Taking DEI Into the Future feat. Amanda Stewart ‘08

[00:00]Intro: Welcome to Owl Have You Know, a podcast from Rice Business. This episode is part of our Flight Path series, where guests share their career journeys and stories of the Rice connections that got them where they are.

[00:14]Scott:I am joined by Amanda Stewart, Full-Time MBA, graduating in 2008. Amanda, welcome to the show.

[00:22]Amanda: Thank you so much, Scott. I'm excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:26]Scott: Absolutely. It really is a privilege. I just want to start from, like, an education standpoint. You, you've got a bachelor's degree at UT with a concentration in marketing. Just curious, like, why marketing? Like, what kind of drew you to that major and at that point in your life?

[00:41]Amanda: Thanks, Scott. That was quite a while ago. I graduated from UT in 2002. I grew up in Houston. Most of my family is here in Houston. Went to Austin and love the UT experience. But I will tell you, you're going to hear a theme as we talk about my undergrad and why I went to Rice later and even, you know, my career post Rice. Is this kind of idea of where can I grow? What am I learning? How do I mix it up a little bit, and what do I want to do differently?

So, I did choose, you know, marketing as my undergrad focus. After I left UT, I was at a PR company. So, I was doing publicity for books and authors, calling media outlets. Are you interested in having, you know, this person on as your cast? Here's a great topic for your show or an article that might feature this book that has commentary on, you know, this current event. So, marketing was really where I thought I was headed, and that ended up not being the case later on.

[01:50]Scott: What sort of caused the pivot? Tell us just a bit about what you're working on now and sort of what was that shift from that marketing background to what you're working on today.

[02:00]Amanda: So, like many young professionals in their 20s, my first job out of school at the PR company that I mentioned was fulfilling and rewarding, and I really learned so much in that organization. It was a very small company, maybe like 20 people. When you have 20 people in a small organization, you end up wearing so many different hats.

My main role was doing publicity and contacting the media, but there were instances where I was jumping into sales conversations to help, you know, the one or two sales guys, and one of them was out of the office. Focus on marketing for the organization. I clearly remember having to do some QuickBooks because we had one of our accounting representatives out of the office and not knowing at all what I was doing, but I think that's pretty typical for a small company.

And I think what I realized was I wanted to try something different. I also did not feel like in that small organization, I was already kind of getting the opportunity to play different roles in that organization, and I wanted to see what else was out there. So, I started looking at business schools. I kind of had this idea in mind. Native Houstonian, maybe I didn't want to be back in Houston. Maybe I wanted to try different opportunities, different city, different schools. But I got into Rice.

And as soon as you visit the campus, at least in my opinion, it's impossible not to fall in love with the Rice campus, the Rice community, the business school. And that was probably one of the best decisions I've ever made in my career, is to come back to Houston to do the full-time program at Rice. It was exactly what I needed at that point in my career, where I wasn't really very specific about what I needed. I just knew it was something different, something original and unique. And I needed a little bit of a refresh at that point.

[03:58]Scott: Was it just sort of like your hometown understanding of Rice? Was there something that sort of drew you initially? Were there other schools in consideration at the time or…?

[04:07]Amanda: Yeah, there were definitely other schools in consideration. All my eggs weren't in the Rice basket, but I did have a fellow alumni who was currently attending Rice who suggested, why don't you just come on campus and take a look? And it was really, I think sometimes personal references are the best selling point. So, it was that personal connection of having somebody walk me around campus, show me kind of the building, the admissions office, introduce me to enough people that it was clear to me even in those early visits that Rice was going to offer a very different experience than I'd had in undergrad. UT is an amazing campus, amazing program, but it is very big. You are a little fish in a big sea.

And so, I was really, one of the things that appealed to me about Rice on that kind of, like, personal visage was just the sense of community and the smaller size of the classes, the smaller size of the building, the kind of feeling you got from the staff and other students. That was really kind of the turning point for me. Obviously, there was a hometown connection, but I would actually say that was in my pros and cons column at the age of 26, that was not one of the things that was appealing to me, to come back home. Happy I did it, you know. Twenty years later, I'm like, that was the best decision to be back and close to my family, and it means so much to me now. And this is where we'll call home, you know, forever. But at the moment, mid-twenties, making that decision, that wasn't what appealed to me. It was really the sense of community on campus and just the beautiful kind of experience of being there.

[06:04]Scott: I love that. I want to just sort of step to the next part of your career. What sort of led you to where you work today, Constellation, and some of the things that you're working on and doing there? So, what drew you to the organization, and what's kept you there now for so many years?

