Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Trainers

Fostering DEI in the Workplace

Maria Morukian

• Publisher: Association for Talent Development
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781953946065
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Make DEI Training Foundational in Your Organization When done well, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training creates space for courageous conversations that acknowledge hard truths around systemic inequities and explores topics that touch on people's vulnerabilities in all facets of their lives. For those of you who do this work, there has not been a clear path to follow for making progress. As a DEI trainer, you have forged your own way and learned as you went. With Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Trainers: Fostering DEI in the Workplace, the need for DEI trainers to go at it alone comes to an end. Expert facilitator Maria Morukian provides the guidance you need to develop the knowledge and skills required for DEI training. Morukian covers the historical underpinnings and rationale for DEI work; takes you through the process of organizational assessment, design, and delivery; and offers strategies for embedding DEI and promoting sustainability through collaborative practices and dialogues, allowing you to develop and understand your own identity lenses and biases. Reflection questions and worksheets are included in every chapter.

Chapter 1

Overview of the DEI Landscape

As the daughter of educators, I felt like I was receiving a lesson in every moment spent with my parents. If I asked my mother for help with an essay, she pulled out a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a red ballpoint pen. Hours later, my essay would be covered in red lines with suggestions for better word choices in the margins. There would be several rounds of edits before she was satisfied with the final product. If I had to study for a history exam or write a paper on a particular historical event, my father would settle into his green wingback chair, adjust his glasses, and begin, “Well, to understand the Korean War we really need to go back a few hundred years to understand Chinese–Korean relations …” I would emerge with pages of notes and a dazed look on my face after a marathon history lesson from my dad, wondering how I was going to fit all the stories he wove together into a consolidated report. As a kid, I found these home lessons tedious, and sometimes wished I had never opened my mouth to ask for help. I just wanted to do the assignment as quickly as possible and go back to watching TV.

But from those evenings of study with my parents I learned two overarching lessons that have forged my path and purpose in life.

From my English-teacher mother, I learned the power of words. They can be used to inspire, illuminate, and elevate. They can be used to inflict pain, dismiss, and destroy. They can incite movements of compassion or hate. They can promote intellectual and emotional growth or regression. Words can bring forth laughter, tears, love, fear, rage, or diffidence. They can raise us up or shut us down. The absence of words when we stay silent can also be powerful, especially when the power of our words is needed to support others who have been silenced. Words are to be chosen with great care and intention.

From my history-teacher father, I learned the power of stories—the stories we hear and the stories we tell one another—and the power held by those whose stories are most often told. Our past serves as a window into the future. The further back we go and the more we explore human history, the clearer the patterns of our civilization become. To make sense of the present and to envision the future, we must delve into the past and explore history from multiple perspectives, especially from those who have been silenced or marginalized. The adage “History is often told by the winners” clouds our collective understanding of the past and does not accurately reflect the experiences of those who have been oppressed or victimized. Who writes the history books and whose stories do they choose to tell? How might we perpetuate lies and oppression by passing along stories that are one-sided?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion work starts and ends with the self. We have to be willing and able to explore the multiple dimensions that come together to create our unique identities. We must explore how words, our own and those of others, can create positive or negative reactions. We have to be open to challenging others’ beliefs and be willing to have our own beliefs challenged.

DEI work requires an understanding of how history has shaped the way we experience the world. It requires a balance of strategy and storytelling.

How do you define diversity, equity, and inclusion?

This chapter sets the foundation for our study of DEI. First, we define the common terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We also introduce the newer concept of expansion, which is integral to progress in DEI work. We then cover a brief history of the evolution of DEI work, examine the challenges to making DEI efforts “stick,” and outline key efforts to make DEI sustainable in our organizations. A worksheet at the end of the chapter can help prepare you to deliver DEI training.

Defining Core Concepts

Diversity encompasses all the dimensions of human identity that make us who we are. Diversity includes all characteristics that shape our identity “lenses”—our beliefs, values, worldviews, perceptions—which thus influence our communication, our behaviors, and ultimately our relationships with others.

Diversity includes characteristics like race, skin color, ethnicity, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, physical or mental ability or disability, socioeconomic background, academic background, profession, family and relationship status, language, habits and activities, and personality traits.

There are dimensions of our identity, like race, gender, sexual orientation, or physical or mental disability, over which we may have little or no control, but which have a significant impact on how we are treated, how we live our lives, and how we perceive ourselves and others.

Other dimensions of our identity, like religion, geographic location, and socioeconomic status, which we may be born into, may change over the course of our lives.

Depending on the context, we may find certain dimensions of identity play a more prominent role in how we define ourselves, how we are perceived and treated, and how we engage with others. For example, we may be very aware of certain dimensions of our identity in the workplace that are not as much of a priority in our personal lives. We are often much more aware of specific dimensions of our identity when we are in the minority, or when we have less power or privilege because of that dimension of identity.

Equity promotes fairness by creating a level playing field for everyone. This means providing opportunities for people to advance in their careers, to receive fair compensation and credit for their work, and to provide input into decisions that impact them.

Imagine an oval racetrack. The outer lane is longer than the inner one. So the runners’ starting points are staggered to ensure fairness. By placing the runner in the outer lane a few paces ahead, we’re not giving them an unfair advantage; we’re evening the race. If we placed everyone at the same exact point on the starting line, the person on the inside track has a greater advantage because they have a shorter distance to run.

Equity works in a similar way. It’s not about giving unearned advantages to people. It’s actually recognizing that some people already have unearned advantages simply by being part of a group that has held power and privilege in our society. When we are intentional, we ensure that we provide opportunities for growth, training, mentoring, and career advancement for people who perhaps have not been given those opportunities.

