Ask a Manager Featuring Michelle Silverthorn
For the last few years, I've had the privilege of being a guest columnist with Ask a Manager. I know that's how many of you have found me! I'm guesting this week again. Read my column for today and again on Wednesday on how to address issues of race in the workplace. And join the Ask a Manager comments! There are thousands of engaged commenters wanting to do the same as you - learn how to be better allies at work. See you there.
Here's one of the questions I answered today!
My question concerns team diversity, and what responsibility manager/team leadership have towards cultivating it, and how that should happen. In the technical branch of a large tech company that strives for equality, my team of just under 20 people has three full-time employees who aren't white and male (passing, at least). In the past year, every new hire except one has been both white and male (again, passing). Another wrinkle is that two of three of the non-white-and-male employees are Asian, which isn't even considered a racial minority in tech! To what extent can this be attributed to the leadership of the team, and what are things they could have done (or can do in the future) to prevent this? (Is this even an appropriate grievance to have?)
Michelle says: "What type of diversity would you like to cultivate and why? There are many reasons to increase diversity across all identity groups – improved problem-solving, greater variety of perspectives, richer discussions, better decision-making, reconceiving tasks, and on and on and on. But I’ll be frank. If the business case for diversity were enough, every organization would have “solved” diversity years ago. If your team is thriving, no one is complaining, and you are delivering the impactful results your community needs, then it’s no wonder your leadership might shrug their shoulders and say, “We’re fine.”
But, and I say this as someone who has done this work for a very long time, there will be a time where it will not be “fine.” It might happen when you hire a transgender employee who feels both misunderstood and isolated in the workplace. It might happen when you have an autistic colleague who feels their peers don’t understand how to communicate with them. It might happen when a Gen Z employee rejects your workplace because it doesn’t meet their inclusion expectations. It might happen when a woman files a discrimination suit because they have gotten passed over for a promotion multiple times. It might happen when you release a product that doesn’t at all represent the community who you want to adopt it. It might happen when an entire nation has a racial reckoning and companies start scrambling to understand what racial justice means in a workplace that lacks any Black leaders. Instead of waiting until that happens, your team leadership needs to think about what kind of team they want to be.
I may have mentioned this before, but every single diversity initiative needs to start with two questions: “Why are you doing this?” and “What does success look like to you?” If you can’t answer these two questions, then in times like right now when there is massive pushback on diversity initiatives – both legal and otherwise – your leadership can go, “Well we don’t really know why we’re doing this,” and, “It hasn’t been successful anyway.” You can either wait until the crisis arises – and it might take one or multiple crises to get to that tipping point – or you can sow the seeds now.
So here is the 5-Step Guidebook for Diversity According to Michelle Silverthorn
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