Yet another “hot take” on Diversity Training
This morning, an op-ed was published in my hometown paper, The Washington Post. The headline read, “Does diversity training work? We don’t know – and here is why.” This being a subject well within my wheelhouse, I clicked on it immediately. By the end of the day, no fewer than three friends had sent me the link.
I’ve been conducting diversity training workshops in companies large and small for the past two decades. By all available measures, I’m good at my job. That is to say, people generally give me good scores on the smile sheets we pass around at the end of class, and I’ve received many grateful thank-yous, both written down and spoken aloud, from people who were admittedly less than excited about attending my courses but pleasantly surprised by how much they learned and how engaged they were. Which is great, as far as it goes. Those conversations help my ego, certainly, but they don’t answer the question we all ought to be asking, which is: Does this [spit] even work or are we all just [fudging] around for two hours to make ourselves feel better while accomplishing zero percent of nothing like a bunch of [glass bowls]?
The research is maddeningly vague on this question. As researcher and Princeton professor Betsy Levy Paluck recalled in the Post this morning, she had received consent from a CEO who runs a global organization to study the effects of a recent rollout of diversity training. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, he was listening to his employees and eager to make a real difference. He had introduced a “highly creative but completely untested” training program to the company, and Professor Paluck and her team were ready to measure its effects on everything from hiring and promotion data to behavioral shifts (how often are women interrupted in meetings before and after the training, for example) to surveying employee attitudes. But before the study could be completed, the company’s lawyers pulled the plug.
So now we’ll never know if this company’s innovative new diversity training worked or not. And all because the organization lacked the courage to look at itself in the mirror. Perhaps the good professor could find another subject willing to risk being scrutinized? From where I sit, it feels possible, but unlikely.
The truth is, there are plenty of DEI practitioners like me who would love for this stuff to be studied. I will admit, I wouldn’t enjoy being told that the stuff I’ve been doing for the past twenty years of my life was a giant waste of time, but I’d love to be a part of the team that figures out what does work so we could do that instead, and I’m certain I’m not alone. But a lack of bravery is only one reason why it’s difficult to measure the effectiveness of a DEI training program.
Another dynamic is the fact that when you conduct diversity training in a vacuum (e.g., send people to a two-hour class once a year and change nothing else about the workplace), your training initiative is destined to fail. I can tell you that without a professor from Princeton conducting an exhaustive study. The best you could do in such a situation is to measure whether the training was so bad as to make your diversity metrics get worse. In that scenario, no change would be the very best result you could hope for.
On the other hand, a robust DEI strategy can deliver results. This kind of transformation includes training but also involves changing policies, procedures, and norms to be more inclusive, looking for diverse job seekers in new places, conducting hiring programs in a more fair and welcoming way to promote the success of diverse and talented applicants, and revamping your performance assessment processes to reward knowledge, skills, and abilities with less implicit bias and office politics so that different kinds of employees can forge a pathway to leadership. When an organization approaches change management from a variety of angles, great things can happen. But when you measure those changes, it can be nearly impossible to discern how much of that positive momentum was directly due to the quality of the training you conducted.
Still, organizations seem bound and determined to send its employees to diversity workshops, without any real sense of their effectiveness. This is for a few reasons, I think.
The first is that it seems fundamentally wrong to ask employees to change old habits without giving them at least a moment to practice their new behaviors. When I teach a DEI workshop in an organization that is truly invested in change, I can see the metaphorical light bulbs going off over the heads of my learners. Suddenly, the new script for job interviews makes more sense, or they can see elements of the inclusive leadership model they just learned in their CEO’s last town hall meeting. There’s a lot going on outside the classroom which will give them plenty of opportunities to apply what they’re learning now. The conversations are rich, and the questions are brave and insightful. In contrast, when I’m working in an organization that is checking “the diversity box” by offering a single two-hour workshop with the hopes that they won’t have to talk about DEI again until this time next year, I get a lot more folded arms and eye rolls.
But even then, there are people who are eager and willing to learn, likely frustrated that this is the only opportunity they have to engage on these issues and soaking it all up while they can. Those employees can at least hang on to the idea that their organization hired a trainer and set aside two hours for this important conversation. One could argue that it’s a waste of time and money if it’s not going to result in real change, but I would argue that for those eager learners, it’s time and money very well spent indeed.
Not many organizations are sophisticated enough to effectively measure their diversity training efforts. I imagine very few get a call from an Ivy League professor who is willing to conduct an expensive and confidential study for free. But I do hope that the next time Professor Paluck makes an offer, it will be eagerly accepted by a company with courage and follow-through.
In the meantime, I will continue to do the DEI work I’ve been called to do. I will do my level best to focus on awareness-raising and skill-building rather than pious moralizing. I will welcome curiosity and refrain from shaming those who clearly have a lot to learn. I will try to have patience with those who actively resist my efforts and resolve to keep going in spite of their resistance, knowing that they have a story I am not privy to and believing that the work was never meant to be easy. And if you think that’s a journey worth taking, drop me a line.
