Jenny just walked into your office and confessed her life is falling apart due to an addiction to Vicodin.
Tom just showed up in a dress and used what appears to be the wrong bathroom.
Your reaction to these events says a lot about how ready you are to be a manager in the coming decade. Your company is not likely to be of much help.
I recently finished reading Mike Isaac’s “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.” It’s the story of how Uber rose from humble beginnings to become a Silicon Valley unicorn, then stumbled from the top as its bro-tastic culture caused it to be tone-deaf to the world around it via repeated PR fiascos.
The cultural challenges led to the ouster of founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, who was replaced by former Expedia leader Dara Khosrowshahi (still CEO at Uber).
To illustrate the cultural overhaul underway at Uber, let’s look at some old founder-driven values under Kalanick, then compare those to new values rolled out under Khosrowshahi:
Old Uber Values: Meritocracy, toe-stepping, always be hustlin’.
New Uber Values: We build globally/live locally, we celebrate differences, we do the right thing.
Company values must evolve over time. Uber was late to make the cultural change, which underscores an important reality in most workplaces. Almost every people manager faces change happening faster than organizational infrastructure or company values can accommodate.
Great managers adapt before they are forced to and usually before the company sponsors cultural change.
Change is everywhere in society and comes at us fast. You’re reading about the drug use facing corporate America in this issue of Workforce. Opioid addiction, legalization trends and more are upon us. Company policy regarding hot button issues naturally trails the change we see outside the workplace. The fact that cultural change happens faster than companies can pivot is why one of the most important manager competencies in today’s world is rapid inclusion and empathy.
Consider the following realities:
You’re a leader.
You’re full of personal thoughts, a specific background and some bias.
When change comes and you’re asked to consider the rights of yet another special class of people or individuals, you may react as if it’s a burden or worse. You can say it’s all gone too far. Some will agree with you.
But you’ll ultimately acknowledge the rights and needs of the segment of people in front of you, or you won’t be allowed to lead anymore.
History shows this cycle of events to be true. Look at all societal change and trailing legislation from yesterday’s Title VII to today’s LBGTQ+ conversations and emerging laws. Once societal change reaches critical mass, mandates come to the workplace. It’s just a matter of time.
Most of us don’t work for a company like Uber in crisis and as a result, cultural expectations related to inclusion and empathy are less clear. That means you’re on your own as policy at your company trails societal change. What if you weren’t late the game? What if you as a leader made it a priority to make all feel welcome and equal in your company and on your team?
Great managers adapt before they are forced to and before the company sponsors cultural change.
If that was your approach, you’d find the people in question — the special class of people currently causing others discomfort — incredibly willing to work for you and, just as importantly, freed to do their best work. You’d be maximizing your ability to get great work from the employees you have.
Many of you are HR pros and leaders working for companies stuck in the middle. Your company is slow to pivot on societal change for many reasons.
But that glacial corporate reaction to change is an opportunity. While you likely can’t change corporate policy in an agile fashion, you can still lead and train others on the business opportunity that happens when you treat people the right way.
When you’re early on inclusion and show empathy, a funny thing happens. Performance and the ability for someone to do their best work goes up. Word spreads about your empathy and the candidate pool expands. Managers start to have their own gravity from a cultural perspective
None of us are perfect when it comes to the change required as society evolves. But the best managers and leaders are moving quicker through the cycle to acceptance, and they’re viewed as a manager of choice as a result.
Uber was not an inclusive or empathetic company until it was forced to change. You don’t have to wait on your company to dictate inclusion. Be early on acceptance.
As the 21st century dawned, enrollment in university MBA programs was a virtual rainbow of diversity. In the early 2000s, MBA graduates were comprised of 36.2 percent people of color and 40.7 percent of grads were women, while 39.1 percent were white males.
At about the same time, chief executive roles were predominately occupied by males, most of whom were white. More than 89 percent of white men and women occupied the chief executive’s chair as of 2005, with 76 percent of those executives being male.
Considering that getting an MBA is generally a key element to a career path leading to the C-suite, the following years should have seen a succession of female and minority executives ascending to leadership roles.
That doesn’t appear to be the case, according to the research department of Human Capital Media, Workforce’s parent company, which compiled data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics annual digest. The data show that diversity in the C-suite has not kept up with MBA graduation patterns of the past two decades.
