Christian Mccarrick:
[0:00] Good afternoon Jason welcome to the show.

Jason Wong:
[0:03] Thanks for having me.

Christian Mccarrick:
[0:04] Absolutely so I think this is a very special podcast episode actually in one of the ballrooms of the Hilton Midtown on the mall location as they say with Jason Wong so thank you for joining me in New York City.

Jason Wong:
[0:16] My pleasure.

Christian Mccarrick:
[0:18] Awesome Jason and we got to know each other a bit kind of last few months and that’s an awesome too but why don’t you give my listeners a little bit of background of kind of who you are and where you got to be where you are today.

Jason Wong:
[0:29] Yeah what’s up my name is Jason Wong I’ve been in the tech business for about 20 years now she got my start working in an IT office at my college,
I’m doing the whole HTML and JavaScript coding that turned into a full-time job are from there.
That got me to Yahoo for about 4 years work for Yahoo sports,
are the news editorial site moved back to New York after that and spent seven years at sea or I really.
I just got my teeth in management started mandating with three ended up overseeing a team 85 all of infrastructure development for free at sea.
After my time has been short amount of time a smaller company and then now I’m on my own doing some Consulting organization work leadership coaching and hopefully some some tea nice stuff is well diversity inclusion.

Christian Mccarrick:
[1:30] Accent will get into a little bit time or at the end about kind of what you’re doing now and how people cannot going to reach out to you for that but when you went into your first team three people with the best just got promoted to that suggestion get hired at Sea as a manager.

Jason Wong:
[1:44] Yeah she is started there as an engineer and I like to describe my career as a series of crises one after another.

Christian Mccarrick:
[1:50] It’ll never stop actually we just talk and I went today.

Jason Wong:
[1:55] And this made a crisis was we were growing rapidly and we needed to.
Start supporting folks asthma with the management team and I happened to have been approached for the opportunity,
I think like any startup we thought we would reinvent management and so it was Pitch to me as an idea it was like yeah you’ll have three or four engineers and that way you can still find time to code and do the things you came here for,
and I think three or four months later I had eight reports. 1 months after that I have 13 reports and then I never saw terminal again.

Christian Mccarrick:
[2:31] Nicoletta Peyton switch,
to get people to manage and don’t worry it’s the same but different.

Jason Wong:
[2:36] Yeah.

Christian Mccarrick:
[2:37] One thing I ask all my guests to is a what what was the name of the biggest mistakes you made that you can publicly discuss course management.

Jason Wong:
[2:47] Yeah goodness so many.
I think my biggest mistake is when I started out managing I really felt like it was my job to Rage Against the Machine.

Christian Mccarrick:
[2:59] Okay sure.

Jason Wong:
[3:00] Which is one of those things where you can get away with for a little while but eventually you’d understand that you are part of the machine and so I think I made a number of moves there which probably work against my.
Better interest in a company’s better just.

Christian Mccarrick:
[3:17] Which is actually interesting saying I mean I think I’ve done the same thing in the past right you start off being sort of revolutionary but understanding that,
how do you be effective inside of a system and it’s not always like railing on it from the outside,
and then committing your teams that know you’re not becoming you know the Dilbert manager you’re actually trying to be effective for them to get the change you want it’s just different than the Pitchfork you know.

Jason Wong:
[3:42] Yeah yeah I can’t I can’t watch the office because it just.

Christian Mccarrick:
[3:47] You you rinse you are doing some Consulting now and as a manager and a leader you ended up managing managers,
what was some of the advice that you give to new managers entering the SpaceX or one piece of advice you like to give them when they said their first week of a job where you know they’re going to be a manager in a week or two and I’ll help repair.

Jason Wong:
[4:06] Yeah it is I think the question I get most often is how do I know I’m doing a good job.

Christian Mccarrick:
[4:11] Okay sure.

Jason Wong:
[4:12] Ask manager and that one I think is for me really comes down to a philosophical question of as a manager you need to.

