Title:
Julie Sowash on Inclusive Hiring and Neurodiversity Awareness
Subtitle:
Julie Sowash is Partnering with Companies like PepsiCo to Transform Workplace Inclusion
Transcript:
Alycia Anderson: Welcome back to Pushing Forward with Alycia. I’m Alycia Anderson. We are joined today by Julie Sowash. She is a passionate disability advocate, award winning business leader, speaker, podcast host of Changing Minds and Changing Lives.
I love it. welcome to the show, Julie.
Julie Sowash: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I really, really appreciate it. And I’m excited to be here.
Alycia Anderson: You are rooted in disability inclusion. And a matchmaking for employers and job seekers, trying to bridge that gap for inclusion of people with disabilities in the workforce, which I love and is such needed and important work.
Julie Sowash: Yeah. We really just try to meet employers where they are and in the systems that they use. And then we use those systems to the advantage of talent with disabilities and advertising, branding, all that kind of get the messaging, right. Get the process, right. Get the culture, right.
so that we can help companies build at scale, hiring programs that are actually going to result in people getting hired.
Alycia Anderson: I believe that you identify with disability in some way. Can you kind of share? With our listeners, how this all began, what inspired you to go down this road? Can you share a little bit about you?
Julie Sowash: so really my background is in federal contractor compliance, which is a complicated way to say affirmative action. and I managed a federal grant for the state of Indiana on overcoming barriers to employment for people with disabilities. And it was really during the time when I was managing that grant that I got Appropriately diagnosed.
I live with both mental illness and neurodiversity and I didn’t get the neurodiverse diagnosis until I was about 30 and then got to this place of, of actual stability and for the most part, you would never know. I was a person that was spiraling 99 percent of the time because I couldn’t manage because I wore that, that outward face that for the most part kept things together, but I happen to work with some disability experts at the state who were not just my leaders, but were my friends enough to say, we can see what’s happening and this is not what stable looks like, let’s talk about what stable looks like.
And so for me as, as a. young, single parent as, as an adult who grew up where we didn’t talk about mental illness, we didn’t talk about problems. We just asked Jesus for more help. I had never had a space where I could say, this is not good. And my mind’s not functioning in the way that I need it to.
And, and so that was kind of my first experience with. Understanding what normal for me looked like, what stable look like is, is the better word, it was my first experience of having a leader that understood what my needs were without necessarily me even telling them. And then we kind of tie in the other piece, right?
So if we go back to the actual work stuff and away from the personal is, I realized that government is not going to change the world. Charities are not going to change the world. Businesses change the world. And if we can convince business leaders through both carrots and sticks that hiring in our community is a good thing to do, then we can change the lives of a multitude of people with disabilities, 99 percent of which will never meet in our lives because we can build programs that ripple off of each other.
And we have corporate leaders who can speak to one another about the value. And so that’s sort of how I got to this place of what the need was. Then I just happened to be very lucky. our parent company, so disability solutions, parent company, ability beyond. has had PepsiCo on the board of directors for, I want to say 40 years, at least 20 years.
And our board member at the time said, Hey, you know what? We, we’re figuring out how to hire veterans. We’re figuring out how to hire people of color. We’re figuring out how to hire women. We cannot figure out how to hire people with disabilities. If we pay you, will you come build it?
And I don’t say no to an opportunity like that. So fast forward now, 13 years later, um, and I’m lucky enough to lead the organization and, and to have an amazing team that helps us accomplish our mission every day.
Alycia Anderson: I love the fact that your non apparent disability is related to neurodiversity and mental health. the second of that, the latter, the mental health piece is one of the last ones to really like have its own light on it
I know for me as a young disabled women in the workforce for 20 years before I started my business. I always wanted to mask it. I hid it as long as I could. I wished it away in job interviews. I, would overcompensate for it because I felt like I had to, to be accepted to even get like one wheel in the door to even have a conversation.
I want to start with the employee. How do we support and empower them and put them in a space of this is who I am.
I’m not hiding it. I’m going to leverage it as an asset. Let’s go.
Julie Sowash: So I think for me, one sort of eye opening moment that I’ve had over the past, I’m going to say seven years is I always felt like employee resource groups were a profound waste of time until I started seeing them done well. And understanding how magical and impactful those environments can be in creating solidarity for an employee community, as well as creating a safe space, in which to, to do that.
And so if I’m talking to an employer, that’s one of the first things that we’re going to talk through is what are you doing once a person is in the door? And the likelihood is once they’re in the door, you have a great chance of keeping them because they want to be there. What can you do to create the most inclusive environment possible?
And so I’ve kind of, I think, turned the question back a little bit to say that young women, and young people. People with disabilities should expect more from their employer than what we have expected in the past. And these are some things that you should be looking for in finding a place where you feel is safe and is home.
I think the other thing is that we can afford to give each other a lot more grace than we do right now. And so a lot of what stops employers and people who really, really want to be involved in this work, And who already have the commitment to the community. Oftentimes they get into analysis paralysis because they don’t know where to start, but they also are terrified of mucking it up.
