Alicia:

Welcome to the Soul of a Leader podcast. In today’s episode, we have Amir Johnson. For over 19 Years, Amir has been instrumental in helping organizations and their people inspire and create extraordinary in their business and community. Welcome to Soul of a Leader podcast, Amir Johnson.

Amri Johnson:

Thank you, Dr. Straughter, I’ll call you Alicia if that’s okay.

Alicia:

Sure, sure. We are so excited to have you with us.

Eileen:

Please feel free to add anything else we missed in that bio. I know there’s much more because I researched.

Amri Johnson:

Yeah, I consider myself kind of a public health guy that became a business guy, probably because I really wanted to understand how the business worked. And I’ll share a little bit about that later, but I really wanted to really understand how organizations work. So, I kind of took my life from being in public health into businesses in this space called inclusion and diversity, with the lens for how inequity and health equity were playing out. And so, that’s how I really got into the business of healthcare, but my epidemiological lens never left me.

Amri Johnson:

So, even when I’ve been working in organizational effectiveness, diversity, and inclusion, I still kind of look at it with that lens of a scientist and that’s in a systemic approach. So that’s kind of professionally a little bit more, but probably the most important thing is, I’m a son to my mother, Harriet who lives in Topeka, Kansas. That’s where I grew up. You can imagine some of my history being from Topeka, Kansas, and having parents that were at the age that schools were desegregated in their childhood. And also, I live in Basel, Switzerland, and I live here with my two step-kids and my two-year-old son, and my wife Martina. So, those are the more important things I think to myself, my identity, to my history.

Eileen:

Well, thank you so much for sharing that. Your business background, your health, public health background, that’s wonderful, and the diversity and inclusion. And I have a question to ask you. When you work with organizations, especially global organizations that you do, how do you lead and kickoff the DI, and I’m really big on the I, the inclusion. Because Alicia and I’ve worked in HR, we can bring top candidates in, we can do that and get them in there, make contributions, but it’s the inclusion and the vision that I see, is the inclusion and how you align the growth opportunities and that included with the business objectives to make it seamless. So tell me how you vision this.

Amri Johnson:

Yeah. It’s a complex dynamic and the more organizations grow, the more complex they become. It’s just, the nature of the world is more complex, the social situation intersecting with businesses is more complex and I think you’re spot on that we need to focus on inclusion. My company’s inclusion wins. We often say when inclusion wins, everyone wins. And what’s happened a lot of times in the diversity space, particularly since the murder of George Floyd, is the workaround racial equity has come to the fore as I think it needed to. And, sometimes the way that it’s delivered, makes it seem like racial equity is for black people full stop.

Amri Johnson:

And if you think like that, it’s a little bit short-sighted because at some point people will be like, well, if they’re not from that group that people believe is the focus, they’re like, “Well, what’s in it for me?” And it seems like somebody is losing and somebody is winning. And that’s the same thing that a lot of black people have been thinking for a long time, is that they’ve been losing and other people have been winning, and so now it’s flipped and maybe it’s better for black people, but it’s not. It’s not going to be better because it’s not sustainable. And so, when we understand that race is a subset of humanity and we focus on humanity, we’ll make inclusion work in our organizations for everyone and when there’s a disparity or there’s inequity, we design our organizations systemically for equity.

Amri Johnson:

So, equity is an outcome of inclusive inputs and a lot of diverse people with a lot of tension and a lot of complexity, and you have to work through that all the time. You need the skills, you need the systems and designed all those things happening simultaneously for you to get to that inclusiveness as normative and the kind of equity that allows everybody to get what they need to contribute at their highest level. So, I mean, I can’t say you do it X, Y, and Z, and you figure it out. It’s a process and lots of different ways you can do it in different organizations. So, it’s never one thing that happens and it works for everybody, it’s multiple things that you try and you experiment with, and then over time, you might figure it out, and then you have to go back to the drawing board again. It’s nonstop. It’s not a destination, it’s just a set of skills and capacities that allow your organization to thrive and that’s how I position it with my clients and build it for sustainability from the beginning.

Alicia:

Yeah. So, one of the things that I hear most of, or some of my clients talk about is, well, how do we include people of color sometimes or brown people? And so, one of the things I do talk about with them is, lets peel back like an onion and let’s look at all the processes, or let’s look at your high-end practices first. But importantly, let’s be more authentic about the approaches and why you feel that you don’t know how to include people. Because I’m a believer of this, if we just be authentic about why this process has been in place and how you want to turn this around to start including everyone, and not just people of color, but everyone and so, how do you approach that when oftentimes people may say, “Well, how do I start including people?”?

Amri Johnson:

I don’t want to sound facetious but just include them. I mean, welcome people to the table. One of the ways that I define inclusion is the willingness to be influenced by the so-called other. And so, if you have a certain willingness to open yourself up and to be a bit vulnerable or humble in a way to dialogue with somebody that might be less advanced and understanding of the business than you, you’re probably going to discover something that you weren’t able to discover. Business is way too complex right now and probably always has been, but even more so now, that you have to have certain flexibility to allow those perspectives in, or you’re just putting… We use the euphemism, you’re leaving money on the table. And so, if you’re missing those perspectives and you know that they’re either in your organization already and you’re not getting their perspective, that’s really just a missed opportunity and that’s how I usually frame it with clients.

Amri Johnson:

And then if they are not in your organization right now, how do you build the networks to engage with people that are outside of your affinities or your preferences? So, sometimes that’s people that look like us, sometimes it’s people that have the same disciplines that we have, they went to the same schools that we did, they live in our neighborhoods. They could look different than us, but they could still be affinities based on either proximity or identity or something else. How do you expand your network to be more diverse so that you can hear the perspectives of people different than you? Particularly in the case of race, people that are of a different race or ethnic background than yours. So, it’s an intentional thing and a willingness that I think people need to have. And that takes a kind of being a little bit uncomfortable sometimes because there are some people that aren’t comfortable with people different than them, and that takes time to develop and it’s not hard, honestly. But it would be difficult if you haven’t developed that willingness yet.

Eileen:

Thank you so much. And I want to go back to a comment that you shared about humanity. I mean, Alicia and I have been friends for 20 years, right? Each year we learn more about each other, which changes. I worked for years at the Muscular Dystrophy Association, which focused definitely on including people of disabilities. And, what I like to say is that, and reinforce what you said, reaching out, getting to know someone different, we’re all in this together, we’re on this planet together, we’re humankind, it takes effort and it takes understanding. It takes compassion and it goes back to the heart of humanity. When you said humanity earlier, could you share with me some maybe instances or stories or an aha moment with a client that maybe crossed that line of where you said, “Okay, it’s really about inclusion and being human,” and like Alicia said, authentic?

Amri Johnson:

I think I saw something early in my career that kind of gave me a particular perspective on leadership and on the kind of a relational approach to leadership that I didn’t learn kind of to the extent that I wanted to until I got probably in my thirties. But it was one of my second jobs as a manager. So, in my first job as a manager in public health, I got a team of 10 people. One of the people was, her son was born on the same day in the same year as me, so it was like I was managing my mother. She happened to be a fantastic tuberculosis nurse for 30 years. She knew so much about it, she taught me so much. She was probably the most open, but the rest of the team I had did reorgs and I didn’t bring them along and I didn’t understand what their interests were.

Amri Johnson:

And so, I learned a little bit about it then. But then I took on a job, my second kind of managerial job where I had about 30 or 35 people on large substance abuse and mental health services, administration, grant, and academia. So, I reported to a principal investigator at Emory University and this project was in public housing developments in Atlanta. It was about six to eight public housing developments. And we were doing a substance abuse intervention for youth. And so, the people that were doing the intervention were students that reported to me and the people that were running the sites were community members. And these community members had great agency, they weren’t highly educated in terms of formal schooling, but they knew this community and they used their power.

Amri Johnson:

And when I had to do something that was about my power versus their power, I was not clear on how they were invested. And so I never got clear about their interests. It took me a long time to break through that, to really step back and listen. So, I wasn’t humanizing them, I was transacting with them and I didn’t even realize it. It broke my heart because I was like, “What are you doing,” after the fact that I had done it? So I had to go back and say, “You know what? I’m not humanizing them.” I liked them and I thought they were great, cool people, nice people, but I wasn’t humanizing them and I wasn’t seeing them as partners. And so, when we kind of stepped back from that, because it caused a lot of issues in getting the project done and so, I started getting nervous about that.

Amri Johnson:

And so, I was like, ‘Oh my God the project.” And then I stepped back and said, “No, no, no, no, the people.” And when I did that, it shifted everything. The project took care of itself, but I just focused on the humanity where they were, there was the process of public health housing getting dismantled. They were dealing with all that in the background, it was intense. The gentrification, because these were really high level, nice properties in the middle of Atlanta that everybody wanted the land and they were getting displaced. And so, I wasn’t even considering that. So most of those public housing that used to have developments are no longer there in Atlanta. And I was there at the beginning of that, and I wasn’t taking it into consideration when they were making decisions with me around how we engage with the community. So that was me seeing the humanity of others.

