Path to Well-Being in Law - Episode 24: Kori Carew

 

CHRIS NEWBOLD:

Hello, wellbeing friends. Welcome to the Path To Well-Being In Law Podcast, an initiative of the Institute for Well-Being in Law. As you know, my name is Chris Newbold. I serve as executive vice president of ALPS Malpractice Insurance. You know, our goal here on the podcast is to introduce you to thought leaders doing meaningful work in the wellbeing space within the legal profession, and in the process, build and nurture a national network of wellbeing advocates intent on creating a culture shift within the profession. As always, I am joined by my co-host, Bree Buchanan. Bree, how are you doing today?

BREE BUCHANAN:

I’m doing great, Chris. Great to be here.

CHRIS:

Good, good. As you all know, Bree is the president of the Institute for Well-Being in Law. Bree, we have some really exciting news to share about the institute and the journey that we’re on to engineer this culture shift. Would you maybe give us a clue as to the breaking news that I think that we were so excited about?

BREE:

Nobody could be more excited than me because you said, you know, Bree is the board president. Well, up until this news, I had two jobs. I was the acting executive director, so I am just delighted to let people know we have hired our first full-time staff person and that is our inaugural executive director. Her name is Jennifer DiSanza. She comes to us with a whole host of experience in wellbeing issues and particularly with the law students. For many reasons, we wanted to bring Jennifer on board, but also strategically, we really realized that’s where she’s coming from is the future of our profession. And also, aside of where we know there’s a lot of behavioral health distress and stress on the youngest members of our profession and the law students. So we’re just thrilled to have Jennifer on board.

CHRIS:

Yeah. See, I had the privilege of serving with you Bree on the hiring committee. Boy, we have a dynamic leader now that will be working day-to-day to think about advancing wellbeing in our profession. You know, there’s so much work to be done as you well know. We’re actually planning on having Jennifer as our next podcast guest, which will be awesome to be able to just talk about the vision, why she’s passionate about this work. It will also happen to be after the conclusion of some strategic planning that we as a board will be doing. So things are just really aligning well with both what has transpired, where we’re going, and then focusing on what lies ahead in terms of some big issues that we have to tackle as we think about the wellbeing of lawyers and legal professionals in the profession. With that, today we’re going to circle back to, we’ve spent considerable time in the area of diversity, equity, and inclusion. You know, we had anticipated a three part series on this, but sometimes you extend an offer and you get somebody who’s so awesome that you sit there and go, we have to expand this even further. Right?

BREE:

Along came Kori. Yeah.

CHRIS:

That’s right. Along came Kori. And when Kori came along, we’re like, okay, we’re breaking the rules. We’re totally bringing Kori into the mix. And so we were really excited to welcome Kori Carew to the podcast. Bree, would you be so kind to introduce Kori? And again, this is I know a podcast that we’ve been very excited and looking forward to.

BREE:

Absolutely. So Kori is a people inclusion strategist, an advocate, a speaker, a writer, a status quo disruptor. Got to love that. Child of God, wife and mother of two curly-haired, wise, energetic, fierce, spitfire daughters. Her family is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious and spans multiple nationalities. She brings a fierce love of community and belonging that transcends differences to work, ministry and life. She loves to sing, cook, entertain, dance in the hallways at work, we need a video component of that, and read. Equipping leaders to be inclusive, to interrupt bias and disrupt the status quo. At her day job, she focuses on developing and implementing strategies for individual career and diversity and inclusion success, and helps organizations build bridges across differences and improve inclusion.

BREE:

When she’s not working, she focuses her voice and talent on issues of gender equity and rights, inclusion, and human and civil rights, serving in her church and community, and cherishing her phenomenal tribe and community. She’s energized by helping people live their very best lives. Kori was the Director of Strategic Diversity Initiatives for seven years at Shook, Hardy. And then she came over to Seyfarth and is now the Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer there and oversees their really spectacular wellbeing program, Seyfarth Life, and a whole host of other initiatives we’re going to hear about. So Kori, welcome to the podcast.

CHRIS:

Yay.

KORI CAREW:

Thank you. I appreciate you inviting me to be on this podcast and also very much the work that you are doing. This conversation of wellbeing for attorneys is such an important conversation. It’s one that we probably started having too late, and it’s one where diversity and inclusion, there’s more work to be done than time. I’m super thankful for all that you do and all that you do to help our profession be better, so thank you very much.

