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Episode 153: Coaching for Social Impact: Leadership Beyond Self-Interest with guest, Daphne Watkins
What does it truly mean to lead with social impact? Dr. Daphne Watkins, researcher, professor, and executive coach, takes us on a profound journey exploring leadership that prioritizes uplifting marginalized voices over personal advancement.
Drawing from her remarkable career transition—from two decades researching Black men's health to coaching leaders across racial and cultural differences—Dr. Watkins illuminates how coaching can transform leaders into powerful agents of social change. She defines social impact leadership not as holding power or titles, but as "giving voice to the voiceless" and creating meaningful legacies that extend beyond individual achievement.
The conversation tackles head-on the challenges facing diversity and inclusion work today. Rather than abandoning critical progress during DEI backlash, Dr. Watkins describes how leaders are "pivoting"—maintaining their commitment to equity while adapting their approaches. Her practical insights include creating psychological safety in coaching relationships and using identity mapping exercises to help leaders understand how their backgrounds shape their leadership styles.
Most compelling is Dr. Watkins' nuanced exploration of privilege—how we all carry it in different contexts, often without recognition. As a self-described "data nerd" measuring coaching effectiveness through "ripple effects," she demonstrates how seemingly individual leadership transformations can cascade through organizations and communities. Her current research with leaders of color heading research institutes further reveals untold pathways to influence and impact.
Ready to examine your own leadership through a social impact lens? This conversation offers both the challenge and the roadmap. Connect with Dr. Watkins at daphnewatkins.com and discover how your leadership can create meaningful change in a world desperately needing voices for the voiceless.
Watch the full interview by clicking here.
Find the full article here.
Learn more about Daphne Watkins here. #datanerd
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Welcome to Beyond the Page, the official podcast of choice, the magazine of professional coaching, where we bring you amazing insights and in-depth features you just won't find anywhere else. I'm your host, Garry Schleifer, and I'm excited to expand your learning as we dive into the latest article, have a chat with the brilliant author behind it and uncover the learnings that are transforming the coaching world. When you have a chance, join our vibrant community of coaching professionals as we explore groundbreaking ideas, share expert tips and techniques and make a real difference in our lives. Remember, this is your go-to resource for all things coaching. But for now, let's dive into our podcast. In today's episode I'm speaking with Daphne Watkins, who wrote an article in our most recent issue Coaching, anti-racism and the Backlash Against DEI. Her article is entitled Coaching as Agents of Change ~ Shaping the Future of Social Impact Leadership. A little bit about Daphne. She has a PhD, an executive MBA and she's also a coach who has dedicated her career to improving the lives of underrepresented communities. With more than two decades of research on black men's health, she has worked to dismantle systemic barriers limiting their access to health care and education. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she expanded her focus to include leadership development and organizational development, drawing from her extensive experience working with leaders in higher education, health care and community settings. Today, her research examines the impact of executive coaching on faculty and professional development, in hopes of empowering social impact leaders across industries to transform systems, institutions and organizations. Just like that, right, Daphne? Simple, Okay. So I do have to ask. So, first of all, welcome and thank you for writing for choice, I really appreciate it, and for being here for our podcast. What had you focus just on Black men's health?
Daphne Watkins:Oh, that is the million-dollar question, isn't?
Garry Schleifer:Right?
Daphne Watkins:So you read in my bio that, yes, for 20 years I've been focusing my research pretty solely on Black men's mental health, and it has a lot to do with just family dynamics and how I grew up and trying to understand the implications of how men see themselves as men and how that impacts their decisions to seek help for health care, or to seek help for mental health care in particular. And so I've always been interested in sort of gender and race intersections and how that influences behavior. And so it wasn't until just recently, about five or six years ago, that I got bitten by the coaching bug, if you will, and decided to expand my work beyond Black men's mental health to learn a little bit more about coaching and its effect on professionals.
Garry Schleifer:Oh, wow. And just while we're talking about it, did you tip into some commonalities for Black women's health?
Daphne Watkins:I did.
