August 24th, 2009
There are a lot of misunderstandings regarding the what, why and how of diversity work today. One of the most common confusions I run into is that focusing on diversity means “special treatment” for certain groups of people. If this is what people think diversity and inclusion efforts are about, it becomes pretty easy to understand apathy or resistance towards those efforts. If we want other folks to be supportive of what we are proposing, clarity is our friend…and there is room for a great deal more clarity in this field.
Diversity and inclusion are not about special treatment, but rather about increasing the capacity of your community or organization to identify talent and potential, to bring talent and potential inside and to utilize and retain that talent and potential. Despite our lofty aspirations (and some amount of delusion) this does not happen on its own. It requires intention.
It requires intention, because human nature (and some other stuff) gets in the way.
We often say things like “just hire the best person for the job and the rest will take care of itself.” When we do this, and when we demand more detail on “the business case for diversity” and when we tell each other “we don’t have any issues here” we are being a bit dishonest or a bit confused or a bit of both.
We are all biased.
We are all in myriad ways biased, despite our most happy and shiny intentions. This is a big part of the reason why we are still better at finding and hiring people that are like us than we are at finding and hiring the best people for the job. We are biased in many ways…we make multiple assumptions about people, situations and groups of people every single day. It is not a good person – bad person issue…it is a human nature issue. To question the “case for diversity” is to overlook the mountains of evidence showing that our decisions and evaluations regarding each other are far less scientific than we might like to think.
We have a default orientation towards likeness, commonality, and conformity. Things like stereotypes, cognitive dissonance, fundamental attribution error and cognitive biases can all play a powerful role in skewing our interpretation of others (and ourselves). Good intentions, without actions are worthless and I think that one of the defining challenges of our time is the need to better disentangle intentions from outcomes.
Regardless the wonderful intentions of the teachers and administrators, if a school district has racial disparities in graduation rates…there is a problem. Regardless the wonderful intentions of healthcare providers, if a hospital has disparities in outcomes…there is a problem. Regardless what wonderful things an organization says about its commitment to diversity and inclusion, if there is little diversity in senior management…there is a problem.
We far too often overlook disparate outcomes by convincing ourselves that the people involved are “good people.” Our ideas of good people and bad people are ill informed, of little real value and distract us from what really matters. Look at outcomes. If we truly believe the things that we say about people, about talent, about ability then we should never be satisfied with outcomes that are contrary to that. Look at outcomes, look at outcomes, look at outcomes. That is where what matters shows up.
Are you (as an individual, organization or community) being who you claim to be? Change starts with having the right intentions, but intentions alone are not enough. The evidence will show up in the outcomes.
Be good to each other.
Great take on why "good people" often pass by issues of difference and diversity and inclusion without solid positive action. Logic would seem to say if I’m a good person my behavior will lead to inclusion and fairness. Not realizing of course, that good people still have the limitations inherent in the human brain which will often make some wild assumptions. Don’t rely on "goodness", rely on measuring and thinking out loud with others to get to the meat of the matter. Outcomes people, OUTCOMES!
Great article. The only issue I see with selling the message about being outcome focussed is that it may be interpreted as tokenism – that the "outcomes" could be measured against the "quota" of people that large organisations feel they need to recruit to be "seen" as demonstrating diversity and inclusion strategies. When we reduce people to numbers in order to meet quotas, we have lost the true meaning of being inclusive.
Certainly gives us much to think about. Diversity in the workforce is something we strive for every day, both internally and for our customers.
Great article again. reminds me of my favorite quote by Nelson Mandela" A good head and a good heart is always a formidable combination"