Ever wondered about the global side of diversity, equity, and inclusion? Our guest, Diya Khanna, has a unique perspective. With experience living in Singapore, Canada, and the US, Diya's diverse background has helped ignite her passion for DEI, giving her a deep understanding of inclusivity within different cultures.
With 15 years of DEI experience, she now runs Global Idea, a consulting business focused on DEI from a global perspective.
In this episode, Diya also dives into the complexities of the "Where are you really from?" question, her thoughts on interconnectedness and leadership in DEI are especially relevant.
Join us as we discuss how Diya's international background shapes her approach and her journey within her work.
Get in contact with Diya here
The Culture Ministry exists to create inclusive, accessible environments so that people and businesses can thrive.
Combining a big picture, balanced approach with real-world experience, we help organisations understand their diversity and inclusion shortcomings – and identify practical, measurable actions to move them forward.
Go to https://www.thecultureministry.com/ to learn more
If you enjoyed this episode and maybe learnt something please share with your friends on social media, give a 5 star rating on Apple podcasts and leave a comment. This makes it easier for others to find A Dog Called Diversity.
A Dog Called Diversity is proud to be featured on Feedspot's 20 Best Diversity And Inclusion Podcasts
Thanks for listening. Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.
Ever wondered about the global side of diversity, equity, and inclusion? Our guest, Diya Khanna, has a unique perspective. With experience living in Singapore, Canada, and the US, Diya's diverse background has helped ignite her passion for DEI, giving her a deep understanding of inclusivity within different cultures.
With 15 years of DEI experience, she now runs Global Idea, a consulting business focused on DEI from a global perspective.
In this episode, Diya also dives into the complexities of the "Where are you really from?" question, her thoughts on interconnectedness and leadership in DEI are especially relevant.
Join us as we discuss how Diya's international background shapes her approach and her journey within her work.
Get in contact with Diya here
The Culture Ministry exists to create inclusive, accessible environments so that people and businesses can thrive.
Combining a big picture, balanced approach with real-world experience, we help organisations understand their diversity and inclusion shortcomings – and identify practical, measurable actions to move them forward.
Go to https://www.thecultureministry.com/ to learn more
If you enjoyed this episode and maybe learnt something please share with your friends on social media, give a 5 star rating on Apple podcasts and leave a comment. This makes it easier for others to find A Dog Called Diversity.
A Dog Called Diversity is proud to be featured on Feedspot's 20 Best Diversity And Inclusion Podcasts
Thanks for listening. Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.
Thanks. Welcome to a dog called diversity. This week's guest is an incredible diversity, equity and inclusion leader based in North America, but what I love about her background is that she takes a real global view of the work that she does, which I think is super important. So welcome to the podcast, dia Khanna. It's lovely to have you.
Speaker 2:Thank you. I'm very excited to be here and to be in conversation with you, lisa, and to share some of our findings and learnings with the audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, and you are joining us from Seattle, which is a city I would love to visit, and yeah, so when I come visit, I'll come and meet you.
Speaker 2:That would be great. Yeah, we would welcome you very warmly. Seattle is beautiful and it is just a city of absolute nature, and so we would love to have visitors anytime.
Speaker 1:I love that. Would you like to start and maybe tell us a bit about yourself, and I guess you know how you grew up, where you grew up. Yeah, that would be a great start.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. I was born in a city country, singapore, known as the Tiger, because it is one of the most economically prosperous countries in Asia and actually in the world, not far from where you are, lisa, and I did grow up in Canada and for now I'm in the US, but a lot of my influences came from a number of different parts of the world. Both my parents are of Indian origin, so they're South Asian, but my mom also had some influences from being raised in Iran and in Italy, so that just fed into a lot of my exposure to the world and growing up in Canada. I grew up in Toronto which, if you look at, similar to Melbourne. It's very multicultural, and with that came exposure to a number of different people from various backgrounds. One of my mentors often said in Canada we don't bring in immigrants, we bring in future citizens. So that melting pot of I apologize the mosaic of different cultures strongly shaped me into who I am today.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, and did you go to school in Canada before you moved to the US?
Speaker 2:I did. I went to high school university, I did my master's in Canada, and that's very close to my heart, because I think it's important to recognize those global educational institutions, myself being a graduate of one of them. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And tell us a bit about how you came to work in diversity, equity and inclusion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think that's a fantastic question, because often people in DEI come into this work from a variety of different places. For me, my background is in journalism, so I love to write, and when I went into media I realized that as an institution we could benefit from more perspectives than what we were hearing in the mainstream news media. So it started piquing my interest. And then I went into education another institution and I remember realizing that who we learn from is as important as what we learn. So collectively, I started developing this interest in diversity, equity and inclusion as an incredible opportunity and way to become creative and innovative in our products and services, but also to develop a way to bring people in into conversation, into our work and apply a lens of fairness and equity. So that was really it for me, and from there I haven't looked back. I've been in the space for 15 years now and looking forward to doing it for many more again.
