Jim Norman, Adriene Bruce, Michelle Lee

“You’re so articulate,” “You must have voted for Obama” and “I love your name, it’s so ethnic” top the list of blatantly obvious things you shouldn’t say to Blacks. But it’s not always about what you should say as much as how and when you say it.

“The comments frequently may be coming from an unconscious bias,” says Kraft Foods Group Vice President of Diversity Jim Norman. Living in an increasingly diverse country doesn’t necessarily make it easier. In fact, it becomes more difficult, especially when you’re unsure of how best to build relationships at work. People struggle to find affinity and fall back on stereotypes unintentionally, Norman says.

Most people aren’t aware of the negative impact their words can have on others, according to Wells Fargo Executive Vice President and Northeast Regional President Michelle Lee. She recommends that Blacks “call it to attention and explain how what [the person] said sounds. The average person doesn’t walk around wanting to be offensive and most are very grateful for the insight.”

Norman also advises not to jump to conclusions of racism or discrimination. “These instances are best responded to candidly, with some sense that the individual asking the question is doing so from a lack of knowledge,” he says.

5 Things NEVER to Say to Blacks

1. “You’re so articulate.”
This phrase is one of the most frequently cited gaffes. “When someone makes this statement, they think they are providing the receiver with a compliment,” explains Adriene Bruce, Vice President of Consulting, DiversityInc.

But the comment implies that the person is an exception to a rule, which promotes stereotypes. “It comes from ignorance or lack of exposure and is nonintentional,” says Bruce, but it’s condescending.

2. “I actually voted for Obama.”
It’s not what you say—but when you say it. Telling a Black person you voted for Obama when you’re conversing about what’s being offered in the cafeteria downstairs or immediately after discussing last night’s game unintentionally highlights underlying issues of race that exist.

The statement is an attempt to create affinity or commonality, says Norman, but translates as superficial. “Don’t assume to know who I support politically,” Norman says.

3. “Is that your real hair?” and “Can I touch your hair?”
This question should not be asked of ANY person. Hair and grooming are personal. Read Do Blacks Need to Relax Their Natural Hair to Get Promoted? (www.diversityinc.com/natural-hair) for more on this subject. As a general practice, you also should never initiate unsolicited and/or inappropriate physical contact with anyone.

4. “You people”
Referencing Blacks or any other demographic as a collective “you” quickly causes negative assumptions that you mean to offend. “You’re implying an intention to make the Black person—or any person—at the receiving end of the statement feel substandard,” says Bruce. For example: “Please be on time, since you people have a tendency of being late.”

“No specific race is late,” Bruce says. “People are late and people are on time.”

5. “Do you know any good diversity candidates?” and “Let’s take a risk on a diverse candidate”
“Yes, I know good diversity candidates. Why don’t you?” says Norman, noting that the word “good” suggests a belief that the majority are not qualified. While the speaker may not intend to imply this negative connotation, it implies that choosing a Black for a senior-level position is a risk.

“Usually it’s someone trying to be very supportive of the company’s or their own diversity initiative, but a statement like that lands negatively on people,” explains Lee. “What I’ve done is called it to their attention and explained how that sounds.”

Bruce, Lee and Norman also advise to avoid these phrases:

• “Is this how the brothers do it?”
• “I love your name, it’s so ethnic” and “Whatever happened to good old-fashioned names like Bob, Jim and Mary?”
• “You’re like the Black [insert white person here]” and “You look like [insert famous Black person here]”
• “So what sport did you play?”
• “I don’t see color” (“Sure you do,” says Norman)
• “You are only here to meet the company’s quota”
• Don’t try to dance, rap or use terms associated with hip-hop culture in jest
• Don’t assume all Blacks are African-American; there also are people who are African, Afro-Latino, Afro-European, Afro-Caribbean, etc.
• Read more at www.diversityinc.com/10-things-blacks

Most importantly, companies need to equip their employees to have these difficult conversations and take advantage of these opportunities to provide some cultural perspective, stress Lee and Norman. An organization can address acts of discrimination, but that will not mitigate less obvious stereotypes and biases.

