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Re-envisioning Inclusion: Accept the Symbolic Role of Leadership with Kenji Yoshino, Professor, NYU School of Law; Author
In our study we discovered that people who are asked to cover or down play various aspects of their identity reported that they were 50 percent less likely to feel that they had opportunities within the organization and 51 percent less likely to think that they had a sense of commitment to the organization. And so, any leader who’s concerned about an individual’s engagement with the organization should be concerned about allowing that individual to bring their whole selves to work.
Leadership vs. Culture
So 60 percent to 73 percent of individuals said that covering was somewhat to extremely detrimental to their sense of self, depending on the axis in question. And so we said to what extent is this coming from your leaders and to what extent is this coming from your organizational culture? And I actually lost a bet on this because I thought that the leadership number would be lower than the organizational culture one because I thought that people would say oh, this covering demand is in the air, it’s in the water but I can’t really point to a particular individual who’s imposing this covering demand on me. In fact what we found, although the numbers were close, is that just over 50 percent said their leaders imposed the covering demand on them and just under 50 percent said that it was a matter of organizational culture.
The important difference was that when leaders imposed the covering demand, people took it much, much more personally. So when leaders imposed the covering demand about 50 percent of individuals said that it diminished their sense of opportunities within the organization and their sense of commitment to the organization. So that’s a really significant statistic, right, given that what you’re saying is that 50 percent of 50 percent of your workforce is feeling that they’re opportunities and commitment are diminished by the fact that covering is being demanded of them by their leaders. And this is something that is easily fixed and that you can train your leaders not to do this. When we move to organizational culture the number was slightly less than 50 percent. But people took it a lot less personally so the numbers plummeted where people said that their opportunities and commitment were affected but the numbers hovered around 25 to 30 percent rather than 50 percent. So this is actually a good news story for us because if the problem is with the leaders and the leaders can be trained that they’re going to diminish commitment and engagement and happiness among their employees if they don’t change their practices. Whereas if the problem resides in culture, you’re already at one removed from the problem.
The Bottom Line
This notion of authenticity is really crucial because it allows people to bring all of their talents to the organization. So one of the ironies of covering is that people in our survey reported covering in ways that not only hurt them but hurt the organization by not bringing the full gamut of their talents to the table.
The Center for Talent Innovation, the Center for Talent Innovation talks about this example where People magazine was being translated into Spanish, right. And initially they were just going to translate it so that it was just a word for word, picture for picture translation. The words would just be flipped over into Spanish. But one of the Latina executives in the firm said this isn’t going to work because for many people who are quite comfortable speaking Spanish, reading Spanish still feels like homework and so the picture to text ratio has to be different. So that was a moment of cultural translation that allowed, you know, the Espanol version of People to become an enormous success. But imagine if that woman had felt like, “well I’m not going to advance in this company unless I cover the fact that I’m a Latina so I better not raise my hand here and make this intervention because otherwise, you know, I will not advance within the firm.” So firms need to signal very clearly that they want to leverage all of the diversity in the company and they don’t want this kind of bleached out professionalism where, you know, people of different skin colors are in the room but they’re all desperately trying to merge into the dominant ethnicity which in this case would be Caucasian.