Tag Archive for: lgbtq pride month

Alexandra Tyler: Managing Director, Digital Transformation Leader, Accenture Song

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Alexandra TylerRemoving my protective wall around my identity has enabled me to create deeper connections in my work and in building more meaningful relationships with my family and with my colleagues and clients,” says Alexandra Tyler. “The protective wall goes down, and it impacts everything, including being a better leader.”

Curiosity and Customer-Focused Growth

Curiosity has driven Tyler’s career. She’s come across specific job positions by asking questions. “I’ve been lucky in that I’ve been able to pave my way in making my own adventure, essentially through conversations with people about open positions they had that weren’t quite right,” she reflects, “and in which we often crafted a new position that matched the needs of the business with my expertise and interests.”

Having studied psychology, she began her career in advertising, where she learned to appreciate the power of understanding what customers want and need.

“If you understand what customers want and need at every stage of their journey and are able to fulfill those needs and desired successes, you can enable growth,” she says. “What do those customers want to achieve and how do you develop the roadmap and path to get there? That is the opportunity. That’s why I’m excited about Gen AI and other innovative capabilities to unlock and enable more insights to meet customer needs.”

Being Focused on People’s Motivations

Growing up as a daughter of first-generation immigrants and raised by a father with a disability, Tyler understood the importance of two important lessons that he imparted: in order to succeed, one must persevere and exhibit true grit. In addition, one must celebrate differences in others.

“I feel strongly about focusing on doing right by others. Ambition goes awry if you don’t have respect for individuals, and if you don’t think about what motivates them,” she notes. “I want to understand what’s important to the people with whom I work. I focus on treating individuals how I would want to be treated – including respecting their differences, talents and expertise.”

In addition to treating her colleagues and team members with mutual respect, Tyler learned the importance of inspiring them to pair their great ideas with great follow-through: “I often see people who are incredible ‘ideators’ – who come up with innovative and breakthrough ideas – but they struggle with execution,” she observes. “The devil is in the details when it comes to lighting up an idea. It takes focus, management and collaboration.”

Freeing Herself To Show Up Fully

“It took me a long time to feel comfortable as an authentic leader. Growing up in the world I grew up in, as an LGBTQ+ individual, was challenging,” she notes. Recently at a bank branch, she saw a sticker related to the LGBTQ+ community about celebrating differences. It struck her to imagine the impact that seeing that message would have made early on in her career.

“When I first started my career, I was lying by omission, often doing what LGBTQ+ people do…not using pronouns for your partner. It’s only in the last ten years that I have been comfortable enough to be honest about who I am and to bring my full self to the equation.”

What you feel you cannot say begins to grow heavy and become a burden. Tyler imagines carrying a sixty-pound barbell all those years. “When I put that burden down visually in my head, it was exceptionally freeing,” she says. “When I freed myself of that burden, opportunities in my career opened up.”

For example, at a work town hall, Tyler recently shared her personal journey and the value of bringing her full self to work. She was commended by the head of her division for showing up as her true self and was applauded for doing so, exhibiting the traits of leadership that Accenture values.

“I cannot tell you how much positive feedback I received just for being true to who I am and being vocal about it,” says Tyler. “Leaders at Accenture have been phenomenal in recognizing the power in whatever differences you bring to work and the ability to bring your full self.” And sharing her experiences of exclusion has built bridges of empathy with others who have faced challenges. LGBTQIA+ peers have approached her inspired by her authenticity and, in turn, let down their own protective walls.

Advocating and Inspiring Others

“Freeing myself up to be myself empowered me to be an advocate for others. It is important for me to pay it forward by being an advocate in my community.”

Tyler is on the Board of Be The Rainbow, an LGBTQIA+ nonprofit organization in her Long Island hometown. On their third Pride March, Tyler is excited to be opening minds and hearts to create a greater platform of equity in which all can have a voice.