Speaker 1:I know you've had various DEI roles in your career. What are some of the, I guess, what are some of the things you're really proud of that you achieved working for, I guess, other companies and institutions?
Speaker 2:One of the pieces I'm most proud of is being able to create learnings that reach people in ways that they weren't reached before. I think we can get really creative with how we do this work and maybe it's the background education or storytelling but being able to create interactive workshops, especially with that global lens, so that people walk away and say, wow, I didn't even think about it that way, or oh, here's something small that I can put into place that can have over time, over that consistent time, some great impacts and then starting to see things shift and turn in workplaces and in people's personal lives. It's a tremendous opportunity to reach people in ways they hadn't been reached before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really love when you run a workshop or you have a conversation with someone and this light bulb goes off for them. You know, that bit is so satisfying in some ways. You know, in big organisations we track performance usually by measuring percentage of a certain identity in the business and it's great when you see that shift. But yeah, I find the really those individual moments with people so satisfying. Yeah, I love that you brought that up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the aha moments, as we call them. I think it's easy to say, oh, people are not good, or they are good or positive. You know that binary. But the truth is people don't know what they don't know and when they learn, and when they learn through storytelling and when they learn through these moments where they can reflect and think oh, I never really thought about it. That way we can see mind shifting and the impact it can have long term. It's great yeah.
Speaker 1:Tell me a bit about why you decided to go out on your own and I'd love to learn, you know, tell me about your business and and that decision make, that decision making process, I guess, to leave the security of of a large company and and go out on your own.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I think, that.
Speaker 2:So I have a consulting company by the name of global idea.
Speaker 2:Idea stands for inclusion, diversity and equity and action, and part of the reason I wanted to go out on my own is because, both personally and professionally, I think I have developed this critical and necessary global lens on D?
Speaker 2:I that I would love to share with people through my offerings, and often, when we do it on our own, we can frame it in ways that we think is relevant to the people that we're working for, so our clients essentially, and I just found that that package that I can create, along with that storytelling that's dia branded, is what a lot of organizations can truly benefit from. I am a woman, I'm a woman of color, I'm also an immigrant, I'm also somebody who has a disability, so there's a number of things that factor into my lens, and it's interesting to be able to share that in a way that's unique to what I've developed, not just through my D I work, but just over time, from being on Earth. It even extends back to, as I said, you know my mom growing up with these different influences, so it's something that was passed down to me that I gained tremendous influence in and I'd love to share it with others in that same way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that you know how challenging it might be to be different in the world or in an organisation or in a team, but I also love that the work you do really takes a global lens and.
Speaker 1:I run a survey and one of the things I survey DNI leaders in the Asia Pacific region and then also this year for the first time in Europe, and One of the frustrations is often if the organisation is headquartered in the US or even in the UK, the work, the strategy that comes through big organisations is often through that lens, through the experience of the US or through the experience of the UK and, as you know and I know that that sometimes doesn't translate into other parts of the world. So can you talk a little bit about how you, I guess, help organisations with that global lens?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, in DEI work, we often look at where the dominant group holds that power and privilege, and and similarly in the US. And it's interesting because we don't always look at it through this lens, but the US itself holds a certain degree of power and privilege and 4% of the world lives in the US. There's so many things happening outside the US that we want to Be aware of that. Not only we want to solve for, but we want to learn from and I'll give you some examples, being from Canada. The way we do our census surveys are not Looking or collecting, gathering it racial data on four or five different groups. We break it down into multiple groups and you look at the, the Asian categories broken down into a number of different subcategories South Asian, southeast Asian, we have Middle Eastern and we have all kinds of different categories, and it allows people to more accurately Define the identity that they most associate with.
Speaker 2:In South Africa we have a Policy called triple B, double E, broad black based economic empowerment. So I like to look at it from a lens of not just oh, here's the US and here's the UK, here's what we're working on and here's what we suggest the rest of the world does. It's more of a, I guess, a global Collective, as in the US and the UK, is part of an ecosystem, and part of that ecosystem is learning about the US experience and learning about the, the US lens, but the US also learning about the other lenses from cultures that have been around for a A really, really long time and have gone through their own challenges and, in some cases, have come across their own or develop their own solutions as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, I've been working on a project with a US based company which has been amazing, and the project has been to build in self identification into their HR system so that they can more accurately measure the demographics of their workforce, which is great, amazing.
