Posts Tagged ‘diversity’

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How I Learned To Be Black (Part I)

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

(This is the first of a five part series of unconventional reflections on race)

Lesson One: How I Discovered I am More than Just Black

I gave an informal talk last month to a group of leaders on what I have learned about myself and my leadership over the past seven years. I reflected on how I have used the tools and techniques I learned from attending leadership seminars facilitated by Learning as Leadership (LaL), a San Rafael, California-based leadership development organization. There, I participated with managers and executives from all over the world to learn how to grapple with my unproductive habits and behaviors and how to institute new ones.

On this day, I was inspired to talk about being black. I was one of only a handful of black people in this largely white gathering, but this was important, I thought. I had always taken comfort in the fact that I’m a black man. Even though being black in the U.S. is challenging, seeing myself that way has provided a source of clarity. When I needed that boost of self-confidence, I could remind myself that I was an intelligent and strong black person. When I needed social support, I knew I could rely on other black folks—even those I didn’t know—to offer it. When unjust events happened to me, I could explain them as a consequence of the intentional and unintentional racial bias that permeates this country.

But the comfort of my blackness has also held me back. When I undertook this leadership training, I entered with the goal of deepening my understanding of myself and of diversity. I expected the exercises and reflections to help me with this. To my surprise, though, over the course of the 12 months in which I participated, race came up infrequently. I found myself much more preoccupied with new concepts like “desired image” which captures behaviors I’ve taken up—both consciously and unconsciously—to try to get others to see me in a particular light. Or the “driving idea” or prevailing anxiety I hold that deep down, I’m really a fraud and not as capable or competent as I think, and worried that others will figure it out and I will be exposed. This was very weird stuff that may have been affecting me in my work and my relationships. With these kinds of things on the table, race fell into the background for me, important, but not central. Had being focused on myself racially kept me from attending to these other really important issues?

The real “aha” emerged when I learned about my “mattress.” That is the term for the psychological habit of preparing ourselves for failure in the activities we undertake. In short, we all have ways of thinking that protect us from the painful thoughts and feelings that emerge when we fail at something we really want to succeed at. A mattress, like a soft landing surface, does just that. One of my stronger mattresses is that that the odds were so stacked against me because of my race that I just couldn’t succeed this time. In fact sometimes this is true and sometimes it isn’t. At times, I am the victim of systemic biases that favor others and disadvantage me. And sometimes I just didn’t prepare well enough. And sometimes (heaven forbid) I’m just not good enough. The beauty of the mattress is that these more ego-based, painful options disappear in the outrage of the blanket assertion that I could have been successful if factors outside my control weren’t conspiring against me. In other words, “it’s not me, it’s you. Or him. Or them. Or the system.

My insight that I have these habits does not negate the fact that real discrimination happens and that I and other black people suffer when it does. For me, that is a fact of life and if you don’t believe it, I have a long list of resources to help you with that one. What I realized was that I was not always skilled at knowing when the real discrimination was happening (and needs to be fought) and when I was protecting myself from feeling pain that had little, if anything, to do with my race. This was not about “playing race cards” or any other such nonsense. It was about learning to be skillful in separating my authentic but incorrect belief that I was suffering because of discrimination from really suffering from discrimination.

I felt like I was beginning to have an experience of myself as larger that only being a member of my racial group. I realized that with expanding and deeper understand of history and culture, my blackness was becoming a huge and nourishing vessel in which to live. And as I said, it helped me in many ways. What I was beginning to explore was that there may have been an even larger, more nourishing vessel in which I was embedded. I was beginning to understand in a much more profound way that I was more than my race. That was lesson one in learning to be black.

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The Drive Towards Oneness

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

Timed to the unveiling of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, this week’s Washington Post‘s On Leadership roundtable explored King’s leadership legacy and where we stand today in fulfilling his vision for the nation. They asked me to write an opinion piece.

