Business Success With Immigrant Leaders With Ukeme Awakessien Jeter

 

Immigrant leaders are reshaping the future of leadership. They bring fresh perspectives to work, are known for their boundless resilience, and have a unique ability to drive innovation wherever they go. In this episode, Elizabeth Bachman talks with Ukeme Awakessien Jeter, a trailblazing immigrant leader who made history in 2021 as the first person of color elected to the Upper Arlington City Council and as its President and Mayor in 2024. Ukeme reveals how immigrant leaders like herself harness resilience, grit, and diverse viewpoints to propel business success and cultivate transformative leadership. Learn how the immigrant experience shapes essential leadership qualities in today’s ever-evolving and versatile business world.

Download Ukeme’s free roadmap here: https://immigritbook.com/

For more on resilience, find Ama Marston and her book here: https://type-r-resilience.com/

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Business Success With Immigrant Leaders With Ukeme Awakessien Jeter

Hello and welcome to Speakers Who Get Results. I’m Elizabeth Bachman, your host. This is the show where we talk about leadership, communication, presentation skills, and how to be a better leader in this world. This is not my standard introduction because this is the second to the last episode of the show for the moment. At the end of the year, we’re going to go on hiatus while we do some reorganization and rethinking.

I was thinking about who I want to feature for the second to the last episode. The last one is going to be me, talking about what I learned. I thought about my wonderful friend Ukeme Awakessien Jeter. Ukeme was on the show a couple of years ago, talking about her journey as an immigrant having gone to college in the US and then became an engineer. She then became a lawyer and was elected to politics. Now she’s a mayor. She had this amazing blossoming. She’s also an author. She’s one of my favorite people ever and I thought, “Let me bring her in to wrap up five years of podcasting with one of the smartest people I know.”

Here is her official bio. Ukeme Awakessien Jeter made history. In 2021, she became the first person of color to be elected to the Upper Arlington City Council in Ohio. That’s outside Columbus, Ohio. It’s the first time in its 103-year history. In January 2024, she proudly became the first person of color to be selected by her peers on the council to serve as president and mayor.

Ukeme is recognized as a trailblazer. She was named by the Columbus, Ohio CEO Magazine as one of its Future 50 Leaders. Professionally, Ukeme began her career as an engineer, and after almost a decade doing that, she became a lawyer. Today, she’s a partner at Taft Law in Columbus. Her practice focuses on helping her clients bring innovative products and services to market through negotiating and structuring intellectual property licenses and related agreements. She thrives on tackling complex challenges in the realm of product development and is a true catalyst for innovation.

Beyond her career and her service to Upper Arlington, Ukeme is a tireless advocate for the causes of access, equity, and inclusion. She serves on the board of directors for Ohio Legal Help, which is a startup non-profit that leverages technology and innovation to improve justice and fairness for all Ohioans. Her debut book ImmiGRIT: How Immigrant Leadership Drives Business Success offers valuable insights for business leaders seeking to cultivate a culture that maximizes the potential of immigrant leadership.

She is a caring mother of two wonderful children and a dog. She received a JD from Case Western Reserve University School of Law, an MBA from the University of Massachusetts, and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maine, where she was also a college athlete in track and field. Ukeme is a shining star, very smart, and had some interesting ideas about immigrant leadership and why it’s important. We’re focusing mostly on the book ImmiGRIT for this episode. I know you’ll enjoy the episode and I know you’ll enjoy the conversation. On to Ukeme.

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Ukeme, my friend, I am so glad I finally got you back onto the show. The interview that we did a couple of years ago is one of the most popular ones I’ve ever had. Welcome.

It’s good to be back. Sorry, it has taken so long, busy ladies.

Dream Interview

Before I get into all the cool things I want to ask you, let me ask about who would be your dream interview. If you could interview someone who’s no longer with us, who would it be, what would you ask them, and who should be listening?

That’s an easy answer for me. It’s Shirley Chisholm. She was the first Black congresswoman in the United States. She was the first Black woman to run for president. I have a lot of her sayings around my house. I dressed up as her for Halloween last year. I think of a conversation with her. The people I’d love to have in the room are emerging leaders and young women. Why it’s important to have those people is sometimes history may seem so far away, but she has navigated some of the dynamics that we are experiencing today by having been the first. We just came off of a historical election.