Amri Johnson:

With bigger clients, it happens pretty much all the time, but it’s not the same scale as a kind of community engagement. But I think one example happened when I was still in pharma, where we were going into the African continent and wanting to do good. But the people that we talked to that were bright, bright, bright, high-level degrees, many of them studied in the US, went back to the continent to do work, and they wanted partnership. They didn’t want charity, they didn’t want humanitarian efforts, they wanted collaboration. And when we broke through that, the returns to the company were pretty massive because it wasn’t just the project scientifically or access to a genetic database with the re richest genetic data in the world, because it’s where everybody came from, it was really placed where we were able to develop relationships about getting drugs on the formulary.

Amri Johnson:

Things that we didn’t expect that happened because we went into it with a humanization mindset and how we partner and collaborate, not just, well, when we’re coming in, we’re going to give you something and we’ll look good or maybe you’ll give us something in return later. It was more, let’s get to know who you are, let’s get to see what our respective complementary capabilities are, and make some things happen from there.

Alicia:

So, one of the things that I heard too when you were talking about your story in Atlanta is, with the HR background it’s connecting with people first, and that’s one of the things you openly admit and took ownership of that. Because I think that is so important and valuable. And so, my question would be for you is, what are some of the top values that you can outline that really kind of had you resonate back and say, “Wait a minute, I’m missing something that’s really strong and instrumental in this process.” What are some values that allow you now to go back to start connecting with the people?

Amri Johnson:

Values now, I would say, one relational leadership where everything is a co-creation. You do nothing on your own, everybody is co-creating with one another. And so, if I exist as an I, and they exist as for them, then we don’t really fully understand what’s going on. So, the first one is a kind of relational nature and a co-creative nature of everything. Probably the next one is caring. And when I say caring, I oftentimes, I’m a big fan of Milton Meyerhoff. If you ever read his book on caring, it’s one of the most powerful, and he says, “To care for another person in the most significant sense is to help them grow and actualize themselves and that I can only fulfill myself by serving someone apart from myself.” So, caring is service, it’s patience and humility, it’s really understanding deeply the other with intention and it’s helpful. It’s courageous to really care for someone deeply.

Amri Johnson:

So, those are kind of principles wrapped up in the notion of caring and I believe that everybody can grow and I didn’t fully get that before. We often now, Growth Mindset, Carol Dweck’s works become really popular. But in a scientific way, I think about this notion of Liebig’s Law of the minimum that, Justus von Liebig was a chemical botanist. Some universities are named after him. He’s really kind of one of the greatest scientists in German history and he had this idea called, Liebig’s Law of the minimum. And it basically said that a plant system can only grow based on the nutrient that’s in the least supply in the particular medium or soil that the plants are growing in. So, unless you increase that nutrient that’s the least, you can’t grow the rest of the system.

Amri Johnson:

And so, in an organizational system, if you don’t make sure that the person who’s got the least influence or power, or making the least money if they’re not growing, you probably aren’t necessarily growing your entire system. And a lot of organizations spend time trying to get rid of their low performers instead of elevating everybody consistently. And if people are low performers, there’s always going to be somebody that’s the lowest. So, what are you going to do? Just get rid of them every time and think that that’s going to elevate you? No, you make sure everybody’s getting better, raising the tide for all. And so, those are principles that I take into every engagement that I have and it’s the way I lead teams as well.

Alicia:

Yeah.

Eileen:

That philosophy is wonderful and should not only be… I mean, it should be for every day, right? And that’s why it is so important to be a servant leader or to give back or give time. Anybody and I’ve seen it at all levels in organizations and in my life giving back to humans to help them grow. And that’s what’s going to make it better. And I think COVID has given some compassion and empathy along with the social justice movement that will help us get back and all connected. So, with that, what are your thoughts on describing your…? You’ve described your values, relationship, how do you lead? How do you lead in the world today? A few comments there.

