On 22 October, Mike Tharkoodin, TransFIRe Post Doctoral Research Associate, and I attended the Ethnic Minorities into Leadership Conference in London to gain insight on best practice that we could apply to TransFIRe Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI).
Formerly called the BAME into Leadership Conference, the overarching theme was: ‘The time for talking is over. Now is the time to act!’ In its 11th year, the focus of the conference is on empowering and enhancing the capabilities and leadership opportunities for ethnic minority civil servants. Over 400 attendees are given opportunities to address persistent challenges, barriers faced and develop solutions. An overview of the speakers is listed below and they all included their lived experiences to provide engaging and insightful sessions.
Bernadette Thompson OBE, Associate Director of Inclusion for the Barts Health NHS Trust
Examining the current landscape for Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority leaders – Examining the barriers and enablers affecting progression.
Bernadette spoke about senior leaders needing to: ‘develop impatience on the slow progress of DEI; adding race equity as a strategic imperative; becoming active sponsors; developing intentional succession planning strategies, promoting boardroom diversity, reducing ethnicity and gender pay gaps.’ Leaders and allies needing to ‘use their influence and privilege to increase diversity and inclusion, avail opportunities and championing marginalised employees.’ Ethnic minority staff need to ‘protect their mental wellbeing, speak out and not to be aggrieved by injustices, but instead to optimistically direct that energy to creating positive change.’ She emphasised that ‘mentoring and sponsorship is collective action that leaders, allies, organisations and underrepresented employees should all engage in.’
Justin Placide, Head of Net Zero Governance BEIS
Leadership in action: The importance lifting others as you climb.
‘Representation matters, help those in your community through coaching, mentoring or sponsorship.’
Elaine Powell, Peak Performance and Communication
Networking for Success. She highlighted that ‘what makes having conversations difficult is not the subject, but because people try to formulate their answers while the speaker is still talking, thereby missing the majority of what the speaker is conveying’
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, journalist and author
Leading a change in culture: Where do we go from here?
‘Having a diverse conservative cabinet does not mean we have finally achieved inclusion or diversity in the UK; we all have a collective moral obligation to fight inequality and exclusionary practices; we mustn’t judge people by their colour but by their actions.’
Susie Ramroop, author and coach
Imposter syndrome: reframing mindsets; spoke about ‘our attitudes and efforts determining what we achieve; identifying the cost to imposter syndrome; the need to adopt the ‘Unicorn Effect’ whereby ‘a person assumes the best, and trusts that if they are true to themselves, they are capable of anything they focus their efforts on and that they deserve it’. She stressed the importance of being cognisant that ‘you cannot lead other people until you have led yourself first.’
The conference was a collaborative environment for ethic minority professionals to engage, learn and network. Mike and I hope that best practice from this conference can be applied by other industries, and we will explore how we could support TransFIRe / Industry partners into having a similar forum.
The full conference details and presentations can be found at the conference website.
Ciel Newton, TransFIRe EDI Project Manager