Speaker 1:And when you were talking about the, the census in Canada, it, yeah, we, we came up against I guess it's not a barrier but a bit of a challenge when we were looking at the Australia, in New Zealand market for that, that business, because all the other countries we defined Race and ethnicity in a certain way, so we'd taken the major race groups black, white, asian and then had subcategories. And then we got to Australia where, a bit like Canada, the census data, which is one of the things you look at in countries when you're trying to define self-idea categories. And Australia made the decision a number of years ago to not measure race or ethnicity but to measure heritage and and to Allow people in Australia to select a number of heritages, because Australia has a large immigrant population of it, like Canada. And it was really fascinating working through that process, you know, to go to pick categories, to go on a really large system that could somehow fit with what the US had and what some of the other countries had. So, yeah, that was a great, a great example.
Speaker 1:Thank you, of course, yes, that's.
Speaker 2:That's one of the examples that come to mind. It's just it's different in different parts of the world, but it doesn't have to end with it being different. The conversation can Begin where the differences occur and how we can learn from each other about how to do this work in a way that's most effective to moving the needle on DEI.
Speaker 1:Yeah, have you had the opportunity to do some different work in your own business than you had, I guess, in some of the bigger companies you'd worked in?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, especially around cultural intelligence and cultural humility.
Speaker 2:The work that I have been able to do in my or own business is informed by my lens, and that is a combination of I, the professional, and the personal, but I another way to look at it is the formal and the informal, and Maybe it's that when we do this work on in a in a wider way, or sometimes attached to an organization, we're looking to solve right and and shifted to this is an opportunity. It's not that DEI is a problem that needs to be solved, it's that DEI is the solution to the problems that we face. Maybe it's that my mind thinks of it as, globally, we face all these challenges, whether it's climate change, anti-blackness, you know, xenophobia there's so many challenges that we're faced with and when we, when we are able to Bring in those different perspectives because everybody's doing their best work possible, because there is diversity, but also the equity, the equity of opportunity and the inclusion of them, feeling as if their perspectives matter, we can actually arrive at critical solutions together, long-term, sustainable solutions. So those are the two things I've noticed are different in my business is the opportunity to work on that cultural intelligence and the opportunity to solve for large critical problems. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:How do you start the conversation about cultural intelligence with organizations?
Speaker 2:Oh, you know, I find the way to is to begin with curiosity, right? A lot of us like to. I mean, if we are privileged enough to be able to travel, that's a wonderful opportunity, but I don't want to exclude people from the conversation that haven't been able to do that. So another way is just either even that curiosity from perhaps watching a foreign film, reading a book, being exposed to somebody that is maybe different than yourself, and culture, and that's something a lot of us can relate to and then saying, okay, now I want you to envision what we can do when we have those different perspectives in a room together, whether it's virtual or in person, and I give examples. And then I start to say the interesting thing about culture is that it's not stagnant.
Speaker 2:Culture itself is evolving, and, sure enough, people say, hey, yes, if I've evolved and if the places that I'm from have changed I mean, even here in the US we've changed so much over the past I'd say 20 years right. Of course, we have to lend that same understanding and excitement to other cultures as well, and people really want to develop the skill. Deloitte has six signature traits of an inclusive leader, and they all begin with C, so I use this all the time in my work, such as curiosity, cognizance, collaboration, but one of the C's is cultural intelligence, and it's actually one of the ones that a lot of people are very excited to learn about, because we know there's differences around the world and, rather than applying that one size fits all, that one lens, why not apply a lens of let's, that curiosity and that continuous learning lens that can allow us to work in different ways with people from different backgrounds?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. And I was wondering, as you were talking, how do you, how do you bring your own personal experiences into the work that you do? Because I think you know, by being vulnerable, it's one of the ways we create safety for other people to be vulnerable and for them to share their experiences. So I'm wondering, like, how do you do that?
Speaker 2:One of the ways I do that, lisa, is to use myself as an example. And yeah, example I. When I moved to the US and one of the racial categories that were offered for me to check off was Asian, I struggled with that. I have never identified as being Asian, even though my family is from Asia. I've always referred to myself as Indo-Canadian. So in Canada we we like to believe that we're part of a mosaic versus a melting pot, so it's almost a stitched number of quilt pieces together and there's a lot of hyphenated identities. And so Indo refers to the Indian part, and Canadian is where I was raised, not even where I was born. And so, coming to the US, I said how do I navigate this? And then I thought, well, if I'm struggling with this, but if I have questions around this, I'm sure other people do too. And when I opened that question up, the floodgates are down. People say, yeah, you know, I have a challenging. I mean, even we've heard from people who live in Europe saying I have a challenging time identifying as white. I actually identify more with my nationality than with my race.