And if you’re terrified of mucking it up, you’re coming from a place of, of genuine care. And so we as employees and we as employers should not expect perfection from each other and we should. Give each other grace when there’s errors. And so when we’re creating an employee environment, I have people on my team who have mental illness, I have people who are on my team who have learning disabilities, who have physical disabilities.
I’m not a perfect leader and sometimes I don’t do it right. And I have to say, Hey, mucked it up. I’m sorry. And I also have had people who work for me to say, Hey, this is what I need. And are just being transparent and not trying to think that I should be able to read their mind. Because I think the saying Is as old as time. If you’ve met a person with a disability, you’ve met a person with a disability. You know, I’m a mom of a young 20 something woman and a even younger than that 20 something woman. And what I found is that their expectations are much different and they’re, harder on them themselves. I think then even me as a generation earlier. But they’re more robust and more outspoken about who they are.
And I think as. Someone who remembers being a 20 something woman who was super driven is that I also thought that every time I failed, it was catastrophic. And a lot of that was related to the instability that I was experiencing with my disability. And I have talked to parents and, and young college students and young 20 somethings at the beginning of their career, who. Just have to give themselves more grace who have to understand that if you have an anxiety attack at work that happens, you still gotta get up and go to work. We still have to do those things, but we have to figure out a way to do them. In which you can also be healthy and stable instead of feeling like, Oh my God, I just have to quit.
I just have to pull back. And that’s really what I want to encourage everyone is just employers want to do it a lot of times, not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. And people want to go to work and they want to be successful. It’s about working together to do that.
Alycia Anderson: Grace, Is one of my favorite words, so I think that’s really beautiful. you talked about companies wanting to do the right thing. There’s a lot of fear and anxiety that goes into this conversation in the workplace.
I know you’ve worked with Pepsi Cola on this. You’ve worked with Bristol, like big, big companies. What are some of the key components of your program, your mission that are really supporting these organizations in this, like Brand new path of exploration out of just compliance to like the broader human
Julie Sowash: Let’s actually do it. Yeah.
Alycia Anderson: do it. Let’s do it.
Julie Sowash: Where, where we started was a lot of like, Hey, this has got to be an in depth consulting, we’re going to kind of like McKinsey and EY our way in and, and do all of this end to end stuff. And it was very high maintenance and very labor intensive. And one thing that we learned is that we had to have a product and a solution set to meet companies where they are. And so we know you’ve got your big dogs, like a Pepsi or Frito Lay or a Sincerely Financial, who are a hundred percent in, they’ve got money to spend and they want sort of that intensive piece of it.
And then you have other companies who are dipping their toe in. You’re a part, we’re a part of this strategy or quite frankly, they’re like, Hey, we need to advertise. So can we come here and do that with you? and that’s really where we sort of do the majority of our work is, Hey, let us give you some plug and play solutions that help drive applicants in that start to help drive self ID up
Alycia Anderson: Hmm. Yeah.
Julie Sowash: your staff to be more inclusive. or even like accessibility of your apply process, those kinds of things, and they can kind of mix and match what they need. Now the, Other parts, the, the really sexy fun parts are like what we do with a, a Pepsi or a Frito, where we get into the, to the weeds and say, you have in your Canada database right now, a hundred thousand people.
Let’s look at how people are moving through that system and create an equitable funnel that allows people with disabilities to move through that system. And get to a place where they’re going to get to an interview. And then let’s take that and continuously measure and do improvements.
And so the, that’s the first is how do we advertise? To people with disabilities, these open roles from a place that they trust. How do we make sure community based organizations know about roles when they’re opening, especially if you work for a big company and they’re just closing like that, and then and that’s really, where, where we’re trying to get people to be More thoughtful is most often the accommodation and I’m using air quotes around accommodation that’s needed is just getting someone through the apply process, because if you’ve applied for a job lately, you may interact with five to 10 different vendors. That you think are the company because they’re, they’re dressed as the company that are designed to get the most qualified candidate, the fastest, that data and those data man, data management techniques are built on data. That is flawed. And then you do the human work on the other side, right? Is. Getting hiring managers comfortable, teaching them about managing talent with disabilities, understanding that just because maybe one person you hired with a disability didn’t work out, doesn’t mean I’m not going to hire people with disabilities anymore.
That’s something that like has always sort of blown me away. And employers feel very comfortable saying, yeah, we don’t hire those people still to this day.
Alycia Anderson: Mm
Julie Sowash: Very comfortable. Or, you know what? We hired that one guy in a wheelchair one time. He didn’t work out. So we’re good. You wouldn’t, you would never hear an employer say that about any other underrepresented community. They would never say that about, about African Americans, about Brown Americans, about, women. And so there’s still a lot of bias that we have to overcome.
And the best way to do that is to build. Within systems and, and to build in ways that exist within their existing systems or existing processes. Excuse me.
