Bill Kerr: Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host Bill Kerr. This episode is one of a series of special dispatches on the sweeping effect that Covid-19 is having on society, the economy, and the future of work. In addition to our regular podcast episodes, we’ll be bringing you interviews with business leaders, policy makers, and leading scholars on the coronavirus.

Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement have forced a reckoning with America’s legacy of systemic racism. What does the present moment mean for the push for equality in the workplace? Laura Morgan Roberts is an expert on organizational psychology. Her research spans workplace diversity and the maximizing of human potential. In her work, she emphasizes “personal and professional alignment.” Professor Roberts, who teaches at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, is co-editor of the recent book Race, Work, and Leadership: New Perspectives on the Black Experience. With coauthor Anthony Mayo, she wrote a November 2019 Harvard Business Review article analyzing the state of opportunity for African-Americans. They concluded, “Race continues to be a major barrier to advancement in the US workplace. We are far from realizing the principles of equal opportunity and meritocracy.” Laura joins me today to discuss the ongoing crisis and the prospects for systemic change. What policy and management strategies can narrow the gap between ideals and reality? Welcome to the podcast, Laura.

Laura Morgan Roberts: Thank you so much for having me.

Kerr: Laura, let’s maybe get started with, tell us a little bit about yourself. Your professional practice and scholarship cover a lot of topics related to diversity. So how’d you get involved in this area? And then maybe give us a couple of projects you’re working on right now.

Roberts: I’ve been interested in this area for 25 years, actually. It dates back to my undergraduate studies at our alma mater, University of Virginia, when I first became intrigued in organizational psychology—how people could cultivate a career path that would be fulfilling and generative for them, how they could pursue work that was aligned with their strengths and their values and their desire to maximize their human potential. I came to those questions also with the understanding of structural inequality and structural advantage. And that was really shaped by my childhood experiences growing up in Gary, Indiana, which is a steel town—former steel town, really—outside of Chicago, Illinois. And in that environment, it was really clear how the kinds of opportunities were shaped by the local economy, and how many of my classmates had to work that much harder to be able to pursue their dreams and take on college paths as well as career paths that would be fulfilling for them. I, on the other hand, though, also grew up in Gary, Indiana, and attended public schools, grew up in a family with a father who’s an orthopedic surgeon, a mother who’s a former high school math teacher. They’ve had multiple graduate degrees, as did my grandparents, and even a couple of my great grandparents. Even through this lens of my own set of questions and experiences around race and around the economy, I could see the importance of those structural advantages and structural inequality. And so I just wanted to be able to speak to individuals, to help them have more tools and resources to navigate their path. But I also wanted to be able to speak to leaders, so that they could design systems that would allow more people to truly be able to bring their best selves to work and make their best selves even better through the growth and learning that we all get in our work experiences. And then, most importantly, to be able to bring out the best in others.

Kerr: It’s a very powerful sort of personal background. And for our listeners, we both graduated from the University of Virginia in the same year. We won’t say the year on the podcast live here. Laura, it’s late June 2020 as we’re recording this, and we’re in the midst of very sustained and global protests over police bias and violence, as well as also, more generally, racial inequalities. What do you make of this movement, and what are you hoping might result from it?

Roberts: Well, it’s a prescient moment. In some ways I think it’s a call to consciousness. Maybe for some it’s a wake-up call, and maybe a loud alarm. I think what we have the opportunity to do is to learn from the experiences that we’re seeing and hearing that were catalyzed by these racial protests, and start to tune in more intensely—you know, turn up the volume, try to listen more, try to understand more. Don’t tune out when it gets tough and challenging and difficult. So that’s the second part of your question, right? What do I make of this moment? It’s the call of consciousness, where people are tuning in. What am I hoping might result is that, as we roll up our sleeves, we really start to do the hard work of creating more just and equitable workplaces that embody thriving and flourishing and all forms that will do that while remaining tuned in to race and racism and inequity, so we can identify it when it shows up, and we can eradicate it by holding people and systems accountable for their behavior or their ... not just the personal behavior, but also some of the policies and the practices that have been built on this system of inequity. That might be a small hope: Just don’t tune out. But I think it’s what’s going to sustain our momentum going forward, is that ability to stay vigilant, stay tuned in. We’re talking about some issues and challenges that have plagued our world for nearly 500 years at this point. It’s not going to change overnight.

