Episode 38: Harmony in Higher Ed and Corporate America: Bridging the Divide

In this illuminating episode, Director of Equity & Belonging at Zillow Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson unpacks the connections between higher education and corporate America around attracting new talent, subtle differences in jargon, and bridging gaps to create inclusive workplaces.

Chris Riback: Dr. Verdeja-Woodson, thanks so much for joining us.

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Chris Riback: We are excited to have you want to start with you. Could you tell us a little bit about your background, your role at Zillow? What do you do and why do you do it?

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: That's a good question! My career really began as an education. I was a ninth through twelfth grade English teacher in Atlanta, Georgia, and it was actually the first time I sort of began to engage in this thing called diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging work. I had a principal of mine who asked me to develop a in-service workshop on what does it mean to create classroom inclusion. And it was the first time that I found the word “belonging” and sort of introduced that to my peers. And it was just a really, I loved the conversation so much, I started engaging even more. Left the classroom, went and got a Master's in Higher Education, and then moved into student affairs in higher education space and LED DEI initiatives at places like NYU, Cornell University, University of Vermont, while I was there for grad school as well. Realized that higher ed was a little slower than I like to move, and there was an opportunity to move a little bit faster and see things sort of try and fail and try again. And so I saw an opportunity to move into the tech space. So at Zillow, I am the director of Equity and Belonging, and I oversee our data team and as well as our internal consultants, if you will, but we call them equity and belonging business partners similar to HRBP’s. And so I help to work closely with the executive leaders of each function to identify and look at their data within their function around representation, hiring, promotions, retention, et cetera, and develop a set of goals that they can focus on that all ladder up to the larger Zillow's goals. And why I do what I do is because it's deeply personal. I think many of us get into this work because we have experienced some level of discrimination or oppression, personally. Why I stay in it is for the voices that I don't necessarily represent women, trans people, people with disabilities, et cetera. So for me, this why is not work, it's livelihood.

Dr. Alexandria White: You were speaking my language, our trajectories are basically the same. What have you seen? Because we love to say that higher ed is about educating and getting the next leaders of tomorrow, but higher ed is about a business. It's money. Chris and I both pay tuition, right? It's about money. And so how is that connected? What have you seen in higher ed, also corporate America - how do they connect?

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: For me, I always tell people that in my opinion, higher ed is a corporation with nonprofit status. They operate to make money and to keep the lights on the same way any other business does, to create more consumers coming in to pay the bill and get the services. For me, the connection is exactly that. It is in the spirit of how do we draw a new set of consumers - the only difference is that every four years you're losing some and you got to replace them. And so both of these concepts are attracting new people to the product, enhancing the product, hopefully, to also be able to attract new people and also to meet the need of the consumer market. For higher ed, the consumer market for the most part is, in my opinion, are the businesses. What is it that corporate needs in terms of skills and knowledge? How do we provide that from an education standpoint? And then how do we pull in the consumers to buy into our product over someone else's? So to me, the only thing that was different was the jargon and some of the ways in which you manifest the work within the actual organization. But the goal was exactly the same.

Dr. Alexandria White: So the goal of Zillow, I'm a consumer of Zillow, right? What specific initiative has Zillow implemented for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging?

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: We've done a lot. And so it depends on what part of the strategy you're talking about. So when look at from diverse workforce perspective, it's getting out there to all the different spaces where the voices and the people who historically have been kept out of companies like Zillow, where are they? Where do they go to find their new roles? We're not waiting for them to come to us. We're going to them. We're coming to find them. We're making the business case to them while we're the employer of choice. I think another piece of it too is also our ERG programs. We really invest a lot into those to create those spaces for folks from different groups and backgrounds to be able to find community and find space where they can connect with people who come from a similar walk of life as themselves. The one that I'm really proud of though is not only do we have a set of three year commitments that we commit ourselves to every three years, and we're actually up on our last set and we're creating a new set, but we also don't just sit the goals at the top and have no sense of strategy for how everyone contributes to those goals.

We're working with each individual leader to understand how does what you do in your function contribute to the larger goal? And so accountability is the initiative there. We're holding each leader accountable for how they're contributing to that particular goal. And so that for me is the real big piece for how we're actually turning that data, utilizing data, turning it into goals and holding people accountable for them as well.

Chris Riback: How do they react to that kind of feedback? And I'm asking in the sense of curiosity around where you feel we are as a society and maybe where you feel Zillow is in terms of this journey that people like you are advancing. You don't need me to tell you there are questions around effort, around need, around approach. On the one hand, the business case of that you just described, of going out to identify potential talent so that you are widening the access to talent to Zillow, that was one of the initiatives. So who can argue with that? Why wouldn't any company want access to a wide range of talent? On the other side, you're talking about feedback to leaders and managers, some of whom may be open to feedback and others may be less open to feedback. How's that part of your role going?

