We're At an Inflection Point: Will We Press for Progress?
Channel: Mercer
Date: 2018-04-06

Mercer | https://goo.gl/rPDhV8 | Mercer WWT When Women Thrive Keynote Pam Jeffords Media Entertainment

Please welcome When Women Thrive leader, Pam Jeffords. Good morning. After slow progress like excruciatingly slow progress we’re here today because there is an inflection point and we’re sitting in the epicenter right now. As we look at and we talk about an inflection point, I’ve often had people say “well, it’s just the intersection of all that stuff we just saw” and we said “actually, it’s not.” There’s a difference between an inflection point and intersection point and clearly, we’ve had a lot of painful stories shared this last year that have intersected and we do believe that you are all sitting in the epicienter of the change. But that inflection point is important because we can go 1 of 2 ways. We can either take those painful stories and press for progess as today is International Women’s Day. Press for progress is the challenge for us all. Or, we can let this slide away and there’s probably a 50/50 debate on which way we’re going to go. Those of you in the room, many of you in the room, are storytellers. So we’re excited to be here because we do believe that you have an opportunity to create these stories and paint a new picture for me 5 generations from Louisiana.  The storytelling is part of y life ad it’s the same stories over and over that we always told, everything, skimming it was the same story. My mom used to always say “you know, am, the way that you can get by with a really good story, one that you can tell every single tie and people will always laugh, is to stay in the shower” when to the pool should always say the shot on the pool we’re from Louisiana. It’s always a pool bar, there’s always music, there’s always laughter, and she would always say when you’re telling a story don’t go in the deep end. The deep end is very scary. Nobody wants to go there. It’s not fun. Stay in the shallow end of the pool. So I’ve left Louisiana but I haven’t left storytelling and I love telling stories. My mom got it almost right. It is about telling fun light stories. We call it anak. Hypotheses of what’s going on. But you do have to go to the deep end of the pool occasionally and pull through the proof of what’s actually working. Sometimes the proof of what’s not working. So what we’re doing at Mercer these last 5 years is we’re going back and forth so you’ll see throughout the day we’ll tell some stories, we’ll share anecdotes, hypotheses, but then we’re going to pull back and talk to you about the data. What is the data telling us? what’s actually working and what’s not working. You’ll see this thread throughout the day. Because as you start to talk to middle managers and as you’re going to hear about the silent middle, they’re not excited about the anecdotes and they hypothesis they do want to see the proof of what’s happening so you have to embed both of these together and you’re going to see a theme as our CEO Julio Portalatin said on the WEF World Economic Forum in January. This is not rocket science. This is pay attention science and pay attention in the right way. You’re going to hear from Pat Milligan about diversity inclusion. So less thatn 20% are HR here. 1 year ago 100% would have been men. As Pat mentioned this is not an HR issue this is a business issue. 

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