Disruptive Diversity Through Purpose

by Arthur Woods and Rajkumari Neogy 

Why Diversity Initiatives Fail

It is a widely held belief that diversity and inclusion programs, which bring people from different demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds together, can improve workplace relationships while enhancing corporate innovation and brand. As a result, many tech companies began implementing such diversity and inclusion programs with particular emphasis on issues tied to unconscious bias.  While all very well intentioned, it is perplexing to see that the diversity and inclusion needle has barely moved within tech companies over the years. Why is this so?

Programs aimed at diversity manifest themselves in an intentional effort to cultivate a workforce representing different social, racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds.  In such diverse work cultures, there is recognition that stereotyping can occur which might impact workplace performance. This has led to the explosive growth in unconscious bias training, and yet, problems persist.

Unconscious Bias is Not the Answer

Unconscious bias initiatives are built around left brain or rational thinking. They assume that awareness of an issue is sufficient to avoid problems.

Behavioral shift demands more than awareness, or left brain training.  Inclusion initiatives must go the extra step in addressing the right brain processes tied to inclusion and its negative affect, exclusion.

As companies make the purposeful migration from homogeneous to heterogeneous workforces, issues of exclusion can crop up among the most well-intentioned employees. The feeling of exclusion registers in the brain identical to physical injury. With exclusion, if an emotional repair doesn’t occur, when an employee encounters someone who reminds them of feeling excluded, according to their brain, it’s as if they are being re-injured.

Integrating both the Left and Right Hemisphere

Research has shown that in order for the left hemisphere to integrate new information, it comes from an externally referenced lens, and therefore it blames its surroundings and/or people in order to reach comprehension. The research also shows that the left hemisphere doesn’t have an awareness of self, therefore it is unable to relate to self. This is often why people with lower levels of autism have no idea why they should apologize for spilling the cup of coffee, as they don’t have the level of self-connection to comprehend that their actions created this result. They simply notice the coffee is now spilled. This is often a state of thinking. Additionally, we could also say that this might present itself as a scarcity mindset: the ability to  view the world through a lens with very limited options, typically from a cause and effect perspective.

The right hemisphere is where we connect to ourselves, have the sense of our body and take accountability. Here we can see the bigger picture, stand in empathy for ourselves and others, feel our feelings and know what gives us purpose. This is often a state of knowing. Additionally, we could also say that this might present itself as an abundant mindset: the ability to view the world with through a lens with greater options, typically from a curiosity perspective.

Why We Choose to Exclude Others

The key leadership skill for anyone in any position of influence is attain the dexterity in vacillating between both mindsets with facility and ease. This level of resourcefulness is the core element in the Disruptive Diversity framework. By becoming vigilant of one’s combination of mindset, language and behavior, we begin to have greater understanding to how we’re engaging with those around us and over time, surface valuable patterns that allows us to confirm or deny whether we are on a trajectory of exclusion.

An article written by NYT showed that a study at Google concluded that the company’s most effective teams met 5 main needs consistently, the number one being ‘psychological safety’, which they define as, “team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other.” The bottom line is, when we don’t feel safe, one or more of our needs are not being met. We might not feel included, and therefore we may have the experience of not belonging. When we feel excluded, this registers as physical pain in the brain. And our nervous system must quickly adapt in the moment. If we have crafted a solid connection with our right hemisphere, we may find ourselves getting curious, wanting to get creative in solving the issue, perhaps wanting to partner with others to collaborate in the problem-solving and listen from a place of compassion to understand how we arrived at this place initially. We’re attempting to connect and build relationship from our right hemisphere and a place of inclusion.

The definition of disruptive diversity is, “The ability to use a strategy to get a need met that fosters inclusion.”

If, however, we find ourselves blaming the other person or event, we may then notice that we have arrived in our left hemisphere and we are attempting to connect and build relationship from a place of exclusion.