She’s known for being the woman who says, “If they don’t invite you to the table, bring a folding chair.” She said that 56 years ago. We’re still bringing folding chairs to tables that we are perceived not to be at. I think she would have some great insights from her time that would shed some light on some of the things and experiences that young women and emerging leaders are having today.

Increasing Importance Of Immigrant Workforce

Ukeme, congratulations on the book, which is awesome. I read it when it first came out. I was rereading it preparing for this. When you call it immiGRIT, I loved that. You say that immigrants are projected to make up 1 in 5 of the US workforce by 2035. In the book, you’re talking about why business leaders need to measure the immigrant workforce percentages as another trackable dimension. Can you explain that, please?

We know about intersectionality. Maybe we do, maybe we don’t.

For our non-English speaking audience, define intersectionality first.

Intersectionality is the multiple parts of your identity that make up your lived experiences. The workforce should understand the immigrant population to help them develop from that into sectional points. I’ll see it this way. I’m a Black woman, but I’m a Black immigrant woman. My lived experience as a Black immigrant woman is very different from a Black woman.

I’ll give an example. I talked about this example in the book. When I immigrated to the United States, it was my first Martin Luther King Day in the United States. There is an expectation that every Black person knows, feels, and understands Martin Luther King in the same way. There was no more visual representation of this than a reporter coming up to me and asking me on MLK Day what MLK meant to me.

It was a very awkward encounter, not because I didn’t know who Martin Luther King was, but because I hadn’t grown up in this country experiencing the same news or information about him, being taught in schools about the same thing. He was just a historical figure for me based on where I was from. I was eighteen at the time, so I don’t have that experience, but if you’re going to develop me as a Black woman, you missed that intersectionality. You missed that civil rights.

It’s not part of the things I learned in my history books. You missed that it doesn’t color how I navigate spaces or move in spaces. The same can be said of any other type of intersectionality. Even a cis White but with an immigrant dimension to that intersectionality. It’s very different. That’s why I think what happens in corporations is we lump people as they are missing the immigrant experience. We do that and we lose an aspect of what’s important, who an important aspect of who they are.

One of the things that this makes me think of is how people are judged by what they look like. The color of your skin makes a big difference. I lived for half a year in Europe. I looked like the Austrians, but I’m not. That’s not my background. Sometimes I have to say, “Who was this person and why was it important?”

Also, if you have a disability, that’s invisible. I can check a couple of the diversity boxes, but you wouldn’t know to look at me. That’s one of the things I think about often. There have been times when I’ve been told, “You have no idea. You can’t speak on that topic.” I said, “Actually, there are parts of it that I can speak on, but you wouldn’t know to look at me.” That reporter looked at you and thought, “Here’s somebody who grew up in Atlanta.” Bearing in mind that the immigrant workforce is more and more a part of our world, people have global teams these days, why should we be tracking it and hiring for it?

I think you hit the nail on the head. They become a global workforce but beyond that, we also have a global marketplace. It means that consumers of our products and services are not limited to boundaries and borders anymore. It’s the same way that the workforce is diversifying with immigrants and not just coming from different parts of the state to be there. It’s the same way that people who are buying your products are different.

When you track it, you are able to understand and adapt your marketing strategies. You’re able to be very culturally intelligent in how you communicate to your customers about your services. You’ll see your CSR, which is your Corporate Social Responsibility program because you have immigrants in the workforce and because you can connect that with the people you’re serving. These are the very quantifiable off the top of my head and some of the things I talk about in the book of why it is important to understand who your immigrant workforce is. You’re reflecting that back with your customer.

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What are the aspects of the grit that immigrants have that are useful within a team or in leadership? Why should we have more immigrant leaders? Unless you’re in tech, which we seem to have a lot of them.

I always start with this question, “What makes a great leader?” Usually, when I ask that, they’re like, “Someone adaptable. Someone resilient. Someone who goes beyond the financials and understands strengths.” We usually named off qualities and resourcefulness. I looked at these qualities and I thought about immigrants. Immigrants are not a monolithic group by any means. The only monolithic thing that we have is the experience of leaving our home country, coming to a new place, surviving, and thriving in that new place.

