You Need the Truth about Racism in Your Institution

This is an inflection point in American race relations, and, like all crises, it is an opportunity for leaders to lead the transformation of their institutions. But that opportunity can only be seized effectively with enough courage to learn the unvarnished truth about the sources of systemic racism in any given institution. What leadership and cultural dynamics along with policies and practices keep blacks and other minorities from feeling and being fully included? 

My colleagues Tony Mayo (Harvard Business School) and Laura Roberts (Darden School at the University of Virginia), who have studied racism and reviewed the research, conclude that companies rarely make real change in this area. My own research and that of many others shows why: the inability of employees—white and black—to confront senior management with the truth about barriers to management’s espoused strategic and moral directions. There are too many doubts about speaking up: Will I be branded as not being a team player? Will my career be derailed? Will anything change anyway? This is the case even for operational problems—it’s much worse for issues of race.

The protests we have seen at the national level are an indication of how confronting problems head on, while necessary to get those in power to hear, do not alone lead to collaborative solutions. If you think this cannot happen inside your institution, think again. Employees at Google protested its policies (regarding treatment of workers and relationship with certain customers) because its leaders had not led and probably did not know how to lead an organization-wide constructive honest conversation. The result was the counterproductive firing of a few protest leaders, which not only deprived Google of valuable talent but also destroyed many remaining employees’ trust in management and reinforced their belief that speaking up is dangerous.

It doesn’t have to go that way. What Google bungled actually can be done right. For the past 30 years, I have been helping courageous senior managers to lead such honest (the whole truth is on the table), collective (the whole organization is involved), and internally public (everyone learns what top management heard and what they will change) conversations through a process my colleagues and I developed, called the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP). We have formally studied its efficacy and found that SFP consistently accelerates change that would not otherwise have occurred quickly, if at all.

Now is the time to apply honest, collective and public conversations to erase systemic racism in our institutions. At least one unit leader in a global pharmaceutical company has already shown that it can work. The senior team began the conversation with a two-page statement of their aspirations for inclusion. This necessary step was—as it always is—itself a learning experience for the senior team. Next, a task force of black and white high-performing associates two to three levels below the senior team was commissioned to interview black and white employees across the organization specifically about barriers to achieving the aspirations in that statement. Not surprisingly, some interviews were pretty emotional.  

The task force then jointly conducted a rigorous analysis of the information they had collected, extracting the repeated themes. In a carefully structured meeting (with specific seating arrangements and “rules for engagement”), the senior team was presented—face to face—with the “unvarnished” truth about race relations in their organization. Key issues were fairness in pay and promotions and the lack of developmental opportunities for blacks, as well as leader and peer behavior.

I was there. It was clear that hearing the truth had a profound emotional impact on everyone. The next step was for the senior team, working alone, to have a diagnostic conversation about the cause of racial tensions, which they could not have done with the task force present. 

An action plan was developed and shared with the task force—again, face to face. Task force members then met alone, as the senior team had done, to critique the plan. Did it reflect the feedback? Did it ignore any? Would lower levels see it as credible and implementable? After the senior team and the task force resolved such concerns, senior management communicated to the larger organization what they had heard and what they planned to do about it. 

Why are honest, collective, and public conversations—conducted as I have described—so effective? The structure of the SFP ensures honesty by the task force and, even when very difficult issues are raised, it ensures that mistakes don’t shut down the conversation and make things worse. Hidden frustrations—even anger—that cannot normally be expressed in a hierarchy are confronted constructively. Because the whole truth is confronted directly, not through a consultant’s report that no one ever hears about, trust and commitment to change increase immediately and dramatically. (For more detail on how and why SFP works, see my recent book, Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations about Your Company’s Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy.)

Because the whole truth is on the table, the systemic action plan includes changes in practices that would otherwise not be considered. Also, the fact that the whole truth is on the table makes it clear that senior leaders are committed to make real change, not launch another training program everyone knows, and research shows, will not change anything.

Racial justice is something you can no longer afford to fumble—and thank heavens for that. The transformation won’t be easy or obvious, but it is demonstrably possible.