Female Disruptors: Margaret Greenberg & Gina Greenlee of The Business of Race On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Margaret & Gina: “Stay in your lane.” We received early draft feedback suggesting we include many more societal sectors (beyond the workplace) in our book. And when we felt tempted to do so, we went back to the words that introduce and underscore our thesis: “Beyond the workplace, numerous complex, intersecting facets of structural racism are rampant across our institutions: health, education, law, childcare, housing, banking and finance, law enforcement, and the penal system. We respect and support the work being undertaken to dismantle racism in these domains; however, that is not the focus of The Business of Race. Our lane is the workplace.”
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Margaret Greenberg and Gina Greenlee.
We are organizational development professionals, coaches, and educators with a combined business experience of 50-plus years with Fortune 5, 50, 100, and 500 companies in roles as both external consultants and internal employees.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Margaret & Gina: Margaret founded her consulting firm, The Greenberg Group, in 1997 to coach executives and their teams to lead large-scale organizational change. And she’s designed, consulted, and facilitated hundreds of business strategy sessions for global companies.
Gina’s had multiple career trajectories over the decades in wide ranging industries and roles. This includes healthcare, publishing, and financial services. Inherent to all of these roles was the practice of Strategic Planning and Organizational Development.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Margaret & Gina: Actually, it’s not about what we think we’re doing that is disruptive to the status quo. Rather, it is about how others perceive our work as disruptive. We were fortunate to have New York Times best-selling author Tom Rath write the foreword to our book, The Business of Race: How to Create and Sustain an Antiracist Workplace — and Why it’s Actually Good for Business.
After reading an advance copy of the book Rath wrote, “The authors are not traditional diversity experts, and that is precisely why their ideas are fresh. With deep backgrounds in business, coaching, and OD (organizational development), they get us to explore what’s needed at the individual, team, and organizational levels to reimagine a workplace that mirrors the customers we serve.”
A concrete example from Gina’s experience: In the late 1990s she was the Director of Strategic Planning for the Connecticut newspaper, The Hartford Courant. One of the first initiatives she led was the migration of the newspaper online. Many of the employees — managers, directors, individual contributors — wondered, What the heck does she know about this? She just got here. Moreover, Gina was coming from a completely different industry — healthcare. And she was not fluent in the technology world.
Gina’s boss at the time, the paper’s General Manager told the organization, “It’s precisely because Gina has sat outside of our industry that she has a perspective we don’t. We’re too close to it.” To the General Manager’s point, that had been the hallmark of Gina’s career: helping organizations of all stripes evolve their systems, cultures, policies and practices. By definition, OD practitioners are not experts in all industry subject matter. Rather, we are trained, skilled, experienced and fluent in how organizations and the people in them fundamentally exist, change and evolve: in other words, their operational and cultural DNA — no matter the industry.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Margaret & Gina: We can’t think of any funny “mistakes.” But we did have fun writing this book, mostly because of our longstanding friendship. Also, fun is organic to how we live and work. That’s one reason The Business of Race is an accessible read. We take the topic seriously. And because race work is hard, we take care of our spirits and psyches by, in part, infusing our business processes with play.
With that as context, when we were writing a chapter that traces the evolution of workplace diversity, equity and inclusion prompted by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we wanted it to be engaging, not dry. So, we played. Margaret mused how a chart, similar to a bartender’s mixing guide, might serve as a template for outlining a history of race in the workplace. Gina researched the idea, found some cool models to explore. That surfaced a memory for Gina — a catchphrase from the 1967 Star Trek TV episode, The Trouble with Tribbles: “Who put the tribbles in the quadrotriticale.” The rhythm of that sentence sparked this one: “Who Snuck the “E” Between the “D” and the “I”? And that is the origin story of how the title of chapter three in The Business of Race came to be.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Margaret & Gina: We’ve had so many influences on this journey of writing, sharing and evolving the book and our organizational consulting in the area of workplace racial equity. However, four people come immediately to mind:
Rochelle Newman-Carrasco, who is Gina’s childhood friend and a career DEI marketing professional with four decades of experience. As we write in the “Gratitude” section of The Business of Race, “We so appreciate Rochelle mentoring us while we stumbled toward knowing what we didn’t know: helping us to surface our biases, deepen our explorations, stay in our lane, and keep it real.”
Best-selling author Tom Rath, who wrote the foreword to the book, read an early draft and saw opportunities for us to “tell really good stories” and “grab readers by the throat.”
Dr. Deborah Plummer, PhD, is a psychologist, author, and university professor whose research on topics central to racial equity inclusion evolved our thinking along the way and to this day.
Amy Li, our McGraw-Hill editor, whose Chinese-American lens afforded us a worldview our lived experiences don’t offer. And because of that, she encouraged exploration beyond our Black and White identities, which enhanced the richness of the book.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Margaret & Gina: Whether or not disruption is positive depends on your lived experience — in the workplace and in life. If you’ve been the center of any industry, system or structure, any disruption can be perceived as a threat. Why? Because you created that system or structure. So, reimagining it — without you as the focal point — will be challenging but not insurmountable.
Let’s speak clearly here like we do in our book and our consulting work. In The Business of Race, we name without shaming or blaming. We cannot solve what we don’t discuss. So, with that lexical context, some White people, and White men in particular, will resist this work.
What is the work?
