848 Lauren Tucker: Inclusion Is the Future of Work

Melinda Wittstock:

Lauren, welcome to Wings.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Thank you. Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

So I’m going to start with one of your suggested questions, which is why do your employees hate you? Gosh, I read that in your intake into the podcast and it’s like, oh God, do they? And so let’s break that down. Why is that a prompt? I guess it sounds like that’s a pretty normal thing. A lot of entrepreneurs have employees that hate them, so what’s that about?

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Yeah, I think it’s really easy when you are an entrepreneur and you’ve done a lot of work, and this is not to take away from the fact that you’ve done a lot of work, but it’s easy to get arrogant, it’s easy to think you know everything. And yet at the point of your building that success, you start getting more and more distant from what’s happening on the front lines. And that means you have less expertise about your own business’s day-to-day frontline experiences, and you ignore the employees that are having those frontline experiences at your own peril. But this happens all the time, big companies, small companies, and it can be a hit to your ego when somebody who’s on the frontline might be a more junior person, might be early career. He starts to tell you, well, hey Lauren, you can improve this by doing this, that, and the other. And it does strike you. It does, with me and my team. It’s like, well, wait a minute, this is my business.

And then you really have to take a beat and take a step back because at the end of the day, every time my team has told me something either about what I can improve on the front lines, where my focus needs to be, where I can help them out, it has profoundly helped the business. And we live in an era where the economy is based off of knowledge, innovation, creativity. These are uniquely human capabilities. And I know everybody’s talking about AI and all kinds of stuff, but nothing is going to replace the humans that interact with the human aspects of your business. They need to be considered your business partners. They can help you grow. It’s easy to make money, it’s harder to make more money. They can help you grow.

And yet I find it appalling, the kind of disrespect for the talent that I see in business globally, but especially in US businesses. And there’s just an assumption that somehow employees deign to work for companies, that somehow they’re being forced through the threat of starvation and homelessness to work for a company rather than the fact that they want to feel not just safe, valued, heard, but productive. People actually don’t want to just goof off all the time, but they also want to, they may have other ambitions than becoming CEO or COO or C-suite in your company. They may want to be productive because that’s the best way to take care of their families or to do other things. And that’s not bad. That is their ambition, but that still doesn’t mean they don’t want to come to work every day, be productive, be participating in the growth and success of your company, and you ignore that resource at your peril.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, this is so important. It speaks to the character of the leader. I’ve seen it all from the person who’s really controlling, command control and the micromanaging aspect of that through to the person who is a lot more empathetic and empowering and such. And it’s like a scale, and it can vary by your age, your culture, male, female and whatnot. And so let’s talk about that end of the spectrum where you have a leader that’s very empathetic and wants to create this great inclusive and wonderful culture, but then gets walked over, because that’s one end of the spectrum and then the other end of the spectrum is that arrogant thing that you were describing, where they’re removed from it or don’t know what’s going on.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Yes. Here’s the thing, respecting your employees doesn’t mean letting them bully you, and it doesn’t mean letting them really walk all over you. One of the things that Do What Matters really is a core center of our philosophy is a philosophy that came out of social work. It’s called solution therapy, solution brief therapy. There’s now an arm that’s really in the workplace, really led by a lot of British consultants called Solutions at Work or Solutions Focused Work. And it really is about how to have collaborative inclusive conversations as a leader where you can make sure that, again, your employees feel safe, valued, heard, and productive, and still make the decisions that are best for the company. Meaning you can listen to folks and still say, okay, I’ve heard you. This has been great input. Here’s the way we’re going to work towards the solution we all want to get to, and I’m going to take pieces of your suggestion, but at the end of the day, what your employees want to see is collaborative leadership, not command and control.

They’re not expecting you to just go with the flow and every conversation turns your head because that’s demoralizing to your talent force as well. That pisses them off. And that also creates a range of disrespect because decisions are never made. And I’ve heard that from the talent force as well. My leaders are not making any decisions and everything is being dragged down. I need decisions to be made. So one of the things that really is very challenging is most entrepreneurs, people with startups, et cetera, they become leaders based on their functional capabilities, but not on their ability to lead and to manage people productively. And then once they get to that level of leadership, and they’re in the C-suites and Wall Street’s calling and everything seems like, oh, I’m making all this money. They do not want to admit that they don’t understand the hard yards of managing talent of a larger scaled up organization.

