The Power of Equality

Tackling discrimination is a round the clock job and has major implications for the health an entire organization, says Tim Mazur, COO of the Ethics and Compliance Officers Association.

Failing to deal with issues around sexual or racial harassment or discrimination can have a huge effect on organizations. They cut right to the heart of what’s important to people. Employees just don’t even feel even the most minimum basic level of dignity if they’re discriminated against because of these issues. When it comes to the passion for their work and tapping into the potential of what they have to offer the organization, you can barely get started if they don’t even feel that they’re achieving the most minimal levels of basic dignity.

Management has evolved a great deal over the past 75 years. There are now a huge amount of books, courses and opportunities for business leaders to learn how to manage an organization well, and the result of that has been a lot of very constructive messages. There are now a lot of very well-trained individuals who talk about how our employees are important, let’s serve the customer, let’s accomplish our goals and so on. What’s interesting is if they under-address these discrimination issues then everybody, not only the minority of folks who are discriminated against but everybody else, they feel like these messages are all just lies.

It is all very well to say, “We care about our people”, but if they don’t see that it actually is happening when it comes to these discrimination issues, it simply fuels cynicism. It’s such a big issue in business ethics. Is it possible for a big company to be anything close to being an ethical organization? If some CEO is saying, “We care about our customers and we care about our communities and these issues”, could that be true? There’s a lot of talk from upper leaders these days on that front, and many of them are very sincere, but they won’t be received as sincere if there’s an inconsistency in the message. You’ll find instances when someone is saying all of that stuff, but then they will discriminate against women or against persons of minority backgrounds on these issues. Then everybody gets the wrong message. They might have been ready to believe their organization was moving in a direction of actually living up to all of the fancy words that the CEO is saying, and all of a sudden they realize that it’s not true and it is just words.

Employees are expensive and so when you’ve got people on your payroll you absolutely want to get the most out of them. So much of the positive quality of life and the better standards of living that we have seen in the first world over the past 30 or 40 years has happened because we have become more productive. We have increased productivity and it’s allowed us to make more and do better with the resources that we have. We need to do that with our people too. Folks that are discriminated against have so much to offer and it’s just such a waste if you under-appreciate or under-attend to these discrimination issues. These individuals just never have the inspiration to be the best that they can be for the organization because they wont want to support the organization unless they feel that the organization supports them.

 If the evidence is that the organization allows discrimination to occur and isn’t doing enough about it then people completely lose their motivation to give the organization that higher level of productivity. Those are just a few examples of why it really is a big issue.

In business today, perhaps now more than ever, there is an ever greater focus on establishing hard dollar returns for every single program. Unfortunately, I can’t say that I’ve ever seen that we can quantify that in relation to discrimination. A topic which has been coming up more and more lately is that the business community is being attacked by the professions like medicine, law and even accountancy. These are professions where you have to earn a license to practice, whereas of course in business there is no license. Anybody can be a business person, and certain professions are speaking up to say that the problems the world is suffering right now are the clearest evidence in the difference between a profession and a non-profession. They claim that the people attracted to business just want life to be nothing other than making the most money in the shortest possible time, and that there’s no other criterion where judging good or bad or success or failure.

One of the realities is that professions learned hundreds of years ago that life isn’t that simple and if you are an attorney or a physician there isn’t just one criterion for success. This is why their entire code of ethics lays out multiple standards that define what it means to be successful and we have to fight for that in business. I’m not a professional, I’m just a business person. As a businessperson I have to fight this desire to over simplify in making decisions and to over quantify. Don’t try to quantify things that can’t be quantified.

Think about it like this: is someone asks you if you love them, can you put a number on it? Do you say, “Gosh, I feel that I love you at 142 today?” Probably not. We have to embrace the reality that we judge things from a qualitative standpoint when they can’t be quantified. So when I’ve seen attempts to quantify the cost of discrimination I think what we’re really doing is we’re playing down to the audience when instead what we need to do is educate them and raise them up. We need to challenge the idea that everything has to come down to a dollar figure. People need to buy into the reality that they have to understand that defining what it means to be successful in an organization will include a lot of quantified things but some qualitative issues that can’t be measured so simply. The sooner they realize that, the better it will be for everybody.

A key factor in challenging some of the negative attitudes, is that there simply are more women and minorities in positions of power than there were 20 years ago. Without a doubt my experience has been that the number one thing that actually will get people to change is exposure to people. I think it is the number one thing that has made a huge difference is that the workplace is filling up with people of all different backgrounds. If someone grew up in an environment where they didn’t have a lot of exposure to minorities or interaction with women as leaders, then certain attitudes are more likely to be deep rooted. If that person is suddenly in an organization where the environment is different and they are exposed to a woman leader who’s excellent at what she does, that’s is the number one thing that can get someone to change that ingrained perception that women are biologically less capable to be leaders.

