When Sandy Harvey was 4 years old growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, she began playing soccer to help deal with her childhood asthma.
For years, she played on a team where she was the only African American – ‘That was my community,” she said – but later had teammates who were Asian, Hispanic and from other cultures.
Her experience with diversity as a child was that she spent time around people from a lot of different cultures. “I grew up that way,” she says now.
When she came to Detroit after getting married, she came to realize her life experience was “so very different” from other African American females.
“I spent my childhood growing up in a very diverse community environment,” said Harvey, now the founder and president of Exodus Consulting Group, whose mission is to help ensure inclusion and equity is threaded throughout every activity in every organization. “I didn’t really know there were different cultures, because I was immersed in everybody’s culture at that time.
“My experience with diversity was that I was around a lot of different cultures, and so I grew up that way,” she added. “But there are so many other people who did not grow up with a diverse culture. I had a friend who said he never met an African American until he joined the Marines.”
For Harvey, just sharing that experience and understanding from the standpoint of what she experienced is that “privilege is not about race, but it’s about experiences.”
“I know for me, I had more experiences as an African American female than others may have had,” she said.
She knew she had to be careful not to assume everyone had had the same experiences she had. For instance, not everyone has flown on an airplane, let alone flown first class.
“It’s those things that when we start talking about what we’ve experienced, I mean, I had a best friend whose mom did not get her driver’s license until she was almost 50 years old,” Harvey recalled. “She just rode the bus and never drove. That’s somebody’s experience. She enjoyed riding the bus. She’d ride the bus to work, she’d ride the bus home. We can’t assume that the way we do it is how everybody else does it.”
Harvey launched Exodus in October 2017 because, as a career in human resources and training had taught her, culture, diversity and engagement weren’t being paid the attention Harvey thought they deserved.
With a background working in banks, credit unions and the financial services industry, she realized the consulting work she was doing revolved around those things.
“I really started in the DEI and HR space focused on culture because … that’s been really important,” she said. “That was always a critical need that was often overlooked or no one paid attention to. So, culture, DEI, employee engagement, employee experience, candidate experience, succession planning … no one really paid attention to those things.”
Harvey talked with Corp! Magazine about her career, the continuing need for DEI efforts and other issues.
Corp!: Is this kind of work you’ve always wanted to do. You didn’t want to be an astronaut or a doctor or a superhero?
Harvey: I feel like I am a superhero (laughs). My desire has always been around people. It’s around HR. I went into banking because my mom says that I, many years ago, said I wanted to be a cash register lady. So, I started working in banking straight out of high school. So, I had an internship and just kept doing that.
Corp!: Talk a bit about Exodus.
Harvey: Our primary focus is on helping organizations develop a diversity, equity and inclusion strategy. We do an assessment with the entire workforce just to see how people are feeling and assess psychological safety. We look at a lot of different pieces on how a company can advance their DEI strategy.
Corp!: You said earlier the inclusivity and culture and DEI was being overlooked. So, you decided you were going to be one of the people to look at it?
Harvey: Yeah, I love it. I enjoy it. And I feel like that’s a critical gap. And a lot of companies that I work with now, I’ve been working with them for three and four years just to, because it’s not overdone. It’s like, oh, now we’ve got this, or now you have a pandemic, and now people only want to work from home. And now you have leaders that are mid-level managers that are exhausted and overworked. And I’ve had some leaders tell me, I don’t have time to do this. And I’m like, but you don’t have time not to.
Corp!: Did you find resistance to this work when you first started?
Harvey: No, because for me, it’s not just diversity. I want to help people with culture. And so, the focus is on how do we create the culture where it’s not going to be a fit for everyone, but at least go through the 80-20 rule. Look at 80% of people want to show up as their best selves. They want to do the work. And I think that that’s really important. Most people want to go to work and do a good job. The response is, ‘well, they don’t do it the way that I want to.’ And I say, ‘OK, now we’re getting to the real problem.