In her training and at work, Tyler’s approach is comprised of experimentation and optimization. She often tests the waters, dips her toe in, tries out different messages and approaches. What she found when she ‘came out’ is that the response was much more positive than she had anticipated. She encourages others to consider who they can safely share with – a person, a group – in order to build that positivity. Tyler acknowledges that the experience of speaking one’s truth, no matter the reaction, is alone invigorating and empowering.

The Intersection of Identity and Innovation

Tyler admires that her daughter’s generation wields identity and labels quite differently. “Labels are fluid and I know that my daughter and her friends are comfortable at the same time with no labels or multiple ones: Imagine what you could do if you were not carrying the burden of the sixty-pound barbell, or invisible burden, every day?”

At Accenture, Tyler is fascinated by the intersection of innovation and identity – particularly how removing obstacles around identity frees you up to create and innovate. She considers cryptanalyst Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the film The Imitation Game) who developed the ability to decode messages and the predecessor to the computer, and who was also tortured for being homosexual.

“I think about what more amazing things he could have done. He was such an innovator, even with the constraints of conversion therapy and being tortured,” she notes. “What aperture could have opened if individuals like Turing could have been safe to express their identity freely? I’m interested in that tension for any minority who is held back because of societal constraints or one they put on themselves. I’m fascinated by the intersection of how innovative you are as a thinker and the ability to free yourself up to feel comfortable to think differently.”

Why Failure Is Growth

Early on in her career, Tyler worked on developing and launching a new product that consolidated all utility bills into one billing statement. For various reasons, after two years of pretests and pilots, the project failed to launch. But her functional leader was an innovator who believed in failing often and failing fast. Instead of berating the team, he applauded the risks and innovation and threw the team a “failure party” and handed out awards. The team received their best performance reviews that year.

“I learned the importance of reinforcing that failure can actually spur innovation,” says Tyler. “I was very lucky to find leaders that encouraged failing. I know that it may sound trite but, to me, the age-old notion that failure begets growth is very true.”

As a result, Tyler encourages her teams to take calculated risks and experiment: “It’s okay to fail because you learn and those learnings bring you closer to success. Because you WILL eventually succeed. Perfection at the sake of innovation is failure in itself. You must try and also not be afraid to be curious, and that effort and curiosity are successes in themselves. ”

Tyler has two daughters, 15 and 18, a freshman in high school and college, respectively. Her wife, Beth, is a special education teacher in Queens. Recently, her oldest daughter “failed” to get into her first college choice. After the initial disappointment, she applied to an array of different schools that she would otherwise not have considered. She now feels “at home” at UNC Chapel Hill where she is thriving – an example of how failure can lead to the growth you didn’t see coming.

To be surrounded by her family and watch them grow are her greatest successes, and Tyler now embraces sharing those successes with others.

By Aimee Hansen

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Mary Cassai: Senior Vice President, Perioperative Services, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital

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Mary Cassai“When you’re building teams, you always want to be strongly committed to the diversity of your team’s experience and ideas,” says Mary Cassai. “You don’t want to have uniformity in thought or expertise, as it could challenge disruption and innovation.”

Cassai is responsible for all operational oversight for Perioperative Services at NYP, including 140 operating rooms, 10 central sterile reprocessing departments and 40 endoscopy suites, producing over 180,000 procedures annually.

Converting Empathy Into Purpose

“I love problem solving. I am driven by challenge and uncertainty,” says Cassai. “I find comfort in bridging operational gaps and in understanding the dynamics of people and process that will lead to the best outcome and solution.”

Cassai finds purpose by creating the best possible environment of care for both patients and the interdisciplinary teams. She loves building relationships, partnerships and discovery – as well as finding what inspires people, the why it matters; and how different pieces of the puzzle and people come together to create the greatest results.

While in nursing school, her uncle was diagnosed with end-stage liver disease cancer. Observing the gaps in his bedside care validated why she was going into nursing. From a young age, she has always been driven by empathy and a keen sense of what empathy means; which is invaluable in healthcare: “I sometimes call it my superpower. I feel like I can decipher quickly how folks feel in certain dynamics.”

