Think about all the people you encounter throughout your workday—and how wide-ranging their ethnic backgrounds are—and it’s easy to believe you have the diversity thing down. But think harder: How many of these diverse people do you have lunch with or invite to your birthday dinner? How many are top-of-mind when you have to staff a new project? How many would help you out in a pinch and vice versa?
“Just because you’re surrounded by different kinds of people doesn’t mean you embrace diversity,” notes Magda Yrizarry, vice president of workplace culture, diversity, and compliance at Verizon Communications.
Suppose a Latina makes a comment in a team meeting that goes unnoticed. Then later, a white woman suggests something very similar, and their white boss says her idea sounds interesting. “That Latina is going to think, Why bother? and she may become less engaged in her work,” Yrizarry says. “So as a manager or as a peer, you need to tune your ear to hear everyone’s opinions, not just people who are familiar to you.”
Yrizarry’s own team took shape at the start of this year. Some she hired; others relocated from Verizon’s Texas and New York offices to its New Jersey headquarters. When she first took the group out to lunch, she set a rule: They weren’t allowed to talk business. That topic was off-limits.
Common Ground
“We talked about hobbies and whether people drive to work,” Yrizarry recalls. “A lot of the talk was about relocating and acclimating ourselves to the new facility and to New Jersey. That opened up the conversation to one person mentioning a child in college who’s now far away, and to other things that gave us a sense of who we all are.”
Of course, we all have proclivities and habits we’re scarcely aware of, and they usually steer us toward people who are—well—similar to us. “We’re hardwired that way,” explains Megan Connolly, PhD, an industrial psychologist who teaches a course on corporate diversity at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. “The brain is geared to recognize surface-level demographics—skin color, race, age. It’s easier and quicker than deeper-level stuff. And in the workplace, where you’re so rushed, you fall back on what’s easiest to process.”
New Perspectives
But you can’t really know what you’re missing until you’ve had the opportunity to branch out from your usual circle. Marcie Molek, assistant vice president for human resources at Allstate and mother of a teenage son, recalls being asked to take an assignment outside of the HR department. “I was on a team with people who had deep technical expertise, but I was the only one from HR,” says Molek, who is white. At first she felt she should only ask technical questions of these teammates from diverse backgrounds. “But when I began to rely on them for insights on human resources issues, they brought a different perspective from my HR counterparts. They viewed HR work through the lens of a user, not just as a theoretical exercise. I got good, practical advice from them.”
Molek has since made a point of building relationships with people from different areas of expertise and ethnicities. “Until you explore problems with all kinds of people, you don’t know what you’re not seeing,” she says. “You’re more likely to overlook a unique or subtle nuance that could be important to groups other than your own. So reaching out [to people of color] can improve the probability that your work and ideas will be successful.” These days, when Molek meets people whose perspectives she believes might expand her own, “I ask if they would mind if I occasionally run ideas by them,” she says. “I’ve never been turned down. Most people seem pleased to be asked.”
Sometimes you’ll want to introduce yourself to people who are different from you because you’ll benefit from seeing an issue from their cultural perspective. But another reason is that if you let ethnic differences become barriers, you’ll forfeit opportunities to connect with people whose business skills, knowledge or experiences can help you, Molek and others say.