In fact, little appears to have changed since that graduating class of 2000-01. As of 2018, the most recent data available, the numbers have barely budged, with 73.1 percent of chief executives who are men and 89.5 percent who are white.
Yet mounting evidence points to diverse leadership as an economic driver. “Delivering Through Diversity,” a 2018 study by consulting firm McKinsey & Co., found that gender-diverse companies are 21 percent more likely to outperform their non-gender-diverse peers financially, and that the number for ethnic and cultural diversity is 30 percent.
A September 2019 report released by global communications company Weber Shandwick meanwhile found that when diversity is closely aligned with the overall business strategy, companies see a positive impact on reputation, employee retention and financial success. Among organizations that align their diversity strategy with their business strategy, 66 percent of diversity leaders said that D&I is an important driver of financial performance, the study found.
Even so, government data show that a diversity shortage continues to afflict executive level positions.
Author Pamela Newkirk
With research showing that the executive pipeline has been filled with diverse MBA graduates for two decades, it begs the question of where did these candidates go? And if diverse leadership indeed pushes the financial needle, as the evidence shows, then why has corporate America turned its back on this pipeline of ready-made diverse executives?
“In the 1960s, we had begun to see change. The doors were finally open to people who had historically been left out,” said Pamela Newkirk, a professor of journalism at New York University whose new book “Diversity, Inc.” takes a deep look into how workplace diversity efforts have done little to bring equality into America’s major industries and institutions.
The 1960s specifically saw efforts like affirmative action implemented to make up for the legacy of slavery and the legal discrimination that followed the end of slavery, she said. These efforts were beginning to see positive results but ultimately saw adverse responses from people who challenged affirmative action with claims of reverse discrimination.
By the 1970s, diversity numbers were barely seeing change in fields from corporate America to higher education to major media.
“Society has not been able to come to terms with ways to address this that don’t trigger the kind of backlash we’ve seen time again,” she said.
With research showing that the executive pipeline has been filled with diverse MBA graduates for two decades, it begs the question of where did these candidates go?
Rethinking the Talent Pool
Most leaders don’t know what it means to lead diversity, said Courtney Hamilton, managing director at The Miles Group, a management consulting company based in New York. Consciously or not, they may lean toward conformity and then lose the wider talent pool along the way.
Building a diverse pipeline for organizational leadership comes down to what companies are doing in hiring and promotions, she said.
Many companies try to “reverse engineer” diversity in their teams when a position opens up, she said. While it’s not bad to think about diversity when looking to hire, that is more of a reactive than a proactive strategy.
“What people miss in building a diverse pipeline and leading inclusively [is that it] needs to be front and center for organizations every single day. There is no Band-Aid. If you want that pipeline of talent, it needs to be a value and priority,” Hamilton said.
Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics show that diversity in the C-suite has not kept up with MBA graduation patterns of the past two decades.
Kevin Groves, associate professor of management at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School, said that many organizations fall into the trap of allowing boards or management teams to follow their intuition to pick new members of the leadership team. This intuitive judgment leads to a less diverse talent pool.
There is a way around this trap, he said: a standardized review process that is not exclusively based on the board’s judgment. This formalized talent review should be parallel to but separate from the annual performance review.
Molly Brennan, Koya Leadership Partners
It’s a tough hurdle to overcome, Groves stressed. It comes naturally to employers to believe that they know their talent best and can be reliant on their own judgment for these big decisions. This isn’t to say that the executive team should ignore their judgment completely, but the starting point for the candidate pool should be something standardized and data-driven rather than intuitive.
What’s especially helpful in diversity hiring is casting a wide net and “not assuming that when it comes to placement of key executive roles, the only place that can come from is an heir apparent,” Groves said.
Deloitte is one organization that has worked to expand its talent pool. While the professional services industry has historically looked toward a small set of specific universities to recruit from, Deloitte is making room for those schools previously overlooked like state schools and historically black colleges, said Terri Cooper, the firm’s chief inclusion officer.
Opening the search to a wider range of people allows for a more diverse group of candidates. But the benefits go beyond that, Cooper said. Looking toward the future of work, candidates with specific skills — rather than candidates with degrees from a specific school — are likely to be the right fit for a role.