BREE:

You bet. Kori, I’m going to start off. We ask all of our guests a variation of this question. What experiences in your life are drivers behind your passion for work around diversity, equity, and inclusion and belonging and wellbeing?

KORI:

Thank you for that question. And of course, you’re causing me to go down a bit of memory lane. You would think this is an easy question, but it actually is not. It’s not as easy because it forces you to look in the rear view mirror and try to understand where the dots connected to where you are. Before I do that, I do want to make one small correction. Seyfarth Life is an incredible initiative at Seyfarth that I am super proud of and one of the things that energized me about joining the firm. It has a steering committee that leads it. It’s four partners at the firm, all of whom have a connection to wellbeing and mindfulness. My department and my role actually does not oversee Seyfarth Life, but we do work very closely with them. Because as one of the founding members, Laura Maechtlen noted from the very beginning, there’s that intersection between inclusion and diversity and belonging and wellbeing, and the two work very closely together. But my department does not oversee Seyfarth Life. So just wanted to make sure I give credit to the right people.

BREE:

Absolutely, give credit where it’s due.

KORI:

You know, because they’re awesome and they do great work. In fact, if I may brag on them, out of the steering committee members, one of them is the chair of the largest department in the firm and an executive committee member and co-chair of the national diversity and inclusion action team. Oh, wait a minute. No, that’s not right. Three are office managing partners. They’re part of this steering committee, this leadership group, because they actually practice wellbeing and mindfulness and meditation in their own personal lives and allow it to influence how they lead. So I know Seyfarth didn’t pay me to do a promotion, but I felt like I needed to shout some guys out.

BREE:

Absolutely.

KORI:

Our talent team helps them quite a bit in terms of organizing programs and handling the administrative and logistic things. Okay. So to answer your question, what are the experiences? I often say this and it is true that when I look at my life in the rear view mirror, how I ended up where I am makes a lot more sense as I connect the dots in ways that I probably couldn’t have foreseen. For example, I never intended to be a diversity and inclusion professional. I actually never intended to go to law school. I started my university career as an electrical engineering major. When I came to the U.S., I wanted to build planes. That was my thing. I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. I wanted to build planes. I loved science. I could spend hours in the lab. One of the best gifts I ever got was a lab coat. My dad had a custom drawing board built for me when I was a teenager that I carried with me everywhere because technical drawing, engineering drawing was one of my top subjects.

KORI:

So a lot of things make sense in hindsight. I look at my family composition and my sisters and I were all born in different countries. We have different passports. We grew up in Nigeria, a country with over 300 different ethnic groups with different languages and traditions and customs, so there’s that. My family is multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-racial and there’s just so much diversity there. You know, in the family tree, there’s a granduncle that’s a Methodist church bishop, and one that’s an Imam. And my grandfather’s father was a teacher, was a teacher of the Quran. And so all of that diversity is there in the family, but it probably influenced how my parents raised my sisters and I and how even through childhood, I was always the person who was connecting the dots between similarities between people. And today we would call that cultural fluency, this ability to recognize cultural differences and not judge them but just adapt to them and be able to say, okay, you know what?

KORI:

It looks to me like person A is looking through a lens that’s different than person B, but they’re looking at the same thing. So how can I get these two people to be on the same page? So there’s that family dynamic. But another thing that happened when I was growing up that I do think influenced me quite a bit. I grew up in Nigeria. Most of my childhood, we had one military dictator after another. So I grew up with coups happening more often than I would prefer. There were times that things broke out into religious violence. You’re talking about incidents where a few people are killed or a lot of people are killed and everything goes to standstill, everybody’s on edge. You don’t leave your home. When the students go on riots because they’re protesting something and things get out of hand, you’re turning off the lights in your home and sort of huddled together, trying to make sure that you stay together as a family until everything passes over. So that was also something that I grew up around and experiencing.