Alycia Anderson: And educate on this, bias. people don’t even realize they’re doing it. It’s so extreme. It is so extreme sometimes, that you actually can’t believe it’s happening. Can you, can you share like a quick, your favorite success story? this might be putting you on the spot. Okay,
Julie Sowash: No,
Alycia Anderson: Cause I,
Julie Sowash: I do. so we were working with a call center, in Winston, Salem, North Carolina, and there was a young man that came through a community based organization, I believe he was like 19 at the time. And he had been working at. A retail shop, uh, doing janitorial services, which we know is where people with disabilities, socially learning disabilities get shoved and forgotten about a lot of the time.
And he had a couple of, of really big missions in his life. He wanted to buy a car and he wanted to move out of his parents house, and so where he was having problems, securing a job it was in the interview, he is autistic.
He had a very, very literal. Conversation style. And that was creating the wrong persona for hiring managers. So what we did was we actually built personas based around these types of individuals to help hiring managers understand, Hey, you know what a person who has autism may not interview well, this is going to be one of their challenge areas, here’s some of their strength areas.
And he got a job in customer service. and he moved out.
He bought a car. because of The blunt nature of, of the way that he spoke, it actually made it easier for people to understand Because there was not a lot of filler and fluffy words in And that was actually an asset because you’re like, people go, Oh, people with autism, they can’t work in customer service because. You know, they’re, they’re not personable. They’re not sociable. Those are stereotypes. And so getting this kid to work and being able to watch him flourish where he had been told, you know what, your future is sweeping the floor.
And that’s bull. His future was not sweeping the floor. His future was making enough money to live on his own, to be an adult, to be successful. All we did for this kid’s life before, he got to this job was set low expectations. And he is capable of more.
People just told him no all the time. And like, it still gives me chills even thinking about it because it was a, I don’t always get to see the impact, but like when I get to see the impact, it just, it changes you and it changes your commitment to the work.
Alycia Anderson: I, so I got chills too. And I love story because one of my notes right here in front of me is. how do we shift this paradigm of siloing certain disabilities into certain type of jobs that won’t ever move forward and you can’t grow your career and all these things. And that was a perfect story to emulate the problem. And that there is a solution and there’s so much more value behind what we place on disabled people.
Okay.
So I have a question and it’s going to shift a tiny little bit, but I know you’ve got a podcast too, and it’s titled changing minds and changing lives. And you’re exploring around DEI, and workplace.
Julie Sowash: Yeah, It’s, it’s an interview based, very similar to yours is, you know, we sit down with experts in the field, or just people whose everyday lives are making impact or they have a great story to tell and just sharing Those stories so that employers can get comfortable. They can see what’s possible. I think is important, but always focusing that back to how do we change your mind to get as many people to work as possible?
Because that is a life changing activity for us as, as human beings.
Alycia Anderson: I love that.
And, from a DEI perspective, like we’re having a lot of conversations about that right now.
Julie Sowash: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s a source of consternation, I guess I would say, because, you know, we, we did, there was the first six, seven years of doing this work where people hung up the phone when I called, and it, and it was hard.
And then, you know, you have, you start to see this shift around a conversation in 2016, I feel like when we were represented on a stage at a, party’s national convention, when we started to see like on social media. Really open conversations that were life changing conversations as communities gotten built for people who maybe were more isolated and then you fast forward to 2020 and the murder of George Floyd and the pandemic, and then you have sort of this Awakening all of the sudden that we’ve been lied to.
we’ve been told that we have to fight each other for the same piece of pie. And all that means is, is that you won’t share some of your pie and you’ve kept us fighting over this little sliver that you’re willing, that you’re allow us to have as, as diverse or underrepresented communities.
And all of a sudden the entire world knew what it was like To live as a person who couldn’t interact with the world in, in the same ways that they were comfortable with and used to and then I think as Americans we, we go from one extreme to kind of another extreme that the pendulum for our arc of justice is really rotating.
And I think that what we’re seeing right now is part of that hard swing back. And so you’re starting to see some of the, I call them the corporate chills pull back, Their commitment was never real.
Alycia Anderson: I love that. okay. So let’s look ahead for a minute. What is the future look like for you and your world?
Julie Sowash: What we’re working on right now is how do we create More system, so that we can get better at knowing who we get hired.
Wouldn’t it be great if we knew for 80 companies, how many people that have actually been hired? And so right now we’re, we’re really figuring out how do we become. The gold standard for data and for outcomes.
Alycia Anderson: I love it. We’re going to leave all your information, everything to find you, how to work with your organization in the show notes.
So we end the show with a pushing forward moment.
Like a mantra, something to motivate. Our community.
Julie Sowash: Yeah. Yeah. Just get after it. Yeah. Get after it. The work’s not going to do itself.
Alycia Anderson: I love it. Thank you so much for your time.
Julie Sowash: Thank you for having me.
Alycia Anderson: You’re doing amazing work.
Thank you for going to bat for us in the workplace. It’s awesome. Thanks. I’m going to sign off. Thank you to our community for showing up every single week. We are growing like crazy and I appreciate every one of you. This has been pushing forward with Alycia and that is literally how we roll on this podcast.
We’ll see you next time.