This week's episode is a real treat for me. My friend and colleague, Celeste Herron, interviewed me on my podcast! We discussed neurodiversity and the ways that the workplaces of today can better nourish all the ways that we are human.  Fundamentally, cultivating the inclusive workspace is about knowing about and removing the barriers to full contribution for all team members. Because, let's face it, if your team members are performing in spite of the barriers, you are wasting money. Cultivating this workspace where human thriving isn't an exception starts with being curious about this question: What aspects of your work culture, workflow, systems, processes .. block team members people from showing up and contributing fully? More often than not, the most significant answers to this question dial down to difficulty tolerating differences. In our conversation, Celeste and I discuss this struggle using neurodistinctiveness as an example. We look at how our history contributed to this issue and how the workplace needs to chance to reduce and remove these barriers. As you listen, think of any aspect of difference that seems relevant to your workplace or team. Whether it's related to gender, ethnicity, personality, stage in life or anything else, the same principle applies. Get curious about the barriers to contribution. There's so much written about building an inclusive cultur ein your organization, yet very few organizations are doing this effectively. Instead of trying to force yourself to expertly know it all, do a team audit instead. Based on what you share with me, you will get 2-3 customized solutions that you can easily implement, so you can see tangible changes immediately. Visit FaithClarke.com or click here to schedule your quick audit. About Celeste: Celeste Herron, Brand Experience Designer, Strategist, and Mentor to visionary women, who build businesses and brands that change lives and are using their wealth to change the world. She is the creator of the Embodied Brand Method, a framework and a new way of thinking about branding and business development, where the personhood of the leader, the humanity of the company are paired with a brand experience that is exquisitely curated to create a feeling of trust, bravery, and wonder that deeply supports your buyers and clients. This is a transformational rite of passage for the woman who is ready to move beyond being just a business owner and become the leader of a highly profitable, high-impact brand. Book a consultation with Celeste to talk about your transformational brand or visit celesteherron.com to learn more.

Disrupt and L.E.A.D.

Neurodiversity and barriers to full contribution in the workplace

Mia and I pulled back the curtains and looked at the innards of her team onboarding and staff supports practices. Since Mia is in a beautiful growth phase in her business, she's been expanding her team and is actively thinking through the most effective ways to connect her team members to Copy-Haus' unique approach to copywriting, while energizing their connection to the company and to each other. In a fast growing business, this has not been easy. You will hear us talk about figuring out what new staff need, your unique way of offering that and about integrating community connection rituals into the workflow to build a strong sense of TEAM. Onboarding is really about cultivating connection and shared responsibility for the work and for each other, to maximize productivity while everyone thrives. In other words, feel good and like you belong WHILE getting the job done. If you think you'll be hiring a new team member in the next 2 - 3 months, this might be the time to audit your onboarding processes. I'm doing a few quick audits over the next few weeks. Go to https://calendly.com/faithclarke/teamaudit to schedule one and I'll share the 2 - 3 simple things that your process needs so that it can be more effective for your new hire and less overwhelming for you! About Mia: Words are Mia Francis-Poulin's jam. A conversion copywriter, native New Orleanian, and Parks and Rec enthusiast, Mia helps impact-driven creators to find the right words to market their products authentically and confidently. She's the owner of The Copy Haus -- a boutique copywriting agency for course creators, consultants, and online business owners offering done-for-you and done-with-you sales page, email sequence, and website copywriting. Check out www.thecopyhaus.com/manifesto to see how The Copy Haus is doing copy differently. Connect with Mia: www.thecopyhaus.com/manifesto Facebook.com/thecopyhaus Www.thecopycommunity.com Instagram @thecopyhaus 

Mia Francis-Poulin: Healthy Onboarding and Supports

Studies say as much as 70% of new hired don’t think theirs companies onboarding processes helped them get up to speed in their new role. AND more than 50% of managers find their company’s onboarding processes to be burdensome and overwhelming. No wonder we have so many values breakdowns in our teams. What’s going wrong?? In this short episode, I discuss some ways to reframe the Onboarding experience so that it’s a win win all round, and some essential ingredients of effective Onboarding that helps your team recreate itself to include the new members, while strengthening a healthy team culture and infusing team values. If you are about to start recruiting for your team, this is the time to do an audit of your current Onboarding strategy so you can leverage what’s working and get rid of time wasting processes that frustrate new hires and overwhelm managers. Visit FaithClarke.com to talk about an Onboarding Strategy audit.

