Friday, April 15, 2011

The real problem with diversity in the workplace

There are few topics in the corporate environment that are as unclear and emotionally charged as Diversity. Managers are told to pay attention to it and make it a priority, but it’s such a murky pond in most organizations that even well-meaning managersimage (diverse or not) often just bow to political correctness and try to avoid doing anything that would get them in trouble. It’s exacerbated by the fact that most corporate HR departments are not allowed to share any actual statistics with the broad management population so they can understand the current situation (e.g., how many “diverse” people are there in a division at each level vs. what’s the expected number) Add it all up, and it can seem like a pointless exercise to try to make it better.

It’s a little tougher still if you’re a white male manager, because you’re not just the focus for fixing this ambiguous problem, it’s often assumed that you don’t get it in the first place. Unfortunately, that’s sometimes the case. And, not only are you considered ill-equipped to fix it, the fact that you’re taking up a headcount with your “non-diverseness” means that your very presence is an example of the problem itself.

It’s a nasty situation.  But there’s a different way to approach this than I’ve seen in most organizations – one that can get to the real root of the diversity thing so we can actually fix it.  First, we need to understand a core dynamic that exists between people and their workplace that creates barriers to a diverse culture.  Second, managers need to understand the role they are playing in screwing things up. 

It’s about power

First, the problem.  Here’s why tackling diversity is such a big challenge for most organizations, and why I’m not a big fan of most corporate diversity initiatives.  The real problem with diversity isn’t really anything about diversity at all.  Diversity itself is about a lot of very cool, very beneficial things – it’s about leveraging differences, it’s about equal treatment, it’s about inclusiveness and not pushing people out or holding them back because they’re different.  Hard to argue with any of that. 

But the problem with diversity is an entirely different beast.  Some in the ranks of diversity initiatives think it’s about things like awareness, education and acceptance.  But that misses the point.  It’s about power.  And the reason most managers don’t get how to improve the culture of diversity where they work is because they don’t have a very good understanding of how power works, especially their own. 

So now I've taken an already charged topic and introduced the “P” word into it.  But if we’re going to actually make some headway on this, we need to go after the real issue.  So bear with me for a minute while I lay this out. 

The organization is about power

Every organization is experienced differently by each person in it. Everyone’s history and life experience is totally unique, so actually, we’re all diverse, in a broader definition of the term. And everyone uses the lens of their life to make sense of their workplace. But one of the biggest challenges people face at work is how they regard authority and people “in power.” If you were picked on a lot growing up, for example, or were unjustly fired over a misunderstanding early in your career, you’ll probably see the balance between The Powerful and The Powerless a certain way. Those who have personally experienced race, culture or gender bias in their lives are well aware of what a lack of power can feel like.

That’s the worker’s side of the equation.  Now to the workplace itself.  The workplace is completely and deliberately a power structure – it’s designed for the appropriate distribution of authority so the organization’s objectives can be met most effectively.  We each get a space to play in, and someone we have to answer to.  And that someone controls our ability to put food on the table. It’s how organizations work and get things done.  There are those who make decisions, and those who carry them out.  There are those who give promotions, and those who get them.  And, more to the point, there are those who fire people, and those who get fired (if you’re a manager, congratulations - you’re actually in both camps).  Of course, there are great places to work where managers make people feel part of something transcendent, but we all know that there is a Darwinian undercurrent flowing through every organization – if you don’t believe me, ask any one of the literally millions of people who were unexpectedly laid off in the latest economic downturn.

So, what – you may be asking – has this got to do with diversity? Here’s what.  Those who fit the category of diverse are defined so because they are in the minority.  It’s the whole point of a diversity initiative – to create an environment where those in the minority can be heard, can flourish and can have access to more power.  The whole glass ceiling concept is all about a lack of access to power by diverse people. 

Racial, cultural and gender biases have been around forever.  But in the workplace, these biases play out in a power structure.  For example, it’s one thing if someone doesn’t get your need to reduce business travel because you’re a single mom.  It’s another thing entirely if that someone is your boss.  One is a lack of empathy, the other is a serious threat to your livelihood.  Which is why diversity issues are often never even raised to managers – the very discussion could create a career barrier.  And most managers are totally unaware of the things they do that stifle real dialogue because they don’t really see how their power affects that dialogue.