Research shows that often men will apply for a new position even if they don’t have all of the existing qualifications, while women will not apply unless they have all those qualifications (Mohr 2014). As an example of equity, a leader may encourage a female colleague to apply for a position even if she doesn’t have all the qualifications and provide advice on how to handle questions in the interview process.

In another example, it may be more difficult for an employee of color who is in a lower-level role to see themselves as capable of making a career shift, while a White employee may feel more empowered to take that risk or ask for professional development opportunities to be eligible for a different role. Equity in this case would be to encourage and provide time and resources for an employee of color to develop the new skills needed to shift to a new area of expertise.

Inclusion is the practice of creating an environment where everyone feels equally valued and respected for their individuality. Inclusive environments ensure that every person is able to participate fully in organizational life, and has equal opportunities to leverage their talents, skills, and potential.

All human beings want to both feel a sense of belonging with the group and be recognized for their unique qualities and characteristics. The term optimal distinctiveness, coined in 1991 by the social psychologist Marilynn Brewer, describes individuals striving to achieve the optimal balance between belonging and differentiation both within and across social groups. A core part of our human survival has been our reliance on group belonging.

In the context of the workplace, inclusion refers to practices, behaviors, and structures that promote a sense of belonging and interdependence of the collective and encourage divergent ideas, acknowledge unique skills and experiences, and value individual characteristics and identities.

Expansion is the practice of immersing oneself in the lived experiences of others, broadening one’s social networks beyond the comfortable “us” group, and building community across the broad landscape of our differences.

I employ this term because of two trends I witnessed in my work:

• Often the individuals in positions of privilege and power have noble intentions but lack an understanding of the depth of work they need to do to truly enact change in their organizations and communities. A number of organizations’ diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts only scratch the surface of the deep-seated problems around inequity and exclusion, often because the people who most need to change their attitudes and behaviors have the least incentive to do so.
• Our society has increasingly become polarized due to a variety of factors—political, economic, cultural, technological—that play into our instinctual human need to entrench ourselves in our “us” group. If we are to make progress not only in DEI but in all the complex challenges we face as a human civilization, we need tools to override our biases, make ourselves emotionally vulnerable to those we have been conditioned to perceive as the “other,” and embrace new ways of thinking, communicating, and living with one another.

Expansion means seeking out new voices, divergent ways of thinking, and pushing oneself to challenge existing schemas. Expansion requires individuals, especially those in positions of privilege and power, to:

• Leave their comfort zone to immerse themselves in the experiences of those they perceive as “other.” Human nature often drives us to seek out or stay in the spaces that feel safe to us. When we encounter people whose beliefs or behaviors are foreign, confusing, or in conflict with our own, our instinctual reaction is often to distance ourselves. Expansion requires us to do the opposite, to engage fully and listen openly when we encounter opposite viewpoints. This does not mean we must sacrifice our core values or beliefs. It simply frees us to explore and thus better understand the reasons people may see the world differently.
• Shift power to the voices that are often silenced. Expansion goes beyond superficial acts of inclusion, where we not only welcome people to our space, we leave our comfort zone behind and venture into spaces that are unknown to us. Accepting or inviting people to our proverbial table has an inherent power dynamic buried within. There is an implicit message of giving permission for others who are not part of the norm or majority. Expansion shifts the power from those who already had a seat at the table and requires us to leave our seat and maybe even leave the table itself to make room for people who have not historically had a seat. When practicing expansion, we have to be willing to temporarily displace ourselves from what is known and feels safe. We have to be willing to explore and engage with people in their comfort zones, where they have power.
• Challenge existing schemas and blind spots. Expansion is about bringing deep curiosity and a willingness to question our own mental models. We are willing to examine the way we’ve always done things and question whom the current structure and culture serves and whom it does not.
• Co-create a new culture with shared purpose and power. Expansion provides the unique opportunity to co-create a culture that works for everyone. Rather than expecting assimilation from those who have been underrepresented or sidelined, we explore how to design a new way of working together that incorporates divergent experiences, values, and needs, and seeks to create a more balanced power structure.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are interconnected and interdependent (Figure 1-1). To enact long-term change, we need to explore these three concepts in a meaningful way. Expansion is the glue that binds them all together.

Figure 1-1. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

DEI: A Historical Perspective

Human history is rife with stories of inequality, oppression, and polarization. It is also rich with stories of compassion, intercultural communication, diplomacy, and social progress. Mark Twain purportedly said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

To more fully grasp the present-day context of DEI, it is important to have some knowledge of what prefaced the era in which we find ourselves. This is by no means a comprehensive history so much as a spotlight on the major themes that influenced how people viewed issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion during a particular period of time.

Civil Rights and Social Justice (Righting Wrongs) (1950s–’60s)

The 1950s and ’60s brought an awakening to the US about the daily injustices racial minorities, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community experienced across the country. This era, rife with civil unrest, violence, and assassinations, culminated in significant societal changes as well as policy changes. There were a number of inflection points that contributed to the civil rights movement. Following are just a few of those inflection points.

In just a little over a decade, there were landmark decisions by the Supreme Court to outlaw segregation, and federal laws were passed guaranteeing equal employment and upholding voting rights. There were peaceful protests of all sizes, including the Montgomery bus boycotts, the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, the Delano grape boycotts in California to fight the exploitation of farm workers, the March on Washington, and the “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. There was the incomprehensible loss of life, including icons like Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as allies like Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb. The Stonewall Uprising in New York in June 1969 was a galvanizing moment for LGBTQIA+ activism, in which members of the LGBTQIA+ community took to the streets and confronted law enforcement to fight against endl...