Without Excuses: Unleas the Power of Diversity to Build Your Business - Hardcover

JOE WATSON is a dynamic management consultant, business owner, and former business executive who now leads major corporations and individuals through the process of operating and living Without Excuses. Much of his time is spent advising on employee issues, especially workplace diversity. His clients include Freddie Mac, MTV Networks, and Lifetime Entertainment, among many others. He was a special aide to former Governor Mark Warner of Virginia. Joe Watson has hosted his own radio program and is a sought-after speaker to organizations around the world.

Chapter One

Strip Away the Excuses
 
To succeed at diversity recruiting, you must strip away your disabling excuses and get real. Getting real means you no longer tolerate the use of the word "can't." It means you start to recognize suspended business logic when you see it, and treat diversity like every other important strategic initiative.
 
With respect to diversity, it is my experience that organizations typically fall into one of four categories: obstructionist (they do as little as possible), defensive (they do only that which is legally or politically expedient), accommodative (they meet legal and ethical requirements, and perhaps a bit more), or proactive (they act before they have to). Do any of these sound familiar? If your organization falls into one of the first three categories, this chapter was written especially for you. It is time for you to look in the mirror and tell the truth. Pitney Bowes looked into the mirror and began a proven, documented commitment to diversity in the 1940s. One aspect of its mission statement declares that it will "value, actively pursue, and leverage diversity in our employees, and through our relationships with customers, business partners and communities, because it is essential to innovation and growth." The company is proactive in that it holds itself accountable to certain standards for diversity and integrates diversity with other strategic initiatives.
 
Any diversity initiative short of a proactive program is not real; it lacks teeth and it lacks substance. Organizations short on commitment usually expose themselves in at least one of two ways: inadequate resource allocation and lack of accountability. All too often, organizations don't commit adequate dollars to make their diversity efforts work. Yes, you may attend all the important Unity Dinners and People of Color Conferences. But now that we're being honest, we know this is not real money. This is "make nice-nice" money. Organizations also underpay, overwork, and neglect to develop the skills needed to fulfill the roles tasked with driving the diversity recruiting effort. You don't hear, "Lets not put Mary on that project because she makes too much money" with regard to other important strategic initiatives. So why diversity? Without proper resources, results suffer. But since few results are expected anyway, failure in diversity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
 
Here's what companies do when they allocate "real" resources to a project: They fund research to study the issue. They fund manpower to create a business plan. They fund a carefully thought-out, adequate budget, and put their most talented people on the project. They pay them well, give them the tools they need to succeed, and incent them to deliver the best possible results. They monitor progress by measuring intermediate and long-term outcomes. And if the team doesn't deliver, they lose raises, or promotions--or their jobs.
 
Like many large organizations, Wachovia Bank has a developed diversity strategy; but unlike most organizations, it demonstrates true commitment to the outcomes and so developed metrics to measure progress. The company identified key factors of its corporate goal of increased workforce diversity, and began evaluating recruiters on the completion of these goals, offering incentives for those who presented a diverse slate of successful candidates. The "scorecard" criteria included number of hires, time to fill, percentage of diverse candidates, percentage of diverse hires, interview-to-offer ratio, and offer-to-acceptance rate (Garvey, Charlotte. "The Next Generation of Hiring Metrics," HR Magazine, Vol. 50, No.4, April 2005).
 
This kind of accountability is the other clear index of commitment. It boggles my mind how people can sit at a big conference table and talk about how they "can't" find any diverse professionals, and everyone else just passively nods in agreement. In the real world, where there is commitment, there are tangible, meaningful consequences for those who fail.
 
For example, when a consumer product company launches a new brand, a team of very smart professionals methodically conducts market research until it knows where consumers in its target market live, how much money they have, what cars they drive, and what they eat for breakfast. If that team came back and said, "We just can't find any information about our target market," there would be serious consequences. The team members' superiors would question their every move, trying to determine what went wrong and whose fault it was.
 
These same questions should be asked of recruiters, HR professionals, or executives who say they "can't find any" diverse professionals. Are we really to believe that these same companies that can dig up information on anyone, anywhere, can't tell you where to find African-American accountants or Latino lawyers or Asian-American marketing professionals? Am I the only one having a hard time with this logic? Did anyone ever think that the same methodologies that led a company to open restaurants in Toledo and Santa Fe also could inform us that Xavier University in Louisiana graduates more African-American biology majors than any other university in the country, and has for twenty years (Isaac Black, African American Students' College Guide [Wiley, 2000])?
 
I believe that's called a trend--and it's easy to spot with a little research.
 
So the first step is to come clean, admit you have committed inadequate resources or failed to require accountability, then strip away the excuses that have enabled you to fail for so long. I don't care what your excuses are; in my eighteen years working in the corporate world and my eight years as a recruiter, I've heard them all, and they are almost always lame. While there are as many excuses for diversity failures as there are companies to make them, the following are the excuses I've heard most often:
 
1.         "We can't find any." Well, you won't find any if you don't look. They are out there. Forget anything you've heard about the numbers of diverse job candidates shrinking. As with any statistical analysis, you must examine the numbers you read with care--and the reality is that every year there are more qualified diverse candidates, not fewer. For example, while it is true that the percentage of accountants who are diverse has been shrinking in the past few years, the overall pool of accountants is growing--so the aggregate number of diverse accountants is actually larger today than it was several years ago.
 
But these numbers shouldn't matter to you anyway. The issue is not whether there are enough diverse candidates to go around to every organization. The issue is whether you can attract and recruit enough for your organization. This is called competing for resources--something your organization likely does every day. If the challenge were to find new clients, your organization would scour markets and databases, conduct focus groups, and generally do whatever was necessary to find them. Research is powerful stuff--it can reveal down to the street who lives where, how much they make, what they read. But when it comes to diversity, these principles often are not applied. No, when it comes to diversity, organizations run ads in the same old newspapers, attend the same old conferences, and wonder why nothing happens.
 
Now let's think about what would happen if you applied the same targeted efforts that have worked on other initiatives. Imagine, for example, what would happen if you Googled "accountant" and "Howard University" (one of the leading historically black universities in our country). The names and networking contacts that come up will be largely African-American. Or even better, search for the "Top...