definitely been a windy road. And I never knew I'd end up here. But as an inclusion and culture consultant, I really work with leaders and teams to transform their culture, you know, and I help them sort of dig deep and get uncomfortable in challenges and issues and situations that they find themselves in, because all organizations find themselves in there, in those, you know, uncomfortable spaces. So by helping them create content, and creating learning experiences, like some of the tough conversations - we'll talk about coming up - really helps them build the culture that they deserve, and that all of the employees deserve to be a part of. www.toughconvos.com

3. Peter - Yeah, absolutely. I would love to understand how you ended up here because this is such a critical and important conversation for all you mentioned, all companies to be having right now. And a space to be engaging with and prioritizing, but... What led you here, how did you end up founding tough convos and addressing this, this gap area? Daphne - I have done a lot of work with global companies that had challenges working with different cultures. And so you know, as a result of that work, www.toughconvos.com

4. it became glaringly obvious to me that the real challenge was around not understanding each other, and not realizing how different your training, your education, your values, determine the way you act, behave, what you think is good, what you think doesn't work, you know, what you think's appropriate and respectful, and all these things. So the challenge though, was you see these biases as a trainer or consultant, blinding folks, but some are not really open to tackling things that are sensitive like that, and when you can't label it, what it really is, it makes it even more difficult. And so what I realized is, while working across cultures with those various global orgs, whether they were American and Indian teams, or Chinese and French teams, you know, no matter where we were Singapore, everywhere had the same types of issues, and they were all rooted in misinformation, and really, poor education to be frank. Peter - This is something that, you know, is particularly important to this, this whole space of one’s own potential, because we talked about it through the lens of professional development, professional growth, owning your career trajectory, but there are simply folks who are faced with obstacles that not everyone is as a result of some of the things that you're talking about. www.toughconvos.com

5. Peter - And so what I love about that is I think in certain circumstances, it is that simple. And I like that sentiment, I think it's a powerful thing for people to hear. And the fact that you said it in a blunt way, I think makes it that much stronger of a takeaway for people to walk out of this conversation with so you know, this space that you've built your consulting career around it's wholly driven by passion and belief in the need to impact this human rights space and it being a driver for you. Can you talk about that as kind of this intrinsic driver for how you push forward to grow this business and grow your own career? Daphne - 100%. I mean, as a young child coming up, growing up in a very diverse multicultural community, and being biracial, this social conflict between Black and white was my existence, you know, it was just a part of who I was. And having so many examples around me you know. I was blessed to have someone who loved me as dearly as my mother and sacrifice as much as she did, but I definitely didn't consider that we were advantageous in any regard financially, so that really led me to dig deeper into why those gaps existed, why certain groups in particular seem to be the ones on the bottom, and other groups in particular, seem to be the ones on the top. And that just made me dig deeper. www.toughconvos.com

6. There's so much more....... Find out more about podcast here - https://www.oypnow.com/episodes/episode40-daphne- magna Tough Convos, Canada Tel: 1(858) 876-8176 www.toughconvos.com