Senior Vice President for Global Inclusion and Strategic Innovation, NYU
What do you feel are the qualities of a good mentor?
Well the first quality, I think, of a good mentor is a mentor who understands that their mentee is different than themselves. Sometimes, some of us have experienced mentorship where the mentor wants you to be like them or follow their advice all the time. And I think being a good mentor is sort of like being a good therapist. You listen, you provide feedback, and then you allow the individual or individuals to grow in their own way. Your efforts are to support that growth and to provide the relative information, connections, sometimes point them (in my area) to do the right research, and that is what I think is being a good mentor. And to help them create their own networks that will help them navigate whatever it is that they’re gonna do throughout their lives.
Do you feel being a mentor — the question is, how does mentoring benefit the mentor and the mentee — career wise, intellectually? What do you feel has to be the mutual relationship?
Well, you have to establish trust; that’s the first thing. And then you also have to establish that trust with candor. Because feedback is key to the mentor-mentee relationship, and that feedback can’t be unidirectional. So that feedback can’t be just mentor to mentee. The mentee has to be able to give feedback that says, well this is what I need, this is how I’m thinking about this, actually what we talked about last time didn’t work, I need more help in this direction, et cetera. I think this is where for the mentor and the mentee, it’s a learning experience. You’re learning about, usually, a subject, an area of exploration, and to go back to my earlier answer, your mentee’s career or aspirations are not your own. And so you’re going to learn about that, and that can be helpful because any time — I mean, certainly in my field — any time you’re learning, that is an opportunity to grow, and I think that’s for both the mentee and the mentor: to grow, to learn, through honest feedback and establishing that kind of trust that allows for candor.
I think, in your words, and in knowing that when we think about corporate America, we think about the bottom line, and there’s no getting away from that, whatever institute, organization, structure anybody’s in. And I think that the numbers show that when you have a diverse, inclusive employee base, that you are naturally going to have great organic growth and commitment and loyalty. I mean those are the pieces I often find companies and corporations tend to miss, and feel, ‘okay I’m only thinking about this.’ But what the results show of the commitment to employees today is the solidarity is massive.
That’s absolutely right. And what I know, because I work across the generations, is that generations do shift, and when we think about emerging generations — first of all if you think about the millennials to Gen-Z and now to the Alphas — these are increasingly diverse generations. And when I say diverse, across a host of different kinds of axes. And so in those ways, it behooves organizations to think about what is happening in diversity and growth globally, and that’s impacting lots of different corporations, markets, et cetera. And you’re exactly right. All of the research demonstrates that if you build your organization, you work with your diverse population, whatever that means in your own organization, you will experience growth to your bottom line. McKinsey has demonstrated this, PWC, and all the big companies that look into this. And the growth ratio actually is dependent upon your investment, which is similar to other kinds of things — how you invest, how you embed — that allows for that sometimes minor growth or accelerated growth. And we’re talking thirteen to forty two percent. And that’s a huge growth to your bottom line.
And I think it’s amazing when that actually happens and people appreciate it and see it, because, as you say, research has indicated that it is validated, it has this hard fact to back it up.
Yes. You think about SAP. SAP started this program working with people who have autism and Asperger’s. Why did they do this? SAP is a company where they do a lot of background software development. And what they found is that persons with disabilities, depending on their disabilities, have certain skills that can be beneficial, particularly working in that area. So they have a large scale program. What has that done for SAP? Well, it’s made them a great company in a lot of ways. They’ve learned how to create different kinds of networks. They’ve also learned how to have growth and development across countries in this approach, and thinking about persons with disabilities, because they’re based in Germany, not just in the United States but also in Europe. And so it’s allowed for tremendous growth for that organization. And that’s just one example.
In the nineteenth century — these are hard facts drawn from materials that say that in the nineteenth century the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. The twenty-first century, the paramount moral change was the struggle for fairness and gender equality around the world. Why is gender equality even a challenge, especially in the enlightened Western world today?
