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4. Mentoring Matters: Cultivating Diversity and Inclusion | Tim Loake | Dell Technologies
40 Plays1 year ago
About Tim Loake
Tim leads Dell Technologies’ Datacentre Speciality business across the UK. He is a seasoned tech practitioner with a passion for ensuring seamless technology transitions for Dell Technologies’ customers. Additionally, Time actively contributes to internal employee resource groups, mentorship programs, and diversity initiatives, fostering opportunities for the next generation of IT leaders.
Watch this podcast and learn:
- Discover more about Dell’s MARC initiative Many Advocating Real Change
- What it means to be a good mentor
- How Dell is cultivating a culture of inclusion
Recommended
Transcript
Inclusive Language and Behaviors
00:00:00
Speaker
I use we and us far more which helps to create an environment where I've kind of neutralised the physical impact that I can make with behaviours that I exhibit to create a more balanced environment for everybody else to participate which is something I have had to learn to do and it was not something that came naturally or easy. It has been a long journey and I still don't get it right all the time.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:27
Speaker
A podcast all about cultural intelligence and inclusion. We're asking loads of people the important questions to find out what makes them tick and how culture has impacted their lives. We're going to look at their cultural hippo and find out what we can learn from the people who've made a career out of leveraging culture and inclusion.
Guest Introduction: Tim Loek
00:00:55
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of The Hippo Question. And with me today, with me and Matthew today, is Tim Loek. Welcome, Tim. And lovely to have you here on The Hippo Question.
00:01:07
Speaker
And I think it's time for me to fess up a little bit, Tim. You're not actually just a guest, are you? Or a leadership speaker or a diversity and inclusion ally, but you are my mentor. And you've talked about how mentoring's helped you in the past, but before we even go there, right, let's just look at who you are, what do you do, and why you're on the HIPAA question with us today.
Tim's Role at Dell Technologies
00:01:29
Speaker
So over to you, Tim. Okay. Thanks, Nikki. Thanks, Matthew. I think,
00:01:36
Speaker
By way of introduction, I am a vice president at Dell Technologies. I run the data center business for Dell in the UK. So that's all of our products that could or should go into a data center and the services and support around those. It's a reasonably substantial business. I've got a team of about 160 people operating across the UK, all customer verticals, all segments.
Diversity and Inclusion in Recruitment
00:02:08
Speaker
What was the second part of the question? No, it's the same. What brought you here today? Why are you here? Oh, yeah. So I'm here today by way of a favor to you, Nikki. So thank you for the invitation. But also because diversity and inclusion is a
00:02:30
Speaker
a massive subject for my business. Running a technical sales organization within technology, recruiting a diverse panel of people can be challenging. Most of our candidates tend to come from a similar mold. And so I'm keen to build an organization that more appropriately represents the communities in which we operate. Dell has a
00:02:57
Speaker
a guiding purpose around enabling people everywhere to thrive and through the technology solutions that we provide. And therefore, I think the team needs to be made up of people from everywhere and of all different types. So that's why I'm here. Hopefully we'll have an interesting chat and see where we get to. Well, I'm going to jump in straight in there, Tim, if you don't mind.
Strategies for Diverse Recruitment
00:03:20
Speaker
You've hit the prime topic straight away. Obviously, when I think of a company like Dell,
00:03:27
Speaker
I'm thinking of someone who looks like you, possibly a little bit shorter because I understand you're really quite tall. Possibly wearing a suit, but I would say male, middle-aged, white man, and that I suspect is most people's stereotype of an IT company. And you mentioned that you want to make your recruitment more diverse.
00:03:53
Speaker
I'm going to go straight in with a simple question. Why do you think it's important to the business? That's a really easy one. I'm going to talk about the problem first and then I'll talk about why it's good. We all recruit
00:04:14
Speaker
people who look and feel like us, right? By nature, we surround ourselves with people with a similar background, a similar educational base, similar experiences, because it's the people that we have the most in common with that we find the easiest to communicate with. So we would, if left unchecked, we would all build communities of clones, right, of ourselves. And that's how we would operate. The problem is, I only have a single lens on the world, right? I see the world through the eyes that I have, and I go about my life in my
00:04:43
Speaker
relatively affluent, sorry home and take my kids to school and that's the world that I see. But that isn't the world everywhere, right? And if we don't bring people who have eyes and experiences and perceptions of the whole of the community in which we tend to operate as a business, you can't possibly expect to make good decisions about how you spend your time and money in order to run and grow your business. So we make better decisions when we have diverse thoughts and experiences in the room.