Garry Schleifer:There were systemic issues and things like that.
Daphne Watkins:but oh, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, one of the places where I trained after I finished my PhD was a department of OBGYN, and I often tell people it was the first time someone had to convince me to take a job, because for many years I have studied Black men's mental health. But the folks in OBGYN said you know, it's time for you to understand the family dynamic and the family health and what are the sort of intersections between women, men and children's health. And so one of the best jobs I had ever taken. Actually, it really brought in my scope to think about family health and how do men and women sort of play into that dynamic?
Garry Schleifer:Wow, and you're in the United States.
Daphne Watkins:I am. I live in Michigan.
Garry Schleifer:Oh, I'm just over east of you, I'm in Ontario in Canada.
Daphne Watkins:oh, okay.
Garry Schleifer:And I can't even imagine the differences between the American.
Garry Schleifer:Well, I know the difference between the American health care system and the Canadian health care system, but I can't help but believe there's still systemic issues for people. So, yeah, thanks for doing that work and for continuing to do it and being a leader in that.
Garry Schleifer:So, moving on to what called you, inspired you to write the article for us at this time?
Daphne Watkins:Well, I was invited by one of our dear colleagues to think about contributing to this issue because, like I said, I've been doing executive coaching and working with organizations and leaders for the past several years and these are just the hard questions that it's sometimes very difficult to answer.
Daphne Watkins:And more recently, I've been getting this question a lot and quite a few of my coaching clients have not been people of color. Actually, they've reached out in the past few years and have said I'm a white man, I'm a white woman and I want my executive coach to be a person of color. And so it just got me to thinking about okay, what does that look like? You know, what does it look like in this sort of anti-DE&I world that we live in now, right, what does it look like to coach someone of a different race, of a different gender? And so I just kind of went from there and got the idea for the article. And one other thing that I'll say that definitely contributed to the meat of the article is that I'm a professor at the University of Michigan and I teach in our management and leadership pathway, and the title of one of my classes is Social Impact, Leadership and Governance. I've thought a lot about these issues, Garry.
Garry Schleifer:No kidding, you did write about it. Well, thank you, that's great.
Daphne Watkins:Yeah, great. So that's what motivated me to write this article.
Garry Schleifer:All right. For those that haven't read in the article. What is social impact leadership?
Daphne Watkins:Yeah well, the short answer is really uplifting the lives of people whose voices have not been heard. It's not just about leadership around, being the most important person in the room or having a title. It's about how can you give a voice to the voiceless. How can you uplift people who are experiencing challenges, who are struggling. It's about being the kind of leader who cares about more than yourself. You're really trying to give back to the community, to the organizations and the people that you care about, and really trying to do more to actually leave a legacy once you're gone.
Garry Schleifer:Okay, so tell me why everybody isn't like this, or do you have to self-identify as a social impact leader?
Daphne Watkins:Well, I'm so glad you asked because the first time I discovered social impact leadership, I had the same reaction, like shouldn't we all strive to actually be the kind of leaders that want to help people and give a voice to the voiceless and really have impact on the social challenges that our world faces? But, Garry, not everyone thinks like this. A lot of people who rise to leadership positions are all about me, me, me. They're all about making the dollars. They're all about, you know, sort of just self-promotion and stepping on whoever they have to step on on the way up, if you will.
Daphne Watkins:And so being a professor in a school of social work, as you can imagine, you know this is not really what we focus on at all. We don't teach our students to be those kinds of leaders. Instead, we teach our students to have some value and some morals around what brought them to social work, first and foremost, and then, secondly, how can they use their platforms and leverage their leadership positions to make sure that they have as big of a reach as possible to help those communities at need?
Garry Schleifer:Wow, you said a couple of key words values and morals, and I'll leave it at that, and so so I mean it behooves me. I still shake my head, and you must as well, like people don't look around and see who they stepped on to get where they are and acknowledge them. I guess, being a coach, I've been, you know, engaged in that conversation for so long now that it seems, you know, it's almost like going out into the real world.
