Contributor: Andrea Yeh

Work and Life is a radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday at 7 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body, and spirit).

On Work and Life, Stew Friedman spoke with Bill Proudman, founder and CEO of White Men as Full Diversity Partners.  As a leadership development consultant, coach, and facilitator to many organizations, Bill works to help men see that diversity in the workplace relates to them, too. He has also co-authored a three-volume field guide on white men in leadership and diversity partnerships.

Stew Friedman: Let’s talk a little about your background.  How did you get into advocating for men to be engaged in discussions about diversity in the workplace?

Bill Proudman:  My background from forty years ago was in the Outward Bound movement—the outdoor adventure, personal growth realm.  I was engaging with people, observing what happens when we change our assumptions, and how that affects behavior and action.  Around the late ’80s, I had a learning experience that was profoundly transformative for me.  For the first time ever in my life, I realized that I was white, male, and, in my case, heterosexual.

I learned that was my group identity and that my membership in those groups had a bearing on how I viewed the world, how I walked through the world, what I expected not just of myself but of others, colleagues.

SF: Was there a particular incident that led you to this epiphany, or did it happen gradually?

BP: Well, there was the original epiphany at a two-hour workshop that I attended that opened the door to this set of identities and privileges that I, as a straight white man, never had to think about.

I recognized that, as a straight, white man, a lot of my own personal beliefs and values had come from my upbringing.  Where it really became crystalized was in the early ’90s when I was starting to do diversity work.  I was noticing a peculiar dynamic. When I was working with executive teams, anytime the issue of diversity came up, the white men in the team would always outsource the issue to anybody on the team who wasn’t a white male, so it would always be the white women, colored men or women, or out gay or lesbian person on the team.  All of a sudden, they were anointed as the diversity guru.  This was very unconscious and very well-intended on their parts, but basically what it did was to create the dynamic where they never spoke about the topic white male to white male.

SF: So while the intention was to perhaps give voice and power to the minority group representative, it was in fact making it worse for him or her?

BP: It’s a complicated issue.  For example, many companies put together diversity councils.  When I would go work with those councils, I would meet with some of the white men on those councils.  Invariably, they would introduce themselves as the “token white guy” on the council.  Behind this word “token” was the notion that “I know that diversity is about all of us, but really I’m just here.  I don’t know anything, but I’m learning a lot because I’m having great conversations about these issues with colleagues who are, of course, the experts.”  So, a big part of my work is to emphasize that diversity inclusion is, from a leadership standpoint, everybody’s issue.  When we white men outsource the issue to others, we actually abdicate some of our responsibility in creating a more inclusive environment.

SF: So one of the keys to making white men into full diversity partners is to not delegate away the responsibility for leading that effort.  Is that right?

BP: Exactly.  In the United States right now if you think of Chief Diversity Officers of Fortune 500 companies, I know of two who were straight white men, and one of the guys retired.   Those roles are almost always held by white women, men and women of color, or gays or lesbians because of this pervasive societal notion that those are the people who are best able to coach, mentor, and support organizations on the topic of diversity and inclusion.  In some ways, this lets white men off the hook.

SF: But it seems to me that the other side of what you’re proposing is that if you didn’t have a representative from the minority group in the Chief Diversity Officer slot, it would seem like a different kind of problem.  How can you have a privileged white man who doesn’t understand his own unconscious bias leading the effort for diversity in our organization?  It doesn’t seem right.

BP: Exactly, it’s a Catch 22. The role of the Chief Diversity Officer is to act as a partner and help business leaders be accountable on this issue much in the same way that they’re accountable for safety, manufacturing, or other business metrics.  So this should not be outsourced to a particular department.  But if a large part of the population does not think that this issue is about them and their groupit can create really challenging difficulties at the personal and organizational levels for people who happen to be female and the first VP or SVP.   She is not just operating on her own merits.  She cannot fail because she would let down all the other women.  In other words, when you and I [older white men] get promoted, we can wash out of a position.  If I fail, no one looks at you and says, “You know what happens.  It’s another one of those white guys.”  A woman or a person of color who washes out of a very senior position can create enormous ramifications on others of the group.  As a white man, I have the privilege of being seen as an individual.  No one confuses me with all the other white men.

SF: So you are saying that women and minorities who rise through the ceilings that they have to break through carry a special weight because they are representing, right?

