Walking the talk on workplace inclusion

It's easy to include the people you agree with. The real challenge is including those whose views you can't stand: the inclusion skeptics.

This week, I gave a brief speech at an internal event at work. I wanted to challenge people like me—people who invest a significant amount of time in diversity & inclusion efforts in the workplace—to reflect on what we’re doing, how it’s working, and whether we’re truly including everyone. Here’s the text of my talk.

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I joined our company straight out of college many years ago, and from my earliest days here, I’ve had a passion for diversity and inclusion. What does inclusion mean to me? It means building an environment where everyone’s unique perspective is valued; where people feel comfortable sharing their ideas, admitting when they were wrong, and growing together. Trust is high and fear is low. People do not have to face huge biases that might prevent their ideas from being heard or cause their contributions to go unappreciated. Inclusion arguably makes business sense, because a diverse group of people with a diverse range of perspectives tackling a problem together as equals, with trust and mutual respect, will always produce a better outcome than groupthink ever could. But for me, it’s more than a business objective—it’s a moral imperative. Treating each other with respect, checking our biases at the door, and rooting for each other to succeed is just the decent way to treat each other, as far as I’m concerned. Per the Golden Rule, it’s how I want to be treated too!

Before we go any further, I want to ask you all to take a minute or two to reflect, or even jot down your answers on a piece of paper, to the following:

• When you think about D&I, what are some of your guiding principles—the things you won’t compromise?

• How do you imagine our current D&I efforts will help us reach a desired state at our company?

• How might you be willing to change our D&I approach to try to get us closer to that desired state?

I’d like to share just a few of my experiences over the past year. A year ago today, I was pretty certain of what we needed to do to make our company a better place—I just had to convince everyone else to see things like I saw them! We often refer to inclusion as a “journey,” but I did not expect the twists, turns, and humbling u-turns that I ended up taking as I learned more about myself and my co-workers than I ever expected.

After the death of George Floyd last year, like many of you, I dramatically increased my participation in D&I efforts at work. There was a surge of interest in racial justice topics, and our company stood in support of employees who took initiative to educate ourselves, engage in conversation, and advocate for change. It felt like topics that had been taboo to bring up at work were now front and center. The attention to these topics began to snowball, and more people enthusiastically joined in the movement. But the louder the message got, the louder the pushback became. At first it was comments on homepage articles. Comments on our D&I group chat pages. Comments in Q&As. I think some of you may know the feeling I would feel when I saw these comments. My blood pressure would start to rise. I’d get angry or offended. I’d feel flushed. I’d want to shout. I’d draft clever retorts in my mind (or sometimes on the comment page, though always in a restrained form!). I’d find replies from other people I agreed with to “like.” I had to make sure they knew they were wrong!

Meanwhile, I’d helped to launch a group here at work dedicated to learning about racial injustice. Every week we assign some “weekly work” for members to read, and then we discuss it together on Fridays. It’s entirely grassroots and entirely voluntary, but it has been heavily promoted by leadership. I knew we were pushing the envelope for the kinds of topics that get discussed at work. Given that it was highly visible, it was only a matter of time before we started getting pushback. Things really ramped up when I had a few people reach out to me directly, by phone, email, or direct message. Some were extremely polite, but concerned and confused. Others seemed confrontational. They were using terms I’d never heard of like “Critical Race Theory,” or “cultural Marxism”—this was last summer, before these terms were all over the news. I really didn’t get it. I knew some people would be uncomfortable with reflecting on their privilege or discussing difficult history. But our group was voluntary—why were they so upset by it? How could anyone oppose inclusion? You might as well oppose puppies and cupcakes. The stress of dealing with this pushback literally kept me up at night. There were a few tough months where I kept trying to make headway with these folks. Sometimes it blew my mind how stubborn they seemed. It was like there was a square clear as day in front of us, and even while I counted out the four corners, they denied there were any corners at all and called it a circle. Maybe if I could share the right study, or the right article, or make the right point, or pull the right heartstring, I could get them to see the light? Get them to convert from being D&I skeptics to D&I advocates? Isn’t that the dream?

