By Cory Rieken
The growing wave of requests for diversity and inclusion training is heartening: It means companies are ready to get serious. The bad news is that training isn’t enough. We’ve got to think far beyond training if we want to be truly successful in achieving diversity and inclusion. In the mid-1990s, I supported training for a large tech firm. At the time, it was incredibly popular to offer diversity training, and we seemed to be at a turning point. While most of today’s corporate leaders have gone through such training, we still face a barrage of data and media stories exposing the severe lack of progress. What went wrong back then? Are we doomed to mediocre results from our current initiatives?
Not if we approach today’s programs with a new mindset. Gaining a new mindset requires us to examine the old and how it’s hindered our progress. Here’s a personal example, which didn’t occur to me until recently, 34 years after it happened: When I started working at that tech firm, we had a fantastic employee activity center with lots of sports leagues and clubs. I was in the finance area of a large corporate services department, and as is typical of some work groups, we often socialized. The sports teams offered a way to organize this. The guys in the department formed a basketball team, which included the department leader. At five-feet-three-inches tall, and not being male or good at basketball, I wasn’t invited to play. Makes sense—it was a men’s league, after all. But I was quite literally invited to the sidelines to cheer on the team. And I went. It was fun.The guys practiced together, went to lunch together, and sometimes invited me and the other women "cheerleaders" to lunch and sometimes they didn’t. We became a social group; but the men met together more often as they practiced and played.
As they bonded, interesting things began happening at work. When new projects came up, they were typically assigned to one of the men on the team. I would volunteer and be offered a chance to work on the new projects, but I wasn’t usually approached to lead them. When it came time to support the local marathon as a department project, I was asked to head that. Hmm . . . a major project that impacted crucial systems and processes was not something I could lead, but finding enough cups, bananas, and tables for an event was. And this was all fine with me at the time. I was complicit in my own sidelining. Content to be a cheerleader forever, and not a key player.
Back to diversity training. In the 90s, we focused on awareness. We tried to change people’s mindsets by showing the advantages and opportunities some people had simply because of their race or gender. We tried to make everyone conscious. As you can imagine, this type of training wasn’t wildly embraced by everyone, especially the people who felt accused of being "advantaged." A book excerpt printed in Time on February 5, 2018, titled, "How Diversity Training Infuriates Men and Fails Women," sums up the experience perfectly. The author, Joanne Lipman, refers to the same type of training that we had at my company—the training I oversaw. I was complicit in infuriating men. Heck, I was complicit in infuriating everyone. We all went away feeling that others judged us unfairly.
As we enter a new era of focus on diversity and inclusion, we can’t make the same mistakes of the past. Isolating the victims of discrimination won’t work, and neither will trying to tell “advantaged” groups that they’ve got everything easy. Training alone won’t cut it. For more on how we need to change diversity and inclusion, check out my full article.