It Should Appall Us That Equity Is A New Framework For Leadership. But It Is.

My fellow organizational leaders, especially my fellow white leaders: Employees’ expense reports can wait. That promotional-spot recording can wait. That staff satisfaction survey can wait.

We are not helping our colleagues connect with a sense of normalcy amidst a pandemic by holding to arbitrary timelines, when all around us all is the arbitrary use of power and control. 

We are not leaders because of where we sit on an organizational chart. Because leadership and power and authority are not the same. And we are surrounded by leaders whose inter-generational resilience is greater than what many of us have shown. Who move forward when all the signs say turn back, don’t go here, the path isn’t clear. Who don’t get promoted because they are women. Because they are people of color. 

White leaders, we are not leaders unless we show up, but don't take up space. Give back the oxygen we've taken from rooms for years. Pass the mike. Listen with humility. Feel outrage, but do not pretend our outrage is more proximate or more searing than is that of our colleagues of color. Know that we know Amy Coopers. That some of us are Amy Coopers. That we are in relationship with people who don’t think what she did is wrong. That we might think ourselves brave leaders on the Zoom call with an investor and shirk our responsibility to interrupt racism with our friends.

Philanthropy, that June 1st deadline is not special. The import will still be there in a week. The deadline we missed— that our country missed— is equity’s deadline. That missed deadline and all the promises made and broken — those matter more. Those cannot wait.

My fellow white CEOs, what cannot wait is our showing up. And recognizing that we are here because the country worked for us. That is not an accident. 

What cannot wait is our pointing to the places we have been given the benefit of the doubt, where we assumed the police would protect us and our children. 

What cannot wait is our recognizing we have work to do. What cannot wait is our doing that work. Not just you; me too. I have work to do. I am a quarter-mile into an anti-racist marathon, and because I am a white CEO, I get cheered for my quarter-mile. My colleagues of color have run the marathon and too many of us white people expect them to line the marathon route, cheering us for every step of a journey on a course designed to make us look good. 

We need to run harder and faster without cheering. We need to staff our own water stations on the marathon route.  

That zero inbox is not important now. It does not mean things are okay and that we are in control. It does not mean we are doing our job. It is not an indicator of our value.

Because for too long power has not recognized the messages coming to our national inbox. Hundreds of years of mothers keening for children taken from them. Hundreds of years of the purposeful separation of fathers from their families. Pleas and protests and knees taken. A Black quarterback’s knee on the ground is a threat. A white officer’s knee on a Black neck is ... what? 

What do we call George Floyd’s death?

Do we call it murder?

What we call it says a lot about where we are nationally. What we call it in the workplace— if we call it anything in the workplace, if we allow it to be discussed in the workplace— it says a lot about whether we fully see our colleagues. Whether we see hundreds of years of white knees on Black necks.

Whether we see hundreds of years of privilege being marked by how much a person can count on breath in the face of indigenous genocide. Slavery. Jim Crow.  COVID. The police, a descendent of slave patrols.

CEOs, managers, Supervisors, especially, but not only, if we are white: Let us step back. So breath can fill in.

My Forbes “swim lane” is new frameworks for leadership.

It should appall us all that equity is a new framework for leadership. But it is.

It is late. So, so late. But not quite too late.