While reporting this Fortune story on black men in executive leadership, I had a particularly inspiring conversation with technologist and consultant Art Hopkins. It keeps haunting me, in the best possible sense. “My motto is: I’m not a token, I’m a wedge,” he began.
Hopkins has had a long career in technology at a variety of outfits, starting as a programmer and leapfrogging up the ecosystem to become a CEO. He currently helps lead the technology practice at consulting firm Russell Reynolds Associates. As a black man in technology (the non-Silicon Valley variety, yes, it exists) he understood early that there was an asterisk by his name. “It was always part of the responsibility that came along with my opportunities,” he says. “If I was the first person to get a foot in the door, I was leaving behind bread crumbs for others.” That the asterisk still exists in the world is a disappointment, but not a surprise. “It’s like encoded English,” he says. “It’s acceptable to go around with this belief that an African American male in tech is ‘less than.’”
Like most black men who succeed in executive life, he learned early on to be above reproach in dress and conduct, to mitigate any behavior that might be interpreted as threatening – sitting down and leaning back when delivering difficult feedback, for example. But as a senior leader, he’s also developed techniques that help him coach others into considering how other people around them are faring. “I am trying to institutionalize empathy,” he says. “It’s the first act of identifying with another person as he or she self-identifies.”
He uses an exercise he calls ‘First Person Singular,’ which he describes as a way to get someone to think about the unmet needs of someone who may be different from them. You’re asked to “become” someone else and then walk through their day. I wake up and have coffee. I’m worried about my presentation. I change my outfit three times. I run for the bus. I walk into work. That sort of thing. Hopkins will then ask questions about how you feel. It’s done in front of a group, and though it sounds deceptively simple, it can get very uncomfortable.
When we did it together, he asked me to consider being a transgendered person, which he did recently at an inclusion coaching session at his office. I walked through my day in my head, trying to tell the story of myself as someone else.
Then he asked: “So, what’s it like to use the bathroom facilities as a transgender person? Here? At work?” After spending 10 minutes as someone else – and having had all that coffee – it was a jarring question. “That’s when I ask people, ‘What thought have you given to the needs of your transgender colleagues?’” he says. So many of the experiences we share at work are the same – until, of course, they become totally different.
Hopkins says that this exercise is not about acceptance or understanding. “They – whoever they are – have been living their life fine without that,” he says. “It’s about getting out of your own context and committing yourself to seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, if only for a short while.” What flows from that, he says, is up to you.