Supervisors don’t just need to understand the challenges faced by minorities and the legal ramifications, they must also experience what it’s like to be a minority within the organization, says Rene Petrin, who, as president of Boston-based Management Mentors, sets up corporate mentoring programs for clients.
“One of the most effective ways to translate theory into action has been by having supervisors participate in a formal mentoring program that allows for a relationship between a majority person and a minority person which can transform both of them,” Petrin explains.
“Too often,” he continues, “supervisors believe that diversity efforts really mean making the minority person conform more to the majority culture or individual. It’s known as ‘how to be more white to be successful.'”
But it’s critical to effective diversity and supervisory efforts to recognize the uniqueness of the individual and, in honest dialogue, understand and strategize on how best to facilitate the success of the minority individual and remove those barriers that are truly biased.
- Petrin, who spent 12 years as a vice president of HR in both health care and sales organizations, says a mentoring relationship can do just that, yielding the following benefits in the process:
- By hearing, first hand, the challenges faced by a minority individual, supervisors are forced to confront their own behavior and how it may affect their employees.
- This kind of experience can then lead to the supervisor becoming a true champion of diversity and being able to share nsights with other supervisors and with senior management, “which can then lead to real change within the organization thus moving from lip service in diversity to embodying the truth of diversity as a business asset in today’s globalized market,” Petrin says.
Meanwhile, the minority individual “who almost always has biases, too,” Petrin maintains “can also better see how his or her behavior impacts the majority individual, so that there is also an opportunity to change or effect change, albeit without sacrificing who they are as a result,” he says.