Dear Dr Doyle #10

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Dear Dr Doyle, our company recently announced a program of 3-month secondments onto our Exec Team. Our line manager is part of the Exec team. She is actually great and very well-meaning. She has ‘tapped-up’ a few of the skin-colour minorities and the only deaf person in our team (me) to apply. We all think it’s all a bit empty and tokenistic from the CEO, but she thinks it’s a brilliant idea. I feel like I owe her a reality check. What would you do??

Hiya!

My answer to this is pretty straightforward: you don't owe it to the people at the top to teach them to be better. No matter how nice or well meaning they are. If you have a Chief Inclusion Officer or similar role, it's worth passing on your feedback to them and they can then take that up with the Exec. If not, then give the same feedback to HR.

If you do decide to speak with your line manager, or she brings it up again - I'd give her no more than 2 minutes of teaching time - tell her to google tokenism or send her my way.

With regards to actually applying, if you think having a 3 month secondment on an Exec team would be interesting in terms of seeing whether you'd like to be in leadership (in your current company, or elsewhere), then don't let the feeling that it's tokenistic/empty stop you from applying. I'd be pretty convinced the White "able-bodied" squad aren't talking themselves out of applying.

One of my colleagues recently implied that our newest member of staff (who doesn’t start until end of April), only got the job because they are transgender. I am non-binary, but not out at work so felt completely blindsided by the comment. How can I make sure that this colleague doesn’t make our new colleague feel excluded??

Hello! Thanks for this.

Firstly - completely fair that you didn't know what to do when your colleague said this. Couple of reflections:

1) Why/how does your colleague know that this person is trans? Should they have that information? (Probably not) And should they be sharing it? (Definitely not) Alarm Bells.

2) Do you know what the reporting channels are in your company for reporting this? HR and/or your Inclusion team ought to know that this sentiment exists not least cos it's a pretty big accusation against the company/hiring team

3) You're not responsible for anyone else's behaviour - you can make sure that your new colleague knows that you're a safe person for them, point them in the direction of other good eggs and Pride Networks, should they need them.

4) It's worth ensuring that the rest of your team know what to do to be the best possible colleague. This probably isn't your responsibility but you could just flag to inclusion/HR that they ought to pull their fingers out. You could share this common sense advice from GLAAD, for example. TL;DR your trans colleague should decide what they need/want.

5) Finally, make sure that you have good people around you - you matter too and this sentiment has undoubtedly impacted on you as well.

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