Episode 25: Getting to Diversity: The Do’s and Don’ts with Dr. Frank Dobbin, Harvard University
Dr. Dobbin explains why formalizing internal systems – hiring, mentoring, promotion, and more – is the best way to simultaneously advance diversity and equity in the corporation.
Transcript
Chris Riback: I'm Chris Riback. This is Call In with Dr. Alexandria White. We discuss business leadership in our time of social change when to call in, when to call out, and how to build sustainable business value today.
Before our conversation though, an ask from us to you. We hope you like these call in conversations. And if so, we'd appreciate if you take a moment, go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and if you're so moved, leave a five-star review. The ratings really matter. They go a long way to helping other people find the podcast.
Dr. Alexandria White: Our show is brought to you by Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, which is committed to a more diverse and inclusive future. Let's call in.
Chris Riback: Professor Dobbin, thank you for your time. Thanks for joining us.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Chris Riback: We have been looking forward to this conversation. I think it'd be useful to start at what I believe is the very top, and that is what is diversity management, and to what extent does enabling diversity within an organization need to be a mindful practice?
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Well, I think it's a great question. I think the issue in most organizations is the hiring system, mentoring system, promotion system, the skill and management training systems are kind of informal and they access to these parts of the career ensemble, it is limited to a fairly few people. People come into organizations with connections often to people. Often those people become their mentors, usually their managers or executives who bring people in. Most people find their jobs through connections. So, I actually think the management of diversity has to be extremely mindful, and that we haven't been mindful enough, because in order to open access to all kinds of people, you have to get beyond the networks of your existing managers, and also beyond their zones of comfort.
Dr. Alexandria White: But Professor Dobbin, what about the people who say, "If it's not broke, don't fix it"? You said most people find their jobs through connections. Well, my connections have been pretty fruitful for company X, so why do I need to stop doing that?
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Well, from an individual perspective, you should absolutely be using the connections you have. But from the perspective of a company, if you rely on the connections of your white male executives, for example, to get referrals, or if you rely on them to choose the proteges who will get mentoring in the firm, they tend to choose people like themselves.
Dr. Alexandria White: True.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: You'll just be excluding a lot of people from the core advantages of the career system. And one thing that means is, you'll be increasing the turnover of people who have been neglected by the networks that you currently have. So, you'll bring people in, maybe through job ads rather than through a referral or through recruitment at an unusual kind of place, and they may not stay for very long. So, I think there are all kinds of benefits to firms, to including everybody in the benefits of the internal career system, which is often informal. And if it's formalized and open to everybody, in our own research, we find huge effects on the diversity of managers.
Dr. Alexandria White: Speaking of your research, you have a recent book called “Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn't.” Tell us about that.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Well, my co-author and I, Alexandra Kalev, who teaches at Tel Aviv University, about 20 years ago, we started working on this project and we've published a number of papers and decided to finally kind of update the analyses and write a book. What we do is, we look at about 850 companies over about 45 years, and we look at the diversity programs they've put into place, dozens of different things, and we look at which things actually have effects on the diversity of their managers in subsequent years.
So, we look an average of five or 10 years out across all the years after a particular practice was put into place, like legalistic diversity training for managers. What happens? Does the management workforce actually become diverse? And what we find is that some of the most common practices don't just have no effects, they actually backfire. For example, legalistic diversity training for managers backfires in a very unsettling way if you consider that it's the most common form of diversity training. But other things are not used that frequently are super effective at promoting managerial diversity.
Dr. Alexandria White: What was the name of the one that you said backfired? I quite didn't hear that one, Professor.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Legalistic diversity training for managers, where-
Dr. Alexandria White: Legalistic. Okay.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: ...usually the form that takes is, there's some sort of implicit bias component where the trainers, or sometimes this is online, the first point is to convince people that they are biased and they have to do something about it. And then the second point is to convince them that stuff they have been doing regularly as part of their jobs as managers breaks the law and they need to stop doing that.
Dr. Alexandria White: Oh, okay.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: They need to stop doing the things that break the law, and people just don't respond well to that.
Chris Riback: Why do companies rely on those? If those approaches have not been, are not effective, yet they stay in place year after year at corporations, companies, why do they keep them?
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Well, I think there are a couple of reasons. One is, when you talk to legal counsel at most companies, they'll tell you that they really can't eliminate diversity training programs because it would look bad. They'd be the only firm in the industry without them, and they feel they would risk lawsuit. This, despite the fact that there are dozens, hundreds of studies, mostly by psychologists, but some by sociologists like myself, showing very little positive effect of the kind of diversity training that most companies have. So, part of it is they're worried about the legal consequences of getting rid of it. The other part of it is that it's something that you can do that doesn't interfere with daily operations. And you can check the box and say you've done something. The things that I'm talking about interfere slightly with daily operations and companies are more reluctant to do them.
