We were lucky to catch up with R Dwayne Burks recently and have shared our conversation below.
R Dwayne , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Any thoughts around creating more inclusive workplaces?
The definition of an “Inclusive workplace” seems to be all over the board. In my own work attempt to default to the dignity of every human being. If we, as leaders in the our individual areas of influence create workplaces that acknowledge the dignity of every person, in every situation our workplaces will, by default, lean in a good direction. But achieving inclusivity is a journey, not a destination. It is incumbent upon leadership to make sure all voices are at the tables as policies, procedures, and cultures are developed.
When I first entered the workforce I simply did not know what I did not know.
One incident relays the depth of sheer of ignorance from which I had to be extracted.
I was a young professional, working full time and attending school. Part of my job involved collecting past due accounts. Before the advent of mobile phones and the Internet collections efforts were limited to letters, phone calls, and if absolutely necessary, personal visits to borrowers’ homes.
Once home visit will forever be burned into my memory. I recall driving up to the home, adjusting my tie, and walking the few steps to the customer’s front door.
Before I even had a chance to finish knocking the customer stormed the door, cursed at me, and promptly instructed me in no uncertain terms to leave and leave now. As I backed away in my vehicle I heard him say, “Get out of here, you redneck.”
Not only was I startled. I was confused. Why was the man so angry. I had not even had the chance to tell him why I was there. I lived with my confusion for years. I lived with it until someone helped me see what I had never before been able to see because my colleague and friend helped me gain a better understanding of the customer’s perspective.
Permit to explain.
When I pulled up the customer could see my car and me before I could see him. On the front bumper of my car was a tag that I had placed there because I was proud to be a young man born and reared in the Southern United States. Yes, I had a small Confederate flag on the front of my car. But it gets worse.
I have always been a bit of a jokester and like to do silly things to make people pause and think. So a few months before this disastrous visit, while sitting around a campfire with friends I had a leather boot string in my hand. Not sure why I had it but it was just something to fiddle with while making small talk. As we split up and headed for our respective homes I realized I had fashioned to boot string into a somewhat macabre item. Without thinking I hung it from my rear view mirror.
So several weeks later when I visited my customer, who happened to be an African American gay man the first two things he saw were a young white driver wearing a suit and a confederate flag tag on his car bumper. Oh yes, there was a third item in his line of site. Remember the boot string hanging from my rear view mirror – well it had been fashioned into a noose.
Never in my dense, young, white-privileged head had I even thought of the noose as potentially offensive. To me it was an oddity, a conversation starter, a throwback to the Old West.
But my Southern pride flag and old west noose projected a far different message to my customer when he spotted them.
Can you even imagine what must have gone through his mind when as a gay, black man in the south in 1984 he saw a white man in a suit arrive with not one but two symbols of hate displayed?
If I could relive any moments of my life I would certainly choose to relive this incident. But I am thankful for the lesson I learned. I just wish I had learned it before I hurt and offended another dear human being with my ignorance.
Dr. Maya Angelou often told us that once we know better, we can do better.
My life has been a journey toward learning to know better and in turn, doing better
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
This excerpt from a piece I penned several years ago provides a glimpse into my personal journey. I am thankful for the grace extended to me by God, my family, and others as the journey has been challenging at times.
Person #1 Good morning. It is a pleasure to meet you. I am a youngster, rapidly approaching adulthood whose life has been routine in some respects and unbelievably complex in others. At age six I was diagnosed with a chronic pathological disorder that could never be healed. This same disorder took my dear father’s life when he was only 36 years old and I, on the threshold of adulthood at age 17.
One reason the disease took dad’s life is because its ever present threat lingers in the background of the patient’s life. If one does not control it, diabetes can take your life in a moment, or over time it can cause excruciating physical complications, stress, and ultimately untimely death as with dad.
As you can imagine this never ending need to control my food intake, medicine and every component of life causes me to migrate to anything that might help me feel in control.
Religion is one of those things. I am immersed in a religious and social culture that finds its identity in God, Guns, and America. Ours was a world of rules, reward, and punishment. There were written rules for virtually everything imaginable. And when the rules were not codified the people in charge would construct revisions, often on the spot, based upon their literal, yet personally flexible interpretations of Scripture.
Religion proved a powerful, albeit fleeting antidote for my never ending need to control. My extreme religious activities filled me with a self righteous fervor that isolated me from anyone who disagreed with our brand of belief. “Those people” were not like us therefore we had to “come out from among them and be separate.”