“When people have a good relationship, they can talk about a few things very openly. irrespective of race and gender. We all have biases we need to become aware of and we need to become conscious of what we do and say,” explains Norman, noting that it’s important for Blacks to take the time and get everyone engaged in genuine conversations about diversity and how stereotypes affect them.

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We asked Jim Norman of Kraft Foods, No. 7 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50; Raymond Arroyo of Aetna, No. 24; and David Casey of CVS Caremark, one of DiversityInc’s 25 Noteworthy Companies, for their views on the DiversityInc Top 50 process. We came away with the three main areas in diversity management that they cite as having received value from the process.

If you would like to participate in the DiversityInc Top 50 survey for diversity management, click here for more information.

• They use the survey to create an overall diversity blueprint and determine areas of focus for their diversity management  

Jim Norman of Kraft: The survey can be used by a chief diversity officer as a strategic tool to create conversations with partners in the organization that he or she has not had or has been dying to have, and to put some parameters around what “best in class” looks like. It’s work that you’re doing for yourself and the organization to get better and to monitor your progress each and every year. 

Raymond Arroyo of Aetna: We have quarterly reports that mimic the DiversityInc Top 50 methodology so that we know whether we are making progress against the goals. This relates to the methods DiversityInc is going to measure, and the survey tells us that. We get all the data around new hires, retention and promotions.

David Casey of CVS Caremark: When I sent the CEO Commitment section to our head of communications (she’s kind of the CEO’s keeper), she started scratching her head, saying, “Wow, these are really the things we should be having them focus on.” It’s another way for me to get best-practice information out there in front of different parts of the business. 

• The survey captures trends and best practices across various organizations that become the standard for diversity management

David Casey of CVS Caremark: What does the Top 50 really mean? It gives you a data point. It gives you a data set. It’s one thing to go into your board or to your CEO and say, “X percent of our workforce is people of color or women, and we’ve spent this much on supplier diversity,” but unless you give them an anchor and some kind of relative sense of what that means, it doesn’t work, and that’s what DiversityInc provides.

Jim Norman of Kraft: I know there could be criticism around any survey, and people get confused about why they’re doing it or why they would be involved. We have strategic plans. They’re about creating a better organization. The survey, then, is a tool for me to mark progress against a journey I’m already committed to. It holds me accountable. It’s a very usable tool. It asks questions that are critical to driving the kind of deep, sustainable organization change that I need to drive.

• The survey forces companies to track important data and understand how the results affect diversity management

Raymond Arroyo of Aetna: The survey asks the questions in a very, very specific way that every single time requires us to look at the data in a very sophisticated way. I love the stuff about human capital because it’s something that we should be doing ourselves anyway.

David Casey of CVS Caremark: Before the DiversityInc Top 50, there were not a lot of robust, true surveys or measurement tools for diversity management. There was just a lot of affirmative action and EEO recognitions and awards. DiversityInc’s Top 50 is by far the most robust analysis of what a company does in diversity management.

About the DiversityInc Top 50

The survey measures four key areas of diversity management: CEO Commitment, Human Capital, Corporate and Organizational Communications, and Supplier Diversity. Participation is free, and companies that do business with DiversityInc have no advantage. Each company that completes the survey receives a free report card assessing its diversity-management performance overall and in those four areas.

For background on the history of the DiversityInc Top 50, click here. For more information on our upcoming diversity-management event, click here.

Note: Since this article was written, Raymond has taken a new role as the head of Alternative Distribution, Aetna.

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By prioritizing the allocation of resources, diversity leaders can better align diversity-management initiatives—such as talent development, resource groups and mentoring—with business goals, which is crucial for success, according to the diversity leader.

“We diverted our dollars away from heritage celebrations and some external partnerships to focus on leadership training. We provided external coaches and up to six hours of one-on-one time putting together a viable and robust development plan,” said Norman during an interactive session on talent development at a DiversityInc event.

The audience of corporate diversity leaders and executives was able to ask Norman questions, contribute their best practices for talent development and share their real-life success stories firsthand.

