Turning White Men into Champions of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace
White men still hold most of the power positions in the corporations, institutions, and small businesses of America today. Even with the progress made by women and people of color moving into more influential positions, white men will continue to hold the majority of power positions for the next decade at least. White men also still hold an advantage in getting started in their careers through hiring, talent development, and promotion practices of the majority of employers. Especially in large to mid-size businesses.
While efforts to help women and people of color respond to workplace injustices can prove useful as a short term survival strategy, this endeavor produces no change in the white men who control the inherently biased organizational systems. Often the favoritism still shown white men is not a conscious, malicious, or intentional effort by organizations, but the outcomes still have not created a level playing field of opportunity that everyone seeks.
Conversely, as an increasing number of organizations do face up to the challenge of workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues white men in these organizations often feel threatened, confused, and blamed. These feelings arise when they find their behavior does not always reflect their professed values. While many hold core values of equality for all, when feedback on their behavior does not confirm these values they frequently feel unfairly attacked, surprised, or ashamed. Other white men voice the rhetoric of equality, but when pressed tend to fall back on beliefs of white superiority or male privilege. Like other people, however, white men can become champions for the values of equality and justice if they develop a deep compassion for themselves, other people, and the world.
In my previous work with white male executives and managers my colleagues and I helped organizations embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion. As a white male myself I have found several factors critical to the development of my own commitment to DEI, and to having success with helping other white men. These factors include self-awareness, confession, issues awareness, conceptual clarity, core value metamorphosis, and visioning the personal benefits of equality.
Increasing Self-Awareness
Personal change of any type begins with self-awareness. Knowing my strengths, weaknesses, deepest feelings, strongest beliefs, how others view me, and my affect on others makes me a more effective person in all areas of my life. Like most white men I live my life rarely sensing a need to know my feelings or how my behavior impacts on women and people of color. I’m more likely to feel threatened and confused when confronted about the negative impact of my behavior because I don’t consciously intend to hurt or discriminate against anyone. Clearly, there are some white men acting with malicious intent towards women and people of color, but most of us just act automatically from our assumed or actual social, economic, and political status.
Too often I may try to convince women or people of color who confront me that my positive intentions makes me a “good guy”. The confronter, often the person who has experienced a negative impact from my behavior, and that of countless other white men throughout his/her life, wants me to understand how the outcome causes hurt, frustration, or anger. Being able to see the outcomes of my behavior, accept responsibility for it, and see beyond my good intentions marks the first step towards a deeper self-awareness of how my behavior impacts the lives of other people.
The advantages I have had in life seem normal, feel comfortable, and I do not naturally look to give them away. By acknowledging the greater privilege and advantages I have had simply for being a white man, I open the possibility of women and people of color wanting to know more about me.
At the workplace, for example, I can acknowledge to my colleagues that I may be the recipient of unconscious or unintended preferential treatment by my peers and managers. The preferential treatment typically given me, however, can mislead me into believing I am smarter or better than women or people of color. Usually I get positive feedback regardless of my performance and may continue to advance over others who may be better performers.
Awareness of these advantages then presents me the opportunity of finding out actually how skilled and knowledgeable I am. With such knowledge I can then judge whether I have been living off illusions of superiority fed by a life of unearned special treatment. I can also make an effort to insure all employees receive equal treatment, by demanding that performance feedback and reviews occur more frequently, skillfully, equitably, and that feedback to managers include their performance on DEI issues.
Another area of self-awareness consists of expressing feelings and accepting the feelings of others. Dealing with issues of DEI such as racism and sexism often fosters strong feelings. I often feel some degree of confusion and discomfort with expressing my feelings on any issue. With sensitive guidance from friends, colleagues, mentors, and counselors, however, I can learn how to get clearer about my feelings in a particular moment and find ways to express these feelings in a non-threatening manner. I nearly always experience relief and less emotional tension when I express feelings freely.
