What if the key to a successful startup lies not just in its venture's brilliance but in its workplace's inclusivity? In this episode of "The Angel Next Door Podcast," Marcia Dawood invites Gena Cox to explore a crucial aspect that entrepreneurs often overlook amidst the hustle of financial planning and product development—organizational culture. Cox, an organizational psychologist with over 30 years of experience, asserts that the human experience within an organization is foundational to its innovation, customer satisfaction, and overall success. Gena Cox is a distinguished expert in workplace culture, employee engagement, and survey design. Hailing from a diverse background—born in England, raised in the Caribbean, and later relocating to the U.S.—Cox offers a unique perspective on diversity and inclusion. Her recent book, "Leading Inclusion," targets senior business leaders and board directors, helping them foster environments where every employee feels seen, heard, and valued. Cox's insights are informed by both her professional expertise and personal experiences, especially in the wake of social events like the death of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. In this enlightening episode, Cox talks about the significance of nurturing an inclusive culture right from a startup's inception. She underscores the role of inclusion over sheer diversity, pointing out that everyday experiences and interactions within the workplace shape an organization's culture. Listeners will gain practical guidance on implementing structured hiring processes that align with company values and mitigate biases, ensuring sustainable growth and innovation. It's a must-listen for any entrepreneur, business leader, or angel investor supporting them, aiming to build a successful, meaningful, human-centric organization.
What if the key to a successful startup lies not just in its venture's brilliance but in its workplace's inclusivity? In this episode of "The Angel Next Door Podcast," Marcia Dawood invites Gena Cox to explore a crucial aspect that entrepreneurs often overlook amidst the hustle of financial planning and product development—organizational culture. Cox, an organizational psychologist with over 30 years of experience, asserts that the human experience within an organization is foundational to its innovation, customer satisfaction, and overall success.
Gena Cox is a distinguished expert in workplace culture, employee engagement, and survey design. Hailing from a diverse background—born in England, raised in the Caribbean, and later relocating to the U.S.—Cox offers a unique perspective on diversity and inclusion. Her recent book, "Leading Inclusion," targets senior business leaders and board directors, helping them foster environments where every employee feels seen, heard, and valued. Cox's insights are informed by both her professional expertise and personal experiences, especially in the wake of social events like the death of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
In this enlightening episode, Cox talks about the significance of nurturing an inclusive culture right from a startup's inception. She underscores the role of inclusion over sheer diversity, pointing out that everyday experiences and interactions within the workplace shape an organization's culture. Listeners will gain practical guidance on implementing structured hiring processes that align with company values and mitigate biases, ensuring sustainable growth and innovation. It's a must-listen for any entrepreneur, business leader, or angel investor supporting them, aiming to build a successful, meaningful, human-centric organization.
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Marcia Dawood
Well, hi, Gina. Welcome to the show.
Gena Cox
Oh, wow. Marcia, I'm really delighted to be here. Thank you.
Marcia Dawood
Well, I am just so excited for you to be here. We've known each other through several different circles, and I've been watching the work that you're doing. So impressive. And I am a super fan because I have multiple copies.
Gena Cox
Oh, my gosh.
Marcia Dawood
And I love giving them as gifts. I think you just did such an amazing job writing the book and getting your point across in a really. You're taking a very complex and sometimes controversial subject, and you're making it so that people can not just understand it, but can really embrace it. And I think that's just. It's such a gift. So thank you so much for being here. Why don't you start off by telling our listeners a little bit about your background and all the things you've been working on.
Gena Cox
Wow. Where do I start? Well, I'm an organizational psychologist. That is like, my core identity. And I guess it's one of those identities that once you get stamped with it, is very hard to escape from it, because all it really means is that I think about workplaces and I think about the human dynamics that occur within workplaces. But it's not that long since the industrial revolution. It was the start of the point at which we started putting humans together in large numbers and asking them to perform, get something done that the organization desired. That is a relatively new concept in human experience, and it turns out we're not good at it. Right.
Gena Cox
There are just all sorts of human kinds of things that happen when you put people together and ask them to get things done is my domain. I know. That's the thing. I know best. And so I focused in my career for, wow, more than 30 years, really, on things that have to do with organizational culture, have to do with leader behavior, and have to do with employee experience. And that includes employee engagement, motivation, satisfaction, those kinds of things, because those three big buckets that I just mentioned are really all. That's the domain that a leader can control, an executive can control to determine the experience that their employees, their customers, their business partners, the whole ecosystem has with them. So that is my domain.
