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The Creating Belonging Podcast
In the book, Creating Belonging: A Practical Guide to Accelerate Belonging in Organizations and Communities, Justin Reinert describes a model where belonging sits at the intersection of authenticity and acceptance. In The Creating Belonging Podcast, host Justin Reinert will continue the conversation of creating belonging by discussing others' experiences when they've been at various levels of authenticity and acceptance in their communities. Our goal with this podcast will be to help others find new paths to belonging in their communities.
The Creating Belonging Podcast
S2E4 Inclusive Leadership: Faith, Empathy, and the Quest for Belonging
Let us know what you think of this podcast!
As we grapple with the intricacies of forging genuinely inclusive spaces, Nancy Lyons, a tech innovator and staunch advocate for workplace diversity, lends her voice to our latest conversation. With Nancy at the helm of Clockwork and Tempo, her journey as a queer woman carving out a progressive company culture is both inspiring and instructive. Her stories, rich with the trials and triumphs of embedding inclusion into the DNA of a business, remind us that the pursuit of a welcoming environment is an ongoing, deliberate process. Nancy's recount of a colleague's struggle to reconcile his faith with a modern workplace ethos sheds light on how even the best-intentioned inclusivity initiatives can inadvertently marginalize, urging us to listen, learn, and adapt.
The dialogue turns deeply personal as Nancy reflects on a transformative exchange with a junior employee, probing the intersection of faith and leadership. It's a testament to the power of empathy in leadership, illustrating that understanding and mentorship can coexist with a multitude of beliefs. By embracing the complexities that each individual brings to the table, Nancy's leadership narrative challenges us to consider love and compassion as the cornerstones of not just personal faith, but of corporate culture. Join us for this thought-provoking episode where we confront the realities of fostering true belonging, navigating differences with grace, and the continuous evolution required to lead with inclusivity at the forefront.
You can order your copy of Creating Belonging on Amazon.
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Welcome to another episode of the Creating Belonging podcast. Today I have with me Nancy Lyons. Nancy, if you wouldn't mind just introducing yourself.
Nancy:Sure, I'm happy to Thanks for having me first. So I am Nancy Lyons. I live in Minneapolis, minnesota, and I am a co-founder and CEO of an experienced design and technology consultancy called Clockwork. I also am a co-founder of a low code no code agile studio called Tempo, and I've written a couple of books. I'm a keynote speaker and I'm also the. For the purpose of this particular podcast, I will share that. I'm also a chair emeritus for an organization called Family Equality, which is the leading national organization working for lived and legal equality for LGBTQ plus families and those that want to form them.
Justin:Great. Thank you, nancy, and most of our listeners are used to us kind of starting the conversation with just disclosure of identities, so I want to take a moment and to see if there are any identities that you'd like to share to anchor us in our conversation.
Nancy:Sure Thanks for asking. Well, my pronouns are she, her, they, them. And I am a queer, a woman, I am white, I am a mother, I am a spouse, I'm also a badass.
Justin:Okay, I love the some of the random identities that come up. I'm like badass, like I is. I love that as an identity. I got to add that to the list of excellent.
Justin:Well, so, as Nancy and I were just chatting before we were getting started and I'm excited to dive into this conversation we were talking about the creating the longing model, and Nancy was sharing an experience that she had had with a number of years back when she was going into another organization, I believe, doing some consulting, and so I would love to kind of dig into that story. If you wouldn't share it, let's start there and then see where we go.
Nancy:Sure, sure. Well, yeah, it was an organization that I actually worked inside of and I had become, I'd sort of worked my way up the ranks and this was sort of my early managerial career, if you will, and I was learning how to lead people right, and a lot of it was pretty organic. There wasn't. You know, we were young and it was a technology company and it was in the 90s, and what we knew at the time was we wanted to be values driven and we wanted to bring our authentic selves and we wanted people to have a different experience with this organization than they had had in other workplaces. In other words, we wanted them to feel free to bring their whole selves and, to you know, bring their authentic selves. And we wanted and this was before the language of belonging was really in play. So we were working really hard to create our own language, but also to make a space that was open to people of. You know, I don't even think we the language of diversity was was existed at that point in time. I don't think there certainly wasn't a real effort to create belonging, but the reality was that's what we were trying to create. So in doing that, I think we all sort of coalesced around a shared set of very progressive values. Right, we were, you know, we didn't have a dress code. It was a technology company. We made software and websites in the early days of software, internet software and websites. So we didn't have a dress code, we didn't really have a starter end time. It was really results oriented. We were remote before remote was even a conversation in the technology space. We let people sort of build their own schedules, benefit from flexibility, bring their sort of, you know, experiences, and you know, for me as a, as a queer woman, it was really important for me to be able to be out and safe, right, and so we wanted that for everyone else too, and we believe that that's what we were creating.