Kerr: Yeah. Progress would certainly have to go well beyond acknowledgment of this issue, and we appreciate you walking through that sort of making sure people stay on that channel and make progress toward it. This is coming during also the Covid-19 pandemic, which has proven to be three times more lethal for Black Americans than for white Americans. How connected is this to the pandemic? And what does that reveal to us about inequality in America?

Roberts: Yeah, Bill. Covid-19 has been devastating for everyone. And the differential impact of Covid-19 on Black and brown communities definitely gives us cause to pause and reevaluate the structure of our society. Why is it that African-Americans are so vulnerable in the face of a global pandemic? In the early announcements, right, the public service announcements and the recommendations around Covid-19, we were hearing the phrase, “We’re all at risk, and we all have to take precautions” and “Covid-19 does not discriminate. Anybody can catch Covid-19.” That’s true, but we’ve also learned there’s a “Yes, and ….” Some people are more vulnerable than others. And why is that? Part of it is due to exposure. Part of it is due to lack of protective barriers. So when we look at, in our conversation, the context of work, we have to call attention to occupational representation and the disproportionate number of women of color, in particular, but also men of color who take up low-wage occupations and who were called essential workers—the cashiers, the nursing assistants, the cleaning and janitorial staffs, the transportation drivers. All of those people who still remained in the direct line of sight with Covid-19 so that our economy could keep moving to the extent that it did, and so that individuals could continue to get access to whatever care that they needed while we attempted to fight off or curb the spread, really, of Covid-19. I do see more productive or constructive engagement on these issues with respect to naming race. When we started this year, 2020, we were still at a point where you would talk about race in code in organizations. Even if you were talking more broadly about diversity equity, inclusion initiatives, you would talk about DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], you might say “diverse talent.” You might say “unconscious bias.” You would talk about belonging—the importance of belonging—but not really hit the nail on the head squarely when it came to the conversation about race, racism, and the unique sets of challenges that Black people face in today’s work environment. So I think it is constructive, because it’s an important starting place for us to name race and talk about race explicitly. But it’s only a beginning, right? It’s one thing to acknowledge it, one thing to put up a hashtag that says, “#blacklivesmatter” or that says, “We stand with George Floyd’s family members, and our heart goes out to his family.” “We stand against the injustice that happens in our streets.” But it’s quite another thing to say, “We’re going to now hold ourselves accountable as individuals and as a system to act in more just equitable and inclusive ways, especially when Black people are concerned.” So I think that’s the next step. I’m excited to see the forward movement. And as they say, the proof will be in the pudding when we look six months down the road, 12 months down the road, five years down the road, to see how these pledged commitments were operationalized and if they’ve truly transformed some of the power dynamics that we see within our organizations and communities.

Kerr: Yeah. Beyond just naming the issue, you’ve worked on and developing techniques to help business managers and leaders approach these vital topics and kind of take that next step. Tell us a little about the Reflected Best Self Exercise and some of the similar techniques that you advocate for people that are trying to move that next step.