Gena Cox
I grew up, I was born in England. I grew up in the Caribbean. I came to the United States just around the turn of my 21st birthday. And when that occurred, I didn't anticipate. I had been to the United States many times on vacation, but I hadn't anticipated when I came to live here that people would respond to me in a way that felt different than the way that I was accustomed to being responded to by the people who were in my world. Of course, my family, my parents, my loved ones. But in general, because I had spent most of my growing up years in the Caribbean, when I came to the United States, I felt like a veil had dropped in front of me and I couldn't understand. People didn't make eye contact.
Gena Cox
In the Caribbean, you can't walk into a room unless you say hello. You say hello to people on the street. Complete. There's certain social norms in the United States would look at me like I was crazy if I would say hello to a stranger or there were other things that I. You have to learn as an immigrant. But when I. One of the things I figured out fairly quickly was that when I would show up, people would respond to me as the avatar of what I call, I've come to call black american woman, because I realized there's a very particular idea of who that is and what that is and what that person does and what they think. And so I then had to study black american women to figure out how, what does that mean? Because I'm that now, but I don't know what that is, and I have to figure it out.
Gena Cox
What does that have to do with anything? I think that experience, those early years in the United States, which now has now been 20 something years later, I mean, 30 something years later, is, I think that was when I began to think a lot about the experiences of people who vary, groups of people and how they might vary and how those differences impact the experiences that they have wherever they show up. But my real thing, the thing that I would spend most of my time talking about and doing if I had my druthers, is really helping individual leaders and groups of leaders just be more aware of the things that make the difference in their influence and impact in organizations.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, I love that because we're always talking about startups and we're talking about investors who are investing in these very early stage companies. Culture is just such an important factor, and it so often gets overlooked because entrepreneurs are just so busy and they're trying to solve every single problem, and they're trying to do every job in the company, and they don't have enough staff and they don't have enough time. And now how do they stop and say, wait a minute, I need to build a culture for my company, too? So what are some of your thoughts on that?
Gena Cox
Yeah. Well, you mean, you just said it. I mean, the reality for a person who's starting up a business venture is. It's a big deal, million things going on. And it is pretty natural that you would focus primarily on things that have to do with the money and the operations and the product or service that you're offering. That is a very natural thing. However, in order to get the best of the product, in order to have the most efficient business, in order to optimize the return on investment of dollars, there's always right in the middle of those three things. Let's say we had a circle, and in the outer circle, we had three wedges.
Gena Cox
One was money, one was operations, and one was product or service, let's just say. And then let's stay in the middle. Then there's that circle. Well, and that's where the humans live. Because at the core of everything that any organization is trying to accomplish is the human experience. Not just the human experience of the employees and partners, but of the entrepreneur themselves. The entrepreneur, him or herself. That human experience is what determines exactly what that product ends up looking.
Gena Cox
Whether it satisfies the needs of the intended client. Certainly it determines whether people will share their ideas that can lend to the innovation that is necessary to cause your product and your overall business to be competitive relative to others in the marketplace who do similar things. Because often, especially in the early days, the differentiators are things like innovation, the customer experience, and so on. All of that is completely, 100% a human experience. And so it would be beneficial if, as you think about those rings, you recognize that the thing in the middle of the rings and the thing that holds that ring, those rings up would be the experience of humans. Culture is what it feels like to work in your company, what it feels like to do business with you, what it feels like for anyone to interact in any way with your organization. It's those unwritten rules. It's what people do when you're not in the room to tell them what to do.
Gena Cox
That's what. And so it does make a difference, that pay attention. Pay attention to establishing whatever that culture is that you desire from the very, very beginning. And I'll just say one more thing, which is that the actions of a leader at the beginning of an enterprise can really set the tone that will continue for the rest of the life of that entity. When I think about my favorite company in the world, which is a company called Raymond James Financial, I always I didn't know Robert James, who was the founder of Raymond James Financial, but I did have the pleasure to work in that organization while his son, Tom James, was the CEO of that company, and to understand that the way that they operated on a day, okay, you have this company, it's an upstart. It's starting in St. Petersburg, Florida, but it wants to have its place in the capital markets. That means it has to eventually go up against the JP Morgan chases of the world.