Why does Onboarding fail???

Jane Rosenzweig and I had a beautiful, vulnerable, courageous conversation about her experiences as a white DEI practitioner, wrestling with helping majority white organizations integrate their DEI values into the daily behaviors of all associates. Jane has spent her career developing corporate DEI strategies anchored in social justice foundations. Through her 20+ years experience in this industry, Jane formulated a support and racial literacy program for white leaders and corporate stakeholders loosely framed 'make better white people'. This program grew out of her own experiences as a practitioner, noticing that white associates in corporations needed a different type of education and accountability than their BIPOC counterparts and these differences must be identified within the DEI implementation plan. Listen as we talk through a specific intervention that Jane participated in and what she leaned as a result. If you want to your values infused into every aspect of your team’s work, let’s have a virtual coffee (schedule at FaithClarke.com) to brainstorm some strategies specific to your team. About Jane Rosenzweig: As the first Head of DEI (CDO) at W.L. Gore & Associates (www.gore.com), Jane developed a philosophy and strategy that built on Gore’s humanistic values and innovative business model. Relying on culture change and social movement methodologies, Jane galvanized the involvement of thousands of Associates from around the world. Using curiosity and conversation, teams deepened their understanding of identity differences and committed to disrupting bias in day-to-day life. Jane’s approach is rooted in her belief that empathy and dialogue can solve most things. (Along with a strong focus on systems and structures!) Prior to Gore, Jane spent 11 years at J.P. Morgan Chase in NYC. As part of the Corporate Diversity team, she was responsible for the employee engagement and communication strategy. She began her career at the US Attorney's Office in Washington, DC, where she had her fist formal DEI role: EEO Investigator. Contact Jane by email: janerosenzweig1@gmail.com

Jane Rosenzweig: Race in the Workplace

In this episode I talk about one of the 3 C’s that help me figure out the best intervention strategy for teams. I gave an overview of the 3 C’s in episode #6 and then about Communication in episode #8. CRAFT is an artist’s analogy for the team’s WORK. Craft has 3 components and I talk about them with a triangle in mind so you can visualize the 2 foundations to the team behaviors that you want. As you you listen, think about the analogy that makes the most sense for you, and, if you want to personalize this for your team, schedule a virtual team chat and coffee at FaithClarke.com

5 or so minutes: What’s Team Craft?

Why did we have that meeting??? I’ve heard that complaint from BOTH team leaders and team members. It’s tempting to think that meetings are the problem and that they should be avoided at all costs. But avoiding them would be a mistake. Team meetings are synergistic powerhouses, when we get them right. So if your meetings feel like a drag, fix them. This episode has 3 suggestions for more productive meetings, including tips summarized from earlier interviews with Celine Williams (episode #7) and Nikki McKnight (episode #15). Enjoy and let’s not have any more meetings that could have been emails!

That meeting should have been an email!

Grab a notebook and get ready! Nikki McKnight and I have a fast paced, totally authentic conversation about what businesses need to do to build spaces that make it easy for people to contribute. Nikki shares strategies and practices that help the culture to become more explicit and meetings more productive. She's a systems and processes guru and has so much insight into the little practices that makes everything work better. And we got real, since the cobbler's kids might not have the best shoes. So we talked about how much the medicine (or support) we give others is the very thing we have to protect in our own businesses.  About Nikki: Nikki McKnight has over a decade of experience working with companies to improve processes, drive communication and performance, and build a rockstar team. She’s worked with multi-billion dollar retailers, million dollar entrepreneurs, and startup boutiques looking to start off on the right foot. Nikki loves working with the artistic, creative, and spiritual personalities because she truly believes they will be the ones who will change the world for the better. Nikki loves cycling, pop culture podcasts, romance novels, and hanging with her dog, Riesling. Yes, like the wine Connect with Nikki and ask her about the templates! Instagram: @Nikki_mcknightmoc  Website: mcknightoc.com  Join her email list at mcknightoc.com/news

Nikki McKnight - Make your business culture more explicit in every way.