Roberts: Yeah. Well, the Reflected Best Self Exercise is guided by the principles of positive organizational scholarship, which is a desire to examine the system, discover the pockets of goodness within the system, identify those best practices when systems are operating from a position of strength, and then realize how you can learn from those strengths. How can we utilize those strengths more effectively going forward? And so the Reflected Best Self Exercise and other tools for cultivating and sustaining positive identities are really important right now when we’re taking up the difficult work of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in our organizations. And here’s why. First, when we identify the barriers to diversity, equity, and inclusion, a lot of them are structural, right? As we’ve talked about earlier. A lot of them have to do with people being vulnerable, having limited opportunities of advancement because of their geography, because of their occupations, because of educational inequality, because of a lack of decent health care. All of those barriers can make it more difficult and challenging in organizations. But when we reach these moments where we say we actually want to do something differently, we want to change, we want to move in a positive direction, there are another set of barriers that hinder us from making that forward movement. And those barriers are often related to our own insecurity, identity threat, and ego-defensive routines. So our insecurity comes in the diversity, equity and inclusion conversations when we say, “Wait a minute. If I acknowledge structural inequality, then I might have to unravel some of my long-held beliefs about meritocracy.” And that’s a strong belief, a strong narrative, especially in the United States of America, that people over generations endured hardship and struggle to build a country, and also to build companies. So your success is a function of your hard work—and we define merit as the product of individual effort and hard work. So I become then destabilized in my own belief of legitimacy and worth when someone tells me, “Well, Laura, the fact that your father is an orthopedic surgeon, that gave you a hand up in life. And the fact that your grandparents had college educations, as did a couple of your great-grandparents, that, too, gave you a hand up as you were navigating the educational system.” Then I could become ego-defensive and say, “Well, wait a minute. No, that’s not true. I worked hard for everything I have. How dare you challenge me and say that I didn’t work hard?” That’s not what the insight on structural inequality is telling you or structural advantage is telling you, but that’s how we internalize it. You’re saying that something’s wrong with me, that I’m inadequate. And then we start having these conversations about how racism plays out on a day-to-day basis, and people become even more insecure or threatened or ego-defensive: “Wait a minute. I’m not racist. So, therefore, how could I have said something that a person of another race would have found demeaning or devaluing in that way?” What the Reflected Best Self Exercise does—and other positive-identity tools—is help people to anchor themselves in a more positive or secure base of self-worth, so then they can do the difficult work of challenging their belief system and creating a more just and open society. In other words, it helps to counteract or break down some of those ego-defensive routines because it gives people the validation and the affirmation that they need to see how they do add value and make important contributions in the world. Despite what people may say about whether they like applause or like to be celebrated publicly or quietly—there’s a range where people fall on that continuum—but the Reflected Best Self Exercise allows everybody on that continuum the opportunity to think about how they have added value and how that has positively impacted others. And I should mention, I’m sorry, I did not even explain what happens with the Reflected Best Self Exercise. I’m talking about what it does and what it undoes, but let me just say for a minute how it works. The way that the Reflected Best Self Exercise works is that people will reach out to their friends, family, and then, of course, their professional contacts, past and present, and ask for contribution stories. So those people will share with them—people in your life would share with you—stories about times when they say you at your best, adding value and making important contributions. So then when you read this collection of stories that you’ve gathered, you have a deeper understanding of why and how you matter to the people who matter most to you in your life. It’s a connecting and affirming experience, but also helps you to become more intelligent and wise about how you can use your strengths and how you can show up in the future. So you can imagine then the kind of validation that you get from that experience and why it would be important to be centered in that way before you try to tackle some of the more disruptive belief systems about equality and inequality, merit, equity, inequity, justice, racism, and so forth.

Kerr: Laura, that reflection’s very powerful, and it’s happening at the organizational level as well as also the individual level. Business schools, including Harvard, have received renewed criticism about their record on race. For academics, and in particular in academia, what can we do to support and provide opportunities for minority students, staff, and also faculty?