[4:23] When you’re and I see you been and I see for 5 to 10 years before you’re someone approaches you to become a manager usually and during that time you,
good Garnet a positive reputation for knowing things you are the person who knows all about this system you are the person who can debug these issues when you become a manager,
all that stuff goes away.
And it doesn’t matter how much you read up on management or how much you read up on human systems humans are humans and you’ll be in a one-on-one and you will.
Maybe ask a question that you don’t know the answer to you and you going to run these experiments that have long pad.
Wong me a long time before you understand if a fork or not right is that how do you sustain yourself through that.
So
Grant Oaks is if you can wake up everyday and look at yourself in the mirror and say I’m managed to my values and that’s it that’s a good sign right and.
If you find a place that will your values align,
he will do extremely well and if your values don’t align you have two options one of them is to change your company and the other one is to change your company.

Christian Mccarrick:
[5:47] Keppra black and white.
Yep okay and,
you know so I think one of the things to that we’ve talked about and you had a talk at the lead of in Austin this year which I recommend everyone to listen to the podcast doing Michonne on so put it on there to check it out and it was about can a bootstrapping inclusion,
so I like to spend the rest of the show as I do tend to focus on one topic here talking a little bit about that okay and I know that you work in technology for a while you’ve run multiple teams and,
was there a moment that you looked around and said this is a problem right or is it something that over your career started becoming more and more of like a bug you noticing something was there one moment or is it like hey it’s something really needs to change how do I go about doing that.

Jason Wong:
[6:34] Yeah I was largely uneducated about it and it wasn’t until our VP of engineering at the time Mark Hedlund really initiated a lot of this change at that see you could see.
The effects of what we’re doing we had an agent organization which was like 90 95% men building for a customer base that was 90 95% women.

Christian Mccarrick:
[6:57] A little out of touch.

Jason Wong:
[6:59] And we were missing wildly all the time right beside.

Christian Mccarrick:
[7:02] You wonder why.

Jason Wong:
[7:04] So but.
When that had one when work sort of made this initiate this move in and decided that we’re going to be the first organization,
that was the turning point for me about it starting to see just the gross Injustice is ever happening around me to,
thought you were not you know straight white men.

Christian Mccarrick:
[7:28] Sure sure and I think one of the things that,
a lot of losers know is they know in general like lots of benefits for having a good team and having a diverse team and but there’s been a lot of research into this field right so,
what what are some of the research statistics in Odyssey that show that having diverse team is actually better for the business.

Jason Wong:
[7:56] Yeah I know I shouldn’t Avalanche of information out there it’s kind of its kind of absurd,
so pretty and that one States like new,
play some percent more likely to have Superior valuation if that’s the diversity,
there’s a paper out of North Carolina that says on average diverse teams launched two more products here.

Christian Mccarrick:
[8:25] Which is something we could all use.

Jason Wong:
[8:26] Definitely an interesting one out of catalyst and for them they had to study that showed that companies with the highest percentage of women board directors outperformed those with the least by 53%.

Christian Mccarrick:
[8:41] Tremendous.

Jason Wong:
[8:42] And I think my car talk is I don’t know if I’ve ever worked on a product that has had that kind of impact for the company.

Christian Mccarrick:
[8:49] It was as if I was a vendor selling a product or service to a CEO I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demand if I could promise those results
right so but then with that being said why do you think has been
so slow to change it wiser is it reluctance or is it just inertia like why is there been not as much ad option of having you no more diverse teams.

Jason Wong:
[9:11] Yeah I think we’ve just normalized the TV into touch with you hard to actually,
take ourselves we’ve we’ve all been programmed to some degree around by our environment by social cues and that programming has systemically biased us towards a particular outcome intact,
if you look at all the stories at,
7 hole today there towards a specific viewpoint on you know how they got there right there was the.
Steve Jobs archetype Does Elon Musk archetype in we have somehow,
canonize that as the only way to succeed and so when we try to replicate that we we’ve gone into these areas where we no longer try to entertain different ways of success different ways of means of achieving success,
and did a ton of Survivor by a ship survivorship bias in our industry interviews being the most glaring example like why do you ask a question to ask in your interview is probably because you ask those questions and,
you got pass interview process there before I left you could interview question but how does that align to what it actually take to do the job.

Christian Mccarrick:
[10:24] And to my guess I mention this before it’s so some of the reasons why I do this podcast it’s why I asked a lot of my guest early on know how they got to where they got to be where they are,
because there is no clear path or no right path to becoming an engineering leader write an engineering manager,
I had people coming through codecademy is or literature backgrounds or more serious backgrounds but again if the point is,
for all you listeners if you want to get into leadership or you want to advance in your career don’t let the fact that you might not have come through whatever that quote on quote your right path is to stop you right it’s available to anyone here.
No okay so imma imma take leader I’m the manager what can I do to starting tomorrow,
help me if I wanted to sort of improve diversity in my company or on my team’s at least.