[06:22]Amanda: So, I work at Constellation. Constellation was my first role after finishing my MBA at Rice. I am currently the VP of our retail operations team at Constellation, and I have been with the organization over 14 years now. I hit 14 years this summer, so I'm headed into year 15. And my journey with Constellation will continue well beyond 15 years.

When I first finished my MBA, when I was, I was still kind of in a place where if somebody was to ask me, what do you want to do, I don't know that I had as much of a clear career path as many of my fellow students, like in my class at that time. Constellation was offering a rotation program. It isn't something that we are still doing, although I'd love to bring it back at some point in the future. But at that time, we had the opportunity to sit in different parts of the organization, different functional areas of the organization.

What Constellation has given me over the years is really this opportunity to grow new skill sets, to use many of the competencies I got from my MBA. Things like how do you analyze a situation? When there's a lot of gray area and problem solve, how do you kind of look at this situation in a little bit of a different lens and do something to resolve this in sometimes a very creative way? And Constellation, especially in our operations organization, has really afforded me those opportunities to just keep almost owning my fate around how do I want to tackle this? How, as a team, do we want to wrap our arms around this? And that's what's kept me at Constellation. Just…we continue to change, we continue to evolve, but we also have the freedom to, like, decide our own fate in many cases.

I think that was, looking back on when I left Rice, I think that's what I was looking for, is really not so much, this is the functional area that I'm absolutely committed to. This is the industry that I'm absolutely committed to. It was how do I use these skill sets to grow and develop and keep learning, problem-solving, solutioning, like those other kinds of things. I've realized over time are really what get me jazzed and what has kept me with Constellation. So, it was a little bit hard, Scott, to articulate, at the end of my MBA, what I was looking for. But Constellation's appeal to me was that I didn't have to make a decision right away.

[09:10]Scott: I love that. I want to ask a question about, you know, you are passionate about and a champion for DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion. And would love to just hear a bit about what contributes to that for you. What are sort of, like, the underlying embers and kind of drive and the fire to support that and to make that a central part of what you're solving for?

[09:35]Amanda: Thank you for asking that question because it is an area that I'm very passionate about. I remember when I was at Rice, we had a very diverse class, and it felt very inclusive. But that was 15 years ago, and we weren't really using those words. We weren't using diversity, equity, inclusion as part of, kind of, our normal day-to-day conversation.

Constellation's done amazing embracing what DEI means for corporate America. And as I think about my role as a leader in an organization, I have a sphere of influence. I would never be so arrogant to say I could solve all of the world's problems, especially as it relates to how we create equity, how we create opportunities, how we really create an environment that embraces people for all of their history and background and who they authentically are. But what I can do is influence my own sphere. And today, what that looks like is within my organization.

So, it was, Constellation's commitment to DEI and my own commitment to DEI have nicely intersected in a way that I can play a big role in continuing to create opportunities, continuing to create an inclusive environment.

My real passion for DEI, kind of, comes from my family's history and a little bit of my background. And if you’d give me, kind of, the freedom to share a little bit of that, Scott-

[11:22]Scott: Please.

[11:22]Amanda: … I'd love to share with the audience a little bit more about, kind of, where we come from. So, I am Asian-American, and my family is of Japanese descent.Like many Japanese American families who've been in the United States for several generations, the internment camps of World War II, kind of, intersect with my family's history.

My grandmother and her family were living in California in the ‘40s before the war started. She was born in the United States, along with all five of her siblings. And when the war began, and she was part of 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were forced to leave their homes, she and her family were originally relocated to, basically, a horse truck. So, she, along with a family of seven, lived in what was essentially a horse stall.

They were later moved to an official camp in Poston, Arizona. The Poston Camp became one of the larger internment camps in the United States. She graduated from high school in the camp, and then she and her sister, as part of a work relocation program, they were released early and they were moved to Detroit. These were teenagers who were moving to a new city kind of independently away from their family. And they continued to face discrimination, segregation, and hate as they navigated the new city.

One of the stories we heard, the first thing that happened when they got off the train, is somebody had graffitied on, like, the walls of the train station, “Go home, Japs.” So, it was definitely not a warm and welcome reception leaving the internment camps. Her and her family eventually moved to Texas where she met and married my grandfather. On my grandfather's side of the family, he is also American-born Japanese. But because he lived in Texas, it was a little bit of a different situation, depending on where Japanese-American families were located.