Roberts: Well, Bill, you know that I started my faculty career at Harvard Business School. I was 27 years old, African-American woman, five foot, two inches on a good day, and there I was in the middle of the pit, teaching the required course in leadership called “Lead” to MBA students, 90 of them, staring at me in this amphitheater-style experience. And I don’t have to articulate some of the things that came out of their mouths during those classes or in the course evals to follow. But suffice it to say, I was not who many of them expected to greet on their first day of class when they were meeting their leadership professor. So that experience of disruption to the Harvard stereotype was something that I carried with me in and out of the classroom. Bill, I carried it on airplanes. People would ask, “Oh, what are you doing? Are you a student?” And I would say, “No, I’m a professor.” And they’d say, “Where do you teach?” And then I would have a churning in my stomach. Do I even tell them, or do I just lie? It almost got to the point where I just wanted to lie because I knew I would get the gaze, the gaping mouth, and the wide eyes, and the “Really? Tell me, what’s that like?” And it’s not because they were so fascinated with Harvard, itself—though many people are—but it was this contradiction between what they expected to see or all the different attributes that they associated with Harvard, and then what I was embodying sitting next to them on that airplane. So in the years that have passed, I’m now on faculty at UVA-Darden, but I’ve returned to HBS over the years for different teaching engagements and also as a research scholar. And one of the projects that motivated the article Tony Mayo and I wrote, as well as the book that we just published, Race, Work, and Leadership: New Perspectives on the Black Experience, was HBS’s decision leading up to 2018 to commemorate the founding of the African-American Student Union, AASU. It was the 50th anniversary of AASU, so from 1968 to 2018. My colleagues and I examined the history of African-Americans at Harvard Business School—Black people, not just African-Americans at Harvard Business School—and then we also started to examine how their careers unfolded afterwards. So what did we learn in terms of what business schools can do to support and provide opportunities to those students, to faculty like me who were junior faculty at the time, still business school faculty members, and also staff? Well, here’s where it gets really tricky, Bill. One of the things that we saw consistently is that business schools are really, really bad when it comes to doing the hard work around race. Race is often considered irrelevant, superfluous, or optional or ancillary to a business curriculum. I find this ironic, given the fact that race was fundamentally embedded in the infrastructure of the society and the origins of many of the management practices that are put in place today, as well as the economic foundation of the business owners who started major enterprises in the 19th and 20th centuries. So to not talk about race seems to be a dangerous omission in basic economics—that it’s not just a blank slate of supply and demand, but there’s generational wealth and there are ways in which it’s accrued and was invested, and there were a set of practices, some of which were highly unethical, that generated tremendous wealth. But that’s taboo, Bill. That’s the unspeakable. I can say that to you today, because this is our topic of conversation. But that would be a taboo conversation in the classroom. But let’s back it up a little bit, even if we weren’t going that deeply into it. What students don’t see in their business school experiences is the positive associations between Black people and business success. So they don’t see enough, by way of examples, of Black business leaders or Black businesses in their curricula. They don’t see enough Black tenured professors or even tenure-track professors in their business school experiences to be able to make those positive associations that counteract many of the stereotypes that people have about race and about business. And then they don’t experience the climate as one that’s really open to learning and changing in ways that would allow it to be more inclusive. The emphasis on networking in business schools is palpable. People are concerned about job placement, yes, but they’re also concerned about building and maintaining that network, especially when they’re at these top-ranked business schools. So they fear saying or doing things that would marginalize or isolate them, and that often means that they stay silent around issues of sexism, anti-immigration sentiment, the labor exploitation conversations or comments about low-wage workers that often come out in classroom discussions and, of course, pertinent to our topic today, racial stereotypes. They go unchecked, and people often bear that burden silently, because they don’t feel they have the support of the community and the system to speak out about these kinds of experiences, nor do they feel that their classmates or their professors, really, will be held accountable for it.

Kerr: Yeah, Harvard certainly has a ways to go. As we record this, we are both acknowledging the shortcomings over the last 50, 100 years and also at many of the unit levels making public commitments about how we can make sure we have a Black protagonist in more of our cases, really highlight many of the issues that you’re describing. We’ve got a ways to go. Let me continue on your book that you brought up, which was done with Anthony Mayo and David Thomas, both of whom ... one’s current and one’s past at HBS. You present a lot of scholarship and best practices on race in the workplace. What are some of the key takeaways around that, and what are you trying to push in the scholarly realm?

