“I Wanted To Be a FBI Agent” — The Career Arc of Katie Gailes

Katie Gailes is a proud native North Carolinian who has devoted most of her professional life to helping small business owners and entrepreneurs. She attended Bennett College for Women in Greensboro and the Duke University Fuqua School of Business. After a long career with IBM, Katie launched a consulting practice, which she ran full-time for six years. She was a counselor in the Growing American Through Entrepreneurship (GATE) program at the NC Rural Economic Development Center where she helped displaced workers in rural North Carolina start businesses. Through this program and her consulting practice, Katie has trained or worked with over 1,000 small business owners and entrepreneurs. Her strength is strategic planning, messaging, and creative problem solving. She is currently the Director of Entrepreneurship Initiatives at Wake Tech, where she runs several projects like LaunchWakeCounty and LaunchWakeTech. She is also the co-Founder of Our Stories: Brave Conversations on Race and a 2012 Goodmon Fellow.

“Well, I was very unhappy with him. So I wrote myself into his lunch hour and thought, I’ll go down there and tell him what I think and at least, he won’t be able to eat lunch. I went in dressed in gauchos and hair all over the place and purple nail polish and bangles all up and down my sleeves and I was very curt with him and very aggressive.

In September, I get a letter from IBM saying we want you to come in and interview.”

Kristine: Katie, when I read interviews with you they tend to go something like “She was with IBM for 27 years and then…” I’m curious to dig into those 27 years, or how you would trace the evolution of your career.

Katie: As the 11th of 12 children and the first one to go to college, I was not being very strategic. It was about survival. I didn’t see anybody in my community that I wanted to emulate, but I did know that the people that I looked up to most in school were both Bennett graduates. And so of course I ended up at Bennett College because nobody in my family knew how to fill out college applications or anything about that process, and it was the only place I applied to.

Even when I started working with IBM, there was no grand plan. I had no desire to work with computers, none. In fact when I went to school at first I was gonna major in sociology — I think if you grew up in an environment where you see a lot of social issues, you’re drawn to that, but the registration line was so long for sociology and so short for business administration, that I just lined up for business administration. But then I found out I would have to take a bunch of math classes in my first two year. And I didn’t want to take that. So I switched into an interdisciplinary studies program where you basically created your own curriculum.

My ultimate goal, at first, was to get a four year degree, then go to law school and join the FBI. I wanted to be like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. That was my thing. I was going to be gun-toting, adventure-seeking FBI agent. I grew up between two very large boys — outdoors men. I played touch football in the street, rode my bike into the woods, shot Sparrows with a BB gun then cleaned them in the Creek and cooked them over a spit made of twigs. So, the life of an FBI agent seemed adventurous and really appealed to me. One of the things about the interdisciplinary studies program was that you create your own project, outside of the classroom. So my project was to go audit the Greensboro police department, which I did for a semester. I got to the juvenile department and saw photos of abused children and I thought, well maybe I don’t want to be an FBI agent because I’m not sure I could be objective when I found the people who did this to these children. So back I abandoned the FBI agent dream.

Because I was putting myself through college, I had a lot of cooperative education assignments and paid internships. One of my jobs was working in the placement office. So employers would come on campus to interview students and my job was to manage their schedule. One afternoon I had several young ladies with 3.6 and 3.7 GPA’s in math coming back from their interviews with IBM crying. Their dream was to work for IBM and the guy doing the hiring said he wouldn’t hire anyone without a 4.0 GPA.

Well, I was very unhappy with him. I thought that was really rude, unrealistic, and probably not true. So I wrote myself into his lunch hour and thought, I’ll go down there and tell him what I think and at least, he won’t be able to eat lunch. I went in, dressed in gauchos and hair all over the place and purple nail polish and bangles all up and down my sleeves and I was very curt with him and very aggressive.

In September, I get a letter from IBM saying we want you to come in and interview. And I was like, really?! Well why not? It’ll be good practice. The other job offers I got were from outside of Greensboro. So I went in, I did like three interviews. I wore the same outfit to every interview because you know, IBM back then had this reputation, very strict, you know, blue suits, white shirts, wingtips. My mother bought me a white shirt, a blue and white pinstripe suit and we found some high heel wingtips. I rolled my hair into a tight bowl, took off my purple nail polish, and did three interviews in that same suit. On the fourth interview, they offered me the job.

So my goal was never to work for them for long, but I said, well, I just got this Volkswagen. Let me pay for my car and then I leave. And then I got braces and I said, let me pay for these and then I’ll leave. And then I bought townhouse, and so on. I ended up with them for 27 years.

(At this point in our conversation, Katie’s grand niece wakes up and enters the Zoom screen, a tiny bundle of cuteness named Aspen).

Kristine: Tell me about that time at IBM.

Katie: So I started out as a technical person, can you believe that? My job was to crawl through every process in the company to give them an idea on what they should automate. Eventually I got promoted to the regional office, and then to my first management job in Roanoke, Virginia. My career at IBM was marked by a lot of firsts. I was the first Black female marketing manager in the Roanoke office.

While I was at IBM I got a MBA from Duke. I found out I was pregnant one month into starting the program. I was the first female student to give birth during the program. My class had the largest female enrollment in the history of the weekend program, but out of 40 students, there were stil only 8 women. My daughter ended up in the Duke brochure — because she was in my arms on graduation day.

