The cavnessHR podcast – A talk with Steven Matly
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Below is Steven’s book recommendations:
“We Can’t Talk About That at Work and how to talk about race, religion and politics inside the workplace” by Mary Frances Winter
Click on the link below to purchase the books from Amazon.
https://amzn.to/2K34NNk
Jason: 1:00 Hello and welcome to the cavnessHR Podcast. I’m your host, Jason Cavness. Our guest today is Steven Matly. Steven, are you ready to be great today?
Steven: 1:11 I'm ready, thank you for having me.
Jason: 1:13 Today's podcast is brought to you by Audible. get a free audio book download and a 30-day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/cavnessHR You have over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle and MP3 player. So Steven, tell us what's keeping you busy these days.
Steven: 1:38 Thank you, Jason. I am proud to serve as the CEO and founder of SM Diversity. I’m proud to serve as partner to SDS Consulting and then I do have a couple of ventures and joint ventures that are revenue-generating in other industries and roles that I play from a consulting or an investor point of view. I'm a serial entrepreneur through and through and I'm fascinated at always being a life learner and connecting, forging relationships with people like yourself. The core of who I am and how I serve in the field of SM today is that with the clients that we service, how do you get their job opportunities, market it to a diverse community of professionals. How can we engage them into coming and learn to become more of an inclusive workplace through our D&I consultants that lend their experience that lends in sustainability in the framework to execute that. We also do it through events at workshops and multimedia. We believe that the future and the norms of recruiting and attracting, retaining, advancing, promoting is all in the lens of voice of the employee. The same that you would do as the voice of a customer and we bring that in the dynamic light and the behaviors of candidates and what are the demands from the audience to track talent in such a competitive market and we’re proud of that. We're proud to be able to understand the marketplace, understand the behaviors in different online/offline engagements and how to make sure that we see that through in a diverse and inclusive lens. So that’s what’s keeping me busy.
Jason: 3:32 Let me tell our listeners some of your background real fast. Overcoming adversity is nothing new to Steven Matly. A high school dropout turned entrepreneur. He has twice created six figure revenue generating companies with less than $5,000 startup capital. Raised by a single mother in the South Seattle housing projects. Steven entered the workforce at age fifteen and quickly recognized the limited resources, mentors, and role models available to families like his in the area. In the years that followed Steven worked for both small companies and large corporations in a number of different roles. In 2014, Steven launched SM Diversity, a boutique hiring agency committed to helping businesses create a more diverse and inclusive workforce. By connecting them with community based organizations, subject matter experts, and experienced recruiters, his clients are able to leverage a broader network of diverse talent. Ultimately resulting in an expanded marketplace. Steven has become one of the up and coming thought leaders in the area of diversity and inclusion employment practices.
Jason: He was recently featured in the Seattle Times October 2016 issue around “Untapped Talent” and was selected to be a speaker for TED TALKS at University of Washington in May 2017 as it relates to organizational behavior and Inclusive Leadership. He has conducted ground breaking workshops such as their HACK Diversity & Inclusion Program to serving on panels alongside organizations such as SHRM, Tech Inclusion, Seattle Interactive Conference, Chase Startup Week, WTIA, Uber, F5, Boeing, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Bank of America, Amazon, Zillow, Expedia, Wells Fargo, Slalom, Progressive, Seattle Police Department, Starbucks, BECU, Comcast, IBM, and other Fortune 500 companies. In his quest for continued education, Steven successfully completed his Cornell University’s online Strategic Human Resource Leadership program focusing on diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Steven also completed the Business Certificate Program at University of Washington Foster School of Business in August 2017 and serves as a Partner at SDS Consulting in September 2017 to focus on providing end to end resources towards current and future Professional Cleaners. Steven, I stand up and applaud you. You’re doing a lot and making some great contributions to a lot of people.
Steven: 6:01 Thank you. This is amazing. I think that was the first time that I've ever heard my bio read back to me and I keep thinking, “there’s so much more that should be in there that I didn't even mention. But to the hear that the first time from a different perspective, not to boost myself, but it's been quite a journey. Thank you for reminding that to me right now at this very moment. I'm humbled by what you read and I'm appreciative. Thank you.
Jason: 6:32 Yes. And you have to realize you’re in every single bit of that, that’s you doing the hard work. So Steven, why is diversity and inclusion so important to you?