And then managerial incompetency takes over, that fraud syndrome takes over. And what I have noticed is how resistant C-suites are to learning, to training to be better managers. And yet they expect everybody else that’s not in the C-suite to be open to constant learning, training and improving, but they themselves are resistant because they think they’ve arrived. So I would argue that for those folks who are on the spectrum where they’re just getting whipsawed by everybody, this is about learning how to focus on a common GPS destination, which is what solutions focused work is? You don’t use a GPS to figure out how you got lost. You use a GPS, and that’s what the leader is supposed to be, is to say, let’s all align on where we want to go. What’s that GPS destination? And then I’m open to hearing, okay, do we take the side streets, toll ways, express ways, a combination of both?

And then as a leader, I’m driving the car, I’m driving the car, but I’m good with people in the backseat and sitting in the passenger seats contributing to the best journey, but I’m driving the car, I’m going to make a decision on how to get us to our GPS destination, but without understanding and aligning on that GPS destination, everybody just sits around pointing fingers about how we got lost and analyzing the misery of our past, and decisions aren’t getting made. And that’s just as bad as the command and control where somebody’s just taking the wheels driving willy-nilly to get to wherever they think is right, even if it’s maybe not the best decision.

Melinda Wittstock:

And I suppose it really differs depending on what stage of company you’re at and how fast you’re scaling. So say from the perspective of the entrepreneur at the early stage where they’re doing everything themselves and then they start to bring in team members, but they’re not necessarily, they have to learn a lot about leadership, which is an ongoing thing and how to create a great culture, how to do all these things, but they’re in the doing and they get spread too thin. And if you’re in a situation of a fast-growing company and that culture is not clearly defined, or even if it is defined, but there’s no accountability to the culture, how to maintain the culture, there’s a whole bunch of things to do. Meanwhile, you’re building your product, you’re selling stuff, you’re this, that, and whatever. How does a founder at those early stages really lay the right groundwork here from the beginning?

We can talk about bigger companies later but at this early stage of triage entrepreneurship, how do you recommend that more early stage founder, particularly female founder, navigate that and set up the right systems and culture from the get-go?

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. This is a really hard concept for people at that startup stage to understand that sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. Out of the solution building canon is a couple of great behavior-based studies around expressway traffic jams at rush hour. And what they found was when everybody’s trying, let’s just say everybody’s trying to go 65, but it’s expressway. Everybody’s trying to go 65, some people are going 80, some people are going 70. Man, but when you’ve been there, I’m sure when somebody way up usually 10 miles in front, just puts on the brakes, then it becomes this chain event, just break after break after break. And before you know it, you 10 miles behind are sitting in a traffic jam for at least 30 minutes and you’re just sitting there, you’re not getting anywhere. You’re not getting to where you want to go fast.

So what engineers have found is that when they slow everybody down during rush hour, people are less likely to put on the brakes, less likely to have somebody going out of control, somebody doing something else. And people actually get to their destination faster when they’re all going 45 miles an hour than when people are going 65 miles an hour and you’ve got some people going 70 and some people putting on their breaks. So what we know is that sometimes even as scary as it is, but you know what? Building your own company is all about taking risks.

We always think it’s about the risks of leaning forward and racing to be the first mover or what have you. But what risk we sometimes should be taking is the willingness to do, especially what I’m doing right now, is the willingness to step back, look at where the company is going, where the culture is going, where the team is going, and to say, okay, I’m going to take a risk to put the brakes on the business model as we know it, and we need to make some shifts for the future of the business. And that means taking our foot off the brakes, going a bit slower, reassessing where we’re going. I see this, and we see this in some of these big companies right now, your job as a CEO, basically as a CEO, you’ve got a team. Pretty much 90% of what you do is just overhead. You’re not the one actually making the moves. It is your team. But that 10% that’s so important is strategizing about the business model and making sure that the business model that you currently have is still viable.

When we look at things like, let’s look at entertainment and the actors in the writer strikes and the conflict-

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, wildly broken business model there.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

… wildly broken. But let me just say this, Melinda, it was broken 10, 15 years ago.

