Jamal joins us to discuss how grit and innovation can be used to effectively address some of the most complex issues facing us as a society, specifically around inequity and access to essential resources.
Jamal is a Senior Vice President of Customer Inclusion at Fidelity Investments, a group charged with the leading focus diversity and inclusion efforts within underrepresented communities.
Jamal joins us to discuss how grit and innovation can be used to effectively address some of the most complex issues facing us as a society, specifically around inequity and access to essential resources.
Jamal is a Senior Vice President of Customer Inclusion at Fidelity Investments, a group charged with the leading focus diversity and inclusion efforts within underrepresented communities.
Description:
Jamal joins us to discuss how grit and innovation can be used to effectively address some of the most complex issues facing us as a society, specifically around inequity and access to financial resources. Jamal is a Senior Vice President of Customer Inclusion at Fidelity Investments, a group charged with the leading focus diversity and inclusion efforts within underrepresented communities.
Transcript:
Erol Senel:
Hello everyone, and welcome to Success Shorts. I'm Erol Senel. Today we're joined by Jamal Stockton. Jamal is a Senior Vice President of Customer Inclusion at Fidelity Investments, a group charged with the leading focus diversity and inclusion efforts within underrepresented communities.
Jamal brings a ton of personal and professional insight to our chat about some of the most complex topics facing us as a society. So I encourage you to set aside your personal pretense and enjoy our time with Jamal Stockton. Let's go.
Erol Senel:
Hey Jamal. Thanks so much for coming on today.
Jamal Stockton:
Yeah. Great to be here and happy to have this conversation.
Erol Senel:
And I'm really eager to get into your story and see where this discussion goes, because quite honestly, it can go in a lot of directions. But first, we seem to be inching towards a light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to some of the things around COVID. And as with any tough situation that we're faced with, it's always kind of good to take a step back and do a little bit of self reflection. So I'm curious, what's something that you learned about yourself during this time and something that you kind of plan on continuing to foster moving forward that you're going to bring out of this?
Jamal Stockton:
For me, this is kind of an easy one. I think first, resiliency is something I wasn't fully aware of in terms of myself. And then I also think kind of the value of family and friends and more of an appreciation for work-life balance.
Jamal Stockton:
First off, with thinking about resiliency and I will probably dig a little bit deeper in this conversation about that, but just kind of your life trials and what that prepares you for in terms of events like this that happen in life. Thinking back into my childhood and certainly my family upbringing and kind of things that have happened in society, I think for me personally, I've just developed a higher threshold for adversity due in part to some of the things we'll talk about I'm sure today in terms of social injustices, systemic racism and oppression by large. So while I think many people have not faced some of these issues kind of in their life journey, these are things that I've been dealing with my entire life that I think better prepared me to deal with some of the situations and the hardships that COVID has brought on.
Jamal Stockton:
I think probably more important for me personally during this time, it's just realizing how much time and energy I was spending on work and the preparation for work and focused on career and not spending as much time kind of being present or mindful in the moment and when I had time to spend with my friends and family. I think maybe that's just part of our culture in America and part of our capitalistic society in how much time and effort we put into those things. But I'm sure just like you, you've got a lot of time at home now. You're not doing errands like running to the dry cleaners or going to the grocery store. I'm spending a lot more time in the house with family and it's nice. You're you're sitting down having dinners. You're actually cooking for the first time in a long time and really finding that balance to be much more enjoyable, kind of to the state of the world that we were living in before.
Erol Senel:
Yeah. You hit on some interesting things there. And I feel like we all finally went through something communal. Before this, there's, I mean, huge pockets of society that haven't really felt this level of discomfort that COVID brought on and all the restrictions and the shift within ourselves as to we can't do exactly what we want in some of these things. And I feel like a lot of what's happened over the past year is actually a little bit of a by-product of that. And I know we're going to get into this a little bit more, but the fact that we've all gone through this, I think has actually brought out a lot more empathy and openness to some of the things that maybe we didn't understand before. And now that we're going through something communal like this in a way, we know that we have to lift each other up and we can all use this as a launching point to do something better.
Erol Senel:
That's just some thoughts that kind of came to my head as I was listening to you saying that. And work-life, I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, to say we don't leave the apartment or house or wherever we are, I think that's an understatement. I mean, the butt imprint on my couch cushion is getting bigger by the day.
Jamal Stockton:
Right.
Erol Senel:
But when you think about it, it hopefully has brought us a lot more together as families, even if it's been tedious at times and we wanted to get out. We're never going to get this close period back. Once things reopen, there will be some leveling out and we'll leave the house a little bit more, but this was really valuable for me. So I appreciate you sharing that.
