Race, Risk, & Leadership: Profound Lessons You Need to Know from the Executive Bench

When I came up with the idea of starting The Equitecture® Coaching Collective, a program for leadership development, I was down the road of recovering from severe work trauma directly connected to facing race in the workplace.

The work trauma occurred in a protracted way and commenced after an unprecedented track record of closing gaps in racial equity, shifting toxic racial climates, as well as driving  DEI-centered systemic change at the scale of several hundred thousand people across 16 departments in HR. 

Getting back up after being knocked down for effectively facilitating a shift in structures and conditions for the multiply marginalized has been the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life. 

I’ve learned so much about leading with integrity and an antiracist ethos, setting a global, company-wide racial equity strategy, shifting the racial climate of a team and organization, and how the systems we need to change behave. 

The experience imparted profound lessons that live at the core of the Equitecture® leadership program for executive leadership. Like the racing certainty of needing strategic foresight, the life-altering dangers that come w/ race & leadership, the unrelenting dilemmas in operationalizing equity, and the searing demands of moving as an equal parts visionary, strategist, and implementor.

It includes lessons on the aspects of being leaders that require honorable gamesmanship, risk-taking in leadership, and organizational politics.

Many know that systems work tirelessly to self-correct back to the status quo. The dynamics systems used to disastrously return to the status quo taught me so much about the nuances of power relations in the workplace, when competing values and beliefs collide, how c-suite/executive BIPOC can collude to protect the status quo and get used by the system to enact horizontal and vertical oppression in addition to the ways whiteness functions in organizations.

When I reflected upon what might have been preventative, dampened the grave harm to my personhood, or ensured a soft place to land, I realized it didn’t exist. Especially in programs for leadership development and executive leadership.

In the spirit of creating the space I needed - because I suspect that you might need it too - I make this offering now that I re-emerge better healed and with more sovereignty:

The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership is rooted in the lessons I've learned over the last 20+ years. As there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path (The Matrix).

We will fill in the spaces between theory and practice, conscientiously build community, cultivate soft places to land, sharpen our strategies and tactics for antiracism, build models that attenuate structural inequity, and design our interventions to be robust enough to compel inequity to equalize while maintaining our wellness. How ‘bout that?

I help trailblazing leaders like you, who are stuck between mainstream minutiae and resistance from status quo keepers, pivot organizational systems from unfair to equitable.

When you enroll in The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership, you shift from:

• Risk aversion to fortified, unshakable leadership
• Mainstream generic approaches to unprecedented models for more racially equitable outcomes
• DEI burnout to tenacious healing and growth
• Martyrdom , reactivity, or inaction to honorable gamesmanship
• Misaligned and unclear to found providence
• Being an isolated load bearer to cooperative command

Work with me to expand your leadership capacity in care-curated leadership crucibles, sustained coaching, community, and battle-tested curriculum. If you want help applying these concepts, enroll in The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership.