Zach chats with Fortune senior editor Ellen McGirt about her journey to writing on race and leadership and what fuels her to do this work, and she graciously details the dynamic of what it looks like for her to talk about these topics with majority-white executive leaders while breaking down how it works for her as a journalist. Ellen's reporting has taken her inside the C-Suites of Facebook, Nike, Twitter, Intel, Xerox and Cisco and on the campaign trail with Barack Obama - check out all of her information in the show notes!
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TRANSCRIPT
Zach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and man, goodness gracious. Wild times we're living in. I hope that you're washing your hands, keeping your hands off your face, not congregating in groups of more than 10--just chilling really, right? Take care of yourself, take care of your family. I hope that you've been listening to the content that Living Corporate has been putting out regarding just working from home and still maintaining community while working from home. Just taking care of yourself. I'm hoping that you're able to engage in our content, and irrespective of that I'm just hoping that you're safe. You know, we always have conversations on this platform that aim to center and amplify underrepresented voices, and I think that we continue to separate ourselves as it pertains to doing that, right? Like, we're trying to be unapologetic about really amplifying and centering marginalized, underrepresented and underappreciated, underestimated voices at work, and we do this by having authentic, available, candid, transparent--any other words you want to use for real--conversations with all types of people. Authors, writers, professors, activists, executives, recruiters, entrepreneurs, influencers, artists, right? Like, anybody that is passionate about this space, and with that being said, we have somebody on who honestly--and I don't know why I'll always say, "I'm really a fan of this person," but I really am a fan. Like, this person, if y'all--anyway, we'll get into it. Ellen McGirt. Ellen McGirt is an award-winning journalist, senior editor at Fortune Magazine, and covers race, culture and leadership in a daily column for Fortune called "RaceAhead". Make sure y'all check out RaceAhead. We'll talk about that a little bit later, but it's fire. Her reporting has taken her inside the C-Suites of Facebook, Nike, Twitter, Intel, Xerox and Cisco--now, look, those are just a few, okay? 'Cause that's not exhaustive--the campaign trail with Barack Obama--what's up, come on--and across Africa with Bono to study breakthrough philanthropy. In the past, she’s written for Time, Money and Fast Company, where she wrote or contributed to more than twenty cover stories and created the digital series "The 30 Second MBA." Back when the web was young, [laughs]--so that's when Al Gore was, like, you know, like, a little less stodgy. Like, this was earlier. She was the founder of a financial website for women called "Cassandra’s Revenge," and she established similar sites for AOL and Oxygen Media. Y'all, she established sites for--it's crazy, 'cause I'm reading this and I'm like--as if I haven't read this before, but it's just wild when you think about, like, sites for AOL. Like, that's back in the day. You know, some of y'all don't remember. You had to log on, and then, like, the little man would be on the screen, and then, you know, you couldn't be on the computer, and then your mom would be on the phone 'cause--the busy signal 'cause you had dial-up, and you'd pick up the phone and it'd be like *noise*. Anyway, so the point is, like, she's OG. OG in the game. Ellen was the lead editor for Your First Leadership Job, a book published by Wiley in 2015, and she attended Brown University. Ellen, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Ellen: I am exhausted after listening to my bio. My gosh, I've been busy. But so happy to be here, Zach. Thank you.
Zach: Now, look, first off we gotta shout you out, because you were one of the first articles that we cited on Living Corporate, "Why Race & Culture Matter in the C-Suite," talking about leading while black. Can we talk a little bit about that piece and your journey on writing in race and leadership?
Ellen: 100% we can, 'cause that really kicked off a whole new career development for me. But before we do I have to shout you right back, Zach. I mean, when I stepped into this space of writing about race, particularly for the corporate world, I was stepping into a space where giants already inhabited the world, and you are one of them, and I appreciate you, and I just want to let you know that at moments when I really don't know what to do, what to write, what to think about what's happening in the world, I've got your voice in my head, and you steer me in the right directions, so I appreciate you.
Zach: Would you stop? Oh, my gosh.
Ellen: That's the thing. But that's also the thing. I know that you know this from doing this work, which is different from, you know, your day job and your home life and it's just a distinct part of what you do, is that when you decide to talk about race and inclusion, particularly in the workplace and what that means in the world, you inherit a whole bunch of people who you didn't know who existed who have been thinking about how to make the world better in this challenging way, and that's the blessing of the work. It really is.
Zach, You know, speaking of the work, why do you think so few folks discuss the intersection of race and leadership in major publications? This is not even really an ad for Fortune, right? Shout-out to Fortune. What's up? But, you know, I don't see this a lot. You know, you see pieces from time to time in Harvard Business Review, but I don't think I've seen dedicated spaces for this intersection of race and leadership in white-owned publications. Like, why do you think that is, and what's your fuel for doing this work?
Ellen: You know, this leads me right back to your first question. You know as well as anybody who is reading business material or even news magazines or news material that race is just not something people are willing to talk about, are comfortable talking about, and I think for Fortune, which writes for the business audience--and not just any business audience, for a corporate audience--this is not something that had ever been taken on seriously in the corporate world before, and in addition to subscribers, in addition to people showing up at our events, major corporations actually are our advertisers and our sponsors. In many ways, we are paid for by the people that we cover. So it is an inherent tension, and we do have to walk that fine line. I know you and I have talked about this in the past. So imagine my surprise, you know? [laughs] I hadn't worked at Fortune in years. I had left in 2006 and joined a competitor for many, many years, which you mentioned. I had worked on a book. I was sort of looking around for my next act, and I get a ping out of the blue from Cliff Leaf, who is now the editor-in-chief, asking me if I would be willing to write a piece about why there's no black men in the executive pipeline in Fortune 500 companies. So two things leaped to mind. "Oh, my gosh. Of course yes," and the second one is "There really must not be anybody as part of just Fortune's daily lives who felt comfortable writing a piece like this," which reflected just how tentative it all is for everyone. News rooms are not as diverse as they should be. Corporate America isn't. Nothing is as diverse as it should be. So in my first conversation with Cliff--and I have to also shout-out Alan Murray, who's now our CEO--then our president--you know, this is something that people, that they cared about, brought to their attention, as something that would be welcome in the marketplace, and to their credit, two white men stood behind me and said, "We pick you. Let's see what happens," and my conversation with Cliff is this can't just be about data. This just can't be an inspiring conversation with a beleaguered chief diversity officer somewhere,
who we all know doesn't get the resources that they need. We need to look at what happens that black men very specifically, from the time they're born, in under-resourced neighborhoods, in neighborhoods without sufficient food resources and with environmental issues, to the time
they don't get to the C-Suite. And where are we losing them? We're losing them in school, where they're--under-resourced school or biased treatment, disproportionate treatment while they're in school. We're losing them into the criminal justice system, and we know how that works out. We're losing them through a series of biased decisions and screening mechanisms which are systemic. Hell, if their mothers survive their birth with them we're losing them every step of the way, and that was what that first story was intended to do, was to look at it from that holistic point of view. And Zach, it worked. It almost killed me, but it worked, because, you know, in order to do it I had to take the testimony of men just like you, and some not like you--younger than you, in different stages than you, [?], young men who would never join the corporate world for any reason because they don't trust it--and put that, their pain and their regrets and their pressures and their inability to cope with some of the unique pressures they experience, on full view, and that kicks us off with an opening to have more of these types of conversations in longform and print and in a daily newsletter, which had--to my knowledge--n