Erol Senel:
So Jamal, I have to say it was fun doing some research on you. There's so much leading around your story and everything that you do. There's the work that you're leading now around the customer inclusion in the underserved communities. And before that, you were leading innovation in the legal and technical space and just a lot of energy going to nonprofits and speaking to different groups. And so looking back, when you think about your trajectory throughout your life, what trait would you say you most attribute your ability to drive this energy into what you do today so that you can take on such complex areas? And how did you foster that as you were going through the years?
Jamal Stockton:
I think a lot of what I've been able to do is develop a certain amount of grit, certainly, and focus. And that happened through just basically an emotional journey throughout my life, through adversity. Just thinking about moments in time, I had teachers that would tell me to go back to where I come from, right, in classrooms, in front of other students. Or so-called friends that might use derogatory terms against you, certainly in the community, whether or not you're on the playing field, playing soccer and all in all aspects of life, walking into stores and people being afraid of you or not greeting you or women holding their purses or crossing the street when you come. I mean, the examples go on and on in terms of facing adversity and then not falling into a trap of being emotional about it.
Jamal Stockton:
So there's an emotional learning journey that you're on what things work in order to change the minds of others. And so you learn quickly what works and what doesn't work. And through that process, you develop a tremendous amount of focus on getting to that objective of what actually changes things. And that process of focus creates grit, right? So your kind of tenacity, your ability to move forward regardless of the adversity that you face, you just buckle down and you do it until you get to the outcome that you want.
Jamal Stockton:
And so I think that for me, those early childhood experiences and life experiences really enabled me enough to focus on what I wanted to do. And ultimately going to school to be an engineer I think was more of a skillset probably I was born with, which is the ability to solve problems and look at the way that systems work and deconstruct those things, re-engineer them, or engineer things from the ground up. And so obviously it was good parenting, right? They kind of put you on the path of where you need to be based on the skills that they see in you.
Erol Senel:
Yeah.
Jamal Stockton:
But it's a combination of both those things.
Erol Senel:
That's excellent. So I want to stick with that problem solving component for a little bit. I mean, it would be interesting to kind of get into a little bit of your background as far as the legal innovations because I have questions around that. But I mean, you do have this exceptional trait that has kind of followed you through your career. Not everyone can do that.
Erol Senel:
So recently you've taken on this new challenge when it comes to customer inclusion and working with the underserved communities, which I mean, on the surface it just sounds like such a massive undertaking. But if we can kind of break that down just a little bit, if we were to survey the landscape, what are some of the most pressing areas of focus that you're interested in in that space? And how are you going to use this skillset of not only your grit, but also your problem solving skillset to really envision how you're going to drive that work and come to a positive solution?
Jamal Stockton:
Yeah, I mean, you nailed it. Obviously it is a complex and complicated issue. One that's been, I think, around since the formation of the foundation of the country. Really, the solution is based in three pillars. One is personal finance and financial freedom and access to finances, which is obviously squarely in our industry.
Jamal Stockton:
The second component of that is, I think, education and access to education around personal finance. The other areas of which I've been involved in professionally is certainly our access to justice reform and our criminal justice system, being treated fairly underneath the law so that you have access to things like your financial wellness and your personal finances, the ability to take out loans so that you and your family can be prosperous.
Jamal Stockton:
And then I think lastly, the other component of that is just good quality healthcare for all and making sure that people have access to healthcare and are treated again fairly under the law. And so those three issues are extremely complicated ones that we're dealing with. And quite frankly, as we know in the history of the country, that systematically, people have been left out of that process, oftentimes purposefully, to make sure that they could not prosper.
Jamal Stockton:
So I think the second part of your question there, when thinking about the complexity of the issue and how you move forward with this is also multifaceted. So the first question you asked yourself was, "Well, what can I do, given the scope of work and the responsibilities that you currently have in your role? And then where else can I influence, even if it's not within my scope of responsibilities?" And there's key areas of which Fidelity does really well. Right? And that's certainly in our retirement products, when we think about financial wellness, when we think about our healthcare offerings and making sure that those things are accessible to all.
Jamal Stockton:
And so then you have to kind of dive into what's the core reason why those things might not be accessible and look at the history of why they haven't been accessible. And the trust has been lost in some of these underrepresented and underserved communities because people have purposely left them out of having access to those services. So the first thing that we need to focus on when you think about the root cause is building trust in these communities by building knowledge about how to make the right decisions. And when you build knowledge and people can make the right decisions, then you start to gain confidence on your ability to support yourselves and of course your family. And so education becomes one of the most critical things in this entire process that both we're offering the education and knowledge to people that we're also advocating at the legislative level for bills that address these educational issues as well as equity issues. And so we need to make a stronger push there as well.
