Your Culture Is Broken, Not Your Pipeline.
Your company’s attitudes towards Black employees are causing them to leave.
The definition of insanity.
“One of the biggest issues we have is our pipeline. We just can’t find enough diverse candidates.”
Can’t pin this quote down? That’s because it’s a go-to line that organizations use to wriggle their way out of accepting the glaringly obvious conclusion that any outsider can see: your workplace culture excludes and hurts minorities.
Here’s an analogy: I recently toured (pre-COVID, of course) the University of Chicago School of Molecular Engineering. The students and researchers spend hundreds of hours on iterations of polymers that will eventually create amazing new materials, like self-healing skin grafts. Granted, I understood about 1% of what was going on, but it was enough to see a clear pattern: researchers assemble the molecules in different ways, sometimes thousands of times, put them into various machines, and wait to see if the result is the material they had envisioned.
Now imagine if each time they tried these experiments, they simply put MORE ingredients into the same machine every single time. This is what the pipeline fallacy is: you send even more Black and brown people, women, and other marginalized groups, through the exact same “machine;” that is, your employee experience, expecting it to yield different results. It doesn’t matter if you add more people into the pipeline; if you hire five or 500 Black employees into the same terrible experience they’re still going to leave.
The classic “we’ve solved it!” trap
When I worked at Uber, a company that struggles with a reputation for toxic workplace culture, one of the major changes they made to improve Diversity and Inclusion was to implement the Rooney Rule in hiring. The idea was simple: for every position at a certain level, at least one “diverse” candidate would be interviewed. Also importantly, the panel of interviewers would also include a “diverse” person (usually a woman), and interviewers would undergo unconscious bias training.
I’ve witnessed companies adopt policies like this across many industries. It has the aura of progress: fairness, formality, tied up with a nice bow that can be announced externally.
Recently, I spoke with a leader at another company that’s “working on their pipeline” by “increasing the number of schools we recruit from to include HBCUs”.
The fallacy of the “pipeline” logic is threefold. First, by spending tons of energy fixing the hiring process, it can feel like the diversity work is “done”. All the unconscious bias training and all of the formality creates the illusion that so much work has gone into this new system, surely the issues are solved.
Second, Black employees feel disenfranchised because we don’t see our peers getting promoted, we don’t feel like they’re getting honest performance feedback, and we don’t see Black and brown leaders in the highest-ranking echelons of the organization. Most companies working on their “pipeline” issue are focusing on entry-level positions.
Your workplace culture hurts and excludes minorities.
Third, to add “fairness” to the pipeline, Black people are asked to sit on interview panels. On the surface this makes sense, but in organizations with very few Black people represented, this places a disproportionate amount of time pressure on their schedules (usually with no additional compensation). It means we either have to a) make trade-offs between work and interview time, b) work longer hours, or c) opt out of interviews altogether. None of these is an optimal choice.
The call is coming from inside your house.
When I speak to my Black friends, many of whom hold degrees from top-tier schools and work for brand-name firms, the same message rings true: we’d love to see more representation at the top that looks like us. However, a lot of white leaders interpret this as “I need to run out and find an amazing ‘unicorn’ person that checks every box so that I can have a CxO who’s Black or brown.”
No. That’s not what we mean.
Before you run out and drop hundreds of thousands on an expensive external search, look inward. Because a new executive hire from the outside is just another person entering the same machine again. Talented Black executives have options — why would they work for your company with a backwards culture if you’re not willing to do the work to change it?
Before you run out and drop hundreds of thousands on an expensive external search, look inward.
When we say we want to see more representation at the top that looks like us, we mean we want to see more pathways to get there. We want to know you will invest in us, give us opportunities, celebrate our wins, pay us equally, and give us honest feedback. And we want you to promote us, even if we don’t have the perfect “unicorn” resume.
Yes, I said promote Black people who don’t have perfect resumes. Why? Because we see white men get these chances all the time — someone’s friend, poker buddy, or other connection gets an opportunity because he’s 70% qualified. Meanwhile, Black employees are used to hearing the “you just need one more tiny thing” feedback as a way to keep them in their current role.