Dr. Alexandria White: Well, you say that they don't want to feel like the only one not doing it, and there's a particular type of program that is not working. So, what is the best type that is impactful, that's going to get some results? Don't want to spoil your whole book, but can you just give us a little insight into what is going to work?
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Well, Dr. White, the things that tend to work are things that get managers involved themselves in solving the problem, rather than leaving that to the diversity inclusion office or leaving it to outside consultants. And that are designed to deliberately open the career system to people who've been excluded from some of the benefits of the career system. So, that means new ways of recruiting, like referral incentive programs, very effective at diversifying the managerial workforce, like targeted recruitment at historically black colleges and Hispanic-serving institutions, incredibly effective, and most of these are college recruitment, right?
Dr. Alexandria White: Right.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: People recruited stay on and five or 10 years later they become managers. Those are incredibly effective. So, recruitment is usually done formally, most big companies have a formal college visit program.
Dr. Alexandria White: Yes, they do.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: But they go to the alma maters of existing managers who are mostly white men. So, if you don't go to historically black colleges, you're not looking for black people seriously, I think. Even though they'll tell you that they're historically a white college, like the university I teach at, Harvard.
Dr. Alexandria White: Yes.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Doesn't discriminate anymore, but if you actually wanted to hire a lot of Hispanic recruits, you would go to places like the University of New Mexico, and if you wanted to hire a lot of black recruits, you would go to Howard. And there are plenty of historically black colleges. Well, this is an instance where companies think that they're being meritocratic by going to top universities that don't discriminate, but they're really neglecting a big part of the pool. Another thing companies can do is formal mentoring programs. So, mentoring often happens informally.
And when companies put in formal mentoring programs where they offer a mentor to everybody, you just have to volunteer to take a mentor. They find that women and people of color disproportionately sign up for that. Why is that? White men already have mentors in most of these companies. So, when they're asked why they didn't sign up, white men will say, "Six people already think they're my mentor. I don't need anybody else. Thank you very much." And that's just through voluntary systems. So, I feel like if we open up each of these systems, skill and management training is similar, it's often informal, make it formal and allow anybody to nominate themselves, five years later, you'll just have a lot more black and Latinx people in management, and Asian Americans.
Dr. Alexandria White: Yes to everything you're saying. As a black woman in corporate and in academia, my mentors were mostly white men, especially in corporate because there was not a lot of black women leaders that looked like me. But I want to backpedal to something that you said, just to push back. At ReBoot Accel, we often talk to companies that might even be in your study and they say, "Alex, I hear that it's illegal to pay for diverse referral." And so, I want you to answer that. We talked about the legalization part of this, but we hear that as well, that's illegal to pay someone an extra $1,000 because they bring in an Hispanic employee or an Asian American or someone from the LGBTQ community. What do you say about that?
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Well, it's a question for the courts, whether that's illegal or not. I've never heard that before. So, people are always making up what they think should be illegal and saying it's illegal. So, I'd be skeptical. But we're not even looking at that kind of referral incentive program. We're just looking at a wide open referral incentive program that tries to use every person in the organization as a referrer. If you don't have a program like that, you're going to get referrals from the top people who think that every second cousin of theirs could be working at the company. So, since they're usually white guys, you're going to get a lot of white people referred.
If you open up the referral system and give the same incentive for whether the person is black, white, Hispanic, Asian American, it's usually a small incentive. What we see is just a wide open, not diversity themed referral incentive program has very strong positive effects, for some of the same reasons that mentoring programs, if you make them formal, they have positive effects on the diversity of managers because now you're getting referrals from people who are not at the top. You're getting referrals from frontline workers, from newly hired workers, and so you're getting referrals that you weren't getting before, much more likely to be people of color and women.
Chris Riback: Where do you find the questions or the challenges around the ideas that you identify? And it's based on evidence and research and data that you've collected over the years. Do you get any type of commentary back from the C-suite executives around the role of diversity, the ways in which it needs to become or should become a formalized, regularized process, more formal than some of the tactics that seem to exist that you've identified? Do you get commentary from line managers or area managers who are tasked with both keeping production, keeping P&L advancing, and now you're suggesting that they add another layer to their operations and capabilities?
