Carol Cone:
I'm Carol Cone, and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact. Today we have a returning guest to the show, and that's Margaret Spence. And Margaret, about a year ago, she joined us to talk about DE&I and advancing women who are talented in the C-Suites. And we talked a tremendous conversation. But today, as the world has been evolving, Anne and I, we were talking, "Who can we invite to the show? Who can illuminate what's going on and how can companies respond and continue to advance their really important work?" And that's Margaret Spence. So Margaret, she's fantastic. So welcome back to the show.
Margaret Spence:
Thank you, Carol, for inviting me back. It's always an honor to be here and to share the vision, the prospect, and the purpose behind what we do.
Carol Cone:
Fantastic. So Margaret is the CEO of C. Douglas & Associates, and they just had their 25th anniversary, so congratulations on your anniversary. She's also an author, a podcaster. She's founder of the Employee to CEO Project, that's a leadership success program for powerful women leadership. She does a lot of trainings. But I'd love to just hear a little bit about your background.
Margaret Spence:
Yeah, Carol, it's a lot to sum up. So I think from a background standpoint, I started my career in the insurance industry. So I come out of insurance. I was an adjuster, I would say. I was also a regional manager. I've did a lot of things on that side of the house, and then eventually ended up in HR. And from HR decided to go into risk management and HR. And I have navigated this almost 40-year career. And I'd say it's 40 years because my older son turns 40 this year. And I started my career a full year plus before he was born. So I would say this is a 40-year career that is evolving still at this point. So that's my background is insurance, and then HR, and then into risk management HR, and then over to consulting.
Carol Cone:
So tell our listeners, what is your purpose?
Margaret Spence:
So if you'd asked me that question a year ago, I would have answered it differently. I think right now my purpose is my three-year-old grandson.
Carol Cone:
Congratulations.
Margaret Spence:
Thank you. His name is Douglas. I now include him in everything that I do, because for me, my purpose right now is legacy. There's a point where you go through your whole career and you're building and you're doing all this stuff, and now I'm at this place where it's legacy. But the legacy for me is an impact. I want to make sure that the work that I do from here onward to the point where I decide not to do anything anymore, it's creating a better world of work so that when my grandson walks into the world of work in 20 years, 17, 18, 19 years, he walks into a better world of work than the one we have right now. And I think if we are not purposeful about what we do and how we do it, and if we are not deliberate around what we challenge in the current world of work, we will not create what is truly possible for the next generation who hasn't even started kindergarten yet.
Carol Cone:
That's very, very powerful. So you have in one of your books, leadership self-transformation, 52 career defining questions. Number 18 says, or asks, what connects your passion, your purpose, which you just eloquently so shared, and your value.
Margaret Spence:
Yeah. That is an intersection that most people don't think about. I think my value right now is years of experience. I can look through the windshield and I can look through the rearview mirror. And through the windshield, I can see the future, I can see how it is aligning. Through the rearview mirror, I can really speak to experience that this generation may not have access to.
My dad is 96 years old, and he was just outside in the garden digging up. And I saw him out there forking and raking, and I looked at him and thought, "There is no way in the planet that I could be outside in the Florida heat," it's probably 70-something degrees outside. And he's out there in that garden every single morning at 9:00, and he stays out there till just before 12:00 noon every day. He plants all kinds of vegetables. And the value that I think I learn every day from him is that small, little tiny things make an impact. It doesn't need to be humongous, it just needs to be tiny.
Carol Cone:
It's incrementalism.
Margaret Spence:
Incrementalism.
Carol Cone:
So I'd love to know, what's transpired in the Trump administration, before that? So I want to do a before and an after. So before January 20, what were some of the most difficult challenges in diversity that your clients as well as the field was facing?
Margaret Spence:
First off, let me level set a little bit. I've actually been doing this work my whole career, even before I went into consulting. Back in the '80s, I was the affirmative action manager for an organization in California. And back in the '80s, the role of that position was for you to go in and make sure that there wasn't a violation of the new EEOC laws. I don't think a lot of people realize that the employee relations role came out of the affirmative action role back from the early '80s.
