Discrimination: It Exists In Your Workplace
The beginning of a new year for a media company usually implies revisiting a host of annual activities that must don new and improved avatars to be future-fit for at least one more round. As we do this exercise, several discussions happen, and inadvertently the traits that make good leaders, promising future captains, team builders, company creators, trendsetters and the like are tabled.
Businesses are only as good as the people that drive them. Hence, people must be celebrated. But the more we understand this, the more we are faced with the vulnerability of this truth. Human behaviour comes with doggedness.
Don’t go by statements such as he is hard headed or she is combative. When it comes to things that matter, everyone is stubborn. People come to believe in little truths of life, inculcated directly or indirectly into their ideologies over time. Driven by that long term training, people’s response mechanisms to change, vary. Some retaliate and refuse to budge, while some bide time to come back, with perhaps even more force. A disagreement will always find a way to boomerang.
On the bright side, it could be seen as a healthy and equal exchange of ideas. But on the flip side, it will manifest into that inflexible boss or colleague, whose very thought process may seem counterintuitive. The point here is that it is this set of individuals that become the collective that runs a business.
When, by definition, habit and culture is this deeply rooted, how can anyone claim to be unbiased? True, that is the very quality needed to bring decadal changes or to break the monotone but the removal of bias is an impossible ask. It is not going to happen, and the wise do not insist on it.
Instead, it should be accepted and addressed. Over the years, different ways have been created for leaders and people to address bias at work.
Some bring in systems and processes that will compel the need to think differently. Some structures force diversity that can challenge instinctive decisions and force people to rethink and take one more look. More evolved setups take the pressure off the outcome and shine the lens on the process of reaching that outcome.
Understanding the need, and putting in the laws and systems, for diversity and inclusion have been around for over five decades. We continue to lag. There is progress, of course. It is fast and it is big but it is not fast enough or big enough to be dubbed as equality.
Everyone is subjected to discrimination at work every day. It can be gender, age, race or it could be the way people think, live or their lifestyles. It could be just about anything that makes a person different. People may have to deal with it in office or interactions with partners or external stakeholders.
Pushing for change is everyone’s responsibility. And knowing how to work around the current realities is prudence. For employees, choosing the workplace well is critical. Companies that have similar looking people constructs, or pride in their processes more than their people, or misunderstand their arrogance for self-confidence, or use the no-fix-needed-if-ain’t-broken approach as a principle, or eerily look like people factories — are all avoidable.
As for leaders, if even one of these describes their teams or their company, then it is the alarm bell for change. Because if they don’t, they will become the data point of the surveys that show how leaders’ tenures or company’s success periods are becoming shorter-lived.