Nancy:And I had this experience with a colleague who was just really a gifted engineer, and this was one of those moments that I will never forget. I'm very outgoing, I'm very talkative. He is an engineer who likes to be in quiet spaces in the dark, and we were somehow paired together to drive to Iowa to deliver a pitch to an agricultural organization, and it was in that six hour drive in the car. You know where we were, where we were being inundated with the smell of turkey farming. It was thrilling. I remember thinking, I remember saying out loud like what is that? It's horrible. And interestingly enough, we also enjoyed a couple of fun little side trips, little field trips on the way back. After we had this moment that I'm about to share with you, we were suddenly so comfortable with each other that we stopped at one of those either sort of living museums. You know the Homestead Farmstead Living Museum.
Nancy:And we weren't friends, we weren't close, we barely knew each other. We worked together and he was very quiet. But this moment that I'm about to share actually brought us closer to the point where we were taking pictures of each other standing, you know, in an old farmhouse next to somebody dressed up like Laura Ingalls Wilder. But the moment itself was tense and I realized, you know, sort of my own failing or my own tunnel vision, because my colleague was telling me how much he appreciated the place where we both worked, but that he was feeling confused and sort of well, marginalized. And what he revealed was, while we were so busy trying to create this safe space for everyone, he was feeling like it wasn't okay for him to be a Christian, a person of faith, and that it wasn't okay for him to acknowledge that to. You know, share any of his sort of faith based interests.
Nancy:You know a lot of people find community in their churches. He didn't feel safe talking about his church. A lot of people find, you know, enjoy their family in the context of church or their faith. A lot of people, you know there's so much that Christianity does to influence how we, how, how a Christian lives, and what he was trying to explain to me was there was just no room for that. And I have to admit and I've already admitted to you that it was a stunning revelation for me, because here I thought I was working hard to make space for everybody and in fact I was making space for a lot of people that were perhaps usually marginalized or kept out of those conversations that lead to belonging.
Nancy:But in doing so I was marginalizing my white Christian colleague and it made me feel lousy, mostly because I really felt committed to that purpose, like in my mind.
Nancy:He should have felt safe, being a person of faith, in the environment we were creating together. He should have felt okay and I actually had a lot of admiration for him for saying it and not just sort of tamping it down and letting his masculinity sort of drive the conversation and express himself as not being afraid of anything. I think that was the option that certainly where a lot of people would have gone. You know I'm tough, I'm a leader, I can manage this, it's not important. But clearly his faith was so important to him that he found a moment where it was essential for him to share that and I think in that moment you and I were talking about that concept of being overbearing, and I realized, as you were talking, that that's exactly what I was, and I believed that we all saw the world the same way and that we were all operating under the same set of assumptions, and because of that, I made no room for this man and whomever else identified in a similar way with him on our staff.
Justin:Yeah, nancy, thank you for sharing that.
Justin:I think it's interesting because it really drives home the point that there's some research that I reference in the book around traditional approaches to DEIB.
Justin:And you're talking about a time before those letters existed and I mean, I definitely remember when I started the work it was just diversity and that was in the 2000s and so, yeah, the DEIB wasn't in that lexicon back then. But as we look at the research and the typical approaches and some of the challenges, that kind of multicultural approach which is much more common today, where differences are celebrated, non-marginalized individuals are celebrated, which is great, it is off-putting or makes others feel marginalized who aren't typically marginalized. And it's interesting because for me the biggest thing is like and I don't know how many times I say this whenever I reference that work it's not that I have a problem with making white men uncomfortable, including myself but the problem is that they're often the people that we need to get on board to help make room for everyone and ensure that our inclusion and belonging efforts are actually working. So it's interesting. I'm curious to dig into that a little bit more. What else did he share in that conversation that made him feel othered or marginalized?
Nancy:Well, I do think that because the time was the 90s, the late 90s. I'm aging myself here, but we were all very young. We were typical Gen Xers. We looked like we were out of a movie, like a Winona writer Ethan Hawke will be right Like reality bites. We were all wearing our flannel and our jeans. We were non-conformist. We were going to make change. In some ways, we were rejecting the establishment.
