Inclusive Talent Management: How Business Can Thrive in an Age of Diversity with Stephen Frost

Many organizations believe that they are truly meritocratic. This belief can make C-suite executives react defensively when faced with evidence of bias. How can diversity and inclusion advocates best communicate to such an audience in ways that leverage existing research and, most importantly, in ways that will be accepted and incorporated by those in leadership roles? This week’s WAPPP seminar featured Stephen Frost, Founder and Principal at Frost Included and WAPPP AY14 Fellow, whose latest book, Inclusive Talent Management: How Business Can Thrive in the Age of Diversity, demonstrates how to align talent management and diversity and inclusion agendas.

Steve began with a video that encapsulates the notion that “it’s easy to miss something you’re not looking for.”

When viewers are concentrating on counting the number of passes one team makes, it’s easy to miss the moonwalking bear! A similar logic applies to talent management concerns – when managers protest that they “can’t find qualified women” for a leadership role, it behooves us to ask how we can restructure talent management processes with an eye toward diversity and inclusion to make sure that such qualified candidates – who certainly exist! – are properly identified and given due consideration.

One reason it’s so easy to “not look for” diverse candidates is because we anchor on our in-groups. Think of your five closest friends, your five closest colleagues, your partner(s), and where you live.  How diverse is this group? Often, our in-groups are very similar to ourselves. Our in-groups also serve as our anchors for perceiving traits like intelligence and trustworthiness in others. Without a diverse in-group that would counteract this implicit bias, we create schema of what a “leader” looks like, for example, based on the people we know who are similar to us. This bias can also manifest in corporate decisions, so that we tend to hire, retain, and promote people like ourselves.

The challenge, Steve says, is that in an age of diversity, we are still addicted to likeness. The resolution is how to change the system and our own behaviors. The key to creating change is to employ both unconscious nudges – changing the way we structure our environment to incentivize less-biased decisions – as well as conscious leadership efforts.

Steve and his colleagues interviewed 66 organizations, asking whether they believed themselves to be meritocracies and asking about their talent management in terms of recruitment, retention, and promotion. The current state is homogenous talent management, infused with large amounts of bias at each stage. However, Steve also found three models of diversity and inclusion programs. Diversity 101 is “diversity for diversity’s sake,” characterized by a compliance-based approach – “we do it because we have to.” Diversity 2.0 is “diversity for social responsibility,” which makes a marketing approach to diversity designed to draw out the benefits of difference. Diversity 3.0, by contrast, treats diversity as a boardroom-level issue and employs a bottom-up, integrated approach to systems designed to embed the benefits of difference.

One such example, as Steve described, was a decision to interview candidates in groups of ten in order to save time and money. In these larger settings, interviewers tended to see skill sets as more salient, rather than identity, and were primed to think about team dynamics rather than the individual. In these group interview settings, recruiters hired more diverse candidates. This change was to save resources, not because of the research on nudges toward diversity and inclusion, but had the effect of creating a more diverse work environment.

Steve also discussed an intervention in talent management specifically related to gender at KPMG. The organization’s talent management approach involved all of the (predominantly straight white male) partners gathering in one room, talking about who they want to promote to the partnership, putting candidates on table, and agreeing on 10-20. Unsurprisingly, given what we know about in-groups and unconscious bias, the candidates up for promotion tended to look like the existing partners. The question is how to make this group less biased and more meritocratic without making them defensive.

The simple intervention that Steve proposed was to whiteboard the pipeline of potential incoming partners, separating the pool that were considered ready for partnership from those who were one to two years out, but to write the names of male candidates in red and female candidates in green. As soon as the names were written out, the discrepancy was clear – women were considered one to two years out for consideration for partnership, while men were disproportionately considered ready for promotion. On top of this, Steve attached a quantitative measure of performance for each name. Then, it became clear that several names in the “ready for partnership” group, predominantly men, were less well-performing than women in the “one to two years out” group. This intervention employs simple strategies to engender a rational, rigorous, calm, and systematic approach to checking in-group bias in talent management.