Melinda Wittstock:

I know.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

This doesn’t happen overnight. I love these people like Iger down at Disney or some of these folks at Netflix were, this wasn’t broken overnight, this was-

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, the fascinating thing about this is that the writers and actors are seeing the studios and Netflix or Apple or Amazon as the same thing, and they’re not. Netflix is the winner here. The studios have a totally different issue.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

And you hear this with the big banks as well, Jamie Diamond opens his mouth one more time. Just sit down, shut up, listen to what’s going on the ground. Because at the end of the day, these business models, and I think the banking model is, the big banking model has been broken for a long time. And the goal of the CEO is to have vision, is to have a strategy that says, I see the business model changing and I need to figure out what to do in anticipation of that. So I can lead these five people or these 10,000 people into the future and make sure they’re prepared for the change in the business model. And I will say these studios and these streaming services and so forth, that they were just raking in the money, they were raking in the money and their overhead because they did not… They knew it, they saw it coming, and they did nothing to adapt.

And now you see this breach. So when we go back to how we started, why do your employees hate you? Well, that’s one of them. Your job in the C-suite is to make sure that you are keeping your eye on that vision, because me at the front lines, whether I’m a writer, whether I’m a UPS driver, whether I’m frontline banker in a small office, I don’t have access to all of that. I don’t have access to that vision. That’s what I’m relying on you to do. And I hate to say it, but I tell people all the time that are CEOs, that’s your job, boo. That’s your job.

Melinda Wittstock:

For any public company, that quarterly incentive and the incentive to just shareholder value, bottom line, very short-termism stands in the way of that kind of thinking. This is one of the reasons why when I think of the highly scalable business I’m building, one of the reasons I’m not all that interested in exiting via an IPO is because that structural thing almost prevents the very thing that you’re talking about.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Yes, yes. And it is the short-termism, was it Milton Friedman, who is another personality and finance that I curse every day because this idea of everything you do is to drive shareholder value, just has, how can I put it? It has distorted everything.

Melinda Wittstock:

Everything because it used to be pre-Milton Friedman. I share this perspective with you, pre-him. A company was measured by how it gave back to the community and how it treats its employees and all of these things. And then we look around at our culture and the politics and all the people who feel left behind. We talk about this rising employee activism. Well, is it any wonder? Because you just even look at the separation of wage growth versus other costs, or all of these things in these companies. And this is one of the reasons I’m an entrepreneur because how can entrepreneurs, and particularly female entrepreneurs, really change that game? Because it has to be changed. There’s so much that’s broken.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Yes. And I think that word you just used, broken. So I think there are a lot of broken systems with modern capitalism that is not accommodating and it’s interesting. I think we’re seeing it all over the place, especially with the conversations around AI. That’s just one of the conversations. I’m just pulling that out of the most recent bin of discussion. And that is we are lacking that kind of thought leadership in the world of economics. I think there’s some people out there that are saying things, aren’t being heard. We’ve got a lot of broken systems right now with modern day capitalism, and it is not accommodating the way that technology is changing, the way we work, the way we live. It’s not accommodating these dramatic changes in environmental issues.

And I do not see right now the world of business allowing voices, I think those voices to get through. As I said, I’m not going to lie, Melinda, I do not like Jamie Diamond, I don’t like anything about him because I think he represents a group of leaders that are so, so tightly holding on to the past of the way that things worked. And you hear it every day, not just in terms of employees, but how we work, how we live, back to the offices. I said, I’m not against back to the office, people going back to the office, but we have to reconceive what the office is all about. What are our obligations to our talent forces who are saying, I can do a lot of this work at home, or what is the office going to do for me other than cost me money to get to and childcare, especially among women, it can cost anywhere from 15 to $45,000 a year for childcare. What am I getting in return for going back to the office? How are we reconfiguring what the office means?

But what I hear is people like Jamie Diamond still holding on to a business model and a way of working in the past that is flying in the face of all the things that we’re seeing, and the people on the front line, your employees, the people who are supporting those employees, they’re seeing it every day and not being heard, they’re not being listened to. And then what happens is that fundamental insecurity that they feel because they’re not feeling heard, they’re not feeling listened to, they’re not feeling productive. That insecurity means they’re going to act in ways that are going to be about self-preservation, whether it’s striking, whether it’s I’ve quit and I’m going to do the digital nomad stuff, or I’m making different decisions about how I live. This is what is happening now, and we need new leaders, or leaders with new ideas that are really accommodating the future of business and the future of work and economics and capitalism to start coming up with new systems and new processes that are going to accommodate what I believe is the next evolution here of capitalism in the world of work.