KORI:

And then my parents are from Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is actually my home country. If you ask me where I’m from, I will tell you I was born in Canada, grew up in Nigeria, but I’m from Sierra Leone. Because in my culture, you’re where your father’s from. So my entire identity has always been that I am from Sierra Leone. In the ’90s, Sierra Leone began to experience a very brutal civil war, which calling it a civil war is actually inaccurate. You have a bunch of people with weapons who terrorize the population for 11 years. And it’s been one of the most brutal wars that the world has seen at least in recent times. And that impacted my family in the sense that we lost people, in the sense that I hadn’t been back to Sierra Leone for a long time. And it kind of started with my mom not feeling it was safe enough for us to go and visit, with grandparents living on the run and being sick and dying and me not seeing them in a long time because of just this state of chaos.

KORI:

And all of this fueled how I ended up going to law school, wanting to do human rights work, wanting to be a human rights lawyer, feeling as if I learned so much about the American system and the role that the legal profession played in terms of maintaining democracy and freedom and wanting to multiply that. Right. But then I go to law school. I graduate. I fall in love with a boy who I actually started dating in college, and I ended up in Kansas City because I followed a boy. You know, career took a different turn, ended up being a defense lawyer. And then you fast forward to doing an evaluation and me going through a process of saying, okay, I’ve done a lot of the things I wanted to do. I’ve achieved a lot of the things I wanted to achieve. I wanted to try cases. I wanted to build this reputation. I wanted to be successful in A, B, C, D.

KORI:

And I started taking inventory of the things I was passionate about, the skills I developed, the experiences I had and where I was losing time. You know, where was I given my time in community? What were the things that I could lose myself doing in such deep flow that I don’t even recognize that time has gone by? And that journey ended up leading me to inclusion and diversity work and I haven’t turned back since. There’s some aspects of the legal profession I miss. I miss trying cases. I miss solving problems for clients. It may sound like the weirdest thing, but boy, playing around with evidence, rules, and figuring out how to get things in or keep things out is a nerdy love of mine. And so those are just some of the experiences that I would say led me to this love for helping people build bridges and I’m empower people to succeed despite the challenges, and being able to create just a level of cultural fluency amongst groups of people so that we understand how much better we are together as opposed to isolated from one another. So that’s a long answer.

BREE:

Well, what an amazing life you’ve had to date and an incredible background that informs your work at a depth that I know Chris and I can’t even begin to imagine.

CHRIS:

For sure. Kori, how long have you been more squarely centered on the inclusion and diversity side of things?

KORI:

I have been for 11 years now full-time diversity. What I realized, you know, somebody asked me a question similar to this, how long have you been doing diversity work, which is different from what I usually hear. I actually did the inventory and realized that, you know, 29 years ago, when I first came to the U.S., that was when I actually started doing presentations. At the time, we called them multiculturalism. We started doing presentations on bridging differences, on being able to understand different cultures and how you navigate it. And so I’ve been actually teaching on diversity, inclusion, cultural fluency leadership topics now for 29, 30 years. But it being my full-time job, that happened when I left litigation and moved over to Shook, Hardy & Bacon.

CHRIS:

Okay. I think a good point to maybe start the conversation is, you know, again, your perspective is so unique and informed. For diverse members of the profession, can you talk to our listeners about some of the more challenging aspects of the last couple of years?

KORI:

Yeah. So the last couple of years have been tough for everyone. This pandemic, it’s been brutal and it’s impacted us in so many different ways. We’ve lost our sense of certainty to the extent that we didn’t had any. We’ve lost our ability to have some kind of predictability, something that is a core need, a core need for many of us. Well, not for many of us, for everyone. It’s actually a core human need. And so we’ve been sort of thrown into this whirlwind of uncertainty with no deadline, right? We went from thinking, well, I’ll speak for myself. You know, since I’m not a scientist, I foolishly thought, well, maybe in two weeks I’ll go back to the office. And then it was a month. And then I thought six weeks. And then I thought for sure by summer 2020 we’d be able to go out and about and things would be quasi under control. And here we are, you know, some 28, 29 months later and we still have COVID. I’m sick right now recovering from COVID after avoiding it for almost 30 months, I get it.

