Introduction
Generally speaking the [Australian] culture I live in is pretty inclusive. Of course, biases are present and there acts of intentional exclusion.
When I was DCJ DEN Chair [11/2016. to 3/2020] I made a point to the then Secretary that there was an abundance of good will in the department, and we should aim to tap it. It wasn’t that people were not responsive to disability inclusion as much as not being habituated to thinking inclusively. I was committed to engaging with that goodwill.
There’s a trend toward greater inclusivity, but, as ever, demand exceeds supply. Those in need are justly impatient. But that impatience must not become cranky. There are smarter ways of making good change happen. Blaming people for not ‘getting it’ doesn’t work. Having a sense that one is on the right side of the moral fence – and there are others who appear morally defective – is destructive.
Contemporary workplace data tells us that staff members are under pressure just dealing with business as usual. Many also have private life demands and dramas that decrease the cognitive and emotional bandwidth they have to process changes in perception and behaviour that foster greater inclusion – even if they want to.
We all want to be as good as we imagine we could be, but we have only so much capacity to modify our behaviour in the blizzard of demands upon us.
Inclusion advocates must work smarter. They can work harder too, but if they are not working smarter that will be energy wasted.
We are always better off reinforcing positive behaviour than punishing bad behaviour. This is a fundamental insight. Being nice and being kind gets better results than being cranky – even if there is apparent justification.
This post has been inspired by Michael Morris’ Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together. Studies in evolutionary, cultural, and social psychology are helping us re-imagine what we thought we knew about making good change happen.
Today there’s an ever-growing wealth of insights for leaders of positive inclusive change efforts to tap into. It’s a constantly evolving area of inquiry. Below I want to reflect on some of the challenges leaders face.
An historical perspective
Depending on your age, your sense of how fast things are changing will have a different perspective.
The Australian community has been evolving toward greater inclusivity since the period after WW2 which saw refugees from war-ravaged Europe come here up to the present. Things have been helped along by movements and campaigns, and by generational change. This is as well as legislation and policies. It has been a multi-faceted and collective effort.
I marched or protested for the rights of women, gays [it was called Gay Rights back then], and Aboriginal people in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Because I grew up in a community full of post WW2 migrants I didn’t have any problems with multiculturalism. My parents did. They were immigrants from the UK, as was I. They didn’t eat foreign food. At my 2ndwedding my mother eyed a plate of French vegetables suspiciously. She earnestly, in a whisper, asked me whether they were “safe to eat.”
My serious interest in disability developed in the early 1990s when I started working with the NSW Department of Community Services [DOCS]. I had been involved with people with disability since back in the early 1970s when I worked in psychiatric hospitals and in several roles after. But DOCS introduced me to the political dimension.
Over that time, I have seen the introduction of legislation, and the development of policies, designed to reduce discrimination. In the 1980s I was working in the Commonwealth Employment Service when legislation against discrimination in employment came into force – and we had to introduce our business owner clients to it. That was a fun thing to do in a rural community already fed up with ‘hippies’.
When you have a perspective spanning 6 decades you have a sense of definite change rolling out slowly. That’s evolution for you.
Some cultures and communities have remained steadfastly determined to perpetuate divisive and discriminatory values and practices. But they are in the minority. Recent trends suggest a backlash has been manifesting. While that’s true to some extent, we need to reflect on whether the ‘good guys’ are not part of the reason.
I think we have been working harder, but not smarter. We have been relying on ‘truths’ that no longer stand up to contemporary evidence. We need new truths. Scholarship has provided what we need. But we need to take the time to discover it.
Change leadership
Whether one is an ERG lead or a member of a business unit’s leadership team, or an executive leader change is a constant theme. There are always external factors necessitating internal adaptation. And there are always internal factors demanding further adaption.
One of those factors is social change as values and expectations evolve. The welfare of staff isn’t just a WHS concern. It can determine who stays, and who seeks to join the organisation – ultimately influencing its culture and its ability to perform in conformity with its mission. In the private sector this can be a matter of life or death in the marketplace.
The public sector is very different. This is something we don’t reflect on deeply enough. Departments don’t go bust, and there’s always a steady stream of candidates for vacant positions. The organisational mission is the public good delivered to an acceptable degree. Instead of profit, strong principles and high standards of thought and behaviour are intended. That’s on a macro level.
On the micro level of individual self-interest, for many staff members the reality is that their job is just that – a job. Their focus is on meeting the requirements of their role so they can keep their job, pay their bills, realise their ambitions/dreams, and sustain their families to the best of their ability.
This places leaders in an interesting position. They have the same imperatives as other staff plus a need to navigate the complexities generated by the forces of change. For-profit businesses have an imperative to invest in supporting internal leaders to be effective change leaders. This isn’t uniformly the case in the public sector for a variety of reasons that I won’t explore here.
I want to focus the reader’s attention on two key ideas:
- Any role having to do with leading change is complex and challenging.
- The resources and support to perform in the role well may not necessarily be offered or available.
ERGs are about change
It is worthwhile reminding the reader that ERG is Employee Resource Group. Let’s focus on resource – for what? If it has anything to do with BAU that’s paid work. ERGs are substantially voluntary – so to do what?
Its to change something in the organisation that the organisation can’t do without voluntary assistance – and that change is to the benefit of the staff [especially ERG members]. What could be that difficult?
