Post-election thoughts: what haven’t you learned, acknowledged or reckoned with?
Post-election thoughts: what haven’t you learned, acknowledged or reckoned with?

In 2016, I told myself I NEVER wanted to feel that way again - shocked, betrayed, and most of all ANGRY at the ways at which I had learned to deny my race, even to myself, in order to buy a kind of safety that was NEVER on the table, because safety that requires you to deny parts of who you are, safety that is offered up at the expense of others, a safety that props up a system of advantage and privilege based on genocide, enslavement and colonization is not actually any kind of safety at all.

Today, I am saddened and dismayed, but my work over the past 8 years means I am not surprised. Because what I’ve learned is - this is who America is.

Read More
Dismantling oppressionAlethea Fitzpatrick#election2024, #history, #truthComment
Trading success for survival: the hidden cost for Black women in leadership
Trading success for survival: the hidden cost for Black women in leadership

Black women are incredible. They lead, they innovate, they stabilize entire industries—often while juggling more than anyone should ever have to. And yet, the numbers tell a darker story: Black women are paid just 63 cents for every dollar earned by white men, and even with advanced degrees, that only rises to 69 cents. Despite making up the largest percentage of women in the workforce, they hold just 1.5% of leadership positions in industry.

Read More
Dismantling oppressionLaVoya Woods#blackwomen, #blackwomenleadership, #dreamingComment
Inclusive leadership skills: needed for collective healing and liberation
Inclusive leadership skills: needed for collective healing and liberation

Something we’ve seen with our organizational clients is that traditional, top-down, hierarchical models of leadership continue to have a strong grip on many leaders.

This makes sense, given that traditional and dominant culture in the US, including corporate culture, has its roots in plantation culture.

Read More
Inclusive LeadershipAlethea Fitzpatrick#inclusiveleadershipskills, #inclusiveleadership, #workplacecultureComment
Inclusive leadership skills: authenticity
Inclusive leadership skills: authenticity

Authenticity is an essential inclusive leadership skill. It builds the trust and psychological safety needed for collaboration, innovation and impact. It’s one of the things that people need to do their best and most fulfilling work in alignment with the mission of their organization.

But if authenticity is defined as being true to oneself, how can you measure authenticity, particularly in the context of the workplace?

Read More
Inclusive LeadershipAlethea Fitzpatrick#inclusiveleadershipskills, #authenticity, #consistencyComment
We are all worthy of protection
We are all worthy of protection

There is always grief and trauma around us, at a local, national and global scale. Organizations often grapple with acknowledgements - what events should be acknowledged, and how can you possibly cover them all?

We’ve been talking about this at Co-Creating Inclusion as well, and have been considering the idea of a “grief acknowledgement.” We may not be able to acknowledge every single thing that is going on, but we can acknowledge that we are all likely struggling with varying degrees of grief and trauma, including secondary trauma.

Read More
Co-creating inclusionAlethea Fitzpatrick#griefacknowledgement, #mythofscarcity, #worthofprotectionComment
The continued invisible and unpaid or underpaid work of women
The continued invisible and unpaid or underpaid work of women

I’ve been thinking a lot (again) about how women continue to do a disproportionate amount of caregiving work… invisible, overlooked, devalued, under or unpaid emotional and administrative labor in the home, the workplace, and all around. And sometimes it feels like white women do it so cheerfully it makes it that much harder for women of color.

At an event recently, I heard a horrifying statistic - apparently 98% of food shopping is done by women!!!

Read More
Dismantling oppressionAlethea Fitzpatrick#invisiblelabor, #womenintheworkplace, #paygapComment
Privilege and trauma are not mutually exclusive
Privilege and trauma are not mutually exclusive

One of the things that happens when we start to talk about privilege with people who are not accustomed to naming it, and especially about white privilege, is that the word “privilege” is experienced as an insult.

And that’s because the word “privilege” is often used as an insult.

That’s not what we mean though.

Read More
Inclusive LeadershipAlethea Fitzpatrick#privilege, #whiteprivilege, #trauma, #systemsofoppressionComment
Grieving is necessary for change
Grieving is necessary for change

A few months ago I wrote about how every memory hurts and everyone is traumatized.

Every memory still hurts.

And what I along with our team at Co-Creating Inclusion have been exploring is how grief is necessary for change.

The ability to grieve, then, is a rarely articulated leadership skill, if we are aspiring for creativity, innovation and transformation towards equity, inclusion, justice and liberation.

Read More
Co-creating inclusionAlethea Fitzpatrick#grief, #traumainformed, #wildedgeofsorryComment
Breathing and recalibrating for the US election
Breathing and recalibrating for the US election

Much as it seemed to be becoming more and more of a possibility over the past few weeks, I wasn’t prepared for the shift last week from Biden vs Trump to Harris vs Trump.