Anyway, in 2006, I got laid off from IBM and decided to launch my own consulting firm. It was while I was doing some work with the Rural Center that I got a partial scholarship to attend Leadership Triangle. After that, I did some work with Wake Tech to re-envision how they think about their Center for Entrepreneurship. They asked me if I would run the new initiative, and here I am five years later.

Kristine: I know you recently co-founded Our Stories: Brave Conversations on Race. What made you want to create that organization?

Katie: In June, my friend Matthew Kane called me and said Katie, we gotta do something about the racial situation in our country. He shared that he had been involved in a Racial Study Circle in his church many years ago, that it changed his life and perspective. He wanted to start something similar and he wanted to collaborate with a person-of-color on the project. I have learned that when Matthew has an idea it is usually a good one. He came to me four years ago with the idea for an entrepreneurship program in Southeast Raleigh called LaunchRALEIGH. Now we have seven active towns under the LaunchWakeCounty program and have graduated over 400, primarily low resourced entrepreneurs and there are a total of 16 of these programs across the country. So, of course, I said that sounds good. But as a person who used to do the EEOC Annual Lecture every year at IBM…I got to watch everyone’s eyes roll back in their heads, Black people and white people alike, as they sat through it, asked a few questions, checked the box, and promptly went back to exactly what they were doing before. And I was just not at all interested in a group hug where everybody feels good about completing something but are not transformed. If we can’t create something that will actually change the hearts and minds of people, I don’t want to do it. So, we took a month to create the structure and identify and train the four facilitators for the two cohort pilot we conducted in July. We completed four cohorts in the fall as the second part of the pilot.

Our Stories is built on small group, facilitated conversations on race, aimed at changing the hearts and minds of people so that this country can find peace.

“In my opinion, one of the reasons many of our social and economic problems remain unsolved is that well-meaning people want a one size fits all solution to everything; especially those that primarily impact that which black people and other people of color need.”

Kristine: I imagine you were quite intentional in building the structure of the programming. What are the fundamentals of that structure?

Katie: I tell people this work is like losing weight. In most cases, when people drop 40 pounds in two months it all comes back. But somebody who’s steadily doing like a pound a week are changing their lifestyle. They’re changing their habits. They’re learning in a way that’s going to stick.

Our conversations are facilitated and they follow a pattern. Facilitators are the secret sauce. You know, if you go to Louvre and you just walk around by yourself, you’re going to see some interesting things. But if you hire a guide, they’re gonna point you to all the right things, the things that will make a real impression on you, and you’re going to learn more. Our facilitators are like those guides.

And we are all about having brave conversations. If you’re a white person and you’re really honest about your past behavior, what you understand, and what you believe, you might be afraid that people will judge you or call you a racist.. If you’re a Black person and you’re honest, then you might be perceived as militant or having a chip on your shoulder. There’s a lot of risk in this type of open conversation for everybody. So that’s why we chose brave. Anybody who participates in this program has to be brave enough to open up.

It’s a six week program and we meet for 90 minutes each week in10 person cohorts. The cohorts are put together deliberately; five whites and five people-of-color, no two people from the same organization, not too many folk from the same profession, and generational and gender diversity. We have a pattern that we follow for each session and guidelines that everyone agrees to before we begin.

This is a program about reflection. It’s the wide mouth of the funnel. What we’re trying to do, what we expect, is that everybody will walk out of this and say, oh my goodness, I need to do something, I want to do something, and I can do something.

Kristine: The program meets this moment well. To your point, I think a lot of people truly want to get engaged, but they enter into the engagement from a place of activation rather than a place of being grounded. For white people, we can perpetuate white saviorism from that place.

Katie: Yeah, there’s part of white privilege that says, I know more than you. I know what’s right for you, I know what you need. And so instead of being angry at them, I say, wait a minute, why don’t you go learn something about the people you want to help. Then you can be more effective. And for people-of-color, I say here is an opportunity to pull back the curtain of perception and experience, to listen, and to learn. When everyone is coming from a position of openness and a desire to understand, everybody learns.

We had a situation where one of the participants felt comfortable talking to me and he said “Katie, I really want to learn about black culture.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s wonderful. You want to learn about black culture? ’Cause I want to learn about white culture.” And he said, “well there is no one white culture because we are so diverse and there’s such a big population.” And I said “And yet, you think that there’s only one black culture and that by talking to me you’re going to learn all about black people. We are so simple and so much alike that you can just talk to a couple of people and you’ve got black culture covered.”

And he was like, “Oh yeah, that sounds pretty bad.” I said, “Yeah, it does, but it’s common because we’re the minority group and you’re the majority group. And it’s common to think, Oh, those people, they’re not as complicated. They’re not as sophisticated. There’s not as much to them. That’s it.”

It was wonderful that the two of us felt comfortable enough with each other to have this type of open discussion. That’s what OUR STORIES: Brave Conversations on Race allows to happen. We are connecting people at the heart level and building trust by learning from each other. In these conversations, everybody learns.

In my opinion, one of the reasons many of our social and economic problems remain unsolved is that well-meaning people want a one size fits all solution to everything; especially those that primarily impact that which black people and other people of color need.

Kristine: How can people support your work?

Katie: We need four things. First, we are looking for another nonprofit to adopt us as a fiscal sponsor. Second, we’re looking for people to apply and get in line to be in a conversation. We will have six cohorts of 10 people each this spring. You may not get placed right away because we were so deliberate in how we put the cohorts together. But you will get placed. Third, we welcome the opportunity to speak to other groups who think this offering would be of interest to their members. And, finally, we need donations. You can connect with us at https://ourstoriesonrace.org/