When to Shut Up and Listen and When to Speak Up

Blair and David, as two white business leaders, try talking about the traumatic and emotional yet very necessary changes happening now to end systemic racism. As they listen and allow space for the voices of diversity that need to be heard, they also struggle with when to speak up as examples, owning up to their mistakes which will hopefully help lead the way for real change.

Links

“How I’m Trying to Process Things Right Now” by David C. Baker

“Speech and Systems” - episode 186 of Exponent podcast

A Statement from the Founders of Monday Night Brewing

Transcript

Blair Enns: Exhaustion is the state, right? I wanted to ask you like, "How are you doing?" and you just opened with, "Tired?"

David C Baker: Yes.

Blair: You and I, we're not in the middle of this, but it's tiring. You were talking about how great it is to be in conversation with your kids. The fatigue is it's a combination of rage, outrage, and impotence, and then that heartbreak, and all of these things. I listened to the podcasts that dropped in the middle of these riots of this social strife going on, and it's like, oh, I'm thinking, here we are talking about business, but this is a business podcast, we need to talk about business. You sent an article early on into this thing. I don't know what we're calling it, I'm calling it police riots. I don't know what other people are calling it.

My father was a policeman and I don't want to get riled up or political here, but you sent an email early on, and I really, really liked it. I wanted to talk about what agency principals should be communicating right now, and maybe you can talk about communication to their team members; people of color and others, and then clients, but really, thought leadership because I don't have all the answers. I don't even know if I can articulate the problem. Back when we were just dealing with a global pandemic and things were so much simpler.

David: Just dealing with a pandemic.

Blair: Yes, I know, it's crazy. I started to get these pieces of content marketing. I think I got three or four emails titled 'branding in a pandemic'.

[laughter]

If you're going to comment on something going on in the greater world, somebody said, and maybe it was you who said, you either get in early, you have a point that's to be made and is appropriate and relevant, and then you run all of these risks by speaking up early, or you come in late with a provocative point of view on thinking about what just happened.

Then you see 'branding in the middle of a pandemic,' and I'm wondering, am I going to get an email saying, "Branding in the middle of a race riot"?

[laughter]

David: That would be a new low, I think. How did you react when you got the emails of 'branding in a pandemic'? What was your reaction to it?

Blair: I don't remember who sent them, but I'd look at these things and I think, "Oh." Somebody who's sitting around for three months thinking, "How do we continue to do content marketing in a way that's not idiotic?" I think the challenge is when you're talking about branding, it's really hard to open your mouth and not sound stupid. Oh, wow, let me take that back.

David: No, you can't take it back. This is on the record.

Blair: Yes, it is on the record. One of the things I'm really ashamed of over the last week or so is I'm trying to shut up. Look, I think my job right now, I follow Dan Mall on Twitter, he's a great guy and runs a business called SuperFriendly. I forget what his heritage is. He's a person of color, but he's Not African American. He had this great advice early on. He said, "White people, shut up." I'm paraphrasing Dan, but I took it as a friendly like, "Your job now is to amplify black voices. Just cut out the noise."

I've been trying to do that, I've been saying that to my team in terms of the marketing messages we send out, but then you get on social media and you see these videos of the things that are happening, and then I just like explode with rage. Rage and social media do not go together. I don't know how I got into this, I just want to confess about it. It's really hard to do the right thing.

David: Here we are, two white guys doing a podcast. If the format was to have guests on every episode, we would absolutely have the right guest, but that's not the format of this thing. Should we even talk about it, should we not? I don't know. I've gotten mixed advice on this and I've gotten my hand slapped both ways. I've heard people say, "You should just shut up and listen," and I completely get that because I haven't listened carefully enough." Then other people are saying, "What? There are people listening to you, maybe not a lot, but there are some people listening to you, your job is to speak to it."