Do you get feedback, questions from the internal professionals? Maybe it's out of HR, maybe it's out of a department that is responsible for diversity and inclusion who say to you, "Well, you don't understand, Professor, if I leave this to the line managers, the people who are responsible for various P&Ls, they are going to be driven by P&L requirements and not by these other goals." It's a misalignment of incentives. How do you deal with the commentary that I would guess that you might get from the different constituencies that you engage with?
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Well, it's interesting. I think in the C-suite, top managers are often all over this because they see that turnover is very costly. Losing people you've trained is costly. And also having dissatisfied workers who stay on is costly, people who feel that they've been excluded from the benefits of a career system that has really advantaged big groups of people, but has left them out. So, those kinds of effects, of not having a systematic effective system of diversity programs are costly, and managers see they are, and top managers don't want to be in charge of an organization that has a reputation for being discriminatory. And whether there just aren't people who can make it up through, it isn't possible for some groups to make it up through the ranks. I take your point about line managers. There's no question that when we speak to line managers often they'll say exactly what you voiced, which is, "I've got so many things on my plate, I can't take on one more thing."
And that's why I think what we need to do is not treat this as an add-on, but treat this as a slight pivot of how you recruit people. Maybe the team that goes to University of Georgia also goes to Morehouse and Spelman. Maybe the mentoring program that's for the top 10% of employees just gets expanded to everybody. One of the things about mentoring programs is they provide huge advantages to the mentors as well as the proteges. And I think once mentors have tried it, have tried being a mentor for a couple of years, they're often touting the benefits of joining that kind of program. So, I do think it's not that hard to convert line managers. One way to do it is to put in a task force at every establishment that brings together leaders of different departments or their lieutenants. They look at the data, they try to figure out where the problems are, whether they're in recruitment, retention, retention after childcare leaves, and they try to come up with solutions.
And that model works well because it brings people together in a room every two months to look at the HR information systems data. They brainstorm for solutions and they bring them back to their departments and make sure they get implemented. So, in terms of implementation, that turns out to be a really effective way of getting new programs and practices put into place, much more effective than having HR send out a mass email that says, "From now on, we're going to do X," which usually has no effect on actual behavior. So, I do think it's possible to change line managers.
HR professionals are kind of all over the map, HR professionals and diversity professionals, I do think there's a growing recognition that what we're doing hasn't worked and that there should be some accountability around this function. And that there is increasingly some accountability because companies are now publishing their own diversity numbers every year. More and more companies are setting explicit goals. Something like 300 of America's biggest companies are doing that now, up from something like 50 tech companies three years ago. So, I do feel like HR professionals and diversity managers are now rebooting, thinking again, what do we need to change? Why hasn't this been working? And I find that exciting.
Dr. Alexandria White: Oh, you might find that exciting, but there are some people that don't find that exciting. But I wanted to go back to your statement how DEI should not just be something or this extra task. And so, we like to say that DEI should be in the DNA of a company so that it is not something extra. It should be part of the culture. So, I definitely agree with you with that. But you said some things, such as everybody come together and put in a task force and look at data and come up with solutions, and let's bring everybody together, and what's not working and how can we change?
Well, there's people who feel that this is becoming too woke, that there is this anti-woke sentiment, this anti-woke idea about, we are doing too much in the workplace. There is current articles about the removal of ESG and things that are going on, and we need to separate all of these ideas about inclusive and go back to what is corporate work? What do you say about that?
Dr. Frank Dobbin: I think the best way to address that is with data. And so, when I'm talking to individual companies, I ask them to look at their own data. And especially many companies are now making the data publicly available, posting the data on their websites. So, is change happening too fast in your workforce? And I can't think of a company in the world, certainly in the US, that's going to answer yes, change is happening too fast. If they look at their IT workforce, their professional workforce, and their managerial workforce, we are stuck in the '80s, literally, in terms of progress on diversity management.
One of the things we do in the book, the very first graph, graphs the representation of eight different groups, black, white, Hispanic, Asian American men and women in management over time. And if you were a black man in corporate management, and we have every company with, at least... it employs from 1971 to 2018, if you were a black man in corporate America, you had a 6% chance of being a manager in 1985. In 2018, you have a 6% chance of being a manager. Your odds of getting into even low level management jobs have not changed at all.
Now, there are more black men in management because there are more black men throughout the company, but if you get into corporate America, you're no more likely than you were then to make it into management. Hispanic men, it was 7% in 1984-5, it's 7% in 2018. Black and Latinx women have moved up a little bit. Black women have moved from 4% to 5%.