00:05:12
Speaker
That's a fact. There's no disputing that. And if I recruit a team that looks and feels exactly like me, I won't make good decisions. Absolutely. I know. I think many people would agree with you.
Fair Recruitment Practices
00:05:25
Speaker
How does that work at a very practical level, though? Obviously, we can't go out and say, I'm going to recruit a woman to this post. Well, you can, but it doesn't tend to go over very well.
00:05:39
Speaker
And you exclude half of your potential candidates if you do that. So for me, I am very particular.
00:05:47
Speaker
about setting the conditions for recruitment specifically to be successful in this way. So what I mean by that is I will always hire the best person from the candidate pool that I am interviewing for a specific role. That's a given, there's no question about it. However, and here's the question, if I take applicants for a role, let's say I have, I normally do an interview to hire ratio of roughly 10 to one, right, when I'm hiring outside,
00:06:15
Speaker
If I have 100 applicants for that role, given the demographic of people who work in technology in the UK, I will have at least 90 white men, right? That's pretty much what I'm going to get. If I then take nine CVs of white men and one woman,
00:06:33
Speaker
The likelihood is when I interview those 10 people, I'll hire a man. It's just statistics, right? Because the best candidate will be. However, there's nothing stopping me taking the five best women who applied and the five best men and interviewing that as my panel, right? And building that balance into the recruitment process. So if you want to get in as a man, you better be the best, right? If you want to get in as a woman, you still got to be the best, right? But I might be taking the bar a little bit further down through my application pool
00:07:01
Speaker
in order to make sure I've got a balanced panel. Then I'll hire the best person, right? I also make sure that when we're building a decision team, we make sure that that team is balanced, right? Back to my earlier point about hiring in our own image.
00:07:16
Speaker
If I build a decision-making team or board of people who look like me and behave like me and have a background like me, we'll probably hire someone like me. That's not helpful, right? So you've got to build diversity into the people making the decision as well as the pool of people from whom you're picking. And I think that's only fair. And that's practically how I do it. Fantastic. Thank you.
00:07:43
Speaker
But Matthew, it brings me to a really fundamental question and Tim for you.
Quotas and Culture Change
00:07:47
Speaker
And, you know, I love what you said about fair recruitment practices, right? You pick the best person out of the pool of best people that you've listed. What do you think is going on in the world today? Why are we still seeing people sort of suggesting quotas for people that have been in the past ignored? You know, women and other sort of things. Do you believe that that's the right thing to do then for organisations?
00:08:14
Speaker
I'm not sure quotas are the right answer. We definitely have goals around how we want to transform the organization and we're very clear about the percentage of the company that we want to be female at various different levels and we have a moonshot goal around that. However, certain quotas I don't necessarily think is the right answer.
00:08:37
Speaker
But quotas are, in most cases, government's way or large organization's way of getting people to behave in a specific way. And by doing that, you force those who don't necessarily think progressively to at least tilt towards it. And it's about getting the pendulum swinging. So we have a world that has been tilted for
00:09:02
Speaker
hundreds of years towards a male professional base, right? That's what we have. Men go out to work, women tend the home. That's changing very rapidly. And it's not necessarily the societal view today, but that is what we're dealing with in terms of the workforce that we have today. So the pendulum has swung all the way over here. We have to do it whatever we can to start it moving back the other way. Some of that will come from
00:09:30
Speaker
people who get it and change their practices. Some of it will come from governments and quotas and organizations setting targets. I don't think that's necessarily the best way of doing it, but I think it is one of the tools we can use to start momentum to swing back towards the middle, right? So I'm not against it, but I think there are better ways and I think educating people and helping them understand the why
00:09:59
Speaker
is a far more powerful tool than setting a KPI or a quota around it. I think moving that needle, or you could call it a pendulum, that's about culture change. I think that's, I mean, how do you change that
Inclusion and Cultural Awareness Programs
00:10:17
Speaker
culture? How do you drive that, whether it's in an organisation, whether it's in society? We talked briefly about your background in rugby.
