How to make Asians care about Diversity & Inclusion

“I’m skeptical about Diversity and Inclusion efforts.” “It seems like form over substance” “Why do we need diversity training in Singapore if we’re a multicultural country? It’s a waste of time.”

These are the typical comments you will hear in most workplaces here from employees struggling to fight COVID19 fires and in many cases, living from pay cheque to pay cheque.

 Global research has conclusively demonstrated that Diversity & Inclusion investment translates into hard bottom-line results.

Diverse and Inclusive corporate cultures are 2x as likely to meet or exceed financial targets and 6x more likely to be innovative. 80% of respondents indicate inclusion is important when choosing an employer, 39% of respondents would leave their current organisation for a more inclusive one.

 Yet most D & I efforts are relatively limited in Singapore where I'm based, and also in other Asian financial hubs like Hong Kong and Japan.

Part of this is due to internal mindsets. We have no long tradition of challenging norms or open debates. Look at our history of "Asian parenting values" that prize obedience and putting the collective over the individual. Or look at our schools, where so much of learning is still assessed according to unyielding rubrics with little space for divergent and free thinking.

We also may think we don’t have problem because we look diverse, take multi-cultural Singapore for example.

But while diversity is about having the different puzzle pieces represented, inclusion is making them fit together, and we are far from inclusive.

Many expat CEOs I speak to have the misconception that Singapore is a diversity dream as they experience a much greater mix of cultures than in their home country.

It often stuns them to discover that prejudicial attitudes and racism can be deeply entrenched. The Institute of Policy Studies surveys regularly show that the majority of minorities is Singapore have perceived discriminatory treatment at work and that half of Singaporeans hold negative stereotypes of other races.

And even more troubling is that data that suggests that Singaporeans may even tolerate or support injustice when they counter it. A survey from IPS suggested that 60% of respondents had heard racist comments, but 65% of those who heard the comments simply ignore them, and 17% even agreed with the person making the racist comments.

I’ve seen the vast majority of my corporate clients in Asia struggle with silos, group think and getting their employees to speak up and contribute divergent opinions.

To make matters worse, many training efforts we have seen in Asia tend to be cut and pasted from US unconscious bias training programmes and rolled out globally, featuring content mainly about blacks vs whites, and aimed at redressing historical injustices such as slavery and racial equity. This turns off audiences in Asia, who ironically feel a sense of cultural insensitivity and lack of relevance to their context.

 What do we need to do to make D & I successful in Asia?

 For me, the biggest missing piece is leadership actually modelling the behaviour they want to see, rather than just checking the box by asking HR to organise unconscious bias programmes (many of which are completely useless when it comes to behavioural change.)

Leaders also need to make it blindingly clear that psychological safety, diversity and inclusion are hugely important for the bottomline using the plethora of research available. Without it, you alienate your customers, impact the performance and contributions of your employees and put off younger talent from joining your company. This is not a soft and fuzzy subject, but has real impact to profits and productivity.

Asians are also skeptical by nature, and need to see leaders sharing their own stories of bias and admitting their own mistakes and unconscious biases. Employees tell me that what made them increase their level of psychological safety and trust was when their manager gave them specific praise for speaking up, e.g. taking them aside after a meeting to give them positive feedback.

 Give people simple social-emotional intelligence based skills to practice e.g. mindful listening, or empathic communication, and specific behaviours, for example at meetings, making sure to check in with the quiet or unheard voices.

Leaders also need facilitation skills as the inexperienced tend to shy away from “difficult topics”. As English is not the mother tongue for many and in our multi-cultural society, many corporate staff tell us that they struggle with finding the “right words” and the fear of saying something wrong. One recent example was a client who was “scarred” by his experience where he had asked his staff to tidy up the mess around a religious shrine in the company carpark, and faced such a backlash over his "insensitive words" that he now actively avoided people of that particular faith.

We need to be much more simple, explicit and directional about showing our employees what inclusive behaviours look like. Fancy terms like “cognitive distortions”, “microaggressions” or “implicit associations” are way too abstract.

Lastly, perhaps the biggest challenge for diversity efforts lies within the human brain. Much research has shown that people often rebel against forced-feeding methods, and that clumsy training can actually make efforts worse, making people more resentful and more convinced that their opinions are right. It’s called the backfire effect in Psychology, where people actually become more convinced of their own beliefs when presented with opposing evidence.

Simply put, people do not like being made to feel shamed. Just rubbing diversity statistics into people’s faces and hoping that it shames them into changing their behaviour does not work.

Trying to solve diversity problems through cognitive reasoning is like pouring water on an oil fire, it seems like it should work but it just makes the matter much worse as the brain goes into overdrive coming up with multitudes of justifications for its original position.

Harvard Professor Mahzarin Bahnaji’s work on blind spots suggests that the human brain is deeply wired to have implicit biases, no matter how enlightened we think we are.

In our view, we believe that problems created by the brain cannot be solved by the brain alone, but require moving into a different field of intelligence – that of the heart. A truly inclusive and fair culture must rely on the development of compassionate empathy, which is not just a skill but also a mindset and belief in common humanity. In the workplace, that means training employees to practice empathic listening, developing emotional literacy and sensitivity e.g. noticing not just who is talking but who is silent, and how to involve them in the conversation and make them feel like it is safe to voice their opinions.

Researcher Kristin Neff has produced a compelling body of research that suggests that when people engage in empathy and compassion practices that focus on common humanity, this not only encourages a growth mindset but it has a lasting positive impact on company culture as employees can discern when leaders believe in them and their growth.

Our wish is that we move away from merely measuring and monitoring Diversity metrics to modelling a deeper compassionate approach in our workplaces. As Einstein said:

“A human being... experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

When we have never lived in a time of such globalisation but yet such disconnection, this is the true work that lies ahead of us.

Crystal Lim-Lange is the CEO of future-readiness consultancy Forest Wolf and Strategic Advisor to Minerva Project University. Her book (co-written with Dr Gregor Lim-Lange) Deep Human- The Secret Guide to Success in the Future is available at Kinokuniya and Popular. She is one of LinkedIn's Top Voices Singapore 2020, a list of 16 thought leaders driving professional conversation today.

 Sources:

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/about-deloitte/us-about-deloitte-unleashing-power-of-inclusion.pdf

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-wins-how-inclusion-matters#

https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it

 https://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/docs/default-source/ips/td_racism-still-an-issue-in-singapore-today-say-most-polled_180816.pdf?sfvrsn=9366710a_2