Stop fantasizing about Diversity and try this instead
There’s no magical stick for diversity, neither a single game changer idea, however people could stop dreaming about it and try this deliberate practice instead.
In the same spirit of Jim Collins’ work in Good to Great, I conceived this deliberate practice, as the flywheel for diversity, because it seeks at putting a framework that works almost effortlessly toward the desired objective.
It also follows this simple rule of compounding, where in order to achieve an objective, favor decisions or actions that increase the likelihood of your desired outcome and neutralize the ones that are preventing you from achieving it, and stick to your goddamn principles. At one point, this will work exponentially toward your objective.
Before jumping into the practical work, let me clarify one common question that I had to deal with on diversity, it’s about why we should do it in the first place?
If you are reading this right now, you’ve probably identified your own reasons, but then you might believe that you’d need to convince everyone within your organization.
Unless you have a very solid answer that hits everyone into the face like an ultimate truth, I’d rather suggest to not waste your time trying so hard convincing everyone.
Just make sure that the crowd would follow you.
So skip the why, and try instead to answer with whom are you going to lead the change ? then what would you do to make it happen ? and finally how would you do all of this?
Start by your who? I mean look at who your people are. People with whom you are going to drive the change. So often, we start with why, what and so on, before even tackling this who question. Sometimes we don’t even bother to think about the “who”. This is clearly a mistake, because the more you know who is your who, the more you are able to have specific answers for your other questions, instead of having generic ones that might not help you.
Generally the who constitute a whole spectrum of people within your organization and potentially outside of it. It’s very crucial to consider everyone and not ignore some groups because they’re not interested or whatsoever. Isn’t our work about inclusion.
It’s likely that your who are subdivided in 3 groups:
The Advocates: They are at one end of the spectrum. They are the true believers, and supporters of diversity. You don’t have to convince them, as they already know for what reason they support it. They have the greatest will to drive the change, they might know better than anyone why things were not working so well up to now, and they could be of a great help to generate ideas and share their enthusiasm. Don’t consider that all minorities are advocates and vise-versa. Sometimes people from minorities are in camps, where you don’t expect them to be ( ie the opposite camp).
The Naysayers/Skeptics : At the other end of the spectrum, there are the Skeptics or the Naysayers. They might be the big losers of diversity, either because they hold onto established norms and if those norms are challenged they would be the losers, like losing a predominant status or a belief. They are generally unconsciously against diversity, I mean they don’t necessarily know it, but they do stuff against it. They generally reject some of its concepts, like quotas, or positive discrimination. You can consider getting rid of them into your organization, and this is indeed the only way to deal with the radicals, the toxics, or the people who act deliberately against diversity, but other than those extremes, it’s very unlikely that you’d fire everyone acting unconsciously like this.
First, because we might all be subject to unconscious biases, second, because you’d better need to know how to interact with everyone including these people.
The Neutrality group:Those are people in the middle, neither against your idea, nor fans, they lack one thing that exists in both previous groups “ the Will”.
I mean they have no specific belief about your idea of diversity, either because they are not conscious about the diversity issues surrounding them, or because they simply don’t care. They generally follow the wind and whether they like or not they contribute to reinforce the established norms in your organization. They could represent a good indicator on how your strategy is working.
One advice about them: just make sure that they stick to your new established strategy.
Now that you know your “who”, here are the typical interactions you might have with each group:
- Use the will power of both Advocates and Naysayers in favor of your success and make sure that the neutrality group follows your new norms.
- Don’t make the mistake of trying to confront advocates with naysayers, you will lose your time and energy and could seriously compromise your objective. They will fight each other with no concrete results.
- Use Advocates to provide you with ideas, analyze the data, and push forward initiatives to help you promote diversity.
- Listen carefully to the Naysayers, because if they criticize openly some of your ideas they might raise some issues that you need to tackle. They might not be right on everything, but you’d better listen to what they have to say.
What to do and how ?
In his book Talent is overrated, Geoff Colvin explains that what makes world class performers stand out has nothing to do with a pseudo talent. What really makes some people great in their art is their deliberate practice of it, and they are deliberate by being mindful, disciplined and fully focused.
This is exactly what we should all do to achieve a successful diversity strategy. We need to implement it through a disciplined approach, with great awareness about the whole ecosystem and the resulting outcomes.
To start with, have a clear idea about your vision of success.
