How to break the damaging “going with what you know” syndrome

June 26, 2012 By Stephanie Leave a Comment

Why diversity in all it’s many forms is essential for business competitiveness, community growth and organizational sustainability

Why would any business, municipal council, non-profit or volunteer driven organization diminish their effectiveness, reduce their viability and alienate customers or consumers?

Truth is that few would do so intentionally but far too many do so by falling into the pitfall of “going with what we know.”

Here in Nova Scotia as with many smaller communities across the country where diversity is slowly growing, this seems far more prevalent than cities such as Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton to name a few.

“The going with what we know” syndrome curtails growth at a time when growth is vital. It diminishes creative problem solving at a time when effective solutions are essential and it hinders innovation.

“Going with what we know,” leaves us on a gerbil wheel of endless, short-handed repetition, surprisingly, the solutions to this syndrome are easy to create and usually at no cost or low cost.

So, what is “going with what we know?”

It can be any homogeneous group that looks to similar group members to fill jobs, sit on boards of directors, volunteer, market to, speak to or engage and encourage participation from.

Put another way-if you have a group of purple people on your board of directors and they are all purple people of roughly the same social-economic and cultural background, that group will again and again approach similar purple people. Which means if there are green, yellow, blue and pink people in your community, they will usually not be approached or included, not because they are intentionally being excluded, but because it never enters the awareness of the purple group to reach out. The purple group, simply doesn’t see, what it doesn’t see.

Some common examples and consequences

Boards of Directors – most boards in small cities and communities tend to invite new board members from their circle of friends, colleagues and business acquaintances which is one reason why many non-profit and community boards remain active.

However, it the board itself isn’t very diverse and the individuals themselves don’t diverse networks what ends up happening is a board that is similar in age, culture and outlook and this becomes an repeating cycle. The consequence of this is over time, programs and services will become less responsive and relevant to an increasingly diverse community. It can also mean that volunteer recruitment is aimed at the same small group of people. Organizations with a more diverse and eclectic leadership will probably be more aware of the gaps in services and in a better position to meet those needs and also have greater scope to go after funding.

Volunteer recruitment – again, volunteers tend to be recruited from the ranks of people we know or are used to appealing to. From year-to-year, volunteer recruitment strategies usually don’t vary much and some strategies haven’t been revamped for years because dealing with daily operational needs puts things like re-assessing who and how volunteers are recruited gets set on the back-burner, plus there is often the underlying belief that if it’s working, why fix it.

Without some assessment on who makes up our volunteer bodies, it’s hard to see if there are problems and going to the same pool of potential volunteers means less volunteers and more volunteer burnout.

Volunteering is a mutually beneficial situation. The organization is able to carry out its mandate and the volunteer gains valuable and sometimes invaluable work experience and skills, self-confidence and the opportunity for a reference they can put on their resumes.

There are large groups of untapped volunteers who would be amazing assets for an organization but who will also receive phenomenal value from the experience. Traditionally untapped groups are youth, people with different abilities, First Nations, under-represented groups like low income, minorities, immigrants and New Canadians.

City/village councils and committees – pretty similar situation to boards and volunteer recruitment but with far larger and far reaching impact on community members. Lack of representation means a lack of engagement and that isn’t good for the growth, sustainability or responsiveness of a community. Plus healthy and robust civic engagement benefits all of us.

Having a mixed group that includes youth (15-25), low income, immigrants, LGBT, seniors, people with different abilities and other under-represented groups gives a political body greater access to insights and solutions to community concerns and needs. The more diverse a group is, the more creative and innovative their solutions will be.

Marketing imagery- This is another large area that is often neglected because lack of insight and awareness. In a country as multicultural as Canada and in a growing diverse community as Halifax where a lot of time and money are being spent on promoting the city as “A great place to live,” most marketing material seems aimed at only one group, young and seemingly of Northern European descent.

When we look at imagery we have a visceral reaction to it. So if we don’t see ourselves at all, we tend to exclude ourselves. Whether we are marketing a store or a service if our imagery doesn’t include diversity, that diversity will go where they feel represented, wanted and valued. When it comes to the bottom line, companies and businesses are hurting themselves and their long-term sustainability by not objectively looking at their marketing materials and asking themselves who are they missing and who do they want to attract as new users.