Steven: 6:41 Diversity and inclusion is very important to me. One, it's part of my fabric, it's part of my DNA. I believe that right now, at this very moment. I can be my authentic, real self and by doing that I am in the best mental state possible. In what they call a knowledge workforce. We are constantly trying to find critical, cognitive diverse thinking. However, society and behavior has now influenced us to where your mom, your dad, your household, your cousin, your football coach can actually perpetuate different forms of hate. These things show up outside of the workplace and they're polarizing and they show up inside of the workplace. I wouldn’t have any opportunity to do what I'm doing and contribute to life, to earth. I wouldn’t be able to contribute in this lifetime if it was not for people seeing past the obstacles, the barriers, the things that I was born into without my control. It's so important to understand that and I guess one of the most important ways that I ever heard it was when a gentleman named Juan Coto from Fred Hutchinson, which is a cancer research place, I said, “Why is diversity and inclusion so important to cancer research? Tell me why,” he said, “Well, if you have the answer to solve cancer, with a lot of biases and discrimination. We could’ve easily rejected or pushed away the possible source and answer to solve cancer, that you could’ve contributed to the research.”
Steven: I look at it that way in every part of our lives, whether it's technology, what we're building. If you’ve been from the crash-test dummies to sports, diversity and inclusion is everywhere. Well, diversity is everywhere; inclusivity, to some people, is still optional, and they're not being held accountable for it. We are essentially, based on our decisions and conditioning or unlearning. These are the ways that our world’s going to be shaped over history, over time, when we look back at the history, that's why that's so important to me. I feel if, in the Russell Wilson analogy – why not us, why not me, we were made for this. Forget the diffusion theory of somebody else is going to take care of it, somebody else is going to do it. No, I think I'm responsible for this. I am going to hold myself accountable to committing to being a servant leader where I want to help others that might have the same obstacles that I had that were unseen by other people or were unreal to others. But they were real for me to experience. When I shot out that broadcast, and what comes back out of it is an overwhelming of demand of people that go, “I know how you feel, I feel the same way. I'm looking for ways to overcome that.” I would love to magnify that more and more and through different outlets. I know that's a long-winded answer of why diversity and inclusion matters to me. But that just gives you a small fraction of why it really matters to me and why it should matter to everyone and how we should make our decisions.
Jason: 11:01 That’s great, Steven. Steven, next, when you hear someone say, I didn’t hire this person because they're not a culture fit, what do you think to yourself or what's your reply when you hear that?
Steven: 11:20 I hope this year and, if I could, I want to resonate this more with everyone in HR and everyone in recruiting or anyone that makes a decision. We need to eliminate the words like “rockstar” because rockstar doesn't resonate with candidates like me. If I was a candidate in the market because I love rap. I respect rock, nothing wrong with rock, but I love rap. So when people are always talking about rockstar and associate it with being top talent, what about rap star? We live in such a right-handed world we forget the left-handed. When I think about culture fit. I talk about that and I use that analogy because culture fit, to me, is like we're rockstars, and if you like rap, we don't get it here. Well, if you look at the history of Jimi Iovine and you watched the documentary called The Defiant Ones, the reason why Jimmy and Dr Dre are billionaires now is because he understood diversity and inclusion. Even in music, even in entertainment, it’s that you have to be able to understand outside of your own behaviors or what you've been accustomed. So, yes, we like rockstars, yes, this is how we are but why does everyone need to be like that?
Steven: Why can't we hire the cultural addition instead of always looking for the fit. Always looking for other rockstars, always looking for other singers. So the reason why I say that is because not everyone wants to be that rockstar. Not everyone wants to be like you, not everyone wants to have a micromanager, or some people prefer that. It’s like different working styles. It’s like what are you passionate about, what do you excel in, where, and what’s you working style? Some people like the agile stand-ups, some people don't. Those are certain things that – working styles and all that – I think the right word to use is, “do you have our shared values?” Now, that's what we should be hiring for; “do you have our shared values for how we interact with one another? We believe that you don't discriminate against somebody of a different faith and religion than you.