00:10:25
Speaker
rugby, again, traditionally, is a very, very male-dominated environment. I think they've done quite well, actually, in promoting the women's teams. But how do you go about changing that perception or that culture? Well, I think the first thing to do is to start, right? And that's slightly tongue in cheek, but it's also true that we've talked about this problem for a really long time, but no one was prepared to do anything about it. It was always
00:10:54
Speaker
And I'll use gender as the primary example, right? Because it's the easiest one for people to understand. Gender diversity in the workplace was always a women's problem, right? It's the women's problem to deal with. But the women only make up.
00:11:11
Speaker
in tech companies, 15% of the workforce, right? How can 15% of the workforce change the cultural behavior of an organization? They can't, right? You've got to bring the majority to the conversation. So you have to start getting the 85%, the men, on board with the need for change. So from a Dell perspective, that's why we took on
00:11:38
Speaker
a program originally called Men Advocating Real Change, we now rebranded it to Many Advocating Real Change, which is effectively, it's supposed to be, we try not to call it training, because it's not training, because training implies something that you learn to do. This is about awareness more than anything else, and it's about helping people understand
00:11:59
Speaker
why some of the cultural differences that exist around them, the concept of privilege, the concept of in and out groups, the concept of dominant and subordinate behavior, the concept of unconscious bias, and just help them understand that their perceptions are shaped by their experiences. And everybody else's perceptions are shaped by their own experiences and by the behaviors that they receive from others. And once you get people on that journey,
00:12:28
Speaker
then you can start moving the needle.
Rugby's Community Values
00:12:31
Speaker
But you've got to bring men to the conversation in the workplace. If you don't do that, you'll never move anything because it's the women's network running fantastic charity events to promote women in the workplace and maybe attending a few seminars and it's not going to move anything, right? You've got to bring the 85% to the conversation. So that's the first thing. On the rugby side,
00:12:57
Speaker
It's about consistency. It's about showing and living the values and living the behaviors, right? I mean, community rugby has really strong values. So we talk about teamwork, respect, enjoyment, discipline and sportsmanship as the five core values that the RFU has set out.
00:13:16
Speaker
If you go to any coach in any club in the community game at any age group, I would hope they will be able to name all five values and explain to you how they build those into the training programs that they put together with their kids or, or, or young adults or whatever it is. And indeed in the adult game as well. I think as we look towards the, the professional game and it is now a profession, the, the influx of money and technology into the game.
00:13:45
Speaker
has changed some of that. I don't think it's changed the core values necessarily, but it's certainly changed the exhibited behaviors, both of players and of match officials, and not necessarily for the positive, right? So we are, we're on a journey with, for example, VAR to make the right decision all the time. And that's good, right? In terms of
00:14:08
Speaker
implementing the laws of the game, the way that the game should be played and deciding whether the points are scored or not scored, it's a fantastic tool. The problem is it obfuscates to some extent the decision-making power of the referee and by doing that you actually diminish the perceived responsibility of the referee and therefore the respect towards the referee from some of the players because they just go check it on the TV because I don't trust you.
00:14:32
Speaker
and that it breaks some of that implicit trust that is absolutely still there at the community game where the referee's decision is final, you have no argument, there is no recourse, there is no VAR, you have to just roll with it because that's how the game is played. That changes as soon as you get to that top level.
