DEI

Inclusion: The Foundation

Posted on by Seniye Groff

I am working with a new client on bolstering their inclusion practices with employees and clients. In the most basic form, inclusion is defined as “the act of including” by Merriam Webster. But we all know it is a lot more than that. In fact, all people want to feel included, valued and appreciated…or at least I know for sure that I do! So how do you create an environment where folks feel a sense of belonging, feel heard and feel safe to express their authentic selves?

First, accept that we all have bias. One of the ways to work through our bias is to talk about it. Many DEIB programs hit walls when they focused on blaming and shaming. Blaming and shaming never work, especially when you are asking someone to be open-minded to others that are different from them. Being bold enough to tackle these tough conversations is difficult since you don’t want to be called a racist, you don’t want to be misunderstood, you don’t want to offend someone and you certainly don’t relish is discomfort!

So what can you do to be more inclusive? I like this video on making assumptions and the framework is offers to Pause/Recognize/Question so that you are not misled by your assumptions (bias). Ask yourself, “What assumptions am I making?” and “How do I know these assumptions are true?”

Another tactic is to acknowledge your own preconceived ideas, move beyond generalizations and know the difference between perspective and reality. In other words:

•What messages have I received in my life that may influence my perspectives?

•What identity groups do I have the most exposure to?

•What identity groups do I have the least exposure to?

•How can I check for blind spots?

Other things you can do are expose yourself to new experiences, talk to people with different identities from your own and broaden your worldview. I love it when I talk to someone and I can say, “I never thought of that perspective or view before.” and “Wow, that’s a whole new way of looking at…” I think the American Negotiation Institute’s guiding principle says it best: “The best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations.”

What have you done to address your blind spots?

This Chair Rocks by Ashton Applewhite

Posted on by Seniye Groff

I challenge you to flip the script and believe that you are not OLD, instead you are experienced!  Ageism is stereotyping and discrimination on the basis of a person’s age. Influenced by social movements that were challenging racism and sexism, Dr. Robert Butler coined the word “ageism” in 1968. It is the last socially sanctioned prejudice.  With age comes experience; with youth comes experience.  Both are valuable.

We experience ageism any time someone assumes that we’re “too old” for something—a task, a haircut, a relationship—instead of finding out who we are and what we’re capable of. Or “too young;” ageism cuts both ways, although in a youth-oriented society older people bear the brunt of it.

Like racism and sexism, discrimination on the basis of age serves a social and economic purpose: to legitimize and sustain inequalities between groups. It’s not about how we look. It’s about how people in power assign meaning to how we look.

Stereotyping—the assumption that all members of a group are the same—underlies ageism (as it does all “isms”). Stereotyping is always a mistake, but especially when it comes to age, because the older we get, the more different from one another we become.

No one is born prejudiced, but attitudes about age—as well as race and gender—start to form in early childhood. Over a lifetime they harden into a set of truths: “just the way it is.” Unless we challenge ageist stereotypes—Old people are incompetent. Wrinkles are ugly. It’s sad to be old— we feel shame and embarrassment instead of taking pride in the accomplishment of aging. That’s internalized ageism.

Unless we confront the ageism in and around us, we lay the foundation for our own irrelevance and marginalization. The critical starting point is to acknowledge our own prejudices, because change requires awareness.

Working together we can:

  • Challenge ageism – in ourselves, social practices, policies, and institutions.
  • Create new language and models that embrace the full life journey.
  • Create new paradigms in society so that adults can participate fully consistent with their capabilities and ambitions at all stages of life.
  • Celebrate the contributions of older adults.
  • Create a more compassionate and interdependent society that supports the well-being of people of all ages.
  • Inspire and help develop cross-generational communities where people of all ages enjoy the gifts and capacities they have to offer.

Read Applewhite’s book to learn more.

Bias and Intersectionality Part Three

Posted on by Seniye Groff

Our Inner Bias/Inner Critic can be our own worst enemy. Our inner bias can show up as:

  • Shame
  • Self-doubt
  • Low confidence
  • Beliefs that propel you forward or hold you back

What to do:

  • Be aware of it
  • Pause
  • Show yourself compassion
  • Get curious

Calm you inner bias:

  • Explore what beliefs hold you back.
  • Decide what different data can you use to make different assumptions.
  • What contrary evidence exists?  Choose to scrutinize your assumptions.