One practical challenge with diversity and inclusion interventions is that everyone is stressed and has little time and attention, to say nothing of resources, to put toward this critical work. Fortunately, even simple interventions can decrease unconscious bias, and when paired with conscious leadership efforts, these interventions can be very powerful. The simplest approach is simply to ask people to remember to ask “WADI”: What About Diversity and Inclusion.

The Advantage of Being Oneself: The Role of Self-verification in a Successful Job Search

Who hasn't heard the advice? Smile? Check. Firm handshake? Check. But not too firm? Check. Smart business suit, preferably in a boring color? Check. Clean Facebook/Twitter/Instagram page? Check. Check. Check. Acing a job interview can be difficult work. And even if you nail the interview, you may only be one of many. It is estimated that between 10 and 40 people will apply for any given job in the United States. How can you stand out amongst a stream of applicants who are all encouraged to act and look homogeneous? In this week's WAPPP Seminar, Dr. Celia Moore, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the London Business School shared two studies that can answer that question (in a somewhat unexpected way): Just be yourself! How exactly does a researcher reach that conclusion? How can she measure the degree to which people are being themselves in real life?


Dr. Moore uses a tool that measures people's tendency towards what is known as self-verification. It is an eight item questionnaire that gages the level of need a person has to express their true thoughts and feelings to others. It includes statements such as For me, it is better to be honest about myself when meeting new people even if it makes me appear less than ideal, or I'd be willing to take less pay in order to work with people who know who I am and what to expect from me, to which people record a level of agreement or disagreement. People who report a high level of agreement to this kind of statement are referred to as self-verifiers in Moore's research. They have a high need to express their true selves.  What does this look like? "We don't know how this trait manifests itself behaviorally," she explained, "it is a very intangible but predictive trait". And what does it predict exactly?


Dr. Moore: Knowing the 'right' answer to 250
interview questions may not help you all that much

Dr. Moore studied a graduating class of MBA students that was interviewing for jobs. She rated them on their level of self-verification and then observed whether or not they received a job offer. For those who were rated by interviewers as low or medium quality, the degree to which they self-verified hardly mattered (and even hurt a bit in the case of low quality applicants). In contrast, for highly qualified candidates, self-verification boosted their likelihood of receiving an offer from 51% to 69% (when all other factors, like race, gender, and experience, remained equal). She offered the example of Anne Hathaway's character in the movie The Devil Wears Prada: By being highly qualified for a job but still honest about her possibly undesirable traits, she was able to land the job she asked for.



Job Interview Dont's? Maybe they are Do's!

To hone in on the nuances of this effect, Dr. Moore conducted another study, this time about the entry process into two highly selective working groups. The first was the legal corps in a U.S. military branch, and the second was a program to place international school teachers in a U.S. district. Each field was highly gendered, with the military working team receiving a group of applicants that was two thirds male, while the teaching program received a cohort that was two thirds female. The results of the study suggest that gender and self-verification interact in very different ways for different groups.

Within the set of high quality applicants seeking the teaching job, the women who were self-verifiers increased their likelihood of being hired by 29 percentage points when compared to low self-verifying women, from 46% to 75%. Men, of whom there is a shortage in that field, went from 68% as low self-verifiers to 71% as high self-verifiers. Conversely, in the male dominated field, women were the "scare commodity", so their likelihood of being hired was high regardless of self-verification level, much like the men in teaching. In this case though, high self-verification slightly decreased their likelihood of getting hired, from 25% to 23%. In contrast, for men, who were facing a field of similar candidates, self-verification provided a significant boost, from 1% to 13%. So it seems that when you need to stand out among a group of people similar to you, self-verification is important.

Because this research "contradicts common aspirations about how to succeed in the job market", and explains the nuances about people in gender congruent and gender incongruent fields, it can be very valuable for both men and women. Related research shows that self-verifiers in the long run report higher job satisfaction, ability to function in a working group, and overall higher performance on the job. So Moore concludes the findings are pointing us in a very healthy direction: Be yourself and you will be better off!

Is 'Opt'ing Out Even an Option?