Roberts: Well, we’re so grateful for the contributors to this edited volume. The edited volume has over 30 chapters that were written by over 50 thought leaders. Some of them have been doing this work on race work and leadership for a good 40 years. Then others are doctoral students, right? Very early in their career. So we have a nice range of voices and perspectives. We were able to cover some of that history around racial activism and how that affects the way that we think about and teach leadership. And then we were also able to end the book with a call to action for engaging millennials and generations that follow—I guess, Gen Z—in doing this work, too. So we definitely see it as a multigenerational, multisector issue. We’ve got voices from folks coming out of health care, the legal field, financial services, education, and community activists. And in all of those different voices across generations and across sectors, we do hear some common refrain, Bill, and that’s maybe the most poignant issue at hand. How can you issue an open call for a volume like this? Ask people to submit their interesting work, and you bring it all together, and you just find that common refrain of validation of the experience. But it’s sobering in that validation. So that’s one of the key takeaways—that there are [inaudible] of shared experiences around a Black experience that transcend these different aspects, and a couple of highlights of those. So, 1) lack of access to career paths and not being encouraged or being actively discouraged from career ambition in multiple sectors. It’s just shocking. It’s just shocking to hear Michelle Obama say that she was discouraged by her high school guidance counselor in going to Princeton. And reading different other Black professionals talking this month, June 2020, about their experiences with racism in academia—some are professors, but others are other professions—and talking about how they were actively discouraged from pursuing these paths. So access is a big issue, that’s the first “A.” The second is authenticity. That’s the second “A.” That’s a big issue, too. So Black professionals feel that, in order to be accepted in their organizations, in order to advance in their careers, they have to be less authentic at work—particularly when it comes to expressing their racial identity or their underlying values that go along with it. The third is authority, and their experience once they get into the position of leadership, they beat the odds, that they get the access, they find their own path to be authentic, and be agile, so they can get to that top level of the C-suite. Their authority is still contested, even in that. They get a lot of pushback. There’s a lot of second-guessing. There’s a lot of going around in circles multiple times in order to get something done, when their non-Black counterparts, especially white men, are able to just kind of put forth the request or issue the set of expectations, and people are much more willing to comply. So those are three of the big challenges that we found existed. And then there are a set of chapters that speak to what organizations can and should do to meet those challenges. They talk about Martin Davidson and Valerie Purdie-Greenaway, talk about designing race, intelligent inclusion programs, not one-size-fits-all diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, but designing learning experiences and candid, authentic forums where people can truly confront the unique elements of the Black experience in the organization and develop some strategies so that people can feel more authentic. They can feel more successful, more encouraged, and more supported in their ambition, and that their leadership authority will be respected. There are other mechanisms that help as well, right? Mentorship is really important. Sponsorship is important, too—like having people throw your name in the hat when you aren’t even in the room and you don’t even know that you’re being considered for the position is huge. And just the opportunity to feel that you’re making progress, you’re growing, you’re developing, you’re advancing. So even though things won’t be easy and the path can be rocky, you’ve got that level of resilience and that robust sense of self we talked about earlier that helps you to continue to persist. And that was really important for the giving kind of parting words to Black professionals like, “Don’t give up.” Right? “Stay the course. Continue seeking out that support and drawing upon your best self in order to advance and move forward.” We’re hoping that it inspires more research on the topic. We’re excited about the research that we were able to compile in this volume, but, Bill, there are so many other studies that people have conducted and they haven’t been able to get published because journal editors who are professors in the academy push back when they get these papers and say, “Well, if this is just a study of Black people, then I don’t think it’s relevant.” Or, “I don’t think it’s impactful enough for our field. So, I don’t think it belongs in this particular journal.” And so we’re losing the opportunities to really learn about some of these experiences because of the biases that are built into the publishing systems as well. So David, Tony, and I were really hoping that this would inspire scholars, but it would also inspire publishers to see that there is a market here, and editors can be a little less cautious and a little more enthusiastic about entering into this space and supporting the authors who are doing this work.

Kerr: I also really hope that your book catalyzes more, and maybe I can provide just a bit of context from the economics profession that I’m a part of. In response to Covid, in many ways, the discipline has done somersaults backwards and produced hundreds of new economic studies about Covid and its consequences and ways to approach it and so forth. And it has been commented that if we were to provide similar levels of attention to the Black Lives Matter movement and racial injustice and so forth, we would make a massive shift in our understanding of the issues and the policies that we can help people think through and so forth. And we, just as a profession, need to adopt that and make that important. So I appreciate your leadership in the book Race, Work, and Leadership.

Roberts: That’s such a great example, Bill. Thanks for calling attention to that. I do think these moments in history—when we are confronted with wicked problems—should be the catalyst for a host of scientists to try to take up these questions in informed and responsible ways. And we’re hoping to see just that. And there are still some barriers there. There’s a stigma, Bill, which probably is a little different than publishing around Covid. But doing the work as a consultant or a speaker or a teacher or definitely as a scientist on race means that you’re having to make a bet. And you’re betting that you can be successful enough in this work to override the stigma that comes along with doing it. Some people say it’s not rigorous enough, it’s just based on your opinion or your own agenda. They politicize it rather than viewing it as science. And then that undermines the scholars who were trying to do this work, especially the junior-level scholars who are trying to get tenure.

Kerr: Yeah. I will cross-reference one of our colleagues, Lisa Cook, who did some amazing work about the innovation of African-Americans. And there’s a Planet Money podcast for those that are listening to this podcast that you could hear more about both Lisa’s amazing findings, but then also the challenges that she encountered in publishing the work and educating the profession about that. Laura, let me turn and ask as we come toward the end of this podcast for just your basic kind of reactions of “Here’s something you can do, some way to get going.” We’ve talked about the Reflected Best Self Exercise and so forth, but a lot of our listeners are going to be in professional business organizations. What’s the way that they can really get the senior management to acknowledge the systemic bias and engage really in that open-minded way. What’s a technique that can open up a door that has been closed up until now?