KORI:

So you have that benchmark that is impacting everyone and the uncertainty that we’ve seen with everything going on around us. But as with everything, I think people from historically underrepresented and marginalized groups, what happens is the things that… There’s this saying that the things, and I’m going to probably say it wrong. And it may be an African American saying, but it’s this thing that what gives some people a cold will give others the flu. And so what you’ve seen then is populations that have been historically marginalized and underrepresented and haven’t had access to full equity, had been impacted very differently by the same storm that we’re all in. So we’re all in the same storm, but we’re not in the same boat. We’re experiencing it differently. So communities of color, we know got hit by COVID much harder.

KORI:

And you have that intersection between race, between housing inequity, between education inequity, between healthcare inequity and healthcare access, all of those things coming together to adversely impact some groups more. So if you are someone who is Brown or Black, or from one of these historically marginalized communities, and you are going to work during the pandemic, or you’re working from home, you are more likely to have family members who have been directly impacted by COVID, right? You are more likely to have lost family members. You also, generally speaking are more likely to be in a position where you are in an extended family situation where you are responsible for more people than just yourself. You know, one of the things that we know, for example, that impacts generational wealth is that those of us from communities of color oftentimes are responsible not just for ourselves, but for extended family members.

KORI:

So you have that dynamic playing, then you have the racial pandemic, which has been going on, but in the last two years have come to fevered pitch. And so the daily trauma of dealing with racism and microaggressions then gets compounded by all the incidents, George Floyd, Charles Cooper, and all the other incidents that have been bombarding us from our television screens, from the news reports, from articles. And so now all of a sudden everything is right in your face and you’re dealing with all of it at the same time. And so those are some of the things that are professionals from “diverse communities,” from underrepresented marginalized communities have been dealing with. And our reserves have been tapped into and overstretched to where for some of us, it feels like it’s been just too much.

BREE:

Absolutely. It’s unimaginable just how much to carry on in that space. All of the things that you just described, this litany of horrors is on top of just the day-to-day difficulty as been expressed to me, and reading in my friends of people of color, just the microaggressions and just how hard it is. Just take away pandemic and everything else and the racial reckoning, how hard it can be just to get through the day. I can’t even imagine. It is absolutely just too, too much. Kori, there’s so much to unpack here. I wanted to kind of pushing us along here talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion and talking about belonging and overlaying that. I mean, when I started looking in the legal profession, we talk about DEI, it was diversity then DEI, and now we’re getting into some of the really, to me, needy and interesting stuff around belonging. I know that you created a belonging project at Seyfarth. Could you talk to us about the importance of that, and also about this project that you got started at Seyfarth?

KORI:

Sure. Let me separate them out. Belonging is a conversation that more and more of us are having, and it is fairly new to the conversation when you’re talking about diversity and inclusion. It started with we talked about diversity, and then we started talking about diversity and inclusion, and now we’ve included equity and belonging. Belonging goes to that sense, that feeling that each of us have when we belong and we feel like we are part of a group and that we belong to something that is bigger than us. It is also a core human need. Brené Brown has this phrase that she says that we have three irreducible needs, and they are to be loved, to connect, and to belong. What we know from the research is that when we don’t have belonging, it impacts us. It is wired into our DNA to belong to something.

KORI:

So we will either have healthy belonging, or we will seek a belonging that may not be healthy and may not be good. This is where you can queue in hate groups and cult because they will do anything to belong. We will also conform to fit in so that we have a quasi sense of belonging. The problem though is that when we don’t have belonging, we actually see physiological, physical, spiritual, mental, psychological impact on our wellbeing. It impacts our sense of health. Forget our sense of health. It actually impacts our health, right? We know that exclusion and the lack of belonging actually results in increased depression, increased high blood pressure, increased diabetes. Incidentally, a lot of the same things that racial trauma and microaggressions also causes on the human body. And so if we don’t have that sense of belonging, then we are not able to actually actualize that sense of inclusion where everyone is able to be leveraged and their differences and their strengths leveraged so that they can succeed as they want to succeed.

KORI:

And without belonging, you don’t get wellbeing. But conversely, without wellbeing, you can’t cultivate that sense of belonging. And so those two things are intertwined as well as this concept of engagement, which also is in the mix, right? You can’t create engagement unless you have social connection and belonging. And so all of these things come together. Unfortunately, in many of our organizations, they’re treated as separate, right? In many organizations, you have the wellbeing function being managed in a way that it doesn’t speak to diversity, doesn’t speak to belonging at all. So imagine now we just talked about COVID and we talked about how COVID has impacted everyone. Then imagine you’re developing a wellness initiative or a wellbeing initiative and you’re not stopping to think, oh, wait a minute, because of diversity, this pandemic has impacted people in different ways.