The Antidote: Stop the programs; focus on power

All managers (white male and otherwise)  need to understand something if we’re going to crack the code on diversity, and a host of other organizational challenges  as well.  Every interaction your people have with you has meaning attached to it, because you hold power over them.  Meaning that you probably don’t see at all.  Your ill temper that day someone cut you off on the way to work, or the fact that you’re regularly on email at midnight, or that small comment to a coworker about how nice he or she looked that day – ultimately, it’s all seen through their lens of power and authority, because at the heart of things, that’s who you are to them.  The one who giveth and the one who taketh away. 

So, just for now, stop trying to address diversity by spinning up a bunch of affinity groups for women or racial minorities in your organization to acknowledge their presence (in a series of recent meetings with people in affinity groups, the participants overwhelmingly told me that affinity groups are nice, but useless in improving diversity).  

Instead, focus on yourself.  Step One for creating a culture where diversity can thrive is to become very aware of your own behavior and the signals you send to people who rely on you for a paycheck.  For example:

  • When you interview a group of candidates for a job, is the candidate pool diverse, or is it a bunch of white guys?  Trust me, people know – especially those who are not white guys. 
  • When you recognize people for top performance, do most of them perform the way you do?  Are they mostly like you?  Again, people notice – especially the ones who are not like you. 
  • When it’s time for career development discussions, do you really take the time to listen, and then act on what comes out of the discussion?  If the person you’re coaching is diverse and you’re not listening, how do you think they see your lack of interest?
  • Do you “sponsor” people who are diverse by providing stretch assignments with plenty of air cover?   Are you using your authority and influence (i.e., power) to support them?
  • When you’re running a meeting and someone says something insensitive as a joke, do you let it go because you’re embarrassed and don’t know how to handle it, or do you call them on it? If you don’t call them on it, what generalization could the others in the meeting make about the organization’s leaders?
  • Were there an unusually high percentage of women impacted in your last layoff?  Did you raise the topic during its planning?

These are the moments of truth where people decide whether the organization is serious about real diversity or not, because to them, you are the organization.  Diversity isn’t about programs or posters in the hall.  It’s being aware of how you show up and use your power as a manager to support people, including those who aren’t like you.  It’s demonstrating a little compassion by listening.  It’s helping people feel valued, regardless of who they are.  Whether you agree with them or not.  It’s being aware that none of your directs can really think of you as a peer or just another person on the team, no matter how informal you are with them.  It’s pushing your best and brightest along faster, regardless of your ability to identify with their background or workstyle.  It’s getting really clear on performance metrics that make your evaluation of people’s success less subjective.  When you can do that, you no longer need initiatives for diversity, because the goal is already met.  Access, addressing of unique needs of your people, and fair treatment across the board.  It sounds a lot like just good management, doesn’t it? 

And if you’re running a diversity initiative for your organization, step back from  “the program” for a second.  Have you done anything yet to help managers understand power and how it plays out in the organization?  I don’t mean power plays or political power – I mean the basics of power. The types of managerial power. The difference between expertise, authority and influence, and how to make the most of each. Delegation vs. empowerment. How managerial power affects working relationships.  Trust me, it would solve a lot of performance problems for them and make them better leaders. 

And you might just solve the diversity problem along the way, without ever even mentioning diversity.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Leadership Voice, Part II: Building leadership credibility

My recent post on Finding Your Leadership Voice really heated up my inbox – thanks MP900443014[1]for all the comments! A key theme I heard was the challenge leaders have in the area of authenticity and believability (another theme was how to get leaders to become more self-aware – that’s for another post).  So here is Part II on Leadership Voice - building leadership credibility. A longish post with a lot to cover, so let dive right in.

Agreeing on the definition

Credibility, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is the “ability to inspire belief.” This is a key aspect of leadership, but it’s only one aspect. For example, Credibility doesn’t necessarily validate the nobility of a leader’s belief, just that others will buy into it. Martin Luther King Jr. led a cultural movement by inspiring the world with his noble belief that people should be judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin. On the other hand, the road of history is strewn with moral potholes left by leaders who inspired entire societies to buy into (and act on) insane beliefs.

So credibility is measured solely by the level of belief in your followers. Truly great leadership requires credibility, but it also requires much more. For this post, we’ll just focus on the elements of credibility, so we can really get a handle on how it works independent of other aspects of leadership.