BP: Absolutely.  I’m not representing anyone in those situations other than myself, so it lets me more easily be more of who I am.  I’m not even conscious of this 99 percent of the time, and other white men are not either.  And for those women and people of color, it shouldn’t be a deal breaker for them either. But a woman who’s new to a role may believe that she can’t fail because she has to prove that she didn’t get the job simply because she’s female and someone wanted to score some points on their diversity scorecard.  Those of us that are white and male are generally free of that pressure.  It doesn’t mean that our work lives aren’t challenging and stressful at times, but it’s certainly not about who we represent.

SF: So what are the keys to creating the social and cultural context for there to be true partnerships where all parties are engaged collaboratively in the struggle to create an equal playing field that is truly inclusive?

BP: That’s a great question.   Catalyst, the New York-based global corporation that for fifty years has been looking at research of women in the corporate environment, did a study a couple years back and found three large barriers for men who are visible champions around gender equity: apathy, fear, and ignorance.  Apathy was rooted in the notion that if I and other men think about diversity as everyone else’s issue other than mine, I can be a pretty good short-term champion about trying to create good environments for those historically marginalized groups, but ultimately long-term I have to really understand my personal self-interest in creating a more equitable environment.  So apathy is one barrier.

Another one is fear.  For a lot of men in the US, we have a fear of making mistakes, and that’s certainly very prevalent these days.  In any given month, there’s something in the popular media about some notable figure, some politician, or some celebrity who’s made a faux pas, and all of this magnifies this idea for men of having to be perfect and not making any mistakes. We’ve got the privilege of being silent.  Nobody thinks badly if we don’t raise our voices.

And, lastly, ignorance can be real or perceived—it doesn’t matter.  The fact is that I don’t know that I don’t know.   Being part of this group, I’m sort of this fish in water.  I’m in a culture, that is, the water that I swim in, where I almost never have to leave, and because I never have to leave it, I don’t even know that I’m in water.

SF: Some people refer to this as unconscious bias, and note there are things that we can do about it.  What have you been doing in your work?  Are your workshops integrated, or are they for white men only?

BP: We do some of both.  Because historically white men have always learned about diversity from people other than white men, in 1997 we started a white male only learning experience where it was with white men learning with and from white men debunk the myths that we don’t know anything about the topic and, more importantly, that we don’t think that we can learn anything about inclusion from other white men.

SF: What was the reaction to that?  I can imagine there being all kinds of resistance to the idea of an exclusive white male club for dealing with the question of diversity.  It seems somewhat paradoxical.

BP: I read an article called “White Men and Diversity: An Oxymoron” that was exactly about that topic.  It’s that notion that “You’ve got to be kidding me.  It’s a group of white men.  That’s not very inclusive or diverse.”  But that’s what happened in 1997, and it’s still very much alive today.  We just did a workshop last summer in Portland, Oregon, where our company resides, with the mayor, the police chief, and the police commanders for the police bureau, and it was a white male only session.  Even though Portland has a fairly socially progressive label for itself, there were a lot of comments in the public discourse.  Media outlets here said that the mayor had lost his mind because it’s not a normalized notion.  For forty years or more, we’ve learned everything about difference from these marginalized groups.  The purpose of white male-only learning is to reframe and reset how men, and white men in particular, come to learn this.  One of the great benefits of this work is not just how I relate to other white guys but also how I reframe my relationship with white women and people of color.

SF: So how does that work?  Give us a snapshot of what actually happens in the white male-only groups that transforms the conversation and the mindset.

BP: I love to tell a story about one of our longtime clients.  He’s the Senior Vice President running a North American marketing organization for a global company.  His name is Lee.  .  Until this work, Lee, like most people in the US, believed that he didn’t see race and gender.  He aimed to treat everybody the same.  Through this work, he learned that maybe some other people in the organization were having a different experience.  Out of curiosity, he went to an African-American colleague he had known for 25 years who was three or four layers down in the organization from him, and he asked him if he would be willing to talk to him about what it was like as a black man working in the company.  This black gentleman was a little taken aback because that’s not a normal conversation to have, even with somebody he’s known for 25 years.  But they negotiated that boundary, and this gentleman shared something with Lee for the first time ever.  He said, “Lee, something I’ve heard you say for 25 years is that you expect people who report to you to manage down, across, and up, and I’ve really struggled with that.   I think my career is really stalled.  I’ve never thought about this before, but I realized that, when I grew up in Georgia in the ’60s, my father and the other black men and women in my life told me not to look white men in the eye because to do that would be a threat to my physical well-being, if not my life.  I’ve never thought about this until now, but I think that I’ve carried this into the workplace.  I think it’s a residue of something that happened a long time ago.”  Lee was stunned, and he asked, “What, if anything, do you want me to do about that?”  And the black man said, “I’m not sure, but just being able to talk about it out loud with you and not being told to stop whining or to just get over it or that I was just playing a race card was comforting.”  So the two agreed that they would continue talking. It was important just to be heard.