That’s fascinating that you should ask this question. And I think that when we look at gender equality, what we have seen — and thank you for the arc across time — is the shift for how we even understand gender. That’s the first shift we have to think about, coming out of the 1900s into the modern era. And the modern era has required us to do things differently. That has to do with labor markets, it has to do with childbirth, all of these areas. Our policies, our thoughts, et cetera, sometimes haven’t caught up with the reality of the times. Sometimes what we have done is we have baked into our policies and our practices gender inequities. And those gender inequities have continued to follow us.
So I’ll give you one example. For instance, women have been giving birth forever. Women give birth. In the early 1900s we did not have the kinds of medical interventions or the kind of ability through technologies to participate in work that we have now, et cetera. So we have all kinds of different ways in which women can participate in the labor force if they choose to do so. But we still penalize women for being mothers and we reward men for being fathers, and you can see this in the inequity in pay. So women who become mothers, often their pay is less, because they are thought they’re going to leave the market, as opposed to men. And that’s across the West, so I’m not just talking about the United States, but also in Europe. And again, that’s based on an old archetype. We don’t have to do that anymore. Those are the kinds of things where in some ways it seems simple, right? Simple adjustments. But it’s not simple, because it’s based in our policies and practices that go back in time. When we look at inequity in any area, much of what we are dealing with are inequitable policies and practices that have been embedded or baked into our systems, in whatever ways those are. We just have to reimagine it.
In my field one of the things that we do is called tenure, for instance. Tenure is usually, and depending on where you are, but somewhere between a seven to eleven year project. And if you were to take off a year or two to have a child, then you take time off. Well, people take time off of their tenure clock for lots of reasons. They might get sick, they might have to do extra research, all kinds of things. But historically, what has happened is that when women have to take time off for tenure for their childbirth, then they lose this sort of trajectory of moving toward tenure. And we’ve seen a lot of universities really move toward allowing people to take off their tenure clock for a year to two, which helps with this idea of inequity. The other area that I think companies have started to do, which I do think is very helpful: maternity leave was always seen as just the woman’s role, so the woman is going to leave work. But now what we see is we have paternity leave. And what I really like that I’m seeing in a lot of organizations is family leave acts. So it’s not paternity or maternity, it’s both. So that way we’re allowing men and women to fully participate in the caretaking of children. Which then is about reimagining child-rearing, which then can help, in the back, help us reimagine: What does it mean to take care of children? And taking care of children is very important; that’s our future.
Wow. That was such a comprehensive answer. So brilliantly broken down, because everything you touched on indicates human nature and the response to what impact change has, why change is relevant, the importance of it but also the fear factor.
The fear. You think about generations — I think about generations a lot because I’m working with new generations all the time. It’s not as if I’m always hanging out with fifteen year olds. I certainly do not, but I work with fifteen year olds. And what I realize, and year after year I learn it more and more: we criticize generations that are younger than us. “They’re not ready, they’re this, they’re that,” whatever they are. And that’s about change. New generations are going to change things dramatically. Now, sometimes change needs to be harnessed, it needs to be directed; I’m not saying it’s all the exact way we want to go, but we have to work together to figure out how that change impacts us all. And I think about it with gender because gender is being disrupted by new generations — they’re not thinking of gender in the same ways. Well, how does that impact our policies today? If I come into work as a ‘they,’ what does that mean? Those are very different questions, and it’s about gender, but it’s also about change.
Was there a defining moment or experience in life that brought you to where you are today?
Yes. There are a couple, so I’ll briefly talk about them. One was when I was very young. To be honest, I had to volunteer in high school — you had to do a volunteer activity to graduate. And I’m honest about this, that I was trying to do the easiest volunteer work that I could do. I was trying to get around the volunteer work. I was an athlete, I did all these other things, but I was like, okay, whatever. The first volunteer activity I did, it just didn’t work out. It was with one of my mother’s friends, but it just wasn’t the thing for me. And then the second volunteer activity that I decided to do was to work in a school that no longer exists; it was called Alexander Graham Bell. It was a school for people with disabilities. They had people who were hearing impaired, people who were sight impaired, and people who were on what we would now call the autistic spectrum, and served these students through K-12. And I worked in that school and I learned sign language at the time.
