Present an initiative for promoting those who are underrepresented at the top

What is equally important to keeping your middle management catalysts engaged instead of resistant is positive reinforcement from the top. If, for example, there are initiatives underway to promote underrepresented people to the top, that sends a powerful message to everyone in the organization—and it will help middle managers attract and retain diverse hires. A brilliant example of this is the plus-one approach that Chief Diversity Officer Erby Foster put into action at Clorox.

The idea was that the company could build in change simply by adding diverse leadership incrementally but with an effort to add those diverse leaders across all departments and functions. Within each division, the company should proactively identify knowledge or experience gaps on senior teams and bring in people from diverse backgrounds to fill the gaps. As Foster points out, if you have an ethnically diverse senior team but they all went to the same business school, that isn’t true diversity, because they’ve all learned to approach business problems the same way, so you’ll still have some blind spots that forestall innovative thinking. In that case, it’s important to look further afield, another degree. Hence, plus one.

To identify such gaps, the senior executive teams at Clorox conducted an executive inventory. In less than a year, nearly thirty teams evaluated their makeup and added new people who could bring diversity of thought. Clearly, this kind of intentional diversity creates immediate changes it the composition of a company’s leadership. It’s an excellent way to make sure that you spotlight very capable people of color and make them part of a structure that will remove or dismantle impediments to progress. It also has a strong impact further down the organization.

“If a Black person gets promoted to a senior position, all of the Black employees have a sense that ‘we got promoted,’ ” says Foster. “They see that the company is making some progress, so they want to stay.”

I’ve been in that situation myself. At Nestlé Purina I was promoted thirteen times in fifteen years, and as I moved up the ladder, I founded and led employee resource groups and promoted others who had previously been overlooked. White executives often don’t realize that when you have the first person of color step into a top position, it tells others that they, too, can achieve their dreams. We saw that when Barack Obama became the first Black president, and more recently, when Kamala Harris became the first African American and the first woman to hold the office of vice president. Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, wrote eloquently of the impact: “Harris’ journey inspires Black women and girls to break out of the boxes that dictate how we fill up space in the world. It shows us how to pivot and walk freely as multidimensional, unapologetic Black women. We don’t need to be chameleons, changing constantly to fit in.”⁶

The doors are beginning to fly open. People of color and other minority groups will start finding opportunities elsewhere if their present employer makes them feel marginalized. Employers that lose potential talent this way will be hard-pressed to catch up with more inclusive competitors.

Show your managers how to interrupt bias

I don’t believe that you can eliminate systemic racism and biases just by throwing money at antibias training, but it is very important to help everyone in the organization recognize how biases might affect their actions. When you let your middle managers know that inclusive leadership is going to be mandatory from here on, and biases will not be tolerated, you will most likely have to show them the way to a more inclusive management style.

This is no small feat. Biases are deeply ingrained and often unconscious. You’ll have to change mindsets and change the ways individuals communicate with one another and the judgments they make in the course of a day. Yet it’s a transformation that you instill through concrete steps and programs. The first step is your own intentional efforts to weed out bias. At all times, show your teams what you expect by leading through example.

I’ve talked already about how Lisa Wardell makes a point of calling people out on biased behavior when she feels it’s necessary—thereby letting everyone in the room see inclusive leadership in action. In another example, she tells a story of a meeting with two men and a woman from a company that had a service to sell. All three were white, but in this case the bias was directed at the woman, a young junior executive who was also the one who had done the research and given the presentation.