Leader-led Programs for Cultural Change
00:14:54
Speaker
And I think as you bring that back into a corporate world, and I'm going to go back to the
00:15:02
Speaker
the mark example, the way we rolled that program out was that Michael Dell took his direct reports through that program first. It was leader-led. The ELT then took their teams through that process, leader-led. And then as leaders through the organization, we cascaded all of that messaging, all of that
00:15:26
Speaker
knowledge through that program to our teams to try and lead by example. So this wasn't a training company coming in or a bunch of external consultants. This was Dell people talking about Dell examples and Dell challenges and Dell opportunities to help our teams move forward in the way that they interact with each other and the world around us and our customer base, ultimately. And I think that's really important.
00:15:56
Speaker
And we need to be careful in rugby that we don't create a separation between the game that's played at the very top, both national and premiership level, and the rest of the game. And some of the proposed law changes actually potentially make that even worse, right? They're going to have different rules in the community game versus the professional game. And I think that is a slippery slope because you will separate the two. So for me, that I'm concerned about for the future of rugby.
00:16:27
Speaker
I think in a corporate world, leader led, set the tone, lead by example. That's the best thing we can do. Let's pick on that a little bit.
Leadership Challenges and Excellence
00:16:39
Speaker
I love the idea of leader led, Tim. But if you look at the corporate leadership in most last global organizations, it's still white male dominantly. So how do you change that first? And the second part of this question would be, is there fear
00:16:57
Speaker
because you could be making yourself this white male in professional capacity obsolete, perhaps, or, you know, talking yourself out of a job by supporting Mark. So tell me where, how does that sit with you? What's going on there? So I'll do the fear question first, right? Because I get this one a lot. You just have to,
00:17:26
Speaker
If you want to be promoted, if you want a new job, if you want to do something, you've got to be the best, right? And that's not best from the half the population who've decided to ask the question. It's you've got to be the best of the best, right? And that's the best of everybody. So for me, and I don't know whether it's confident or arrogant, I've always worked on the basis that I'll be the best I can be, and that will either be good enough or it won't.
00:17:54
Speaker
But I'm quite happy to be tested against everybody and anybody as to whether I am the best for the role, the function, the project, whatever it might be. And if I'm not, I'm caught found wanting, then somebody else should do the job. And that's fine. So I think the best thing is a relatively straightforward one.
Increasing Diversity in Leadership
00:18:15
Speaker
In terms of changing from changing at the top,
00:18:18
Speaker
That is a long process because we can't take people with zero experience and who've had zero opportunity to run large parts of organizations or companies and just put them in at the top and go, hey, great. You fit the profile of what we were looking for to change the diversity thinking on our executive board. Good luck.
00:18:40
Speaker
you actually also need to be able to do the job, right? And so we have to bring people through the organization. So it has to start at the grassroots and we have to then progress people as quickly as we possibly can without breaking anybody and without breaking the company in the process to move them through the organization at pace and get them to the point where they are ready to take on larger chunks and larger jobs at the top of the company. And that means we need to
00:19:11
Speaker
Be proactive in the support that we provide, and I'll use women again, but to our female population. We have to provide, make sure they've got mentors, make sure they've got coaches and sponsors, make sure they get access to challenging projects and opportunities. Give them the best possible chance to be successful and to progress and move their way through the organization. That has to happen.
00:19:39
Speaker
But at the same time, that doesn't mean that the men get overlooked. It just means they have to now compete with a bunch of the population who weren't there before, right? You've still got to be the best. And for me, that means, yes, we will give our female population a helping hand because they need it, right? There's less of them.
00:20:01
Speaker
the table stakes are tilted against them just statistically. So they will get a little push and that's okay, right? That doesn't mean that we will discriminate against any men. It just means we're gonna give the women a push and we're gonna help them be successful. And I think that's okay. So Tim, time for the inevitable question of this podcast.
Managing Physical Presence for Inclusivity
00:20:21
Speaker
Tell us, what is your cultural hippo? Oh, cultural hippo. I think for me,
00:20:30
Speaker
It's always been associated with my physical presence. I mean, you know this because you met me in real life, Nicky, obviously others and I was on the podcast haven't. I'm a reasonably big guy. I'm six, five. At one stage I was
00:20:50
Speaker
a lot larger than I am today when I was playing rugby, so I've slimmed down a bit recently, but I still can be a relatively imposing presence when I walk into a room. That can be
00:21:04
Speaker
difficult for people to deal with, particularly if I come in with direct booming language and I can dominate a room in a way that will make those of a more introverted disposition unwilling to participate in a discussion.
