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Building an Inclusive Organization summary

Name: Building an Inclusive Organization
Rating: 4.4 (145 reviews)
Author: Stephen Frost and Raafi-Karim Alidina

Stephen Frost and Raafi-Karim Alidina

Leveraging the Power of a Diverse Workforce

4.4 (145 ratings)

24 mins

What is Building an Inclusive Organization about?

Building an Inclusive Organization (2019) offers a roadmap for leaders to create organizations that truly celebrate diverse perspectives in the workplace. The authors show that to become truly inclusive, workplaces need to work hard to overcome unconscious bias, create divergent teams where people challenge each other, and implement policies to create a psychologically safe environment for all.

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Building an Inclusive Organization
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What’s in it for me? Learn how to make your workplace more diverse, accepting, and innovative.

Diversity and inclusion are the latest buzzwords touted by every corporation. But what do they really mean? And how do you get past the slogans and put them into practice in your company?

Too often, companies treat diversity as a box-ticking exercise – what the authors call “Diversity 101.” They thrust people of color into token positions, or begrudgingly appoint a woman onto the board and proclaim themselves diverse. But if the decision-making is still made almost entirely by homogenous teams of white men, this diversity is merely surface “window dressing.”

Leaders need to see a lack of diversity and inclusion as a crisis for the intrinsic culture of the company, to be assailed at the highest levels. Instead of expecting minorities to assimilate to the existing company culture, the company culture needs to make structural interventions to become truly inclusive.

Companies that integrate diversity and inclusion policies throughout the organization are more creative and innovative, have more engaged employees, and even earn more money. Equality is a win for everyone!

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why unconscious bias is so dangerous;
how a lack of diversity is stifling creativity in many industries; and
that companies can win awards for promoting gender equality despite not paying women fairly.

In increasingly polarised times, diversity in the workplace is more important than ever.

We’ve all done it. We’ve clicked “unfollow” or “unfriend” on that family member who insists on spouting political beliefs we find abhorrent. Or that friend who posts tasteless Facebook memes that make our blood boil. Such an easy solution: with a simple click, you never have to hear their awful theories on the world again.

And why not? Why should you be forced to listen to things that enrage you? Well, the problem is that unfriending your racist uncle doesn’t make him less racist. And now he doesn’t have anyone to contradict him, allowing his racist views to go unchallenged.

The key message here is: In increasingly polarised times, diversity in the workplace is more important than ever.

Diversity, in its essence, is about engaging with different perspectives. But in recent years we’ve become increasingly polarized, existing within homogenous “silos” of people sharing the same identity and opinions. Politically, this drive has resulted in the once unthinkable: the UK leaving the European Union, and the US electing a president who openly derides refugees and immigrants, and who built a platform based on their exclusion from the country at all costs.

Social media makes this polarization far worse, with technology “optimizing” your online experience using cookies to track your tastes and interests, and reflecting them back to you in the content you see. Before the internet, people used to consume news from a handful of newspapers and TV channels; today, they’re informed about the world via a “personalized” feed. So they’re rarely confronted with contradictory opinions. Worse still, many sources are overtly biased, or even completely fabricated.

Our lives are made poorer by homogeneity. In the workplace, any completely white male team has deeply entrenched blind spots and is prone to “groupthink.” They produce fewer original ideas and are ill-prepared for the future. Worst of all, these environments often lead to cronyism, with gender pay disparities and nepotism strangling growth and scaring away fresh talent.

In these politically intolerant times, corporations bear responsibility to take a leading role in creating genuinely diverse and inclusive workplaces, where employees can learn from each other and “bring their whole selves” to work. How can corporations learn to transform homogenous cultures? As we’ll learn in the next blink, it starts by confronting unconscious bias.

We must confront unconscious bias to transform our workplaces.

Researchers from Princeton University conducted an experiment in which participants were shown two photographs. They were asked to decide which of the subjects looked more competent. Unbeknownst to the participants, these photos were of two candidates in a US congressional election. Sure enough, the candidate that the participants had decided looked more competent was indeed more successful, and won their races around 70 percent of the time.

But what makes someone look competent? Their clothes? Their ease before the camera? We make these kinds of superficial judgments about people all the time. This is called unconscious bias, which means we have judgments and beliefs that shape how we think and interpret information.

Men need to start worrying about the gender pay gap.

