Joe Gerstandt

Using Stories and Research to Foster Next Generation Cultures to Flourish in the Workplace

Nancy's Note:

“Right at the get-go, Joe impressed me with his passionate insight and wisdom. Joe’s advocacy for reframing the diversity and inclusion conversation is brilliant.”

Joe Gerstandt

Using Stories and Research to Foster Next Generation Cultures to Flourish in the Workplace

Nancy’s Note
“Right at the get-go, Joe impressed me with his passionate insight and wisdom. Joe’s advocacy for reframing the diversity and inclusion conversation is brilliant.”

Joe Gerstandt

Using Stories and Research to Foster Next Generation Cultures to Flourish in the Workplace

Nancy’s Note
“Right at the get-go, Joe impressed me with his passionate insight and wisdom. Joe’s advocacy for reframing the diversity and inclusion conversation is brilliant.”

Expertise

Diversity, Inclusion, Unconscious Bias, Equity

Travels From

Omaha, Nebraska

Speaking Style

Informative Action-Oriented, Provoking

About Joe...

Strong advocate for resetting the diversity and inclusion conversation, bringing greater clarity, action and impact to the workplace.

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Watch Joe in Action

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Presentation Topics

For the past 15 years, Joe Gerstandt has been helping organizations of all shapes and sizes to find new clarity relative to diversity and inclusion, and to put new practices in place. But he did not take a very direct route into this work, in fact there was a time in his life when he likely would have rolled his eyes at what he now does for a living.

The often-discomforting experience of becoming aware of and addressing his own privilege, denial, bias, and bigotry still informs his work today. This is a story of how one person’s heart, mind, and behavior changed and what we might learn from it.

From his own story of growing up on a family farm in rural Iowa, serving in the United States Marine Corps, personal and professional successes and setbacks, and just being in the world with other human beings, joe distills insights applicable toward leadership, behavior change, culture change, and enlisting more allies in this work.

What specifically do you mean when you use the word “inclusion?” It has become one of the most popular words relative to the modern workplace, yet in most organizations it remains a vague, ambiguous idea; and vague, ambiguous targets are incredibly hard to hit.

If inclusion is the product you are trying to deliver, then you should be able to speak to its characteristics. This message brings a powerful new clarity to the concept of inclusion, what it is, why it matters and how it happens. The audience will leave this message with a strong foundation upon which to build impactful and sustainable diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Inclusive leadership requires more than a statement of commitment, it is an active practice. This session introduces you to that practice. Anchored in a practical model of what inclusion is, joe will introduce you to a set of competencies and commitments to ensure that your leadership is, in fact, inclusive. You will leave this session with work to do and tools to use, things that you can act on immediately.

An internal hackathon is a high-energy, interactive way to model inclusion, invite greater diversity of thought and perspective into your inclusion efforts, generate creative new solutions, and build new relationships. Once participants are grounded in a common framework of inclusion, a basic process for “hacking,” a target and deliverables, they set to work competing against other teams with very real time constraints to solve an inclusion challenge within your organization.

Most leaders and organizations already care greatly about talent, but are we having the right conversation about talent? More and more of our work is today being done at the group or team level, yet our talent efforts remain laser focused on the individual level.

We seem to be operating on the belief that if we group talented individuals together, we will naturally end up with talented groups. But it does not work that way, at the group level there are a bunch of other variables involved. This message provides research driven insights into what makes a talented team (cognitive diversity & psychological safety), as well as practices and behaviors for getting there.