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Jazz Shaper: Raj Tulsiani

Posted on 13 February 2021

Raj Tulsiani is CEO and Co-Founder of consultancy Green Park alongside Co-founder of Race Equality Matters and author.

Elliot Moss

Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.

Good morning, welcome to Jazz Shapers. It’s where Shapers of Business join the Shapers of Jazz, Soul and Blues. My guest today, in our second show of this new season here in 2021, is Raj Tulsiani, the diversity headhunter and Co-founder and CEO of Green Park, the leadership consultancy. After fifteen years working as recruiters, Raj and a small team wanted to work for a firm that fully demonstrated diversity and inclusion in their actions, not just in their aspirations and in their marketing. Unable to find such an organisation, they launched their own challenger brand, Green Park, in 2006, specialising in interim executive recruitment with equality, diversity and inclusion at its heart. As Raj says, “if we are unable to deal with a more diverse society in a way that’s fairer, then that society will continue to fragment. It’s not about finding leaders who think the same but look different. It’s not about ticking boxes. It’s about each organisation realising that their future will be different." Passionate about the power and obvious benefits of diversity in leadership, Raj is also the Co-founder of Race Equality Matters, a UK-wide collaboration of thousands of organisations and millions of employees creating change to achieve race equality in our workplaces, and he launched the first National Race Equality Week which was the first week of February in this year. Hello it’s lovely to have you here in these slightly strange, remote surroundings. We’re here on an amazing piece of software. I can see Raj; handsome he is too. How are you doing?

Raj Tulsiani

I’m as well as can be expected, thank you.

Elliot Moss

Yeah, definitely. I don’t think anyone has got away with this, wherever we are in our lives and in the world, unfortunately. Raj, tell me a little bit about Green Park in your own words. We’ll come into the whole why you set it up then, but just about what it does now versus what it did fifteen years ago or so.

Raj Tulsiani

Well, I think like any business, it’s had to adapt and make itself continually more relevant to the people it wants to serve. The reality of course is that for a business like ours, you have to be purpose driven both in terms of acquiring, understanding, motivating and obtaining talent both for yourself and for your customers. So, we started off with a really simple idea which was, you know, if we are going to spend all this time at work, could we do something that actually made the world a fairer, more sustainable, more inclusive place because that seems like a purpose that anyone would be interested in, so if people got paid to do that and built expertise and personal brands along the way then that sounds like a platform that I wanted to work for, so that’s what we did. The business itself now is really involved, at it’s best in the creation and sustaining of inclusive ecosystems for organisations, the constituent parts of that are board and executive recruitment, leadership on demand and access to independent consultants, so that’s a kind of talent acquisition side and then the talent development side is a business around diversity, inclusion, culture and ethics, so not just finding and developing cultures and leaders who can help organisations make themselves more relevant and less likely of obsolescence in the future and we do similar things in social value, ESG and around certain parts of digital transformation so, like everybody else, you know, our model is to try and do more integrated and effective services to fewer clients but with that golden thread of diversity and inclusion as a drive of productivity and competitive advantage through everything that we do.

Elliot Moss

Now the interesting thing of course that having this conversation now in 2021, the words you are using – diversity, inclusion, ESG – everyone goes, yeah of course, I mean obviously. Not the case in 2006, I mean at that point, those who were enlightened in business may have been talking about it but it wasn’t mainstream. Why was it important to you then, fifteen years ahead arguably of it becoming front page and middle page news rather than something else?

Raj Tulsiani

Well I think fairness and quality and having people move forwards or backwards on their own merits has always been of great importance to the people who are different. You know, my background, the racial attacks I have suffered, you know the hospitalisation, it all helps to build your view of looking at the world and you are quite right, you know, in 2006 even some of our best clients and the ones that had stuck with us in our previous careers, you know, their idea of diversity was someone from Oxford and someone from Cambridge on the same shortlist so, we’ve come a long, long way from then but what we have and what we are inheriting now, I think is a really dangerous phase where talking about diversity inclusion or carbon reduction or social value or all of the other intangible benefits that affect our brands are respected and viewed now. Talking about it is not the same as doing it, so I think that’s a massive change since Covid healthcare disparities were highlighted, since the murder of George Floyd highlighted a lot of the kind of death in custody and problems that we had with our own relationship with race in this country, so I think organisations now I think genuinely have a bit more will to do something but of course having the will to make change is not the same as having the skills and experiences and, critically, relationships with those who have got lived experience of those problems. So, we are at a really interesting tipping point where the narrative and the quality of the narrative has gone through the roof, you know, everyone cares but then for people who are in those organisations or shop at those shops or use those services, they would need to feel that something is actually different and, you know, a corporate black screen to support BLM is not going to get the job done.

