Diversity & Inclusion: Getting out of the Chicken & Egg Dilemma and Into Action
How can you attract diversity when you don’t yet understand how to operationalize inclusion, and how do you become inclusive with insufficient diversity on the inside to make your blind spots known to you? Image Copyright: https://www.123rf.com/profile_vectorlab
I wrote last month about getting out of the personal White bubble, that cocoon of filtered information that keeps us exchanging similar perspectives and blinds us to alternate ideas and beliefs. But what of getting your organization out of its bubble?
The Symptoms:
Many leaders of historically White organizations who try to do this work run into what I call the Diversity and Inclusion/Chicken and Egg Dilemma, DICE for short. It presents with the following symptoms. You realize that you’re in a homogenous bubble and you’re beginning to feel hemmed in by it. You know that diversity of thought is a creativity booster for your teams, and that a breadth of lived experiences leads to a breadth of perspectives. You understand that a diverse team will attract a wider range of clients, customers, members or students. You want to stay relevant in the rapidly changing demographics of your locale. Maybe you even want to challenge your own thinking as a leader to keep from getting stale. Perhaps you’ve even written goals or an aspirational DEI statement about all this. Yet you still aren’t making any significant progress. A DICE-y situation, indeed.
Anatomy of the Dilemma:
How do you attract constituents from outside the mainstream of your organization when you’re sitting squarely within it? And when you hire folks from communities that have been historically marginalized, what needs to change for them to feel welcome? How can you attract diversity when you don’t yet understand how to operationalize inclusion, and how do you become inclusive with insufficient diversity on the inside to make your blind spots known to you? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Many leaders get caught up in this tangle of thinking and throw up their hands in frustration, retreating to the head-in-the-sand, “we’re still OK as we are” position. Others delegate to people in HR or middle management, who also don’t have the skills and understandings to manage what is being asked of them. Some laudably invest in professional development for themselves and their staff, but find themselves unable to bridge from the personal to the organizational level of practice. A critical mass wants to make important changes, but nothing seems to get any traction. The organization predictably runs into difficulties hiring a more diverse staff; when they occasionally do, these new hires often don’t last long and can leave amid hard feelings all around. Everyone has the sense they’ve been set up to fail.
So how can these high level concepts become actionable in your organization? Start by uncovering the dominant cultural norms that are hiding in plain sight, possibly written into your policy documents in innocuous-sounding language.
A Quick Review of Dominant Cultural Norms
Cultural norms are an animating factor in whether an organization creates a sense of belonging, who feels that belonging, who blossoms to do their best work or become a loyal customer, and who withers or goes quietly away, too exhausted or disgusted to even tell you what went wrong.
When a dominant norm becomes ubiquitous it unintentionally suppresses other ways of being. Image credit: themonsterproject.org
These norms, or unwritten rules of group behavior, can be hard to notice because of how early in life we learn them - so early that they feel, well, normal (“This is how we do it”). They often develop to send a message of superiority (“This is the best way to do it”), and even ubiquity (“This is the only right way to be”). Because of this I refer to them as cultural ways of being.
In the US, dominant culture places intersecting norms on power and gender, framing a narrative that power is to be used in stereotypically masculine ways. This in particular can interfere with hiring, retention and promotion of people who grew up female or don’t conform to mainstream masculinity. Certain components of our dominant US norms - particularly those valuing competition, individualism, and expert status - get in the way of our collaboration and personal agency in dismantling racism.
Cultural ways of being are neither good nor bad, except to the extent that they become so dominant that they don’t allow alternatives.
Let me be clear: I am not saying that expertise has no value, or that competition can’t drive improvement, or that any of these norms must be expunged. These and other cultural ways of being are neither good nor bad, except to the extent that they become so dominant that they don’t allow alternatives. When this happens, the acceptable range of behaviors and attitudes narrows, and because we place values on our own ways of being, we make moral judgments about people who don’t conform. And this leads to a sense of exclusion, not inclusion.
How can you locate these hidden cultural norms?
Your organization can learn to recognize the blind spot of your cultural ways of being and also to notice and value alternative ways that are practiced outside your community. A Cultural Ways of Being audit process is a type of equity audit I’ve developed to help organizations recognize the limits of their inclusiveness and find ways to become more expansive. A Cultural Ways of Being audit will:
Examine policy and personnel documents for language that upholds dominant norms.
Illuminate alternative cultural norms and existing practices that validate them.
Develop non-judgmental vocabulary for talking about norms as ways of being.
Use these real-life examples to teach leaders, staff and community to notice, respect and discuss a range of cultural ways of being
Why is each of these vital?
Examining Documents for Dominant Norms:
If you’re having Diversity-Inclusion/Chicken and Egg problems despite having begun the work of transforming personal mindsets, it means that you need to look at the structures that scaffold your culture. These structures are found in your policy documents: handbooks, hiring and public relations documents, rubrics for supervision or advancement, and many more. After having audited a range of schools, religious organizations, mental health providers, and other organizations I can confidently say that the policy documents of any historically White organization will harbor the White cultural norms of its founders. As I said above, cultural norms are the unwritten rules, hiding in plain sight. People who come from outside your culture can see them, but they are invisible to people for whom they are truly normal.