I don’t need to know much about an immigrant’s racial background, socioeconomic background, or any of that to know that the very process of leaving one place to another requires adaptability. It requires resourcefulness. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the King of Persia and have billions, you still have to figure out what bank account you are going to put that money in when you’re in the United States. That is all resourcefulness. You still have to rebuild your networks in a new place. That’s the stuff that takes a long time. That takes resilience to do that work.

We know the definition of grit as perseverance and passion over time. One thing about the immigration process, whether it be the visa process, or the rules to stay legal in the country. All the loopholes that we know about being an immigrant in a country are a sustained passion for a long period of time. Many people have packed up their bags and said, “I’m just going to go back to my country.” The ones that sustain and stay, that’s grit.

As I thought about these common qualities that come out of the immigrant experience, and you have to have that immigrant experience for those qualities to come out, I collectively coined the term ImmiGRIT. I map that onto all the surveys we see out there, all the data we see out there, and all the leadership experts who talked about the qualities of the leaders. I was like, “Look at that. Of all these top ten qualities that we want to see in a leader, these four come out of the immigrant experience. Why do more of these people, who I can say for a fact have these experiences and qualities, not leaders?” That’s where I was like, “They already have these qualities. They need to be leaders.”

Understanding Language Bias

It’s easier said than done. You talk a lot about unconscious bias. I’m not going to go into that today, except we’re talking about language bias. I am a presentation skills trainer. I’m a word gal. Tell us a little bit about language bias and how that affects how one is perceived.

Interestingly, language is a skill. It’s like any other skill that we acquire, but for some reason, we tend to attach intelligence to the English language. It’s an unconscious bias. How someone sounds and speaks the English language, we automatically attach the level of intelligence to it.

 

That’s in the US because English is the main language. I certainly know that the French will judge you on how you speak French. In German-speaking countries, it matters a lot what kind of German you speak. Speaking, if you’ve been in America, the English language.

We tend to attach intelligence to it. Again, as I said, that’s completely an unconscious bias. An unconscious bias means something that your brain automatically does without you knowing where it comes from. The problem with that though is that’s why we see a lot of immigrants that are not asked to lead because we expect to hear them communicate on the accent in a certain way.

Language is a skill. I think about anyone who has ever tried to learn a language in their adult life. They don’t gain mastery of it. Even taking it in high school or all the way up to high school, you don’t gain mastery of that language in a year. You don’t gain mastery of that language in two years. Why do we expect that in the workplace if communication is happening? By communication, I mean what is said is understood and received, and vice versa. That’s communication. That should be the principal goal of how we use language in the workplace. It is for communication but not to attach intelligence to it.

I think I tease about this in the book and tie it also with the foreign education bias piece. It doesn’t matter where you learn chemistry or you learn where the human heart is in the body if you’re a medical doctor or the math principles that you learn. Your intelligence is the same and now it’s to reduce the emphasis on how we want to hear it, which is how you speak the English language, and focus more on, “Am I communicating in the workplace with this person despite the fact they don’t roll their Rs the same way or sound like me in speaking English.”

This is one of the things that I’ve always thought about language because of my 30 years in the opera business. How you learn to understand new music is by thinking as if it’s somebody who’s speaking to you in a very thick accent. You have to get used to the way they speak before you can hear the content of what they have to say. That translates when you have someone on your team who speaks very accented English. You have to get used to the way they speak before you know what they’re doing.

I worked with a lot of people from all over the world. They’re not always native English speakers and we’re always adapting. The thing is that there’s a language bias and it’s an unconscious bias. How can we raise our awareness so we can get past the way someone speaks to understand the content of what they have to say?

First of all, it is self-awareness. The more we talk about this, you raise awareness of it. I like to see it in the workplace. When I talk to leaders I say, “You start first with the people that you put on to give you company-wide presentations.” I asked this, “How many people who give you company-wide presentations have accents, besides your technical leaders?” We expect the chief technology officer to be an immigrant or whatever. We expect maybe the chief financial officers to be immigrants because they’re skilled in math and technology.

Beyond those people, who other leaders can you put up who speak with an accent and are allowed to do it in a company-wide presentation? Most companies don’t and they haven’t because of unconscious bias. They think, “This person is not going to be understood company-wide,” or those kinds of things. You start to break down some of those barriers and start to raise some awareness of the conscious unconscious bias when you start to confront people with it.