It’s important to “make sure that your aperture isn’t so specific that it’s preventing the opportunity to bring that greater diversity into the fray,” Cooper said.
Diversifying the C-Suite
Rising to a C-suite position is the culmination of many experiences that start much earlier in a person’s career, like the opportunity to rise through the ranks in management positions. Such management roles are not particularly diversity-friendly.
Terri Cooper, chief inclusion officer at Deloitte
BLS data show that 60 percent of those in management positions are men versus 40 percent who are women, and 77.9 percent of those in management are white while the numbers are much smaller for black, Asian and Latinx populations. Moving to positions higher up the corporate ladder, the gap becomes wider, with a chief executive population that is only 26.9 percent women and 14.8 percent people of color.
There’s more opportunity to tackle diversity at the management level than the executive level because the population is larger and less competitive. While management positions make up 5.3 percent of the total workforce, chief executives only make up 0.1 percent, according to 2018 BLS data.
Studies show that people in underrepresented groups face many opportunity roadblocks such as fewer mentorship or sponsorship opportunities and fewer opportunities for growth within the organization, said Molly Brennan, founding partner and executive vice president of Boston-based executive search firm Koya Leadership Partners.
“This idea that there’s not a lot of qualified candidates [from] underrepresented groups out there is a false one,” she said. “There’s a whole host of diverse, qualified people who are ready, willing and able to take on leadership roles.”
Cooper said recruiting diverse talent is not the biggest challenge most organizations have. Rather, it’s advancing them within the organization to higher positions.
A key component to ensuring that talent advances is that companies must be more intentional about what an inclusive leader is and how the organization can hold leaders accountable to supporting diversity. This doesn’t mean just the most senior level of leadership but anyone who is in charge of managing people.
Deloitte relies on six components of an inclusive leader, Cooper said. They include a personal commitment to diversity, creating a work environment that allows people to identify bad behavior and being curious about others’ backgrounds and heritages.
The fundamental component here is that leaders make sure individuals can be their most authentic self at work, she said. If people are experiencing bias, it has a negative effect on their productivity, happiness, confidence and well-being, she added.
“Ultimately, if you’re experiencing that, of course you’re going to leave the organization. You’re going to look to find somewhere else where you feel you’re accepted for who you are,” she said.
There are many ways in which organizations can hold leaders accountable, Cooper said. They can set specific diversity goals for leaders and measure their success reaching those goals. They can also have leaders share specifically what initiatives they have taken to create an inclusive environment and what their recent experiences have been on mentoring or sponsoring people who don’t look, think or sound like them.
Further, other people should be able to comment on their leaders, Cooper said. Deloitte holds an expansive talent survey annually, and eight to 10 questions are specifically geared toward how inclusive of a culture they experience. Questions include: Do you feel like you’re being professionally developed? And do you feel as if you belong on your team?
Dissecting this talent data allows Deloitte to see aggregate data at a particular client site, for example, and identify the lead partner there. They can help show if this partner is truly creating an inclusive work environment for their employees.
Deloitte is careful with this data so that no one can be identified based on their answers, and the information “enables us to determine where we need to focus to move the needle,” Cooper said.
A Partnership Between D&I and Recruiting
Lee Jourdan, chief diversity officer at Chevron
Focusing on the relationship between the diversity and recruiting teams is key to Deloitte’s strategy, Cooper said. Deloitte spends a lot of time looking at available candidates and also expanding their awareness of diversity beyond gender and race. How is the company making sure that it considers talent from different socioeconomic backgrounds or neurodiverse candidates, for example.
What’s critical from the recruiters is that they’re aware of their biases, Cooper said. Her department pushed unconscious bias training for the recruiting team, and there has been positive feedback to this.
Chevron also has recruiters participate in bias training, said Lee Jourdan, the energy giant’s chief diversity officer. It’s part of the influence that employee resource groups have had on recruiting.
Such groups have been a part of Chevron for 20 years, and they work with hiring teams by helping them communicate with a broader range of candidates and lead interviews. There are 63 chapters in 12 countries, and the groups represented include women, people of different races and ethnicities, people with disabilities and those from indigenous tribes.