Melinda Wittstock:

So entrepreneurs have a real role in this, because it’s been small businesses, it’s been entrepreneurs that are innovating, and yet there’s so many things that make entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial success really tough. Right now just even if you think of the venture capital funding environment, just the amount of investment is way down. It’s very difficult to raise money, very difficult, particularly for female founders to raise money. We get something like 2% of the venture capital. There are a lot of structural things, and yet the real innovation is happening there. I think there are a lot of female founders coming into this with a much more empathetic, inclusive intent for the way that they lead their companies and whatnot. But there’s a glass ceiling on that too, in terms of how big these companies get and all the various challenges just of training, of all these different things to lead them well.

You had mentioned go slow to go faster, but what are the things that you think a lot of female entrepreneurs in particular miss and could get better at as they grow their companies and scale their companies. From hiring? How the hiring is done, to the results, driving accountability, listening, all these things, really creating a team of leaders that have ownership in all ways in their companies as those companies grow, obviously the future, but how do we best get there?

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Yeah. First of all, let me just say, we would have to have a whole other podcast to talk about what women are facing economically from a business standpoint, entrepreneurially, politically, globally. We need to all get together and talk about what we’re going to do to ensure that women are really able to benefit and thrive in an economy that is actually favoring what women bring to the table. Again, we’re really living in a global economy that’s much more dependent on the strengths that women bring to the table. It is not a brawn driven economy. This is an economy that is based on creativity, innovation, knowledge, service. These are the things that women have really done throughout the ages. It is now becoming something that should be valued because, and I think technology has enabled that to be the strengths that women bring to the table to be elevated.

But those old broken systems still favor what I like to call domination over excellence and the pursuit of excellence. It still is dragging women back because we’re seeing… Well, again, another whole podcast devoted to that. So what I will say though is women, and this seems so fundamental, but I see it every day where women are just not supporting other women. And that, we’ve got to fix that. We’ve got to fix that. And when I say women aren’t supporting other women, there are women out there that have a ton of money, I’m just going to say it, a ton of money, but they’re not helping other women or they’re parsing it out or they’re making women jump through hoops. Where are those women? And I hate to say this, Melinda, but I’m talking about some of these women, I was just reading, guilty pleasure of reading things that come out of things like People Magazine where these women who have benefited from these very expensive divorces and they’ve walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars, and I don’t see them helping other women.

They have the venture capital, they have stuff to help other women, but they’re not doing it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Why aren’t they? This has always been a really frustrating thing for me as a female founder that is dependent, a technology company, and speaking of which is AI powered needs investment. They’re in fast scaling, it’s potential to be a billion dollar plus business. One of the interesting structural issues is that the female venture capital networks, they don’t raise as a big fund as their male counterparts. So the check sizes are smaller. And when you’re looking at the pre-seed environment and seed, and even A, the amount of money, the check size for women is much smaller. So for pre-seed, it’s an average of $250,000. For a woman, it’s $1.5 million for a man. And then you’re measured to the same standards.

Then there’s some other interesting thing too, where I’ve had the privy to meet a lot of wealthy women and they say things which blow my mind like, well, I write checks to charity, but my husband handles all the investment things. And so even for social impact companies that are doing a better job at actually solving the problem that the charity will solve, and there’ll be a social impact and a return, and they just won’t do it. Why? Why? What’s the problem?

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

I’ve been working a lot on myself, Melinda, over the last year, and I can say I need to manage what I call my inner Lucy van Pelt to have an answer for everything and to put my 5 cents up and say, but my brother is actually helping me work on it, because he loves to remind me of my inner Lucy van Pelt. So my first instinct of trying to sublimate my Lucy van Pelt is to say, I don’t think I have an answer for that, but I’m going to come up with a little Lucy by saying, I do think that we have to be honest with ourselves as women, and I see it with even my most progressive female acquaintances and friends, when they use the benefits of patriarchy to their advantage, they benefit just like you just said, well, my husband handles all those investments. I just do the charity stuff.