Nancy:I think what he represented for himself in the context of all that was exactly what we were rejecting. It was interesting because he was a pretty shy guy. He wasn't terribly, the conversation wasn't really lengthy, he didn't spend a lot of time emoting, he was very direct. When I think about it I'm not naming this person for a variety of reasons but when you think about it over time, what I've realized is that he, too, probably lived in the context of a number of identities, one of which may have been neurodivergent, because the way that he expressed this and I'm not trying to diagnose somebody that I'm not close to, but the way that he expressed it was so matter of fact and so direct and so lacking in additional details that I wish I could answer that question in a thrilling way for you. What he said was pretty point blank. It was I don't feel safe being Christian. I don't think you all think about those people in your midst that have values that are different from yours To me.
Nancy:Here's the thing I don't think values. I think values are something that we can share, regardless of our identities. For me, you can be a Christian and I am a person of faith, probably more on the agnostic side, just because I think there's no way. This all just. I believe in science, but I also believe science may have come from. We don't need to get into me.
Nancy:My point is I believe that people who don't believe in Christianity can also live by a moral code that resembles I'm going to tread lightly here the good side of Christian morality, not the judgmental, I don't know. Not the judgmental, difficult side that sometimes I witness in the world the condemnation, the hellfire and damnation. But the teachings of Jesus are really the ideal moral code, whether you believe in Jesus as the Son of God or Jesus as a prophet or a man walking the earth. This idea that we should love each other as we love ourselves, that we should do right by our neighbor, that we shouldn't harm others or be selfish, that we should share and care for one another. My God, my God, I mean, there's no reason for us not to be able to subscribe to a moral code that looks like that.
Nancy:So it was interesting to me that he was actually speaking of values and suggesting that we didn't share them, when in fact, I think part of the reason why I was so deluded at the time is because I guess I thought we all just want to care for each other, we all just want to collaborate and share, we all just want to make space for one another, we all want to feel safe at work, and there was something about his Christianity that he didn't articulate in that moment that made him feel like it wasn't safe.
Nancy:Now I will say we had very vocal and this was also before HR was terribly advanced and caught up to the current cultural conversation we had very vocal people who condemned Christianity at the time in a hateful way, but just in a dismissive way, and so I'm sure that someone actually said something around him that made him feel small and I think that may have been what he was reacting to and, like I said, I think it was a super brave thing for him to bring up and it was something that I was able to address in a more covert way when I got home.
Nancy:It wasn't like I was like we're going to love Christians, now let's make space for the Christians, but I was able to speak to the leadership team and the rest of the staff in a different setting, just about our need to really expand our definition of inclusion, what that can't just be people that agree with us, and actually I think that's what the world is suffering from right now. Right, like we want to be inclusive only if we all feel the same way about how things work. No-transcript, it's not possible.
Justin:Yeah, oh, my gosh, okay, there's so many directions I want to go. Sorry, I'm going to start with values, because I know I've told this story several times and maybe even on the podcast, but I'm going to share it with you, kind of in the context of this, because I think it's meaningful. So several years ago, in my work of diversity, I worked for a very large global organization and so diversity there is, like we're, literally in many, many countries. So let's start with the fact that we are, by nature, a very diverse organization and very culturally diverse. Anyway, I ended a session on diversity when the message was about holding people in a place of acceptance and appreciation and that tolerance is not enough, that if you ever felt tolerated, that's just not actually a great feeling. And there was a woman who came up to me after the session and very unironically said Justin, my faith tells me that I can't accept gay people. And so you're telling me that the organization is telling me that I need to accept gay people, but my faith tells me that I can't and in front of me which I love the irony and of course, have to conjure up all kinds of strength in that moment of like. Okay, well, let's have the right conversation here and calmly.
Justin:And I did say look, it sounds like your values may not align with the values of your employer and you may need to evaluate that and choose whether you want to work for an employer that has values that don't align with yours. The interesting part of that and this is going to dovetail into what you were saying of that kind of general moral code is I'm like I actually I don't think if, if of the Christian faith. I don't think anybody said don't accept gay people. You can interpret. I'm not going to debate like interpret 5000 ways of the scripture, of whether it's right or wrong. However, there are some specific things that I understand about the Christian faith that are like love others as yourself, except everyone, just much, no one, like all of those kinds of things that don't line up right. So I just think it's interesting. Anyway, I'm going to pause there and get some great questions.