Start by building a clear Vision of how Diversity looks like to you if you succeed:
If your organization involves a lot of people, you’d need to be very clear about what you mean by diversity. We tend to underestimate how differently we perceive it.
If you really want to succeed, start by building this vision and make it as tangible as possible.
Ask yourself and your organization questions like :
What’s our vision of the ideal outcome?
How does it feel like if we succeed?
Be aware that if you lack a clear image or idea of what you mean by diversity, this will leave a great space for disparity and dispersion and it’s very likely that you’d lose sight with your objective and miss the opportunity to draw all your efforts toward the same direction.
Also having a clear vision puts the railways for your journey, and leaves less space for confusion.
Confront the Data:
Be both obsessed by getting the data, but be also open to its interpretation.
You need to build an exhaustive tool to monitor this data. But you also need to leave some flexibility, because some type of data might not provide you with an exhaustive picture of what’s happening in your organization, and through experience and continuous practice you might need to adjust your type of data and select new criteria that provide you with more insights.
The Advocates could be of great help to know what type of data to look at, so make sure to involve them in building your data monitoring tool.
Naysayers could also help you to have a critical perspective on your data. It’s not necessary to confront both sides in a unique committee but you’d need to have a place where you gather both ideas and feedback from both sides in order to build the most robust monitoring tool.
Be Mindful:( Be always mindful)
Be mindful if something is harming Diversity initiatives within your organization.
Try to identify if there are unconscious/ conscious biases or practices that are belittling or marginalizing some minorities. Ask your people with very specific questions and check whether you find some common patterns.
Be also mindful of what works and identify best practices/ or explore new ones in a safe to fail environment¹.
One thing that is very crucial for this to work, is that you need to create a very safe space for people to speak up. You need to identify trusted people in your organization who could be the recipients of those difficult discussions. You’d absolutely need to be mindful that people don’t want to feel that they are conflicting with their bosses or some highly influential people within the organisation. Your framework needs both to make it easier for people to speak up without conflicting with their bosses while it should also guarantee them that they won’t be punished.
The second aspect requires identifying what are the Best practices. You might create a community of practice and foster/share ideas that work best, or determine more accurately factors of success².
Now that you know that you’d need a clear vision, being mindful, get data, and create safe spaces for speaking up and experimenting, you’d also need to stick to the following principles.
Principles:
Apply a Thorough discipline:
There is no way those things work without sticking to a disciplined practice.
Accountability : Make people accountable, no matter what. Ask yourself who and how ?
Boundaries : Define your boundaries. Have you identified your red lines that you shouldn’t cross ? and what are your limitations in implementing those changes ( people/material)?
Transparency : You might not need the radical transparency as advocated by Ray Dalio in his book Principles, but you’d definitely need it in some areas like in advertising opening jobs, and in monitoring your diversity data.
Conclusion: You might wonder if this would really work. In fact I cannot guarantee you that it works for sure, but as a quant strategist with years of experience in the investment industry, this is how we deal with complex and non linear issues. We try to figure out how likely the strategy could work. And it will, as no matter what is the domain or the organization, these rules constitute the prevailing strategies within successful organizations. Make sure to have the right people to drive the change, apply a thorough discipline, look at the data and analytics and continuously adjust your diversity strategy through feedback looping.
[1] Jennifer Garvey, explains in her book “Simple Habits for Complex Times” why it’s so important to have a safe to fail space for experiments. It comes to the idea that healing from a lack of diversity in the workplace is clearly something that involves complexity, uncertainty, volatility and ambiguity. To deal with that, one needs to be flexible enough to readjust and feel safe with some space to learn from practicing
[2] We are currently working on this kind of safe to fail experiment through our Women in Front Tribe which consists of a community of women working as investors and who seek to challenge the established norms in a white male dominant like organizations. We are currently building the foundations of this community for it to change the prevailing mentality from the inside and that creates a flywheel for a gender balanced organisation.
Books:
Simple Habits for Complex Times Jennifer Garvey Berger on how to deal with complex problems
What works: Gender equality by design Iris Bohnet
Inferior Angela Saini a great read to be mindful of wrong beliefs about women
Good to Great Jim Collins how to drive a change from good to greatness
Talent is overrated Geoff Colvin World class performers approach to their domain of excellence
The Path of Least Resistance Robert Fritz Best read I had for decades about how to build your own vision and flesh it out
Principles Ray Dalio Radical approach to disciplined practice used in the investment industry but likely to be replicable in different organizations
