What Color is Your Rolodex?

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.”