Well, that works, that works for her, that works for her, that works for a lot of these women who I think about, and this happens, full transparency, this also, I get this question asked a lot about African-Americans, well, why are Black people not supporting other Black people? And I come back with, why is there a Clarence Thomas? I don’t know. I look at Jenny Thomas and I think Here’s a woman who benefits from this weird intersection of patriarchy and racism and so forth. So I would say the one answer I do come up with is this, that we need… We are lacking, I guess, I would say this, we’re lacking some major voices of change here. I get very concerned by people like Elon Musk, not for the more obvious things, I get concerned because he, Rupert Murdoch, there are a lot of men out there with billions of dollars who own the platforms on which to elevate voice, that could be elevating voices of change. And it’s not happening.

Bezos owns the Washington Post. We’re not elevating, I don’t care whether you’re right, middle or left from a political standpoint, men still control way too much. Even more so now, the platforms on which I think women’s leadership voices can be heard. We don’t have the Gloria, whether you like Gloria Steinem or you didn’t. She was a huge voice in the women’s movement early on. You had big voices, you had influential voices. Now everything is very atomized, very granular. And the people who have the control of the channels of communication are still wealthy white men. And we need to have some channels to hear voices of change from women who can start to corral these women with wealth, maybe start to shame them a bit, come up with a vision where they can truly get enthusiastic about following it, coordinating. We just don’t see that with women.

Melinda Wittstock:

Do you think at the root of this, of the women who are very wealthy, I often wonder whether women are still in scarcity thinking. Like if she really succeeds, that means that I don’t. Whereas men tend to have a culture where they help each other more in business, just the way they talk about money or like, Hey, I’ve got this deal. You want to come in on this with me? Or that kind of stuff. And women tend not to do that. There’s more of a weird competitive thing. This was very, very obvious earlier in my life where women really didn’t help each other. I go way back to my first job. I was 22. I was a correspondent on the Times of London. And for each specialist correspondent, we shared what was then called a secretary. Secretary would bring coffee to everyone except me, would bring mail to all the men, but not to me because, and I asked her about it once, she said, well, you’re a woman. You can do it yourself.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Yes. Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s that. And it’s more subtle, it’s not nearly that bad, but that still exists.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Yes, it’s a lot of crabs in a barrel. And I would say too, and it’s interesting, because I see this also happening with Black entrepreneurs. They do not have… It’s interesting, and I’ve found this myself in just my own business, this unwillingness to “spend the cultural and political capital to give somebody else a leg up.” And I think you’re right, this scarcity mindset, what it says to me is, well, I really like Melinda. I’d really like to help her out. But yeah, I do have a really fat bank account, but my biggest fear is that I got to save all this cultural and political capital for when I really need it. And I don’t know when I’m really going to need it. So I might recommend her for something, but then she’s on her own. I’m not going to invest in that.

And I do think it is a genuine mindset shift that we need to happen, but I’m not so sure it’s going to happen unless… I would love to be able to amplify my voice. I’m trying to figure out how to do that. I’m trying to write a book. I’m trying to do… I do podcasts, I do whatever, but I don’t really have that platform. And yet, the one thing I have decided to do in stepping away from the day-to-day management of my business, is that I am willing to risk whatever social, cultural, political capital that I do have to speak as much truth to power as possible to see things improve for women, and to see things improve for people of color by coming up with new ways of talking about the challenges that we face. Because bottom line is, if women do not succeed in building business and growing their businesses, the global economy will be dragged down. We have to open up that space. It’s, I don’t have billions of dollars. You know what I mean?

So for me to come and try to do what I’m doing is great, but what we need is we need Melinda Gates. We need, Oh God, what’s her name? I’m losing my ability-

Melinda Wittstock:

Bezos’s ex. So they’re putting a lot of money-

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

… charity and whatnot, but I don’t see them investing in female entrepreneurial founders who can create generational wealth and-

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

… women.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Somebody needs to bring them together somehow. We need to get them to open up to that possibility. I think Serena Williams is trying to do some of that with her wealth, but it needs to be a coordinated effort because to your point, men do that. They coordinate, they start funds, and they get together and they do this. And that’s not happening with women.