Bias and Intersectionality Part Two

Posted on by Seniye Groff

Women are in a “no win” situation and walk a tightrope of meeting societal demands for women to demonstrate female characteristics of compassion, warmth, communication and collaboration vs leadership characteristics  (dominated by male characteristics) of forceful, assertive, dominant and competitive.

Did you know? When women display male characteristics, they are seen as competent but not liked.  When they display female characteristics they are viewed as less competent. Women leaders are seen as competent or likeable but rarely both. I saw this play out in my own career and it is incredibly frustrating.

And when you add women of different race, ethnic, sexual and gender identities to the tightrope of gender bias it gets even more complicated navigating the ladder to success.

A few ways bias shows up:

  • Pay gap
  • #Metoo  wakeup call  sexual abuse, harassment, microaggressions at work
  • COVID and “second shift” awareness
  • Who gets promoted or the cool assignments
  • Who gets listened to

How else have you seen bias show up?

“The Wake Up” Part Two

Posted on by Seniye Groff

Reading “The Wake Up” by Michelle Mijung Kim has been powerful and informative. She shares so much great information. Her comment, “Many of us desire to have good impacts, but sometimes even our best intentions can bring unintended consequences of harm.” This results in fear to do or say anything but then harm is also caused by inaction.

Kim suggests a few things to do when you get called out for being harmful:

  • Listen and calm your defenses.
  • Apologize and acknowledge the harm.
  • Express gratitude for the feedback.
  • Make amends without expecting forgiveness.
  • Commit to doing better and then actually do better.
  • Get support for yourself.

“The Wake Up’ by Michelle Mijung Kim

Posted on by Seniye Groff

I believe it is important to constantly continue to learn. And I love learning new things to to help me consider other points of view. So, I was definitely intrigued to read Kim’s book. She is a queer, immigrant Korean American woman writer and like every other person in this world, she has a unique perspective. This perspective informs her work in the DEI space. The premise of this book is good intentions vs. real change, which also is challenge in the DEI space.

Some things that I liked from this book:

  • Her definition of allyship. She states that it is, “the active and consistent practice of using power and privilege to achieve equity, inclusion and justice while holding ourselves accountable to marginalized people’s needs.
  • I agree with her comment that good intentions produce unwanted outcomes all the time. “Doing good” is not the end game. Validation must come from the group that is marginalized. They decide what doing good really means. For example, ” By failing to set accountability metrics that are driven by the very people such initiatives have been created to support, companies end up solving nothing and doing no good.”
  • Kim’s distinction of do-gooders vs each of us owning that we “each play a critical role in upholding and dismantling systemic oppressions that ultimately impact all of us.” Who does your “why” serve? Yourself? Or historically marginalized people?
  • We need to understand they ways in which we are harmed by or benefitting from different systems of oppression. We all benefit from some and cause harm in other ways. And the belief that everyone has the opportunity to succeed through hard work and their own skills is a myth. The folks that hold the power, access and resources while not acknowledging the barriers marginalized people face, have enjoyed success, believing they earned (and deserve) their success.
  • I think about the Afghan man that I am teaching English to and how motivated he is to learn so that he can improve his opportunities. Someone that already speaks English clearly has advantages over this immigrant. This is a simple example but shows how inequities begin and stay in place.
  • White supremacy exists in every system we have in place: work, healthcare, criminal justice system, real estate, the interviewing and hiring process…the list goes on and on. “Racism is a complex set of systems, policies and beliefs that reinforce the marginalization of people while privileging white people in society.”

Kim lists a few questions to help guide us:

  • Who has the power?
  • How is the power being used?
  • Who benefits?
  • Who is harmed?
  • What historical, social, cultural or political context might I be missing?

There is so much to this book, I am going to write multiple posts about it!

“Say the Right Thing”

Posted on by Seniye Groff

I love learning new things and certainly have spent the last several years reading, watching and listening to anything I can get my hands on about diversity, equity, inclusion, bias and belonging. So I recently picked up, “Say the Right Thing” by Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow. The premise of the book is to learn how to talk about identity, diversity and justice.