“I was asking questions, and the woman—I’ll call her Meghan—was answering them,” says Wardell. “The men were letting her speak, yet every time she closed her mouth, one of the men would jump in with ‘What Meghan is saying is …” or ‘just to reiterate …’ as if a woman wasn’t capable of making things clear. I finally told them, ‘If I don’t understand what Meghan is saying, I will let you know. Until then, I’m good.’ ”⁷

The way Wardell spoke out is one example of being a “bias interrupter.” This is a term that comes from my colleague Joan Williams, a law professor and founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. Williams has documented how subtle forms of racial and gender bias are transmitted through organizational cultures and systems. To call out the deeply rooted expectations that influence our views of people and their abilities, she has created a series of tool kits called bias interrupters, which she defines this way: “Bias interrupters are tweaks to basic business systems (hiring, performance evaluations, assignments, promotions, and compensation) that interrupt implicit bias in the workplace, often without ever talking about bias.”⁸

Besides injecting bias interrupters into the conversation when needed, a CEO should institutionalize them as part of operational practices and policies. I have used bias interrupters in many ways. Requiring that a diverse slate of candidates be considered for any open role is a form of bias interruption. So is having white managers attend Black and Latinx MBA conferences and using action-learning teams to integrate diverse voices into key projects and expose nondiverse leaders to wider talent in the organization.

But there’s more you can do. Let your middle managers and other key catalysts know that they too will be expected to act as bias interrupters. Addressing structural racism requires having managers who understand the specific ways bias commonly privileges one group, so that they can understand the reasoning behind the new policies, procedures, and incentives. Accomplishing this will require antibias training, but it must be training that does more than just explore the cognitive bases of bias; it must provide concrete strategies for interrupting it.⁹ Williams’s “Individual Bias Interrupters” workshop does this by explaining how bias plays out on the ground and by giving managers time to brainstorm ways they personally would feel comfortable interrupting it. Facebook is doing something similar in its inclusion training sessions, which give people a chance to brainstorm ways to interrupt bias. Make this kind of training part of the structure: all training, from onboarding to leadership programming, should seamlessly build in continuing education on how bias enters into company culture, at many evidence-based, meet-you-where-you’re-at touch points.

There will be many such opportunities to interrupt biases as you begin the journey to inclusive leadership.

Make middle managers a part of every action-learning team

I always recommend that middle managers be represented on every action-learning team because they bring an important functional perspective of what can be accomplished. In particular, handpick several middle managers to serve on action-learning teams that are looking at how to achieve greater diversity and inclusion throughout the company, so that those managers will be at the forefront of the transition and see for themselves how previously unheard voices can emerge as leaders when they have the opportunity.

In addition, middle managers are typically the people who decide who is going to get the career-enhancing assignments and future promotions—a task that includes making assignments to action-learning teams. For those who participate in action-learning teams, the work they do becomes a stepping-stone to promotions or to top rankings when it comes to performance reviews, generating new business, sales numbers, and such—which is one of the reasons it’s so important to have a diverse slate of participants. The middle managers you enlist as catalysts for change will have the important task of scoping out potential and choosing who else serves on these teams.

Keep everyone on the alert for biases

As I’ve noted, all of the organization’s leaders are going to be engaged in an ongoing effort to eliminate bias—their own and that of others, conscious and unconscious. By continuously identifying and interrupting biases, you begin to incorporate a new communication style into the organization. The very language that managers use in hiring, performance reviews, assignments, promotions, and compensation will have to evolve to reflect more inclusive practices. The message to be inclusive comes first, but as you start requiring managers at every level to reflect on how they’re judging people and why, they will have to pay closer attention to each individual’s specific contributions and potential. Middle managers, because they interact closely with a large number of employees day to day, have a particularly influential role to play here in being on the alert for biases at every touchpoint.

They will also need to be aware of their own biases, and part of their training must guide them in recognizing how they judge people. For example, bias interruption is critical when it comes to the way your managers review their staff. Make meaningful performance reviews an integral part of the system. To be meaningful, employee evaluations must be specific. I’ve always required my managers to state examples so that it’s clear they aren’t just making assumptions, which can be reflections of blind spots. Otherwise, you risk a culture in which managers and colleagues might reflexively label a Black woman “aggressive” or an Asian employee “reserved” without actually analyzing what that individual has done to earn those adjectives. This is exactly the kind of culture that says “he has a lot of potential” when evaluating a young white male, while young Black employees have to prove what they can do.

