No More Basic Diversity Training

If you know me well, you know I have a love/hate relationship with diversity training. I love what it is supposed to do. I generally hate how it’s done. I also hate that people automatically assume that because I’m a Black woman that I ONLY do diversity-related work.

A few years ago, I had a diversity engagement that changed my diversity life! It was powerful, painful, and my come-to-Jesus moment. I was working with a senior leadership team that was divided about the value of diversity and whether it was beneficial to take a public stand on anything related to it. Although the organization was already having some problems (it’s been my experience that most orgs ARE having problems when they want diversity training. It’s rarely an entirely pre-emptive measure), the impetus to bring me in was that a senior leader removed an employee from a high value client’s account because the client didn’t want someone working on their account who had their pronouns in their email signature. The client was annoyed that he had to deal with the fact that the employee was not cisgender and “brought his personal politics into business”.

I’d managed to create an environment where the team felt safe enough to say the quiet parts out loud. The senior leader wanted to have a discussion about org values because he felt like profit should trump diversity. Specifically, he wasn’t about to lose his bonus over somebody’s feelings (we’re not going to talk about the violation of Title VII). It was painful to listen to the dialogue. I wondered what would’ve happened if a client said they didn’t like an old person, a Black person, a woman, a person with a disability….you get the picture.

On the other hand, I absolutely loved the engagement! To this day, I can’t think of a better diversity and values engagement! The group began a really hard conversation about who they were and how to communicate that so that their stakeholders, employees and customers, could decide how and whether their values were aligned with the organization. With this experience in mind, I decided that I would only do diversity work if it involved values clarification and talking about the organization’s actual culture. So, no ma’am, I am unable to provide basic diversity training.