So, unlike families on the West Coast, Texas Japanese families weren't relocated. His father, so my great-grandfather, was arrested by the FBI and hauled, and then later released. I guess you could say that's not as bad as an internment camp, but it's also, you know, not-

[13:48]Scott: It's not nothing.

[13:49]Amanda: … it is still a blemish on our treatment of Japanese Americans during that time frame. My grandfather joined the 442, which is an all-Japanese-American infantry unit, along with many of uncles or uncles in-law. This was a segregated unit of American citizens, segregated for all of the reasons that you can imagine.

So, here's how, kind of, that history intersects with why I'm passionate about DEI. I moved into the role of vice president here at Constellation just earlier this year. And when I accepted the offer, I called my mom, shared the good news with her. But I did ask her the question, what do you think Grandma Okabayashi would say? Do you think this is anything that she could have imagined when she was graduating from high school in an internment camp? Like, is this just beyond what her wildest dreams could have been at that time? And my mom paused and she said, “Well, Amanda,” and you know the way moms will say that. “Well, Amanda,” she said, “I think she'd be really proud of you, but I also think this is exactly what she would've expected.” And that's what really struck me.

As a leader in a huge organization, I do feel a strong sense of accountability for creating a culture that embraces diversity, embraces equity, embraces inclusion. I believe in inclusion. I believe in representation. I didn't even know how important representation was until I saw other people that looked like me in leadership roles. I didn't realize how important representation was until I realized what I was representing to other people, as being the only person in the room that looks like X, Y, Z. You know, those things are things I'm really passionate about.

Constellation has afforded me incredible opportunities for development and challenged, you know, my ability to build business acumen. And I've had amazing mentors over the years. So, continuing to create that experience for my own employees, for the organization with my, within my sphere of influence, that's like a real responsibility to me, but also a very nice privilege.

But the real story behind my passion for DEI, it comes right back to my grandparents. They had very high and very hopeful expectations. They believe that freedom, basic human rights, happiness, and a little success for our families was not only possible, but probable for generations to come. And so, really, when I think about my DEI work and the work we still have left to do, I'm really motivated to do right by them and everything that they did for us.

[16:55]Scott: Thank you, Amanda, for sharing that. Really a powerful background and something for us to learn from. As you work with people in your, in your organization, as you speak with people, what's some of the advice that you give for people? Everyone's sort of at a different stage of their journey. What are some of the things that you have found are helpful as people consider DEI broadly and how to sort of make that a feature of their organizations or bring that sort of front and center?

[17:25]Amanda: I love that you call it a journey because I think if we treat our DEI experiences with a real growth mindset, a real opportunity for us to continue to be open to hearing, open to learning. If we treat DEI like a continuous learning journey, I think there's a lot of benefits and giving each other a little bit of grace for being on different places in that journey, for giving each other a little bit of, “Hey, if you'll be vulnerable, I'll share what my experiences look like, and I'm open to hearing about your experiences.”

In my part of the organization, we are hosting quarterly DEI conversations. I have a team of about 250 people. So, this is conversations, you know, panels, that type of thing, where we are sharing with a very broad audience. Every event that we host internally with my team or corporate event that we're able to attend, I walk away with some new education or learning or experiences that I had never heard about before, that I had never really put myself in somebody else's shoes and having the ability to, one, have that growth mindset. So, you're open to hearing and learning continuously.

And then, two, creating the forums to have those kinds of conversations. I think ultimately leads to, one, you know, just this idea and this concept that we can work together better because we understand each other. I understand where you're coming from. I understand the experiences that are informing the way you get work done.

But also there's this amazing side benefit, that if we understand how to work together better, we will deliver better results for the organization. We can become a high-performing team that delivers for the organization because we've created an environment where everybody's voice matters. You have a totally different experience than mine. If I learn from your experiences and then we use it when we sit around a table to solve a problem, we'll come up with a better answer.

Let me use an analogy, like a system development analogy. You're building a new system, and everybody's sitting around the table. You have somebody that says, I needed to do X, Y, Z for my team. And you have somebody representing your customers from like a customer care organization. They say, “Well, don't forget about the customer, I needed to do this also.” The person who is creating those system requirements will sit back and say, “I didn't think about, you know, what your functional team needed, and I forgot about the customer's going to want this to happen also in this system requirement, let me figure out how to create a solution that does what I was intending, does what you were intending, and does what our customers need also.”

That kind of diversity that sits around a table, not just diversity and ethnicity, but diversity and age and experiences and functional areas, it leads to a better system delivery. If you think about it in that lens and all of the problems you're solving, you come to a better answer. And so, there's this, like, primary goal around let's learn from each other. Let's create an environment where we have community and culture that allows you to bring, you know, that phrase that I use, bring your whole self to work.

