Episode 7: Train the Bosses

Third and final part of the conversation between Dr. Vic Marsh and fp21 CEO Dan Spokojny.

Transcript

A robot made this and may be mistaken.

Vic Marsh
I take a very dim view of mandatory discrimination or anti-harassment training. And here's why it involves using just one more logical lens than the man daters like to use. So first, let's try to understand why do we end up with mandatory compliance-driven training programs for some very natural reasons, right? It's perfectly understandable. It's logical in a legal way. So if I'm a lawyer, and I'm looking at the risk that someone's going to get harassed at work, right sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, discriminated against racially, I, if I'm a lawyer, I'm thinking in legal terms, I'm trying to figure out what is the way that I convince the judge that we take this seriously? How do you show someone that you mean business, you make it mandatory, right? That's the logic out there. There's just one really significant problem with that. And that's that second logic that I'm bringing to the table. And that's the logic of studying scientifically, the results of your choices. And the choice to make it mandatory is a major problem for your future results and retaining and recruiting diverse people. So for reasons that are imaginable but are hard to pin down, we see that mandatory approaches to training, if you fast forward five years, you're going to have on average, 9.2 fewer black women in your organization, you're going to have 4.5% fewer Asian men, and 5.4% fewer Asian women on average right? Now, some people look at that and don't they don't process it. They don't treat it as the preventable emergency that it is. But if you're choosing to make your training program on anti-harassment and anti-racism, mandatory, because you want to show you mean business, you are doing exactly what harms diversity instead of what enhances diversity.

Dan Spokojny
So you're saying that mandatory anti-harassment or anti-discrimination training programs

Vic Marsh
harms diversity? Absolutely. So we've learned that in three separate sources, one is to look at large firms, private sector firms, you figure out what kinds of diversity initiatives they do, what kinds of HR things they do, year by year. So we've got major studies from Alexandra Caleb and Frank Dobbin, who over the years have tracked this in the private sector, firstly, looked at big firms. Okay, so what happens at big firms? Let's say you do a mix of things. Maybe you have a Diversity Task Force, maybe you have full-time, people who just do diversity work full time. Maybe you have special college recruitment and women's colleges, maybe you have for Latino Serving Institutions than historically black college. So you do a bunch of diversity stuff. And they track year by year from 1973. forward to 2012. What did you do, including diversity training, whether it was mandatory or voluntary. And we've learned quite a lot from that we've extended and replicated this work in smaller firms. So it's not just the big fortune 500 stuff, we've got scientists working on the smaller firms. Then I spoke with Frank Dobbin pre recently just at the end of last year, and they've got new work coming out next year that looks at universities, right to look at the results of various things tried at universities, and whether it impacts their future diversity. So you choose a program and you're one programs getting implemented, maybe year two and three, year four, maybe the program drops off, maybe it reappears. You just trace this stuff across time. And you look at the little upticks and the downticks, and the dives off a cliff in your diversity over time. You look at the surges in diversity over time, and you relate them to what was this organization doing in the time just before that, that led to these results, and mandatory diversity training, mandatory anti-harassment training, it harms that you're going to get more harassment and a mandatory approach to tours all your employees for sexual harassment and it's a strange finding, but it's one that's keeps getting found over and over again. And people in positions of authority continue to ignore it. They continue to try to show they mean business. I would like them to mean business to achieve less harassment, to achieve more racial and gender diversity. That should be the goal. It should not just be a signaling goal to show you mean business by making it mandatory. You should substantively want to have good results.

Dan Spokojny
Does non-mandatory training reach the same negative results?