Gena Cox
Companies that had been in existence for 200 years had this brand and this influence, and this Nash and this little upstart in St. Petersburg, Florida wants to compete with that. Well, how do you do that? For whatever reason, I don't know how he knew this, but Robert James figured out that it was going to be on talent, that they would be differentiating and competing with this marketplace. And from the very beginning, they would say, we want to hire the best people. Well, the best people in investment banking and research, in trading didn't want to leave Wall street and come to Florida, so they had to grow that talent in house. And so they decided we have to have a point of view, want people to treat people a certain way. We know we want to aim for excellence. Whatever the various things that they established, that was how they eventually got to the point that they are at today a Fortune 500 company.
Gena Cox
Well, they started off as another little mom and pop business in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Marcia Dawood
Wow, that's a great story. So for entrepreneurs out there and these small companies that are just starting up, it sounds like there has to be a lot of intentionality on how they treat the very earliest of employees, how they treat their first customers and clients. How can people think about that? What would be like an exercise or some structure around that?
Gena Cox
Yeah, well, you certainly have got to be thinking about this from the very, very beginning. So a good way to think about it would be, I think, to start by thinking, what are the values? What are the values that you'd like to put the staff as the stamp, the brand of your organization? What would you like when a customer interacts with you from the very beginning? What are some of the words that you would like for them to say when they talk about the experience that they have with your organization? I mean, you have to be very deliberate about this, and there's no right or wrong. You don't need to hire somebody to do this. You just have to say at the very start, this is what, this is the experience I'd like my customers to have. That means that you might come up with words that say, we want to have integrity. You might say, I'd like for anyone who interacts with us to feel they a certain level of respect in those interactions you might come up with two or three words, and you can change those as many times as you want. But if you think of them as the North Star, as you start this, it can be trial and error. So it doesn't have to be perfect.
Gena Cox
You can at least say, I'm putting a line in the sand that now these three words that are going to be the mantra that are going to drive not just the way that I interact with my customer, but how I make decisions about who I hire that very first, hire that very important person. I'm sure that it's very commonplace. I know this because another thing that I have spent a lot of years doing is working on selection and assessment of executives. And so, yes, you might decide that they had to have a certain technical level of skill in a certain thing. They might have to have a certain expertise, but it would be also very important during your selection process that you measure for these three characteristics that you say are the critical values that you now want to be a part of your organization. You have to do that from the beginning. And so if you come across this amazing person that was introduced to you and you had an immediate rapport, you're like, oh, I cannot wait to hire Pat. But if in your process, you said, that might be true, but I still want to go through a method, a consistent method of evaluating candidates.
Gena Cox
And you write down the criteria and you say, does Pat have a, b, or c? Oh, wow. Yes. Does Pat have this thing about respect? Does Pat have this thing about authenticity or about integrity? I'm getting some, some negative signals. You can't hire Pat. Never mind that Pat was hired, was referred to you by this other billionaire over here or this other person over here who has good thoughts and is a wonderful person, you've got to. It will be, you'll have to make difficult decisions, which sometimes mean you will have to not hire the person who seems like the first, obviously, most obvious choice.
Marcia Dawood
Yes. Hiring, and it's so hard and it takes so long, and yet it is so important. And I think what you're saying is doing the diligence, taking the time. It does really matter.
Gena Cox
Yeah. And again, I will tell you, because I have built sophisticated assessment systems and I have nothing against those. And in companies that have 500,000 employees, that's the way to go. But when you're talking about your own special, perfect little organization that you're trying to create and you can have that stamp, it really is worth the effort for you to just stop and think about what is it that you're looking for. And here's what I know, Marcia, which is really fascinating to me. Even in organizations where people think that they're taking a critical approach to selection, they often dispense with that criteria, that list of criteria, and they just hire on the basis of, I like that person, I could have a beer with that person, whatever. That's human, right. So you got to fight against that natural human tendency.
Marcia Dawood
Yes. And so often, especially in startups, we see people hiring people that are like themselves because likes. Yeah, yeah.
Gena Cox
I mean, that is the other human. All these biases that humans have are natural. But what we have to do is we have to think about it in terms of how can I. How can I trick my own brain so that it doesn't carry me away? I don't fall in love with this candidate or whatever. The thing is that we want to guard against, the same way that you are likely to be very objective in making decisions about money, decisions about buying your furniture or whatever software, whatever, various things that you need to do, what you do, you need to have that same willingness to apply a fairly standardized approach to thinking about hiring as well.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah. And how does diversity, equity and inclusion fit into the hiring process? And how should it be fitting in with startups?
