The Business of We

The Proven Three-Step Process for Closing the Gap Between Us and Them in Your Workplace

Laura Kriska

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781400216819
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Auditing
• Index: Business

Discover how this leader-focused approach to understanding, managing, and maximizing organizational diversity and inclusion can increase employee retention and productivity.

Workplace misunderstandings lead to lost revenue, lost time, and increased legal risk, thus your success in the marketplace will depend on our ability to collaborate across difference. Yet, inevitably, Us versus Them gaps disrupt workplace efficiency.

In The Business of WE, cross-cultural consultant and diversity expert Laura Kriska will:

• Provide a practical roadmap for creating trust with others who are culturally different from yourself
• Help you create a WE mindset throughout your organization, bringing teams together into cohesive units.
• Walk you through the steps in fostering a workplace that is inclusive and respectful of all employees—one of the most critical, yet most widely mismanaged keys to success.

 

Stakeholders are demanding real change, and nothing less than comprehensive solutions that lead to meaningful and lasting solutions will suffice.

The Business of WE arrives just in time to help you stop Us versus Them gaps before they start and foster authentic connections across race, ethnicity, religion, age, and any other factor of identity to exponentially strengthen your entire organization.

SECTION I

FRAMING THE ORGANIZATIONAL CHALLENGE

1

DIVERSITY CAN BE DIVISIVE

A Growing Problem in a Culturally Varied Organization

DIVERSITY HAS BEEN PART of the American dialogue for more than fifty years, but protests in support of Black Lives Matter combined with disproportional impact of the COVID-19 virus on communities of color inspired overdue and urgent attention unlike any in my lifetime. During the past five decades, we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of diversity and inclusion directors, as well as conferences and publications devoted to the topic. Yet most organizations still don’t have an integrated and diverse workforce. They lack effective programs that enhance inclusion, despite the increasingly varied population. Many organizations’ responses to employee diversity issues have been superficial, reactive, and not effective.

It’s no wonder, then, that tensions between various groups of employees remain high and hurt organizational efforts to create high-functioning teams or to produce synergies among employees from different countries, races, or generations. At best, organizations struggle with integrating diverse employees onto teams. At worst, they’re the target of lawsuits and negative publicity that affect their stock prices, their hiring and retention capability, and their employee morale and productivity.

Most business leaders recognize that these problems exist, but they don’t always see how extensive or damaging the effects are. It’s telling that few companies openly acknowledged issues of racial disparity until Black Lives Matter protests swept the country. In response, many of America’s largest and most influential corporations, including Walmart, Amazon, Apple, General Motors, and YouTube, made public statements denouncing racism and calling for justice.¹ Some companies made donations; others committed to new policies. Even NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who had openly criticized Colin Kaepernick, posted a public apology saying that he and the NFL had been wrong for not listening earlier to players who had protested police brutality toward Black people.²

As we will see throughout the book, organizations often take action to close gaps only in reaction to negative publicity, a lawsuit, or public demand. As such, their efforts to address diversity are rushed, costly, and orchestrated to quell criticism rather than address underlying issues. There is a better, proactive, less costly approach and it starts with examining who is in charge.

Organizations are grappling with many types of cross-cultural issues because so often there is a homogeneous group in power—I call it the home team. The home team norms of communication and behavior become the standard by which all people in the organization are measured. Employees who identify with the home team have an advantage but are often unaware of it. Until those on the home team engage in self-reflection and understand their role in any specific Us versus Them gap, diversity will be viewed as a problem to be solved rather than a strength to be leveraged toward successful outcomes.

Everyone agrees that cooperation can be a powerful tool in business and in life. Working with others can lead to accomplishments that no single human, no matter how talented, can achieve on his or her own. Michael Jordan, one of the most talented and successful athletes of all time, knew that as a singular player his contributions could make the difference in games. He famously said, “There is no ‘I’ in team, but there is in win.”³ In the popular ESPN documentary series The Last Dance, however, even Jordan revealed that he alone could not achieve the greatness he desired, which was to win NBA championship titles. “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”⁴

WE-building is more than cooperation. WE-building is working together across differences. It is seeing difference as an opportunity, not a barrier, to learn and to expand. WE-builders do not subscribe to superficial stereotypes or pretend that differences do not exist. Instead, WE-builders see that differences are real and must be acknowledged. They look at difference not as good and bad or better or worse, but as predictable outcomes of growing up in different environments. WE-building is the deliberate choice to close any gap between people who are separated by geography, language, generation, ethnicity, race, religion, or any factor that divides.

Diversity in the workplace has increased, as it should, to reflect changing demographics. But skills among those on the home team to see and to recognize difference elude many people, including leaders. Knowing how to close gaps remains a mystery to many of us. Instead of trying to understand difference, many people default to magical thinking that proximity to those who are different will be enough to bridge the vast divides that exist in everyday life. WE-building provides a specific, much-needed process for building lasting connection with those who are different—those who speak a different first language, worship in a different faith, or see a different reflection when they look in the mirror. WE-building is a proven methodology that can help anyone close a gap that gets in the way of their ability to communicate and to build trust successfully.