Upon leaving for college I continued my myopic perspective at none other than Bob Jones University – a school founded by a Klan-supporting fundamentalist who loudly and persistently proclaimed that the Almighty himself was the author of segregation.
I was so caught up in my efforts to control life that I was a full grown man, well into my first professional job before I even knew a person of color by name. I was almost 15 before I ever heard a person speak any language other than English. And I lived almost 4 decades before ever engaging in a true friendship with anyone who was not straight and cis gender.
For me there was no middle ground. Right was right and wrong was wrong and if your definition did not match my definition that was too bad for you. I was right so you were wrong and would find out the hard way Jesus someday casts you into hell.
I am person #2. I am a father, working hard to provide for our growing family. I have staff in many different cities. This affords me the opportunity to travel all over the country (on the company’s dime) and even internationally.
I am good at my job because corporate America loves to exploit a go-getter. I expected others to work every bit as hard as I work. There is no time for middle ground goofing off. We all have a job to do and if you can’t do it then there’s the door. In a word I am driven. Driven to provide for my family. Driven to manage my division. Driven to do things right. Yes, I expect perfection. After all, if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. People are fine as long as they aren’t lazy and stay out of my way. I have a job to do. And I’m going to get it done no matter the cost.
Oh the cost. My drive to control and succeed is killing me. In fact, nobody knows this but often when I cross the bridge on my daily run I wonder if I have the nerve to step out in front of an oncoming vehicle. But I don’t. Instead I continue running, reaching, striving. If I can keep it all together things will be ok. But my family must know they are not as important to me as my performance and carefully crafted image. This life I’m living is exhausting.
I am person #3. In a word, I LOVE PEOPLE. (OK That’s 3 words). But I do. Think about it. Every single person is uniquely crafted in the image of God. Each one similar, yet unique. Life and potential are within you and you and you and you. And how cool is this? I get to pull back the curtain that sometimes shields the eyes of our hearts and reveal this awesome reality to you and you and you. I don’t mind your color, your code, your gender, your denomination or even your aroma (face it. Some people really do smell funky when you get up close and personal).
Yes, I’m a minister but ministry is a vehicle. My why is to share the unbelievable reality that moved me from being driven to being passionate.
But there is a challenge. Sometimes I serve others at the neglect of myself. I stopped jogging years ago. I don’t always eat well because I am running here and there doing good things but often ignoring the critical things. I sure hope this doesn’t catch up with me
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Following the events of 9/11/2001 the company where I worked (Citigroup) downsized a significant number of its workforce in my particular division and I found myself without a job. It scared me almost to death. And caused me to reevaluate everything.
During my time off I clicked an item off my bucket list and visited England. While there I was invited to visit and speak in a small church in Hartlepool. Mind you, I was not an ordained minister. I was a downsized banking professional who happened to have a long history of lay ministry in my local American church.
Something happened on that Sunday. As I lunched with a couple of the church’s leadership team our hearts found common ground. They considered my experience as a lay speaker and professional troubleshooter for business and invited me to serve as their interim pastor if my family was willing to take this risk with me.
So… four months later my wife Charlotte and I departed America with four children in tow. To say this assignment changed our lives is an understatement. Our micro pivot had morphed into a wholly unexpected macro pivot.
When our assignment was finally completed and the time to return home arrived I knew I wanted to return to America to do more than just make a living. I wanted to make a difference.
Upon return I retooled my education and began working in ministry and nonprofit never to look back. The ensuing 20 plus years have been the most fulfilling of my life thus far.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
This is excerpt from my forthcoming book may be the best response to this inquiry.
For over three decades, I have been privileged to connect with many people who, in turn, have impacted my life in extraordinary ways. I would love to share how this capacity to connect for the common good has unfolded for me.
In 2015, I found myself sitting at a restaurant with one of these amazing people, Johnaton Schnibben, discussing some of the more difficult challenges facing our community. These challenges were centered around issues of human service and dignity. My friend and I were passionately concerned with these issues. In our community, there was simply an absence of dignity in the way that services were being delivered to our economically marginalized citizens. Fragmentation, bureaucracy, and even competition for funding ruled the efforts to provide human services to the county’s citizens. As you can imagine, the primary losers in this equation were the impoverished families who felt overlooked, shuffled, and abandoned. Recognizing my concerns for both issues, my friend challenged us to consider what kinds of efforts had provided success in other areas of our lives. How had we built teams of people to achieve critical accomplishments up to this point?