Through bias training and their relationship with the resource groups, recruiters work on mitigating their biases. Jourdan said they have removed the requirement that a candidate has a specific number of years of experience to get a role. This can exclude people who have not been given the opportunity in the past to gain certain experience, he added.
Employee groups have also helped the global company consider different types of diversity per region or country, Jourdan said. For example, there are three major tribes in Nigeria, and people may be marginalized if they are not a part of one of these tribes, he said. Chevron’s diversity efforts there could partly be geared toward this group.
Making Diversity a Business Imperative
At executive search firm Koya, which mostly recruits for leadership positions at nonprofits, clients increasingly are expecting and requiring a diverse pool of talent, Brennan said. Their focus on making diversity a priority has seen promising results. Forty percent of its placed candidates are people of color, she said.
This number is much higher than the general leadership population. Brennan believes this is because they purposely and consciously set out to make this number high. It’s both what the client and the search firm want.
Aspirational diversity goals help Chevron continually create a more even playing field, Jourdan said. Rather than having specific diversity targets for individuals of underrepresented groups, he believes that aspirational numbers, whether or not they are reached in a given year, help the organization take on certain behaviors and move in a positive direction.
One place to look for these aspirational numbers is the demographics of individuals graduating from business school, Jourdan said.
“We believe that [diversity targets] drive the wrong behavior. We’re vocal about the fact that we don’t do those,” Jourdan said. Rather, he said that Chevron holds leaders accountable to move toward improving numbers to achieve the aspirational goals.
Most importantly, it takes leadership and intention for diversity to work, author Newkirk said.
She stressed something that Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said in an interview for her book. There must be a sense of justice, especially given the history of slavery and discrimination in the U.S.
“This is also an issue of justice. Without that mindset many diversity initiatives won’t really work,” Newkirk said.
Pamela Newkirk, author of “Diversity, Inc.,” award-winning journalist and New York University journalism professor, talked to Workforce about the diversity industry. She questions whether billion-dollar diversity programs have worked and explores why the progress has been so slow, challenging the workplace and individuals to do better in applying incentives and sparking a different conversation.
Workforce: Why did you decide to write “Diversity, Inc.”?
Pamela Newkirk: I was on a train, heading back from Washington, D.C. I was reading the paper about another disappointing diversity report, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, here we go again.” Every year we see this flood of reports, and every number turns out to be disappointing. Why is it that so much attention is given to diversity, but so little has been achieved?
As I say in the preface of my book, diversity has been a preoccupation for 30 years of my career, yet two fields in which I have been most closely aligned — journalism and higher education — have numbers that show radical underrepresentation of particularly African Americans and Latinx. Why is that? I wanted to lift the veil and look behind the scenes to see what is actually happening at these institutions and why it is that after so many years of hand-wringing, conversations, task forces, training sessions and hiring diversity czars, we’re still at this place where people of color are still radically underrepresented in most influential fields.
Workforce: What do you hope people take away from this book?
Newkirk: Part of what I hope to achieve in this book is contextualizing some of these racial misunderstandings that we have. A lot of it is due to our different experiences as Americans based on race. For instance, we can’t assume that a black American has the same relationship with the police force, the criminal justice system [and] higher education.
We have to look at the attitudes and customs in this country that [have] set us on different paths. Until we truly understand the role that race plays in the myriad of interactions that we have in this country, we’re always going to be in this place on misunderstanding and mistrust. Hopefully we can move the needle and not continue to resort to this same conversation that we’ve had for so many years.
Workforce: What do you think we can do better — as a society, as a workforce and as individuals?
Newkirk: We have to be honest about our intentions. To achieve diversity, there [have] to be true intentions, and it requires leadership from the very top to incentivize change. As many people who I interviewed during the course of my research have said: It’s not rocket science. But so many companies somehow act as if this is something that is so difficult to achieve. It has to come from the top, and people have to know that there are true incentives to make progress in this regard. Without incentives to move in that direction, and without believing that it’s truly a company priority, it’s not going to happen.
We also need to be honest about the ways in which race, ideology and history play into the current realities of people of color in the workplace and in society at large, and about some of these lingering attitudes about African Americans. For example, African American stereotypes and all these ideas that are deeply embedded in the social fabric play a role as well in diversity, or the lack thereof, in the workplace. If we still have these deeply embedded attitudes about who people are based on their race, that will be reflected in the workplace.
