Effortless Thursdays #18: What helps organisations and individuals thrive? It's not diversity.
To belong is to thrive.
Diversity sucks
It shouldn’t, but it really does. And it boils down to this: “Just because an organisation is more diverse doesn’t mean that it’s better”.
It’s not diversity itself that is problematic. Bringing different people together allows innovation to flourish. As Steve Jobs said,
“Creativity is about connecting things”.
When we have people from different cultures, upbringings, world views, and experience - they bring with them different things to connect.
No, it’s diversity itself, it’s the objective of diversity initiatives to be inclusive, that sucks.
Ticking boxes
I’ve ticked more boxes on forms that count my uncommon characteristics and features than I can count.
As I've grown older, I've noticed that the more forms I fill in, the more I'm asked questions about my characteristics and features.
In my late teens, the questions started off with:
Which gender? Male or female?
Which age group do I belong to?
Which university did I attend?
Then other questions appeared.
What ethnic group did I belong to?
What's my sexual orientation?
Over the years the number of questions has increased, as has the range of possible answers. Now, with the tick of a box, I can also keep the number crunchers guessing some of my characteristics, if I’d "rather not say".
When I was filling in the paper application forms to train with law firms, I remember thinking about why they were interested in capturing this information.
Diversity, I suppose. But I was left asking myself whether a more diverse organisation is indeed better.
The Chinese Detective: is that too Chinese?
Representation and visibility of role models are important, but equally, I’d rather not be hired into an organisation that hones in on the boxes that are less frequently ticked.
Just as a white, private school-, Oxbridge-educated 21 year old male could turn out to be a brilliant lawyer, so could a Chinese, closeted, comprehensive-, grammar- and Oxbridge-educated, 21 year old called Eric turn out to be a shit one - even with all my differences.
It’s not an easy balance to strike. It’s easy to slip into thinking that inclusiveness is about individuals having opportunities because they are different, rather than individuals having opportunities who happen to be different. Box ticking seems to shift the emphasis too much on the former.
Our unconscious biases call it out too when we think:
“They got the job because …”, rather than
“They got the job.”
My characteristics that were less common didn’t seem - to me - to matter. I wanted to be hired for all the other reasons - my strengths, my values, my perspectives.
Yet the subtext behind the headlines, like the organisation is “too white”, “too male”, “too Oxbridge” is that we need to include others. But when does a diversity and inclusion policy succeed? When can the “too” label fall away?
It often amuses me to turn these phrases on their head. My husband has a love and encyclopaedic knowledge of theatre and musicals that even inspires seasoned arts lovers about the latest version of a performance.
I often joke that the plays and musicals we see in London almost always have an underrepresentation of Chinese people. The only person I had to look up to as a child was David Yip who starred in “The Chinese Detective”.
When I lived in China and I watched a Chinese language play written by a friend of mine, I didn’t catch myself thinking that the cast is "too Chinese". My characteristics in that audience were much more commonplace.
To belong is to thrive
When diversity focuses on inclusion, it’s difficult to know where to draw the line.
What does make an organisation better and the individuals within it thrive?
Rather than focusing on inclusion, I think there’s something beyond inclusion that’s more fruitful to focus on: belonging.
It’s a subtle difference, best illustrated by what we notice in ourselves when we answer these two questions:
“Do you feel included?”
“Do you feel you belong?”
The second speaks so much more to the importance of social connection to how we thrive, not just mentally and emotionally, but physiologically, too. Belonging is crucial for our health and wellbeing.
First, there’s a basic evolutionary reason behind it. As hunter-gatherers, belonging to the tribe was a matter of life and death. If you were cast out from the group, you were highly likely to perish.
We evolved to be social creatures, to create connection, to look out for facial micro-expressions in others that signal “welcome” or “threat”.
When we’re under threat, our bodies prepare for it: blood pressure rises, heart rate increases, digestion shuts down diverting blood to where oxygen is needed.
In our modern world, we get the same physiological responses to workplace stress as we did being excluded from our tribe.
Second, we avoid the challenge of defining what the right balance is when being inclusive works.
Are we a diverse organisation when we’ve achieved a certain number of ticks in certain boxes?
What do we do if the Chinese Detective had grown up in a part of the world populated with ethnically Chinese people?
These are questions with no right answer. But focusing on inclusion implies that there will also be exclusion, so who - or, rather, what characteristics - remain excluded?
Third, imagine an ethnic minority, LGBTQ individual being appointed to a senior role. That ticks lots of the ‘less common characteristics’ boxes. Their appointment might make them feel included.
But what happens if some individuals in the organisation shut them out from meetings, from decision-making, from being heard. They are included in the statistics, but they don’t feel they belong.
Belonging is the true measure of diversity
You know when you belong because you feel it. Your parasympathetic nervous system is activated: you’re calm, in a rest-relax-digest state. You don’t feel threatened or excluded.
Belonging doesn’t depend on ticking boxes of characteristics: we either feel we belong, or we don’t.
You can also hear it in the conversations in any group or organisation.
's we-they test is an excellent proxy for belonging.
Belonging is marked by having a voice, being heard and seen, being valued. It’s not only promoted by bringing transparency to diversity statistics, but we can see it in real human-to-human contact, too.
How to create a feeling of belonging
As a leader, it starts with you, and those around you. Put aside the diversity statistics for a moment. You can make a difference right now.
A simple, powerful way this works in practice are the two ways I shared in my last two articles:
SAVE, don’t praise. Praise is pathetic and doesn’t create connection. SAVE-ing a more authentic way to create in others trust, connection - and a sense of belonging.
What’s right with you? This is all about focusing on what’s right, not what’s wrong.
Over to you!
How do you create belonging in your teams and with the people you work with?
Have you tried Robert Reich’s we-they test with your team, or individuals in your organisation?
What good examples of leaders creating a sense of belonging have you noticed? Maybe that’s been at work, but it could be at home, too?
Do you see your differences as a disadvantage? If so, you might like this article I wrote about how they can be our superpowers.
What new ways do you want to try to help the individuals that you work with feel like they belong?
A final thought
This week’s newsletter is on a topic that might make you bristle. I’m sure I’ll have missed some perspectives, or got things wrong. If so, please help me understand better. I encourage you, as always, to look for insight, rather than agreement. I invite you to share those insights so we can both better understand: so that we can both still feel belonging.
PS It makes me smile to think that no-one could come up with a more catchy title for a TV series than “The Chinese Detective”!
That’s it for this week!
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Eric I'm grateful you took on this topic! We do live in an unprecedented time where so many tribes are colliding, as if thought all the comets could light up the night sky at once without bumping into each other!
I wonder if our inherited structures of hierarchy and work are even functional for the breadth of origins and individuals collected together today. From my own personal experience as a Mestizo in the United States, none of this diversity stuff works, nor do I have hope that it will. History has no precedent for its success and as long as we rely on the systems of the past, its failure will be all but guaranteed.
Still, I do hope for integration. Perhaps that is the objective to the subjective feeling of belonging. Let diversity be only heard of by wealth managers, and inclusion be for batteries in the box. I hope at least for a society integrated to a point where, like in Mexico, being mixed becomes the unifying identity. Maybe celebrating the mixing in itself is the solution?
Great article Eric. It's interesting, as white, straight, upper-middle class guy in the US, I almost feel as though I'm not supposed to "belong" to any group. Or at the very least, I should feel guilty for wanting to.
To your point about fostering belonging in the workplace, my goal has always been to get to know people as best I can. I like having personal conversations so that I know who people are, what they do, where they came from, etc.. I've felt this helps people feel more welcome because at least somebody cares about them as an individual and cares to learn about their background.