Acceptance Is The Real First Step To Building A Truly Inclusive Organization
Some time back, the organization I work at was acquired by another organization. Overnight, from an organization with a global presence, steeped in Indian-ness and our Indian roots, we turned into a multi-ethnicity, multi-cultural team with people from diverse backgrounds.
Diversity brings with it a fair degree of discomfort. It requires a person to embrace the unknown - people and behaviors they are unfamiliar with and may have never encountered before, and hence do not know how to deal with. A natural knee-jerk reaction to diversity is exclusion - to shut out or ignore what you do not know or cannot understand.
Inclusion means that people who are different culturally and socially are included and accommodated, to make them feel respected and valued.
To truly make diversity and inclusion go hand in hand, there is a subtle, less talked about step in between — acceptance.
Acceptance is when you understand that people around you are different from you. You do not view them through a lens colored with your beliefs. Instead you accept that their identities, beliefs, perspectives and vulnerabilities are not the same as yours.
Acceptance does not need you to accept differing perspectives, it just needs you to accept that different people have different perspectives, and that’s ok!
Once you have truly accepted that people can have perspectives different from yours and operate in a context you do not understand, you have scaled the most difficult part of the process of being inclusive.
Humans have an implicit instinct that expects everyone to think and behave the same way —driven by an implicit bias. And it is not intentional. I am a fairly keen observer of people, and during the said acquisition, the one thing I saw a lot of people struggle with was just accepting that the person across the table could have different perspectives. However, in conversations where people accepted that team members thought and behaved differently, there was more collaboration and better outputs.
Once you have accepted that people are different, only then you can start the next step of collaboration — of being willing to listen to others, learning from their viewpoints, and working together towards common goals. Acceptance of diversity also encourages people to bring their unique perspectives, which in turn leads to more innovative solutions, a broader range of ideas, better decision-making and a score of other benefits that DE&I are intended to bring to an organization.
Non-acceptance on the other hand will cause you to judge and discriminate — most of the times unknowingly and unintentionally — against people for being themselves. This might have a domino effect of shutting them up in conversations and a feeling of discontent on not being heard.
Acceptance lays the foundation for an inclusive culture by creating an environment where people are not reluctant to express themselves, everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered to contribute their best. This, in turn, ensures that the DE&I policies, practices and initiatives that organizations implement are not only effective and recognized, but celebrated.
Update: Found this really great visual shared by Jamie Shields with an edit by mographies that sums it up pretty neatly!
