May 4th, 2011
Inclusion is not about being politically correct…I would say that political correctness actually gets in the way of inclusion. Inclusion is not about giving everyone a trophy or about a place where everybody is best friends with everybody else. I think that these are dismissive and lazy ideas regarding inclusion. Inclusion is also not about niceness, or tolerance or sensitivity.
Inclusion is about the nature of the relationship between a social group (family, neighborhood, team, organization, community, nation, etc.) and its environment.
Inclusion is about the ability of a social group to fully utilize the resources it has access to, inside and outside of the actual group.
Inclusion is about the capacity of a social group to include difference…difference in people, practice and perspective.
It kind of matters.
The question is not “are you inclusive?” Inclusion is not a yes/no or an on/off thing. Social groups are exclusive by nature…part of their identity is rooted in who gets in and who does not. The questions that matter are:
- who is included (and what is the evidence to support this)?
- who is not included (and what is the evidence to support this)?
- is this the optimal approach for us moving forward (and what is the evidence to support this)?
Organizations are often not able and or willing to talk about these questions, but organizations are often not willing and able to talk about much of the stuff that really and truly matters, this is one of the reasons why they tend to have short life spans.
There is an invisible filter around any social group determining who gets in and who does not…and because it is invisible we can easily pretend that it does not exist. Then it gets really easy for us to believe that who gets in and who does not get in is really about “them,” rather than about us. Any organization that is truly serious about talent, must be engaged in ongoing examination of their filter; this often unexamined filter is becoming increasingly important to the success and even survival of our organizations. Change happens faster now, and value creation happens differently now…so the more resistant we are to the entry of new information, ideas and individuals the more reckless we are being with our own future.
In considering the filters around your organization, a couple of things to keep in mind…
There are both intentional and unintentional filters. We deliberately keep some people out. In some situations you cannot be seriously considered for a job without a college degree. In some situations a criminal record can keep you out. Some organizations do not hire people with visible tattoos. Those are intentional policy decisions made about who gets in and who does not. The unintentional filters are both more difficult to evaluate and more important to evaluate. We have some built in bias (homophily) towards people that we think are like us and towards practices that are already in place. Regardless of how “open minded” or “non-judgmental” we like to think we are, labels, assumptions, stereotypes, attribution errors, unconscious bias, cognitive biases and implicit associations are always guiding and nudging our decisions about people. Organizations unwilling to be deliberate and proactive about reducing the impact of these tendencies will always be paying an unnecessary talent tax as their filters will be keeping people out for reasons other than talent.
There are external and internal filters. This is not just about who can actually join the organization, but also about whether those that join the organization are actually fully included. You might know of a family where someone has joined the family through marriage, but they are not fully included. They are consistently treated differently than other members of the family, they are routinely left out of important conversations, information is not freely shared with them, etc. The same can be true inside organizations and measurement often shows disparity in things like retention and engagement by gender, race, age, department, etc. Social network analysis can illuminate varying degrees of inclusion as well with connectivity, which can be correlated to who has access to information and influence, often skewed by things like age and gender.
So. In your organization…
- who is included (and what is the evidence to support this)?
- who is not included (and what is the evidence to support this)?
- is this the optimal approach for us moving forward (and what is the evidence to support this)?
Be good to each other.