A few examples for low-cost solutions

Assess, assess and re-assess with a critical eye and if need be with outside, objective help to determine who are the people that make up your board, committee, marketing team, hiring team, volunteer recruitment team. Make a list of who is missing and who you want to include. Knowing is the biggest first hurdle in creating change and all you need is paper, pencil, a good cup of coffee/tea and a hour to consciously think it through.

Develop new and dynamic strategies for engagement of different groups. For some, sending an e-mail is a great way to engage, but for other groups, especially groups that often feel marginalized an e-mail or a phone call is not going to elicit the response you might want and will often go ignored. For these groups, it’s important to invest face-to-face time in building relationships. Sure it takes some time out of a busy schedule, but the long-term value is well, invaluable.

Inventory your individual networks-how diverse are they? Does your network include different genders, ages, languages, ethnic diversity? If not, than you can be more aware of who you tend to approach and make a concerted effort to approach people and groups that you haven’t in the past.

If you’re not sure how to approach a different group, invest some time in making one contact and asking them for ideas and suggestions on the best way to engage that community. Make sure the engagement is from the ground-up and not top down.

Re-assess the venues that you use for meeting, gatherings or events – will some people find them intimidating, too formal, to outside their comfort zone. Play with using different venues in different communities and notice what worked and what didn’t. It’s too easy to use the same formats and same types of processes even those we see evidence that they may not be working any more. It’s about trying new things to find new ways and better ways of engaging people.

Hire a different type of consultant and ask them how they have engaged diverse groups in the past, what was their success rate or how are they going to approach it differently this time. Don’t keep going to the same people just because you know them because you will likely keep getting the same results.

Above all do not say...”yes but…” As soon as you put the BUT in there all is lost and closed down. Yes, But.., says it can’t be done, that it’s been done in the past and didn’t work so there is no sense in doing that again. Yes, But… kills creative problem solving and drowns ideas. Change the “yes, but…” to “how are we going to do this?” “What is a solution?” “Is the timing and group dynamics better to try this again?” Sometimes, by simply taking the negative out of the equation and only focusing on solutions, the solutions are there and often those solutions are simple even for complex issues, cost effective in a time of hard economics and possible even with limited time and staff. More than anything, the solutions come with a change of attitude and increased awareness.

Here are a few useful resources and articles. And, to keep the pool of ideas growing, please leave a comment and share with me and us, some of the new and innovative ways that you are engaging new groups and what you have learned through the process.

Canada’s Best Diversity Employers

DiversityInc.

Maytree Foundation – Leaders for change

Kevin Carter Inclusion Innovation

McKinsey Global Institute has an interesting article that puts projected skilled labour shortages in perspective and is, in a sense, a warning for creative solutions sooner, rather than later.

Filed Under: Colourful Thoughts

Forget political correctness and diversity jargon, it all boils down to this…

June 11, 2012 By Stephanie 1 Comment

Close your eyes, keep them closed, take a deep breath and imagine…

Imagine you are on a playground, you watch a child fall hard, she’s crying and has a bloody knee, you are closer to the child then the mom. What do you do? What is the first thing you ask the child?

In your imagination, do you run to that child, pick her up, ask if she’s okay, reassure her that she’s alright, maybe pull out a tissue and help dab the tears and the blood away?

Or in your imagination, do you first look at the child and think, “it’s just a little white girl, hope she has a broken leg.” Or, “It’s a little Asian girl, hope it hurts.” Or, do you simply ignore the bleeding crying child and turn away, “it’s not my problem, think I’ll imagine the beach instead.”

Imagine that your next door neighbour’s house is on fire, you are standing outside with them, watching with them as everything they own burns to the ground, family photographs, pets, clothing – what is the first thing you feel for your neighbours? The first thing you think to yourself?

In your imagination to you think, “this is tragic!” Do you offer help, food, blankets, a warm hand on a shoulder and ask, “how can I help?”

Or in your imagination do you first think, “hey, before I feel any compassion or empathy, let me first imagine what colour and culture they come from?” Do you imagine “hey, it’s just a single mom, so what, time to get back to my show.”