Elliot Moss

There’ve obviously been… you touched on it, you talked about being hospitalised, there have obviously been some pretty pivotal moments in your life when you said, right if this is the way it is, I need to do something about it. How early on in your business career did you realise you would apply that lived experience in the world of business because some people become activists in different ways?  It feels like you’ve channelled your sense of injustice into your business model, which is pretty cool, but when did you start to do that at least, you know, tangibly and intentionally?

Raj Tulsiani

It’s a very difficult question. I mean, my… like many kids from a southeast Asian background, although my background is Indian and French, you know we had a shop and I remember the National Front coming into that shop and attacking people and I suppose from then I always kind of thought business has to be more than just sitting there and waiting for someone to come and buy your boxes because you don’t know who is going to come in and, you know, as a… I mean I couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8 then and that was, you know, that had a quite big affect on me. I think, as you get older and as your skills and confidence grow, you can channel it in many ways and, you know, the pivotal things that happened for me around business, I think, all happened before I got into business so, I was a very keen cricketer, I still play cricket and I remember being lots of dressing rooms where, you know, there were comments made and, you know, I remember once playing against the mighty Caribbean and Commonwealth team for Purley Cricket Club last century, you know, people said, “Don’t worry, we’ve bought an extra bar of soap” and “Are you not in the wrong dressing room?” so, as a fourteen/fifteen year old kid, you know, you’ve got two ways to go there haven’t you and the way I went was, I used cricket for many things but what it taught me was that people are just people and if I hadn’t have been arguing and behaving in a certain way to protect myself then, then I wouldn’t have the confidence and lived experience to have made what I have done at my career because a lot of my career has been, whether positive or proactive, has been challenging the norm about what people think about talent. Now, for the last ten years I have been able to do that with much better evidence because of our leadership series that maps the top 10,000 jobs or our Ethnic Minorities On Boards report or all these other trappings that, you know, Green Park has been brilliant at providing for the people that work there and for our customers but it all stems from this idea that you are no better than me because of how you look or where you went to school or how you talk, so that social mobility through socialisation and being able to channel that into business, I know it’s not just people from an ethnic minority background that feel that way and often that can be the fuel for a different type of entrepreneurship. I don’t think there is a conflict between being purpose driven and being commercial and, you know, from a personal perspective, not only are many of the most powerful business leaders and business builders and business influencers that I come across and, you know, we put 200 people on Boards in 2’19, 73 of them are ethnic minorities, over a hundred of them were women so, you know, we’re talking to really cool people and the higher you go, the less linear you are in your thinking so, for us, we just wanted to be able to help customers to monetarise that relationship because we are a commercial organisation and people don’t respect stuff you do for free, generally. But more than anything else, we wanted to kind of support that purpose which was, you know, if you think differently about talent than your competitors then surely you should have a different way of attracting and retaining talent and driving productivity through engagement and inclusion.

Elliot Moss

Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper, Raj Tulsiani. Incredibly eloquent about the issues of diversity and why profit is not in conflict with purpose, he’ll be back in a couple more minutes. Right now we are going to hear a taster – it’s relevant, he says, gratefully – from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions and they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Victoria Pigott is talking about ESG, that’s Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance, and what the resulting long-term benefit is for businesses putting purpose before profit.

