This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
A really important thing to remember in business and life is what people want and what they say they want is sometimes different, right? It's not as simple as just asking people, "Hey, what do you want? And then I'll find a way to give it to you." It's more like understanding what they want and then finding a way to give it to them. So sometimes as well, when you are dealing with more than one person, like with a company, there can be a lack of alignment because one person says one thing, but then you discover they don't speak for all the decision makers. That's what today's episode is all about and this is part of our Failure Friday series.
It's a collection of short stories all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course failure. Often failure is a precursor to success, but I really wanted to focus these segments on what goes wrong and then how do you respond and adapt to it when that occurs. And just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you will hear directly from side hustlers who have struggled in some way, like all of us have struggled, but they're being very honest and candid and vulnerable and I very much appreciate that. So they'll tell you a short story of something that went wrong. Today's comes from Dr. Akila today.
We told her story on episode 781, Workforce Expert Creates Empowerment Consultancy. This consultancy focuses on workplace inclusion and anti-racism, which as you might be aware, has been something a lot more people have been paying attention to over the past year. We've talked about it here on this show a couple of times and as part of this process, a lot of people have said, well, we need to learn more about this or our workplace can do a better job in this area. How do we do it? Well, Dr. Akila's business was perfectly positioned to thrive and grow during this time, but fast
growth usually produces any number of issues. It requires you to make some more adaptations and adjustments. So let's hear how she responded to the need along with a particular leadership challenge that she faced as business scaled up. If you can tell that story better than me, I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. Hi, my name is Dr. Akila Kade, founder and CEO of Change Kade.
We are a organizational development consulting firm that specializes in diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and anti-racism. And of course, we do organizational development work to like change management and restructuring. My company's been around for six years, but last year, 2020, coinciding with the unfortunate murder of George Floyd, business skyrocketed. The demand was insane. So I was able to scale appropriately.
That was pretty easy for me. But the thing that I didn't prepare for was how we were interacting with clients. So when we bring a client on, we have a meet and greet, we figure out what they want, and we provide a scope of work to what they've shared with us. And then we move forward with the plan, a project, an effort, anywhere from coaching to a survey, focus groups, an audit, policy changes, doing strategy metrics, roadmaps, you name it, we're there to do it. But the problem that kept coming up for us was that the leaders were not aligned with what they wanted with culture change, diversity, or anti-racism efforts.
And that would put serious delays on the work that we are providing and giving them, as well as our internal timelines to meet the demands of other clients coming on board. Projects just weren't finishing on time. So what we did collectively as a company was come up with guiding statements. What a guiding statement is, is language of a future state of where a company wants to go. So our goal is to be this anti-racist.
We want to make sure this is a workplace of belonging, whatever that is, it's something that all leaders can point to, to strive to, and to move towards. That lesson was crucial for us because once we do that either right before we meet with a client or at the very first meeting, which we call a kickoff meeting, that allows us to be more on time for their needs as we planned, as well as how we can move forward with our additional clients that are coming on board. But more importantly, it's a phrase and a statement that everyone internally can use when there's moments of difference. So they can be aligned to move forward to having more of a diverse, equitable work environment that perhaps may be anti-racist, but definitely includes belonging. And now more than ever, we all need to feel like we know that our leaders can support us and we are happy that we can support them.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. Thank you so much, Dr. Akhila, for sharing that story. I'm so glad a lot of people are looking to her business just as these issues of workplace inclusion, belonging, as she calls it, anti-racism, and so on, are getting more attention as well as they should. Now, I like what she said about this guiding statement.
I thought this was really interesting because you could use this in a lot of ways, not to take away anything from the concept of workplace belonging and inclusion, but it can also be used just for yourself about what kind of world do you want to live in in the future? What kind of world do you want to have for yourself? What is your guiding statement? Or of course, if you work in a team or a company or an organization, what does that environment look like ideally in the future? And of course, from there, what steps can you take to get closer to that?
So I often think that way myself about what do I want to have one year from now or five years from now, not just have as an acquire, but who do I want to be? What do I want to have achieved or experienced? And how can I then take those steps? I'm really grateful to Dr. Akila for helping us out with this segment.
Check out her website at changecadet.com. That's spelled like cadet, so change, C-H-A-N-G-E, cadet or cadet, C-A-D-E-T, dot com. Or follow her on Twitter @changecadet. If you've had a disaster, a mistake, a misstep, a failure, some kind of struggle that you want to share, whatever it is, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you're taking care of yourself today.
I hope you do something to get closer to a goal you believe in, and I also hope you'll check on somebody else because, you know, it's a crazy world out there. We all need all the help we can get. With that, I'm signing off for the day. Thank you once again for listening. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