To learn more about Bill Proudman and his work, read his blog posts for White Men as Full Diversity Partners or MARC (Men Advocating Real Change), an initiative of Catalyst.

Join Work and Life next Tuesday at 7 pm on Sirius XM Channel 111.  Visit Work and Life for a full schedule of future guests.

About the Author

Andrea Yeh is an undergraduate junior majoring in Operations and Information Management and in International Relations.

Contributor: Shreya Zaveri

Work and Life is a radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday at 7 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body, and spirit).

On Work and Life Stew Friedman spoke with Ric Ramsey, Executive Director and Vice President of City Year Philadelphia, a national non-profit dedicated to fighting the national high school dropout crisis. Ric also spent a decade at the Leadership Education Development Program (LEAD), a national organization working to identify and nurture high potential youth of diverse backgrounds by developing them into high achievers and responsible leaders. Stew spoke with Ric on preparing young men and women from minority backgrounds for successful careers.

The following are edited excerpts of their conversation.

Stew Friedman: Why did you choose to use your skills to help those in the minority community – particularly men – to advance and contribute?

Ric Ramsey: When I was doing an executive MBA program at NYU Stern, I began to think about what my legacy was going to be. I was in a conversation with some of my peers, and one of my colleagues asked me what my legacy was going to be. At the time, I was working in a traditional role within a corporation. I looked at him with a blank stare;   I hadn’t really ever thought about it. I had traveled around the world, worked in technology for a couple of years, and I was studying to get an MBA, when he told me I really ought to do something for the African-American male community. He felt that, at the time, I was pretty self-serving. I wanted to be the next great wealthy entrepreneur. But his comment led me to reflect and wonder, what if I went into the non-profit space for just one year? Well, here I am, twelve years later, because my soul was awakened.

SF: How did you discover that this was your calling?

RR: Self-reflection. I realized that I woke up every morning feeling alive at the idea of going to work, and I came to that feeling while running this small non-profit. Every day was a challenge, but the reward was always significant, and every day made me feel that I had a purpose. Now that I’m in City Year, we’re having an impact on 7,000 ‘off-track’ young people in 18 schools throughout the city, and my army of 255 Americorps members are working with them from 7 AM to 5 PM every day.

SF: Tell us about your mission and accomplishments with LEAD.

RR: The goal was to identify the nation’s most talented students of color and expose them to business, engineering, and the sciences and provide them a full view of what it takes to thrive as, say, a Wharton undergrad. So we would bring the students to Wharton for an entire month, and have them engage with professors on what it meant to be a student here – the academics as well as the socialization.

SF: I’m sure that’s such a crucial aspect of thriving here, and in the upper echelons of business society.

RR: Definitely. You discover how to thrive in a very intimidating environment. This institution has the world’s leading young people coming to it, and LEAD helps minority students navigate that environment. For that summer LEAD session we put students in colleges across the nation to gauge whether it might be the right environment for them and help nurture them as they enter some of the world’s most elite universities.

SF: What have you accomplished?

RR: When I joined LEAD twelve years ago it was very small, less than one-million-dollar organization. Upon my departure two years ago, we were a five-million-dollar organization on 14 different campuses. We started with Wharton in 1980, but we have since expanded, even internationally to South Africa, with plans to go to Canada and others. They’re still thriving without me.

SF: Well, that’s what you want to do, to leave behind a legacy where something is growing in your wake. What would you say was essential to your success in creating experiences that enable these young people to find themselves and seek out informed and intelligent answers to questions such as, ‘Do I fit here?’ or ‘What does it mean for me to fit here?’

RR: I think you start with the man in the mirror. I grew up in Denver, Colorado in a single parent family. We were on welfare, but I didn’t realize we were poor or think I was missing anything. I grew up in a loving household where I was taught that the sky was the limit. But, for example, my mother didn’t have a car so you’d always see me at a bus stop. And I thought it was great, because it was all I knew. I didn’t think there was anything negative about the way we lived. When I was engaged with the LEAD program and telling very bright young men and women of color that the sky was the limit, I knew I would have to educate them on the socialization necessary to achieve their goals without being deterred by words or actions of others.