In reflecting on celebrations of the new monument commemorating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I get queasy.  I get the same uneasy feeling whenever the King holiday rolls around.  The reason is that these become occasions when speakers and pundits routinely tarnish King’s dream.

Nearly 50  years ago, Dr. King spoke of his dream that racial inequality—as well as other forms of inequality—would dissipate with time and people would be judged only by “the content of their character.” “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he wrote in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Many people think they are leading toward Dr. King’s dream in politics, education, business and other social domains when they argue against separating people into categories by race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. They worry that highlighting these different social identities is the antithesis of King’s vision. They say we can’t treat people based on the content of their character (or their qualification for a job or political office) if we remain focused on the color of their skin or the sound of their accent.

But few things pose a greater threat to King’s dream than this drive toward “oneness.” Pretending that differences don’t matter is not the same as having differences no longer matter. The push to make us all just human has two benefits for people who espouse it. First, it’s comfortable because it avoids the hard work of negotiating differences. People retreat to the familiar place of just assuming that “deep down other people are just like me.” But a lot happens on the way down to deep. Peoples’ background and experiences, many of which are shaped by their social identities, make them not at all “like me.” And that means that if we really want to get to the place in which our differences are unimportant, we must roll up our sleeves to do some work, starting with an honest exploration of how we are different.

Our society is made up of people with vastly divergent experiences, perspectives, backgrounds and talents. Often those differences are defined by the structural inequality that exists today, just as it was in King’s day. A Gallup Poll of more than 1,300 people nationwide found that 90 percent  of whites and 85 percent of blacks  think civil rights for African Americans have improved in their lifetimes. Yet wide gaps between blacks and whites remain in average income levels, and access to housing, education and employment.  Similar statistics can be found to make the case for gender and class inequities.  And a few sound bites from contemporary debates on gay marriage reveal how far we are from treating people of different sexual orientations equitably. On the positive side, differences that are well embraced can generate the breakthrough innovation, community cohesiveness, and the commitment to making society extraordinary rather than merely ordinary.

The drive toward oneness—toward “we’re all just human beings”—tends to discount both facets of difference. It rewrites the story of structural inequality as one in which the Promised Land has been reached. We hear things like, “We are post-racial.” “Discrimination is not as bad as it used to be, and it’s getting better.” “Young people don’t worry about this stuff the way the older generation does.”

This denial infuriates people who live a life in which their experience of being disenfranchised is glibly attributed to them being oversensitive. And it creates privileged but vulnerable people who think they live in a world where everything is really getting better, leaving them unequipped to deal with the discontent of the disenfranchised. The drive toward oneness also deprives us of the opportunity to come up with new ideas and perspectives because it makes it undesirable, or even dangerous, to express a novel and unusual way of seeing the world. It becomes bad to be unique.

Of course, it is possible to foster divisiveness by overemphasizing differences. Poorly executed diversity initiatives like hiring or admitting candidates based too heavily on skin color or gender is not good for a company or school, nor is it usually good for the person of color or the woman who enters the institution. Overemphasizing social identities can relegate people who are different to being seen (and feeling like) one-dimensional aspects of the people they truly are. King’s dream comes to fruition only when we neither ignore nor overinflate the importance of social identities in how we engage differences, whether in neighborhoods or schools, businesses or government agencies.

Getting to King’s “content of their character” place requires more than just leveling some metaphorical playing field. This place of clarity, in which people truly see one another for who they are, comes from being willing to engage—not avoid—our differences. It comes from letting go of the mindless habit of looking for similarity and commonality, and cultivating the ability to open oneself up to looking for and learning from difference. This is the leadership charge we should hold before us as we memorialize Dr. King’s legacy.

 

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26th Annual SIOP Conference

Friday, April 15th, 2011

Martin will participate in a panel on Leadership and Diversity at the Society for Industrial Organizational Psychologists 26th Annual Conference in Chicago, Saturday, April 16 at 12nn. For more information or to register, visit http://www.siop.org/conferences/default.aspx.

