When diversity initiatives backfire
From unrealistic expectations to moral licensing, and from the “cappuccino effect” to the detriment of discomfort, six cases where DEIB can have unintended consequences.
There is an old and wise proverb that has followed humanity for centuries: “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
It is an aphorism that -let’s admit it- could sometimes be used to describe the state of various diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives pursued by companies today.
Even when equipped with the best of intentions, several DEIB strategies have fallen short of delivering. Occasionally they can even damage both the underrepresented communities they aim to uplift and the organisations that chose to implement them.
Backfiring in diversity efforts can come in many shapes and sizes: from half-finished attempts that lead to tokenism to misguided policies that lead to complacency, and from procedures that enhance biases to strategies that cause resentment or cynicism. In today’s polarised world, where DEIB enjoys enthusiasm and backlash alike, diversity policies are also under a magnifying lens: a misstep can lead to pushback or even backtracking.
Whatever the reasons for the backfiring may be, it wouldn’t truly be an “Uncensored” series if we didn’t close our thematic exploration with an overview of where DEIB can go really wrong, and why. Join us as we look into six common cases behind diversity, equity and inclusion backfiring, providing ideas about how to ensure that such strategies push forward, rather than fire backwards.
🪤The trap of setting unrealistic expectations
In our first article we already laid out the business case of diversity- and for good reason. Plenty of studies have proven that DEIB can produce tangible and quantifiable benefits for an organisation. The problem arises when DEIB officers simply copy a lot of those studies verbatim, adding them to their slides unchanged and making ambitious claims to leadership about the abundance of profits their organisations will see if they implement their strategies.
“It can become a disaster when the pitch comes with overpromising, and without a framework, roadmap, timeline or metrics and data processes tailored to the organisation’s needs”, a DEIB leader who has worked with several organisations in Southern Europe told us.
He added that the trap of unrealistic expectations “sometimes comes from a good place, but it eventually risks making management disillusioned with DEIB because they anticipate immediate and impressive results in performance, sales numbers or innovation”.
Elsewhere, the problem of overpromising may come in internal communications or employment value propositions, when organisations make sweeping claims about their diversity gains or inclusive workplaces, without the practices or the transparency needed to back it up.
In both cases, unclear and unrealistic expectations are set to fail and disappoint. Overpromising on DEIB will most likely lead to resentment or cynicism. And a disillusioned leadership will most often end up withdrawing support for DEIB initiatives, resulting in disjointed efforts that damage both the marginalised groups and the organisation as a whole.
There is of course a proper way to set realistic expectations and avoid backfiring: and that is a data-centred approach to DEIB, away from one-size-fits all mantras and tailored to the organisations needs and overall goals and strategy. “You can expect only what you can inspect”, as Cecile Kossoff, Group Chief Brand, Marketing, Communication and Sustainability Officer at Europ Assistance, told us earlier in our DEIB exploration.
(Yes, data is always incredibly useful when it comes to deciphering challenges employees have with their leadership. Read on and you may find yourselves a relevant easter egg 🥚)
🔎Making it impossible to attract and retain the best
Another elusive pitfall of diversity occurs due to persistent social injustice, when certain skill areas are not made accessible to the majority of the group that a company is trying to hire from to redress an imbalance. It is difficult to talk about, but HR managers will admit and discuss it behind closed doors.
Sometimes it just becomes too difficult to attract the best, and even more so to retain them.
An illuminating example was shared to us by a black CHRO in South Africa, where despite a predominantly Black and Indigenous South African Population of over 80%, chronic injustices that made access to higher education difficult have created a relative shortage of black employees with data or coding skill sets. Occasionally, it has made hiring and retaining diverse talent particularly challenging.
“When it comes to software developers, the truth is that these skill areas are not accessible to the majority of black people in South Africa”, the CHRO told REBORRN. “So sometimes you simply don’t have enough black software developers. They are there, of course, but they are not easily available and everybody’s looking for them”.
“So what ends up happening is a war for talent: these employees become very expensive because everybody wants them. And then a lot of them end up not staying. They jump around because they can always get something else or find someone to pay them better. It’s basic economics”.