Roberts: Yeah. So first is that piece about centering yourself—preparing your heart and your mind to do the work—and that’s where the Reflected Best Self comes in. Then we move into a three-part framework that was included in an article that I recently published with Ella Washington in the Harvard Business Review about US businesses taking a meaningful stance against racism. So that three-part framework involved, first, acknowledging—so doing an audit of your organization’s practices with respect to race, and the representation of people at various levels in your organization and what that tells you by way of race and power and how it’s distributed within your organization. Acknowledge, acknowledge, acknowledge using some data, using some statistics and facts. Also, affirm. So acknowledging the harm that has been done, the inequity that may be present, but then affirm the right to personhood and dignity and humanity. That’s what Black Lives Matter is. It’s a call for the right to personhood, dignity, and humanity for a life to be valued, to be cherished, to matter. And so that has to be signaled and communicated in the ways that we talk with each other, with how we interact with one another. When you’re trying to learn more about race and racism in your organization, you listen, and you listen to people’s stories, and you resist that temptation to jump in as a devil’s advocate and say, “Why, are you sure that’s what happened? Could there have been an alternate explanation?” Chances are the story this person is telling you they have played over and over and over in their head a million times, and try to find a way to tell their story so that it wasn’t about race, because that would be a lot more comfortable for that individual. It’s not easy to have brown skin and then have to confront the reality that that happened because you had brown skin. Some people think it’s a cop-out excuse. It’s actually is quite the opposite, because that’s not mutable. That’s not something that you can change. If I can make it about something I did, then I can prevent it from happening in the future, right? But if it’s something that has to do with an immutable characteristic, like my skin color, well, gee, that’s really hard for me to have to sit with. So affirm is really important in the way that you listen and engage in these conversations. Then we get to act. I know there’s a bias to act. People want to feel like they can do something. They should be doing something. We all should be doing something. What can I donate to? What can I change? But you can’t act if you’re not informed by the data. So sometimes your action is to start gathering that data, listening to the stories, begin your lifelong process of learning, and then come up with an agenda that speaks to your role in the broader society. What will you do outside of the walls of the enterprise to affect change socially? And we’ve seen a lot of examples of that, right? Where corporate leaders are making donations, have made multimillion-dollar donations to support Black-owned businesses, Black colleges and universities, and the like. But then there’s the internal work. How are you going to change your talent management practices so that they are not subjected to racial bias and stereotyping? How are you going to look at your performance evaluation, for instance? In our environment and in academia, it’s well documented that student evaluations are racially and gender biased. And yet we still use them almost religiously to identify who the best teachers are within the school and reward people for such, to make hiring decisions based on what someone’s portfolio of teaching evals may look like, and then make leadership promotions also based on people’s reputations in that respect. So that’s just one example of changing some of the performance management systems and reward systems so that those biases cannot undermine certain people’s careers and elevate other people’s careers. But there are a range of others. Recruitment is also huge. Trying to understand how to get a concentration or a higher concentration of Black and brown people at entry levels to then be reflected in the most senior levels of the organization is probably the biggest hurdle that most organizations still will have to cross.

Kerr: Do you have any best practices on that particular hurdle? I know many people are going to be trying to think, what can I do to improve the recruitment and hiring?