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: I got really lucky with Zillow. We have a set of executives that it's less about the feedback and more they want to know how. They're not at the what stage. I'm not about helping them get bought in on why this matters and why we need to not only build, but also to maintain and sustain a diverse organization. It's a matter of, okay, what's the tangible things we need to get done in order to make this happen? Now, every once in a while when they look at that data and find that they're not doing as well as they thought they would, that's where it kind of like, oh wait, hold on, all that work? And it's like, yeah, welcome to the party. This is hard. In three years of work, you may get half a inch where you really want to go. But I think it humbles them.

It reminds them of, to quote Dr. King, “the urgency of now” that there's a lot of work to do and there's no time for us to wait and hold off on the right time to get this done, the right time is right now. And so it just continues to motivate them, empower them of what is it I need to be doing? They're engaging self-education to understand what they can be doing. And I think that's why having their specific data is so important because it allows them to focus on their locus of control and it makes the task not so huge anymore when it's what they can control.

Chris Riback: When you deliver them that type of data, when they ask the follow-up questions, is it more about them or is it more about the tactics?

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: Meaning what they are and aren't doing?

Chris Riback: Yeah. Because I assume on some level it's a journey of discovery for leaders as well.

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: So it is both, right? We're taking a holistic approach here, and we start our leader, any initiative I implement has to start with the individual. What are the biases and the barriers that block me from being truly engaged in the work that has to get done? And one of the ways that we do that is through IDI, the Intercultural Development Inventory, which allows the individual to take an assessment of how they see the world, how they view things, and to deliver some results that show them like, oh, wow, I have work to do in this area and this area potentially is a blocker to why my function may not be doing as well as it can be. But then we're also double clicking into that and goes, how are our managers in my particular function doing as well? And how am I engaged in dialogue and conversation that allows them to understand that this matters to me as their leader and that we need to get on board with it. So it is a journey of not only what the function is doing and things of that sort, but it's, as you said, Chris, self-reflection. But also how does my team, the people who are, let's be honest, really executing on these things. How are they showing up in the way that we need to in order to move these things forward,

Dr. Alexandria White: Moving things forward, people being authentic, self-awareness, psychological safety, all this terminology that you're talking about, you've got to hit some roadblocks in there. What are some challenges that have came about?

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: This is more overarching challenges and not just challenges at Zillow. The challenges oftentimes are this work of diversity, equity, inclusion hits a personal bone for people. It's very different. I was actually just teaching a course on change models and how organizations and that change. One of the things I told my professor when I was getting my doctorate, I said, yeah, these models are great, but they're not touching on the unique ways and unique barriers that we hit on when we talk about diversity change. This isn't, we're going from workday to lever, right? We're changing the system. We're actually trying to change hearts and minds, and that gets deep into people's personal values. And my daddy taught me this, and my grandfather taught me that, and my mama told me this. So you're unraveling 10, 20, 30, 40 years of socialization, and that's the major, major barrier. But also the fear of what that change means. What I loved about the organization, if we do this change that's going to lead, that's going to go away. So they're fearing this loss of what they've always appreciated, what matters to them. And so it's always the personal stuff. It's not the funding. I always tell people to make the change we need to change to make doesn't really, in my opinion, cost any money. It's the mental mind shift that has to happen. That is the biggest barrier.

Dr. Alexandria White: Yes to all of that. When you talk about unraveling years and years of, I heard this, or this is what my family grew up with, it's hard. It's hard. And so we can't do it sometimes in our work in 60 minutes. What is Zillow doing that's intentional that our listeners can take away because it takes that unraveling and more than just checking a box.

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: I love this question. So one of the things that we utilize is something we call, not we call, but it is called the New World Kirkpatrick model. Folks listening might have heard just before, but it's a model for assessing education and L and D efforts, but really helps to hit at behavior change. And in this model, it talks about, it's not just enough to assess the success of your workshops through, did I like it and was it great and how many people came and sat through it, but what happened after they left? And it requires the person developing this context to think of the after-workshop actions. How we continue to have people play with and touch the skills and the core competencies and practice the core competencies. So at Zillow, we have not just our workshops, but we also have assessments that allow people to continue dialogue.