SF: How did you do that?

RR: We asked them to define where they wanted to be, not ten years from now, but tomorrow. Students often get pressured about their five- and ten-year goals when we as adults know we didn’t have a strong view of that ourselves at the time. We asked young people, ‘Tell me what your interests are today. What gets you moving every day? And if that anchors you, why aren’t you doing more of that?’

SF: That’s the essence of what I’ve been teaching in my Total Leadership class for over 15 years. This is universal! The principles of being real and acting with authenticity by clarifying what means the most to you – that’s how it has to begin.

RR: You have to ask that question to yourself as well.  What is it that I want to be? Where do I want to be at this particular stage in my life?  And you also have to be grateful for the mistakes and the success along the way. I am true believer in the idea that you learn more from your mistakes than your successes. Every time I make a mistake I think, ‘this is going to be so great,’ because next time it’s not going to happen.

SF: Hopefully! So you start by asking people where they want to be right now. Is that an easy question for an eighteen-year-old to answer in an authentic way?

RR: We know our kids. I remember when I was speaking to Oprah Winfrey – if I can name drop here – and she said to me, ‘You know Ric, we all have our gifts.’ That resonated with me because my gift is to engage with people and have a true-to-life dialogue. I tell them that, as a mentor, I’m going to hold them to a standard of excellence that might be just a bit tougher than their family might hold them to. It allows teenagers to open up, and when I hear them lock into a more focused view of where they want to go next, I drill down and ask them to tell me more, and then probe making it cohesive with their plans. It opens up the floodgates, for example, when I ask them why they’re applying to a local college if their passion is travel.

SF: So you challenge them to focus on things that matter to them in a loving way by expressing a natural curiosity about their desires.

RR: Exactly. I never engage with young people as an ‘all-knowing elder.’

SF: What do you do once you discover that passion?

RR: I make comparisons. Not to other people, but to themselves in another lane. So I probe, and ask that student from earlier, what the equivalent is to staying in a local college but loving travel. I put a dichotomy out there for them to arrive at the realization themselves regarding what is keeping them from travel. It’s a game of providing the obvious to them so they can answer the questions themselves. I have a group of four mentees that I’ve been working with for about eight or nine years, and I ask these young men where they’re going to go now that we’ve discovered their passions. What will be the immediate next step? Where are they going to travel to? And then we create an action plan that’s still within view. You allow them to take ownership of then plan, and they say things like, ‘and then, I discovered…’

SF: How do you scale this? You’ve learned the craft of mentorship through a lot of trial-and-error. Tell me more about your army of 200 and the young people they directly touch.

RR: The 255 Americorps members are about 85% undergraduates or college grads, who work with about 7,000 students. Scaling begins with the little things I do at the office, which all goes back to the power of listening. More than an open door policy, I announce to the staff via email the new assortment of candy that I have in my office to encourage them to come in to say hello.

At City Year, these 255 Americorps members serve in 18 schools across Philadelphia for one-year terms. They provide support during the school day, and they engage with the students in math and reading interventions. The goal is to reach them between grades three and eight in order to reduce the dropout rate, based on research by Johns Hopkins Talent Development Group and Dr. Bob Balfanz, who did ten years of research showing that early warning signs indicating that a child is going to drop out can be addressed if they are focused during the right periods of this child’s life. These indicators include attendance, classroom behaviors, and literacy. Continuously intervening each year is what makes a difference. Teams of ten to twelve corps members are inside each school every day working with school staff with a focus on “off-track” students with plans to get them back on track.

SF: How are you doing with that goal?

RR: Very well. 72% of the students that we worked with from the list of “off track” students last year went up one assessment level in math and reading. When City Year intervenes, we consistently move the students back on track. We now aim to scale up to the entire city and then the entire nation.

Caller (Lee): Ric, I was wondering how we could apply your principles to perhaps retool veterans to society, seeing as they’re socialized to the army. As a veteran myself, I deal with similar challenges on how to find myself, where I want to go next, and what I want to do. Listening to the model that you have created, I want to hear your thoughts on how to create something like this to be appropriate for veterans?

RR:  In terms of retooling yourself, the hottest products on the market nowadays are veterans! My wife is a veteran and has shared the interest by corporations and other organizations including universities to bring more veterans in. If your goal is to develop your own non-profit to support veterans, my recommendation would be to start small, identify those entities that would be interested in engaging with veterans to get some form of organizational support, and then work with the business community to help you establish 501 (C) 3 or non-profit status. Know that as a veteran you are a pretty hot product in the market right now, and if you can leverage or communicate that fact to promote the launch of a business or non-profit, I think the market is ripe and ready for that.