So having said that, one of the challenges that I saw in organizations is a lack of clear commitment to the work of inclusivity. There was a lot of sudden acknowledgement after George Floyd's murder, but we've been doing this work with organizations long before George Floyd was even a person on the radar. I define organizations in five categories. There are those who want the status quo, who don't want to change. They will put on whatever mask they want outside, but they want to maintain the status quo. There are others who are detractors from the entire process. They've always sat in the detractor role where they will detract from anything.
You have others who are persuadable, help me cross the bridge that you think I should cross and persuade me that this is good for me. And then you have others now who are what I call our true believers. And then you have people who are partners. The true believers, even though we give them the name true believers, and they sound like they should be believing everything we tell them, they believe, but they take no action. You walk in their building, they've got all these big marquee with lots of things on it, but when you ask them to take an action, they don't take an action. And then you have people who partner. That was only 25% of organizations before January 20th.
Carol Cone:
And then you had January 20th.
Margaret Spence:
Right. They believe they don't need Kool-Aid drinking. They have already believe wholeheartedly. It's embedded in their organization. It cannot be disrupted because it's embedded. Those are the people who were partnering around inclusivity and wanting a better world of work. The other 75% were playing the game.
Carol Cone:
To your father's story about roots, was this a fad with deep or shallow roots?
Margaret Spence:
It was a fad with shallow roots, but it also had problems. The people who came to the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion post George Floyd had their own vision around what this work was. Not a lot of them had done the trench work that those of us who had been doing it for 20 years or 15 years had done. They came in with their secret sauces, they came in with their things that they felt could be done. Organizational change is what diversity, equity, and inclusion is. It is a change management process. And you cannot take people to implementation without taking them to knowledge and acceptance and understanding that they have a problem and giving them real rooted reasons to make a change. So if you are doing the work based on policy and process, it was never going to work. Diversity, equity and inclusion is heart space work.
Carol Cone:
That's brilliant in terms of it's not headwork, it's heart work. The election is held, we have a returning president, and DE&I becomes right in the center of the crosshairs. Just describe the current landscape for DE&I. If you only had 25% that really embraced it, and all of a sudden they're getting a get-out-of-jail card. What's the landscape? And then I want to dive even deeper.
Margaret Spence:
I think organizations do not have a commitment to the process. Here's the thing. We want organizations to do what is a social construct. Organizations have always been profit centers. We now layer over a social construct of we want inclusivity. And the organization looks at it and says, "No, no, no. Our whole purpose is to be a moneymaker. We're not here for the soft and fuzzy.
And so that is the first sort of like a slap in the face where you go, "Wow, okay.� I think what has happened is this current administration has tapped into the pain that people have and the division that they want. Tapping into people's fear, tapping into their inner self-loathing, their inner feeling that they haven't accomplished anything and other people have taken it from them serves right now until everyone realizes that they're all on the menu. But as long as we keep fighting in the bottom of the pot and stirring in the bottom of the pot, we don't realize what we're truly losing.
Carol Cone:
So let me ask you, what are the major impacts that you're seeing overall?
Margaret Spence:
I think the major impact is people are fearful of being targeted. And so because they're fearful of being targeted, they're unwinding and undoing things that don't make a lot of logical sense. But I also think that organizations are calculating that this will be a blip on the horizon, in three to four years, this will be done and they can resurrect and return to who they were before, and nothing will be the wiser and everyone will forget and they will get to return to this place.
Carol Cone:
And we're hearing from a lot of our clients and others, something that I've heard very cleverly stated, the cover is changing, but the book is the same, the language. So are the 25% who believed in it, has that become 10% or are the 25%, they're stalwarts, they'll create the parameters around what they can and can't say, but they're going to continue to invite different types of people into the organization because it reflects their customers and it gives a greater richness to the thinking, addressing innovation and problems?
Margaret Spence:
Yeah, I think we're still at the 25%. Here's where I don't think that things have changed to a huge extent. People are still getting recruited into organizations. We're still recruiting diverse people into the organization. What they're not doing is going out and investing in diverse schools and diverse programs to bring students in. They're going to have to now go figure it out on their own. If you're a first time hire, you're going to have to go and figure that out on your own.
