November Featured Author | Rhodes Perry, MPA
Welcome to our featured author series where we share different points of view on advancing social justice and DEI+B efforts through the ever evolving fields of multicultural organizational development, human resources, implementation science, equitable evaluation and applied research, improvement science, learning science, performance measurement, and team science.
Each month we highlight someone in this work we admire and have learned from in the past. Our hope is that you find new perspectives, ideas, and insights to inspire and challenge the way you live and work.
Rhodes Perry, MPA
Best-Selling Author + Strategic DEIB Advisor, Rhodes Perry Consulting
Rhodes Perry (he/him) is a bestselling author, award-winning entrepreneur, and an internationally sought-after keynoter. He helps senior executives and leaders build belonging at work by establishing psychological safety and trust. Nationally recognized as a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) thought leader, he has over 20 years of leadership experience having worked at the White House, the Department of Justice, the City of New York and PFLAG National. Media Outlets like Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press have featured his powerful work. Both of his books, Belonging at Work (2018) and Imagine Belonging (2022) debuted as #1 Amazon bestsellers and were published by Publish Your Purpose Press. He earned a BA from the University of Notre Dame, and an MPA from New York University. He currently serves on the National LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce’s Transgender Inclusion Task Force, and the Cascade AIDS Project’s Board of Directors.
Why do you do the work you do?
I feel called to help leaders build a greater sense of safety, trust, and belonging at work because for far too many years, early in my own career, I often felt excluded by my former employers.
The organizations I worked within never were intentionally built for people like me. As a younger queer and transgender man, who had to manage a gender transition on the job in the late 90s, I frequently encountered microaggressions from more seasoned colleagues from different generations, casual homophobic comments, and unmentionable and harmful acts of transphobia.
While I hold a number of privileged identities, most obviously being a white man who has unearned privilege from those identities, the marginal identities I hold made showing up and doing my best at work extraordinarily difficult. At the time, I knew I would hang onto these experiences to help future executives gain the inclusive leadership skills to make work…work for all of us!
I hold onto some of these more painful moments of exclusion to empathize and motivate me to continue showing up for those at work who are the most likely to endure exclusion on the job and who are furthest removed from the power to transform their workplace’s culture.
Today, I’m grateful to have a thriving consulting practice that supports leaders confidently answer this question:
“Who are we intentionally including, and who are we unintentionally excluding, and what is the cost of not answering this question?”
Together with our clients, my company develops innovative solutions to help design targeted interventions to upend existing inequities that create barriers for everyone on the job to consistently feel a sense of belonging.
What technique, method, tool, theory or practice would you like to highlight that is promising and/or proven for advancing social justice?
I am deeply inspired by the Othering & Belonging Institute’s Director, john a. powell’s, concept of targeted universalism. He describes this concept as an approach to making equity-centered decisions that sets universal goals for the greater good of the group that are accomplished through taking targeted interventions based on the needs of the most marginalized people within the group.
In workplace contexts, targeted universalism deepens our sense of belonging by working towards a shared goal (“we want everyone to belong at work”) and that can only be achieved by designing and implementing targeted interventions that will meet the needs of historically underrepresented employees who experience harmful barriers that overrepresented employees do not see nor experience.
I help executives committed to building safety, trust, and belonging, incorporate targeted universalism into their DEIB strategies to ensure that employees and other stakeholders who hold multiple marginalized identities are not left behind by experiencing intersectionality erasure, a concept coined by legal scholar and civil rights advocate, Kimberle Crensaw. Intersectionality erasure is the abandonment of analyzing the barriers encountered by people who hold two or more marginalized identities that cannot be separated from who they are as a complete person (e.g., a Black, neurodiverse, transgender, lesbian woman).
As Audre Lorde once said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” When intersectionality erasure occurs in the workplace, DEIB commitment becomes siloed into single-issue approaches that fail to upend inequitable systems, policies, and practices. Taking such an approach undermines the overall success of achieving a workplace’s DEIB goals.
What is one book you wish everyone would read?
For executive leadership teams, I wish that they would prioritize reading Imagine Belonging, a book I wrote last year. It urges leaders to dream of the possibilities of what their workplace culture could look like 10, 20, or even 30 years from today by first encouraging them to interrogate what their current workplace culture actually is.
Once this culture is known, the book helps readers gain clarity about what kind of culture they actually want to cultivate for the future of work. Knowing where you are today, and where you’d like to be in the future will actually help to realize your vision. The book shares helpful leadership, team building, and organizational frameworks to engage in this kind of visioning work. It also offers accessible and practical actions that can easily be implemented.
During prospective client calls, executives share the many different DEIB strategies they are trying to achieve in a very short amount of time, with little resources, and staff support. When I ask them what vision these different DEIB strategies are designed to achieve, these prospective clients all too often lack a clear and succinct response. In other words, they lack a true north star to focus their actions, and this often leads to a lot of energy being spent with very little impact.
Imagine Belonging helps executives define what success will look like first, before creating and implementing different DEIB strategies. It sounds like an obvious first action, yet far too often, this very obvious action is overlooked, and this book helps prevent that from happening.
What are a couple of practices, resources, and/or tools that help you live more to your values on a daily?
Personal Practice: Every morning I meditate for 10-20 minutes, I journal for about 15 minutes, and exercise, usually taking a bike ride or a walk before starting my day. Taking this time for myself helps regulate my body while settling my mind for the day ahead. Setting a clear intention for the kind of day I’d like to have also helps set the tone for a really good day.
Resources: When it comes to living more of my values on a daily basis, I get inspiration from past speakers from the Belonging at Work Summit. Speakers like McKensie Mack, CEO of MMG Earth, Emily and Amelia Nagoski, NYTimes bestselling authors of Burnout, and Jess Pettitt, bestselling author of Good Enough Now, all give me the stamina to keep helping executives build safety, trust, and belonging at work.
Possibility Model: As a queer and trans person, I am deeply grateful for the thought leadership of Alook Vaid-Menon who embodies how to fully live a life aligned with one’s moral values. Alook’s work embodies their personal values of freedom, self-determination, doing no harm, and speaking truth to power. I share many of these values and dream of a world where more of us have the agency to show up exactly as we are, without apology, and to be met with care, affirmation, and empathy.
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