Speaker 2:But we can still have very critical conversations within these different ways of approaching how we identify or how we choose to identify. So I really do use my own storytelling as examples. I use examples of how my mother came to school when we were young. She was the lunch lady volunteering, and she would sometimes wear her Indian clothes, or so Varkames sorry is when we would go out, and at the same time, she never grew up in India, right?
Speaker 2:So that diaspora that you can be of, you can be influenced while not only belonging to one single identity. So it's a different way of having conversations about culture and intersectionality and DEI. That's not so much about the definitions, it's more informed by well, if you felt this way, that somebody feel this way too. Another example is, even when I talk about family, I say, hey, you know, I don't define families nuclear. In my definition, family is extended. I have one son and I also have two nephews, so I like to consider myself as having three kids as opposed to one. But that's also because of culturally how I define family. So it's pieces like this that people find themselves, these little nuggets. They say, hey, I felt that way too. I just didn't know where to take these thoughts and ideas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, I love. I love that description and I think being able to bring a piece of yourself to the work is is so important. I wonder, because you've worked within large organizations doing this work and now out on your own, what are the, what are the challenges and the barriers that you're seeing in this work to be able to make change?
Speaker 2:One of the barriers that I'm seeing is there is a hesitation to doing this work. In fact, I'm having a debate about that in a couple where there, without seeing what the objectives, the long-term objectives, are, there is a hesitation that, oh, are these learnings intended to make anybody feel bad or are we going to offend somebody, or are we going to isolate a certain group? And it's unfortunate because conversations and I use this a lot safety is not the same as comfort. Right, we want to be safe, but I encourage us to step into a place of discomfort. Culturally, even a lot of cultures embrace discomfort.
Speaker 2:Discomfort is where growth happens, and an effective DEI training will focus on bringing people into conversations instead of pushing people out. Bringing people into the dialogue, asking questions, even if they may come across as challenging at times. That is the basis of critical thinking, right, but without seeing the long-term impacts of why we're doing what we're doing. There is still a degree of nervousness around that and I would love to encourage people to step into the opportunity to learn. And yeah, it may be uncomfortable I've been uncomfortable at times sure, absolutely. But from that comes a greater purpose and a greater goal, which is to shift, in some cases, our ways of thinking. A lot of us think of it as like unlearning and relearning, and that's a refresh right. We want to do that our whole lives. It's what continuous learning is all about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I, you know, as you're talking, I'm thinking, yeah, how do we take down the barriers? How do we remove defensiveness? So, when people are in discomfort and they're feeling threatened, we often get a defensive action. So then, yeah, the work is how do we create spaces where it is going to be uncomfortable? But we want you to lower your guard and we want you to be open and curious. Yeah, in the work.
Speaker 2:Well, a good friend of mine also told me that psychological safety, the idea that we're safe from risk taking also needs to flow both ways. So as DEI practitioners, we also want to create a space where people aren't feeling like there's a question they're afraid to ask. I actually was with somebody at an art show the other week and we had a question and we didn't know where to ask it. It was about gender and how to address somebody in a more formal way. So we're very familiar with sounds, but really we didn't know where to ask the question. And in that moment I myself had a moment of realization where, if I don't know where to ask a question and I'm not sure I'm going to make a mistake Imagine how others may feel. So, lending a little bit of that empathy and reiterating that it's okay to ask questions, but we also need to create an environment where people are comfortable even asking those questions to begin with, listening more and just opening the doors to that communication is truly important. It's what we do all over the world all the time.
Speaker 1:That piece about being safe to ask a question. I was reminded of that recently. I've been in New Zealand about 18 months and I'm slowly learning about the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand, which is the Māori, and I joined a webinar where it's from, I guess, a consulting company here in New Zealand and we're talking about how to interact with Māori people and in a workplace setting. So how do you get their input and support to things that you're doing in the workplace? And I'm like I need to learn this. So I joined the call.
Speaker 1:The woman speaking was amazing and there was a chat, you know, where people could ask questions and as we got into the webinar, it became very evident that many of the Māori language was being used in the presentation and, like me, there were other people on the call who don't understand the language yet and someone actually asked in the chat about that.
Speaker 1:There was so many words in the Māori language that we couldn't understand and you know almost that it was not helpful, because we're here to learn and you're using language that we don't understand, so it's really hard for us to learn, and I thought it was a genuine question and they got taken down and said like that is completely inappropriate to ask. You know, if you just keep listening, it'll become evident which it didn't. And it was like for me, it was this example of them trying to create something great and help people white people like me learn. And then it turned into a situation where, okay, we're not allowed to ask questions and we can't give you feedback about how we still don't understand. And, yeah, it was that stuff you're talking about, like where, yeah, how do we create those places that it's safe to ask the question?