Over the last year, Facebook Chief Operating Office Sheryl Sandberg, has made a splash with her “Lean In movement,” which seeks to elevate the role of women in the professional world. In her book and preceding TED talk, Sandberg---a former VP at Google, and former Chief of Staff at the US Department of Treasury---has been trying to “keep women in the workforce...because I really think that’s” why we have so few women leaders. “The problem…is that women are dropping out.”

At the New York Times, Lisa Belkin had written a piece called the “Opt-Out Generation, about educated mothers who have left a career to stay home, usually to take care of children. (Statistically, the revolution was limited to an economically fortunate few). More recently, follow-up articles have talked about how the promise of home life didn’t deliver: how “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In,” but is having trouble reintegrating into the workforce.


In last week's WAPPP Seminar, Opting Out among Women with Elite Education: Evidence, Causes, and Societal Consequences, Professor Joni Hersch of Vanderbilt Law School looks at how valid these views really are. She looks at national averages across different types of college-educated women, and finds that most opting out is concentrated among married mothers who are graduates of elite institutions like Ivy League universities. To the extent possible, Professor Hersch even looked at how a woman’s parents’ educational background affects their current decisions; and indeed, the more educated her parents, the more likely she stayed in the workforce.

Women are more likely to stay in the workforce if they have science and engineering background; if they have graduate degrees; if they are employed in management, science, or health (rather than service or blue-collar industries); or if they are not married to very high-earning men.

Of course, as Anne-Marie Slaughter famously argued, the pressures on all women, in lower income and upper-echelon circles alike, to focus more attention on their own family remain strong---maybe even biological. The option to have a better work-life balance ought not be limited to those of elite educations, backgrounds, and industries, nor should this only pertain to women. Women that are not able to pay for nannies and other surrogate caregivers are particularly in need of “opting out” themselves.

Some steps toward that include lowering institutional barriers to that work-life flexibility: increasing public funding and other access to childcare and family leave, through legal protection.

That's definitely a vital start. But a sad paradox is that many industries that have welcomed women over the last decades---from increasing their numbers to improving work-life balance---have supposedly lost their economic and social “prestige” at the same time, making even that hard-won progress seem incomplete.

So, even as we start to change institutions and policies, we've got to influence how people think of their work and colleagues as well.

The Politics of Work - Family Policies in France, Germany, and Japan

The issue of women, mothers, and work has received a lot of attention in recent headlines: which women have the choice to "lean in," try to "have it all," or find some balance that best fits their lives? Just how far can a mother (or father!) lean in when holding a small child without toppling over, and what kind of work policies permit more choice in these matters?

Patricia Boling, Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University, dove into these questions as she researched fertility rates, parental leave policies, and child-care options in three different countries. Fertility rates - more easily understood as the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime - are an important driver in adjustments to national work-family policies.  France, Germany, and Japan have all faced low fertility rates. This is not necessarily a state concern about women choosing fewer children; rather, the concern here is usually about the economics of supporting an aging population with a decreasing working-age population.

France tackled the issue of declining fertility rates at the turn of the last century, and its pronatalist policies and outcomes may offer some guidance to nations looking to impact their declining populations. The long-standing French policies that support child rearing include a 3-year long gender neutral paid leave, free public school for toddlers, and tax incentives for additional children. Germany followed suit in 2007 by offering a year of paid leave and an increase in state child-care spaces for 1-year-olds. Japan has been adjusting family policies, known as "Angel Plans," since the 1990s, increasing dual-partner leave time, compensation, and supporting child-care programs.

These all sound great, but just how successful have they been? As Professor Boling points out, national work-family policies matter, but no country is a blank slate. Many factors influence a woman's choice to have children: their culture, the political economy of the labor force, gender wage gaps, and the practical impact parental leave has on career choices. The success of work-family policies is often constrained by these factors as well. Institutional capacities, the tradition of administrative political action, the relationship between national policies and local implementation, and the traditions of businesses as political actors and their relationship with training and expectations from employees also impact how these policies play out.