00:21:28
Speaker
So I can use that to my advantage, but as I've moved on as a leader, I have found that that has become more of a disadvantage than anything else. So I now have techniques that I deploy to actively reduce the impact that I make in a room, specifically when I'm physically there. It's less of an issue on Zoom because I think we're all equalized by the armpit to head
00:21:55
Speaker
video window but yeah when I'm physically in a room it can be a challenge so I will artificially lower my voice, I will use more inclusive language, I very rarely will say I or me, I will use we and us far more which helps to create an environment where
00:22:18
Speaker
I've kind of neutralised the physical impact that I can make with behaviours that I exhibit to create a more balanced environment for everybody else to participate, which is something I have had to learn to do and it was not something that came naturally or easy. It has been a long journey and I still don't get it right all the time, but I continue to work on it.
Philosophy on Mentoring
00:22:41
Speaker
So what's good mentoring look like then? Because you're my mentor and I'm curious to hear what you get. I don't know, you tell me. I think from my point of view, I think mentoring gives an opportunity to provide a perspective that you wouldn't otherwise get, right? The people that we deal with day to day, we will typically have
00:23:11
Speaker
will have a vested interest in what we're doing because we're doing business together in some way. We're either working for the same company or we're working in different parts of the same organization or working on a project together. The people you deal with always have a vested interest in the outcome, in the answers that they give you. So when you're looking for perspective on a problem or a challenge or whatever it might be, being able to ask somebody who has no axe to grind
00:23:39
Speaker
and a bunch of possibly relevant experience will give you a perspective. Now, it might be a perspective that you go, that is not the problem I'm asking about. I'm not going to listen to that today. But you have the choice. At least you've had the thought, right? And you've had the input from somebody outside, given the facts as presented. This is what I would do or where I would go or whatever it might be. So for me, I think mentoring is about perspective. I also think it's about
00:24:09
Speaker
experience. I have experience of large corporates for the most part. That's the bulk of my experience. I did spend a couple of years running my own business for a while, but it didn't last very long. So I would never profess to be an expert in how to run a small business, not my thing.
00:24:29
Speaker
But if it was, if I'm talking to somebody who's running a small business, but who wants to be more like a grownup business, right? Who wants to start bringing corporate values to their company or who wants to think about how they get into the corporate space in terms of their client base and they're struggling, I can absolutely help with that because I understand the other side of the conversation. And I think, so mentoring is a combination of skills and experiences that you don't have and perspective.
00:25:01
Speaker
Just on that. Sorry, go on, Matthew. I was just going to say, I think where it's helped me the most, perhaps, is that very sense of perspective, the very sense of someone who has a bit more experience than I do in this journey, in a career progression, et cetera, who can bring in a new point of view, perhaps, or something they've tried and tested and a safe space to kind of talk about it.
00:25:27
Speaker
without there being any judgment, without there being sort of any coaching, because coaching is slightly different, isn't it, to mentoring someone? And I think that's what I've appreciated very much about that relationship of mentor and mentee. Sorry, Matthew. I was going to follow up on that and ask Tim whether you've had those people in your life
00:25:53
Speaker
who've been able to mentor you or who perhaps helped you on your way.
Building Support Networks
00:25:58
Speaker
Have you had those people? I have. And I had them more earlier on when I needed it, I think. And it's not that I don't need mentoring now and I have people I work with today, but I think we go through
00:26:16
Speaker
Your careers and personal development and progression tends to be, it's not linear, right? It kind of comes in steps and waves. And I think we need the most help when we're trying to overcome our next personal barrier, right? Our next breakthrough point. And I have been fortunate enough to have some of those people support me as I've gone through some of those journeys. So one specific example,
00:26:47
Speaker
I moved from being a frontline leader to taking on my first kind of organization wide role, probably coming up for 10 years ago now. And our EMEA leader at the time, who was somebody who I had kind of grown close to working on a couple of projects and what have you. And we had an informal mentoring relationship. He pulled me into his office. He said, right, you got the big job now. You need to work out.
