This Month’s One Thing: You are more powerful than you know.

I had the absolute honor to speak with Denise Hamilton for this month’s LinkedIn Live. Denise is an author, a speaker, and an inclusion specialist. She's a nationally recognized expert in workplace culture and DEI, founder and CEO of WatchHerWork, a digital learning platform for professional women. She has worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies, including GE, Apple, IBM, Shell, BP, Meta, and many others.

Last but certainly not least, she has just released her new book, INDIVISIBLE, described by Adam Grant as “a force for unity… an extremely powerful, surprisingly practical read.”

Denise’s groundbreaking work is helping to recalibrate current approaches toward DEI to better unite, as opposed to divide. There were so many key takeaways from my conversation with Denise, but here are a few that stood out for me:

• We need to recognize our collective power to effect change, challenging the notion of helplessness and emphasizing the need for action and commitment to a shared future.

• We need to let go of broken stories, choosing “uncomfortable truth over beloved lies” that limit potential and inclusivity.

• There’s power in fostering environments where differences are celebrated, and everyone works towards common goals, creating a sense of team rather than opposition.

• As a society - and as individuals - we are so much more powerful than we realize, but we've been talked out of our power.

Here’s a snippet of our conversation, but I encourage you to watch the full conversation here:

Laura: I would love it if you could start with sharing this powerful opening story in your book, which I have not been able to stop thinking about.

Denise: I care deeply about women's health and have for many years. I was reading some statistics about maternal mortality rates and infant mortality rates among black women. They were just incredibly high relative to the general population. And quite frankly, I was apoplectic. I was furious. How did we let this happen? Why aren't we doing something? Why aren't we in the streets marching?

This is unacceptable.

The very next day I heard a statistic that surprised me about the sheer number of suicides among white males in the United States. And I didn't care. It didn't hit me the same way. I didn't think about it or feel passionately about it the same way as I had just the day before. And I started thinking about that. I started ruminating on it. What is this about? 

So I did what I always do when I come across a problem like that. I started reading and researching and watching different documentaries and reading articles about why the suicide rate among white males was one of the highest in the world. Then I started to see this commonality between these two groups of having expectations, whether they be low expectations or high expectations. Both are forms of tyranny. Both are a cage that precludes us from being sensitive to each other's needs, desires and wants.

That got me thinking about the real challenges to being truly inclusive, which is stepping outside of our experience and making sure we're caring about each other, seeing our interconnectedness. In this case as a nation, but even as a team within a company or even in a family. What tears people apart is the lack of willingness to care deeply about the needs of another person. How do we give rebirth to this idea of being indivisible? How do we give rebirth to being interconnected and being clear on that? 

The best example of indivisibility is the human body, I have a heart and lungs. You can’t argue about which is more important. Your legs are the most powerful muscle group in your body and they can take you anywhere, but you're going nowhere if the little structures in your ear don't take care of your balance. It's about every part being able to do its part to the highest level of its ability. That's how you get optimal conditions and that's what I want for us as a country - to be indivisible.

Laura: Do you think we are less committed to one another than in the past? Or has this always been an issue, and you're advocating for a change?

Denise: That’s such a good question. I think it's the question of our time, to be honest with you. I think that we are in an environment of so much disinformation. The bottom line is people are monetizing our separation, right? The dissonance, the anger, the frustration - people are making money off of that. You click more if you're angry, right?

So I have to remind people: it’s not as dire as you might feel like it is. We are making progress. People say things like DEI doesn't work. It absolutely does.

You don't fight against things that don't work, right? You don't suppress votes if they don't matter. If it didn't matter if you voted, people wouldn't be trying to talk you out of it.

So we've made a lot of progress. But I think this idea of seeing the world through a negative lens and a lack of possibility is one of the biggest challenges that we have. We have a crisis of hopelessness and helplessness, which is really strange because we're the most powerful people on planet earth. Let's just be honest. That's who we are.

To walk around the world with an air of helplessness is just bizarre. Where did that come from? Where are we getting that? 

I have a historical muse in Harriet Tubman. This amazing woman who was enslaved, couldn't read, couldn't write, didn't have a map, didn't have a horse, didn't know anybody in the north and had a seizure disorder. She ran by herself from the south to the north to her freedom, then turned around and came back and got people. First three people, then five people, then four more people. Do we have less than Harriet Tubman in the 1800s? No, we have so much more. We're so much more powerful than we realize. We've just been talked out of our power.

And that's the opportunity, right? That's the excitement. That's what wakes me up every day. 

Laura: When you talk about us moving beyond this framework of hopelessness and helplessness so that we can activate the middle and transition from viewing ourselves as opponents to seeing ourselves as teammates and finding points of intersection, this is the type of framework you bring to companies and teams around inclusion efforts.

Can you walk us through that a little bit?

Denise: I think we all want to have successful companies. We all want to have healthy communities. We all want to be safe in our communities. We want to have an educated workforce that we can tap into. We don't disagree about these things.

I'm always struck by how easy it is to reduce the whole world down to two perspectives - when in fact, the world is a big, huge, multifaceted reality.

What on earth would make you think you could reduce it to two parties and their approach to it? We just need to be in a creative stance and a creative posture. We've gotten to a space where we celebrate people who obstruct rather than people who create. I'm looking for problem solvers.

I do a lot of work with executive women and women in leadership. They're such incredible doers. So when I talk to male leaders, I tell them: you should be throwing the doors open [for these women]. You want these women in here because they make things happen and they're activators. 

If we think about it from the position of wanting to build and to develop, we won't argue about so many things. We won't argue if school children should have lunch. We won't argue if there should be hospitals and access to health care in rural areas. These are things that we would agree upon if we saw each other as teammates, rather than opponents. Instead, we use these opportunities for agreement as bargaining chips. How do we shift that?

How do we, the average everyday person, demand this shift from our leaders and how do we each contribute as individuals? What do we need to be doing to create the country, the team, the organization that we want? If I want a team that works well together, then I want them to understand each other. I want them to connect. I want them to have tolerance for one another. I want them to capitalize on each other's strengths. I don't want them to be quibbling over silly things because they had a miscommunication that could have easily been avoided.

We all want the same things. I think focusing on that and aligning ourselves around that is how you can build a truly indivisible team.

Laura: What are the top three takeaways that you would like our listeners to come away with?

Denise: Well, it's really easy.

• #1: You are more powerful than you know. No more powerlessness, no more hopelessness, no more helplessness. You can do so many incredible things. Let's get to work. 

• #2: Let the story change. We have to allow some of these myths to fall away so that we can let every person be as amazing as their giftedness allows them to be. We have to let the story change.

• #3: If you say you love America, you're gonna have to try to love Americans. We're going to have to be kinder to each other, gentler with each other, more patient.

We are on the same team. Let's not allow ourselves to fall into a paradigm of being opponents. We're not opponents. We want our country to be successful. So let's work to that end and stop humiliating each other, stop denigrating each other and stop name calling. Let's work on our shared problems and let's start loving each other again.

It’s not positivity we need; it’s bravery.

March is Women’s History Month and if you're a fan of the global health company Athletic Greens and women making significant leadership strides in the workplace, you won't want to miss this conversation! President and COO of AG1, Kat Cole, will be joining me on March 18th at 11 AM PT. RSVP, here. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laura Putnam, CEO of Motion Infusion & Author of Workplace Wellness That Works, is on a mission to leverage every workplace and every team to promote better health, happiness, and well-being. Subscribe to Laura’s newsletter to get 4 tangible ideas each month to infuse well-being at work and at home.