Roberts: Right. So you have to set targets, you have to set quantifiable targets. And I know this makes people very uncomfortable, Bill. Because as you get to the more-senior levels in the organization, it does turn into more of a zero-sum game. You can only have one CEO. At this point, there are three Black CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies. That is much less than the representation of Black people in the US Census, which is 13 percent at this point. So there has to be some movement. And if you’re going to increase the representation or increase diversity as a whole, there have to be more Black and brown people in those higher-level positions of power and fewer white people by converse. And so the first thing we have to do is just confront that and say, “Yes, this is the reality. This is what is going to happen. This is what it’s going to look like.” And there’s going to be resistance and pushback, but we’re going to do it because as part of our core value system as a firm, as an industry, as a society. Whoever is making that individual or shared commitment. And then you have to start looking at the barriers to advancement, particularly understanding turnover. So why is it that when David Thomas and Jack Gabarro’s book was published, Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives—it came out in 1999, right, so, 20 years ago—and they found this pattern where the minorities were more likely to plateau in mid-levels of their career, whereas their white counterparts were more likely to advance to the senior executive levels or the C-suite. And so they talked about how different people got differential developmental opportunities. Are you giving the right kind of stretch opportunities—high-visibility opportunities, growth opportunities—so people can test their mettle and show what they’re made of and gain more of that exposure and consideration for the senior levels? Or do you tend to delegate those kinds of opportunities to the typical cast of characters—the ones who remind the current CEOs of their former selves? “I’m going to pick the person who reminds me of a younger me, because I feel like I know how they think, and I can trust that they’ll be able to pick this up and grow and develop. But the brown-skinned woman over there, I’m not sure. I don’t really know what it’s like to walk in her skin. I don’t know what it’s like to be in her head. So maybe we’ll have to get to know each other a little bit better. She’ll have to have a little more opportunity to prove herself before she advances.” Those are the kinds of practices that we have to systematically disrupt. You have to be really intentional about giving the developmental opportunities equally, and in some instances, if you’ve got to choose one or the other, and they’re on parity in terms of their qualifications—or they both bring interesting things to the table, let me put it that way, Bill. They both bring interesting things to the table, that you factor race into the equation as well and make a difference that helps to advance the racial diversity of your senior leadership. And then that last piece about turnover was important, too. The turnover is looking at where attrition happens, why people leave, who’s managed out, what kind of data do they get, was their performance feedback, was it too subjective and, therefore, bias might’ve entered in? That often happens with Black employees. Did they leave because they were disenchanted with the culture, or with the lack of opportunities for growth and development and advancement in the firm because they felt they were plateaued there and they felt the only way that they could advance in their career was to make a lateral move someplace else? But firms don’t generally conduct exit interviews, and they don’t ask pointed questions about race, even during those exit interviews. So we’re not really getting the full picture that would then allow us to adjust accordingly.

Kerr: So Laura, thank you so much for these best practices, and I highly recommend those that want to take it a step forward personally to look up Laura and her coauthors’ Harvard Business Review articles, including one that was very recently published, that outline more here. Laura, I want to end on maybe something that combines the overall contextual political social environment that we’re in right now with where we’ve spent the second half of this podcast, which has been more practices that individual managers and leaders can make. How do those two things connect, and how can we best accomplish the goals in—be it business schools or be it in a private-sector companies—to build this inclusive environment that really overcomes the systemic issues that Black Americans and other minorities have faced in a context that’s often going to be polarized?

Roberts: Yeah, so that polarization can be really challenging and dangerous, Bill, because it can lead to dangerous and violent conflict. And we certainly wouldn’t advocate that. But there’s also a piece of the equation here that requires individuals to take a stand and not straddle the fence on these issues. Some of the work that we’ve been doing and the way that we’ve been approaching this work around diversity, equity, and inclusion—when we just put everything together under the umbrella, from cognitive diversity, diversity of thought, to a range of political beliefs, as well as socio-demographic groups and [inaudible] all blended together—that definitely reflects all of the variety within our society. But it also lets us off the hook, because everybody can say, “Oh yeah, I’m the outsider. I’m the one who’s being marginalized. I’m the one who’s being mistreated here.” And we take our eye off of the structural inequality that positions certain people with the less-hospitable, much-less-safe environment in their workplaces or in the streets. So we can’t really straddle the fence in a one-size-fits-all welcome wagon kind of approach to these conversations if we really want to move forward in countering racism head on. We have to take a stand. And that’s what many leaders are doing, is taking a stand. Many are saying this is the first time they’ve ever taken such a stand, but they’re doing it and saying, “We will not tolerate this kind of injustice. It goes against our fundamental belief of who we are as an organization and who we wish to be. And we’re ready to make the tough decisions that we have to make in order to eradicate racism in all of its forms.” Maybe that is a way of polarizing people. Some may see it as divisive. But silence has not been the solution, right? Trying to sweep it under the rug has not done anything but further exacerbate the inequalities that we’re talking about right now. In being silent, things have only gotten worse. So I think in being vocal and trying to confront it head on, we have more of a chance of coming together in a unified voice than we would otherwise. But it’s going to require people to take a stand. And you can’t really straddle the fence too much on this one.

Kerr: Laura, thank you for your just very important and also at times very challenging thoughts today about where race is in the workplace in the United States and what we can do both as individual leaders, but also a society, to take that next step. We appreciate you joining on the podcast.

Roberts: I appreciate you having me, Bill.

Kerr: Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Managing the Future of Work podcast. To find out more information about our project on the future of work and for more information on the coronavirus’s impact, visit our website at hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work and sign up for our newsletter.