President & CEO at Sanders\Wingo, Leslie Wingo lists leadership, advocacy, and storytelling as central themes of her career, and of her life overall. This episode digs into:

• How humans make decisions in our new normal of COVID-19.

• The necessity to integrate diversity and inclusion into our culture.

• Assumptions we might make with one simple question.

Samantha Meazell: I'm so grateful to have a chance to chat with Leslie Wingo. Leslie owns the most impressive list of titles: President and CEO of Sanders\Wingo; Advertising Badass; TEDx Keynote Speaker; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Expert; Wife; Mom, and Oenophile. Save yourself a trip to Google, it's a wine connoisseur. So cheers on that! That's a perfect Friday guest if I've ever had one!

Leslie Wingo: Thank you.

Understanding the irrational choices humans make each day.

SM: It's so amazing reading about how Sanders\Wingo describes itself, herself, themselves. You're running a Texas-based independent creative agency and your team emphasizes “understanding humans and understanding the irrational choices that humans make.” You didn't say communicate to humans and you didn't say influence humans, you understand them and that sounds like a pretty empathetic distinction you're making there. So why is that important, and how are you doing that?

LW: You know, it's interesting. There are so many things that come into play when people are making decisions and I think for me it boils down to two things: people want to belong and they want to know that they're going to be okay. And just because it boils down to those two things, doesn't mean it's not complicated because it is.

I've been looking as we move through this time of COVID-19, this sense of belonging and finding belonging when we're not together. I think the thing I've been seeing a lot of is how do we do this thing alone together. So instead of meeting in person, which I would love to meet you in person, we're doing things like Zoom calls and phone calls and What's App.

And for some of us, we’re meeting our neighbors for the first time, social distancing, of course. And we're developing new relationships from six feet away. I was on a bike ride with my daughter, my husband, and my son, and I knew people lived in these houses I had just never seen them before. So these kind of things are new where we’re in close proximity, it's irrational that I don't know the people who live next door to me but yet I've met them for the first time because we've all been quarantined in our neighborhood.

I think for other people this belonging is virtual book clubs. And I've been following black Twitter because I want to know what's happening in the African American community. And watching shows, what should we binge watch. And talking within our online communities because that's how we select to belong. And then some of us don't have a choice of belonging because we have to go out and work and we don't have the luxury of shelter in place.

Will I shop for my own groceries again?

And then I also talked about the sense of being okay and what's interesting to me during this time of COVID-19 is how people are feeling okay. So in the beginning of it, the thing to do was to get toilet paper, and not just like a normal thing of toilet paper, it was packs and packs and packs of toilet paper. The toilet paper disruption is still affecting us because sometimes it's still hard to get toilet paper. So that's an irrational decision. I get that people needed toilet paper, but did you need like five things of toilet paper from Sam’s or Costco? It's an irrational purchase but it's a purchase that makes somebody feel okay.

And for other other people, we can see “being okay” is changing the way that we communicate and how we consume products and services, how we shop. For example, I want my family to be okay and my local grocery store now has an app that I now use. They probably had the app forever. You plug it in, and you just drag it, and then groceries are brought to you. It is amazing and I have never done that before. The question is, once we get on the other side of COVID-19, will I go shop for my own groceries again?

SM: What do you think?

LW: I don't know, so there's the convenience of the app so they know exactly what I'm getting but sometimes the things that I want aren't in the app and you have to go into the store to get them. The very unique specific type of cheese that I like and my kids like is asadero cheese and you can't get it on the app.

SM: I was wondering about this the other day, do you think people buy more when they're in person and it's more of an impulse buy or online where you can also have the impulse buy right there, like we're recommending this add on?

LW: It's funny because I've been doing the curbside pickup and then I realized I needed one thing from the grocery store, or the kids needed something that was substantial, so I was going to go to the store quickly. That doesn't exist anymore. So that was a change in behavior. And what I realized as I left the store with my $85 worth of groceries, I impulse buy a lot when I shop, but when I'm online I have a list and I stick to my list. So I don't know. I think the way consumers consume and how it changes will be really interesting to see now.

We've moved past toilet paper and I think the new trend is baking bread, people making sourdough at home. If people want to make it for me, I'm very happy to eat their sourdough but now you can't get yeast. Those supply chains are disrupted, so you can't get yeast at the store but they're not selling enough for restaurants to produce. So I think we'll start to see a shift in a new economy, then we'll see where people become rational and irrational at the same time. When it comes to decisions, rational choices become irrational decisions in terms of should I save my money to buy my medicine or do I use that money to buy groceries? Medicine or groceries?

The playbook that existed in January is never going to exist again, so how do we get comfortable being very uncomfortable?

SM: Thinking about brands that you work with and understanding the human of now, how does that influence the way in which you're servicing your brands? We're so early on something that we all know is going to be long.

LW: When I look at brands, it’s so complex and simple at the same time, just like human beings so complex and simple. A lot of the things I'm curious about for meetings is how many more meetings will we start to do like this (remote) instead of I need to fly to New York and then I need to fly to Chicago? In this time of togetherness, I think that's one thing to consider. When I talk to brands and talk to the clients, the playbook that existed in January is never going to exist again so how do we get comfortable being very uncomfortable? And being comfortable with things that are incomplete because right now I think there has to be a right tone things. Also, a lot of our clients plan around events and there's the likelihood that the NFL may not happen this year, or if it does happen how will it be different? Just with the NCAA. All of these experiences that we want to partake in have completely changed.

SM: How do y'all start conversations with your clients around tone? Is it something like “this is how humans are responding, this is how society is responding right now, we suggest this kind of a tone?” How do you work on that?