Like many other white men I was taught to contain my feelings, “remain cool under fire”, and to focus on finding solutions and attaining goals. I was taught that feelings were an impediment to success, but now I know their expression actually leads to greater personal and professional effectiveness.
Providing Opportunities for Confession
The concept of confession scares many people because of the religious connotations. In a purely generic sense, however, confession is the way humans admit mistakes, expose their harmful behaviors, and accept responsibility for their actions. Productive confession also involves saying openly to friends and colleagues what I am learning through greater self-awareness.
A person’s conscience can be cleared through confessing mistakes, and moving beyond guilt to taking new actions. Like many white men I sometimes feel pressured to accept blame for the behavior of all white men past or present when confronted with the legacy of inequality and oppression in this country. Rather than taking an honest look at myself, I allow this self imposed pressure to increase my defensiveness and confusion. Over the years I’ve been fortunate to have women and people of color colleagues teach me that while I do not need to accept blame for the oppressive behaviors of other white men, I do need to acknowledge the advantages and privileges I receive because of those past and current behaviors of many white men in power positions.
Confession also includes seeing past my good intentions, and acknowledging that I do not experience the daily insults, insensitivities, and oppressive behaviors that women and people of color experience simply for who they are. Admitting my ignorance, demonstrating a desire to learn and change my behavior, and forgiving myself for mistakes, allows me more honest and caring relationships with all people. Contrary to my socialization as a white male, I am learning how women and people of color view admitting my mistakes as a strength in character.
Issues Awareness
In gaining self-awareness and the courage to confess my mistakes I become more receptive to learning about specific issues. Without more knowledge about what comprises DEI issues I risk continuing to misunderstand and under appreciate what the lives of women and people of color are about. As a minimal start I am trying to understand how these issues involve every minute of life, and that the experiences of inequality and injustice can occur subtly or blatantly.
Specific issues can include employment, housing, education, the judicial system, finance, health care, public access, and others. Increasing my awareness on the content of these issues can come about through reading books and articles by women and people of color, through formal education and training on issues of equality, through discussions and debates with friends and colleagues, and through a more discerning view of how the media presents women and people of color in movies, TV, and print.
The particular aspects of these areas must be learned before I can skillfully respond to specific inequalities. This knowledge enables me to respond to decisions and events in my workplace, community, state, or country. Misleading rhetoric, false rumors, and wrong information can lead me to find excuses for not getting involved, to suggesting insensitive solutions, and to the classic trap of blaming the victims. I may choose, for example to become an expert on demographic changes and how these will impact workplaces all over the United States. In that search I will learn about why higher attrition rates occur for women and people of color in the workforce. On this or any other issue I must educate myself so that rhetoric, rumor, and backlash do not determine my beliefs and actions.
Conceptual Clarity
Along with a better awareness about specific DEI issues I have also benefited from learning how to make sense of these complex issues by using a few conceptual frameworks. One that I often use contains a breadth and depth analysis of the issues, plus an effective means to apply this knowledge.
The breadth of awareness includes understanding how these issues play out at individual, group, system, and societal levels. The depth aspect includes our ideas, feelings, attitudes, behaviors and core values. Like a matrix these two dimensions can be woven together to form a conceptual basis for understanding the way DEI issues play a part in every aspect of our lives.
For example, I have particular ideas, feelings, attitudes, behaviors, and core values about DEI. Some of these ideas are influenced by the race and gender groups I am a part of and the experiences more common to my particular groups. I am also influenced by the various systems I live or participate in such as my family, community, or workplace. These various systems have also developed ideas that make sense for them, deemed certain behaviors more acceptable than others, allowed the expression of feelings in a particular way, and formed a base of core values which seems to help the system thrive.
With a sharp conceptual picture of how various issues connect I can see ways to change my behavior as an individual, understand the meaning of my group identity, appreciate the experiences of women and people of color, and grasp the complex way systems impact my life. I can also better diagnose the specific aspects of an issue or event, and prepare better solutions.
