Diversity, inclusion, openness and dialogue
Diversity in the workplace means that an organisation employs a diverse team of people that is reflective of the society in which it exists and operates. Diversity refers to the traits and characteristics that make people unique while inclusion refers to the behaviours and social norms that ensure people feel welcomed and respected. Not only is inclusivity crucial for diversity efforts to succeed, but creating an inclusive culture will prove beneficial for employee engagement and productivity.
Our Framework sets out five ‘behaviours’ needed to build character and achieve purpose – and one of these is valuing diversity and building bridges (plurality) – this is described as:
It is easy for diversity to end up being a tick box exercise if people do not genuinely value the richness of different perspectives that real diversity and inclusion can bring. There is increasing external pressure on organisations to be seen to be more diverse, and thinking about this in terms of quotas or demonstrating external diversity – making sure x number women or people from a BAME background make up new recruits, are on Boards, or company brochures – are often where organisations start. These approaches can be helpful in starting to make a shift, but often the work can stall here. If there is no real effort to embrace the different perspectives that diversity can bring, people will find themselves feeling they need to change how they behave to fit in or they may feel excluded or discriminated against.
These issues are not easy, and many companies struggled with how best to respond to Black Lives Matter in the Summer of 2020, beyond virtue signalling. This Blueprint blog reflects on our experience: Purpose and Race: learning from recent experience | LinkedIn
Achieving real diversity and inclusion in business is not easy. The challenges are multi-faceted, and reflect issues in society more generally, including education and other socio-economic issues. Nevertheless, businesses can choose to operate in a way that reinforces the status quo or they can seek to shape their culture to make it more genuinely inclusive, understanding that by building an organisation that more closely mirrors the society in which they operate will make them a better business in the longer term.
Openness and dialogue
At the centre of Blueprint’s Five Principles is a commitment to enable and welcome scrutiny of alignment to purpose. This commitment is lived out by seeking to be with and alongside customers, employees, suppliers and communities rather than doing things to and for them, asking for feedback with an open mind, listening to learn rather than to respond, engaging in dialogue and inviting regular challenge and scrutiny as a normal part of business life.
One of the shadow sides of a strong and collaborative culture is that it can become insular, and loyalty can conflict with the need for challenge and mutual accountability. There are some good examples in: Deborah Rhode’s Cheating – Ethics in Everyday life
The key to combatting this risk is to seek to create a workplace environment where people will intervene to regulate their own behaviour and challenge others in a way that builds relationships that enhance a purpose-led approach to business success. It takes courage and skill from everyone to facilitate and encourage people to speak up and challenge misconduct in an environment of psychological safety. See Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth; also Google project Aristotle on the importance of psychological safety for high functioning teams.
There are two common reasons people remain silent – fear of the potential consequences of speaking up; and a belief that there is no point because no action will be taken. The leadership mindset must be one where voices can be raised safely and are listened to because people are seen as a source of insight and moral awareness and deserving of respect. As Margaret Heffernan puts it in this article she wrote for the FT:
Companies where people can speak up are organisations where every employee is an early warning system, where improvement and change are normal.
This quality of openness and a desire for true dialogue is also fundamental to gaining the true benefits of diversity and inclusion. For each of us, one of the ways of learning who we are is to take the risk of being in relation with someone who is really different. It is about honestly facing others with my identity and letting others see me for who I am and allowing them to open up to me. In the process, we will all learn a lot, and, yes, we will change, but we will change in a way that allows all of us to become even more deeply the people we are. This demands courage and humility, a readiness to face into rather than avoid conflict, and a constant commitment to respecting the dignity of the other person and to see what we can learn from them. This is reflected at the centre of the Blueprint Principles which brings together the commitment to purpose with a genuine desire to welcome scrutiny through dialogue with critics as well as supporters.
Clarity and consistency
There is a risk, that a purpose-led approach could be thought of as constraining people’s creative spirit and even creating ‘cult-like’ environments overly controlled by the centre. A purpose-led approach should in fact release energy – liberating rather than inhibiting people’s sense of autonomy and the entrepreneurial spirit. At the same time clarity about, and consistency in, the way people are treated is essential. It is very easy for silos to develop in which different norms of behaviour spring up. The tolerance of inconsistent behaviour, and especially if allowances are perceived to be made in high revenue generating areas, can be deeply damaging to sustaining or building a strong purpose-led culture.
Consistent leadership and effective dialogue are needed both to encourage people to express their own creativity in a purpose led environment and at the same time to ensure core beliefs and values are lived out everywhere.
It is necessary too to understand the power of unwritten expectations – which can sometimes be very positive but also can completely contradict the stated values or rules. For instance, some organisations professing to value dialogue in reality consider dissenting voices as annoying or as troublemakers. Unwritten expectations send a strong signal of what a company truly values.