Illuminating Alternate Norms:
The norms of West African cultures include Sankofa: "It is not wrong to go back for what has been left behind." In this worldview, it doesn't really matter which came first, chicken or egg.
Because the mission driven groups I work with start from a base of truly caring about doing good in the world, I almost always find something in the documents that could be built into a genuinely welcoming and inclusive policy. Becoming aware of these things allows the organization to become consciously competent, able to choose the most appropriate way of being for the situation at hand.
Teaching Cultural Ways of Being and Non-Judgmental Vocabulary:
Because, in words attributed to Peter Drucker, Culture eats strategy for breakfast, simply re-writing your handbook isn’t enough. Teaching a broader group how to recognize ways of being that feel familiar - or not - gives everyone a framework to talk about differences without resorting to loaded language. By using unique examples from your own policies, we can bring inclusion out of the abstract realm and ground it in shared experience.
Becoming aware of these things allows the organization to become consciously competent, able to choose the most appropriate way of being for the situation at hand.
A Common Example
Even when organizations interview candidates using equity best practices, they can wind up hiring someone very like themselves. The committee uses a standard set of questions for all the candidates and evaluates them based upon the skills and qualities set forth in the position description. Yet a pattern arises of that “different” candidate just not feeling like a “good fit” for the culture. The organization’s unspoken norms are the very things that make people in the dominant group feel so comfortable that they sail through your hiring process, while causing unease in those from marginalized groups. This discomfort is what makes them seem subtly like “not a good fit.” They sense that they might not be welcome to bring their whole selves to work, and you sense their wariness.
A Cultural Ways of Being audit of position descriptions and personnel manuals will expose vaguely defined terms that scaffold the “good fit.” Everyone internally takes these terms for granted, though in reality they can have multiple definitions.
The 1960's era Three-Martini Lunch as depicted in Mad Men is no longer widely considered "professional"
One that shows up over and over is “professional,” applied to communication, dress and hairstyles, boundaries between personal and work life, and more. This has meant many things over time and in different places. At one time in this country, “professional” dress did not include pants for women or hair longer than collar-length for men, and a “professional” lunch could include multiple alcoholic beverages. None of these remain true in most places. And many ideas of professionalism are culturally or racially bound. Black natural hairstyles have long been singled out as “unprofessional” in some quarters, a conception that has been redefined as a form of discrimination in CROWN acts that have recently been enacted in more than a dozen states. Dove and LinkedIn have partnered to publicize this in a series of ads, including this one that illustrates the slippery notion of "culture fit."
"Professional" notions of hair and dress that are in fact discriminatory can be hidden in plain sight in your policy documents, sabotaging your hiring process and talented candidates.
And hair is a fitting metaphor for this work. One client quipped that taking a fresh look at the language in the personnel manual was “like seeing a photo of me with my high school haircut,” embarrassing and outdated. Yet, for the organization, it is much more consequential. The most important thing is to become aware of these vaguely defined, culturally bound terms and come up with definitions that are intentional and apply equitably. The point is not to toss out the idea of professionalism. That would be the all-or-nothing equivalent of making everyone shave their heads. The point is to re-conceive “professional” hair in a more inclusive way. I find that the new definitions that people come up with are more thoughtful, flexible, clear and contextual. Does the hair need to be protected from catching in machinery the fabricator will use? Be kept out of food that the chef is preparing? Not obscure the vision of the driver or the teacher supervising small children? Reveal the face of a facilitator so that deaf participants can lip-read? These definitions get down to what’s important and implicitly answer the question of why they exist in the first place.
Fog on the Lens
My job is to breathe a little fog on the lens of cultural norms to make them known as an operational point of view.
When a norm reaches the level of dominating our consciousness it becomes like the lens of a camera that frames our experience and makes our point of view seem universal. When we see a film, the director has framed each scene so that we believe it’s the entire vista that’s available. In reality there are other people, pieces of equipment, edges of sets, and the entire real world that are excluded from our view. When we narrate the lives of our organizations based on a cultural framing that tells us what we’re used to is the only right way to be, we forget that other scenes are playing out very differently in other kinds of rooms with different norms. We lose sight of the full range of possibilities. As I’ve recently written about great facilitation, having a range of possible responses keeps us out of the realm of knee-jerk reactions. This in itself can elevate the situation from re-traumatizing to trauma-sensitive or perhaps even trauma-healing.
“Rie helps provide tangible ways for organizations to not just consider racism 'out there,' but to address the legacies of systemic racism 'in here' -- within our own systems and cultures.”
I once worked with a filmmaker named Bushra Aziz who said that her job as a teaching artist was to blow a little fog on the lens so that her students could see that it was there and become aware of the director’s point of view. My job in an equity audit is much the same. I blow a little fog on the lens of cultural norms that appear in policy documents so that the people who work with them can see that they represent a point of view. I also provide context to clarify where these hidden points of view might be supporting structural racism, or opening possibilities to become a more equitable organization. As one client put it, “Rie helps provide tangible ways for organizations to not just consider racism 'out there,' but to address the legacies of systemic racism 'in here' --within our own systems and cultures.”
If you’re ready to get past the endless Diversity and Inclusion/Chicken and Egg Dilemma and into action, let’s connect. Book a no-strings-attached exploratory conversation and start getting out of your DICE-y situation today.