Beyond Inclusion

Worklife Interconnectedness, Energy, and Resilience in Organizations

J. Goosby Smith, Josie Bell Lindsay

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137385413
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137385420
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Beyond Inclusion adopts a holistic and systems view of the organization, presents a behavioral model of organizational inclusion based upon research with thousands of employees, and discusses elements of organizational design that need to be adjusted to create, nurture, and sustain an inclusive culture.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

After decades of committed efforts many leaders, diversity and inclusion scholars, and practitioners have hit a metaphorical “brick wall.” After taking affirmative action, valuing differences, diversifying, and balancing their scorecards, they are now approaching the bounds of their effectiveness in terms of creating and sustaining diverse organizations that maximize the value of their human diversity. After doing everything right (e.g., making recruiting practices more fair, populating leadership pipelines with a diverse candidate pool, ensuring fair policies, sponsoring diversity climate audits, conducting diversity training) today’s leaders, scholars, and practitioners realize that having a highly diverse and trained¹ workforce is simply not “enough”—something is still missing.²

This is not for lack of research. Our colleagues—diversity and inclusion scholars and practitioners—have researched this area heavily and well. Among other things, they’ve uncovered underlying paradigms adopted by organizations seeking to diversify.³ They’ve examined how these underlying paradigms impact perceptions of inclusion.⁴ They’ve identified competencies for managing a diverse workforce.⁵ Also, they have analyzed the role that diversity plays in group decision-making⁶ and performance.⁷

Thought leaders identified the topic of inclusion—the next stage of development in organizational diversity thinking—about a decade ago.⁸ Once organizations employed a variety of people, the priority shifted from hiring them to retaining them and getting the best out of them. Cutting edge scholars have elevated inclusion to the next level in terms of scholarship.⁹

So, what do we mean by inclusion? Inclusion is the combined state of organizational affairs that seeks, welcomes, nurtures, encourages, and sustains a strong sense of belonging and high performance from all employees. Said differently, inclusion is a state in which all organizational members feel welcome and valued for who they are and what they “bring to the table.” All stakeholders share a high sense of belonging and fulfilled mutual purpose.

Organizational members engage in practices at the individual, group, and departmental levels, which may increase individual employees’ perceptions of inclusion. Such practices can induce first-, second-, or third-order changes.¹⁰ Most organizational efforts result in first-order, incremental changes—small changes within the organization’s existing operating schema. In this book, we propose a second-order, transformational, and discontinuous change—an alternate overarching framework through which organizational and thought leaders might conceptualize, investigate, and create authentically inclusive organizations.

As of the writing of this book, we have found few empirically based definitions of inclusion. More importantly for our purposes, we find no large-scale published qualitative research on how inclusion is perceived and experienced by organizational members. As a result, little evidence-based advice exists to guide leaders seeking to foster a genuine sense of inclusion within their organizations. We also see no evidence of large-scale research on inclusion at multiple levels of analysis: intrapersonal, interpersonal, team, and organizational.

Many previous approaches to ensuring the full integration and inclusion of diverse organizational stakeholders have been from an instrumental paradigm: how to improve the bottom line, how to ensure fairness, how to attract a diverse customer base, how to increase organizational learning, how to enhance individual performance, how to diversify suppliers. Little research pushes the envelope of inclusion to what we believe to be its ultimate end: tacitly accepted mutual connectedness and interdependence among internal and external organizational stakeholders.

Our Approach

Widely regarded as a genius, Albert Einstein is quoted as saying “The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation.”¹¹ We interpret this to mean that we can’t solve a problem with the same type of thinking that created it: thus, our approach to this book. We believe it is time to experiment with a well-considered, but different perspective on organizational inclusion. We posit that inclusion is not an end, but rather a means to manifest a broadly and deeply felt sense of connectedness. We believe that the ultimate state of sustainable organizational inclusion is best exemplified by the long-standing African concept of “Ubuntu.”

In Ubuntu, inclusion is not something to be “achieved” . . . it simply is “the way.” In his book about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Council, Prime Minister Desmond Tutu defined the concept of Ubuntu as community members understanding that they belong in a greater whole and accepting that when others are diminished, harmed, or oppressed they, too, suffer.¹²

Similarly, in June of 1965 while addressing the graduating class at Oberlin College, the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., perfectly captured the spirit of Ubuntu when he remarked:

What we are facing today is the fact that through our scientific and technological genius we’ve made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools. This is the great issue facing us today. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone. We are tied together . . . All I’m saying is simply this: that all mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be—this is the interrelated structure of reality. John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main . . . And then he goes on toward the end to say: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. And by believing this, by living out this fact, we will be able to remain awake through a great revolution.¹³

