115: A conversation with Taisha Nurse, Global Senior Director, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, McDermott

The Elephant in the Room

Shownotes

On The Elephant in the Room podcast it has been my endeavour to spotlight leaders from the global majority. I recently had the privilege to speak with Taisha Nurse, Global Senior Director, Diversity Equity and Inclusion at McDermott. As a senior HR practitioner she has been responsible for building Centre’s of Excellence across multiple geographies before moving to her current role in 2020. A role she loves the most and believes that her various experiences have prepared her to navigate the web of challenges and opportunities she faces in the course of her work.

The focus of the conversation was on an industry well known for its lack of diversity, and to her her views a female leader on all things DEIB/A. We covered many interesting topics including

👉🏾 The challenges to finding success in her DEIB/A role in an industry that isn’t traditionally recognised for gender diversity

👉🏾 Cultural intelligence and steps to building an inclusive culture (one culture) in a global organisation

👉🏾 The role of managers and leaders in building safe work spaces

👉🏾 Her definition of leadership

👉🏾 Measurement and evaluation of DEIB/A efforts in an organisation

I name checked @Pamay Bassey when Taisha spoke about being a learner for life❤️❤️

“It's probably my most favourite job in my 20 plus years is it definitely keeps me on my toes, but it allows me to stay in the sphere of being a learner for life. Every day, I'll have a conversation, I'll read something. I'll have an experience. And I think, wow, I didn't see it from that perspective. And so it's really putting me in a very open mindset. Even though I sometimes resist it, I want to be kind of in my comfort zone, but it puts me in this open mindset to see the world through someone else's eyes, when I'm thinking of a strategy, a campaign, the training that's required, being able to sit and think, okay, this is the audience, how are they going to receive it?”

To listen to the episode, head to comments for Links 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript

Sudha: Thank you, Taisha, for being a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today. Wonderful to have you here.

Taisha: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to today's dialogue with you.

Sudha: Brilliant. So to start with give us a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Taisha: So my name is Taisha Nurse.

I am currently the global senior director of diversity and inclusion at McDermott. McDermott is a global engineering procurement construction and installation organisation. So we're in energy, let's say. But my background is I have over 25 years of HR experience. I am an American born, so I started my work experience in the US. However, only worked in the US for two years, I then transferred to London, still in investment banking. I've worked in the Caribbean in telecommunications and now at McDermott in energy for the last 10 years. I've worked across most of the centres of excellences in HR. So mobility, HRAS, compensation and benefits, recruitment, and also worked as an HR generalist.

So the scope of my HR experience is quite broad, but I would probably say I'm now in my favourite, most favourite position being diversity and inclusion. And it truly takes a bit of all of my experience and combines it quite nicely to help me navigate through what I kind of see some days as a web of challenges and opportunities et cetera. So that's me in a nutshell.

Sudha: And I think you're a multi, country experience must come in really handy with a global organisation that you work in.

Taisha: Definitely. I say time and time again, diversity inclusion is not a one size fits all. And at McDermott, we have over 25 countries, we're averaging 30, 000 employees. And so it's being able to be very open to others experiences, listening very intentionally to come up with strategies that will work for that particular market.

Sudha: So how easy or difficult has it been to succeed as a DEI leader in an industry that isn't traditionally recognised for diversity or gender diversity. The industry isn't really known for being a very inclusive industry.

Taisha: So I will say my organisation, we would say we're very diverse. Again, working across over 25 different countries and diversity is measured across many, many dimensions, as we know. I would say from a gender perspective their scope to improve. But when you look at the nature of the business being engineering, being construction, you don't find many women even leaving their undergraduate studies or even in their secondary education going into STEM studies. So as an organisation, we really need to look at establishing partnerships all the way down to perhaps secondary schooling to get more women into this type of industry.

We're never going to achieve 50/50. It just doesn't exist in the market. But like I said there's opportunities to improve. I think as a DE & I leader. I have been successful because we know that the world is changing and the market is changing and the industry is changing. And there is a focus on diversity and inclusion.

We have a function of DE&I and I work very closely with top leadership to say, what does our strategy need to be to continue to celebrate our diversity and bring more diversity into the organisation, but also to be inclusive. And all organisations want to be inclusive. That's effectively where everyone feels valued, respected and recognised.