In 2017, 45 top female performers wrote to BBC director Tony Hall to complain about the gender pay gap. Notably, not one male performer had signed the letter. It was seen as being a “female” issue, or a feminist issue, and so was left for women to fight, without any participation from the men who were benefitting from the pay disparity.

The key message here is: Men need to start worrying about the gender pay gap.

Homogenous workplaces are bad for business.

It’s a tradition in the famous Tour de France cycle race to give both the first and last cyclist to cross the finish line an award. While the winner is given a yellow jersey, the loser is given a red lantern, in recognition that they were lighting the way from behind.

It’s easy to see the winner’s strengths. They were fast and nimble and demonstrated their sporting prowess. It’s much harder to see the value of the losing cyclist. But the loser demonstrated different qualities that are no less important, such as perseverance, stamina, and determination. As a team, the winning and losing cyclists complement each other, each bringing different strengths to the table.

Inclusive leadership starts with gathering data.

One of the authors, Raafi-Karim Alidina, always dresses up and makes sure to smile at security when he’s walking through an airport. That’s because he knows that as a Muslim man, people will subconsciously associate him with being a threat, or a “terrorist.” The New York Times columnist Brent Staples has taken to whistling Vivaldi when he walks home at night because he noticed that his very presence on the street frightened the white people he encountered. By whistling “white” music, he puts them at ease. Both men are very familiar with minority stress: the experience of constantly trying to fit in with the dominant culture, and reassure everyone else they pose no threat.

Efforts towards improving diversity in the workplace are usually aimed at trying to help minority employees assimilate more seamlessly by, for instance, offering them workshops. But this doesn’t solve the problem. In fact, minorities already know how to adapt; they do it all the time. The people who need to work at it are men – specifically, the white men who lead companies and therefore play such a disproportionate role in creating the company culture.

Transformation happens through action. Culture is something you do.

These days, unconscious bias workshops are ubiquitous. While this heightened awareness is great, studies have shown that knowing you’re biased isn’t enough to change your behavior. In fact, it could have the opposite effect; people may become complacent after attending training, and fail to interrogate their deeply-entrenched biases.

To really change the culture of a company, you have to go beyond awareness and focus on concrete actions. These actions shouldn’t be sporadic and individualized, but rather, embedded in the daily functioning of the company.

Diversity and inclusion policies should be tailored to specific industries.

British comedian Lenny Henry was knighted by the Queen. But on ITV News, another Black man was seen accepting the award. They’d played the wrong footage. This blunder is indicative of the fact that TV news crews are often almost entirely white. In this instance, they didn’t have the cultural competence to realize that they weren’t actually showing footage of Lenny Henry.

When we look closely at specific industries, we see how destructive it is that they are largely white and culturally homogenous. We also discover how different industries mount different obstacles to becoming diverse and inclusive.

The tech industry has the power to lead the way on diversity and inclusion.

Try typing “three Black teenagers” into Google Images. You’ll be greeted with row upon row of mugshots. Do the same for “three white teenagers,” and you’ll see image after image of sporty young people.

While technology is often heralded as a utopian solution to countless problems, this example shows that it’s not free of bias. An investigation by ProPublica revealed that an algorithm, COMPAS, used to try and predict whether those previously convicted of crimes would reoffend, was twice as likely to incorrectly suggest a Black person would reoffend as their white counterparts. Technology is created by people who embed their own racism and biases into the programs they create. It further exemplifies the urgent necessity to tackle diversity in the workplace.

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Best quote from Building an Inclusive Organization

Diversity is a reality, inclusion is a choice.

—Stephen Frost and Raafi-Karim Alidina

About the Author

Stephen Frost is the CEO of consulting firm Frost Included, and author of The Inclusion Imperative: How Real Inclusion Creates Better Business and Builds Better Societies. He teaches inclusive leadership at the Harvard Business School, and works as a consultant for companies all over the world.

Raafi-Karim Alidina graduated from Harvard with a Master’s in Public Policy. He was a Research Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and now works as a consultant for Frost Included, advising companies on diversity and inclusion strategies.

Who should read Building an Inclusive Organization?

Hiring managers who want to learn how to turn good intentions into action
Leaders wanting to make their companies more innovative and inclusive
Anyone who has suffered systematic discrimination and wants to understand how the system works.

Categories with Building an Inclusive Organization

Management & Leadership Corporate Culture

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