By R.V. Baugus
Kevin Clayton serves as Senior Vice President, Head of Social Impact and Equity for the Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA. Clayton will also serve as the Opening Keynote Speaker for VenueConnect in Pittsburgh. As one who works in an important role in a public assembly venue, Clayton is among the best-equipped to blend his experience at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse with a social responsibility that is crucial to the success of every IAVM member venue. In a far-ranging interview in which Clayton was so gracious with his time and his expertise, much was revealed about his own interesting past to where he is today. We share with you this week Part I of the interview with Kevin Clayton.
AS SOMEONE WHO WORKS IN SOCIAL IMPACT AND EQUITY, GIVE OUR AUDIENCE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THOSE SUBJECT MATTERS AND ESPECIALLY WHY DEI IS SO IMPORTANT AND EVEN WHAT MIGHT BE MISUNDERSTOOD ABOUT IT.
I plan for the audience to hear some things they will take away that will set the tone for the rest of
the conference. There’s a handful of things out there, one of which is there is so much misinformation and so many people that really don’t understand what the conversation of diversity, equity, and inclusion is. I’m not saying your audience doesn’t. I just know it doesn’t matter if I’m speaking in front of people that have been doing this work for a few years or have never done this work or businesspeople that are leaders that when they hear the word diversity and now when you hear the acronym DE&I is kind of its own word and it’s like no, they’re not.
I want people to really be clear as to what it is we’re talking about. Like, what is this and the reason why is that the work of DE&I on a national basis is under attack and has been the last six to nine months. It’s because it’s been set up to fail by us as practitioners as well as a lack of common understanding. What I’ll share with you is when you think post-George Floyd how many DE&I or directors or leaders just had those titles or jobs. There is no curriculum for this. There is no undergraduate degree. There are a few certifications that are out there. But for the majority of us that are doing this work it was really who has passion, who is a woman or person of color then, ah, you’re our diversity leader.
Is there any position at any facility that you can get just based off of your dimension of diversity? No! So, the reason why it is so important to understand what it is and what it’s about one thing, but I also want people to have enough that they can build strategy to operationalize this work. It is way beyond an HR function. It’s a business strategy and for those organizations that get it and understand that they’re the ones that are going to be further ahead. I tie all of this back into the facilities. We operate Rocket Mortage FieldHouse and I am involved in everything that we do in that building so I’ll be able to talk from how we handle our part-time workers, how we handle our union workers to how we get around with our food service. It’s all connected.
How I do this is the sales side of me and also the training side of me. I give people tools on how to do exactly what I say. I’m not going to say, hey, if you want to know how to do this read my book. I will give people at least five or six different ways for them to begin the processes that will be practical and achievable and with so much practical sense it will be like wait a minute, what’s the catch?
FANTASTIC AND WE CAN’T WAIT! DID YOU HAVE ANY EXPERIENCES GROWING UP THAT HAVE BEEN BENEFICIAL TO YOUR UNDERSTANDING DEI OR PREPARED YOU FOR YOUR CURRENT WORK?
I’m going to give you a personal and professional parallel because it all adds up. I’m from Cleveland, grew up in Cleveland, raised by three women. My mother, my grandmother and my great grandmother. A single mom and we would move from two-family homes to two-family homes because the landlord would go up on our rent. We moved into Shaker Heights. The reason why we moved every year is because she wanted to stay in the school system and at that point it was my first interaction with Jewish people.
I am 10 or 11 at this point. I was part of the first busing program in Shaker and at that point that I knew I was being groomed for this work based on my destiny and my life’s purpose. I didn’t know then but as I look back now, I’ve always been thrown in these situations where differences were important and how to overcome those differences and what have you. Where differences were an obstacle, but how you overcome those differences for good.
Fast forward and right out of school I started with Procter & Gamble in sales and marketing. I had 10 years at P&G. Let me back up. So, I played basketball at North Carolina Central, a D1 school and an all-Black school. I was there for a year. The program wasn’t what I thought it was and there was no transfer portal at that time. If I was to transfer, I would have to sit out. I then went to a Division 3 school, Wilmington College in Ohio and had a good career. I then started working at P&G two days after my graduation from college and was sent to inner city Detroit. Now, I’ve got no experience in living in the inner cities. For the leaders of P&G then to say, hey, we’ve got a great section for you and it’s in the inner city of Detroit. That was their own biases of seeing me as a Black man … you must be from the inner city.
P&G then began to in the early 90’s, late 80’s, we began to look at diversity – not DE&I but diversity to leverage our business against Japanese companies and Taiwanese companies that were coming to America. You recall back when the US car industry kind of hit rock bottom and so many Asian car companies were moving in with less quality. So, we decided one way for us to actually protect our business leverage was cultural diversity and gender diversity.
Again, I’m a salesperson and I saw it and understood it and was like, wow, that’s a competitive advantage. Fast forward after a decade at P&G I had a great career and then opened my own consulting firm to help other companies do this. I was 31 years old, and I could use the P&G model to help other companies do that.
I worked with Russell Corporation and then worked with the United States Tennis Association. I was the chief diversity officer for the USTA, then went back to doing my consulting work. I worked in healthcare with Mercy Health and then the Cavaliers.
AS WE KNOW, YOU ARE THE SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF SOCIAL IMPACT AND EQUITY. HOW DID THAT TITLE COME ABOUT AND WHAT DOES IT ENCOMPASS?
About my title, I came in as VP of DE&I. My working position got elevated and my CEO and I were like, OK, what’s the position going to be called? I wanted it to be called the Outcome of the Work. I didn’t want to describe it as DEI.
So, community falls under these names — DE&I, community relations, government affairs, our Foundation, everything public-facing within the Cleveland Cavalier Operating Companies and with that as SVP Head of Social Impact, that’s the outcome of our work. It has made an impact. Equity is internal and external so looking at the title, but I also was fortunate enough to understand if I could use a hockey term “where the puck is going.” I knew that if I continued to be connected with DE&I that was going to pigeonhole me although I have done a lot of that work, but I wanted to get away from that to be on the cutting edge of impacting ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance investing). How do we impact social impact? How do we impact corporate responsibility and social responsibility? I can bury DE&I work into my work so that it’s not magnified, and people can relate to impact versus, oh, this is diversity.