Gena Cox
Yeah. So here's the thing. If we're talking about this in the United States context, the demographics of the United States are what they are, right? That today they are what they are. In the future, there'll be something else, but they're always changing. But we have to be. We have to know what they are, first of all. So, for example, when people talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, the first thing I want to remind everyone is that those three words really mean the same thing. They're not synonymous with one another.
Gena Cox
Diversity is really like about representation. So if you take the United States, where the black population in the United States is about 14%, it is going. It is not dramatically changing in any way, as far as I know. So let's just use that group, 14%. So if the goal with diversity efforts is to, as much as possible, have a workforce whose members, whose employees are representative of the national demographic patterns. But another way to think about this is to have a workforce whose characteristics are representative of the available labor force. Because especially in certain professions, what we find is that certain groups in the United States have never had access to those professions. They never had access to train for those professions.
Gena Cox
They don't have the degrees, they don't have the background. So if we just say, okay, we want to get 14% black people into an organization, we might find that it might be difficult as a starting point. Furthermore, the great people we find will often get recruited by other companies and stolen away from us. And thirdly, if we don't have a certain kind of inclusive culture, they won't stay. That's what diversity is about. Inclusion, on the other hand, I would say inclusion is really about what is the day to day experience of any employee in your company. And does that experience vary as a function of some characteristic on which it should not vary? So everybody in your organization should be generally able to have the same positive experience that you're going to create. But if some employees who are square have a negative experience and the triangular shape people have, the great experiences, whatever those patterns are, if those patterns exist, that likely means your organization is not inclusive because it's their day to day experiences are not likely to be consistent, right.
Gena Cox
They're going to vary as a function of who they are, things that they cannot control. So that's what inclusion is about, equity, which is a part of that Dei thing that gets rattled off. Equity is really about thinking about whether all of the people in the organization have the same chance to have access to what I call the organizational goodies, like the promotions and the visibility and the things that everybody would desire. It's just that usually only certain people tend to get. And the reason I broke that down in that way is because when people just say Dei, what they're mostly talking about is they're talking about diversity. And so that is only part of the thing now. So from a hiring perspective, diversity obviously might be a goal. You might want to diversify if it is possible, by whatever dimensions you decide matter or are important for what you're trying to accomplish, right? Race, gender, ethnicity.
Gena Cox
There are a variety of protected federal groups of people that you might want to try to get, but I say that inclusion tops diversity. You shouldn't focus on the d as much as you should focus on the I, especially when you are a newer organization, because the I is about that day to day experience. And so what you ought to focus on is thinking about. Again, this goes back to culture. What am I creating here? What are those values that I have said I want to carve in stone that will matter and defining our culture? And then is that, how do I make it inclusive? Right? So that if I do happen to hire a triangular shaped person but everybody else currently is square and I'm square, at least when they show up, they will feel like, oh, there's a place setting for me, at this dinner table, it doesn't feel like a culture, like a slamming together of two completely alien experiences, which is what often happens. But if you think about inclusion, the easiest thing that you can focus on from a startup perspective, I think, isn't even thinking about race or gender, is to think about do I leave space for every person on my team, a three person team, a 300 person team, to speak up and feel like they can express their point of view and share their ideas, and that those ideas get used for good? That actually, of course, is a driver of innovation, and that never hurts for any kind of startup, regardless of the nature of the business. But the other thing that does is a component to creating the kind of culture in which all of these other things that might be more specific, like you might get a more diverse workforce, you might find yourself in a situation where you have the luck of having women on your team eventually who lead people who aren't women or whatever, those various ways things show up in your organization. But having a culture that allows for people to speak up is a sort of a double edged opportunity for startup firms to really say, you know what? Every person in this organization matters.
Gena Cox
We'll start at the idea level, and then that idea will apply to everything else.
Marcia Dawood
Gena, that was such a great definition that you gave of de and I. Awesome. So why is it that we're hearing so many things lately? It's Dei has become the elephant in the room. Can you tell us more about that?
Gena Cox
Well, there are a couple of explanations for that. The first explanation is that this concept of DEi, which, as I have said already in this conversation, is one that I handle very cautiously. I more focus on culture, leadership, and employee experience. But Dei is something, a concept that was created in the 1960s in the United States after the passage of the Civil Rights act, which mandated that any organization with more than 100 employees would report every year to the federal government what their demographics, the work, the demographics of their workforce, according to these protected groups that are enshrined in federal law, race, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, and so on. Right. When that happened, these functions were created within larger organizations, in particular, to make sure that, to increase, for example, diversity. I told you what that is, and to keep track of everything that was going on, to make sure that those individuals were being hired and getting opportunities. So over the years, it has always been like a compliance function in a way.
