What does it take to get ahead in the corporate world? How much harder is it when you are female?
Jean interviews Dr. Brad Johnson, a White male clinical psychologist who has spent most of his professional life learning and teaching how to encourage female talent.
His answers are straightforward; simple but not easy. These involve mentoring in the moment, seeking out those who are different, and promoting talent.
Author of 14 books, his most recent include: Good Guys: How Men Can Become Better Allies for Women in the Workplace (2020, October, with David Smith) and On Being a Mentor: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty (3rd Ed.) (2025, with Kimberly Griffin)
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
Dr. Beth Kaplan, in her introduction to her new book Braving the Workplace: “I know what it's like to be unseen, unheard and unhappy. I know what it's like to feel so much and have so much to say, but you can't find the words to express what you're going through. I know what it's like to feel tired, a deep fatigue, preventing you from absorbing joy. It's lonely, but you are not alone. We're in this together.
“The good news is, you survive 100% of your toughest days, and I'm going to get you through the rest.”
Inclusion and belonging are sisters, not twins, she writes. If you want to change the relationships in your life, you have to care back. And you cannot belong to something fully until you belong to yourself.
But how to do these things while being true to yourself and where you are? How can you do these in the workplace, with its conflicting mixture of community and pressure to perform?
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
What if you could bring passion, joy, and meaning to your life? What if you feel stuck in a humdrum routine but have no time for anything else? What if someone could show you how to function with your whole heart even if you only have a few minutes?
Jean interviews Suneel Gupta, who tells you how to find everyday dharma in the midst of a challenging life. It is not measured by outward success, nor by achievement, but by finding your essence.
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
What are the secrets of becoming a really great leader?
Jean interviews Craig Dowden, author of A Time to Lead: Mastering Your Self… So You Can Master Your World and positive psychology coach.
The most important qualities of leadership, he says, are trust and authenticity. Trust: your leaders will hear you, value you, consider your concerns, and be honest and transparent. Authenticity: their values, beliefs, and behaviors are in alignment.
Craig posits the seven pillars of leadership: mindset, emotions, resilience, strengths, feedback, difficult conversations, leadership, authenticity.
There’s much more. Watch Craig and Jean have a lively discussion about leadership and empathy.
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
How do you go from being a 19-year-old activist, meeting Harry Belafonte, to deconstructing power, to being a bank president getting CEOs on board with DEI? Where does wealth sit? How was it obtained? Along the way she discusses the “nonprofit industrial complex.” For answers, listen to the podcast. Then read her book, From Intention to Impact: A Practical Guide to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
Jean interviews Minal Bopaiah, author of Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives. She has much to say about the long and complicated path for DEI.
Key highlights:
Minal shows how the US benefits from other countries' publically funded education systems by recruiting their skilled workers, despite often opposing similar "socialized" education at home. This practice contributed to the "model minority" stereotype.
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
This week Jean interviews Dr. Myrtle Bell, author of Diversity in Organizations. Dr. Bell talks about the value of diversity, the resistance to it, and how to overcome the resistance without the use of quotas.
She says, “I really believe that people don't know what they don't know,” and “sometimes empowerment is just being able to decide not to do something; that means you're strong enough to say, I'm not doing this.”
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
Lisa Fain is the head of the Center for Mentoring Excellence. She spoke with Jean about the growth potential for mentors and mentees when they truly speak with, listen to, and respect each other’s personhood.
Nobody owns difference. Everybody owns difference.
Lisa says: "Relationships involve getting to know one another. It involves real curiosity. Seeing you as a human being with whom I want to have a relationship, that starts to create some accountability for change and that gets super exciting."
People think the mentor's job is to be the sage on the stage. A good mentor is a guide on the side.
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
Hamza Khan’s book, Leadership Reinvented, offers a roadmap to productivity, resilience, and constant change. In this podcast, he and Jean Latting engage in an animated conversation about leadership, resilience, belonging, and burnout.
He speaks of his own experience.