SF: Lee, thank you so much for calling. Ric, what can you say to people about what employers could be doing to help your cause?

RR: In Philadelphia, we have a major challenge with the education group and their ability to fund organizations such as City Year. We’ve shared with the Philadelphia school district our plans for growth, and they are very excited about them, but we need the private sector to step in and support that. We can have an impact on up to 50% of the off-track students in this city over the next ten years if we are given appropriate funding.

Visit City Year’s website to learn how your corporation can get involved with City Year, either directly via employees or by engaging in schools. You can also follow @Cityyearphilly on Twitter.

Join Work and Life next Tuesday at 7 pm on Sirius XM Channel 111.  Visit Work and Life for a full schedule of future guests.

 About the Author

Shreya Zaveri is a junior in the Wharton School studying Management and Marketing and OPIM with an International Relations minor. She also serves as a vice president for the Work-Life Integration Project Student Advisory Board.

Contributor: Andrea Yeh

Work and Life is a radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday at 7 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body, and spirit).

On Work and Life, Stew Friedman spoke with Kenji Yoshino and Christie Smith. Christie Smith is the National Managing Principal at Deloitte University’s Leadership Center for Inclusion.  She was named Diversity Journal’s 2013 Woman to Watch and was thrice recognized by San Francisco Business Times as one of the most influential women in the Bay Area.  Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU, author of Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, formerly on the faculty at Yale where he also served as Deputy Dean.  Together, Smith and Yoshino have been studying why people of all backgrounds cover up their identities in the workplace. Following are edited excerpts of their conversation.

Stew Friedman: Christie you are a phenomenally accomplished professional who is out and raising children with your same-sex partner.  Your portfolio of professional activities includes many other issues apart from those that affect the LGBT community.  You’ve really been at the forefront of bringing awareness to these complex issues that are faced by some gay men and women at work. I wonder if we could start with the question of how and when you decided to come out at work and to invest so much of your time and energy in the workplace issues affecting the LGBT community?

Christie Smith: I’m not sure that it was a conscious decision to advocate strictly for the LGBT community.  I come by this very naturally having a mother who was a tremendous social justice activist working in Newark, NJ in the 60s helping to educate black men and growing up watching my father support her in her career. He took part in raising six daughters, all of whom were very strong young women. I guess I grew up in an atmosphere that valued social justice – fighting for the underdog – with a very untraditional father figure in terms of his support of my mother and of his daughters.  I think with that as the basis, my entire life has been about the values of service, seeking social justice, and fighting for the underdog.  It wasn’t until I made the decision to join Deloitte – and I had been out as a gay woman for twenty years prior to joining Deloitte – that I made the decision through the interview process not to hide my identity and not change pronouns and not do things that I had done to cover previously in my work world because I was simply uncomfortable or felt that it hindered my professional opportunities.

SF: You had been covering in prior professional environments?

CS: Absolutely.  I was being recruited by another firm at the same time.  The stark difference between the two firms was that Deloitte wanted to know who I was, not what I had done.  It was a very different interviewing process.

SF: How was that manifest?  Was it particular questions you were asked, or was it nonverbal cues?  How did you get that sense?

CS: I think it was all of the above.  When you join Deloitte as I did, as a direct entry partner, it is a long process to be admitted into the firm. Mostly that is to honor our culture but it is also to make sure this is the right decision, not only for the firm but also for the individual.

SF: Backing up a bit, what led you to decide at that moment in your life and career that you were no longer going to cover up who you really are?

CS: I knew I was successful enough that I didn’t need to anymore, and I was comfortable enough in my own emotional journey to feel that I didn’t need to play the game anymore. If I was going to make a commitment to a firm like Deloitte – which really was a decision to join a firm that I knew I would retire from – it was going to be long-term, and I couldn’t do that unfaithfully by hiding who I was.

SF:  You had a track record of success that gave you the confidence to be more true to yourself. Do you regret not revealing more of yourself sooner in your life? How do you advise young people on this question of when to reveal oneself?

CS: I’m not sure that regret is the right word.  I am saddened by the missed opportunities by having covered or hidden an aspect of who I was.  I often say in Kenji and my work on covering that it’s almost as if you’re going to work a second job.  Imagine the feeling of only giving half of yourself to your work – half of your brain, half of your passion, half of your emotional connection – because you’re working so hard to work that identity instead of your job.