Gena Cox
And often, executive leaders did not pay very much attention to this issue because they didn't know why they should. Nobody was telling them that. In fact, when I often did employee surveys for large companies, what I would call the data about the various experiences of various groups never got reported to the executive team. It was kept in Hrtaine. So when George Floyd was killed in May of 2020, and everyone realized, wait a minute, there are some social issues in this country that impact employees at work. And we didn't realize how bad they were. Then leaders really began to pay attention to the EI stuff with very good intention. I think the desire of the leaders who were paying increased attention was that there was probably something that they could do that would make sure that the people in their company weren't having those bad experiences and that at the very least, they were hiring all the people they should hire in a fair fashion.
Gena Cox
Those are really good and laudable intentions that I saw, but they also got, those leaders got really bad advice from people who, some people who call themselves de and I, professionals who were not, that, they were just charlatans. And so there was an inordinate focus on implicit bias training. And people were saying, you got to hire a chief diversity officer, and you've certainly got to hire more people in certain groups and so on. And they were giving that advice. And so organizations just jumped into that, and several things happened. Number one, they didn't know that they would have to provide political clout and financial support to the chief diversity officers so they could actually get something done. And so the chief diversity officers were often unsuccessful and did not stay, and then the rest were fired. By the way, the other thing was many of people of color, for example, who were hired into these organizations.
Gena Cox
Organizations during this time came into the situation I described earlier, where they were triangular shaped and everybody else in the organization was square. And the people of the square building organization were like, what are these triangles doing here? Right? And no one had prepared them for. And further, the culture was not inclusive, which is why I say inclusion tops diversity. So those individuals came in, and then after six months and a year, they were like, wait a minute, and then they left. And so there was this constant turnover, and then there was all this stuff about implicit bias training, which we know from the research, caused some people, even the. Some people with good intentions, to feel like, what? Very defensive. Like, why are you talking to me? You're assuming that I'm the person who created this problem or who does these things. There was a whole bunch of stuff about that that wasn't handled well.
Gena Cox
So there's all of that. Those are reasons why there were insignificant Dei positive outcomes or unsustainable outcomes. And then on the other side, there was a bunch of stuff going on in the political arena, which I wouldn't get into all the details of the political part of it, but the political part of it actually is the part that had the biggest impact, because there were large numbers of marketing dollars put into place to talk about something called woke and to say that anything that you were doing that fell into this umbrella that we just described was something that was then anti white, actually, is what that campaign was about, which is ridiculous, because none of this really should ever have been solely about race. But nevertheless, that was what was said. But I will give you one piece of evidence as to how effective though that woke campaign has been. I live in the state of Florida. I work with companies all over the world. But I recently did some work with an executive team of a Florida company.
Gena Cox
And in the pre work, I could tell that there was at least one person whose responses I had received from this eight person team, nine person team, who didn't think we should be doing any of this work at all because it was related to De and I strategy. And so on the day of the event, I set everything up so that everyone would have an opportunity, opportunity to share early on. And this person, I said, very honestly, why are we talking about Dei? It's illegal to do that in the state of Florida. I said, pardon me? They said, there's a law that says we shouldn't be talking about Dei in the state of Florida. I said, well, here's the fact. And I already had a slide. And the slide said, yes, there was a law called the Stop Woke act that was passed that for sure is still in place in the state of Florida that prohibits publicly funded universities, colleges and schools from talking about De and I and doing the de and I work. They've disbanded the departments and all of that.
Gena Cox
However, the law sought to go one step further. It tried to stop these same kind, the same kind of culture, leadership and employee experience work. They tried to stop that in private enterprises, in corporations. And that was the point at which this law was challenged and ruled to be unconstitutional in the federal court. So that part of the law was never, has never been enacted. Couldn't possibly be. However, the marketing still kept talking about the successes with anti woke. And so people eventually began to think, well, Dei is a really bad thing.
Gena Cox
It's illegal, we shouldn't touch it, and we won't. Those are. Marcia, those are like, the logical, rational reasons and answer to your question. But here's the real answer to your question. Why is it that we feel as if there's so much pushback. It goes back to the fundamentals, which is that no one has really been talking about the fact that the real issue is that we have to focus more on the piece of it that has to do with connecting people who are different. This is an issue that if you're in church, you might talk about it, you might. In school, you might talk about it, but in corporations, we don't talk about it that much.