People generally want to show up, they want to do a good job, and now that we have five generations in the workplace, work is different from when I entered the workforce. It’s very different than how young people are entering the workforce now.
Corp!: Why is it different?
Harvey: When I, way back in the dinosaur days, started working, you worked and there was some level of allegiance and loyalty to the company, to your leader, to ‘I have to do this great job.’
Now young people have decisions. I like it because they are challenging the norms that for 20-30 years, we don’t know why they were there. Just someone told us you have to do it, and that’s it. But they’re challenging that in a way that’s making us think about, we really aren’t creating the inclusive workplaces that we thought we were. We’re just telling people to show up work and do it the way that I told you to.
We hire these great people because they tell us these wonderful things that they’ve done, or they would like to do in these interviews. Then we hire them in, and we tell them don’t worry about all of your great ideas because this is how we’ve set up our system. So, we really crush their hearts. You hired them because they could do all these spectacular things, and now you’re telling them that they can’t do it because your process doesn’t allow for it.
Corp!: It seems when you mention DEI people’s thoughts go right to race. You don’t believe that. How do you change the perception?
Harvey: I talk about inclusion. I know even some organizations I work with struggle with the word equity. It’s a reality. So, when I think about inclusive workplaces and spaces, when I talk about trust and transparency and emotional intelligence, I try to break it down, not just about DEI, but the real tangible things that are necessary for leaders to be great leaders and for organizations to be great organizations.
Corp!: There was a lot of talk during the recent campaign about eliminating DEI officers and programs and the like. Are you finding your work harder these days because of the political climate?
Harvey: Yes and no. I’ve spent over the past seven years (getting work) by referral. So, people call me because somebody told ’em to call me or they’ve seen me speak someplace. I’m human centered, so I don’t do this work because it’s sexy or it’s the catchy thing. I do it because I care about people, and I feel there’s a better way. I stay out of politics because it’s politically charged. And DEI, in some sense, has become a political footstool for some people.
But they don’t have the true understanding of what the work is. So those that I engage with, I share. I ask them what their thought is, tell me what it means to you. That’s one of the first things I do when I work with clients is create DEI language. Let’s define what diversity means for your organization. Let’s define what inclusion means. So, we define the language that everyone in that organization can grab, hold to, and understand. We don’t use whatever. We’re not using woke language or things like that, which are disruptive. The goal is not to divide, but it’s to bring people together.
I know from a municipality standpoint; I mean there are a lot of government-funded organizations out there where they’re really having to work to navigate (the political climate). So, we don’t dress it down, but we do talk about, I mean, it is, when I share about turnover, that’s a real number and a negative impact to an organization.
Corp!: What does have to change if a company is truly trying to take on this project?
Harvey: Senior leadership needs to be all in. This is not one of those projects or initiatives where you can get senior leadership backing and then they say, ‘OK, go talk to employees, the ones that need the help.’ I start with senior leadership and then go on down. But it’s really addressing it at the leadership level. Also, one of the struggles that I have with many organizations is when I start talking about leadership accountability, how will you hold leaders accountable to not being bullied, not being a bully at work?
Go figure that we have to say that in 2024, but you do. But really, what’s the accountability that’s associated with this work? And those are things that we talk about and discuss because it’s important. Otherwise, they know no one’s taking this seriously.
Corp!: DEI is not a one-size-fits all kind of thing. How hard is it to determine what a company might need?
Harvey: We do an initial assessment. We do an organizational assessment, do stakeholder interviews at the beginning, and then from that listening session with team members, with mid-level managers, really just assess what we see and from data. We’ll look at the employee handbook, we’ll look at employee engagement scores, we’ll look at turnover rate, we’ll hear things, and we’ll validate it with the data, and then we’ll help build out the strategy.
Our process usually takes anywhere from about four to six months before we build out the strategy. And then from that, we help organizations figure out the low hanging fruit and how to move forward with their inclusion strategy.