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, so long as people have an appetite to learn, there's an opportunity to shift mindsets. That is something we need to continuously remind ourselves of. It's not the responsibility of the underrepresented group to be that perpetual educator. And at the same time, we can Look at a question for what it really is and what it's really asking. An example is and this is an interesting one but in the US and in Canada one of the questions that, as an immigrant, I've heard and many others have heard, is where are you really from? And it can in some cases imply You're not really from here.
Speaker 2:I've encouraged myself and others to say who is asking the question, what's the context that they're asking the question in. For example, if it's an older Indian man who is Trying to connect with our trying to connect, you know, looking at me and say I think you're from India and I'm from India, and where are you from? Yeah, it's a different context. And if somebody in the workplace looks at me and says where are you from and I say oh, I'm from Canada, they say no, like where, where are you actually from? You can say you can see difference in the implication there. So it's not that one size. Not everybody who says something has an intention, negative intention behind it. It's still a learning opportunity. But when we down that dialogue, when there's that appetite for learning, it's a missed opportunity in my opinion. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think if you're being asked that question over and over, yeah, yeah tension matter oh.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, around the hundredth time you get. Yeah, it's almost that people are trying to peel back, but it's important to look. I mean there's an opportunity to educate in every opportunity we. We we face maybe not us ourselves, but as allies we can, we can certainly do that. I think that can keep the dialogue going to a place where we can see some behavioral shifts. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So what are you optimistic about in this work? What are you saying? The light.
Speaker 2:Well, COVID was challenging for a lot of people, a lot of communities, a lot of Just countries around the world. Seeing what India went through their height of COVID was was tough. Just about everybody I knew locally here in Seattle had lost somebody through association, and it was also a pandemic. That put into perspective how interconnected we really are. Prior to that and maybe this is my media lens coming in but there Was this perception of picking and choosing, as in this is relevant to me and that's over there somewhere, so geographically, there's a term called Orientalism, which was coined by a Palestinian writer the idea that Something is over there, it's not, it's foreign and it's exotic.
Speaker 2:And but I feel like Going through COVID globally has brought people into more of a interconnected space of what impacts me, impacts you, and there are certain challenges that we're facing that are not going away unless we work together. And I'm very optimistic that organizations that are taking a leadership position in In their spaces, whatever they're doing, the ones that are going to stand out, the ones that are going to Not just follow the path but lead in their work, are the ones that take this sort of a mindset. Yeah, I think it's tremendous opportunity and long overdue. We said like long overdue. We've been like this for a long time. Kudos, a lot of the people around the world that are in roles such as yourself, that are connecting with people from different backgrounds, but I think that we're at a part where, if you don't know what you're doing, that we're at a part where, if you don't do that at this stage, you'll be held back Definitely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we're already seeing organizations that are doing good work in this space Are separate. Their performance is separating from those who Are not, and those are stagnating. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, even young people at the workforce. It's extremely important for them to work for a diverse, equitable and inclusive organizations. I think it's something like 80% to look prioritized that when they are deciding which company or organization to work. So it's not something that is a nice to have, it's definitely a necessity and something that we need to prioritize.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, completely I. I go look. The first thing I do if I'm considering working with an organization is I go look at their board and I go look at their executive team, and it doesn't matter how much they tell me how important this work is to them. You know, if you, if those two things are not diverse, yeah, I don't want to work. Tell me about how people can work with you. Yeah, how can they find you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, one way people can find me is through my website, wwwglobalco. That is probably the best way. I'm also on Twitter, instagram, facebook, linkedin, and I used to write a column for the Seattle Times. I am starting A DEI column for Newsweek, so that's another one, but please do google me and let me know if anybody's interested in working together. My area of focus is DEI in the area of All trainings 101, 201, 301, with a global lens, global DEI and I'm always interested in connecting with global thinkers. That is where the magic truly happens, whether you're a writer or an educator or a C-level executive. There are Journalists, you know, podcast creators. There are Tremendous opportunities when we connect across our cultures and differences. Yeah, fantastic.
Speaker 1:And I will put all your contact details in the show notes so that people can find you. It's been delightful speaking with you today. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Of course, lisa, it's been wonderful to chat with you too. It's just, you know, sharing our experiences and reflecting on this and being able to put this in a podcast format. It's just something I'm really excited about. Our listeners Like I think of that and how we can continue to build our global community. Yeah,