Joan Williams says a performance review should begin with criteria directly related to the job requirements, so that you present evidence of a person’s capabilities. For example: “He is able to write an effective summary judgment motion under strict deadlines,” instead of, “He writes well.” Rather than saying simply, “She’s quick on her feet,” you might say, “In March, she gave X presentation in front of Y client on Z project, answered his questions effectively, and was successful in making the sale.” This way, the manager has to keep observing and documenting how effectively her staff members are doing their jobs—so that every evaluation of performance or potential comes with proof.

Keep track of DEI metrics

When a company’s leaders are trying to solve a problem, they gather evidence, set goals, and compile a set of metrics they can use to analyze their progress. As we often say in the business world, if it matters, measure it—so the fact that metrics have long been absent from DEI agendas speaks volumes. In chapter 3 I talked about auditing the culture and setting benchmarks for your progress. As you’re building an inclusive culture, collecting data will continue to be key.

Data analysis will help you identify where the biases are and let you continually gauge how antibias measures are working. Culture is defined by what we measure. Does your company measure the racial, ethnic, gender, and LGBTQIA+ composition in such areas as talent acquisition and development, talent retention, and supplier diversity? You won’t know what you have until you start keeping score.

The data should provide a complete evaluation of how the company finds job candidates, what questions are asked and what is measured in the interview process, how performance is assessed, how promotions are structured, and how the company handles complaints, reprimands, and dismissals. The exact metrics will vary from one organization to another, but the goal is always to measure the frequency of practices that indicate bias.

Take, for example, a measurement of how many people consistently receive top performance ratings and who those people are. Do your performance evaluations show consistently higher ratings for straight white men than for people of color, women, LGBTQIA+ employees, or other groups? Do employees’ ratings fall after they take parental leave or become involved in efforts to increase diversity? I’m thinking, in the lattermost case, of the criticism of Google’s treatment of minority employees, sparked when Timnit Gebru, a Black woman whom the New York Times called “a respected artificial intelligence researcher,” was fired from the company, a firing allegedly tied to her criticism of minority hiring and biases built into Google’s AI systems.¹⁰ Data should capture all of the patterns in the way people are evaluated.

Similarly, metrics should be used to give you a snapshot of who is being hired and promoted, whether people are truly receiving equal pay for equal work, who feels they are getting all of the tools they need to excel at their job—and even who feels their contributions to the organization are valued and who is happy with their job. Are the results skewing in ways that show an underappreciation of underrepresented groups? If so, then you know what needs to change.

At Jamba Juice, we polled employees on these questions every quarter. Bonuses for middle managers—in our case, that was general managers for each Jamba Juice café and district managers for the cafés under their jurisdiction—depended in part on the overall health of the culture and on employee engagement as measured in the survey. The other part of their compensation was determined by customer experience, which we measured in a separate survey that customers were asked to fill out online or by phone in return for a discount on their next purchase.

You can also use analysis to evaluate the evaluators. Williams suggests appointing people in the organization to be bias interrupters for multiple purposes—a role that either the chief diversity officer or a group of key catalysts from the HR team might play—and one of their key mandates should be to provide what Williams calls “bounceback.” That is, they make a point of identifying managers and supervisors whose performance assessments consistently show lower ratings for certain groups of people, and then talking through the evidence with them. For example, says Williams in the bias interrupter training materials on her website, “when a supervisor’s ratings of an underrepresented group deviate dramatically from the mean, the evaluations are returned to the supervisor with the message: either you have an undiagnosed performance problem that requires a performance improvement plan or you need to take another look at your evaluations as a group.”

Middle managers should be kept informed on all of this data so that they know how they stack up. They should be able to compare data from their own division with that of others, as well as with that of the company in general. They should be told if their departments consistently show lower performance ratings for certain groups of people. That way they will know when they themselves have work to do, while those who have a great track record for inclusive management can work with other managers who need improvement, perhaps through brainstorming sessions and action learning.