You put people in the position to speak how they speak at company-wide presentations. To your point, we get used to hearing the accent. It’s very prevalent in the workplace. It is seen and it’s not unusual. We have to tune out. It is the way of business. Our ears change a little bit, and then we can start to get down to the content and we’re less tied to the accent.

Ukeme’s Journey And Immigrant Experience

This is fascinating. I am such a word geek. I could talk to you about this for hours, but let me go on to some of the other questions. We interviewed you about your journey a couple of years ago and you’ve done so much since. You were an engineer, then you were a lawyer. You’re still a lawyer, and then you were on the city council, and now you’re the mayor. What are the aspects of your immigrant experience that have helped you in these career transitions?

First of all, I hadn’t seen it the way it was brought up, but it’s the comfort of taking the risk. People look at my story or look at the timelines and it’s like, “Having only lived in the city for three years, how were you not frightened to death about running for public office?” My immigrant experience is that it’s a sink or swim sometimes. You have to be willing to take the risk and understand that failure may come but if you don’t take the risk, how are you going to know? I think that comes squarely from my immigrant experiences of not being too afraid to take those risks.

The second thing is adaptability. I don’t know everything and I never will, but I’m confident in my ability to adapt quickly to new situations, in new rooms, and learning new information. That directly comes from my immigrant experiences. These pivots have been made better because of my confidence in leaning into those skills that have come out of my immigrant experience.

I have to ask the other side of it. What are the aspects of your immigrant experiences that made it more challenging for you?

It’s the knowledge gap. That’s what we’ll cultural norms or some of the history. It’s both a challenge and also an opportunity. It sounds very corporate speaking when you use two sides of the coin. It allows me to always continuously be learning. Because I’m so naive to some of the history, it allows me to step out a little bit more than someone who knows more. I sometimes tease that in my story. This brazenness is because of how naive I am about the full picture.

The challenge is if I did the full picture before I did it, I wouldn’t. I’ll be frozen in all the bureaucracy, the history, and what has been. That is a challenge, but once you get into it, you start to learn and know. The opportunity is to just embrace it, not see it as a challenge, feel confident that you can learn it, and that you can change it in the position that you’re in. I would say that’s been the challenge. It is all the unknowns, all the history.

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Power Of Resilience

It’s a huge advantage to have an outside view of what’s going on and to say, “Just because it’s never been done this way, why not? Why can’t we do this?” Another interesting thing that you mentioned is the concept of resilience taking you forward, instead of resilience allowing you to bounce back. I know that was not your original concept but tell us about this.

The author Ama Marston, who I interviewed for the book, is the one who talks about this concept. She wrote a book called Type R (Ama Marston), so Type R people. These are resilient people who spring forward. We often tend to think about resilience as this rubber band. I’m giving a rubber band as a visual because you stretch and you bounce back. You stretch because of resilience. Resilience is an interesting skill because it comes from challenges. Resilience, you have to be tested. Something difficult has to go on for you to develop resilience. You don’t just develop resilience by being comfortable.

In a way, it’s traumatic, but we also have this trauma response when we say, “We’re resilient, meaning we’ve endured so much difficulty, and we always bounce back. It doesn’t matter what you throw at me. I bounce back,” like a rubber band. I love the concept of we actually grow from the difficulty, which is springing forward. You’re not just completely bouncing back and being the same person and “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” whatever that song is. I forget who sings it.

It’s not just hit me with every bad thing you have, I will still keep standing and I will rise like the phoenix. The concept is you grow. It’s transformative resilience where you grow from the challenge. You’re a little bit smarter. You’re a little bit more aware. If it took you two months to recover before, springing forward means now maybe it takes you weeks because you’re mentally stronger. I see the resilience in immigrants as that. Actually, they can’t even throw to bounce back. It’s like everything inches them into a better version or a smaller version.

It’s like a slingshot instead of a rubber band.

Thank you for finishing that. Yes, I like that.

Challenging The Status Quo

I love it. One more question because I know your time is precious, Miss Mayor. You have mentioned that learning and development programs tend to put people in a box. They try to fit everybody into a box that fits a straight White mostly male culture, which is still the majority of where organizations are led. You suggest changing that paradigm. Tell us more, and if you can give us an example, that would be great.

I think this is a great culmination of four questions in terms of what we’ve talked about so far. The stats of this is that 95% of executive leadership at companies are still White males. What happens with our leadership development programs is we’re developing people based on the success factors or the leadership factors that we see in those 95% White males, as what the successful leader model looks like.