Jason Wong:
[11:12] Yeah that’s a good question so when I was doing this,
the first time in NC actually didn’t have much of an approach to benefit a lot from all the systems are already in place and all the things are happening at the leadership level when I found myself sort of trying to sell my own I found that,
it really helped to approach this as if it were any other initiative that was important to the organization and so for me it was really really help to be clear about what we’re going to do and why we’re trying to do it and that’s catching it in.
Are engineering values that’s that’s developing a vision and Mission and a and a strategy for how we’re going to approach this.

Christian Mccarrick:
[11:58] Can you talk about I think too that you can’t talk about diversity without inclusivity and,
thank you note 8 Houston had a quote to about you have to be inclusion first and what is that what are the problem is that we see today in technology that are hindering include.

Jason Wong:
[12:17] Yeah so many.

Christian Mccarrick:
[12:19] Delena or.

Jason Wong:
[12:21] I think you can talk about and it don’t take this lightly but the the more nocuous ones which are.
Pay pay apps right pay different is what we’re not paying people equal pay for equal work,
I already talked about careers technician and how underrepresented groups progressed to careers and get promoted at a slower rate than their white male pairs very serious but the lighter side right,
the more heavier things that we talked about things like harassment and even assault that actually happen and.
I mean and I think there’s a there was a study by the New York Times right that said that gets third of men,
self-reported that they done took in the past year in the workplace that could be considered objectionable a type of harassment right there.

Christian Mccarrick:
[13:14] Self-reported so it’s probably low.
I want to go back into the career stagnation piece because I think this is an important thing for hiring managers to be very conscious about,
and knowing that looking at if you have if you’re viewing resumes coming in that you might have someone may be hiring for a manager or director position and that person.
You have to look at what other responsibilities matching their title and lot of cases right cuz I’ve seen you can’t just it’s hard to.
Had a requirement safe for being out of position before and it’s important for us to look at not only kind of the responsibilities they had maybe I should the title to have it also would you think that they’re,
their abilities and capabilities are moving forward because you don’t want to propagate someone who says oh as a female leader is a woman leader who did not get promoted or previous job and hold that against that person of an underrepresented group,
because their company that came from was participating in some of the career stagnation intentionally or not so I think it’s important for managers to really look hard when they’re looking at people from,
resumes from underrepresented groups to really had that conversation peel-back oh,
it didn’t have the title this but you’re really managing for team so that’s a little odd so and then making sure you can use that if you have to go to your HR to Department Sableye,
or you can take out the requirement from your job posting the beginning.

Jason Wong:
[14:39] Yeah, totally it is there’s also a lot of research on there that shows that underrepresented groups are underleveled in La underpayment also under level think so.
If you see a senior manager who is managing 14,
are probably operating a director-level and they just aren’t level I’m also going to go the opposite way right staff engineer from Google who came through our interview process and we underleveled interview process and said the person is not.
ARB small company in the mic but mic my mind almost exploded.

Christian Mccarrick:
[15:13] Yes it’s right there is that Marquis by us sometimes.

Jason Wong:
[15:18] Yeah so it is it is it is what it wanted to kill the skills you need to build is being and identify and CD situations so you can act on it.

Christian Mccarrick:
[15:32] No excellent you mentioned before again about Vision Vision vision mission and strategy just like any other project right what goes into some of those different pieces when you’re talking about putting together a diversity and inclusion program to edit your team or company.

Jason Wong:
[15:45] Yeah I think it’s,
what are things I’d like to practice is sort of this Mission setting leadership style is probably like in the emotional intelligence language it’s in and they called up in authority to style where you paint this patient has bright future and say you didn’t come with me,
and I think that’s really good Vision it does so what are you looking to do is motivate and inspire people to,
help you achieve your goals and suppress I actually,
use the vision statement from American University have not good at writing fiction statement so I decided to borrow from from the pro tip borrow.

Christian Mccarrick:
[16:29] Which is fine right I think another thing for managers were they are doing Doris and inclusion or anything you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for a lot of the stuff we’re doing don’t spend all that time to resurface Lee Pyle on the shoulders of come before you and use what you think is going to work best for your environment,
make sure you give credit where due course but I certainly use what others have so you can get there quicker.