What I'm not clear about is retention. Are people staying? And I don't think that anyone is doing a deep dive into the data to say, "when these programs were dismantled by the organization, did people of color and women leave at a greater rate than before the programs existed?" Did it impact retention and did it impact recruiting? I don't know that that discussion is happening. And because companies are not going to release their data anymore around attrition or around hire, we're never going to find this information out. So the chapter is yet to be written on this whole thing.
Carol Cone:
So the New York Times, again, they reviewed 25,000 annual financial statements this year because they wanted to see what was happening with language. And so they said that DE&I language has fallen by 60% from 24 yet, and I think the yet is probably people are not even focusing on this. 78%, 297 of the 381, continue to discuss their actions, but use different language. What do you think about that report? And is that, again, deep-rooted work continuing in the companies? Are they just doing enough so that they'll still hopefully recruit people of color, women, et cetera?
Margaret Spence:
I think it's both. I think what came to mind for me is organizations are burying their programs so that they don't become the ire of the administration and the people who will target them. I think if we look at Lean In, their report in 2026, and we look at where women and people of color are in the corporate space, and we look at advancement into leadership and where women are, where people of color are stuck in organizations, then we will know if this underground work is actually happening.
Carol Cone:
Do you think that Lean In will be able to get those numbers? Because so many companies are saying, "We're not reporting anymore."
Margaret Spence:
That's my worry, that they're not going to get the numbers. And if they get them, they won't be true.
Carol Cone:
Right. If they get them, then the question is, will they be damaged in any way because they're reporting? I'm curious what you are saying to your clients and in your panels and presentations, what language should companies be using in this environment?
Margaret Spence:
I think even for us, we have always been the Inclusion Learning Lab. We went to inclusion versus diversity. Everyone is diverse. I think if we look at from a DNA standpoint, diverse is everyone. Diverse does not mean inclusive. I think one of the most disheartening things that occurred last year was the Society for Human Resource Management, SHRM, removing equity from their entire discussion point. They removed equity from their website, they removed it from everything. And so if you don't discuss equity, you don't discuss the economic impact that occurs for women and people of color. And for first-generation people coming into the workforce and for young people coming into the world of work, if we don't discuss how they equitably land in the organization, then we don't discuss their long-term economics.
The next part of this, what I call a five sides of this, is in order for us to build the world of work without the word diversity, equity, inclusion, equality, take all the words away. What is the behavior that we want you to exhibit? The behavior is we want you to become a collaborative builder, meaning that you learn how to collaborate across people, generations, races, sex, orientation, ethnicity, everything. You learn how to build collaboration across every sector and every person in the organization, which means that you connect people to amplify impact, and you put people together so that they get comfortable with each other. We have to stop othering people, and whether we aren't other them because of religion or we other them because of our social construct, we have to end the othering even within our own races and nationalities.
The next thing is we have to become inclusive innovation catalysts, meaning that we have to ignite creativity and push the boundaries of inclusion. It's no longer what do we need to do? What more check boxes do we need? The question is, who is not at this table? And how do we get them here? And what is the skillset that I'm going to use to make that happen? And then the last part of this is in order for us as a society, as a group of people, to get to the next level, we have to become boundary pushers.
And so in order for us to recognize what the future is going to look like, we have to push against the boundaries that are either being created or the boundaries that are self-imposed, because at the end of the day, we have to be there to inspire, innovate, and empower the next generation.
Carol Cone:
It's brilliant that you're saying that. Do you have any recommendations about... Those who are listening to this, and they're going, "Right on, Margaret what can I do now?"
Margaret Spence:
It comes down to us recognizing that we may look different, but we're not different. We still want the same things. We want success. We want financial stability. We want our children, our grandchildren, nieces, nephews, significant others, the people in our lives to succeed.
Those of us who see this right now have to be recognized, just go into your small group and make a difference in your small group. This can't get solved in this big grandiose way. I think this is smaller. This is more grassroots, this is more personal. This is more what does my neighbor need? What does the senior citizen person in my community need? What is the person I see in the supermarket every week or the cashier, what do they need? It's going to come down to small acts of kindness that build on a bigger momentum towards change.