I became very interested in being a volunteer so I stayed in that school long past the period I was supposed to be there. And what I learned in that environment were two things. One is that we don’t treat people very well when we think they are different than ourselves. And the second thing I learned was about poverty. Because some of the students in the school had different access to resources based on their family background. And there was a little white boy, a little white child and his best friend was a little Black girl. The little Black girl came from a very middle class, upper middle class family. She had lots of different kinds of resources. She was hearing impaired and had cerebral palsy. And she was best friends with this little boy who lived in a car; that’s where his family lived. I watched the interaction — I get choked up every time I think about it — I watched the interaction between these children and how they came to understand each other and support each other. And what I also came to realize was that that might not last throughout their lives because we’re pulled apart because of difference in class and race and all of those kinds of things. It was a pivotal moment for me because I learned about languages and misunderstandings and how we don’t see each other. I think — I know, because I’m talking about it even now, and I’ve talked about it — that it has stayed with me throughout my life and it’s probably one of the things that compelled me to do the work that I’ve done. I can’t say it’s a straight line to diversity work, right, but I can say that it made me ask some questions that I had not heard people ask. I admit now that some of those questions got me in trouble early in life but they also propelled me into my career.
The second area goes back to the question that you asked me about gender inequality. So, I went to single-sex schools as a younger person, so all-girls schools. And when you’re in all-girls schools, there are all-boys schools that you’re affiliated with; you have to have your proms and your events and all of those things. You might even have exchange programs with those schools. But I had not been in a co-ed environment in the formative years of my life, and then I went into a co-ed environment for college, and I made that choice. Actually, it’s funny because now when I reflect back there are these women’s schools that I love — the Smiths, the Bellmans, the Wellesleys. But I was saying to my parents, and to my mom at the time, “I am not going to a single sex school. I mean, you’ve subjected me to this, I was there.” I’m sure I was very dramatic about it.
And so I was like, I’m going to a co-ed school. And I did. And the school that I went to is a great school, but all of the presidents of every organization were men, the student government association — I’m old enough that that’s the case. And so it wasn’t that I was a feminist or anything at the time. I was just shocked. It was just weird to me. And so I started asking questions again, built on the kinds of questions I had learned from high school and some of the other learnings. And I realized that — and I did a project to graduate from high school about World War Two and propaganda, and how propaganda was used in World War Two to create an ethos, and to create the image of Uncle Sam and to get people involved in this idea of war. So I was super interested in how propaganda worked and how you use different kinds of messaging. What I realized in college was that the message was: men were leaders and women weren’t. So I was like, “Oh, that’s not true.” And I also realized that that wasn’t specific to my college, that that was rampant across other kinds of universities. I think that’s when I also began to think about, okay, well this is also just not true. And it wasn’t true from my own experiences. I had seen women principals, women leaders, women leading all kinds of organizations. So again, it made me ask all sorts of questions, and then I got called this dirty word, feminist, and I was like, “What is that?” So I started to explore some of these concepts early in life, and I admit, at the time I did not know what they were, and it was not said as a compliment. But I learned a lot, and I think those experiences allowed me to also learn that we have different experiences — humans, we have different experiences. Those different experiences sometimes inform how we think about leadership, who’s in charge, etc. So we have to expand the experiential and we have to expand our knowledge, and I think that’s why higher education was the place for me as well as thinking about these issues of diversity and inclusion.
Wow. That’s such an interesting learning to expand what impacted you and helped you figure out your journey.