Then I just very gingerly put my finger out and say something and see what happens. I'm terrified of saying the wrong thing, and then I start to think about that, and then immediately I realize, oh my God, I just made it about myself again. Here we have an entire race that has been abused and treated unfairly. You can get emotional thinking about it, and I'm worried about how my statement will be taken. So then you're over-processing all this stuff in your head, the exhausting thing is you don't really know what the right thing to do is. I'm perfectly willing, I just don't know what the right thing is.

I have never talked about political things in my regular emails to people, but I just feel like, well, this is a different time. I hope this is a different time, I hope this doesn't just blow over and we go back to the way things were. I want to hear things differently. A minute ago when you were talking about what do we say to our staff, what do we say to the people of color that work for us? We may be the most least integrated industry on earth in terms of people of color, and I don't know the answer to that.

Blair: I wonder about that. I've been thinking about that and talking to some people about it. Even if we are, I think the creative community has an opportunity to lead. I want to say progressive without painting too broad a brush with that word, but I think on these issues of race, the sample that I'm drawing from, and the same as you, the opportunity to lead and set an example, I think the creative community would rise to that challenge.

David: Absolutely. Not only that, but they want to. These people you and I serve, they are largely good people who care about this stuff and are not sure what to do or do know what to do and haven't done it. I have a lot of hope for change coming from the audience that you and I address.

Blair: Yes, I do too, and I think if they see it as an opportunity to lead, they can take that opportunity. What are the next steps? I don't know. I don't know that it's for you or I to say. I think there's some black voices out there that we need to find a way to give a platform to and to amplify. I don't know where the next steps are going to come from. We're recording this Friday, June 5th. The movement is going global. I'm Canadian, this is not a uniquely American problem at all. Canadians can often be critical of what's going on down south, but when I'm critical of it, it's like I feel like I'm talking to me. I feel like I'm part of the society.

I live in Canada, most of our clients are in the US, I have a US visa, I have for years. Part of me thinks, "Oh, shut up, Blair, it's not your problem," and the other part of me thinks, "It damn well is part of my problem."

David: Yes, and look at the reaction in the UK, and Australia, other countries in Europe, this has appropriately riled up people all over the world.

Blair: I was listening to a podcast, I want to ask people to go get this to listen. The podcast is called Exponent. The tech blog, Stratechery, run by Ben Thompson, he does a few podcasts. The free one is with a guy named James Allworth. Typically, they talk about the stuff that Ben is writing about, and it's about technology. I feel like he's the only one who's getting the role of social media right. We're all up in arms over what Jack Dorsey at Twitter is doing or not doing, what Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook is doing and not doing.

I have my issues with both of those people and both of those platforms, but he is the only one who is seeing this for what it is, and how social media should be used, and how more speech is through these platforms. It can cause all these horrible moments. It's actually the solution to the problem. In that episode today, I finished listening to it and it's like, yes, it's inspiring, it's painful, but this is part of the democratic process and the American experiment that you have to go through these horrible moments for any change to come about.

There's some times when I can look down the road into the future and think, "Okay, I don't want all this tension to go away. I don't want it to be resolved today. I don't want the change that's on the other side of it. If I want the change that's on the other side of it, I need to be willing to go through these difficult times." I'm saying that acknowledging that I am not going through any difficult time other than emotionally.

I don't want to compare myself to somebody who's in the middle of this, who's suffered a lifelong of racial abuse and denigration, et cetera, so I'm not making that comparison, but we as a society, and I include myself and Canadians and all Westerners in that, if we want the change that's on the other side of this, we have to go through this.

David: What are the influences that have been more recent in your own thinking? I'll share what they've been for me. Here I am on the overside of life having lots of different circumstances and growing up in different times. I look at how my own perspectives on this have changed, but so slowly. It feels like over the last maybe five or six years, they've changed at a slightly more rapid pace. Julie and I are married, we've got two kids, both boys are married, and each of those two subfamilies have two kids. On one side, two of the kids are adopted; African American, Hispanic.

That has, wow, talk about bringing out the mama bear in yourself, and I'm not even the parent, I'm the grandparent. Seeing how it changes how you think. It uncovers things that are deep in the shadows you didn't even know you thought about and that has been very powerful for me. The other thing that's been very powerful for me is having two boys who are both close to the millennial age who are not afraid of me at all and having conversations with them where they're equals, and I can see things through their perspective.