KORI:

And so I can’t just trot out a wellbeing program without factoring in diversity and how diversity has resulted in different people experiencing this pandemic differently. Similarly, we fail when we try to, for example, have a wellbeing initiative that doesn’t stop and think, oh, wow, we’re not talking about racial trauma. We’re not talking about microaggressions. We’re not talking about the impact of implicit bias and exclusion on the psychological and physical wellbeing of the people in our organization. And so what’s happening is these concepts are tied together, but in our organizations and most of our organizations, we’re not doing DEI and incorporating wellbeing and we’re not doing wellbeing incorporating DEIB. Instead, we’re acting as if they’re completely separate and they’re not.

CHRIS:

I mean, I think it goes without saying, we, I think as human beings, sometimes we compartmentalize of there’s this and then there’s that. I think that from the infancy of the institute, I think we’ve emphasized the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of, has to flow through everything, every lens that we look at from the wellbeing perspective. But I have to admit, it’s been more challenging than I think, than we’ve appreciated because sometimes we look a little bit myopically at some of these issues without broadening our lens. That’s the perspective that I think that you can bring our listeners that, again, this intersection of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging with wellbeing, I guess I’d be curious on just, how can we merge? Right? Because again, even the fact that there’s organizations that work over here and organizations that work over here, and we really should be just the coalition and the umbrella and the totality of how it all works together is something that I don’t know that we appreciate the magnitude of.

KORI:

Well, and the only way we can appreciate the magnitude is if we have these honest conversations. But we also have to have the conversations around the structural and the cultural underpinnings, right? How do we have conversations about wellbeing that take into consideration differences? That take into consideration, okay, we’re telling people, hey, we have therapy or we have EAP, or we have whatever the organization offers. But how do you do that and also acknowledge that for some communities that there is a stigma around maybe going to a therapist? How do you have that conversation with those communities? Or that racial bias and racial aggressions are having an impact on people, but you have an entire generation of Black people, for example, who have survived by plowing through all the challenges that the world has put in front of us. And to sit down and talk about the way in which racism has impacted us is asking us to put our shields down, which means opening up ourselves to attack, which means possibly being accused of playing the race card. Right?

KORI:

All of things that you may have grown up in a time where we just didn’t talk about that in mixed company, we only talked about that with each other. And so there are all these layers, all these layers. I recently listened to a friend of mine, Ratu Basin, and she was talking about how it feels for her as someone of Indian heritage to see how much yoga, for example, has been whitewashed. There’s so many conversations to be had even in the wellbeing space, even when we’re talking to people about things like self-care. Well, what are you recommending? Because some of the things we tell people to do for self-care, go get a massage, who can afford that? What culture support that kind of self-care? And is that really self-care or is that treating a symptom? Should self-care and wellbeing be about a way of life and a way of working such that we don’t need these emergency [inaudible 00:32:26] like solutions to fix the symptoms, right?

KORI:

And that’s the big conversation and that’s the conversation I’m hearing some lawyers begin to ask where they say, the organization says they care about wellbeing, but we’re getting these other messages that say it’s productivity and hours and billables that matter, right? How do we shift the culture and how we’re embracing these topics in a way that makes it more meaningful? I just realized, I didn’t even answer your second question about the belonging project, but yeah, this is the stuff that to me, I see a lot of potential for us to have really good conversations that can lead to solutions that are more inclusive of a diverse profession.

BREE:

Kori, you’re clearly such a thought leader and a visionary in this space. Can you talk a little bit about how do we get change to occur in a profession, the legal profession that is so reluctant to change? Even more so than general society. Where do you see the bright points of really being able to make some change?

KORI:

Can you repeat that question?

BREE:

Yeah. Just about how do we get change to occur in the legal profession? You know, this is a profession that is just so stayed and slow and bound up in tradition. This is the way we do it, that sort of thing. And here you are with these fabulous ideas, working with a very large law firm, having come from another very large law firm so you’re in this space. What are your ideas for actually getting real change to occur? Where are the pressure points, I guess?