At the age of eight, she struggled with the diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which she remembers as world changing: “Rather than suffer through it, I made it work in my benefit in terms of my own perseverance and seeing how I could optimize some of that compulsive tendency into good and being the most productive and healthy.”

She accredits her parents with not ignoring the condition or hiding it away, but rather handling it directly with consideration and thoughtfulness: “I think that experience, which both pained me and also allowed me to become much stronger and even more empathetic, led me towards this desire of being in healthcare.”

Orchestrating Teams to Harmonize

In her present corporate remit, much of Cassai’s work is in leading multiple teams across the enterprise to improve clinical and operational outcomes. She provides the oversight of all strategic planning as it relates to operating room and endoscopy operations across 10 campuses.

Empathy comes into play differently than it did back in her bedside days: “It’s the ability to understand quickly what each person’s strengths are and how to leverage that best across teams in order to achieve success.”

She has found that when you have the right diversity of people and experience in a room, you come to the end-result faster because of positive friction and the ability to leverage each other’s thoughts in a spirited way.

Agility has become even more important as a leadership skill, especially in managing increasing complexity, whether it be facing the “untoward circumstances” of COVID-19 and having to create more hospital bed capacity for the surge of acute patients or transitioning from a clinical operational world into a more technology-based environment.

“Orchestrating” part of the why it matters for Cassai means helping everyone to harmonize together as a group – even beyond words through body language and action. Encouraging fluid, interrelating working dynamics – to drive for the best solutions. The previous years’ Covid 19 required orchestrating unprecedented collaboration: “We had to figure this out together, and that’s what we did. The solidarity of the team was absolutely amazing. It was beautiful in the face of disaster, and I walked away feeling like this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Fail Fast and Fail Forward

Humility has served Cassai, including being able to transparently acknowledge to her team when something didn’t go as planned. She’s learned the criticality of asking more questions and leading by coaching her teams.

Encouraged throughout her career by mentors who supported her professionally and in growing in emotional maturity, she received the great advice to: “Fail fast, fail forward, move on.”

When failure happens, Cassai focuses on understanding what could have been done differently, to learn from the mistake, but not to harp on it, noting that failing is less about the failing and more about the learning that comes after, which often makes for even better results. She embraces this mental strategy for herself and imparts this on her teams.

“It’s important that we don’t live in monotony and that we are absolutely thought-provoking, disruptive, and creative. If we start to stifle that because of the unknown, then we’re never going to advance as quickly as we need to.” Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress.

This advice also helped her to step up, professionally, and take on roles she hadn’t foreseen herself in: “Having been given that gift very early on allowed me to be more fearless in my choices and allowed me to rise into what others saw in me with less trepidation.”

Being Part of An Inclusive Organization

As a lesbian woman, Cassai feels blessed to be part of such an inclusive organization as NYP: “It is definitely an honor to work in a place where I feel so much pride not only for the organization, but for how much pride they take in their people. It’s been truly a feeling of belonging and it gets even better and more powerful day-by-day and week-by-week. I can’t say enough about the sense of belonging and safety that this organization provides.”

She recalls how warmly she and her son’s mom were embraced from the start. Senior leadership demonstrated such enthusiasm and joy in meeting and learning about who Mary called family.

Cassai is also proud of the consistently inclusive hiring and promotional practices at NYP: “There’s been a genuine and tremendous amount of focus by the organization on creating diverse platforms of teams.”

Earned Comfort in Her Skin

Early on in her journey as a registered nurse, Cassai recalls she was not as comfortable in her own skin as a lesbian woman as she is today, and had moments when she felt like she wasn’t being who others wanted her to be – not because anyone else said so, but from her own insecurities.

What Cassai did experience were people would question her sexuality aloud and sometimes make discriminating comments. Worn down by the constant questioning of her sexuality, she decided to take a stance and cut her hair short in her mid-20’s, hoping that would make it clear: “I made the decision to own who I am.”

