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Re-envisioning Inclusion: Develop an Action Plan with Kenji Yoshino, Professor, NYU School of Law; Author
After all of this analysis, organizations have to act, and so the question is what prescriptions can I give for managers or for organizations of goodwill who want to help their employees uncover their talent. And we really have three ideas here. The first step is to diagnose. The second step is to analyze and the third step is to act.
Diagnose
It’s really crucial that we understand this is a conceptual project and a project about vocabulary. So as Gloria Steinem once said, we couldn’t do anything about sexual harassment until we had the terminology of sexual harassment. And once we had that terminology, we could create affirmative change within organizations. I want to do the same thing with covering. Not just at the level of the term itself but with each of these four axes of covering.
When I give workshops on this I, you know, print out the charts and make people fill them out. And then we have breakout sessions where people cross chat among their tables and the tables give presentations to the room about how individuals within their group cover. These are often extraordinarily emotional and powerful sessions in and of themselves. We should never underestimate the power of naming and diagnosing a particular phenomenon.
Analyze
After you diagnose we move to analyze, right. And what we mean by analyze, is to measure the covering that you engage in against both your own values and the organization’s values. So we talk a lot about organizational values with regard to whether or not organizations are living up to their values of inclusion. So if your organization says we believe in inclusion on the basis of sexual orientation, but you still feel uncomfortable bringing your same-sex spouse to work functions, then you might want to challenge the organization about whether or not it’s living up to its values. And if the organization doesn’t respond, and we’re quite candid about this, it might be time to search for another organization.
So sometimes we engage in covering demands that when we really think about it, it’s not that big of a deal, you know, that you can actually say well I’m willing to let this one go because, you know, I can’t boil the ocean and not every covering demand is something that I need to worry about. So, for example, individuals are often told based on hard research that they’ll get further within an organization if they whiten their name, right. So Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, these two economists, sent out two sets of resumes that were identical except for the name at the top. The name at the top of one set of resumes was Gregory or Emily. On the other set of resumes it was Lakeisha or Jamal. The first set of resumes got 50 percent more callbacks than the second set of resumes. This isn’t just organizational values. This is very deep sort of personal values, so that for one individual changing their name might not be an enormous deal but for another individual it might actually be a dignitary harm. And so only, you know, the individual himself or herself can make that decision and so the analyzed portion of this has to do with not only interrogating the organization’s values but also interrogating your own values.
Act
And then finally our last step is action. So none of this is going to do anything unless we act on it. We have, you know, a deck of solutions that we like to offer to organizations but let me just offer you three. So the first one is sponsorship. One of the most pernicious aspects of association based covering is that people are unwilling to be sponsored by individuals on their own group. Whereas the person who belongs to your own group who has succeeded in the organization is likely to be one of the best resources available to you about how to navigate that organization.
Oftentimes it’s not the mentor who refuses to extend the helping hand, more likely it’s the protégé or the potential sponsee who rejects the sponsor because they’re worried that any help that they get from that individual will be placed on a discount and there’ll be an asterisk next to any achievement or recommendation that they get from that sponsor because they belong to the same group. So the big action item is think about this when you’re thinking about sponsorship both as a manager and as an employee of when somebody extends their hand to you who, you know, belongs to your group, think twice before you reject that hand.
The second of the three solutions has to do with bonding and bridging capital. We all have a kind of affinity for people who are like ourselves and there’s nothing wrong with that in building deep rich connections with those individuals. But it can’t stop there. We’re not going to be a healthy society if we simply balkanize off into groups and we don’t have this bridging capital across groups. And so whenever I give these workshops I always make sure that there’s a cross teaching element to it. So I not only have groups fill out their covering charts for their own bonding capital, I also cut it according to axis and chase the axes across different groups so that we can say, how do you engage in appearance based covering. And for somebody who’s a Gen Y-er they might say oh, I engage in appearance based covering by wearing glasses to look older. Whereas a woman might say, you know, as Margaret Thatcher did, you know, I lower my voice in order to sound more masculine to project more gravitas, right. So all these forms of covering are self-presentation based forms of covering, right. And they differ according to the group that engages in it. But, you know, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that we’re all doing the same thing. It’s just different variations on a theme. And once you see that they’re different variations on the theme, then you can actually have the one firm, one organization mentality. And groups that initially weren’t talking to each other start talking to each other along these dimensions.
Finally, the third solution would be positive forms of uncovering. This study was done in conjunction with the management consultancy Deloitte. And the Share Your Story initiative is to my mind a form of positive uncovering. What they did is that they filmed their 60 top leaders, right, talking about their lives and sharing their stories. And what these videos did was not to talk about these individuals in a way that a resume or a professional biography would talk about these individuals. Rather it was a really powerful forum of what Robin Ely up at Harvard Business School calls mature vulnerability where people at the top of the organization were powerful enough and mature enough to show up as human beings and to be authentic. And so the kinds of stories that were articulated were things like, you know, I am a Latino executive in this firm, but when I joined the firm I was told to, you know, shave off my Frito Bandito mustache and to lose my polyester suits. And this had implications for how I felt about my ethnicity and it cut me off from my community of origin and my family and so on and so forth.
Just think about stories like thatm how empowering it would be for a young individual within the firm to hear stories like this. I mean this went completely viral within an organization because these leaders seemed so distant, right, to this extremely large organization and the individuals who inhabited it. But simply by willing to engage in this form of mature vulnerability and uncovering themselves, they created these forms of connectivity, not just with individuals who shared their particular experiences – it just humanized them for everybody, right. And I think that the big mistake that leaders make is that we don’t realize because we’ve been through it and we know all the struggles that we had to go through to get to the top. We don’t realize that once we get to the top, that a revisionist history is immediately told about us and that revisionist history as you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth and all lights turn green for you all the way down the highway and your life is perfect now.