8 Ways to Cultivate an Anti-Racist Workplace
By Martina Pansze
On June 23rd, the Montana High Tech Business Alliance held a webinar on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Tech Companies.
We captured 8 key concepts shared by instructors Michael Cassens, Theresa Floyd, Elizabeth Hubble, and Tobin Miller Shearer that will help leaders at all levels — from new employees to CEOs — cultivate these values at their companies.
University of Montana Associate Professor of History and Director of African American Studies Tobin Miller Shearer opened the conversation by outlining the most effective frameworks to address racism.
“I tried to boil down some of the main learning about things that I have found to be the most critical and most essential when a business is wanting to authentically work at issues of race and racism, rather than just trying to do window dressing,” said Miller Shearer.
Through more than 30 years of experience as a consultant, he found that businesses equipped with the following four approaches were more successful in bettering their workplaces:
Develop a common vocabulary for talking about race and racism.
Miller Shearer said leaders need to begin by giving their teams a shared vocabulary to facilitate conversations about race.
“Most of us in our society, and the business community is no different, don't have really good words, ways, and modalities, of talking about race and racism. And we often trip over ourselves in the midst of trying to have a good conversation. We need to develop that common vocabulary so that we can talk with nuance and with skill about this very important topic.”
Equip leadership and staff with a shared analysis of race and racism.
In addition to using shared language to discuss race and racism, businesses also need to equip their leadership and staff with analytical frameworks to understand and develop effective strategies to combat such complex issues.
“Quite often the impulse is let's just do something now. Let's get it done,” said Miller Shearer. “We need to be proactive and absolutely want to support that, but if you don't have a shared analysis, most of those efforts will peter out inside four months to a year.”
Do the deeper work to prepare for long-term, substantive change.
According to Miller Shearer, companies should move beyond an immediate reaction to recent events to ask what systems, training and analysis they can put in place for longer-term work toward racial justice.
“What I've been saying now, particularly in response to the realities of [the] Black Lives Matter movement that is moving across the country, is that it's not only what you're doing right now. What's equally, if perhaps more important, is what you're going to be doing a year from now, and five years from now,” said Miller Shearer.
Developing a road map can help affect proactive, continual improvement in diversity and equity within an organization.
“One of the first impulses of predominantly white institutions is simply to hire as quickly as they can people of color and bring them into their organization,” said Miller Shearer.
However, this “add and stir” approach will fall vastly short without also taking a deeper look into the structure, mission, and purpose of an institution. Without addressing equity and inclusion at the root of their organizations, businesses will be doomed to continue the cycle of both finding it difficult to recruit new employees of color as well as failing to keep new hires with their company long-term.
Listen to the grief and the criticism of the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) community.
Lastly, it is essential for white businesspeople, and particularly white leadership, to approach conversations about the realities of racism without defensiveness.
“The more we can have those open channels of communication and invite and expect that there will be grief and anger in that sharing, the more equipped we are for authentic change in any business that we're working in,” said Miller Shearer.
Not preparing to hear painful feedback, he said, is to “ignore an incredible reality that needs to be understood, needs to be listened to, and needs to be sat with for a while.”
Consider intersectionality.
Elizabeth Hubble, Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Montana, introduced concepts of intersectionality based on the work of Peggy McIntosh.
McIntosh was one of the first in sociology to study how hierarchies in society are interlocking, and interrogates how her privilege as a white woman gives her advantage.
Hubble said that understanding one’s own privilege and how privilege operates in our society is important.
“I see privilege sometimes used as kind of a bad word, but for me, it just is one of the profound ways that my field of study explains the issues in our society,” said Hubble.
Thinking about race in the workplace through an intersectional approach will deepen understanding of the underlying explanations for why certain systemic and institutionalized problems exist. A nuanced grasp on racism’s multifaceted roots considering sexuality, ability, gender, and other identities will help those trying to implement long-term change.
Re-think company policies and compensation practices.
Theresa Floyd is a professor in the University of Montana College of Business. She acknowledged that business as an institution has reproduced inequality through a myriad of ways, including through recruitment/hiring, promotion, and compensation practices. Floyd was optimistic that in implementing policy and culture changes, businesses can model a more equitable society.
