Susan Scott’s Remarks
In our webinar on Tuesday, November 10th, our day of action and education for DEI in public media, Susan Scott from UNC-TV gave an inspiring speech with actionable steps to improve diversity in public medai. She’s kindly shared her transcript notes with us here:
Hi, I’m Susan Scott – Chief Growth Officer at UNC-TV. I am delighted to have been invited to share a bit of my story with you as part of PUBLIC MEDIA FOR ALL’s webinar on their day of education and action. I’ll tell you a little about my background and I’ll share some of my philosophies and beliefs about hiring equitably, compensating fairly, promoting, mentoring and sponsoring people of color at all levels of an organization. I’ll also share some experiences and organizations that shaped those beliefs.
My background is steeped in media. I worked for more than 20 years in commercial media. My areas of focus spanned sales, content distribution, marketing, business development, general management and strategic planning. My commercial media career took me all over the world – from Europe to Asia to Latin America. The companies I worked for include brands like Comcast, The Weather Channel, Turner Broadcasting, Frontier Communications and Fox News Channel. Over the course of my career, I developed from a junior account executive to a Senior Vice President with responsibility for generating more than $100 million dollars/year. I have been responsible for leading teams as small as one other person and as large as 300 people. I was often the only black person and/or the only black woman in the room. I recognize that I was a “safe black person” – eager, didn’t challenge the social status quo and worked to assimilate, yet put my intellect and abilities on full display.
For the past 5 years, I have worked in public media. Outside of my current organization, I am still, often, the only black person in the room. I find public media thrilling and vital, yet I also find it insular and hide bound. I observe that the laurels we’ve rested on have been the work we do for others – not the work we do in support of each other. In spite of the public media missions, we do not yet have a strong, collective, unified expectation and approach to equitable hiring, compensating, promoting, mentoring and sponsoring people of color and women. Peter Drucker said “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. I bet you’ve all heard “what gets measured, gets managed”. There are models that our industry could work to follow and learn from. I’ll talk about them a little later.
Everything that I believe about fair treatment of people of color was learned from my parents and in the industry where I grew up – the cable and broadband industry.
Let’s start with the third rail – compensation. At one point in my career, I worked for a Japanese-American man. As were negotiating my salary, he asked “how much do you earn now – please include your highest bonuses because I want it to be clear to you that we value your talents. And, we do not want a few thousand dollars to become an emotional roadblock for you”. He took my base salary, added bonuses and 10% and made that my base salary. I have never forgotten that level of respect. He also made it clear that every business development person was compensated within a small range of each other. Be as generous as you can and value positions based upon the work and the importance of the work – not the gender or color of the people doing the work.
My philosophy on compensation in the non-profit world is also informed by Dan Pallotta. Google his TED Talk. He talks about the “overhead myth” asks the public to rethink their assumptions about charities and non-profits needing to keep overhead low in order to win grants and donor funding. Pallotta wonders “why” if this is not a standard that businesses are held to? He wonders: Could a non-profit grow to a size big enough to tackle a problem by investing in great talent, in advertising and marketing and in new ideas?
Three months after his talk went live, GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance — three leading resources for nonprofit data in the US — announced that they were “denouncing the ‘overhead ratio’ as a valid indicator of nonprofit performance.”
The presidents and CEOs of these three organizations wrote: “We write to correct a misconception about what matters when deciding which charity or non-profit to support. The percent of charity expenses that go to administrative and fundraising costs—commonly referred to as ‘overhead’—is a poor measure of an organization’s performance. We ask you to pay attention to other factors of nonprofit performance: transparency, governance, leadership, and results.” Where I am able, and I have to admit that this is difficult in the non-profit world, I and UNC-TV work hard to lead and to be competitive in the non-profit space. It’s how you get and retain the best qualified talent.
Everyone can mentor – it is not the exclusive purview of the person with the biggest title. If as you watch this, you ARE the person with the biggest title, I am asking you – besides yourself -who are you sponsoring and are they a person of color? If you are early in your career, have you identified people that you’d like to learn from? If so – ask them to help you and be your mentor. When I was the SVP for Distribution at the Weather Channel we had 810 employees across the country and as a result of an employee survey, we developed culture improvement measures. One of them was a mentorship program. Every employee was eligible to request a mentor. I was the most requested mentor in the company. It was because I take the responsibility of leadership seriously. I asked deep and penetrating questions, I encouraged people to be themselves and did not censure them for their lack of experience or knowledge. I also guided without “telling” them what to do. I respected their individuality – and assured them that there was value in being themselves. I also challenged people to be realistic about the relationship between their reality and their aspirations.
In my experience, often, promoting people is one of the single best things leaders can do to strengthen an organization’s culture. Leaders have a responsibility to check their style preferences and their pre-conceived notions and focus only on the requirements of the work. I once had an opening for a director reporting to me. I had 2 people of color working within my team and they both expressed interest in the role. It didn’t require going outside, yet my boss at the time encouraged me to look for someone “new”, from the outside and then suggested 3 people – all of whom were white. It took some time to convince her that her perception and desires were steeped in style and comfort rather than the needs of the organization. It delayed hiring by 3 months. I ultimately chose one of the two and we outperformed in that category the next year.
There are two organizations that directly influenced my beliefs about mentoring, hiring, sponsorship and compensation. The first is Women in Cable Telecommunications. I volunteered within this national organization for many years and was the Chair of the organization 15 years ago. WICT’s mission is to “create women leaders who transform our industry”.
They do this by providing unparalleled professional development programs, commissioning original gender research, and supporting a B2B network that helps advance women. WICT is especially known for its WICT PAR Initiative that measures the status of women employees in the cable industry based on three main criteria:
Pay Equity
Advancement Opportunities
Resources for Work/Life Integration
It is a comprehensive advocacy program that helps companies set goals, institutionalize policies, measure progress and achieve results. the PAR Initiative showcases best practices in achieving stronger gender diversity. With a goal to improve diversity metrics for women.
The second organization that influenced my beliefs is the T. Howard Foundation. Its mission is to promote diversity in media and entertainment by increasing the number of diverse and under-represented groups and underserved communities within media.
They offer an internship program that provides a professional work experience and knowledge of industry careers and opportunities
A talent development program targeting young professionals and recent college graduates for skills development and training, designed to prepare them to meet employment and advancement opportunities
A diversity advancement program that helps partner companies attract, identify, secure and retain the best diverse talent.
Nothing I’ve mentioned can happen overnight. Yet, I wanted to paint a picture of what is possible, what I have benefited from and what our industry can learn from. I hope that something that I’ve shared will inspire or motivate you to reach up or back, support, question and change your behavior and expectations on behalf of yourself and on behalf of the people with whom you work. Be well friends.