France has experienced some successes with its policies, though challenges remain with the gender balance of parental leave. The long parental leave offers low pay for the parent who chooses to take it, and there are only 11 days of specified paid paternity leave. As a result, women often take repeated leaves and stay in low-skilled jobs with little chance for advancement. While fathers could conceivably take the longer leave, the incentive structure and labor force economy are such that the "gender neutral" leave is in-name-only.  Germany's adoption of child-care policies has a strong correlation with geography and history: the former East Germany has high rates of toddlers attending child-care, while the West and South have lower rates and a cultural aversion to mothers who do not stay home with their young children. Japan is more challenged by a number of institutional factors. It has the largest "mommy penalty" in the world: the gendered wage gap between women, men, and mothers. Businesses expect loyalty from employees and are hesitant to invest training in women of childbearing age. These same businesses play a major role in political processes, and may limit the success of attempts to adjust practices.

The lessons to be learned about work-family policies are still developing, as nations around the world continue to shape their responses to declining fertility rates. Professor Boling's discussion was a brief insight into a book currently underway. As our own national conversation continues about leaning in, stepping out, having what we can or want, it is worthwhile to keep our eyes open to other nations and their approaches to women, work, and family.


Valerie Kane is an MPP Candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Diversity to a Deadline: Delivering Everyone's London

The research is growing: for those of us concerned about diversity and the incorporation of traditionally excluded groups' members and voices into realms ranging from politics and boardrooms, to cubicles and community functions, there is probably a report or an experiment to which we can turn. We can examine the resilience of diverse groups, the challenges they face, and the styles of leadership that guide them best. 

Reports and experiments are valuable, but when an entity embraces a goal to integrate diversity and inclusion throughout all functional areas, what does this actually look like?

Stephen Frost, WAPPP Fellow and former Head of Diversity & Inclusion for the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, was faced with this challenge. He spoke yesterday not as an academic, but as a practitioner. Before we begin, watch this fun video for a quick recap of the history of the modern Olympic Games and how this factors into the need for an intentional focus on diversity and inclusion.

Frost approached the task before him with an important guiding principle: it doesn't just happen. Diversity and inclusion (D&I) could not be taken for granted as a given in international games, nor could it be seen as a extra little side program.  Rather, D&I needed to be a commitment integrated into all functions and decisions. The question "had to become not why would you do the program, but why wouldn't you?"

The D&I process for the London Olympic Games had three components: understand, lead, and deliver.  London's vision was to use the power of the games to inspire change. The bid to the Olympic Committee highlighted diversity - of age, ethnicity, ability, gender identity, sexual orientation, and social status. A wonderful goal, to bring the experience of the Olympics more in line with the myriad of lives gathered in the audience, serving as volunteers, or employed as staff, but how?

Leadership is the key. Frost brought in Desmond Tutu to inspire the board and agency managers. Nearly all at the upper and mid-management level signed the diversity leadership pledge. There were no quotas for hiring; instead, information was monitored and frequently shared. No department wanted to rank at the bottom of this shared list, creating an internally competitive dynamic to meet and exceed all targets. The media caught word of this process, and unfortunately mocked it with headlines like, "Will Britain Take Gold for the Most PC Olympics Ever?"

The proof, however, was in the pudding. This process was not about being politically correct.  It was about showing that a commitment to diversity and inclusion could be realized to exceed expectations in a large organization - and that these were, indeed, the people's games.  The final part of the D&I process, delivery, illustrated its success. Frost highlighted the D&I efforts in workforce, procurement (supply chain/contractors), and service delivery.  Specialized programs reached out to traditionally excluded groups for the workforce, no contract over £20,000 could be awarded unless the contractor met certain D&I standards and was approved by the Diversity Team, and the various needs of different groups were taken into account while designing details such as counter heights and entrances. 

Frost challenges practitioners to reframe their perspectives on diversity and inclusion.  While a commitment is necessary, there need not be additional programs or requirements - creating a more inclusive workplace need not be a burden.  The key is removing barriers to entry, and accepting diversity and inclusion as critical aspects of every day business.



Valerie Kane is an MPP Candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Collective recruitment limits discrimination in hiring

By Julie Battilana, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School
Originally published in French in Le Monde

February 11, 2013

If the last decade was marked by the willingness of businesses to fight discrimination against women and ethnic minorities, both in hiring and promotions, it should be noted that good intentions haven’t always been followed by results. In fact, far from it.

