Transcript
EPISODE 37
Leadership, Accountability, and DEI:
Why Real Leaders Take Responsibility for What They Didn’t Do
Introduction to the Play Big Queen Podcast
Welcome to the Play Big Queen podcast.
This is for the woman ready to lead with power, move with confidence, and own your Play Big self.
For my newly minted or late blooming, neurospicy visionary babes who are waking up to your power and unmasking your brilliance.
For the sovereign leader building success on your own terms.
I am your host, Kate Bailey.
I am the Play Big Queen.
My name is my title and a command for all women, Play Big Queen.
I invite you to claim this title for yourself and coronate your Play Big Self too, so it can serve you.
This is a space for bold embodiment, radical reclamation, unapologetic leadership, and a business that works with your wiring, not against it.
Your voice is meant to be bold and heard and your brilliance is here to be claimed.
You are already powerful.
I am in service of everyone fucking tired of the people pleasing grind.
We go deep, we get real, and we play big.
It's a new era for women on the Play Big path.
Long may we reign.
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Welcome back to the Play Big Queen podcast.
Today I want to explore a question that I have been asked again and again -
Is leadership really about taking responsibility for things you didn’t do?
The short answer is YES.
But the longer answer, that is where our real education begins.
Because if you are a leader, especially if you are a white leader,
especially if you are a white woman in leadership, then this conversation about responsibility, race, and equity is one that you cannot afford to avoid. And I know that there are a lot of white women out there who are just exhausted. We take on a lot of extra labor and thinking about taking on more labor in the context of fighting racism and systemic inequities just feels exhausting.
But I want you to think about the way that leadership shows up in our everyday lives.
About how leadership is truly about taking responsibility for shit you didn’t even do and then holding people accountable.
Volunteers clean up a beach that they didn’t litter and then go on to create anti-littering laws.
Community leaders repair damage after storms they didn’t cause and then change housing construction laws about how houses constructed in flood zones need to be on stilts.
CEOs, they apologize for mistakes made long before they joined the company. And then they get to work creating policy that benefits all.
Religious leaders, they apologize for harms their institutions committed centuries ago and move into repair and redesigning their internal structures.
Scholarship funds. They invest in students that they did not birth and they support communities in getting more resources to raise the bar on education for marginalized communities.
That is what leadership is.
Leadership is not guilt for what you didn’t do.
It is not shame, but repair, stewardship, trust building… it’s about building trust that you are there to heal and repair and to make sure that this does not happen again.
It’s about holding a vision for a company or organization until that vision is an actual reality.
And the same principle applies to race and equity. Real leaders, seasoned leaders do not avoid the hard, ugly truths.
They go straight into it.
They don’t ignore history. They rewrite it.
And here is the hard truth and real history about America that only real leaders and true Christians will acknowledge and face.
America was not just built on discovery. It was built on genocide.
From the moment European colonizers arrived, Native Americans were systematically massacred, displaced, and stripped of their land through violence, forced removal, and broken treaties.
Something called the Doctrine of Discovery was a series of papal decrees issued by the Catholic Church in the 15th century that gave Christian European nations the right to claim, conquer, and exploit lands
that were not ruled by Christians.
This was far right extremism that infiltrated church elites who betrayed the real Jesus by allowing the power of the church to be leveraged and exploited for political gain.
Politics that wanted to conquer lands and destroy people just so they could own more under their empire.
The Doctrine of Discovery justified this conquest under the guise of Christianity, while westward expansion unleashed waves of slaughter and starvation.
Entire communities were erased through smallpox blankets, scorched earth military campaigns, and the deliberate destruction of food systems that people rely on to survive.
And what followed was centuries of erasure through boarding schools and cultural bans and legal dispossession designed to completely destroy indigenous identities.
Their culture, their language, their food, their way of life was completely stripped from them.
And America did not simply settle the land. Settle is this very nice whitewashed word that made all of this seem calm. No, this was not calm. They stole it through the attempted annihilation of the people who already lived here.
There’s an Instagram account @freeyourmindandthink that spelled it out so clearly in a very simple post:
If you are an American or live in the US today, your heritage can only be one of a few things. Your heritage could be either Native American, like you were here before the Europeans got here, enslaved refugee, right? so you were stolen from Africa or someplace and forced to work here to build the new America. Or you were an immigrant, like my family, right? That’s it.
Many of us were descended from immigrants who were probably idealistic and ignorant. And I don't mean ignorant as an insult.
I'm not saying immigrants are ignorant. mean ignorant in the truest sense of the word, lacking knowledge, understanding or awareness about a particular fact.
There were a lot of immigrants who believed a lot of the marketing about the quote unquote new world.
Yes, there were racist immigrants too, but many immigrants to the US arrived without realizing that they were entering a country built on genocide and slavery. By the 19th and early 20th centuries, violence against Native Americans was reframed as Manifest Destiny, the belief that the new Americans were destined or even divinely ordained to expand westward across the continent, which was not true. It was like the way some Jewish people today frame the genocide in Gaza as noble or inevitable in the name of quote unquote civilization. Manifest Destiny painted conquest as progress.
