When President Trump issued an executive order banning the military and federal contractor’s use of diversity training programs that suggest that the United States is “an irredeemably racist and sexist country,” I wasn’t surprised. The fact is we live in a hyphenated and polarized America. If your daily experiences as a person of color or a female in this country represent a narrative or viewpoint that is disquieting to the dominant American narrative, you risk being seen as angry or anti-American. The plausibility of your talents, efforts and contributions are subject to the “master’s tools” and interpretation. After 30 years of working globally as a diversity, leadership and organizational development thought leader, I accept that the fight for the promise of racial equality in the United Stated of America is flawed by design. We need to create a “preferred future” of our own design.
As a black-gay-American-man who built and led one of the first diversity functions for a Fortune 75 company in the early 90’s, I witnessed how the diversity training in corporate America is designed to fail. Research on the voluntary attrition of jobs in tech released by Kapor Capital reported diversity turnover is directly related to workplace culture and it costs corporate America $16 billion per year.
Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf recently suggested in a June 2020 memo, “While it might sound like an excuse, the unfortunate reality is that there is a very limited pool of Black talent to recruit from with this specific experience as our industry does not have enough diversity in most senior roles.” The Bloomberg.com article went on to say that since taking over a year ago, Scharf has frustrated some in the firm’s ranks by adding mostly White men to his leadership team. As long as trustees at corporations like Wells Fargo continue to hire CEO’s like Mr. Scharf without holding them strictly accountable for producing measurable results and impact that guarantee that diverse talent has real access to advancement, rewards and power, change will never come.
The excuses haven’t changed in over 30 years. I have heard all of them, like “qualified black talent is hard to find”, or “change is going to take time.” Somebody please explain to me why corporate America’s boardroom is willing to incur a $16 billion dollar annual loss caused by its failure to fully embrace diversity, equity and inclusion?
According to Forbes, a study conducted by McKinsey reveals diverse companies make 19 percent more revenue than companies that don’t value diversity. The data proves that getting diversity and inclusion right is great for shareholder value. Yet the unacknowledged experiences of the diverse professionals I have coached in America’s workplace suggests we will kill anything that makes the most powerful group in America’s workforce uncomfortable.
Instead of hitting our hyphenated heads against the wall, let’s re-imagine our American workplace by co-creating new possibilities for leadership development, culture change and systems accountability that benefit all members of the US and global workforce.
How Lemons Become Lemonade
The President’s new executive order is unwittingly causing some forward-thinking leaders in corporate America and the social sector to ask, “what would going beyond diversity and inclusion look like for 21st century leaders and organizations?” I have been focused on helping organizations create preferred futures for all of their stakeholders. A preferred future lives at the intersection of an organization’s vision, mission and strategy. It guides leaders and teams to produce results and impact that are time-bound, measurable, achievable, equitable, sustainable and transformative. Mercedes Martin, CEO of Mercedes Martin and Co, an equity and sustainability firm that works with global companies and leaders says, “We need new tools to address this preferred future. Tools that take all stakeholders into consideration. We need tools that are bottom up and top down.”
Maanav Thakore, a diversity, equity and inclusion expert who helps tech companies to implement strategies for diversity in their workforce and marketplace feels “while we have done a really good job at making the case for diversity, equity and inclusion, we have become stuck. Now we must be willing to resource creative strategies that help us co-create how we want to be with one another.”
We need Beautiful Leaders
We need beautiful leaders to build beautiful new economies, ecosystems, companies and cultures that generate their preferred future. We all deserve to live in an America whose leaders no longer use unconscious bias to excuse systemic racism and sexism. But to accomplish this we must be willing to replace the double consciousness of white guilt and black shame with a clear consciousness that is born from self-reflection and empathy. Until we do, America the beautiful will remain a dream deferred.
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Toby Thompkins is the Founder and CEO of SAFIOO Inc. (www.safioo.com), the first real-time leadership development platform that uses psychometrics and deep machine learning to help remote workforces address challenges at work and beyond.
