April 17th, 2013
There is a company that invites me in for a song and dance every year or two. Same story every time… they have grown tired or bored or disappointed with their current diversity efforts and are ready to take things to the next level. They keep getting referred to me, and I keep going in for the song and dance because I would really like to light that place on fire. I always meet with a group of folks, very serious folks including their HR leader. The HR leader does the same thing every time, about halfway through the song and dance he interrupts with a chuckle and says something to the effect of: “I hate to make you uncomfortable, but you have got to tell me how you came to do diversity work as a white guy and if you see that as a problem…”
It is fantastic.
This company never hires me to do anything and I doubt they ever will. Now, let me be clear, I give companies a lot of reasons to not hire me. I often park in reserved parking spots. I am chronically under-dressed, I am tattooed, and generally unshaven. Sometimes I start a pitch by sharing the list of curse words I am going to try and not use during the pitch and people rarely find that as hilarious as I do. It is easy to find reasons to not hire me.
So, I am not saying that this company does not hire me to help them make some awesomesauce because I am a white guy, and this is not some absurd “its soooo hard to be a straight white guy today” post…not at all. I have and continue to benefit from a great deal of privilege connected to my social identity, and it follows me pretty much everywhere I go.
But I think when you are surprised that “this person” is interested in “this work” it gets kind of hard to give them full consideration. You are not really comparing apples to apples anymore, because one of these things is clearly not an apple….and its difficult to actually consider what a candidate has to offer when a candidate just does not make sense to you.
This HR leader probably does not have anything against straight white guys, in fact he is one…go figure, right?
This is not an issue of hatred or intentional discrimination, but of expectations. We have stereotypical expectations for many professions…nurse, librarian, accountant, basketball player, engineer. Are we as individuals and organizations truly able to identify talent even when the packaging does not meet our expectations?
Be good to each other.
Great point about stereotypical expectations and ggod for you to not try to conform. One of my mentors tells a story about how she sat in her car outside of a potential client’s office for days that had turned her away multiple times to try to figure out why the “other guys” kept winning the bids. She observed they all wore suits and glasses and carried expensive looking briefcases. So next time she went to pitch she dressed to match expectations and won. Was it the change in attire? Who knows, but it likely had something to do with the expectations you are talking about. That was 20 years ago though. We have all changed and it behooves us to be mindful of the stereotypes we bring to any conversation lest we start listening to the persona instead of the person. When we do that we miss a whole lot of value!
Hello Joe,
You are on fire with this last set of posts (and the preceding ones were also incandescent, of course). I have been compelled of late by Roman Krznaric’s discussions around “outrospection” and the need to nurture our cognitive empathetic capacity. We construct unreasonable expectations of others because we have developed a framework of the world according to our own vision, needs and egos. Unless we learn to walk in other people’s shoes, we are destined to be bemused as to why the world doesn’t always conform to our understanding.
I shall plug my own related post here, which draws out that point a little further: http://squishtalks.com/2013/04/14/revisiting-to-kill-a-mockingbird/
Thanks for the intriguing posts, Joe.
Stuart