But what that really means is you have an opportunity to actively sit at a table, contribute what your experience might create value in solving a problem that delivers better business results. And I like to say that's a nice side benefit, that is not just a side benefit. It is a hugely impactful opportunity that we can harness in corporate America.

[21:43]Scott: Thank you. That's a lot of tangible kind of perspective, actionable. I suspect that it's not always a smooth road, that there's bumps or challenges along the way. Is there sort of an example that jumps to mind where, you know, it wasn't really working the way that you thought and how you approach that and handle those things to steer things back onto track?

[22:04]Amanda: I think that's such a great question, Scott, because we would be remiss in assuming there isn't any resistance in DEI efforts. You know, what I was kind of talking through is these DEI dialogue sessions, when we really started these DEI dialogue sessions with my entire organization was in the summer of 2020, after George Floyd's murder and kind of the social unrest.

We hosted a panel. I was, I had the privilege of being on the panel along with one of my African-American male colleagues. The focus of the panel was Black Lives Matter, and what we talked through was his experiences as a black man in corporate America, my experiences, and how to support him in a moment where we couldn't just, like, live in a bubble about what was happening in the outside world was impacting. You don't just turn off everything when you turn on your computer for work, and it was impacting how it felt to show up and be the only black man in a leadership team or to be the only black man in a room.

And so, we had this very personal conversation. It wasn't about everyone's experiences. It was specifically about his experiences, and how I support him and his experiences by actively listening, learning, not depending on him for all of my education, you know, where there were other opportunities to be educated. That was one of the first DEI dialogue sessions that we did. We've done them every quarter.

The most recent one, we had colleagues who have children with IDDs, so intellectual developmental disabilities, talk about their goals for inclusion, how that affects them and how they get their work done, how that affects their perspective and how they get their work done.

If you think about, like, these wide variety of topics, there's a couple of kinds of resistance. There's, like, the kinds of resistance, and I think this is maybe the kind you would expect. I'm in the majority and I feel excluded from this conversation. I feel like I no longer have value or a purpose because you're not, you know, like are you singling me out because I'm not part of the minority or kind of the outside group? You know, my answer to that is tell me more about it. I want to be an active participant, and anyone who does feel that resistance, not to overcome it, but just that's what inclusion looks like. We hear different perspectives, and we understand them. And we might not agree with them, but we embrace them and we listen. That becomes an opportunity for a partnership. You know, what is your story and how do you bring it forward?

But we also have the other, and maybe this is a little bit more of a subtle type of resistance. This is probably stemming from historically underrepresented groups or what you would consider like the outsider group. I think some of the questions I get from that portion of the population of my organization, is this enough? Have we gone far enough? Is this deep enough to really make a change? We want to ask ourselves those hard questions also. “You're, I, I'm diverse, why are you talking to me about this? Shouldn't you be talking to the non-diverse group of people?” You know, so there's a whole range of potential, you know, to answer your question, a whole range of potential for it not going and not landing or impacting the way that you would help anyone.

And I think if you really believe this is a journey, you really believe that you're learning along the way, then you take that feedback and you say, okay, this is how we'll do it differently. Thanks so much for giving me that feedback. I'm happy to incorporate it in how we continue the conversation, how we continue to create an environment that feels equitable, that feels inclusive, that if you're sitting around the table, everybody has a voice and we're using their valuable input and experiences to deliver what we need to for our customers and our company.

[26:45]Scott: That's really helpful. You know, you've got this deep personal experience to kind of draw from. Are there mentors or other resources that you look to that help to inform and continue evolving your perspective on the topic?

[26:59]Amanda: Absolutely. Absolutely. We've had, at least within Constellation, some amazing guest speakers. Speakers who weren't even, whose only purpose wasn't a DEI topic. I love the connection of Rice here. So, we recently had a keynote speaker named Carla Harris. Carla Harris recently did an event at Rice that I was able to attend also, which is really fun opportunity for me to return to Rice, kind of see her on campus right after we had seen her in, kind of, a forum that was specific to Constellation.

If you guys don't know Carla Harris, She has a couple of books, Lead to Win, Expect to Win. She's an amazing speaker. She was on Wall Street for most of her career. She is a black woman. And as you can imagine, typically, she's the only one in a room. And as you think about her career, and I certainly can't do her justice in paraphrasing her amazing wisdom. But one of the things I remember her talking through in one of her keynote speeches, she uses it as an advantage. If I'm the person that looks like me in the room, they're going to remember me. And that's an advantage.