Imagine that a woman has just given birth and you have the privilege of holding this perfect little newborn in your arms, how does it feel? What is the first thing you hope for this new new baby?

In your imagination do you remember a time when you’ve held a baby, yours or a friends, a niece or nephew or a grandchild. Do you remember thinking how fragile and how perfect that baby is, how innocent and full of potential and possibilities. If you are remembering what it was like holding your own child for the first time, did you think to yourself, “how do I keep something so small, safe, loved, secure, protected?”

Behind the policies and the politics. Behind the intercultural and diversity professional jargon and behind anti-racism rhetoric and ideology of white privilege, colonialism and oppression lies a simple truth and a simple want.

I want people to be treated the way I want me and my loved ones to be treated. Most if not all of us want that very same thing. I doubt that anyone, regardless of who they are ever thinks to themselves, “I want me and my loved ones to be devalued, unloved, disrespected, rejected…”

With all the ‘noise’ that is in our lives I think most of us just forge ahead, unthinking and heedless of the effect we have on others. I choose to believe the average person doesn’t consciously want to be responsible for the pain of another person. I think that many, if not most people would be horrified if they knew that their actions and words impacted another person enough that their daily trek to work or to school was a painful and horrific experience.

Making a powerful positive impact is really rather simple and doesn’t entail any economic cost or even a huge change in our normal, daily behaviour, because it comes down to:

In that moment of space before judgement, criticism, bias and assumption leaves our mouth, infects our body language, fuels our attitude, we can step back and for a split second think “what if this was me, my child, my lover, my friend, my sister, my brother or my parent how would I want them to be talked to, treated? How would I want them to feel after being talked to by someone like me?”

Can you share an experience when perceived differences were less important than similarities and compassion?

For local and global voices on diversity take a look at The American Diversity Report “The ADR is the Creative Center for Cultural Diversity and Inclusion.”

Filed Under: Meanings

Stepping back helps us step forward

March 21, 2012 By Stephanie Leave a Comment

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

— Anne Frank

Cultural Competency is our ability to engage, interact and communicate with interest, effectiveness and respect with people who we have always automatically viewed as different to us because of their looks, colour, how they sound what they dress like, how educated or uneducated, how young or old they are and even how rich or how poor they are in comparison to ourselves.

For employers and organizations, this is particularly important for the people involved in recruiting, interviewing and hiring staff, engaging new members to the board of directors or accepting new volunteers. When we can examine our own assumptions and pre-conceptions of other people based on their differences and actively put those assumptions and judgments aside for a little while, we are more able to experience people for who they are rather then who we have decided they are.

Honestly examining our prejudices opens our ability to post jobs more creatively or be more flexible in how we hear responses in the interview process. It helps us to be more objective in how we assess skill transfer or people’s experience and their actual ability instead of dismissing people because of where they received their credentials or what country they worked in.

It’s the difference between automatically dismissing certain people because we always have, to honestly asking ourselves why.

Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. They make other people good-natured. They also produce their own image on men’s souls, and a beautiful image it is.

– Blaise Pascal

Cultural Competency is also our ability to objectively self-assess the family, community and regional cultural influences colouring their perceptions, biases, judgments and stereotypes of people outside of our known religious, workplace, cultural and social environments.

Once we have gone through or started our cultural self-assessment, it is then up to us to take that enhanced awareness and consciously choose to step outside of our comfort zones.

The culturally self-reflective person starts to become the culturally competent person when we begin putting aside our familiar and reactive responses of “me or us” versus “them” or “those people” when encountering a person or people who are different from ourselves.

When each of us is capable of taking a couple of steps back from our usual, automatic response to another person’s difference in colour, language, accent, place of birth, religious affiliation, dress, food, body weight, body language and facial expression (to name a few), we are gaining a measure of cultural competency and are becoming a culturally competent person.

Becoming a culturally competent person is a journey of learning about other cultures and people, asking questions, shifting our views and being interested in the answers. It has more to do with an honest internal willingness to learn, to experience and to change. It’s an ongoing process. We cannot learn cultural competency in a workshop or a university course but they can give us a starting point to help us build on what we already know and learned.

Ultimately, the building and the learning are work we need to do.

