2024 Annual Summit: Collaboration of Colorado Inclusive Economy and DEI Leadership Institute with Maria Putnam and Stephanie Knight

Skills-based hiring and workforce diversity are important when it comes to performing workplaces. When we focus on hiring based on skills rather than just traditional qualifications, we open the door to a wider pool of talent. How can we make these practices more widespread in our workplaces? In this special episode, I’m joined by Maria Putnam of the DEI Leadership Institute and Stephanie Knight, the CEO of Colorado Inclusive Economy. We discussed the upcoming event on October 11 at the Hyatt Aurora, the 2024 Annual Summit. We talked about the event overview, partnerships, mission, and the progress and challenges in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Don’t miss the date—join us! See you there! --- Listen to the podcast here: 2024 Annual Summit: Collaboration of Colorado Inclusive Economy and DEI Leadership Institute with Maria Putnam and Stephanie Knight Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. As you probably know if you’ve listened to some of my other episodes, I’m based here in Denver, Colorado, and probably about half of my guests are in the area and I do like to promote events that are happening in person, especially events around the things that people around town are doing that they’re passionate about. As you know, Denver’s a city with a lot of passionate energy, a lot of people that are starting things up, a lot of people that are putting things together, a lot of people that are thinking through the world and how we can kind of even improve upon humanity, to get a little bit woo-woo and high level. One such event coming up in October, I believe in October 11th, is a partnership between Maria Putnam of the DEI Leadership Institute, who you probably already know from one of my earlier podcast episodes, and Stephanie Knight, the CEO of Colorado Inclusive Economy. --- Maria, Stephanie, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, glad to be on. Well, let’s, let’s start out by talking about the event in October 11th. What are you putting on? What you were exposing to everyone? And what would people expect if someone might be interested in such an event? Yeah, well, the event is going to be in October 11, as you said. We’re going to be hosting this event at the Hyatt Aurora and we are expecting to have 350 people from all the industries. So, this is a really good event to go and to meet leaders, actually, who are really proactive and working in diversity, equity, and inclusion. I would just echo what Maria said, it’s going to be a wonderful event. It is on the 11th, it’s 8 AM to noon, and so, again, it’s going to be two distinct tracks of learning with two separate sessions each and we have engaged wonderful subject matter experts to lead these sessions. They’re highly topical and things that are on people’s mind, like diversity and AI, again, healthcare, inclusion, and scarcity. We’re also going to talk about some legal things, not too deep, but talk about with everything that’s happening in our larger world around diversity, equity, inclusion, how can companies stay the course and stay safe legally so it’ll be a lot for everyone. So excited to host with the DEI Leadership Institute and combine audiences. So we’re really excited about it. And what type of audience are you specifically looking to reach in this event? Is this the CEOs? Is this other leaders, division heads, more kind of small business entrepreneurs? Is there anyone in particular you’re looking to reach more with a lot of the advice that you have for these companies? I will say all together, you just said business owners, CEOs, students, people who’s actually doing the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion at whatever capacity they are. Yeah. It’s open to the public. Colorado Inclusive Economy is a membership organization so we engage C-suite leadership and their teammates and what we call learning journeys. And so, again, it’s open to our community as well as the public at large as well as DEI Leadership Institute affiliates so we want to see a good cross section of everyone who finds this to be of interest. Again, there’ll be a lot of learning. So, again, no matter what stage or phase you are in your leadership or your journey with diversity, equity, inclusion, there’ll be something that connects with you and resonates with you when you attend. Now, tell us a little bit about Colorado Inclusive Economy. What is the organization all about and how do you operate? Sure. Yeah. So Colorado Inclusive Economy was started in 2020 in response to the activities around George Floyd. As you know, we all kind of witnessed together collectively something that was very disturbing publicly and, again, it spoke to many communities and many persons, specifically in the leadership community. So we started out with a faithful five or seven Colorado companies, prominent leaders who authored a letter of commitment to participate in making Colorado the most inclusive economy in the nation. As I said, it’s a membership organization. We’re up to nine cohorts. We have hosted 180 companies through our curriculum and program, engaged 130,000 employees, and what we do is a series of learning journeys. So, they’re typically eight sessions in length, 90 minutes in duration, and each one is led by a subject matter expert. So we tackle some tough and courageous conversations, do a lot of learning, and then last year, we launched additional pathways that are very specific so they’re deeper dives of learning. So, they include topics around supplier diversity, workforce development. We actually developed a leadership equity guide based on the eight prevailing attributes of an equitable leader. So that’s a little bit about the Colorado Inclusive Economy. We are local. We are growing statewide. We do have a high representation of Denver metro companies at this point but we do engage folks across the state, and that’s growing. So that’s a little bit about us. And what does an inclusive economy look like? An inclusive economy really is where every member of our state is participating and they’re actualizing what we would call a good paying job, which is a little subjective, but, again, it means a job where there’s upward mobility, where there’s ongoing opportunity, where there is a good living wage for you and your family and household, and, again, stressing on opportunity. So, to attain inclusivity, we really need to see folks from all areas of our community, again, our BIPOC community and everyone, reaching some opportunities within organizations of good salaries, again, benefits and bonuses and incentives and ongoing training and professional development. If you look at a mid-management role for some of our communities of color, there is a disparity of about $15,000 to $20,000 between black and brown communities in a management role versus those in the white community. So, again, some good work to be done. Again, similar skill sets, education, and background but there is a difference in the salary rate. An inclusive economy means you’re creating opportunity ongoing for everyone within good paying jobs and emerging sectors, like our clean energy and tech sectors, and they are on ascension pathways to really grow, to reach their highest heights of potential within that organization, and actualize good salaries and benefits. Now, in the roughly four years since all this was started with the George Floyd murder that we all saw, has, in your view, any meaningful progress been made in Colorado or nationwide? So, again, that’s subject to debate and it’s quite a topic of discussion right now. We’re in the backdrop of an election so DEI is being very interestingly messaged by some members of our community in our nation and certain parts of the country, to be an honest, so it has taken quite a hit. Again, those like Maria and her Institute and folks that we align ourselves with in the Colorado Inclusive Economy want to stay the course, they want to continue this work. This work really does fall under the umbrella of change management. When you’re looking at things that we’re talking about, there are very, very substantiated business case for having a diverse workforce, which bubbles up into a diverse economy. If we don’t have all the minds and hearts and belief systems around the table, we will not be able to reach, when you think from a business standpoint, if you’re trying to engage a market and you have a product or a service that you want to get to the masses, again, you need to have voices from every community, from every background, from every age range at the table because that informs how you roll out your products and services, it informs what you offer, it informs your pricing, your marketing strategies. Diversity, equity, inclusion needs to be paramount and as important as something like your business strategy, your market strategy.Share on X And what we’re seeing with our companies is, again, them really committing themselves to the course of our learning journeys and our programs but also having a little bit of pause around, again, maybe how public they should be about the work they’re doing, given some of the negative publicity as well as some of the emerging losses that have happened with very forward-leading DEI companies. So they want to stay the course, they’re good participators and supporters, but they do have some concerns but they believe in the business case, which is really important. Now, Maria, we talked on this podcast a few years ago. People heard about your story in starting the DEI Leadership Institute, we talked a little bit about what’s going on and how there’s some controversy around DEI and some people having some negative perceptions of it. How do you personally persevere through that and stay the course and con