Cultural Brilliance: The DNA of Organizational Excellence
With Host Claudette Rowley – Transformation Talk Radio – Every 2nd & 4th Friday 10 AM (PT)/1 PM (ET)
“Brilliant Cultures are Inclusive Cultures: The Neurobiology of Diversity”
With Special Guest Rajkumari Neogy
I had the pleasure of interviewing Rajkumari Neogy on my show Cultural Brilliance Radio. Rajkumari Neogy is the creator of the Disruptive Diversity Framework and the author of the Wit Factor – shifting the workplace paradigm by becoming your optimal self. Today we will explore the critical roles of inclusivity and diversity in organizations. Disruptive Diversity rewires the nervous system to create a permanent shift in how team members view themselves and each other. If your team or your culture are stuck in ways that don’t make sense, this show can unlock the door to profound ways of understanding how we unwittingly create cultures of exclusion.
Below is an article written by the Conscious Business Radio team about the show.
Cultural Brilliance helps you experience groundbreaking ways to transform your company’s culture. Host Claudette Rowley invites some of the foremost experts on organizational culture to help understand how to make a brilliant culture the rule rather than the exception.
Claudette had the opportunity to speak with Rajkumari Neogy, creator of the Disruptive Diversity Framework and author of the Wit Factor: Shifting the Workplace Paradigm by Becoming Your Optimal Self. Rajkumari is fascinated by team culture especially in the tech area; she believes that every individual brings a superpower that often isn’t fully unlocked, and provides expertise in team culture cohesion, diversity and inclusion, leadership development and organizational epigenetics. Over the last 20 years, she has worked with organizations worldwide including TruMaker, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Hop Skip Drive, Wells Fargo, Shuttle, Cisco Systems, Facebook Sony, Adobe, JVC and Amazon. In 2013, she found it iRestart to address issues of team dysfunction, impostor syndrome and feelings of exclusion.
Today’s discussion starts with a discussion of the term ‘organizational epigenetics’. Rajkumari explains that epigenetics is how our gene expression is dependent on the environment in which we create. In organizational terms, this can translate into people with jobs that are in a toxic environment or a toxic culture – can find themselves really struggling.
Rajkumari then gives an analysis of workplace exclusion, and subsequent problem of how to get to inclusion – how do we get people engaged? In her experience as an executive coach, she believes it’s really about an understanding of psychological safety and trust. Once we begin to understand what these are, we can then start to understand how to create inclusive culture, and to look for the places where we judge, the places where we exclude, the places where we feel inadequate – and how all of that leads to dysfunction in the workplace.
The discussion continued with Rajkumari giving an explanation of the terms inclusion and diversity, and what they mean to her. She states that she uses the word inclusivity rather than inclusion, because inclusion is about the action and including and inclusivity is the intention of including – and she believes we all start with intention before we get to action. Inclusivity is the ability to create safety for others, and belonging is the ability to create safety for self, and diversity is the ability to hold that tension moment by moment by moment. She quotes David Rock from the Durrell Leadership Institute, “If we are not intentionally including at every moment, you risk accidentally excluding”.
To listen to the full show, click here
For more information on Rajkumari Neogy and her work, visit www.disruptivediversity.com
(Archived episodes available at www.culturalbrilliance.com and www.transformationtalkradio.com)