He offers much to contemplate, including his own experience as a Muslim erroneously placed on the do-not-fly list. Ironically, as an entrepreneur with 2 million views of his TED talk, his clients included Homeland Security and the Canadian Air Force.
I consider myself fortunate that I found a very accessible keyhole issue with which to explore systemic oppression: occupational burnout.
What are the system level reasons why I burned out? Sure enough, a lack of fairness in the workplace, unsustainable workload, insufficient uncommunicated values, insufficient reward, lack of control, poor/toxic community.
Fundamentally, what's at the heart of broken systems of systemic oppression? It's people who are propping up the status quo. And the status quo isn't the avoidance of a decision. It's a continuous past decision.
We eventually arrive at the dark core of personality, which is human beings' hardwired capacity to accept, neglect, or provoke the disutility of others, in order to maximize their own utility.
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
This week Jean interviews Amri Johnson, CEO of Inclusion Wins, "a global cooperative of product and service providers focused on people-related solutions for organizations of all sizes." He is the author of Reconstructing Inclusion: Making DEI Accessible, Actionable, and Sustainable. Amri Johnson has a few provocative things to say about the current state of efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. "Contact theory basically said, when you bring people together as equals, and I'm not talking about economically, but as under the Constitution equals, and you bring them together to solve a common problem or to address a common goal, and you give them time, and so you have them connect with each other over time, and you have some sort of institutional support, prejudice gets reduced significantly.
"And that research, along with many hundreds of psychologists telling the courts that segregation harmed Black and White kids, it wasn't just about harming the Black kids. They came together around it, and that science was the other piece to go beyond the moral abhorrence of segregation, and separate but equal. "And so what we did, where we had the opportunity to actually create more contact, we didn't solidify the contact, we just kept hammering at what White people are doing wrong, kind of collectively, and I think it took us from the potential for something transformational to something that was reductionist and, you know, it was getting major blowback." He also has much to say about the importance of dialogue, acceptance of personal responsibility, and the need to get out of the victim mentality.
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
Who are you? And how do you want to be known? One can be Black, male, heterosexual, cis-gendered, liberal, college graduate, athletic, married. Which matters to you? Which will cause you to be judged by others who don’t know you? What would your DNA test think you are? How do you self-identify? Our identities affect our allyship with those who are being marginalized because of one or more of their identities. What would cause you to stand up on their behalf? Watch or read Jean’s interview with Bärí Williams, lawyer, tech expert, and author of Diversity in the Workplace: Eye-opening Interviews to jumpstart conversations about Identity, privilege, and Bias.
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
Speak up! But how? "You don’t know my boss." Daniel Oestreich knows the dilemma well: he coaches people and groups on how to speak their truth with dignity and curiosity. Dan says: "The word I like these days is dignity, that we should be treating each other in a way that reinforces dignity of whoever you are." What does dignity look like? And what are the temptations that take us away from dignity in our relationship building work? Dan lists 10 characterizations of dignity, including identity, inclusion, and safety, that are paramount in being able to speak your truth; he draws from a book by Donna Hicks, who worked on reconciliation with Desmond Tutu (author; Dignity: Its essential role in resolving conflict).
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
If you lived close to the equator, how might your skin color protect you from harmful radiation? And if you lived far from the equator, would this protection be as critical?
What about Vitamin D? How might your closeness to the equator and the lightness or darkness of your skin affect how much you are able to absorb?
Nina Jablonski proposes these two factors – susceptibility to harmful radiation and absorption of Vitamin D – as the simple explanation for why people have different skin colors, a product of evolutionary adaptation.
Leonard Jeffries Jr, former chair of CUNY’s Black Studies Department in the 1990s, referred to Blacks as “sun people” and Whites as “ice people.”
He said many other things that were deemed a lot more inflammatory, getting fired from his position as a result, AND he was correct in this statement.
Interesting tidbit: his nephew Hakeem Jeffries is a US Congressman and Democratic minority leader.
So why is there so much value judgment on skin color? That’s a harder question, taking us into the historical evolution of the slave trade and emerging science of epigenetics.