Daphne Watkins:Yeah, yeah, and you know it sounds funny because I think for some people it's a no-brainer like obviously, based on how we grew up or how we see the world, it's our natural inclination to want to give back, to tackle some of those wicked problems that we see in the world, those challenges that underprivileged people experience. But for others that is not how they move about the world, Garry. I mean it's really all about how can I get to multi-billion dollar status and I don't care what I have to do to get there.
Daphne Watkins:It's not really about what can we do to actually provide some social good to the world.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah Well, thank you for doing it. It still needs doing. Is there a way to measure the effectiveness of social impact leadership coaching?
Daphne Watkins:Yeah, absolutely, and so I'll say that the way that I tend to do this with my clients is I often use a multi-layered evaluation approach, and so I'm definitely a researcher at heart, I'm a data girl, I'm a data nerd, self-identified data nerd. But the nice thing about a multilayered evaluation approach is it really goes beyond sort of those traditional coaching metrics. You know it really works to first start out with a baseline assessment, try to figure out where people are when you start that coaching relationship, and then we track both individual and organizational metrics along the way.
Daphne Watkins:You know, how are you progressing as an individual, but also looking at the dynamic between you and your organization along the way. I also measure impact in what I like to call ripple effects. So, not just how does our coaching engagement influence you as a leader, but how does that then ripple out to the people that you work with, your teams, your direct reports and others who are connected to you?
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, wow, well, and there must be some pushback and some resistance to this kind of leadership. How do you handle those situations where the systems resist the changes that those leaders want to make?
Daphne Watkins:Yeah, I think it depends. You know, there are some organizations who pride themselves on having a social purpose, right, naturally, those are a little bit easier to enter into because the leadership is saying we don't just want to do, you know, we just don't want to make billions of dollars, we actually want to do something good in the world and we want to, you know, give back, we want to have every dollar that we generate in revenue goes to this or that. And so, you know, I think that it's about figuring out what is the climate for this kind of situation.
Daphne Watkins:You know what is the current climate and how open and receptive is the organization to truly transforming themselves into focusing on social impact and having that kind of mindset in the work that they do. It can't just be a sign on the wall in the office, right. It has to be sort of a daily practice that continues to be monitored over the course of time.
Garry Schleifer:Well now, with the DEI being challenged and threatened, if you will, I've heard a lot from my clients about how they're still, I would say, doing the work. They're just labeling it differently and maybe going about it differently and hopefully just as effectively, and I hope that you'll see that in your research and your training and teaching as well.
Daphne Watkins:Yeah, I'm pretty sure I will. I think folks are really trying to figure out, I think the word is pivot. How they can pivot.
Garry Schleifer:That's right.
Daphne Watkins:It doesn't totally disrupt their workflow and their career trajectories, but also stays true to who they are as people. And yeah, as you mentioned, for some people that will be a title change, for some people it's going to be something else.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, as long as the work goes forward.
Daphne Watkins:Yes, exactly as long as we can continue to make moves.
Garry Schleifer:We are a diverse world. We are a diverse world. Well, here's one that is directed at me. A question for you is so what does a typical coaching conversation look like when you're helping a white leader like me examine privilege and positionality?
Daphne Watkins:Yeah, great question, great question, and I get that question a lot. You know like, how do we enter into these spaces? Well, I'll say first that my work with all clients, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, is about creating psychological safety right and making sure that we operationalize that definition for ourselves.
Daphne Watkins:What does it mean to you when I say that word, and then I can tell you what it means to me. This work requires vulnerability. You know we have to be vulnerable. We have to break down barriers and truly speak to those hushed conversations that we hear about over by the water cooler. I might be dating myself here, right, but by the water cooler.
Garry Schleifer:I think the concept is still out there.
