Introduction
MY time as a disability ERG lead was dominated by addressing the multiple concerns raised by members. We had a lot of work to do with limited resources. I left celebration of diversity up to my successor. I focused on inclusion in a very practical problem-solving way.
Over the past near 18 months of working with ERG leads from a range of diversity areas I have been rethinking my hyper focus on practical problem solving.
Celebration of diversity is an inclusion strategy. It has a goal of bringing about positive cultural change in the workforce. It should be part of a balanced approach by an ERG.
ERGs are created to address a perceived need – so their primary focus is on generating change – of perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. On an organisational level this includes policies, procedures and practices. On a workplace level this includes activity that allows a workforce’s culture to evolve into a more aware, responsive, inclusive, and kinder community.
One of us
Contemporary research affirms that our natural behaviour is to privilege members of our own group rather than specifically exclude members of other groups.
In the book Tribal Michael Morris argues that we have misunderstood this reflex as primarily exclusive when in fact it is the opposite. This doesn’t mean that we aren’t also brutally exclusive at times – just that it’s not our primary nature. The problem is that our in-group can be too narrowly defined, too exclusive. The challenge is to make our in-group bigger. We can expand from a small team or group all the way up to the ideal that we are all fellow humans – and maybe beyond that if we are so inclined.
In between there is a realisable goal – we are all members of the same workplace community equally deserving of kindness and empathy – and (the benefit of privileging in-group members) the extra effort to respond to individual situations and needs.
We are naturally social creatures. In fact, some are reimagining that what made it possible for humans to evolve the way we have isn’t our way with fire or tool making. It is that we are more potently social than the other primates.
In-groups are cool with diversity, and with accommodating (privileging) individual needs within the group. We have a natural response to be inclusive and supportive of our own. The challenge is how we can expand our in-group – how we embrace others as one of us.
Celebrating diversity as if people really matter
I didn’t want to initiate celebrations of the diversity of people with disability while members were still being excluded through inaccessible physical spaces, technologies, and practices. Being included in principle but not in practice isn’t a welcome experience – and for way too many people with disability that has been a persistent reality in workplaces and in the community.
But among ‘diversity groups’ people with disability are unique in that others do not face the same physical and practical needs for accommodations. Some diversity groups do require changes to policies and procedures, while for others the need is for changes to attitudes and behaviours.
We exclude unintentionally when we do not see how we respond to difference unconsciously, triggered by cultural or circumstantial conditioning that says, ‘They are not one of us.’
Research undertaken in the US a few years ago showed that managers, while sympathetic to the cause of Disability Inclusion, were not comfortable talking to staff with disability in case their ignorance of their disability gave offence.
I had a similar experience in 2019 when an office fire warden admitted they had not approached a blind staff member with a guide dog about their emergency response needs out of fear of being thought offensive.
So, while there maybe be an inclusive sentiment that wants to embrace a person as ‘one of us’, unresolved anxieties can create a barrier and push that person into an out-group.
We often use the term diversity not to denote subtle differences we all have, but to denote large differences that place another person into a separate group – whether they want that or not. Members of diversity groups want inclusion because the distinctions we make about them are unkind and inappropriate. So, if we label them as members of a ‘diversity group’ we have created a classification that not only excludes them through an act we imagine as inclusive, but it can impose upon them a primary identity they do not want.
Our tribal instincts are not at fault, but they do induce us to think and behave in terms of groups and membership of groups at an unconscious level – even when it creates out-groups we do not intend to make. We have the ability and the power, as well as an obligation, to make our sense of tribal identity far larger.
This last point is important because by their very nature, an organisation’s workforce constitutes a group to which all staff belong. It has the potential to be a vital in-group for all staff members. This is often explicit as an obligation in codes of conduct.
The fact is that we are all diverse, and we can all be divided into sub-groups that could become grounds for exclusion – where we live, which sport we follow [and which team], music tastes, hair colour, and so. Indeed, there have been times when such groupings have been grounds for exclusion, and sometimes violence.
Our culture has evolved to a point where a residual stubbornly persistent insistence on putting some people into out-groups remains. Our community has steadily evolved into a rich array of diverse individual expressions as the demand for conformity to determined and imposed identities has declined. Individuals are asserting self-determined identities over those culturally asserted. This is a novel development.
Our next step is to affirm diversity as an individual attribute of every member of our evolving in-group. We are who we say we are, not who we are said to be.
Conclusion
The evolution of our shared community over the past several centuries has been remarkable. However, there are persistent culturally embedded habits of exclusion by the legacy of rigidly defined in-groups that will continue to decline slowly, probably via generational change.
In the meantime, our efforts to advance that process of change include celebrating the diversity inherent in our community members we identify by their ‘diversity group’ labels. There is a risk that we will accidentally contribute to the persistence of these exclusionary group ideas if we start seeing individual group members as inherently identified with the group.
I don’t want to be known as Michael with a disability. Disability is part of my identity – an obvious part – but I could offer up another 100 things that make me who I am. It’s not all of who I am. Its not even most of who I am.
Celebrating diversity is important, but let’s remember that it is diversity within a group. The question is whether that group is our in-group and the people whose diversity we celebrate are one of us.
This is an intentional choice on our part – and it is what will make the positive difference that should be the goal of every ERG.
Michael Patterson
12 December 2024