With a thoughtfully woke CEO and consistently high ratings on all the diversity lists, Randall Tucker knew that his new life as Mastercard’s Chief Inclusion Officer would be a different kind of gig.

“This was not a turnaround situation,” he laughs. “But my marching orders were to build on the great work and make it more relevant and global.”

Now, just over two years on the job, Tucker says he’s making a mark. “We’ve elevated the conversation of diversity and inclusion at that leadership level,” he says. “We’ve all made sure that the work is seen as just as important as all other functions within the company.”

RaceAhead caught up with Tucker just as he was about to jet off to celebrate his 24th wedding anniversary. “My husband and I met our first week at college,” he says, an unexpected development but a wonderful one. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that everything is better when you have someone to share it with.”

It’s a philosophy that informs his thinking about what makes a welcoming workplace. What follows is a lightly edited version of our conversation.

RA: Let’s start with how you started. Mastercard was already doing so well and has a vocal equality champion in CEO Ajay Banga. How did you set your course?

RT: Well, we needed a working definition of what we were trying to tackle. I started with my formal definition of D&I – diversity is all the things that make us similar as well as different, the things you can and can’t see about other people. Then there’s inclusion – how do build diverse teams and keep them? At the end of the day, those are the two things that made sense for me, the management committee, and Ajay to focus on.

I imagine data played a big role.

Exactly. Next, I took a pause for the cause to figure out what we’re really trying to move the needle on and how D&I can help support our core businesses. I had leadership interviews with the first two tiers of the organization. I had one-on-one conversations with board members. I looked at our HR data and employee engagement survey data and then the customer data which asked about our commitment to diversity.

How does “diversity” play out globally?

It’s very different from region to region. In the US, we tend to gravitate to gender and ethnicity as the markers of diversity. But in other parts of the world that might not be the heavier weight. It might be language, it might be education, it might be religion or your career experiences. So that was part of the thinking.

Then basically I looked at all this stuff and said, what’s it trying to tell me?

What was it trying to tell you?

Two things, one big, one modular. The first is that inclusion education matters. I don’t believe we are born inclusive leaders, so part of the job is to build the muscle of inclusive leadership in our talent. That’s how we make sure everyone can reach their greatest opportunity in the organization.

Next, we needed to focus on the regional goals that made specific sense to those leaders, while still mapping back to the global vision. One size fits all, but with regional customization.

Can you give me an example of regional differences?

The idea is that to create the greatest business opportunities you need diverse perspectives at the table. In Asia, it’s how do we hire more people outside of the payments and banking industry, since our focus is primarily tech? In Latin America, it might be increasing women in senior leadership. In the US, it’s often how do I get more people of African descent in the mix. The goal is to get all those perspectives working together harmoniously, so everyone feels that they belong.

How did you shape inclusive leadership training at Mastercard?

I started by thinking about what those things that keep coming up that we need to get better at right now. Things you’d find on employee surveys, things that we get sued for – and then solve for them in tangible ways.

It’s not about holding hands. What’s impeding us from meeting our goals and creating a space for belonging so people can think better and innovate better? Also, I have opinions about implicit bias training.

Let’s hear it.

Inclusive leadership is a skill you can learn like any other, like financial acumen or executive presence. It’s a honing of something. It’s hopeful. It’s a relaxed approach because we can all be more inclusive leaders. Standalone trainings feel like “we need to fix you.” It creates outlier work and people don’t understand how it relates to their business.

Instead embed your inclusion thinking in every policy, practice, and conversation. Now, it’s just the way Mastercard execs learn to lead.

The numbers show – and it comes up all the time in my reporting – that non-majority culture talent can’t make it past their first leadership jobs. What should companies be doing differently?

The piece that I make sure that I control is the development piece: What is the inclusion dialog around talent review? In that discussion, who is going to be given those stretch assignments. Who is in your next class of leaders in the organization? Are they diverse? We’re having those conversations upfront about the people who are being identified as high potential. I show you the photo of your talent pool and ask you, is this what you want? Give them a chance to make a different decision by giving them the data.

The inclusive leadership part is – what do people specifically need to succeed?

So much of inclusion is about getting people to really see each other.

We do ourselves a disservice if we only talk to people like ourselves. We make sure our business resource groups (BRGs) are collaborating with each other. We make sure people are mentoring and sponsoring people different than themselves. There is not a Mastercard executive who won’t make time for lunch if you ask. So ask.

But really, I learned about the power of dialog and crisis management when the Pulse Nightclub [mass] shooting happened.

You were the Senior Director of Inclusion and Diversity at Darden Restaurants at the time?

Yes, and it was right down the street from us. Orlando is already a welcoming environment. But now we needed to ask, what does it mean to love and respect your neighbor? So, I brought in people from the black, Hispanic, gay, Muslim, and law enforcement communities for a panel discussion. You know, we didn’t all agree, but it was healing.

And that’s what I’m really proud of, bringing that sense of dialog and discussion here to Mastercard every day. How can we get better at really talking to each other? Working with other groups? Inclusion can’t be built in silos.