00:27:16
Speaker
who you can talk to. He said it might be me, it might be somebody else, but go find yourself someone you can talk to because all the people you used to talk to who were your peers now work for you. So you just single-handedly taken on a job that's significantly larger than you had before and destroyed your support network in the process. So priority number one, go build a new support network.
00:27:44
Speaker
and find people you can lean on because it's really important and then he says and second piece is you're going to make mistakes you're not going to get everything right the first time and half your team are going to hate you because they wanted the job too so people are gunning for you accept it
00:28:07
Speaker
and move on because you can't do anything about that other than being who you are and doing the best you can in the job. So go get on with it. And there are pieces of advice that I have shared subsequently with others going through similar transitions and actually have served me quite well. There's plenty of others, but that's just one that brings to mind.
00:28:30
Speaker
The reason I ask is because someone I was working with a couple of years ago said to me that the biggest problem with being a woman and a person of colour who's succeeded is that I get 15 to 20 requests to be a mentor to them a day.
Mentoring Challenges
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah. And when you have a person who is a person of colour or a woman or someone who
00:28:59
Speaker
feels they're from an underrepresented group, they're looking to people like them to find out how they overcame the challenges, how they've survived, how they've succeeded.
00:29:10
Speaker
And what we're doing is we end up putting this huge burden on these people who've managed to somehow get to the top, despite all the structural barriers in place, and say, here you are, now mentor these 300 people who want to get you a job. Yeah, the mentoring thing is a problem for me too, and I don't fit any of the reduced or minority demographics that we've been talking about today. I am literally the template of majority, you know, mid-40s white male.
00:29:42
Speaker
But it is a problem. And so I am quite careful about the number of mentees that I take on, because otherwise it can become a huge drain on my time. So that becomes a problem for me. But also I end up giving nobody any value, which then becomes a problem for them as well. So in my experience, certainly within a corporate, mentoring relationships have a six to 12 month lifespan. After that time, you've kind of run out of useful things to say to people.
00:30:12
Speaker
And so you might continue to meet with them on a regular basis or an ad hoc basis for coffee and biscuits, but the mentoring part kind of passes by and just becomes a networking opportunity. And so as I roll people off, then I'll create slots for others to come on.
00:30:37
Speaker
But I think we also have to be, as mentors, we have to be honest with ourselves and with people who are coming to us for help and say, you know, I'm busy right now. I don't have any space.
Supporting Cultural Intelligence and Inclusion
00:30:48
Speaker
However, given what you're looking for help with, why don't you talk to this other person, go work with them for six months and then come back. Right. And let's have a conversation and see where I'm at. Help them progress in the meantime.
00:31:01
Speaker
I think that's the responsibility that we have, and that's certainly the way I approach it. And funnily enough, I had one of those conversations only a week ago, and the person was incredibly grateful. They had expected a no from me, but they did not expect the, but why don't you talk to this person who I think can really help you? And so that was a good outcome.
00:31:22
Speaker
No, thank you, Tim. I think I've benefited, I know this, some unproof of the mentoring that you've offered, definitely. And I sincerely hope listeners out there, because you've shared some amazing advice today, some of the practices that you are encouraging within Dell, but also Mark, you know, as a team, if you like, and supporting others with this. And that's what this podcast is all about, right? The HIPAA question is all about,
00:31:48
Speaker
people like you who've been there, done that, to support people that are either on their journey of trying to be there and do that, but also for organisations who are really trying to fundamentally shift a culture and become more inclusive in their practices, you know, develop greater cultural intelligence overall. And so on behalf of all of us, Matthew and myself on The Hip Hop Question, thank you so much for joining us today and have a great rest of the week. Fantastic. Thanks, Nicky. Thanks, Matthew.
00:32:18
Speaker
The Hippo Question with Country Navigator, the number one platform for cultural intelligence and inclusion training. Tune in for more interviews with global business leaders and find us at CountryNavigator.com.