“Income is the number one driver of enabling people to accumulate wealth,” said Floyd. “And so our policy decisions and the way that we hire and promote and compensate our people has a huge impact on their ability to accumulate wealth. We know that if we help our individual employees achieve their potential, we will change their lives and the lives of their descendants, etc. So, I really want to point out that as businesspeople, we have a lot of power to do good.”
Floyd also suggests doing away with any compensation confidentiality policies in place. Instead, be honest and transparent about salaries in the company.
“If you really want to make a change, those confidentiality policies are poison,” she said.
Being Part of the Solution
Miller Shearer also spoke on what businesses can do to authentically respond to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Get training in anti-racism for your staff and leadership. “I know this ends up sounding self serving, but I also know it's true that unless you're equipped with these kinds of training resources, it can be very difficult to find a way forward that has some lasting dimension to it.”
Do an anti-racism audit. “Again, focusing on racism, there are some great tools out there—again, we offer some, but are not the only ones—where you're doing a frank assessment of where you are, so that you know where you need to go. Because the strategies are different depending upon where we are. If we're at an earlier stage or later stages, we need to do things differently.”
Join the thousands of businesses across the country to publicly, unequivocally say that Black Lives Matter. “And then be open to feedback from the BIPOC community for having made that declaration. And I don't want to suggest that it's all a matter of just making statements, but I think when we can claim our support for a movement like this, I hear from my students all the time when they're thinking about the jobs they want to go into that they want to be aligning with businesses and partners who are authentic, who are principled, and who are talking about real things in real way. That's one way to do it. Not the only way, it may not be right for you. But I've been inspired by local businesses I'm a part of who have made that kind of choice and have been principled in doing so.”
Implement a mentorship program.
Floyd gave the example of cultivating mentor/mentee relationships as a potential policy and culture change.
Data shows that companies are often more racially diverse at the lower levels of the organization, but people of color are less likely to be promoted into leadership—a phenomenon known as the ‘broken rung.’
One way to help to repair that recurring problem, said Floyd, is to create a mentoring program. Leaders who would like to participate are assigned a mentee.
“They don't get to necessarily pick a person that they have a strong similarity with, because we all feel more similar, more comfortable with people that we perceive as similar to us. And also, you know, if most of your leaders are white males, you're going to have to force them to have a mentor that's a female or a member of a minority group, or you're never going to have mentors for those folks. But the way that this changes things is that when we get to know each other on a personal level, the differences start to disappear and the similarities that we have with each other start to emerge. And those mentors start to take ownership of the career of that person that they're mentoring.”
Implementing changes such as the mentoring program is well within many organizations’ capacity.
“Set the goal just like you would do for any other strategic initiative, and then create a plan for how to get there and then assess your progress, make changes as needed, and create a feedback loop, said Floyd. “Keep going back and trying again when you fail. And then the end result hopefully is a stronger company.”
Commit to a growth mindset and hard conversations.
Michael Cassens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media Arts at the University of Montana and the director of Grizzly eSports, UM’s video game team. On and offline, gaming communities have often been exclusionary towards women and people of color. However, Cassens is intentional in creating a welcoming space within the eSports team, and makes a conscious effort to keep a growth mindset for the group’s progress. Instead of focusing on perfection, Cassens often asks himself, “how do we not only acknowledge that we have something to learn from but how we're going to grow from there?”
Although confrontational conversations are difficult, Cassens is committed to discussing missteps or incidents that arise on a continual basis.
“We have to commit as organizational leaders, as businesses, to say, these conversations are something that's that important that we're willing to do,” said Cassens.
The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion webinar was an introduction to a more in-depth conversation taking place through a two-part, 5 hour virtual workshop on July 29th and 30th, 2020. Registration information is available on the MHTBA website, as is a recording and transcript of the June 23 webinar.
About the Author: Martina Pansze is the Communications Director for the Montana High Tech Business Alliance. She graduated from Whitman College with a degree in Film and Media Studies, and has worked as a freelance journalist and grant writer.
About the Publisher: Launched in 2014, the Montana High Tech Business Alliance is a nonpartisan nonprofit association of highly-engaged high-tech and manufacturing companies and affiliates creating high-paying jobs in Montana. For more information, visit MTHighTech.org or subscribe to our biweekly newsletter.