For the first 12 or 13 years of my career, I was blissfully, painfully unaware of genuine issues on inclusion and diversity. I knew how to say the right things because I’d gone through all the training programs, but I didn’t really feel it in my heart of hearts. I’m a white male from the New York City area, so I was always part of the majority culture in whatever major law firm or major US corporation that I worked for.
Then I came to work for DSM, which is a Dutch-headquartered company, and I found myself travelling at least once a month to the Netherlands for internal meetings. It was all Dutch people, and they would speak in a language that I didn’t understand, they’d talk about sports teams that I didn’t follow, they’d eat food that I found very strange, they wouldn’t invite me to dinners or lunches or even just for coffee because I was the outsider in many respects. I would find myself flying home on the plane feeling depressed, angry and frustrated.
It finally dawned on me that, for the first time in my career, I wasn’t part of the majority culture in these environments, and it altered my behavior. It made me hesitant, it made me less likely to speak up, it made me much more aware and in tune with all the little gestures and words that were made in the room – and that was exhausting.
I was actually thinking of leaving and, after a few of those trips, I said to myself, if I feel like this when I go there, how do my female employees, my racial minority employees, how do they feel working in an environment that’s predominantly American white male? So I asked them, and they told me. That was my epiphany: how can we get the most out of any organization when such a significant portion of it is not bringing their whole selves to work every day (like I wasn’t when I went to the Netherlands)? And that was how we began to change the programs.
Now that I found myself to be awake and aware of these issues and the impact of not being part of the majority culture, I started to work hard to change things. I had a more junior female lawyer that I worked very closely with for a few years on mergers and acquisitions and, as a consequence, she would sometimes have to travel for two, three weeks at a time when we were doing due diligence at a location or in the midst of a transactional negotiation. She did a great job.
Over a period of two years, she had two small children, and so I said to myself, why don’t I take some of the pressure off of her and not give her these assignments anymore because they require her to be away from her family and two small children for such an extended period of time? What a great person I am!
And then I talked to my sister, who’s about the same age and a lawyer at a corporation in the US. With such pride I explained it all to her, and she looked at me and said, ‘You are a number one fool!’
And I said, ‘What are you talking about? Look how smart and progressive I am!’
She said, ‘No, you are a complete idiot. Who are you to decide for this person what they can and cannot do? Do you decide that for your male lawyers?’
So the next Monday, I went into the office, set up a meeting with this lawyer and said, ‘Look, I think I have really done you a disservice. I thought I was being a good guy by not assigning you these M&A projects that would have been high-profile, but would have required you to be away from your family, and it has been brought to my attention that maybe that wasn’t the smart thing to do.’
She actually started crying, and said, ‘I’ve been thinking of leaving the company, because I thought that since I’d had children you had lost faith in me.’
Going forward, I’ve been very keen on talking to all of our employees around, ‘Hey look, if you have an issue with the demands of different assignments because you can’t balance it with what you have going on at home or with elderly parents, tell me, and accommodations will be made and there will be no adverse consequences for you.’ But I don’t want to be in the position ever again where I’m making decisions for people without having that conversation with them.
Certainly we look to recruit and hire diverse talent, so we take a lot of different things into consideration when we’re looking to hire lawyers for the law department that go beyond just experience. We try to bring in diversity in terms of age, gender, national origin and race. They certainly can’t be determinative factors in hiring because that would be discriminatory, but they are definitely taken into consideration and we certainly put in place – not just for the law department but for all of DSM – different tools and processes to try to weed out unconscious bias in the hiring process.
We use a basic questionnaire that’s the same for everyone, so we can generate similar responses and ensure that there’s no bias in the questioning or interviewing process. We have a diverse team that looks at responses again to ensure we’re weeding out a little bit of the unconscious bias that creates an environment where folks tend to hire people that look like them, act like them and think like them. Then, our diverse team will have an opportunity to not only conduct interviews but be part of the decision-making process. As such, it’s not just me making a decision as to who we hire and who we don’t hire, but the team itself – I give a great deal of autonomy to make a decision as to whether or not a candidate will fit with the team from an inclusion perspective or not.
Once we bring lawyers on board, the inclusion part is where it gets difficult. You really have to spend a lot of time and energy and effort to ensure that when you bring folks together from different backgrounds and different experiences, that it is a very close team, communicative and collaborative – and that can only happen when you spend time ensuring that there’s complete transparency and authenticity, and giving everybody an opportunity to reach their full potential within the group.
DSM is not unique – many companies have a lot of internal diversity and inclusion and unconscious bias training programs and things like that, which I find to be very nice but not impactful. So I try to create experiential learning opportunities for members of the team, because that’s how I came to my epiphany on these issues myself. I’m on the board of directors of the Tri-State Diversity Council and what I’ll try to do, for example, is find some white male attorneys and send them to events that are overwhelmingly attended by African American females. Putting people in an environment where, for the first time in many respects, they are part of the minority culture is an eye-opening experience for them, and those experiential learning opportunities create a need for reflection. That reflection allows for adaptation, not just in behaviors but point of view. The most important thing for me, is that those members of the legal team who are part of the majority culture have an opportunity to be confronted with the privilege that comes with that majority, and that changes their point of view. When I create these experiential learning opportunities at provocative inclusion and diversity conferences and experiences, the lawyers come back with their own evangelical bent on the issue and then become my ambassadors within the organization for change.
I’m working on a project for the whole company to completely rewrite our policies, procedures and norms to be a better fit for the future of work. I’m a strong believer that, in corporate America today, the current policies, procedures, benefits and practices were written 60 years ago by people who looked like me – and they are still working really well for people who look like me. If we want to drive change, we don’t make incremental changes to these policies, practices and procedures to adjust to changes in the law, we bring a diverse team together to rewrite them so that they work for everyone.
To me, it’s about adapting to the future of work. We’ll see much more flexible work time, much more use of technology for collaboration, more concierge services offered to employees so that they’re not wasting their time grocery shopping and picking up dry cleaning and things like that, much more of the forced sponsorship programs where diverse talent gets a traditional sponsor so that the next generation of leaders doesn’t look exactly like the previous generation of leaders. I’m completely convinced that, because of demographic changes, diversity is a given. If a company is not diverse going forward, it just means it’s forgotten a half-to-two-thirds of the population when looking for talent, and no company can survive that way. It’s those companies that create a culture, environment and infrastructure to foster inclusiveness that will be really successful going forward.