You can enjoy all our former Jazz Shapers and hear this very programme again with Raj popping Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice or if you have got a smart speaker you can ask it play Jazz Shapers, politely please, and there you will find many of our recent shows but back to today, it’s Raj Tulsiani, Co-founder and CEO of Green Park, leadership and recruitment consultancy but a lot more apart from that too. The purpose, and as you are talking and I can see you – the wonders of technology even though we are not in the same room – it strikes me that goes pretty deep and obviously some of the things you have said do that but this isn’t about lip service, you said it’s not about talking, it’s about doing. The kinds of people you hire in your business, how do you make sure you get it right?  Are you looking into their eyes and seeing if there’s the fire of fighting unfairness or the fire of doing something new or the fire of breaking the rules so to speak?

Raj Tulsiani

I think you have to have a pioneering and challenging spirit for some people but, you know, no moment ever becomes a movement by just having people who are the same and feel the same, you know, we can’t do anything about race equality in this country without white people being allies and understanding it and, you know, people from ethnic minorities who have slightly backward views, you know, being challenged and just moving forward. So, I think from my own business, you know, I am really interested in character and energy. We’ve made, as with all businesses, some bad hiring decisions, all my fault, you know everyone tells me don’t hire that person but, you know, it’s much bigger than me now and I think what happens with organisations is you hope that purpose and that spirit of the organisation, the Founders, the background etcetera, you hope that that gets developed by other people and taken to a way that’s more relevant in their marketplaces. So, although our values of courage, rigour, empathy, energy and diversity, you know, we like to recruit against that, we like to pay people against that, we like to manage people against that but ultimately people are people and if you can’t take an individual on a journey then how are you supposed to help your clients?  How are you supposed to attract talent that might have different perceptions about their brand, you know, so I think for us it’s, we are purpose driven but, in this world, you also have to be pragmatic.

Elliot Moss

How many people are in the team now, Raj, across the business?

Raj Tulsiani

Just under 80.

Elliot Moss

And through this pandemic, how have you ensured that that team still feels a sense of team?  How have you kept people connected to purpose and to each other and to the emotional side of what we all do, what’s going on for us actually outside of our work lives?

Raj Tulsiani

I can tell you how we’ve tried, you know, and I can tell you what outputs we’ve measured, you know, both in terms of just recently being named the second most efficient recruitment business in the country by the Hot 100 or being the only recruitment business on last year’s Fast Track. But the underlying thing is, it’s a constant juggling battle, you know, during first lockdown we had eight colleagues who were alone in flats so, you know, they don’t teach you that at MBA school do they?  And your notes are like well, you know, call them all the time and of course you can’t and they don’t want really you to call them all the time so, creating those support networks was really important. We were lucky that we made some investments in a mental health and wellbeing app that we made available to the staff and to kind of people in our network that thought they could use that and I know some people have used that for people that aren’t professionally linked to us but needed a bit of support and that is put together by a really smart guy called Craig Ing who is a top level trauma Psychologist so, we were really happy to be able to do that but we were just finding our way as we went along. Around purpose I think in that first phase of the lockdown where everyone was just assuming that, you know, everyone was going to go bust because no one had three months’ payroll in the bank, you know, and everyone was just assuming that there would be no income, those were dark days, you know, they were really hard and I think towards the end of that where we thought, well you know we’re going to get through this but each Wednesday I was talking to the team and, you know, I think personally I really needed something to focus on that wasn’t just keeping the business alive or just keeping clients happy or you know just working out how much under our budget we could come through and all those kind of tactical things, I needed something bigger and that’s the, you know, the idea of where Race Equality Matters was born which was, you know, how can we use this focus on inequality and then help shape it in conjunction with the very people that organisations are trying to understand and serve better.

Elliot Moss

Even during this period, you have created, help create, this new organisation, Race Equality Matters. Your team must go, “Dhh, this guy! I mean, he’s struggling and he’s gone and done another incredible thing which is both generous, it’s outward facing, it’s not about him, it’s about what he believes in." How do they view you?  How do they keep up with you?