Melinda Wittstock:

I want to make sure that we get to your whole thesis about DEI practices. So we’ve had this whole ruling from the Supreme Court about affirmative action. We’ve had all this pushback on diversity and inclusion. Politically it’s been, it’s a really murky time on that. And you’ve said that these practices that are emphasizing diversity over inclusion aren’t really working, they’re not being effective. What would make them more effective? And talk to me about inclusion and what that actually means.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Yes. It’s funny because I actually, I just got back from spending two months in Puerto Rico at a co-living compound with some young founders there. And I remember sitting at a table, a lot of them are Puerto Rican folks of color. There’s some gender diversity and a couple of African American founders. And we were sitting down in a large dinner that we had communal dinner. And I said, here’s the thing. We have got to come up with a new vernacular here because diversity without inclusion hurts everyone. And that’s what we’re seeing right now. We’re seeing across the board this, and I’m all for diversity, but the bottom line is if we don’t start with everybody understanding that we have to all feel safe, valued, heard, white guys are feeling very insecure. They’re acting on that. They’re acting on the fact, whether we agree with whether they should be insecure or not, whether it’s a genuine concern of their loss of status, it doesn’t matter. That’s how they’re feeling and they’re acting on that feeling.

What we have to do is start with, we want everybody to feel safe, valued, heard, and productive. What will it take for that to happen? How is it linked to the GPS destination? And so I remember saying as we were part of this conversation, I remember saying, “You know what? First of all, everybody needs to stop getting triggered.” And they just looked at me like I had five heads. And I said, that is not where the conversation needs to be. I said, at the end of the day, my parents saw worse than what some of these youngsters are getting triggered by back in the day in the civil rights movement.

We can’t just get distracted by getting whip sided by all of our personal feelings. And that’s what’s happening right now. And these personal feelings start to get connected to political action. Political action starts to go awry. And before you know it, we’re all blaming each other and we’re not getting anywhere. So I think with inclusion first, we’re focused on ensuring that everyone feels safe, valued, heard, and productive. And what is the GPS destination that look like… What does that look like, that makes sure that everybody gets their feeling included, feeling that sense of belonging? We are not doing that because we’re not focusing on good leadership. And good leadership says, here’s the destination we really need to go to. This is what we need to do together. And then this is everybody’s role in it. And instead what happens is we’re focusing on very performative pieces, writing statements, checking boxes. And quite frankly, my own business has been a victim of this box checking diversity theater as opposed to-

Melinda Wittstock:

Diversity theater.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

… Yeah, it is, it’s diversity theater and the show just seems to go on and on and on. And quite frankly, it’s in the systems and it’s in the systems and the processes that really focus on improving managerial competence, governance competence, and fixing those systems that we should be focused on rather than all the diversity theater that we see. And everybody goes home feeling like their money was taken. And so I think there are a lot of us that are on the vanguard of inclusion first versus diversity first, where we are focused on systems and processes rather than individual psychology change. And we know these work because they worked with the Civil Rights Movement. Back in the day, the Civil Rights Movement, it wasn’t around changing psychology of clan members. It was about we’re going to put laws in place. We’re going to put systems and processes in place. We’re going to focus on anti-poverty programs.

And that actually had not only an impact on improving the lives of people of color, of women, raising people out of poverty, but it actually helped white people who were feeling that somehow their lives were slipping from their fingers. And yet we continued to retrench into identity politics is what a lot of people on the right would call it. But I would call those politics on the right and the left still diversity first, because it’s all about identity rather than substantive changes with the systems and processes that continue to foster not only exclusion, but it also corrodes our creativity, innovation, and innovation that we need to prosper as a country, as a country moving forward.

Melinda Wittstock:

I want to make sure everyone listening knows how to find you and work with you. What’s the best way?

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

Well, I tend to be very active on LinkedIn, so look me up on LinkedIn and our Do What Matters page. But we have a website where you can contact us, it’s called letsdowhatmatters.com, which is our website page, and that has all of our contact information, and we will follow up with anyone who is interested in continuing the conversation. I’m taking some steps back moving to Spain for at least the next year where I’m going to be working on my book, but also we are going to be rethinking our service offerings to make it more e-commerce friendly, where people who are really interested in learning how to be inclusive leaders can download our playbooks and sign up for some management coaching without having to wait for the full organization to sign up for a retainer. We realized that there are a lot of individuals who really want to understand how to make positive change, and it may just be through them that we see more change happening than waiting for C-suite leadership to sign up for our larger programs.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s wonderful, and I encourage everybody to get in touch with you and, of course, listen to your podcast as well. Lauren, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Dr. Lauren Tucker:

It’s been excellent speaking with you. Thank you so much for inviting me.