Nancy:Yeah, you know, actually, if I, if I may, I'd like to share another really interesting story in it and it and it and it touches on what you just said, and it and it and it also speaks to my own evolution as a leader. So, cut to later, in the 2000s, when I was a co, I'd be, I was a co founder of the company that I am the CEO of. Now We've been around a long time I think that's the story you're hearing. So have I ancient and I had really worked hard to make space for people that had, you know, different opinions and different belief systems from me, from us, and, and I, and over the years, at this point I had had some really interesting conversations with other folks of faith who were deeply enmeshed in, you know, doc, dogma and and religion and communities of religion, and and enjoyed those conversations. And I had a young man who had started with us. I think if he didn't start as an intern, he started as a, as a very junior level front end engineer, slash designer, and he and I had become you know, it's so different from now, because it was so early in our in our story that I had relationships with everybody and now I don't. I don't work on the delivery side of the business, so it's so different to even think about this and this story is probably going to stun folks that I work with too.
Nancy:And he and I had an opportunity to get to know each other a little. We had done some of our one on ones and I'm a very approachable person. Once you get to know me, people tell me all the time oh, you scare me. It's like cool. But you know, whatever I can't do anything about it. This I'm big, that's my, that's my personality, that's what it is. But this young man had gotten to a place where he felt comfortable enough to approach me and I always encourage. I have this open door. You can direct message me anytime. We can have any conversation you want, if there's you know, if you need counsel or mentoring or you have criticism or feedback, I'm open, right, and this fellow.
Nancy:We were all sort of working on a tight deadline. It was, it was nighttime, we were all in our homes and this was when I don't know if we were using like IRC. It was before Slack, it was before Slack days and we were using some direct messaging application. He messaged me and I opened the message and he said I you know what, I don't want to fight about you, but how do you feel about the fact that you're going to help? And it was like like I'm, I'm the CEO and he is the newest hire at the junior risk level and you know, in any other, in any other organization, that would be problematic. So I was proud that it wasn't in my own. You know that I mean, I've never.
Nancy:I can honestly say, regardless of my personal feelings or my personal relationships inside of the organization there've only been one or two times where I have really given myself grief for treating somebody unfairly. But for the most part I really work not to treat anybody unfair or to operate out of taking something personally. I can't say that I don't operate from emotion. So he asked me how I felt about going to hell and I thought about it a minute and I remembered I had this mentor who was also a person of faith and he and I had had a conversation and he shared, you know, this little bit of wisdom with me that I then shared with this young man and I said you know, I said I don't profess to being capable of speaking for God.
Nancy:I sometimes worry about people who are, and I certainly don't take aspects of the Bible literally, because it has been through so much and so many translations and so many writings and rewritings, and let's not even start with the origins and why it was written in the first place. But what I do know is that when Christ was asked what what God really wants from us, he really wants from us, he said simply to love God and love each other. And I know that I do that. I know that I am showing up for the thing that Christ said God cares about the most, and when I think about God, I may not think about the same being that you do, but God also said we are made in His image. So, taking a page from your scripture, if I love people, if I truly care for people, I am doing what your God is asking of me and I don't feel like that God is going to condemn me to torment, because I do genuinely care about people and I do work to help those that are less fortunate than me or to work to create spaces where marginalized people can exist freely and openly.
Nancy:I do work to be a decent employer, a decent human. I'm not a greedy white lady, and he really accepted that. I think it really threw Him off. He was hoping to challenge me and I think he didn't know how to respond to it, and we actually became very close and are still in touch to this day. He no longer works with us. He's now a leader in his own right In a company. I actually saw a picture of Him recently. He's bald that's how old I am. I have a young man who has grown up and is now bald on my network, but I was glad to have that response for him and it's helped inform how I respond to other people that ask equally as difficult questions relative to their Christianity.
Justin:Yeah, it's such a great response and it also just makes me think of the individual who initiated that conversation, like what's the objective? Is the objective to have an argument or is the objective to convert you to something? I love your response and I love how that landed.
Nancy:Yeah, I mean, he's actually a really lovely guy. He was so young and so influenced by his parents and his church, and so I don't think he'd gotten to a point where critical thinking was part of his resume, if you will. I think he's matured and I doubt that he would ever ask a CEO of a company that question again. But we have great respect for each other and he is still a fine Christian man that I think he's a lovely guy. But I do think to your question was he trying to have a fight? I actually think he was worried about me. I think that was it. I think it was such a you wanted to challenge me, but I think he was worried about me. He was worried about my soul, and I hope that what I said to him made him realize that my soul is not for him to worry about.