To reimagine how your organization fundamentally operates so that all voices are central, not only a self-ordained few. And resistance to workplace racial equity — to remain specific to our lane — comes from the perspective of what one has to lose, not what there is to gain.
The September 2021 issue of MITSloan Management Review unpacks this dynamic in the article, Fighting Backlash to Racial Equity Efforts: Understanding the real reasons why diversity initiatives provoke opposition can help you lead employees through cultural transformation. Authors Rosalind M. Chow, L. Taylor Phillips, Brian S. Lowery and Miguel M. Unzueta write: “We believe the experience of White people to be as important as the experience of those who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), because any movement forward in racial equity will require the willing cooperation of equity-minded White people…If Whiteness remains undiscussed, then the advantages [a workplace system] offers Whiteness are also left undiscussed.”
And we, the authors and practitioners of The Business of Race, believe that willingness comes from reimagining how your workplace fundamentally operates with racial equity as a core business principle. Organizations can do this by taking an asset lens to this work. This is where the science of positive psychology can be applied to race work. Recall the adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Add this twist, “If it ain’t broke, break it.”
In positive psychology, we apply an asset lens and say, “If it ain’t broke, study it.” Find out why something is working so well. So positive psychologists study healthy marriages, flourishing teams, and when it comes to business, they study thriving organizations that people are clamoring to work for. This is why while researching The Business of Race we sought out organizations that had already begun their race journey. We asked them what was working in their evolution to include racially diverse voices in their business strategy, and how they were measuring racial equity.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
Margaret & Gina: “Stay in your lane.” We received early draft feedback suggesting we include many more societal sectors (beyond the workplace) in our book. And when we felt tempted to do so, we went back to the words that introduce and underscore our thesis: “Beyond the workplace, numerous complex, intersecting facets of structural racism are rampant across our institutions: health, education, law, childcare, housing, banking and finance, law enforcement, and the penal system. We respect and support the work being undertaken to dismantle racism in these domains; however, that is not the focus of The Business of Race. Our lane is the workplace.”
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Margaret & Gina: We love reimagining! Reading a book, alone or with a group, can only have so much impact. It’s what you do next to operationalize it; to make it stick. To that end, we are now bringing together business leaders from different industries and organizations, in a learning experience to explore how to embed racial equity into their business strategies. No more silos, no more “programs,” no more off-the-side-of-your-desk, no more DEI-only initiatives. This is what we are doing next: facilitating REAL change. We are bringing people together and they’re learning not only from us, but most importantly from each other. This is arduous work. And demanding work is best accomplished in coalition. “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together,” says the African Proverb.
You might ask, “Why would we make visible to people outside our organization our challenges in doing race work?” Because, like you, they are struggling with how to advance racial equity in the workplace, too.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
Margaret & Gina: Let’s reframe this question a bit using our asset lens. Rather than biggest “challenges,” how about biggest opportunities? There is a movement to bring more diverse voices to the table. Women are being sought out like never before to be on panels, boards, and leadership teams; to be keynote speakers. More publishers are now seeking women business authors because women publish less than 10 percent of business books, but we make up more than 50 percent of the workforce.
Now there is one big challenge that cannot be reframed: The funding that women business owners receive compared to men. According to Forbes, since 2011, the amount of venture capital dollars granted women-owned businesses has ranged from 1.8% to 2.7%; and as of June 2022, that number is a mere 2%. Of that 2%, a fraction is granted to women of color.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
Margaret & Gina: We listen regularly to NPR’s Code Switch podcast. Hosted by journalists of color, the podcast tackles the subject of race with empathy and humor. We are also inspired by the book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. It’s a book that helped Gina to better understand her origin story as the only child of two southern-born parents. They, along with millions of other Black southerners migrated from the Jim Crow states to the northern US from 1910 to 1970. Also, The Warmth of Other Suns influenced the narrative structure of our book because it is filled with beautifully written, highly relatable stories.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Margaret & Gina: Our hope is that The Business of Race will inspire others to use their voices to make workplace racial equity integral to how their organizations function. As a society (US) we tend to react and mobilize only in response to a perceived isolated incident captured on cell phone video that goes viral. For example, a violent attack or murder of an Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) or an unarmed Black man. These incidents, however, are but symptoms of intentionally-enacted, centuries-long inequities. Systemic change will only come when we connect individual acts of racial violence and economic oppression to their daily expression in every societal institution including the workplace.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Margaret & Gina: What influences your tomorrow is what you do TODAY.
Two years ago, neither one of us could imagine we’d ever write a business book about race. But the tomorrow we are living started with us acting on a single telephone conversation on May 26, 2020, the day after the murder of George Floyd. That was the “today” we felt compelled to take our personal conversation on race public — in the form of a LinkedIn series — and each day thereafter took steps that led us to the “tomorrow” we live at this moment:
- Celebrating the first-year anniversary of our book
- Creating over a year ago, an LLC that offers strategic services for racial equity organizational development, and
- Designing and delivering live, interactive learning experiences that explore racial equity using a business and OD lens, and applies evidence-based tools from the science of positive psychology.
How can our readers follow you online?
Margaret & Gina: At our website: https://businessofrace.com/
And our LinkedIn pages: Margaret H. Greenberg (LinkedIn), Gina Greenlee (LinkedIn)
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Margaret & Gina: Thank you for the opportunity to share ideas!
Female Disruptors: Margaret Greenberg & Gina Greenlee of The Business of Race On The Three Things… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.