The bounding box of diversity and inclusion
Why understanding the field of play means understanding the impact you can have
I. Welcome back & follow up
Good Morning ☀️
This week will be follow up to the newsletter on diversity from a week ago. I received several comments around putting diversity into action, to ensure it’s not simply lip service.
Let’s get right to it!
If you have found this newsletter useful in any way, feel free to share or forward to others. It helps greatly in finding new readers and individuals for engaging discussions.
II. Moving from diversity to inclusion, and understanding a companies bounding box
I forgot where I first read this, but I’ve always loved this summary of putting diversity into action, which was labeled as inclusion. This isn’t exact, but conveys the concept well enough.
Diversity is having individuals of different backgrounds, upbringing, and races, while inclusion is actually providing them a platform for their voice, and an ear to express themselves to provide input to the company.
Why is this delineation important?
I’ve talked to individuals at companies who have a clearly diverse workforce in terms of race or background, but drive a tightened homogenous culture that doesn’t take advantage of that diversity. They don’t take advantage of the knowledge and backgrounds they have brought in. In doing this, everyone can suffer, including the customers for who the company serves. When diverse teams are leveraged, it’s almost always a win for customers, who are often made up of a diverse footprint themselves. There are plenty of examples of products going wrong when diversity isn’t included early in the process. Similarly, there are plenty of articles on how to ensure you are building a diverse team.
What I’ll cover instead, is how providing employees a voice for inclusion only works within the bounds of what a company is willing to accept - inclusion has bounding boxes. Companies should be cognisant of how those are set, and employees should know when their voice strays outside of those bounds to understand the type of impact they can have.
One of the worst things a company can do is to completely ignore the input or asks of the spectrum of people who actually create their products. It’s an easy breeding ground for apathy and unhappiness.
All companies should strive to be inclusive in terms of providing a platform for listening. Good management check-ins and surveys are a simple first step. They should also provide an understanding of what parts of the company are malleable based on the culture. In this way, employees understand the limits, and companies can listen better to the voices that are presented.
However there are always two sides to a conversation.
When employees are given a platform and an ear, they should also understand the company has no obligation to act upon their requests.
This distinction is where I see conflict often arise.
Companies have direction and vision set by the leadership. Leadership should be listening to the various teams to ensure vision is carried out and understand what creates the right environment to do that, but a company is in no way beholden to carry out what all individual employees want.
Companies, like people, each have their own personality, principles, and cultures. I’ve rarely understood employees who stay at companies that don’t fit within with their own cultural values, only to bitterly complain that the company won’t change. Employees can very easily vote with their feet by taking their talent elsewhere.
In a conversation with one of my peers at argo, she pushed back saying that employees should work to change a company, if they feel it’s for the better. That leaving is akin to forfeit because you didn’t try. While I do agree employees should work to change a company, they need to understand the field-of-play and boundaries they are working within.
There is the overall company culture, which is often framed by the individuals leading the company. Then there is what that culture allows, where employees can push, pull, fight, challenge, etc. This is where employees can shape and fine tune the culture. Finally, there is the entire realm of possibilities - simply put, anything you can imagine. It is when employees want to change a company outside of what it allows, outside its cultural boundaries, that conflict often arises.
Taking a simple example, a company may be open to flexible hours during the day for those with small children to assist in school pick-up or drop-off. Their culture supports family life. However the company is simply not going to engage in a conversation for a 4-day work week - this is in the “entire realm of possibilities” but not within what the company culture allows. If you want a 4-day work week, you should probably go to another company, but if you want to have 15:00 - 17:00 blocked to “pick up the kids”, that would be acceptable.
When employees are looking to push for change, I would encourage them to apply a basic principle I see used by great individuals in Sales. You sell to someone who is looking to buy - not someone who isn’t interested. In that way, if a company is inclusive, they still may only change in the ways they are prepared to do within what their culture allows.
Employees can fight, but personally I’d coach someone to join a company that aligns with what they value and then work to influence that company. The return will be tenfold over what you would see with a company that doesn’t fit their values. Of course over time a company may change their values or culture, and that can be from being part of the fight or other factors, but it can be a long road. For some, it can be worth it, and I leave it to each individual to choose their path.
Inclusion doesn’t, and shouldn’t, mean universal acceptance of every ask, but it should mean that voices are heard.
Not all companies need to be right for all people - and that’s ok.
That’s all for this week.
Thank you for reading!
Rock 🔥