Amri Johnson:

I lead kind of fluidly. So, I have principles and I kind of shared those principles that are my values. But I believe everybody’s a student and everybody’s a teacher, so you’re always learning from everybody. And so, I said that I believe that everybody can grow, I believe that you have to care about your people. So those values are kind of reflective of how I lead. And I watched my dad, my dad was a mortician. So my dad was probably one of the most compassionate people I know. Because he dealt with people working through pain and grief. And so, he developed a way to listen to people and it was kind of like a ministry for my dad. I think one day somebody asked my dad, they said, “I love my…”

Amri Johnson:

He said there was an interview. He said, “I love my job so much that I would do it for free.” And then he paused for a second and he says, “And sometimes I do because people don’t always have the money to pay.” So it was watching him, how he interacted with people and it was a certain leadership and he took it into how he worked with his staff. But at some point, where his staff wasn’t working with integrity, they weren’t caring for people, my dad would become a lion and he’d roar and you would remember it and then he would be done. It would take him like five minutes. Everybody would be still shocked, then go back to normal. But he did it out of care and love, he didn’t do it because of his ego. My dad had a little swagger and ego, but when he did things like that, when I watched it, it was because he cared and he wanted his team to give the best and at the highest level of integrity for everybody that came through the doors of his establishment. So that was that.

Amri Johnson:

And my mother has a Ph.D. in early childhood education, she was an educator. My mom was a… Everybody loved her when she was a high school administrator or a school administrator, they loved her. But when you weren’t doing right, my mom had this way of just telling you stuff and you’d be like, “Wait a minute. Why do I feel so bad?” But it was so nice and so kind, but she told you exactly what you were up to and what you needed to just shift. And it impacted people and people just did it, and they didn’t even feel that she was… They just felt like, “Wow, I just got a lesson in how to lead and how to do my job at a higher level and more consistently.”

Amri Johnson:

So, just watching that, that was a big inspiration. I didn’t know it, I didn’t know what they were doing. But it was just watching their examples of leadership that allowed me to kind of take on and over time with my own failures and challenges learn from what they taught me as well as from other mentors that have been great leaders and taught me a whole lot about myself as well.

Alicia:

Well, I must say that the conversation with you has been very, very filled with wisdom, particularly when it comes to just compassion and caring and the love for humankind, right? And I always say on our show is, when you’re having great fun, time goes by so fast.

Amri Johnson:

Agreed.

Alicia:

Yeah. As we begin to end, tell us some words of wisdom that you would like to leave with our listeners. And you have said a lot and it could be more, but I know that you have some words of wisdom to leave with the listeners for today.

Amri Johnson:

Sure. I think, first of all, be clear on your purpose. Mine is spiritual transformation and inspiring others, spiritual transformation, and that kind of goes through everything that I do. I don’t turn that off for business. That kind of love and care stays at the center of everything that I do. So, I think my words of wisdom are, spend more time working to be clear than to be right. Being right or self-righteousness, I don’t think has ever transformed anything. So, I think it’s better to, instead of trying to be right, just choose humanity. And so, if we recognize that humanity is the superset and our identities and our opinions and our rightness and wrongness are a subset of that, I will move towards understanding each other on deeper levels with humility and love. And that’s how I want to live my life and when I get off the mark, I do my best to remind myself of that.

Eileen:

That is so impactful.

Alicia:

I was trying to write notes on that one.

Eileen:

Choose humanity.

Alicia:

Yes.

Eileen:

You don’t have to say anymore. In your spiritual transformation, those are really powerful words of wisdom. Thank you so much for sharing that, Amir. It was just really, really it… It’s what we’re all here about. And if we can all live in that moment, choose humanity, boy, this place would be so much better, wouldn’t it?

Amri Johnson:

I totally agree with you.

Eileen:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Alicia:

And life is always about learning and learning people and at every level. Whether it’s inclusion, whether it’s diversity, whatever it is, it’s equity, it’s all about learning the process of it or the people involved in it or the systems and the situations. And I always see myself, I’m always learning about this. So, I liked that when you said that, everything is about learning about people. This is… Yeah. You’re so full of wisdom on this topic.

Amri Johnson:

Oh, I don’t. This wisdom comes from something way bigger than me. So, I can’t take credit for it, I can just give thanks for it.

Alicia:

Yes.

Eileen:

Yes. And that’s what… There’s something that Alicia and I always say, there’s, listen and silent, have the same letters.

Amri Johnson:

That’s so true.

Eileen:

Doesn’t it? And when you say something bigger comes, it’s in those silent times that you can hear if you really listen to what’s coming.

Alicia:

Yes. Yes.

Amri Johnson:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Eileen:

Thank you for joining us on the Soul of a Leader podcast. We are igniting a new way of leading with your soul and interviewing ordinary people with extraordinary impact. Thank you for listening to the stories of our leaders who will help and guide you on your leadership journey. For more information on our podcast, please visit our website at wwwsoulofaleader.com. Thank you for listening.