What’s your plan for dealing with the almost-certain presence of bigotry in your workforce?

As pointed out last week, if you lead and manage a group big enough to be a statistically significant sample, bigotry is, almost certainly, present, and dealing with it has, with George Floyd’s murder, become a part of your job description.

Not the most fun part, to be sure, but it’s now among the most important.

Some context:

Once upon a time I thought jokes about the Irish and their propensity to drink in quantity, told in Lucky Charms Irish, were funny. That was right up until an Irishman overheard me and explained, in no uncertain terms, that he didn’t find my jokes at all funny.

In high school I thought Italian jokes were funny. That was right up until a young lady of Italian origin, who I found quite attractive, made it clear telling Italian jokes made me quite unattractive.

I also thought Polish jokes were funny. I told one to my friend, whose last name happened to be Kowalski. He explained that if I told another one he’d become my ex-friend.

Ethnicity and race were standard features in the humor of my youth. But just because my intention was to be funny, not mean, didn’t matter then and matters less now.

Which is why, as a leader and manager, your spider sense should tingle when you hear someone preface a remark with the telltale phrase, “This probably isn’t politically correct, but …”

No, it probably isn’t. What it probably will be is offensive.

It is, perhaps, a shame that we can’t solve prejudice by everyone who’s on the receiving end of such things growing thicker skins. But while I’m certainly in favor of enough epidermal thickening that we don’t encourage a culture of victimhood, making this the centerpiece ignores the reason racial and ethnic jokes are a bad idea.

It isn’t that these jokes offend people and hurt their feelings. They do, but there does come a point when having to tiptoe around a growing thicket of sensitivities does nobody any good.

No, the problem with racial and ethnic jokes is that they establish and reinforce stereotypes. And presenting the stereotype in the form of a joke makes it impossible to counter: Were you to hear a drunken Irishman joke, would you really feel comfortable saying, to the assembled, possibly chuckling audience, “Hey, wait a minute. Don’t you know the Irish rank 21 in per capita alcohol consumption? Why aren’t we picking on the Moldavians?”

Stereotypes are pernicious, because they turn people into cartoons. And that isn’t fair to the cartoons: The stick figures in Randall Munroe’s xkcd are more differentiated than “Jews are good negotiators.”

Stereotypes are why so many IT shops resisted Agile for so long, and why so many that reluctantly adopted it are busily turning Agile in to “Scrummerfall.” Namely, it’s the stereotype that says programmers aren’t capable of having conversations with non-technical managers and users, coupled with the stereotype that regular folk just aren’t smart enough to have conversations with technical professionals.

The cure that’s worse than the disease for this stereotype is to insert a business analyst to translate non-technical English to programmer-ese and back, thereby enshrining the children’s game of Telephone as methodology.

What stereotypes do is establish expectations as to how people will think and act. That’s a problem when three employees are expected to collaborate and one is an IT geek, the second an HR bureaucrat, and the third a bean counter from Accounting.

That isn’t, you might think, a big deal and in fact forcing them to collaborate can help them break through their stereotype-laden thinking.

And it can, but having to break through it is certainly more wasteful than not having it in the first place.

And anyway, it doesn’t stop there. What might be even worse is that sometimes, some people deliberately sign up for a stereotype, as happens in high school and the notorious mean girl cliques. Jillian wants to be part of the popular crowd, and so, even though she doesn’t have a mean bone in her body, she ends up growing one.

In this respect, culture can make stereotypes real.

Which gets us to the linchpin of combatting prejudice in your organization: As with most forms of change, it starts and ends with the culture. That’s as true for culture that makes stereotyping others okay as it is for culture that establishes and legitimizes expectations we have of ourselves.

# # #One of the hazards of writing about IT management for as many years as I have (24 and counting) is that I find I’ve already written about the topic at hand. In this case I suggest you take a few minutes more to revisit these archival missives: “Leading in general,” (9/4/2006) and “Uncomfortable conversations,” (9/13/2010).