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Come to a Great Conference on Education and Business

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

I’ve been working with public school educators a lot in recent weeks.  Teachers, principals, superintendents and education scholars are all challenged to improve our education system.  That makes the Darden School of Business’ upcoming conference, Education in the New Economy—all the more exciting for me.  It takes place Friday, February 25, 2011 beginning at 9:00 AM and is presented by the Black Business Student Forum at Darden.

The 20th century economy was built on manufacturing power and scale, but the economic powers of the 21st century will be defined by an innovation economy anchored by an educated citizenry.  The future of the American economy depends on our education system; a system that has prepared far too few to be the next generation of leaders. The gap in the education system that we have and the education system we need affects all facets of our society. Re-thinking this system is a collective responsibility.

The conference brings together a diverse group of experts from the education and business community, to thoroughly examine how schools prepare students to be successful in the workforce, and why the business community should be partners in this challenge.  Highlights include:

  • Lunch Keynote by Dr. Steve Perry, renowned educator, author, and contributor for CNN
  • Keynote by Dr. Christopher B. Howard, the dynamic President of Hampden-Sydney College
  • Amazing line up of panelists ranging from policy analysts, business leaders, consultants and entrepreneurs. Highlights: Dr. Pam Moran, superintendent of Albemarle County Public Schools, Secretary of Education for the State of Virginia Gerard Robinson.
  • Great Darden alums, including Victor de la Paz, Nicole Lindsay, and James Temple. Tierney Fairchild will serve as a moderator.
  • Darden School/Curry Education School Partnership for Leaders in Education will also support the conference as Senior Director William Robinson moderates a panel entitled “MBAs in the Schoolhouse.”

Come to this conference if you are a:

  • Business-minded professional—you’ll gain insight into how public education systems are preparing the next generation of talent: YOUR next hires.
  • Current student with an interest in education—come hear how others have successfully established careers in the intersection of business and education.

Come to Darden and check out this terrific event!

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On the importance of minority faculty

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

I was recently asked to answer a series of questions on why it is important to have minority faculty represented at business schools. While it seemed like the answer to the question would be obvious, I was happy to go through the exercise, and found that it may not be as straightforward as one might think.

Minority representation among our faculty is essential because we know that being competitive in the global business school market means getting smarter and smarter about how we create high quality learning for an increasingly diverse student body.   Having excellent minority faculty means that we are better able to leverage the diversity of background and perspective among all of our faculty colleagues to create that high quality learning environment.  Here are a few examples:

a)     Our faculty collaborate extensively in teaching.  In our teaching meetings, everything from the selection of cases to the pedagogy we use to teach our students is informed by the multiple perspectives of our faculty teams, many of which are racially and culturally diverse.

b)    In the classroom itself, our minority faculty serve as role models, not only for our minority students, but also for our majority students.  Students and typically build strong learning relationships together and when the faculty member is a minority, students are exposed to perspectives that expand their models of who they can learn from.

c)     Our faculty collaborate extensively in conducting cutting-edge research.  Our minority and majority faculty work together to produce new research ideas that contribute to academic scholarship and to our mission of informing practicing managers.  For example, I’m working with a colleague on a new research project explaining what prevents organizations from developing minority and women managers sustainably.

I can’t help but reflect back twelve years ago when I came to Darden from Tuck as the only minority faculty member at Darden. In twelve years since, five more minority faculty have joined our faculty (raising our percentage of minority faculty well above industry averages).  More significant, five of the six minority faculty member at Darden have earned tenure (the sixth is a junior colleague) and all continue to thrive at the institution.  The absolute numbers are impressive; the retention is remarkable.

This success has been achieved for several reasons: 1) the three deans who have led Darden during the past twelve years have consistently supported the hiring of minority faculty; 2) our current dean, Bob Bruner, has overseen the promotion of 4 of the 5 tenured faculty at Darden; 3) the school—faculty, students, and administration—has embraced eagerly the trend toward increased diversity among faculty.  Most important, the environment at Darden is welcoming.