Vic Marsh
No, this is great news. So the very first thing we could do is flip a switch from mandatory to voluntary. You actually see over time that voluntary training programs worst case, if it's actually voluntary, worst case, you might have no effect on your diversity. Now, I don't like wasting people's time. So I don't view a zero effect is all that great of a bit of news, please tell me we're going to aim higher than just doing absolutely no harm or benefit. The great news that we've heard from the work of Aaron Kelly, I believe now at MIT, is that on sexual harassment programs, you and countering sexual harassment, you can focus on the managers, and you focus on voluntarily attracting managers to buy standard awareness training. So this is where you're actually equipping managers, not with a bunch of legal scenarios is this harassment is that harassment, that stuff that leads to watercooler conversations about how you can't even tell a joke around the ladies these days, right? Like you've got to step away from having your general counsel lawyers write a bunch of legal scenarios in your training because you're hurting people you're teaching harassers how to be smarter harasses, how to tap dance right next to the line and not cross into illegality. So what Aaron Kelly has found is that when you instead, take it away from your general employee training, focus it on the bosses, train the bosses in how to recognize some ancillary signs that some harassment is going on. You're not putting the onus on employees to go tell your boss if somebody violated your rights. No, you're not making people turn themselves into the proverbial rats. Instead, what they found is that this manager focuses boss focus training on noticing the signs that something is going wrong on a gender level and giving them tips on how to strategically and smartly intervene in some using some smart language and smart skills. This bystander intervention stuff is very important. My frustration with this topic is that we actually have some good recommendations to give leaders on how they can end the scourge of sexual harassment. Another is this retooling hanging in there to retool and retool your mentorship programs? The State Department never does this, our mentorship programs last a year and then they go bust. Why? Because it's actually pretty complicated to mentor in a globally dispersed organization across 200 something offices, we've got stratification by rag, can I just call up my ambassador and ask for some mentorship? Maybe not? I don't know, it depends on the person. So mentorship is one of those approaches some formal mentor mashing, that delivers a lot of eye rolls, people are rolling their eyes at the wrong thing. They're looking at mentorship program, and they're saying, oh, that will be organic, right? That will help boost organic relationships. The evidence is to the contrary, a formal mentorship programs will boost the number of people rising through your ranks, who are Asian men and women by an average of 18 to 24%. Hispanic men and women will see boosts from nine for the men and 23% for the Latinas on average. So some are higher, some are lower. This is just the average. And you really see an unleashing of black women's talent on average in the corporate sector have 18% more representation in managerial roles over time. So we've got to stop letting the institution be so lazy when it comes to the initiatives that pack the biggest punch for diversity. We can't just say mentorship programs are hard to run, so we're not going to keep going at it. We've actually got to reinvigorate these efforts. And I think Congress could help tremendously with this by making sure that it doesn't suffer the boom and bust cycle of rotating employees. We should have some professional who has built global mentorship programs before alumni type networks might be some good skill sets to have people who have done mentor matching in a globally dispersed institution Before that, we can hire full time to tinker with this thing to measure results. And to get it improved. One of the most disappointing findings from my work with the Sherman center Task Force on transforming the State Department is that the current hyperlinks inside the State Department for the AI Mentor Program, the kind of globally dispersed mentorship program lead to nothing they lead you to with error paid. So you want to click huh. I'm interested in getting mentorship, click error 404. And I just think we can do better than that. There was a report that the State Department sent to Capitol Hill that was asking about mentorship programs, among other diversity initiatives. And the State Department reported that we have 90% match rate, what does that mean? It's some people you sent an email, right? You bashed people, you said, Hey, you that you're matched with data. So 94% of people in the organization were matched Is that good enough, you've got to get in there, track this thing over time, make a tweak, measure the result, make another tweak, measure the result, and I think Congress can help by mandating the department. This is one of those things that helps everyone and yields meritorious diverse outcomes for your organization.

Dan Spokojny
This 90% match rate speaks to one of the vital aspects of social science that I think some folks are skeptical of that, that Yeah, you can lie with statistics. That's what I hear a lot of time when I'm talking about evidence and foreign policies. It's just so easy to lie with statistics. Yeah, of course it is. It's easy to lie. But the power also is it's easy to tell the truth too. And when things are transparent, and you can look at the data, and you have a range of folks who can take a look at the work that you've done. It allows us another opportunity, in addition to storytelling and qualitative evidence and people's lived experience. All that is vital evidence, of course, but statistics help us as well, to be able to say, wait a second, maybe that's not the right statistic, there should be a different one we're looking at. And if you're hiding the ball here, then that's not right. That brings me to my next section here in this legislation I was reading through on leadership engagement and accountability. This recommendation suggests the secretary Well, in fact, it requires the Secretary to implement performance and advancement requirements that reward and recognize senior management efforts to promote diversity and inclusion on its face. It sounds like a good idea. How do you feel about that this

