Jennifer Tescher: Seeing the Silver Linings

Jennifer Tescher:

Welcome to EMERGE Everywhere. I’m Jennifer Tescher, journalists turned financial health champion. As founder and CEO of the Financial Health Network, I’ve spent my career breaking down silos by engaging with innovators across industries, and now, I’m sharing those conversations with you. Meet the forward-thinking leaders challenging the status quo and unleashing creative new ways of improving financial health by seeing their customers, employees, and communities in 3D.

Hey listeners! We’re going to do things a little differently today. Instead of hosting a guest this week, I wanted to share my reflections on the themes we’ve explored on this podcast in 2020.

I didn’t intend to launch a new podcast in the midst of a pandemic. But it turned out to be the ideal environment for a show about breaking down silos and seeing people in 3D.

The COVID-19 crisis of 2020 has actually been a series of overlapping and interconnected crises – a health crisis, an economic crisis, a racial justice crisis. Each of these emergencies played a role in instigating the others, and solving any one of them requires solving all of them. Taming the virus requires reduced business activity. The nation’s economic health depends on its physical health. Racial justice won’t become a reality unless we reduce economic and health inequities. Having 3D vision means seeing these intersections and solving them in ways that address people’s multifaceted lives.

I am a financial health champion, and my organization works to ensure everyone can be resilient and thrive. It might seem like financial health is about people’s financial lives, but that would be an example of narrow, silo’d thinking. To really improve financial health, we need to focus on the totality of people’s lives – their jobs, their health, their education, their housing, their transportation, the neighborhoods they live in, the quality of the air they breathe and the water they drink, their support networks, their family life.

In planning for the launch of this podcast, we sought out guests that represented the breadth of that ecosystem. A workplace culture and equity champion. A mayor. A banking regulator. A public health expert. Some of them I knew well; others I was meeting for the first time. As I reflect on the crazy year that was 2020, I have been thinking about how my podcast conversations help illuminate the silver linings that have emerged and that provide hope for 2021 and beyond.

我可以谈论银衬里之前,though, I have to acknowledge the tragedies. More than 1 and a half million people around the world have died as a result of Covid this year, nearly 300,000 of them in the United States, and we continue to break daily records for new sickness and death. People have lost loved ones, they have lost livelihoods, and many are at risk of losing a safe place to lay their heads at night. They are hungry and lonely. Those suffering are more likely to be Black and brown, people who were already suffering from inequities centuries in the making, and who continue to suffer violence and death at the hands of law enforcement.

Managing through this staggering level of dislocation and uncertainty has been a true test of leadership – for business executives, for policymakers, for innovators. Most of us are hard-wired to categorize and simplify in order to make sense of the world around us. The stress of a crisis further narrows our field of vision, and we end up designing narrow solutions to complex, interconnected problems. The leaders I have been privileged to interview during these first few months of EMERGE Everywhere are flourishing during these challenging times precisely because of their ability to embrace complexity, demonstrate empathy, and act boldly. They see in 3D. And despite how bleak it has been, my guests have emerged as vital influencers forging a new brand of leadership to match the complex, interconnected challenges of our time.

Listen to Michael Bush, the CEO of Great Places to Work and one of my first guests, talk about the responsibility of employers to consider the full breadth of their workers’ interconnected challenges:

“随着Covid-19的进行，您现在无法看着我们，并且不知道一个人以前所未有的方式担心自己的身体健康。一个人的心理健康状况恶化了。因此，我们已经进行了调查，它正在继续恶化。然后，当您身体健康变得颤抖和心理健康变得颤抖时，猜猜是什么？钱更重要。从马斯洛的角度来看，这是真实的。这是切实的。因此，当事情变得摇摆时，请给我一些东西要坚持下去。钱做到了。然后，您对未来产生财务不确定性，这是人们现在正在处理的事情，您的情况很疯狂。 And you can’t say you care about them if you aren’t talking with them and helping them with all of those things.”

Michael and the rest of my guests have identified what I see as three silver linings of this challenging year: Growing energy around stakeholder capitalism, racial equity and empathy.

The movement toward stakeholder capitalism pre-dated the pandemic. In 2019, nearly 200 members of The Business Roundtable signed a statement declaring that the purpose of a corporation is about caring for its customers, employees, suppliers and the communities in which it operates, in addition to its shareholders. When the pandemic hit the following year, corporate leaders had the opportunity to walk the talk. As some of my guests pointed out, not everyone rose to the occasion, but many did. Employers offered paid sick leave, child care stipends, hazard pay for front-line workers, and the opportunity to work from home. While some of these additional benefits have since been pulled back, the pandemic and the economic fallout that resulted has shone a spotlight on the importance of worker financial health and seeing employees in 3D, momentum I expect will continue into 2021 and beyond.