Jason Wong:
[16:50] Yeah.

Christian Mccarrick:
[16:51] Turn the build vs. buy vintage earring.

Jason Wong:
[16:53] Totally totally Jimmy came up there with there is,
a place where people of all identities and experiences are understood appreciated and fully included in the community and Equitable treatment and outcomes prevail.
So there is that piece for the mission piece I needed something that,
we can all participate in no matter what I left was inform me that was creating a company of allies
and a litter folks who have privilege to lenders privileged that privilege to folks with less privileged.

Christian Mccarrick:
[17:32] Nobody wanted everyone submit to just cuz I think it’s important to understand that,
they’ve also done lots of studies to wear it right it it shouldn’t be up to the responsibility of the underrepresented group in an organization to leave the change and in some cases it’s been shown that those that do can be punished for it,
it’s so there’s a reluctance for people to me that chain so I think that’s why,
all of our listeners here I think becoming a lie is important and for you wonder what are some of the ways that a manager or appear or something in an organization can become an ally to the sconce.

Jason Wong:
[18:10] Yeah that is great I think the first part is actually just being able to see the inequities are happening in these situations that occur in the day-to-day interactions with hooks.
I get the question login,
I’m just a straight white male I don’t know I’m part the problem I don’t know what I can do and actually it’s a straight white men do you have to have the most influence on the outcomes you’re probably going to mess it up,
at the start right so that they find ways to listen right find ways in,
I just made a conversation where you are actually talking like you just listening and when you hear something that piques your curiosity or doesn’t quite jive with what,
you understanding of the world is go do some research on that topic,
pictures about it I’m trying to understand the different perspectives that are going on on ultimately the goal is amino,
one day you’ll have done enough listening internet research that something will happen in the workplace at the meeting or an interaction and you can build identify,
this is not right and you going to be able to say like or and speak out and oil and your privilege to help tell that person out.

Christian Mccarrick:
[19:27] Okay and then you talk the end of the last piece of that was some strategy so what are some of the strategies to teach you things to do than once you’ve got that vision and Mission.

Jason Wong:
[19:37] Yeah so for me the strategy was build awareness provide education and an affect behavioral change,
awareness is I still do have a strong belief in that engineering spirit and that problem solving spirit and so pudding,
that information highlighting the problems I think for me,
gives my Engineers tools and our inability to actually understand the problem right and get curious about a problem and so,
on the way to spend it is talking about it and equities are happening it is.
Highlighting issues of the Justice or or discrimination of racism I did a lot of talking about current events at the time in terms of,
by the time binary Capital happens the Google manifest what happened,
and these things affect your peers right and you might not be aware of them but I’m going to bring these issues into our other place so that we can build an awareness of it and then hopefully empathy it we can work together and help each other through it.

Christian Mccarrick:
[20:46] How do you start a conversation like that likes it as soon as a major news story going on it’s affecting number of employees do is it something you’re right you calling all hands to you and it went to wait for someone to approach them.

Jason Wong:
[20:57] Yeah I am a subscriber to a week in review,
then so must we must have my communication is done till we can review and saying them a pierce Bishop date but also be hearing some things are on my mind and I use that space talk about.

Christian Mccarrick:
[21:13] And then how do you distill a tape in conversation cuz that we could have used a little bit one way right have you done facilitated feedback in conversation for getting other people’s points of view.

Jason Wong:
[21:22] Yeah some of it is facilitating within the week in review so it’s a Google Docs I know I can comment on it a lot of it is done and what a onesie,
be shocked about the power communication.

Christian Mccarrick:
[21:35] Yes yes and misc.

Jason Wong:
[21:36] Read it right and so when you throw something out there,
and you make it known that this is a priority for you and you care about it you know your your engine organization will will pick up on that and they’ll ask you about it and you can have to become stations.

Christian Mccarrick:
[21:56] Okay and then any other things for awareness that you didn’t work.

Jason Wong:
[22:00] We

[22:20] What do you think we did was I asked,
show me after all these events happened I asked my team to start diversifying their social networks just follow different voices right on the Twitter or whatever social networks you subscribe to you,
the goal being we needed to change archive of what an engine look like and what it into your sound like and what and and.
Bring those experiences into our consciousness.