Working on being credible?

But before we go further, let’s acknowledge that this can be an odd topic to get your brain around.  Why should a leader have to work on being more credible?  It seems like a contradiction – why would I work on something that’s supposed to be natural and authentic?  For two very good reasons:

  • Leadership amplifies and distorts your authentic self: As your authority increases, so does your persona, and that persona is held up to scrutiny. Just as a film actor has to work so her facial expressions look normal when 30 feet tall on the screen, you need to understand and address how your authentic self comes across in organizational life. Small, even silly things can become large – like the media circus that ensued when George HW Bush mentioned he didn’t like broccoli in the early 90’s. Your followers’ perception of your credibility is subjective, complex and dynamic, often shaped through back-channel communications, events and the context of the workplace.
  • Reactivity steers you away from your authentic self: An ambiguous, high-velocity work environment can quickly shift an ungrounded leader into a reactive mode, where the leader’s actions may have no connection to who or what they are. So while you’re dealing with mess after mess and bouncing around like a pinball, your people are reading your behavior as if you are purposely, carefully choosing every step you take as a reflection of your core values. Scary, but true. 

Suffice it to say that being credible as a leader isn’t so simple.  Or, better put, it’s simple, but not easy.  And it’s definitely work.

Five pillars of leadership credibility

There is a vast amount of information available on this topic, but all seem to mix leadership credibility with other elements of leadership that are more about just being a good and noble leader in general.  For example, Kouzes and Posner, in their excellent book on credibility, site things like appreciating the diversity of constituents.  This is a great thing for a leader to do, for sure, but it’s not necessarily a requirement to be viewed as a credible leader.

So, in culling from the best, here’s my list of the five key elements of credibility that leaders can’t do without:

  1. Purpose: To “inspire belief,” you need to be extremely clear about what that belief actually is.  Your mission and the possible future you lay before others need to be so palpable that others can taste it.  To do that, you need to be extremely clear yourself, and be deliberate in how you communicate and model your purpose. You also need to communicate that purpose in a way that connects with common desires or concerns that cut across the people you wish to inspire.
  2. Competence: People need to perceive that you understand your job and can handle your scope of responsibilities.  Domain knowledge, good judgment and a pattern of success are the three keys to demonstrating that you are up to the task in the eyes of followers. No matter how wonderful the destination, no one wants to get in the car with someone who doesn’t know how to drive.
  3. Confidence:  People will not find you believable as a leader if you don’t demonstrate belief in yourself.  This is different from competence, in that even the smartest leaders can appear unsure, particularly in ambiguous, unpredictable situations.  Confidence is most important when followers are not feeling confident themselves. In toughest times, this manifests itself as leadership resolve – think Winston Churchill during WW II, constantly reminding the people of Great Britain the importance of no surrender, regardless of how the war appeared to be going.
  4. Openness: On the other hand, leaders can take confidence too far and show up as headstrong – they have decided what they will do and won’t hear otherwise. It’s a fine line.  A truly credible leader allows room for input from others, especially those who work directly with that leader on a regular basis.  The act of listening – really listening – to others affected by your decisions shows them you have enough adaptability to consider new information, inspiring trust.  Open dialogue also provides others a window into your human, relational side, where your values and priorities can come through.
  5. Integrity: Integrity simply means that everything hangs together, like the structural integrity of a building. In my earlier post on Leadership Voice, this is where I spoke of “the audio matching the video.”  People usually associate integrity with morality (not lying on a tax return or stealing from the company, for example), but that’s just one form of integrity.  Essentially, integrity has three parts – alignment of what you say and do (e.g., keeping promises and following through), consistency over time, and honesty – being transparent and truthful (no hidden agendas). Integrity removes the questions of your trustworthiness so followers can focus on where you want to take them.

Being vs. doing

So you can see from the above attributes that credibility is more about being something than doing something.  Sure, actions reflect who you are, but the source of credibility is the character of the leader, which develops over a lifetime.  That said, character and credibility can definitely be developed through self-awareness of these five areas and a real commitment to change.  In many cases, a leader may lack credibility due to a glaring issue in just one of the above areas (like confidence, or openness).  By identifying and addressing a single, serious blind spot, a leader can significantly improve leadership credibility.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Building personal capacity: Work like it’s the day before vacation

I recall a day a few years back when I was in my office, trying desperately to get some work done.  A guy I worked with at the time strolled in.  He seemed to have no sense of urgency about, well, anything.  He proceeded to explain to me – for over ten minutes – how incredibly busy he was, and how he expected to be at work until the wee hours finishing up something that was tremendously behind schedule.  Instead of being frustrated by the interruption, I found myself mesmerized by the contradiction before me, wondering how much earlier he’d see his kids that night (or I’d see my kid) if he’d just get back to work.