Steven: Yeah, maybe the majority of us are Christians, but we embrace, in the workplace, people with different religious faith, or not.” By hiring for culture fit, we're basically telling people out there, that have the talent and skill, that, “well, everything all works out but because you're a Muslim, you can't work here.” How ridiculous does that sound? Culture fit. Or like, “well, we like to play ping pong and beers and even though you're a woman who prefers going to wherever you want to spend your time with after hours. If you don't fit our culture and the bro-grammar type, we can’t hire you.” Culture fit, to me, should be changed. It should be about culture addition and it should be hire for shared values. We talk about the soft skills and the cognitive and critical thinking skills. One the things that I heard about how Google hires is, “if you can’t explain your thoughts, it's hard for us to hire you. Because if you think about what we're doing, all we're doing is just sharing thoughts and we're using different mediums. Now you have to be able to share your thoughts. I've even heard other companies use, when they ask a candidate, “tell us what you’re really passionate about.” “Well, I’m really passionate about making cups.” “Okay, if you were to reverse-engineer about making cups and selling cups on an e-commerce site, walk us through those steps, please.”
Steven: You’ll have to whiteboard those steps like this is what I would architect, [etc] – you're explaining your thoughts. That's a good indicator that wow, if Jason and I work next to each other, and I needed to know something from Jason. Would he be able to explain his thoughts and what mediums would he be using and how can we support that? So, when I think about culture fit, I think about let’s look at different culture additions and shared values. Let’s look at different working styles, communications styles, conflict styles. Let’s embrace other perspectives. Some of the indicators of that, because people like to say, “well, diversity and inclusion, but what about diversity of thought?” I couldn't even tell if Jason has a diversity of thought or not. But what are the two indicators if you were to look across the room and go/ “These people definitely have a diversity of thought.” It's in the makeup. Well, diversity of thought starts with race and gender; it shouldn't stop there. But diversity of thought starts at race and gender.
Steven: You have to look at the fact that, as a white person, you're going to have a diverse thought from a black person – it’s just the way it is. The way of society and the way we behave, it's just a diversity of thought. But diversity of thought has been used to continuously discriminate. Or have the agenda and the focus off of why we even have these discussions in the first place. It's what the numbers say – what's the intentionality, what are we not being intentional about? So when I think about culture fit, that is the long-winded answer of how I feel about it. How I feel about all that encompasses that and I couldn’t give you one answer because it's a whole all overview of the 30,000 foot looking down and these are the reasons why I feel that way about culture fit. It all kind of plays into one another; it's not one solution, one stop.
Jason: 17:17 Great answer. So, for me, whenever I hear “culture fit” I just cringe because to me, that's code word for “we don't want your kind, whatever that kind is, around here.” Steven, let's say a business owner has only five employees and they say, “you know what, I really don’t have enough employees because I’ve been thinking about diversity and inclusion,” what’s your reply?
Steven: 17:50 My reply is I've heard the same thing from companies that are the size of Titanic – “Steve, we're too big, we have 5,000 employees, you know how it is, Steve, it's just too big here to move anything to make any changes.” Well, just because we have wars, does that mean that we should just say “forget World Peace?” Just because you give a dollar and you're not giving a hundred million dollars, “my dollar doesn't matter, my vote doesn’t matter.” What do we see what happens when people think like that? So that's what the danger of “we’re too small, we're too big.” There was an interview where I believe the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, said, “when I first started Twitter, it was me hiring and trying to get things off the ground,” (I think that's what he said or somebody in the team said in this interview). He looked back at his organization at the size of it now. But he says, “if I could look back when it was 10, and if I caught it, then that's when I can make changes because everyone looked like me then.” As know as you get growing, you’re merging, you’re hiring. It's hard because I've had people at Microsoft tell me, “yeah our department wants more diversity or get more people to apply but my one recruiter has 60 open racks.
Steven: If they're working 9:00 – 5:00, where do you think they're going to find the time if they’re going to be just really taking ownership and working after hours and going networking. There's people that do that. Shout out to those recruiters that go the extra mile and beyond the call of duty when they have the ability to. But if you are a recruiter that maybe doesn't work at an agency and you're salaried. There's laws of you're working after so many hours and you have whatever life you have outside of work. You're not held accountable for making sure more diverse candidates hear about the job. So I'm going to give you an example. Here's a job, it's a product (whether it's a job or product), “get this out there.” Well, if you're getting it out there, and you have 60 of these and you don't have any time frame. The quality’s going to diminish. The intentionality of how many sourcing channels that you can use online/offline and different creative ways to get more increased participation. You're not going to have the energy to do 60 with one person – it’s overwhelming.
