DE&I with a Twist with Leonardo McClarty

Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Leonardo McClarty. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.

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Introduction

Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Voiceover Talent 0:13
And now your host. He thinks positive affirmations are important playing and you are awesome. He’s gonna get Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:23
Hello Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Leonardo McClarty is the president and CEO of the Howard County Chamber of Commerce in Maryland. His specific duties are largely centered in four distinct areas organizational leadership and business development, marketing and program management, public policy and Community Relations and fiscal management. Prior to coming to Howard County, Leonardo was director of economic and community development for the city of York, Pennsylvania, where he was responsible for promoting the city to the private sector and efforts to foster economic investment and neighborhood redevelopment. With his within his purview, were bureaus of economic development, help housing and planning, permits, zoning, and native of the Atlanta area. Leonardo served as president and CEO of the DeKalb Chamber of Commerce for nearly 10 years. A career economic development professional Leonardo has also worked for the city of Roswell, Georgia, to Cobb County, Georgia, and the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. He holds an undergraduate degree in political science from Furman University and a graduate degree in city and regional planning from Clemson University. He is a certified chamber executive through ACC, certified economic development finance professional through the National Development Council, and is a graduate of the US chambers Institute for organizational management. Leonardo is married to Shamika. And they have three daughters, Leonardo,

I’m excited to have you with me today, here on chamber chat podcast, I’d like to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that we have out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.

Something Interesting About Leonardo

Leonardo McClarty 3:15
Thank you, Brandon for having me. And definitely looking forward to this conversation and his chat. I always enjoy talking about the profession, and just my experiences and things I’ve perhaps been able to do or witness and even just learning just as we have these dialogues. And so I guess something maybe interesting, you know, former college football player played running back for farmer. And so definitely, I’m a Paladin, and so continue to to root on my alma mater, which plays in the Southern Conference. And then while they’re also had a radio show, and so my roommate and I, we, we had a hip hop show back in the early 90s. And so it’s seems to be a long time ago now. But that’s a little bit about me that maybe some folks would know.

Brandon Burton 4:07
That was the good old days of hip hop right there.

Leonardo McClarty 4:11
Yeah, and it actually it actually, you know, was it’s funny sometimes, you know, you’re sounding Oh, when you find when you start saying, Oh, I don’t listen to that anymore. anymore. You know, I guess the same way that our parents talked about, you know, they was, I guess sometimes they were stuck in the 70s. And I feel like I’m maybe stuck in the 90s Yeah, yeah, I

Brandon Burton 4:31
catch myself doing the same thing as I see, like, tick tock and stuff, you know, all these social media things and like, what a waste of time, you know, and, you know, older generations are looking at Facebook saying the same thing. So it’s, it happens with every generation, you know, it was rock and roll was going to be the downturn of society. And yeah, we’re still here. So share with us a little bit about the Howard County Chamber just to give us some perspective. Before we jump into our topic today, I’d like to get an idea of, you know, staff size, your chamber budget, that sort of thing.

About the Howard County Chamber

Leonardo McClarty 5:06
Yeah. So, so Howard County Chamber, we’re here and actually Columbia, Maryland. And so Columbia is actually situated in a greater Baltimore area. And so we’re right around the i 95. Corridor, where roughly about maybe 15 miles or so south of Baltimore, and then we’re about 30 miles or so. I guess that would be north of DC. And so if anything, as a community, probably in particular, Colombia, really grew heavily in the 80s. And kind of part of it was because it was it kind of served as a good in between place between Baltimore and DC. And for those that may, you know, be Greek government officials and also maybe doing something medical wise in Johns Hopkins, or, or what have you, as a community, we are about maybe a little over 300,000 as a county. So chamber wise, we have about 630 members, including myself, it’s six of us on staff. And so been around organizationally, I think we’re in our maybe 52nd 53rd year. And so budget wise we are we sit somewhere around about maybe around that 1000, close to a million dollars. Okay. Well, that