Daphne Watkins:But when I am coaching leaders who don't share my same identities, I usually begin with a mapping exercise that really helps us outline and identify all of the identities that that leader may hold, so not just race, maybe class, education, gender, even geographic location, sort of where they are in the world and the context of that, and so typically we use that mapping exercise to explore how these identities have shaped their perception as a leader. I mean, I think a lot of us do this in our coaching engagements. Sort of where did you come from? How does that shape how you see the world? How are you engaging in the work that you do
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, that's now part of the core competencies, finding out more about who you are and what that brings to the coaching relationship. Yeah, no, well, through mapping, that sounds very interesting. Now I have to ask, being the white man of privilege in the room, what's the most common? Oh my gosh, I didn't realize I was leading like that.
Daphne Watkins:Ooh. So I've seen this now and probably, I would say, several of my clients up until this point. It's the This is how I was trained, in this particular climate and culture and with this particular sort of org behavior. And I'm now trying to bring that into this organization and nobody's feeling it Like, nobody is connecting with that particular kind of mindset. So I myself am a former athlete and so like and I'll just use that as an example you know, sometimes if we're former athletes we get into a space with a team and we immediately start using sports jargon.
Daphne Watkins:So that can be off-putting for some people you know or being from a certain part of the country you know, and the stereotypes that are attached to that West coast, East coast, you know and sort of bringing that energy into a workspace. And people are like, oh gosh, this is just not the kind of leader I want to follow. Like what is going on but that's typically, I would say the most common. It's someone saying this is how I was trained, this is how I was raised. Like what's wrong with me behaving like this? And I have to say, okay, let's take a moment and just acknowledge the fact that this is who you are and this is how you show up in in your leadership space. But let's think about it from your staff perspective. How are they receiving that person? Is it what's best for the team that you say those things or that you behave like that? And so that's really kind of what we're coming at, but that's it. It's people saying this is who I am. They should just change instead of let's figure out how we can negotiate this evolution with your organization.
Garry Schleifer:Well, and I'm guessing it's probably easier when we self-identify as wanting to make a social impact through our leadership.
Daphne Watkins:Yes.
Garry Schleifer:We're open to the conversation. I've been open to this conversation ever since I got the message from Robin D'Angelo at the ACTO conference in 2019 in Victoria BC, when and it's let's do a kind of give a lay of the land. The majority of coaching schools at that time were run by women, and predominantly white women, and there was me at the back of the room promoting choice Magazine. So I was, first of all, I was the only guy and pretty much in the room. So no disrespect to the other ones who were there. I'm sure there were, and I know who's going to call me out on it but you know she said, didn't say it directly at me, but I received it that I'm a white man of privilege and I was kind of like.
Garry Schleifer:I was stopped in my tracks just from being identified as such. It stopped me to think. So, to your point, how is how I'm acting and talking and doing and being impacting the people that I'm serving, that be the coaching? Well, it's predominantly the coaching community through choice magazine and stuff like that, and ever since then I just keep it like looking like.
Garry Schleifer:For example, we're in a predominantly India, Indian neighborhood, Indian immigrants, and they were under British rule.
Garry Schleifer:So what I notice is a lot of them call me sir, and I make a point of just kind of like you know, if I know them well enough to say you know my name's Garry. Right, because I don't know that they still hang on to that, or if it's like how did it become a cultural piece?
Garry Schleifer:I'm actually working with a client right now who we're working on, and I keep feeling like I'm up here just because I'm a white guy, right, like, and so one of my biggest jobs is to bring to an equal playing field, an equal level rather of the equal power, if power is the word to use. But you know, having us, it's like I don't. I keep reminding my clients, you're the expert in your life, I'm not. So you know, don't be elevating coaches. I've never said that, but you know the, you can tell, you can tell. So I'm very thankful for you and all of the others who wrote for this and keep writing for our Kaleidoscope column, which is an ongoing DEI column giving voice for coaches through choice Magazine, because I just keep learning, keep learning.
Daphne Watkins:Yeah, and you know, I really appreciate you saying that too, Garry, because I think people don't realize that we all show up to certain settings with a certain amount of privilege, right? A lot of us don't want to admit that.
Daphne Watkins:I'll just, I'll just use myself as an example. As a Black woman, you know, I would show up to spaces sometimes and say, oh, I understand your struggle, I understand, I'm a Black woman, I get it. And people would see that PhD behind my name and say you have no Idea what I am going through.