We become culturally competent by putting aside the familiar security blanket of judgment, assumptions and bias to honestly hear another person and see another person without stopping at the shallow edge of differences in colour, language, accent, geographical area and religious affiliation or practices.

Let go of your attachment to being right, and suddenly your mind is more open. You’re able to benefit from the unique viewpoints of others, without being crippled by your own judgment.

– Ralph Marston

Individual Cultural Competence isn’t about being an expert on our own culture let alone an expert on all cultures of all people in the world. Nor is it about being able to speak two or more languages or having traveled extensively both in and outside of Canada (and while all of that helps, it is not a requirement in acquiring cultural competency).

However it is about a willingness to think and learn about culture and the rich differences that exist between people based on our differences. This is as applicable to neighbours in a small rural Albertan, Nova Scotian or BC town as it is in a multicultural city with and abundance of cultural diversity to people from or in a foreign country.

Individual Cultural Competence is about our willingness not to tune out or react negatively to another person the minute we hear an accent, see purple hair, someone much younger or much older, a different colour or wearing clothes that are alien to how we think people should be.

We need to check and step back from our biases even if our negative reaction is internal and we don’t think it is overtly obvious. We may think that our internal negative reactions don’t show or affect other people, bu they do. Our reactions influence our tone of voice, the words that we choose, our body language, the distance we stand from the other person, or facial expressions, our understanding of what they are saying, or assumptions about what they say and what they might mean and ….

Someone developing or building on their cultural competency is someone willing to actively, respectfully and with an open mind, engage with someone who is younger, darker, lighter, fatter, thinner, more educated, less educated then ourselves and who we have always held in judgement and refused to interact with or have done so with distaste.

Individual cultural competence is understanding that none of us can know it all, all the time and so we are willing to take risks, ask questions, learn, share and expand our knowledge about the world and the peoples in it.

I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do.

– Helen Keller

We don have to agree or like everyone we meet especially if they are different and we don’t want to be seen as biased or judgmental. We do need to grow our awareness and nurture our ability to separate out our internal background noise and objectively self-assess whether our attitude and/or immediate reaction to the other person is based on faulty, biased information and reasoning, unexamined prejudices and assumptions or whether we just don’t like the other person’s personality and character or honestly don’t think they will be a good fit for a particular job.

Please share how you or your organization is changing the way you might think about differences and the way you include new people into your social circle or into your business. Or contact me to find out more about strategies to increasing the scope of diversity in your workplace or your organization.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Can a White Person Teach Diversity?

March 5, 2012 By Stephanie 1 Comment

‘Can a white man teach diversity?’ was an ongoing discussion for one of the diversity groups I’m involved in on LinkedIn, while I didn’t weigh in on that particular conversation, the question has been on my mind a lot lately.

I don’t believe that the right question is whether a white man/person can teach diversity or not. The answer to that is clearly a yes. Anyone can teach diversity but just because I or any other person can do something, doesn’t always mean that we should.

The question isn’t whether a ‘white’ person can teach diversity, but whether it is effective or appropriate for a person from a homogeneous group to teach that homogeneous group about diversity. This is a question of particular importance to organizations, employers, Boards of Directors and municipal politics.

Think about it for a moment.

If you live in Japan, are Japanese and teach Japanese students about cultural diversity, how effective is that?

Let’s use Canada as an example; if you are in a province, town, city or region that doesn’t have a lot of cultural diversity and is mainly Canadians of English, Scottish, Irish, German and French descent (to name a few), and the teacher is also a Canadian of the same ancestry how effective will that be for changing attitudes or increasing awareness about culture and diversity? More importantly, what is the message being received by the participants in this group?

Regardless of the rich cultural diversity a person may have within their lives and their ancestry, if a visually white person is trying to teach cultural diversity that encompasses visible cultural differences to another group of visually white people, I believe that there is an unintended reinforcement of the idea that people from visible minority groups do not possess the expertise, skills or credentials to educate others.