The authors suggest a framework called A.D.D.A. which stands for avoid, deflect, deny and attack. The authors contend these are conversational traps that one needs to be aware of and prepare for as one tries to have conversations around identity, diversity and justice issues. I thought this framework really did capture how conversations derail, sometimes before they even start!

One line in the book really captured the issue for me:

As excruciating as it can feel to have conversation about identity, it’s important to remember people from nondominant groups have always experienced emotional turmoil in these dialogues from being ignored, mocked, tone policed, or subjected to retaliation. When you find yourself wondering, “Why am I so uncomfortable? You might instead ask, “Why have I been comfortable until now?” You might then hear the answer: “I’ve been comfortable because until today, the other person has carried all the discomfort on their own.”

The authors suggest some strategies to deal with the emotional discomfort of these types of conversations such as a growth mindset by treating mistakes as opportunities to learn, self-affirm by reminding yourself what is most important and right-size feedback by remembering claims about privilege are often not as extreme as you perceive them. Reframing the situation can make you more open to the conversation in an objective way.

There are lots of helpful nuggets in this book. The authors share stories, examples and suggestions. One of the ending notes I think was helpful, “Don’t ignore people’s group identity, but also don’t reduce them to their group identity.” And finally, educate yourself! It is your responsibility to do so. Be curious, humble and ask for help but don’t expect someone else to educate you. Check out this book and let me know what you learned.

DEIB Training Efforts

Posted on by Seniye Groff

Training is a necessary component to any change initiative. And the topic of DEIB makes training that much more crucial. I believe training in this space is about creating “ah ha” moments rather than telling people what they have done wrong. Think about it…who wants to be reminded of all their faults and poor behavior. Ultimately we need people to WANT to learn and to change and to grow and to EVOLVE.

Some key points for your training to be successful are:

•Employees need to learn about each other, connect and engage.

•Focus training on positive actions employees can take. 

• Discuss how can employees positively affect an outcome.

•Workplace training on rules, regulation and what behaviors are prohibited should be a separate session.

•Think about pre and post-work.  Level-set definitions and base information so that the classroom gets used for the important stuff like dialogue and discussion!

•Importance vs. time devoted. Too often I hear companies saying, “We can only devote one or two hours to this session.” Well, if DEIB is as important as you say it is, doesn’t it deserve an appropriate amount of time to train??!!

Multiple sessions vs one long one. This helps work around the belief that there isn’t enough time. It also allows people to ruminate and consider what they learn, put it into action and then return for the next training session.

There is lots of discussion on whether or not training should be voluntary. Some points I think you should consider are:

•Employees should believe they are opting in.

•Deliver a clear and consistent communication plan that shares importance, expected outcomes and opportunity to be involved.

•Remind employees it is not voluntary to be inclusive at work.

•Consider what your competition doing?  And then ask, “Does it matter?”

•Training is centered around white people.  Ask your what marginalized employees need. This is overlooked almost 100% of the time but is a very valuable perspective.

Let me know what other strategies have worked for DEIB training.

Equity vs Equality: Input vs Output

Posted on by Seniye Groff

•Example: If you are disabled you need to worry about if a building is accessible.  If you are not disabled, you don’t even think about it.

•Example:  Everyone gets a pair of glasses (input, fair, equality). We want everyone to see well (output, everyone gets what they need, equity).

“Treating everyone exactly the same is not fair.  What equal treatment does is erase our differences and promote privilege.  Privilege is when we make decisions that benefit enough people, but not all people.”  Amy Sun

So think about outputs first and then work backwards to determine goals and actions to take to meet those goals.

Metrics:  Accountability = Trust

I often get asked how leadership can build trust at their companies. I think it is pretty simple, do what you say you’re going to do. When you are accountable to your promises, you build trust. So I suggest you create a very public and consistent way to show (and prove) that you are indeed working towards the goals and outputs you set for your organization.

•Create measurement and indicators so you know you’re making progress.  Create a dashboard.

•Establish a baseline with each indicator.

•Measure at multiple points, not just beginning and end.

•Regular surveys.

•Feedback loops.

•Ask the community, employees, etc.

What other ideas do you have to build trust and measure your results?