SF: Can you give us an example of what kind of extra burden or work that covering requires, this second shift as it were?

CS: It requires not engaging in personal conversation.  So when frequently asked about my weekend on Monday morning, I would probably give one response: “Oh, I went for a long run.  I’m training for a marathon.  What did you do?”  I’d immediately deflect by asking a thousand questions to the person who was talking to me, so as not to have to field any other personal questions about my weekend.  It’s not only distracting in the moment because you’re working so hard to protect your identity, but it even lingers afterwards.  For me, when I walked away from a conversation, it impacted me for the next fifteen minutes, sometimes a half hour.  I just would be distracted by the fact that I didn’t feel comfortable revealing my own identity as a gay woman.

SF: Of course, you’re basically having to lie about yourself, and that’s got to create all kinds of angst and doubt about confidence in your professional life.

CS: Exactly.  I wonder about the missed relationships that I didn’t feel I could develop.  I wonder sometimes in some instances, Could I have been more successful? Could I have served my clients better?  While there were no great catastrophes, I am left wondering, If I had felt comfortable in bringing my whole and authentic self to work, would I have had more energy to have deeper human connection and engage in greater productivity?

SF: So that’s a huge cost, isn’t it?  What have you thought about or even assessed in terms of the economics of this cost?

CS: What we saw in our research are three main things.  First, covering is happening: not just in life or the law, but at work as well. 61 percent of our respondents said that they are actively involved in hiding an aspect of themselves while at work.  Second, and as a result of the first, people are showing up feeling sub-optimized in their roles.  Finally, people who cover or feel that they have to cover are contemplating walking out the door.  The real cost is to their productivity and retention.

SF:  Kenji, could give us the short version of what brought you to focus on this issue in your professional life, in addition to all the other work that you do as a constitutional law professor at Yale and now at NYU?

Kenji Yoshino: For me, it was driven by the experience of being a gay man in the workplace and particularly in academia. Like many other gay people, I overcame the demand to downplay my identity. It evolved from a time when I just wanted to be straight; to passing, which was when I was in the closet; to, by the time I entered the workforce, covering, which is when you admit you have a particular identity but make every effort to downplay it.  Stew, I’ll never forget walking down the corridors of Yale Law School as a junior law professor and having a very well-meaning colleague put his arm around me and say, “Kenji, you’ll do a lot better here if you’re a homosexual professional, than if you’re a professional homosexual.”

SF: What does that mean?

KY: I knew what he meant was that I would go further and faster if I were a constitutional law professor who just happened to be gay, rather than if I were the gay law professor who taught gay rights subjects and litigated gay rights cases and wrote on gay rights issues.  Unfortunately for me, my passion was the latter.  For a couple of years I tried to heed to his advice, but after a while, I realized that I would much rather not get tenure acting as somebody who I was, rather than get tenure as somebody who I wasn’t.

SF: How did you come to that decision, Kenji?

KY: I think it was really cumulative.  I sensed that I wasn’t doing the things that were at the front of my mind nor was I doing them at the top of my game and that those two feelings seemed to be related.  I looked peripherally, and I saw that my colleagues who taught constitutional law were teaching a lot more gay content in their classes. This was the 1990s when cases like Romer v. Evans were breaking and when same-sex marriage was on the horizon.  It was a very exciting time to be in that area of law, and I felt like it was crazy that I was gay and passionate about this but couldn’t bring myself to be involved in it.

Ultimately, the decisive factor was related to the person who actually mentored me when I was at Yale Law School – an openly gay man who came from the ACLU to teach a class on sexual orientation in law.  Once Yale had hired me on the tenure track, they no longer kept him on because he was just a lecturer, and they wanted somebody who was a full-time professor.  There was this kind of irony that they wanted a gay person but didn’t necessarily want – at least according to this individual who gave me advice – a person who was too passionate about working on gay rights issues.

That’s when I started wondering about what was going on and whether there was a word to describe this phenomenon. It wasn’t conversion or passing – nobody wanted me to be straight or to say I was straight or to stay in the closet – but it was this notion of “you can be different, but just downplay it.”  Instead of having diversity and inclusion, it was diversity or inclusion; you could be included so long as you downplayed the things that made you different.  I found the term “covering” from Erving Goffman.  The more I delved into it, I realized that it seems to hit LGBT people first, but once you start pulling on the thread, it really becomes a universal phenomenon.

SF: We all wear masks, right?