And this isn't to make an excuse, but this is to understand that it was a different time. A lot of these immigrants come from communities that still believe in folklore. Some of them did not have education and that made them very easily influenced.
And by the time immigrants came here, the most visible massacres of native peoples and the legalized transatlantic slave trade had already taken place and the horrors of slavery were downplayed in mainstream narratives.
There were many immigrants that came chasing promises of freedom and prosperity, and they were hyper-focused on survival, while propaganda and rewritten history concealed the actual truth.
Over time, some immigrants and their descendants became complicit by assimilating into whiteness, while others joined the abolitionist and civil rights struggles once they recognized the injustice.
And if you are a descendant of white immigrants who didn't fully know what was going on because news traveled slow, there was no social media, and people were not as educated about globalization and manipulative advertising, you get to choose now.
You get to know the truth of what lured your family to this country and decide.
Will you forsake your culture of origin for the development project that was America and just call yourself white?
Or will you own your roots and the history that comes with it, the good, bad, and the ignorant?
Will you pretend you didn't learn better than your ancestors?
Or will you step into the civil rights movement your ancestors may have unwittingly landed smack in the middle of when they came here without the full picture?
Today there are many white leaders who did not invent slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, or all the discriminatory policies that continue to humiliate, exclude, and disempower Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.
But those systems and the inequities in them still shape our neighborhoods, our schools, our opportunities, how we socialize with each other and what we think of each other. And it shapes our daily lives. Even if we’re not conscious of it, these policies and these racist ideas that are infused into these policies shape the way we interact with each other, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
and white leaders, we still benefit from them even if we can’t always see how. And if we do the work to dismantle these inequities, it doesn’t mean that we are losing our part of the pie. That’s a big fear that I see from a lot of people who are scared about having either immigrants work here or having to share resources, but that is a scarcity mentality.
That is saying that there is not enough.
Real Christians know that Jesus said, this is my body, eat from it… and the fishes and the loaves… and all the things multiply.
Leadership does not work if you are acting from scarcity.
You have to move from abundance.
You have to know that when we share resources, when one person goes higher, we all go higher together and the health and success of our communities increases exponentially.
So leadership today really means asking:
Who is missing here?
Who is silenced when I speak?
Who pays the cost for the empowerment that I am building?
Who’s not at the table?
And also, why was this table even built the way it was?
Because a women’s empowerment movement that excludes women of color, indigenous women, 2SLGBTQIA+ women, neurodivergent women, and women with disabilities, that is not empowerment.
It is patriarchy in disguise.
This always matters, but it matters especially right now because we live in a moment where DEI is under attack. People
The Importance of DEI in Leadership
all the time misunderstand DEI, especially if they’re coming from a scarcity mentality, right?
They tend to think that, if you got hired because you’re black, you got hired because of the color of your skin.
When the truth is you got hired because somewhere in the racist policies, someone dismantled those racist policies and acknowledged that the path to success looks different for different people because of our history, right?
So people will misunderstand DEI.
Politicians, they’ll distort DEI.
Even some organizations quietly walk DEI back because they’re operating from fear and they fear pushback.
Again, playing big is operating from love.
It’s not operating from fear.
So here is what doesn’t get spelled out clearly enough for people often enough, right?
DEI benefits white women too.
The same doors that opened for women of color when DEI gained traction also opened for white women.
And this was because there was a time, and it’s still happening today, where women don’t have equal rights in our systemic policies.
And you know this, if you’ve ever had to work and raise kids and you’re expected to do everything as a single parent, like our system doesn’t support childcare, it doesn’t support single mothers. The labor is not the same for women as it is for men. The rights are not the same. The right to rest as a woman is not the same in our system.
So many white women’s careers, many white women leadership positions and paychecks exist today because of DEI initiatives that they might not even realize were working in their favor.
Diversity, equity, inclusion… DEI says, we recognize that through this system, you have not had a fair shake. And because of that, your development compared to people who have access to these things already may be delayed. There may be a gap in milestones, like for generations, women could not have credit cards or get a loan without a man or even access to financial education. So there are generations of women who were not homeowners. Home owning is a form of wealth that we as women missed out on for centuries.
And same with indigenous people and people of color. So DEI is just one part, one very small part of recognizing, hey, your communities have experienced genocide and trauma and systemic policies that kept you from the things that everybody else got that held you back and that created a generational form of either poverty or trauma or not having access that we see that you have to overcome in order to get to the same place that other people are trying to get to.
And that place might be a bachelor’s degree, it might be gainful employment, whatever it is.
DEI says… we see that the starting point is not the same for everyone.
DEI says… even if you don’t have money, you might have health. Even if you have health, you might not have property. So when DEI is dismantled, it’s not just the communities of color who lose, white women, we lose too. Which means speaking up about equity, it’s not just altruism, it is definitively enlightened self-interest.