And so even though I sit as a DE& I lead, it's my challenge perhaps, what's perhaps difficult is trying to make that everyone's responsibility, not just mine. I can't be accountable to being an inclusive and diverse leader for such a big organisation. And so It's being able to create a message that resonates with every single employee that they realise that I can contribute to creating more diversity and also inclusion within the organisation.

So those are, the big pieces, but I think as a DE&I leader in the industry, it's not as challenging perhaps in the past because the focus is growing and the understanding is also more clear to all leaders and throughout the world. So it's one step at a time. I always say it's a journey. It's going to take time, but we're getting there.

Sudha: Yeah, I think the important thing is that you get started and you recognise that this is critical for the business. So if you're on that journey, it's brilliant. We spoke about this in the first question that you worked across multiple geographies and that sort of is definitely a superpower. It gives you an understanding of cultures, etc.

As a global organisation, you said you're present in 25 countries, 30, 000 employees on an average. How do you go about creating an inclusive culture or one culture that everybody strives for?

Taisha: It's challenging because I think, also the dynamics of our workforce is very different.

So not only do we have our office-based staff, who I probably spent a lot of time trying to educate, raise self-awareness, run campaigns, and really engage that population. We also have probably over 15, 000 employees working in fabrication yards. And so these are our blue-collar workers. I can't get them all in a room and do training.

We also have employees on vessels, we work offshore. And so they're doing rotations where they live and work on a vessel. And so how do you tap into that culture? And then we have project sites in some of the most remote locations. And so an inclusive culture and creating one is a challenge because it's again, not a one-size-fits-all in terms of how do we do that in some of these different locations.

However, what we're trying to drive is a McDermott culture. And so we tap into what are our values? What is the culture that we want everyone to experience irrespective of where you're sitting on this planet. And so it's looking at what are our values, it's educating our leadership on inclusive leadership behaviours.

So they're adopting it into their language into their day to day behaviours, into their decision making. So that takes time because effectively what we're doing is saying when you walk through McDermott's doors, this is how we want you to show up as an employee, as a leader. This is the experience we want you to have.

And so, by definition of inclusion, we want you to feel that you can bring your whole self to work, that you feel that we value and respect you, that we celebrate your uniqueness, which is your diversity. And ultimately we want you to be successful in the work that you do.

And so is it a big challenge? I think yeah, just organisational culture on the whole is going to be a challenge. But the inclusion part of course has its own challenges. But it's every day, one of our values is 'One Team’. And so it's breaking down what does that ‘One Team’ then mean when we think about inclusion, and how do we make sure that we're getting the best from our people.

So creating it is setting it at the top, they must live it, breathe it, exemplify it. And then pushing it down and teaching others, what does that look like in your day to day interactions?

Sudha: Yeah, sounds like a huge, huge task I can't imagine it being easy and it must require a lot of engagement and coordination with leadership and of course different teams and functional heads and countries.

Taisha: I mean, a part of the role, especially this year, that we've looked at doing a lot of cross-functional collaborations. So we're working with our ethics and compliance. We're working with our quality, health, and safety. We're working with communications. We're working with sustainability and social governance.

We work with our leadership and so it's looking at how do we drive this message? We work across all of the HR areas to make sure that the message is embedded in everything that we do.

Sudha: Yeah. It's a huge task nonetheless.

And how important is cultural intelligence for your employees and leaders in today's world?

Taisha: Well, cultural intelligence pretty much sits as our business strategy. So just to take a step back at McDermott, we operate as a ‘MOPEX’, which is a multi office project execution organisation. So that means we can have a project where the project director may sit in the US, the engineering is going to be done out of India. The fabrication may take place in the Middle East, or let's say Indonesia, and you have individuals supporting from anywhere in the world. And so sometimes we work off this basis that we've brought the best resources together across the world. We threw them onto one team, and so they're gonna have the same working styles, speak the same way, communicate effectively and as that is so far from the truth.

So as a part of our strategy, probably for the last two or so years, is looking at how do we build cultural intelligence, cultural agility in our managers, so that they can flex their style of communication, so that they can flex their working styles to accommodate different cultures.

And. It's working well. Of course, it's not intuitive, if you have someone that is very different from your style, even if they're from the same culture, that has its own challenges. Now imagine you're working with different time zones, even language could be different. It's going to be challenging. But we need to have cultural intelligence in order to have successful project execution.

That's how we function. That's a part of our success.