Dr. Alexandria White: Oh, yippee.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: And Latinx women from 4 to 6.
Dr. Alexandria White: I guess then that I'm one of those. Yay.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Yes. Your odds of making it have increased dramatically. So of course, there are more people from these groups in corporate America, so corporate America looks more diverse, but the odds of getting ahead really haven't changed for those groups. And I don't think you can argue against that when... so that's why I think using the data is very helpful, because to be honest, when I show that slide when I'm giving a public presentation, the people who say, "We've been doing too much," they just stop talking.
Dr. Alexandria White: Wow. Is it possible to share that slide in our show notes or where can they find that? Or is this your internal research, Professor?
Dr. Frank Dobbin: It's in the book, and I could send you a color version if you want.
Dr. Alexandria White: Yes, yes. Wow.
Chris Riback: But given what you're saying and given the commentary that you are aware of and the commentary that stops when you show that slide, I don't know if this falls into another aspect of being the head of the Sociology Department at Harvard University, but if anyone can help us understand the tension between the increasing commentary, the increasing pudding of diversity and diversity programs into the cultural crosshairs, the business cultural and political crosshairs, the tension between that increase in conversation against the black and white or color if you give us the color version of the chart, the slide, reality that you've defined, I'm hoping... Do you have the ability to explain that tension? Why does that type of increasing commentary exist in the face of data and evidence and reality that you have researched and identify? How do you think about this time that we're in?
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Well, there's an old sociological psychological concept called group threat, and it is mostly applied to white men in the organizational setting. And the observation is that when other groups seem to be gaining a foothold, when they get to a certain percentage, 25%, 35% white men or the dominant group, whatever it is, will start to fight back and try to protect their position and they will begin to act tribal. And I think we're seeing that here. Although interestingly, there are not very many domains of life where black and brown, Hispanic people have shown significant success. So, I think that we're seeing group threat at levels of participation in the labor force, especially the high skilled, high wage managerial professional labor force, that are still pretty low. But I think what Trump did, is he legitimized racist language, and we're just seeing lots of people say stuff that they wouldn't have said before.
I think something else has gone on, which is there's been a huge income divide within whites over the last 30 years. So, what it means to be poor and white is very different than what it meant to be poor and white or working class and white. And so, I do think that that group feels threat very vividly, just because they've seen their positions decline and Trump managed to convince us that it was immigrants and people of color who were responsible when it's really not. The people who got rich in the years when the working class got poor are CEOs.
Dr. Alexandria White: What do you say when companies, they want to read your book, they want to understand the wonderful statistics that you just said a couple of minutes ago, and then they want to do the work. They're posting those statistics, public statistics. But what do you say to the companies that some people feel that they are being performative, like you said earlier, they're just doing the checkbox because everybody else is doing it. But how can organizations overcome being performative allies with DEIB or pushback from investors or board members who say, "We're not there yet." What can they do? What are some talking points for them?
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Well, it's a very interesting question. I think partly because what we see in our analyses, we see a pattern where the practices that are not even diversity practices, they're just efforts to open the career system. And I'll say the other thing that I haven't spoken about that helps a lot to promote racial equity are all kinds of work-life programs. They help to increase the numbers not only of black, Hispanic and Asian American women in management, as well as white women, but also black, Hispanic and Asian American men. And their effect sizes are about the same for men and women from non-white groups.
So, that's an example of policies that are not racial equity policies, and increasingly, they're not even gender equity policies. So, childcare, parental leave and flex time are the main three buckets. These things are done in lots of different ways, and there's not a lot of pushback against these kinds of policies in firms. And nobody is claiming that it's too woke to adopt these policies. To be honest, the things that I've talked about when it comes to changing career systems, open mentoring to everybody.
Dr. Alexandria White: That's right.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: That's not a racial equity policy and it's super effective.
Dr. Alexandria White: Correct. Yes.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Open all kinds of training to everybody and let people self-nominate. That's not a racial equity policy, it's just it's good business practice-
Dr. Alexandria White: Human-centered.
Dr. Frank Dobbin:...development policy.
Dr. Alexandria White: Human-centered, yes.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Human-centered. Expanding your recruitment to a wider range of schools, that's just good business sense. So, I think there's something to the idea that the programs that tend to work well don't actually elicit much resistance, and they don't even have to go under the banner of diversity, inclusion and belonging. They can just go under the banner of, we want this to be a better functioning organization. And I hate to think that we're at a moment where we need to be careful about the messaging around programs that promote diversity. But there's no question in some firms, you do need to do that.