Watch this week's interview for some fascinating observations.
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
This is a remarkable podcast with a remarkable woman. Dr. Menah Pratt-Clarke is Vice President for Strategic Affairs and Diversity at Virginia Tech. Her parents earned PhDs in the 1960s and had to navigate racism and sexism in academia.
Dr. Pratt learned how to follow the whisper of the spirit, work within and without the system, address racism and sexism head-on, and promote impactful diversity initiatives.
In the podcast, she tells how she did it.
And how she manages to live a life with no regrets.
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
In today’s world, leadership is not about telling people what to do. Moral leadership is required. But how does one learn moral leadership? Can it be taught? And more important, can it be learned? Follow this week’s podcast with a conversation between Jean Latting and Rod McCowan, who trains leaders to consider moral principles when making decisions.
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
Health disparities between Black and Whites, ethnic groups, and socioeconomic groups are not news. Sherra Aguirre speaks with Jean about the leadership role she took on in her community to promote changing the typical African American diet. In concert with other community leaders, the goal was to stave off common health issues such as heart disease, even without medical intervention. In the process, she marries, divorces, completes her education, learns on the fly how to run a profitable business, and finds mentors and helpers all the way. What does it take for a leader to learn how to move the needle? How did she learn how to improve herself first? What is the impact of meditation, grit, mentoring, and a commitment to continuous self-improvement on success?
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
This week Jean interviews Victor Varnado. Born with albinism, he didn’t know he was any different from his Black family until around age 4. Bullied at school for his light skin and poor eyesight, he learned to use his humor as a weapon. From there he worked in entertainment, became a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and wrote The Anti-Racism Activity Book for kids (available through antiracism.online). Victor chose to beat the odds stacked against him in life by using his comedic skills to pursue his dreams. This approach could have backfired. In today’s cancel culture, some people are genuinely perplexed as to when humor is appropriate. Victor has an unusual take on how to decide whether a joke is funny or offensive, and used that distinction to build his success today and plunge into topics that others stay away from. Listen to this interview to learn about the interplay between humor, pain, and pursuing your dreams.
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
Moral dilemma: Suppose you completely disagree with someone on a principle that you are morally sure of. What next? One person will find it easy to listen to their point of view even while disagreeing. Another person will try to pinpoint exactly what they are disagreeing about A third person will break off the relationship and stop talking. In this conversation, Jean questions Ilana Redstone about the tenets of The Certainty Trap which, Ilana says, we all are subject to. The Certainty Trap happens when we have moral principles we are 100% sure of and shut out any objections to the contrary. We find it difficult to work with, much less live with, anyone who opposes our certain beliefs. Ilana says that our certainty works against us in the long run and harms our society.
What does leadership look like when the mission is fighting against sex trafficking? What does it look like when a woman with a corporate background, masters in clinical psychology, and megachurch pastor takes on sex traffickers?
Elizabeth Melendez Fisher Good was burned out. She moved away from Chicago to get away from the pressure, take a breather, sit on the beach… and ended up with a mission to address sex trafficking.
How did she attract so many true believers? How did she get people to commit their faith, time, and philanthropic donations to this mission? Where did she learn her passionate leadership skills? How did she heal her own trauma? And how can she love the people who cause so much pain?
#Leadership #SexTrafficking
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.
Joanna Cea and Jess Rimington wrote Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work, which invites us to reimagine work and reimagine capitalism. They believe it is possible for organizations and communities to set up structures where decision-making is shared, and the well-being of people is considered, along with profits and efficiencies. What are beloved economies? What are loveless economies? What happens when businesses embrace an ethic of listening, loving, and true inclusiveness? Follow the interview for a view of future economies that serve everyone. #LeadingConsciously #Business #Economy #Ethic
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Conversations with forward-thinking leaders about patterns that keep us stuck and how the leaders are breaking the mold. Personal reflections on provocative topics and how to level up despite yourself. Get unstuck, change your story, become more effective. Join us.
The ability to lead consciously can open your eyes.
Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.