Learning. To Deal with Racism.
I meant to put that period there.
Learning is important to me. While I have been in only two Chief Learning Officer roles in my career, and only for a small fraction of said career, learning looms large in everything I do. The value of learning over knowing will be one of the anchor capabilities in the book I am currently writing. I take furthering our capacity and ability to learn as a sacred trust. As a calling.
But, I’ll be honest, I was leery of any corporate title with “Learning” in it when first offered one. For most of my career, the learning area appeared to be where HR went to die. And HR was often not all that healthy to being with. Learning meant training, and training had a bad reputation. I’ll never forget a former C-level executive from a large and prestigious UK company saying to me that one of the greatest things about achieving the level of status and position in an organization that he had was that he never had to waste his time on “corporate training” again.
But this is not a rant about where learning has fallen short in the past. It is about the role that learning is shifting towards. The discipline now has the opportunity to stand up and fill in a gap that is so desperately needed in our society. Learning has been shifting away from just compliance-based training, or even programs that everyone likes but have questionable ROI, to actually undertaking the task of building a learning culture. To me a learning culture is defined quite easily—does the culture create space and encouragement for people to uncover what they need to do to change for the better? You can define “better” however you want, but the elements of it being about a change, not an accumulation of knowledge, and it starting with you, not others, is what matters to me. In a learning culture the organization senses that it has not yet arrived, and everyone needs to become something more, something better.
Which brings me back to the issues of systemic racial prejudice and discrimination that we can no longer pretend doesn’t exist in our country. What can we do with learning, as a function, to implement both immediate and long-term fixes and eradicate a stain on our country that shames us all? Here are a few thoughts. I hope they are good starters. They are not enough. I’d love to engage in a conversation with any of you to find more.
First, talk about ugly history. In our organizations do we look at the history of racism unflinchingly, especially when it is resident in our organizations? And, yes, I am suggesting that talking about racial prejudice and discrimination of our past is a way to open the door to dialogues about it today for tomorrow. We need to look at the pictures, feel the disgust and ask, “How could this have been allowed to happen?” Then we need to ask ourselves how we are allowing it to happen today. This is important, especially if racism is resident in the company’s history (which it probably is if it’s been around very long). I recall being told of a time when a senior executive at a financial services firm (not to be named here) held a meeting with a potential client organization. He was white, and it happened that the three client representatives were all black. During the business conversation he went on to proudly, and without malice of any kind, talk about the long history of his company. In fact, the beautiful conference table they were sitting at was made from one of the “cotton ships” the company owned, where it got its start. After the meeting, when it was pointed out to him by a black colleague that the ship had probably carried more than cotton, or whose labor the cotton it carried came from, he was deeply mortified at what he’d said. But the organization’s pride in its history had almost erased the horror that this table had seen in everyday conversation. There was no dialogue about the darkness of the company’s illustrious history. The “forgetting” was part of the system.
Second, invest unequally. Someone recently remarked to me on the challenges of putting more black people in roles occupied by white people if there weren’t enough “qualified candidates” who were black. Setting aside the systemic discrimination from birth that caused the disparity in “qualified candidates” for just a moment, that cannot stop us. As a leader in organizations I have seen many people rise to the challenge unlooked for. I have seen our assessments of “ready” or “capable” turn out to be rather useless and unfounded. And I have also seen that investment in those “not yet ready” can get them there damn fast. So, put someone black in that role and invest your learning budget heavily in supporting them to succeed. Give them high-quality coaching, build a support community for learning, invest in formal education programs, partner them with your best and those with great success. Do what it takes to make them “capable” now. Right now.
Third, invest in the long game. Identify people of color whom you can invest in from birth. I’m not being facetious. Why not? Find a hospital in your city with a discriminated against demographic and start to invest in the education, healthcare, nutrition, and social support that the family of that newborn needs to begin to claw back some of the disadvantages our society will heap on them. Follow them through school, pay for tutors, build communities. Help them discover their aptitudes with tests you contract for that do not have bias built in. Stay with them through college. Bring them in to your company. Give them more. Teach them and learn from them. See them become leaders. A CEO that was over 40 years in the making? Now that would be succession planning that means something! I know that this may seem like an impossible task and that there are so many variables outside our control and that this is not what corporations are currently built to do. It is something that we probably feel government or society should do and that it just is not the place of the modern company. But, we decide what the modern company is, don’t we? I suggest that the new Committee on Diversity you are forming is not near bold enough. The donation to #somethingblack just papers over the issues and makes us feel better (and makes it someone else’s problem to actually work on and solve). This will be a long, hard, generational task. Start investing in it now, for the long run. The real long run.
Finally, learn about your own racism. Learn about the subtlety of it. Find out how it’s there even when you don’t see it. Be willing to say, “It’s very possible I am racist and don’t even know it.” And then determine that this would be unacceptable and learn what to do about it.
Learn. To stop racism.
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