Daphne Watkins:I'm thinking. So it took me a while to realize, oh yeah, like in some spaces that PhD gives me some privilege, that it doesn't in other spaces, right, or the degrees or the title professor at this major university. And so I don't think people in general acknowledge the fact that to some degree in certain spaces they will have privilege over others. Regardless of whether you see it or whether you want to admit it, it is there and other people see it and will call you out on it if you don't see it.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, well, hey, I was thinking at a pool party I was at recently and it was all a bunch of white guys.
Garry Schleifer:I was like isn't that interesting, right? Facebook, you know you go through. Oh, this might be a possible friend white person, white person, white person, white person, right. So, like the universe supports our privilege in a way too. You have to fight on many fronts. Not fight, but be aware and change
Daphne Watkins:Yes and be intentional.
Garry Schleifer:That's right, yeah right, be intentional, so you know. So, yeah, now I'm getting like oh, okay, so where's equality, Garry, when you're saying hello to new friends on Facebook, right? So yeah, wow, wow. We could go on and on about this. Let me tell you, oh, what's your next work? What are you working on? Like, are you continuing that? But is there something else in your spare time?
Daphne Watkins:Oh, the spare time that I have so much of? .
Daphne Watkins:Being a professor and all the things that I do, yeah, and the coaching, but I will tell you that one project that I'm really excited about right now is I'm doing some data collection with people who lead research entities. So research institutes, research centers, research labs and programs, particularly people of color. I'm really interested in learning about their paths to leadership and their trajectories. How did they learn how to lead? How did they learn how to lead a team to disseminate their work, to actually plan and organize and manage and operate? And some of these leaders that I'm interviewing they run $50 million centers and institutes all over the country, and so it's just really interesting to work with them and sort of unpack. How did you learn how to do what you do every day?
Daphne Watkins:And there's always that pause, like well, I guess I never thought about it. Let's talk about that. So that's the project that I'm probably most fired up about right now, because it's sort of pulling the curtain back on a group of people who are just behind the scenes doing amazing work, but you never quite know the steps they took to get to their positions.
Garry Schleifer:Look at you researching the researchers now. Being a researcher wasn't enough.
Daphne Watkins:I told you I'm a big data nerd, Garry. You didn't believe me when I said?
Garry Schleifer:I got it.
Garry Schleifer:Oh well, you keep doing all that great work. What would you like our audience to do as a result of the article in this conversation?
Daphne Watkins:I would like the audience to read the article and do some self-reflection about how they show up to different spaces and realizing who they are, be they coaches or clients, or just people who are intrigued by the idea and the topics that I present in the article. I would love people to really dig a little bit deeper and do some self-reflection about what those words mean to them. You know, leveraging their own identities. I talk about that in the article. I talk about white fragility in the article and sort of how do you coach across race? And so I would love for people to just just digest it and take some time to reflect on what's there and reach out should they have any questions or want to talk further.
Garry Schleifer:Wow, Thank you. And speaking of reaching out, how can they best reach you Daphne Watkins?
Daphne Watkins:Yes, yes, so I think check me out on my website, daphnewatkins. com, and I have links there for ways that people can reach out to me if they want to talk more.
Garry Schleifer:Brilliant. Thank you and good luck with all your research you data nerd you. She said it first.
Daphne Watkins:Yes, yes. So we're going to do #data nerd, we're going to start.
Garry Schleifer:There we go, Nancy, when you're working on this recording. Well, thank you so much for joining us for this Beyond the Page episode Daphne.
Daphne Watkins:Thank you, Garry, for the opportunity to publish in choice and for this amazing opportunity to speak with you today. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Garry Schleifer:Me too. That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe via your favorite podcast app, probably the one that got you here. If you're not a subscriber to choice Magazine, you can sign up for your free digital issue by scanning the QR code in the top right-hand corner of your screen. If you're listening and not watching, you can go to choice-online. com and click the Sign Up Now button. I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.