Dr. Lauren Tucker on cultural transformation and acting as the vanguard of change.
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Photo of Dr. Lauren looking at the camera, smiling. She is wearing a white turtleneck sweater and black-rimmed glasses.
For this week's series, I got the chance to chat with Dr. Lauren Tucker, founder and CEO of Do What Matters, an inclusion management consultancy. I'm inspired by her journey leaving the advertising industry to address its structural inequities from the outside. Learn more about her and her organization's work in our interview below.
In an interview, you mentioned you decided to leave your position as an agency Chief Strategy Officer to address the lack of representation in marketing head-on. What has been the most illuminating part of this journey?
The most shocking, if not surprising, part of this journey is how talent has taken such a back seat to the pursuit of growth and EBITDA, especially when so many businesses run on the engine of the creativity, innovation and productivity of their talent.
Do you feel that the advertising industry has made significant changes since the racial reckoning of last summer?
I’m still waiting on authentic transformation. I’m fascinated by agencies that have now suddenly developed a DEI practice to sell to their clients while still struggling to build more inclusive, equitable and diverse cultures of their own. I continue to hear stories about the exclusion and bias that dominate these same agencies that are offering these services. Talk about the cobbler’s kids have no shoes.
I'd love to hear more about the company mentors program your organization provides. What is the role of mentorship in fostering more inclusive workspaces?
This is one of the most popular and very useful resources we offer our clients. After an egregious incident, it’s easy to look so far inward at your organization that you can’t believe anyone else has experienced the trauma that your company is facing. The mentors assure our newer clients that there are no alone in the mission of developing a more inclusive and healthy culture. I encourage all of our clients to mentor one another and share best practices in IE&D so that they can teach and model behavior for the rest of the industry. Nothing around inclusion should be proprietary. IE&D should and must be an Open Source mission.
What do you look for in prospective clients that approach your firm?
They need to be highly motivated in favor of transformation rather than transaction. We get a lot of interest from agencies and other types of companies that just want us to design a narrative or help them with change communications. We typically find that these prospects are not really interested in the hard work of the transformation required to ensure that your culture and what you say about your culture are fully aligned with the inclusion mission. Unfortunately, it typically takes an egregious incident combined with the loss of significant revenue before companies really value the need for our services and the impact that we can bring not only to the health of their culture, but also the health of their bottom line.
How do you see the role of diversity, equity and inclusion evolving in the years ahead?
We believe we are part of the vanguard of change because we are an Inclusion-First management consultancy. While there has been a lot of great work done by Diversity-First consultants, we believe inclusion-first solutions result not only in more sustainable change, but is also more scalable in an increasingly multicultural, transcultural and global world. Diversity-First management typically is seen as a US-centric approach whereas our Inclusion-First approach appeals to global clients who need to ensure that colleagues around the globe feel safe, heard, and valued. Too often, diversity management practices focus on race and ethnicity, but these are not always the relevant differences that make the difference for global inclusion.
What have you learned as an entrepreneur since starting Do What Matters?
Having been an advocate for inclusion, equity and diversity all of my professional life, I learned it is hard to be a prophet in your own land. Organizations are more likely to hear me and act on my recommendations when I am on the outside as a consultant. This observation has been confirmed by so many of the folks who are doing the hard work within their companies as employees. This really pisses me off, but it is the reality. We do everything I can to support those within their organizations to give them the support they need to move their inclusion agendas forward.
I’ve also realized how emotionally challenging this work is for my consultants and myself. I’ve been asked whether I’m having “fun” doing the work that I do. I respond by saying that I am very gratified by the work and am passionate about the positive change I believe we are helping to achieve in the industry. However, this is not what I would call “fun” work. We have a long way to go to see the type of transformation that the industry will need if it is to truly create content that is memorable, meaningful, and remarkable to an increasingly multicultural, transcultural and global world. While it sometimes seems like we’re pushing water uphill, I truly believe we are helping to create the change we want to see.
Dr. Lauren Tucker is the founder and CEO of Do What Matters, an inclusion management consultancy, challenges the cultural homogeneity in the storytelling industries by designing inclusion solutions that foster greater creativity, innovation, and growth. She is an entrepreneur with a history of leadership, research, practice and activism in race, ethnicity, gender and is currently an honorary research fellow at the School of Mass Communication Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, where she received her doctorate. Tucker has worked at some of the world’s most renowned advertising agencies, including Leo Burnett, Burrell Communications, the Martin Agency, and she is a co-founder of Indivisible Chicago, a progressive political organization dedicated to making civic activism easy, accessible, and impactful.