Shortly after, strangers have said some hateful things to her based on appearance, and she remembers thinking she needed to empower herself to turn the pain into pride: “I had to learn to not take it personal, this was their issue, not mine. I acknowledged that this is going to happen. It’s not okay, but it’s going to happen. I was really shaken up but I just focused on what matters and became my own advocate and ally.”

Having experienced moments when I was not supported for who I am and was, Cassai has made it a purpose to be the person who does: “From that moment forward, I said to myself that I would never allow anyone I worked with, or was close to, to be on the receiving end of that.”

As a leader, Cassai wants to make it safe for people to always feel like they can speak up. It’s important for her to promote a feeling of safety, belonging and acknowledgment. She focuses on checking in, asking the right questions to understand how they are feeling: “I make a conscious choice to acknowledge what’s happening in the world and within my teams on a day-to-day basis, even if it’s just to check in.”

Cassai considers her seven-year-old son to be her world, and loves spending time with him going on adventures, watching movies and doing sporting activities. She rides the Peloton twice a day, enjoys reading and cooking – and hopes to build a pizza oven one day.

By Aimee Hansen

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5 Ways To Become a Better LGBTQ+ Ally

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LGBTQ+ allyBeing an LGBTQ+ ally is being an advocate for, and active participant in, building cultural inclusion.

According to Fast Company, “Allyship refers to everyday acts which challenge behavioral norms and support members of marginalized groups through an awareness of the issues being faced by others.”

A team of professors in Harvard Business Review view “allyship” as: “a strategic mechanism used by individuals to become collaborators, accomplices, and coconspirators who fight injustice and promote equity in the workplace through supportive personal relationships and public acts of sponsorship and advocacy. Allies endeavor to drive systemic improvements to workplace policies, practices, and culture.”

Here are five ways to be an accomplice in creating cultural inclusion:

1. Cultivate Awareness and Empathy.

A lot of advice for being a better ally focuses on self-education. But what is the objective of that? Cultivating awareness and empathy.

A prerequisite of support is cultivating awareness of realities and painful disadvantages that you do not have direct experience of: becoming aware of the bias and discrimination and understanding why it causes harm. The absence of having to experience that reality is what we call ‘privilege’.

Allyship requires a willingness to open your eyes and place yourself in another’s shoes as they tell you how that experience exists for them through their eyes.

In their March 2020 survey of 2,000 LGBTQ+ employees and 2,000 straight employees, in partnership with NYC LGBT Community Center, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found an interesting insight.

Natural allyship is on the rise, because the separation between young LGBTQ people and their straight peers is more narrow. Compared to their older counterparts, straight employees under 35 are 1.6 times more likely to know LGBTQ colleagues, 3.6 times more likely to join ally programs and 3 times more likely to find value in colleagues being ‘out’.

The younger the employee group, the greater the awareness of discrimination. For example, only one-fourth of straight 55-64 year olds witnessed any discrimination in the past year, compared to 57% of their LGBTQ+ peers. But 85% of straight 18-24 year olds witnessed it, much closer to the 91% of LGBTQ+ who also did.

That change reflects a much smaller gap and increased sensitivity in the ability to see certain behaviors as harmful to certain groups, even if you do not belong to the group.

By expanding your exposure to the stories of others, whether through personal connection, documentaries, books or following LGBTQ+ leaders and media, you increase your awareness of the nuances of discrimination and build empathy. Start here: Are you aware of the common microaggressions that LGBTQ+ people experience?

2. Recognize Identity As Personally Defined and Fluid.

As theglasshammer covered recently, social identity is increasingly becoming more personal, intersectional, fluid and multiple. But more than anything, identity is increasingly self-identified. The myriad range of LGBTQ+ experiences are far from universal.

It’s important to realize that language matters, and not make assumptions about the identity or orientation of another person or about what that belonging means for them.

By allowing others to tell you about themselves through their voice, rather than make assumptions, you remain curious and allow others to find their authenticity. An inside-out connection that begins with the internal connection with self, and interacting with others and the world from the space of that inner truthfulness, is the basis of authenticity.