Let’s establish the insight that an organisation needs its staff to volunteer to deliver change that is necessary and desirable. That must be complex and/or difficult. It is also a clear admission that the organisation knows it can’t achieve its objective with its own ‘professional’ resources.
I want to appear to digress for a moment. There is legislation, with related policies, that require changes to the way organisations behave. However, governments do not resource agencies to comply with these requirements at a paid professional capacity. Why would you need volunteers otherwise?
I think there are two reasons for this. The first is governments are still operating on the ‘cognitive silver bullet’ theory which assumes that humans are ‘rational actors’ who adapt their behaviours to information. This has never been true outside the fantasy of hardline reason fanboys. The second is that government agencies have not developed a cogent argument against this position because [a] they believe the same theory, and [b] they haven’t taken the opportunity to become deeply informed on what the reality is.
The response is to hope that a body of motivated and self-interested but not necessarily well-informed staff might have the solution. What they can do is articulate what their needs are. But if that was the nub of the problem a few consultations and a couple of surveys would be ‘job done’. Plainly that’s not the case. Maybe these volunteer staff could offer insights into what the real problem is?
So, let’s be clear. Driving necessary organisational behavioural and cultural change to create a reality that inclusion and diversity ideals are manifest across an organisation is a hugely difficult and complex challenge. And of course, a bunch of enthusiastic volunteers are going to provide the solution. No?
This is hard work – but it must be done
I quit fulltime work on 10 June 2021. I had quit the DEN Chair role in March the year before and had devoted my time to working on my department’s Disability Inclusion Action Plan [DIAP]. My unexpected elevation to DEN Chair in November 2018 made me a member of the DIAP implementation committee. That was a firsthand exposure to how complex the whole Disability Inclusion business is. That experience profoundly influenced how I operated as DEN Chair.
For 18 months after I left fulltime work, I researched Disability Inclusion in particular, and Inclusion in general for 18 months – putting in at least 4 hours a day, sometimes 7 days a week. I finally had the time to catch up on stuff I wished I had known earlier.
It was obvious that Disability Inclusion was more complex than a DEI team could manage, but why was this the case? Changing human behaviour has always been problematic. One of the reasons we invented religion was to do that. That’s worked a bit, it also generated more unforeseen problems that we are still arguing over.
Changing behaviour in an organisational context in response to evolving cultural values and expectations adds new flavours to the challenge. This is especially so in the public sector where there an expectation that agencies funded by public money reflect and honour the evolving level of diversity in the communities they serve – and which fund them.
We have legislation, policies and programs but our culture prefers persuasion rather than enforcement. This is a kind and inclusive approach, but it just multiplies the level of difficulty beyond the scope well-intentioned amateurs.
I have elsewhere argued that member elections are not a reliable guide to getting the best leader, and here I want to affirm that ERG leadership roles are complex and demanding and require knowledge and skill. It would be a very good thing if those supporting the ERG were similarly knowledgeable and skilled. I should also reaffirm that this is collaborative work – ERG professional, DEI professional, and organisational leadership professional.
I think an intentional, planned, and supported approach to ERG leadership is essential if ERGs are to meet the potential that is implicit in their formation.
ERG leaders must be supported to grow their skills in the same way as any other professional role. This is especially so because the job is implicitly beyond what the organisation can manage without volunteer support. And here’s the paradox – the hardest job is easily least supported.
Conclusion
Change is a constant challenge these days. Sometimes it is exhausting. Sometimes it seems pointless. But making our workplaces more inclusive and safer is an objective we cannot responsibly resile from.
The only reason an ERG exists is that it is assumed to play a vital role in attaining a goal that is beneficial to everyone involved. It is implicitly understood that getting to that goal is very difficult. I was a founding member of what is now the DCJ DEN. Its inaugural meeting was in July 2010. That’s over 14 years ago now. And still not mission accomplished. The equal rights movements I participated in in the late 1960s and early 1970s can report the same thing – still not mission accomplished.
Nevertheless, we have come a long way with Disability Inclusion – and all the other equal rights causes can say the same thing. We are getting there. But even [nice and kind] people of goodwill are slow to adapt. It isn’t intentional resistance, just the nature of who we are.
This is good work. We are making progress. But, like any field, we can do far better if we are skilled and knowledgeable.
Here’s my challenge to ERG Leads, Champions and Executive Sponsors – answer these questions quickly:
- Why does the ERG exist – what lack in organisational capacity is it supposed to fill?
- What exactly is the volunteer ERG meant to do that the organisation’s paid staff can’t?
- What tangible outcomes from ERG activities are expected/desired from all stakeholders -and do they align?
I think ERGs play an essential role in driving very necessary positive changes to align organisational cultures with community values. The argument is compelling for private sector bodies when inclusion and diversity enhance their capacity to attract and retain staff who sustain or boost their bottom line. In the public sector it is a moral imperative. Taxpayers are shareholders in a sense – and there is an expectation that they have equal rights to employment in the organisations their taxes fund. That right to access employment includes a right to safety [physical and psychological] – and have the opportunity to flourish.
Safe and inclusive work cultures provide more equitable and effective services – which is the mission of the public sector. Good leadership is essential. If ERGs are to perform as desired, then they must be supported. And we must begin with helping them find the best leaders they can and developing their potential.