Brandon Burton 6:36
does help give some perspective. Both you know, where you are geographically in Maryland, but also the size of your chamber? And what type of chamber do you guys do economic development? Do you do tourism and just chamber what type of chamber don’t

Leonardo McClarty 6:52
want to just chamber one of the things I think that perhaps many of the listeners are fine, maybe adventurous or unique, depending on where you are? Maryland is probably and what I found, so as it was mentioning, a random chamber in DeKalb. County, Georgia, you know, now, I guess, gosh, that term ended, I guess about sometime in 2014. And, you know, so I would say when you get to kind of Richmond, Virginia, south, southwest, going into the Midwest, it’s not uncommon for chambers to do economic development, it’s not uncommon for even chambers to maybe have a tourism program or even sometimes a leadership program. Whereas what I’ve found that’s been interesting is probably Richmond, Virginia, North, particularly as you get into Maryland. Very few chambers here, do economic development, the tourism, a lot of places, even the leadership program to separate our leadership program here started as a part of our chamber, sometime in the maybe the mid 80s. And that kind of spun out on its own, I guess, might have been in the 90s or something. So you still have a close relationship with leadership, our county with our tiny tourism or Economic Development Authority, but as a chamber itself, we just do with just the chamber.

Brandon Burton 8:12
All right. Well, that does help. But I find this our topic for today’s is intriguing. Obviously, you know, across the country as diversity equity inclusion is kind of top in my top of mind for most chambers, I would say across the country. We’re going to take a little twist to the standard approach of DNI and we’ll get into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Topic-DE&I with a Twist

Alright Leonardo we are back. So for our discussion today talking about DE and I with a twist And I, I’ve been wanting to cover this topic for some time. And a lot of episodes, we’ve touched on it, but we haven’t had, you know, this be the the main focus. But I’m excited to have you with me today to talk about this this topic. From your perspective, what is what does DNI with a twist mean to you, but maybe just in general DEI and then we’ll add the twist on, you know, a little bit later.

Leonardo McClarty 10:30
So, so typically, when you talk about DNI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, obviously, you’re talking about it from the lens of particularly, you’re taking into account maybe gender, race and ethnicity, you’re talking about, perhaps sexual orientation. But it’s normally those facets, certainly some might even we then perhaps, if you’re differently abled, or, or maybe even, there’s another one that escapes me. But that’s generally when people talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, when I think about it with a twist, I think is adding other components to it. In a sense of particular, from a chamber perspective, recognizing that one, we either are charged with serving a city, multiple cities, county, sometimes, you know, state. And so we’ve got to take into account all of these other facets. And sometimes maybe that’s geographic location, maybe that is the size of business. Maybe even in this age, maybe it’s age, it’s ultimately trying to be, you know, trying to recognize that there are just all of these different components, and that at the end of the day, I like to say, people like to be able to identify the folks that look like them, and look like them can be a lot of different things, it doesn’t always mean, you know, again, that I identify because it’s a male speaking, but maybe it’s the fact that it’s a small business owner, and I run a small business. And so that’s kind of the twist component.

Brandon Burton 12:13
I think that’s great. As we get into this topic, you know, I see whether it’s the media culture, or whatnot, the world loves to put labels on people, right. And, to your point, I think, as we look in programming, or even speakers for different events, your participants that are there, they, they would like to hear from somebody that they can relate to somebody who’s walked in their shoes, somebody who sees the world in a similar way as they do. But I think a lot of this also goes to kind of what the purpose of your chamber is, what that ideal goal is, because I think in the end, most chambers aren’t looking at the world through the lens of, you know, we’ve got 16 Different groups of people. But we have one business community, you know, we’re trying to further the development of our community, we want to bring people together rather than divide. But I think part of that, to your point is, in order to bring people together, you have to have some of these segments to say, look, this person is part of this greater organization. And they’re like you in these ways, is that kind of how you that’s how I see it, as you’re explaining