If our pipelines, by pipelines I mean the people who are in this leadership development programs, are not that, we’re trying to force them into a model that is foreign to their beings. Earlier, we talked about intersectionality. We’ve also talked about unconscious biases. If the people in this pipeline who you’re trying to develop into leaders don’t sound a certain way, you’re going to make them sound a certain way because that’s the factor that you see.

I often say that your lived experiences are a value-add to your leadership, the vantage point in which you lead and see things from. If you try to scrub that out, you take the magic or the things that have made that person come into your pipeline in the first place out. We; ‘re doing a disservice to these people. I often hate the word authentic because it’s overused in our world and our culture now. I’m drawing a blank on what other word to use. You fail to develop that person in the magic that brought them to your leadership pipeline in the first place.

What can we do about it then?

I think I talked about this concept of gross collaboration projects. In some of our leadership development programs, we’ll put them on an assignment in someplace. We give them the rubric which happens to be the 95% male rubric on how to lead that team or how to take that project to an end. The feedback that we give them is based on the original model. What we could instead do is cross them with someone else who is maybe in the 95%, and not to give feedback, but to actually learn from their leadership style. That’s cultural intelligence.

Allow them to lead in their ways, and almost like guiding and learning from them in that way. The feedback goes something like this, “I see that you did that differently and I like that. Ordinarily, that would have been my approach, but I have learned something from your approach.” Rather than the other way, we already feed them the approach. Let them lead. We let them lead and learn from that process when they have led differently and it has still shown success.

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Taking Immediate Steps

I love that. I think it’s a much larger conversation. Everybody, go buy the book. Ukeme, I’m so grateful to have you as a guest. If somebody is listening to me and says, “This is amazing, but where do I start?” Is there one thing that somebody could do today about not leaving money on the table by not taking advantage of the immigrants in your organization?

As part of writing the book, I came up with a guideline or a starting plan on how to build effective immigrant leadership pipelines. They can go to www.Immigritbook.com. There’s a spot there to download that guide. It’s my freebie of five principles on some things that they can start doing to build that pipeline. That’s available on the website for them to do that.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter, thank you so much, my friend. I bugged you for months to get you back so I was happy. Thank you so much for having been a guest on Speakers Who Get Results. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to us on whatever podcast app you listen to. We have five years of fabulous content. Follow us on YouTube. Follow us on social media, and tell your friends. That would be great. Tell your friends so we have more people who can listen to wisdom from amazing guests like Ukeme. This has been Speakers Who Get Results. I’m Elizabeth Bachman and I’ll see you on the next one.

 

Important Links

• Ukeme Awakessien Jeter – LinkedIn
• Ukeme Awakessien Jeter – Youtube
• Ukeme Awakessien Jeter – Instagram
• ImmiGRIT: How Immigrant Leadership Drives Business Success
• Shirley Chisholm
• Type R

 

About Ukeme Awakessien Jeter

In 2021, Ukeme made history, becoming the first person of color to be elected to Upper Arlington City Council in its 103-year history, and in January of 2024, she proudly became the first person of color to be selected by her peers on Council to serve as President and Mayor. Recognized as a trailblazer, Ukeme was named by Columbus CEO Magazine as one of its Future 50 Leaders.

Professionally, Ukeme began her career as an engineer and after almost a decade as one became a lawyer. Today she is a partner at Taft Law. Her practice focuses on helping her clients bring innovative products and services to market through negotiating and structuring intellectual property licenses, and related agreements. She thrives on tackling complex challenges in the realm of product development and is a true catalyst for innovation.

eyond her career, and her service to Upper Arlington, Ukeme is a tireless advocate for causes of access, equity, and inclusion. She serves on the board of directors for Ohio Legal Help, a start- up non profit that leverages technology and innovation to improve justice and fairness for all Ohioans. And, her debut book IMMIGRIT: How Immigrant Leadership Drives Business Success, offers invaluable insights for business leaders seeking to cultivate a culture that maximizes the potential of immigrant leadership.

keme is a doting mother to two wonderful children and a dog. She received a J.D from Case Western Reserve University School of Law, an MBA from the University of Massachusetts – Lowell and a B.S in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maine where she was a college athlete in track and field.