Another influence on me, and this is a mixed bag, those two things have been fantastic, but this one's a mixed bag, and that's discovering a deeper side of people that you didn't really know existed. This is one of those times in history where the sand gets brushed off the top and you get to read all the fine print underneath that, and seeing how people react to something I might say on Twitter or Facebook, it's like, "Oh my God, that is a racist." I didn't know that I had spent a lot of time with that person. Or somebody else, not necessarily a friend but an acquaintance, a very public speaker and author who dropped in on a Facebook thread that I started.

He took me to task and rightfully so, my immediate reaction was defensiveness. I just tried to marinate in that defensiveness and discover why was I so defensive at that point, and where was the truth in what he was saying? Not only what he said, but how he said it was very well-delivered. Just seeing, oh my God, I'm even using phrases that are going to cause, at a minimum, discomfort. It could be much more than that with people. All these things are going through my head, and meanwhile, I'm just still trying to run a business, trying to figure out what my place in the world is and it's just flat exhausting. I'm not complaining about that, it's a good kind of exhausting.

It's the kind of thing where you get to the end of a week and you realize, wow, this has been a different week, but hopefully, I'm a different person at the end of this week than I was before. This is all the easy stuff though. The hard stuff is what comes after when we get down to the grind when it really costs us something. I don't know what that looks like, but I am more open to that than I've ever been in my life and looking forward to being a small part of that change, whatever it is.

I posted this yesterday, I said, "Posting on social media feels like a blind person on all fours crawling quickly through a minefield, but we have to allow these conversations and they're stumbling to occur. Extending a little grace if phrasing isn't just perfect. Otherwise, a lot of the good people will just be silent." Then after I posted that, I got this message from a very good friend of mine that I'm close to, we've been all over the world together and he said, "Your Facebook posts have really resonated with me lately, but I'll continue just being a listener for many of the reasons you mentioned. I get overwhelmed in just a matter of minutes on social media and I don't know how to sift through the bullshit.

I just wanted to say thanks for the thoughtful commentary." This is somebody who is, he's white. He wants to do the right thing. He doesn't know what to say, he's afraid of getting his hand slapped, but he's just listening, which is what a lot of us need to be doing, me included. I don't know where I'm going with all this, but this is something that our world really needs. I hope I can be on the right side of it.

Blair: I think that balance of should you be listening or should you be speaking? I'm not going to give advice on what do you say to your team. Maybe you want to speak to that, but in terms of the messages that go out in the world, I thought, okay, if something like this happens, there are people I expect to hear from, they don't all have to be people of color, and there are people I really hope not to hear from.

David: That's interesting. Okay, keep going.

Blair: You're always early on everything. I saw your email in my inbox, I looked at the title, and I thought, "Oh, this is perfect." Then the title is how I'm trying to process things right now. You're wrestling with, well, this is me talking about me at a time when I'm not the one bearing the brunt of all of this stuff. I think those people will follow you for management and leadership advice in the firms that they're running, you're just sharing how you're trying to process and the steps that you feel you need to take. I think that's exactly the right example to set. Now, of all of the people that I follow or who have added me to their lists, there's a lot of them I really don't want to hear from right now.

I think what I've said to my team is, let's just shut up for a while. Let's just not throw any, and we've already made some mistakes in this, but let's not just throw a bunch of messages out into the world marketing messages or whatever. Let's just create some space for the people who need to be heard. You're a white male, but I think you're one of those people that I, and maybe I have this bias because of my relationship with you, but I think in difficult times, you offer some guidance on how to handle this. I think you might get some pushback from people saying, "It's time for you to be quiet, David," but I suspect you're hearing from a lot of people who are thinking about what you've written.

