Perspectives: You can't have DEI without inclusive leadership
Lessons and learnings from a former corporate exec turned entrepreneur and consultant
For this week's Perspectives, I spoke with Melina Cordero, Founder & President of P20. She helps companies develop inclusive and innovative cultures built for a post-2020 world through culture audits, workshops, and a digital learning platform.
Melina worked for a Fortune 150 company but then quit to start her own consultancy. She and I were both guests on the Why I Left podcast. I didn't know Melina before she commented on one of my LinkedIn posts, but when she did — I had to reach out!
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Anna Burgess Yang: Tell me a bit about your work history.
Melina Cordero: Work was crazy, but when you're in it, it's just what it is, right? I was the youngest in my role as a managing director and was the only woman in that kind of role within the department. I had a different background. Most people who'd gotten to a senior level in that space were investment brokers, and I came from research. I was also the only Latina.
In terms of the work itself, I was on the road every week. I ran between meetings and spoke at conferences a lot —and I'm an introvert! These weren't things I enjoyed.
ABY: What was it like for you to be the only woman in the room, or to feel culturally different?
MC: It felt annoying. I had to make more of an effort to connect with people. It was annoying and pretty exhausting. I didn't realize until afterward how much it would deplete me.
After I left, I started researching these dynamics. There's been a lot of psychological and cognitive research on the experience and impact of being the only X in the room, whether you're the only woman, or the only person of color, to the only person from a different socioeconomic background. There's a whole range of identity alienation that can happen. Psychologically, it's extremely taxing. It affects the brain. It affects stress. Your cortisol levels go up and it drives burnout.
ABY: So what led you to realize that you wanted something different?
MC: From a young age, I had wanted to "do well." I had to get straight A's and I was at the top of the class when I graduated. I went to Yale, I went to grad school, I lived abroad, I spoke three languages. I got this great job and rose right up. I got to that place we're supposed to be trying to get to, and I was like, "Oh. Is this it?"
I was looking up at the people senior to me — where I could go next — and I thought it didn't seem like a great life. I could be running around and stressed all the time because I was 30 years old and in good health, but what about when I'm 40? What if I want a family? And so I was looking up at what I was climbing towards and I was like, "I don't want that for myself."
I had this realization, and it was years and years of feeling that way. But each time I was close to pulling the plug and trying something else, they'd give me a promotion. I would think, "Well, maybe this time it'll be different. Maybe this time, with this promotion, it's going to change the team, and change the dynamic, and more money will make me feel better, right?" Spoiler: it didn't.
ABY: What did you end up doing?
MC: So ultimately, I made the decision to leave. During the pandemic, I really started to pay attention to inequity with gender and race. I became much more aware of what I didn't like about company culture. I knew I was unhappy, but I always thought it was me. This is something you'll hear a lot, especially from women. I thought I was the problem. I just needed to learn how to manage my stress or manage my inbox. I needed to learn how to not take it personally when a broker had a hissy fit on a phone call. I needed to adjust myself in order to make this situation, this career, more tenable.
But I started to realize that it's not me. There are some broken systems in the workplace. It's the culture. Then there was this surge in awareness with Black Lives Matter and more conversations around racial inequities. The things companies were doing—the approaches they were taking, the memos they were sending out—felt very outdated and ineffective to me.
I saw a real gap. Leaders and organizations wanted to do better but were really struggling to know what to do. I said, "You know what? I think I can help here." I understand the business world. I care about DEI and inclusion. I decided to learn more about it and study the technicalities, strategies, research, and data. And I'm going to put it together and help companies do better.
ABY: What was your next step in your research and equipping yourself to help others?
MC: The first step was to "de-program" from everything I had lived for 10–15 years of my career. And even from school. My instinct was to quit my job and get going on the next thing. And I realized that was part of the problem in the systems we face. It's very go-go-go, deadlines, timelines, push-push-push, grind-grind-grind. I realized that if I was going to try and do something differently, I couldn't do it in the same way I had done my whole career.