Yes. I also say that, to go back to the mentor question, there were people along the way who said things to me that, now I think back, and I have no idea what they were saying to me. In fact, I’m trying to get in touch with a gentleman with whom I worked. When I first started working in higher education, I was a young teacher, a young professor. I hadn’t even gotten my PhD yet when I first started, because I was finishing my dissertation, and I was quickly hired. I was hired into a university and I was put into — now that I think about it, they never even put young professors into this kind of thing, they usually put old professors into these — and so I have no idea how I got into this. But anyway, I was put into this team teaching environment. I was in the humanities, so I was paired with people in the sciences, social sciences, and mathematicians. Great — it was phenomenal learning. But what happened was I met a gentleman; we worked together for about three years, team teaching together. I remember we were at Vassar, and we were walking back, and he said to me: “You know, you’re going to make a great president one day, and a great academic administrator.” I mean, this was thirty five years ago. I looked at him with a smile and was like, “that’s funny.” But I remember thinking in my head, “that’s insane. I will never do that. I don’t even know anything about that; I’m a professor.”
Do you know what’s really interesting in listening to your journey, because I know a little bit about your background and who you are, that when people have to grow up very quickly, they become different people. You are so much more embracing, and in just meeting you, I feel that — you can meet some people, and they’re just closed. And often they don’t know how to engage or be open. In meeting you, immediately, it was like you’re an open book. It’s as if you’re all-embracing of everything around you, and you’re happy to give everything around you. Right? And that, immediately, comes off when you meet your energy. For me, that’s massive. That is the making and breaking of people because they’re so scared to know what’s next — does it impact me? Is it going to be detrimental to me? Come away from the ‘me’ and you’re there.
That’s exactly right. I think that one of the things, and this is certainly true of the West, is that we become — and this goes back to your arc — is that we’re very individualistic. We’re very focused on the ego and on the ‘me’ and the ‘I’. I think when we think about how we as humans have been able to survive and navigate historical kinds of things, it’s actually through community. It’s actually through work. I think of this through Covid. We could not have navigated Covid as individuals. We navigated it as a collective. Even pharmaceutical companies had to work together. Because change is inevitable. The question is how do we greet that change, how do we imagine that change, and how do we do it collectively, and how do we do it in a way that allows many many people to do well through that change. When I think about this most recent pandemic, I think that the lessons and the takeaway were that we saw that some people, we saw the cause of inequities. We saw that sometimes it was very difficult. And that was very shocking for some people. But I hope that some of the takeaways from that are now, well these inequities have real impacts, and that impact will impact you, even if you’re not in the space of the inequity. That’s where these things are interrelated and interconnected. And we are interconnected globally. This virus made that very clear to all of us. And there will be more — not just viruses but that interconnectedness. And that goes back to that arc you’re talking about. There was a time when we were not as interconnected globally. But we are now.
Fantastic. I could sit and talk to you forever just dissecting that part of the conversation. I’m just so conscious of time. And thank you for being so embracing and being you. That’s very — just the energy of feeding off who you are, I’m loving it. Because it’s so rare, Lisa, I have to tell you, it is so rare. All the time when you have conversations, you know yourself, but you can be in people’s spaces and you measure responses and reactions to conversations, and so you pull back. I mean I’ve done it.
I interview a lot of people. Part of my role, I’ve always said, is the background role. My role is to bring people to the fore, to highlight, whether that’s researchers or scholars or students, whatever that is. And that means that I have to develop rapport with people. That rapport, as you’re talking about, is hard sometimes to pull out because people are afraid of lots of different things, and have had lots of different experiences that impact them. Again, people don’t like change. Fear and change coupled together is an interesting recipe for sure.
And academia. People who have lived in their bubble of education often have massive interactive issues.