It’s not enough, but when it comes to what should we do and what can we do, it’s one of the best options. Sometimes a company will say, “Here’s some data from our company and here are our problems. What can we do?” Very often the biggest and best thing they can do is to figure out a way to ensure that the process by which they’re hiring or promoting is not discriminating against certain people. If they ensure that those discriminations are taken away, the statistical reality of everything will mean that more women and more minorities will find their way into positions of leadership. Assuming such an individual is good at what they do, it’s amazing thing how it can change the opinion of someone who felt strongly about certain views for 50 years of their life. All of a sudden they can change in 12 months just by being exposed to a high quality leader.

That exposure often now will just happen at an organization, whether it was forced to by law or whether a good leader will bring someone in that will allow these interaction. The problem is that those opportunities are too few and it could take decades for parts of organizations or in certain industries for change to happen. What we need to do is make an effort so there are different types leaders somewhere within an organization. You might work for a mining company in the production division. In that area you have to have a very solid background so it’s going take many, many years before minority candidates can come through the proper channels of being trained and educated. But what can happen is another part of the organization might be benefiting from really good leaders with a minority or female background.

The question is how can the leader of the organization allow those in the production division to be exposed to the quality leadership in another division who they might otherwise never interact with? The first answer to the question is to look for opportunities to expand beyond just the normal course of things, and really expose employees to great leaders. It’s one of these things where it has to be ingrained in the upper management. When it comes to affecting thousands and thousands of employees, if you have a racist leader you get rid of him or her. So many of these organizations are turning over new leadership more frequently than in the past, so the next time that a company is putting together the criteria for who they’re going to choose to bring in as a leader you make this issue a very important part of the analysis.

You still want to take the best qualified person, but now the best qualified person is no longer the best qualified person unless they have a very positive attitude towards this issue. It’s the attitude, which just has to be ingrained in how they do things minute to minute. It’s just got to be absolutely natural to every leader that all human beings are equally capable of being excellent business leaders, that no one by their race or gender is prevented from being highly qualified.

That really trickles down because then that executive has an influence on which of the middle executives get promoted and he or she won’t promote somebody that they think has a backwards attitude. When it comes to the issue of ingrained prejudice I think our organizations have done much better when it comes to communications, training, following the laws and helping human resources recruit more fairly.

The challenge is now within the organization. I still see the old mentality where the CEO will say all of these positive things because he’s been told to and he believes that a smart CEO will do that, but often they don’t really believe it. A lot of these people grew up in the 40’s and 50’s. They grew up in an environment where they believed that the reason why the most powerful people in the world are white males wasn’t just because of a turn of history but that it was the natural order. They’re comfortable around other white males. They go golfing with other white males and they go to the gym with other white males and their wives are friends with other white males’ wives and so their entire world is surrounded with the elite of life are these white males.

It’s hard for them to just pretend that away. What they’ve got to do is go out of their way to open their eyes up to making sure that everything they do from the jokes that they tell to the events they choose to attend will help them learn. It’s not just the superficial. It’s got to be in that person’s heart 24 hours a day.

I mean it’s really the CEO asking himself or herself, “How can I spend my next 365 days expanding my own horizons and ensuring that there’s not a little side joke here to my chairman of the board or something there?” If they’re in a room of people and the CFO makes a joke about an up and coming female executive and calls her a bitch, the CEO has to find way to send the message that is just not appropriate. No one would say that if she were a man, so there’s no room for that kind of attitude in today’s boardroom. Business needs to go beyond the cleverly written speeches, the once-a-year emails and the picture on the front of the employee handbook. There’s so much more to do than that.

Tim Mazur is the Chief Operating Officer of the Ethics and Compliance Officers Association. For more information go to www.theecoa.org.

The race continues
It’s increasingly common that we hear people talking about how the increased success of minorities in business and in everyday life means that we’re now living in a ‘post-racial’ society. I think that’s way off the mark. It’s convenient for those folks who want to continue to discriminate and who are upset. There are white males out there who are upset that their opportunities are dropping as we’re making things more fair and less discriminatory. Without a doubt people in some organizations, not all, are seeing a positive change, which is great. But just because they’re seeing a positive change doesn’t mean that we’re anywhere close to being done yet.

A learning experience
Training around issues of discrimination and harassment has improved, but it’s still not sufficient. To say it is would be to suggest that everything’s fine, that we could just keep on training people and the problem will go away. Unfortunately, the problem is bigger than that and it’s very complex. These issues get to the heart of some of the biggest problems we have in society and so it’s encouraging that the training is genuinely better than it was before. I was involved in this business before the internet took off and it was all face-to-face. There was a real fear that when the online training came in that it was going be a terrible because it clearly couldn’t be as good as face-to-face.

I’m very pleased to see that the best organizations have realized that the best training is a compliment of a lot of online training but some face-to-face. It’s a balance of the two, not just one or the other, but it gets better every year and it does some very good things. However, for some people these are very ingrained and deep-rooted opinions. You can’t get rid of that or make that go away by just having a very flashy one-hour training program.