Steven: So when I look at that. I look at the same thing as probably what Twitter went through or what any company went through. “We’ve just got to get it off the ground, let's just hire whoever has the talent, let's just get it off the ground.” When you’re in motion like that, as an entrepreneur. Or when you're building out a technical startup. You have other things on your lens that you have to worry about. You might not have the budget, the bandwidth or the resources. To learn how recruiting in the lens of D&I and the initiatives of D&I and how those behaviors and what you're seeing that you want are very two different things. It’s almost like saying, “I want to feel healthier,” but yet you continue to go to McDonald's. You get the Big Mac, you get the fries, the Coke and you continue to do that Monday through Sunday. Well, your behaviors don't match your outcome. So when companies talk about how, “well, we're too big, we’re too small,” those are excuses, first off. That's a lack of knowledge because whether you're too big or too small. You should look at your peers and figure out well, if you're too big, how are the other big companies executing these strategies.
Steven: I will say D&I as a business strategy because I want to be firm on how smart it is for companies and I will to stick to that when I’m speaking on it in this case because I want to drive it home. It would be different if you were to say, “we've invested one million dollars on Dale Carnegie training to move up our professional sales team and our business development team using the Dale Carnegie business strategy.” What you're doing is you're taking a learning environment, a classroom, and baking into your DNA of your company and how you take care of your employees’ health, wellness, growth – advance, attract, retain.
Steven: Well, there's no difference in a consulting strategy of diversity and inclusion as a business strategy as well. Because when you understand those numbers and you understand how that works. You understand that it’s smart for business. There's certain excuses that people make – they're too big or too small. If you're too small, that's actually great. Because you don't have all the complexities that maybe Microsoft has to immediately start going out to networking event. Or sponsoring a coding academy or sponsoring a documentary at a community college called Code Debugging the Gender Gap to give more awareness and attract more women into tech. That doesn't hurt you any. Those are things that I've done. That's for a small company. Now, if you're a big company, you don't have to look far. You have to look within other organizations and they’re called employee resource groups, business resource groups. They are supposed to be, if effectively done, opposed to activate the organization – not as a corporate social responsibility. But a sense of belonging, have that exposure, that experience, that interaction.
Steven: I spoke in front of the Leadership Summit for Bank of America and there was the veterans at Bank of America. There was the OLA at Bank of America, there was the pride at Bank of America. When you think about all these different channels. What companies are signaling and what they're trying to hopefully get back is very much strong knowledge. There's a gentleman named Dr Brian Uzzi https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianuzzi/ that I had a fortunate opportunity hearing him talk in a workshop, sponsored by Boeing and the Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion series. He was talking about leadership networking, the Six Degrees of Separation, Paul Revere versus William Dawes. Basically, in short, and this is our secret sauce, it’s not a secret sauce. But if you can promote yourself and engage with different communities. You essentially impact their networks as well and their webs of influence. So LinkedIn understands this, LinkedIn understands this very well, from first degree, like Jason and I are now connected. So therefore that means I'm connected to his second degree, to his third degree and whatever messages that he can promote to his based on what I tell him is going to connect through his network.
Steven: So when you understand how those highways of marketing work. You can use it to your advantage and for good. What I mean by that is companies immediately now can start engaging into group such as Here Seattle. If you're a five-person company or whether you're hundred-person company. You can engage them as an external employee resource group because shared values mixed with shared activities will increase your D&I initiatives and your qualitative data in that experience. ERG’s do that for you. They're supposed to operate in that sense. They have so much in their natural network and the communities that they belong or have come from. That they can give you a sense of an idea of what are the norms. Or what are some of the obstacles and challenges. Or some of the things that community could be faced with, more so than others. For example, I'll give you a clear example, in one of the books that I've been reading, we're dealing, in America, with what they call a perception gap. In studies, when they ask folks – I want to say more than 60% of people believe that Muslim values go against US values. However, in the same study, the people that believe that, seldom or have ever had a desire to meet and talk to a Muslim person. There is a disconnect right there of what it is that's really happening at what it is that's not happening.