Little did I know my inclusion journey was about to take a series of twists in thinking and re-thinking. New legal requirements were flowed down, and I was desperate to find an anti-racism approach that met the requirements when I came across the Theory of Enchantment. Chloe Valdary starts her content with three principles:

1. Treat people like human beings, not political abstractions.

2. Criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down, never to destroy.

3. Root everything you do in love and compassion.

Principle #1 jolted me into a massive realization: I – was - biased. OK, yes, of course, any D&I advocate knows they have biases! We extensively discuss and reflect on biases associated with race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. We all have these biases, and you can either acknowledge them or deny them. These biases don’t make you a bad person—just a human. But our biases develop around SO much more than these traits. A bias is defined as “an inclination of temperament or outlook, especially: a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment: PREJUDICE.” Prejudice. Pre-judging. A bias is a narrowing of perspective that leads you to see the evidence that supports the judgement you’ve already made about a person, however subtle. It leads you to give some people the benefit of the doubt and look at others with suspicion. I knew it was possible to be biased about minorities, about women, about people from other countries, about what college someone went to or what sports team they rooted for. But I’d never realized just how biased I was about white conservative American men.

I know, that might sound silly to some! It would have to me last year, that’s for sure. But biases are sneaky, persistent things. They evolved to help us draw conclusions quickly based on limited information, but they can seize onto anything, and they seem especially tuned to sorting friends from enemies, “good guys” from “bad guys.” They act as a sorting mechanism that ends up dividing us into tribal alliances. Whatever our ally or opponent says is filtered and translated on our part to confirm our ideas about them. For our friends, our biases dial up the good and wave off the bad. For our foes, the opposite happens. Decades of social media exposure had trained me to use a decoder ring of sorts to translate the concerns of skeptics into confirmation that they were at least a little racist or sexist. I read their words and assumed the worst possible tone—snarky, conspiratorial, condescending. And the kicker is, it turned out they were doing the same to me.

The workplace split between D&I advocates and D&I skeptics follows our national political divide almost exactly. Most of us live in a hyper-polarized media world where we’re ever more sure that our team is in the right, and the other team is morally and ethically bankrupt. Our preferred news sources amplify the articles that confirm this world view, and our biases about the other side get stronger. Let me make this extremely clear: this phenomenon is happening on both sides. We can see the “other side” more clearly: their news sources are biased, while ours are factual. They are morally compromised, while we’re morally superior. Everyone on both sides feels this way. If you want to know how genuinely someone on the “other side” feels about the validity of their worldview, just look in the mirror.

After a years of increasing polarization, 2020 managed to dial up the division even more as people took partisan positions on even the response to Covid. It might be easy to dismiss D&I skepticism as just another example of tribalism run amok on “the other side.” But I want to remind you of what I said up front: To me, inclusion means building an environment where everyone’s unique perspective is valued; where people feel comfortable sharing their ideas, admitting when they were wrong, and growing together. Inclusion is a diverse range of perspectives tackling a problem together as equals, with trust and respect, which will always produce a better outcome than groupthink ever could. And I am afraid that a one-sided approach to D&I will not just continue to hurt the sense of belonging that our conservative co-workers feel; it will result in groupthink and worse outcomes when it comes to D&I efforts themselves.

The truth is, the problems that D&I attempts to address are extremely complex. They are a messy knot of historic biases, systemic inequality, mental health stressors (that we all experience), trust and fear, cultural differences, and interpersonal relationships. I used to teach a course about the subject of systems thinking. As engineers, we understand that complex problems have many, many variables to them. The more dimensions there are to a problem, the more you need multiple inputs to help understand it. If you only look at a complex problem from a single perspective, you’ll never make progress—you need to integrate multiple perspectives. This is the heart of diversity: breaking groupthink requires bringing together a wide range of perspectives as equals. This, to me, is why it’s imperative that we don’t just ignore D&I skeptics, or keep lecturing them hoping they will change their mind—we need their perspectives incorporated with our own to better understand and solve the problems we all see. Maybe it’s not just a square.

As I started over again in conversations with my colleagues, I shifted my approach. I decided to live up to my principles of inclusion. First, I assumed positive intent, and I assumed they were no more biased or ignorant about these topics than I was—which is to say, they are probably pretty polarized, but that doesn’t automatically mean they are racist or sexist. Second, I leaned into curiosity instead of anger. I asked a lot of questions and practiced deep listening. I checked my assumptions and tried to accurately understand what they saw that I didn’t. What worried them? What motivated them? What were their principles and core values? Third, we worked together to find common ground, no matter how small to start. The longer we talked, the more we found.

When it came to the important stuff, the real non-negotiables, we generally agreed! Everyone is equally worthy of dignity and respect. We don’t want people at work to feel excluded. We agree racism and sexism exist and are bad, and we want to work toward a world with less of it. We want everyone at our company to have the opportunity to succeed, and not be inhibited by bias.

