The Way Forward Leader Lunch Break with Eddie Harrell and Kevin Griffin

So today we'd like to welcome two very special people: Eddie Harrell and Kevin Griffin. Let me tell you a little bit about them. Eddie serves as Regional Vice President for Radio One. Prior to coming to Cleveland, he served at Radio One in Columbus and prior to that he also served for five years as President and CEO of the Urban League in Columbus. He's a board member of his alma mater, Otterbein University, and a former board member of COSI in Columbus. And most importantly, he is a longtime season ticket holder for the Cleveland Browns and has made that trek up North on 71 on many occasions. We're also pleased, and I know he's proud, that he is an alum of Leadership Cleveland 2015. You do have a fan club here today, Eddie. And Kevin Griffin: Kevin currently serves as Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at Adcom, a position he has held for four years. Prior to that, you're going to sense a theme here, he served as Vice President of the Fan Experience and Marketing for the Cleveland Browns. Prior to that, he was with the Seattle Seahawks. He is a youth football and track coach in Strongsville, and sports are at the center of his life. I think he's currently waiting for his daughter to finish gymnastics practice. He is a board chair for the Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance of the Boys and Girls Clubs and a member of Leadership Cleveland 2019. So Kevin reached out to me several weeks ago and shared an idea that he was working on with Eddie and with their fellow LC alum Keith Hotchkiss of iHeartRadio. I think what they were trying to do echoes a personal philosophy that Kevin once shared: 'Live humbly, attack each day with an infectious passion that uplifts others, strive to fulfill my purpose, love, learn, and lead.' And lead is exactly what they did in forming an amazing collaboration to deliver 'Justice for All: A Conversation About Race, Equality, and Inclusion' on June 17th. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Kevin and Eddie.

Gentlemen. Thank you, Marion, and Rachel, and everyone who has put this together. We really appreciate the opportunity to spend some time with fellow leaders from the Northeast Ohio and Cleveland community. Eddie and I briefly spoke and discussed how we wanted to kick this thing off today. What we wanted to do is set this up with a brief background of how we arrived at the idea for a 90-minute kind of conversation over 21 different radio stations across Cleveland at one point in time. So I'm going to start there and then turn it over to Eddie to give you a bit of background, and we'll go back and forth with each other if you don't mind. So, first of all, Eddie and I happen to know each other. We're in somewhat of the same industry. He leads a number of incredible radio stations and digital properties here, not only in Northeast Ohio but across the state of Ohio, with Radio One. I'm obviously in marketing and advertising. So we've gotten to know each other during my time at the Cleveland Browns and my time as well. We built a rapport and friendship. Following the weekend of protests around the country after George Floyd was brutally murdered in front of us all, I just sent Eddie a note and said, 'What's next?' or 'What now?' something of that nature. I was just reaching out to Eddie to see what we might be able to do. I had spent the weekend—and particularly Monday—just listening. I was listening to some of the content on his stations across the Radio One platform as well as other radio stations across the dial here in Northeast Ohio. Quite frankly, I was hearing two different conversations. There were two different conversations. I felt like people's values were somewhat similar, but they just weren't singing from the same hymnal. So I asked Eddie what we might be able to do. Fortunately, he emailed me back and said, 'Let's have a conversation.' We did, and we really had no idea at that point in time what might happen. We just wanted to have a conversation about where we were. In the business of communication and marketing, the first thing you should do is really be an incredible listener, and that's what I think Eddie and I tried to do from there. We decided after about a half-hour, 45-minute call how we could possibly leverage the strength of Eddie's radio stations and all of his communications platforms across Radio One. Then we said, 'What about other people? How do we begin to have a conversation that we're hearing on some stations along with the same type of conversation that we're having?' A heavy conversation. The idea was simply this: people weren't saying the same thing, and because we weren't saying the same thing, we weren't starting in the same place, and that non-commonality was prohibiting us from moving forward. So that's how we got started. I'll hand it off to Eddie to take it from there.