You think about academics and to all the academics out there, I’m one of you. But most of us grew up in a space where we were intellectually curious people. That often put us to the margins. So we weren’t part of the social ecosystems in some of the ways that some others were. Then, you make the choice, often, especially if you’re going to get a doctorate, to then spend seven, and if you went to California, thirteen years, or fifteen years in school, just to get your doctorate. The doctorate is about specialization and narrowing, so that you narrow over time to a topic. That bubble is part of the process. The hope that I have always had for academics — and this is the hope, I think, for the modern university — is that we begin to work across our silos, across our departments, across our disciplines. But that is very hard. That’s what I meant earlier when I was talking about systems. Baked into the system of higher education is not just tenure, but the PhD process, et cetera. Those processes have consequences in and of themselves. How do you, twenty years later, break those patterns when that is the pattern with which you’ve been embedded? Even for me, as an early scholar and as an early teacher, I was much more closed than I am now because that was part of my learning process as well. I think I was always a little more open than some, but I was definitely, as a twenty five year old when I first started teaching, I was definitely more closed than I am now.
What is the best piece of advice that you were ever given?
I think that the best piece of advice has to do with resiliency. I just watched a TED Talk where someone was talking about different generations, which I actually don’t think the information was accurate, but. The reality is: you have to face adversity to build resilience. Adversity sometimes means, not literal adversity, but making mistakes. I think the best advice I ever got was make a mistake, brush yourself off, and get back up. I think the difference between successful and unsuccessful leaders are three things: one is, you make a mistake and you don’t learn from it, so you just go back and make the same mistake over and over again. The second is, you make a mistake, and then you live in the space of failure — you can’t get yourself out of that space of failure. And the third is, you make a mistake, but you don’t get any feedback — you just get your own feedback in your own head. You need those three: you have to get feedback, you need resilience to brush yourself off and not live in the space of failure. Those pieces of advice have been very helpful to me. Because I’ve made mistakes, obviously. But I’ve tried to grow from those, I’ve tried to learn, I’ve tried to work in community so I learn even more. I think that, for me, has been a thing. I think the other thing is: take strategic risks. You can’t just take random risks all the time. Sometimes. But you have to take strategic risks, and taking strategic risks also means you have to get feedback, do the research, and figure out where to take those risks. And they’re tied together: the risk taking, and then of course thinking about resiliency and mistakes and feedback. I have this joke that I say a lot, because I teach on the campus in Abu Dhabi and we have the ministries. So I always say, if I were to open a new ministry, it would be the Ministry of Mistakes, Recovery, and Resilience.
And that would be so appropriate. I get that. And I think just the very idea of that is a clear indication of yes, we need this. People would respond. I think when people have somebody else setting the template for something, people are like, “yeah, I do feel that way” or “yeah, I get that.” It’s often the trigger that people are looking for. How do you make it happen? But thank you for that, that’s really — as you were going through that, on what the best piece of advice was that was given and how that was broken down. Oh my god. I saw myself in that space as you were breaking down. Yeah, I get that. It’s important to me to not — a rejection for me is not something I fear. I always feel from a rejection better things happen.
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. I think rejection — and I also will say this. I say this to people — I don’t know where I learned it. But I will say this, and I think this is really important for leaders. You won’t always be liked. That’s just not the case. In fact, the sweet spot of strategic risk-taking, I think, is somewhere around eighty five percent. If fifteen percent is agitation, then probably that means there’s some growth there. If eighty five percent of your company wants to get rid of you, you’ve got another problem. But if there’s about a 10-15% ratio, then that means that the agitation is probably good for growth. That’s that mistake resiliency moving through. And so I think that startup companies do well with this. More traditional and seasoned organizations sometimes have a hard time in building that mistake resiliency, that loop into the organization, but I think it’s needed in all organizations.
And it is fear, it comes right back down to the fear factor, doesn’t it? Thank you for sharing that, that was fantastic. I’m reading this question and I think there’s many layers to the answer, and I think you’ve got this. I’d like to throw it out there, because there’s only three more questions, and two of them are tight. This is one I know you might enjoy. If it’s true that whenever women are involved in any aspect of life — domestic, business, recreation — the evidence shows that activity is enhanced in real, tangible ways when women do things. Why is there such fierce resilience to female influence?