Christian Mccarrick:
[22:48] Okay yeah that’s your diversity of thought to I think is important and what you’re seeing,
is out there oh it’s where the people are not all you know straight white men right there’s lots of other people out there in the second thing you mentioned to is awareness is a good first point,
and then you go around education it was some of the educational things that you were able to do inside of your teams in NC.

Jason Wong:
[23:10] This was actually,
one piece I struggle with the most I mean I think there’s a lot of easy education play it’s right there is the unconscious bias play there might be a workshop here and there that you can that you can do.
They’re still I think if I’m going to research of like what what kind of unconscious bias,
is helpful or not helpful and some of that stuff is still unsettled and also requires budget and timing inside I didn’t really have that’s what my,
disposal so something that we did you would want as I put together reading list.
I think what’s interesting about it is inclusion and diversity is a topic from super deep right and they give like 4-year degrees in.
Graduate degrees out in this stuff like it is well studied and researched this is not a new frontier.

Christian Mccarrick:
[24:09] Well neither is management but they throw Engineers into the deep end anyway so.

Jason Wong:
[24:13] Totally and so there are a lot of folks you like I,
I’m not qualified to teach this stuff and so I just again borrowed and put the other two resources and when folks approached me about a given topic I could say haters hear some interesting meeting about,
there’s a piece there was a talk that I give on allyship and what that looks like answer to some behaviors of Valor ship it is largely based on the work of Toria Gibbs and he and I’ll pass,
I formally both formally Betsy and I gave that Target at our company as well and we had many interesting discussions about that.

Christian Mccarrick:
[24:54] And maybe something can get other companies in your new your new job they’re currently doing right now,
I think the last thing to you talked about was affecting behavioral change in one what does that mean and then and then what are the some of the things that went into that.

Jason Wong:
[25:12] Yeah I mean this is like this super uncomfortable part,
like it at 8 uncomfortable bringing some topic into the workplace bacon when it is kind of uncomfortable,
being like his and his unit organization but let’s go read up on the feminism,
it is way way uncomfortable when we actually have to start correcting our behaviors right and behaviors are interesting habits are interesting and we need and human that really hard for us,
to build you have it’s like we really need to create Frameworks and and and condition ourselves.
And so something to happen to like if you if I heard or saw anything that was exclusionary like I would pull a person aside and have a conversation like that joke about lgbtq folks and not okay,
the statement about your girlfriend not okay type of things so does I handled messing around.
At home bases as they came in came out took their Dispatch they were the bits around.

[26:27] Updating calibration in making sure like we have started and developed a practice of looking at,
our entire organization and making sure that I put eye drops in Enfield Square,
do you pay the same rate the same amount of money for,
at all the levels as they’re done under-represented peers and also we wanted to take a look at it career progression we had,
all the species that attract one of us has promoted depression and how long is people staying on average in their levels,
just to ensure that we would keep an eye on that. Such things there was.

[27:23] Oh we were removed racist black emojis which is.
Interesting thing right emojis are these weird expressions and you know oftentimes are used as sarcasm or comedy or wit and I think it’s really easy for us,
to excuse bad behavior if there wasn’t bad intent.

Christian Mccarrick:
[27:49] Sure yeah you can’t separate the intent from the effect.

Jason Wong:
[27:53] Right right when I say in general is like car accidents but you don’t intend to get into car accidents but at the end of the day your car is.

Christian Mccarrick:
[27:59] Yes I think I’ve used didn’t you need me to run over your neighbor’s cat but you did in their piss.

Jason Wong:
[28:05] Exactly.

Christian Mccarrick:
[28:05] We’re sad everything.

Jason Wong:
[28:08] Multiple things that we had to rename some of our software projects they are named in a gendered way,
and so.

Christian Mccarrick:
[28:18] Give an example.

Jason Wong:
[28:19] Yeah that’s project shortly after I joined this company called log lady that went out and it was part of a log decoration platform so,
appropriately named I think it’s on the surface it looks fine,
but when we serve anthropomorphize our technology we bring with us our biases right and so,
weather things I talk about is imagine what the Opera filter review is for this piece of software right and you know someone gets into room and says what happens when Lolita goes down,
right in that already know little stickers in the in the peanut gallery,
there is no law that you might be great today but at some point it will not be great and how do we talk about our software technology in a way when they went to stop. Right we generally.
Do very poorly like you know that never works type of things and so we wanted to get.