LW: I have been very curious and been listening to a lot of economists and futurists. They have these crazy brains and it’s really interesting how they look at the world and these life changing events. One person was talking about September 11th and at what point was it okay for the United States to move forward and laugh again. I think it was SNL, Saturday Night Live, was the first to say it's okay to do these things again. And I feel like we're laughing at ourselves because I’ve seen it on Twitter and I’ve seen it on Instagram. I think what I'm curious to know is when we’ll feel okay being together again. And together can be at work.

I mean will I ever be comfortable sending my kids to school? How does that look and feel? People are coming in and out of school all the time from teachers and educators and parents and picking up the kids. When will it be okay for us to be together again? And will we ever go back to doing something as routine as shaking someone's hand? I don't know.

A diversity measurement is not success, change is the success.

SM: Among the many hats you wear, presumably all the same time, is your expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion. More and more there's language and context that we're able to better understand diversity, equity and inclusion; and as we know, it's always evolving. I'm wondering, when you're speaking with individuals or teams or clients, are there any sort of stand-out missteps that are coming up? Something's not noticed? You know, people are feeling like, “Yep, got this, didn't hurt anyone in the room, everybody feels comfortable when I'm in the lead.” Are you seeing little or larger things that that people might want to change?

LW: One of the groups I follow is The Hustle and they had a quote that said people hate two things: change and the way things are, which is my favorite quote. I think when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion work, people make mistakes and sometimes they don't know that they've made the mistake. And so part of that is it can't be incumbent on the minority or the woman in the room to address the mistake. It's going to take all of us move that needle. Companies are also hopefully moving away from this idea of we have to check all the boxes to meet our diversity goal because a measurement is not success, change is the success.

I'm starting to see a little bit of a shift, but I wish there was more and we'll see what happens after we get to the other side of the pandemics, is the CEO and COO has to be fully vested into this idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We can't solve it after there's been a mistake, you’ve got to think about it before. The investment, in my opinion, should happen before there's ever a problem so you can anticipate what some of those things might be. And we have clients that do it and then we have some clients who are asking us to help them in the middle of something, but it's more effective to have the conversation before than after.

I want to be in a world where we no longer have to have the conversation on diversity and inclusion because it's part of our culture and what we do.

SM: Yep, absolutely. And in this remote world we're all in, I'm wondering about ways in which diversity and inclusion are coming into play with just the way in which people are interacting in more of a virtual sense, too.

LW: If I had a crystal ball to tell that future, that would be great. I think what we're seeing a lot of when it comes to the diversity inclusion work, not just for the industry I'm in which is advertising and communications, but what does that look like when it comes to education. We have pockets of kids who don't have access to the Internet, nor do they have a device that gets them on the Internet. So automatically that's an issue, that's the problem.

Or when it's access to healthcare and how do we get better healthcare for everybody. And why is it that certain populations are more affected by this pandemic than others. I think these are the questions that while we knew they were there, there's just more and they're highly elevated in this conversation of COVID-19. And I'm hoping that moving forward, we can recognize these things and talk about these things to create, not fixed systems, but create new systems that work.

I think it's going to take a bigger imagination and not reverting back to what we were doing before. And there's a lot of things that I'm sure people are working on now, but this part of it is very important to me because I want to be in a world where we no longer have to have this conversation because it's part of our culture and what we do.

The tricky get-to-know-you question, “Where did you go to high school?”

SM: I watched a talk of yours in which you reference a question that’s often asked when people meet the first time. And that question is...

LW: I am from El Paso, Texas and in El Paso, Texas the question is, “Where did you go to high school?”

SM: It's the question. Totally.

LW: It's interesting because even when you go to college, it's “Where are you from?” So you're from Dallas, what neighborhood in Dallas? So then all sorts of assumptions are made about you and stories are created about you by just asking this one basic question. And it's interesting, all of a sudden you know where I'm from, you probably have an idea of what my parents might do, my family background, things that I grew up with, things I had and didn't have. That list can go on, and on, and on by that simple question, “Where are you from” or “Where did you go to a high school?” And it's fascinating. It's completely fascinating. And so the other half of that is when people ask me, “You're from El Paso?” Yes, I know there are black people from El Paso.

SM: I’m a Jew from Houston. They’re like, “Jewish, wait, Houston?”

LW: As a set-aside, the founder of our company David Sanders was Jewish. And my father wore the Star of David because the people who taught him the apparel business in New York were also Jewish.

SM: Schmatta. See, it all comes together. It always does.

No, no, no, because I said so. No, but I love you, but no.

SM: I know you have a couple of children, your daughter is around seven and your son is around three. As a fellow parent, I know I have some key phrases that are coming up a lot around my house. The main one I'm saying these days, and I did say it yesterday and it's not helpful, is “Be careful on that rock, we can't go to the doctor right now.” I'm wondering if you're repeating any sort of key phrases with your kids these days.

LW: That's such a good question. My favorite one is, “No, no, no, because I said so. No, but I love you, but no.”

SM: It's like con, pro, con. It's supposed to be more pro, con, pro, but I heard the pro in there.

LW: And then the other funny one, “ Eléana, don't forget about your Zoom meeting.” Oh yeah, she has Zoom calls.

SM: So wild.

LW: And my favorite question is, “Where is my iPad? Which one of you has my iPad?”

SM: Well, you're doing it and it looks as if you're doing it beautifully.

About For Humans’ Sake

If you’re passionate about making other people’s lives easier through great user experiences, you’ll enjoy For Humans’ Sake, a video series from Slide UX that curates wisdom and helpful insights from experienced product leaders in a bite-sized format.

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