“We have to end racism.”

I’ve heard and read this sentiment countless times. Believing it might just be the, or at least a reason George Floyd is dead.

And yes, what follows matters to you as a business leader and manager. Bear with me.

# # #

I grew up in a Chicago suburb that was so Jewish, as a child not only didn’t I know anyone in the world was anything else, I didn’t know there was anything else for them to be.

When an older me did encounter antisemitism, I found it quaint and comical. Serious, violent antisemitism was, I thought, something everyone had grown out of, except, perhaps, for some laughable yahoos who were barely worth ridiculing. I’d thought it was like smallpox — eradicated except maybe for a few lab specimens.

Now, it’s a growth industry.

If we still haven’t eradicated antisemitism, why would anyone think we can end racism and other bigotries?

# # #

Nobody is a bigot. Nobody looks in a mirror and sees a bigot looking back out at them.

Where I see bigots, the bigots might see themselves as protecting a way of life against an invading force. They might seriously believe they’re fighting a secret cabal that runs the world … never mind that they hated the group that runs the cabal before they ever heard of the cabal.

They might believe, with evident sincerity but no knowledge of population genetics or cognitive development, that racial mixing is a thing, and a bad thing at that.

# # #

In just the past few weeks we saw the videos of Amy Cooper and Ahmaud Arbery. Now we have George Floyd, who followed Eric Garner as a black man choked to death by police officers. If you’re a young black man, to you the police are exemplars of lawlessness. If they don’t have to obey the law, why should you?

# # #

Imagine you’re Medaria Arradondo, the chief of police here in Minneapolis. You aren’t stupid or unperceptive — you know racism and other forms of bigotry are entrenched in the local police culture. Heck, your entire career depended on you having a thick enough skin to shrug off the occasional tasteless race-oriented “joke.” Or not so occasional; these things aren’t generally reported.

You know you have a problem with bigotry in your workforce. You know you need to fix it. You also know you can’t just fire all of the 800 police officers who work for you and start over. It would be a bad idea even if you weren’t the city’s first black police chief and weren’t willing to deal with complaints about reverse racism.

What’s your plan?

What your plan isn’t: Tell everyone to stop being a bigot. Even if your plan is to tell them over and over and over again … “And I mean it!” you might say … there’s no point. Nobody looks in a mirror and sees a bigot looking back out at them.

Which is why I blame “we have to stop racism” for George Floyd’s death: Trying to end racism is futile. It wastes energy and accomplishes nothing. Better to focus on what can work.

# # #

Let’s get to it: You aren’t Medaria Arradondo. You probably don’t have 800 armed employees reporting to you, nor do you have to deal with a history of your employees killing other people in questionable circumstances.

If you’re leading and managing a workforce of any size, what you and Arradondo probably do have in common is entrenched bigotry. Telling everyone that bigotry isn’t okay won’t accomplish anything for you either. And for you, like Arradondo, identifying even the worst bigots in your workforce isn’t easily accomplished. Nobody wants to be thought of as a whiner or a snitch. A minority employee who already feels like an outsider is even less likely to complain.

It’s your workforce and your problem. What are you going to do about it?

Organizations run on trust (see Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21^st Century Information Technology, Chapter 4: “Relationships precede process.”) And as trust and bigotry can’t coexist, bigotry will hurt your organization’s productivity.

So even if we ignore the question’s obvious ethical dimensions, doing nothing is still the wrong answer.

The right answer? I’m not a fan of zero-tolerance policies, so how about a one-tolerance policy: If an employee says, or even hears something and doesn’t say something, and you learn about it, that’s one. One earns that employee a spot on your You Can Think What You Want but You Can’t Say What You Want task force.

If overt bigotry happens again and they’re in earshot, that’s two.

But it’s your workforce and your problem. What are you going to do about it?

Please share your thinking in the Comments.