Dr. Alexandria White: You are exactly right. Me and my business partner, Diane Flynn, we talk about that all the time. Do we say diversity training or do we say training or belonging at company A? Because it's become so polarized just to say diversity. And so, interesting that you said messaging. So, one of your colleagues, Frances Frei, we quote her in our presentation, we're going to start quoting you too, Professor. And she talked about how companies should say I&D, which is inclusion and diversity. Because if you made the company inclusive, just like you just said, mentoring to everybody, recruiting to different schools and university, that's an inclusive practice. And so, if you do that first, then diversity will come. If you build it, they will come. So, what do you think about her idea of doing I&D and just messaging in that way? Could that be helpful?
Dr. Frank Dobbin: I don't know. I like the idea, it's a testable proposition that people react differently to that. That's something on Mturk, you could find out in 10 minutes. And Frances may have already checked that out. Wouldn't surprise me. She's a scientist too. But I do think that a lot of the practices that are most effective have long been part of what in management is sometimes called high performance work practices. So, offering training to everybody. Job rotation is super effective. That's another high performance, like getting everybody trained in different jobs, but also exposing people to different kinds of jobs to see if they might prefer to do something else. It also gets people out of their segregated department and allows them to try something else. If all the women of color are segregated in HR and diversity, it might help to rotate them through finance and marketing, for example.
Dr. Alexandria White: Great idea.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: So, a lot of the programs that are effective are just consistent with good business practices, and especially high performance practices.
Dr. Alexandria White: Definitely.
Chris Riback: Well, if nothing else, Professor Dobbin, from this conversation, you've gotten now a conversation opportunity the next time you see Professor Frei in the sociologist cafeteria. Dr. White is giving a-
Dr. Frank Dobbin: I think I only ever run to into her in the very lush faculty cafeteria. I don't think she'd ever venture over here for lunch.
Chris Riback: Oh, okay. Got it. Go to the lush one, for sure. That would make sense. My last question for you is, anything practical, tactical for companies, particularly around success measurement? Obviously, measuring data is a core part of what you do. Are there specific metrics, or what are the specific metrics that you advise companies to track progress? Do you suggest specific metrics? Do you offer ways to do that measurement, to execute that measurement? What do you talk to companies about in that area?
Dr. Frank Dobbin: That is such a good point, and I'm glad we will be ending on it. I think if companies aren't looking at the problem in their own organizations, looking hard at it, not looking at how many black people are on the board, how many Hispanic people are in the top 20 positions, the top 20 jobs in the company, but are actually looking at career systems and how they're working, I think that's the way to make change. If you're not looking at it, you can't figure out what to change. So, what task forces usually do, is they use the existing HR information systems data. So, if you have Oracle, PeopleSoft, any medium size company has automated their HR information systems. And so, it's very easy to run the numbers and to figure out, what's our hiring ratio for blacks and whites we interview? What is our promotion ratio from this kind of job to the next kind of job, the next level for people from different race, ethnic, by gender groups?
And this data, it's either managers already have it or they can get HR to run the numbers in 10 minutes. So, what task forces do is, they look at, where are we failing in recruitment? And they look at, where are we failing in retention? Because they have the numbers. And of the people we're not retaining, how many left without being fired and how many were fired? Is the problem that some of our managers are firing too many people?
Is the problem that people are just quitting because they're so unhappy with their work groups? What's happening to people when they come back from parental leave? What's happening to people when they have an elder care problem or a childcare problem? It's so easy to run the numbers now, that I think any company that's not looking at these things and trying to figure out solutions to the problems they can identify is just lazy and they're not taking advantage of the data they're collecting with their existing HR information systems.
Chris Riback: Feels like such an age-old problem in so many different areas of business and management and life, knowing what to measure, how to measure, looking at how to ask the right questions and what you just described, the answer is not necessarily how many diversity individuals do you have in X level positions within your company, but it's the ratios that you were talking about, because you can certainly game certain measurements. You could hire five people in the top 10, 15 positions all of a sudden. And if that's what you promote, all of a sudden you can look like you have terrific integrated diversity. But what goes on behind that might not tell the same story.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: And that is what so many companies do. They try to appoint three black people to the board and five people to the top management team. But middle management is all white people.
Chris Riback: Dr. White, anything else for Professor Dobbin before we let him go?
Dr. Alexandria White: Thank you so much for spending time with us. We love your research. I look forward to buying your book and unpacking a little bit more of your concepts and research. So, thank you.
Dr. Frank Dobbin: Thank you, Dr. White. Thank you so much, Chris.