I’m afraid there is likely to be a shortage of minority faculty in top 20 business schools and in international business schools because networks that provide talent to these institutions have not yet been widely opened to U.S. minorities. So one of the most important goals 21st century business schools must achieve is to develop and transform their way of doing business education;  business schools have to be “fluent” in diversity because our global stakeholders—students, recruiters, faculty, alumni, donors—are demanding this of us.  U.S. minority faculty have a critical role to play in helping business schools gain this fluency. Together, members of a culturally diverse faculty can create “laboratories” to help everyone learn how to build processes and organizational cultures that better produce relevant, high quality business education.

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Why You Have to Align Diversity with Business Goals

Monday, January 31st, 2011

“For a sustainable change in diversity, make sure every activity is well aligned with the business strategy; it is much more likely to last!”

In reference to this statement, key to my teachings on Leveraging Difference, Mistinguette Smith recently posed this question to me through Facebook: “Every CEO knows to say this, but what does it really mean? Where have you seen good examples of it in the private sector? Public sector?”

All it really means is that altruistic-driven stuff has an expiration date. “We’ll bring more women in because it’s the right thing to do” usually means, “We’ll bring more women in and they’ll all be gone in two years.”

If any organization wants the changes in diversity to stick, the leaders and the people in the organization have to have skin in the game—they have to want to change. The best way to drive that is to align changes in diversity with things that really make the organization work better. For example: A U.S. software company makes a big push to retain Indian engineers who are leaving at a rapid rate. Having the Indians means two things: it creates greater diversity, and they can make better software. And making software is the mission of the company. That company will learn to maintain its cultural diversity.

This works for any organization. You just have to decide what differences make a difference for that organization (easier said than done).

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Black Russians

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

I met Black Russians today.

No, I don’t mean Russians of African descent. And I’m not using a euphemism for going on a bender of delicious vodka-laced drinks during this exciting trip to Moscow. Rather, I’ve just finished teaching an amazing session with a sharp group of Russian executives who I’ve been helping foster a high-engagement, high-performance culture in their company. They have been struggling with a culture that has pockets of cynical, demoralized people and they really want to do better. But it wasn’t until we dove more deeply into what was happening in the company that I stumbled onto this fundamental insight:

This young, talented group of Russians is having an experience inside the company that is remarkably similar to that of black people in U.S. corporations.

The parallels are fascinating. I’ve learned that the history of this generation of Russians is, in some ways, disheartening. First, the demographic patterns over the past couple of generations mirror the story of African Americans. Just after World War II, there was a major shortage of males in the population: there were 2.2 females for every male in the population.[1] While those numbers have evened out over the years (1.2 females for every male in 2009), the legacy of the devastation of the male population during the 20th century remains—significantly higher health vulnerabilities than women, shorter life expectancy, and higher incidences of substance abuse, especially alcoholism. 2 These are all issues that have been visible and widely discussed in the African American community, too.

Culturally, the Soviet political structure left many challenges in its wake. For example, one participant shared with me that one consequence of Russia’s late entry into a capitalist economy is that Russian professionals receive a pretty consistent message from the multinational business world: your markets are lucrative, but as skilled managers and leaders in those markets you are lacking. No matter how competent they are objectively, there is a sense that many young Russian professionals feel as though they are not perceived to be competent enough to take senior leadership positions locally in global corporations. They don’t yet see many role models in their organizations that would counter that concern. And while they acknowledge that as a group, they do have a lot to learn professionally, they also feel that some are talented, experiences, and very ready. And they are frustrated by not having that talent, experience, and potential recognized. They spoke of wanting to have more authority and responsibility and of simply wanting a fair chance to advance to the highest levels of the company, messages I continue to hear in my work with black professionals in the U.S.