David: Some, yes. I'm not sure, I was very nervous sending some of the stuff. Here's an email I got, I received several of these. This one says, "David, thank you for sharing your heart and frustration. I'm a black woman who's also a member of your audience. You've helped me tremendously in reframing how I do business as a creative and I truly value what you bring to the table, your willingness to share. What you're learning is helping me to build a framework of entrepreneurship. I tend to sit silently in the background and follow virtual mentors from a distance. I found that if you follow someone long enough, they'll eventually show you how they treat you in person, so I wait.

I decided not to do that this time. You can't see me, I'm the one waving my hand frantically in the back of the room saying, 'I'm here too and I'm listening to your words.'" It gets emotional. I think part of what I need to be doing better is elevating the right voices, and that's something that I can do and letting other people's perspectives that just resonates so clearly with me. I can elevate those voices and let them speak into this because many of them have a lot to say and just simply don't have the audience for it.

I tend to get impatient in these times and it's a real character flaw because I want to skip through all the pain and get to the end of this and say, "All right, just tell me, what's going to be different? I can take it, but whatever it is, I want to be a part of it." I'd rather skip the nasty messy times when we misunderstand each other and that's not good. You don't develop that depth. If none of us are talking, then nothing's going to move further. We're only going to get progress if it doesn't have to be me talking, it could be me listening, but some people have to talk here, or it's not going to get better.

I love the fact that I'm listening to some different voices or, I love what you said a minute ago, there are some people I just don't want to hear from. That's absolutely true for me. I got an email, so Fred Wilson who writes the blog at USV, I read his stuff. He's definitely on the progressive side of things and he's also a very wealthy white man. On Fridays, he sends out a note that says, "This is what I'm supporting today," and it's lots of really interesting things. Boy, the one he sent out this morning was very meaningful. It was somebody who had corrected him about some assumption that he'd made. I was amazed at how there wasn't an ounce of defensiveness in how he responded to this person.

He just very graciously redirected his action based on what somebody had said to him. What somebody said to him wasn't said all that empathetically or gently, but Fred didn't get lost in that. He dove down deeper and looked at the essential message, gave somebody grace about how they had approached him, and did the right thing. If nothing else, that's got to happen more and more. We've got to give each other a little bit more space to maybe not say things the right way. There's a lot of lingo out there right now and I feel like it's not cultic, but it's close to it, where you can be pretty quickly judged, or I could judge somebody else by not using lingo in the acceptable way, and I think that's a mistake.

I think we need to relax the rules of language just a little bit. I know words mean things, but we need to give ourselves and other people a little bit more space. If they don't express things exactly right, that's okay. We'd rather have the voices continuing with a little bit of rawness around the edges than people just climbing up and just thinking internally all the time.

Blair: That example of Fred Wilson, he gets some critical feedback on what he's doing or saying, and it may come in an emotional wrapper, and he discards the wrapper, and he takes the information, then he takes full ownership of what he said or done, and he makes the adjustment. Those examples go so far. I had a moment on Twitter the other day where I was raging at Medium for their "You might also be interested in algorithm," which just set me off.

David: Yes, I saw that.

Blair: I won't get into it here, but I was unkind to the organization at Medium. I was angry, I should have cooled off, and somebody a day later sent me the kindest, most polite nudge and I just responded with, "This is great feedback, thank you." He was modeling leadership. He was modeling how you should behave in these times. I want to say I woke up the other morning and I checked the news, it was something I never did before 2016. For like 20 years, I didn't check the news and now I check the news every day, a news website. I think it's the Washington Post or something and I see Drew Brees, the quarterback for, is it--

David: The Saints.

Blair: New Orleans Saints. He had said something publicly about this whole one knee protest, "Yes, you're disrespecting the American flag" or something. I read that quote and I just cringed in my heart. I had this like heartbreak and rage, and then the next article I read, it was just a few minutes later, it was on his apology and I was so struck by what a full, complete, open, honest apology it was. I thought every politician on the planet should see this. It was not a conditional apology "If I've offended anybody, I apologize."