I'm sooo excited to share this conversation with Karlee!  She represents the beginning of everything since I met her in the early days of being trained by autism to be present and settled, even when life was crazy. She was teaching yoga and I was learning to care for myself and build my home support team. Fast forward 12+ years and we are talking about the beautiful integration of business, holistic nourishment, leadership and boundaries. I had fun on Karlee's Messy and Magnificent podcast (go check it out!) and needed to have more so here we are!  Listen as Karlee and I talk about how her leadership and her team has needed to change as her business matured. Karlee talks about how stressful it was to NEED her business to meet her all her needs and affirm her value as a person, and how that impacted growing her team and finding the right people for her mission. She realized that she can't be the emotional support person for her team members and is now figuring out how to support her team as whole people while focussing on the needs of the business. We wrap up with a conversation on the power of healthy boundaries to help us see and know ourselves well and live our own lives, a core pre-requisite to leading without co-dependency.  About Karlee: Karlee Fain is a celebrity business and boundary coach, author, speaker and founder of The Boundary Academy- all from her quiet small-town home. She shows career motivated folks how to upgrade their boundaries and tap into their deepest wisdom so they can stop people- pleasing and start prospering while having far less to do. Karlee Fain is a celebrity business and boundary coach, author, speaker and founder of The Boundary Academy, all from her quiet small-town home. She shows driven career-motivated folks how to leverage nourishment as the professional growth strategy that will make them leaders in their career without sacrificing their bodies or spirit again. But she didn’t start out that way. At nine years old Karlee’s parents moved her to a yoga ashram so she could live and train with world leaders in the the fields of healthy living. These foundations are central to her ability to clear busy work off her client’s plates so they have the time and energy to thrive in their career, health and relationships that has made her the sought after live-in coach to a-list celebrities. That said, she calls career driven women the real rock stars - because while they don’t have an entourage, they possess the wisdom and courage to create careers that uplift both themselves and others. Karlee’s Website: https://www.karleefain.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karlee_fain LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karlee-fain/

Karlee Fain - Leading your team as you scale your business

Marissa and I had a blast talking about the unique ways that our differences show up in the work place and on teams. From rocking and hand flapping to introversion and hating cold calls, we explore the various ways leaders can support ALL members of the team and help find the middle ground, where we understand each other and work together synergistically. We also talked about the upcoming Spring: Changing the Face of Business conference, an online event committed to true connection, collaboration and community with a uniquely diverse collection of business owners. I've hardly ever seen such a diverse speaker line-up as Marissa has put together! About Marissa: Marissa Loewen is a Transformational Business Coach, Community Catalyst and Creative Entrepreneur. Marissa works with business owners, political leaders and radical changemakers to create the rules in order to create thriving, resilient, prosperous businesses that fuel the business owner. In addition to a signature system for creating profit and ease in businesses, personal coaching and an online digital profit planner, Marissa also is launching her first podcast called The Little Podcast of Big Questions.  Find more about her at createtherules.com and on Instagram: Http://www.createtherules.com Http://www.instagram.com/createtherules  Get tickets to Spring: Changing the Face of Business at https://spring.createtherules.com/