My equity and belonging business partners continue the conversation from the workshop with the leaders in their regular meetings every single month where we're talking about those skills, we're looking at their IDI assessments and they're coaching them. They're going through what are the areas that we want to work on for you personally as a leader when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion, belonging, and how do we move forward? So it's an ongoing conversation. We're encouraging managers to have conversations with their teams about the impact of belonging and inclusion on how we do what we do. So we're creating little, small curriculum that they can, a video, a short article, something that they can watch really quickly and then have a couple of 10, 15 minute dialogue of what does this mean for us? It's the repetition. Same way we engage in value setting. We don't just throw the value, well, we shouldn't create the values and throw 'em on the wall. They have to be repeated every, all hands, every meeting. Everyone should be reciting these values. That's how things get embedded. And we're taking that same approach with our DEI philosophy as well.

Dr. Alexandria White: So let's repeat that model for our listeners. What was that model?

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: It's called the New World Kirkpatrick Model.

Chris Riback: How do you advise leaders think about and balance the power or lack of power of metrics and measurement and how to measure what success is, which I guess first you got to define what success is and define what you're measuring. Why I'm asking this is because it's compelling to me that I'm hearing you emphasize that it's about hearts and minds. It's about conversations, it's about learning and exposure to other realities that are just different than one's own zone and that type of exposure and, one would hope, life learning for any of us. And so on the one hand, that's a bit of a prose-oriented approach, a narrative. And at the same time you have mentioned, and any business person will advocate, well, you can't advance what you can't measure, don't know if you're being successful if you can't measure it. How do you advise balancing the narrative with the math?

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: They're parts of the same system. The narrative in the story, I'll give you a prime example. There's an old documentary called Race: the Power of an Illusion done by PBS probably in I think 1996, but great documentary. And one of the sociologists who was interviewed on the documentary said, during slavery time, if white people just said, “we need this free labor in order to build this land and do what we need to do,” but didn't necessarily create the narrative that black people were less-than. We might have a different world once the ability or need to have slaves was removed, but because they created a narrative, because narratives last, they exist, they get passed down, actions can be swept under a rug and forgotten about and moved on from, but the narrative will last.

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: So I say that to share is that that's the reason why the narrative piece is so important because it is ultimately the hallmark of why some of the behavior and the actions exist. And once we can get people to understand how we got one, where are we, how we got here, and to look at that vision, then the data comes in to help explain where we are and the impact of where we are on different groups. So it's not for me one or the other. I'm a systems thinker. They're a part of an entire system that has to work together in order to make it work.

Dr. Alexandria White: Speaking of working together, you have to have buy-in from someone. Someone had to hire you, someone has to attend these employee resource groups meeting. So talk about, especially for our listeners that are c-suite that are change makers in their companies and organizations that have the ability to move the needle, what do you say to them? How do you get the buy-in to them that might be listening to say, ah, not so much.

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: Yeah, I'm smiling. This was literally my dissertation. I did my dissertation on the motivation of particularly white, heterosexual, cisgender men in leadership roles to engage in the advancement of DEI. I interviewed 12 white men, heterosexual, cisgender men and I asked them this question, what would you tell people who were like, I don't know. And one of the things, several of the things that they said was that this impacts you two, and that the more people are free and liberated, the more we're all free and liberated. If you are a business mindset kind of person, not everyone thinks with the heart, there are some people who are very business oriented, they think heady, and that's how we get them to the table. And so they often said too, if you believe that this doesn't hit the bottom line, let's look at the money we're leaving on the table and walking away from, because we don't build with different people in mind and do the work to attract them to product.

We're leaving money on the table. So if your goal was to make money, you're leaving it on the table. But if you think that this doesn't impact you, then you're also wrong with that as well. There's a level of freedom none of us have been able to enjoy because of the ways in which these systems prevent us, all of us, from being able to be who we truly want to be and who we truly are. Let's say you never get on board with the idea that this is about you. The reality of it is you have an opportunity to be a part of helping others achieve what you've achieved. You have an opportunity not to save, not to be a hero, but to be a part of a legacy that helps remove barriers that prevent people from not just surviving but thriving in the world. How does that connect to your personal values? All the men in my study talked about this is a value thing for me. This is about doing good work and being a good person. So how does this work connect to the values that you aspire to? That's how you can draw yourself into the work.

Dr. Alexandria White: Excellent. I will be reaching out because I would love to reach your dissertation.

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: Oh boy. I haven't shared it with anyone yet, but I'll share it with you.

Chris Riback: Well, we'll put it in the show notes.

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: Oh my goodness.

Chris Riback: Lastly for me, and that's interesting. So from a dissertation, from having been in a different sector in education and now being in business and technology sector, what has surprised you? Is it what you thought it would be? Is the business world where you thought it would be are the opportunities for impact what you thought they would be? What has surprised you?