So often, I hear that “diversity” is a U.S. thing that has limited relevance globally. No one denies there is tremendous diversity globally—that’s obvious. But often, executives and students I work with see the way U.S. folks deal with difference as idiosyncratic. We are obsessed with race, they say, and we are too focused on attending to differences without seeing how similar we are.

Ironically, my experience reinforces how similar we truly are all over the world. We struggle with similar inequities borne of the unique circumstances of our societies and our histories. Whether it is slavery in the U.S., or the government political system in Russia and the former Soviet Union, or the ethnic divides in Vietnam (I learned that some people from certain provinces in Vietnam tend to receive preferential treatment within the labor force), every nation and every society has a story of difference, power, and inequity. Leaders and managers do a disservice to all of their stakeholders when they deny these realities in their organizations.

Leaders and their organizations do better when we engage these issues and these differences with openness and an attitude of exploration and learning. Today, my Russian colleagues will initiate a conversation about their experience as Russian professionals with their ex-pat leaders. It’s a great start.

[1] Age structure of the Russian population as of January 1, 2009 Rosstat Retrieved on 2009-10-08.
[2] Wikipedia entry “Demographics of Russia”

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Walking In Traffic

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

Hanoi Traffic

In Hanoi, there are millions of motor scooters in the streets and not so much traffic management.  You get across the busy thoroughfare by simply walking into it.  If you wait for an opening in traffic, often you would never be able to get across the street.  So the new skill I learned is to just walk into oncoming traffic…

I’m becoming way too comfortable traveling all over the world.  I’m on an excursion that began in Hanoi, Vietnam, and sends me to Paris and then Moscow in the space of three weeks. When I first traveled overseas, I remember that difficult and exciting time when you first have global encounters and it seems as though there is something new to learn every hour of every day.  But in my recent travels and global engagements, I had been feeling increasingly confident of my ability to navigate in different cultures, to manage both the logistics of getting around in places where I don’t know the language, for example, as well as to manage the emotion of being immersed in situations that are ambiguous and sometimes scary.  I learned to just walk into oncoming traffic.  And I felt good doing it.  I felt like I had mastered a new skill and with my new ability, I could afford to relax and daydream as I walked.  I wasn’t in danger.  I was untouchable.

Then I took a walk in Hanoi, about 1 kilometer, through bustling streets.  I was on my way to find a belt from a local mall (I thought I had packed everything) and as I walked, I noticed how chilly it was.  There was a cool breeze blowing off of Westlake where I was walking and I was a little underdressed.  The streets were generally narrow, but seemed to get more constricted when scooters and cars came zooming through at me, horns blaring (beeping horns are a way of life on the Hanoi motorways.  People just drive with their hands on the horn all the time).  There were vendors and kids and chickens and roosters all along the roads I walked (rarely was there a sidewalk) and there was all kinds of wet blotches in the road.  Not sure what they all were.  The air was full of exhaust and I started coughing a little.  As I walked the sun began to set and by the time I was halfway into the walk, it was dark.  The oncoming traffic became only oncoming bright lights and I was increasingly uneasy as I walked.  It was rush hour now and there was much more traffic on the road.  Suddenly, I was dodging bright-light-scooters and weird wet spots and horns constantly blaring, nervously looking in front of me and behind to make sure I wasn’t about to be swiped.  And all I can remember is the story I had heard from another visitor of a bloody accident he saw on the way in from the airport a few days earlier.

I got to the mall, got my belt and got back to my hotel.  But I realized that I was not safe and sound and in control in Hanoi.  It was scary and dangerous and just because I learned to walk into traffic arrogantly did not mean that I would not get hit by a scooter or car.  I was just lucky up to that point.