Being conscious of your own language helps to avoid making assumptions, such as using gender-neutral terms like ‘partner’. Honoring a person’s self-identity includes observing the personal pronouns that people choose for themselves and normalizing that choice.

Certain short-cut assumptions are well-conditioned in our brains, so it takes effort to not make those automatic leaps. But when it comes to another person’s life, it’s far more connective to show up by listening to them before you assert assumptions about who they are.

3. Embrace The Growth in Discomfort.

“Allyship is not knowing it all and never making mistakes. That’s impossible,” writes Freddy McConnell, host of Pride & Joy BBC podcast. “It’s putting in the effort and not expecting trophies.”

Allyship requires vulnerability, because you’re going to be clumsy at times. As McConnell writes: “When my friend came out to me as nonbinary, I practised their pronouns in private. Being trans does not imbue me with a special gift for unlearning familiar speech patterns.”

It’s not about getting it right or wrong, but about being open to learning. Before we challenge any unconscious bias, stereotypes or assumptions in the culture around us, we often foremost come to confront the existence of them within ourselves, even as part of the LGBTQ+ community.

Often the roots of rejection (of others and self-rejection) are shame-based beliefs and conditioning. Evolving involves unlearning that cultural conditioning, including the habit to shame ourselves if we get it wrong.

A willingness to be wrong, admit when you’re wrong, own your mistake and be receptive to guidance is what is valuable to a growth mindset and to keeping the focus on your intention of better allyship.

“Allyship is actually more about the mistakes than the things that you do right,” says human rights advocate Maybe Burke, who conducts allyship training on behalf of the Transgender Training Institute. “It’s about how you deal with those mistakes and move forward.”

4. Treat Ally as a Verb.

As suggested in a University College London (UCL) blog: “Think of ‘ally’ as an action rather than a label.” Being an ally is not about whether you consider yourself as an ally, but how you show up in support consistently.

In their research, BCG found that only 34% of straight employees always intervene when they see an encounter. As written in HBR: “When you witness discrimination, don’t approach the victim later to offer sympathy. Give him or her your support in the moment.”

Remaining silent is a comfortable form of passive collusion—it assures that heteronormative assumptions and microaggressions remain invisible, insidious and unchallenged within the fabric of an organizational culture, and puts the emotional burden on LGBTQ+ people to be the only ones calling out these behaviors. It also makes it more vulnerable for them to do so.

Are you willing to speak up when you hear something that feels wrong or discriminatory or does not sit well, inside of your heart? And will you be that voice in the room, even when the LGBTQ+ person may not be in it? Are you being an ally (verbing it) in the moment it’s called for?

5. Uplift LGBTQ+ Voices.

Ultimately, allyship embraces an interdependent lens: a culture is not really working for anybody if it’s not welcoming and nutritive for everybody. An organizational culture needs to be a win-win for all employees on all levels to be maximally effective.

That’s why performative allyship is dangerous—it comes from a place of ego protection, does not integrate win-win and keeps the focus on the appearance of allyship (the guise of doing good) rather than fundamentally being aligned to real organizational change for everyone’s good.

Performative allyship fears losing its position or does not really embrace the point.

Speaking up as an ally is not about speaking over, but raising everyone’s voice. Be willing to ask how you can support your LGBTQ+ colleagues in the way that is most meaningful for them.

While your voice will be needed as an ally, your success will be evidenced in the greater space for marginalized LGBTQ+ voices at the center, not the edges, of the organizational conversation—down to the small and casual daily interactions that form relationships and culture.

(If you are a leader who wants to develop your skills as an inclusive leader to leverage diversity and truly understand the topic as a strategic capability, work with Nicki Gilmour on this topic as she coaches male and female leaders and managers who are growing their skills and evolving their behaviors to lead the current and future top talent of their firms. For an exploratory call, please book a session here.)

By Aimee Hansen

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