Attend To The Weeds In Your Organizational Culture

I put a lot of work into my garden early in the summer. Everything looked wonderful. Over the next month I noticed some little weeds popping up. I kept saying to myself I should take care of it, but I kept putting it off.

Now, guess what? They are everywhere. I’ve been trying to clear them but it’s so much work. And it seems like they’re growing back overnight.

Note to self: attend to problems as they arise, or they will spread. Then it will be infinitely harder to deal with them.

That lesson applies just as well to attending to inclusion in your organization. 

Someone makes an inappropriate joke; an interpersonal conflict is brewing; you’ve noticed a pattern of behavior that may be driven by bias. 

These are weeds. 

If you don’t address the issues in the moment, the offenders might feel the behavior is okay. Others might imitate it. “I guess this is what we do here.”

The people affected might lose trust. “No one has my back. Why even say anything? It won’t make a difference.”

Before long, you don’t just have incidents—you have a culture. The roots will have gone deep. Weeds will have entangled with other plants. You can’t remove them without disrupting or even damaging the garden. 

Tend your organizational culture like a gardener. Pay attention to people’s well-being, and deal with issues before they become invasive species. 

Don’t wait until you have to dig deep and rip things up.

The More Diversity, The Harder It Is

I kick off my workshop on managing diverse teams with a question:

“What do you find challenging about managing a diverse team?” 

Because while diversity makes your team stronger and more effective, it doesn’t make it easier to manage. 

When you interact with people who come from different experiences, you don’t know the impact your behavior will have on one another. You will step on people’s toes, and have your toes stepped on. If you want everyone on your diverse team to thrive, you’ll need to navigate these interpersonal differences. 

And you’ll need to learn how everyone’s differences interact with your organization’s underlying systems. 

Are the norms and policies that work best for you bumping up against what other employees need? When do you hold meetings? (Avoid kids’ drop-off time.) How do you acknowledge holidays from different cultures? (Check those staff retreat dates against the Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu calendars.) What activities do you sponsor for social time? (Not everyone drinks…and some must avoid alcohol entirely.)

You’ll ultimately need to examine every aspect of the organization. Find and fix the root causes of inequity, and reduce bias in hiring, compensation, and promotion.

Yes, it’s a lot of work. 

You can’t just do the same thing for everyone. You have to think about what individuals need. 

But here’s the thing: that’s actually what good managers do, period.

All teams are diverse. Even if it’s not racially diverse, your team contains a range of genders, religions, working styles. People need different accommodations, different types of feedback, different cultural habits. 

And when you focus on meeting all those individual needs, you begin to leverage the benefits of the diversity on your team. 

It takes practice and resilience to develop the skills to manage diverse teams.

But they happen to be the same skills you need to manage any team well. 

Belonging Is Not A Finite Resource

Diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies are sometimes criticized for being “divisive.”

The argument seems to be that when employees emphasize a component of their own identities at work, like their race, gender, or sexual orientation, they are “dividing” off from the whole group.

Critics say that employers should discourage affinity spaces such as Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) because they fuel conflict and dissatisfaction.

But in my experience, that’s not what actually happens.

When I was in college at Georgetown, I joined the student activities commission and student government—and I also joined the Black Student Alliance and the NAACP. 

All of them made me more loyal to Georgetown, not less. 

Even participating in protests against the university made me feel more connected to the university.

I thought of this again during the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The first major fundraising events were grassroots virtual rallies organized by identity groups—Black women for Kamala, white women for Kamala, “white dudes” for Kamala, and so on. These didn’t divide the Democrats. They were actually very successful in generating loyalty and engagement for a common cause.

That’s because belonging isn’t a finite resource. 

You can belong to more than one thing. And belonging builds on itself. When I feel the positive impacts of being in affinity spaces—the shared references, the empathy, the relaxed anxiety about being accepted and understood—I often associate these impacts with the institution that is enabling them. Even when these groups foster critiques or advocate for change, I feel more engaged, not less. Building deeper relationships in service of improving the organization makes me feel even more connected to it.

On top of the benefits to employees, ERGs provide concrete benefits to organizations as a whole—providing insights about internal culture and processes as well as products and services. For the Harris campaign, those benefits amounted to record-breaking funds.

So I encourage organizations to open the door to affinity spaces.

Maybe you’ll get the kind of excitement for your institution that she got for her campaign.