Leonardo McClarty 13:39
it. No, it is, I think, if anything, perhaps maybe another way of saying it, and maybe even easier way of saying truly being able to answer the question who was missing? You know, we we like to say in the chamber world that we are the voice of business. And so if you’re the voice of business, how can you be the voice of businesses, if not all businesses there? And so I think about it as an example, you know, a few years ago, we were doing what we call it our vision for 2020, which is a three year strategic plan at the time. And one of the things that we recognize as an example and Howard County, we are a very diverse community. And yet, as a chamber, we didn’t have necessarily that much diversity. I mean, yeah, we had this is getting into the more traditional stuff. But yeah, we had, you know, white businesses and black businesses and we had, you know, women and what have you, but specifically as a community. I would say we probably have, you know, four distinct kind of ethnic groups, if you will, you know, we’ve got white black, but then we’ve got specifically a large Indian population and a large Asian In population, and so much so that there’s double, it’s double digits across the four. And then if you go and start breaking down aging into, you know, whether that’s Korean, Chinese, what have you, and so forth. But we said, we don’t have a lot of the other parts of the business community represented. And then it was kind of why, you know, so then it became a case of just trying to be more intentional about first listing this try to reach out to these other groups, and we started to want a multicultural networking event, just have nothing else to create a safe space for people that because what we ended up finding, when we spoke as an example to I think it was one of the Korean groups, they had members that wanted to move beyond just doing business, just amongst themselves, particularly if they were second generation, and maybe felt some hesitancy as to how do I quote, penetrate the larger business community? We had other members in the larger, more, I guess you could say motto with the chamber that had interest in other populations. And again, everybody’s trying to figure out, well, how do I get invited to their dance? And so we said, Okay, well, you know what, let’s create a dance that we invite everybody to. And so we did the first mixer where we had a couple of Indian groups we had, like the Korean society, we had our tourism partner, we had, I think, the Hispanic Chamber, we had the Maryland LGBTQ chamber, we probably had about 100 plus people there. And it was truly kind of this melting pot thing. And so I think, you know, again, with that, it was one just recognizing that, first and foremost, to your point, if we are about and as we talked about offline, if our job is to promote commerce to promote industry, the job creators, increase the tax base, be that true advocate for private industry, private enterprise. And we’re going to say, on our business cards and mission statements, that written voice of business, how can we truly be that voice? If not, everybody has a seat at the table?

Brandon Burton 17:20
Absolutely. And you hit on so many great things there, I was thinking, you know, a lot of chambers do a really good job at highlighting the women in business, and they have a great programming around women in business. And I think we’re seeing more and more of an effort to reach out to other other demographics that fit within business ownership. But when you talk about who’s missing, you know, if I’m in Texas, you know, and in Texas, we get a lot of Hispanic populations. And a lot of times you don’t get a whole lot of the Hispanic business owners as members of the chamber. Maybe they don’t see the value proposition they don’t, I don’t know, you know, what all the reasoning is necessarily behind all of it. But you had mentioned about these different segments, wondering how do I get invited to their dance? And it made me wonder, you know, are our most of these people asking how do I get invited? Or do I even want to be invited? Like, where are they on that spectrum? Yeah, yes. For me, what does it has?

