What do managers need to know to move diversity and inclusion forward?

That was the question Vernā Myers challenged ICMA Annual Conference attendees to respond to during her Monday morning keynote address, “Overcome Your Biases: Walk Boldly toward Them.”

Myers reminded attendees that most of us focus on the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” because that’s what we can see. Yet, in our dealings with other people, it is important to dip below the “water line” to explore the factors that affect who we are, including age, birth order, birthplace, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity.

What is the value of more diversity?

One reason why we need more diversity, according to Myers, is that we’ve gone as far as we can by pretending to understand other people. It’s not what we see, but what we do with the differences that we see. We need to be able to predict what is coming our way, and understanding others can help us in our predictions.

Diversity holds a number of important value propositions for local governments, including organizational, economic, moral/ethical, and liability. Not understanding where others are coming from, for example, could cost local governments a lot of money in lawsuits, for example.

Valuing diversity can help local governments:

• Improve public service and satisfaction
• Improve outreach and connection with constituencies
• Enhance the organization’s credibility within the community
• Decrease misunderstandings
• Give employees a denser perception, which in turn leads to greater innovation and creativity and ensures more accurate predictions.
• Strengthen our ability to attract talent from a diverse pool.

How do we build the workplaces and communities we believe in?

The “Black Lives Matter” activism movement hit Baltimore in April, and the city was not prepared for it. By the time of the Freddie Gray incident, the city was poised to explode. At the same time, the incident got people talking about issues that previously went undiscussed, such as how sustained poverty can lead to incidences of community unrest, worldwide gender inequality, marriage equality, transgender awareness, and the immigration crisis.

Thanks to those discussions, according to Myers, we now realize that society is not as binary as we once thought, and we are watching people become themselves and deal with the variety of ways through which to examine our differences.

Inclusion is different than diversity

Myers used stories to explain the distinction between diversity and inclusion. In 1953, for example, Harvard Law School opened up its doors to admit its first women students. No one, however, considered the fact that this group of pioneering women might have to use the restroom on an all-male campus. In the end, the school installed a women’s restroom in a janitor’s closet in one of the campus buildings.

What does it say when we invite folks in but then cannot accommodate them? Inclusion, according to Myers, is about promoting an environment in which people from different cultural backgrounds are welcomed and treated with respect. Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance.

Being inclusive, she continued, means saying hello to people in a language they understand. Getting their names right and paying attention to where and what time meetings are held. Noticing who isn’t at the table. Arranging social gatherings to accommodate a range of cultures, personalities, and behaviors. And knowing how to acknowledge and consider new ideas from people other than ourselves, even if ultimately things go in a different direction.

We must be able to talk to talk to one another, she said. In many workplaces, for example, people felt uncomfortable talking about what had happened during the tragic shooting of the nine Charleston church parishioners. We have to be willing to forge a path to conversation and feeling comfortable enough to talk “sensitive” issues.

Cultural competence: The path to inclusion

Myers encouraged attendees to help their organizations develop a new set of skills, a cultural competence that enables institutions to value differences as an asset. Organizations, she said, must fully integrate their understanding of and appreciation for the diverse cultures and backgrounds of all of their employees, clients, and other constituencies. This knowledge should inform each organization’s vision, mission, culture, and policies.

The first step is to understand your own cultural background. When she traveled to China for the first time, Myers’ first reaction to what she perceived to be reluctance on the part of the Chinese people to engage with her as an African-American woman was to ask “What’s wrong with those people?” She realized that she needed a cultural informant, someone who could translate indigenous cultural norms into information she could process.

Once she identified a cultural informant, that person explained to Myers that most Chinese had never seen anyone like her, and that she was unrealistically mapping her assumption that diversity was the norm, as it is in many cosmopolitan cities in the United States, onto the Chinese people. She also realized that the many “universal truths” that people such as her mother had imposed upon her, led her to apply the wrong “lens”  to the Chinese people.  

To be more culturally competent, Myers said, we must become more self aware. We must understand that all cultures are valid, look for the hidden cultural norms in our workplaces, let go of the golden rule, and be more curious and empathetic.

To illustrate the need to embrace our own biases and listen to the stories others tell, Myers cited a study of unconscious bias that was based on 40 years of social science research. She encouraged the audience to begin by understanding that our brains are wired to draw certain conclusions without actually telling us that they are doing so. It’s not because we are bad people; it’s how we are wired to respond with automatic perceptions.

Myers talked about the gender revolution within the world of classical music. Once auditions for orchestras became “blind,” for example, the number of women in top U.S. orchestras increased fivefold. Studies of unconscious bias have also documented that people with names like Jamal and Latisha are far less likely to be called for job interviews than people with names like Emily and Greg—even when their resumes are identical.

We need to avoid in-group favoritism, a bias that favors one’s own group; and out-group favoritism, which involves going out of our way to favor those from outside our group, even if they are not qualified. Instead, we must practice leniency bias, which is when objective rules are applied flexibly so that “others” can be hooked in.

She encouraged the audience to take Harvard’s Implicit Association Test. On the race portion of the test, 70% of people who took it indicated that they preferred white people, and remarkably, 45% of black people who took test indicated that they preferred white people too. To avoid these unconscious biases, we must begin to pay attention to everything, including who we interview, who we mentor, etc.

Parting words

Myers closed by saying that we must be on a mission to weaken our biases, to constantly look for information that disconfirms our preconceived notions. We will not make a difference, she said, until we are willing to be uncomfortable. Once we commit to that, we can move forward. Her parting note to the group was to be active, not passive, because passivity equals bias.