Christian Mccarrick:
[29:20] Old Country Place in United.

Jason Wong:
[29:25] Until I think about these things in terms of conclusion that writing this content of inclusion debt and if you incur debt every time you talk about your technology then you’re going to be in trouble because as in any organization going to talk about your technology,
all the time.

Christian Mccarrick:
[29:40] To meet one very specific thing to chat about here and it’s about the conversation topic you you went too often times as managers we’re going to come into an organization,
and we’re going to look at our hopefully you know our spreadsheet or whatever it is of all the salaries for everyone hopefully with a company that has some sort of leveling and if you’re not well that’s we can tackle that as a separate conversation and it have in the past,
you might find some gross examples of disparity and I’ve run into this in the past myself to.
If you want to make them whole but we can’t possibly give that person that much of a raise it wants right how do you do a do do what increments do you do it all at once if you do auto it wants your what’s the argument with a case you have to go to an HR Finance hitting over this is what we need to do.

Jason Wong:
[30:29] Yeah so we ran all those experiments and at Sea and trying to figure out like what’s the best way to,
folks back up to par we found that doing it incrementally over time never fix the problem,
and everything about this is you know say everyone gets a 5% raise right and we’re making this Press News underpaid like a seven and a half percent raise well I went outside base is also larger so unless you’re willing to,
put a pause and everyone else’s pancreas is like your ex,
exactly you never going to catch up and in the meantime you’re perpetuating years of pay inequity.
Which is not there when I found is,
because we were doing this on a regular basis we were Mighty Med on a quarterly basis we actually really good about talking about compensation with folks and we can have conversations with them about hey this is a thing happening.

[31:29] This is an abnormality right you know we shouldn’t expect this type of bump.
All the time they wear correcting in a in an equity having us a message with HR saying we’re not going to build a habit out of this we’re not going to give people 23% raises every year.
We need to make good on,
I can make it to our folks and to the credit of HR at Sea they were super supportive.
I didn’t get much back at all,
but yeah once you build that muscle development you can have all sorts of interesting conversations about compensation and promotions and whether they correlate or don’t correlate,
and because much much easier for the managerial perspective.

Christian Mccarrick:
[32:17] The great and.
We always try or sometimes yeah one of the carrots for changing behavior is incentivizing a behavior that you would like to change towards did you do any work at all with,
from a performance standpoint and promotions I can including any sort of diversity inclusion things in that career ladder and performance.

Jason Wong:
[32:41] Oh yeah I was fortunate to be able to roll out the first career letter at this small company I was working at and we wrote inclusion into the career ladder,
so at every single level we meet expectations about,
behaviors so if you were a starting engineer like your job was just to learn about inclusive behaviors that contribute to the increase of culture as you progressed,
the level is it was your job to Mentor folks and sponsor folks.
And on the measuring side when we one of the points of performance was a power retained recruiting and retaining diverse teams that swept into the directorship roles it was about creating systems of equity,
creating processes and policies that resulted in that fool outcome for everyone type of thing so.

Christian Mccarrick:
[33:33] And a plug for Jason since Jason is also helping us do some work on her crew letter,
I’m going to use his expertise and helping us to you know make our is even better than it is today. I’ll See Arrow and I’m sure he can be more than willing to help you too and we’ll talk about that little bit.
She’s everything else that you kind of want to add does points of of things that you’ve run into,
inflection points where things are challenges that along the way that people might expect it to see at certain points.

Jason Wong:
[34:03] Yeah when I talk about inclusion only talk about two threes pivotal moments right which which function hung up on a lot and the first one is going from,
not complicit to complicit we generally like to live our lives thinking that were really good people,
or at least a nerd enough not to be actively harming others but,
you know where all can pushing somewhere she perform his kind of unavoidable because we live in a system of systems right.
And,
just like her the stages of grief like getting to acceptance is super key to moving forward right and so it’s not a question like how if we’re compressor or not it’s a question of how complicit are we going to do,
Concorde II Reflection Point is believing in Olympic sprinters of others.

Christian Mccarrick:
[35:02] Hugely important.

Jason Wong:
[35:03] Yeah yeah because of you know by its two people can do the exact same thing and end up in Wylie different places,
and so came to the point where you.
Default to believing folks when they when they surface this information to you is a place where I see a lot of like incredulous there wasn’t there’s an extension of benefit of the doubt the folks.

