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My guest for Episode #113 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Gena Cox, PhD PCC, an industrial psychologist, executive coach, author, and speaker. She has advised corporate leaders for 20+ years how to build organizational cultures that support innovation, inclusion, and employee engagement.
Gena earned a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of South Florida and is also the Founder/CEO of Feels Human, Inc. She has a book coming out in October 2022 called Leading Inclusion: Drive Change Your Employees Can See and Feel.
In today's episode, Gena shares her “favorite mistake” story about leaving a company in a way she thinks was “cavalier” — regretting that she couldn't recreate that same culture elsewhere. Sometimes, you don't know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
We talk about that and other topics including:
- How did recognition of mistake reveal itself?
- Feels Human, Inc. — what is a “human first organization”
- Human first doesn’t mean human only?
- “Inclusive leadership matters” — Beyond being the right thing to do from a human perspective, what are the connections between D&I to business results?
- Inclusion as a component of “effective leadership”
- Behaviors that are more inclusive?
- Diversity easier to measure than inclusion?
- Definition of inclusion?
- Blog post — “Why are you always talking about race?”
- The book — coming 2022, Leading Inclusion
Find Gena on Social Media:
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- How to subscribe
- Full transcript
Video
Quotes
!["And as the years have gone by, my biggest mistake, I realized, is that I left a place that I absolutely loved and was never able to replicate that experience."](https://www.markgraban.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Gena-Cox-My-Favorite-Mistake-1-2-1024x858.jpg)
!["Inclusion and leadership are just two sides of the same coin, or maybe even the same side of one coin. You can't consider yourself to be an effective leader if you're not inclusive."](https://www.markgraban.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Gena-Cox-My-Favorite-Mistake-2-1-1024x858.jpg)
!["I never personally talked about race at work until last year, because that is not the way the business corporate culture has been set up. So most people of color that I know would not only would they prefer not to talk about it, there has never really been room to talk about it. "](https://www.markgraban.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Gena-Cox-My-Favorite-Mistake-3-1-1024x858.jpg)
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