KY: Exactly. All the organizations that Christie and I survey believed in inclusion on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability, but when we actually talked to respondents about whether or not they felt like they had to downplay those identities in order to be fully included, we saw a supermajority saying that they had to choose between being included and being diverse.

SF: Wow.  So Christie, what did you make of that startling distinction?

CS: Well, it certainly wasn’t unanticipated. We did expect that we would find that traditional minority groups covered, on one dimension or another.  What we didn’t necessarily anticipate was that 45 percent of straight white men would also state that they covered or hid some aspect of themselves.  Many of the straight white men covered that they were participating in their son’s or daughter’s soccer game, for example.  They would say they were leaving for a meeting instead of leaving for the game.

SF: Was that the most common kind of covering activity by the straight white men in your study, or were there others that were also apparent?

KY: People reported covering age a lot as well; “I colored gray hair to look younger” was a common answer.  People also covered their class background, so if someone was coming from a working class background or their parents had not been professionals, that would be a form of affiliation-based covering.  People would cover their veteran status too.

SF: They would cover their veteran status because that was stigmatized?

KY: Yes, people would say that, particularly in advocacy-based covering, which is where you don’t stick up for your own group, that people would report hearing an anti-military joke and not speak up lest they be perceived as overly strident or militant.  But also, on affiliation-based grounds, veterans would also often report PTSD.  The veterans who reported affiliation-based covering on the basis of the PTSD were very candid.  I think we were actually honored by how candid the responses were.

SF:  Affiliation-based covering – could you define that term for our listeners, Kenji?

KY:  Affiliation-based covering is the form of covering of behaviors that can trigger stereotypes about you. The idea is that I might tell you very proudly that I’m a veteran, but I might not tell you that I have PTSD because I worry that will trigger you to have conscious or unconscious biases toward how I’m going to behave.

SF: So you were proud of those veterans in your study who spoke to you about the fact that they were doing such covering?

KY: Not exactly. I was proud of the fact that they were very candid about it, and that they were also very pragmatic.  Christie and I are very practical people, and we don’t want our research to just sit on a shelf.  We said, “What can we do to help you uncover yourself in ways that would be helpful to you?”  Some of our military respondents said, “When we were in the military itself, and we had PTSD, we had a buddy system so that somebody would know that we had PTSD and would actually support us when we were in situations where that manifested itself.” PTSD itself is not an easy fix, but assisting people who have it can be easier.  For example, say I’m going into a meeting, and I have PTSD.  A car backfires in the street, and I suddenly have an episode.  If Christie is there with me at the client meeting, and she knows my condition, she can actually help run interference for me.

SF: I want to make sure we get to what you have been doing with this research in practice by helping to raise consciousness. You were talking about the importance of really digging into how these stigmas play out in everyday life because that’s the only way we’re going to get to solutions.

CS: I think there are two buckets for the solutions.  One is the personal bucket: What will I do in order to uncover? The second is organizationally: What can an organization do to help?

On a personal level, there are five aspects we generally look to, but I’ll share a couple just to give you a flavor.  First is to develop your personal uncovered narrative – how does your personal diversity or experiences define who you are at work and your leadership? The second thing from a personal standpoint is to share your story – your personal uncovered narrative instead of your professional resume – and we have leaders who are actively doing this now. When they give presentations, they start with who they are, not what they are, and include their experiences growing up such as being the first to go to college in their family.

SF: Whatever has been a source of struggle for them – is that the key to the narrative, that it creates that sort of trust?

CS: It includes anything leaders believe they had to cover because they thought these might impact their sense of opportunity or commitment.

SF: When you’re coaching people, particularly executives, to be able to convey these stories, what do they wrestle with most? Or is it an easy thing for most people to be able to do?

CS: I think they wrestle with the vulnerability, first and foremost, but they also face an internal challenge because “this isn’t how we’ve always done it. 

SF:  How do you help them?  What do you do to coach people through that anxiety of vulnerability?

CS: We generally do that on an individual basis, through one-on-one coaching. We discuss what they stand for, what they’re hoping to accomplish from a business standpoint, and how revealing their own story – including the challenges they went through and overcame in developing a followership – will be useful in creating a culture of bringing diverse experiences in order to ultimately solve business problems on the table.

SF: So we’ve discussed your belief system about diversity and your personal story about where you’ve had to cover and how you’ve dealt with that.  What’s the third piece?