Raj Tulsiani

Well, it’s not a competition, you know, and I think at that time I stepped off the STRIDE Board of the Met Police which I sat on for five years, largely because I didn’t, you know, the only difference I felt that I had made was getting people to talk to the public before they did the stop and search and, you know, there’s real difficulties around stop and search and I think the Police need more money and more help but they also are a bit of an echo chamber. So, I knew I was coming off that and all these things happen for a reason I think so, as I was pretty sure I wanted to come off the Met Police STRIDE Board and I had already had the conversation with the Commissioner and a direct report in the diary to do that, I was driving back through Epsom and Thornton Heath to my house in Brixton/Clapham area and I saw two incidents where Police were kind of dealing with what I assume was unruly youths and purely by accident I was stuck in traffic in both so, you know, like being a nosey, middle-aged man I wound my window down and the way the group of white youths were spoken to in Epsom and the way the black youths were spoken to in Thornton Heath, it was a bit like a cold shower and, you know, I mention that as one of the reasons why I couldn’t sit on that Board anymore and that all coincided again with this kind of desire, not just for me but for other ethnic minority business leaders and allies who wanted to do something a bit more meaningful around race equality as a battery, not just for making things better in organisations around racial prejudice but for the whole intersectionality and social mobility arguments because these things are totally interlinked, you know, if you implemented SAP, you wouldn’t do it in such a way that the various components didn’t sit together nicely but when we talk about DNI, our whole structure for doing it is, you know one box at a time and it’s stupid, it doesn’t really create business results, it wastes money. So, Race Equality Matters really was a very, very simple idea which was if organisations are going to spend more time trying to sort this out for whatever reasons, you know, and there’s of course a variety of integrity behind those reasons but forgetting that, then how could we for free create a meaningful infrastructure that would a) give the ethnic minorities in those organisations better support, create some status around leadership of this agenda within the organisations and some free guides on how to do it because our research and the research we have done with Mental Health First Aiders shows that a lot of those ethnic minorities who stand up as the poster boy or girl or the head of the race network or, you know, whatever it might be, the senior board champion etcetera, they suffer quite a lot of wellbeing issues, or can, because it’s all suddenly on them and, you know, none of these people are changed DNI experts, you know, none of these people are technical experts in inclusion, you know, what they are, are people with lived experience so, building an intelligently constructed bridge between decision making and lived experience was that number one thing we wanted to do because we were just worried that people would do rubbish or people would cut and paste what their American owners did and of course the context in America is very different, the markets are very different, and you know I wouldn’t swap with America on race full stop, and you know I am a great fan of America. That was the first thing. The second thing was, you know, we just wanted to use our expertise and the expertise of our partners to say look here’s how you do it, right, we’re not going to charge you any money for it, we’re not on the make but here is, in our case, fifteen years and some of our partner thirty years of campaigning, of learning lessons, so whether it’s the big promise or the safe space guide or all of the other stuff that’s down the pipe, it was really important that we said, look, if you want to support this whether you an ally, a senior business leader, an ethnic minority in an organisation, someone in HR or resourcing, here’s a toolkit and here are parts of it that you can. So that was great because we felt that immediately we’d spoke to 250 people, 73 of them network chairs, the rest leaders and ethnic minority role models and they told us what the problems were so went and built the solutions to those problems and that network which we hope will continue to grow, at the moment we are expecting over 1500 organisations to take part in Race Equality Matters in February 2021 and what we’ve seen is, a lot of the companies and organisations who make the biggest noise about this don’t want anything to do with it and we asked those 250 people all the same question which was “Who do you think does this well?” which of course is, whatever professional services you provide as a lawyer, an accountant, a headhunter, whoever, you know, one of those questions is always well, who does this, which one of my competitors do this well?  And I can tell you and the listeners that out of 250 times that question was asked, one company came up twice and most people couldn’t name anyone who did it well.

Elliot Moss

And there you go and that’s why Raj Tulsiani is doing something about it. Stay with me for my final chat with him and we are going to be playing a track from Thelonious Monk, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.

I’ve got just a couple more minutes with Raj Tulsiani, he’s been my Business Shaper and if you weren’t someone who thought about DNI (Diversity and Inclusion) and the structural impediments to making it happen, I think you will be a little bit more knowledgeable now because Raj I think your exposition of what the problem is, goes beyond the headlines that we often read about and it is a plumbing issue in a way, it’s got to be multifaceted in the way that the solution emerges. Where do you go from here?  You’ve still got twenty years, more, of working and running this business and shaping the future of Green Park and indeed, wider society. Just give me a couple of things that you want to achieve. If we were having this chat in ten years and you had two sentences saying Elliot, what I really want to have made happen are the following. What would they be?