KORI:

Well, I think some of the pressure points are actually external. You asked me a question earlier about the last two years, something that I didn’t mention that has impacted a lot. It’s impacting individuals from underrepresented groups, but it’s also impacting our organizations. Is this fake cultural war that is also going on, you know, regardless of what political party you’re in, I think we can acknowledge that for the last six years, there has been an attack on everything that we are trying to accomplish in diversity and inclusion. White is now Black, Black is now white. And if we are in a state of being, for example, where I’ll use Florida as an example where someone can say, we want to ban any training if it makes someone uncomfortable. What you’re essentially saying is let’s keep the status quo the way it is, even if the status quo supports white supremacy.

KORI:

Even if the status quo is inequitable. You would rather keep the status quo than have an uncomfortable conversation. When it comes to the legal profession, in particular, law firms, because of how we are constructed. A law firm essentially has multiple owners. It’s not like a corporation that has a board of directors and has shareholders. Let’s say you have a law firm of a thousand people and 300 of them are partners. You have 300 people running around who think that everybody should have an equal say in every single decision. It’s one of the reasons that law firms function so differently from other companies and why decision making is so different. Everything we do is different. You know, we put people in leadership positions not because they’re leaders, but because they’re great trial attorneys or they’re great business generators or whatever, whatever the criteria is, but rarely is it because someone actually is a good leader.

KORI:

And so we have this culture that we have built that really makes it difficult for us to have real hard conversations on the things that really matter, on the things that really can make change. So imagine that law firm now sitting in the last six years and even more so in the last three years. I can tell you when it comes to diversity, inclusion, many of us are throwing our hands up and saying, so how in the hell are we supposed to have this conversation then? If you’re saying, oh, we can’t talk about white privilege because someone says, oh, that offends me. Or we can’t talk about systemic racism because someone’s going to say, oh, wait a minute, if you say systemic racism is real, then that’s anti-American. So we are living in a time where the terms racism, the terms CRT have been completely redefined to where they mean nothing that even resembles what they actually mean.

KORI:

And then we’re over here arguing about these fictitious decisions, these fictitious definitions, and we’re not actually doing the hard work that needs to be done, right. Because if you won’t even acknowledge that systemic racism is real, then how do we evaluate the systems to see where we may be having inequitable results and then changing those systems? Because if you deny a thing exists, then we can’t even address it.

BREE:

Absolutely.

KORI:

And so that’s probably one of the biggest challenges I see, but also the biggest opportunity. And if anything is going to change when it comes to diversity, we have got to get more courageous about having difficult conversations, but conversations that are worthwhile, they are important. Nothing about creating equity is comfortable and cozy and touchy-feely, it’s hard work. It requires us to say some things that we maybe may not have faced before, but we don’t get to change what we won’t face, what we won’t acknowledge, and what we won’t be honest about. It’s like, you can’t write a new end into the story if you won’t acknowledge the truth of the story. That’s the whirlwind that I think we are in now, not just as a profession, but as a country and a society.

BREE:

Absolutely. What an incredibly difficult place to be? Yeah, go ahead, Chris.

CHRIS:

Well, I was just going to say, I want to unpack that more. Let’s do this. Let’s take a quick break and come back because I mean, my burning question and Kori began to sort of thinking about it, which is what’s the pathway to better, more productive, honest conversations, right? Because I think that you’re right. The question is, how do we create the environments for ultimately that societal discussion to occur in the most productive way? So let’s take a quick break and we’ll come right back.

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CHRIS:

Okay. We are back with Kori Carew, our esteemed guests and the chief inclusion and diversity officer at Seyfarth Shaw. Kori, we were just getting into the, I think the discussion. I feel like we’re going deeper than even I had thought we would in the conversation, which I love. You know, as we think now about we need to have the honest conversations, right. And so I would just be curious on your opinion as what’s the pathway to get there. If we appreciate that there’s a lot of noise and the volume levels are high, and there’s a lot of yelling, frankly, on both sides of the equation. What’s the pathway toward problem solving, thoughtful discussion, intentional discussion that ultimately advances the dialogue?