Whether a person or a group can teach diversity comes down to basic common sense and self-realization of our limitations as culture and diversity facilitators. As someone who specializes in teaching diversity I know that I can give personal examples, generalizations and an intellectualized awareness of certain issues around diversity. I share information about cultural and communication differences, strategies and information on avoiding common language and perceptual missteps. I can assess professional development gaps and engagement gaps and while I would make suggestions and/or offer support on addressing those gaps, I would never presume to suggest that I or any one person or group could meet all of a person’s or organization’s learning needs or be able to bridge all the gaps identified.

Neither I nor any one single person or approach to culture and diversity can teach anyone everything. Each piece of information builds on another and in the end, each person and each organization has to do the work, take risks and engage in their own learning about culture and diversity.

Some of the questions we need to ask ourselves when we are teaching or facilitating learning on cultural and communication diversity are: am I the best or even the right person to teach this element and do I need to invite a co-facilitator from a particular community to join me in facilitating the session?

There are also important questions that an organization, business or company needs to think about when they engage culture and diversity trainers/facilitators for their staff or business development sessions.

Here are just a few questions that are good to think about when deciding which diversity trainer will best meet your needs.

Have I taken into consideration the current cultural make-up of the group I am scheduling training for?
My staff (board, organization etc.) is fairly homogeneous, am I making sure that my diversity trainer/facilitator is visibly culturally diverse?
Does the trainer have personal experience of being a visible minority, an immigrant, speaks a language other than English, has worked within other cultures and has lived within other cultures.
Does the trainer have practical experience accessing other cultures including the Aboriginal community
Does the trainer have a good understanding of Canadian culture and the historical diversity of the provinces and territories?
Has the trainer/facilitator lived in other provinces across Canada?
Does the trainer have experience working with youth, seniors, people with disabilities/mental health and understands gender issues within a Canadian framework and within some other cultures?
Does the trainer have an understanding of the historical cultural issues of the community and how those can possibly influence current relationship building?
Does the trainer/facilitator have a strong understanding of the concept of “we go with what we know,” and is able to help you devise a strategy to circumvent that common response?

Asking some of these questions of yourself, your staff and your management team will help in deciding on what type of training your organization needs and what type of diversity trainer will be most effective for the developmental growth of your staff, community relationships, marketing strategies or in diversifying your board of directors.

I can support your organization in deciding on the best approach to your learning needs through consultation, information sessions and gap analysis.

Please leave a comment about this post and if you have questions or would like more information please contact me. I respond to all inquiries within a business day or sooner.

Filed Under: Colourful Thoughts, Uncategorized

Cultural Competence

January 19, 2012 By Stephanie Leave a Comment

A Story of an American Black Muslim & a Cherokee Jew

I just turned 50, and what has stuck with me for over 41 years is what my second grade teacher, Dona Maria told the class one day. She said that the truly sophisticated person is someone who can be equally comfortable speaking to a King as to a peasant.

I think this definition also holds true for a culturally competent person. It’s the willingness to be comfortable listening and speaking with someone who exists outside of what is familiar to us. It’s an openness to communicate with people who come from completely different age, educational and economic backgrounds as well as ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds.

I don’t speak differently to someone panhandling on a street corner than I do with a high level politician or with a child. It’s about listening and speaking with the same level of respect for each person even if the words I chose may be slightly different so the other person can understand them better.

Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. They make other people good-natured. They also produce their own image on men’s souls, and a beautiful image it is.
– Blaise Pascal

Cultural competency is about being interested enough in getting to know other people, being self-aware of the family, community, regional, national and other cultural influences shading my perceptions and fueling the biases, judgments and stereotypes that I might hold of people who exist outside of my religious, workplace and social environments.

When we’ve started, or gone through our cultural self-assessment, it is then up to us to take that awareness and consciously choose to step outside of our old comfort zone. Or as I’ll share with you in a moment, be forced out of our comfort zone.

In my experience, the culturally self-reflective person starts to become the culturally competent person when we begin putting aside our familiar and reactive responses of prejudice and bias when encountering a person or people who are different.

I learnt this when I was 17-years old and had fully incorporated into who I was and am, all the lessons my mom had taught me and brought me up with. Not so for my mom. She had intellectualized some of these concepts but when push came to shove, her prejudices and biases raised their ugly heads. I didn’t let that state of affairs last very long.