Vic Marsh
It fits a certain logic, it's very popular, right? When people say that McDonald's, for example, did something similar. They started tying executive pay some bonuses for your executive leaders, to their efforts to promote diversity and inclusion. And I retweeted the tweet of our president of the Academy of Management, right, so the top researcher on all management issues, and she expressed some reservations, she said this usually use leads to more of a juking the numbers of facts, rather than genuine organizational change that lets people of all races and all genders thrive. So what this is in the research is, we will call this the diversity evaluation, right? You want to promotion, you want to get that next pay grade, you got to submit to us a write up of what you did for diversity. Now, there's one problem, and that's the problem of incentives. This kind of approach will yield lots of creative writing, you're going to get a boom in narrative precision about these things. One of my first lessons that I learned at the Department of State was from a wise office management support officer and she showed me the ER, the employee evaluation report that she was helping to type up for her boss. And her first lesson to me was, some people lie on these things. There was a section that mentioned how this boss held jam sessions at their house, on the weekends with all the entry-level officers and the interns to really mentor the next generation. These jam sessions included music with career advice, the person was such a great writer. This was a political shift. So they were there. Their prose was this beautiful, I found myself transported into a jam session that I had never attended, because these things never happened. And so I know there are a lot of people who are using the logic of their experience. They'll say, hey, Vic, I've sat on a promotion board. What we do is we take the precepts and we look at their experience. You only get promoted. I've heard it I've heard lots of senior officials have said, Hey, trust me, I've been in a promotion board. We need these diversity evaluations in there for our senior management. I'm telling you, that the kind of accountability for this that actually works is the accountability of knowing that you're gonna have to explain your diversity results to the chief diversity. The officer, that's the accountability pathway that works. Accountability by writing, sometimes creatively about your efforts to improve diversity for promotion boards evaluate, is exactly the wrong thing to do. If I keep hiring mics in this department, will I pass muster with the chief diversity officer? Well, I get a lot of uncomfortable questions, a lot of uncomfortable requests for justifications from that chief diversity officer. I don't know if you notice, but what I just mentioned, doesn't take a whole lot of money. So rather than signing all these checks, for folks to do mandatory classes, so you got folks feeling shackled, they're feeling all kinds of bad things, maybe feeling bad things about black people, because someone forced them to go into a diversity event. We in the scholarly community are saying that those bad feelings have consequences, someone gets up and they bar the door for promotions of minorities after you force them to go to these things. So we've got to think strategically, and really invest our time in those thumbs up things, the targeting the bosses for training, voluntarily letting them build a positive identity by themselves. I'm the type of guy who shows up at the voluntary bias intervention training. That's the way to build this stuff. That's the way to get results. And we've got to leave aside those thumbs down programs, or else we're what signal are we sending, saying, Hey, we got the evidence, we just don't care.

Dan Spokojny
It'll be useful to do a quick lightning round, tell me thumbs up or thumbs down on the recommendations from this congressional report. Let's start from the top 15% training float,

Vic Marsh
Thumbs up strong, instead of up to 15%. Make it at least 15%. And Congress can help with the appropriations,

Dan Spokojny
Publishing diversity data,

Vic Marsh
Strong thumbs up, transparency is a very strong predictor of future diversity when people know they have to write it down, and that it will be seen by the world they start to try to act right.

Dan Spokojny
Exit interviews for employees who have departed.

Vic Marsh
Strong thumbs up, I would add in addition to the one on one or focus group, whatever approach of exit interviews, that actually unobtrusively tracing the future promotions people have with a LinkedIn API or something like that will help us understand if we're retaining the right folks or the wrong folks.

Dan Spokojny
How about mandatory diversity training for managers

Vic Marsh
Two thumbs down and Dan, if you'll lend me yours, we'll make it four.

Dan Spokojny
Instead of mandatory diversity training, which should be replaced it with...

Vic Marsh
Voluntary boss only bystander intervention training. There are many fakers out there the genuine bystander intervention training, you want someone who has been trained over by Sharon Potter at the University of New Hampshire. And last but not least required performance reviews of management efforts to promote diversity and inclusion. Thumbs down the unfortunate news for this kind of diversity evaluation is that you'll probably suppress on average about 8.3% fewer black man rising through the ranks than otherwise.

Dan Spokojny
One last question, is there anything else in this report that they missed that should be in here related to improving the diversity, equity and inclusion of the Department of State? You

Vic Marsh
know, what I am just really impressed with the transparency piece of this? I think that Congress and the executive are aligned. At the same moment, on the issue of transparency, they trust that the GAO did a good job in reporting. They know that we have lost diversity from 2002 to present day. And, frankly, the folks on Twitter who like to say that diversity doesn't matter as much as merit or missing the main idea, but Congress gets it. And the President gets it, right, that this is about achieving merit, that if you've got an organization full of Mike's you've missed something in the labor market, that's a little suspicious. And so transparency on this, tracking our diversity performance over time, is very important. I'm glad Congress got it. I honestly am. I'm so pleased with this. I think the one thing I would add in there is to take if Congress would help the department build those thumbs up systems with some real staffing, some real appropriations for the diversity office. You got to retool this mentorship stuff over time, you got to answer people's feedback and improve it over the years. And so you're going to need someone who's not going to zip in and zip out on rotational assignments to do this work. Someone's got to be an expert, and track it over time to make improvements and to retool. I think that this legislation could use a little more help to the department on recruitment efforts of the State Department is very volunteer-driven on this. The idea is people haven't met diplomats. So we're going to meet all the people, like all the diplomats will have to go meet all the humans in America, and then they will learn about diplomacy. So rather than having brand new volunteer initiatives, one piece that's missing is for Congress to authorize a real surge in the recruitment effort to help us identify merit wherever it is across our country.