He just wholeheartedly said, "I made a mistake, I had no idea," and he apologized to individuals and organizations, and there was just no question about the sincerity of his apology and he left himself no place to hide. He just took complete ownership. I go from this one moment of thinking, "Who is," I don't follow NFL football, so I know the name, but I’m like, "Who is this guy?" Thinking these not very kind thoughts towards him to thinking, "Okay, look at the way he has responded to this." I always say to my kids, "We all screw up. We screw up all the time and we have to allow for that, it's what you do after that counts."

David: What do you think if pricipals-- Just most of the audience listening to this, and I just want to say I don't really feel like either of us have all that many answers, it's just you and I talking, but let's say, principals decide to be quiet publicly, do you have a sense, have you been getting feedback from any of your clients or seen good examples? I don't even know how to ask this question.

Blair: What should you say? What should you do? Leaving aside what you should say to your teammates, I'll just speak to that quickly, and then I'll talk about a more public statement. I was talking to an agency principal yesterday who said, we had a team meeting Tuesday afternoon on this, and everybody talked, and it was a great conversation, he said, "Our mistake is it should have been Monday morning." In that day and a half, the people of color who worked for us have said that they just felt lonely, isolated, et cetera, so he owned that.

You need to be talking internally and giving people the platform to talk, but in terms of what you're saying publicly, in terms of messages that you're putting out there for public consumption, you want to be seen to be doing the right thing. One of our team members reached out to a client of ours who owns a crisis communications firm, and he said, "Hey, before you say anything publicly, two questions you want to ask yourself," and I hope I'm getting it right. "Have you spoken out on this issue before? Number one, and number two, are you going to continue to speak out on this issue?"

I thought, "Whoa, that's really good." It's like there's a group of people marching down the street, it's a parade, we jump in line, some of it's jumped to the front of the line, et cetera, but then the parade’s over and the problem is still largely there. So if you're going to make a public stand now, are you going to embrace continuing to make a public stand? I think that's one way to think about it.

David: I'm reading the statement that our oldest son owns a brewery with two other partners and this is how they started it, they just released this. "The recent string of murders of innocent black men and women," so that right there tells you what the perspective is, right?

Blair: Yes.

David: It was murder. "Is a heartbreaking eye-opening reminder of the long history of systemic racism that has plagued our country for decades. As Atlantans, it's been hard to see so much fear and pain in the city that we love," and then it goes on. I think people are more forgiving of getting a few things wrong at a statement than they are of not addressing this at all. Maybe you don't need to make a public statement as a business, but it feels like as a leader, people do need to hear from you, and your family, and your neighborhood, whatever is happening. I welcome the fact that maybe this will inch us closer to facing some of this in our own lives.

Like me, personally, just seeing some of the latent racism that I wasn't even aware of. Just under the surface assumptions that I've been making. When you say something and you're immediately misunderstood and you're just like, "Oh, shit, that makes me so mad. That is not what I meant," and that was precipitated by you saying something that you had complete control over. Now, imagine people making assumptions about you all their lives because of something you didn't have control over. I can't imagine that kind of pain. I can't imagine what that does to you.

I know it's popular to hate big swaths of our country right now, but I'm actually proud of the fact that, over centuries, we've struggled with these issues, and we have come to some pretty good conclusions in some areas, and I'm hoping that this discussion moves us forward. Here we are, here you and I are talking about this, we have no outline. It's just an open blank slate. People are no longer driving in their cars commuting to work listening to 2Bobs, they're probably sitting somewhere. If they're still listening to it at this point, they're thinking, "Yes, they're as confused as we are, I'm glad somebody admitted that," and if they turned it off earlier, then we said something wrong.

I appreciate your friendship, and your openness to all of this, and your heart. You're a very good person who cares deeply about everybody. I've never seen an inch of racism in you and I just want to say that publicly. I'm sure you see some areas where you feel like some of that changes, but I don't know many people that accept others so evenly without any judgment on that level, and I just want to thank you for that.

Blair: Thanks, dude. I think the same of you too. Whether this is a, I don't know what this is, but it's great to talk to you.

David: Should we end it there?

Blair: Yes. All right, so let's get back to business next week, but I'm glad we talked about this.