Fortunately, throughout the years as education injustices are addressed in South Africa, the shortage is shrinking making those challenges less persistent. But apart from patience, companies that face similar problems can enrich their DEIB strategies by also incorporating reskilling or mentoring and additionally focusing on inclusion and belonging in their offering.
☕The Cappuccino effect
Another case of potential backfiring occurs when efforts to diversify come with hiring practices that focus exclusively on entry level jobs, or when addressing bias touches upon hiring but not promotion. It creates the perhaps familiar phenomenon of a pyramid shape, where the base layer of an organisation may be diverse but the dominant group is almost exclusively occupying the top.
The CHRO from South Africa had an interesting name for the way the phenomenon manifests in her country, dubbing it “the Cappuccino effect”.
“To be honest with you, there are hardly any companies that have the representation of coloured people (mixed race) and Africans (black) at the senior levels”, she told REBORRN. “It’s what I call the Cappuccino effect in terms of DEIB: where you have got a big chunk of black at the bottom, and then at the top you've got this white layer and just an occasional sprinkling of colour. That is what it looks like for most companies, despite some improvements”.
A different manifestation of this can be found in call centres, which globally see a workforce predominantly staffed by women, but men disproportionately occupy supervisor and leadership positions. And an unbalanced approach to DEIB that creates those pyramids and sustains them for a long period of time can actually reinforce biases by perpetuating stereotypes and hierarchical structures, despite attempts to diversify the workplace. It is yet another pitfall that comes when organisations place an emphasis on diversity through numbers and hiring, forgetting the pillars of equity, inclusion or belonging along the way.
💼Tokenism and the “professional board members”
But that is not to say that there may not be instances where an attempt to diversify the composition of boards of directors doesn’t backfire as well. This is often the case when quotas are imposed on boards to address their extreme homogeneity, but organisations end up seeing them as issues of mere compliance and take a tokenistic approach to filling the positions.
An interesting case study can be found in the Greek market, where a series of new legal and regulatory corporate governance provisions have required a minimum 25% participation of women on the boards of directors, but real progress and mentality change may be taking more time to simmer. Among the things seen in Greece, as recorded by a Capital Markets Commission report, is that in frequent cases, the same exact women participate in many different boards of directors - a phenomenon that some people have described as “professional board members”- while most companies have also simply adapted their compositions to barely scrape the margin prescribed by the law.
It may be too early to judge whether the quotas will bring forth substantial change. But cases like this show that quotas in leadership can lead to cases of tokenism or the same individuals overpopulating boards in the short-term, especially when corporate leadership strategy is not coupled with an effort to expand one’s network and attract BOD members based on a combination of identities, experiences and expertise.
😶🌫️The Detriment of Discomfort
While DEIB training can be crucial for cultivating a respectful and inclusive work environment, it must also be carefully designed to avoid alienation and ensure that it encourages genuine dialogue and reflection. When not done right, it risks reinforcing the very biases it aims to dismantle, paradoxically even increasing discrimination in the workforce.
A common mistake here is an over reliance on discomfort as a pedagogical tool in those training sessions. The logic of “getting comfortable with being uncomfortable” dates back to the earliest social change work done in workplaces, whereby practitioners pursued a variety of tactics to activate discomfort thinking that it would make learning more impactful.
But while some participants to such training responded well, not everybody turned their discomfort into productive learning. A great chunk actually had the exact opposite reaction, becoming harshly polarised against social change and adopting dramatically worse attitudes towards underrepresented groups.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion speaker, strategist, and organisational consultant Lilly Zheng recently addressed this backfiring effect in a LinkedIn post, where they cited a 2019 paper by social scientists Kari B. Taylor and Amanda Baker that examined "discomfort-first" learning approaches within higher education, and proposed critical amendments.
Turns out the research suggested discomfort will not result in learning “when it activates feelings of threat, when it makes people concerned for their safety, and when adequate support to resolve that discomfort and turn it into learning is missing”.