Were there still things we disagreed about or saw differently? Of course. But by finding significant common ground, I no longer felt offended about the places where we disagreed. These disagreements were rarely about dignity and respect, and usually just a difference of opinion about what actions would help and what actions would hurt the team. It no longer felt like an existential battle, and more like the opportunity for different people to collaborate and learn from each other.

Here is where something magical happened. On more than one occasion, when the person I was speaking with felt like they’d been truly listened to, that I understood their perspective and I wasn’t judging them for disagreeing with me, their defenses went down. So much of the anger and confrontation we often see is rooted in frustration at not being listened to or understood. I think we all know that feeling—when we keep trying to express ourselves but our partner has made up their mind about us. It can make us angry, or depressed, or just choose to disengage entirely. And this is a major problem. For every D&I skeptic who asks snarky anonymous questions during Q&A or makes disparaging comments on the homepage, there are a dozens who’ve decided to just stay quiet.

Just think about it… how many of you have ever had a concern with something related to D&I, but you were afraid to express it because you worried what others would think of you? I can tell you I’ve spoken to dozens of people in the D&I space who are petrified of rocking the boat. This is a problem! Groupthink is when a desire for conformity or harmony in a group leads the team to agree at all costs, and it results in fewer ideas or solutions being shared. It creates an inflated sense of certainty in the in-group and a rejection of ideas from the out-group. There are hundreds of our co-workers who are deeply worried about the direction of some of our D&I initiatives, but they have decided it is career suicide to express those concerns. So the only people left working on the problems are people who all agree and all have a single, unified perspective. This is the antithesis of diversity.

So how do you respond when someone brings a unique perspective to the table? Are you able to consider everyone as equals, and listen to their ideas with respect and an open mind? Here is a chance to practice, as I have. An example of a common concern raised by D&I skeptics is around race or gender-based “good faith goals” for representation in hiring and promotions. I myself have made the case in favor of such goals, so I understand some of the good reasons for them: if we don’t measure, we won’t know if discrimination is holding people back. Because I was subconsciously assuming that the (mostly) conservative white males making arguments against these goals were subconsciously racist and sexist, it seemed to me that their true motivation was that they wanted the odds to stay skewed in their favor, or that they wanted the team to remain disproportionately white and male. The logic for my own perspective was so bulletproof that the only way someone could possibly disagree was out of ignorance or malice. In returning to my principles of inclusion, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. What might be their genuine cause for concern be? Many are deeply concerned that managers will feel pressure to make hiring decisions based on a candidate’s race or gender, which was made illegal by the Civil Rights Act. Maybe they are concerned that other possible contributing factors to disparities might be getting neglected, like the rate at which women freely decide to switch fields or leave the workforce, or the rate at which members of different racial groups tend to gravitate toward different majors in college. These points aren’t necessarily correct, and they don’t necessarily explain all of the disparities, but they’re not necessarily racist or sexist either, nor are they denying the existence of racism and sexism. For complex problems, there are likely many contributing factors, and it can be hard to know conclusively what the relative contribution of each factor is. The underlying thesis of inclusion is that many different perspectives help a team solve problems. Why wouldn’t we want their perspective at the table on problems like this? The more I opened my mind to the ideas and perspectives of D&I skeptics, the more I could see that D&I advocates were frequently trapped in groupthink on thorny issues.

I won’t sugar-coat it: we still have a long way to go to achieve our vision of a company where everyone feels like they truly belong, their life experiences, perspectives, and ideas are valued, and they are judged without bias. But I do believe D&I advocates already have all the right tools and principles identified—we just need to start practicing them with everyone. My personal objective now is to practice a much broader form of inclusion: treating everyone as human beings, not political abstractions. Staying aware of my tribal tendencies and checking all of my biases. Soliciting input from a diverse range of perspectives on D&I topics. And staying open-minded, choosing curiosity and compassion for instead of fear and anger. These changed in my approach have made D&I more interesting and invigorating for me than ever, and I hope more people give it a try too. Thank you.

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Recommendations for further reading:

• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

• Theory of Enchantment by Chloe Valdary

• Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times by Irshad Manji

• Self-Portrait in Black and White by Thomas Chatterton Williams

• Braver Angels

• Think Again by Adam Grant

• Scout Mindset by Julia Galef

(Not shared at work, but I’d also recommend Scott Alexander’s I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup.)