Among active women in France, only 6% occupy top managerial positions, the same proportion as... 1995. As for ethnic minorities, although the collection of statistics concerning them is not allowed by law, an examination of the French leading class is enough to note their poor representation.
To end discrimination, stereotypes must be eliminated. Yet, these die hard, as a recent study conducted by three researchers at Havard University ("When Performance Trumps Gender Bias : Joint versus Separate Evaluation" working paper published on Social Science Research Network, www.ssrn.com) reveals.

Wanting to better understand hiring and promotion decisions, Iris Bohnet, Max Bazerman and Alexandra van Geen conducted a series of experiments, the results of which suggest a direction for effectively fighting discrimination.

Neutralizing Predjudices

Among the 654 participants in their study, which included men and women, some took on the role of employers and others that of potential employees.

The latter completed a task that tested their aptitude in mathematics. Their performance levels were, afterwards, communicated to employers so that they may choose an employee who would perform this task once more, this time to the employer’s benefit.

The results showed that employers had a negative bias against female candidates when their performances were presented individually and independently from other candidates.

Male candidates whose scores were slightly inferior to the average were selected, while female candidates whose scores were at the average were not. The stereotype according to which women would be less competent than men in mathematical tasks thus heavily skewed employer’s decisions.

Avoiding Selecting Candidates One After the Other

Interestingly, a simple manipulation allowed to do away with this bias: when the performances of female candidates were presented not individually, but at the same time as those of their male counterparts, those with performance levels greater than the other candidates were selected.

To effectively fight against discrimination, businesses should thus avoid selecting candidates one after the other, and instead use a collective method. This approach is being used more and more in recruiting, but it is less widespread in promotion decisions.

This approach is, however, essential because it forces decision makers to rely on the comparative analysis of objective information, which neutralizes prejudices. It is time, for all private and public organizations, to recognize the importance, still today, of these prejudices and to act on them.


Translated from French by the author. 

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Photo courtesy of Forbes.com

“Most of us think that we’re better drivers than the average person, and we really think we’re more honest and morally upstanding than the average person,” says Michael Norton, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He has been studying how people can lie and yet think that they are perfectly great, honest individuals. You might think he is interested in politicians or car dealers, but actually this is about regular people like you and me. We are quite prone to engaging in questionable behavior, yet we are very good at finding excuses for problematic decisions and even tricking ourselves into believing that we did not cheat.

He described a simple experiment – college men were asked to pick between subscriptions to two sports magazines. The magazine descriptions were identical except for the fact that one offered more articles per issue and the other covered a broader array of sports. The preferences split half and half. However, when one of the magazines also offered a swimsuit edition, that magazine became the overwhelming choice. They were then asked to explain why they picked the magazine. The men in the group whose “more articles” magazine offered the swimsuit edition explained that they valued having more articles, while the men whose swimsuit issue was packaged with the “more sports” magazine were equally emphatic that they liked reading about a wider variety of sports.

Perhaps the guys just did not want the researchers to know their true motivation, but what if they were not even aware of their choice process? And what if their decision was more consequential? In a similar experiment, hypothetical managers of a cement manufacturing company (a stereotypically male field) were asked to select between two applicants – one had more education, the other more experience. Those ‘employers’ whose more experienced candidate was named Lisa, overwhelmingly chose the other candidate named Dan, citing the importance of education credentials. But those whose Lisa was more educated, hired Dan because he had more experience. When told in advance that they would be accountable for their decision, the subjects simply became more vociferous in explaining the importance of whichever non-questionable characteristic they picked, sometimes writing whole essays about their choice and how they never took gender into account.

These experiments have implications for hiring, promotions, political recruiting and college admissions, among other fields.  Are we really guided by objective criteria when we read an application, interview someone or consider them for promotion? All signs point to people making the biased choice and then justifying it with the most conveniently available “objective” information. Perhaps even more troubling is the notion that you and I might be completely unaware of our own questionable behaviors, whether they are gender-biased, race-biased or simply dishonest. After all, we are more morally upstanding and more enlightened than the average person, right?  

Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.