Sudha: Yeah. and the model that you said that you have as an organisation, that means that this is just an imperative. So the definition of leadership, since I was a young person has changed dramatically, even in the last 10 years or in the last three years or post-COVID, Black Lives Matter, the definition of leadership has changed dramatically with all that has happened in the world.

And it's, moved on, I think, from where it was about command and control. What does leadership mean to you?

Taisha: I think leadership it has transformed. And I believe it's starting at a much earlier stage. So we have a younger generation coming out of university and they feel they are leaders. So it's not being linked to perhaps work experience. It's not linked to age. It can be thought leadership. It can be individual contributors that are leaders.

And I think if I go back to how you and perhaps myself, how we experienced leadership, it was authoritative. It was driven by age. It was hierarchical. It was based on being very technical in your experience. And what we're seeing is this huge shift to being collaborative, very much people oriented.

The softer skills are taking precedence. So we have a lot of conversations around being an empathetic leader. How do you coach as a leader, being inclusive, being flexible and adaptable. And I think for some of the leaders that I know, this is huge that if I say, be empathetic, they're looking at me with cross eyes, be compassionate, they're like, what are you talking about?

But that's the expectation from a new generation coming out that my leader, is not going to be hierarchical, that I can voice my thoughts and that we can collaborate, even though I may not have as much experience. I have knowledge and I have ideas and the thought is that should be embraced. And so I think you're seeing yeah, this definite shift in leadership to the softer side. And I think that goes sometimes a little further than the technical leadership that we know because if you're very agile and you can learn things and you can lead people not necessarily processes, that takes you a lot further than just being very technical in your in your leadership style.

So, yes, it's changing, but I think, there's some gaps in us being able to move a previous generation into this leadership style that I think is going to take time.

Sudha: Yeah, I think there is some resistance and reluctance.

Taisha: Yes still, even though we can say leadership has shifted, it's more softer still, compassionate, empathetic leadership, being able to actively listen and relate to employees. We know that is the way forward, but yeah, there's definitely resistance from previous perhaps generations. And saying, well, we're just here to get the work done, just do it.

Sudha: You can't win them all, yeah. So, leadership and people in supervisory roles have a very critical role to play in creating inclusive and safe workspaces. Why is psychological safety critical to workplace inclusion? So we spoke about how we experienced leadership or how we experienced workplaces. And what was yesterday doesn't have to be today. So I guess the changes for were good, but what are your thoughts on this?

Taisha: Yeah, so when I think about individuals in these roles, they have a duty of care to create an inclusive and a safe workspace and the nature of McDermott's work where we're working in fabrication yards, safety is paramount. But I think in previous years, we spoke about physical safety.

And what we realise is that psychological safety is actually linked to physical safety. So when we talk about creating these safe workspaces, it's beyond physical. It's psychological where employees feel they can speak up. They can share their thoughts and opinions if it differs from status quo, that if they see something going wrong, not being done properly that they can raise the flag immediately and in our case be able to stop work.

But that comes with a level of, there'll be no retribution, I will not be penalised, that this is an environment where my thoughts, my ideas, my voice is actually welcomed. And if you don't have an inclusive and safe workspace, things can go very awry. And so what we're pushing is that we need to really start focusing on how do we build psychological safety, and that's down to your people in leadership, they have to start with demonstrating behaviours and that mindset that we want you to speak up, that we value your opinion.

It's not this hierarchical, do as I say, we need to expand that. And the younger generation will not tolerate.

Sudha: No, they won't. They just won't.

Taisha: No. They're not gonna come to a work environment that's not inclusive and that's not a safe workspace. So, it's really important and it's quite interesting to see the research and the conversations really starting to shift around psychological safety and how do you create that and how it impacts the overall work environment.

Sudha: Yeah, I think it's a part of the older health and safety thing, which is just brought to include, this very, very, very critical for successful workplaces. Do you believe Taisha that, it's important to regularly measure and evaluate the work that's been done in the DEIB space and organisations? Because a lot of organisations speak about this. So there's a lot of talk that's happening but not everybody can stand that scrutiny and that's why probably measurement or accountability is essential. What are your thoughts on this?

Taisha: I mean, we definitely have to evaluate. Measuring tangible measurements are probably a little more challenging in the DEIB space. But definitely being able to tap in with engagement surveys spot polls to understand how are your initiatives landing. I think in kind of the DE&I space, it's absolutely imperative, because sometimes the dialogue, or if...