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#Inclusion #culturechange #govtech #DEI
A few days ago I was on a panel in DC for government employees, talking about how to increase diversity in their organizations. During Q&A I was asked about how to shift leadership minds at government agencies and suppliers towards being more open to inclusion initiatives. I told them that in my observations two things are key:
1) It depends on what the existing culture values
2) Working against the existing cultural value system won't work. Work with it
The culture of a place is the set of behaviors that are rewarded and punished. That's it. Not the mission statement. Not what the CEO or Executive Director says. Not the marketing materials.
A company like Google has a different set of values, than say, the Department of Agriculture, the Golden State Warriors, or Grumman (maker of USPS "long life" trucks).
One culture is not necessarily better or worse than another. But it's important to know what is valued in the culture you're chsnging
For Google for example, I learned a lot from watching Laszlo Bock change the culture around interviewing, and have borrowed heavily from his technique to change the culture further.
Some of Google's existing values were "making decisions with data," "insisting on the highest standards," and "hiring the best," and at the time, yes, "meritocracy." (Unpacking the idea of meritocracy is a whole different thread...)
Google's interview process at the time was not passing many underrepresented folk. At the time, conversations around addressing this devolved into "Underrepresented candidates perform worse!" And "We can't lower the bar for them, or anyone!"
This was of course very frustrating to folks that knew that this pushback was unfounded. "This isn't lowering the bar! It's being more equitable! Equity is important!" Are all true statements. But the arguments were counter to the existing cultural values.
Saying, "Let's consider more dimensions than just interview performance! Let's lower the bar for technical performance to factor in lived experience!" Also doesn't quite work.
"lowering the bar" feels like moving away from "insisting on the highest standards." Having a different bar for underrepresented folks feels like a move away from meritocracy (that word again). All this feels like a move away from hiring the best.
Again this will work on some folk! But it is against the existing culture
We can get mad about if this should or shouldn't have worked, but I think that's unhelpful.
We can get mad about if the existing cultural values are "good" or "bad," but again, that won't help drive the change that we're looking for.
Instead Laszlo and friends asked a few questions that I'll paraphrase.
"Let's look in our performance review system at the top performing Google employees, and pull their resumes and interview scores. Let's also look at where they went to school, and their GPA"
"Do you think we will see a correlation between top performing Google employees and higher interview scores?
Between top performers and where they went to school?
Top performers and GPA?"
I think you know where this is going. 🙂
Much lower than expected correlation with interview scores (at the time). Lower correlation with "top schools." Lower correlation with GPA.
The precision and recall of our interview classifier was too low! We could've been "hiring the best" even better!
@mekkaokereke I had this same observation at CIA. I once told a senior manager that we hired people who could pretend to be your friend, manipulate you into betraying your country at the risk of you and your family's life and sleep just fine at night, then we put those people in leadership and wondered why we had shit leadership culture. (Case Officers). She (in leadership) was defensive: "We use the same personality profile as CEOs." Me: "LOL you mean sociopaths?"
@chasteen @mekkaokereke
David, I worked for a consulting firm in DC in the early/mid 90s that did work for An Agency (that you might have mentioned). The thing I found interesting was that a majority of the contractors were hired from BYU - conventional wisdom seemed to be that Mormons were un-blackmail-able. Made for some strange culture in my office (as a non-Mormon).
It does suck to see sociopaths in leadership positions...
@dyedgrey @mekkaokereke
Yeah. Mormons are pretty competitive candidates. They have foreign travel, speak a second language, but can pass the background check re: drugs etc.
But anyone who thinks Mormons don't have deep, dark secrets doesn't know many Mormons. :-)
It's also self-perpetuating, like the Ivy League in the early days of CIA. Once you get a few BYU alums in the door, they facilitate others coming in behind them.