• On Point

  <span style="font-weight:400;">Intel talks diversity on Capitol Hill</span> Intel’s diversity and inclusion chief Barbara Whye testified to Congress in support of the STEM Opportunities Act, a law that will address the issues that women and underrepresented talent face in tech. She had plenty of pointers to share. Intel had made a public promise in 2015 that by 2020 its employees would better reflect the population of the US. They ended up reaching their goal in 2018 with a workforce now 27% female, 9.2 % Hispanic, and about 5% African American. She ticked through a variety of inclusion strategies, but asked lawmakers to do better. “These programs can help to reduce the opportunity gap, but only Congress has the influence and resources to address these systemic problems on the national level.” Washington Post

  <span style="font-weight:400;">The UK conducts a “racism in the workplace” survey, gets bad new</span> The UK’s Trade Union Congress (TUC) used an online survey to better understand the daily experiences of their Black and Ethnic Minority population (BME) in the workplace. The survey asked over 5,000 people some basic questions about their experiences at work, whether or not they had been racially harassed, or if they had been treated differently by their employer because of their race. The survey also asked the workers to share their experiences of bringing issues of racism to their employers and how they reacted. The study found that racism still plays a large role in the lives of the BME workers with over 70% of Asian and Black workers reporting they had experienced racial harassment at work and around 60% of Asian and Black workers, reporting that they had been given unfair treatment by their employer because of their race. The full report, called “Racism Ruins Lives,” is below. Racism Ruins Lives

  A fire in a New Haven mosque was intentionally set I’m not sure why this story isn’t getting more attention, but a two-alarm fire which heavily damaged a New Haven mosque is now a federal investigation. “This was intentionally set,” New Haven Fire Chief John Alston told the Hartford Courant. “Any time there’s an event like this in a house of worship, anywhere in the United States, it triggers a response of both the ATF, the FBI, and state and local authorities. That has happened.” Hartford Courant

  White supremacy is terrorism The number of hate-based murders, people who were killed for their race or religion, doubled in 2017. And, the attackers followed an ideology of white supremacy which meets the FBI definition of terrorism. But, experts say, law enforcement has been slow to treat these criminals as terrorists because they are American and white. The first domestic terrorism conviction happened in 2017, after a white assailant determined to start a race war, stabbed a 66-year-old black man to death on the streets of Manhattan. It’s still an outlier. “I think we needed to call it what it was,” Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance told CNN. “This was an act of terrorism,” Vance explained. “This exists in our country and it happened here.” CNN

• On Background

  <span style="font-weight:400;">A surprising podcast about the day-to-day lives of people in China</span> One of China’s most popular podcasts, “Gushi FM” (or Story FM in English), tells the kinds of stories people rarely hear in the country’s tightly controlled media market. The stories of loneliness, heartbreak, love, loss, and adventure range from a Chinese construction worker’s escape from war in Libya, to a man who went with his father to Switzerland to die by assisted suicide. Kou Aizhe, a librarian turned journalist, is the host. “Through every story, my goal is to show the complexity of each person. I want to show the different angles,” he says. While the podcast’s audience is growing, with 35,000 new listeners each month, it’s facing funding headwinds. But fans love it. Listener Shao Xueyan says that “Through listening to other people’s stories I could reflect on my own life. It made me realize that there will always be good things that happen in life as long as you are alive.” New York Times

  <span style="font-weight:400;">The forgotten survivor of the 16th street Baptist Church bombing</span> It’s been almost 60 years since the 16th street Baptist Church bombing took the lives of four young girls, but no one remembers that day more than Sarah Collins Rudolph. She survived the attack, but her older sister Addie Mae did not. While the event may have been a turning point in the quest for civil rights, to this day Rudolph and her husband George carry deep feelings. After the accident, in which Rudolph lost an eye, she received no counseling, recognition, or restitution. She still struggles with health problems as a result. “The way they treated me here in the city of Birmingham, they don’t acknowledge me as being the fifth little girl,” she says. She thinks about the incident every day and worries for the future with the many recent shootings. “We have a president now, and it looks like all this stuff is coming back because he don’t talk against it,” she says. WBUR

  How to write about and understand immigration in the US This resource, from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy is designed for journalists, but it works for anyone who wants to publish anything from a memo to public remarks on the subject of immigration. The number one issue with immigration reporting is a lack of context. Is the event you are highlighting a single event or part of a broader history? “It’s really tempting, I think, at this moment for journalists to say the Trump administration is doing x, y, z. I think it’s really important for journalists to ask the question, ‘When did this program start?’ Or, ‘When did this issue start?’” says PRI’s Angilee Shah. Click through for more and a public Google document with over 70 immigration data sources. Shorenstein Center On Media

  Aidan Taylor assisted in the preparation of today’s summaries.

• Quote

  

  At the end of the day, if you surround yourself with people who look like you, who walk like you and talk like you, and grew up in the same places you did and worked with you in your prior jobs, then you will have a sense of comfort of hiring people around you who have that familiarity. But you will also have the same blind spots. You will miss the same trends. You will miss the same opportunities. —Ajay Banga .