I had an excellent executive coach. She told me, "I know what you're going to do, and I don't want you to do it. I want you to take at least four months off. You're not going to work, you're not going to go hard on anything, you're not going to commit to anything. You're just going to take four months off to reset." And that was some of the best advice anyone had given me.
ABY: How did you end up launching your company and the work you're doing now?
MC: I got a call from an ex-colleague who was taking over a company and wanted a more inclusive culture. He said, "We need your magic" and because it was a space I had worked in, I said, "All right, let's figure this out together." I had done just about a year of research at that point. Over the course of a few projects, I started to form my framework for how to tackle things.
As I had more conversations, I realized: we have a leadership problem. Very, very few people have been trained in proper leadership and management. At one point in my career, I was running a team of over 500 and I was never given any leadership or management training.
The data tells us that most toxic workplaces come from toxic bosses, and most bosses don't know what they're doing. I was one of them. We wing it, and some of us figure it out better than others. My work has morphed to be not only about DEI but also about inclusive leadership, because I don't think you can have one without the other.
ABY: How do you help companies figure out what's wrong, what needs to be fixed, and what they do from there?
MC: The first thing is something called a Culture Compass, which is like an audit. A company knows it has challenges or wants to do better, but isn't really sure what the problem is. I have a customized audit process and 1:1 conversations. Out of that, I can say, "Here are some things you're doing really well, and here's what you should focus on to make your people happier and address imbalances and inequities."
I also conduct a lot of training and workshops, focusing on tactical topics like how to run an inclusive meeting, what a gender-inclusive conversation is, and how to bridge gaps in how different generations work.
And then the final thing I've been building is a digital learning platform like Netflix for DEI leadership training. You have a series and have episodes in a series. It's based on toolkits, like inclusive hiring with segments like: How to Write an Inclusive Job Description, or What Not to Do In an Interview.
It's very practical and very video-driven. It's called P20, which stands for post-2020 workplace. Since 2020, everything has changed about how we work. And frankly, we need support navigating that. Even if you did get leadership and management training pre-pandemic, a lot of it doesn't apply anymore. We need new tools, new ideas, and new resources for a new way of doing things.
ABY: What's it been like, working for yourself versus working for a huge company?
MC: I love it. I've worked for different sized companies in my career. I worked for a startup that had 20 people and I worked for an 80,000-person Fortune 150 company.
But, of course, you go from having teams of people who are experts in things that you're not, like marketing graphics and making a signature in an email. Suddenly, I'm everything for myself. But I enjoy the creativity and freedom of getting to develop my ideas, and change my ideas, and not having to waste time convincing someone else to invest or do it.
Now, there are challenges in entrepreneurship that nobody can deny. Like asking myself, "Is this going to work? Am I going to make the money I need to?" But every time I experience those challenges, I ask myself: is this better or worse than where I was before? And I would take these challenges I have now as an entrepreneur every single time over the stressors and challenges I experienced before.
ABY: What's your hope for the future of work?
MC: I hope that companies really come to grips with the value of investing in their people. I've studied this evolution of companies over the past few decades, and we've had a real divestment from people within companies. Less and less profits and revenues are going to support people. You can see that concretely in learning and development platform budgets being slashed. Back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, management training was very popular and a standardized thing provided to employees. I think now, the expectation is that employees should just feel lucky they have a job and a paycheck.
I'm hoping this really rough patch companies have gone through — with attrition, retention challenges, and low employee engagement — doesn't continue. I think there are a lot of leaders who want to do better. I'm optimistic in that regard.
My message to CEOs out there is: you don't have to be a culture expert. You don't need to take that burden on yourself; there are great people and companies that can help you. I'm one of them! If you feel like you can do better, get some help. It doesn't have to be a super scary or uncomfortable process. It can actually be kind of fun.
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