Leonardo McClarty 18:28
Yeah, good. And I would say that it’s probably a little bit of both. I mean, and I think, you know, I’ve used this other analogy at times, you know, we may not ultimately increase our membership amongst these other diverse populations. But I say sometimes it’s one thing for me to stand on the front steps of say, of my porch, and to say, hey, you know, the doors open come in. And then you have a choice on whether or not you want to come in or not. It’s another thing for me to sit inside the living room. And the door is open. And I just kind of say, well, you know, the doors open. But I haven’t necessarily invited you and you haven’t seen me to say, look, come on in. You’re welcome. And I think if nothing else, I think that’s one of the big things in which, you know, different types of some groups were when they were they kind of a wondering, do I really want to be invited? It’s a case of, you know, have we created as a general chamber, an atmosphere, where we actually say, look, you’re welcome. We’d love to have you and I’ve got a board member, she’s actually gonna be my chair next year. And it was interesting, when she first interview and she, you know, to come on the board, one of the things she talked about with sometimes that that perception that we deal with is chambers, and a sense of maybe not being Open, you know, in some cases to just, you know, the other weather small businesses or coops that haven’t been necessarily in the know or in the loop. And so she challenged us to create an even more welcoming environment. And she even says, hey, if I’m on the board, I see chamber events, much like a dinner party at my house. And I find that if you if I invite you to my home, but I walk around to all the guests saying, hey, look, how are you doing? Maybe to anything else that drink and get something else to eat? Are you fine? Are you comfortable? And she was like, we have to create that same type of atmosphere, when people come to our events, as opposed to, as a previous chair said, when he used to be involved in chamber, he said, I would go to these events, and a joke would be told, and other people knew the punch line. And I did. Yeah. And so you know, so I think it’s just one of those being, you know, conscious of our perceptions. And whether they’re real or not constantly having to fight, you know, the perception of the I think I’ve even written a couple pieces here. As an example, when I would hear all the chamber still has all been. And it’s like, well, have you seen our website lately? That, you know, we’ve got about a 32 member board, and literally half of them are women. You know, and it’s like, you know, it’s not that, and I think I titled the piece that not to check not your father’s chamber, or something to that effect,

Brandon Burton 21:32
you know,

Leonardo McClarty 21:33
so I think we have to just tackle some of these perception issues head on, to really try to, to change, because I think, lastly, as we look at particularly, millennials, especially Z, you know, Gen Z, they are truly all about looking for inclusive organizations and seeing who’s being left out. And because we all, you know, fundamentally as we strive to grow, as an industry, and as we try to grow our respective chambers, I think we have to be conscious that it’s going to be hard to attract the younger generation if they see us being standoffish for, perhaps not being open minded to alternative box. And so cool.

Brandon Burton 22:23
Absolutely. And for me that the big takeaway is being able to, can have that outreach to these business owners of different diverse backgrounds, and sharing the messaging that the Chamber has for them, that you have valued offer to them. And let me show you how, you know, and then tying it in somehow that’s relatable to them, that they can see oh, there’s other people like me, there’s other people that that I can relate to. And it’s not just an exclusive membership for, for whatever the perceived, yeah, vision is from that business.

Leonardo McClarty 23:03
And Brandon, I think the other P That’s key is that the thing that they have in common is that, hey, we own a business. We employ people, we have payroll to make we tax. Right. And so, you know, so I think, you know, if anything is kind of, you know, trying to bring out that look, you know, you know, at the foundational levels, this is what we have in common, you know, that we all are struggling to make sense of some of the stuff that’s taking place, whether it’s in a regulatory environment, or just dealing with supply chain issues, or labor shortages, or what have you. And we can

Brandon Burton 23:45
learn from each other. Yeah, there’s a lot of issues that affect all of us, it doesn’t matter where you are in the community affects all of us is if you’re a business owner. So you shared the example of having your multicultural networking event, as there have been other successful outreach opportunities that you guys have had there that might be good to share with others listening.

