3 Habits Anyone Can Adopt to Support Diversity at Work
Want to support diversity but not sure where to start?
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We are thrilled to bring you a guest post by Yue Zhao, Chief Product & Technology Officer turned career coach. Her mission is to support more women and minorities in ascending to the C-suite. Yue writes a weekly newsletter on career growth ✍, teaches a course at Reforge on Breaking Barriers: Manager to Executive 🚀, and provides 1:1 and group coaching to aspiring executives 👭. She was formerly the CPO & CTO at Fuzzy Pet Health, PM lead at Instagram and Meta, and the 1st PM at Thumbtack. Yue started her career with McKinsey & Company and dabbled in entrepreneurship with a failed wine startup. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and Bachelors from University of California Berkeley in Biomedical Engineering.
Below, Yue shares 3 simple tweaks you can make to activities you already do to support diversity. These tweaks will help you get started and overcome the fears of sinking too much time or being pinned as “the diversity leader”.
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Research has repeatedly shown that diverse teams lead to higher-quality work, better decision-making, and greater team satisfaction. Additionally, Gen Z and an increasing number of Millennials strongly prefer working in companies that offer diverse work environments.
In many workplaces, a lack of diversity in leadership results not from intentional exclusion, but from a lack of focus or proactive effort. Diversity takes work. It takes additional effort to find and hire diverse candidates. It takes mental work to be humble, check your biases, and be open to critical feedback.
When it comes to supporting diversity and inclusion (D&I) efforts, those in the majority (e.g. white males in Western business) feel they have only two choices: Become highly vocal advocates in a way that takes a lot of effort and is very visible, or do nothing. On the flip side, those in the minority are also overloaded as the default leader who is approached with ideas for diversity initiatives. And so, diversity efforts stall, and the workplace becomes more homogenous due to the fear of standing out, lack of time, and apathy.
Rather than putting the workload of increasing diversity on a few (e.g. the vocal majority or the token minority), the key to making supporting D&I more approachable is to ingrain them into the incentives and culture for everyone. If you are a white male (or any) leader, you already spend time building informal networks, advocating for ideas, and setting cultural norms and processes. Small tweaks to how these tasks are done shift the balance in favor of promoting diversity. The same is true for minorities — the actions you can take to change the workplace don’t have to be dramatic or martyr-like. Instead, conscious small nudges across many people will change the culture slowly but surely.
Here are 3 small things you can do today, as a majority or minority, to invest in and increase diversity. For clarity, I will give examples from the perspective of a white male leader, and an aspiring leader who is a woman of color. However, these same tactics can apply to any type of racial or diversity situation.
1) Share Your Credibility with Diverse Leaders
As a leader, you are regularly looking for high-potential, rising stars to connect with and further your influence. Keep an open slot (or two) for diverse leaders, even if they don’t “fit” your mental model for successful leaders. It may feel a bit uncomfortable at the start, but growth happens just outside the comfort zone. If you want to continue building your influence across the organization, welcoming new and different perspectives will accelerate that growth.
When supporting aspiring minority leaders, it’s helpful to “overly endorse”. For example, where you would normally give a “plus one” just once to an idea a minority leader raises in a large group meeting, do it twice or thrice instead. Or, when you would normally offer just one speaking opportunity at a team All Hands, consider offering a minority leader two chances a few months apart. These additional reinforcements are necessary to overcome the stereotypes and biases that are in place.
As a minority aspiring leader, look for white male leaders who are willing to share their credibility with you. When someone already trusted by the in-group puts their trust in you, the rest of the group will feel comfortable trusting you as well.
Shared credibility can range from a mention of your work in a group meeting to an official endorsement at an all-hands. Either way, these soundbites can be very helpful in giving aspiring minority leaders the credibility to get meetings and buy-in for the success of their projects.
2) Find Shared Professional Interests
It can be difficult to find social common ground across cultures. You may not share the same upbringing or cultural interests. One way to work through this is to build trust based on common goals at work. For the leader and aspiring leader, focus on how you can help each other professionally to create win-win scenarios.
Examples include:
Do you share a common belief in an impactful project or idea that you can jointly advocate for?
Do you share an annoyance at an outdated process and want to evolve it?
Are you both passionate about mentoring others?
Can the minority leader provide a perspective that may be different, but impactful to your projects?
3) Opt for cultural norms that minimize bias
Often, just having diverse colleagues “at the table” is not a guarantee that there will be a higher impact. Research shows that things may get worse as increasing diversity can increase tensions and conflict (source). To gain the benefits of a diverse team, it’s important to ensure that the team culture respects diverse perspectives and promotes fairness. One place to start this is with meetings.
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