In this book and in our careers as writers, professors, and consultants, we, the authors, espouse a holistic and systems view of organizations. So, while we view the typically instrumental definitions of inclusion as worthy interim goals, we do not see these definitions as capable of creating worthy or sustainable end states. The present notion of inclusion is a useful benchmark; but the ultimate goal is Ubuntu. Though it may sound paradoxical, we believe that inclusion can’t happen until organizational members are no longer conscious of the need to be (or in today’s politically correct environment, be perceived as being) inclusive. We propose that only when the notion of Ubuntu is tacitly accepted (and reinforced) throughout the organizational system will its members consistently and actively coestablish authentic connectedness among organizational stakeholders: themselves, their teams, organizational systems, customers, and other organizations. Inclusion is a byproduct of all organizational members who see themselves as not only instrumentally connected to their coworkers, leaders, and external community, but also cocooned in an organization-centered version of Dr. King’s “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

If, by now, you’re thinking that this is merely a “warm and fuzzy” or “hearts and flowers” approach to inclusion, you are mistaken. Consider the following example, which we consider to be an exemplar of most of the dimensions of inclusion that we present later in this book. Sandler O’Neill & Partners, a former resident of the 104th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center was a thriving and profitable small financial firm. It was run by three partners—Herman Sandler, Chris Quackenbush, and Jimmy Dunne—whom Fortune referred to as the “ruling troika.”¹⁴ However, the attacks of 9/11 killed 40 percent of its employees: a third of its partners, all of its bond traders, its syndicate desk, and almost all of its equity desk. Gone were these employees’ knowledge, skills, abilities, attributes, and networks.¹⁵ It was announced erroneously that the firm was closing. Shortly after the disaster, Jimmy Dunne, the only survivor of the three partners who ran the firm, took guidance from the values of his late partners, Herman Sandler, and thanked his competitors.

In the “dog eat dog” shrewdly capitalistic world of financial trading, one would not expect to see an exemplar of Ubuntu. Recalling the chaos of the first few weeks after the attacks, Dunne shared with us that Sandler O’Neill simply would not have made it without help from its friends, existing clients, new clients, and surviving employees. Initial help came, unexpectedly from its competitors:

Firms that used to compete with Sandler for deals now put the crippled firm in their deals to get it some money. Just as important, they gave it information—“market color,” as traders like to call it. What was the spread on the A-rated trust preferred bonds? What was the last bid? How big were the blocks? That kind of crucial information is what Sandler’s traders used to see on their computer screens; now, with the traders dead and the computers destroyed, the firm needed its rivals to convey the market color over the phone. Its competitors went one step further. “They made sure we weren’t being taken advantage of,” says Joel Comer, the bond salesman turned trader [partner and, once again, fixed income salesperson].

With the syndicate team dead, no one at Sandler knew how to put together the many pieces of a deal [because those with this expertise had perished]. Again, competitors rushed to help. “The other syndicate desks had to tell us what to do,” says Mark Fitzgibbon, [a partner and, now, Director of Research] the co-head of research who was suddenly running the syndicate desk. “They taught us how to syndicate. They’d say, ‘Did you send the regM?’”—a standard document, “And we’d say, ‘What’s that?’”¹⁶

You may be asking yourself, “Why would fierce competitors help each other?” Such behavior flies in the face of our present purely individualistic and solely profit-focused notions of corporations, especially US financial firms. Let’s be clear. If operating from a purely instrumental paradigm, one less competitor means more business for one’s firm. However, operating from a paradigm of Ubuntu, one less competitor means my firm suffers. What harms one of us harms us all; no firm is an island, so to speak. While they compete, they exist together in a precarious state of dynamic equilibrium. Thus, what happened to one firm happened to them. Competitors saw themselves in Sandler O’Neill. This sense of interconnectedness and interdependence with an external stakeholder is indicative of what we believe sustains organizations internally.

You’re probably wondering about the “end” of the story. As of the writing of this book, James J. Dunne, III (Jimmy Dunne) is Senior Managing Principal of the firm and the firm is alive and thriving after the disaster. Without the help of its friends, new and existing clients, surviving employees, and competitors, this simply may not have been the case.

We offer you, the reader, several takeaways. Whether you are an executive, a thought leader, a middle manager, a supervisor, or an individual contributor we present you with informal and formal ways to make your organization more inclusive and, thus, more interconnected, energized, and resilient. After more thoroughly explaining the philosophy of Ubuntu and its relevance to organizational inclusion, we share our research in concrete terms. In a 7-dimension model of Ubuntic inclusion, we show you how inclusion manifests at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, team, organizational, and external, levels as told to us by thousands of employees in financial, retail, and educational organizations. Our ultimate goal is this—as soon as you finish each chapter of this book, with no additional expenditure of time, energy, or money, you will be able to start infusing Ubuntic inclusion throughout your span of influence: yourself, your coworkers, your team, your direct reports, customers, community members, and suppliers.

We organized the remainder of this book as follows. In Chapter 2, we delve deeply enough into the notion of Ubuntu so that you grasp it cognitively, affectively, and intuitively. This is important because in order to effect inclusion in your org...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Introduction
• 2   Ubuntu: Cocreated Connectedness in Organizations
• 3   The Research
• 4   Connection
• 5   Intrapersonal Inclusion
• 6   Communication
• 7   Mentoring and Coaching
• 8   Care
• 9   Fairness and Trust
• 10   Visibility and Reward
• 11   External Stakeholders
• 12   Ubuntu in Action
• Notes
• Index