Core Value Metamorphosis
What I consider most important in life and try to act on consistently makes up my core values. Myself and many other white men have developed core values about life and about DEI issues which typically match those of women and people of color. Why? Because we’re all human beings and mostly consider the same qualities and values as what matters most in life. We’re not really much different each other. We may have very different life experiences but a deeper core value level we’re mostly the same.
Where we often differ, however, from people different than us by race and gender usually shows up in how important we consider issues like DEI. In my life, for example, I didn’t grow up feeling the need to pay close attention to DEI issues on a regular basis. Except as an interesting topic to study in school. I had this choice primarily because I didn’t then and still don’t experience much if any negative impact in my life based on my race or gender. By contrast every woman and person of color has to pay close attention all the time. To move beyond this comfort zone I have to wake up to what life is like for women and people of color and care enough about them to get involved when opportunities exist.
Without having my own significant trials, errors, conflicts, and learnings, I struggle to understand the elements of racism and sexism, agism and other forms of discrimination. To deepen my commitment to DEI I need to find ways to have my core values put through greater challenges than normally occur in the course of my life. I can get directly involved in issues at work and in my community. I can seek to learn more from women and people of color through their feedback on my behavior. To be ready for the inevitable conflicts and challenges, I need to know the depth of my commitment to DEI and the types of responses I am capable of in those moments.
Visioning the Personal Benefits of Equality
To stay committed to equality issues for the duration of my life I must come to see how I benefit from these efforts to change the systems in which I live and work. An altruistic motive will not suffice during the toughest conflicts and challenges of working on DEI issues in my workplace, community, or country. Too often, while being an advocate for DEI, self doubts about my effectiveness will surface. I can become discouraged when feeling overwhelmed by the the enormity of the problems encountered. At times I can experience intra-personal conflicts which hinder my emotional and intellectual clarity about why doing this work is important.
In advocating for race and gender equality, for example, I am as a white man acknowledging the need to give up the privileges and advantages I have inherited, assumed, been granted, and built my life around. In giving up these types of “benefits” I must find others. Without finding new personal benefits it becomes too easy to give up my commitment to the cause of equality.
This discovery of new types of benefits begins with visioning the possibilities. To actually experience the benefits I must be receptive to the opportunities and people who come my way. I personally benefit through an increase in the quality of relationships I have with different types of people, in my knowledge and appreciation for the different ways people lead their lives, in the the depth of compassion I feel for others, and in the desire I have to build my life around the cause of justice and equality.
I know other white men at all levels in corporations and institutions who are working on DEI issues in the workplace and who report an increase in new types of personal benefits. I hear about an increase in trust and respect from women and people of color, more open communication about important business issues, a decrease in feeling the need to fit into the traditional white male corporate role of being the tough, emotionally contained, rugged individualist, and a clearer sense of how to improve their performance and opportunities while working in an increasingly competitive yet equitable workplace. The blinders have come off for many of these white men and they feel far less of the guilt and discomfort that occurs when living in an unfair environment.
My individual vision and experience will be different from other white men but all of us must find ways to develop and express our core values about DEI. I must face up to the challenge of believing and understanding how a world with equality for all will bring me far greater personal meaning, satisfaction, and happiness than by having unfair and unearned advantages over women and people of color in nearly every aspect of life.
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From 1988 to 2000 I worked as a Senior OD specialist with the firm Elsie Y Cross Associates, which was considered by many corporations and practitioners as the premier DEI consulting firm in the country from the 70’s through the early 2000’s. Since then I have continued to try my best to be a Champion for DEI issues by learning more about the issues and more about myself as a white man. I also try to help any organization which I’m part of to learn more about DEI issues and how to incorporate this new learning into building a healthy internal culture.
Here are 2 links about Elsie Y Cross: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-08-09-tm-6185-story.html