KORI:

Thank you very much for that question. Honestly, it’s one I’ve been thinking a lot about. You know, I did do a TEDx in 2017 and the impetus for that TED really was that question that you just asked, which was, there’s a lot of yelling and not enough dialogue that allows us to move into action. Since I gave that TED, I’ve sort of watched what’s been going on in organizations and in the country. I don’t think I would change anything about that TED, except that there are a few more things that I would emphasize. One of the first things that we have to do if we truly want to make progress, and I’m going to steal a Nigerian thing, tell the truth and shame the devil. We are avoiding being honest with ourself about so many things. Whether it is just being honest about the experiences people have in the organization, or being honest about where the gaps are, or being honest about what the failures are, or even individual honesty.

KORI:

That self-awareness to say, you know Kori, you talk a lot about wellbeing and you talk a lot about leadership, but the reason you talk about those things is because you were searching for something that you did not have in the leaders that you grew up under, right? So you were trying to create something for others that you didn’t have, but you are also trying to create it for yourself. And there are many days that you totally suck. There are many days that you are making very bad wellbeing decisions. There are days that you are not as inclusive as you would want to be, but it’s okay. And the only way you’re going to get better is by acknowledging where you’re not doing it right. Now, think about that when we’re talking about gender or race or LGBT inclusion or disability inclusion. If we as individuals and we as organizations are not willing to be honest about our history, what has happened and what is happening, then we don’t even have a starting point.

KORI:

And the way that we do that is very, very cliché. Getting comfortable with what is uncomfortable. I remember when I first started saying that, when I was at Shook, Hardy & Bacon and it wasn’t even a thing many people were saying, and now people say it so often that it has lost its meaning. But it truly is the beginning point. And in too many of our organizations, we are shutting down any discussion or any movement in the name of trying to get consensus, or in trying to water things so much that they’re meaningless, right? Or being so hyperworried about future possible hypothetical litigation that somebody may have over something that they don’t like that they heard as opposed to possible litigation over people who do not feel like they are being treated equitably. You know, it’s like we have to choose our heart. And so it’s either the heart of sitting in the discomfort and learning things we may not want to learn, challenging ourselves, reaching deep to say, you know what? I don’t really like that.

KORI:

When you talk to me about Christian privilege, this is a true story. Okay. True story. A [inaudible 00:46:22] of mine talked about Christian privilege. We’re talking about something. She said, “Yeah, but there’s also Christian privilege and people never talk about that.” And can I admit to you that I was like, “Oh, is she for real? We’re talking about racism and she’s talking about Christian privilege.” That was my initial reaction. But I sat with it. You know what? She was right. Because she was Pagan and I’m Christian. I’ve never had to use PTO for Christmas. My holidays are respected, they are recognized, they are centered, they are prioritized. But other people in this country who are not Christian do not have those privileges. Now that’s a benign example because it’s not one that makes people get as upset as some of the other topics.

KORI:

But the first step has to be a commitment to sit through the discomfort, sit through what may rub you wrong, and acknowledge that just because something is uncomfortable or just because something offends you does not mean the thing is wrong or it is offensive. And in many of our organizations, we haven’t even gotten past that first part. Then the next part has to be a commitment to learn more. We have to operationalize being able to say to each other, tell me more, and not just, oh, I didn’t like that training, or I didn’t like what I was learning. But to say to yourself internally, okay, I didn’t like that. But rather than projecting how I’m feeling it in this moment, I’m going to put myself in the position of saying, tell me more, help me understand why that bothered you, help me understand why you feel that way. Because until we’re willing to do that, we’re not going to learn.

KORI:

And without knowledge, we have no opportunity for growth. Growth comes with new knowledge. Growth comes with practicing new skill sets. Growth comes with trying things that you haven’t done before. But if you’re more invested in protecting the status quo than you are fighting for change, then the status quo will always win. And the status quo right now, it’s not working for a lot of people from a lot of underrepresented and marginalized communities. Those are some of the things that have to happen. Oh, Chris, something else I want to add. Both sides. We got to talk about this both sides thing. Not every opinion and argument is equal, and that’s something else that we’re not willing to address head on. We’ve allowed inclusion to be so redefined that some people think it means anything and everything is of equal footing, right.