Zones of Exclusion

Exclusion comes in the form of 4 main flavors or zones: entitlement, victimhood, neediness and righteousness. And a person is driven toward one of these 4 flavors because they have experienced some form of pain, which can often be seen in the workplace as disrespect, being interrupted in a meeting, not being invited to meeting or event, withholding of information, not getting the promotion - the list is endless. When we distill these actions and begin to titrate for the root cause, what we immediately find is that a particular need is not being met.

I recently spoke with client I had coached several years back, who has risen (quite rapidly) in the ranks and found herself in the C-suite. In dealing with the VP of Product, she shared in a conversation, that this person was combative, aggressive and defensive and the only way to speak to this person in every meeting was to literally yell over them. She concluded by saying, if I have to keep this up, it will drain every ounce of energy I have and I will not be able to focus on the business results.

And if we’re busy standing in one of the zones of exclusion, we are most likely adopting a scarcity mindset, our nervous system is experiencing a form of threat and our entire focus is surviving this threat. If this is an on-going issue rather than a one-off situation, we may find ourselves ‘coping’ at the workplace and all our energy and focus is expended in surviving the workplace, rather than thriving in it.

The 4 Tenets of Disruptive Diversity

Nellie Peshkov, VP of Talent Acquisition at Netflix, spoke at Lever’s Talent Innovation Summit in May. Her topic: stunning colleagues. As she began to elucidate what makes a stunning colleague, I was pleasantly surprised to hear her name the 4 tenets of Disruptive Diversity: trust, risk-taking, high-performance and competence. These tenets can only be experienced and sustained when the culture promotes and fosters meeting the needs of the individual. When this level of engagement is happening throughout the organization, then the cultivation of inclusive culture becomes the default standard.

From a neurobiological perspective, something very interesting happens when we are able to trust: our brain secretes oxytocin. Oxytocin is known as the bonding chemical, initially found between newborn babies and their mothers. Research now tells us that hugging releases oxytocin, even seeing smiles on peoples faces! When we feel more trusting, we are apt to be more vulnerable and take risk, share our ideas, our feelings and even places where we might feel challenged. As Nellie puts it, when ‘well-formed adults’ are able to receive this data from a place of curiosity, collaboration and compassion, they feel supported and that their contributions matter. They feel included. This directly impacts their performance level of accuracy, which can be attributed to competence. Leadership executives call these individuals ‘high-potentials’.

According to Josh Bersin, “A ‘high-potential employee’ is an employee who has been identified as having the potential, ability, and aspiration for successive leadership positions within the company. Often, these employees are provided with focused development as part of a succession plan and are referred to as “HiPos.” Leadership teams are constantly seeking hi-po’s within their organization, so cultivating an inclusive culture literally breeds a drastically higher number of people.  

So how can organizations deliberately and intentionally grow a greater percentage of hi-po’s internally through inclusive culture?

Inclusive Culture and the Right Hemisphere

Inclusive culture stems  from the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere employs curiosity, creativity, collaboration and compassion to integrate new information, rather than its counterpart, the left hemisphere, who employs blame. Cultivating inclusive culture starts with cultivating an inclusive-oriented person. Nellie Peshkov mentioned how much the Netflix culture valued 1:1 coaching. The Disruptive Diversity version of a ‘well-formed adult’ is a ‘whole-person culture’.

Disruptive Diversity advocates that the polarity of exclusion is empowerment, standing in your ‘whole-self’. And we get to empowerment via inclusion. When we start to feel safe enough to include all the parts of ourselves, then we notice the feeling of empowerment. We begin to acknowledge ourselves more fully and we begin to see our value from an internally referenced point of view, rather than needing to feel validated by other people or other things.

The fastest way to build an inclusive culture is to build solid working relationships.

The Influence of ‘Work Orientation’

A study conducted by professors Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton found that we each form a psychological orientation to ‘work’ and the role it will play in our lives at a young age. The findings showed that, based on work orientation you could split the workforce into three groups:  the first two groups (those money and status-oriented) have a transactional relationship to work, they see work as a means to an end or purely advancement, respectively. The third group (purpose-oriented) sees work primarily as a means of serving other people and achieving fulfillment. For this group, work is not a means to an end but primarily a source of meaning itself.