布雷娜·泰勒（Breonna Taylor），乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd），艾哈迈德·阿伯里（Ahmaud Arbery）和许多其他黑人的杀戮为争取种族正义的斗争提供了类似的势头。我主持的几乎所有播客对话都谈到了这个主题。Melvin Carter, the first Black mayor of St. Paul, talked about being stopped by the police more than once, even after being elected, and how his decades-long fight for racial justice took on even greater meaning when George Floyd was killed in the隔壁的城市。希望在密西西比三角洲的希望的创始人兼首席执行官比尔·拜纳姆（Bill Bynum）谈到了他为将种族平等支持的公司支持变成资本承诺的努力，以支持黑人企业。Prudential的商业领袖Yanela Frias和Jamie Kalamarides反思了对他们的公司在系统性种族主义中的作用向黑人社区形式道歉时对他们的意义。罗伯特·伍德·约翰逊基金会（Robert Wood Johnson Foundation）的首席执行官，公共卫生专家理查德·贝塞尔（Richard Besser）博士反对人们的外表和住所所定义的健康成果的不公正现象。

最吸引我的是我的客人在做什么，而是他们的工作方式 - 具有巨大的同理心。简而言之，他们关心人民 - 他们服务的人，与之共事的人，这个世界上每天都在努力获得的人 - 他们使他们的事业倾听，理解和帮助。

这是市长卡特在听扮演我的角色n his leadership approach:

“The truth is nobody’s suffering from a shortage of hearing from me these days, but in order for me to be most informed in what I say, I need to hear from you, right? I need to hear from our community members. But the same principle applies, in order for you to be most informed in what you tell me, you have to hear from your neighbors. You have to hear from somebody who lives in a different part of town or is a different age or a different culture, a different gender for you.

So our goal isn’t to sort of center me at the center. We have events all the time where people go, “I thought you were going to give a speech.” And I go, “No, I’m not, isn’t it great.” We’re all going to have a conversation with one another and we’re all going to learn from each other, we’re all going to build a truth kind of together that we’re going to own together and we’re going to walk this road together.”

Here’s Dan Schulman on listening as an act of empathy:

“我认为您真的无法理解别人，甚至您自己，如果您没有大量同理心，可以将自己放在别人的鞋子上。我父亲总是告诉我的另一件事是，我们天生有两只耳朵和一只嘴，我们应该按比例使用它们。那确实是他说你永远不知道这一切的方式。您总是可以学习更多。学习的方法是通过聆听和让自己穿上某人的鞋子。”

One of the ways we demonstrate empathy is by telling stories that create points of connection. Being stuck at home with everything virtual has forced us to find new ways to connect and build bridges. I believe that empathic leadership is often engendered by personal experience, and my guests all shared personal stories to help explain what influenced them and their leadership approach:Bill Bynum on his reverse migration as a child from New York to a small mill town in North Carolina called Bynum, likely named after the people who owned his ancestors.Dan Schulman on his mother taking him to civil rights marches in his stroller. Jelena McWilliams on her family losing everything during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Lisa Marsh Ryerson on following in her feminist mother-in-law’s footsteps to become a college president and live a life of service. Eliciting these stories from my guests and learning from them brings me great joy and has helped sustain me during these tough times.

If you have been inspired by the leaders featured on my podcast this year, I invite you to make a new year’s resolution to do some silo busting of your own. It may feel scary to think about pushing yourself out of a silo in the midst of a crisis. But maybe it’s the perfect time. Maybe we have no choice. In Chinese, the word crisis is actually two words put together – the word “danger”, and the word for “opportunity.” Right now we have the opportunity to learn from the past and rebuild our systems to be more functional, more humane, more equitable, more integrated. I believe it is not just our opportunity – it is our responsibility.

我通常是一半的杯子。因此，当我们在今年年底时苦苦挣扎时，我忍不住感到希望我们正在进入一个康复和转变的时代。我与之交谈的领导者 - 以及我邀请参加新年前几集的人都集中在未来，并致力于采取行动。我为世界各地出现的事情感到非常兴奋。我们将再次听到各个部门领导人看到3D中的人并分解孤岛的消息。希望您能加入我的行列，邀请您的朋友和同事听。

Also, if you have enjoyed these conversations, please consider leaving a review on iTunes. Your feedback helps us make the most engaging podcast for you. You can also find me at@Jentescheron Twitter.

祝您节日快乐。