“DEIB practitioners, seeking to maximise discomfort but without minimising threat, guaranteeing safety, or providing resources, inadvertently do more harm than good and leave organisations angry, vulnerable, and polarised” described Zheng. “Discomfort is not a silver bullet, and is not a goal in and of itself. It's a means to an end, and if we want discomfort to be productive, we have to be doing the work to minimise threat, guarantee safety, and create resources to resolve discomfort—for both majority and minority groups” they concluded.
🪽When DEIB acts as moral licensing
Behavioural scientists have proposed another explanation behind many instances where good intentions may lead to unintended backwards outcomes: moral licensing. It’s the logic behind a range of activities such as eating an extra ice-cream because you have “earned it” at the gym, cheating a bit on your taxes after you donated to charity, or leaving your dirty dishes for your flatmates to clean because you took the trash out last week. It turns out humans often feel justified to behave immorally if they have just done something morally good.
Moral licensing also appears with corporate DEIB, in different shapes and forms. Sometimes it comes in the form of a company implementing a robust hiring initiative to increase gender diversity, only to later justify promoting fewer women by believing their initial efforts suffice for equity. Other times it is an unintended consequence of diversity training, where an individual who has participated in such workshops may feel unconsciously licensed to engage in discriminatory behaviour, assuming their previous "good deed" mitigates any future bias.
There are also cases where the achievement of a certain milestone in DEIB by an organisation can unconsciously justify a terrible mishandling of inclusion and belonging in the workforce in other ways - in other fields, for other groups, or for all employees as a whole. That is why any organisation who embarks on a DEIB journey should pursue it continuously and holistically, and why data and indicators should matter in forming and presenting its strategy.
🔭Data as a conversation starter - and our contribution to it.
After reading these successive cases where DEIB can end up backfiring, you may be wondering anxiously whether diversity is actually one of the most frequent challenges that employees are facing from their leadership today.
We actually asked them for you. In fact we asked them much more than that - in a survey we conducted with over 800 employees evenly distributed across Greece, South Korea and the United Kingdom, that we first presented in April in the context of the Delphi Economic Forum.
Here is the promised Easter egg: a first access to our report and its key findings
Aiming to pin down the gap between what’s being talked about in corporate leadership circles and what the actual reality for employees is, we invited participants to evaluate 30 common leadership challenges, from areas ranging from culture to innovation and from strategy to alignment, based on whether they experience them or not, as well as their frequency and importance.
The results surprised us in many ways. And one of them was the fact that the option “diversity isn't valued" was actually the least recognised challenge in our sample as a whole in the "True/False" category, with only 34.8% of respondents picking it.
Diversity as a challenge was also positioned in the bottom end of the lower quartile of the scatter plot combining frequency with importance, and even more interestingly with only a minor difference in percentages between genders (W = 32.4%, M = 37.6%). That being said, when diversity was actually selected as a challenge, it was deemed fairly important by employees with a total rating of 3.49/4.
As is the case with most studies that investigate correlation, the goal of our survey is to open discussions: this surprise finding could be due to multiple interpretations. Is it because employees in large organisations don’t prioritise or notice diversity challenges as much as other problems? Is it because they think it’s a process detached from leadership? Is it because they see diversity as an empty vessel, or a checkbox that may be ticked even if actual inequity persists?
It could be none, or all of the above. We actually made the data open source, and included a good mix of ages, genders, tenure, rank and industries, so that it could allow for secondary segmentation analysis. We invite you to dive in, to adjust any parameters you like, to test your own observations and to challenge your preconceived notions about the Future of Work.
We will be doing just that in our next Uncensored theme this coming month that -you guessed it- will be looking at the Challenges Employees Face with Leadership. Taking the results of our survey, we will try to dig deeper into the experiences of employees, to spark a conversation about the Future of Work, to invite business leaders to challenge their preconceptions and to unveil the true challenges for leadership across different cultures.
Starting from another one of our surprise findings: it seems that almost everyone, everywhere feels that they’re not recognised often enough for their achievements. Join us next week, as we explore why
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Thank you for reading Uncensored this week, as we conclude our Depolarizing Diversity series. In case you missed them, check out our previous articles where we explored the most common pitfall for DEIB, allyship, and the forgotten groups in the quest for diversity.
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