As an engineering leader at multiple FAANG companies and growth startups, I’ve seen organizations invest time and money in building a strong DEI teams. I’ve also seen umpteen efforts in incentivizing and motivating employees to undergo training, to volunteer and spread the word and in general increase our diversity across teams to promote stronger teams and more cohesive teams. But, as a data guy, when I look back at the team healthiness or company healthiness indices and team productivity, I don’t see any quantitative indicators to show improvement. In some cases, I see these efforts achieving the exact opposite, which was creating more barriers and more divisiveness than intended.
I must admit that I’m nervous of saying this loud in the corporate world due to fear of retribution and not being a team player. May be thats the problem for the lack of effectiveness of these programs? But, that cannot be it. For, we are talking FAANG companies with minds much more brilliant than mine and more accomplished than mine. So, they don’t have any fear of retributions, right? Or do they?
First of all, we as a society have created a “cancel” culture, where challenging an existing and prevailing notion is discouraged and at worst punished . At times, I wonder if we had successfully turned the clock back to the medieval ages, where questioning anything that went contrarion to what was written in bible led to inquisitions. We had moved way past that to embrace scientific thinking and now we have unintentionally gone back to the medieval thinking with a different bible of sorts and anyone who questions that gets punished and ostracized. I see this thinking creeping into many of the DEI efforts. I’m not saying every DEI effort is on the same path, but all of them that I’ve had the opportunity run along the same lines.
A classic example is the one we got in the case of James Demore, a former Google engineer who was fired for writing a memo on the case of echo chambers. Leaving the merits of the argument, the message that sent to the broader community was to just listen to the whole DEI argument as a mute spectator and do not try to engage in any conversation that may lead to questionning. James Demore was fired from Google for writing a memo of his thoughts and he was neither in a position to make any of his thoughts in the memo actionable. The strong criticism that evoked from all quarters (incl. former CEO of youtube) and the mob-like hysteria to have him fired didn’t do any good in sincerely helping the DEI efforts. The same company that fired him for writing a memo paid hush money to a senior VP of Android leave Google on sexual harrassment charges. The former wrote a memo and the latter actually hurt the DEI efforts by abusing his power.
The material presented in these sessions does nothing to break down the barriers. All it does instead is to reinforce that certain sections have been discriminated against and the system plays an active role in such discrimination. What could someone do to break the cycle? Do we break the system? Can we develop a broader outlook to ensure that we don’t take things forgranted? If its the latter, what practices are being taught to develop that broader outlook? A lot of DEI efforts paint the majority as active or mute spectators for historical wrongs. How can we develop broader outlook if we are told to be suspicious about majority? And there have been some significant efforts done by the majority during those times to undo the wrongs. We don’t acknowledge their efforts and instead paint the entire system as wrong causing discord and at times sowing the seeds of suspicion in everyone? For the minorities, it tells them to be wary of the majority and for the majority, it tells them to not do any outreach as they have been guilty of past crimes. Given the lack of safe space, the majority chose to be mute spectators and we have no meaningful results. In one of my companies, the diversity efforts consisted of sponsoring movie tickets to the movies made by minority groups. And the person who organized that got promoted for their diversity initiatives? Is this really considered meaningful participation?
I’m often troubled when I’m asked an interview question like tell me your efforts in advancing DEI causes. If I purely go by data, in all of my roles, diversity candidates have been hired more and promoted more. But, I feel uncomfortable in such chest thumping activity. It makes me feel like I’m sending a message across saying that they got promoted because they were diversity candidates. I don’t think that was the intention for their promotion and they were really fabulous candidates. So, I settle on focussing around equality and mechanisms that I’ve introduced to ensure that there is no discrimination against majority or minority and we build systems to ensure everyone gets a fair share. My DEI colleagues won’t be pleased if I say this loud, but I honestly don’t know how do I as a leader answer such a question?
This is where I feel DEI organizations fail. They are not creating a safe space for leaders like me to ask questions, understand the intent and then provide us guidance to ensure we make meaningful progress. Most DEI leaders hark upon platitudes and/or victimhood offering no tangible steps to push forward meaningful narratives. Executives and companies see them as another arm of the legal and HR teams to ensure that they don’t get sued. And as a result, over a period of time, they get submerged or removed altogether. Target is not just the only one who has removed their DEI team. NyTimes has published a study (I’m quoting Nytimes because its seen as sympathetic to this as opposed to WSJ) showing that DEI organizations are actually doing more harm than good. And if Nytimes is coming out with such predictions, then well, there has to be some truth. Unless, we paint Nytimes as being part of the system and discredit it alongside everything else?
In my opinion, it would be nice to focus on helping making this a decent human being problem than anything else. Instead of focussing on the divisions that exist among us, can we start focussing on the commanalities? Can we paint a picture of hope that even amidst tragedies, human beings were able to set aside their differences and come together. And if they could so in the midst of a civil war, a revolutionary war and a world war, we could do that in a world that exists today which is a lot more safer and a lot more inclusive?