So, with a napkin and a pen, the two of us began diagramming how successful and collaborative partnerships had formed in other areas of our lives and work. As we moved from that restaurant into the streets of our county, one thing remained foremost in our minds; If we don’t worry about who gets the credit, good things will happen. Since that moment, good things have happened all around us.
In just six years, The Gateway Gaston initiative that launched from that napkin has grown into a fully functional service, guided by a commitment to connect our community for the common good. The Gateway has served over 10,000 local families with dignity by providing a connection point for their human service needs. Each one was served within 90 minutes of their requests being submitted. Likewise, we did it with almost 100% volunteer effort and by partnering with over 150 collaborative agencies and houses of worship. This did not happen overnight, and we still have much more to accomplish, but the foundation for human service delivery with dignity is firmly in place.
One key component has made these things happen: connecting – not merely networking, but truly connecting with others who share our concern for instilling dignity into the way we interact with marginalized community members and our colleagues who provide care service, has been the backbone of our service.
Often, networking is confused with connecting. For instance, any of us can attend a trade show and network with hundreds, even thousands of people. We have probably all networked this way at some point on our journey. But consider this question: Once that trade show closed and we returned to our respective workplaces, what did we have? Did we make true connections or just get a briefcase full of business cards and empty conversations?
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”- Buckminster Fuller, Futurist.
This can work anywhere. I have seen this work in banking. In the 1990s, I created a plan for connecting and not merely networking that aided scores of employees to make more money than they had ever dreamed of making. The entire concept was rooted in simple and strategic mutually beneficial relationship building that truly connects instead of merely networking.
In Gaston County, The Gateway continues to create models of collaboration that are making the obsolescence of other nonprofit and human service models increasingly apparent.
Likewise, The Gateway modified its’ macro-effort and created a personalized plan for job seekers that, in its initial launch, equipped 45 out of 50 chronically unemployed participants to find work within six weeks. All these participants had been unemployed for at least two years before entering The Gateway.
Often, when faced with a challenge, we tend to think one-dimensionally in terms of networking. Whether a person needs a new job, is considering an automobile purchase, needs a family relocation, or has any significant need, it is common to reach out to people we know well. A job seeker might call her sister-in-law and ask if her place of employment is hiring. A car shopper could talk to his buddy to learn more about his last vehicle purchase. One who needs a new primary care doctor may ask close friends for recommendations. On some level, these approaches work. But when the need is acute, as in a personal job search or when seeking employees to fill critical positions within one’s business, these close associates are not always the best resources.
According to Mark Grovetter of Stanford University, a full 75% of jobs are secured with contacts that we only “rarely or occasionally” see. Why do you think this is the case? Why do so many networked contacts fail to deliver when we need them most? Is it because they don’t really care? Or is it because of their perspective on the challenge we face? Over and over our research has shown that the closer the contact, the more their perspective is limited by the echo chamber of one’s close relationship with them. Their vision is often skewed by their perspective.
Some years ago, I found myself in need of a new job. I remember talking with my uncle about this, thinking he certainly knew lots of people. He was successful as a salesperson, and this put him in contact with all kinds of people from CEOs to secretaries. Yet, he proved to have no options for me to pursue, nor did he even attempt to offer anything that might help me get employed. Was this because he did not care about my situation? Certainly not, after all he was family and he loved me. Yet his perspective was limited. He knew me as the youngster who had shown up and married his niece. He did not think of me as a professional with marketable skills and talents. Our relationship never exposed him to those arenas of my life.
Have you experienced this? Perhaps you have reached out to uncles, aunts, friends, colleagues, classmates, or people from networking events. Maybe you’ve even asked your favorite barista if he had any leads. No matter how much you networked, nothing happened. The phone didn’t ring. The email didn’t light up with interviews, job offers, or even standard rejection letters for that matter.
On the other hand, perhaps you are the person charged with staffing a growing business. No matter how many signs you display, online message boards you engage, or calls you make to people you think could surely send you some solid job applicants, you still find yourself short of the goal and scrambling to fill positions. Networkers consistently tell us that this kind of silence is among the most frustrating, yet most common things they face.
In our work with the 50 chronically unemployed individuals mentioned earlier, we found that every one of them was working diligently to find work. They were applying at endless numbers of companies, sending resumes, visiting friends in various industries, and even utilizing employment agencies and other professional resources. All the while, their phones remained silent. Most of them started to doubt their abilities and skills to the point of great personal discouragement.
Contact Info:
- Website: gatewaygaston.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dwayneburks?mibextid=LQQJ4d
Image Credits
Image 3 by garland burks marketing others are by r d burks