Christian Mccarrick:
[35:27] Yeah and really having empathy for how that affected them and if we had a speaker that came in,
add to one of our board meetings and he was an African American male but he was never growing up in New York here and his experience of say walking home from school everyday,
never bothered him but you in retrospect it turned out when he talked to his sisters that they were like afraid every single day that won’t come from school and he just had no concept that I am not affected,
every day of their lives and then I was he went into effect in a little bit as a you know as they grow into adulthood.

Jason Wong:
[36:01] Yeah. Totally and then that third should have paper pointer inflection point is investing kind of money,
like talk is cheap right now.

Christian Mccarrick:
[36:12] Sure right that’s that’s with the money where you’re at you.

Jason Wong:
[36:15] Right and when someone comes to you and says hey we need to spend the next 3 or 4 days removing master-slave terminology from our killer base,
what you going to say how you going to feel that question how are you going to talk about that to your leadership and your partners so.

Christian Mccarrick:
[36:36] Any you’ve mentioned a couple of things about you you had a other reading list that you had that something you can share.

Jason Wong:
[36:44] Oh yeah sure.

Christian Mccarrick:
[36:46] I’ll put that new to you to send it to me I can put it a link to that time I show notes for this anything maybe one or two things off the top of your head that you would recommend though is
yo hey this is so this is like a great read either about diversity inclusion or about serve management leadership in general.

Jason Wong:
[37:02] Yeah.

[37:10] Mostly say that I have most of the material I have on depression connection is biased towards gender inclusion that’s mostly where my background lies.
And my experience lies and so I pick up at 2.
Things that I need to work on and get better on overtime and so is that piece I’m in that world there is a.
Great safe remind cwit I think I’m about all of the should have explained all the systems that play and how they present,
in our workplaces environments that are really really super lightning I would definitely take a look at that.

Christian Mccarrick:
[37:54] Awesome in a post that to put that on the show notes for her own simple leadership that I owe for anyone who wants to try that okay.

Jason Wong:
[38:01] Chelsea Troy had a great post on writing inclusive inclusive addition to developing a rubric for inclusivity and then on the management side.
On the management side there I can’t read that are 10 departmental hbr articles.

Christian Mccarrick:
[38:24] You know I highly recommend hbr like either online or getting a subscription cuz if there’s a really good not necessarily always specific to Tech leadership that are really good I think thought leadership around management in general.

Jason Wong:
[38:36] Yeah totally interest enable the way they are able to communicate Frameworks it’s just really great so like,
organic almonds much intelligence that an article on that Amy Edmondson psychological safety great stuff there.
So there’s did that stuff I eat one of the books that I’ve gained a lot about you from is actually written by this guy named Adam grant called given take this model of,
should I damage the organization there’s a lot of interesting research in there that that I found that have been a repurposing to veritiv in areas that I thought was was super helpful.

Christian Mccarrick:
[39:18] Awesome thank you know as I said before give me the 32nd minute elevator pitch for certain what is Jason Wong doing today and how can you help my list be better at what they’re doing in their companies.

Jason Wong:
[39:32] Yeah I may think the main driving force for going out of my own was operating in this model where I could sign up with a company on.
One year to year four year engagement right at it full-time employment and try to bring about inclusion and diversity and equal outcomes one company at time or I could try to.
Be more democratic.

Christian Mccarrick:
[39:58] Orbi multiplier.

Jason Wong:
[39:59] I’m all right it’s not the big driving force behind what I’m doing now which is she won’t work so I called the leadership development company it’s there’s a piece of the business which is leadership coaching,
there’s a piece which is a fractional cheapest a / B P engineering I give you extra hands on things and then there’s the diversity inclusion sign,
depression creams that actually permits all the things that I’m doing but those are the things that remain are is it in Portugal right now of how I can help company.

Christian Mccarrick:
[40:33] Awesome well thank you for that in for my listeners you in if you can help spelling it out what’s the best way to contact you if they wanted to get in touch with you just.

Jason Wong:
[40:39] Sure I just email me a Jason at jwong works.com that’s j w o n g w o r k s.com.

Christian Mccarrick:
[40:48] Excellent Jason a really super appreciate it of the extra special podcast Edition live from New York City from Midtown thank you for coming in today and sharing your time I appreciate it.