Leonardo McClarty 24:10
The other thing that I would say that’s probably that we’ve done is I have internally this little matrix when we go through our board nomination process. And it’s kind of just an informal tool that I use, again, getting back not we’re factoring in this twist component, where I’m literally writing down everything from, you know, obviously, you got the, you know, the person and it’s easy to determine whether or not they’re, well. I’m gonna say we’ve phrased the statement. But you know, you’ve got, you’ve got the gender element, they may have an ethnicity piece, but then I’m writing down to their small business mid sized business for, you know, are they small business, where are they located? Did the county even down to now we’re looking at what’s their, their age group. And, and so we’ve been fortunate that we don’t necessarily deviate from our process our processes our process, but at the same time, were these conscious of, okay, if we’re bringing on five or six board members, you know, are we bringing, you know, bringing in maybe three men to weapon or two women and three men, you know, are we bringing in? Wow, okay, we’ve got a couple of boomers here, we’ve got lineal we’ve got to Jen’s ears. You know, one of the things I was sharing is just the fact that people like to be able to, you know, have something that they can relate to the other person. And so sometimes when people look at the board, and if they’re folks that they respect, and the community and our business community, and you’re younger in your career, and you say, Wow, she looks like she’s about my age, or we went to college together, how does she get on the board? or what have you, you at least feel like okay, well, you know, what, I, there, I don’t have to wait until maybe, you know, at this level within the company, or what have you before I have an opportunity, maybe to be on the chamber board. So. So it’s it’s those things that I’ve been really proud of over the last five or six years that we’ve been very conscious on, is again, classically asked that question, who’s missed? In some cases in industry, like we recognize last year, when we went for, I guess, it was earlier this year, going through our process, because our board development piece, people come on the board effective June one. And so we were looking at earlier this spring, and we recognize, okay, we don’t have any restaurant tours on the board. And so we brought this one board member on, she was what I call the three, four. He was a woman, she was a small business. And she was a restaurant tour. So And technically, she’s probably a Gen X. Whereas, you know, when we brought our YPN rep on, he was a guy. He’s I think, maybe Pacific Asia, he’s AAPI. He’s a millennial, you know, so he’s, I mean, so it wasn’t necessarily that we were trying to fill the slots. It’s just the fact that, you know, we had criteria, people met the criteria, they were in certain roles within the chamber already. And when we went back and looked at them, he said, Wow, we met all of these different goals. And so for me, it’s just a case of actually charting it. And something I think you’ve heard me say, offline is being intentional, I mean, I think are the same, you know, what gets measured gets done. And so I think actually measuring, you know, where we are. And lastly, what I would say is, you know, in some communities, you may not have as much ethnic diversity, but you’ve got diversity in terms of where your business is located. You’ve got diversity in terms of how you the size of business, or maybe the type of industry. You know, I think we’ve all heard if you’ve been in the chamber industry for a while. And here is I think, for me, I’ve got now almost, I guess, about 17 years in business. And you’ll constantly hear oh, chambers, just from the big guys. Well, 7870 80% of our members probably have 25 employees or less. So if you’re dealing even with just that stigma, oh, okay, well, then let’s take a look at who do I have speak? And where, who’s on my board? You know, am I addressing kind of the stigmas? And again, it doesn’t always have to be around, you know, racial components. It could be around again, industry, business size, geography, what happened?

Brandon Burton 29:06
So I love the great example you share, for sure. I love that the age component that you bring into it, and I think it, it cuts both ways. You know, there’s other young professionals and see, oh, this, you know, I relate to this person, but then you have the older generations that can see this younger generation, say, I thought these were just people lived in their mom’s basement, that this person knows what they’re talking about, you know, breaks down those stigmas. And I love that. When you talk about being intentional, and like who speaks How do you do incorporate that into the outreach somehow. So if somebody is not a member, but you have a young professional to try to open that up and invite some business owners that are younger, how do you go about that?