We were living in Ibiza, Spain and every couple of years the American Navy made a stop in Ibiza. I was 16 when I met Robyn. I’d stopped at my favorite café to pick up a coffee before going into work (I worked at the Galleria Tanit after school). I started talking to a table of young Navy guys and the short version of that is Robyn and I swapped mailing addresses and started an ongoing letter writing relationship.

Left-Robyn 1978

About a year later in the spring of 1979 when Robyn was stationed in Mallorca for a few weeks, he took some time off to come and visit me in Ibiza. My mom and stepfather were okay with all of this and he was invited to stay with us during his visit.

The minute Robyn entered our house well, the proverbial “shit hit the fan.” You see, Robyn was a Black Muslim from the ghettoes of Chicago. He entered the house with a red bandana on his head, his hair pick stuck in through the front and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth.

Ten minutes later my mom had taken me aside and told me Robyn couldn’t stay with us. When questioned, her only answer was “he’s a Black Muslim,” as if that should explain everything which it didn’t. That fact seemed completely irrelevant. Shaking with fury, I collected Robyn, drove him to a hostel telling him I’d sort everything out and be back to pick him up, probably before the morning.

As soon as I walked in the door to our house I demanded an explanation. My mom explained that first of all, Robyn was from the Chicago ghettoes and secondly and most importantly that he was a Black Muslim. To my “so f@#$% what” she said that the American Black Muslims hated the Jews and this boy had probably never been in a White person’s home in his whole life.

Left - Stephanie 1978

I looked at her with all the scorn and disgust that only a 17-year old can muster and told her that she was the biggest racist I’d ever met. That I was ashamed to call her my mother and everything she had ever taught me and everything she said she was simply a lie.

You see, my mom was White and Jewish and my stepfather was White and Canadian. My biological father had been Black and Cherokee. My mother had been a maverick marrying a Black man in Los Angeles in the early 60s when interracial marriage was almost unheard of and still virtually taboo.

My mother had always been a fighter and defender of human rights and she’d been extremely involved in the Human Rights movement in the States and had marched to Selma, Alabama at the height of it. She’d had a lover, Victor, who had been a member of the Black Panthers.

I grew up with stories about Martin Luther King Jr., of the KKK, of the slogans used by those opposed to the Human Rights movement, of how Mahatma Ghandi broke English Colonial rule and I’d cut my teeth on stories about the Holocaust and how her parent’s families had been decimated by the concentration camps.

Yet, here she was, telling me that this young man who I’d written to for over a year couldn’t stay with us because he came from a social-economic background outside of her knowledge and comfort zone and because of his religion.

I reminded her of everything she’d taught me, and that Robyn always knew she was White and that I was Jewish and if he had the courage to stay with people he didn’t know and might never encounter than she with her background, knowledge and experience should have been a better person.

Then of course, I had to ram my feelings and own sense of betrayal home. If she felt that way about him, just because of where he’d grown up and his religion was she secretly ashamed to have Black children and when she thought of us, did she privately call us “Niggers,” in her head?

I think that only teenagers can be quite that raw, uncut and brutally honest in what they think. Sometimes that is a very good thing. My mom was shocked that I could even say such a thing, hurt and angry. I on the other hand was unapologetic and probably said something like “if the shoe fits.”

She walked away, I stormed away and about 20 minutes later she came to me and simply said, “I taught you well. You’re right, and I am terribly, horribly sorry, go get him.”

I went and got Robyn and we had a lovely, fun, uneventful 5-day visit and of course, he and my mom got along really well because he could be funny and also laughed at her humour, he was incredibly respectful and didn’t make a mess.

This story epitomizes what becoming culturally competent means to me. It’s not about being politically correct all the time, or saying the right things all the time, or even doing the right thing the first time. It’s about being confronted by our judgments and prejudices and having the courage and the willingness to put them aside, step out of the well-known comfort zone and truly meet someone different and new from a place of respect and openness.

My mother was one of the most culturally competent people I’ve ever known. She taught me well.

Let go of your attachment to being right, and suddenly your mind is more open. You’re able to benefit from the unique viewpoints of others, without being crippled by your own judgment.
– Ralph Marston

I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this story. Even more so, I would welcome your own stories of experiences that influenced a change in perception towards a person or a group.