Kraft Foods, which is No. 7 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50, was recognized with the 2012 DiversityInc Special Award for Top Company for Executive Development. Mark Clouse, president of the U.S. Snacks Business Unit, acccepted the award on behalf of the company at our October event in New York City.

Companies participating included: Procter & Gamble (No. 5 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50), Prudential Financial (No. 9), American Express (No. 14), Automatic Data Processing (No. 27), Toyota (No. 41) and MassMutual (one of DiversityInc’s 25 Noteworthy Companies).

In What Makes Kraft’s Talent Development So Successful?, the companies detail their top talent-development challenges and provide the solutions that are helping them improve diversity in succession planning. Talent-development best practices include: 

1. Focus development efforts a level below what’s needed
2. Personalize talent-development plans to individuals
3. Determine the importance of global experience to high-ranking positions and tailor the quality of assignments now
4. Use resource groups to identify high-potential talent from traditionally underrepresented groups and nominate candidates for mentoring
5. Utilize metrics to measure the potential success of mentor pairings
6. Mentoring should include cross-cultural, cross-gender and cross-functional components

Click here to read the full article, available to subscribers at DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

Not a subscriber? Request subscriber information and pricing for DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

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For more best practices on resource groups, view our Diversity Web Seminar on Resource Groups: Connect With Customers for Top Sales Results.

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Read the specific actions that these executives are taking.

You can also read Increasing Participation in Employee-Resource Groups. Click here for the full stories, videos and PowerPoint presentations for this event.

What are the best ways to measure engagement across all cultural issues? How have you used your employee-resource groups to increase employee engagement?

Jim Norman, vice president of diversity, Kraft Foods (No. 9 in The 2011 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity): Hold employee-resource groups accountable for organizational initiatives. So, for instance, if the issue is advancement of people of color, if I have that as a charge, then the African-American, Latino and Asian-American council can work on development issues jointly. There’s a recognition that there is some assimilation required and that there are business objectives to be achieved and that there is an aspect of diversity that is of value to the organization and there are some that, very frankly, are not.

We make sure they’re aligned to our diversity strategy. We meet with them four to six times a year to make sure they’re following the strategies and keeping committed. We focus on three things: assist with recruitment, support employee development, and community inside and outside the organization. This year, we put together what we called the Employee Council Leadership Academy. We brought the national leaders together and had a two-day facilitated meeting, followed by a half-day team meeting, so they worked on people, process and results. They exit that meeting making sure that they’re aligned to the diversity strategies and focused on what they’re doing to benefit those strategies. They have assignments and we have joint initiatives, three areas this year. One is a program called Jump Start, which is navigating the unwritten rules of the organization. They help new hires as they come into the organization—how does this place really work? What will get you in trouble? The second one is the peer-coaching project. We’ve actually had them improve the development plan and then engage their manager effectively in that development plan. The last one is mentoring: We had them review all of the mentoring programs and tell us what they’re missing.

Ron Glover, vice president, global diversity and workforce programs, IBM Corp. (No. 7): We’ve had the resource groups coming together for three years now to have a joint professional-development conference. It’s what diversity in action looks like. If you want to force people to learn to work together, which is the theory behind breaking stereotypes, you organize the business situation and force them to do it.

Billie Williamson, Americas inclusiveness officer, Ernst & Young (No. 5): We have some metrics that we use in our global people survey that include an engagement survey. While it’s anonymous, we do get demographic information that’s male and female, different ethnic group, gay or straight, abled or differently able, and we can cut the data by those different groups so that we can see if the answers are different. It also has a set of inclusiveness questions.

We also look at all of our promotions to see if we are making progress. We also look at what people are assigned to. My business is an accounting company and a consulting company, so we advise. There are certain accounts that are premier accounts that enable people to get the experience they need to progress to the partner level within our firm, so we look at the composition of those teams. What percent is women? What percent is people of color? And if that differs from what’s in the representation of our population, then we ask the business unit to explain that.