Fair. I want to point back to one of the things that I think is so important with Leadership Cleveland, and that is the importance of relationships. Eddie touched on that—what that means and how we value that here in Northeast Ohio. As Eddie and I wrapped up our original conversation, it was, 'Okay, who do we reach out to? Who do we know?' Fortunately, between the two of us, not only do we know everyone with one exception, we have incredible relationships with these folks. So to ask them if they would be willing to go to their corporations and step up, and also how do they sell that into their own staffs? Fortunately, we have trust in relationships, and that matters a lot here, as every one of us knows in Northeast Ohio. Sam and Keith, who is one of our Leadership Cleveland classmates, and Tim and everyone stepped up, and there was a level of trust that allowed us to move fast. You've probably heard the saying that we move at the speed of trust. Because we had that trust as a baseline, we were able to get going. So then those relationships extended. Once we solidified the concept, we were able to reach out to the mayor's office—again, trust and relationships between a number of us with the mayor's office and Chief Williams—and then others that we began to populate. As Eddie mentioned, the real work after we got beyond the 'yes' was how do we begin to program the conversation? Who are the guests? What would be the most appropriate conversation to have for the community? Then how do we bring a balance? What we meant by balance was number one, there are no sides. That was a really important factor as we laid out the memo of understanding: 'There aren't any sides here.' But what we do need to do is in some way shape or form begin to bring everyone to the table so we can start our conversations moving forward from a place of commonality. What had been interesting—and I hope you don't mind, but I think you and I both expressed this—throughout that weekend and into Monday, we had phone calls from our Black and white friends. There were similar conversations. Our white friends were looking for space to be able to express their opinion in a safe way, even if it was maybe off-kilter, but they needed to express themselves and were looking for guidance. Our African American friends and colleagues were saying, 'What are we going to do next? I'm feeling a certain way, I'm having a certain experience, but that's not being articulated across the dial.' That's what we were able to do: bring the mayor to the table, bring Chief Williams, and other leaders including David Gilbert. I think we put together what hopefully was a good show. It was poignant, and there were a lot of moments within that show where I was uncomfortable. I remember sending Eddie a text saying, 'This is like award-winning content, but I'm uncomfortable,' which was good because we were beginning to have conversations across the dial. If I were only listening to that content on a Radio One station, I would have been comfortable. But knowing the audience, I knew that there were things that other people were going to hear for the first time or maybe not actually agree with, which was the point of the show. So that's how we got there: building the relationships to end up getting the right type of content and message. Originally we had an idea of what a good show would be, an hour. Ultimately, it probably could have been two hours. One of the things that, as we're self-reflective, is to think okay, what do we do next after this? We kind of threw out a grenade in terms of a conversation, but there wasn't necessarily a structured follow-up for people to either continue the dialogue or to move to action. That's one of the areas I hope we can begin to focus on as we go into the several months.

If you don't mind, Eddie, I think what was interesting is that it was so vivid to watch George Floyd die in front of us. That sparked a motivation. I think all on this call understand the concept of motivation. Now that everyone's eyes were wide open, hopefully we can take advantage of this moment to have the right conversation because their eyes are open, hopefully their hearts are open along with their minds at the same time. But motivation is different than inspiration. Motivation gives you a week or two, and then we didn't want to lose that motivation. We wanted to take this moment of time to inspire more people to get involved. That inspiration is going to have a longer lingering effect than just this moment of time because believe it or not, our news cycle moves so darn fast. People probably have somewhat forgotten about the way they felt at that moment when they saw George Floyd and that murder. Quite candidly, I haven't experienced anything really like this in my life. When I see that video now the other day, it triggers something inside of me—physically triggers something—to see his life taken away. So we wanted to use that moment in time to get people while it was still important to them, while they still have questions, and quite frankly while they were somewhat emotional about what they saw. Hopefully we were able to accomplish that. I'll leave it with this before maybe we open up with questions, Rachel. I know we missed in a couple of really important areas: number one, what was the follow-up, and number two, the young people who were out on the streets actually protesting and doing the really hard grassroots work—their voices weren't heard during our show, during the program. That was a miss, and that wasn't a miss by design. That was just we were moving fast, and as we know here in Cleveland, you can work with people that you trust and we work usually with institutions that are already established. That's how we ended up with our show guests. But I think we have to continue to support and honor the young people who are out here doing hard work. When it's time for them to put their feet up, someone else has to pick it up and support them another way. So we got to keep this going. That's really important. I hope through this, more young people—and I don't mean super young, but younger people and people whose voices haven't been heard from a leadership perspective in our community—their voices begin to be heard, and they have a seat at the table as we go forward.

Thank you both for sharing kind of behind the scenes of bringing this important conversation to the airwaves. We have had a few questions come in. To start, were you able to generate any metrics that indicated how many people might have tuned in to the production? Kevin, I'll start with you.

Yeah, and I'll add to that. As Eddie mentioned, his colleagues having the courage—this show preempted, and this is not little, this is a fact, it preempted normally where Rush Limbaugh sits at that time. So you have folks who are tuning in to listen from Rush Limbaugh who all of a sudden they're hearing from our program. You're going to get some emails and phone calls from there, right, with such an avid audience that Rush Limbaugh has. I would tell you this: we built a website and some social platforms to support 'Justice for All.' On that day, there were over 3,000 different unique website views, which is pretty significant with a website that just got stood up within 24 hours. A lot of people were coming in to relisten to the program but also to get some background about the program. Although we don't have the hard metrics in terms of overall listenership, we know there was strong engagement across those platforms.

