Communicators group offers diversity solutions

“We’re talking about our responsibility as organizational communicators, to provide depth to our communications. And part of that is to be educated around the social, political and historical context of the topics from which we are now talking about,” Clark said.

Stovall and Clark are experienced professionals who have extensively worked in the area of DE&I. Clark is a DEI communications consultant and educator. Stovall, a TED speaker, executive speechwriter, DEI consultant, communicator and diversity pragmatist. Together, they’ve taken an unique approach to cover a spectrum of internal and external communications concepts with a DEI lens. Their book is geared to assist professional communicators and people who create content for organizations.

“The reason is because that group (communicators) don’t get considered more when talking about business issues. You get books and things about technique, but you very seldom get people who talk about the topics that you have to face, especially now,” Stovall said.

Though the target audience is ideally professional communicators and the people who create content for organizations, the information that has been collaboratively produced can be of benefit to almost any type of professionals from CEOs to those on the front line and in human resource management.

The book also includes a recommended five-step model to build diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) skills and help organizations communicate with meaning.

“Most companies didn’t step into issues of social justice before 2020,” Stovall said. “Companies had diversity, equity and inclusion issues but they were primarily in HR and they were about representation, bodies in the building. But 2020 and the murder of George Floyd, combined the issue of social justice, justice period, with equity. So you have employees in the company saying why are we not stepping out on these issues? Why are we talking about this?”

“Let’s face it, there is not a consensus in this country or globally that Black lives matter.

There is not a consensus of people saying Black lives matter and I’m leading with that because George Floyd (and the pandemic were the two things that really kicked writing the book off). As a result of those things society in general, just became more vocal about social justice issues. And then in the past few years, we’ve had sort of this conservative backlash. Companies don’t have a choice of not taking a position. They have to have a political position,they have to support the passion, put money into things. Our goal was to talk to the people who have to deal with this,” Stovall said.

According to Clark, confronting microaggressions must be dealt with head-on and she addresses this in the book as well.

“This is unprecedented,” Clark said. “And business communicators have never been in this kind of situation with this level of accountability, visibility, social media, you know, feedback. We’ll call it feedback. From people when we miss, so we’ve just got to build our skills around this. That’s one of the things that we hope to accomplish with this book.”

“When I heard about what the authors were doing, I was like yes! We have to include them in one of our programs,” said Rick Alcantara, IABC president-elect and principal of Rick Alcantara Consulting. “We really want to drive DE&I efforts home to our members.”

“The Conscious Communicator: The Fine Art of Not Saying Stupid Sh*t” is expected to be released this month.

The International Association of Business Communicators was founded in 1970 and has 8,000 members across 100 chapters. The organization produces an annual, three-day World Conference, where attendees network and learn the latest tactics in everything from crisis management to employee engagement. For more information, go to https://www.iabcphiladelphia.org/