We don’t talk a lot about race in progressive settings. There’s usually this assumption that progressive workspaces are free of racial bias, yet what I find in my research is that many of the least diverse fields are those that are considered progressive — like the art world, Hollywood and higher education. Many of these assumptions that we make about progressives and liberals don’t really apply when we’re talking about race and equality.
You don’t need to be a bigot to not see anything wrong with these predominantly white workspaces. We have normalized the absence of people of color in so many fields.
That is what I most wanted to interrogate. Because it would be easy to point out one network that doesn’t have a great reputation on racial issues and say, “Yeah, that’s where the bias lies.” But what I wanted to do is to look even in the places where people of color would assume they would have natural allies because they are progressive people. Even there we see this radical underrepresentation of people of color. That’s where we really need to make progress, because if we’re not making progress in these progressive fields, then we know that we’re not going to make progress in places where people are more blatant about their racial biases.
Workforce: Why do you think some people are still claiming that this isn’t an issue today?
Newkirk: Often times people will see one or two people of color and think, “Oh, there we go, that’s diverse.” I think — especially in fields where people of color are so radically underrepresented — that the one or two who are there are pointed out as proof that there is diversity when that is not what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about superficial, symbolic diversity. We’re talking about real diversity.
It’s a critical issue for this country, [and] it’s a critical issue for our world. We have so many people whose talents are being overlooked or whose potential is not being developed because we have this idea of who should be in these fields. We even have an idea of who is American. We need to interrogate our notions about fairness, equality and opportunity. All these ideas are bubbling up — especially now due to who is in the White House and the whole focus on immigration and diversity — and not in a positive way.
Workforce: Do you think that the current political divide in this country is amplifying this issue?
Newkirk: Fifty years ago, we had President Lyndon Johnson who kind of embraced this whole notion of diversity [and] inclusion of people of color in fields and in segments of America from which they had historically been excluded. Now, 50 years later, we have a president who has openly attacked immigrants of color, who has vilified urban blacks and who has openly attacked the ideals of diversity. We’re going in the opposite direction at a time when the demographics are showing that we really need to make progress in this area. It’s hurting our country.
In most organizations today, leadership competencies are being revised due to the impact of the changing dynamics of globalization, technology advancements and demographic shifts.
Among these revisions, there is a significant focus on inclusiveness as a distinguishing leadership competency.
It is my contention that inclusiveness is not a new leadership competency. Leadership hasn’t fundamentally changed, and inclusive ways of working have always been a part of the traits and skills that leaders need to exhibit.
Many aspects of inclusive leadership are connected to more traditional leadership competencies:
Open-mindedness: Inclusiveness is characterized by having a mind both open and attuned to differences. Inclusive leaders value differences, exhibit curiosity to know more about the world around them and are not opposed to being proven wrong in the spirit of learning.
Pritika Padhi
This is not very different from the learning agility that we expect leaders to demonstrate, in terms of quickly grasping and adapting to changes. Understanding the limiting nature of beliefs (whether their own or that of others) helps leaders be open to change and more diverse experiences that can expand their beliefs and views.
Freedom to dissent: The role of a leader is critical in fostering an inclusive climate at the workplace. This entails creating an environment where employees feel safe and empowered to dissent with and challenge each other.
Not surprisingly, this has always been a leadership requirement as it promotes divergent viewpoints that are fundamental to sustaining innovation and creativity in the organization. The courage to question norms and the freedom to take risks is also a characteristic of teams and leaders that zealously guard their integrity.
Awareness and understanding: Inclusiveness begins with a better understanding of self. There is a need to be conscious and mindful of our biases (conscious and unconscious) and mental blind spots.
Checking for biases is not just good for a healthy work environment. Biases are threats to clear judgment, and any decision-making or critical thinking competency has an aspect of developing awareness of one’s biases.
However, enhanced self-awareness is not enough. There is also a need to accept and respect others’ beliefs and choices. Respect is a fundamental leadership trait that cuts across several competencies like collaboration and interpersonal effectiveness.