It’s not that confidence in new cultural contexts is necessarily bad.  It’s just that it’s hard to balance that confidence with the reality that when I am out of my home country, I am in a pretty precarious position.  Always.  I live in the illusion that it will all work out, an illusion that has a particularly American quality to it borne out the pervasive comfort with which I, as a U.S. citizen, experience on a regular basis.  My problem was just that I started to believe my own hype that I had this global thing down.  I’ll never have it all down.  I’ll just keep experiencing and learning and trying to remember with clarity how challenging it is to be present in the world.

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Why Everyone Needs to be a Token

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

I feel sorry for anyone who has never been (or will never be) a token.

I was reminded of the value of tokenism in an unusual way last week.  I attended the National Communication Association 2011 Annual Conference in San Francisco and I went to a very thought –provoking session on “Solitude and Distraction” by Dr. Mara Adelman from the Seattle University’s Department of Communication.  The part of the workshop that captivated me was the segment on solitude and the power and importance of being alone.  It made me remember my days as the only black faculty member, first at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and then at Darden.

There are lots of downsides to being a token and a good deal of research over the past 30 plus years (starting with Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s classic book, Men and Women of the Corporation) has described them:  receiving heightened attention that creates extra pressure to perform;  being excluded from important social and professional networks;  being prevented from moving into non-stereotypical jobs (e.g., women were more likely to be stuck in HR or staff jobs that were seen more as “women’s work”).  Not only that, but the presence of visible tokens lulls others who share that token’s identity to believe that they, too, can make it, even though the reality is that very few people like them will, in fact, make it.
Given all this, it’s no wonder that most see tokenism as a bad thing.

But what occurred to me at the session I attended was that there is also a value to experiencing yourself as alone.  Too often, we covet the presence of like others because it counters all the bad stuff I just described AND it leverages the age-old adage that there is strength in numbers.

But these benefits shield the cost of numbers.

When I was a token in my early career, I often felt isolated and kept to myself.  As a result, I learned some powerful lessons, many of which I recalled in the workshop:

  • Heightened attention provided opportunities to shine. When I first learned about tokenism and critical mass, I learned that some tokens have amazingly positive experiences in their organizations.  They are successful in their work and are often well-liked.  Now there are some interestingly dysfunctional reasons for this phenomenon like: the majority highlights a token member as way to help the majority feel good about itself as it uplifts the poor token; or the reason the token is so good is because the average tokens never get to be a part of the organization.  Only tokens who are extremely capable ever gain entrance, so of course they are successful.  They are, as the saying goes “better than the best.”  But in this kind of situation, the token can garner resources and social capital that allow her or him to flourish.
  • I was able to draw on my creativity in unexpected ways. They say that when you are in a trying situation—one in which you have the capacity to overcome it, but not easily—you are able to actually able to learn and perform more effectively.  I became more innovative out of necessity.  My research became sharper and more interesting, in part, because I sat alone so long thinking about it.  My teaching improved as I became more comfortable being myself in class (see the next bullet) which was, for me, an innovative approach to being in the classroom.  If I was going to be successful in my endeavors, I realized that I could not easily rely on that which was external to me; I had to fend for myself.  Necessity was indeed the mother of invention.
  • I was more reflective in understanding my identity as a black person because that identity was so salient. Being the lone black person in these organizations meant that my race was always in the foreground for me.  Lots of social psychological research reminds us that it is difficult to forget the factors that make you unique when you are placed in a context in which you differ dramatically from those around you.  In an interesting way, I became more attuned and aware of what it was like to be black.  I read more and reflected more as I sought to make sense of my experience.  This deeper self-knowledge is one of the benefits of solitude.

The caveat I will add to all of this is that strictly speaking, I was not operating in solitude.  I was a member of an organization and that meant there were people all around me.  Indeed, it was that social milieu that helped define my experience.   Other people were the referents I used to experience myself as different.  But what I found illuminating as I reflected on the workshop was that one can be profoundly alone even among lots of people.  That is often the life of the token.  But that life need not be one of anguish and desperation (at least not solely).  It can also be a life of energy, renewal, and strength.  It can really be quite nice to be unique.

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