CS: I think it’s to dare to have the conversations across difference.  We’ve spent so much time in the past ten years talking about emotional intelligence as a great attribute to great leaders. That is certainly true, but what we need to do is to move to emotional maturity, which is a competency to take my own self-knowledge and create an environment in which I can have a conversation across difference and invite other people’s stories into the room.

That is a different competency; it takes more time, which we don’t like in our organizations, but it ultimately creates great teams and great innovation and enables us to delight our clients. From a personal standpoint, those are some of the things we look at.

Organizationally, we want to diagnose and analyze whether covering is happening in your organization, and, if it is, what the impact is. We administer our survey to understand where the blind spots are and where covering may be happening.  The second step is to understand where biases show up in your talent life cycle, so we examine the analytics in your hiring, retention, attrition, and performance management system.  The combination of those data sources gives us an opportunity to specifically identify where the breakdown or the stalling of leadership efforts is happening and ultimately provide point solutions to those business units, rather than just a blanket initiative across the entire organization, which is what we’ve done for thirty years.

SF: Kenji, what have you found to be most challenging about the work of engaging the organization or other institutions in doing the fundamental work of diagnostics?

KY: We actually haven’t struggled that much in the area of diagnostics. I think the real struggle has been in beginning the conversation.  Part of this project includes public education regarding self-diagnosis and organizational diagnosis, and it’s been happily a pretty smooth ride for both of us in terms of different sectors of society getting involved –

corporations but also educational institutions. Organizations are really driving to take the survey in order to understand both how they might be diminishing the authenticity and commitment of individuals who are in their organizations and how that might be hurting organizational effectiveness across the board.

SF: Can you tell us about a success story that you’re either in the midst of or that you’ve been a part of in doing this work of both diagnosis and then intervention to create meaningful change in an organization?

KY: Well, the phenomenon that Christie was sharing earlier was the “Share your Story” campaign at Deloitte, which is a form of mature vulnerability.   A number of versions of this have gone out, and I think they were outgrowths of Deloitte’s commitment to authenticity and leadership.  “Sharing your story” is exactly what Christie was alluding to earlier when leaders were videotaped and asked to tell not their resume stories, which are extremely polished and manicured, but rather to show up as human beings.

Harvard Business School Professor Robin Ely is fond of talking about “mature vulnerability,” which I think is a wonderful phrase.  The idea is that when you actually show up as a human being in one of these videos, the videos go viral within the organization because you have individuals who say that they had to cover the fact that they were gay or Latino or black or female and then explain how they overcame it.  That’s not only inspiring for people within their own cohorts, it also sends a broad signal which is particularly important to the millennial generation.

CS: I think one problem we’ve seen in our push to shift organizational mindsets for our clients occurs when you begin to talk about diversity and inclusion and all of the eyes straight, white men tend to glaze over.

SF: Why does that happen?

CS: I think it’s because they don’t feel or see a path through which they actually belong as participants in this conversation.  Rather than showing them as knights in shining armor that are coming in to sponsor a program or vilifying them because they have the roles that everybody wants, our research ironically levels the playing field for the straight, white males in the conversation of inclusion, and ultimately the adoption of the change management process is thus accelerated.

SF: So is that working?  What is the trigger that helps you get past the glaze?

KY: The trigger is the statistic.  When we present the fact that 45 percent of straight white men cover, they immediately want to know how they cover.  So when we start going through anything from veteran status to mental or physical illness to working class background, immediately people are leaning forward and engaged for the first time.  Many people in the room find themselves actually inside the paradigm.  They’re not outside looking in, rather, they’re actually part of this communal issue.

SF: What’s the main message that you want our listeners to take away?

KY: I would say to be yourself because being anybody else is a lot harder work, and you’re going to use up a lot of bandwidth to do it.  When you actually begin to be your authentic self and uncover that in public, you plug yourself into a power source that hugely benefits both you and your organization.

SF: Christie, what is your final word for our listeners in terms of what you want them to take away?

CS: I would agree that being your authentic self is important, but I think you also have to be particularly intentional. You have to develop that personal, uncovered narrative and connect it to how it defines who you are when you’re leading at work. Then you have to be able to share that story.

To learn more about Christie Smith’s and Kenji Yoshino’s work on uncovering you can visit www.deloitte.com/us/uncovering, check out Yoshino’s book, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (Random House, 2006) and follow on Twitter @Kenji_yoshino.

Join Work and Life next Tuesday at 7 pm on Sirius XM Channel 111.  Visit Work and Life for a full schedule of future guests.

About the Author

Andrea Yeh is an undergraduate junior majoring in Operation and Information Management and in International Relations.