Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Natania Malin Gazek. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Natania, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today The first dollar your firm earns is always special. We’d love to hear about how you got your first client that wasn’t a friend or family.

The day I decided to start my own consulting practice, I texted my business school classmate Will. Throughout our time in school together, as he’d been working on launching his startup, he’d tell me he wanted to hire me to run his HR team. Now that we’d graduated and his startup was off the ground, I knew I wanted to help him – but I also knew that running an HR team wasn’t for me.

“What do you really need help with?” I asked him that day. Over coffee later that week, he explained that he was struggling to recruit new team members who would add gender and racial diversity to his team, and that the recruiting companies he was working with weren’t helping much. I had some recruiting experience, but I didn’t want to build a recruiting firm – I wanted to build a DEI firm that would help organizations build inclusive cultures through sustainable, equitable systems. So I pitched him on a different way to solve an underlying problem I saw: the “best practices” that his recruiting firms were leveraging weren’t yielding candidates from underrepresented groups because they were perpetuating the long-standing inequities in his industry.

I’ll recruit for you, I told him, but I’ll do it while simultaneously building an equitable recruiting and hiring system for you that will ensure your team gets more diverse over time, and that you’re treating candidates fairly in the process. We set up the terms to make sure we were both incentivized in ways that were aligned with our values, and then we were off to the races.

A few months later, I’d designed and trained Will’s team to use an equitable recruiting and hiring process that not only helped his team grow sustainably, but which I’ve since customized and brought to many more clients over the years. I consistently find that my clients appreciate the way this method addresses their biggest underlying recruiting and hiring challenges rather than trying to use band-aid solutions. Today, I’m proud that it’s available to learn through an online, self-paced course for any hiring manager or HR team member who wants to learn more equitable and effective methods for recruiting. You can check it out here: https://nmgazek.com/hiring-course

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consultant – which means something different to just about every single DEI consultant out there. In my case, it means that I work with organizations that have strong intentions around how demographically diverse they want their staff to be, how equitably they want to treat their staff, and, as a result, the sense of inclusion they want their staff to feel at work across identity groups. Together we assess the gap between those intentions and their staff’s actual experiences. Then I design and help them implement strategies to bridge that gap. Sometimes, that means working together long-term to fully integrate DEI best practices into the systems, structures, and processes that shape the organization’s culture. Other times, it means facilitating a one-time workshop or writing/updating a policy to help an organization move one step forward in their DEI journey.

Typical problems I solve for my clients are things like:
–What DEI work should we be prioritizing?
–We made a commitment to DEI/antiracism work in 2020, and now our staff are frustrated because they don’t think we’ve made enough progress. We’re not sure what we should be investing our time and budget into. What are some best practices for this?
–How can we hire new team members in a way that’s aligned with our values and will help our team become more diverse?
–How can we make better use of our DEI Council? We’ve had it for a while but its members are getting burnt out and we don’t want to lose them.
–What best practices should we teach our staff so they can avoid microaggressions and improve our culture? We have a book club and are trying to learn about implicit bias, but folks are hungry for actionable steps.

I think about systemic oppression, how it’s impacting us, and how we could behave differently to create more liberatory futures during most parts of most days; it’s the lens through which I see the world. When I graduated from college, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer because it was a career I was aware of that could seemingly be used to make the world a better place. So, I worked as a paralegal for a while. During that time, I realized that I was much more interested in designing new systems for our office to help people work together more effectively and efficiently than I was in the legal nitty-gritty. Then, an Organizational Development consultant came to our office and a whole new world was opened to me. I had no idea people’s entire jobs could be about helping teams work together better and improving workplaces. I was hooked, and that’s been my focus ever since.

Today, my job combines my sociology background from undergrad (thinking about how systemic oppression impacts the communities in which we operate) and my organizational behavior background from my MBA (using practical solutions to improve internal culture and optimize business outcomes). I feel very lucky that I get to make a living by doing something I feel so passionately about.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Referrals! My favorite new clients are consistently folks who my current and past clients refer. There are few things more professionally gratifying for me than when folks who I’ve worked with in the past recommend me to their colleagues – and I love that it provides an opportunity for me to reconnect and check in with past clients as well, so I can learn about how our work has impacted them since.

I also love it when folks I’ve worked with at previous clients start jobs with new organizations and bring me on board to help their new team. It’s so fun to see their growth over time and watch how their skills show up in a new context. (If you’re reading this as someone who has made one of those referrals, thank you!)

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

When I was getting my MBA (and to a large extent in my educational and professional contexts before that), Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In feminism was the norm. Be more assertive, learn to take up your space in the room, act like the white men who have leadership roles around you, I was taught, and you’ll get ahead. But over the past decade or so, I’ve been realizing that that’s not the leadership model I want to perpetuate. It’s misaligned with the impact I want to have.

Instead, I’ve been learning from folks like Tricia Hersey and adrienne maree brown about alternative ways of leading: imagining and modeling alternatives to white supremacy culture’s focus on perpetual urgency and instead moving at a human pace; Following emergent strategy, and prioritizing interpersonal connection. Following these models, I’ve found, has resulted in much stronger work with my clients, and a better relationship with myself and others.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nmgazek.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/NMGazek_DEI
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natania-malin-gazek/
• Other: https://bio.site/NMGazek