Marissa Loewen - Leading a diverse team

Cultivating inclusivity on your team will positively affect every aspect of your team's life and effectiveness. Inclusion alone will massively increase your team's engagement, and this will have a ripple effect within the team, the organization and outward to the wider community. Yet, this state within a team may not be easy easy to create and sustain. This episode reviews the basics of successful inclusion and suggests 3 simple (though not necessarily easy) ways to improve inclusion in your team and organization. The slides for this episode and a checklist of team experiences that can help you assess the health and development of your team are available at PeakPerformingTeam.com

Successful Inclusion in the Workplace

Anuradha did not spare any punches in this episode! We started off our conversation with a reflection on our humanity, and the wisdom that comes when we honor that humanity. Then Anuradha went straight into the core message: Equity and Inclusion is impossible within capitalist and colonialist systems. As much as we try, our organizations produce the results that their founding systems were based on, unless they are radically reengineered. "Indoctrination from capitalism and colonialism has made us cookie cutter", Anuradha says, and we are missing so much of the richness and innovation that humans can contribute to many of these spaces. Listen as we discuss Anuradha's experiences with racism and disability, inclusion, accessibility and some possible solutions to cultivating spaces that overcome these issues. Connect with Anuradha and register for the upcoming session of Sowing Post-capitalist Seeds, an experiential journey into the practice and praxis of creating post-colonial communities. Mention the podcast for the discount Anuradha mentioned in this episode!  Anuradha Kowtha, a catalyst, educator, and Business Liberation Strategist, who works with small businesses and organizations to liberate their essence so they can meet these uncertain times with resilience and courage. Anuradha's journey working across both public and private sectors has led me to see systemic issues like hierarchy and exploitation and find ways to address systemic issues at their root cause. The thread that runs through Anuradha's work is illuminating and liberating individuals and small teams from the indoctrination and cookie-cutter thinking that comes from capitalism and colonialism, so they can provide bold and innovative solutions rooted in justice to their clients.  Connect with Anuradha:- https://www.sowingpostcapitalistseeds.com https://www.thekowthaconstellation.com/  https://www.facebook.com/TheKowthaConstellation  https://www.instagram.com/thekowthaconstellation/  https://www.linkedin.com/in/anuradhakowtha/ 

Anuradha Kowtha - Building the post-capitalist organization

It’s been a doozy of a year! In this episode, I share my yearly birthday reflection ritual with you! The big questions for me when things feel hard are 1) what motivated me? 2) What’s the thing I want to change in the world? I share my thoughts on the revolution I’m championing and my why (my kids) and some ways you can share in the revolution if you want. And if you are a social impact business leader who is committed to fully delivering in your brand values by eliminating the practices in your organization that may have come from other values that aren’t what you hold any more, and that your organization’s real values are reflected in every team member’s hearts and feet, let’s talk. I can help. Happy birthday to meeeee!! Visit FaithClarke.com or PeakPerformingTeam.com to be in touch.

Faith’s birthday episode!

Cultivating inclusivity on your team will positively affect every aspect of your team's life and effectiveness. Inclusion alone will massively increase your team's engagement, and this will have a ripple effect within the team, the organization and outward to the wider community. Yet, this state within a team may not be easy easy to create and sustain. This episode explains what inclusion is and discusses the negative impact of not including YOUR OWN differences. We cannot include differences in others that we reject in ourselves. 

Want Successful Inclusion? Start Including Yourself

Communication is the life blood of every team. The tasks don't fit together to meet your team's goals without it. This quick episode shares 3 isses that may be slowing the communication flow in your team. Which one resonates the most for you? Get a detailed checklist to help you figure out exactly what you need to do to help your team become even more effective, engaged and efficient at PeakPerformingTeam.com

5 or so minutes: Inclusive Team Communication

Disrupt and L.E.A.D. - conversations about the chaos, the crazy and the courage to create more of what we want. The podcast encourages parents of kids with disabilities who either want to be entrepreneurs or who are business owners, to: 1) commit to thriving without compromise 2) embrace the special rhythm of their lives and to 3) see their experiences as gifts that will help them in the entrepreneurial journey, even when life feels chaotic and messy.

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Disrupt and L.E.A.D.

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