Gena Cox
But that's reality. We live in a very segregated country, and so when people go away from their workplaces, which is the place where they're most likely to encounter people who don't look like them, we usually don't. And so we just don't understand each other. We don't understand the problem that we're solving for. And that's really the fundamental issue.
Marcia Dawood
Gina, your message is so strong about how inclusion is so important, and I love your dinner table example that you mentioned a minute ago. That just makes so much sense. So the title of your book being leading inclusion just really resonates as to what people should be thinking about and how they should be doing it. What prompted you to write the book and tell us a little more about it?
Gena Cox
Well, that. So I think I mentioned earlier that one of the things I have done for decades is been involved in designing employee survey opinion surveys in global companies to help leaders understand the day to day experience of employees. So this whole employee experience, employee engagement thing is something that I have been steeped in for a very long time. And what I knew for decades because of doing this work was that I consistently saw the pattern in the United States that if you arrayed employee engagement scores from high to low percent favorable scores on a rating scale, the pattern that emerged is exactly what I'm going to tell you right now. It would be that the highest scores would be white males, followed by white females, followed by sometimes asian females, sometimes hispanic females. Then you would have asian males and asian hispanic males. Then you would have black males and you have black females. If you did it by race, the pattern was very consistent that black women would have the lowest engagement scores consistently.
Gena Cox
I saw that all the time, and I knew this, and I understood it at a very personal level as well, just because of my own experiences. But in 20, March 13 of 2020, Breonna Taylor was killed. And when Breonna Taylor was killed, I had a little bit of a nervous breakdown, is what the old, my grandparents would have called it. It wasn't really that, but it was like a I became frozen, a little preoccupied with, how could this be? And I concluded, just by feeling level, that the only reason police officers could shoot into a person's home in the middle of the night was if they didn't really think of that person on the other side as a human, just like them. They had to have. Have been objectified, not a real person. And I kept this idea for a while, and then I said, I feel like I need to be a part of the solution in helping humanize everybody. And so how about if I write a book that just is for senior leaders in business, meaning the top of the house is really very targeted with my book, knowing that maybe that's not the world's greatest marketing decision.
Gena Cox
But that was, I knew. I was convinced that was the audience that needed to hear what I had to say. What if I said, took everything I knew and put it into a book for executive leaders and board directors to help them just think about this issue in a more nuanced way, and that in thinking about this issue in a more nuanced way, they could perhaps identify the actions that they could take in their company to help all employees feel seen, heard, and valued. Seen, heard, and valued is my definition of respect. So basically, we're trying to help every employee in a company feel respected. And the way to do that is to have. It's for leaders to understand how big of a deal that respect thing really is. And so that was why I wrote the book.
Marcia Dawood
It's a great message for leaders, but I think it's something that we can all benefit from just thinking about when we walk into a room, are we being inclusive to our, our peers, our coworkers, our people who report to us and even to our superiors? There's always going to be hierarchies in companies. How can we be thinking about it so that we're all creating the culture and we're all responsible for it?
Gena Cox
So, yeah, and another way that, so if you're listening and you just remember seeing hurt and value, does the person feel seen as if there is this sense that the person with whom I'm interacting is feeling my humanity and it's a mutual thing, do I feel her? I, which is my ideas, my opinions, and then are those used? And do I get some credit every now and then for them? But I feel important, even if my idea is simply that we should buy this kind of paper instead of that kind of paper, whatever the decision. And then the third thing is valued, which is not just, am I compensated? And do I feel like I'm paid fairly and that sort. But it's also about recognition. It's also about for whatever little contribution I make, does anyone ever say thank you for bringing in some fresh flowers and putting them in the office? Or for the donuts? Or for letting us know that this thing was in the email? Whatever the thing is, or whatever big thing or little thing, those three elements must always be present. And the leader, the startup leader, the leader, the colleague, whoever. It really matters. Because if the leader does not behave in a fashion that suggests inclusion, no one else in the organization will. There's another really popular there's a quote that I read, I don't remember the author.
Gena Cox
This is not mine. This is attributed to someone whose name I can't remember. But the quote is leaders bring the weather. And this applies to everything we're talking about here. If it doesn't start at the top, it never happens.
Marcia Dawood
That's right. Well, Doctor Gina Cox, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about everything related to culture and how companies can really make their employees feel more engaged and more included. And we will make sure to tell everyone about how to get your book book leading inclusion drive change your employees can see and feel.
Gena Cox
Well, it's been a pleasure and thank you.