I’ve been listening to interviews of restaurant owners and patrons who are defying the stay-at-home orders in California. The owners say they don’t want to lose their businesses and want to help their employees. One patron said, “I am willing to get sick to help the restaurant workers.” And while I appreciate their struggle, not once do I hear them or the interviewer mention the people that may die as a result of their actions. Are their businesses or employees more important than the lives of others? Is the patron willing to die or have a loved one die as a result of his defiance? These actions sound righteous when only one side is considered. But how can we ignore the rising number of infections? The death of nearly 2500 American citizens a day? How do we identify a solution if we only consider our own challenges?
Our inability to understand and empathize with other’s perspectives prevents us from addressing many of our society’s problems: climate change, police brutality, systemic racism, housing shortages, food insecurity, educational disparity, and economic inequality, to name a few. We need to find a willingness and mechanism to listen, learn, challenge and share. Ask questions when someone provides only one viewpoint. Challenge their logic and reasoning. Expand their worldview. Have a dialogue.
I have practiced the art of dialogue with a few friends. One of my dialogues was with one of my black girlfriends from southern California. While she acknowledges systemic racism exists, she believes she has never been negatively impacted by it. She also believes there is no racial bias in policing in the US. We have stumbled into this dialogue several times. I have provided data to show her the disproportionate number of incidents where people of color are arrested or killed, but she says she doesn’t like to read, except for Facebook. I found charts to visually display the research, but she interprets the data by totals instead of percentages, supporting her position that more white people are killed than any other race. I affirmed her feelings and life experiences as a former police officer, knowing that if I fail to appreciate what she is saying or honor the validity of her subjectivity, I would be discrediting or discounting her realities, thereby putting her being into question. After all, how are the ways she experiences the world or her beliefs different from mine? Just as my experiences and beliefs of bias form and support my worldview, so does hers. So I looked for the common ground.
“What I learned from each of these instances is that I needed to disabuse myself from the notion of a presumption of a single truth or the existence of universal logic.”
Since we could not agree on the numbers, I returned our focus to her expression of systemic racism, something we agreed on. While we still do not agree on the impact of racism, she did empathize with me and others when hearing personal accounts of discrimination and supported the contention that some improvements can be made to prevent police brutality for all races. In the end, I learned a bit about police training and how some black people can view systemic racism as something that only negatively impacts the lower-income population.
I became more curious about this assertion that racism only affects the less fortunate. So I engaged in a dialogue with another one of my friends, this one from the midwest. He is white and male, was raised in a lower-middle-class family, and considers himself a “have not.” He, too, believes that racism only affects poor people and that racism doesn’t happen to wealthy minorities. He also believes because he has worked for everything he has and that since there are minorities who are wealthier, white privilege is something only rich white people have. This time I started with connection instead of data. Through personal stories, he could see how black and brown people of all classes endure prejudice. He could understand how my experiences with the police are different than his experience with them. And could consider that the difference in treatment could be related to race regardless of wealth. However, based on his personal philosophy that success is the direct result of individualism, meritocracy, or legacy, he found the concept of racism as a system of white dominance a little more difficult to accept. He was unwilling or unable to accept his accomplishments may have been based on an advantage or that he maintains a personal bias.
What I learned from each of these instances is that I needed to disabuse myself from the notion of a presumption of a single truth or the existence of universal logic. I learned that transformative dialogues require curious thinkers and a willingness to expand their worldview and facilitators that can embolden participants to deconstruct their beliefs and personal biases. I learned that dialogues differ from discussions in that in discussions, participants tend to remain attached to their particular points of view and attempt to persuade others to adopt their perspective, often resulting in the divide we see all around us today. In contrast, dialogue requires participants to suspend attachment to their particular points of view. It stresses respect for others, listening, trust, and the shared pursuit of deeper understanding.
We live and work in relational environments where the individual impacts the collective and the collective impacts the individual. Dialogic thinking helps us perceive the interconnectedness of our surroundings. Dialogue helps people to transcend their individual perspectives in order to achieve a larger view of reality. This is why transformative dialogue is a key tool to your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategy. It can be used to establish goals and strategies for dismantling personal and structural biases.
“Openness denotes an intention to respect the coherence in others’ views and encourages members to tell their stories in a way that lets others see and understand them.”
Rules of Engagement
There are no universal rules for transformative dialogue. Dialogues that have strict rules about how people interact may promote civility but may have little or no long-term effect on interactions. Allowing conversations to go to the heart of the participants’ differences allows them to confront what is difficult, to take responsibility for the exchange, and to hear each other’s voices in a new way. The dialogue itself will determine the character of transformation.