Erol Senel:
But when you think about the financial freedom and educational component, and we're going to kind of look at it through the scope of finance, since, I mean, that could be just a massive elephant to have to figure out what to do with. But some of these topics have been addressed before. I'm not saying they've been addressed effectively, but I'm curious. What were some of the missteps and maybe misconceptions that went into the inability for them to have real change? Because when you look at some of these things, we've seen huge amounts of resources go there, but not a really big change in the outcome. How do you feel that we can begin to influence that now when there's a lot more momentum behind it so that we have a different outcome? But what are some of those things that we need to be aware of so we don't trip over some of the issues that kind of led to just duds happening?
Jamal Stockton:
Yeah, it's another great question and I think that my immediate to that would be the communication and the way in which we communicate about financial services and people's wellbeing. There's a core component of this when we're communicating that we have to understand the differences between people's values and needs and their wants, and ultimately the nuances and the differentiation and people's cultures. Because what you're trying to do when you're teaching people and educating them is that you need to speak to their lived experiences and the way in which they make decisions so that they understand how to take that knowledge forward.
Jamal Stockton:
And I'll just give you a couple of examples there. And so let's just use people that might be immigrating to the US and let's just take our Latino cultures, for example. Now, things that we know about those cultures is oftentimes the people need to send money home to the countries in which they came from because they don't have the same opportunities of those people that came to the US. And then often times, in family settings at the dinner table is where financial decisions might be being discussed and where people are making choices around what to do with their finances.
Jamal Stockton:
And we don't show up in a way and communicate to people in a way that we understand what they are actually trying to do with their finances. And that is a priority for them above something like retirement. So the way we might have communicated to someone in the past might have been, "Hey, when you're 65, you can retire and you can own this vineyard." Well, that's completely out of touch and tone deaf for those people that are just trying to get their family out of a bad living situation in another country.
Erol Senel:
Right.
Jamal Stockton:
So immediately you didn't welcome the person into the situation. You didn't understand their cultural needs and values. And so how are they ever going to trust you? And then how are they ever going to begin to engage with you and then utilize the services that we're able to offer them? And it's these nuances that are extremely important as we move forward, to get people more engaged that we can serve them better, which is ultimately what we're here to do.
Erol Senel:
You hit on something there. And this term, I feel, has definitely come to the forefront because it does involve nuance. And that's the concept of being tone deaf and not hearing your voice in a message. There's times when even if you're just driving along and you're listening to a commercial, something makes a mass generalization. It doesn't apply to you. You completely shut it out. You don't pay attention to it. Yet when it comes to some of the most important messaging as to education around financial literacy, making the right decisions, home ownership, whatever the different things are that are being messaged, they don't hit the mark because they feel like they're not approaching it the right way. And it sounds like that's what you're saying is one of the biggest things that has been missed on in the past.
Jamal Stockton:
Yeah, 100%. I mean, that's right. I mean, you've got to speak to those lived experiences that people understand, or you don't engage. And we all do that to your exact point in all aspects of life. If it's some sort of marketing materials or a commercial, if it doesn't apply to you, you don't listen, right. If a song comes on the radio, it's not your genre, you tune it out or change the station. And so how can we expect a different decision-making process in the way in which we're communicating? We should expect that same behavior in people, regardless of the topic that we're talking about. If you're not speaking to me and you don't understand me, then why would I listen?
Erol Senel:
That's the million dollar question. How do you create the right tone that will resonate with different pockets of the community that have felt under-representative and as if certain industries don't have their best interests in mind?
Jamal Stockton:
I mean, that one for me feels very easy, which is we've got listen a lot and you've got to learn, right? So you can't assume that you know anything or that you can apply your 30 plus years of experience or a company's experience for the last hundred years and apply it to every community that you're trying to engage with. You got to open up your minds to what are the folks saying in these different communities that are their needs? And how are those different than the way in which you're communicating to them about the services that you're offering to other people? You're going to find lots of similarities, right? People definitely want to retire, or people want good financial wellness for their family. People are all caregivers, right? So we're all people, right? And that human centered approach to this process allows us to understand what things remain the same for us all versus which things do we need to differentiate in terms of the way in which we communicate to you. So listening and hearing what people are saying is going to be critical to this process.
Erol Senel:
Definitely, so it's taking it away from generalizations about groups of people and almost making it almost a more customized individualistic approach to some of these problems so that you can get in and actually know what's going on.