You mentioned that this is a challenging topic and that you were able to keep politics out of it, and you might have even had some listeners who were tuning in specifically to hear a political conversation. As you were prepping for the discussion, how did you work to keep the politics out of a conversation that often heads there? Eddie, do you mind if I take this first?

No, please.

Yeah, so although as many years ago... a couple things. Although I'm a marketing executive, I have a content background. I had worked with Keith and with Tom and Sam and all their stations, building out in those radio networks and programming and working with talent. It's something that I really enjoy. So I got a chance to sit with Ramona on a number of occasions over the weekend. We spent time reviewing what we wanted the structure of the conversation to look like and then a number of rounds of questions. But I intentionally did not share that with anyone else besides Ramona. We talked about that and to honor what she had asked, so that everyone would be a little bit surprised. We had some guardrails. But anytime you have an elected official, it's going to feel political just by nature, so I'm not sure if it's anyone's individual point of view that's political. What I would say is throughout the show, we really were only dealing in the facts as opposed to policy that might lean one way or the other from a political spectrum. I didn't hear anything that I would say was for the most part political; it was just people's points of view. And quite frankly, I thought Ramona did a really nice job asking some questions of both the mayor and Chief Williams. That was appropriate. I thought all the guests did a great job, but I really appreciated David Gilbert's point of view as the lone white male and corporate leader on the call. He really kind of said, 'Here it is. Here's how we have to be able to move forward.' He shared his journey, which was uncomfortable, and I thought that was a moment of time that was poignant in the show. I was hopeful that people would be able to take that away and connect with his point of view because it was similar to maybe theirs.

In thinking about how you crafted this conversation that stayed out of that realm, how might someone translate that experience to more of a corporate setting where there might be a large array of people at different levels of comfort and awareness around issues of race and systemic racism?

Yeah, I appreciate the question. At our agency, a lot of our clients are beginning to ask this question over the last two to three weeks really. It relates to where they stand in terms of corporate leadership and understanding their internal and external stakeholders, and where they should stand on issues related to their mission, vision, and values. I think our counsel has really been that there are moments of time when there's principled leadership and there's kind of business decisions. This is a moment of time where you have to have principled leadership. Quite frankly, what we're hearing in the marketplace is that leaders are starting to feel a lot of pressure from their internal stakeholders, even more so than their external stakeholders. Their employee base is really pushing to get clarity. They might not like the answer, but they're at least asking, 'Where do we stand?' Because I hitched my wagon to this corporation, and I want to know where we stand on these issues. It's a tough conversation. But I think as corporations, their boards and their exec teams together, hopefully they're listening first and foremost to their employees. They're able to shape their position and then the way they communicate that out to all their internal and external stakeholders appropriately. I don't want to reference sports too much, but it's been incredible over the last 72 hours what's happened to the NFL team in Washington and the corporate pressure from venture capitalists quite frankly who are forcing that team to make a name change based on a racial slur. So we're hearing more and more of that coming through.

So anyone who's tried to put a collaboration together knows that it can be very challenging, especially in a short amount of time. Looking back at how this came together and the relationships and trust that were in place, what are some best practices or things you've walked away with from this experience that others could learn from to have a successful collaboration?

Yeah, I think the art of the possible was the mindset that we all went into. I probably do this too often, but give me kind of four things that I'd say: Number one, the relationships you have and reputation are critical. Everyone here really trusted each other. I know I've said that too often, but that was key to this entire thing. Number two, we did what we did best. Whoever had an area of skill, within that area they could help, that's what they did best for us. We recognized that quickly. Eddie might do one thing and I might do something else, or Sam or Keith handled things in different ways. We trusted each person to get that done. No one cared about credit. We checked the egos at the door. That was really important. No one had to know who was involved. We just wanted to do something good, period, point blank. Then finally, I think we all work in somewhat of a creative process until we understand that creativity and these things are iterative. That gave us some space allotted to, as Eddie mentioned earlier, say, 'We might start here, but throughout this creative process we might end up in a different spot.' As long as we stayed focused on the outcome that we're looking for, we were confident we were going to get it done. All those things added up to a successful collaboration.

So as we begin to look ahead and as you consider the move to action, what can that look like and what can this audience do to support that?

Having you... you can take that one first.

I want to thank you both for sharing your insights today. To wrap up, I want to share a comment that was shared in the chat box a little earlier from Jill. She listened and watched and just wants to say how meaningful and engaged she found the presentation and the conversation. Thank you both and your teams and partners for making it happen. With that, I'm going to turn it back to Marion.

Thanks, Rachel. I will echo Jill's sentiments. It was a great coming together in collaboration on so many levels, and kudos to you for making it happen. I think you have folks on this call who are willing to take the next step forward with you to realize some change taking place in Cleveland. So thanks for starting everything moving in that direction.