KORI:

But someone saying in the workplace, we need to be more inclusive of people with disabilities is not the same as someone saying, I don’t think disabled people should have to work here. And sometimes what is crouching in is people want to hide behind inclusion to spew hate or bigotry or an excuse not to make the change and growth that is consistent with the so-called values of our organizations. I’ll pause there because you’re about [inaudible 00:50:05].

BREE:

Yeah. I just want to comment to our listeners Kori’s TED Talk, just in your browser, put in Kori Carew and TED Talk. I really encourage people to check it out. It is powerful and profound. So Kori, I’m going to ask you a question here that we also tend to ask this sometimes near the end, if you could look for, I don’t know, five years or even a decade. If we can do a decent job around changing hearts and minds and attitudes around diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging and wellbeing too, hopefully, how would the profession be different? What do you want to see?

KORI:

My goodness, my goodness, my goodness. Excuse me. That cough came up. If we could actually accomplish all these things that we’ve been talking about for 20 years, we would see leadership teams that are more humble in their approach, leadership teams that are people-centric, organizations that are listening to employees and actually care about what employees want. We would no longer be having conversations as if it’s either you focus on the bottom line or you focus on employee happiness. Like we will understand that without happy employees who are engaged and doing fulfilling and meaningful work, we actually don’t have a great bottom line to talk about. Right? Our organizations would look like inclusion and wellbeing and belonging, it’s just part of the business strategy. It’s not this separate siloed thing. It’s not this thing that we talk about when we are worried about how the woman or the gays may react. Right.

KORI:

But it’s just something that is operationalized into our values, into our competencies, into how we evaluate people, into how we promote people, and that we are constantly in humility, learning from each other. Right. So that even when somebody who’s a chief inclusion and diversity officer, here’s a phrase and someone says, “Did you realize that that was ableist?” That I would say, “I didn’t. Tell me more.” And once you tell me more, I changed my language, because we understand that we’re always going to be moving. We’re always going to be learning something new and there’s always an opportunity to be better. And if we do that, we will also see different representation at all levels. We will actually have critical mass of diversity in our organizations. And then I would be unemployed.

CHRIS:

I was going to wrap up with this though, Kori, like if I was to serve up to you 500 managing partners, that were, again, I think one of the things that you’ve already mentioned is every individual in an organization is either additive or perhaps distracts from the culture that you’re ultimately trying to create. A lot of the wellbeing discussion is about connecting and emphasizing wellbeing with decision makers and those who set the tone of organizations. And so my question to you is this, if I served up 500 managing partners of all sizes of firms around the country and they came and Kori was the keynote, what would be your message to them?

KORI:

My message to them would be that they are ridiculously in charge, that things happen in their organizations because they allow it, or they create it. And that by choosing to focus a hundred percent on their inclusive leadership skills and up in their ability to interrupt bias, to be culturally fluent, they could transform their organizations because where the leader goes, everyone else follows.

BREE:

Right.

CHRIS:

That’s great. That’s awesome. Well, again, Kori, you have certainly cultivated my curiosity, which I know is one of the things that you strongly advocate for. Couldn’t be prouder to have you on the podcast and the sharing of your perspective. We got to get you more platforms for you to be able to shout loudly about these particular issues, because again, we got a lot of work to do, right. We know that there’s a lot to be done in terms of realizing the potential of this profession, to realizing the potential of historically underrepresented and marginalized lawyers within our profession. Bree, I think that we all would agree that even as we pursue our wellbeing mission, that so much more has to be done on the diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective that integrates in the intersection there between those two that lanes need to merge in a much more substantive way.

KORI:

Thank you.

CHRIS:

Thank you, Kori.

KORI:

I appreciate it. I appreciate you having me. I appreciate you allowing Justin to come and hold my hand because she’s my blinky today. I appreciate you inviting us to talk about what we’re doing at Seyfarth and just my perspective as an individual separate from Seyfarth. Again, I’ve said this before, the work you’re doing is so critically important. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for everything that you do to promote wellbeing in the profession. So important.

CHRIS:

Awesome. Well, again, thanks for joining us. We will be back with the podcast probably in a couple weeks with our executive director, Jennifer DiSanza, which we are so excited to be having her join us as we talk about the future of where this movement is going. Thanks again, Kori. And to all our friends out there, we will be back in a couple weeks.