Raj Tulsiani

Elliot, what I really want to make happen is the following.

Elliot Moss

You are so obedient. I love it. You never argue. This is… he’s playing with me. Go on. Go for it again. I love it. Excellent.

Raj Tulsiani

I’d like organisations to be confident that the promises they make around climate change, diversity, inclusion, social value, the conditions they create for their staff, the products that they manufacture or design for their service users, are all equally applicable, all work equally well regardless of somebody’s protected characteristics. I’d like to be involved with an organisation who actually helps and pressured business into being a force for good and I’d like to be somebody who, regardless of what people think of me, is involved with the creation and increasing influence of leaders who think about future problems now. So I think business and society in general, as we’ve learnt in the last year, you never know what’s round the corner and if you’ve got six people who think the same and have been educated the same, respond to stimuli in the same way, you know, those organisations are just at greater risk and with the more and more prevalent of technology in business and society, there’s a greater danger that that individual integrity around decision-making and shaping organisation strategies and cultures, gets lost to the technology facet of managing people and managing interactions with customers. So, I would like to be involved in creating more inclusive ecosystems that affect people equally regardless of their background, through technology, through personal interactions and most of all through the promises of leaders because I think they should be held accountable for delivering what they’ve promised.

Elliot Moss

Good luck. That’s an excellent summary and I hope in ten years we do get the chance to chat and find out whether indeed businesses have stepped up and individuals have stepped up and those promises…

Raj Tulsiani

And I hope you are still playing Sade on your radio station in ten years.

Elliot Moss

So do I. I want to, I’ll do it just for you. When you come back, it will be a Sade special. Just before I let you go, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you. Thank you. Thank you for making the time, here in the virtual world, even though we can see each other quite clearly which is good. What’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?

Raj Tulsiani

My song choice is Hercules by Aaron Neville which is a song that always seems to pop up at different parts of my career and life and for me it’s always kind of said the same thing which is, you know, there’s always someone worse off than you, you do have responsibilities, sometimes those responsibilities can seem very heavy, you know, but the reality is the more you do for others and you allow other people to do for you, the easier it is to get through those very dark days.

Elliot Moss

That was Hercules from Aaron Neville, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Raj Tulsiani. So many things to say about this man and his views. He talked about being purpose driven and how it’s not in conflict with the notion of profit. He talked about doing not talking. We are in the era of going beyond the words and into actions and promises. The notion of being grateful for what we’ve got. So important for every single person who is going through this and that is everybody, that is you and that is me. And he talked about the importance also for leaders to think about future problems now. Plan for that and we’ll do as well as we can possibly do.  That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.

We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You will find hundreds of more guests available to listen to in our archive, just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.

Named Recruitment Agency Leader of the Year 2020, Raj has led Green Park from a challenger brand to become one of Europe’s fastest growing recruiters, delivering roles in over 70 countries. Raj sits on a number of boards and is a Co-founder of the not-for-profit community interest company Race Equality Matters, a UK wide collaboration of organisations, employees and race networks to achieve race equality in the workplaces. Raj is the author of Diversity and Inclusion for Leaders: Making a Difference with the Diversity Headhunter, Raj has over 20 years of experience moving the dial on leadership, talent and diversity.

Highlights

You have to be purpose driven both in terms of acquiring, understanding, motivating and obtaining talent both for yourself and for your customers.

My background, the racial attacks I have suffered, the hospitalisation, it all helps to build your view of looking at the world and you are quite right

Talking about diversity inclusion or carbon reduction is not the same as doing it

We are at a really interesting tipping point where the narrative and the quality of the narrative has gone through the roof

As you get older and as your skills and confidence grow, you can channel it in many ways

I used cricket for many things but it taught me that people are just people

If I hadn’t have been arguing and behaving in a certain way to protect myself I wouldn’t have the confidence and lived experience to have made what I have done at my career

It all stems from this idea that you are no better than me because of how you look or where you went to school or how you talk

If you think differently about talent than your competitors then surely you should have a different way of attracting and retaining talent and driving productivity through engagement and inclusion. 

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