Justin:Yeah, yeah.
Nancy:This is not where I thought our conversation was going to go. By the way, this is fast. I talked more about Christianity today than I have in the last 10 years. We're welcome.
Justin:So I love it, though I love it because about two months ago so I'm working on the second edition of the book and I'm thinking about what are the chapters I'm adding, what's the research I want to add? And it is not in the outline yet and I'm not sure I'm committed to or would put it in. But I've thought about a religion chapter, creating belonging and religion, because so much exclusion happens in the name of religion. And I'm not saying that all religions are exclusive, but I am saying exclusion happens in the name of religion. And you know, if you look at the religion that I'm most familiar with, being in Christianity, I'm like, yeah, just like you say, like, actually, if we're really examining it, that's not like we need to be inclusive, that's what, right, that's what we're told. So, really examining that, but like I'm just putting it there that I've entertained it, but it seems like a really deep rabbit hole.
Nancy:Yeah, that would be quite the quagmire, and yet I love the idea of it. I do Because I think religion is being weaponized and at its core, you know, there's nothing wrong with faith.
Nancy:You know, faith is what has gotten us through generations of trauma, you know, for many people, not all, and so I think if we could find a way to find each other in spite of, and through and with our faith, I think that would be phenomenal. I mean, think about it right now Our government is weaponizing religion, and religion is weaponizing our government against, you know, a huge faction of the population, and it's really troubling and unfortunate.
Nancy:It's unfortunate. You know I was raised in an Irish Catholic family. My mother converted from baptism. My grandma didn't care that I was gay but she was really upset that my mom went from Baptist to Catholicism. And at our core we all, you know I would go to the Baptist church when I visited my grandmother. We all at our core, the message, the values, the ways of being, you know the expectations, are so similar. I mean there's much more ritual and money, quite frankly, in the Catholic church Don't get me started, but you know, at its core my grandmother was a deeply loving, you know, god-fearing but generous, caring human being. And you know my parents were decent human beings too, or are decent. One of them are and were, and I think a lot of it came from how they felt about their faith. But I couldn't subscribe because the, you know, the institution didn't want me and then I became a more critical thinker as a result.
Justin:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've talked a bit about my evolution as well, over well, for three years in the work, so I'll say that those times, but I think so to close this out. Actually, I just want to grab this like interesting parallel of because I'm always talking back to the model that's the best model and it's so interesting of like actually, in what your response to that employee was we are made in his image and so we are a celebration of God, right, and so if we think about authenticity in showing up as ourselves and loving ourselves as being made in his own image and loving others being ex-ex-ex, that's it. That's the creating, the learning model.
Nancy:That's everything.
Justin:I mean, maybe it all goes back to my roots of like, my like. How would you call it? Oh my gosh, no one can think of it Like confirmation.
Nancy:Oh, confirmation sure.
Justin:Yeah.
Nancy:Yeah, yeah, yeah. The seeds were planted, yeah look, the essence of all of it, the essence of faith, the essence of spirituality, is good and whole and decent. It's people who have corrupted and weaponized those things, but I think what you just said is the reason I am on this earth.
Justin:Yeah, yes, absolutely Me too.
Nancy:I love it. We're gonna have to. Okay, we're gonna meet in person.
Justin:I know we definitely will meet in person. Yeah, and I love. I love where this conversation went today. Totally not what I expected on this Tuesday afternoon, but it's still amazing. Nancy, real quick before we close out. How can people find you and get in touch with you?
Nancy:Oh well, easy. I have a website. My personal website for my speaking in my books is NancyLionscom. Super easy, l-y-o-n-s. You can find my company, clockwork, at Clockworkcom. You can find Tempo at MadeByTempocom and you can find me on all the socials at Nylons. That's because I've been on there a really long time and my name is Nancy Lions and Anne Lions. Everybody saw Nylons so I used it, but now the young people don't even know what Nylons are, so that's a whole other podcast.
Justin:There's this great Gen X meme that I've seen recently. That is something like Regret is your first screen names on the internet. Absolutely, Absolutely.
Nancy:Yes, that's a good one. I gotta find it.
Justin:Oh, great, well, Nancy, thank you so much for the time today. I really appreciate it. And, renelle, stay tuned for another episode of the Creating Blowing Podcast. Thanks, thanks for having me.