Presenteeism: The new corporate disease

The new word for this is “presenteeism” – showing up for work without really showing up. Presenteeism is often associated with people working while sick, leading to low productivity.  But presenteeism goes far beyond people just being sick at work.  It’s a growing problem in organizations, afflicting people who are overwhelmed by their workload.  Ever find yourself just pointlessly doing email when you’ve got bigger fish to fry?  That’s a form of presenteeism. Or wandering the halls like my hapless colleague above?  Presenteeism again.  You’ve reached the saturation point with work, and nothing productive is going to happen.

In a great little book from a few years ago called Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, Tom DeMarco makes the point that people who plan on working long hours during the day are far less productive than people who tightly time-box their day.  The reason?  With no definitive, hard stop for their day, people unconsciously pace themselves, spreading roughly the same amount of work across more hours.  In fact, their most productive time during those extended work days is when everyone else goes home and they realize they have to get something done or they won’t get any sleep. 

Of course, all of us have to put in long hours at times to deal with a peak load, but the chronic pattern of long work hours tends to result in very low productivity. And at great cost to your personal life.

The problem: Energy management

Now, we could get into a big discussion about employee engagement and all the things organizations do wrong that create a detached workforce, and it would all be valid.  But if we take ownership for it at the grass roots level, something else is at work.  This is a classic energy management problem for individuals.  Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz exposed the issues around energy management in The Power of Full Engagement.  In their book, they compare their peak performance training for their clients who are elite athletes with their work with corporate executives. 

The biggest difference between the two, they state, is that elite athletes understand they have to cycle between training hard and allowing time to recover, while corporate professionals don’t allow for any recovery time.  Conditioning to take on more, they say, is based on pushing apolo ohnohard but then resting. So for us corporate athletes, we should push hard for a sprint, but then take some time to recharge.  Not only will your productivity increase, but so will your overall capacity – you condition yourself to do more and handle larger stressors, like elite athletes pursuing higher levels of performance in their sport.  No recovery time, on the other hand, leads to slow-burning mediocrity, which is all you can muster when you’ve used up your energy. 

Maximizing your energy at work

So, if you find yourself wandering the halls, looking for a friendly ear to hear about how overworked you feel, here are two tips. 

  • Build recovery time into your daily schedule.  Personally, I can push hard for about two hours, and then I need 15-30 minutes to get some air.  The time window is different for everyone – some can push for 3 hours, some 90 minutes.  But then there needs to be time to recover.  I’m an extrovert who recharges by being around people, so I plan 1:1’s with people I call “coffee walks” – where people can get 20 minutes of my time, some fresh air and a cup of coffee.  No slides, no office, just talking and walking.  Then I’m back to work at 100%.  For introverts who recharge their batteries by being alone, it’s probably something very different.  Whatever it is, put it on your calendar and do it.  You’ll get more done and be more focused afterwards.
  • Work every day like it’s the last day before vacation.  You know that day – where you’ve got to tie up all your loose ends at work by a set time so you can get home and pack for vacation?  That’s often the most productive day people have.  And the sense of completion and closure is just amazing.  If your workday is out of control, try this.  First, define what time you must leave work that day.  Carpool with someone, set a personal appointment, take mass transit – whatever you need to force you out of the office by a set time.  Second, set specific goals for what you’ll get done prior to your planned departure. This simple discipline of defining and time-boxing the work creates urgency and focus during your work day.  And when you get home, you’ll be home.

Yes, it may seem counter-intuitive, but the way to get more done is through rest.  Your muscles don’t grow during exercise; they rebuild themselves during the rest period that follows.  Consider your capacity at work to be much the same – through rest, you grow stronger and more capable.  When your day becomes a series of shorter, time-boxed work periods, you’ll get much more done, and get home on time much more often.  So the family will get to enjoy more of you.

And the guy down the hall you keep dropping in on – he’ll get to enjoy less of you.