Erol Senel:
So I'd like to take a step back a little bit to your background in the legal area. You were knee deep in legal innovation at Fidelity Investments and in my mind, that can mean so many different things. So I'm kind of wondering what does legal innovation mean to you and how can you take the principles you learned there and begin to apply them on a broader scale to try to address some of the things that we're facing today from a social standpoint?
Jamal Stockton:
So it's kind of an interesting term, right? So innovating legal, given that everything that legal does is based on precedent.
Erol Senel:
Right.
Jamal Stockton:
And the very industry is stodgy and kind of stuck in its ways. And so it's a great question. What are we trying to innovate? And when you think about innovation, well, what do we mean by that? That just means we're doing the same thing, but we're doing it differently. So our job was to look at the way in which law was practiced and think about new ways of doing the same thing to make the practice of law, the delivery of those legal services, more efficient, right? And to make sure that we're doing that leveraging the newest technologies that have come out and emerged in an area where technology had not been adopted before.
Jamal Stockton:
And the practice of law by its nature because of the precedent is slow. And when things are slow, they're costly, right? And so that principle of delivery of legal services as a slow process based on precedent, driving up costs means that you and I, as individual consumers of legal services means that there's a barrier to entry of which we can not even afford. And so, one of the challenges with the legal services industry is that when it's weaponized and the laws can be weaponized to both oppress people, but also to get to the outcome that you want using money, influence and power. And so if you can commoditize legal services by doing what we do in business, which is to make legal services scale much quicker and to make them much more efficient and to use data to drive outcomes, you'll lower the cost of those services that are provided. And you begin to commoditize them. When you begin to commoditize them, then that means anyone can have access to legal services.
Jamal Stockton:
And so that principle of scale and efficiency and using data to drive decisions is ultimately what we're trying to achieve in terms of improving legal services. Now, how does that apply to what we're doing now? Tremendously, right? So everything from healthcare to legal services to financial services, what you're trying to do is make it as easily accessible to as many people as you can to commoditize those things so that everyone can have access to them. So you're trying to simplify the experiences to people, humanize the experiences to people, make it easily understandable and easily consumed, as opposed to making the barrier to entry so high that only those people with power, influence and money can have access to them.
Jamal Stockton:
So those problems are the same, regardless across those three pillars that I mentioned earlier, whether it's the legal system, whether it's the financial system or the healthcare system.
Erol Senel:
So to kind of wrap things up for those listening, I want to leave them with something to sit with because obviously some of the stuff we're talking about, it's heavy and we need to internalize it. But then we need to have further conversations about it and figure out what our role is in all of this. So when you think about grit and the social inequities that need to be addressed, what would you say is a way for those listening to reframe their views? And for one, remove the political or group think underpinnings, because those are the things that get in the way. And just find the common humanity and the desire to help create a fair plane for everyone to participate in.
Jamal Stockton:
For me and for everybody on your life journey, I think oftentimes you just have to do a lot of self reflection about your own personal opinions, about your own biases. And honestly, I think a part of the journey is to constantly reprogram yourself, right? To think, "Am I right?" Is what I just said, right, to do a lot of self-introspection about both your thinking, your opinions, but also your emotions along the way. Asking yourself those questions and having a high emotional intelligence about why am I feeling this way in this given situation and to not always fall into the trap that you think you know because you've got the experience or that you've been on this planet for 50, 60, 70 years doesn't mean that there's [inaudible 00:22:58] the past being right.
Jamal Stockton:
So challenging those assumptions about yourself and always kind of doing that self-introspection is what I think all good people do and good all humans should be doing all the time because life is a learning process. And I think it's just something that we should all practice.
Erol Senel:
I agree with that. That's good advice. And I'm just going to kind of piggyback on that a little bit. I had my own opinions going into this, and there were certain elements of this overall conversation that weren't clicking for me until I actually read Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho. and in doing so, and kind of going in with a clear mind, I was able to do what you were just talking about and actually kind of remove some of this and just really introspect and figure out what are the parts of me that I'm carrying into someone else's real experience. And why am I even doing that? Because it's not my experience, it's theirs. And that really helped me. And for anyone listening, I definitely recommend that you check out that book and go into reading that book with a really clear mind and with the sole purpose of just trying to understand.
Erol Senel:
Jamal, I really appreciate you coming on. This is great, and thank you so much. And thanks for all the work that you do.
Jamal Stockton:
I appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Erol Senel:
And that's all we have for this episode of Success Shorts. Hopefully you found today's topic useful. And remember, have fun, stay curious and keep it short.