Steven: When surveyed, are we doing enough diversity and inclusion efforts in the workplace, maybe a lot of people will say, “yes.” But, however, if you ask people of color or women how do they feel is enough being done, they might say, “no.” So you see those two different experiences are playing out, and unless you have like and ERG, a BRG, or those engagements with different community partners, you don't know. We have a perception gap, and even with the powers of technology and all that. People are still struggling to understand the behaviors and how they can connect online and offline experiences to have multiple touchpoints. If you can understand that and you can use that to your advantage. I don't care if you're small or big. You could do it, today, right now, you can connect with multiple audiences right now. I believe you can do that with products. I believe you can do that with people. I believe you can do that with communities, with job opportunities. With messaging more and more as multimedia the norm of how we get attention and how we market that in the messaging. If you're a small company that's looking to bake that into your company as a business strategy. You might want to do research about that. Don’t assume you know what you know. Talk to somebody that understands that from a business perspective. If you're a big company and you don't have it down. You have seen what happens to bigger companies that are not prepared to have these discussions. It doesn't matter if you’re Uber, if you're Google, you’re Facebook – nobody's immune, nobody. This has been going on since Coca-Cola days. Nobody's immune to if it will happen but when it will happen; when it happens, how you respond do you respond – you can be proactive or reactive to it.
Jason: 29:59 So this is an over-generalization but it seems like a lot of times, companies and people say, “We need to become more diverse.” But what do they do – they talk to the same people that look like them. They don’t make the effort to go find someone that’s different. Or, they recruit at the University of Washington State, they won’t go to HBCU. It’s like, do you even know what and HBCU is? Sometimes they talk but don’t make an effort.
Steven: 30:23 I love that you're pointing that out, Jason. There's two ways to look at that – intentionality, conditioned behaviour. I love analogies because that's how I grasp information. So, for example, like a sales organization. If I said, “Jason, you need to go out and sell ten more cars,
Jason.” You’re like, “well, I know I'm selling five and I can consistently do five. But to sell ten?” “Yeah, you need to go out there and sell ten.” “How?” “I don’t know, figure it out. You need to go out and sell ten cars or else you’re fired.” Now, I told you you’re fired if you don’t sell ten cars. You’re like, “oh my goodness, I’m going to get fired.” So now what do you do, what’s your behaviour now? You're not just selling five cars and now you’re going, after you sell five cars, now the next five. You have to say, “hey, this is the best, you’ve got to buy it, just buy it, buy it.” Now your behavior is so different, unnatural, you're forced. Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be accountable for the five cars, but it’s a stretch, and there's no support, no knowledge?
Steven: What they should be doing is, “here’s how you sell five cars.” So you’re at five cars today. Here’s somebody that sells nine or ten cars consistently. Let's do some training, let's do some exercise, let’s do some mentorship, some support. Let's talk about the frameworks and the path and the metrics. There's got to be infrastructure to get you to ten cars. Now, here's why I frame it that way. There was an exercise that Dr Cheryl Ingram https://www.linkedin.com/in/cheryl-ingram-phd-29093067/ of Diversity City LLC https://diversecityllc.com/ did (shout out to Dr Cheryl Ingram, she’s great), she said, “I want you to list the ten people in your lives that you trust.” We're all listing them out, these are the ten people that I trust and I'm like, I only have three (I'm just kidding). But you listed out your circle of trust, it’s what we call our natural network. It could be people you grew up with, family members, cousins, your alumni, your frat buddies, your sorority sisters, whatever. Well she goes, “now, I'm going to ask you to hire somebody for the company.” I'm going to say, “I need you, Jason, to hire somebody you trust for a job at Microsoft or Intel or whatever it is.” Who are you going to call first? Your 30/40 people, or are going to call your top ten?
Steven: You call your top ten because those are your circle of trust. Now I'll play devil's advocate for a second. But I don't want it to be an excuse for the majority of white males that are in the workplace today that can say, “exactly, that's why we have the problem!” This is not the reason we have the problem. But it could be one of the reasons why, if we unpack the behavior like car sales. We’re telling people that sell five cars a day to sell ten. They don't even know where to start. It’s like saying, “well, I understand that you have your top ten and they're all similar. In these studies, what you find out in the top ten of the circle of trust. There’s more similarities that we look for in each other. We have a bias, we all have a bias. We prefer certain things. But the top two people you trust, for whatever reasons it is – ethnicity, race – these are your natural networks. I happen to grow up with more South East Asian people that like rap, that all came from the south side of Seattle. We just have a natural network. Our shared values, our upbringing – that’s our natural network.