Because even if you want to see yourself as empowered, the truth is women belong to a marginalized community where all the policies created in society do not support women equally in the way that they do other people. And so it’s really important for leaders to speak up.
So what do you do if you’re a white leader in a time when pro DEI stances can feel really risky, right?
I’m gonna give you three tools.
So the first one is to name the reality out loud.
When racism or exclusion is happening, do not sweep it under the rug.
Please do not succumb to polite whiteness that ignores things that are going on.
Use your mic, use your meeting, your email, your influence.
Ask questions about how your company or organization can ensure that all people can thrive and identify any gaps for the diversity of people that work for you.
Many organizations have single moms, disabled veteran dads, indigenous black and LGBTQ people.
Do you know what these people need to thrive?
Are you asking them questions about their experiences?
Do you know what would actually make it better and healthier for them to keep showing up and doing their work?
Number two, redistribute resources.
Don’t just inspire, put money, time, and opportunities in the hands of women of color, invite them into leadership tables, pay them fairly.
That doesn’t mean when you have a black woman at a leadership table that a white woman can’t be there.
It just means that you are making sure that everyone is represented in leadership and that you’re not creating a leadership of an echo chamber.
When you share the distribution of power, when you share the resources, and you have equal representation at the table. This benefits everyone in so many ways. This creates authentic strength in all of the people who are at the table.
And then number three, listen and act on repair.
Don’t assume that you know what inclusion should look like.
Hand over the mic, ask what repair looks like from their perspective and follow through.
Ask your neurodivergent people, ask your black people, ask your LGBTQ people and your single moms, like ask the veterans, like center the voices of the people who are living this and holding different marginalized identities than your own.
Ask them what’s broken in this system according to their perspective and repair it so it never breaks again.
So I want to start to close with this, specifically my white leaders.
Taking responsibility for what you did not personally do is not about guilt. It is not about blame. It is about courage.
It’s about credibility and your ability to actually lead people toward a better and more just reality. This is about healing our communities.
It is about building movements where every woman can rise, not just a few. It is about refusing to replicate inequity in the name of empowerment.
And it is about letting your love for yourself and your community drive your actions instead of playing small and letting fear and scarcity be in the driver’s seat.
Because leadership is not just about vision.
It is about responsibility, even when taking responsibility for things that are not yours.
If this episode landed with you, please share it.
Send it to your organization, send it to your church, your women’s group, your board.
Start the conversation about what leadership and responsibility really mean. Make a workshop out of it… ask yourselves and each other at the leadership table who is not here. What perspectives and experiences in our organization do we not understand yet? And let’s center those voices and listen to them and make changes to our policy so it is more inclusive for everyone so we can all thrive.
And if you want more conversations like this, conversations that are not afraid to talk about race, equity, neurodivergence, and true empowerment of the whole woman, then go to xxxkatebailey.com, scroll to the bottom where it says join our community, and enter your email address to subscribe to Play Big Queen where I send out an email every Monday morning to let you know that a new podcast episode has dropped.
I’ll never spam you, but I will let you know about opportunities to work with me in the future.
Because this work truly matters.
And it starts with you.
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Outro 1
That's it for today, Queen.
Take what lit you up, leave what didn't.
You know what serves.
If you want to stay in this Play Big Queen orbit, get the rituals, resources, and real talk that fuels your Play Big self, go to xxxkatebailey.com, scroll to the bottom, and join this community.
This is where bold women gather. Neurodivergent visionaries, disability warriors, sacred disruptors.
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that feels right for you.
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Until next time, remember to honor your own timing, value your own unique way.
And most of all, when you come face to face with your boldest desires, trust your brilliance and Play Big Queen.
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Outro 2
Hey, queen, are you still here?
Good.
That means you're not just curious.
You are being called and want more.
I am here for the ones who want more than party trick mindset hacks.
The ones who need nervous system rooted, neurodiverse affirming space held by someone who is trauma trained, so they can rise on their terms.
My work is designed to center folks navigating ADHD, autism, disability, trauma, or mental health challenges and their brilliance all at once.
You do not need to be someone who identifies as neurodivergent or someone who has a disability to benefit from this work.
If you're feeling called, you belong here.
I believe in and support queer and trans rights, Black Lives Matter, sex worker rights, Palestinian, Ukrainian, and global self-liberation, religious autonomy, and dismantling abusive systems.
If that's too much for you, then babe, this isn't your podcast and you know where the unfollow is.
But if that lights a fire within you and you are inspired to learn more, then my Play Big Queen, you are home.
You can also head over to xxxkatebailey.com/about to learn more about me, my company,
qualifications, methodology, values, worldviews, philosophies, and my mission.
My mission is to activate 10,000 women with invisible disabilities to lead, create, speak up, and claim the spaces that they were told to shrink inside.
Because their leadership, your leadership, will change the world.
If you know that's you, declare it.
Put your energetic line in the sand and tell me.
Email me at [email protected] and tell me why this work is so important for you and we can explore opportunities to work together and make your Play Big dreams a reality.