Carol Cone:
I just want to ask one other question, which is that, do you see any bright lights of companies out there, again, in DE&I? I know that Costco has stood up and they're getting a lot of lawsuits, but I think it's great. And why Costco and not Target?
Margaret Spence:
Right now, Costco is the only one getting the bin. One of the reasons why Target got hit so hard and why I don't know that I'll go back into a Target is because you invited women into the house for the first time. 80% of the shelf space was given to women for the first time in Target. They were given to Black women, indigenous women, they were given to women primarily. And then you rolled it back and took your shelf space back. You don't get forgiveness for that. There's no forgiveness because you forgot your community, your constituents, and your people. It was never about your employees. It was about the community you serve and the community you're a part of.
Carol Cone:
It's fascinating because you're saying that DE&I is not just about employees, it's about all your stakeholders.
Margaret Spence:
It is. It is a stakeholder-based approach. The only way is to evaluate your entire stakeholder base and say, where are we missing a gap? One of the areas that most organizations, even when they implemented DEI, where they left the gap was vendors and suppliers. They focus in on employees. Some focus in on community because they wanted to go sell their wares to a particular community, but most never went to supplier and vendors.
Carol Cone:
Yeah. Do you feel that the Trump administration is solely focused on the employee in terms of the equity and diversity and the inclusion?
Margaret Spence:
No, they're dismantling contracts. They're dismantling voiding contracts. I have friends that did government work exclusively, they voided every contract. Maybe we need to go back and read the Project 2025-
Carol Cone:
2025, yes.
Margaret Spence:
... and figure out what page we're on so we can figure out what's coming next. Maybe that's what we needed to do.
Carol Cone:
I would love to give you the mic and just say that you are on a stage, any place that you want to be, television, conference, older people, younger people, CEOs, whatever. And then what do you want to share with those people so that we can get through this, not forget everything we've learned and hopefully become better in the future?
Margaret Spence:
I think right now, I'd love to be on the Ted Talk stage. My message is the next generation deserves better, and I think my discussion is around the future of work. It is highlighting that we need to continue to humanize and build purpose into the future of work. There's some data points that I wanted to share with you right now, 75% of roles occupied by women have the ability globally to be disrupted by AI, 75%, the World Economic Forum and a bunch of others. I think while we are busy and mired in what is going on right now and what is going on in this immediate, there are other things going on around us that are going to be even more impactful for the long and short range of the future of not only people of color, but women.
I think the next generation and the next iteration of work and the next iteration of what we do as a society deserves better than what we are willing to give it. And if we do not keenly focus in on understanding what the future of work deserves and what the future deserves, then we will miss an opportunity to come out from what we're in right now, come out from it, to go to the top of the mountain and look down on this and say, "What are we missing? What else is going on?"
This is a lot of noise, but the noise that is being created right now is noise. And so we're caught in the noise because this is where they want us to be, is focused on the noise. The noise is going to end at some point, and when we open our eyes up from the noise, from this spiral every day, we're going to find a different world that has essentially left us behind. The next iteration of what's coming is going to affect how we all exist in the future. And if we dismantle the world of work with artificial intelligence without having an ethical lens to it, without having an inclusive lens, without women at the table, without people of color in the discussion, when this noise ends, we'll find a whole different world.
Carol Cone:
Fascinating. Well, Margaret Spence, it's been an amazing conversation. Continue to just be an amazing, thoughtful, calm, humanistic voice to help us get through this so that in three or four years, we can help the next generation truly define their personal purpose, and that there will be work that will be satisfying for all of us. So thank you very much for your time. You never disappoint, and you're terrific.
Margaret Spence:
Thank you, Carol. I appreciate your invitation and coming back and always focused on purpose.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I'd love to thank them. Ann Hundertmark and Kristin Kenney and Carol Cone ON PURPOSE, Pete Wright and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at TruStory FM. And you, our listener, please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
This transcript was exported on Mar 25, 2025 - view latest version here.
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