We had the opportunity to expand on these findings by conducting US, global and even Generation Z research on purpose, finding that, by every performance metric, purpose-oriented employees outperform the other two groups. They represented every demographic, ethnicity, race, industry, job type and and socioeconomic level. Furthermore purpose-oriented show strong signs of being more adaptability to change, relationship-driven and they see the world as interconnected. Purpose-oriented employees see themselves ideally in the same state in work as outside of work, thus bring their full selves to the work they do.

The collective findings suggest that money and status-oriented employees, on the other hand, have a relationship with work that is often characterized by fear, victimhood and scarcity, they often see work as necessity and see themselves most often in a different state outside of work than in it. Overall, they exhibit many of the same characteristics as the “Zones of Exclusion.” These findings all suggest a strong linkage between a purpose-oriented relationship to work and the drivers of inclusion, alongside a non-purpose-oriented relationship work work and the drivers of exclusion.

Shifting to ‘Purpose-Oriented’

Our research has gone on to suggest that, while work orientation is mutually exclusive and not typically easily malleable, a subset of the workforce is ‘purpose-inclined’ and exhibiting potential of purpose-orientation. With the right interventions, support and community, these individuals would more readily shift their perception of work. For the rest of the workforce that is not purpose-oriented or purpose-inclined, transformational experiences and interventions could also play a role in shifting work orientation ultimately. For example, we found that a significantly-larger proportion of Baby Boomers were purpose-oriented, compared to Gen Y and Gen X. We believe the experience of significant loss and growth in adulthood collectively played a role in shifting work from a “means to an end.”     

A critical step in shifting people to become purpose-oriented is to give them the ability to actually experience purpose in their work. This starts with giving people the vocabulary of purpose - to discover and experience what generates purpose for them (inside or outside of work) and then providing the tools and support to to align the work they are doing to the way they frame and experience their sense of purpose.

The Science of Relationship Building

Nearly a decade of research on the pro bono service space showed that that one of the most critical factors in generating purpose at work is building strong relationships. Forming relationships is truly a skill. It involves being to seamlessly juggle awareness around your mindset, your language and your behavioral patterning. Think of it as learning to dance...with a partner. It’s easy to get on the dance floor by yourself and just twirl and move freely without worrying too much about others around you. And the moment you find yourself with a partner, it seems all of sudden, there are an entirely new set of rules: how close can I get to them? Can I hold their hand? Do they trust me?

Trust is the foundation of building powerful and lasting relationships. Viewing through the Disruptive Diversity lens, 5 needs are essential to building a “whole-person culture”: 1) integrity, 2) participation, 3) trust, 4) connection and 5) support. What is fascinating to witness is that when these needs are met in order, a biochemical chain reaction happens within our brain that results in a secretion of oxytocin. Simply put, if our need for trust is not being met with a co-worker, then we might find ourselves challenged in being supportive of their viewpoint and ultimately, their project.

Establishing Powerful and Lasting Relationships

If we choose to notice when we might be stepping into a zone of exclusion, it is in that moment that we have the opportunity to step into a zone of inclusion. The Disruptive Diversity framework invites a simple and unique ‘rupture and repair’ method that quickly surfaces inner root causes of exclusion (rupture) and creates an innate state of inclusion (repair). By connecting the left and right hemispheres, we begin to dissolve the cortisol caused by experiences of exclusion and allow for the synaptic transmission to complete. Individuals show up in the workplace with greater attention to detail, higher performance levels, sustained dedication and an increased sense of belonging.

Disruptive Diversity through Purpose

We envision a seismic shift in ‘work’ as we know it so it is no longer characterized by exclusion, fear and scarcity but instead inclusion, optimism and abundance. To make this shift we believe it requires us each connecting to our sense of purpose, fostering strong relationships and shifting our relationship to work itself so it is primarily a means of serving others. We believe this is not only what will drive diversity in our workplaces but health of individuals and the wellbeing of society.

This article was co-written by Rajkumari Neogy, Founder of iRestart and Arthur Woods, Co-Founder of Imperative.