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Most of us understand by now that we’ve inherited a world that doesn’t work well for everyone. And there’s plenty of evidence that the mandatory training approach has not led to authentically diverse leadership teams and organisations.
A question often asked is Why is the work of equity, diversity and inclusion so hard? And to understand how we got here, we can learn a lot from UK History:
- 1760 – 1820/40 The industrial revolution separated work and families, resulting in men becoming the primary income provider and women becoming the primary care provider. Before that families lived and worked together, providing a product or service to their community.
- Before 1918 no women were allowed to vote, compared to 58% of the male population. After 1918, only women over 30, who met a property qualification (read White and wealthy) could vote, in comparison to virtually all men over 21, plus men in the armed forces over 19. And it wasn’t until 1928, less than a hundred years ago, that women and men had the same voting rights.
- It’s said we were influenced in 1926 to adopt the working hours of 9-5 from the routine and repetitive world of manufacturing cars. The 24-hour clock was split into 3 x 8-hour shifts and the 9-5 shift has the daytime hours many of us are familiar with today. But that model wasn’t designed for creativity or innovation, and it assumes employees can dedicate almost all their energy to work, with someone else taking care of everything at home.
- It was illegal to be gay just over 50 years ago, still is in many countries, until The Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalised sex between two men over 21 and ‘in private’.
- Ethnicity in England and Wales was reported as 94% White as recently as 1991 and the White population has decreased steadily to 81.7% in 2021. This is since the British Government invited workers from abroad to support the reconstruction work after the Second World War. And the people who accepted that invitation now have multi-generational families.
- The Disability Discrimination Act only came in 1995 and it’s not that far back in our history, that people with disabilities were forcibly removed from families and put into mental institutions.
- The Equality Act 2010 was introduced to consolidate previous discrimination acts, covering nine protected characteristics, and legally protecting people from discrimination.
- Today’s workplace is typically better suited to extroverts and neurotypical brains, despite estimates suggesting at least a third of people are introverts and 1 in 7 are neurodiverse.
You might be thinking, so what?
Well, those in positions of power for the longest time, were typically upper class, heterosexual, White, able-bodied, neurotypical men. And they designed the world based on what made sense to them. So, our laws, policies, research endeavours, services, workplaces, marketing, broadcast content, products…and everything in between, work better for you, if you share that same demographic makeup. And less well if you don’t.
Is it all their fault? Absolutely not.
But we must acknowledge that the world is rigged the favour of people who share a similar profile to the people making decisions about how everything works.
The global population has increased from just over 1 billion to 8 billion in 200 years. That’s a MASSIVE shift, and it’s our collective responsibility to make the world work better for everyone.
So how do leaders move to conscious inclusion?
Leaders today, need to consider how history will judge their impact on society 100 years from now. And the pendulum needs to swing from understanding bias and signing up to an organisational commitment, to understanding inclusion and making changes for personal accountability.
Here are the five habits leaders can adopt to influence their everyday thinking:
Habit one: Make sure there’s a mix
Whenever you’re putting a group of people together, make sure there’s a diverse mix. Start with the people that come to mind immediately, then look to see where you have overrepresentation and extend your invitations to address it.
This applies to meetings, recruitment shortlists, guest speakers, project teams, customer feedback sessions, research groups, product testing, advertising campaigns, gathering feedback…and anything else you can think of.
Habit two: Invite everyone to join the conversation
Once you have the mix, make sure you value, hear and involve the people you invited.
This is how you bring together the knowledge from new hires, long servers, people with different thinking styles and personalities, mixed demographics, and cultures etc.
Habit three: Deliberately seek alternative perspectives
Go beyond your usual ‘go to’ people for feedback and advice.
This is a big one for me personally. I was guilty of being in a hurry, going to the people who already knew my work and knew how I liked to receive feedback. And whilst they gave constructive feedback, they usually shared a similar profile or perspective.
When I started deliberately seeking feedback from people who knew less about my work or who had different life experiences, I learnt so much more, and my work has been better ever since.
Habit four: Ask what would make people included
This might look like saying “Hey ¬¬¬¬Catherine, I noticed you didn’t speak up in that meeting and I really value your thinking, is there something I can do differently so the team can get the value of hearing your perspectives?”
Notice how the focus is on what you can do, not what Catherine can do. The response might be as simple as letting Catherine know you’d welcome her contribution on [insert subject] ahead of the meetings so she has time to reflect and provide her most valuable contribution.
Habit five: Get to know people who aren’t just like you
Think about the five or six people closest to you in your work or home life. Chances are you have lots in common, as that’s how we’re socialised and how we form friendships. And that’s ok. If that’s true for you, next is to recognise how heavily influenced you are by those five or six people and curate a wider circle of influence.
There are many ways to do this at work including active sponsorship for employee networks and inviting a more diverse mix of people to the meetings you regularly host. And there are plenty more ways to learn in private. For example, you can curate the mix of people you follow on social media, the authors of books, hosts of podcasts, and the writers, producers and directors entertaining and educating you on TV.
These five habits are deliberately simple and don’t take much effort. With practice, they’ll increase empathy and improve awareness about how decisions might be affecting people. And it’s that awareness that will underpin the success of the organisations that remain relevant in the future.
Use data that relates to each team’s core objectives
Rather than top-down change initiatives involving huge teams, I advocate for bringing the challenges and opportunities to life by extracting insights from data that relates to people’s core work and everyday objectives.
Most organisations have huge amounts of data, but they’re just not getting the power from it. Your all-important metrics are typically the things you review frequently. Whether it’s your engagement surveys, retention rates, career progression, NPS scores, advocacy etc., most organisations are only looking at the homogeneous scores.
But to understand inclusion, you need to break down an overall score of 83% by characteristic. And you’ll likely find your largest population, let’s say White people are having a better time and that their score of 84% is masking the experiences of your smaller populations of Black, South Asian, Mixed-race people etc who are scoring their experience at 59%, 62% and 65%. The overall score broken down in this way encourages teams to consider who is benefiting the most and least from your products, services, policies, or processes. And the actions determined to close those gaps in experiences are ultimately how you make an organisation inclusive both inside and out.
Unconscious bias training is not the way to make an organisation more inclusive. Instead, we must equip the people holding positions of power to consider the impact of their everyday decisions. Then use data to highlight any gaps in experience for people with different demographic profiles and take the necessary action to close those gaps.
Unless you’re consciously including people, you’re almost certainly unconsciously excluding people.
