Support for corporate and academic D.E.I. efforts appears to be shrinking, even though most people want the same thing: competitive organizations where everyone who shows up to work has a fair shot at success.
As Harvard-based educators and advisers with decades of collective experience, we have worked with organizations failing to meet this objective and taught M.B.A. students how to negotiate difference, preparing them for a work force more diverse than ever. In our experience, many organizations working on D.E.I. goals are getting stuck at the diversity stage — recruiting difference without managing it effectively — and generating frustration and cynicism about their efforts along the way. They are now at risk of stopping in the middle of a complex change journey, declaring failure prematurely.
Inclusion, as we define it, creates the conditions where everyone can thrive and where our differences as varied, multidimensional people are not only tolerated but also valued. A willingness to pursue the benefits of D.E.I. — the full participation and fair treatment of all team members — renders organizational wholes greater than the sum of their parts.
At a time when some organizations, feeling the politicized ripple effects of affirmative action’s repeal, are at risk of abandoning the objectives of D.E.I., our experiences suggest that to do so is bad for individuals, organizations and American society writ large. Persuasive scholarship has identified the ways in which we become more effective leaders when we collaborate skillfully with people who don’t already think like us — people with different perspectives, assumptions and experiences of moving through the world.
Erik Larson’s firm, Cloverpop, helps companies make and learn from decisions. When Mr. Larson and his research team compared the decision quality of individuals versus teams, they found that all-male teams outperformed individuals nearly 60 percent of the time, but gender diverse teams outperformed individuals almost 75 percent of the time. Teams that were gender and geographically diverse, and had at least one age gap of 20 years or more, made better decisions than individuals 87 percent of the time. If you’ve ever called a grandparent for advice or tested an idea with a skeptical teenager, you get what this research was trying to quantify. We often learn the most from people who think most differently from us.
Getting people to share what they know that other people don’t know is essential to collective performance. Our Harvard Business School colleague Amy Edmondson and her research collaborator, Mike Roberto, designed a simulation where five-person teams must figure out how to climb Mount Everest. Teams reporting higher feelings of group belonging repeatedly outperform other teams because their members share more of their unique information about summiting Everest.
These findings are consistent with Ms. Edmondson’s research on the performance advantages of “psychological safety,” the cultural underpinning of inclusion. Individuals, she finds, are more likely to share their views in an environment that does not belittle, or worse, punish those who offer differing opinions, particularly to more powerful colleagues. In a recent study of 62 drug development teams, Ms. Edmondson and Henrik Bresman found that diverse teams, when assessed by senior leaders, outperform their more homogenous peers only in the presence of psychological safety. More diversity is not always better – from a performance standpoint, diversity without the inclusion can actually make things worse.
Inclusion work, done well, seeks to scale these kinds of results. Among other payoffs, organizations that get inclusion right at scale seem to be smarter, more innovative and more stable. One explanation is that they can see their competitive landscape — threats, risks, opportunities — more clearly and have greater access to the full knowledge base of their people.
But achieving gains like this can feel elusive when the will to participate in D.E.I. is waning. It can be tempting to put in place superficial fixes to achieve the optics of inclusion — a primary concern of D.E.I. critics — such as reserving roles for specific demographics. This is often illegal and rarely helpful, and it provides at least one area of broad agreement in this polarized debate: a distaste for hiring and promotion schemes based on an individual’s identity. A way to correct for these concerns is inclusive recruitment processes and rigorous, transparent selection criteria that everyone understands. It is not to scale back investments in inclusion, which would restrict our ability to build healthy, dynamic organizations.
Inclusion work is a way to create the conditions where people you don’t already know — those who are separated from you by more than one or two degrees — can succeed. For example, many U.S. tech companies have successfully created workplaces where young, straight, white men they know can thrive, but have a harder time recruiting, developing, promoting and retaining women, people of color, people from the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, people over the age of 35 and the young, straight, white men they don’t know. Organizations with these outcomes are typically relying too much on familiar networks — the people they know — and when they find someone good enough in those networks, they stop looking.
That is one reason we end up with all-male boards. Senior teams with no people of color. Professorial ranks with no conservatives. If the demographics of your team don’t bear much resemblance to the demographics of the broader population, then you’ve likely put artificial barriers on your talent pools and undermined your ability to reap the rewards of inclusion.
Everyone must be better off for inclusion initiatives to work. An example from Harvard Business School illustrates that point. It has always been an important part of our school’s mission to recruit military leaders and ensure that they can thrive, not in spite of their nontraditional training and experience, but precisely because of it. Over a decade ago, the school was succeeding at recruiting military veterans, but once in the classroom, they were less likely to excel academically. The military student group began providing specialized review sessions that focused on where its constituents were collectively getting stuck, making explicit the links between the M.B.A. curriculum and their military technical training.
Within a few years, gaps in performance closed. The performance of nonmilitary students did not decline because those students got extra attention. In fact, the rest of the student body benefited because military veterans became more active and confident in classroom discussions, offering unique insights into the high stakes of leadership decisions. The school’s experience with the value of customized review sessions also helped close performance gaps with other groups, including women and international students.
What does this work look like inside organizations? Sometimes it means more actively recruiting in unfamiliar places. Sometimes it means becoming more systematic about development opportunities. It can mean improving the ways you assess people for promotion, which can be riddled with bias and pitfalls, relying instead on more objective and self-evident advancement criteria. Indeed, what we hear most often from underrepresented leaders — X’s in organizations filled with Y’s — is the desire for a fair chance to compete, in workplaces where the rules of the game are clear and applied equally to all.
We know that historical change is like sleep. It happens gradually, sometimes fitfully, then all at once. We are in the fitful stage of our evolution toward truly inclusive organizations. But let us not get confused: Inclusion is an end goal that channels universal hopes for meritocracy, reflects America at its best and creates the foundation for an even more competitive future.
Caroline Elkins and Frances Frei are professors at Harvard Business School. Anne Morriss is the co-author, with Frances Frei, of “Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems.”
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