Donald Fan, senior director, Office of Diversity, Walmart (No. 41 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50): The most direct measure would be what we call the associate opinion survey. It’s on an annual basis. It’s really focused on the engagement rate. The other piece that we’re looking at is on a quarterly basis, we provide the report to our business unit. And the report is the representations, what the different demographics are. We also look at who gets promoted related to demographics and who gets demoted and who exited the company. We also look at performance evaluations—who was rated as exceeding expectations, who was rated as below expectations. If you put all of this data together, you can paint a picture of the reality of what’s going on.

Tara Amaral, chief diversity officer and vice president of talent acquisition, ADP (No. 38 on The 2011 DiversityInc Top 50): We’re looking at how good we are at hiring a reflective labor pool in a specific city. One of the things we’ve found is that our numbers look great across the board, but there are clearly anomalies. We’re now taking some of our national business data and overlaying it in a geographic sense. We found, for example, in Denver that there’s a huge employable Hispanic population, but we’re not good at it yet. We’ve bought a few companies in Denver, and now we have to say, “OK, what can we do to change the culture of those new associates?” They’re not feeling it where they live and where they work as well.

Williamson: We publish the results. We have them go out in our normal communications, which is an electronic newsletter, which goes out once a week, and then we do the same things on business units. Everybody has the results. And the business leader is required to hold a meeting to discuss results. And then they work out an action plan.

Why is it relevant to link employee engagement to specific underrepresented groups?

Norman: If I cut [our employee survey] data by race and gender or age or years of service, I can get an indication if there is a different perception that might translate into a difference experience, which might translate into some specific actions for that group. Differences in perception foster differences in experience, which relate to differences in strategy and action. The actions you take in closing the gap for the general population may not work for underrepresented groups. What it does is allow you to take your data and look at it through the responses of the underrepresented groups. So, for instance, if I were looking through the engagement survey data and, for example, I saw that women of color responded very differently and were less favorable than people of color in general, and I saw that African-American women felt rated the lowest across all dimensions, I could then correlate across all dimensions and retrace my turnover rates and promotion rates and representation rates for women of color, specifically African Americans. It adds texture to the data as I’m trying to build a story for strategy and action. They don’t have to be present; I can use their collective voices.

Emilio Egea, chief diversity officer, Prudential Financial (No. 16): You look at underrepresented populations in the organization and connect with these individuals who have their fingers on the pulse of what is taking place in that company. To whatever extent that experiences they have enables them to serve as a voice of consciousness for the organization, a voice to their experience is able to be captured and that story told is very relevant. That’s a great environment of safety, comfort and trust.

Jim Sinocchi, director, workforce communications, IBM Corp.: What we’ve found over the years—and we’ve tracked it since 1995—is that our women have made the most progress. They are the benchmark for all the other groups. We’re trying to figure out where there are gaps, and every country has to do it differently. If we don’t see women represented in what we call our five-minute drills among the senior leadership, the discussion stops and they go: “Where is the slate of candidates with these groups?” What the women taught us was that when we developed mentoring programs, things started getting better because we were bridging the gaps of understanding. So the women worked well, the Hispanics are working well, the Asians do very well. But Native Americans are a smaller group, and people with disabilities are still fighting the glass ceiling because we can’t get ramps up to the glass ceiling. Once you get this understanding and formalize it in our five-minute drills, our mentoring programs, we find that engagement improves.

Rodolfo Pittaluga, principal, Deloitte Financial Advisory Services (No. 8): The overall workforce is shrinking. Corporate America’s expansion into the global market and the people we historically referred to as “minorities,” which is becoming less accurate every day, are driving a huge change in the way companies operate. By bringing people together from varied backgrounds, skills, perspectives, and experiences and providing them with opportunities to grow, that’s part of how corporate America will continue to compete. But, with a shrinking workforce, where is it that corporate America will turn to make sure that it has the necessary talent with the skills needed to handle its clients’ needs? In all probability, corporate America will turn to less traditional sources, non-mainstream and diverse populations, whether they’re educated and trained domestically or abroad.

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