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: I think what surprised me is that corporate isn't as cutthroat as I thought it was going to be. I grew up watching all the shows about how people do certain things to keep you from succeeding, which is why I never wanted to go into corporate. And I was like, absolutely not. I'm staying away from it. And it isn't - I guess it can be in some areas, but it's not quite that way. I actually have found a great home here in the corporate space. But I think the other thing too is for companies that thrive on innovation, that pace for diversity doesn't really work very well. It makes one wonder, what is the real problem though? What's the real goal then? Because we talk about innovation and constantly reiterating, recreating and growing and growing and growing and gaining more even money, yet we use that language that they've been using and yet still can't get them on board.

So I think for me, those two things have been surprising to me that if that matters so much, you think that if I can draw the connection between greater innovation, greater access to money, McKinsey and Deloitte have all done studies that talk about the impact of having a diverse C-suite on market share, and none of that has actually worked on increasing companies commitment and sustainability of their commitment in the work. Even right now, we see companies finding opportunities to drop their commitment. That to me has been a big surprise.

Dr. Alexandria White: And so you have access to so many touch points in addition to being a wonderful corporate professional, Zillow, you have your hands in research, you have your hands in an institution of higher education. What's next? What do you see in the future of this DEIB continuum or not? We pray this never happens, but what happens if there is another George Floyd, right? Does the pendulum swing back? What's next?

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: I liken DEI as a field to student affairs. You know when you look at the history of student affairs, it too was a part of higher ed that people were like, what do y'all do? You're just glorified babysitters. And faculty didn't really respect people who did student affairs. They're like, yeah, I don't do nothing. And at some point, it developed its own sense of professional practice and matrix for how we do what we do. Now you couldn't just come from any role and get into a student affairs role. You had to have a student affairs, student development background until rigor was added to it. I think DEI as a field has always needed more rigor, more research, more connection to research in order to drive what it does.

I see this as an opportunity for the field to really go “We need to really get together and create a sense of theory and models that help drive what we do and why we do it. Because if you talk to 50 different DEI leaders, you'll essentially get a hundred different ways in which we all do DEI. And why is that? There's got to be some commonality. Every organization is different, but there's got to be some kind of commonality in which we all build upon in order to do our work. I think that also requires there to be a tighter connection between industry and the academy. And so what I'm also developing is a scholar-practitioner identity in which I engage in original research that also is written in a way that people literally can take and go, oh, great, and run with it right now. I think the research that we're seeing leaders go, that's great, I love the results. What do I do with that? And so it doesn't ever flourish into anything. There needs to be more conversation between the academy and industry in order to really make this work. But I also think as a field we could do better at being more rigorous and setting more standards for how we do this work.

Chris Riback: Well, I know that I'm getting to talk with two professionals here who surely will be at the forefront of the advancement of the creation of those models. What about the future of DEI in corporations? There's a lot being discussed. We all read the newspapers, we all watch the news, know some of the both advocacy and some of the questions around it. How do you view that? What's the future?

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: I think that we will see, in my opinion, an evolution of the field and the role and where it sits within the company. I have a strong idea that we're going to potentially see a decline in chief diversity officers and embeddedness of DEI practices and responsibilities throughout existing c-suite leaders. Your chief people officer is going to be required to have a strong understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And not just from hiring a DEI leader, but you personally have experience in understanding what that looks like from a culture standpoint. I think the finance person is going to have that. I think the marketing person from an inclusive marketing standpoint, that each of those body of people have this understanding of how it gets embedded into their work, versus having this leader who is an umbrella over it all, trying to fight their way into a table to sort of offer their lens. I think that is going to be one way that we see it change dramatically versus having a CDO or a director or head of. Some people disagree with me, but that's where I think things will end up going.

Chris Riback: Thank you. that's really, really useful. Thank you for making the time and sharing your insights.

Dr. Alexandria White: Yes. Is there anything that you'd like our listeners to know about any of your personal work, different from Zillow, any academic things that are coming up? Please do share.

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: Absolutely. Well, right now, I'm actually working on a draft of a IRB protocol for identifying specific people leader behaviors and actions that lead to team level belonging. I think that people, leaders, middle managers are really the heart of how we create and change culture. People leave their manager, they don't leave necessarily the company. They're leaving some experience at the team level. And most of the time people become managers, not because they're good at leading people, but because good at a particular task. And so we've got to do better as organizations and preparing our managers to be managers. And so I'm working on a study that helps to identify what are the specific actions and skills that are exhibited that lead to that level of belonging, that create that level of innovation and creativity and psychological safety. So there are any businesses out there that would like to volunteer their data for the study, that would be great.

Dr. Alexandria White: Yes, we will make sure they have your contact information. I appreciate that. It has been a pleasure to share this space. And so with that, thank you for allowing us to interview and learn about the wonderful things that you are doing at Zillow.

Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson: Awesome. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure being here.