Steven: If you look at the white male’s natural network today and who they refer, and referrals are like 70% of the people that get hired in the workplace. I will play devil's advocate, “well let's hire all the white males and let’s exclude everybody else.” Now, I can bet, based on behaviors and history and where we're at today and why we're talking about this and why I’m in business is that s*** happens. However let's not kick out somebody that has the ten folks that they’re referring to the company. Now I'm being accused of diversity and prejudice and discrimination and they’re like, “wait a second, I swear, when I started the company. I just hired the ten people that I trusted or, when we told Jason to refer people, these were the ten that he referred. I don't get what we did wrong here.” That is one thing of why we are where we are today. It's just like with Twitter when he looked back, “I just hired the people that I knew, the natural network. There was no evil tick there. What's happening is (and I read the news and I do a lot of research and I immerse myself), people find themselves in more of a defense in, “well, here's why,” whatever that experience is when what we should do is have a learning opportunity of how do we make this person their ally.
Steven: Okay, so you’ve hired your top ten, your Harvard, Yale folks, the people that look like you. How do you go beyond that? Let's talk about that, let's teach that. Here’s some of the methods. Before we even go look for hiring for diversity and beyond the ten people that you trust. How do we make it intentional where you are identifying and looking for talents that maybe you've never looked before and explored. I’m in the seat that I'm in today and have built the company that I'm in today because I have ejected myself into places that I'm uncomfortable. Communities that I don't know people. I'm not naturally from the National Society of Hispanic MBAs community. I don't even know a lot of the other Asian American professionals within my backyard, I am not black, I am not a coder. But through my networking and interactions. I met folks that were from that community and they've grown from five folks that are moved in from Seattle to thousands of people and have got huge recognition. Here Seattle is what I'm talking about. The point that I'm trying to make is you will find magical things that will happen when we get outside of our bubbles and the other side of our top ten trusted groups.
Steven: But what it takes is that uncomfortable, unknown and purpose of why we're doing that. Sometimes, accountability can help that for some folks, That's how we're going to see the changes in the make up of, “darn, you mean Facebook and all these tech companies only have 1% of black people in their entire organization? There’s clearly something wrong.” Now, whether that was intentional or unintentional, it doesn't matter at this point. How do we solve that? What are some solutions, what are some of the different, better practices that we can introduce to these companies to change or improve their behaviors? To address their privileges and not to make them feel guilty. Not to make them feel bad, but to address it and embrace those bold conversations and those perception gaps. That's the way we're going to move forward. You don’t see it yet. Pay it close attention and pay more close attention to how leadership at the top are really going to flip it to where they're going to get more engrained. Now, there's no top and bottom but it’s going to be more – not a flat organization – but where it’s more “spaghetti.”
Steven: The more interactions that we have and the more overlapping. The better it’s going to be. Because here's why I say that. A woman at Microsoft (I love Microsoft, but I’ll use them in this example), there could be a woman who works in tech and there could be a woman in marketing. Let’s just say they’re a ten-person company. Well, from a surface-level, they look like they’re very diverse, like we’ve got 20% women here at Microsoft, They go out to the public and they go, “hey, 20% women!” That is great. But the two women never ever interact. They can be facing the same feelings in their work environments. They could have similarities and they're looking to connect with people for different activities. That they're both into, and there's nothing there for them to connect. There's no internal groups or slack groups or after hours or anything that the company’s offering. Or maybe this company just wants them to come in clock in, clock out. Nobody wants that in the workplace no more. We're seeing more of people saying the demand and the behaviors are changing now. But the two women, without a shared activity. It's going to be hard for them to have exposure, engagement, experience and close that perception gap. That they might have with each other. Or have that unity and a sense of belonging with somebody that has those shared values through these activities. That takes intentionality to set those up internal for organizations. Why don't we do that for job opportunities? I know I go pretty deep, I have a different style that I love.
Jason: 41:43 Steven, I understand you have an event that you want to talk about that’s coming up.