Nevertheless, there are guidelines dialogues traditionally follow – suspend judgment, be open, be curious and listen. Suspending judgment creates space for truth and authenticity. It means suspending one’s opinion and the certainty that lies behind it and focusing on learning and reaching a higher level of understanding instead of a need to produce a specific outcome.
Being open to the process conveys a willingness to be vulnerable and amplify whatever benevolent attitudes one brings with them. Openness denotes an intention to respect the coherence in others’ views and encourages members to tell their stories in a way that lets others see and understand them. Displays of profound directness can generate empathy to understand those around them.
An atmosphere of curiosity encourages contributors to look for the sense in what others are saying and makes room for the possibility that another person’s perspective may have some validity while seeking a balance between inquiry and advocacy.
Listening and taking turns speaking creates an environment for participants to feel safe to share their pain, frustration, sadness, or anger, or personal experiences. Since we believe our inner thoughts and feelings are essential to who we are, that they define us, it is critical that one’s voice is heard for the dialogue to be successful.
The Dialogic Leader
In transformative dialogue, the facilitator(s) do not determine who should participate, what the goals of the conversation should be, or how participants should speak. The facilitators are present and ensure all participants stay on track and have the opportunity to be heard. It is important for the facilitator to allow the direction of the dialogue to emerge naturally. Too much guidance can undermine the parties’ self-determination and make the conversation less meaningful. Too much management can inhibit transformation because conflict is not fully expressed, and what is difficult is not confronted. The dialogic leader should demonstrate an open mindset and help participants forge an awareness of their blind spots and implicit bias.
The Role of Bias
Although nearly every company has policies and procedures to address biases in the workplace, most rarely engage in open dialogues with their employees about perceived biases unless a complaint or lawsuit is filed. Bias is a prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way that’s considered to be unfair. There are two types of biases: conscious bias (also known as explicit bias) and unconscious bias (also known as implicit bias). It is important to note that biases, conscious or unconscious, are not limited to ethnicity and race. Biases may exist toward any social group – a person’s age, gender, gender identity, physical abilities, religion, sexual orientation, weight, and many other characteristics.
Unconscious biases are attitudes or stereotypes about certain groups of people that are formed outside our conscious awareness that affect our views, actions, and decision making abilities. Everyone holds unconscious beliefs about various social and identity groups. The good news is unconscious biases are not permanent. In fact, they are malleable, and steps can be taken to limit their impact on our thoughts and behaviors.
Unconscious bias is far more prevalent than conscious prejudice and often incompatible with one’s conscious values. However, contrary to popular belief, our beliefs and attitudes are not strongly related to our behaviors. Organizations care a great deal about employee attitudes because they assume attitudes are strong predictors of actual behaviors, and notably job performance. Yet, there is only about a 16% overlap between attitudes and behavior, and even lower for engagement and performance, or prejudice and discrimination. This means that the majority of racist or sexist behaviors that take place at work would not have been predicted from a person’s attitudes or beliefs. And yes, it is also true that there is bias at the level of society and culture, in any society and culture, which companies may not be able to change. But leaders must think harder about shaping their own organizational cultures, creating truly ethical, fair, and inclusive environments, and acting as real-life examples of the moral values they want to promote in their own organizations. Hence, dialogue as a tool in the truth and reconciliation process between contrasting beliefs enables organizations to identify, acknowledge and understand the biases present in their corporate systems.
Many organizations committed to equity & justice have already developed their strategies to address implicit bias and structural racism, and some have robust race equity initiatives already underway. However, virtually all programs face unavoidable obstacles when they try to undertake organizational change because they do not include transformative dialogue. Dialogues focused on promoting bias literacy, identifying biases or gaps in recruiting, interviewing, hiring, promoting, performance evaluations, compensation policies, and processes or retention programs. Facilitating deeper, more meaningful conversations to help find mutual understanding, and imagining different perspectives and outcomes, makes way for the paradigm shift needed for real, sustainable change. Dialogues can help generate a broader set of possible solutions to challenge the status quo.
Read Part One of How Dialogue Can Transform Your Diversity & Inclusion Strategy.
Lynne Pederson (Class XXXVII) is an organizational leader focusing on diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging. Lynne graduated from University of California, Santa Barbara with a B.A. in political science; and from Golden Gate University, School of Law with a LLM with a concentration on labor and employment law.
This essay is part of a series of contributions by Lynne Pederson on race equity in the workplace.