You know, those kinds of pearls of wisdom, Carla calls them pearls of wisdom, can come from anywhere. And I loved that perspective because it isn't unusual for me to be the only Asian-American woman in a room. Early in my career, it wasn't unusual for me to be the only woman in a meeting or in a room. And Carla's perspective, like, use that as an advantage if you're the only one that looks like you in a room was, you know, something that I took away from seeing her in multiple forums.

There are so many other positive mentors around how to have good DEI conversations and then how to make them actionable, how to really impact and create change.

[29:10]Scott: I love this. Amanda, this has been a great discussion. I want to just ask sort of, like, what advice would you give to prospective students that are considering a Rice MBA experience?

[29:21]Amanda: The first advice I would give you is go to Rice. It's amazing. It's an amazing program. I can't say enough good things about the experience. You know, for me, the immediate sense of community and camaraderie was something I'll carry through my whole life. I don't, I think back to those two years at Rice as just warm, embracing relationships. It was, it was so relationship-focused. Even some of the subtle things that it took me a little while to realize. Partios, breakfast, endless breakout rooms, those are all subtly designed to help you create relationships and community, and like I said, kind of that camaraderie. So, that was really appealing.

I think the other thing I walked away from Rice with was you feel like you're growing and you're learning the whole two years. You feel like the whole two years, you are just, you know, expanding your capacity for knowledge and skill sets, and that feels so rewarding. But it took me a long time in retrospect to also realize there were a lot of intangible skills that you're getting.

The ability to look at a situation and it might appear on paper, like in one of your cases as a black-and-white situation, and you walk away from it and you say, what am I missing? Where's the gray area in here? And how do I think about this a little bit differently? That is a skill set that is not easy to train in someone. It is not easy to replicate except in that kind of business school environment.

And it was only later in my career that I realized how often I was using that skill set. You've given me two options for whatever problem is facing us in the organization, but I think we should go with solution number three, which, it wasn't on the paper, not black and white. Like, let's add into this gray area and figure out what we can do with this. And for me, that was kind of my biggest takeaway from skills that I learned during my business program. So, circling right back to the first answer, prospective students, my answer is, you should go. You're going to love it. It's amazing.

[32:09]Scott: Amanda, what's next as you sort of look ahead on the horizon, sort of in your career or goals that you've got circled on the calendar into the future?

[32:18]Amanda: I'm 15 years post-MBA. I've been with Constellation that entire time, Scott. I'm not going anywhere. My career with Constellation will continue into the future. And at the point that I make a decision to leave Constellation, it will coincide with a point that I decide I've completed my career. So, that is to say, me and Constellation, we're in the, we're in the long haul together.

I do have a young family. My girls are nine and 11. And you know, one of the bigger challenges for me at this place in my family's life and my career life is just kind of balancing the two of them. How am I available to my kids, but also performing well for my organization and in a new role?

You know, like I said, I was promoted to VP earlier this year. The first year in any job takes a lot of time and a lot more energy than I think the second year or the third year. So, this first year, kind of balancing the two of them, has been a little bit challenging. But as I look at the crystal ball, you know, my work-life balance took a precarious kind of turn, tilted the wrong direction this year. And I think that will kind of even back out in the future.

I'm really excited about where Constellation is headed. I am, it's a privilege to be a part of the organization. And so, for me, it's continuing to move the organization forward, keep up with where it's going. We, in the energy industry, experience a lot of changes. They come quickly and that's what's really exciting to me. And I just can't see a point where I'm getting bored in what I'm doing.

[34:11]Scott: Amanda, thank you so much for sharing your experience and your perspective. It's been an absolute privilege. Thanks for joining us today.

[34:17]Amanda: Thank you so much, Scott, for having us. I love your podcast, Owl Have You Know. It's so much fun to listen to other alumni and what they are doing. Hopefully, I lived up to many of the prestigious guests you had previously, but I really-

[34:31]Scott: Indeed.

[34:32]Amanda: … appreciate the opportunity to be here also.

[34:35]Scott: It was a blast. Thanks, Amanda.

Thanks for listening. This has been Owl Have You Know, a production of Rice Business. You can find more information about our guests, hosts, and announcements on our website, business.rice.edu. Please subscribe and leave a rating wherever you find your favorite podcast. We'd love to hear what you think. The host of Owl Have You know are myself, Scott Gale, and Maya Pomroy.