As Crystal E. Ashbe, CEO of the Executive Leadership Council, writes:
Preparation is not the central issue here; what we lack are opportunities for advancement.
Here is the unfortunate truth: Too often, black corporate leaders are not seen, not valued as highly as their peers, and not positioned for success. Last fall, Korn Ferry, a leading global organizational consulting firm, released the result of its interviews with some of the most senior black profit and loss (P&L) leaders at Fortune 500 companies. Many reported “having to work twice as hard — and accomplish twice as much — to be seen on the same level as their colleagues.”
Promoting from within is one of the single most inspiring things you can do for your Black employees. It tells your staff that you invest in your people, and you recognize top talent comes in all shapes and sizes.
Inclusivity means having tough conversations.
As tempting as it is to stop there, there’s much more work to be done to create an inclusive culture. If you haven’t already looked at your promotion practices, diversity numbers, exit interview data, sourcing strategy, and other formalized processes, it’s time to start now. A best-in-class way of doing this is to have an objective party look at this to ensure you’re getting unbiased input.
However, formalized processes are just codified ways of reinforcing cultural norms. For example, I’ve seen companies value extroverted “go-getters” with “bias for action”. If you change the formal process without changing the informal reinforcements, you haven’t changed anything. Managers will still reward the person who shows the most “hustle”, possibly without even realizing it.
I managed a young white guy who was a self-proclaimed “Bro”. He drank black coffee, high-fived in the hallways, rode a scooter around the office, ate Paleo, and networked the hell out of our company. He’d put time on my calendar as often as possible to talk about his career. He dropped by my desk to talk through projects for 5 minutes. He was a go-getter.
But I also had to have a tough conversation with him that being “proactive” doesn’t mean the work is good. His performance was strong, to be sure. But there were women on our team running analytical circles around him. There were Black men who were better at relationship-building to get projects done well.
I regularly emphasized this contrast with more senior leaders in my organization. It’s tempting to see confidence as competence. It’s flattering to have someone put time on your calendar. But he did it because he had never heard “no”, he had never felt like the “only” one in the room, he’d never wondered if feedback was given to him because he looked a certain way. He did it because society had created a friction-free environment for him.
If you haven’t already, put your senior leaders through a facilitated conversation with your Black employees (and other marginalized groups). Ask them, “when is a time you felt alienated by an informal practice at work?” You’ll hear dozens of responses, and one of them will most definitely be: it feels like the white “Bros” get rewarded simply for being confident and outgoing. Or: I see white guys putting time on your calendar all the time, but I don’t do it because I don’t feel comfortable.
It’s tempting to see confidence as competence.
Dig deep into these issues. Commit to working together to solve them. Make simple changes. A former leader I worked with used to have an open invitation to his office to do high-end whiskey tastings on Friday afternoons. But guess who showed up? White men. Women, Muslim colleagues, and other people on our team didn’t feel included even though we were invited. So he switched it up and started doing whiskey only once a month and other activities the other three Fridays. It’s that simple.
Be willing to let go of talented leaders who just cannot change.
Among many reasons cultures do not change is that anti-racism, inclusion, and equity are hard to achieve. They require accountability. Some people just won’t be able to make the journey with you.
In 2017, a board member at Uber made a flippant, sexist comment at an all-hands meeting. The next day, he was ousted. This signaled to our employees that these behaviors are intolerable.
There will be senior executives, leaders, and teammates who just can’t get on board. Some will be overtly biased, while others will be more subtle. It will be painful to let them go because some of them are delivering incredible business results.
Keep listening to your Black employees, women, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized groups, and you’ll know exactly who these individuals are.
And if you’re doing your job right, you’ll have talented rising stars — including your Black colleagues — waiting in the wings to fill their shoes.
Erin Braddock Guthrie writes about anti-racism in the workplace with pragmatic, actionable tips for business leaders and employees alike. You can read her 4-part series on “Why ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ sets the bar too low” starting here. Erin has spent her career in both the public and private sector, working at companies such as Uber, McKinsey, and Dell Technologies.