This book provides a three-step process for bridging any gap. While the process is simple, the commitment needed to create real change is not. Concrete action and accountability is an essential part of the process for closing Us versus Them gaps. It will take time and effort. But when people work together across differences and take action to close gaps, amazing things can result.

In this book, I will share stories about companies that created profitable new revenue streams, reduced supplier costs, and shortened approval processes—and all because leaders and employees from different backgrounds closed Us versus Them gaps. If they can do it, so can you.

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The workplace is growing more diverse, and it is mission critical to acknowledge this.

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GOOD PEOPLE, BAD COMMUNICATION

Cultural damage occurs because people completely misunderstand and misperceive what is actually happening. Lack of familiarity with people who aren’t members of their own social group causes anxiety and fear, triggering them to think and behave in ways they would consider ridiculous or unacceptable if the tables were turned.

Esther was employed at a New Jersey bank for three years and had performed at a high level. She was always prepared and on time for work. Having grown up in Haiti, she spoke English with a slight accent. One day a supervisor noticed a problem with some missing data from a customer. He pointed it out to Esther, but she told him that she didn’t know anything about it. The bank took customer issues very seriously and soon one of the bank’s vice presidents was fuming about the missing data. “Someone must know where it is!” he exclaimed. The vice president then privately questioned each of the six employees in Esther’s department in his office. When it was Esther’s turn, she went to the office and answered every question honestly and directly. However, as she had been raised to do in the presence of any authority figure, she kept her eyes down and did not look directly at the vice president when she spoke. Her supervisor approached her later that day to say that the vice president had concluded that Esther was lying. “He said you didn’t look at him,” the supervisor told her. “That made him think you had something to hide.”

Esther explained to her supervisor that in Haiti she had been taught to show respect for her parents and others who were older by never looking them in the eye. Fortunately, her supervisor believed Esther and was able to explain the cultural misunderstanding to the vice president.

Large organizations today have hundreds or even thousands of Esthers—people whose backgrounds differ from what the home team considers the norm. Instead of recognizing that there is a dominant culture within the organization, leaders inside organizations may inadvertently make critical mistakes like firing a great employee. Instead of seeing an opportunity to understand an employee who comes from a different cultural background, many home team leaders might think they understand Esther, believing that they’ve helped her learn the company culture and that she has adapted to it. Visibly, that may be true. But invisible messages are being sent or perceived with every encounter. We need to foster greater understanding of these invisible pieces of information. If we don’t, managers will fail to grasp why an employee like Esther acts the way she does and may make false assumptions about what her actions signify.

A PAINFULLY SLOW, EVOLVING CONSCIOUSNESS

How did we get to this place, where we’re becoming more enlightened about fostering diversity yet still unable to tap into the value such diversity offers? Let’s look at the problem within a historical context.

Bridging cultural difference has always been a workplace requirement, but for many decades in the United States and Europe, the dominant cultural norm has been narrow and closely aligned with white, male culture. This is a generalization and of course there have been exceptions, but even a cursory glance at a list of C-suite executives demonstrates that white men ruled and continue to do so.

It is important to note that just because people share identity factors like gender and race does not automatically mean that they will get along. But when the people leading and working in an organization share defining identity factors, many norms of behavior and unspoken values are aligned. These norms are then accepted as correct and become the default to which others are expected to follow.

The demographics of the American workplace began to change permanently after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when women, African Americans, and other minorities joined, not only as laborers or clerical staff, but as professionals who became managers and leaders. These non-white males influenced standards of day-to-day workplace behavior through various means. When spoken or unspoken requests for change were not heeded, lawsuits and new rules forced new standards. As a result, the dominant standards of white male culture began to erode and cultural norms began to shift. For example, the TV show Mad Men portrays life in an advertising agency in the 1960s and early 1970s, and the contrast between our current #MeToo norms and what was then considered normal office behavior toward women is striking.

The Immigration Act of 1965 triggered what would become a fifty-year trend of increasing immigration, often called the Fourth Wave, bringing people from around the world into our workplaces. Reducing international trade barriers in the 1980s and 1990s introduced more global diversity into the U.S. workplace through emerging markets, global outsourcing, mergers, and acquisitions. This Fourth Wave peaked in 2002 with 12.2 million people coming from more than twenty different countries, each with different ethnic, religious, and other cultural norms, now part of the fabric of modern American society.

Each of these slow-moving but powerful trends increased cultural diversity in the U.S. workforce, and started to push “home teams” to reassess what was considered acceptable behavior. But still, awareness of workplace diversity grew slowly in the early twenty-first century with uninspiring results. The combination of video evidence and viral transmission of discriminatory practices brought new clarity to the issue. Video of two black men removed from a Philadelphia Starbucks in April of 2018 caused outrage. Thousands of riveting #MeToo stories shared by recognizable female names has heightened the consciousness about discrimination and harassment of women in the workplace. But it was the swift and powerful impact of the Black Lives Matter protests that sparked accountability among corporate leaders unli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section I: Framing the Organizational Challenge
• Section II: The Process
• Section III: Moving Forward
• Recommended Reading
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author