By Helen Bezuneh
Special to the AFRO
It was the night before diversity consultant Verna Myers’ eighth birthday when the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. rocked her hometown of Baltimore, leaving it in turmoil. Born and raised in the city, she had never witnessed such profound sadness and literal flames of protest engulfing her community.
“My dad was crying,” she told the AFRO. “It was at that moment – maybe it was throughout that period – but I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to be the person that Martin Luther King fought for.’ I understood the sacrifice that had been made for me, so I wanted to make good on the dream.”
Since then, Myers has made it her mission to ensure that Dr. King’s wisdom continues to resonate through her work. As the founder of The Verna Myers Co. (TVMC), she has leveraged her upbringing to establish herself as a powerhouse in the arena of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Having previously served as Netflix’s vice president of inclusion strategy, she has made a substantial impact on the ways in which people approach the work of DEI. Through TVMC, Myers advises corporations and universities, offers DEI online training courses and does keynote speeches, spreading the message about the best ways to incorporate inclusion within every aspect of our lives.
“We started off by helping people recognize that there needs to be a strategy rather than just having events and even having training,” she said. “We started to do cultural assessments. What are people experiencing, what are the strengths, where are the areas that need more shoring up and change?
“We did a lot of strategic planning, assessments and we did an enormous amount of training, we call them workshops,” she added. “What we discovered was that there were a lot of people who morally have this idea that they want to be equal and yet they aren’t aware of all the ways in which they may be creating an exclusive environment.”
Before Myers started TVMC, she worked as a Harvard-trained lawyer, driven by her dedication to civil rights. She wanted to ensure that equality was extended to all–especially Black people, women, and the like.
“I got to law school and realized that often the law is the tool of folks who are already in power and already dominant and already actually responsible for creating unfair structures and systems within our society. So that was a bit of a blow,” she said of that experience. She added, “While it’s also true that lawyers are extremely important in winning rights and changing laws, more of what I saw in law school was men, especially, figuring out ways to manipulate the law so that it ultimately kept them in power.”
Myers went on to practice at a predominantly White law firm in Boston. Eventually, however, she realized she could do more impactful, equity-driven work elsewhere. As she began to consider what her calling was, she became involved in a minority-owned law firm, which ended up being an incredibly enriching experience.
Through the experience, she became passionate about advocating for more representation of Black lawyers in Boston law firms, particularly given Boston’s reputation as a city inhospitable to Black folks. This drive led her to assume the role of executive director of an organization focused on addressing the shortage of lawyers of color, a group now known as the Boston Lawyers Group.
From there, the attorney general of Massachusetts invited Myers to develop a diversity practice within his office. Serving as his deputy chief of staff, she focused on crucial issues such as combatting sexual harassment and increasing the representation of lawyers of color.
“Of the things that I did, a lot of it was focused on diversity and on creating environments where people of different backgrounds can thrive,” she said. “It was also about reaching out to the larger public from all sorts of diverse communities for them to actually recognize that the attorney general was a place where they could come and get protection and have the laws actually work for them.”
After a period of reflection, Myers came to the realization that she wanted to be her own boss and work independently. Motivated by this aspiration, she founded TVMC.
“I set out to create my own diversity consulting practice because I could see that in every organization, there needed to be a specific strategy for how that organization was going to not only bring in people who had been historically excluded, but actually create a kind of environment that would allow those people to succeed,” she said, later adding, “I wanted to talk more with leaders about what it looks like to create an environment that was conducive to the success of women and people of color –– at the time those were the groups that we really focused on.”
In 2018, Myers took on the inaugural role of vice president of inclusion strategy at Netflix. She was able to host in-person workshops, have intimate conversations with vice presidents at the company and get everyone on the same page about Netflix’s developing approach to DEI.
“It is such an incredible place that is very motivated by the culture of curiosity and the culture of feedback, and all of these things serve DEI very well,” she said about Netflix. “It’s also a culture of being direct, a culture that invites dissent, a culture that asks leaders to account for their behavior or to actually be aware when they make mistakes. It’s a very humble culture, too.”
She then introduced the idea of having an “inclusive lens” to Netflix, encouraging people to think about inclusion within every part of their work –– even when the diversity and inclusion team is not in the room. She encouraged folks to not only think about how they speak to their team, but also about how their content reflects their commitments.
“Who’s represented, who’s not represented in our content?” she said. “Who’s directing? Who’s writing? Who’s acting? How authentic is the story we’re telling? But on the tech side, we were also asking people, how can people access our service? Can people who are deaf actually enjoy our service? Can people who are blind actually take advantage of our service?”
Myers ultimately left her role with Netflix in 2023, returning to her work with TVMC.
“When I first entered Netflix, they were so kind but I said, ‘You know, I have my own business, I really love what I’m doing, I don’t know if I wanna come,’” she said. “And they were like, ‘But you’re going to really help us, we really need this, we’re trying to entertain the world and we need to have the skills to do that.’ So they convinced me. But I was never planning to stay for a long time and they knew that.”
Myers has authored her own books, including “What If I Say the Wrong Thing? 25 Habits for Culturally Effective People” and “Moving Diversity Forward: How to Go from Well-Meaning to Well-Doing.”
As she moves forward, she aims to emphasize that the work of DEI begins first and foremost with oneself.
“One of the things that I really want to talk about is the importance of spiritual tools,” she said. “So much about being a person who can help DEI move forward starts first within us, which means that we need to be compassionate to ourselves and to others. We need to show grace to ourselves and others. We need to learn how to forgive, to repair often and regenerate. I want to talk about those and integrate those in the work that I’m doing.”