Championing Diversity with Kuma Roberts

Shift Out Loud with Tracy Spears

Confronting unconscious biases and creating an inclusive, equitable company culture should be at the heart of your mission as a leader. In fact, these are some of the most serious and important leadership challenges today. My guest Kuma Roberts helps teams and organizations change the world, one encounter at a time.

Kuma is the Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer at Arrowhead Consulting, a Tulsa-based boutique project management, leadership development, and executive coaching firm that partners with executives and leadership teams to deepen their commitments to celebrate diversity, champion equity, and cultivate inclusion.

In this discussion, we talk about Kuma’s biggest shift, how she’s building her visioning muscle, and the challenges that people of color face in speaking up, speaking out, and playing big.

Ready for some great insights on how to take more positive action? Listen now to discover:

• What it means to live in “the space between” and how Kuma navigates expectations while bridging different worlds
• The big shift that Kuma wants her audiences to experience — and the #1 takeaway she wants them to walk away with
• What to do when you witness or experience an intentional or unintentional microaggression

Guest bio: Kuma Roberts is the Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer at Arrowhead Consulting. She serves on nonprofit boards that align with her passion for ensuring a vibrant and accountable world for us all, including YMCA, Girl Scouts of Eastern Oklahoma, Philbrook Museum, and #RacismStinks. She was named the 2022 Pinnacle Award Corporate Businesswoman of the Year by the YWCA, City of Tulsa, and Commission on the Status of Women, 2022 Workplace Inclusion Advocate for Oklahomans for Equality, as well as the 2020 Keeping the Dream Alive Award by the Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Society.

Timestamps:

01:39 Intro

03:11 Meet Kuma Roberts

04:57 Kuma’s big shifts

07:58 Assimilation & smallness

11:49 Living in the space between

13:23 Visioning muscle

14:44 The shift Kuma wants for her audience

19:01 “Linchpin” story & microaggressions

22:55 Creating awareness in 2022

26:48 Cultural shift & leaning in

28:24 Kuma’s next shifts

Links:

Kuma Roberts

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kuma-roberts-iom

Discover your tactical leadership toolkit: https://www.exceptionalleaderslab.com

Interested in working with me or having me speak at your event? Find more information at https://tracyspears.com

Want tools and insights that will help you play bigger in your life, at work, and in your community? Visit my resource library: https://tracyspears.com/blog

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