Leonardo McClarty 29:53
So for us, it kind of depends on the type again, well, obviously a couple of things a topic and the type of opportunity it is So for instance, if we’re doing a small business seminar, we really like to focus that within the chamber and see do we have someone or multiple people that have this level of expertise, and and start there, if it’s one of our conferences like we do, for instance, a Cyber Conference that this year I think was in Year 10, we do a Women’s Leadership Summit. That’s now it may be going on year seven, we do issues our first year, we get a wipey Summit, young professionals. And so as an example, then all three of those, we’ve actually had plenty of we’ve had some members, but we’ve also had plenty of non members to speak. On the conference side, we really want, because we look at it as a conference, we want to get the best and brightest. And for the Women’s Leadership Conference, in particular, we do a call for speakers and find evidence because there we are. This is a second year we’ve done this, I think we’ve allowed people to self certify, to say, for instance, that professional development affiliations, like Sherman, I think might have been APA and a few others. And so there were certain parameters that the speakers had to be able to address when they responded. And so in that case, it was open that we cast a wide net, because it was more about delivering value. And the fact that we do people would be able to be with continuing ed units. And there was a certain criteria we had to be. But even still, we chose we tried to have some topics that maybe with lend themselves to certain groups. And it just it worked out this year, again, that we had is the multifaceted group of speakers and so forth.

Brandon Burton 32:02
That is great. So I know we need to start wrapping up here, we’re starting to get a little bit long, but I wanted to see if you have any tip or action item, maybe based on our discussion today that you can put out there to help other chambers listening to take their chamber up to the next

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Leonardo McClarty 32:20
level. The biggest thing and this speaks across the board, as I think I’m constantly challenged, or so, you know, the one thing that I think COVID has done for anyone running anything, whether you’re a small business owner, a not for profit, executive, corporate executive, but we’ve all had to challenge ourselves in some respects to think differently, as to how we solve problems is how we move forward. And I think that’s the one thing that I would say as you deal with things, whether it’s in the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion space, or just overall programmatically, just challenge yourself to think differently. And thinking differently might mean, okay, who do I need to talk to or reach out to that maybe I haven’t done so in the past. And even in some cases, you know, don’t be afraid to lean on the I’m new. Or it’s or it’s a it’s a new day. And the fact that I know, we haven’t worked together before, but it’s a new day. And we we probably have similar interest, how can we work together? So that’s the big thing I would say is we have to constantly challenge ourselves to do things differently.

Brandon Burton 33:35
I love that answer. As we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Leonardo McClarty 33:47
I think you know, continually, I think our future I think continues to be right. I think the one thing the one place that I think we can really stand to continue to have leverage is the fact of being that convener. I think you and I talked about right now, we’re in a place where certainly divergent opinions continue to diverge. And as a chamber, oftentimes we’ve had to play a role in Switzerland. So I think that we can continue to be that piece that really for the betterment of our business communities. To try to me we have to be the one to be the level headed wanted to bring multiple parties and factions together. And and I think the more that we can do that we can continue to generate value for our members. The other thing and I think you did a podcast on this already. But I think also moving beyond just events and thinking about those in really getting into that economic and community development space, particularly maybe when it deals when it comes to advocacy, we don’t necessarily have to be the economic development entity to actually be an economic develop public policy and advocacy and how it impacts. This is economic development.

Brandon Burton 35:18
So, absolutely whether or not you have that official responsibility or not, there’s a role, I think, for every chamber to play in economic development and advocacy for their businesses. But Leonardo, I’ve enjoyed this discussion with you. This has been a lot of fun. I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for anyone listening who’d like to reach out and connect with you, what would be the best way for them to do that?

Connect with Leonardo McClarty

Leonardo McClarty 35:43
Yeah, they could always reach out, excuse me, reach out to me via email. My email address is lmcclarty@howardchamber.com. Alternatively, you can just look up Howardchamber.com. And go to the staff section, and you’ll see my smiling face and email address.

Brandon Burton 36:10
All right, we will get that in our show notes for this episode as well, which will be found at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode151. But Leonardo, thank you so much for spending time with me today, here on Chamber Chat Podcast, I feel like you brought a lot of value. And really a lot of action items that that chambers listening can take back into their communities to be more diverse and to really bring people together under the whole mission of the chamber and be in that same center moving forward. So thank you so much for that.

Leonardo McClarty 36:40
But thank you for what you do to expose others to the chamber profession, and certainly thank you for having

Brandon Burton 30:28
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