All along the way, of course, they will need senior management to support the recruiting and development of diverse talent, and to make it clear that diversity is mandatory and will be monitored. During his tenure as CDO at Clorox, Erby Foster developed a training intensive that gave the company a ready pipeline of women and minorities with the credentials to begin advancing their careers. From there, he tracked the promotions that occurred and held division managers accountable for promoting a certain number of underrepresented people from within the company each year. Managers received bonuses for meeting minority-representation goals. Even so, when one manager said he just didn’t know of enough qualified minorities and was willing to sacrifice his bonus, it became clear why the CEO must be the one who guides diversity mandates. In a case like that, the CEO has to step in and show the manager that his low diversity numbers are dragging the whole company down. Ultimately the resistant manager at Clorox saw how much of an impact he could make.

“So,” says Foster, “I asked him to become the executive sponsor for the Black employee resource group so that he could help influence their role in the company.” That was another tactic Foster used regularly: at some point, nearly every senior executive acted as a sponsor for an ERG. As a result, the senior executives developed a personal interest in the careers of underrepresented individuals and became advocates for them. Those personal connections, he says, helped eliminate a lot of bias.¹¹

Link managers’ compensation to their DEI metrics

About those bonuses for good diversity numbers. It’s great to be able to tell all of your executive and management teams that they’re receiving a priceless opportunity to grow as powerful leaders for the future, but money speaks even louder.

People don’t like change and, at least subconsciously, know they can stop change just by ignoring it. That is particularly true of middle managers, because of their key role in the trajectory of so many careers. But at every level, you have to give people reasons to embrace the change. Part of that is a no-brainer principle: if you affect their compensation, you have their attention.

The incentive structure for helping create an inclusive culture needs to be tied directly to the goals you’ve established. At Jamba Juice, we instituted a new incentive system in which up to 20 percent of store managers’ compensation was determined by the engagement, climate, and organizational-health scores that came from continually measuring our progress through a variant of the Gallup Q¹² survey. I’ve been consulting with a company that measures its year-end manager assessment based on how well the manager has done when it comes to building a future talent pipeline, building a leadership team, and achieving the company’s numerical goals for diversity.

Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch has instituted an incentive system in which 100 percent of his leadership teams’ equity compensation is based on increasing Black representation so that it is on track to reach at least 13 percent by 2023—matching Black representation in the US census. McDonald’s is tying 15 percent of executives’ bonuses to meeting DEI targets, with an aim to have 35 percent of its US senior management come from underrepresented groups by 2025, up from 29 percent when the initiative began in 2021, and increasing the number of women in senior roles worldwide to 45 percent by 2025 and 50 percent by 2030, up from 37 percent in 2021. I should stress that even though the CEO must delegate operational changes, there are no shortcuts. It still begins with having a great leader at the top, and once you’ve made it clear what you expect from both senior and middle managers, it’s more important than ever that as CEO you lead by example. It still falls to the CEO to show that we are all in this together and continually investing in upskilling the workforce so that they will feel relevant and confident.

Empathy must never waver. One of my favorite quotations that I think all leaders should take to heart is from Theodore Roosevelt: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” All that most people in the business world need is a fair chance to be seen for their full selves and talents and passions—and if you give them that kind of chance, they will overdeliver.

Key Takeaway

Middle managers must be key catalysts in creating sustainable change that drives business performance.

Checklist for CEOs

  Identify the managers in your organization who are responsible for most of the workforce.

  Designate a key group of middle managers as catalysts for change.

  Train managers at every level in bias interruption.

  Adapt overall company goals to middle management’s responsibilities: for instance, hiring and retaining people from underrepresented groups, assigning participation in action-learning teams, learning how to stop bias.

  Identify knowledge or experience gaps on senior management teams and promote people from underrepresented groups who can provide what is needed.

  Continue to collect data to identify practices that might reflect bias.

  Create a compensation structure that is tied to meeting DEI goals.