Marsha Bonner, an empowerment speaker, social activist and human resources and diversity consultant, spoke on "how to build a culturally aware workplace" at the Paths to Inclusion event at Overture Center.

Tanya Odom knows it's tempting for companies that want to diversify to check a few boxes for race, gender and sexuality, then declare "mission accomplished."

"Diversity's good, right?" Odom told about 140 people in Overture Center's Promenade Hall on Thursday. "Diverse teams make us smarter. Diverse teams will outperform homogeneous teams. The interesting thing is, they have to be managed well.

"This is what we sometimes do: Look, there's a brown person, there's a black person, oh my gosh, there's a person with a disability. The brown person is LGBTQ! Check, check, check, check. I'm done."

Odom, a Manhattan-based director of innovation with The FutureWork Institute, consults with corporations internationally to help them make sustainable changes around diversity and inclusion (sometimes abbreviated D&I, or EDI for equity, diversity and inclusion).

Odom gave the keynote address at Paths to Inclusion, a new event conceived by the software company Zendesk and Overture Center for the Arts. Her rapid-fire, wide-ranging 45-minute talk focused on implicit bias, micro-behaviors (including micro-aggressions) and how conversations about real, practical inclusion are growing.

"People are looking for ways in the workplace to have a dialogue," Odom said. "Why not let people talk about things? I've never seen so much literature on challenging conversations, speaking up when you see bias at work, ignoring trolls. This is out there now.

"Representation isn't easy," Odom added. "But the inclusion part is what I want to think about."

Paths to Inclusion was conceived by a team at Zendesk, a San Francisco-based company with an office in Madison, and Overture's director of diversity and inclusion Ed Holmes. It featured two speakers who approached diversity in the workplace from distinct but complementary angles, as well as performances by teen Rising Star talent winners Elijah Edwards and Danielle Crim and a local panel on how to "turn divisive conversations into productive ones."

"This is really looking at the intersection between a commercial, for-profit organization and a nonprofit, technology and arts," Holmes said. "That's unique. I had to find speakers that could talk about what would resonate with each of the industries. It's national, international and local."

In her own introduction, organizer Khalida Ali from Zendesk pulled up a memorable quote from Netflix VP Vernā Myers: "Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance."

"Once the person is there, what is that experience actually like?" asked Ali, who is based in San Francisco. "That's actually the critical part. What is the day to day experience like for individuals?"

Holmes discovered Odom at a conference in New Orleans and loved her research-based approach to diversity and inclusion work. For a more social, emotional take on similar issues, Holmes and Ali's team invited Marsha Bonner, a self-described empowerment speaker and social activist.

Bonner centered her talk around inclusive leadership. An employee may be encouraged to show up in the workplace as "your authentic self," but how does that play out? What differences, traumas and identities don't we see? How can we practice cultural humility?

"If we're not holding individuals responsible for their behavior, we're doing the organization a disservice," Bonner said. "It's not just what we do, but how we do what we do."

Bonner stressed the importance of having diverse people in a company's succession plan, to "integrate the known with the unknown" and resist the tendency to ask the same people to solve new problems.

She and Odom stressed the constant challenges of this work, and the need for individual ownership of it.

"It starts at the top, but the leaders need you to take responsibility," Bonner said. "You need to be held responsible for treating others fairly, with respect, based on their uniqueness."

Real, lasting inclusivity isn't easily quantifiable, and the work doesn't stop when marginalized people finally get a seat at the hypothetical table. The local panel, led by Madison YWCA CEO Vanessa McDowell, asked two women from Zendesk and three nonprofit leaders to consider how to best address the bias, conscious or otherwise, that come up at work.

Ruben Anthony, CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, recalled an incident from 2005 when a manager got up in front the whole company and said the company didn't see many women managers because they chose to raise kids instead.

The women in the company were furious, and they let Anthony (and local newspapers) hear about it. He nearly lost his job, but said the comment led to the company re-evaluating how it could fast-track more women into managerial positions.

"Managers have a higher responsibility," Anthony said. "You can't sit there and let those types of statements be made."

Kaleem Caire, founder and CEO of One City Schools, said he tries not to judge colleagues too quickly when they let their bias show. Caire said he's more interested in redemption than punishment, even when the offense seems stark.

"Sometimes people will say things, do things that are not appropriate for the workplace," Caire said. "We'll judge a person in the moment and that'll become who they are. … There could have been an extenuating event, maybe the night before. There could be something going on they're not comfortable talking about.

"Take a walk, find a place where that person is comfortable having a conversation and talk it out. Try to not be tense with them. Get to the underlying cause."

Kim Smith, an engineering manager at Zendesk, said when she sees a problem, she tends to "run at it" before stopping to think if she's going to do more harm than good. She encouraged listeners to keep in mind their own limitations when dealing with tricky work situations — although, she said, it's never OK to just walk away and pretend something didn't happen.

"You need to know where your limits are, and where you're going to be safe when you are going to engage someone," Smith said. "Things escalate. If you can't control that initial surge of emotion, everything's going to go to hell."

At just half a day, Paths to Inclusion felt very short, touching edges of a much larger, longer conversation. Ali said she got about 145 responses for 150 spots, and keeping it small was deliberate. She wanted to see how people responded before scheduling more.

"We wanted to have the panel, that was really important, about how do you engage in conversations that are not fun," Ali said. "Then how do you respond, what do you do?

"But it was also important to hear from experts like Marsha and Tanya about the pervasiveness of bias. What are the actions that can be taken?"

Ali would love to have another Paths to Inclusion event in Madison before replicating it at some of Zendesk's other locations. The whole event was live-streamed to offsite Zendesk employees as well.

"It was really cool to see the engagement in the room, and the cross-section between public sector, private sector, nonprofits, the arts," Ali said. "We all have our own interest in it, and what can we each do? Taking that concept of micro-actions, but having macro-impact ... it feels doable."