Steven: 41:47 Yes, I would love to talk about the Hack Diversity and Inclusion event – #HackDiversity. You can find out more information on our website at www.smdiversity.com Go to the Events and Workshops, or there should be a tab called Hack Diversity. It's also posted on my LinkedIn. It's posted on our social media for SM Diversity. It's on May 2nd. Wework Bellevue inside the Lincoln Center. It is at 5:30 and they will go probably till about 9:00. I will share the flyer and everything. But I don't want to make an official announcement on some of the partners. But I will tell you in the past, some of the companies that confirmed showed up. But we've had every level from county, city, state level influencers and folks show up. We've had recruiters in different in different industries. Every company from right here in our backyard has actually confirmed and have come and presented. Whether it's Microsoft, whether it’s Amazon, whether it’s Starbucks, whether it’s Seattle Police Department. A lot of the companies that Jason shouted out in the beginning are companies that have come out and confirmed.
Steven: This next one I think I can confirm that there's going to be the likes of Google, Nintendo, Northeastern University, Code Fellas, just to name a few. I don't want to spoil it because there's going to be commercials, I can name a few. But we always sell out. We always normally give out all the tickets for free. I just wanted to go out and publicly say I've taken zero dollars to myself for any of these events that we’ve done. Whether it was our first event at Seattle Goodwill. To all the other previous events with Uber or Google that we've done or with the JVLM in Redefining Your Future. Then this next one on May 2nd. So we will have max capacity at about 240 – we’re passing the 160-170 mark. We will be sold out, if not, by next week. If you have not RSVP’d I would recommend everyone to do so. We're going to be announcing the breakout groups and the workshops that we're going to be talking about. The theme this year’s called Bold Conversations. Thank you to Mary Frances Winter https://www.linkedin.com/in/maryfwinters/ for her book that I've been reading, it’s called We Can’t Talk About That at Work and how to talk about race, religion and politics inside the workplace https://amzn.to/2K34NNk and it's about having bold conversations.
Steven: I love what I've been reading in her book. So I decided to dedicate that. We have community partners like Here Seattle, http://www.hereseattle.com/ WAPI, https://wapiseattle.wordpress.com/ Hack Nation, and Hackneys You coming out as well. Really, really glad to hear some of our community partners coming out. May 2nd, Wework Bellevue, RSVP at smdiversity.com. We also have a meet up group if you type in Seattle diversity and inclusion, we’re the only meet up group in Seattle for D&I.
Jason: 45:02 That sounds like a great event, Steven. Can you tell us your social media links for yourself or your company just so people can reach out to you?
Steven: 45:10 Yeah. So you want to type in SM Diversity in any of those social media platforms and we should be able to pull it up. If you want to find me, it's Steven Matly. I have an interesting thing that I recently learned – I would love to ask everyone to answer this question: who has more of a social media following Christiano Renaldo, the soccer athlete star, or Coca-Cola?
Jason: 45:45 That’s a very good question.
Steven: 45:47 It will lend you some insight in my beliefs in what I believe is going to be the new norm for better practices in recruiting and staffing.
Jason: 45:58 So, Steven, we’ve come to the end of our talk. Can you provide the listeners with any last words of wisdom you want to pass on to them on any subject?
Steven: 46:04 If there were some things I'd like to just basically continue to quote the people that I love. Thank you to one of our consultants, Anoro Scientists, Venus at Nord Shifts. I want to shout out some of our consultants and our staff and our team here at SM Diversity, our partners at SDS Consulting. Our consultants – Venus Redcow, Efernes Henderson, the Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion. Dr Cheryl Ingram of Diverse City, all of our clients and network of supporters, thank you so much. Some of the words of wisdom that I want to leave you all with is what Tupac Shakur said and resonated with me at such a young age. When I was trying to just find who I am and my identity. It says, “I’m not saying I’m gonna change the world but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that would change the world.” – Tupac Shakur. In the front of this cup, it also talks, “the time is always right to do what is right.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Jason: 47:09 That is very true. Steven, thank you for your time, you’re doing a lot of great things for the community and people in general I want to thank you for that. Some people say, “I’m making a contribution,” and I know they’re not really making one. But you can look in the mirror and honestly say you’re making people’s lives better every day and I thank you for that.
Steven: 47:27 Thank you, Jason. I really appreciate it.
Jason: 47:30 To our listeners, thank you for your time as well and remember to be great every day.
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