Empathy: Empathy is the ability to view things from different perspectives. It is a step above acknowledging or respecting differences. Authentic inclusiveness stems from an ability to place oneself in someone else’s shoes to understand their point of view and their approaches and challenges.
This is a fundamental trait that helps people relate to each other on a deeper level and is a building block of effective communication. Even with a homogeneous team, an empathetic leader is likely to connect with the team members more effectively than an unempathetic one.
Inclusiveness, then, is not new. Neither is diversity, for that matter. This should be reassuring for leaders and stakeholders invested in employee and leadership development. The focus on inclusiveness is not a fad. It is not a half-baked reaction to emerging workplace developments. It is a fundamental leadership challenge about bringing people together with different personalities, backgrounds, mindsets and ways of working in a way that allows them to contribute their whole selves, leading to significant competitive advantage over homogeneous or conforming teams.
Conversations on developing greater inclusiveness at workplace today are centred heavily on changing the attitudes and ways of working of the groups that have majority representation in the workforce. That makes sense because the onus of inclusion cannot be on underrepresented groups that may not have the power or influence to bring about change.
But that does not mean that underrepresented groups need to sit around helplessly until the work environment changes substantially to make them feel included. There is plenty that they can do, in their own limited spheres of influence, to make themselves heard and even help their leaders make the workplace more inclusive for them.
Bolster your voice – The most obvious idea is to start or participate in employee resource groups. These are groups of employees with shared backgrounds or life stages that come together to support each other by sharing experiences and aiding in personal and professional development.
If your organisation doesn’t have one that meets your requirements already, it is not a bad idea to take initiative to build one. More likely than not, management would be happy to provide resources to help your group interact as it will help them understand more about your group and its needs.
An ERG is not the same as informal corridor conversations with employees of your background. It needs to have a formal structure to provide an effective forum for employees to come together and discuss issues and ways of supporting each other. It can also be a great way to brainstorm further on what actions the group can take to make the workplace more inclusive.
Question assumptions – At the root of all biases and misunderstandings are ill-founded assumptions. It is a human fallacy to jump to conclusions quickly, and we don’t always have the time or mind-space to think through our impressions in detail.
Question these assumptions, both those of others or your own. Ask clarifying questions to others when their behaviour does not seem inclusive to you. “Why do you say that?” or “Is this the reason why you think this way?” Are they operating out of biases or do they have other doubts in their mind? Provide clarifying information to help bust their assumptions and see the other sides of the story.
This is also a good way to test your own assumptions. Are you assuming that the other person is viewing you in a certain light, without checking with them on their actual opinions? Even if your assumptions get confirmed, you will gain more information and insights as a basis for further exploration.
Pritika Padhi
Speak up when you see behaviours that exclude – It is dangerous to be a silent bystander to an act of exclusion. Silence often implies condoning. If you see someone behave in a way that excludes you or a colleague, call it out.
This need not be confrontational. Use your situational judgement to gauge how best to address it tactfully. You can speak in private to the person who acted that way, use humour to diffuse the tension while bringing the person’s attention to their behaviour, or be firm about stating openly that the behaviour was not okay. If you see your colleague at the receiving end of such behaviour, then check-in with them on how they are feeling and how you can support them. At the same time, you will also have to be open to feedback from others on your behaviours that may make feel them excluded.
Interact with different people – Workplace interactions often get limited to departments or colleagues who are physically seated close to you. It is a good idea to walk around and introduce yourself as well as initiate interactions with people from different areas across the organisation.
If this seems daunting to those who are more introverted, then you can also create planned forums to help diverse employees come together. This is the opposite of an ERG, where you are encouraging interactions with people from different backgrounds. Take time to talk about things outside of work in these interactions or forums. This is a great way to understand other people as individuals and build relationships that ease the flow of communication. Being inclusive is easier if we understand each other better and feel more connected with them.
Also read: The ROI of Diversity and Inclusion Efforts
Be a part of a mentoring relationship – Being in a mentoring relationship gives you the opportunity to influence another person’s thoughts and behaviours. It is a fantastic way to share experiences and learn each other’s viewpoints. Irrespective of the topic you choose to mentor someone on, there is always room for you to help them understand what behaviours, in the domain that they are working in, can help promote inclusion. Alternatively, as a mentee, you can take the lead in some reverse mentoring by helping your mentor understand what inclusion means to you.
