DE&I interview with GTO’s Elizabeth Apelles

DE&I interview with GTO’s Elizabeth Apelles

Med Ad News board member Elizabeth Apelles – founder and chief executive officer of Greater Than One – discusses the healthcare advertising agency’s diversity, equity and inclusion program, her personal DE&I experiences, and other related topics.

Please share what diversity, equity and inclusion means to you and why they are important.

So, diversity, equity and inclusion mean just what they say, across every type of human being, every type of behavior and background. It’s black, white, Asian, gay, straight, transgender, all that kind of stuff and then it includes are you from the South, are you from the North, are you from India, are you from Russia? Are you from the city? Are you from a farm, from a large family, from a small family? Did you play sports? Did you not play sports? Did you like to spend your time in the library or not in the library? So, all of those. That is to me, diversity, and I believe very, very strongly that if you have a diverse organization, you get greater thinking and results.

The upside is in the end the product will always be better. The more difficult side is it just takes longer to communicate with each other because we don’t speak the same language. And it avoids a herd mentality. But it’s a lot messier. So, the people who come to Greater Than One understand that ours is never going to be a linear process because of all the different types of people who are here and giving their viewpoints. There’s a certain degree of open mindedness and recognition that diversity is an important strategic initiative. And, in my mind as a human being, Elizabeth Apelles who is a sixty-year-old gay woman, it’s just the right thing to do.

What is your approach to understanding the perspective of colleagues from different backgrounds?

Obviously, we have colleagues from different backgrounds and there’s a lot of self-learning. You know, I think it’s up to me as the leader of this company to do the learning I need to do, in order to best understand. An example would be, I read a book early in my career called “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” and it talked about the different ways men and women make decisions. Men tend to go off by themselves and think about it by themselves and then come out with a solution. Women like to talk it out, which is where the phrase clucking like chickens comes from. Both are the same thing, it’s just a different mental process to get to the solution. So, as a leader, I understand that and you could apply that across different backgrounds and ethnicities.

How did you get the entire company, including the leadership team, on board with diversity initiatives?

Here we started some diversity initiatives and that is certainly a challenge for me. Mostly it has to do with my Executive Committee in terms of how they make the decisions, how they communicate with each other, how they deal with stress. That’s especially true in these COVID times where we’re all remote. So, we have diversity training, which we’ve launched company wide. It’s taking a little more time in our meetings, its’ having longer meetings, it’s meeting more often because ours is a new team. And we are diverse. We have every walk of life in my Executive Committee. And it just takes time.

How much difficulty is there in implementing a diversity, equity & inclusion policy?

I don’t see any difficulty at all, other than time and effort, and cost. So, it’s just how we’ve always been, it’s pretty standard to me. But as we get bigger and we scale, having a policy and training, it becomes more important. I don’t talk to everyone anymore given our size.

Please discuss a time when you advocated for diversity and inclusion in the work place.

Day one of when we opened the company doors. If you looked at the group of people that started Greater Than One, we were highly diversified, we had Asian, we had women, we had gay, straight, white, black, male, female. We had old, we had young. That’s how we started and there was no discussion. This is just what we did.

Have you ever attended formal diversity and inclusion training or required it?

Greater Than One provides a pretty robust diversity and inclusion training program, of which I attend every session.

For your agency’s diversity program, what type of thinking went into it? Did you go to an outside company and did you have internal meetings about how to put this program together?

Our head of talent determined the need to have a diversity program in the company and we used an outside consultant. What was great about it in my view was it took diversity and inclusion to a whole other place. They assumed it was important to us, which is true, and then took it to a place of how do you deal with team effectiveness, creating teams, making teams work well together, managing different types of people, getting the best out of them. We talked about communication and how you must communicate to everybody differently, and so I thought it was just fabulous that they took it to that place.

What were your priorities in creating a diversity inclusion program for Greater Than One?

We are a diverse company, we’re woman owned and LGBT certified. My main priority is creating a respectful way of communicating with people. To create an atmosphere that nurtures highly functioning, diverse teams that are comfortable in disagreeing and having different opinions but at the end of the day coming up with a solution that everyone is on board with. So, that to me is the biggest challenge, that people on the team will accept a solution even if they don’t totally agree with it.

Have you experienced or witnessed a lack of inclusion in the workplace and if so, how did you address the situation?

Absolutely. Personally, I have as a young woman, who’s been working for 40 years. And I addressed it with humor. So, I tried to make a joke out of it which worked. I remember one of my bosses early on in my career used to call me “Cutie”. And I said to him, and I was 25 at the time, “you can call me Cutie now, but you better call me Cutie when I’m 70.” And that stopped him. We’ve encountered it at Greater Than One, from angles you wouldn’t normally expect. And, I have a general policy of two or three strikes and you’re out. My personal view is to try radical candor and if that doesn’t work, we will let them go.

How do you see approaching the topic of diversity and inclusion then when you first started in the business, was it even talked about then?

I don’t remember it being talked about early on, but I will say for me personally that it’s been important from the beginning of when I first started the company because I’m categorized as a diverse person. So, it’s just kind of the world that I live in. It’s how I live my life but yes, I think with Black Lives Matter and all the things that have happened it does seem like it’s being talked about more in the past few years. I’m not convinced though that any new actions are coming about because of it. Talk is cheap, but all I can do is run this company in a way that I think is the right way.

You mentioned that diversity is not a linear process, could you please expand on that, how incorporating diversity is not always a straight process?

It goes back to the team. If I’m with my friends from high school that I grew up with and we go out, we all grew up the same way. You know, we just do the same things. But I think in the business setting this would create a herd immunity, which kind of puts blinders on you. And you go to a place that is not necessarily a great place to go. Whereas if you take the time to build a diverse group, you know just the way people argue is different. It can be more offensive. I become offended sometimes at the way people talk to me, but their tone is kind of the way they grew up. And they’re not being offensive in their mind, so it just requires a lot more empathy, a lot more time, more understanding. And, you know, we’re all busy with our lives. Most of us just want to do our job and then go home to our families or go out to the movies or whatever. And so, it just takes more time, and it’s messier. That’s how it is.