This goes really back to many of the things we’ve been talking about. Because of the different gender expectations, women learn differently. And so they also learn — and this is in the primary learning environment, or K through eight in the United States, and so we are put into different learning environments. That’s just — and teachers respond differently — there’s just a lot of research on this. Okay. As a result, women are taught to be more collaborative—that’s just taught, women are taught that. So it’s not innate; women are not innately more collaborative but it is about the processes of education, and those can be familial as well. And so what happens is women, when they get into companies and organizations, and again we saw this during the COVID — the countries that did the best were run by women, who navigated the pandemic. And people were like, “Why?” And I’m like, because they worked with their communities. They collaborated. They went out. People like Jacinda Ardern [Prime Minister of New Zealand] — why was she able to do the work that she was able to do even with the gun crisis in her country? Because she went out and worked with her community. She worked with her Muslim community. She worked with a variety of communities. And that’s about collaboration. Why is that difficult? Well, and this is true of any diversity effort. What we find is, and people say, well it takes too long, it’s too much, it’s this, it’s that. But the outcomes are much better, as the research demonstrates. But the investment has to be more. And that, I think, is often why organizations, people will fear women’s leadership or women’s — that space of bringing women in to do that type of work, because they don’t want to invest in that space and they don’t want to change. So that change around collaboration — because when you’re collaborating, you might have to take new ideas into consideration, right? It can’t just be your own ideas. And if you’re bringing new ideas in, then that might mean you have to change a policy, or a mission, or a process. And that can be very frightening, right? I say this a lot, and it is really funny to me because we’ve watched lots of organizations come and go. And so I have a Blockbuster joke, because I’m old enough — there was this company in the United States, and it was a video company. And we could use anything.
I grew up with the Blockbuster era. And so I say, Blockbuster could have been Starbucks, or like that; it could have been everywhere. But they relied on this idea that people still wanted to go to the movies. Well, people do want to go to the movies. But they don’t want to go in the same way. Their platform was built on you go there, you get these movies, it costs $19.99, $29.99 to watch this movie, and you get your popcorn and your Milk Duds, and it’s overpriced, and they were recreating that movie experience. Well, in the middle of the eighties, during the economic crisis, Redbox came along and put Redboxes right outside, in the United States what we call our 7/11s or our convenience stores. And now, for a family of four, you can have all of your popcorn, all of your snacks, and four movies for ten dollars. It was like Blockbuster — they were paying attention to moviegoers, but they weren’t paying attention to the economic kinds of crises that people were having. And so I think companies and organizations, we have to pay attention to the times, and the times change. And that’s where we are now. We are in the era of collaboration. We look at things, so there’s the Information Revolution, and what we’re in now is the Collaboration and Imagination Revolution. Imagining new things and collaborating, and that’s about globalization as well. So we have to, I think, really lean into that, but it’s very difficult, because it means immense amounts of change often.
What would you tell your fifteen-year-old self today?
Oh my gosh. I would tell her lots of things. I think one of the things I would tell her is — although I think I’ve done this — is enjoy the journey, have as much fun as possible, and engage with as many people across as many different lifestyles, experiences, et cetera as you can. And I think I’ve tried to do that, I don;t think anyone told me to do that. But I think I’ve tried to do that, and I think I would emphasize that to my fifteen-year-old self, because my fifteen-year-old self was a little more closed than myself now. So go for it, and also to be courageous. I think I learned how to be courageous, but I do think that I, too — I mean, you’re talking to the more mature and seasoned Lisa. But I too had my own fears, I had my own concerns, I had my own ways of probably not learning in the ways that I could have. And so I hope I’ve done some of that, but I’m still — I’m a work-in-progress, I like to say; I think we all are. I think that’s what I would say to her. Just enjoy it!