I’ve trained myself to set realistic (ie low) expectations over the past 8 years and… it felt like we were a lot further away from electing a Black and Asian woman as President than we suddenly find ourselves.

Read More
Dismantling oppressionAlethea Fitzpatrick#election2024, #womenofcolor, #emotionalboundariesComment
What kind of leader do you want?
What kind of leader do you want?

I had a whole different blog post planned for today… and then the news broke. In fact, my 12 year old broke the news to us in the car as we driving home because his friends were texting him.

The 12 year olds are watching.

And yes it’s messy, and no America hasn’t been ready to elect a woman, let alone a woman of color… but we’d better get ready.

Read More
Inclusive LeadershipAlethea Fitzpatrick#blackwomen, #inclusiveleadership, #inclusiveleadershipskills, #presidentialelection2024Comment
Patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and diet culture
Patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and diet culture

This may seem like a bit of a non-sequitur, given that I don’t think I’ve ever talked about diet culture and fatphobia on the blog or in our work… at least not extensively.

It’s something I’ve been on a personal journey with that isn’t entirely my story to tell, and so I am realizing it is something I have held back on.

This morning, though, I stumbled on a social media thread in a group I’m not very active in that reinforced just how deeply indoctrination into patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism and fatphobia goes.

Read More
Dismantling oppressionAlethea Fitzpatrick#dietculture, #fatphobia, #whitesupremacy, #patriarchy, #capitalismComment
What if your impact is better than your intent?
What if your impact is better than your intent?

“Impact is greater than intent” is one of those concepts that has been popularized over the past few years, especially within white liberal progressive culture.

The idea is that the impact that you have, meaning the impact of harm, outweighs whatever good intentions you might have.

It’s a concept, frankly, that I often see white women using to chastise each other in desperate attempts to virtue signal… which makes sense, given that white women are generally socialized to be pitted against one another by patriarchy and often are not able to see how accountability can be accompanied by support.

Read More
Alethea FitzpatrickComment
Diversity should not be your first or only metric of success
Diversity should not be your first or only metric of success

We’ve been talking about this for years actually. In fact, one of our running “jokes” is that organizations often come to us thinking we are “D consultants” and forgetting the “E” and the “E” or any of the other letters that might be included like “J” or “B.”

The fact is, this field did start out with “diversity consultants” so it is not entirely surprising those expectations linger.

We now make it a practice of being very explicit up front that this is NOT who we are.

Read More
Co-creating inclusionAlethea FitzpatrickComment
“No judgement”
“No judgement”

You ask for no judgement when talking about race.

But when you lined us up on the auction block and determined our monetary value, when you bought us and sold us and traded us like livestock, was there no judgement?

When you spat at us, slurred racial epithets and told us to go back to China, was there no judgement?

When you chanted “build that wall” or profiled us as terrorists, was there no judgement?

Read More
Dismantling oppressionAlethea FitzpatrickComment
Entitlement as a form of learned helplessness
Entitlement as a form of learned helplessness

There is a phenomenon that I’ve been thinking about both in personal and professional contexts.

It’s when entitlement leads to a certain kind of helplessness, ignorance, incompetence or even misconduct.

For example, it’s when someone, usually a man, “doesn’t know how to cook” even though they would have been quite capable of learning if they’d ever had to, rather than lived their entire lives expecting and having others (women) to cook for them.

Read More
Dismantling oppressionAlethea Fitzpatrick#entitlement, #learnedhelplessness, #overfunctioningComment
Slowing down to speed up
Slowing down to speed up

We talk a lot with our clients about slowing down to speed up.

Spoiler alert: it’s a little bit of a brain hack because ideally the goal isn’t to speed up at all, at least not purely for the sake of speeding up.

However, we are so deeply socialized into the idea that “progress is bigger/more” and into a “sense of urgency” that the idea of slowing down seems so deeply impossible, ill-advised, and unsafe to the point of being ludicrous.

Read More
Inclusive LeadershipAlethea Fitzpatrick#whitesupremacyculture, #slowingdown, #senseofurgencyComment
Four principles for trauma-informed communication
Four principles for trauma-informed communication

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how everyone is traumatized.

To be human is to be, to some degree, traumatized - that has not changed.

Nor has the fact that marginalized communities have long been living with the impact of intergenerational, historical and systemic as well as individual trauma.

What has changed is that we have ALL - globally - been through the collective trauma of the pandemic at a scale unprecedented in the span of our careers.

For leaders, this means understanding, expecting and accounting for the fact that we and our workforce, while not all equally traumatized, are all traumatized.

Read More
Co-creating inclusionAlethea FitzpatrickComment