Rethinking Diversity and Building a Sense of Belonging
Everyone agrees diversity is a good thing, but breaking down barriers and building a true sense of belonging within diverse organisations takes a lot more than ratios
Has diversity stalled in the UK’s boardrooms and leadership teams? Most commentators, academics and industry leaders feel it has. Last month, Praesta Partners held an evening of lively discussions at the Wellcome Collection, on Breaking the Barriers to Diverse Leadership, chaired by Praesta coach Janet Rubin MBE, with outstanding presentations from our guests Dr. Aneeta Rattan — Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, Simon Linares — HR Director at Direct Line, and Sunil Patel — COO & Head of Capability for Emerging Technology PwC UK.
Together with an audience of leaders and coaches, there was one central theme that emerged, the idea that a sense of belonging is the challenge that needs to be addressed to enable greater diversity in board rooms and leadership teams.
Effective leadership coaching doesn’t just ask if a diverse candidate is ready for the boardroom, but asks if the boardroom is ready for diversity…
Put simply, you might be included in a leadership team, but that doesn’t mean you automatically feel like you belong there. So how do leaders address that issue, and kick-start diversity and inclusion initiatives that have stalled?
Does diversity deliver on its promise?
There’s a greater degree of workplace diversity in terms of ethnicity, gender and life experience (plus a host of other markers) than a decade ago, but in recent years the progress of diversity initiatives has slowed, or they have failed to deliver sustainable change. The truth of the matter is the concept of diversity, often expressed in terms of ratios between different demographics, isn’t a particularly helpful idea when it comes to making workplaces more diverse. It’s a simplistic quantitative measure for something that is both complex and qualitative in nature, namely, personal identity.
Usually, diversity initiatives fail because they treat people as groups, but in typical workplace engagement, people don’t identify or behave as groups. They don’t view themselves as part of a ratio of one demographic segment to another, they define themselves in the workplace by their status, by role, by results, by productivity and host of personal attributes that are more complex than characteristics like race and gender.
Personal identity is more nuanced than a numbers game, we are all part of communities and have an intuitive sense of belonging within them. Fostering a sense of belonging is the underlying challenge facing businesses if they want to create a truly diverse workplace.
The Growth Mindset
Workplace research by London Business School suggests this sense of belonging is fostered by encouraging a growth mindset in employees. The growth mindset was first defined by Dr. Carol Dweck in the 1980s, while studying students’ attitudes to failure. She noticed that some students rebounded while other students seemed devastated by even the smallest setbacks. Dr. Dweck coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset, with the latter describing the tendency — for people who believe they will grow and develop — to invest extra time and effort into work, and therefore attain higher levels of achievement. The growth mindset is the key to building a greater sense of belonging, and with it, making diversity initiatives work sustainably.
The goal a growth mindset business is creating workplaces where everyone feels capable of bringing their full self into work. It means empowering people to talk openly about themselves, their needs and their working processes as part of a diverse community. That empowerment comes through initiatives that create safe spaces for people to be open about stress, mental health, family needs, values, and all the personal issues that influence workplace experiences. It also comes from sponsoring teams to affect change in working processes, and play a role in designing better employee experiences.
Diversity is About Purpose, Not Culture
Fostering a growth mindset within an organisation requires a shift in leadership style and working practices. Clearly, developing talent is critical, as is ensuring recruitment processes provide diverse candidates for the talent pool. Using tools like executive coaching to help transition people into leadership roles also fosters a growth mindset, however, beyond developing diverse talent for the boardroom there is also a key role for coaching to develop existing boards to better understand how to engage with diverse new appointments. This is a very important shift of emphasis, because it doesn’t just ask if a diverse candidate is ready for the boardroom, but also asks if the boardroom is ready for diversity.
To put that another way — as our expert panellists agreed — it’s time to take the vague notion of company culture and replace it with a clear sense of company purpose. Purpose mandates change, whereas culture often stifles it. After all, it’s usually the leadership culture in organisations that makes diversity initiatives stall, not the leadership’s purpose. It is time to take diversity to the next level, as part of a broader company purpose to make everyone feel like they belong there, regardless of the demographic attributes of personal identity.