Inclusiveness is a two-way street. While majority groups have a long way to go in terms of behaving in more inclusive manners at the workplace, it is also important that underrepresented groups get proactively involved in the dialogue so that they feel heard and are able to contribute positively.
If 2016 brought us anything, it’s the death of the status quo. If 2016 has taught us anything, it’s that those of us who have a progressive vision for the workplace — and humanity in general — must change our tactics. Evolutionary leaders committed to increasing diversity, equity and inclusiveness in American workplaces aren’t exempt. Nothing less than a safe, abundant and mutually prosperous future is at stake.
One tactic that needs to change is how we think, speak, and act around diversity and inclusiveness. Voices that have been emboldened by President-elect Donald Trump, plus a series of articles published this summer in the Harvard Business Review, are the most recent jury that’s delivered a landmark verdict: “Old school” diversity approaches don’t work.
“Old School” Diversity doesn’t work because it:
Focuses primarily on what I call “the Skittles Approach” — increasing the numbers of underrepresented groups (especially people of color) to create a more colorful rainbow.
Defines no clear, meaningful goals or specific outcomes (beyond changing racial or gender demographics).
Conducts its main activities around compliance with various laws, regulations and industry- specific requirements.
Outside of compliance, is mainly motivated by social justice values, or a desire to look good or “do the right thing.”
Can have a “charity” feel since it’s oriented toward helping members of certain groups — usually historically marginalized groups like women, people of color, LGBT and/or people with disabilities.
Includes an often unspoken belief that investing in diversity and inclusion means sacrificing quality and excellence.
Promotes initiatives owned solely by one area or department (typically HR or a dedicated diversity office).
Promotes initiatives with no accountability and limited power to effect meaningful change.
Pays little to no attention to developing leaders or creating a great culture.
Involves training that provides awareness and knowledge, but no skill building or clear, actionable takeaways.
Explores the cultural or intercultural dynamics of human difference devoid of power relationships.
However, “new school” diversity does work, because it:
Focuses on attracting more members of strategic underrepresented groups plus creating an inclusive culture where everyone can bring their brilliance and excellence to work (and without which diversity alone can impede progress and diminish results).
Defines measurable outcomes that are mission critical.
Conducts its main activities around reducing the unintended effects of individual and systemic biases; developing leaders’ ability to make effective, equitable decisions; and creating an inclusive culture where brilliance and excellence thrive.
Is mainly motivated by meaningful, high-stakes business goals which either solve an existing pressing problem or take the organization from good to great.
Recognizes and demonstrates that a diverse, inclusive environment includes and benefits everyone.
Requires that diversity and inclusiveness results be owned by senior leaders in all areas including finance.
Holds all leaders and employees accountable for diversity results and inclusive behaviors.
Views developing effective leaders and creating a great culture as top priorities for senior leaders, and acted on as integral to the organization’s success.
Involves training that provides skill building and clear, actionable takeaways that are reinforced and hardwired in daily operations.
Explores and navigates the cultural and intercultural dynamics of human difference within the context of unequal power relationships in the organization and society at large
Management guru W. Edwards Deming once said, “Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.” To survive we must adapt to new information and new realities.
Just as it’s clear (in dozens of studies) that New School Diversity works, it’s clear the Old School way has outlived its usefulness, and we must evolve. Courageous leaders and visionary organizations are already evolving, and leveraging the brilliance and excellence unleashed by a commitment to New School Diversity.
Are you ready to join them? Share your success stories and questions below, and let me know how I can help you get there! #NewSchoolDandI.
Susana Rinderle is president of Susana Rinderle Consulting and a trainer, coach, speaker, author and diversity & inclusion expert. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com
Your reaction to these events says a lot about how ready you are to be a manager in the coming decade. Your company is not likely to be of much help.
We also need to be honest about the ways in which race, ideology and history play into the current realities of people of color in the workplace and in society at large, and about some of these lingering attitudes about African Americans. For example, African American stereotypes and all these ideas that are deeply embedded in the social fabric play a role as well in diversity, or the lack thereof, in the workplace. If we still have these deeply embedded attitudes about who people are based on their race, that will be reflected in the workplace.
